One of the signs of a change in the slope of temperatures is the change in the slope of PR descriptions.
After chanting “The hottest year ever recorded” the message became the “second hottest year on record”, and after that, four of the five hottest years ever; and now, eight of the ten hottest years.
Look out for “12 of the hottest 15 years ever”... it’s coming.
It’s time to knock this on the head. It’s true, but meaningless. It appeals to that prehistoric part of our brains and “gets” to people in the same way that rising stock markets do. For example back in October 2007 we could have said that the top 8 of 10 record Dow Jones results were set that month (and look what that did for the Dow?)
Cluster-Busters
1. Analyzing trends is a lousy form of analysis. It tells you nothing about what happens next. When we don’t understand what drives the climate, analyzing the technicals of “trend-lines” is up there with reading tea-leaves. We don’t know what caused the Little Ice Age; so we don’t know if that mystery cooling factor stopped, or if another unknown warming factor kicked in; or both unexplained forces worked in concert with a silent friend. It sounds quasi-scientific but so does astrology. Look! The night-hunter ate the saucepan. Join the dots. Find your own climate change star sign.
2. “Recorded” history is overrated. It only applies “since 1850”. That’s not long. Take your pick on longer scales: it was warmer 1000 years ago, 5000 years ago, 130,000 years ago, and …. before 5 million years ago; it was hotter for most of the history of the earth. More accurately, we could say, “it’s five of the ten hottest years recorded since humanity discovered thermometers, installed them, and recorded the details in multiple locations around the earth.” Catchy.
3. Yes. It’s got warmer. So? The world has been getting warmer for 200-300 years. Sea levels have been rising, glaciers melting, and “records” have been set decade after decade. And all this started long before Napoleon took 4000-gas-guzzling armored tanks to Russia (or not). He must’ve been disappointed that the Ford Model T’s he’d ordered would not arrive for 103 years. Yet the world was warming.
Ultimately, analyzing the technicals of stock trends is fraught with problems, but doing this on climate trends is inane. What are we relying on—meterological psychology: the greed and fear of clouds?
See Climate Bull or Bear? for a real poke at technical analysis of the climate.
If I were a gambling man, this non-scientist global warming skeptic would bet that temperatures in the near future would be trending… down.
At least for a few more years… or decades.
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Ancient Map Disproves Global Warming by Prof. Allen Quist, Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato, Minnesota.
It was drawn by well-known French cartographer, Oronteus Finaeus, in 1531.
See: http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=3901
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See http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mom/oronteus.html for a 1996 discussion of the claims about the Oronteus Finaeus Map of 1532.
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Mostly drama. In my northern community, it is 20 degrees below normal.
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Mike Post 3, thanks for the input! It’s always good to see both sides of the story!
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This winter has been the coldest since records began on my orchard. Indeed, of the 12 coldest days since records began, all have been this winter. I notice that CO2 has been rising in Hawaii during this time. I wonder if they are related? Yes they are!! Its complicated I know, but CO2 and temperature are corelated and therefore it is “very likely” that CO2 has caused the temperature to drop. What I don’t know is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing but will research it further if someone will give me the research grant.
I am sorry but I seem to have lost the data. In any case I wouldn’t have given it to you because you would only try and find fault with my analysis and conclusions.
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Alan,post 6, Yep! That’s how ALARMISTS work! I think you nailed it, Alan!
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Good stuff! And a great pun in the title as well.
I would never have expected many from “down under” would have even heard of Custer and the 7th Cavalry. But I’ve always had a thing about ‘hot topics!’
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Oddly enough, the earth’s climate may be controlled by the stars (including the sun). Though not as poetically as “The night-hunter ate the saucepan.”
“In a five-part video series featuring Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark, the author of The Chilling Stars talks about his research into the effects that cosmic rays have on cloud formation.”
See: http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=3906
The five videos are well worth watching.
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As the percentage of greenhouse gas contribution of CO2 is approximately 4% of all greenhouse gasses and man’s contribution is responsible for 3 % of this 4% and Australia’s contribution of this is 1%, you soon come to the realisation that our portion of supposed pollution is infinitesimally miniscule ie 0.000048% and then to have a target of 5 to 10% makes this up to 0.00000048%. Can anyone imagine that this will save the world if indeed it needed saving.
Or …….. perhaps I’ve got the numbers all wrong! Me thinks not.
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Gerry Van Hees
“As the percentage of greenhouse gas contribution of CO2 is approximately 4% of all greenhouse gasses and man’s contribution is responsible for 3 % of this 4% and Australia’s contribution of this is 1%, you soon come to the realisation that our portion of supposed pollution is infinitesimally miniscule ie 0.000048% and then to have a target of 5 to 10% makes this up to 0.00000048%. Can anyone imagine that this will save the world if indeed it needed saving.
Or …….. perhaps I’ve got the numbers all wrong! Me thinks not.”
This is what Dr Jay Lehr has been saying on his tour with Professor Bob Carter. I don’t disagree with the spirit of your conclusion but the numbers are actually wrong. You made two errors. First was to use fractions in your calculations and then saying the answer is still a percentage. Then you used the 4% (the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere) twice.
The correct answer is .04 * .03 * .01 * .1 = .0000012 (or .00012%).
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Alan
Thank you for the correction. It is still a vanishingly small percentage that we’re attempting adjust the climate with.
JoAnn
Thank you for an insightful and at times humorous website found the skeptics handbook very inspiring. I tend to be more of a browser but occasionally feel the need to input.
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With pictures: http://xoomer.virgilio.it/dicuoghi/Piri_Reis/Finaeus_eng.htm
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According to Roy Spencers website Satellite data for Sea Surface Temperature is in line with IPCC predictions. He seems quite shocked at the findings. Now this DOESN’T mean the warming is due to Co2, but I find the fact that Dr Spencer is puzzled by the findings intriguing. Link is here at: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/08/somethings-fishy-with-global-ocean-temperature-measurements/
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Alan – This winter has been the coldest since records began on my orchard. Indeed, of the 12 coldest days since records began, all have been this winter.
On a global scale, we have just had the second warmest June and July in recorded human history.
Alan – I notice that CO2 has been rising in Hawaii during this time. I wonder if they are related? Yes they are!!
Yes they are. Temperatures are .74’C over the baseline and increasing at a rate of 0.2’C per decade.
Alan – Its complicated I know, but CO2 and temperature are corelated and therefore it is “very likely” that CO2 has caused the temperature to drop.
Impossible, since temepratures are increasing. Even the stupid denialist article above says the globe is warming. But I understand why you are confused, Jo was claiming the world was unwarming a few articles back. Now we’re back to – it’s warming again, but so what – Denialists can’t seem to make up there mind if the globe is warming or cooling. Me, I just look at the data, and listen to the Science.
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“Five of the ten hottest years wont tell us what will happen next”
Similarly statisticians can not predict the height of the next person to walk in the room but can know with near certainty the average height of people who will do so in 90 years time.
This is why it’s important to understand the difference between climate and weather.
Just as a single persons height is not an average height. Climate is in a broad sense the average weather. And that is why it doesn’t make any sense when Climate Denialists like Alan hold up one years weather or one region’s weather as an indicator. Climate is the average, and one that is generally taken over a time frame of 20 to 30 years.
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Easy Money Mike – If I were a gambling man, this non-scientist global warming skeptic would bet that temperatures in the near future would be trending… down.
Before you lay your bet you should first bare in mind that the current La-Nina is ending and the next El-Nino is starting. Global surface temps should recover to their pre-La-Nina highs sometime next year. So that also answers the question of the article – what will happen next – and again that is why Climatologists use 20 to 30 year running averages.
See this nice presentation – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y15UGhhRd6M
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Damien said: “Similarly statisticians can not predict the height of the next person to walk in the room but can know with near certainty the average height of people who will do so in 90 years time.”
So sure Damien? Your godlike ability to understand the complete genetic profile of mixed race nations and their diets 9 decades in advance would be impressive if you only had some evidence to back it up…
Human populations are in the patchy process of recovering the 6 inches of height they lost with the agricultural revolution 10k years ago. When we stopped being meat-eating hunter gatherers, we ate more carbs, beloved politically correct food that they are, and populations grew but skeletons shrank.
The western teens today are finally getting back the ancient hunter-gatherer heights as dietary protein recovers.
Who’s willing to bet they can predict world population, migration patterns, total meat production, or the chances of a plant protein substitute being developed in time to help 2 billion chinese rise to whatever height their genes allow?
Damien said: “But I understand why you are confused, Jo was claiming the world was unwarming a few articles back. “
Sorry if I confused you Damien, I didn’t think it was that complicated to explain that since the world is unwarming, therefore alarmist PR is forced to use the “cluster argument”. The two statements not only agree but go hand in hand. Alarmists say “8 out of the 10 hottest years” precisely because the trend is flat. Otherwise they would say “another shocking record high”.
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Damien: “This is why it’s important to understand the difference between climate and weather.”
So ten years of no warming is weather and one month of warming is climate? Or, more generally, if it warms it’s climate, if it doesn’t it’s weather?
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I am delighted. Daemon has emerged from the woodwork again – and to attack me! I love it. I must have said something a bit too close to the truth.
Also he doesn’t have a sense of humour. Despite the tongue in cheek part of what I said it was actually accurate. Its funny that however one looks at climate and weather, it must show AGW otherwise its wrong. If I pick the latest decade where it has not been warming, I am cherry picking. If I pick my geographic area I am cherry picking. How about the Antarctic – nope not allowed. Apparently I must use the fuzzy global average temperatures where the data can get lost and the early records were not accurate – to the extent the “warming” comes mainly from adjustments to the data. Why must I use this? Because it shows warming – although not recently. I know that in climate change “since records began” is the biggest cherry pick of them all – records began as the planet was coming out of the little ice age. In Australia, scientists are now saying that ocean temperatures should be used (because air temperatures no longer show warming). Of course all of the science has been based on air temperatures, so I would have thought we would throw it all out and start again.
It is really such a simple issue. Show me the proof that (a) CO2 has caused the planet to warm since 1750, (b) that feedbacks are positive rather than neutral or even negative (c) explain and prove how the planet could stop warming when CO2 keeps rising. Even Daemon says temperatures are increasing at 0.2C per decade which is 2.0C per century, the figure the G8 nations agree would pose no problem – so there is no problem.
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Daemon re your comment
Climatologists use 20 to 30 year running averages.
You forgot to add “when it suits them”. Or just delete decades of data from their models when it suits them
When the “adjusted” temp record supported AGW in the nineties a decade was more than enough of a trend to spread the doom. Have you ever wondered why every adjusted record supports warming or why Hanson’s temps are always higher.
The same as with proxy records, those that support the “Mann” view of history are accepted while proxy records that support the Medieval Warming and the Little ice age are dismissed.
Or when satellites and radiosonde data does not show the missing hot spot dismiss the technology as flawed go for the tried and proving method of solar wind measurement.
