Just when you think it’s too dead to kill: along comes a new paper in a top ranking statistics journal by McShane and Wyner. It’s worth taking stock. It’s a damning paper:
…we conclude unequivocally that the evidence for a ”long-handled” hockey stick (where the shaft of the hockey stick extends to the year 1000 AD) is lacking in the data.
…
But in the big scheme of things the Hockey Stick Graph was already dead.
Each one of these points is enough to cast grave doubts on the Hockey Stick.
- The Hockey Stick uses the wrong type of proxy – tree rings. Trees grow faster when it’s warmer, and when it’s wetter, or when the tree next-door falls down and a herd of manure-making cows move in. Almost all other types of proxies disagree (like ice cores, ocean sediments, corals, and stalagmites). Over 6000 boreholes, hundreds of studies, as well as recorded history show the world was warmer 1,000 years ago. (See here for the refs.)
- Even among tree rings, the Hockey Stick uses the wrong type of tree – Bristlecone pines – which appear to grow faster as CO2 rises, regardless of the temperature.
- It uses the wrong type of averaging. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was centered over the last 150 years instead of the entire millenia. McIntyre and McKitrick showed that this would produce a hockey stick even if it were fed random numbers instead of tree ring data.
- The data is massively incomplete, spatially autocorrelated, the signal is weak, and the number of covariates greatly outnumbers the independent observations.
- The data has been calibrated with a short period of temperature records that are themselves substantially processed with smoothing, adjustments, discontinuities and imputation of missing data, all of which may introduce errors.
- Assuming that tree rings are not so bad, that bristlecones are not misleading, and that the calibration data is not in error, McShane shows that during the last 150 years the most random of “fake” data (white noise and brownian motion) has more predictive ability than the proxy data, and that uncertainties are huge, and neither real (nor fake data) has any meaning over the last 1000 years.
It is not clear that the proxies currently used to predict temperature are even predictive of it at the scale of several decades let alone over many centuries.
As I said back in December, one of the landscape shifting forces about ClimateGate was that it suddenly motivated skeptics, imbuing them with conviction and energy, because it triggered off the universal warning lights that the freeloaders and parasites were at work, playing on our good intentions. Prior to this many smart incisive people were busy and otherwise occupied. Now these movers and shakers are being pulled into the debate, and the climate establishment can no longer get away with their schtick.
Because there were no Climate Science au Naturale Institutes that had an interest in busting the CAGW hypothesis, inept, inadequate work which supported the fashionable theory was allowed to stand for years. The institutes whose funding depended on the Big Scare Campaign did not hire expert statisticians to try to check their own work, and expert statisticians, for the most part, had other things to do than to check papers in an obscure branch of science. Determined volunteers like Steven McIntyre moved in, exposing major flaws, and now finally the world of expert statistics is waking up to the fact that there are nice openings thank-you-very-much for posting papers in top journals, just be redo-ing the work of climate scientists.
Who knows exactly what motivated McShane and Wyner, or when they started investigating, but the arrival of other science related experts into this debate is not a day too soon.
For ten years mediocre scientists have been able to get away with poor work, and have been given the red-carpet (and the odd Nobel Peace Prize). That time is over.
McShane:
“The panel found that the statistical tools that CRU scientists employed were not always the most cutting-edge, or most appropriate. “We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians,” reads the inquiry’s conclusions.
So it goes, McIntyre, McKitrick,and now McShane: Perhaps one day someone will figure out why the Scottish Y chromosomal inheritance is so adept and determined at statistically destroying government funded science. (No doubt Monckton-the-Scot has a view on that.)
McShane, B.B. and Wyner, A. J.: A Statistical Analysis Of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions Of Surface Temperatures Over The Last 1000 Years Reliable? Submitted to the Annals of Applied Statistics
Great Title.
40
Isn’t it time to charge the entire AGW establishment with criminal negligence and fraud along with the academic institutions, professional societies, and governmental agencies who aided and abetted them?
We, the productive class of the world, DEMAND redress of grievances from the chattering and corrupt ruling class. Return our wealth, that WE created, to us and get out of our way. We have no need of them but they need us. Without us, they can accomplish NOTHING! Without them, we can accomplish most anything we set out to do. Ditto for the thugs by proxy who expect to use the gun of government to take our wealth for their own consumption. Your time is up.
51
Alfredo Ponzi invented a criminally fraudulent investment scheme that was too effective not to be emulated by many other criminals motivated by greed and a desire to prey upon people’s gullibility and human fallibility.
[snip…brian, let’s not get too carried away — JN]
20
Thanks for the summary, Jo. I read the paper last night after it was put up at WUWT and was thrilled. Sorry for my absence, but I have had to drop out of the thick of this environmental fracas because I am researching and writing papers related to the REAL pending environmental crisis – water supply, management and distribution as we begin the inexorable cascade toward the 10 billion person world. Water supply, modeling and water resource management is my real expertise, but I really enjoy what you are doing here.
Thanks a million
Tom
30
604 degrees recorded at Egg harbor, Wisconsin
The Satelite #16 is sending false data. This has been a secret for a few years.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/26603
Satellitegate scandal
We have human caused false numbers and now we find out the equipmment was also wrong.
20
Well, you can delete it Joanne, but I would repeat it to anyone including the subject of the message
SOMEONE needs to speak out about criminal mischief carried out with criminal intent –
and if not me, then who
and if not now, then when
10
Indeed,
such a trend would appear to have some significance.
Could it be something inherited from Robert the Bruce, and a spider?
The generosity and hospitality for which they are well reknowned, is matched only by the determination with which they will defend against those who would presume uninvited on the contents of their sporran.
Or is it a long and glorious history of resisting the tyranny of illegitimate governement ?
10
Perhaps it’s still consistent with a hockey stick made from a very old (& gnarly) tree then, such as a Bristlecone.
It might have been a plausible representation of the data in paleolithic times…
10
Or creating it, as in the case of Clerk Maxwell, but I must say that his “government” funding was absolutely minimal.
20
from the Rules for Surviving Zombieland (link):
Rule 4: Doubletap: Carrying a gun is a great idea but it should never be your primary weapon. When you do end up using it for that last minute ‘oh shit’ moment remember to double tap. Its an emergency and thats why your using it and not your cricket bat so why skimp? One bullet more in the head will go a long way to ensuring your survival.
So McShane and Wyner might be a redundancy, but when you are dealing with zombies overkill is a prudent survival requirement.
20
The Hockey stick is a holy relic, and not subject to petty mundane things like honesty integrity or validity. It is important because the believer venerate it.
20
These guys are not fools they are very intelligent and capable men. They knew the result they wanted and they worked out how to get that result using a (thin) veneer of science.
The question is did they become complacent/overconfident enough for that veneer to become too thin and expose them to the legal definition of fraud.
Their main protection at the moment is the universities they have convinced the universities that if they go down the university will come with them.
The tipping point will come when the universities decide that they have to cut them free and save themselves.
30
There’s heaps of other proxies available that disagree with the hockey stick. Go to CO2 Science (via the LINKS on this page) and you will read:
The hockey stick is SO deceased!
Cheers,
Speedy
30
So how can Mann and co have continued support now there are the various M&M papers , Wegman and also Green , Armstrong and Soon all showing conclusively Mann’s methods are wrong? Is this why Schmitt and co are now saying the Hockey Stick is not relevant ? ( even though this was a foundation on which the IPCC based it’s theory).
We also now have, as others noted the UK putting important climate related initiatives on hold ( watch other EU countries follow — Germany and France started earlier in the year). A court case coming in NZ. Don’t forget the case with the Attorney general and Penn State. As Jo has highlighted with this thread “Mr Market” is reacting negatively , so we have not just the foundations of the theory crumbling by the day but now the super structure is going the same way.
I am smiling but I still think there is a long way to go.
10
Unfortunately for contrarians, if they accept the uncertainty of McShane and Wyne about the proxies, then they can’t be certain about proxies as an indicator of the Medieval Warm Period.
On page 37, of the McShane and Wyne paper, they hedge their bets. Note the last sentence in the Conclusions section.
10
The “hockey team” take great comfort that Mann’s hypothesis was described as “plausible” by Wegman (I think). Never mind that his methods were heavily criticised throughout as sloppy. Never mind that M & M’s critiques were judged as valid; Mann held that he nevertheless, arrived at the right answer which earned the response: “Correct answer + wrong method = Bad science.” He’s like the schoolkid who reasoned that 6 and 4 is 8 plus 2 is 12!
It was all “water over a duck’s back” to the team and Mann et al went on again and again to use the bristle cones despite being advised not to do so. Talk about incorrigible!
10
Do tell. Then:
explain the basis for Mann et al to accept the MWP as part of medieval history the N Hemisphere.
Explain why their paucity of data of the S Hemisphere over the same period was acceptable as a basis to average out an anomaly of the N Hemisphere. [Far less data were used to average out a temperature data.]
Sounds to me that medieval proxy data of the N Hemisphere anyway were as acceptable to Mann as they were to anyone else.
Explain what data would contradict the apparent anomalies of the MWP.
10
Max_OK:
August 17th, 2010 at 11:56 am
Unfortunately for contrarians, if they accept the uncertainty of McShane and Wyne about the proxies, then they can’t be certain about proxies as an indicator of the Medieval Warm Period.
On page 37, of the McShane and Wyne paper, they hedge their bets. Note the last sentence in the Conclusions section.
—–
Sorry, it’s p.41 not p.37. But here’s the sentence.
“Nevertheless, the temperatures of the last few decades have been relatively warm compared to many of the thousand year temperature curves sampled from the posterior distribution of our model.”
The blade of the hockey stick.
10
Lionell has it right. It’s time to start getting angry and demanding something be done. No threats, no violence, just “Who do you think you are?” And then it’s time for you to close up shop, give back whatever money is left and go off to wherever the disgraced in science, academia and politics go. We don’t want to see you again, ever.
When enough people get on their case about it what else can they do but slink off into the darkness?
10
Brian G Valentine:
August 17th, 2010 at 12:23 pm
Unfortunately for contrarians, if they accept the uncertainty of McShane and Wyne about the proxies, then they can’t be certain about proxies as an indicator of the Medieval Warm Period.
Do tell. Then:
explain the basis for Mann et al to accept the MWP as part of medieval history the N Hemisphere.
Explain why their paucity of data of the S Hemisphere over the same period was acceptable as a basis to average out an anomaly of the N Hemisphere. [Far less data were used to average out a temperature data.]
Sounds to me that medieval proxy data of the N Hemisphere anyway were as acceptable to Mann as they were to anyone else.
Explain what data would contradict the apparent anomalies of the MWP.
——-
Well, that’s easy to explain. Mann thinks the proxy data can be reliable indicators. McShane and Wyne doubt the reliability.
10
Max_OK:
August 17th, 2010 at 12:28 pm
Max_OK:
August 17th, 2010 at 11:56 am
Unfortunately for contrarians, if they accept the uncertainty of McShane and Wyne about the proxies, then they can’t be certain about proxies as an indicator of the Medieval Warm Period.
On page 37, of the McShane and Wyne paper, they hedge their bets. Note the last sentence in the Conclusions section.
—–
Sorry, it’s p.41 not p.37. But here’s the sentence.
“Nevertheless, the temperatures of the last few decades have been relatively warm compared to many of the thousand year temperature curves sampled from the posterior distribution of our model.”
On p.37, they say this:
“If we consider rolling decades, 1997-2006 is the warmest on record; our model gives an 80% chance that it was the warmest in the past thousand years.”
More hockey stick blade.
10
I think it depends on the proxy data, Max. As far as I know, few made measurements during the period.
Tree ring data are variable as the wind. Literally.
Soil samples proving conclusively of agriculture of what is now “Greenland” and are bit more convincing.
Moreover you haven’t answered my question.;
20
If Mann employed a statistical method that selected data that would yield a “hockey stick” within the error bars and nothing else, would that be criminal fraud?
Yes, if two conditions were met:
1) He knew the result in advance
2) He used it to gain further funding from NGO, Government, etc that he would not have access to if he did not have the “result” that he produced.
1) is impossibly false unless he was insane or three days dead
2) is and remains the basis of his existence
10
Max_OK
Fortunately for Humanity, Science doesn’t belong to the people who holler the loudest. Science belongs to the people who provide a logical case based on reliable evidence. And, in their paper, McShane and Wyner are simply stating that the data (claimed by some to demonstrate AGW is real) has a very low statistical significance.
The authors ignore the data quality issues and assume the data has been collected diligently and without bias. (Which sort of rules out Keith Briffa for starters!) The paper is very kind to AGW, but still not very complimentary.
The burden of proof for the AGW hypothesis remains with it’s advocates – and after 20+ years and 30+ billion dollars, even the best they can come up with is, to say the least, doubtful.
Cheers,
Speedy
20
Fortunately for Humanity, there are people out there who actually care whether the Public is sold a bunch of CRUD (or Krudd) to justify the ends of manipulative Government with an insatiable appetite for money and control
Interestingly, there are people who think this is just marvelous and wonder how anyone would dare question such a thing.
That’s an issue for psychiatrists, not me
good night
10
Max
Did you miss this
10
Max they only used Mann’s proxies, think about what that implies and stop embarrassing yourself with ill-informed comments.
20
rian G Valentine:
August 17th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
I think it depends on the proxy data, Max. As far as I know, few made measurements during the period.
Tree ring data are variable as the wind. Literally.
Soil samples proving conclusively of agriculture of what is now “Greenland” and are bit more convincing.
Moreover you haven’t answered my question.;
Valid? 4 0
——-
What question didn’t I answer?
The Greenland evidence might be good enough for me, but I suspect M&W would question your “proving conclusively” anything unless they could crunch data.
10
allen mcmahon:
August 17th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Unfortunately for contrarians, if they accept the uncertainty of McShane and Wyne about the proxies, then they can’t be certain about proxies as an indicator of the Medieval Warm Period.
——
Max they only used Mann’s proxies, think about what that implies and stop embarrassing yourself with ill-informed comments.
——-
Are you serious? The proxies Mann used show some Medieval warming.
10
24Speedy:
August 17th, 2010 at 1:31 pm
Max_OK
Fortunately for Humanity, Science doesn’t belong to the people who holler the loudest. Science belongs to the people who provide a logical case based on reliable evidence. And, in their paper, McShane and Wyner are simply stating that the data (claimed by some to demonstrate AGW is real) has a very low statistical significance.
The authors ignore the data quality issues and assume the data has been collected diligently and without bias. (Which sort of rules out Keith Briffa for starters!) The paper is very kind to AGW, but still not very complimentary.
The burden of proof for the AGW hypothesis remains with it’s advocates – and after 20+ years and 30+ billion dollars, even the best they can come up with is, to say the least, doubtful.
Cheers,
Speedy
——-
Climate scientists will be amazed to learn the AGW hypothesis depends on proxy-based temperature reconstructs.
10
Max_OK
You have to admit it the hockey stick was the poster child of the AGW guys, don’t you? The hockey stick appeared very significantly in the IPCC reports. And do you ever recall an Al Gore or his ilk claiming that the warming of the late 20th century was “unprecedented”? Did Al Gore endorse this graph? My take on it is they did this because the warming was a natural event, then only a fool would try to legislate against it. And you would be a fool, wouldn’t you?
But maybe we can agree on something. I put it to you that temperature rise over the last 200 years is at least partly Mann-made.
Cheers,
Speedy
20
Check out the commentary at deltoid. Hilarious!
10
allen mcmahon:
August 17th, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Max
“Nevertheless, the temperatures of the last few decades have been relatively warm compared to many of the thousand year temperature curves sampled from the posterior distribution of our model.”
Did you miss this
“Finally, if we look at rolling thirty-year blocks, the posterior probability that the last thirty years (again, the warmest on record) were the warmest over the past thousand is 38%.”
Valid? 2 0
=========
Sure. But do they tell you that the probability for some other 30 year period in the past was greater than 38% ? No, they don’t, but if it was, wouldn’t that be important enough to mention.
10
This study, and the proof that the NOAA satellite data has been recording spuriously high surface temperatures have a huge significance with regards to Climate Science, the IPCC reports and government climate policy decisions world wide. But where has it been headlined in the popular media? Instead we get tenuous links being made by climate alarmists between floods and AGW, Russian fires and AGW, China floods and AGW. Frustrating to say the least.
20
31Speedy:
August 17th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Max_OK
You have to admit it the hockey stick was the poster child of the AGW guys, don’t you? The hockey stick appeared very significantly in the IPCC reports. And do you ever recall an Al Gore or his ilk claiming that the warming of the late 20th century was “unprecedented”? Did Al Gore endorse this graph? My take on it is they did this because the warming was a natural event, then only a fool would try to legislate against it. And you would be a fool, wouldn’t you?
But maybe we can agree on something. I put it to you that temperature rise over the last 200 years is at least partly Mann-made.
Cheers,
Speed
=========
No, it’s not as important as some make it out to be. The hockey stick doesn’t go back very far in the history of the earth, and the earth may well have been warmer at some time in the very distant past. Obviously, man’s activities did not cause a rise in global temperature millions of year’s ago. But modern civilization didn’t develop in a pre-historic climate.
It’s a logical fallacy to say “nature can cause global warming, therefore man can’t.” Both nature and man’s activities can cause warming.
The rapid rise in global temperature over the last 30 to 40 years, however, is attributed more to man than known natural warming influences such as up cycles in solar activity and El Nino phases. Man is believed to be the main cause because the temperature has continued to rise through down cycles in solar activity and the cooling influence of La Nina phases.
I wish burning fossil fuels did not add to the greenhouse effect and cause warming. But I can’t deny the evidence.
10
Jaymez:
August 17th, 2010 at 4:18 pm
This study, and the proof that the NOAA satellite data has been recording spuriously high surface temperatures have a huge significance with regards to Climate Science, the IPCC reports and government climate policy decisions world wide. But where has it been headlined in the popular media? Instead we get tenuous links being made by climate alarmists between floods and AGW, Russian fires and AGW, China floods and AGW. Frustrating to say the least.
=====
All satellite-based and surface-based temperature metrics show about the same global warming trend. If that’s not convincing enough, consider the melting polar ice.
10
Max_OK @ various:
Plenty of temperature records exist without proxies of the Little Ice Age that ended in 1800 – LONG before man was capable of changing climate, and the IPCC say that was only possible starting from the 1970’s. It’s not necessary to go all the way back to the Mediaeval Warm Period using proxies on the above evidence alone such as books and paintings.
Had CO2 actually caused an obvious climate shift or was definitely the instigator in driving temperature changes we would have known about it centuries ago, much like we always knew the main driver was the Sun, for example.
20
Max_OK @ 36:
Erm.. What melting polar ice? You mean the seasonal variation I’m sure:
Had you looked for yourself instead of gleaning all your know-how from WishfulClimate dot org you wouldn’t be so embarrassed now would you..?
10
Max_OK
At last we agree – the Hockey stick didn’t ever go back far into the earth’s history. Compare this to the paleoclimate of 450 million years ago when we had CO2 levels >5000 ppm – during an ICE AGE! But why was the hockey stick spruiked so much by Al Gore and company if it was insignificant? And now, do the AGW crowd want to distance themselves now that it is seen as it is – non-evidence of AGW?
Take comfort, my friend. The world will not end tomorrow. Or the day after. 100% of the people who have said the world was coming to an end have been 100% wrong – from the witch doctors to the Kool-Aid cultists. The AGW mob just join a long and indistinguished tradition of being hysterical and being wrong.
If you would like to see a correlation between anything and climate, check out David Archibald’s work. He’s showing a good link between long solar cycles (e.g. this one) and cold climate. Stock up on thermal underwear and pray that the polar bears don’t freeze!
Cheers,
Speedy
20
Olaf Koenders:
August 17th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Max_OK @ various:
Plenty of temperature records exist without proxies of the Little Ice Age that ended in 1800 – LONG before man was capable of changing climate, and the IPCC say that was only possible starting from the 1970’s. It’s not necessary to go all the way back to the Mediaeval Warm Period using proxies on the above evidence alone such as books and paintings.
Had CO2 actually caused an obvious climate shift or was definitely the instigator in driving temperature changes we would have known about it centuries ago, much like we always knew the main driver was the Sun, for example.
—————–
You may be confusing warm with warmer.
Of course the sun warms the earth. But the subject is “warmer.”
Look at it this way. On a winter day the sun WARMS my house, and my furnace makes the house WARMER.
10
Speedy:
Solar cycles being one cause, the AMO and PDO are also contributors. Check this excellent page for further correlations:
In fact, I suggest everyone should.
10
38Olaf Koenders:
August 17th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
Max_OK @ 36:
Erm.. What melting polar ice? You mean the seasonal variation I’m sure:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
Had you looked for yourself instead of gleaning all your know-how from WishfulClimate dot org you wouldn’t be so embarrassed now would you..?
