“Climate denial and the abuse of peer review“
Can someone get Stephan Lewandowsky his medication? His new marketing message is that “deniers” don’t do peer review papers. There’s a curious case of acute-peer-review-blindness (APRB) occurring. It doesn’t matter that there are literally thousands of pages of skeptical information on the web, quoting hundreds of peer reviewed papers, by people far more qualified than a cognitive-psychologist, yet he won’t even admit they exist.
…most climate deniers avoid scrutiny by sidestepping the peer-review process that is fundamental to science, instead posting their material in the internet or writing books.
Dear Stephan, deny this: 900 papers that support skeptics. What is it about these hundreds of papers published in Nature, Science, GRL, PNAS, and Journal of Climate that you find impossible to acknowledge? (And do tell Stephan, if people need to publish peer reviewed material before they venture an opinion on climate science online, how many peer reviewed articles on climate science have you produced?)
Obviously, the real deniers are the people who deny the hundreds of papers with empirical evidence that show the hockey stick is wrong, the world was warmer, the climate changes, and the models are flawed.
Twenty eight million weather balloons show there is no hotspot. So in response, stumped for evidence, the establishment team rolls out a psychologist to deny the results, and issue unscientific pronouncements about how we all have to “trust the establishment” and use only its’ approved formats to further human knowledge.
Instead of sidestepping the process, articles by people who want to sidestep the issue give themselves away in the first line. We can always rely on Lewandowsky to solve our climate dilemmas by analyzing… something else.
“On 20 April 2010, a BP oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and creating the largest oil spill in history.”
Then if he does get to the topic at hand, you can count on him to stick to fallacies, like argument from authority and ad hominem attacks. No doubt, UWA will be renouncing Lewandowsky’s science degree (I mean, surely the faculty of science at UWA have higher standards than that don’t they?). Breaking laws of reason is an embarrassment for any science faculty, and to any psychology school.
Then when he gets past the fallacies and actually tries to make a socio political point, he reverts to a kindergarten black and white world view — me: good, you: bad. Humans in business = evil and untrustworthy. Humans in government = above question.
During peer review, by contrast, commercial interests are removed from the publication decision because journals are often published by not-for-profit professional organisations.
Obviously, commercial interests who advertise in journals, or own their stocks, their distribution, their publishing house, or offer jobs-for-the-boys never have any influence on angelic science publications**. And government interests are of course, obviously benign. No government has ever used it’s power to deceive its subjects. Right?
Even if private publishers are involved, they make their profit primarily via university subscriptions, and universities subscribe to journals based on their reputation, rather than based on individual publication decisions.
And universities make their money… follow that dollar… by appealing to government bureaus, ergo?* So government-paid-researchers vet other government-paid-researchers-papers which are published in journals which want to get more subscriptions from government paid entities. What could go wrong with that?
Very occasionally a contrarian paper does appear in a peer-reviewed journal, which segments of the internet and the media immediately hail as evidence against global warming or its human causes, as if a single paper somehow nullifies thousands of previous scientific findings.
Dear Stephan, that’s the point of science remember, as Einstein says, it only takes one experiment to prove a theory wrong, and your anti-science mind-set means if a skeptic proved man-made warming wrong (actually we already have) you would “know” the skeptic was wrong before you even read the paper.
In Stephens obey-thy-leader form of “science”, the answers to the universe can be figured out by counting the peer reviewed papers. It’s not about quality. It’s not about a chain of evidence. It’s not that some papers matter. It’s just the tally.
And if we only had a bureau of perpetual motion issuing papers, then we could finally solve the energy crisis. (In fact, why bother to do the research, just ask the government?)
Most of the Lewandowsky-carbon-tax-marketing-tactic is simply to confound his followers with a bread crumb trail of smears, which reinforces the neural pathways of pavlovian fans-of-the-carbon-cult so they too can issue reflexive insults against scientists, and warm themselves with smug superiority. And this man does it with your taxes.
John McLean corrected Lewandowsky’s points on the ABC site. Stephen apparently denys that too.
Other posts: We’ve had hours of entertainment with Lewandowsky (Stephan) before.
I think this post is particularly appropriate in light of a discussion about “experts”: The hypocrisy of the annointed.
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* The UWA page called “Research” lays it out. Research is about doing things that gets you funding from the big-government. “These strategic outcome areas are important because: Alignment with national research and national innovation priorities and State goals and priority areas allows UWA to seek funding.”
** So much for non commercial science assocations: Nature is edited and published in the United Kingdom by Nature Publishing Group, a subsidiary of Macmillan Publishers which in turn is owned by the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Donna Laframboise on the the sacred IPCC pal review process.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/06/15/ipcc-these-people-havent-learned-a-thing/
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The ptolemaic view of the universe reigned supreme for 1500 years. It took one good theory to bring the whole edifice down, together with the consensus …
That’s the way science works Mr. Lewandowsky.
Pointman
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One of my favourite pastimes is reading Joanne’s forensic take-downs.