Whatever happened to 2001 when all natural variables were accounted for in all of the models and temps were going to go up up up. OH dear those pesky natural variables refused to conform, not to worry lets go multi-decade.
It seems that sloppy science, cherry picking, selective editing, stonewalling, slander and the rejecting of scientific method are par for the course in the warmers world of client science.
With no empirical evidence and a case that gets weaker and weaker over time I guess they have to use those tactics.Why bother with reality when things are getting shaky scream louder. Just up the fudge factors and go for 12, 15C if we are lucky it could be 20C by Copenhagen.
The alarmists among the client scientists are at least smart enough to use a time frame(2050-2100) that sees them out of the game before doomsday while the gullible,like you will continue accept any excuse from the high priests of Climatology.
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Why twenty or thirty years? Why not a hundred years? Why not a thousand?
What makes one particular filter window more correct than all of the other arbitrary options?
Are we averaging every point on the Earth’s surface? Just the land? Atmosphere too?
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Thou I walk through the valley of coal mines no evil shall I fear Saint James will lead me on the path of the righteous.
Thou I bathe in the acid seas no evil shall I fear Saint Michael will wash all thoughts of denial from me fevered mind.
Thou my thoughts turn to the great Satan no evil shall I fear Saint Gavin will provide the links that lead to salvation.
Be gone oh evil one, begone Exxon, for I travel to the promised land where I will trade in carbon until I am replete.
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Jo – So sure Damien?
Yes, but if you’re not, a local junior college probably offers an introductory statistics course.
Jo – I didn’t think it was that complicated to explain that since the world is unwarming
You must be referring to some other world since this world is quite clearly warming.
jo -therefore alarmist PR is forced to use the “cluster argument”.
That would make alarmist PR people dead beats as well.
Jo – Alarmists say “8 out of the 10 hottest years” precisely because the trend is flat. Otherwise they would say “another shocking record high”.
Probably not because the trend isn’t flat.
davidc – So ten years of no warming is weather and one month of warming is climate?
No. Why on earth would you think that?
davidc – Or, more generally, if it warms it’s climate, if it doesn’t it’s weather?
No. Why on earth would you think that?
Alan – Its funny that however one looks at climate and weather, it must show AGW otherwise its wrong.
That’s news to me. Why must weather show AGW, otherwise it’s wrong?
Alan – If I pick the latest decade where it has not been warming, I am cherry picking.
Likewise, if you picked a decade it had been warming, it is also cherry picking. As I stated, Climatologists use 20 to 30 year running averages.
Alan – If I pick my geographic area I am cherry picking. How about the Antarctic – nope not allowed.
Depends what you claim. If you claim the globe is cooling because your geographic area is supposedly cooling, or if you claim the globe is warming because your geographic area is warming, these would be flawed statements, wouldn’t you agree?
Alan – Apparently I must use the fuzzy global average temperatures where the data can get lost and the early records were not accurate – to the extent the “warming” comes mainly from adjustments to the data.
The world has been peppered with people recording temperature for decades. Those historic records have been found, studied, and integrated to provide a global average temperature. What evidence do you have that data is lost or manipulated to show warming? none of course.
Alan – Why must I use this?
You don’t have to. You could also use atmospheric brightness that is measured on a column by column basis through the entire atmosphere. But that method also tells us the world is warming. Sucks for you.
Alan – Because it shows warming – although not recently
Depends which starting year you cherry pick.
Alan – I know that in climate change “since records began” is the biggest cherry pick of them all
Records began when records began. In terms of direct thermometer readings, there is no other place to start.
Alan – records began as the planet was coming out of the little ice age.
The planet – as in, the globe – neither went in or came out of a little ice age.
Alan – In Australia, scientists are now saying that ocean temperatures should be used (because air temperatures no longer show warming).
Which air temperatures no longer show warming?
Alan – Show me the proof
That is impossible since Science does not provide proof of anything. Science offers nothing but theory and prediction, and theory is never “proved”. Theory remains theory until it is disproved. How come you don’t know this?
Alan – (a) CO2 has caused the planet to warm since 1750
200 years of Science tells us CO2 absorbs infrared and hence it warms the surface of the earth, and indeed the earth is observed to be warming while attribution studies have ruled out all other possibilities. So we have a method of causation (CO2), measurement of the increase in causative factors, and the correlation between the rise in those factors and the result predicted by theory.
Motive, Cause, and Confession.
Verdict: Guilty
Case closed.
Alan – (b) that feedbacks are positive rather than neutral or even negative
Even common sense tells you a warming planet means more evaporation from the soil and the ocean then there otherwise would be if the world was not warming. Hmmmm so I guess then the moisture content of the atmosphere increases, and that means that there is more water vapor there to increase temperatures even further.
In addition as the northern polar regions continue to melt their nice white snow cover becomes replaced with dark soil and dark water. Thus the amount of sunlight absorbed by those regions increases as well, and wouldn’t you know it, it gets warmer even more rapidly.
Now there are a host of other positive feedback factors like the decrease of ice on mountain tops, and in the worlds glaciers, and the release of methane from one frozen and now thawed and rotting permafrost.
And there are some negative feedbacks as well, like the potential for there to be more clouds. But clouds can be both positive or negative depending on where they form. And the models are telling us that there isn’t going to be much change there at all, with high forming clouds cancelling out the effect (largely), of additional low lying clouds.
Alan – (c) explain and prove how the planet could stop warming when CO2 keeps rising.
Well that’s simple. The planet has not stopped warming.
allen – Have you ever wondered why every adjusted record supports warming or why Hanson’s temps are always higher.
No I have never wondered. GISS includes the polar regions through direct and indirect measurement, and the polar regions are warming fast, hence Hanson’s measurements are always higher than datasets that have less polar coverage.
allen – The same as with proxy records, those that support the “Mann” view of history are accepted while proxy records that support the Medieval Warming and the Little ice age are dismissed.
MWP and LIA were not global, they were regional. As we are all aware, the Hockey graph was affirmed by the NAS and further affirmed by subsequent studies by different teams of scientists using different data sets. You’re flogging a dead horse there I’m afraid.
allen – Or when satellites and radiosonde data does not show the missing hot spot dismiss the technology as flawed go for the tried and proving method of solar wind measurement.
As bizarre as satellites measuring temperature by atmospheric brightness that is measured on a column by column basis through the entire atmosphere.
allen – Whatever happened to 2001 when all natural variables were accounted for in all of the models and temps were going to go up up up. OH dear those pesky natural variables refused to conform, not to worry lets go multi-decade.
Yawn. Natural climate fluctuations are on the order of .5’C and the warming trend is currently around .2’C per decade. At that rate from any starting point it takes 2.5 decades of trend to equal the natural climate variability.
So a couple of years or so of negative trend line doesn’t have much meaning, and in fact you can measure that the probability of a couple of cooler years in a row as we have seen is a little more likely than 1 in 3.
allen – It seems that sloppy science, cherry picking, selective editing, stonewalling, slander and the rejecting of scientific method are par for the course in the warmers world of client science.
Not what I’ve seen, do you have some examples in the Scientific journals?
allen – With no empirical evidence and a case that gets weaker and weaker over time I guess they have to use those tactics.
Denialists do, yes.
allen – The alarmists among the client scientists are at least smart enough to use a time frame(2050-2100) that sees them out of the game before doomsday while the gullible,like you will continue accept any excuse from the high priests of Climatology.
I’m not aware of any high priests in climatology.
Tel – Why twenty or thirty years? Why not a hundred years? Why not a thousand?
Indeed, why not?
129 years
http://members.cox.net/rcoppock/Global%20Mean%20Temp.jpg
1000 years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3A1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
2000 years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3A2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
12000 years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3AHolocene_Temperature_Variations.png
45000 years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3AIce_Age_Temperature.png
Allan – Thou I walk through the valley of coal mines no evil shall I fear Saint James will lead me on the path of the righteous.
Uh huh.
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Damien: “MWP and LIA were not global, they were regional. As we are all aware, the Hockey graph was affirmed by the NAS and further affirmed by subsequent studies by different teams of scientists using different data sets. You’re flogging a dead horse there I’m afraid.”
Seems your horse is the dead one.
.
Craig Loehle used 18 non-tree-ring proxies from all over the world. His graph is:
(Reference to the full paper is in this blog entry- http://joannenova.com.au/2009/07/26/climate-money-auditing-is-left-to-unpaid-volunteers/_)
So, what evidence do you have that MWP and the LIA were regional?
The test here is to see if you can give an answer which has reference to observations about the natural world and not observations about committees (eg NAS, IPCC, UN, WMO et al).
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I am not sure that Damien would know a dead horse if it fell on him. Myself, having owned, bred, birthed, trained, and disposed of dead horses for almost 30 years, I know a dead horse when I see it.
Damien is riding a dead horse, he knows it, but is totally unwilling to admit it. Hence, his repeated use of the Kolker Reset, projection, equivocation, misunderstanding and cherry picking only the so called peer reviewed reports that support his position. He blanks out the massive contrary evidence to his beloved hypothesis because they don’t advance his winning the argument. It is not truth he is after. He simply wants to win an argument.
We should be willing to lose a thousand arguments if, by doing so, we can discover one truth. That way, we can be defined by what actually is. We abandon whim, wish, and fantasy to gain reality for the entirety of our lives.
A true believer MUST win all arguments even if truth gets totally lost in the process. Otherwise, a true believer abandons the only thing that establishes his identity: his true belief. They abandon reality to keep their whim, wish, and fantasy going for just a little bit longer.
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Well, what a diatribe from Daemon! I obviously have a different understanding of science and the need for proof. Science (Paleoclimatology) tells us the planet (globe) warmed to enter the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and this must have been from natural causes (no CO2 increase). Why is the current warming not from natural causes? Because Daemon wants it to be CO2 so therefore must get rid of the MWP which is what the hockey stick tried to do. Read Bishop Hill Blog (Caspar and The Jesus Paper).
Daemon then helpfully refers me to a number of Wikipedia sites showing temperatures and I checked a few of these out. In the last 129 years the increase in temperature has been at the rate of 0.57C per century – doesn’t Daemon read his own references? Then I checked 1000 years and it has an inset covering the period 1880 to 2000 which shows the recent decline in temperatures – did he not read this? The 1000 year graph included the hockey stick but even then the anomalies went from -0.2C to +0.4C, an increase of 0.6C in ten centuries. And then I checked 12,000 years and it shows 2004 temperature anomaly up 0.5C at the end of 12,000 years – half a degree in 120 centuries. I think he shot himself in the foot, or was it the dead cow falling on him?
There are a lot of interesting things in “Watts up With That”, including the lost data, time of day readings, UHI effects, poor siting, poor equipment, no minimum and maximum, discontinued stations. But of course Daemon wont read this stuff and will remain forever a denialist. The one thing he didn’t slag me off about was 2C warming per century being no problem. I’m not even sure where he got this number from but I guess a computer model which was preprogrammed to give this result.