========
You are talking about extent. I am talking about volume.
If you don’t know the difference, never go ice skating.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/IceVolume.php
10
Max_OK @ 40:
Your furnace would have a hard time doing that without insulation, which is the CO2 argument, however noting that in a hot and dry desert, you can freeze to death at night on a clear sky, which is ample proof that CO2 isn’t trapping any heat, just passing it on until it radiates away.
As for hockey sticks and Mann-made warming, there’s FAR more evidence of past climates in ice cores rather than organic compounds which are susceptible to.. well.. everything:
Looking at the end of the video, what would be your guess as to what’ll happen next?
10
Max_OK:
What you’re forgetting is that is currently SUMMER in the Northern hemisphere! The ice will come back, not that we need it, but it always has. Educate self please:
10
Speedy:
August 17th, 2010 at 4:45 pm
Max_OK
At last we agree – the Hockey stick didn’t ever go back far into the earth’s history. Compare this to the paleoclimate of 450 million years ago when we had CO2 levels >5000 ppm – during an ICE AGE! But why was the hockey stick spruiked so much by Al Gore and company if it was insignificant? And now, do the AGW crowd want to distance themselves now that it is seen as it is – non-evidence of AGW?
Take comfort, my friend. The world will not end tomorrow. Or the day after. 100% of the people who have said the world was coming to an end have been 100% wrong – from the witch doctors to the Kool-Aid cultists. The AGW mob just join a long and indistinguished tradition of being hysterical and being wrong.
If you would like to see a correlation between anything and climate, check out David Archibald’s work. He’s showing a good link between long solar cycles (e.g. this one) and cold climate. Stock up on thermal underwear and pray that the polar bears don’t freeze!
Cheers,
Speedy
=====
Oh i’m not worried about the world ending tomorrow. Like most adults today, I won’t live long enough to be affected much by global warming. My attitude could be to not care how my descendants might be affected. After all what have future generations ever done for me? But I think that would be selfish of me.
What does bother me right now is low-level ozone, and you know what causes that stuff.
I wouldn’t put much stock in Archibald’s work. The warming has continue regardless of solar cycles. What temporarily interrupts the warming trend is La Nina, and one is underway now.
10
Olaf Koenders:
August 17th, 2010 at 5:36 pm
Max_OK:
You are talking about extent. I am talking about volume.
What you’re forgetting is that is currently SUMMER in the Northern hemisphere! The ice will come back, not that we need it, but it always has. Educate self please:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/15/sea-ice-news-18/
Valid? 0 0
——
Well, of course the ice is greater in winter than summer. But I’m talking long-term change, not seasonal differences.
I only go to WUWT for laughs. I don’t know much, but most of the regulars there know even less than I know.
10
My bedtime. I wish everyone a happy Tuesday.
10
Max_OK:
Riddle me this then smartie (sorry Jo,a bit off topic):
Why is it that we find ancient hunting tools and trees under today’s retreating glaciers?
How is it possible that 1000 year old graves in Greenland are in permafrost now?
Because it was warmer, and ice core CO2 records were low at those times. Beware your own self-confidence, it might come away rather bruised.
10
Max @ 45
Everyone nota bene:
Please note: Like the first swallow of spring, the first AGW excusing the climate turn?
Cheers
Speedy
10
Max-OK:
All your several posts above display unfortunate ignorance of the subjects you post about. And you are not the first to come here to proclaim such ignorance: there has been a series of “useful idiots” sent here to do the same. But – like you – they have each embarrassed themselves.
Others have refuted your silly comments, but I shall not. Instead, I will point out one of your most blatant errors then ask you to check the matter for yourself.
Please check it. Do NOT take the word of me or your masters at RC, Deltoid, or wherever, but check it.
If you do that then you will believe the reality.
At #36 you suggest:
And at #42 you assert:
Fact:
Polar ice is increasing in both mass and volume. There has been no recent decline in polar ice.
Arctic ice decreased to a minimum in 2007 over the short time of the satelite measurement era but is recovering. Importantly, polar ice continued to increase while the Arctic ice declined because Antarctic ice continued to grow.
More than 95% of all the fresh water on Earth exists as Antarctic ice. It takes little growth of this immense ice pack for its growth to more than compensate for the temporary decline in Arctic ice that happened before 2008. And the Antarctic ice continued to increase.
So, polar ice is increasing and has been observed to continuously increase – at variable rate – throughout the satelite era of observation.
Do not take my word for this. And do not take the word of your masters who sent you to troll here.
Check the facts for yourself.
Richard
10
Jo. In your point 1 of the main post you say: “The Hockey Stick uses the wrong type of proxy – tree rings. Trees grow faster when it’s warmer, and when it’s wetter, or when the tree next-door falls down and a herd of manure-making cows move in.”
True. To a point. However, it would be more accurate to say “Trees grwo faster when its warmer (but not too warm), and when it’s wetter (but not too wet)…………”
The point is that the Team has persisted in assuming a linear relationship between tree ring width and temperature, whereas any gardener knows (though she might not express it this way) that the relationship between growth and temperature is inverse quadratic. That is maximum growth occurs when temperatures are not too cool, but not too warm.
Also, any gardener knows that plant health is a function of many other factors such as soil quality, minerals, fertiliser availability, etc etc as well as temperature.
We need to call them on this issue too!
10
Max_OK:
Is the Mann hockey stick too dead to kill yet again?
NO!
Providing the evidence stacks up – as it does, which it’s done since McIntyre and McKitrick. Killing it over and over again, along with the “establishment’s” flimsy and fraudulent CAGW “evidence”, will be like yet another backhoe full of dirt on the grave. Keep it coming.
All the real evidence is there – naturally ignoring AGW’s unobtanium proxies, that the MWP and LIA existed, through actual physical and written evidence via historical paintings and written accounts – even avoiding empirical ice core data.
How else, could we be finding old hunting weapons and trees under currently retreating glaciers? How can it be possible that Viking graves dug 1000 years ago in Greenland are in permafrost today? Even modern hydraulics find it difficult to dig permafrost, let alone 1000yr old sticks!
Trying to debunk the MWP and LIA?
In the Jurassic, we had some 10-15x the CO2 as today, where life clearly thrived and those pesky un-dissolved fossils of mollusks and corals of that era continue to fill our museum shelves.
Ever noticed that farmers pump CO2 into their greenhouses to max plant growth..? Thought not.
Do you understand CO2’s logarithmic effect?
http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/graphs/log-co2/log-graph-lindzen-choi-web.gif
Thought not.
That puts an end to it. I think you’re done embarrassing yourself. Well.. “I” think you should be.. 😉
10
@#50. Richard S Courtney in all his politeness and in accordance to the Rules of the Site quoted below, says:
All your several posts above display unfortunate ignorance of the subjects you post about. And you are not the first to come here to proclaim such ignorance: there has been a series of “useful idiots” sent here to do the same. But – like you – they have each embarrassed themselves.
Others have refuted your silly comments, but I shall not. Instead, I will point out one of your most blatant errors then ask you to check the matter for yourself.
Please check it. Do NOT take the word of me or your masters at RC, Deltoid, or wherever, but check it.
If you do that then you will believe the reality.
10
You could make this article one sentence long.
Statistics, as we’ve always known, is laden with the assumptions of the statistician, and thereby has NEVER PROVEN ONE SINGLE SCIENTIFIC REALITY EVER and this is just another case.
Simple huh? I’ve been saying this for years. It’s nice that McShane and Wyner wrote a long dissertation illustrating this FACT point for point as it applies to the hockey stick, but this is part of the problem not the solution. WE NEED TO STOP BELIEVING COMPLETE GARBAGE BECAUSE IT SOUNDS COMPLICATED. Every citizen of every country in the world is guilty of this. I knew Global Warming was a scam 10 years ago, and the fact that statistics were the only thing supporting it was the reason. On a daily basis the Mainstream Media fills the margins of its papers with polls, and juicy statistics that cater to or flatter people’s preconceptions. And thus we have come to believe that all statistics are just “statistics” and there is no need to question them. That is the furthest thing from the truth. Quite to the contrary, and again this is a FACT: STATISTICS ALONE HAVE NEVER PROVEN ONE SINGLE SCIENTIFIC FACT EVER, nor are they even capable. So great job McShane and Wyner. Your paper also could have been one sentence, but at least you had good intentions. But EVERYONE needs to drop the self importance and remember that the truth doesn’t have to be complicated, popular, news-friendly, or anything else besides TRUE. Most of the time the truth is the simplest easiest thing. There are a zillion blogs and papers having great debates the finer points of the statistical analyses of climate data, none of which will prove a thing. And after years of this going on we find out that the tree ring proxies used in the Hockey Stick were a fraud, NOAA satellites are badly flawed, and “the worlds best scientists” are in collusion with propaganda writers at the NYT. So call it all a waste. And the reason is because nobody was confident enough to cry BULLSHIT when the smell of it was everywhere. They were too dazzled by meaningless statistical fabrications. Well I wasn’t. And it has been painful watching you all waste 10 years of your life coming to the same realization. Don’t waste the next 10 years. Get smart, get tough, and kick the shysters off the government payroll at every level no matter who you are or where you live…
10
This is more simplification.
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=2773
Mann made hockey stick can’t comment on earlier records and his abuse of a proxy. Tamino and Climate progress are blocking any reference to this enlightenment.
10
@#44. Olaf Koenders quotes:
Max_OK, who goes on to say:
You are talking about extent. I am talking about volume.
Then Olaf responds:
What you’re forgetting is that is currently SUMMER in the Northern hemisphere! The ice will come back, not that we need it, but it always has. Educate self please:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Goodness, Olaf, you are so arrogant in telling Max to educate himself when his basic facts are OK.
Why don’t you look at thirty years worth of Arctic Ice Thickness images before judging others on something you that you obviously have not done the most basic research on?
10
CONCERNING THE ABOVE MENTIONED ARCTIC ICE THICKNESS MAPS FROM 1981 TO 2009 WHICH SHOW A SUBSTANTIAL REDUCTION IN ICE THICKNESS (MASS, VOLUME) THE LINK TO IT FOLLOWS BELOW:
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20091005_Figure5.png
10
What will anybody here convince “Max” of?
[snip.. c’mon Brain, if you are going to throw insults, at least quote something to back up the point…– JN]
10
48Olaf Koenders:
August 17th, 2010 at 5:58 pm
Max_OK:
Riddle me this then smartie (sorry Jo,a bit off topic):
Why is it that we find ancient hunting tools and trees under today’s retreating glaciers?
How is it possible that 1000 year old graves in Greenland are in permafrost now?
Because it was warmer, and ice core CO2 records were low at those times. Beware your own self-confidence, it might come away rather bruised.
Valid? 5 0
———
I get it. Nature can cause global warming, therefore man’s activities can’t cause global warming.
Smarties would say that’s an obvious logical fallacy.
10
Amargi:
Please try to be a little more grown up.
Your post at #53 quotes me then cites Rules of this blog. It is childish for you to fail to see that my comments were factual so did not break the Rules.
Then at #57 you try to distort reality by initiating a citation competition. Any such competition is pointless (and I sincerely doubt that your masters back at your base can outdo me in such a competition). However, as illustration that I was right to suggest that Max-OK “check it for [him/herself]” I offer the following from supporters of AGW at Georgia Tech.
http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?nid=60442
The paper appears in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science this week (i.e. the week of August 16, 2010). And the press release of their paper says:
Nobody who knows anything about the subject disputes “increasing Antarctic sea ice” and glacial ice.
One can sensibly debate why the ice is increasing but only extremist AGW supporters would try to claim it is not increasing when all the evidence shows it is.
Adults discuss the evidence while children close their eyes, put their hands over their ears, and shout “It ain’t so”.
Richard
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58Brian G Valentine:
August 18th, 2010 at 3:31 am
What will anybody here convince “Max” of?
[snip]
——
Max can’t figure out why no scientific societies of standing question man-made global warming. Could it be because –
(a) The scientists know less about science than people who aren’t scientists? If so, they should change jobs.
(b) The scientists are just making things up to get attention and scare people. If so, that’s naughty.
(c) Evidence of man-made global warming is convincing to scientists. That’s probably the reason.
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Richard S Courtney: @ #60
—–
For heaven’s sake, Richard, the discussion was about the ARCTIC not the ANTARCTIC. You know, the North Pole, not the South Pole.
10
Max-OK:
At #59 you assert:
Say what!?
Your distortion of what was said is the logical error!
In science the null hypothesis is that nothing has changed unless and until something is seen to have changed. This is the governing hypothesis in the absence of empirical evidence of a change.
Any claim that there has been a change in the absence of evidence of the change is a denial of the scientific method: it is pure superstition.
So, if the behaviour of the climate shows no difference before and after the industrial revolution then the only scientific conclusion is that the industrial revolution has not changed climate behaviour.
It remains possible that there has been a change to climate behaviour, but it is superstitious nonsense to assert that the change exists in the absence of any evidence of the change. So, the scientific hypothesis is that there has been no change to recent climate behaviour.
Anybody who wants to make a scientific (and non-superstitious) claim that climate behaviour has changed recently needs to present empirical evidence that the change exists. Nobody has managed to find any evidence that climate behaviour has changed in recent decades despite a world-wide research effort over the past three decades at a cost in excess of $3 billion per year.
Got it now?
Richard
10
Society policy statements are decided upon by their governing boards. They generally do not ask “rank and file” to vote upon them.
Societies got on board with AGW to please stakeholders in Societies. They don’t like to be painted as “outliers” because they will be targeted by “green groups.”
It is known that blind acceptance of AGW by Society management, as well as Society choosing to “speak for members” has produced the most bitter acrimony within Societies.
Society management hopes that the furious responses by members arising from management arrogance will “just go away quietly.”
It ain’t going away and it ain’t going away quietly. Lots of people have resigned various societies because of this.
AGW and green goop aren’t chic anymore. Their fifteen minutes is up. Al Gore and similar “celebrities” whose lives belie their true beliefs in AGW are (fortunately) helping this one-time “fashion” to be exposed for the fraud it is.
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RE Max @ 59
Right…. so what is the logical fallacy with regard to natural glacial variation i.e. that you “know” this glacial retreat is man caused?
10
Max-OK:
Lies are not acceptable. At #62 you claim:
NO!!!
At #36 you said:
And at #50 I replied with
You cannot get away with pretending you said other than you did on this blog.
Furthermore, if your change of tune were accepted then your argument defeats itself. Simply, if it is accepted that decreaing polar ice in the Arctic is evidence that AGW is happening then increasing polar ice in the Antarctic has to be accepted as being evidence that AGW is not happening.
Richard
10
When I was 15 years of age and a sophomore physical science major in college (1966) a physical chemist and historian of chemistry said of Arrhenius,
“His [Arrhenius] perfectly legitimate career was ruined by his delusions over the validity of his own calculations of the influence of CO2 in the air.”
In ten years time, similar words will be spoken regarding the careers of many others who have bought into AGW.
10
Re Richard S Courtney: August 18th, 2010 at 4:11 am
——-
Well, Richard, we have the evidence. Know natural causes of warming don’t explain the continuing rise in global temperatures. You can’t attribute the rising temperature to the sun when the solar activity as measured by sun spots is in a down cycle, and you can’t attribute the rising temperature to El Nino during a La Nina.
During periods when global temperature should have declined as a result of a down cycle in sunspots or a La Nina, the temperature did not decline. Why? Because the warming influence of an increasing amount of greenhouse gas(GHG) kept it from declining.
Why did GHG increase? Because man is burning more and more fossil fuels, releasing the CO2( a GHG) trapped in these fuels. And the CO2 from fossil fuels remains in the atmosphere for a long long time, unlike water vapor CO2 which recycles quickly in the form of rain.
10
Max are you moving the goalpost know?
Did you read this post that Olaf linked at #44? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/15/sea-ice-news-18/
10
——
Give me a break. I was referring to the polar ice that’s known to be melting, the ice at the North Pole or Arctic. I wouldn’t say “consider the melting polar ice at the South Pole, where it’s not know to be melting.” That would be silly.
10
Bwahahahahaha. How many more of you are going to get sucked into Max’s vortex. I suggest you all read post 54. Max has locked you all in a stalemate of paralysis by analysis. In your inexplicable need to have him agree with you, even when it is obvious he is just spouting random pap to mess with you, you have all left your posts as scientists.
A real scientist, who knows the facts are on his side, would easily write off Max-types as idiots and not waste their time with them. Why do you so desperately need his validation, even as you insist to him that you are right? You are either right, or you need his validation, but NOT BOTH. And the fact is you ARE all right, and Max IS a kook. Yet he has made fools of all of you. And he has done it by dragging you into the fine details of inconsequential claims and the fabricated junkscience statistics “supporting” them. Richard, Robert, Olaf and Brian, you are ridiculous. You come on here all the time, claiming to be so knowledgeable. Then some guy comes on here spouting random crap that’s clearly BS, and you all get your panties in a bunch trying to win him over when he clearly isn’t here to be won over. Where’s the confidence in all these things you claim to know? I debunk Global Warming in one sentence in post 54 and I defy you to make one credible argument to the contrary. And if you try, you can rest assured I won’t reply with some pasted link, I’ll just write you off as not as smart as me.
FACTS are not negotiable. FACTS are not things you need to win people over to. FACTS are what they are. The people who deny them have their own set of problems. The people that accept them, have the luxury of being able to go about their business without the burdens that the Max’s of the world bear. If you can’t state a fact and let it stand, then you are not as intelligent as you claim to be, and you DEFINITELY are not scientists. I won’t be debating whether or not the grass is purple no matter who says it is or what authority they appeal to. Get it?
And don’t bother responding because these facts need no further clarification…
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@#66. Richard S Courtney:
Your statements, Richard are meaningless. They seem to be rooted in some Ying Yang mysticism that assumes that if you were to have more ice in the South then that somehow magically balances the less ice in the North.
If factual, it would be meaningless, since you can compare it to the increase in ice in the high altitude center of Greenland versus the loss in ice at the low altitudes at the edges. Bottom line, the same satellites that detect the changes in the ice sheet can quantify how much is lost or gained OVERALL. Greenland was losing 236 billion metric tonnes as of 2009.
What have you quantified? Absolutely nothing. Not that it matters that you could and there would actually be more enough Antarctic Sea ice growth to “COMPENSATE” (THERE GOES THAT MEANINGLESS MAGICAL CONCEPT AGAIN) for the Arctic loss.
The point is, that even if this gibberish of a concept had any validity, you are not even trying to fantasy guesstimate how much is being lost/gained at both ends. Just take a look at how the Antarctic has a sea AROUND IT like a thin band up to a limited extent and then compare it to the Arctic WHICH IS A SEA. Do you even know the number of square kilometers the Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is?
In conclusion it means absolutely nothing if there were to be growth in Antarctic ice as far as disproving GLOBAL Warming. Global Warming is about the WHOLE planet not opposite ends of it.
But since you want to think you’re so right, I simply present the following challenge. Where’s the Math? Where are your figures to even backup the claim that this so called “balancing act” is occurring in the first place? What are they based on?
AMARGI
10
Deuce, why so hostile? It seems you are on the skeptic side don’t be so unfriendly!
10
Amargi, anonymous blogger with condescending attitude:
[snip –JN]
Check out the validity of that dictum under “rules and legal,” will you – and report to Joanne any violations you might have identified
[I would ASSume you mean the four legged creature and therefore your comment meets the rules. It is also a nicety that the ass deserves. ED]
10
G Valentine:
August 18th, 2010 at 4:15 am
======
And your evidence of this would be ?
Don’t forget, anecdotal won’t cut it
.
10
Max-OK:
At #60 you assert:
Nonsense!
Merely because you do not know what causes natural variation does not mean you can ascribe an anthropogenic (or any other) assumed cause.
That is the logical fallacy of ‘argument from ignorance’ that has often been used by the superstitious. For example, in the Middle Ages experts said,
“We don’t know what causes crops to fail: it must be an effect witches so we must eliminate them.” Now, experts say,
“We don’t know what causes global climate change: it must be an effect of emissions from human activity so we must eliminate them.”
Of course, they phrase it differently saying they can’t match historical climate change with known climate mechanisms unless an anthropogenic effect is included.
But evidence for this “anthropogenic effect” is no more than the evidence for the effect of witches.
Richard
PS
And the cause(s) of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration are not known;
ref. Rorsch A, Courtney RS & Thoenes D, ‘The Interaction of Climate Change and the Carbon Dioxide Cycle’ E&E v16no2 (2005)
10
Follow up how many actually resigned ACS because of Rudy Baum
10
Mark D.:
August 18th, 2010 at 4:46 am
Max are you moving the goalpost know?