Although, I do prefer it when the ‘victim’ has a bit of credibility.
Unfortunately, Lewandowsky prompts expressions like ‘shooting fish in a barrel’.
I picture Joanne in multi-tasking mode for this one: having breakfast, watching TV and painting her toe-nails at the same time as turning Lewandowsky into chopped liver!
Keep up the good work.
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I am sincerely concerned that Dr Lendowsky may be mentally unwell, judging by the intemperate and agressive nature of his statements about those many of us throughout the world who don’t see a problem with a tiny rise in Man’s production of CO2.
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Ha! All psychologists are. The basic reason why they study psychology is to try to understand their own issues. After 3 years the walk away with a classification system, which has the pretense of science but, is nothing more the a glorified pigeon-holing system based on personal prejudice.
I know that one hour of my labour contributes to the economy(society’s welath) the equivalent of about 10 public sector hours. I contribute more to this country on Monday morning than a public servant does in a whole week.
My brother recently joined the public service and I was telling him how inept they all are. He didn’t believe me. A couple of weeks in he came back and said: “It’s worse than you think”. He couldn’t believe it. He says he’s never done so little work in his life and on his third month he won the departmental employee of month award. “I didn’t do anything” he said.
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“900 papers that support skeptics”?
A quick Google search on climate science, looking at only Biology/Life Sciences/Environmental and Physics/Astronomy/Planetary Science, no citations or patents, comes up with 898,000 links. Most appear to be valid papers.
So the 900 that have been identified in that list (in some cases against the expressed opinions of the authors or even a quick perusal of the abstracts) represent ~1/1000 of the literature. I’m, well, underwhelmed – the presence of a very small set of contrary opinions doesn’t mean that they are
rationalright.As somebody put it recently, with apologies to Churchhill – Peer review is the worst form of filter for good science except all the others that have been tried….
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Al Gore was probably the most influential CAGW advocate. How many of his contributions were peer reviewed?
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KR
” the presence of a very small set of contrary opinions doesn’t mean that they are rational right.”
So if I did a similar search on those believers of AGW and came up X number of papers I could say ” X papers of contrary opinions to the sceptic views doesn’t mean they are right ”
Doesn’t prove much does it.
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Ross @ 7
If 999 out of a 1000 agree with a point of view, and only 1 disagrees, what it proves is simply that most people looking at the evidence find that point of view more reasonable and supportable.
It’s always possible to find a contrary opinion somewhere – but one contrary opinion out of 1000 isn’t very convincing.
So certainly, you could say that X papers contrary to the Y skeptical papers/views doesn’t mean AGW is correct. But with X=900,000 and Y=900, would that be reasonable?
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Waffle @5:
Psychologists seem to have made you angry. And you seem to feel a similar anger towards civil servants. You also seem to believe that you are better in what you are doing then these people. Do you want to talk about that? Can you explain that to me? Using your own words? And tell me, have you ever felt that same anger towards your mother? Especially after she found you in that embarrassing situation you spoke previously about….?
Take your time to tell me. I am here to help. After all, I am a scientifically trained medical practitioner. I am a psychologist, so I will have full understanding of what you are going through. And I can resolve your problems by giving you strategies to deal with it. Just tell me. Just open up to me. I won’t judge you…
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The Conversation seem to have run out of unique contributors and have given the dear deluded professor another bite of the cherry.
see…http://theconversation.edu.au/a-journey-into-the-weird-and-wacky-world-of-climate-change-denial-1554
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I can’t understand how peer review can be of value unless the reviewer repeats the research/experiment being reviewed by exactly the same method until a conclusion is arrived.Besides some people have no peers.
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“A quick Google search on climate science, looking at only Biology/Life Sciences/Environmental and Physics/Astronomy/Planetary Science, no citations or patents, comes up with 898,000 links. Most appear to be valid papers.”
Read them all, did you? And what is “valid”, in this context? And who decides: you? What are your credentials?
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KR @6; Yuo say you’ve found 898,000 links, and “most appear to be valid papers”. A couple of questions for you; 1) are these 898,000 links all referring to seperate papers? How many times is the same paper being referred to or cross-referred over and over again. 2) How can you know that “most appear to be valid papers”? Have you checked them all? 3) Are you not awarte that the vast majority of papers apparently supporting AGW only appear to do so because including climate change/agw in the title is the only way to get funding. AGW is accepted a priori and is not the object of the research described in the paper. You don’t get funding for research if your hypothesis refutes agw.
Oh, and Einstein understood that while 1000 experiments could never prove him right, one experiment could certainly prove him wrong.
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If we had to rely on peer review to get anything done the wheel would still be waiting in the queue. The snobbishness of the AGW crowd is disgusting.
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KR obviously is a novel sort of scientist. Perhaps he could run an independent experiment to verify his discovery. Say printing out both the true believers and the skeptics peer reviewed papers then weighing each bundle separately. He could have that brilliant experiment peer reviewed and I’m sure the true believers would also go into raptures over paper 898001.