I loved Jo’s theory (which has not been disproved so it must be fact – the new scientific method) that temperature is driven by US postal charges!
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Interestingly, each of your own examples gives a smaller figure to the 0.2 degree per decade that you quote.
Your 129 year example gives 0.057 degrees per decade (stated by the line of best fit).
Your 1000 year example has no line of best fit (and please note that each of those coloured lines is merely one geographic location, by your own argument above, single locations don’t prove much). My rough best-fit estimate (putting a ruler on the screen) for the 1000 year wikipedia chart comes up with very slight cooling (i.e. we have not quite left the LIA yet).
Your 2000 year chart also has no line of best fit, but I’d estimate it as maybe 0.1 degree of warming every thousand years.
Your 12000 year example runs time backwards, I hate people who do that, please find the author and explain to them that time runs left to right for all English speaking maths.
You ice-core example graph also runs time backwards, but I’ve seen enough ice core graphs anyhow. Long-term trend of the ice core graph is as close to zero warming as you care to measure.
Thus we have warming estimates ranging from slight cooling, to zero to 0.057 degrees per decade to 0.2 degrees per decade (the last one from a mysterious unknown source).
Which is the correct average? They all come to different results?
If we can’t even agree on a measurement, why bother with any models?
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Great post. Really gives a good come back to all those “5th warmest year” type arguments.
I must say it makes me very mad to constantly hear these “warmest in recorded history” type comments which really mean warmest in our sample period of approximately 130 out of 4 billion years. It’s been a while since I studied sadistics (oops, I mean statistics) but I don’t think that would be a valid sample size.
I’ve also been seeing a lot of media articles lately from Greenpeace, Oxfam, WWF and the like in which they go on and on about “runaway global warming”. Yet, when I mentioned runaway global warming on this site some time ago (referring to positive feedbacks) I was soundly criticised (by CMB I think) for promoting a straw man argument. Evidently I wasn’t as it is in fact widely used by the alarmists.
By the way, any New Zealand readers might like to register on my Sign Off petition: http://www.signoff.org.nz.
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For those who wish to believe the AGW point of view, please see the following quote from an African union representative – ” Africa will seek billions in compensation from industrialised nations during key climate change talks in Copenhagen later this year, an official said Monday.” And – “He said the compensation sought would amount to billions of dollars and “could be anything up to five percent of the global GDP,” which would be equivalent to around three trillion dollars.”
So…. does this sound like a good idea???? Let’s bankrupt the developed world out of some misdirected self-loathing by using a completely discredited and corrupt process (cap and trade with compensation). I’m sure it makes perfect sense to the AGW idiots!!!
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Jo – “Craig Loehle used 18 non-tree-ring proxies from all over the world.”
Citing an obviously flawed article published in a non peer reviewed rag helps your argument not. There’s a lot to question about the methodology used in that article. Quoting from it – “If data occurred every 100 years, each point would be stretched by the smoothing to cover 30 years…” So basically he uses a 30 year running mean in a rather amusing way. Of course, you can only do this if you have a yearly time series, and his data typically did not have that sort of resolution. I mean, you can’t just “stretch” the data point to represent a 30 year period when the data already represents a longer average. That technique imo shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the physical nature of the measurement. But worse, that was the only description of his approach. So there’s no way to know what he did with each data set, since he tells you nothing else. He essentially thumbs nose to the basics of science, which is – explaining the method used in the study.
Also, I had noticed that he provides a link to his data, which actually points to the data plotted in his Figure 1. But for soem reason there is no link to his smoothed data for each of the referenced data sets. So, nobody can look at what he actually did. I also notice that the data is presented in a file with 16 significant digits. I would expect to see the original data as maybe 3 significant digits and presenting data with more significance than is available in the source data is just well, daft.
Jo – So, what evidence do you have that MWP and the LIA were regional?
AR4 discusses much study and evidence in section 6.6.1 Northern Hemisphere Temperature Variability
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf
In short, the Hocky Stick has become a whole Hockey Team.
Jo – “The test here is to see if you can give an answer which has reference to observations about the natural world and not observations about committees (eg NAS, IPCC, UN, WMO et al).”
Ah yes, of course, a dubious article published in E & E, a non peer reviewed science journal and carbon fuel industry front for publishing the pseudo-science of lapdog scientists uncritically, holds more weight than the findings of the NAS and later AR4 findings through multiple subsequent peer-reviewed studies by different teams of scientists.
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May I request that you cite a few references? Just a URL or two would do.
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Damien
To quote James Hanson:
“The overwhelming practical requirement, for the sake of future generations, humanity itself, and the other species on the planet, is phase-out of coal emissions over the next 20 year.”
Will this happen under the current world order? That’s a big NO.
It is obvious that coal emissions will just keep increasing as most governments are operating on the NATO (no action talk only) principle.
James Hanson has a plan you need to embrace – civil resistance.
WHY spend these vital decades in futile exchanges with the nonconvertible? Would it not be better to join with like minded friends form a civil resistance cadre as recommended by James and fight to save world?
I am certain that you will have more success as an eco warrior than you will as a member of the AGW intelligentsia.
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Examples for Tel:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/environment/news/article.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=10591179 second paragraph.
http://www.signon.org.nz/climate-change/climate-change-it-s-now-or-never third paragraph.
There was a letter in the New Zealand Herald today from, I think, someone at the WWF claiming runaaway global warming but it is not on the web.
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See link below for an interview with Martin Durkin…yes THAT Martin Durkin!
He discusses some interesting aspects of how the AGW intelligentsia think.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=33192
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Tel
The Greenpeace Briefing July 2009
Averting Catastrophic Climate Change
Has some pretty alarmist comments in it.Much the same in the joint submission with WWF Demands for Copenhagen. No urls I’m to lazy but easy to find on either web site.
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OOPs!
Wrong link.
Here is the correct link.
http://www.fcpp.org/main/publication_detail.php?PubID=2444
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Impressive! Red herring, incorrect assertion and ad hominem all in one sentence.
Even if true, peer-review/non pee review is not what invalidates a study. Peer-review guarantees nothing (See Mann, “Nature” 1998 and Steig “Nature” 2009)(Red Herring)
Except that E&E is peer-reviewed. (We’ve been around this tree before with the “Venusian Lesbians” dude.)
Yeah, because the lead authors for NAS and IPCC generally reviewed, included and highlighted their own studies. No conflict of interest there, eh?
I leave it to you to figure out the ad hominem.
Unable to produce actual evidence of anything, you resort to the AGW toolkit of red herrings, outright lies and ad hominem. And you wonder why there are more and more skeptics?
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Methinks that’s somewhat of an oxymoron?
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Rob: thanks for the links, the “Sign On” stuff has more than a little bit of the cult of the personality to it. It reminds me of documentary footage I saw of Jonestown.
I’m a supporter of Democracy, not because I love the idea of letting people like Toni Potter explain science to me, but because of what Churchill said — the alternative options are worse. Even with that belief, it’s shaking to see how easily those people have been manipulated and how sure they are of themselves.
Bruce: I think I’ve mentioned more than a few times that the Green movement has a strong neo-Luddite core to it. From that perspective, Martin Durkin’s comments don’t surprise me in the least (although perhaps Durkin goes a bit overboard).
It’s not even an entirely illogical neo-Luddite movement for that matter, plenty of aspects of modern lifestyle have their problems. The deeper issue that these people haven’t faced up to is that most of the stress and difficulty of the modern world come from an ever increasing population sustained by ever more complex technology. I look at Toni Potter’s grinning mug and understand that what she stands for is depopulation and can’t help wondering whether she has the slightest idea of what she is advocating.
In terms of Enlightenment values — freedom, reason, truth, discovery, etc. we have reached a bit of a limit in how far we can go with that. The military have their state secrets, their torture flights, and trumped up reasons for war. The politicos have their tame journalists, the dumbed-out gullible TV watchers with easy to push emotional buttons. Science has become a whore for the highest bidder. The various “progressive” movements are filled with such unbelievable nongs, desperate to belong to something, and believe in something, but clueless, easy to confuse and scatter.
Religion discovered that the way to outmanoeuvre reason is to build structures of orthodoxy, where everyone protects their own position whilst thinking they are part of a bigger truth and the formula has been a great success in so many places.
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Ah Yes, Damien. Still don’t have any papers to back you up. Don’t know what peer review is. Think that committee pronouncements are evidence, and that it’s OK for you to poke statistical questions at a compilation of 18 proxies, which almost all separately show the warming and then cooling pattern, and also matches evidence from fossils, tree stumps, migration patterns, artifacts, glacier records, all while you accept the hockey stick graph based on only one faulty proxy that responds to other factors as well as temperature, and you want us to take you seriously?
And speaking of stretching data … I didn’t see you get too excited when Steig et al statistically invented antarctic temperature records to fill in the gaps where nobody recorded data and showed the continent was warming even though it disagreed with decades of data. Oh but that’s ok… fake data is fine if it’s saving the planet right?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/29/steig-et-al-falsified/
If you ask Craig Loehle, he’ll provide you with all the data and mathods, and you won’t need to beg, plead or take out an FOI either.
None of the “obvious” flaws you mention show that the graphs are wrong, unlike McIntyres papers which showed the Hockey Stick graph was based on poor proxies, censored data, dubious statistical techniques, inept melding of two completely different data sets. If it smells like fraud…
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Tel @ 40: In terms of Enlightenment values — freedom, reason, truth, discovery, etc. we have reached a bit of a limit in how far we can go with that.
Interesting. We have Tel who said that he does not exist also saying he knows that we have reached the limit of Enlightenment values. Even if he did exist, how could he know that without using the self same values that he says have reached their limit? Apparently there is a bit more that can be gained from using those values than he originally opined.
Any limit we have reached is due to the lack of consistent use of those values rather than any limitation inherent within them.
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Joanne: I don’t know why you put up with Damien’s garbage. As for peer review, which he seems to think makes any scientific paper incontrovertible, well peer review has become worthless. Peer reviewers these days are just anonymous persons added to give a paper some sort of respectability and standing. It is obvious from many of the papers that pass peer review that the process completely fails in its purpose (although one could argue that it succeeds in its purpose because it allows non-scientific alarmism to masquerade as science). Much more worthwhile is independent verification and replication, but you don’t see that because the methods and data are hidden away (or lost).
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Lionell, logically the validity of an argument stems from the evidence (i.e. real-world observations) and the structure of the argument… not from the person who presented that argument. Whether I am your imaginary friend, or the Hand of God or some scrappy pamphlet blowing down the street, makes not a jot of difference to the connection between observation and conclusion.
You could be providing real world counterexamples where the system of freedom, reason, etc are still in good functioning order. Instead you appear to be using yourself as an example to support my thesis.