Did you read this post that Olaf linked at #44? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/15/sea-ice-news-18/
—–
That’s one of Steve Goddard’s gems. Steve seems like a nice guy, but he sure has trouble telling the difference between short-tem fluctuations and long-term trends.
I didn’t read the entire thread. It’s too long. However, I was glad to see a poster point out that during melting season the extent of ice underestimates the volume of ice. During freeze season, where it’s headed now, the extent of ice over estimate the volume. That makes sense when you think about it.
10
Max-OK:
At #70 you say:
No! I will not “give you a break”: I can think of no reason why I should. As I said at #66:
You seem to be saying that only facts which bolster your unfounded assertions should be conidered while similar facts that deny those assertions should be ignored.
There is no possible reason why anybody should “give you a break” for that.
Richard
10
Amargi:
Your rant at ’72 is complete nonsense. Please take an elementary lesson in reading comprehension then read my post at #66 (that you claim to be addressing) again.
Richard
10
Richard S Courtney:
August 18th, 2010 at 5:34 am
Max-OK:
At #60 you assert:
Well, Richard, we have the evidence. Know natural causes of warming don’t explain the continuing rise in global temperatures.
Nonsense!
Merely because you do not know what causes natural variation does not mean you can ascribe an anthropogenic (or any other) assumed cause.
That is the logical fallacy of ‘argument from ignorance’ that has often been used by the superstitious. For example, in the Middle Ages experts said,
“We don’t know what causes crops to fail: it must be an effect witches so we must eliminate them.” Now, experts say,
“We don’t know what causes global climate change: it must be an effect of emissions from human activity so we must eliminate them.”
Of course, they phrase it differently saying they can’t match historical climate change with known climate mechanisms unless an anthropogenic effect is included.
But evidence for this “anthropogenic effect” is no more than the evidence for the effect of witches.
Richard
PS
And the cause(s) of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration are not known;
ref. Rorsch A, Courtney RS & Thoenes D, ‘The Interaction of Climate Change and the Carbon Dioxide Cycle’ E&E v16no2 (2005)
=====
You don’t know what causes the global warming that occurs when know natural causes are in a cooling phase, but you are confident it’s caused by some natural factor anyway. You just don’t know natural what. May I suggest “magic.”
The causes of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 aren’t know? And scientist thought burning more fossil fuels released more trapped CO2 into the atmosphere. Those silly scientists.
10
Hi Jo no Reason to put Max to bed under the blanket your commenter’s seem to do the job just fine. When people who are competent in their domain (statistics) and state the obvious procedures to take for the validation of data and then say what that result is. The like’s of Max are on a loser and have only their religion to revert to.
10
Richard S Courtney:
August 18th, 2010 at 5:42 am
Max-OK:
At #70 you say:
Give me a break. I was referring to the polar ice that’s known to be melting, the ice at the North Pole or Arctic. I wouldn’t say “consider the melting polar ice at the South Pole, where it’s not know to be melting.” That would be silly.
No! I will not “give you a break”: I can think of no reason why I should. As I said at #66:
Furthermore, if your change of tune were accepted then your argument defeats itself. Simply, if it is accepted that decreasing polar ice in the Arctic is evidence that AGW is happening then increasing polar ice in the Antarctic has to be accepted as being evidence that AGW is not happening.
You seem to be saying that only facts which bolster your unfounded assertions should be conidered while similar facts that deny those assertions should be ignored.
There is no possible reason why anybody should “give you a break” for that.
——
Richard, you misinterpreted my “I wouldn’t say “consider the melting polar ice at the South Pole, where it’s not know to be melting.” Perhaps it’s unclear, but I mean I wouldn’t make an obviously contradictory statement, not I know Antarctic ice is not melting. I don’t know that. Actually, NASA says it is melting
“Gravity data collected from space using NASA’s Grace satellite show that Antarctica has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002. The latest data reveal that Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate, too. How is it possible for surface melting to decrease, but for the continent to lose mass anyway? The answer boils down to the fact that ice can flow without melting.”
The explanation is interesting. I’ll post the link later.
10
@#74. Brian G Valentine:
How about taking your advise and scratching Speedy’s, Deuce’s and Hunter’s? Or perhaps you think their Mommies gave them those names?
10
Max @ 78….
Do you mean like these: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/alley2000/alley2000.gif
or maybe this: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
or how about this zoom for your convenience? http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo3.png
How would you describe the last 200 years Trend or Fluctuation?
10
Max-OK:
This is becoming tiresome.
At #81 you assert:
Magic! How dare you!?
Science is about what is not known and attempting to find it out.
When we find an explanation we test it. You are calling on magic, not me.
As for “those silly scientists”, if you had bothered to read the reference I presented in the PS to #76 you are commenting then you would have read my name as one of the authors of that paper.
Not content with that, at #83 you say you intend to start a citation competition despite what I wrote at #60. And you are dumb enough to think I will fall for that!
I have had enough of your illogical assertions, your attempts to claim you said other than you did, and now your unfounded insults. So, I will not bother to answer any more of your ridiculous posts.
Richard
10
Brian G Valentine:
August 18th, 2010 at 5:37 am
Follow up how many actually resigned ACS because of Rudy Baum.
=====
According to Wikipedia, the American Chemical Society has more than 161,000 members. Any organization that large is going to have a few members who are at odds with the mainstream. If even 1% resigned because of Baum, that would be about 1,600 members. So how many resigned because of Braum?
10
86Richard S Courtney:
Magic! How dare you!?
Science is about what is not known and attempting to find it out.
When we find an explanation we test it. You are calling on magic, not me…..
—–
No, Richard, science is about evidence, and AWG deniers lack evidence. That’s why they can’t convince the scientific community.
[USE OF DENIER!
Warning once ED]
10
I agree with you for the most part. People like Max_OK and amargi deflect the discussion away from the main point of the post because they can do nothing else. They drag out all the old arguments that have been addressed countless times before because they haven’t got any evidence, their bleating to the contrary notwithstanding. Nor can they demonstrate where the paper under discussion is flawed. Oh, they’ll go back to the echo chamber and ask Rabett or Gavin to throw them key phrases, but they don’t really understand the statistics. That’s why they obfuscate with tangential discussion and we’ve seen this tactic here many times.
I think people here feel the need to say something in counterpoint more for potential lurking readers than to convince the blinkered acolytes.
Everyone, the point of the paper under discussion is not the proxies, the temperature records, or CO2 measurements. In their paper the authors assume that all those pieces are correct. The point they are making, which has been made before by others, is that the the statistical methodology does not hold up.
Statistics only produce probabilities and possibilities, not facts. As Deuce pointed out in #54, statistics are ladden with assumptions. That climate “science” is nothing but a Gordian knot of assumptions and assertions masked in statistics with more layers of assumptions, should make every real scientist skeptical.
10
@#80. Richard S Courtney:
August 18th, 2010 at 5:46 am
Max-OK says to Richard S Courtney:
Amargi responds to Richard on two points:
My friend with the foul mood. Me thinketh you need to take your advise. You obviously did not comprehend Max-Ok.
He was telling you that the causes are known, “. . .we have the evidence.” as well as telling you that, “Know natural causes of warming don’t explain the continuing rise in global temperatures.”
That is not the same as saying that he does not know. It means that natural causes are not the cause of our current events.
10
Mr. JLKrueger! good to see you again!
10
Mark,
Thank, it’s good to be back. Readjusting to life outside the war zone took a little longer than I anticipated. Somehow I’ve actually had less time to blog than when I was in Afghanistan! Go figure. 🙂
I think my ramp-up to the blogging cycle will be faster than the sun’s ramp-up in cycle 24 though.
10
Amargi:
At #90 you assert:
Oh yes it is!
He cannot know that all natural effects have been discounted because nobody knows what all the natural effects are; e.g. nobody knows what causes ENSO, NAO, PDO, etc..
The known fact is that the only clear prediction of AGW (i.e. the ‘hot spot’) has not happened so the evidence is that AGW is NOT the cause of the global warming that occurred from ~1940 to ~2000 but not since.
Richard
10
JLKrueger:
August 18th, 2010 at 6:41 am
Deuce:
August 18th, 2010 at 5:00 am
Max has locked you all in a stalemate of paralysis by analysis. In your inexplicable need to have him agree with you, even when it is obvious he is just spouting random pap to mess with you, you have all left your posts as scientists.
I agree with you for the most part. People like Max_OK and amargi deflect the discussion away from the main point of the post because they can do nothing else. They drag out all the old arguments that have been addressed countless times before because they haven’t got any evidence, their bleating to the contrary notwithstanding. Nor can they demonstrate where the paper under discussion is flawed. Oh, they’ll go back to the echo chamber and ask Rabett or Gavin to throw them key phrases, but they don’t really understand the statistics. That’s why they obfuscate with tangential discussion and we’ve seen this tactic here many times.
I think people here feel the need to say something in counterpoint more for potential lurking readers than to convince the blinkered acolytes.
Everyone, the point of the paper under discussion is not the proxies, the temperature records, or CO2 measurements. In their paper the authors assume that all those pieces are correct. The point they are making, which has been made before by others, is that the the statistical methodology does not hold up.
—–
Not when McShane and Wyner do it, but what makes you so sure they are doing it right? Criticisms of their methods on statistical grounds are emerging. Why not wait and see before deciding they have a valid point.
In the meantime, if you accept their conclusions what do you have?
That their work proves Mann’s Hockey Stick is impossible? Couldn’t have happened. No, they don’t say that, do they?
In fact, McShane and Wyner have used Mann’s data to come up with a Hockey Stick of their own, with a tilted handle and larger error bands than Mann. Do they say their’s is right and Mann’s is wrong? Nope.
They do say they aren’t sure about the shaft of the stick, but they don’t say they doubt the blade.
10
Richard S Courtney:
August 18th, 2010 at 7:07 am
Amargi:
At #90 you assert:
That is not the same as saying that he does not know. It means that natural causes are not the cause of our current events.
Oh yes it is!
He cannot know that all natural effects have been discounted because nobody knows what all the natural effects are; e.g. nobody knows what causes ENSO, NAO, PDO, etc.
——
We know it was natural causes that caused the recent global warming, but we don’t what they are.
Good luck with that one
Doctor to widow: Your husband died of natural causes.
Widow: What natural causes?
Doctor: Gee, I don’t know, just natural causes.
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Max_OK:
August 18th, 2010 at 6:35 am
86Richard S Courtney:
Magic! How dare you!?
Science is about what is not known and attempting to find it out.
When we find an explanation we test it. You are calling on magic, not me…..
—–
No, Richard, science is about evidence, and AWG deniers lack evidence. That’s why they can’t convince the scientific community.
[USE OF DENIER!
Warning once ED]
=====
No problem. I’ll use “contrarians” or “naysayers.” But there are people who deny man-made global warming has occurred and even people who deny the globe has been warming.
(You are skirting the big “D”word with shortened form of that word,you should drop it) CTS
10
J.L. Krueger
Welcome back, you’ve been missed.
10
Richard S Courtney:
August 18th, 2010 at 7:07 am
Amargi:
At #90 you assert:
That is not the same as saying that he does not know. It means that natural causes are not the cause of our current events.
Oh yes it is!
He cannot know that all natural effects have been discounted because nobody knows what all the natural effects are; e.g. nobody knows what causes ENSO, NAO, PDO, etc
——
Richard, the ENSO, NAO, PDO are cyclical. Their influence on global temperature alternates between up and down. Unless the ups usually are greater than the downs, there is no long-term warming influence.
10
Max OK at 30…
A hypothesis must make useful observations about the real world. A hypothesis is no better than its weakest implication. (CP Snow) The AGW hypothesis implies that it must have been cooler in the recent historical past than today, because the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were much lower than today. But we know that it was as warm or warmer than today in the recent past.
http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html
Therefore the AGW hypothesis fails to make a useful prediction of past temperatures. A hypothesis that makes predictions which fails to explain real world observation is falsified.
Game over.
Note: This is, of course, why it was so very, very important for Mann, et al, to do whatever it takes to create a past “Climate Stasis” at a low temperature from which to launch modern warming. Unlike Max OK, real climate scientists (no matter how unethical) understand the scientific method and the importance of hypothesis formation.
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Well, for are trolls today, Ihave a question for you?Yes the earth has warmed and stastaticly by what 1 centigrade or 1.5 cent. in 200 yrs. not many and not on this web site does anybody DENIE this.Now the question where or what is your evidence that co2 is the cause and remeber caoralation is not causetion???? And no papers with the words COULD, MIGHT,and a STRONG BELIEF!!!! MAX the artic ice has been reducing in volume and extent for 100 yrs because of ice breakers trying to keep open the artic shipping lanes. break up the ice and it gets flushed out to sea less ice means less cold to stay there IMHO. Iam no sciencetist but i have common sense. Remember this site and WUWT have scienctist writing and commenting and they do know what they are talking about
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Have you noticed that you can fit several other blades within the uncertainty of the hockey stick shaft?
George
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Amargi @ 56:
You’re right that Arctic ice thickness has reduced over the last 30 years, however it hasn’t melted, and can’t at -30C. It’s obviously ablated away due to wind erosion and immediate evaporation skipping the water phase. This would be due to lack of adequate precipitation,not caused by CO2 and any warming, but changes in the jet stream and local weather patterns.
Conversely though, the Antarctic is seeing the exact opposite, despite it being the driest place on Earth.
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Max_OK and Amargi – two green COMMUNISTS!
Some homework for you both….
Live Green before you vote it:-
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_live_green_before_you_vote_it/
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The Last Word on the Election………
If the ALP/Green Coalition wins this election, carbon taxes and emissions trading will suddenly rise from the dead. Our advice remains the same:
Number every square.
Put Climate Sceptics first and the Greens last.
Make your own choices from there on, but the Nationals, some Liberals and most of the other minor parties are strongly opposed to carbon Ration-N-Tax Schemes. (We forgot to mention One Nation as another group sceptical of the idea that man’s production of carbon dioxide has harmful effects on anything.)
Comments Authorised by:
Viv Forbes
Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition
MS 23 Rosevale, Qld, Australia
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@ JLKrueger
Good to see you post again. I posted inquiries about you a few times. A few days ago baa humbug posted that you were alive and well. How are the ribs?
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@ Max_OK and amargi
You two should start a twelve step programs for trolls. I have read your various posts and you two intellectual midgets are just what we need. Brain dead CAGW zombies can never be persuaded with logic and facts. You do, however, help us skeptics to convince the “undecideds” that CAGW is a scam that needs to be killed before another dime is wasted. Keep up the good work and thanks again!
Please do not bother with a pathetic response as I am going to the Russian River Brewing Company to have a beer and watch my son eat pizza and drink root beer. I have a life, you two losers should try and get one.
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Max OK at 68…
Max OK at 59…
If modern warming is within the parameters of recent past climate variation then modern warming has to be assumed to be natural, since modern warming is, by definition, not anomalous and therefore requires no special explanation.
The fundamental tenet of the anthropogenic warming hypothesis is that the anthropogenic forcings must dominate the natural climate variation, therefore break out of the natural variation parameters both in amplitude and rate of change. Yet neither has been observed. Modern warming is well within the range of normal past climate variation. Therefore, no special one off theory is needed to explain today’s climate.
Note that this is true even if modern CO2 levels and human land use patterns have contributed to warming. Human impact on climate is simply another minor factor, at best, that should compliment – not supplant -our understanding of climate evolution. This is why the debate is about catastrophic anthopogenic warming. Minor warming or cooling is not anomalous or dangerous. One does not need to deny warming has occurred or that human economic activity might have played a minor role in order to debunk the True Believer version of the AGW hypothesis.
Once again, this is why it was of paramount importance for Mann, et al to create the Hockey Stick. “Realclimate” scientists understand that the CAGW hypothesis would be slashed by Occam’s Razor if the MWP and LIA were allowed to stand in their full glory, (if not falsified outright.)
A mythical climate stasis, a pre-industrial Garden of Eden, had to be created in order to provide a proper narrative from which to launch modern anomalous warming.
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Deuce @ 71:
The more people read our factual posts and understand them the more people see the blatant lie of AGW and will refuse to be sucked into govt spin and refuse to pay taxes on harmless but beneficial CO2. Pretty simple.
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Max_ok post # 98:
The ups HAVE been greater than the downs.That is why it has been warming since the 1850’s.
Thus there has been long term warming influence,all of it natural.
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Marhaban Krueger, is-salam allekum. kayf hal?
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sunsettommy:
August 18th, 2010 at 9:33 am
Max_ok post # 98:
Richard, the ENSO, NAO, PDO are cyclical. Their influence on global temperature alternates between up and down. Unless the ups usually are greater than the downs, there is no long-term warming influence.
The ups HAVE been greater than the downs.That is why it has been warming since the 1850’s.
Thus there has been long term warming influence,all of it natural.
Valid? 0 0
=====
And data showing that would be ……….
A. Non-existent
B. Can’t be found
C. The dog ate it
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Max OK at 35
Max OK at 68
Again, we see that the AGW hypothesis is utterly dependent upon the mythopoeia of modern climate variation as anomalous. The AGW hypothesis implies that it must be warmer today than at anytime in the last several thousand years. It is not.
The AGW hypothesis implies that the rate of climate change must be anomalously rapid. Wrong.
There are many, many examples of past natural climate change happening on the scale of years or a few decades…much, much faster than today’s rate of climate evolution…. For instance the Akkadian Collapse of 4600bp within about five years plunged the whole of the Middle East into 200 years of high temperatures and drought. Must have been AGW!
http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/28/4/379.abstract
There is nothing anomalous about the weather today, other than the fact that an alleged consciously self-aware civilization is here to observe, record and create stories about it. Come to think about it, that’s the same as it has ever was….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-io-kZKl_BI
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Olaf Koenders:
August 18th, 2010 at 9:06 am
Deuce @ 71:
The more people read our factual posts and understand them the more people see the blatant lie of AGW and will refuse to be sucked into govt spin and refuse to pay taxes on harmless but beneficial CO2. Pretty simple.
——–
Water is beneficial. But too much water ain’t.
Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.
Pretty simple.
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The “oscillations” refer to periodic differences in barometric pressure between two reference points, and that period is sometimes a decade.
Corresponding temperature differences generally depend on location. Other phenomena such as “El Nino” are sometimes associated with the Southern Oscillation, although the origin is not connected.
I hate El Ninos. I hate summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Every damned nitwit blogger and global warmer appears out of nowhere
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If the widow used the logic of AGW theory she would then conclude since the natural causes aren’t well understood then it must have been murder!
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Re Brian @114,
Indeed your observation is accurate:
Of course you realize that a majority of computers exist in the northern summer (hemisphere) and when it is hot (thankfully this year is a summer) you get lots of bloggers!
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Max @ 111 you have ignored my graphical posts @ 85:
Which kind of ruins your comment at 111:
A=Wrong
B=is found
C=THE DOG BARFED IT UP!
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For Max_OK:
Warming in Last 50 Years Predicted by Natural Climate Cycles
Dr. Spencer shows based on actual climate data,that SOL along with PDO and AMO.Fit very well with temperature changes from year 1900.
It is good evidence that Natural changes is the dominant signal and little or zero anthropogenic effect.
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Wes @ 107, and 112; nicely said and gosh saved me from typing many words that would have in comparison to your posts.
Thanks!
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Sorry add: paled {in comparison} to your posts
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Doubly sorry Wes, Add #115 to my commendation at #119
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Max OK, the unskeptical True Believer@96
(You are skirting the big “D”word with shortened form of that word,you should drop it) CTS
—–
I understand the rule to ban the d-word. However, those truly in denial (I mean that in the proper psychological sense rather than as a hate-speech reference to “Holocaust denial”) are the unskeptical True Believers who literally remain faithful to a falsified hypothesis. Obviously, they find the AGW mythology more rewarding in terms of cultural identity and meaning than as an objective evaluation of the known facts. This is the only true “denialism” of our age. Therefore, while I understand banning the term, I can not wholly support it, because the use of the d-word reveals more about the intellectual bigotry of the user than the nature of the subject of his/her derision.
In fact, the unskeptical true believers in AGW have more in common with the so-called “useful idiot” phenomena – a term coined to describe otherwise intelligent people who supported Stalin and later Mao’s cultural revolution while remaining completely in denial that these two dictators were mass murdering their own people. What is really shocking is that by the 1980’s – when one could no more deny the genocidal nature of Soviet and Chinese communism than one could deny the Nazi Holocaust – the useful idiots (such as Phillip Adams) morphed their arguments from denial to accepting that genocide is simply a regrettable, but necessary, part of the revolutionary process to achieve a post-capitalist collectivist society.