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I thought that this might be a good time to have a peer at an article printed in the Australian Financial Review on 30th June 1989.
“Entire nations could disappear beneath the rising oceans” is the heading of the article.
“Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend was not reversed by the end of the century,according to a top UN environmental official.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco-refugees” threatening political chaos,said Mr Noel Brown,director of the New York office of the UN Environment programme.
Governments have a “ten year window” to solve the greenhouse effect before it passes beyond human control he told the Associated Press.
“Nature will be far more Hobbesian – poor,nasty,and brutish – in the next century if politicans fail to meet the challenge”,Mr Brown said.
As the warming melts polar ice caps,ocean levels will rise by up to one metre,enough to cover the Maldives,Seychelles,and other low lying nations,said Mr Brown.
Coastal regions will be inundated;one sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded,cutting off its food supply,accordingto a joint UNEP and US Environmental Protection Agency Study.
Ecological refugees will become a major concern and,what’s worse is,you may find that people can move to higher ground but the soils and the natural resources may not support life.Africa doesn’t have to worry about land but would you want to live in the Sahara?,he said.
UNEP estimates it would cost the United States at least $US100 billionto protect its east coast alone.
Shifting climate patterns would bring back”dust bowl”conditions of the 1930’s to Canadian and US wheatlands,while the Soviet Union could reap bumper crops if it adapted its agriculture in time,according to a study by UNEP and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Mans use of fossil fuels and the burning of rain forests is releasing excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.The atmosphere is retaining more heat than it radiates,much like a greenhouse according to the theory.
The most conservative scientific estimates state that the earths temperature will rise one to four degrees Celcius in the next 30 years,according to Mr Brown.
Even the most conservative scientists”already tell us there is nothing we can do now to stop a two degree centigrade change”,he said.
Anything beyond that and we have to start thinking about the significant rise of sea levels…..We can expect more ferocious storms,hurricanes,wind shear,dust erosion.
While there is time to act,Mr Brown said,there is no time to waste.
It took us ten years to get the ozone treaty into effectby 1989 cuttingcutting fluorocarbon emissions into the air,Mr Brown added.The ozone layer filters out harmful ultraviolet radiation.
UNEP is working towards forming a scientific plan of action by the end of 1990 and the adoption of a global climate treaty by 1992.In May,delegates from 103 countries met in Nairobi,Kenya,and decided to open negotiations next year.
The climate treaty would call upon nations to reduce the use of fossil fuels,cut the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as methane and fluorocarbons and preserve the rainforests.
Each acre of rainforest can store 100 tonnes of carbon dioxide and reprocess it into oxygen.
Mr Brown suggested that compensating Brazil,Indonesia and Kenya for preserving rainforest may be necessary.”
—Associated Press
Remember this was printed in the Financial Review in 1989.
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KR @ 6
What a novel, and simple approach to “science”.
I just did a google search on “speed of light peer reviewed paper”.
I got 730,000 hits.
I happen to know of only one paper that “denies” that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is responsible for determining the speed of light.
Therefore, according to your logic, there are 729,000 peer reviewed papers out there that support the “consensus” that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is responsible for determining the speed of light.
That’s it then – the “science” is settled.
Sheesh – and you people wonder why you’re not taken seriously.
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The IPCC Summary for Policymakers 1990 states:
The IPCC Summary for Policymakers 2007 states:
It would be interesting to hear how KR’s 898,000 references (not to mention the billions of dollars spent) have advanced the IPCC’s estimates of climate sensitivity, over two decades, one jot.
The fact is that the IPCC has not drawn on thousands of peer-reviewed papers to support its central estimates of climate sensitivity but on a handful and those assumptions have been challenged by scores of peer-reviewed papers since.
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Another day another poll
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/national/xenophon-moves-on-governments-carbon-tax-ad-campaigns/story-e6frea8c-1226079484868
do you want a referendum on the ‘carbon tax’
QUITE OBVIOUSLY THE ANSWER IS “YES” !!!!!
Peer review is a wondrous thing
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The “900” list has poor quality control and includes many papers that are not against AGW at all.
To make the list a paper can qualify as follows:
1. It must disagree, even if only slightly, in part with some aspect of CAGW as defined by anyone, even a newspaper, rather than disagreeing with the IPCC or mainstream scientific opinion (eg Knorr).
2. The paper may confirm fundamental properties of AGW (Scafetta & natural GHG feedbacks).
3. The papers can hold completely opposing views with each other and that’s ok (Gerlich, says no greenhouse effect, Scafetta says there is).
4. The paper can be seriously flawed (Idso). http://www.springerlink.com/content/p774t26218367vl5/ and again http://www.springerlink.com/content/h41u42t104411870/
5. The paper doesn’t have to be from a climate scientist, pollitical views are ok.
6. “Poptech”, the guy who maintains the list, doesn’t have to agree with the findings of the paper, in this way they can avoid the conflict of point 3 and dispute point 2).
7. The author of the paper may have subsequently admitted the science was flawed, but Poptech will continue to list the paper.