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Tel @ 44: Lionell, logically the validity of an argument stems from the evidence (i.e. real-world observations) and the structure of the argument… not from the person who presented that argument.
I agree. Your point is?
Tel @ 44: You could be providing real world counterexamples where the system of freedom, reason, etc are still in good functioning order.
If we cannot use freedom, reason, etc until we have it in good functioning order, we cannot use freedom, reason etc. because it is nowhere in good functioning order. The best we can do is view examples of greater or lessor freedom and the associated rate of advance or regression of the society experiencing it.
I would stack the progress of the 19th century US against the progress of the 20th century USSR as a rather good example demonstrating that freedom, reason, etc. works and its absence does not. There are many other examples in which relative freedom from political coercion resulted in freeing the intellectual and emotional energies of the people to advance their quality of living. Conversely, many examples with a significant lack of freedom have a notable lack of said energy and advance.
I suggest you investigate the nature of self organizing, self generating complex systems and the difference between feedback control and feed forward control in them. There is a direct application to human societies.
A good starting point would be the works of W. Ross Ashby and his general theory of adaptive systems. It can be used to explain why a central controlled society will always fail – in the long run. It also can explain why a free society in which each individual is free to achieve his own purpose for his own reasons and to keep the rewards or be responsible for the consequences (ie a truly free market system) is the best we can do. I refer you specifically to Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety.
I would caution you not to presume that freedom is a primary. Reason is primary with freedom being a necessary condition for its full utilization.
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I love the irony now of a lot of the commentariat saying that we should not rely on the economic modelling because it is only as good as the assumptions programmed in while in the same breath quoting climate models as inviolate truth.
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Hopefully we can both agree that arguing over who exists and who does not is a complete waste of time.
Ask any “progressive” to measure progress… it’s a measurement that is fraught with danger. What units do you measure in for starters?
In feudal Japan, the sword was everything. It takes about 10 years to train a good swordsman, probably a bit longer to train a good smithy and even a good smith only turns out occasional high quality swords. In comparison, a row of musketeers can be trained in a few months, cheaply equipped and cheaply replaced (and it goes without saying they will drill a row of swordsmen, quick smart). The feudal Japanese saw the immense dislocation this would cause in their social structure and simply decided that guns must not be allowed to happen. If stability is your main measure of success in a social structure then the central powers of Japan were very stable indeed (compared with pretty much anywhere in Europe).
Had the outside world not intervened, they would probably be living the same way today.
It is not in any way difficult to imagine that a sufficiently powerful agreement between governments might similarly decide to halt human technology in its tracks at some convenient point. They might not even make this decision consciously, people intent on snatching and holding power very rarely stop to carefully consider whether they are smashing the thing they are snatching.
The problem with Enlightenment thinking (and with freedom in general) is not a lack of results, nor a lack of performance, the problem is a lack of defence against systematic subversion.
Let’s suppose you have a fine sports car parked in your drive, but someone steals it. Then you have to ask, “Was there a problem that this car was not fast enough?” You could make another sports car that drives even faster and it would get stolen even sooner, because it is more desirable. The only way to stop it getting stolen is to lock it up, not improve the engine design.
Now you can lock your vehicle, but when it comes to rationality, trying to lock it up is the complete opposite of the whole premise of free thinking. To say that only certain people are entitled to consider themselves rational merely creates an all powerful central gatekeeper who allows some people into the club… pretty soon this gatekeeper will be king of everything and they will inevitably do away with free thinking, having no further use for it.
The end result is that if “Science” is looked up to as important, then any dingbat idea will get dressed up as “Science” and people will be convinced by this. Every scientific success merely makes this process happen faster. Trying to lock the dingbats out by setting up an arbiter of real science moves you back to central planning again and destroys the thing you are trying to protect.
Sadly, it’s a whole lot more work to educate someone up to being a systematic and skeptical scientist than it is to teach someone to play a convincing pseudo-scientist on television. It’s a huge amount of work to educate ordinary people to tell the difference between one and the other (especially when they are not particularly interested anyhow).
Although the ideas are interesting (and show great promise), in a practical sense they are a far cry from any “direct application to human societies”. It is tempting to think that some common principles might be shared across a great number of complex systems, but complex systems are, you know, complex. The science is not very old, and hasn’t yet had it’s Newton or Einstein to bring devastating insights to the field.
The more venerable language of warfare probably fits the job a bit better. People have been thinking about warfare for a rather long time, and they have come up with at least a few consistent principles. There is a War on Freedom which has been going on all of human history. Central powers invariably find freedom difficult to stomach. Suppose a new technology comes along, it is going to be disruptive. Anyone rich and powerful will by definition be benefiting from the current status quo so why would they support disruption? Why would any remotely sane king contribute to his own overthrow?
On one side of the war we have the technologists, the free thinkers, the rationalists. On the other side we have the church, the dogmatic thinkers, any central authority. Neither side can completely destroy the other without also destroying themselves but one side can become dominant, subjugating the other.
Science and technology subjugates orderliness all the time. We say:
“These are the rules, as we known them now. They are not the great and final set of rules for all future time, they are merely our best effort so far.”
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Tel @ 47: Although the ideas are interesting (and show great promise), in a practical sense they are a far cry from any “direct application to human societies”.
Check out the operation of free market economies. THAT is a direct application of the ideas in which price is the (negative) feedback signal used in adjusting supply and demand.
Check out he operation of central command and control economies in which price and centrally dictated production are all on feed forward control. For feed forward control to work, one must be able to compute ALL the factors at play with their current and constantly changing values. An economy of just about any scale is simply too complex to know all the factors at play, much less measure their levels. The computations are simply impossible to perform. This understanding is not new with me. See Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis
by Ludwig von Mises ( http://mises.org/books/socialism.pdf ).
As far as the rest of your post, man’s use of reason is by active and continuing choice. The method man uses to check the results of his thinking is also by choice. He can chose or not but he cannot avoid the consequences of his choice. That he continues to live and thrive depends upon his making the right choices. Even the action required to know what the right choice is, is a matter of choice. Again, escaping the consequences of that choice is impossible. Now, it might appear that the consequences have been escaped but once the sacrificial victims have been consumed, the consequences become evident. It is this power of choice and its necessity that constitutes man’s free will. It is not, as some would hold, freedom from the consequences of and the necessity of choosing.
The bottom line is, if you choose to live you must choose to use reason. To use reason, you must be free to put the results of that reason into use. Even a parasite and thug is relying on the reason of others to produce what he takes. He is therefore dependent upon them and will perish when all victims have been consumed. He must ultimately give up that dependence and start using reason or die.
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If it was negative feedback (in the simplistic sense) then the market system would be stable. Evidence suggests that market systems tend not to be stable, resulting in steady booms and busts going right through history to the present day. Thus, we need a more detailed theory to explain the lack of stability. Some have suggested that positive feedback is a likely explanation (e.g. Omerod, Keen, etc), I suspect that some phase shifting occurs due to time lags in the process. At any rate, there’s a lot more to it than a simple self-adjusting system.
I’ve yet to see anyone reproduce reasonably plausible market dynamics in any simulation, so we have a lot to learn about how markets really work.
Hmmm, central planners do tend to use more feed forward than free marketers, but it would be unfair to say that central planning does not also feedback the results into the next round of planning.
You can measure feedback systems in terms of “loop gain” and “loop delay”. The loop delay (measured in units of time) is the approximate time it takes a piece of information to go once right round the loop from planning, to implementation, to consequence to adjustment of the plan. Any business (large or small) operating in a free market environment will make use of some centralised system of control, including making plans for the future (i.e. feed forward).
With a small business, the consequences are more rapidly observed so small business is “agile” in its ability to react to changes and update their plan. We could say that small business has a brief loop delay.
Any free market system you care to name will also have big business, operating in a manner much the same as a central planned economy. Head office writes the edict, pushes their instructions out to the branches and waits to see what happens. Big business and big government are essentially two manifestations of the same phenomenon.
Well, if you start with the biggest factors and manage to get most of those covered, then making mistakes on some of the smaller stuff doesn’t matter such a lot. You may manufacture too many shoes and not enough socks, so some shoes get warehoused and some socks have to get patched a bit longer when they should be replaced. Although the world is non-linear, it is close enough to linear that a small issue will typically remain a small issue with small consequences (not always; there are notable exceptions, where you just have to get it right, but please don’t pretend that a free market system does not also make mistakes).
There are bigger problems with central planning than merely computational efficiency. Regardless of whether the computational problem can be solved in a central manner, you also have to ask whether there is any incentive. Once power concentration sets in, fewer and fewer people make bigger and bigger decisions. These people just are not interested in what happens at the far flung corners of their fiefdom. For the most part they make decisions to suit themselves. We can call this corruption or decadence or just plain laziness but the end result is that the primary aim is holding onto power, rather than making good decisions.
Exactly the problem happens with CEOs earning multi million dollar bonuses for a company that is half the size it was last year. The power of the company concentrates in the hands of a few and they milk it dry. They really don’t care if it should fall apart next decade, they will be gone by then. You can build a free market, but it does not protect you from this issue.
Once great advantage of small business is not merely the brief loop delay, but the decision maker has a great incentive to get it right. They know they have no buffer of protection from their own mistakes.
The majority of parasites have mechanisms to ensure that they never fully consume their victims. For the most part, the parasite can enjoy a vastly simpler nervous system and decision making apparatus and still be highly successful. Besides, each side of the fence sees the other as the parasite… Socialists see themselves as part of a higher organism (being the society), free individuals see the society as little more than taxation and regulation. Each perspective has it’s own validity, within it’s own internal logic.
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Tel,
Does reality exist for you or is it all a matter of individual (or collective) definition that creates reality? If the latter, then you, as an independent existent entity, do not exist. You are a mirror reflecting other mirrors reflecting still other mirrors.
There is one fundamental alternative that living things face: to live or not. If to live is the choice, then action must be taken to support that life. Those actions must be consistent with the nature of the living thing AND the environment in which it lives. To die only takes non action. The environment is irrelevant in that case.
Once the choice to live is made, then the challenge is to discover what your nature requires and how that can be obtained from what actually is. What you believe/wish/whim/fantasize or countless others believe/wish/whim/fantasize is totally and completely irrelevant to what actually is.
Ultimately, the question of what reality is and how can we know it, is the most fundamental and most important question to answer. Do you have the slightest interest in the answer? Or is argumentation your only goal?
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Which of your individual brain cells is asking that question? A bit of jolly irony in seeing two super-organisms arguing over the details of how individuality works. Bacteria clearly have the right idea.
I make a bit of an effort to insert a reference when I use other people’s ideas, and I note that you do too. This is of course only for politeness sake, we already agreed that the source of an idea neither adds nor detracts from the validity of that idea.
In Australia we celebrate ANZAC day once a year. Our politicians get so enthusiastic about showing false homage, that they give the impression they would enjoy doing it all again. The modern ANZAC day merely serves as a reminder to people that they should study the history of the time, which is the interesting bit.