(It is unfair to call “true believers in AGW” USEFUL IDIOTS,while they are not allowed to call us DENIERS here in this blog.Moderators have to follow the blog commenting rules of preventing the use of the word Denialist and similar words.Namecalling does not promote sustained civil debates.It is better to drop it) CTS
I suspect that the Greens and AGW true believers will eventually admit that their goals are not supported by a rational, honest evaluation of the facts, but that rational objective thought is part of the capitalist conspiracy to enslave and exploit. Thus, Marx, Mao and Stalin were right all along… All successful millenarianism ultimately results in violent revolution, pogroms and forced “re-education.”
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, 1951
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer
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One of the things I hate most about reading blogs about AGW is the disingenuous posts.
For example like Eddy @ 106:
a beer
Really does anyone believe Eddy will limit his beer intake to ONE?
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Yes, I’ve noticed your little comments on Climate Audit and William Briggs’ blogs. You seem a bit preoccupied with the pretty picture without grasping the underlying math or their conclusions. So far the only significant statistical question raised has centered around their use of Lasso.
What part of:
Or
do you not understand?
Uncertainty is the issue. That they produced “bigger error bands,” as you say, is precisely the point.
Bigger error bands = greater uncertainty
Why the greater uncertainty? Because McShane and Wyner’s uncertainty bands (or error bands as you call them) are pathwise instead of pointwise and account for the uncertainty of the parameters.
What they have said is that given the available data and the uncertainty, you can’t draw any conclusions as to whether it is warmer today than it was during the MWP. If you cannot demonstrate that the current warming is “unprecedented” then you have no case. You cannot given the uncertainty.
Data reliability is left as a completely different and unaddressed issue.
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Hey Eddy! Thanks and good to be back. Ribs actually still hurt a little. My knee, on the other hand, is pain free. My sadistic physical therapist did a great post-op job on me and pushed me pretty hard. But I think calling her a “sadistic” physical therapist is a trifle redundant. I think sadistic tendencies are part of the job qualification. 🙂
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Wes @ 122:
If I read you right you are connecting AGW supporters with the concept of a MASS MOVEMENT as Eric Hoffer argues. I have to say that is pretty spot on.
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When you take a mean of a group of numbers, you will find that should one number go up, and another number go down by equal amount, the final mean will stay the same. That’s a property of the “mean” operation, you can learn about this in school by paying attention in math class.
Thus, to explain this a different way: the fall of one value COMPENSATES for the rise of some different value. That’s normal English usage, and I can respect that possibly English is not your first language, but we can’t change the language just to suit one person. The only magic at work here is the behaviour of addition and subtraction. Here’s a bit more mathemagic for you: try adding up the numbers backwards, whoa! same answer!!
If you insist on saying that compensation effects are gibberish then what you are really saying is that global averages are gibberish. There was an article posted a while back that said exactly this (I can track it down if anyone is interested). With some example data sets you can achieve either rising or falling “norm” out of the exact same data set depending on your choice of methodology for the “norm” (and note that I use “norm” in the mathematical context, where a mean is one particular selection of norm from a very large number of possible norms, and no basis has been put forward as to why one might be better than another).
I would have thought that both poles were equally significant from a CO2 perspective; at least if there exists good reason why one pole should be ignored then please state the reason. Seems that global CO2 would circulate over the decades and if AGW does exist then it would have to be occurring on at least a multi-decade timescale. Why would it all zoom to one pole and not the other?
Links were given in #38 above. Notice that 2008 and 2010 were exceptionally high years for Antarctic Sea Ice Extent. Having been in Western Sydney, and woke up early on the morning that experienced the coldest temperature ever recorded in this city (June 2010) I can personally testify that it was indeed unusually cold, and happened around the same time the Antarctic sea ice extent reached a peak.
Well… we could measure the ice coverage in and around Equatorial Guinea if you think that would give a better reading.
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Thanks for the compliments, Mark D! 😉
The AGW true believers and the Greens are a dangerous socio-political mass movement that employ all the classic tropes of authoritarian millenarianism that characterized the various great mass hysterias of especially the 20th and 19th centuries, but also through out time immemorial — Paradise Lost, Original Sin, Guilt, Self-flagellation, Prophecy, A Great Apocalypse (that never ever arrives), The Promise of Redemption Through Sacrifice, The Scapegoat – The Concept of the Hated Other who must wear the Yellow Star and eventually be cleansed from society in a Final Solution resulting in a Pure Society, The Final Utopian Perfect State in Perfect Balance with Natural Law.
We have read this story before so many times. But we always forget.
The only innovation the Greens and AGW true believers bring to the execrable history of societal mass delusions is that they have successfully appropriated the language of science and captured our academic institutions to cloak their anti-rational and anti-humanist agenda in a veil of pseudo-science respectability. Because of this the Greens represent the greatest danger to western civilization since War World II. The Greens are a cancer upon our intellectual institutions, which will rapidly prove mortal if the tumour isn’t arrested and excised from our body politic before an entire generation is allowed to mature unable to think rationally and freely for themselves.
Green “science” is based on consensus truthiness rather than testable objective adherence to the experimental or observable data. Thus, groupthink just-so narrative trumps the individual scientist who steps forward with a test that falsifies the AGW hypothesis. Note that Max and Amargi remain totally oblivious to the content of Jo’s post, that Mann’s hockey stick has been total debunked. Again. The science is utterly irrelevant to them, other than when it can be cynically used as a tool to advance their agenda. Once they have depleted and degrade science to the point it is useless for their purpose, they’ll simple discard all pretense of rational thought and move on to authoritarian collectivist force to achieve their final objectives.
The key to understanding AGW zealotry is to grasp that it isn’t about the science at all. Nor is it about saving the Earth. I don’t expect the useful idiot True Believers – like Max and Amargi – to consciously understand the true implications of their belief system. They can’t even reason at a grade school level, much less be cognitively aware of the blinding dissonance between their faith and the observed facts. One must assume they are naively sincere, imagining they are doing their bit to Save The Planet. They represent the great failure of our system of education to teach children how to rationally think independently of the hive mind. And their mindless zealotry reveals the great crime against humanity the Green intelligentsia – who must know the truth behind the big lie – are perpetuating upon the youth of Australia.
CAGW is about legitimizing the unprecedented extension of political power into your private life. It’s about the end of the free and innovative modern era and the descent into a new high tech dark ages of collectivism where thought is indirectly manipulated through the control of language and narrative, where life is death, CO2 is pollution, parliament legislates fine weather and property is ultimately distributed by a static oligarchic technocratic uberclass.
God help us all!
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Max_OK @ 113:
Too much water where exactly? Water and CO2 are not analogous and in doing so betrays your lost intellect. The Carboniferous had some 20x today’s CO2, where huge jungles sucked it up over millions of years, which is where we get our coal from today.
The Jurassic had some 10x today’s CO2, where life clearly thrived, delicate aragonite corals evolved in non-acid oceans. The proof of which are those pesky un-dissolved fossils of corals and shellfish from that era that keep popping up in our museums. All that CO2 and never a runaway greenhouse, or fabled “tipping point”, ever.
Mankind will probably never be able to reach those CO2 levels again on his own because nature spews out 97% of it. Currently, we add 30Bn tons/year and nature adds some 640Bn tons/year.
Before you even bother replying with some irrelevant prattle, immerse yourself in this page of charts and hopefully you’ll learn something. If not, you can pay our share of carbon tax:
http://www.c3headlines.com/temperature-charts-historical-proxies.html
I’m aware that I may be wasting my time, since you clearly haven’t learned anything from my previous posts and links, which tells me you’re either afraid of the truth, incapable of learning or both.
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@#122. Wes George says:
@#96. Moderators warning Max_OK:
So let me see if I can understand what’s going on here. The word Denier or other euphemisms cannot be used but it is all right to engage in name calling such as “useful idiot”?
(No.It is not acceptable to be trading namecalling with each other.I have commented again in post # 122 about it.) CTS
Also, it is acceptable behavior on this forum to direct vile accusations like the asinine claim that those who believe in Man Made Global Warming are like supporters of Stalin and Mao and denied their genocides as well.
Does anyone on this site know the meaning of the word HYPOCRITE?
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@#128. wes george:
Wes george, that is pure nonsense. Other than having nothing to do with the issue of Global Warming it is a preposterous ad hominem attack.
Unfortunately, this Glenn Beckian (Pardon my American culture.), paranoid delusion(s), is not going to slow down reality one whit.
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JLKrueger:
It is good to have you back and to learn that your knee is better.
I sincerely hope the ribs fully recover soon, and I hope you are enjoying your time back with your family.
As you can see from this thread, while you have been away this blog has been inundated by trolls whose only objective is to disrupt rational debate.
It seems their appearance here has been an orechestrated campaign because when one of them leaves (with trail between legs) another immediately joins. Also, the most recent three shifts of them have consisted of pairs of trolls who appear (and leave) at the same time.
As Eddy says, they demonstrate to onlookers that ‘warmers’ have no evidence and only illogical asertions to support their case. However, they are a disruption to sensible discussion.
And you have always been an interesting and entertaining contributor to sensible discussion so, as I sad, I am pleased at your return here.
Richard
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Does anyone on this site know the meaning of the word HYPOCRITE?
Yes! Every time you stop by, it gets reinforced.
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@#129. Olaf Koenders:
Why is it that people arrogantly boast to others about how wrong they are when they don’t bother to go off on their own and learn APART from the influences that have an agenda.
Over and over and over again you are informed of the same one fact that is . . .
Never ever and never ever and never acknowledged about the Ancient past.
The Sun was weaker!!! About 4.5% in the Ordovician period and 6% during the last Snowball Earth event. Now do the math with those seemingly small percentages. Remember, you not only have to do the inverse square of the percentage but you also have to start from Absolute Zero.
Such a weak sun would definitely need a lot more CO2 just to stay at temperatures equivalent to our current day Earth. It would need even more CO2 to maintain much warmer temperatures of the Ordovician and other time periods.
PS: You should really apologize to Max_OK for that offensive language. I have only noticed him today and have yet to see him respond to anyone here in such a foul manner.
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@#133. Otter:
Yes! Every time you stop by, it gets reinforced.
You may now say something meaningful otter.
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When you say “along comes a new paper in a top ranking statistics journal” has it actually been published? I thought only submitted.
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Amargi @ 134:
Naturally, you forget we also had ice ages with those same very high amounts of CO2. That ends that proud moment for you.
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amargi: #134
August 18th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Aren’t you forgetting something amargi?
(hint, rotational speed of the sun, hence, speed of solar wind)
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Welcome back Krueger.
Too bad about the sadistic “nurse” but I did warn you not to go to a BDSM massage parlour.
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Amargi @ 134
What he said @ 46 was equally as offensive:
He may know lots about navel fluff but true science isn’t his strong point, which he’s proven quite well lately, including his blatant lie above.
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Amargi. The slur Climate Denialist as a hate speech attempt to isolate skeptics as somehow related to Nazi Holocaust denialism is hardly a bloody euphemism as defined… “a mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing.” Useful idiot, on the other hand, is expository in meaning, if somewhat comically at your expense…
I said that you are probably totally sincere in your naive belief that the planet needs saving from an impending climate apocalypse. Therefore, sadly you are a cognitive victim of the failure of our society to instill you with the mental facilities to divine bleeding obvious facts from ideologically driven fantasy. That’s the definition of a useful idiot. If the shoe fits wear it. You don’t like being exposed as a special kind of fool? Hypocrisy? Not on my part, pal. 😉
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
My intent is to rock your world. That’s the Socratic Method. Without robust debate our ability to think rationally would atrophy. If only you could provide us with incisive and convincing defense of AGW, we would be for ever in your debt!
Should you doubt that you are a useful idiot for an authoritarian power grab then please demonstrate how the AGW hypothesis explains that the historical past climate was as warm or warmer than today at only half the atmospheric CO2 concentration? Demonstrate how modern climate is anomalous to recent past natural climate variation.
Michael Mann thought this question was so important that he sacrificed his career as a respectable scientist in a sordid effort the create a lovely little paleoclimate Garden of Eden in a perverse attempt to fit up the data to the CAGW hypothesis… Please defend Mann’s reconstruction, if you can.
http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html
The dialectic table has turned, Amargi. As I stated earlier, I don’t agree with the moderator’s banning of the d-word, because, it so aptly describes what you represent – the denial of the preponderance of observational evidence. You have shown yourself to unconsciously – with utterly no self-awareness of the implications of your socio-economic agenda – to support an authoritarian extension of government control into everyone’s private life, by deluded yourself that you are fighting to Save The Planet from Doooooom…
As Bob Tyrrell said about the left: “There is only one political value that the left have stood by through three generations, and that is the political value of disturbing your neighbor.” (ripped from James Taranto in today’s WSJ)
Surprise! We are now disturbed. 🙂
–attributed to Lenin. Or was it Bob Brown? What’s the difference?
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It has been refereed and accepted and will be in the forthcoming issue. The authors have already stated that the version we are discussing is the final draft. The refereed version has changes we have not yet seen.
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I guess I shouldn’t have doubted your experience. Next time you warn me about seedy things, I’ll listen. 🙂
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Thanks Richard, I was feeling my brain cells atrophy being away so long. Reasoned discourse on difficult issues is to the brain what physical exercise is to muscles, so back to the mental gym.
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@#137. Olaf Koenders:
August 18th, 2010 at 7:54 pm
Amargi @ 134:
Olaf says:
You are not in a position to tell me what I have forgotten especially when you never knew it in the first place. The proportions of Carbon Dioxide levels would go up and down from a non ice age to an ice age.
In the Ordovician, where there was an ice age in its last million years, or so, CO2 levels went down BELOW 3000 ppm. It was the same common sense type of fluctuation that we’ve had in the past two and a half million years where our current cycle of ice ages and interludes would go from 180 ppm to 280-300 ppm.
The only difference between the ice ages of the deep past and ours is that those of the deep past had more CO2 than ours. Otherwise, it would not have been an Ice Age back then but a much worse situation like Snowball Earth where the Oceans themselves are frozen.
The arrogance with which you speak puts you in the habit of “shooting from the hip” like most people do when they don’t take time to reflect on a given subject or, as in your case, don’t take time to have even researched it thoroughly.
Face it Olaf, you have an attitude problem. What you flippantly referred to as a “proud moment” for me is actually hubris for you.
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@#138. Baa Humbug:
amargi: #134
Baa Humbug says:
That statement, Humbug, is meaningless. Solar irradiance, not solar wind, is what warms our little hearts.
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@#141. Wes George:
Wes, your entire post is patronizing and self serving. Your pompous “holier than thou” attitude prevents any meaningful discussion between you and anyone else.
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Cheers JLK in 142. I’ve read a few damning critiques of the paper, or at least some of the interpretations of the paper. I’ll wait until it is published and see what it actually says.
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For the record: I don’t ban the use of the word “denier” – it’s a useful word and I wrote a whole post on it. I do discourage baseless name-calling (especially when it’s repeated). Since no one who calls skeptics a “denier” can name anything we deny, it’s baseless.
Wes used “useful idiot” but since he has referenced it with a long historical discussion it’s reasonable to make that point once. (Let’s not make it as a regular thing). It is rather inflammatory.
Some commenters are here to bait people into firing back. Please try not to rise to the bait, as Deuce @71 and Krueger @89 pointed out. The only point in replying is for the benefit of all the silent readers and to practice the mental ping-pong.
Max OK – please learn to use the blockquote button, and only quote the parts you are replying too.
Brian – You are at your best when you back up your statements. #74 wasn’t helpful. Nor was the crude ref.
People – this is the current “game”: commenters turn up, say preposterous things, deny the obvious, misquote people, and then wait for respondents to get frustrated and use an adjective of any sort. Then they cut and paste it back point the finger at the poor behaviour, and claim a kind of mental victory, as if the substance of the argument is secondary.
I don’t have time to clean up long discussions. Good manners is an asset. Insults must be backed up with a quote or a reference.
Krueger – Deelighted to see you here again!
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Joanne @ 149
Well said. Name-calling on either side doesn’t do anything to advance the conversation.
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amargi,
You say the Sun was weaker which is why the CO2 levels at 10X the current levels didn’t cause runaway warming. Let’s sanity check your assertion using IPCC forcing values. The forcing power from 10X CO2 is equal to 5.3*ln(10) = 12.2 W/m^2, which according to the IPCC should cause a temperature increase of 9.8C. The sensitivity of the surface to changes in solar energy is about 1.1. I.e, a 1 watt increase/decrease in solar power will increase/decrease radiated surface power by 1.1 W/m^2 corresponding to a temperature increase of about 0.23C. BTW, I prefer dimensionless ratios of power to power when describing sensitivity, rather than the incorrect and misleading ratio of temperature to power used by CAGW supporters. The sensitivity of the surface to solar power is shown in this plot. Note that this is a measurement of the closed loop sensitivity, after all feedbacks, positive, negative, known and unknown have been accounted for. The X axis represents incident solar power and the Y axis represents radiated surface power. The small cyan dots represent all data points, while the larger blue and green dots represent averages for individual slices of latitude integrated over 25 years of satellite data measurements.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/fb/is.png
A surface temperature increase of 9.8C requires 56 W/m^2 more surface power (starting from 288K). To offset this requires a reduction in solar power of 51 W/m^2 (given the measured ‘gain’ of 1.1). Based on an average incident solar power of 341.5 W/m^2, this represents a 15% reduction in solar power which is more than 2X larger than even the most wildly overestimated difference. Now I know that factors of 2 are acceptable errors to AGW supporters, as long as the error pushes the results in the desired direction, but this isn’t the only factor of 2 error in the CAGW logic.
What this exercise really points out is when we express the sensitivity to CO2 forcing as the dimensionless quantification of a power ratio most accurately representing the concept of climate sensitivity (i.e. climate system gain), we see that the sensitivity to CO2 forcing, per the IPCC, is far larger than the measured sensitivity of the Earth to changes in solar power. If 3.7 W/m^2 of forcing causes a 3C surface temperature increase, the 3.7 W/m^2 must be amplified to 16.5 W/m^2 in order to cause a 3C surface temperature rise. This is a sensitivity of about 4.5, as compared to the 1.1 that we measure for incremental solar power.
I have yet to find a warmist who can explain this without resorting to COE violations, magic or made up physics. Matt’s answer was cute where he claimed the feedback was the difference. This just points out how little you guys understand feedback, as the measured 1.1 sensitivity to incremental solar forcing already accounts for all feedbacks and there is no reason to believe why joules of energy recirculated to the surface by GHG absorption should be treated any differently than joules of energy arriving from the Sun.
One more comment is that skeptics like myself prefer to be referred to as CAGW skeptics. That is, we are skeptical of the catastrophic consequences predicted by the alarmists. We understand that CO2 is a GHG, that man is putting CO2 into the atmosphere and that the climate changes. The reason for my skepticism is that the CAGW crowd has yet to put forth any theory grounded in physics or any objective data supporting their position. The ONLY data that supports CAGW are the highly adjusted, extra normalized, ultra homogenized hockey stick temperature plots, such as the one discredited in this article. We all know torture is not a way to reveal the truth, but a way to achieve a confession of whatever it is you want to hear. This also applies to data.
George
10
Yes, you’re right Jo Anne – sometimes I don’t say helpful things.
I admit I get frustrated. Some folks with pre-conceived notions visit here, and continue to condescend whilst contradicting themselves.
Such guests are not paying attention to anything, including themselves. Their intent is to justify their viewpoint (their cherished set of beliefs) at any cost.
Principles of reason, as I think that you would promote, should be enough for anyone to question (at minimum) the foundations of their beliefs. They aren’t.
I have a difficult time being “civil” to people with AGW fears. The reason is, they clamour for laws that influence everybody, but seem clueless that these laws will hurt those with the weakest voices the worst.
When I mouth off “crudeness” I do so with the memory of the disregard people have of the less fortunate, perhaps you might have some guidance for me on a more suitable approach.
10
@#151. co2isnotevil:
What strikes me, co2, is the double standard in such a request IN THE SAME SENTENCE!
I have had no problem in using the word Skeptic. I do have a problem with people who ask to be respected but consistently do the very thing they’re complaining about.
You used the word “Alarmist” in the same sentence where you stated what you prefer to be called. It does not matter how justified you think you are, since it’s an issue of reciprocity.
It does not EVEN MATTER THAT WE ARE ALARMISTS AND ADMIT IT(There’s quite a few that do). That does not justify the term because YOU USE IT IN A DEROGATORY MANNER.
As for the technical information, due to it’s length, it will take some time.
10
Amargi:
At #153 you say in reply to the post from co2isnotevil at #151:
Say what!?
The response from co2isnotevil was a simple and straightforward analysis of the assertion that you made at #134.
Why did you post the nonsense at #134 if you had not made the simple check of it veracity first?