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There is a poll on the ABC Drum on a carbon tax people might like to give their view
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KR @8
What it proves huh?
Perhaps you should reconsider what “consensus” proves.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that will hurt you, it’s what you think you know that ain’t so.” Will Rogers
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I must make an appointment with lewindowski to assess my heterodoxic condition regarding AGW ; it should be an interesting exercise.
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Tabulating 900 papers that someone feels are skeptical of climate science really doesn’t mean much, and as other posters have noted, there are some issues with this list. Not the least of which is the fact that a lot of the papers contradict one another – those papers are NOT presenting anywhere close to a unified view.
The real question, of course, is the science. Which takes us right back to peer review. Peer review is far from perfect – but its the best method anyones found so far to filter papers down to stuff that’s actually worth the paper its printed on.
If anyone has a better idea, well, run with it!
[How about: look at the evidence, instead of counting documents? _JN]
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Lewandowsky gets a lot of stuff exactly backwards. He claims that the Soon and Baliunus 2003 (SB03) paper “concluded, in flat contradiction to virtually all existing research, that the 20th century was probably not the warmest of the last millennium”, and complained that this was a case where “a single paper somehow nullifies thousands of previous scientific findings”.
Actually, that was what Mann’s “hockey stick” papers of 1998 and 1999 (MBH98 & MBH99) did, or purported to do. Decades of painstaking research all over the globe, published in hundreds, if not thousands, of papers, pointed to a Medieval Warm Period warmer than the present over much of the globe, and a Little Ice Age that was colder than the present, likewise over much of the globe. This was the standard view as presented in the first IPCC report. Then MBH98/99 came out, and without any serious review, the climate science establishment “nullifies thousands of previous scientific findings.”
SB03 simply surveyed the already existing body of scientific literature on paleoclimate and counted up studies that found extremes in the MWP, LIA, and late 20th century. It was using many previous scientific findings, not “nullifying” them. It disagreed with a handful of reconstructions published in the previous few years, each of these effectively based only on a handful of data sets, and purporting to provide better global coverage through complex mathematical processing. But it should have been up to these reconstruction studies to show why they were valid and not the many previous studies.
For example, medieval tree lines in the California high mountains were 300-500 meters higher than late 20th century tree lines, implying temperatures more than 3C higher than present. Yet the bristlecone pine tree rings most of these studies relied heavily on were interpreted by these studies as showing very cold conditions during the medieval period — i.e. very narrow tree rings. (I should point out the the “dendroclimatogical” literature acknowledges that tree lines are valid indications of temperature, and tree-ring data must comport with this.) So how should this be resolved? No one in the climate science establishment has even really asked the question in any forum that matters. (Hint: California was in what climatologists call a “megadrought” at that time.)
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@4
How many brain cells does Lewy have ?……..7 my that is alot !!:)
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I wonder who shook the troll cage?
This peer review stuff is getting awfully tedious.
Peer review serves one purpose: it is there to protect the reputation of the publishing journal. It does this by requesting “independent” experts in the field to verify just three things: 1) that the terms used in the paper are appropriate for the subject matter; 2) the research approach and the analysis and presentation of findings are consistent within the accepted practices of the field; and 3) that all of the cited references are to bona fide papers that have previously been published in journals of a similar or higher standard to the publishing journal.
The reviewers do not have the right or authority to argue against the conclusions of the paper if the language, approach, analysis, and references are all valid. This doesn’t stop them trying of course, but it is in the interests of the Journal Editor to publish contrary findings, because if they do not, they will eventually miss the opportunity to publish a seminal paper about a new break-through.
So what is a “contrary” paper, anyway? It is one that shows a differing result to the ones previously obtained, or which reaches a different conclusion from previously established results. Is it not adding to the breadth of knowledge to know that another researcher reached a different set of conclusions. Because they disagree is a good thing, and is no reason whatever for their rejection.
Progress only occurs when the status-quo is viewed from a point of scepticism.
So, the only way that “contrary” papers can be rejected is if they are not up to the publishing standard (very rare), of if economic pressure is applied to the publisher.
This latter case has been a factor in the past, as evidenced by the ClimateGate emails.
It is quite possible (and perhaps likely) for all of the post grad students in a faculty to publish similar papers on closely related aspects on the same topic to multiple publications, and have them all peer reviewed and published. Bingo, instant consensus.
Searching and counting the number of papers in a given area that all agree on a similar set of findings proves nothing (except perhaps, some rudimentary keyboard skills).
[typo fixed] ED
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@9 I don’t blame him for being angry , I don’t like listening to MENTALLY ILL HYPOCRITES either !!!!!!
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Here’s the real graphs..sorry alarmists the IPCC fakes don’t stack up!
http://climaterealists.com/?id=7887
also the Landscheidt theory.
http://landscheidt.wordpress.com/ this hasn’t had much press but it CLEARLY shows the great correlation between the Angular Momentum Theory and Dalton and Maunder minimums.