In WWI, Australia fielded what was probably the largest all-volunteer army in the world at that time. The Gallipoli campaign was a resolute failure, and we learned a lot of lessons (such as never trust a British officer in command). Australian troops were highly successful in other battles including the Somme.
A significant outcome was that a great many Australians ended up dead, by their own choice, because they felt that going into battle for their country was the appropriate thing to do.
There are only a handful of documented historic battles where a loose knit group of individuals were successful against a tightly organised force with a central command structure. Teutoburg Forest was one, the American Revolution was another, we could quibble over borderline cases like the Spanish partisans fighting Fascism. Depending on how bad the US economic situation gets we may see Iraq become another one (looks unlikely).
Every other battle was won by a tightly centralised command structure. By your own argument Lionel, if you want to survive you should be part of one of those centralised command structures.
Except that, not all the world is warfare (it couldn’t be, war is a fire, you either put it out or it burns itself out – Sun Tsu). In the field of technology you get better results from allowing people to follow their own ideas in a free flowing manner, than you do by commanding them to invent. In peacetime, productivity and commerce become more significant, these things require a marketplace.
War has also been a great driver of technology (because it created necessity). The Romans for example fought the Greeks and the Greeks proved inventive in finding ways to protect themselves, but in the long run the Romans defeated them. The Romans were not particularly inventive but they did recognise value when they saw it, and took many ideas (as well as great numbers of educated slaves) from the Greeks. Rome was a centrally planned, militaristic and bureaucratic society but very effective in its day. Devastatingly effective against the free-wheeling Gauls and Celts who operated a loose knit tribal and family-oriented society.
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Tel,
I see. I suggest you go back onto your medication. Perhaps then you could make a coherent reply to the point rather than your repeated flights of equivocated fantasy.
I should have believed you when you said you don’t exist. There is no there, there.
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Rudeness huh? I’ve been insulted by better.
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In all of the blog pages on this web site, I have never seen Damien make a correct statement about the natural climate.
I have never seen Joanne make an incorrect statement about it.
One would think Joanne would have an impression on Damien’s thinking to correct his misinterpretations – SOMEWHERE along the line, after all this time.
Nope. It just hasn’t happened.
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Brian,
As far as I can tell, there is probably no science (on its own) that will change Damien’s mind, because he seems to use authority to decide what’s right. Since there are undoubtly a lot of people like Damien, it’s very useful for us to know what he would find convincing (if anything): i.e. Focussing on the most embarrassing failures of authority; offering a higher authority (does Aristotle trump Hansen?); or (ha ha) wait for the authorities to change their minds and publicly conceed. (As if).
Correct me if I’m wrong Damien, is that what would convince you (should it ever happen): The IPCC announces that they’ve overestimated water vapor feedback and now they expect only 1 degree total warming due to carbon? You are tenacious to tackle a crowd when you are outnumbered. I respect your persistence (if not the logic). But ultimately your arguments fall back on the line that “97% of the worlds scientists agree with one theory” .
It’s the most difficult point for us to find any common ground. Most of the time “consensus” (however it is defined) is reasonable, but it is occasionally hopelessly wrong.
Can we agree on that? (Even if not on this particular issue).
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Yeah, Damien relies on “authority” all right – but only the “authority” he seems to like.
Damien doesn’t like Lindzen, Gerlich & Tscheuschner, Roy Spencer, Dave Evans, et al.
– Damien only “likes” the “authorities” who seem to agree with his pre-conceived notions.
And Damien can get pretty hostile if he wants to – and so I have no problem getting harsh with Damien.
I’ll admit there is no way to change the minds of the Damiens of the world. About the best I can hope for is to help to limit their possible damage
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Joanne Novice – As far as I can tell, there is probably no science (on its own) that will change Damien’s mind
Not My Valentine – I’ll admit there is no way to change the minds of the Damiens of the world
There a simple reason …
Last I checked, the satellite measurements show the globe to be warming, the balloon measurements show the globe to be warming, the surface thermometer measurements show the globe to be warming, the sea based thermometer measurements show the globe to be warming, ocean sound propagation speed measurements show the globe to be warming, and I observe the reduction in glaciers globally, I observe sea level rise, the migration of species northward, the melting polar ice caps, the melting Greenland ice sheet, the seasonal shifts, the delay of the first freeze times of winter, and the final thaw times of spring, and of course the 200 years of radiative physics implicating increasing conentrations of CO2 to these effects.
With such overwhelming direct observational evidence it would be quite hard for me to ignore the truth.
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You still have failed to explain where your 0.2 degrees per decade warming figure came from, when all of the observations you cite deliver substantially lower values.
Is that your standard for truth?
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Daemon,
Regarding the MWP, and whether it was a global or regional phenomena, I like the following link to multiple studies showing there was a warm period some 1000 years ago.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
Or have all of these studies been discredited by one ‘hockey stick’ study?
Mann-made warming indeed.
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Last I checked, the satellite measurements show the globe to be warming,
[cough]
the balloon measurements show the globe to be warming,
[cough]
the surface thermometer measurements show the globe to be warming,
[cough]
the sea based thermometer measurements show the globe to be warming,
[cough]
ocean sound propagation speed measurements show the globe to be warming, and I observe the reduction in glaciers globally,
[cough]
I observe sea level rise,
[cough um, you mean the 1.5mm rise per year that’s been steady for a couple of hundred years]
the migration of species northward,
[cough]
the melting polar ice caps,
[big cough for the Antartic farce]
the melting Greenland ice sheet,
[Svensmark has secretly been reporting everything from Tahiti]
the seasonal shifts,
[ummmph]
the delay of the first freeze times of winter,
[umm, not in Chicago, USA, but Chicago is on another planet]
and the final thaw times of spring, and of course the 200 years of radiative physics implicating increasing conentrations of CO2 to these effects.
Here’s a mystery I cannot solve: Why do satellites that measure 342 W per sq metre of Solar radiation striking the Earth (as a disc) measure the same 342 W per square metre leaving the Earth?
How does the CO2 come into play to secretly heat the Earth?
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Brian
How does the CO2 come into play to secretly heat the Earth?
The Copenhagen Effect!!
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allen,
It must be related to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics in which events become real (aka. wave function collapses) only when observed (aka. measured). However, in the case of Damien, Robin, et.al., actual observations and measurements are not necessary. All they need are reports of reports of reports of … of reported observations that they agree with and reality obeys. Then if there is a report they don’t agree with, all they have to say is “it has been reported that (blah…blah…blah), ignore anything that contraindicates their pet theories, and reality once again meekly obeys.
In other words, if they think that damn cat is dead, its dead and they don’t even have to open the box to find out. THEY have decided and that is enough proof for them. On the other hand, we mere mortals must look inside the box.
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I wish people with conservative, not liberal politics, had introduced this concept.
Then all of the liberals would say, “this is another kook idea from the gun nuts and Creationists,..” blah blah blah
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Lionell
I can accept the dead cat but I will need links to peer reviewed articles before I can accept the existence of the box unless it originally contained a hockey stick, then of cause no verification is required.
Perhaps Damien et. al. are suffering from a digital form of the Stockholm Syndrome.
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Chlorine.
Maybe its chlorine that is causing the “sea level rise” etc etc, the same people who want to “stop CO2” wanted to “eliminate chlorine” some years ago. They wanted to switch from water chlorination to ozonolysis of municipal water (at 10 times the electricity cost), all kinds of imbicile arguments.
These people are non-stop fanatics. They have no clue how the world actually works, or what their demands imply, or anything but contempt for civilisation.
If people give into this at all for them, they’ll just move on to something else. I don’t know what they could find with a bigger scope than CO2, however.
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Hi Brian, good to have you back!
Yes, Patrick Moore talks about the proposed Greenpeace ban on chlorine and other things in this new movie, which no-one has mentioned yet here on Joanne’s blog, so now I’m doing it 🙂
“Not Evil Just Wrong – The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria” http://www.noteviljustwrong.com/
I’ve seen it, it’s brilliant. I urge everyone here who is committed to stopping the madness of enviro-fascism to order your own “Premiere Pack”, host your own premiere and help the film makers make history, as they are asking. Check site for details.
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Quotes from people asociated with the American government:
“I think that also is a signal that our weather patterns are changing and I think that that is further evidence that, you know global warming and the need to do something about it is going to affect us sooner rather than later and I can’t think of a better example than the fact that we’ve had now these habitual wildfires just about every year.”
—Rep. Linda Sanchez, blaming the California wildfires on global warming. Since record keeping began, California wildfires this year are actually below early 1900 levels. Explosive population encroachment, arson, and poor forest management are the primary contributors
“There the forests are dying because of climate change. People go [to Colorado] to be photographed in front of beautiful forests, which in a few years won’t be there.”
—Tom Vilsack, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, pimping the Cap-and-Tax bill at the Iowa State Fair and forecasting the early demise of Colorado forests. Reportedly, the Fair’s resident fortune teller, Ima Frawd, took credit by stating she shared her prediction with Vilsack moments before he spoke.
“Global warming creates volatility. I feel it when I’m flying. The storms are more volatile. We are paying the price in more hurricanes and tornadoes.”
Senator Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.) – recently appointed to the Senate Energy Committee – made clear that fighting the climate crisis is her top priority, which includes embracing cap and trade’s massive tax increase.
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Damien – Clouds decrease, or God heats the earth with a microwave, and whatdoyouknow, glaciers melt, the troposphere warms. There’s a killer cause-and-effect gap here. You keep posting the EFFECTS of global warming. The rest of us are talking about the cause.
Congrats for providing evidence of The Obvious.
Yes the world has warmed 1800 – 2001.
Yes carbon has risen.
Yes carbon is a greenhouse gas.
But no – you still havent provided any empirical evidence that this warming was mostly due to carbon, or that water vapor gives us strong positive feedback (there is no hot spot).
And no previous examples in 500 million years where carbon lead a temperature spike or definitively caused major feedback.
You still haven’t provided global cloud cover stats for 1750 thus showing that changes in cloud cover are not responsible for the warming, nor have you explained the little ice age or the Medieval warming period, except to deny that they were a global phenomenon (despite the evidence from African Lakes & Caves, Andean Glaciers, Chilean glaciers, Antarctic ice cores and global sea levels).
A lab test with one variable is not equivalent to “The Atmosphere”. Do your lab tubes have clouds?
Yawn. We’ve already covered all this ad infinitum. We ask for evidence and you provide “evidence” that supports something none of us are even debating. It’s been almost 2 months of “Daemon” comments. Haven’t you noticed that no one here is saying the world cooled from 1800-now?
(Ian George #59. Excellent link – Thanks. )
Deny this Damien – a NZ cave http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_nzcave.php with temps that are higher by 0.75 degrees than the present during the warm period that you reckon was just European.