In the light of the number and nature of your posts here I think it reasonable to demand a reply to this question before any more of your nonsensical posts are published here, and I ask the Moderators to take note of this demand.
We want sensible and serious discussions here. And we do not want those discussions distracted by a need to rebut a voluminous serious of nonsensical posts from you or any other troll.
Richard
10
@#152. Brian G Valentine:
Tell me Brian WHEN did you ever ask me what my solutions to AGW would be? Hint, they don’t involve Cap and Trade or the “laws” you’ve been thinking about.
Those assumptions of yours are reinforced by your need to maintain simple minded ideas about those you are prejudiced against. It’s nice to keep one’s ideas about people nice and tidy. Reality though is messy.
10
Well that’s good news Amargi, if you’re not here to justify the need for “cap and trade” or any variation of it, then I admit I mistakenly spoke crudely to you.
If you are here to promote REJECTION of such laws, you also have my thanks – but I must admi that I would be mystified if that was your intent.
10
@#154: Richard S Courtney:
Post#134 is based on simple, easy to memorize information.
Post #151, on the other hand, is keeping me busy with a look at the website that co2 linked to. He bases his calculations on information obtained from that post.
Yes, every once in a while I take a break. Writing this is my idea of a break. So boo!
Another thing, Richard, I don’t shoot from the hip or mouth off without forethought like some people on this thread.
10
amargi,
There’s no double standard here. You find alarmist derogatory? Do you have a better word for someone who jumps up and down screaming the sky is falling and we must act to stop it at all costs? I often use the word ‘warmist’, do you find that equally derogatory? I certainly don’t think alarmist is on a par with denialist as a derogatory term. At least alarmist is accurate. I can think of many other terms that would be far more inflammatory and equally descriptive for many CAGW supporters. Denialist is not an accurate description of skeptics and the only reason for it’s use is as an attempt to disqualify sound logic and reasoning. I don’t deny any truth, but I certainly disagree with the speculative claims falsely presented as fact by your side of the debate. If there’s any denying going on here, it’s those of you who deny Conservation of Energy, Stefan-Boltzmann and other first principles physics in order to justify your speculative assumptions.
BTW, not all warmists are alarmists, but it’s the alarmists among you who push the catastrophic message and that was the point I was making and why I chose the word I did.
If the only objection you found to my detailed explanation of the weaknesses in your arguments was that I used the word alarmist once, you’re not representing your cause very well.
George
10
amargi, re 157
Most of my numbers were based on IPCC data. Only the response to solar forcing is shown on the plot. This is a simple XY plot of measured solar radiance data (from U Colorado) and the measured surface power from the ISCCP weather satellite data aggregations. It’s easy to sanity check.
The average surface temp is 288K, which corresponds to a surface power (from SB) of 390 W/m^2 and the average solar power is 1366/4 = 341.5 W/m^2. If we divide surface power by incident power, we get a static gain of 1.14. If you want to get picky, you can claim that only post albedo incident power counts (although then we are not accounting for cloud feedback effects). This increases the gain to about 1.6, which is still far lower than the 4 required for CO2 forcing. But if you really want to get picky, the IPCC defines forcing in a way to preclude solar power as even being considered as forcing power and the reason they do this is because they don’t want you to contrast GHG forcing power with solar forcing power. This is also why gain and sensitivity is obfuscated as a ratio of temperature to power. If I want to get picky, I can show how the 3.7 W/m^2 of incremental ‘forcing’, per the IPCC definition, is really only 1.9 W/m^2 arriving at the surface, so my factor of 4 becomes a factor of 8. (This is another of the factor of 2 errors that push results in the desired direction).
George
10
As Jo points out @ 149 she’d kind of like us to stay on topic. I admit I tend to wander off topic in my comments and that I enjoy deconstructing the meta-cognitive process of those unskeptical of the CAGW hypothesis. I also admit that I am very angry and frustrated at the current level of dishonesty in our national debate on climate evolution.
Much of my comments are sincere attempts to grasp the psychological, sociological and political phenomena driving the (what I consider) irrational belief that the world is about to face a climate apocalypse due to anthropogenically produced CO2….and the related irrational assumption that fine weather for our grand children can be legislated by parliament with greatly expanded powers over our daily lives. You know, the same parliament that can’t install pink bats in houses without burning down a couple of hundred of them. Michael Mann’s paleoclimate reconstruction is, or was, a key enabling bit of propaganda in the climate debate. Mann’s Hockey Stick was for me personally a big part of the reason I once subscribed to the AGW hypothesis.
I apology if I have redirect my dismay too harshly upon individual AGW supporters, who must have perfectly honest reasons for believing as they do. Not that they seem able to convincingly articulate their position. But we must assume that is why they are here — to make a proper argument for the AGW case! Let’s get on with it.
For the record, I did point out @107: “One does not need to deny warming has occurred or that human economic activity might have played a minor role in order to debunk the
True Believerrobust version of the AGW hypothesis.”I also asked Amargi an honest question in an attempt to drag this discussion back the Mann’s paleoclimate reconstruction @ 141.
“…please demonstrate how the AGW hypothesis explains that the historical past climate was as warm or warmer than today at only half the atmospheric CO2 concentration? Demonstrate how modern climate is anomalous to recent past natural climate variation.”
If Amargi wants to be taken seriously, he’ll stay on topic and defend Mann’s paleoclimate reconstruction.
10
Wes george:
I agree your question to Amargi that you put at #141 then iterated at #160.
And I repeat my question to him/her/them which I posed at #154; viz:
“Why did you post the nonsense at #134 if you had not made the simple check of its veracity first?”
I really do think the deluge of posts from him/her/them should be stopped by the Moderators until proper answers are provided to these questions because the nonsensical posts from him/her/them are deflecting from serious discussion.
And I have reached the conclusion that this deflection is the intended purpose of the deluge.
Richard
10
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by chemicallygreen, Truth News Australia. Truth News Australia said: Zombie Hockey stick dies again | Joanne Nova http://bit.ly/aNTBg0 […]
10
Amargi @ 145:
Should I remind you that temperature PRECEDES CO2 level change by some 800 years or more, or just let you guess your way through with your friends at WishfulClimate dot org?
CO2 in atmosphere and ocean has a logarithmic effect (even the IPCC admit this), whereby the more you add the less effect it has, and we’re almost at saturation level for effect now. I’ll pre-empt you right here and say “almost saturated”, because a logarithmic curve can never be fully closed.
http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/graphs/log-co2/log-graph-lindzen-choi-web.gif
The actual CAUSE of the temperature change to/from deep ice ages isn’t exactly known and thought to be caused by Milankovich Cycles, but it’s clearly NOT CO2, and you, the IPCC and other CAGWist trolls can’t prove it is.
What was that about a hubris now..?
10
The Medieval Warm Period, the real inconvenient truth…
Back in the old days (~1950-1998) MWP was well understood to be much warmer than today – the historical evidence alone is overwhelming – then along came the AGW hypothesis and the MWP became a real inconvenient truth. After all, if modern warming is well within the parameters of natural variation then the heuristic of parsimony eliminates the need for special explanation that can’t explain past warming as well.
But even more damaging is the fact that the AGW hypothesis says that temperatures rise as atmospheric CO2 levels increase. Therefore, the AGW hypothesis fails to explain the existence of the MWP. According to the AGW hypothesis, the MWP with about half today’s level of atmospheric CO2 concentrations should be much cooler than modern climate. A hypothesis which fails to accurately predict observable events is false and must be discarded. According to scientific method you can’t say…”Well, OK, the AGW hypothesis fails to describe the past climate, but it still may be right about the future climate.” At least you can’t say that and still be talking valid science.
So you can imagine how relieved Hansen and the AGW academics were when in 1998 along came an obscure bloke with a paleoclimate reconstruction that essentially hacked off the top ~1c of the MWP, thus making modern warming truly anomalous in the last 1200 years of proxy records. This was the justification needed for a special hypothesis of AGW to explain modern warming. The hockey stick also brought the AGW hypothesis in line with past climate. Now the past, with its low CO2 levels was cooler than today. It’s all good.
Without Mann’s MBH98 paleoclimate reconstruction the AGW hypothesis might never have made it far off campus. The IPCC 2001 TAR would have had much less impact, without the MBH98 graphic the media wouldn’t have much to run with and ultimately the climate blogsphere might never have come to be. This is because a hypothesis is a very special kind of statement. It has to be testable. One can say “I believe in aliens” but because it can’t be falsified by the evidence it’s not a hypothesis. AGW acolytes prophesied that the future will be much warmer than today. But that’s not testable now and so doesn’t make AGW a hypothesis. What makes AGW a real hypothesis is the implications (predictions) it makes for the past versus contemporary climate. That can be tested. This is why Michael Mann’s reconstruction was absolutely vital. It appears to show the AGW hypothesis offering a useful explanation of the last 1,000 years of climate variation.
McIntyre and McKitrick debunked Mann’s reconstruction in 2003 and again in 2005. By 2008 Realclimate and Eli Rabbet, et al, were arguing that Mann’s work wasn’t particularly important, therefore McIntyre and McKitrick’s work proves nothing much. They even announced that paleoclimatology wasn’t of any real interest. Essentially they say, the AGW hypothesis could be wrong about past climate and right about future climate. The debate, the rational part anyway, was over. For if the AGW hypothesis which predicts lower temps at lower CO2 levels is proven wrong by the MWP, then it is falsified. And if the Realclimate team says we’ll have to wait to 2030 or 2050 to see if the prediction of the now falsified AGW hypothesis come to past, then it’s also untestable. (Of course, if we want to save the planet we have to act now on the basis of nothing more than faith in a fancy!)
Game over?
Well not quite. Recently, we’ve witnessed a resurgent in blog support for Mann’s debunked Hockey Stick. It’s as if once you begin throwing under the bus the rules of scientific methodology at some point you say, what the hell, who cares about the details! Maybe Mann got some of the statistical techniques wrong, maybe some of the proxies are corrupt, maybe AGW hypothesis can’t explain the past, but we’re committed to truthiness. It’s the narrative that matters. The end matters more than strict adherence to ethical scientific means… We must save the planet!
10
NASA is not giving up yet,diverting USD$7.7 million taxpayer dollars to climate change propaganda.
10
amargi: #146
August 19th, 2010 at 2:11 am
Is that your definitive answer amargi, that solar wind has no influence on earths climate?
This highlights the profound shortcomings in our understanding of climate.
It is also very disappointing that climate science (like you) ignores knowledge, however incomplete, from consideration and further study.
I suggest you spend a little time at, say….Nir Shavivs website and improve your knowledge on the suns role in our climate.
10
Yuck. Take $7.7M USD and use it to convince people that Jim Hansen isn’t just spouting hot air.
Few organizations have $7.7M USD to offer in “cooperative agreements” to “promote the idea that AGW is nothing to be concerned about.”
But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a good idea, I think most corporations would be a bit timid about doing something like that
10
@#158. co2isnotevil:
Don’t take this personally, co2, because I’ve seen many examples of this, especially on these sites. It seems that you pay no attention to the context of what you have previously stated before making such remarks.
The response I made was directed to your last comment, not the whole post. You said, at the end of 151::
And I specifically told you at the end of 153:
“As for the technical information, due to it’s length, it will take some time.”
10
The question you posed at #154 and then repeated at #161 was answered at #157.
It seems that you suffer from the same lack of attention to the sequence of events in which you write things, as well as to the responses from those you respond to, that I mentioned to co2 on post 168.
At the end of #157 I advised you not to “shoot from the hip” and yet either in your sloppiness or in your rage you failed to check on previous posts.
10
@#161. Richard S Courtney:
As for the relevancy of my posts and whether or not they are on topic or not why don’t you look at the others on this site before applying a double standard to me?
My posts were responses to previous posts by regulars on this site. Perhaps the mistake I made was to FOLLOW THEM off topic. However, when I scan previous posts, a good chunk of the thread seems to have gone off topic.
Perhaps you can start policing posters on your side of the issue and not just us “evil demons”.
10
LOL,
why not stick with the topic and stop the whining?
No one here is required to answer everything from every commentator anyway.Select what you want to answer FULLY and ignore the rest.
Maybe Jo will make an open thread and then we can post stuff that might have interest here for anyone to make a reply?
So far the evidence that the “hockey stick” paper is indeed a dead paper,is the best proposition to stand on.That is the main point of the topic.
#6 says it well:
I knew back in 1998 that it was wrong simply because it failed to show a strong warm period 1,000 years ago.
10
amargi.
I never take complaints from warmists personally. You must never have seen the kinds of abuse skeptics like me get when we comment on warmist blogs.
The technical issue I presented is not complicated. Let me help you out.
The ‘consensus’ forcing is given by 5.3*ln(C/280), where C is the CO2 concentration. Sometimes you see this as ln(C1/C2), but this is not correct and the constant 5.3, is valid only for C2 == 280 ppm. Doubling CO2 from it’s pre industrial baseline gives us 5.3*ln(2) = 3.7 W/m^2. This is the radiative forcing, as defined by the IPCC. The climate sensitivity factor of 0.8 is used to convert 3.7 W/m^2 into 3 C.
The power emitted by the surface is given by Stefan-Boltzmann as, P = o*T^4, where o is 5.67E-8 W/m^2*K^4 and T is the surface temperature. For an average of 287K, the emitted power is 384.7 W/m^2. Raising the temperature by 3C requires increasing the surface emitted power to 401 W/m^2, for a difference of about 16.4 W/m^2. The ‘consensus’ claims that the 3.7 W/m^2 of forcing is amplified to 16.4 W/m^2 by positive feedback. Therefore, the same positive feedback must act on incident solar power which must be similarly amplified. Watts are Watts and the surface doesn’t care where they are coming from. We can calculate the incremental ‘gain’ as 16.4 divided by 3.7, which is 4.4. This means that each watt of forcing becomes 4.4 W/m^2 of additional power emitted by the surface.
So far, all I’ve referred to are values, equations and relationships that are explained in the various AR’s and none of it should be controversial from a warmists point of view.
Next, we can calculate the incident solar power as the solar constant divided by 4 (341.5 W/m^2). We can calculate the climate system gain as the ratio of surface power, 384.7 divided by incident solar power, 341,5, which is 1.13. If instead, we used the CAGW gain factor of 4.4, 341.5 W/m^2 of incident power is amplified to 1502.6 W/m^2, corresponding to a surface temperature of 403.4K (130C or 266F). Clearly, this is way too high.
You may want to complain that 4.4 is an incremental gain. while 1.13 is an absolute gain. It turns out that incremental gain and absolute gain are close to identical, as shown by the plot I referred to earlier” http://www.palisad.com/co2/fb/is.png
George
10
Amargi, Why do you feel compelled, much less the right, to tell us how to behave? You walk a thin line admonishing us when you you yourself use offensive language and ire raising methods.
Click on the DONATE button and give a significant amount. When you do so, I think everyone will treat you better. Until then, I think you will be treated progressively worse. All have noticed that your posts are long on telling us what we do wrong and very short on anything substantive to the AGW cause. This means you are really worthless to either cause warmist or skeptic.
In short, (as Richard Courtney has already said) a waster of our time.
10
Amargi is a global warmer who gets a laugh out of pulling people’s chains and crying “victim” when people get angry with him.
The reform schools and juvenile detention centres are full of Amargis.
Departments of corrections probably have a lot better success with most juvenile offenders than anybody here will have with Amargi
10
OK, I’m a little late to this argument, but what you just said makes no sense:
1) Olaf pointed out that shellfish did just fine in obviously non-acidic oceans in the Jurassic, even though CO2 concentrations were 10X higher. (Apparently countering the claim that rising CO2 currently is threatening to make the oceans “acidic”.)
2) You “countered” this (rather breathlessly) by stating that “The Sun was weaker!” (and a bunch of insults).
How is your “answer” related in any way to what Olaf said? You appear to be responding mostly to your own imagination.
10
Amargi:
Let’s see if this works:
There should be an image up there.
10
Amargi:
Damn image feature doesn’t work! I’ll just post the link instead:
http://www.marxist.com/images/stories/environment/climate_graph10.gif
What do you feel has better correlation to temperature, the Sun or CO2?
10
BobC @ 175:
Thanks for the kudos Bob. Amargi and I were actually talking temperature but I snuck in there with further proof CO2 does no harm. I did counter his post later whereby Earth had deep ice ages with those same high CO2 levels. He then pointed out that CO2 drops with temp, and I noted that temp change precedes CO2 change by some 800 years and snuck in a link to CO2’s logarithmic effect.
I’m sorry I misled you a little there Bob. Sorry Amargi, wasn’t my intention to mislead others. Hell, I’ve made those mistakes before too [sheepish grin].
10
Amargi @ 153:
The problem may be that you accept it in a derogatory manner. Speaking only for myself, I don’t mind being called a denier (providing it’s well understood what exactly I deny), a fool or an outright liar. Therefore I quite happily call AGW promoters warmists, CAGWists or thermo-maniacs as it’s their belief system and direction/side-of-the-fence that is identified. To refer to a group of Christians, I could use “Religious Nuts” or “God Botherers”, but the group referred to is now identified. It gets worse than your case though, as many Aboriginals in our country now prefer to be called “Indigenous Australians”, probably because it lends more power to their status of origin. Relax – it could be worse.. 😉
If you feel I’ve been unduly harsh to you or one of your compatriots, I apologise. Someone calls me a moron, I just giggle and continue the game. It’s easy to deride people over the net incognito, but at least I use my real name.
[Olaf, since “alarmist” is sometimes accurate (people are trying to alarm us) I allow it, but prefer not to use it except against the worst of the name-callers. For the sake of friendly discussion, can we try to minimize names?)–JN]
Now.. Do us all a favour and look at this chart:
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a62f922e970c-pi
Roughly every 100,000 years we have a deep ice age. What do you think will happen next? Note that CO2 follows temp by a large margin. For close-up evidence of that look here:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/carbon-rises-800-years-after-temperatures
For a deeper look back in time:
http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/ice-core-graph
Immerse yourself in this page of peer-reviewed (whatever THAT really means nowadays – thanks ever so much UEA and IPCC) charts:
http://www.c3headlines.com/temperature-charts-historical-proxies.html
Once you put it all together, the sheer amount of proven data, the crude US temp stations and data being fudged by MEGA alarmist NASA GISS James Hansen:
http://www.heartland.org/books/PDFs/SurfaceStations.pdf
http://sppiblog.org/news/“horrifying-examples-of-deliberate-tampering-with-the-temperature-data”
Seriously, don’t just flip through these pages. Immerse yourself and you’ll be astounded at the tricks and blatant lies you’ve been spoon fed for the last 20 years. I mean, back in 1974, these eminent “scientists” were pushing for an ice age:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914-1,00.html
Finally, ClimateGate broke. Thousands of emails (some say hacked, I say leaked as all these emails were too carefully edited to remove contact details of those involved – not the sort of thing hackers do):
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/index.php
Some of the best:
eid=136&filename=938018124.txt
Mann:
“..The key thing is making sure the series are vertically aligned in a reasonable way. I had been using the entire 20th century, but in the case of Keith’s, we need to align the first half of the 20th century w/ the corresponding mean values of the other series, due to the late 20th century decline.”
Briffa:
“.. For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth
was probably matched about 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of years as Mike appears to..”
I’m an ex-warmist. I was never alarmist however the temptation was there just to be part of the “in” crowd back in the early ’80’s. It actually took some “alarming” reports of pending catastrophe that in my mind, were not physically possible that sparked my bullshit-o-meter and I looked deeper (sans internet in 1985). You can guess what I found. I continue to this day. Mann’s hockey stick is a blatant lie by doing away with the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age:
http://co2science.org/data/timemap/mwpmap.html
Hundreds of global studies prove the MWP was real, and global. Go ahead, you need to know that a carbon tax won’t influence the climate whatsoever. It’ll just ruin your economy, giving trillions to leaders of poor and despotic countries that’ll give nothing to their peoples. After all, that’s what Jokenhagen was really about – money laundering on a global scale, and I’ll take no part in it.
10
Still, Olaf — Amargi chose to quote your comment about ocean acidity and CO2 as a prelude to his rant about the Sun’s influence on ancient temperatures. It wasn’t you doing the misleading — Amargi seems to be responding irrationally, and not just to you.
There was a guy that stood on a particular street corner in Missoula MT (I think it was Madison and E. Main) nearly every day for about 20 years and shouted “Hey!” at every car passing by. (They’re a tolerant bunch up in Montana — seen bumper stickers that say “At least our cows are sane”.)
Amargi’s not quite there yet, but I see some similarities.
10
Amargi:
At #170 you assert:
That assertion is a simple lie.
Your first contribution was at #53.
It was a support of Max-OK who is not one of the “regulars on this site” but was making his first – and frequent – appearance on this blog in this thread as the latest in the series of trolls disrupting this blog.