Then there’s a great article by Alan Caruba http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2011/06/new-consensus-predicts-ice-age.html
What gets me is that the real graphs show the opposite of what these turkeys are trying to show the public. Someone should be done for fraud.
O and looks like wee Brisbane’s temps are below average..get ya blankies out this winter.
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I see Australia’s bought and paid for Chief Scientist says the science is in, and he knows this because he can read English:
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/labor-closes-in-on-carbon-tax-deal-20110621-1gdlt.html
I guess that means the case is closed… he is the Chief Scientist of Australia after all…
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I see Blimey popping up again just like he did in this thread
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/05/the-worst-cookbook-interview-ever/#comments
His post 20 today is a repeat of 181 in the above thread where Poptech later explained the list and how it was compiled , but Blimey must have trouble understanding simple English.
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KR @ 24
Back when I was at school (admittedly a long time ago), the whole concept of the “peer-review process”, of publishing a scientific paper, was to allow for its claims to be reproduced – or falsified – by others.
Reproducibility of claimed results was the hallmark of a successful hypothesis; failure to reproduce claimed results meant an epic fail for the hypothesis. Naturally this process required that the published paper included full disclosure and details of methodology, data used, and so on.
To the best of my knowledge “publishing” a scientific paper in any of the “hard” sciences (the ones that don’t require the word “science” in their name – maths, physics, chemistry, geology, biology etc), still means pretty-much the same thing as it did 40 years ago.
Only in “Climate Science” do we have the practice of publishing “pal-reviewed” claims masquerading as hypotheses, often bereft of anything remotely like methodology, data etc, and replete with disclaimers such as “might”, “could”, “maybe” and so forth.
In fact, as demonstrated by the “Climategate” emails, often raw data and methodology are zealously and jealously guarded, even against FOI requests.
Viewed in this light it is obvious that “Climate Science”, together with its fatally-flawed “pal-review” process, has more in common with prophecy, alchemy, soothsaying, astrology and tea-leaf reading than it does with the “real” sciences.
Perhaps if “Climate Scientists” ever get around to publishing true, “scientific” hypotheses that can be reproduced (or falsified) by others, then the number of papers they actually produce might have some meaning.
In the meantime however, you may as well add Mills and Boons novels to your list, as few, if any, of them are skeptical of AGW, and they have about as much “science” in them as most “Climate Science” “peer-reviewed, published papers”.
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Rereke Whakaaro @ 27 – “This peer review stuff is getting awfully tedious.”
Perhaps for you. You, by the way, did a reasonable job of describing the peer review criteria, although (2) might include “correct math”, as statistical treatments are also often up for discussion. There’s also sometimes a “enough information to get published” consideration, although the large numbers of scientists going for the Least Publishable Unit (LPU) to pad their CV are pretty obvious from the copious “Look, 2+2=4” papers that get published, indicating that’s hard to enforce.
What’s getting tedious to me (personal opinion, mind you) are the people b******g about not getting published when they have apparently not been able to get the terminology, basic math, methods, and citations right.
If they can’t meet that minimum standard, they’re just not doing a very good job…
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“Peer review” is a filter – but the filtering process includes talking to colleagues, giving talks, writing articles, peer review, publishing, and discussion/citation (for useful papers) in the larger literature. All part of “getting it as right as possible”. It’s got it’s problems, but like I said before, if anyone has a better idea for avoiding publishing unfiltered junk like the Time Cube, go for it.
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KR @8
Millions of flies eat shit therefore so should you.
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Warmists saying that skeptics are unscientific. Nothing new. Just makes them feel more secure in their position, therefore they don’t have to confront that little nutshell, the bloddy evidence.
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memoryvault @ 33
The CRU did a lousy job of responding to the FOI requests. Mind you, having 60-70 form letter requests come in because of a blogger pushing it is harassment, but they did a lousy job of dealing. I believe 6 of the 8 investigations noted that and clubbed the CRU for it.
That said, some of the IPCC data (national temperature records, for example) are property of the various governments producing them for their own meteorological purposes, and they couldn’t release those without permission.
Mann (the “hockey stick” guy) put his data up on web access – I think the only complaints came down to it not being in the format the people requesting wanted, which quite frankly wasn’t his problem.
And Lindzen (who got rejected once from GRL and twice from PNAS before publishing Lindzen and Choi 2011 in an Asian journal) got thumped quite properly because his paper was impossible to reproduce, due to insufficient information about his methods.
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‘Only in “Climate Science” do we have the practice of publishing “pal-reviewed” claims masquerading as hypotheses, often bereft of anything remotely like methodology, data etc, and replete with disclaimers such as “might”, “could”, “maybe” and so forth.’
Would you prefer claims of certainty not supported by the data? And have you read many astronomy or particle physics papers recently? Lots of qualifications there…
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Well off topic now, my apologies. Again, peer review ain’t perfect, but I don’t think anyone’s found a better method yet.
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Colin Henderson @ 35
Well, Colin, you have now firmly established that you have absolutely nothing relevant to say. Thank you for clarifying that – it will save everyone time in the future.