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He needn’t feel isolated, however; he can go over to DeSmog or Deltoid and trash “deniers” all day long – to the resounding encouragement of half-hearted appluause
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I think you told us both sides of the story.It is always interesting to read facts like these.
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For a rather eye-opening introduction to “debunking junk science,” listen to Michael Shermer as he explains an approach to scepticism that he fails to listen to, himself.
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Damien McCormick (Daemon):
September 4th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Just can’t skip the name-calling and ad homs can you. Lovely how you keep reinforcing the fact that you have no case.
Sorta like how humans did when things got a tad warmer after the last Ice Age? And this is bad how? Still doesn’t demonstrate causality.
Yeah, right. Sorry, doesn’t demonstrate causality. There were never any Viking farms in Greenland growing wheat and flax, right? Just a Denier fairy tale, right? Can you grow wheat and flax in Greenland today? Short answer: NO. Hint, hint…Greenland was once warmer than today and CO2 had nothing to do with it!
Except in the minds of lunatics, explain how a longer growing season is bad. Seems to me that you can produce more food to feed people. Oh, and gee, don’t need to burn as much of that “evil fossil fuel” to stay warm either so we don’t need to spew more of that poisonous CO2 into the atmosphere. Hmmm, looks a tad bit “self-correcting” to me…assuming it’s a problem in the first place.
Here’s the basic flaw in all your “observations” apart that they say nothing of causality: most of your data sets are less than 40 years old. How old is earth? Like 4.5 BILLION years? SHEESH!
There seems to be a reason that, among scientists, geologists are the most skeptical. They tend to look in timeframes longer than 30 or 40 years.
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The problem is, just looking at the data, these “longer growing seasons” “species migrating north” etc etc are simply one of a kind observations, that looked at across the map, and across the years, just don’t hold up.
The seasons are determined by the Earth’s obliquity, there is nothing that has changed that, various factors come into play to make cold, warm wet, spring, summer, fall, etc – but there is as much variability of that as there is of the weather, over the years, these cancel out, and makes the climate the climate over the seasons, with an average that stays as constant as the Earth’s orbit
We can see that as plain as day in the geological record, through hundereds of thousands, millions of years; despite what the composition of the atmosphere is or was since life began
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I am always amused when people talk about growing seasons species migration etc. You get an entirely different perspective when living with nature.
In South Australia during the two years before last we had periods in summer when temperatures were above 35C for 10 days or greater and large numbers of trees died this of course led to cries about the effects of Global Warming. There was of course a natural explanation. With water restrictions (caused by mismanagement of resources not AGW) people could not flood their gardens and the tree species that suffered mostly were European imports.
Growing seasons are not set in concrete local climate variations affect when we plant, yields etc.Bird species arrive and depart when conditions best suit them they do not consult calenders. This year we have had a mild wet winter and the magpie chicks hatched about three weeks early to take advantage of optimum conditions.
Most people that talk about the environment have absolutely no idea of the complexity of the cycles that govern the natural world.
We have four generations of records to fall back on and there is nothing unusual with conditions now when compared to the past.
AGW is not the problem it is over funded academics playing simplistic games with expensive toys and cynical politicians pretending to respond to the nonsensical bleating of climate cretins.
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I was first exposed to “global warming” as a result of the Al Gore movie and I must say that the hockey stick graph appeared quite convincing. The basis of the graph was that CO2 has been increasing at “unprecedented” rates and so has temperature and so the former must have caused the latter.
I felt betrayed by science when I found out that the hockey stick was a scientific fraud. I say this knowing that Robin and Damien will deny it as they must do in order to cling on to their ideology. Using bristle cone tree rings and massively massaged numbers with complicated statistical techniques that the average person could not understand covered the temperature side of things. And of course, the CO2 had to be manipulated as well to fit the temperature even though it has been higher than it is now. This left only one option for the lay person. Trust the scientists – or not.
The hockey stick graph got rid of the MWP and therefore the LIA when in the first IPCC report the existence of these periods was acknowledged – they changed their minds. Why? This was the only “evidence” IPCC had to offer to advance the cause of AGW. Indeed in the first IPCC report it was reported that bristle cones were not a good proxy for temperature, yet now it is used. So the hockey stick shows a world where temperature has been stable for 400 to 1000 years and therefore there are no natural fluctuations to explain increases in temperature in the 20th century. Because of this, all the recent warming must have been from CO2 and therefore we can calculate climate sensitivity on the assumption there is no such thing as natural variation. No wonder IPCC had to get rid of the MWP and LIA. While CO2 itself cannot physically explain the temperature rise over the last century, we need the concept of feedbacks to make it so, and the feedbacks must be net positive else we cannot reconcile with the temperature records. So this is the science we got.
The hockey stick has been discredited, the IPCC no longer use it, but its effect remains. It has been a successful manipulating device to get a lot of people to believe in global warming. Not happy to just leave it at that, the same statistical techniques were used to show Antarctica has been warming despite the increase in ice cover there and insufficient weather records to make such a claim. Now, the latest “study” shows that the Arctic cooled for 2000 years, and then CO2 came along to warm it, shown in a graph virtually identical to a hockey stick. Based mainly of course on selected tree rings and mathematical and statistical manipulation.
No doubt Robin and Damien will defend the new studies for they were authoured and peer revieved by the same club credited with the hockey stick. But how come the Arctic ice extent is higher this year than last? How come the temperature went up mainly in one step about 1950 whereas most CO2 (though not all) increased after then? How come the authors and reviewers are all from the same clique and have also had an enormous influence on the IPCC reports?
While none of these papers proves anything, what is proven is that these particular scientists are prepared to falsify and cherry pick to get a conclusion THEY WANT TO REACH. The result is predetermined and the science is merely looking to find supporting reasons.
The whole issue began as a way of altering man’s use of fossil fuels (I have some sympathy with this). Now it is CO2 which is evil – but on top of that all other greenhouse gases and from all sources. So we will target cars, tractors, planes, boats, people, cows, horses, sheep, rice paddies, wetlands, agriculture, India’s sacred cows, electricity, the Serengeti Plains, polar bears, zoos. The atmosphere cannot distinguish between what came from a cow and what came from a polar bear. In other words, life itself is being demonised. This science has become anti-nature whatever its original purpose may have been.
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I think it remarkable how easily politicians are swayed by a handful of hyperventilating academics who have written some computer programs and studied some satellite data, and hare-brained lunatics who don’t like civilisation to begin with.
If I was a politician and one of the academics waved their results at me I would simply ask, “So what do you want me to do about it?”
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But if the politician was thinking… I’d like to find a way to a/ look like a hero, b/ get more money from the public, and c/ have a bit more control over everything that moves, (and quite a few things that don’t), and d/ do all of the above… how hard am I going to study the nice report that appears to justify it all? Just hard enough to say “Yes Please, let’s increase your funding.”
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I would first ask them to demonstrate that anything I could do would have some effect on their results, and demand some positive empirical evidence.
Rerouting some traffic, changing some zoning codes, etc can be shown to have some effect – good or bad.
But no “climatologist” or whatever they call themselves could prove that some law will have an effect on whatever their observations or theory suggests.
No politician has ever been revered for devising ways of “controlling” people more effectively, although within their very short political lives, some of them seem to see this as a worthy objective
Why I have no idea. They certainly revolt when their own lives are micro-managed, I’m sure
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Brian: Why I have no idea.
I find two motivations in operation.
1. When your life is going out of control, you work to control everyone else’s life rather than fix your own life.
2. You hate the fact you must actively and constantly choose to be human (use reason) so you strive to eliminate the possibility of that choice in others.
Actually these motivations are two sides of the same coin. In the middle of that coin is the abdication of being responsible for your own existence. The result is that you work to make everyone else responsible for it. THAT eliminates the possibility of anyone being responsible for anything. Entropy is thereby unleashed and overtakes all.
The process appears to work only as long as there are victims available to be consumed.
When the target victims start refusing to be victims, a speedy collapse of the scam will soon follow. See the decline and fall of any past empire for instructive detail.
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It is interesting that nothing in history seems to set a precedent for the notion of a modern-day “liberal” (in the American sense of the word) excepting a true-blue Soviet Communist.
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Brian: It is interesting that nothing in history seems to set a precedent….
Checkout the details of your local religious outlet of any creed. You are held responsible for everyone else and are demanded to allow yourself to be sacrificed for the lowest of the low. All in the name of a mythical highest of the high who is anything but you. The precedent goes back hundreds of thousands of years when the first tribal chieftain joined forces with the tribal witch doctor to scam a free lunch from the tribe. The only real difference is the substitution of a suit, shoes, and guns for war paint, loin cloths, and stone axes. The principles behind and character of the enterprise is unchanged.
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I guess it’s difficult to resist the temptation to do it when the opportunity to do it presents itself.
The thought process that seems to accompany it is, “if I don’t do it, somebody else will come along and do it anyway. So it might as well be me.”
I have considered running for Federal political office, but I am a Federal employee and I am not sure how the details of that influence how I can possibly do it.
Prior to this, I have never considered such a thing in my life. The only reason I would do it is to flatten opponents from “green groups” and the US Democrat political party in public.
I think the public would be delighted to see this.
For writing letters such as these I receive a lot of letters of thanks.
People seem to be afraid to speak out about the nonsense, even though they are sick of it (excepting a handful of lunatics who can’t be pleased no matter what happens)
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Brian @ #80: I’ve just finished reading Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”. I highly recommend it, it explains a lot and rectifies quite a few misconceptions promoted by the Left.
Gave me a whole new view of FDR, Kennedy, Mussolini, Hitler … Why is it, for example, that Hitler is always portrayed as “ultra right-wing” when his party was called “The National SOCIALISTS”?
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As far as I can tell, the difference between the extreme political right and left is, the former demands (independently of who complains or gets hurt) to “go back” to a former (era) of the way things should be now.
The latter do the same thing, except to “skip forward” to their vision of the utopia that never was.
Funny that the “green movement” is perceived as “extreme left” – when their demands would bringus back to an era of cave people
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I am probably thinking along similar lines to you. See my blog
http://politicalsidelines.blogspot.com/
In New Zealand, Greenpeace enlisted a whole lot of celebrities to front their campaign for the Government to sign on to a 40% reduction in GHG emissions. In response to that my view is that it can be easily achieved and these celebrities are the very ones who can lead by example. If they stop making movies and television programs and CDs and giving concerts, then people won’t be able to “consume” them. No supply – therefore no consumption. Sadly (possibly) a whole lot of out of work actors who are probably overpaid for what they do anyway. [Greenpeace should have engaged brain before enlisting these elitists].
However, the austerity that my plan prescribes is merely what 50% of the world lives with today. It is just that Westerners are unwilling to concede any of their comforts in order to save the planet they supposedly care so much about.
I think if it came down to Governments decreeing such austerity for such a noble cause we would very quickly see a whole lot of converts to the “skeptic” camp.