And that support of Max_OK consisted of a false assertion that I had broken the Rules of this blog by writing to Max_OK saying;
So, your first contribution here was an attempt to start an argument about the Rules.
Your second contribution here was at #56, and it was more support of Max_OK but in the flame of a regular of this site (n.b. not me). It said:
You followed that at #57 with a contentious link and text which was completely in bold and block capitals.
Clearly, you did not start posting here in response to regulars on this site but appeared to help Max_OK who was being shown to be mistaken and foolish.
Subsequently, the deluge of silly posts from Max_OK petered out and was replaced by a series of silly posts from you.
There are far, far too many of your silly posts for me to list them all.
But, importantly, when called to justify posting nonsense (e.g. by co2isnotevil at #151 and me at #154) you responded with bluster and nonsense (e.g. at #157).
There has been a series of trolls sent here with the clear purpose of disrupting debate. They have each failed then been replaced by another. It seems that you and Max_OK are merely the latest in this series. You replaced Max_OK when he failed, and I wonder who your replacement will be in the coming hours.
However, if you were to stop trolling and to join in rational debate here then many – including me – would be pleased.
Richard
10
Richard, it does astound me how people will argue black and blue against their own statements printed in black and white! Anyhow, after scrolling up and down to follow the thread of who said what, I started to wonder about this (#134 above):
I cannot for the life of me think of any formula containing the inverse square of temperature. Does anyone else know it?
Amargi claims later:
Where did you memorize it from, Amargi?
I humbly apologize if my question should be off-topic, since I don’t know the formula, I also don’t know what relevance it may have to zombie hockey sticks.
11
If the Sun was weaker by some 6% in the distant past, it differs only by the same amount as seasonal variation today. Notably, due to changing continents having some inland seas in the past and different ocean currents, this would go a long way to explaining the Jurassic being more tropical than today due to more water vapour (95% of GHG’s) than CO2.
This has been getting far too OT and I’ve said all I can about hockey sticks for now.. 🙂
10
Tel:
Thankyou for the good points you make at #182 and – although, as you say, they are off-topic – I think they are important.
None of our discussions on Ms Nova’s blog can stay lucid and on-topic while we keep being deflected by this series of trolls.
Somehow we need to get them to conform to rational discussion or find a way to stop them distorting discussion.
Please note that I am against the blocking of differing opinions that happens on (un)RealClimate, Deltoid, Rabbett and etc.. That also prevents rational debate.
We learn from the sharing of our differences with an attitude of mutual respect. And I value the fact that I disagree with – for example – you, JLKrueger and Eddy in some important ways, but I learn from all of you.
Trolls disrupt that learning process by attempting to induce mutual disrespect, side-tracking of issues, and pointless disagreements on matters that are not relevant to the subjects we discuss here.
Simply, if I wanted to here only my own views then I would talk to a mirror. I would rather hear your views.
The problem with trolls is that they try to get people to perceive what each of us says as being the image in a distorting mirror.
Richard
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Hi Richard (@183):
You say:
I suggest using the rating checks (thumb up or down) — vote “down” on irrational and off-topic posts suspected to be only for the purpose of obstruction. This will alert others not to pay so much attention to them. Stop responding to posts with so many “down” votes that they are auto-hidden.
(BTY: The number of “down” votes on good, logical posts is an indicator of how many trolls there are on a thread.)
Consequences may do this (worked for my daughter!) — if the only way they can get attention is to make a rational point, then they may start doing so (or go away — also OK).
I know I’m sounding a little preachy and I don’t always follow these rules myself. There is a case to be made for the view that trolls’ false claims should be addressed with countering facts, if only for the lurkers and casual guests here to see. What we need to do is to avoid the personalized arguments they try to engage in, which is what I think is obstructing the discussion, and simply point out their errors in facts and logic — then move on.
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I have been accused of being a troll sent here the purpose of disrupting debate.
I don’t consider myself a troll, but some people might see me as such, and they are entitled to their opinions. However, I was not sent here. That’s a fact, not a matter of opinion.
One poster suggested if you make a comment most people here don’t agree with, you are disrupting a debate. Is a debate supposed to be people agreeing?
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The National Research Council reported to Congress on proxy temperature reconstructs a few years ago. The Council didn’t limit it’s study to tree rings. The findings supported Mann’s conclusion that recent warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented in the last 1000 years.
The following quote is from the National Research Council report:
“The basic conclusion of Mann et et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years.”
The entire report is available online:
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11676&page=
McShane and Wyner look only at tree rings as proxies for temperature changes, and while stopping short of saying tree rings are useless as temperature proxies for any period, conclude that statistically they didn’t find tree rings to be a reliable proxy.
…we conclude unequivocally that the evidence for a ”long-handled” hockey stick (where the shaft of the hockey stick extends to the year 1000 AD) is lacking in the data.
It is not clear that the proxies currently used to predict temperature are even predictive of it at the scale of several decades let alone over many centuries.
I trust the study by McShane and Wyner will be scrutinized by climate scientists and other statisticans, and proxies in addition to tree rings will be considered, as was done by the NRC.
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Max,
When I troll on alarmist sites, it’s for the purpose of initiating a scientific debate, not beating a dead horse. Your initial post was a complaint that if there is that much uncertainty in the proxies, then there’s similar uncertainty regarding the MWP. That would be true if there was only one proxy that predicted both the MWP and recent warming, but in fact, there are multiple proxies, none of which predict both, most of which confirm the MWP while disputing any significant monotonic effect from man’s CO2 emissions. The only proxies that show a CO2 effect are those which rely on very sparse, highly adjusted, ultra homogenized sampled data whose results are presented as inappropriately scaled and bounded anomalies.
As I’ve said many times before, torture is not an appropriate way to get to the truth, but a way to extract the confession you want to hear. The same holds true for data.
The reason some of the regulars get impatient is because you refuse to acknowledge that your initial assertion has been deconstructed in multiple ways. If you have more ammunition, please present it so it can be similarly deconstructed.
Why don’t you try and dispute what I said in post 151 and which I clarified in post 172. Despite amargi’s claim that’s it’s complicated, it very simple argument to follow. Perhaps he/she thinks it’s too complicated because it doesn’t support the consensus and in fact disputes it.
Anyway, it’s the middle of summer here in California and I’m off to my favorite alpine glacial snow field for some hiking and skiing. Our unusually cold (not just cool) spring and summer has left us with some great summer skiing, as long as you’re willing to hike …
George
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Max_OK 186:
No Max and fair is fair.
But don’t you think that means you should follow the line of discussion / debate and not throw an endless supply of new material until the “items on the table” are satisfactorily vetted? In the case of Amargi, that person spends more typing comments on how we behave rather than what has been discussed. Perhaps you do not know Amargi, but it is interesting that we get Warmists here very often in pairs or threes.
If you are not here to disrupt, then perhaps you could get into the habit of asking polite questions? I think that would help. Additionally, commenting on evidence people post instead of ignoring them is much better form.
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co2isnotevil:
August 21st, 2010 at 4:25 am
Max,
When I troll on alarmist sites, it’s for the purpose of initiating a scientific debate, not beating a dead horse. Your initial post was a complaint that if there is that much uncertainty in the proxies, then there’s similar uncertainty regarding the MWP. That would be true if there was only one proxy that predicted both the MWP and recent warming, but in fact, there are multiple proxies, none of which predict both, most of which confirm the MWP while disputing any significant monotonic effect from man’s CO2 emissions.
The National Research Council’s report to Congress on climate reconstructs would disagree with you. Read it, and you will see why.
The entire report is available online:
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11676&page=
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Mark D.:
August 21st, 2010 at 5:05 am
Max_OK 186:
One poster suggested if you make a comment most people here don’t agree with, you are disrupting a debate. Is a debate supposed to be people agreeing?
No Max and fair is fair.
But don’t you think that means you should follow the line of discussion / debate and not throw an endless supply of new material until the “items on the table” are satisfactorily vetted? In the case of Amargi, that person spends more typing comments on how we behave rather than what has been discussed. Perhaps you do not know Amargi, but it is interesting that we get Warmists here very often in pairs or threes.
If you are not here to disrupt, then perhaps you could get into the habit of asking polite questions? I think that would help. Additionally, commenting on evidence people post instead of ignoring them is much better form.
I am so outnumbered here I don’t have time to comment on every post that addresses me, so I have to be selective. Unfortunately, that may result in some people feeling their comments or suggestions have been ignored.
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Here’s another fairly good proxy (from NOAA ice cores) showing that the recent warmth was unprecedented for at least the last 700 years (the Greenland ice core stops at about 1905, so you can add another 0.5 deg to the “blade”).
When you look at the last 5,000 years however, you get a somewhat different picture — it becomes clear why the Vikings were able to farm Greenland, and why some of their farms are today under the glaciers. (Not to mention the last 10,000 years — check out the whole article here.)
It seems that the current warming is anything but “unprecedented”, but is fairly minor compared to temperature swings in the rest of the Holocene (which seems to have been warmer than today for most of the last 10,000 years). “Cherry-picking” the last 3,000 years, we see that this “long-term trend” has been rather definitely downwards.
Perhaps you’d like to take a shot at explaining why the current upswing (but none of the earlier, larger ones) is uniquely due to Human-emitted CO2? Certainly, no “Climate Scientists” have tried — their default position is to deny the MWP was global, and hope you don’t look any further.)
(And, before you repeat the claim that the MWP was a “local” phenomena, I would like to point out that the same structure roughly shows up in the Vostok ice core from Antarctica. (Also Here.)
Oh, BTY: Nobody’s climate models even come close to tracking this data. Current climate models can’t even seem to track the average temperature for > 5 years with diverging. (Could it be that they are assigning the cause to the wrong things?) Why is it we should trust them to predict 50 years out?
No one has demonstrated any predictive skill at predicting the climate, even for fairly short times, much less have there been any models or theories that could explain even a tiny fraction of the historical and paleontological evidence. And yet, the entire claim that “we must act now!” is based on a presumed (but never demonstrated) predictive skill. Who in their right mind would go along with that?
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It’s disingenuous to argue that Mann’s proxies are useless as a defense of Mann’s hockey stick. 😉
Max @ 187…
McShane and Wyner went out of their way to leave the climatology to the climate scientists and stick to pure statistical analysis, thus avoiding just that kind of debate. They simply used Mann’s datasets as they found them!
McShane and Wyner:
“All three of these datasets have been substantially processed including smoothing and imputation of missing data (Mann et al., 2008). While these present interesting problems, they are not the focus of our inquiry. We assume that the data selection, collection, and processing performed by climate scientists meets the standards of their discipline. Without taking a position on these data quality issues, we thus take the dataset as given.”
That’s the beauty of this paper. It demolishes Mann’s Hockey Stick with only on the statistics. The question of whether the proxies are useless or not is left to those with climate expertise to work out…We can look forward to future research which totally deconstructs the various myths which surround the magick proxies.
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Max@190
An Appeal to Authority is a fallacy with the following form:
Person A is (claimed to be) an authority on subject S.
Person A makes claim C about subject S.
Therefore, C is true.
Max, if you want to make a point, then make it briefly in your own words and then provided a supporting link. To simple say “Yo, you is wrong because my man here sez so…” is a waste the bandwidth, dude. Say, your argument style reminds me of my old pal Eli Rabbet. ;-)Funny that!
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RE Max @191
Please don’t feel outnumbered. If you are interested in making a point it would be better if you didn’t drop them as bombs and instead take your time. Throw a cherry bomb once and a while but you won’t make progress if you feel pressured. We really aren’t that mean. We do have a pretty keen sense for trolls though. That should not discourage you IF you are interested in true debate and not something else. Actually various posters here can be very patient and educational. Actually almost any poster would take the time to talk in a reasonable fashion if you let them. (don’t provoke)
Please use the “b-quote” function when you post. Highlight the text you are quoting and click the “b-quote” tab (as opposed to the “b” which is for bold.
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Demolishes Mann’s Hockey Stick with statistics? McShane and Wyner never said their study demolishes Mann’s Hockey. They never said their study proves Mann’s Hockey Stick is wrong. Those would be indefensible statements.
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—–
I replied once before, but it failed to appear. I’m no relation to Eli Rabbet, but I know his blog.
I didn’t say the the NRC is infallible.
But I would say the NRC is right far more often than it’s wrong.
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Max:
What they did not, was that tree ring proxies are essentially useless as proxies, because they can differ constantly due to soil, water, fertiliser etc. Mann’s datasets were also largely incomplete, and the averaging formula used was dubious because it made hockey sticks from even random noise.
I would say Mann’s hockey stick was demolished – twice. Especially due to McIntyre and McKitrick’s initial work.
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Probably anyone with enough sense to see that a “do nothing” policy implies no global warming in the future, a prediction that fails badly when backcast. Actually, Hansen’s middle scenario projection of global temperature, which he made in 1988 for the 1988-2020 horizon, is tracking pretty close to the observed temperature in 2010.
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.
——
You won’t find McIntyre and McKitrick saying that. You won’t find them or Wegman saying Mann is wrong because their work proves the temp change over the last 1000 years can’t possible look like a hockey stick. They know better than to say what they can’t defend.
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Depends on what’s been done to the temperature record Max.
Need I remind you that Phil Jones recently agreed that there has been no statistically significant warming over the last fifteen years and that the MWP may have been just as warm as today? I suppose you will now parse the hell out of that, won’t you?
Need I also remind you that the recently deceased arch-alarmist Stephen Schneider was a “freezer” back in the seventies when he thought it would help pay his rent.
The time/temperature graph has not been a horizontal line over the last few thousand years let alone the past few eons.
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So, you are in favor of “doing something”, even though it would likely have no measurable effect on global warming and might have serious effects on the global economy? You’ll have to explain that logic to me sometime — preferably after you have tried to explain what caused the multiple “global warmings” (and coolings), independent of CO2 concentration, shown in the data I referenced and you ignored.
Actual data, as opposed to your unsupported opinion, shows a different story (see here). A quote from the site:
Just to remind you, Hansen’s scenarios were:
Scenario A: Exponential growth in Anthropogenic CO2 emissions and no El Chichon-size volcanic event.
Scenario B: CO2 emissions frozen at 1988 levels and one El Chichon-size event.
Scenario C: Drastic reductions in emissions in 1990 and one El Chichon-size event.
What has actually happened is:
Exponential growth in Anthropogenic CO2 emissions, Pinatubo (1991), and one large El Nino (1998).
This would put the expected (by Hansen’s model) track between A and B, but arguably closer to A due to the correction of the 1998 El-Nino for Pinatubo.
(Note that the possibility of super El-Ninos were not included in the scenario assumptions, so the chance occurrence of one, should it happen, cannot be considered as a vindication of Hansen.)
If the contrafactual scenario B was tracking (without the help of a chance super El-Nino event), which it is not, it would, at best, be evidence that CO2 plays a smaller role than Hansen assumed in his model.
The fact that even B is not tracking suggests that CO2 plays a much smaller role than Hansen’s model assigns it.
In fact, the only scenario that is tracking is C, which explicitly assumes that CO2 forcing has stopped growing (and even been reduced) since 1990. Hence we could look at the success of this prediction as evidence that CO2 plays no significant role in the Earth’s recent temperature swings.
There is no logical way that any of this can be considered evidence for the correctness of Hansen’s model or the AGW hypothesis.
I look forward to your response, which I assume will ignore all the data I’ve referenced and simply promote your unsupported opinion — which I shall henceforth ignore. (Of course, you could surprise me — but not likely.)
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Bob, you aren’t up to date on the performance of Hansen’s projections. His Scenario B temperature projection is right on target in 2010.
In Hansen”s 1988-2020 global land-ocean temperature projections, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, the B Scenario has temperature 1 degree C higher in 2010 than in the 1960 zero base year(see p. 9347 in link).
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988_Hansen_etal.pdf
Although the annual average for 2010 is not yet available, monthly data for the first half of the year gives a 6-month average. The observed change in global land-sea temperature from the first 6 months of 1960 to to the first 6 months of 2010 was 1.0 C, right on the mark with the projected change of 1.0 C for the annual average.
Bob, I would welcome a check of my calculations. The 6-month averages(13.65 for 1960 and 14.70 for 2010) were calculated from the linked table.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.tx
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Max-OK:
At #203 you assert:
Only according to Hansen’s own (i.e. GISS) temperature reconstruction.
HadCRUT3,
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/
RSS
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/monthly_time_series/RSS_Monthly_MSU_AMSU_Channel_TLT_Anomalies_Land_and_Ocean_v03_2.txt
and UAH
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
agree with each other, and they each show very little temperature rise over the last decade. But GISS does not agree and shows steady rise over the last decade.
Indeed, Phil Jones admits there has been no statistically significant rise in global temperature over the last 15 years.
GISS assumes temperature rises over the Arctic where no temperatures are measured. These high assumed rises lift the recent GISS global tmperature anomalies to achieve the apparent agreement of Hansen’s GISS reconstruction to (nearly) match Hansen’s Scenario B.
Can you think of any reason why Hansen’s GISS temperature reconstruction assumes such high Arctic temperature rises?
Richard
10
Thanks for the link. I am, however, familiar with Hansen’s original predictions — after all, I was quoting them, and they were drawn on the graph I linked to. That graph, BTY, shows average global temperatures lacking 0.5 deg of Scenario B in 2008. Are you really claiming that the yearly average has warmed 0.5 deg in the last two years? Given Hansen’s proclivity for “adjusting” past temperatures, maybe this might be possible in the virtual world.
As Richard has pointed out, only Hansen’s own, highly modified, temperature reconstruction comes close to agreeing with his contra-factual Scenario B. Satellite data (link), which is a much more representative measure of global temperature falls 0.5 deg short, as of July 2010.
I’d love to take you up on that, but the link leads to a “404-Not Found” error.
None of this addresses the fact that “Scenario B” is contra-factual in that it assumes that, by heroic efforts, Anthropogenic CO2 emissions growth had been stopped as of 1988. It also did not include the warming effect of the 1998 El Nino (but it did assume the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption like Pinatubo).
As I tried to point out; IF Scenario B was tracking temperatures, WHILE the CO2 emissions actually followed Scenario A, THEN this would be evidence that CO2 doesn’t have much effect on global temperature — at least much less than Hansen assumed.
The above conclusion (please tell me if you are having trouble following the logic — I will expand upon it), combined with the paleo-climate data I linked to in post #192 (which shows multiple temperature excursions in the past 8000 years, many of which are faster and much bigger than the current one) show that Anthropogenic CO2 is NOT a predictor of global temperature. This means that attempts to control Human CO2 emissions will have no detectable effect on climate.
The desire to do something about a perceived problem is a powerful motivator (no one likes to think they are powerless). BUT: Wouldn’t it be better to do something that worked?
(Not to mention, verifying that there is a problem to begin with.)
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Although the annual average for 2010 is not yet available, monthly data for the first half of the year gives a 6-month average. The observed change in global land-sea temperature from the first 6 months of 1960 to to the first 6 months of 2010 was 1.0 C, right on the mark with the projected change of 1.0 C for the annual average.
Bob, I would welcome a check of my calculations. The 6-month averages(13.65 for 1960 and 14.70 for 2010) were calculated from the linked table.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.tx
Bob, I checked the calculations myself, and found I made a error. The observed change in global land-sea temperature from the first 6 months of 1960 to to the first 6 months of 2010 was 0.8 C, not 0.1 C. So Hansen’s Scenario B projected change of 1.0 C for the annual average was not right on the mark, but very close.
The 6-month averages were 13.94 C for 1960 and 14.73 for 2010, rather than the values I previously gave.
Hansen did not project the satellite-based temperature anomaly. Since it’s a slightly different measure than the surface-based temperature anomaly he projected, why would you use it to evaluate his projection? While it’s an Apple to Apple comparison, it’s also a Winesap to Granny Smith comparison.
If you do want to compare the satellite and surface anomalies, you first must put them on a common base period. The satellite data you linked is not on the same base period as the surface data.
I’m sorry the link to the table didn’t work. Apparently, we can’t link directly to the table, but it can be found another way. First, follow the link to the site:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
Then scroll about three-fourths of the way down the page and click on item titled:
Global-mean monthly, seasonal, and annual means, 1880-present, updated through most recent month
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The last great adventure for any individual is to understand their subconscious mind.
It’s fascinating how some people can maintain a high level of faith for ideas that have by any rational measure been shown to be false. People who believe things that have been repeated demonstrated to be false do so because of ulterior motives that they may well be consciously unawares.
It seems unlikely that a reasonably honest, curious person could read McIntrye and McKitrick, Wegman and now McShane and Wyner and not be persuaded that Mann’s reconstruction got it badly wrong. Yet here it is:
In the 1990’s I wasted a substantial amount of time debating creationists. I say wasted because I never convinced a single creationist that evolution was actually the most useful explanation for the observed natural world around us.