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Colin,
I thought your comment was pithy and succinct. KR is the only one with nothing relevant to say.
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Memory Vault: #33
That’s a good point. It is only the soft sciences that have to call themselves sciences. I hold a military science degree, and believe me, that is not a field that encourages repeated experimentation. 🙂
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Blimey @ 21
Nice. And you are as critical of tree ring proxies?
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climate resistance looks into the NGO’s etc who are behind the recent alarmist “World’s oceans in ‘shocking’ decline” fantasy:
21 June: Climate Resistance: A Deep Sea Mystery
http://www.climate-resistance.org/2011/06/a-deep-sea-mystery.html
some further details in the comments.
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KR @34
How many times have you been snipped, edited or moderated here?
By the way, it’s still cooling outside.
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Rereke @ 24+4 (code)
Well it must be tough to see ones religion shaken to the political core. My guess is that these trolls are seeing their retirement investments on the brink.
They should look for and find the conspiracy: (you know) “democracy”
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Mark D. @ 43 – “How many times have you been snipped, edited or moderated here?”
Not often at all, and when it’s happened I’ll readily admit it was my fault for intemperate language. I try to be polite, avoid Ad Hominem statements, ‘tho I’m only human – the fact that my posts are allowed to stay is actually a compliment to the blog, as I do tend to strongly disagree with many of the posts.
There are a number of “skeptic” blogs where my posts have never shown up.
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Argumentum ad numerum.
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Phil Jones to Michael Mann, Climategate emails, July 8th 2004.
Albert Einstein once remarked,”It doesn’t take 100 scientists to prove me wrong, it takes a single fact.”
Again, Argumentum ad numerum, an appeal to numbers. Most people? Argumentum ad populum. Besides, it only takes one fact to falsify a theory. You have heard of Popper, haven’t you? The “scientist” at the heart of promoting the
theoryhypothesis have been responsible for corrupting the peer reviewed process. They reviewed each others work and kept others from getting published simply because it would challenge the orthodoxy of the CAGW hypothesis.True, but a lot of the data could be released but was not. It always amazes me how any person who is reasonably intelligent could fail to realize that the data has been falsified. “One tree” Keith Briffa and “hide the decline” Mike Mann are, in my opinion, guilty of scientific fraud. You have to give Mann credit! After Wegman, et al destroyed Mann’s hockey stick he was so brazen that he used the same bogus methods to demonstrate that hurricanes were increasing in intensity and numbers despite the fact that his claims flew in the face of empirical data and the historical record!
Actually, I prefer an audit by a government authority to be followed by the indictment, prosecution, conviction and incarceration of those involved for perpetrating this fraud. There is not a shred of empirical evidence to support the falsified hypothesis of CAGW. The IPCC’s credibility has been so thoroughly eviscerated that it beggars the imagination that anyone of reasonable intelligence could give credence to anything they claim. The “Gold Standard” contains a high degree of grey literature presented as “peer reviewed.” And don’t forget the ever growing list of “gates” (e.g. africagate, himalayagate, greenpeacegate, etc.)
Nobody on this site has said the peer reviewed process needs to be terminated. All we are saying is it is corrupt and needs to be reformed.
As President Eisenhower said in his fare well address, “Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”
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KR @ 45 So much for humor
At 34:
So let’s just imagine what would happen if everything was “published”. Wouldn’t it be easy for all the Authorities to quickly flick the erroneous into the can? Wouldn’t this be superior to letting pesky skeptics point to the unfair “good old boy system” “filtering” them out?
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PS re 45
I do commend you for good behavior especially considering the “team odds”.
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Bulldust # 31
So the science is in, settled, and there is no more to know.
Guess they don’t need any more funding then? Just as well, since we can now redistribute all those millions in research funds to help Australians cope with Gillards toxic tax.
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and the usual abuse of sceptical viewpoints (this time FoE and Greenpeace, facilitated by Fiona):
21 June: Guardian: Fiona Harvey: Tory MEPs defy David Cameron over greenhouse gas targets
Conservatives threaten to scupper EU vote on carbon reduction by opposing the 30% cut in emissions committed by the PM
“Cameron should step in,” said Martyn Williams, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth. “He should tell his MEPs ‘we look stupid if you vote against this’.”…
The move comes as EU environmental policy was undermined by one of the most important figures in the European commission, causing alarm in Brussels. Janusz Lewandowski, the commissioner in charge of fraught negotiations on the future of the EU’s €130bn budget, cast doubt on the science of climate change and the future of emissions policy.
In an interview with a Polish newspaper he said: “We already have overambitious agreements on CO2 emission reduction. There is a notion that the thesis that coal energy is the main cause of global warming is highly questionable. Moreover, more and more often there is a question mark put over the whole [issue of] global warming as such.”
Lewandowski said the CO2 targets “are too ambitious for the Polish economy … Polish politicians have to persuade that there cannot be a quick jump away from coal. For Poland it would be a disaster.”