Which brings to mind another thought – if “the science is settled” why is so much money being spent on research? Surely Newton didn’t go back to the University for another grant once gravity was proven?
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There is no real difference in method, principal, or purpose. Their method is brute force. Their principle is whatever they can get away with. Their purpose is destruction. The labels “left” and “right” are smoke screens to hide the fact they are blood brothers.
Their only argument is over who is to have power and control over whom. Who is to be sacrificed to whom, for what purpose, to what extent, and how fast. The state is absolute and the individual is an irrelevant cipher to be consumed at whim. No matter what, the constant element is sacrifice: the destruction of higher values to achieve a lower one.
The true axis is freedom or slavery, life or death, respect for individual rights or destruction of the individual.
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I think you’re right about that, Lionel.
The only ingredient that is needed to make it happen is a collection of people too stupid to say no.
That ingredient seems to be available at any given time in history.
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The point Jonah Goldberg makes in his book is that what liberals CALL “The Extreme Right” IS in fact “The Extreme LEFT”, i.e. there IS no difference. “Right” should rightfully (pardon pun) be “conservative” and what essentially differentiates them from “left/progressives/liberals” is that conservatives do not want change just for the sake of change, whereas the other mob DO! If you look at the platforms of both Mussolini’s Fascists and Hitler’s Nazis, they were very close to the Communists’. It’s all about “fair distribution of wealth”, “Universal health care” and “State education for all”.
“Totalitarian” was a word coined by Mussolini himself, and it meant “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, no-one left behind”.
Who does that sound like? Chilling … Read the book, it’s hard to boil it down to its essence, there’s so much there.
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I think a key feature of the National Socialists was that they formed a strong alliance with big business, which of course the communists didn’t do. So I’d say the AGW political movement is more right than left.
Ann: “that conservatives do not want change just for the sake of change”; or, a bit more positively, conservatives believe that lessons can be learnt from the past.
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davidc: How do you extrapolate from Nazi alliance with business (which, btw, came late in the piece and largely out of pragmatic opportunism on the side of business: “We don’t like what they stand for but it seems they’re here to stay, may as well get on with it, gotta earn a crust”)on one side, and “AGW political movement [being] more right than left”?
Interesting article by Brendan O’Neill in today’s Australian: “Greens cling to moral fix”
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26040345-7583,00.html
And yes, I was pushed for time (writing @ work) so of course you are right, there is more to conservatism than my quick comment 🙂
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Oooh, this is just too good! Review today in Quadrant online of Clive James’ new book, in which he is quoted as saying:
“[…] liberal democracy is about the best political system we can hope for; it’s fragile, and mustn’t be taken for granted; and it must be understood, valued, and defended.
[Clive]James spent a long time honing this view against the twentieth century’s two most lethal forms of totalitarianism. Introducing the current volume, he usefully suggests that we stop regarding Nazism and Soviet communism as radically opposed things — two ends of a spectrum whose mid-point is occupied by liberal democracy. Instead he calls liberal democracy “the breathable atmosphere of a planet”, above which “there is an unbreathable stratosphere called extremism, trying to get in”
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Jo – The rest of us are talking about the cause.
Ah yes yes yes, the cause, the cause. Anything… anything but CO2 of course, of course. Conspiracy, concealment, deceit, denial, space aliens, anything, just anything so long as it’s not CO2. Because if it’s CO2 my taxes are already too high. Awwww, poor little babies!
[ Daemon translated: God forbid, I’d never admit to having made such a basic error of logic that I’d mixed up cause and effect so I’ll mock you like you’re a baby instead and hope no one notices. — JN]
Jo – Yes the world has warmed 1800 – 2001.
2001? What happened to 1998? Can’t the contrarians come up with a consistent story?
[ Daemon translated: Oops. you caught me again, but dang, I can always try to hit you for things Other Sceptics said eh? — JN]
Jo – But no – you still havent provided any empirical evidence that this warming was mostly due to carbon, or that water vapor gives us strong positive feedback (there is no hot spot).
The empirical evidence is the observations of surface warming, combined with the science of radiative transfer, atmospheric science, and measurements of the spectra of CO2. The fact of the matter is that you can’t or are unwilling to comprehend the simple science that links CO2 enhancement to increases in global average temperature. And therefore conclude that there can be no evidence.
Just plain silliness.
[ Daemon translated: I’ll just bluster on about the spurious recent correlation between temps and CO2 (ignoring that correlation is not causation) and dress it up in fancy wordage, mention radiative physics because it sounds clever, even though it’s just more lab tests… The fact of the matter is that my standards of logic and reason are so low that I’ll accept argument from authority and ignorance, lab tests, climate simulations, and I don’t mind that the modelers don’t understand the climate well enough to predict the short term, I’m sure they are honest smart people and I trust them right? — JN]
No doubt similarly you also conclude that there is no evidence for Evolution, no evidence of an Earth older than 7,000 years, no evidence of dark spots on microscope slides causing disease, and no evidence that smoking causes cancer.
[Daemon translated: OK. She’s got me, but heck, maybe if I accuse her of lots of irrelevant things I’ve got no evidence for, I might get lucky? Maybe I can distract everyone from the fact that I’ve got no evidence for global warming while they get sucked into one of these completely unrelated debates? — JN]
Jo – And no previous examples in 500 million years where carbon lead a temperature spike or definitively caused major feedback.
I consider the first half of the Cenozoic as a fine example. CO2 was as high as 1000 ppm, with a forcing of more than 10 W/m2 relative to glacial periods, and the world was an ice free state.
[ Right – you mean like the PETM where carbon rose 3000 years or so after temperature? http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v450/n7173/abs/nature06400.html. A fine exam ple? Got any that count? — JN]
Jo – You still haven’t provided global cloud cover stats for 1750 thus showing that changes in cloud cover are not responsible for the warming
Nor have I shown you there wasn’t an Alien space craft in orbit beaming its phaser gun towards earth to warm it. Sorry about that.
[Damian translated: When I don’t have any evidence I just mock, it’s good cover eh? I’m sure everyone here is too stupid to notice that I just dismissed the importance of cloud cover by talking about aliens. It’s my argumentum ad unrelated-ignorantium defence. I can’t explain cloud cover, but that’s OK because I can’t explain aliens either! — JN]
Jo – nor have you explained the little ice age or the Medieval warming period,
Different teams of Scientists already did all the work for me and the conclusions drawn from their studies is that those periods are irrelveant in context to what we are witnessing today – Jones 1998, Crowley 2000, Briffa 2001, Esper 2002, Huang 2004, Moberg 2005, Oerlemans 2005, D’Arrigo 2006. Curiously most of these temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the original hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.
[ Damien Translated: See I’m sure they won’t notice that the errors bars on the hockey stick are so big they include nearly every possible outcome. Plus I can throw lots of names of people who guesstimate with simulations and hope that no one notices that it’s not empirical estimates. — JN]
Jo – except to deny that they were a global phenomenon (despite the evidence from African Lakes & Caves, Andean Glaciers, Chilean glaciers, Antarctic ice cores and global sea levels).
Thanks for those regional examples. What about the remaining 99% of the globe?
[Damien Translated: If she talks “global” I can tell everyone it’s regional, but if she provides detailed evidence that it happened in places where I said it didn’t, that’s regional too. There’s no way she can come up with a paper for every town in the Southern Hemisphere, so I can debunk them all by just calling them all “regional” right? Who cares if five different continents all had cold locations and warm locations at the same time. That’s just five regions. — JN]
Jo – A lab test with one variable is not equivalent to “The Atmosphere”. Do your lab tubes have clouds?
No, but “The Atmosphere” does, and low and behold, the Earth’s temperature has been generally falling for the last 10,000 years until the current abnormal temperature spike that has occurred over the last 120 years that have brought global temperatures back to the point where they were during the first interglacial overshoot.
10,000 years of cooling has been undone by 120 years of CO2 induced warming.
[Damien translated. Cooling trends – warming trends: they all work for me. Whatever the trend I can always claim CO2 has made things different to what it would have been, even if I have no evidence apart from lab tests and simulations. And even if things were warmer 800 years ago, I can just deny that evidence and call her the denier. Look it works. — JN]
Jo – Yawn. We’ve already covered all this ad infinitum.
Yes yes, another day, another denial – keeps the Tax man away.
Jo – We ask for evidence and you provide “evidence” that supports something none of us are even debating. It’s been almost 2 months of “Daemon” comments. Haven’t you noticed that no one here is saying the world cooled from 1800-now?
Now? A few paragraphs ago it was 1800 to 2001. Last year it was 1998. Make up your mind contrarians. Lol.
[Damien Translated: I’ll never admit that I’ve spent two months attacking an idea that no one is making, so I’ll divert them again by attacking Joanne for things other people said. It’s lucky I don’t need to find evidence that Joanne ever mentioned 1998… — JN]
Jo – Deny this Damien – a NZ cave http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_nzcave.php with temps that are higher by 0.75 degrees than the present during the warm period that you reckon was just European.
No I reckon it was just regional, as does the Scientific press. Btw what percentage of the globe is NZ? Bare in mind the United States only accounts for about 2% of the globes surface area. I don’t know where that leaves little old NZ, Lol.
[Joanne: Thanks for Denying it Damien. Performing on cue. Cheers 🙂 — JN]
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In line reply to Damien posted above…
(Some things are not worth cut n pasting).
So still got no empirical evidence Damien?
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Before the recent 10000 years of cooling, there was a burst of intense warming, and cooling before that, which only makes part of the glacial / interglacial cycle that has been going on for maybe half million years as best as we can measure. I presume Daemon can explain why the current interglacial has lasted several times longer than the previous three (which were much shorter than 10000 years). No doubt great knowledge of radiative physics will clearly point to the cause of this.
Of course, this all hinges on ice-core measurements and when you drill a deep hole it does tend to be a regional measurement. It would seem that all regional measurements have been outlawed from this discussion which makes me wonder how this supposed 10000 years of cooling was measured?
As for the science of saying, “My theory must be good, because I can think up worse theories,” that’s absolutely laughable. There’s a perfectly sensible default situation which is that we don’t currently have a workable model of the Earth’s atmosphere.
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Thank you Joanne for translating Damien. He is difficult to understand on his own.
On the one hand, I admire Damien for visiting here, despite the fact that he gets shot down anyway, it shows persistence.
On the other hand I have no admiration for him supporting some cause that is probably antithetical to the way he lives his life, ANYWAY.
Proof in point: He’s using the Internet, that takes a huge amount of electricity to operate, it couldn’t operate on “solar cells” for anything.
If he wants this for everybody else, why isn’t he lving in a cave, wearing a kangaroo skin loincloth, making his “carbon footprint” negigible?
That goes for never riding in an auto, never visiting the doctor, hunting and gathering your own berries, etc.