I suspect that if one can maintain a faith in Mann’s Hockey Stick after McShane and Wyner then one is also beyond the pale of reasonable persuasion. It’s the same psychological disposition I observed in the Creationists.
However – If we set aside the recent Intelligent Design movement – there is a critical difference between Creationists and the AGW zealots and that is: Conscious Self-Awareness.
You see, Creationists understand that theirs is a faith. They don’t pretend that they are offering a logical scientific hypothesis option to evolution, but simply a “divine mystery.” They don’t claim to know how God created the universe, he just did. Directly. Personally. You have faith or you don’t.
The AGW zealots likewise deny that climate evolution (change) is primarily natural. “Stop Climate Change Now” reads an oxymoronic Greenpeace banner. Climate evolution must be caused by literally the sins of humanity. Michael Mann is their greatest prophet because he shows a thousand years of relative climate stasis, the original paradise, existed. Creation was perfection, then humankind bit from the apple of rational scientific inquiry and fell into industrial capitalism thus destroyed the balance forever. Naturally, unless we repent and change our ways we will be punished with a climate apocalypse.
This is the unspoken, unconscious ulterior myth that provides the psychological strength to defend Mann’s Hockey Stick against the onslaught of wave after wave of reason.
No amount of evidence to the contrary can shake the CAGW faith. Yet, unlike the traditional creationist, acolytes of CAGW are attempting to deceive both themselves and our society as a whole when they claim theirs is a scientific hypothesis open to rational inquiry and therefore subject to verification against the evidence. To be metacognitively unaware of your own internal contradictions is an unhealthy state of mind, nevertheless it’s a private affair, but to attempt to transmute the whole of our society through the lens of a delusion is a threat to everyone.
If McShane and Wyner haven’t convincingly shown to the AGW zealots that Mann’s Hockey Stick is hocus pocus then no amount of reason can ever change their minds.
It’s back to debating creationists.
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@Max_OK (#206):
I get 0.77C — close enough.
Look Max — I’ll try to teach you what I did to freshman physics students 45 years ago:
1) It is not valid to select data you like and ignore what you don’t like.
2) Conclusions must be based on logic — you don’t get to conclude whatever it is you would like to be true.
As to 1): Here are some average anomalies (from the linked chart) for the 1st 6 months of various years:
1958: 0.136 , 2008: 0.383 , (delta = 0.247)
1959: 0.128 , 2009: 0.52 , (delta = 0.392)
1960: -0.058 , 2010: 0.713 , (delta = 0.771)
Gee — I wonder why you picked 1960-2010? If I give that to the goalie, will you promise to change your mind next year if the data reverts to the mean? You will be betting that we are about to see a sharp and sustained jump in temperatures — I will be betting that we are seeing a temporary excursion of ~ 0.4 deg C (which happens many, many times in this data).
When you look at the global, annual mean for 2009 (the last year it can be calculated for) you get 0.57 C. The average since 2001 is 0.534 and the standard deviation is 0.0056 — the 2009 global average temperature (according to GISS) is within 0.65 std dev of the global average since 2001. In other words, the global average temperature has not moved significantly for 9 years.
I’ll be betting the yearly average won’t move significantly this year either, while you will be betting it will take off like a rocket (NO year in this chart has EVER seen a year-to-year change of the average of as much as 0.5 deg).
Hansen’s projections were for the annual mean temperature, not for selected anomalies in partial year averages. (especially if such excursions are common in the data)
As to 2):
As I have labored (apparently in vain) to explain: Hansen’s Scenario B is contra-factual.
By this I mean that Scenario B is NOT what has happened in the real world — that is much closer to Scenario A.
IF you could cherry-pick the data enough to convince yourself that Scenario B WAS tracking, THEN what you would have proved is that Hansen was wrong
The only evidence that Hansen was right would be if Scenario A was tracking the yearly average temperature trend. Currently that trend is zero.
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You know Max — looking back at some of the things you have said I think maybe I’m beginning to see what the problem is. You can’t seem to get into the spirit of the discussion here because we are speaking a foreign language — one that you have no comprehension of — and hence you are blind to the chaotic nature of your posts.
That language is logic.
I could be wrong — perhaps you can help by deconstructing your post #199:
Help me here Max — how is it that a “do nothing” policy (which I’m assuming means not limiting CO2 emissions) implies no global warming in the future?
You seem to be assuming this key point on the basis of no evidence, then wondering why the rest of us don’t go along.
What you tried to supply as “evidence” (The IPCC report) is simply peoples’ opinion that, because they could not think of any other cause for the current warming, CO2 must be responsible. Are you unable to see that this is an unsupported opinion, and not “evidence”? Are you able to see that this opinion, unsupported as it is, is actively falsified by the proven existence of many similar, even larger, “global warming” periods in the near past, where Anthropogenic CO2 played absolutely no part?
And then you say:
It’s hard to see how you can not be aware by now that Hansen’s middle scenario (“Scenario B”) assumes that Anthropogenic CO2 emissions have been capped as of 1988 levels and are not growing. You must also be aware that this is not the case — CO2 emissions continue to grow exponentially, as in Hansen’s “Scenario A”.
Do you have “enough sense” to see that if Scenario B was tracking temperature, it would mean that Hansen was wrong about the importance of CO2?
Let me put it this way:
Hansen:
1)”If CO2 emissions continue to grow exponentially, future temperatures will be high”. (Scenario A).
2)”If we immediately cap CO2 emissions growth (as of 1988), future temperatures will be intermediate”. (Scenario B)
What happens? CO2 emissions continue to grow exponentially, and future temperatures turn out to be even lower than forecast in Scenario B.
Conclusion: Exponential CO2 emission growth had much less effect on future temperatures that Hansen predicted — e.g. Hansen’s model was wrong.
My guess is: You can’t imagine why this means Hansen’s model was wrong, and don’t have a clue what I’m talking about. True or not?
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BobC you deserve a special medal! Very fine job- I think the instructor is coming out.
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How can anyone believe Hansen when he does crap like this?
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/giss/hansen-giss-1940-1980.gif
Hansen can make all the scenarios he likes, but after the fact of the above link, who is he kidding?
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Max_OK:
Check out my post @ 179. Ensure you do as I hope Amargi has done. Learn something.
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BobC:
August 22nd, 2010 at 9:20 am
@Max_OK (#206):
Bob, I checked the calculations myself, and found I made a error. The observed change in global land-sea temperature from the first 6 months of 1960 to to the first 6 months of 2010 was 0.8 C
So Hansen’s Scenario B projected change of 1.0 C for the annual average was not right on the mark, but very close.
Bob, the reason I picked 2010 is because we don’t have temperature observations beyond 2010. I picked 1960 because the near-zero anomaly for that year is close to the 1951-1980 mean zero point for the observations. I did not pick it to make Hansen’s Scenario B projection look better. There are 9 or 10 years between 1958 and 1988 that are better than 1960 for making the projection look good.
I am amused at the suggestion that I am (1) a cheater for cherry picking, and (2) too dumb to even do it well.
In retrospect, I think 1987-2010 is the most reasonable period for a current check on Hansen’s projection. From his previously referenced chart, it looks like his take-off point is 1987. The observed temperature averages for the first 6-months of 1987 and 2010 are 14.2 C and 14.7 C, respectively, an increase of 0.5 C compared to the Scenario B projected increase of 0.8 C.
I think that’s a good performance. I would be happy with that degree of accuracy in a forecast for an investment. And of course it’s obviously superior to a no-change extrapolation.
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Max_OK @ 213:
Would you invest with someone that surreptitiously and deliberately overstates his portfolio?
http://sppiblog.org/news/hadcrut-is-hotting-up-%E2%80%93-adjustments-over-a-few-months
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/20/giss-shaping-up-to-claim-2010-as-1
I think you’d be very annoyed once you discovered it. What’s the real temperature now and, what’s it supposed to be?
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In #209 BobC suggested to Max-OK:
And also in #209, BobC attempted to test his suggestion:
Max-OK replied to this test question in #213 where he says:
Quod Erat Demonstrandum
Richard
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Bob, you have been misinformed. Scenario B doesn’t assume CO2 emissions are not growing. Read Hansen’s assumptions in his 1988 article, p. 9361.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988_Hansen_etal.pdf
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Has anyone at SPPI or WUWT made more accurate long-term forecasts of global temperature than Hansen has made? If so, tell me who, and I will pay attention to them rather than Hansen.
10
Max_OK: BTY, you’ve passed the Turing Test — no computer could be as logic deficient as you are.
You’re right: I was relying on Lucia’s summary on the Blackboard, where she says “Scenario B: Emissions frozen at 1988 rates. ”
Now that I look at Hansen’s paper, it seems that he is really, really, screwed up:
How is it that Hansen was unaware that CO2 had been measured to be increasing at 0.4%/yr since 1958 (and has been steady at that rate up to the present day)?
Hansen obviously assumed that accelerating Human CO2 emissions would have a strong effect on the measured increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The data clearly shows that such increases in Anthropogenic CO2 has had exactly NO observed effect on atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Hence, a major assumption by Hansen in his model is clearly falsified. His projections are therefore meaningless and we shouldn’t bother with them.
Let me ask you one last logic question:
Since Humans putting CO2 into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate over the last 50 years has had NO observable effect on total atmospheric concentration rates, why do you think that stopping such emissions will have an observable effect? By all means, elaborate your explanation.
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Max_OK,
BobC nailed you to the wall back at 208. You can give all the reasons you want to justify your choice of starting year but it boils down to, this is the year I choose because it makes the point I want to make.
More than that, Hansen is not exactly known for honesty — so much so that I would be embarrassed to try to use him as an authority.
In any case, it’s not of very much interest whose temperature forecasts have been the most accurate. What’s of great interest is whether the real world has been following the prognostications of the doom and gloom set. And clearly it has not.
You always do something I’d describe as failure to see the forest for the trees. “Look, this tree proves my point,” when in fact, the whole forest says otherwise. It’s not just the hockey stick, one set of manipulated data or any other single thing that shoots you down. It’s a long history of lies, distortions, data cooking, omission of data injurious to the cause and just plain carelessness that tips the scale. Now even NOAA is forced to admit their temperature measurements are significantly in error — on the high side of course. One after the other these things have been exposed until the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming has a hole in it so big I could drive a Nimitz class aircraft carrier right through it without fear of hitting anything (they’re too big to go through the Panama Canal).
You’re arguing here with people who have a far greater grip on reality than you do and you’re losing even as you keep saying you’re right.
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BobC,
You mean he doesn’t compute? Amen brother, amen.
Roy
PS:
I haven’t heard Alfred Turing’s name since I went through the course in theory of computation or some such title (not sure I remember exactly what it was called). I wonder if they still bother to teach Turing and his Turing Machines anymore. Probably it’s unimportant in any real sense since direct access memory — fallaciously called Random Access Memory — made his tape based memory unnecessary.
RH
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Roy Hogue:
August 23rd, 2010 at 2:07 am
Max_OK,
——-
Roy, what do you find wrong with the starting point for the projection being when the projection was made?
As I explained in #206, from Hansen’s previously referenced chart, it looks like his starting point for his projections is 1987. The observed temperature averages for the first 6-months of 1987 and 2010 are 14.2 C and 14.7 C, respectively, an increase of 0.5 C compared to the Scenario B projected increase of 0.8 C.
If Bob thinks it’s wrong to pick when the projection started to see how it did from when it started until now, he hasn’t let us know.
But if you think it’s wrong, will you please explain why?
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Max,
Did I not say it clearly enough? Choice of starting point makes the meaning of the data appear to be different. But it’s the same data and can have only one meaning; temperature changes over time. And do we not expect that? Bob said exactly the same thing in a different way but you didn’t pick up on it.
Since the little ice age the Earth has warmed, at least until about a decade ago. Big deal! It’s now cooling. Where will it go next? I don’t know and neither do you! I favor cooling because there is some real evidence for that. But I don’t know. Neither Hansen nor the IPCC knows either.
I’m among those who think you don’t understand science one little bit. Worse, you can’t recognize when someone is so dishonest that you should run the other way.
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BobC and Roy,
You guys are doing such a good job at deconstructing the Maxbot, I think I’ll just sit back and enjoy. Although, he hasn’t past Turing’s test to my satisfaction. I think he’s a pre-recorded program cued by key words.
Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave. I’m afraid. My mind is going…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukeHdiszZmE
– – –
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/16/is-hansens-recent-temperature-data-consistent/
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wes,
If you’ve any interest in HAL let me know. I have a .WAV file you might like to have on your computer. I’ll send it to Joanne and she can send it to you.
Roy
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Roy, you forgot to answer my question. I’ll put it to you again.
What’s wrong with regarding 1987 as the the starting point of 1987-2010 projection?
If this has you puzzled, perhaps Bob can help you.
Then, if you are up to it, we can move on to another challenging question.
What’s wrong with regarding 2010 as the the end point of 1987-2010 projection?
10
I empathize with you. Hansen is a bit hard to read. But if you look a little closer, you will find for Scenario B he says “after 2010 the annual increment in CO2, is a constant, 1.9 ppmv.” That’s a very reasonable number, considering recent observations. Over the last three years(2006-2009) the annual incremental increases were 1.7, 1.9, and 1.8. in that order.
10
Pray tell, what’s so useful about Hansen’s 1987-2010 projection? It’s meaningless. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? That’s equally as interesting and just as meaningless. And all the same objections still apply. So why are you beating this horse?
Forget I asked that. I don’t want to know. And here’s why: If Hansen got anything even close it was from luck. He had no data that lead to the end temperature increase of what, 1 degree? And he got 0.77? He was winging it like he’s been winging it all along. Do you know how many times he’s revised his catastrophic temperature maximum down because the world wasn’t cooperating with him?
So that’s your assignment for the day. Go find out who and what the real Dr. James Hansen is all about. Are you comfortable being in bed with a man who advocates criminal destruction of major critical public infrastructure like dams and power plants, all just to satisfy his own personal agenda for the world? Are you satisfied to be in bed with a man who, before a United States Senate Committee no less, advocated trying those who voice an opinion he finds inconvenient, for crimes against humanity? And for that mater, who made him, a mere employee of a relatively useless branch of a government agency, the arbiter of what constitutes a crime against humanity? Do you know how many times he’s been caught in blatant lies?
Go do some research on the man you seem to think so worth following.
One more thing: 0.77 vs. 1.0 is 23% off. That’s a big bodacious error! When I tried my hand at the quantitative analysis chemistry course (at which I wasn’t very good) being that far off would fail the assignment.
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Max_OK;
Hansen is not hard to read — he clearly assumes CO2 increase rates 3.75 times what had been measured for 30 years (as of 1988). Either he is incompetent, or was trying to con people. Why that got by peer review is a scandal. He also assumes that CO2 rates will follow Anthropogenic emission rates — another assumption that has been falsified by data.
BTY: Try taking on any of my questions anytime you feel up to it. Ducking relevant data and questions seems to be a habit with you. Your attempt to brazen it out in #225 is pathetic, given your own performance in that regard. Kindly tell us why you deserve to be held to a different (and much lower) standard. Raise your game a bit Max — you’re becoming irrelevant.
Very nice way of putting it Roy — I’ll remember that for my next class, thanks.
10
Isn’t always the way with guys like Max?
One wonder why they think that publicly displaying their utter inability to clearly and logically offer a simple “robust” defense of Mann’s hockey stick, or indeed Hansen’s failed climate projections, advances the argument for CAGW?
Max says Hansen is hard to read. Riiiiight…
Richard Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science”, adapted from a commencement address given at Caltech (1974)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science
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BobC:
August 23rd, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Max_OK;
Perhaps you problem isn’t misunderstanding what you are reading, but getting tired and not finishing it. You misquoted Hansen in #218 by leaving out several words at the end of a sentence:
That quote is OK as far as it goes, but you replaced Hansen’s semicolon with a period, and then omitted “after 2010 the annual increment in CO2 is a constant, 1.9 ppmv yr-1.”
I think you know better than to misquote authors, so you probably just got tired and missed or forgot the last part of the sentence.
Had you not missed it, you might have investigated further and found the 1.9 ppmv to be close to the observed 1.7 to 1.9 annual incremental increases in recent years( see link). Obviously, Hansen’s 1.9 ppmv increment for 2010-2020 is on the conservative side.
http://www.co2now.org/Current-CO2/CO2-Now/Current-Data-for-Atmospheric-CO2.html
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Hansen’s work is so meaningless the American Meteorological Society awarded him the prestigious Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal last year, and just recently he was awarded Japan’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2010/2010-06-20-01.html
I don’t know about you Roy, but the only prize I ever got came out of a Cracker Jack box.
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Max @ 231:
Gore and Pachauri were awarded Nobel Peace Prizes for NOT being scientists, for blatant lies AND for having surreptitious interests in companies directly connected to the carbon tax gravy train. Gore’s movie has 35 significant errors. It’s no wonder a UK court ruled against him.
Hansen’s work is a box of lies and data manipulation. He was only awarded something for “appearing” to be the people’s saviour, and those people had the truth hidden from them. Why do you think we’re so angry at these 3 liars and would rather see them jailed, for incompetence and towing the party line (for funding), instead of rigorous science and truth?
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OK Max; You’ve convinced me; I no longer think you’re a computer program — I think you’re an idiot.
Re:
Statement A:
Perhaps I should have pasted the entire paper? I did not “misquote” Hansen — I accurately quoted him admitting to starting his model with completely non-physical data that did not even come close to matching measurements of the real world. If he knew this, he is a fraud; If he didn’t, he is incompetent. There is no other valid interpretation, given that he promoted this model’s projections as representing the real world.
Assignment #1: discuss this and give us your view: e.g., Is there an ethical defense for Hansen’s actions? What effect does this have on his credibility?
Statement B:
Even with a perfect model, when you start it off with the wrong data, the answer will be meaningless. What I mean by that (I feel it necessary to explain) is that regardless of the model’s result, it cannot tell you anything about the current world, since it came from somewhere entirely different. For example: Starting with too large a CO2 growth rate, even if that rate decays to the real rate in the future guarantees that total CO2 concentration will be higher than reality for the entire run.
Assignment #2: Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Discuss your reasoning. (If you have any.)
Statement #3:
Consider Hansen’s statement:
Extra Credit Logic Question:
Explain why CO2 growth in (and after) 2010 cannot be both 0 and 1.9 ppmv yr-1. Justify using 8th grade arithmetic.
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Unfortunately (for the students!) Turing is still big in “Theory of Computation” and Artificial Intelligence classes — largely since no one since has bothered to develop as many mathematical proofs about the subject. If Turing were alive today, perhaps he would update his proofs to base them on RAM machines — when he did his work, however, the Turing Machine could be proven capable of any possible computation, hence was the basis for the proofs.
Since it’s easier to get published developing new proofs than updating old ones, I think that the Turing Machine will be with us forever!
As a result, students spend years of their lives learning stuff that has (to be charitable) marginal utility. I think professors teach this stuff rather than coding, because most of their students are better at coding than they are!
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Roy Hogue @ 219 (Talking about Max_OK):
As my brother would say; “You always fail to amaze me, Max.”
10
Which proves only that fools are everywhere!
You are in bed with a lying, cheating self-serving scoundrel of the worst sort. I wash my hands of you. It’s not possible to move you with any argument based on critical thinking, facts or the man’s provable antisocial personality that I just described (with a big dose of charity). He is potentially quite dangerous, advocating criminal behavior on a rather large scale. And the world is full of nut cases who just might take him up on it. But perhaps you think the things I described about him are untrue. In any case I think it best that you hope he never gets his way because such men have no loyalty to their followers and he’ll see you go down along with the rest of us and never even blink.
We see many like you pass through here. You don’t understand science. You display no critical thinking ability at all. You have no visible sense of shame. You’re out of your league, Max, way over your head.
Ironically, the whole thing has never been about science in the first place. If it was the whole charade would be forgotten by now. It’s really political and as with all things political, it’s about power and money. This little fact is lost on so many on your side of the fence. And it’s why I think it useless to argue the minutia of Hansen’s temperature projections. Think about this — can Hansen sit back and remain an unknown scientist in some dark corner of NASA and get the prestige and power he wants. No? He needs a constituency for that and the only way you can get such a following is to tell people they have a serious problem and only you know how to fix it.
10
BobC,
I taught programming part time at the community college level for 17 years along with my full time job, including more years than I can remember teaching C++. I will attest that at least this instructor was a better coder than any student who went through my classroom.
So Turing will be around forever then? I think it shows the difference between what the academic finds important and what the real world finds important.
As for Max, the situation is hopeless. “…fail to amaze me,” is an understatement.
And now I have to get to work.