His remarks were all the more pointed as the Poles at the European council blocked progress on the carbon roadmap to 2050, which the commission hoped would be the basis of a strengthening of climate policy. Poland will hold the revolving presidency of the EU from 1 July.
Ruth Davis, chief policy adviser at Greenpeace UK, said: “It’s terrifying that the man in charge of Europe’s budget is someone you might expect to see in Sarah Palin’s Republican party…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/21/greenhouse-gas-targets-eu-vote
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KR at 38
My apologies for the crappy comment; I usually stick to the science and avoid stooping to alarmist insults. But I get really tired of the “argument” that deferral to authority is science.
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Eddy Aruda @ 46
I hate to say this, Eddy, but you’re running through a lot of different topics in your post. I’ll try to respond…
My point about the “900 papers” is that those numbers prove nothing, especially when considered against the denominator of hundreds of thousands of papers that don’t agree. It’s a minority opinion, and the “900” means very little. The science is what’s important.
The CRU went through, what, 8-9 different inquiries? They found that the CRU did not respond well to the FOI requests, but none of them found fault with the basic collection of scientific opinions that was published in the IPCC report. You may think that difference isn’t important – I do.
Mann, Briffa, etc.? I’ve gone through multiple proxy paleo reconstructions myself – the Mann 1999 paper was too flat in the MWP, but was clearly labeled as a first attempt at such a reconstruction! And Mann 2008, Lundquist, all the other reconstructions since then basically agree with what I’ve looked at with and without the “tree” data.
As to audits – if there’s deliberate misrepresentation of the data, yes, there should be consequences. The FOI requests (for a CRU staff of 6 people and 70-80 detailed data requests, mind you) should have been handled better, but the reviews indicated bad procedures rather than deliberate malicious actions.
—
Again, if peer review isn’t working – suggest something better, even an improved peer review. I’ve looked at peer review issues such as Lindzen and Choi 2011 in some detail – I have to agree with the reviewers, the paper *sucked* in terms of addressing earlier criticisms and detailing methods; his attempts to circumvent review were sour grapes. And claiming peer review is broken because badly written papers don’t get published is blaming others for the writers faults.
As Rereke noted @27, peer review essentially consists of making sure the paper isn’t stupid, not objecting to the conclusions.
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Colin Henderson @ 51
Thanks for the response. What I was trying (apparently not very clearly) was to point out that “900 papers” doesn’t mean much as an argument, especially if the papers don’t agree – it’s the science that’s important. That’s an appeal to numbers.
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The Lewandowsky issue is about a bunch of recent skeptic claims that “peer review is broken”, where Lewandowsky and others (including Hoegh-Guldberg) note that the people complaining are those who aren’t getting published in peer reviewed venues. This includes the Lindzen and Choi paper (oh, so many issues with that), several skeptic books and op-eds, etc..
I’ve looked at a few of these cases of supposed “broken peer review” or “pal review” – I haven’t seen (in my opinion, mind you) any well written articles with clear methods, good statistical analysis, and the like have been rejected contrary to good practice. If anyone has such a paper, please point it out. Otherwise, encourage those making such complaints to improve their writing and methodological skills.
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Well something has gone astray in the peer review of the lastest Mann co-authored paper.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/06/21/amac-upside-down-mann-lives-onin-kemp-et-al-2011/
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Actually, KR, there is a tried and true method of vetting scientific discoveries when it really matters if they are right or wrong — independent auditing of the science by a group that has no relationship with the discoverers. This is the method used to approve new drugs, certify new aircraft designs and materials, and also to certify large, critical software programs.
It is telling that climate scientists fight tooth and nail to prevent release of their data and programs to critics (they allow some friendly oversight, especially if they get to “help”). One wonders how their work would stand up to a real audit. (I predict it would fail spectacularly.)
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Colin @ 35, needs no apology in my opinion. It speaks EXACTLY to the problem of Argument from Authority.
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PS you did say “crappy” 🙂
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I wonder if our wise Lewandowsky can explain this statement in the IPCC’s 2007 report, concerning global warming:
That is a higher rate of decadal warming than has ever been observed in the temperature records, however, for the past decade or more there has actually been a slight cooling, or if you prefer a plateau. Just a simple point, but I wonder if he or Blimey or KR and the like can clarify it for us. It IS after all, a fundamental aspect of the catastrophic AGW hypothesis.
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Really the list of 900 papers need to be peer reviewed so we know if they are actually peer reviewed, and if they are are they actually skeptical (or does it require a skeptical interpretation of a paper that actually makes no such claims). My brief investigations certainly suggest that many of them are not “skeptical” at all.
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Ross @ 54
OK, I’m going to have to disagree with your comment. A paper by Kemp (Mann as author 4 of 6, i.e., minor contributor!) references a proxy reconstruction of temperature that actually agrees fairly well with 8-10 other such reconstructions using different sets of proxy data, and from that you think peer review has gone astray? It’s not even the point of the paper, but rather a separate reference that doesn’t affect the core of foraminifera based sea level reconstruction, since that was calibrated against tidal gauges. It’s a comparison graph, not primary data!