Answer: all kinds of excuses, “I never said,…”, blah
blah blah,
Why don’t you just own up to the fact you are living in a society that operates and could not exist without carbon fuel Damien, and be glad for it – damn it all,
instead of trying to convince people of dunce theories that the people who cooked them up don’t believe anyway.
Stop acting like a gullible patsy, you’re probably sixty years of age or more, it’s time to grow up no matter how old you are.
Damn it – make your parents proud by acting like an ADULT
They would probably find you a fool for acting like that
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Tel – I presume Daemon can explain why the current interglacial has lasted several times longer than the previous three (which were much shorter than 10000 years). No doubt great knowledge of radiative physics will clearly point to the cause of this.
Until now (the last 120 years) temperature changes have been principally driven by changes in the earth’s orbital characteristics. These are slow, periodic and well known. 16,000 years ago is roughly when the last glacial period ended, and 12,000 years ago is roughly when the interglacial warming overshoot peaked. There has been a generally declining global temperature since that time (and yes this interglacial is lasting longer as compared to previous) but at odds with the general pattern of interglacials, current temperatures have been mysteriously (snicker) brought back to the point where they were during the first interglacial overshoot, coincidentally (snicker) since industrialization. How curious, how curious indeed.
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Society developed though 250 of industrialisation for Damien to “snicker” at it.
How droll
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250 years
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Yes, Damien (sigh) curious indeed, but as evidenced on another of Joanne’s threads here we’ve all seen that rising global temperatures are also in lockstep with the rising price of postage stamps. Correlation and causation … bla bla bla bla …. (snore) zzzzzzzzzz.
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Not My Valentine – Thank you Joanne for translating Damien. He is difficult to understand on his own.
My coherent lucid stream of thought was graffiti’d and desecrated with blue spray paint. Tagging ought not be condoned.
Not My Valentine – On the one hand, I admire Damien for visiting here,
You are excused from telling me what you’re doing with the other hand. I don’t want to know.
Not My Valentine – despite the fact that he gets shot down anyway, it shows persistence.
Did you ever stop to think that you’re just shooting blanks?
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On February 14, think about me all day long, won’t you please Damien?
Or try not to. Try to forget me on that day.
Try to forget me each time you see a red heart in a shop window or in an advertisement.
Peace and love!!!
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Anne – Yes, Damien (sigh) curious indeed, but as evidenced on another of Joanne’s threads here we’ve all seen that rising global temperatures are also in lockstep with the rising price of postage stamps. Correlation and causation … bla bla bla bla …. (snore) zzzzzzzzzz.
Lol, childish nonsense.
For the benefit of those sitting in the cheap seats. Correlation is not Causation. Rather, Correlation implies common causation, and unlike postage stamps, the science with CO2 is clear. CO2 absorbs IR and hence it warms the surface of the earth. I don’t think we can say the same for postage stamps.
So we have a method of causation, measurement of the increase in causative factors, and the correlation between the rise in those factors and the result predicted by theory.
Motive, Cause, and Confession.
Verdict: Guilty
Case closed.
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Daemon, you didn’t actually explain why previous interglacials have been relatively brief and warmer than present day, as opposed to the current interglacial which has been long and approx 2 degrees cooler. You said orbital patterns are periodic and well known, which does not explain the difference.
You also neglected to answer my implied question as to which temperature measurements we can use as evidence once we rule out regional measurements? Have you become happy with regional measurements again given that all of our historic temperature data comes from one regional measurement or another?
OK, based on your theory, CO2 was a minor player for most of the historic time, and became a major player in recent times. Based on that theory, what is the critical threshold of CO2 at which point it moves from a minor player to a major player? Or maybe approximately show the curve of CO2 level vs amount of climate influence.
If you believe the commonly quoted line that CO2 contributes 3 degrees of warming per doubling, then the ice core shows a CO2 range between 180 and 280 ppm so we could call that 0.637 of a doubling implying 1.91 degrees warming. The measurement also shows a temperature span of approx 10 degrees.
Let’s go with linear math and attribute 8.1 degrees of long term (million year scale) climate change to orbital wobbles and 1.9 degrees to historic CO2 variation. Then modern CO2 variation would be from 280 ppm up to 390 ppm implying 0.478 of a doubling and 1.43 degrees of warming (using the magic 3 degrees of sensitivity figure). Even if you believe this commonly cited climate sensitivity figure, the orbital wobbles are still the major influence by a wide margin… but more than that, we would expect our current interglacial to be at least 1 degree warmer than measurable historic interglacials. You theory implies that we would be in the warmest period for the last million years.
However, measurement shows this not to be the case, so why not?
By the way, the theoretical 1.0 degree of warming should have happened from 280 ppm of CO2 up to 350 ppm of CO2, which was measured back in 1975 but we have yet to see the warming. If climate is defined as what happens over a 30 year period, we should have seen that warming by now.
Maybe the ice age really is coming, in which case we need all the CO2 we can get and it still won’t be big enough to work against the 8.1 degrees of cooling that the orbital wobbles are wont to inflict.
Or maybe the aliens are secretly cooling us with their freeze rays?
Now that I’ve said something childish and outrageous you have to believe everything else I said, huh?
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Oh dear, I see that attempts at irony are lost on Damien. Thanks for clearing up the misunderstanding on postage stamps for us, Dames 😉
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I couldn’t resist replying to Damien, even though I know he is a gainsayer (reminds me of the Monty Python skit about the argument). But he says CO2 is guilty, case closed. Guilty of what? One of his own references said that temperatures increased 0.74C per century in the last 129 years. Is this what CO2 is guilty of? How can anything be guilty of something so beneficial? I bet he is finding CO2 guilty of something it hasn’t done yet and may never do.
CO2 is actually innocent until proved guilty. The models are just the opinions of some of the people who prepare the models who want to blame CO2 for their projection of, wait for it, catastrophic global warming. But recent events refute the intent of CO2. Just one example is the minimum Arctic ice extent which is 500,000 sq km more than last year which itself was about 350,000 sq km more than 2007. I’m looking forward to the explanation which I’m sure will come to the effect this doesn’t count for some reason.
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What a dumb ass that Damien is.
Yes that’s right Damien, a Dumb Ass with a capital DUMB.
In a letter to me Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, a US coal company, wrote to me and said:
“When I was growing up, there were two general groups of people. Those that would work and those that wouldn’t. Today there is a third – those that won’t work and don’t want us to do so either.”
I think Don’s got it right, there.
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NEWSFLASH. Damien McCormick discovers reliable global data on cloud cover and is able to show for the first time that cloud cover has in no way altered with rising temperatures, that changes in cloud cover can therefore not be responsible for recent global warming.
What really extraordinary about this is that global humidity levels rise as the oceans warm, but that there is apparently no change in clouds. (That seems to defy the laws of physics, what concatenation of feedbacks works to keep this constant!).
So NOW finally we know that there has been no decrease in low clouds, which cool the planet, and no increase in high clouds which warm the planet, despite the increase in evaporation. (The crowd roars!)
Damien McCormick, come on down and tell us how you did it. How did you get a proxy for cloud cover circa 1750? Did George II have secret satellites? Did ancient tibetan monks record the sky in paint on a daily basis? What isotope proxy changes with low cloud cover? Do tell. Do tell. Your conviction about your ability to fully and comprehensively understand the global climate at all heights and latitudes is desperately needed. (The world of climate science awaits you…. Apply here: http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/jobs/.)
Expect the Nobel Prize committee to interview you soon.
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Joanne, you might as well tell the wind as tell Damien anything.
Has anyone ever heard a global warmer tell them what evidence they would need to conclude that AGW was not correct?
I haven’t heard any thing of that nature from them
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Anne, I was thinking in particular Krupp. Alfred Krupp joined the SS in 1933, according to Wiki, and was in control of the company at the end of the war. Hitler signed the Lex Krupp, which gave Alfred special status as proprietor. It was a much closer relationship than if you take the view that Krupp just happened to be Germany’s biggest manufacturer during the war (and just happened to use concentration camp labour, as you do when there is a labour shortage). Nothing like that happened anywhere under communism, so it seems to me to be a distinguishing feature.
As for the AGW connection, there are many different agendas. Al Gore would be typical of what I have in mind. I can’t imagine he believes his own propaganda and assume it’s all PR for his eco-fund. But certainly not all AGWERs would fit into this category.
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OK David, but this is where we have to be vigilant of how we use the terms “left” and “right” in relation to politics. As soon as you start to talk about anything being “right-wing”, for most people I think it conjures up a mental image of the kind of ideologies that flourished in Europe under Mussolini and Hitler etc. Cf what is happening in Britain right now, where the British National Party with its clear racist policies is referred to as “ultra right wing”.
The problem with this is that both Hitler and Mussolini were in fact “left-wing”, not “right-wing”. In my opinion “right wing” is a redundant term because what most people refer to as “right wing” is either: 1) really rampant “left wing” as explained, or 2) “conservative”, which is an entirely different kettle of fish.
What I objected to when you said that AGW is a right-wing movement is that just because big business is interested in a political movement does not automatically make that movement “right wing”. Business people are pragmatists, in that they are in business to make a profit and will have as their overriding aim to be able to continue to do so (in the process giving employment to a number of people, large or small, by the way).
This is what we are seeing now with AGW. Finance brokers, bankers and other business people are jumping on board the “green” bandwagon simply because it is the ‘zeitgeist’ and there is money to be made and grants to be had from it.
We can deplore their lack of moral fibre if individual business people are going against their conscience and better knowledge in this, but we cannot really condemn them for doing their job, which is to keep their businesses running.
“Green” NGOs on the other hand, mostly have a socialist bent, and what you are observing is an “unholy alliance” between business and greenies because at the moment it’s convenient for both.
I hope I’m making sense here, it’s a complex subject. I recommend you read the book (Liberal Fascism); it’s eye opening.
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You have made some very good points Anne.
I remember from 1st Year economics the lecturer describing the political spectrum as a circle which did not quite meet. As politicians gravitated further left or further right they became almost indistinguishable. This was a most apposite observation in the New Zealand context where the then Prime Minister Muldoon started out as being a hard-line conservative favouring the free market, and ended his days as PM with New Zealand effectively in a centrally planned economy under a “wage/price freeze” supposedly to control inflation. In my view he had somehow veered into the communist left.
I like the quotation “Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism the reverse is true.”
I think left vs right cannot be used on their own. There needs to be a qualification: liberal vs conservative, socialist vs free-market, centrally planned vs laissez-faire.
I am also observing a lot of businesses in New Zealand lining up to make money out of the Climate Change industry. (And if there are some making money there are going to be other losing money and at the bottom of the heap the consumer is going to be the one paying for it.) Those who see the business opportunities are prepared to go along with the “the science is settled” mantra and will not abide anyone challenging that. I think they are probably thinking they will be retired and remembered as providing good value to their shareholders by the time everyone is prepared to admit it is a scam.
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