10
My view is you were embarrassed over getting caught misquoting Hansen, so you responded with an ad hominem, and then attempted to malign Hansen with accusations.
You altered a sentence from Hansen’s paper, by replacing his semicolon with a period and removing the words that followed the semicolon. You then represented the altered sentence as a quote from Hansen’s paper.
I don’t know whether you intended to misquote Hansen or were just negligent. But it will not help your reputation to deny you misquoted him when the evidence clearly shows you did.
10
No, I haven’t any. You presented hypotheticals. I have no interest in discussing them.
10
Try to understand the difference between the “growth of an annual increment ” and “an annual increment.”
10
I know, but she’s a good cook.
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Max_OK,
Why is it that you hold Hansen in such high regard? Yes, it was him in an 1984 paper which ‘introduced’ the idea of feedback (of course, he got it completely wrong, mixed up gain with feedback and assumed unit open loop gain). Another of his papers was the famous Hansen Libedoff paper where he basically said that it was OK to over process cherry picked data until you get the answer you’re looking for, And of course, the mealymouthed Hansen is the king of alarmist propaganda.
You were right about Hansen being hard to read, Sometimes I can’t even get past the abstract which often says something to the effect of ‘Our models which assume CAGW predict CAGW’. At that point, everything that follows is moot.
Yes, you do have to parse a lot of what he says carefully as there is often an editorialized subtext of catastrophe built on weak or non existent science, where the weaknesses are buried in the noise, conveniently glossed over and in many cases, artfully disguised. I even suspect that he knows he’s wrong but is just to proud to admit it.
I asked you to address what I posted in 151 and 159 and you haven’t. You were also getting close to playing the precautionary principle card with your better than doing nothing argument. Be forewarned that we all know that once a warmist backs in to the precautionary principle, they have run out of science.
George
10
Bwahhahahaha
Max at least you have a good sense of humor!
10
(Hansen is mistaken here — an exponential rate of increase in GHG will result in a linear rate of forcing, due to the logarithmic forcing to concentration relationship — known since the 1800’s)
Nevertheless, Human CO2 emissions have continued to grow exponentially (LINK), making Scenario A the track the world has followed, since no one was willing to destroy their economy on the basis of Hansen’s computer games.
If the first part of this statement refers to Human emissions, that certainly hasn’t happened (see link above), but the second part is what has happened to atmospheric CO2 concentration — it has remained growing at about 0.5%/yr, in defiance of Hansen’s assumption that Human emissions would accelerate it.
So the Hansen scorecard is:
1) CO2 growth is controlled by Human emissions — falsified by data. CO2 growth has remained steady despite accelerated Human CO2 emissions. This is a strong indication that CO2 accumulation rates are beyond our control and it would be useless (and a fool’s errand) to try.
2) Hansen predicted the temperature track of Scenario A if Human emissions weren’t curbed, but that is falsified by the failure of the companion assumption that atmospheric CO2 would respond to increases in Human emissions. Since atmospheric concentration followed (almost) Scenario B, that track should be used to evaluate his model.
Score: Fail — the track of Scenario B is significantly above the actual temperature track. Max_OK’s attempt to use an outlier to claim a match is irrational — what reason is there to give outliers in one direction more weight than the other direction? The mean is what counts.
There is yet to be a climate model that has any demonstrated skill at predicting climate — hence any action taken on the basis of these models is as likely to work as any random choice.
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MaxOK @231
I don’t think Hansen’s work is meaningless. Quite the contrary and even more troubling is that his work ALLOWS warmists to continue to rant and invoke the Precautionary Principle. I think that IS what Hansen wants and it has meaning to warmists.
But he is not without serious detractors:
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=1a5e6e32-802a-23ad-40ed-ecd53cd3d320
And If you’d like to feel at home with the kind of people Hansen likes to aide and abet look here: (bother to read the entire thread it doesn’t get really good until Keith Farnish posts.) http://joannenova.com.au/2010/01/hanson-barracking-for-lawless-destruction-and-the-end-of-civilization/
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Mark D:
Good place to point him! But $5 will get you $20 if he’s moved by any of it.
10
I apologize for calling you an idiot Max — it was unseemly of me and rude. I think you have raised your game a bit, thanks.
However, I am completely at a loss about your obsession with what Hansen said his models were considering after 2010 (e.g., in #230 and #238). How is that relevant to whether his models are tracking now (in 2010)?
Unless Hansen’s models contain backwards causality, what he postulates happening between 2010 and 2020 has no relevance today. Not talking about what he thinks will happen in the future can not possibly change whether his predictions are working today. Your characterization of this as a misquote is bizarre.
Scenario (B) is closest to what has happened in the real world (at least in terms of atmospheric CO2 concentration — not his assumptions of our ability to control it). The projection of this scenario has failed to predict the temperature (even his own inflated version). By any rational criteria, his model has failed to show any predictive skill (beyond 5 yr) — just like all the other GCMs.
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Max, a Catastrophic Warmist with a sense of humour? :-0
A rare commodity indeed. Mates, I think he may have a home here as a highly esteemed troll. Play nice BobC. Calling Maxbot an idiot, pretty uncreative. Stretch your imagination!
I agree with Mark D – Hansen, and Mann as well, are extremely important as contemporary political figures. Medals and awards glory. But no one will remember their names in 50 years, accept a few lonely historians of the “Great Early 21st Century Climate Panic” just as no one remembers the chief advocates of phrenology, eugenics or the protagonists in the Piltdown Man Hoax.
Still even if Max is a hoot, he’s long on dull quotes and vanishingly sub-atomic on substance. Here’s the most poignant defense of Hansen he’s managed on this thread:
Well, bloody, hell, that proves it then! Hansen must be correct. How did I not see it before! I hereby renounce my membership in the Denialist Big Tobacco Shill Association of Australia and vow to start an organic worm farm with my ill gotten lucre.
10
I’ll try to do better, I swear!
You have to admit that Max has come up with arguments that challenge one’s ability to classify them. For example: In post #72 on the “I was once a green…” thread (I replied at #85) he posits that added CO2 won’t improve crop yields because — get this — He has absolutely no knowledge of the subject. This startling mutation of a syllogism is beyond anything I have ever encountered — one could prove almost anything with this (depending on the state of one’s ignorance, of course).
10
Wes, RE 248; perhaps we need to apply for a grant to study the effects of mental stress (ie worry) on CAGWarmists. I imagine their typical dour lack of humor is a predictor for all kinds of life-span shortening stress, depression and anxiety.
That Max demonstrates a sense of humor perhaps indicates he isn’t so strong a warmist. Maybe he is looking for some skeptical group therapy?
10
Thank you, Bob, but being called names doesn’t bother me much.
I’m more likely to be amused than offended.
10
Bob, you exaggerate. I never said added CO2 wouldn’t improve crop yields. Obviously, CO2 enhancement in a climate-controlled hothouses aids plant growth. But the added CO2 doesn’t make the enclosure warmer. So outside, the potential for gains in crop yields from rising atmospheric CO2 could only be realized if the resulting global warming had no adverse effect on plant growth.
You can’t tell an old farm boy like me that plants are insensitive to climate changes, and more CO2 in the atmosphere will just mean higher crop yields. But a city slicker might fall for it.
I also suspect boosting crops yields with CO2 changes the balance of nutrients in the crop. I’ve read it results in wheat having less protein and more carbs.
This will be my last post here for a while. I am in the doghouse for neglecting my chores, one of which has to do with plants.
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Max Methuselah must be a VERY old farm boy indeed if he’s suggesting that he’s witnessed climate evolution effect crop yield! I hope he kept detailed notes. I’m sure the CSIRO would love a dataset of direct paleobotanical observations.
There is another way that a lucky vegetable can experience climate change: When it gets put in a truck and is driven from, say, Cairns to Tamworth.
10
Speaking of trucks, I come from a truck farming family,and I’ve witnessed unusually warm weather takes it’s toll on yield. So I am puzzled by folks who are naive enough to believe unusually warm weather all the time(i.e., a warmer climate) would be good for plants accustomed to less heat. As my grandpa used to say, “I got mules smarter than that.”
BTW, if any city slickers are reading this, I should mention a “truck farm” is not a place where trucks are grown.
10
Cmon Max_OK, what is the day-night temperature swing? Are you suggesting that plants can’t take a few degrees?
Sure they yield differently each season but that is what farming is all about. If our climate is really warming you’ll either have to move or grow something different. Has farming really changed much due to climate?
10
BZZZT. Strawman Alert! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYfM-frIWlQ
Person A has position X.
Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
Person B attacks position Y.
Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
So that evidence for what exactly? That’s right, another logical fallacy. Called a Red Herring.
Topic A is under discussion.
Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
Topic A is abandoned.
Digressions into the possible future effects of alleged AGW isn’t a rational argument for the AGW hypothesis or Hansen and Mann’s research.
Oh, dear, another fallacy, this time Appeal to Ridicule.
X, which is some form of ridicule is presented (typically directed at the claim).
Therefore claim C is false.
Rubber Ducky to Truck Farmer: Mercy, Sakes Alive, Looks like we got us a convoy (of logical fallacies)!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWO_AIh8drk
10
Climate changes can affect farming, and the consequences can be devastating.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/10-million-face-famine-in-west-africa-1986875.html
Unlike sustained heat or cold, day-night swings in temperature don’t hurt plants, unless extreme. Indeed, the swings can help yields.
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wes george:
August 25th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Max_OK said I’ve witnessed unusually warm weather takes it’s toll on yield.
What I witnessed was a logical fallacy, a Red Herring?
And I thought it was tomatoes.
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wes george:
August 25th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Max_OK said. “As my grandpa used to say, “I got mules smarter than that.”
Mules actually are very smart. I suspect you don’t know much about mules.
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wes george:
August 25th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Max-OK said So I am puzzled by folks who are naive enough to believe unusually warm weather all the time(i.e., a warmer climate) would be good for plants accustomed to less heat.
Well, you got me there. I thought some people who post on this site did believe it. But since you have read all the comments, I guess you know better.
10
Re 257; Max, really? You post an article about sub Saharan drought induced famine as an argument for AGW caused plant growth change??????
In the article:
This is not your best attempt. In fact I think it is your worst.
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Max Take a look here:
http://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/riceyld.asp
http://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyld.asp
http://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/soyyld.asp
http://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/wwyld.asp
http://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/dwyld.asp
Now there is some proof for you! All that “warming” we hear about since 1980.
IF we are warming, it appears to be GOOD for yields. Or is it the additional Co2?
10
Your question was “Has farming really changed much due to climate?”
A long drought is a climate change, not a seasonal fluctuation.
If you want a dramatic example, at one time during the history of the earth, the location of my birth was under a sea, and of course wasn’t farmed.
10
Well that is pedantic.
In the context of the discussion I would think you could fill in the last words of that question.
Here I’ll do it for you:
Has farming really changed much due to [AGW] climate [change where you have farmed]?
Has farming really changed much due to [AGW] climate [change that you have evidence for]?
Has farming really changed much due to [AGW] climate [change in areas other than the edge of the Sahara]?
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Max,
Droughts are not properly associated with ‘global warming’ anyway. This is just more of the disinformation used by CAGW alarmists. Nobody likes droughts and falsely deflecting the blame for otherwise natural and periodic drought conditions to CO2 is an effective fear mongering tool, but has nothing to do with science. There’s abundant evidence that precipitation increases as it gets warmer. Sure regional changes may make one place drier than another and this mix changes on it’s own quite regularily, but overall, as it warms, there are fewer deserts and more vegetation.
Most of the crop failures that arise because of heat arise because of the lack of water. In the central valley of California, just about every crop you can think of (including rice) grows exceptionally well in this desert where the temperature exceeds 100F (38C) on almost any given summer day. The reason for agricultural success is an abundant snow pack in the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains which has for all intents and purposes, has been bottled up for agriculture.
George
00
The Union of Concerned Scientist would disagree with you, and has the evidence to back it up.
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/impacts/early-warning-signs-of-global-4.html
00
You mean the Union of politically motivated, Climate alarmist, pseudo Scientists?
You do realize that their ‘conclusions’ are the result of running models full of faulty assumptions. While they properly claim that increased temperatures increase evaporation, all they say about rain is that rainfall patterns will change, per their dubious models and fail to acknowledge that evaporation and rainfall increase or decrease at the same rate. You know, a consequence of gravity, what goes up must come down, etc.
They also fail to grasp how increasing evaporation increases the latent heat removed from the surface and that at about 300K, the incremental latent heat removed from the surface is increasing so quickly, it starts to exceed the incremental solar power causing the incremental evaporation in the first place. This is why average surface temperatures saturate at about 300K.
George
00
co2isnotevil:
So you have found and read all nine referenced studies in the past 10 minutes.
I’m impressed.
00
Max,
I’ve looked at this in the past. Although, after the first few references, it all becomes more of the same, self referential BS anyway.
George
00
Good luck in finding ag scientists who attribute any increases in those yields to rising CO2 and temperature. You will find many attributing greater yields to improved hybrids and methods.
00
Max,
Some of the crop yield increases are indeed due to increasing CO2 and no scientist in their right mind would deny this. You do understand that all biomass starts from just CO2, water and solar power and that every carbon atom in the biosphere can trace it’s origin to a relatively recent photosynthesis reaction. I would say that no measurable yield increase can be attributed to increasing temperatures, simply because the temperature hasn’t increased by enough to matter over the time we’ve been measuring crop yields, even according to the hyper inflated hockey stick graphs.
BTW, why do you think the carboniferous era was so productive? Could it be the very high CO2 levels at the time?
George
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Imagine scientists using pseudonyms to conceal their self-referential BS. The following 3O or so names from the Union of Concerned Scientist may actually be only a few individuals. I am appalled!
Gregory, J.M., J.F.B. Mitchell, A.J. Brady
RT Watson, MC Zinyowera, RH Moss.
Karl, T. R, R.W. Knight, D.R. Easterling, and R.G. Quayle,
Kattenberg, A., F. Giorgi, H. Grassl, G. A. Meehl, J. F. B. Mitchell, R. J. Stouffer, T. Tokioka, A. J. Weaver, and T. M.L. Wigley, J. T. Houghton, L. G. M. Filho, B. A. Callander, N. Harris, , and K. Maskell
Laird, K. R., S. C. Fritz, K. A. Maasch, and B. F. Cumming,
Nicholls, N., G.V. Gruza, J. Jouzel, T.R. Karl, L.A. Ogallo, and D.E. Parker
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Probably because they don’t want to draw attention away from their contributions in developing hybrids and other technologies that increase yields.
But here is what I am hearing:
In climate controlled hothouses, adding CO2 will increase crop yields. Therefore, adding CO2 to the atmosphere outside will increase crop yields despite any negating effect from the rise in temperature and any other climate changes resulting from the added CO2.
I doubt it. Call me skeptical.
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Ah yes, the good old days of the carboniferous era, when a large part of the U.S. was a swamp and insects were whoppers. Scorpions were 3 ft. long and dragon flies had 30″ wingspans. I would have liked seeing those big bugs. Were some parts of the U.S. entirely under water during that era?
George, I think this thread Is dying, so I’m not posting any more, but I’ve enjoyed the discussion.
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Max,
Temperature does not decrease crop yields. While you guys like to refer to Arrhenius relative to his contribution to the greenhouse effect, what he is better known for is the equation that bears his name describing the temperature dependence of the rate of chemical reactions. Now the last time I checked, growing biomass occurs as the result of chemical reactions and will accelerate at higher temperatures, provided sufficient water, energy and CO2 are available.
Another thing about temperature variability is that the average temperature varies by about 1C per degree of latitude in the mid latitudes (much less near the equator and a little more near the poles). If plants were that sensitive to temperature, the same species wouldn’t be able to survive over more than a narrow band of latitude, which is clearly not the case. The most substantial temperature related issue are perennial plants that can not survive frost do not exist in places that get too cold.
George
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The Point, Max, is that CAGW, AGW, GW …. IS NOT CAUSING A REDUCTION IN FOOD!
Suggesting that is simply fear-mongering.
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Max lost the argument over whether Mann’s hockey stick was utter rubbish, so he’s decided to change the topic to something where he figures his odds are better.
His new topic of choice, also has the propaganda benefit of being based upon the assumption that AGW is well and truly upon us. This is a small rhetorical victory for Max as he has successful manipulated the thread totally off topic. However, by the book, it’s an admission that he has surrendered the debate to the skeptics on the topic of Mann’s hockey stick.
Thanks for the debate, Max! 😉
Unfortunately, Max’s new choice of topic – that AGW will lead to a global reduction in food production – is also a debate a warmist can not hope to win. In fact, only one steeped in Green propaganda would be foolish enough to bring the topic up.
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co2isnotevil @265,
No more. We have our own man-made water shortage in the central valley called a federal judge, who has ordered the pumps shut down that sent the water to the farmers; all because of a 3 inch fish called the Delta Smelt that happens to be on the endangered species list. The whole valley is a dried up desert now. A multi billion dollar a year industry has been tossed in the toilet for the sake of a fish! Of course, California doesn’t really need the economic activity. After all, were only dead broke, not bankrupt. Our government at work and play!
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George is right. A warming climate has to increase evaporation and therefore increase the amount of rain. That’s about as close as you can get to an axiom of climatology. Doesn’t mean there won’t be droughts or regional variation. Warmists, especially in Australia, have tended to exploit the fear of drought rather than the fact that if the world did warm it’s very possible parts Australia would see deserts turned bloom into cropland fertilized by increased CO2.
Funny that you never hear about the possibility that a warmer world might actually be an age of milk and honey. That’s was the consensus among historians before 1998 — past warm periods in history such as the Medieval Warm Period, or the Roman one or the Minoan warm age about 4500bp. All boom times for civilizational progress and expansion in the arts and technologies. The probability that such warm periods were as warm or warmer than today is why Mann had to create his fake hockey stick. If Mann’s hockey stick didn’t exist, some one else would have had to make one up! Otherwise, how do you frighten people into supporting your socio-economic agenda of collectivist, authoritarian directed cultural change if you got no apocalyptic prophecy to back you up? But I digress.
So higher temperatures do reduce certain crop yields while increasing yields of others. It’s not evidence for either side. Wheat, for instance, won’t grow in temperatures above 30c. Tomatoes, cabbage, strawberries, etc. don’t like hot summers either. So what? Are people going hungry in Malaysia and Vietnam because they can’t grow temperate climate crops?
A warmer climate will expand temperate climates towards the poles increasing the land available for agriculture.
Of course, this is an inconvenient truth for the warmists, who NEED a climate apocalypse to justify their collectivist and authoritarian socio-economic and political models.
Farmers decide what crops to plant on an annual basis. So if the climate is warming in one region over a period of years or bloody decades then said farmer, or his ancestors, have plenty of time to move from, say, wheat to sorghum or (if the rain is increase due to warming) cotton.
It’s ignorant to argue that if temperate regions expand towards the polar regions we will experience food shortages. It reveals the dishonesty that characterizes the entire AGW argument.
Perhaps, Max should like to change the topic again?
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Roy,
The failed state of California is case in point. Here in Australia we were lectured by the media and Greens about what a dandy job you guys were doing with Green Economics, creating tens of thousands of Green jobs while saving the environment from scumbag oilmen, powerful ag corporations and rednecks, like those illiterate cowboys in Texas, man, now there’s a socio-economic hellhole, Texas!
Right up to this year the media banged on about the Californian uptopia. A progressive model to emulate. Now you don’t hear anything about the economic trainwreck that California has become and actually has been becoming for a decade. Nada. Just silence.
This is how the whole pro-AGW argument is conducted. What they can’t outright lie about, they omit to mention.
Australians should study very closely exactly what California has done to itself, because we’re right behind them on the same Green path to societal suicide. Required reading:
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_3_california-economy.html
btw, Roy. I’ve visited California many times and once stayed a winter in the valley, Bakersfield, back in 1982. Escogí naranjas para mi dinero. Truly a magnificent place and state of mind. I’m a bit shocked that it has been allowed to slide this far. I hope the grass-roots movement towards free market reforms isn’t too late to save the state from permanent decline.
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Wes,
Good judgment and common sense do not reside in California. There’s no shortage of people who know what’s wrong and how to fix it. But the plain truth is that we’ve spent more money than we have. Professor this and that, a strong public sector, these are all part of the problem. The legislature hasn’t come in with a budget at the constitutionally mandated time for so long I can’t remember when it last happened. But I’m probably not telling you anything you haven’t seen in Australia.
Ronald Reagan was right, “Government is the problem!” I wish we could have him back as governor and president at the same time. It’s way off topic and too long to describe adequately but my last experience of him was truly amazing and unprecedented. I will never forget it.
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Roy, it looks like your “5 will get you 20” was exactly right.
Good thing I didn’t take you up on it!
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