Demonstrate that there is an alternate, well supported temperature reconstruction, and point out the flaws in the 8-10 others that agree – then you might have something to talk about.
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KR
To take up your comment on how to improve the review process — I think all reviewer’s names and their comments should be published with the paper ( even if it is only with on-line version of the paper ). I know of at least one Journal that does this –they refer to it as “pre publication history”. It shows the reviewers comments , the author’s responses and alterations to the paper and any Editor’s comments that relevant. all the dates are included.
It is all out in the open –its great.
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Spot on Mark D
Had interesting discussion with an acquaintance of Tim Flumerys yesterday , whilst he admired some of his accomplishments in his field and had generally thought him a pretty nice chap , when it came to his climate research he was aghast he could support such boulder dust ( his word ) as this climate nonsense !
He and others had been distancing themselves from the debacle that was now becoming embarrassing ,!
One interesting point I gleaned from him was that he would be discredited in the long run and would find it impossible to find employment in the near future , anyone prostituting ( his word ) themselves in the name of science is not an scientist ,full stop , he however won’t speak out due to his observations of the way rational people are being treated …….That said, others are looking to salvage some scientific credibility and are seeking direct answers , what that meant I’m not sure as we were interrupted at that stage and he changed subject …… Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Trolls !
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Oh great here we have yet another “scientist” not trained in any “hard” science hurling mud at others who are trained in hard science. You get kind if sick of it after a while.
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True, numbers prove nothing and it is the science that is important. As noted earlier by me and not addressed in your response is that your reasoning is fallacious. If the science is soooo important than stick to it and admit that your above block quoted statement is illogical, an appeal to numbers.
http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/fallacies.html#Cum%20hoc%20ergo%20propter%20hoc
And Bernie Madoff got away with it for years but was finally caught!
Straw Man. Please visit the link in this comment regarding logical fallacies.
Did you read the Wegman report? If it (MBH98) was only a first attempt at such a reconstruction then why did the IPCC adopt it as their “banner” graph and why didn’t they disclose it as such? Why, after Mann was so thoroughly discredited did the IPCC airbrush it out of there assessment report? The same little coterie of
scientistsconspirators peer reviewed each others work and relied on each other reconstructions. Since Mann was wrong so was anyone else that based there work on his. Is the logic of my argument making sense to you? If Mann was wrong and the other scientists who reached the same conclusion either based there work on Mann’s or they all independently worked objectively to arrived at the same wrong conclusion. Considering the odds of that happening it seems reasonable that they colluded with each other. These climate scientist have a history, as proven by the climategate emails, of collusion as well as unethical, and probably criminal behavior.Your statement that all other reconstructions substantiate Mann is also untrue. When Briffa’s one tree outlier was removed and a more robust sample was used Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick they convincingly demonstrated that Briffa was wrong. The Wegman report agreed with M&M. Either Briffa committed academic fraud by including the outlier tree or he was an incompetent. Either way you look at it, it does not instill confidence in the process. Do you dispute the findings of the Wegman report?
Not necessary for me to respond as BobC already dealt with it so eloquently at #55.
Who in the hell are you to tell me what to do? ONE MORE TIME,NOBODY IS SAYING SCRAP THE PEER REVIEW PROCESS. WE ARE SAYING IT IS CORRUPT AND NEEDS TO BE REFORMED!
I never wrote that! You have fallaciously employed a Straw Man!
Come on KR, is this the best that you can do?
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KR, you avoided Eddy in this very important issue: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Phil Jones to Michael Mann, Climategate emails, July 8th 2004.
What does that say about “peer review”?
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Ross @ 61
“I think all reviewer’s names and their comments should be published with the paper”
That might be worthwhile. I would worry about authors b******g about their reviewers in public, which has happened recently, but that would certainly add some clarity.
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Correction: In my comment above I mentioned that Wegman sided with M&M against Briffa. The Wegman report sided with M&M against Mann.
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Eddy Aruda @ 64
“Did you read the Wegman report?”
Yes, I did. It’s a badly plagarized reworking of McIntyre, which has plenty of known problems of it’s own. The dozen or so “random” reconstructions presented were cherry-picked from the 1% best matches (out of what, 1000+ random series?) to the Mann graph, as were the “red noise” graphs. If you look at the McIntyre computer code, it’s completely clear that they filtered for matches, not representative samples. Absolutely horrible, not deserving of the term “science”. What a mess…
I’ve looked at multiple proxy reconstructions of temperature over the last 2000 years – Mann 1999 had some issues as a first pass, but Lundquist and Mann 2008, among lots of others, broadly agree. Inclusion or removal of the Briffa data changes the results by ~1% – period.
I’m always a bit appalled that people argue against Mann 1999, when it’s certainly not the state of the art at present. Science improves over time when done right – it’s worth arguing against the state of the art!
“ONE MORE TIME,NOBODY IS SAYING SCRAP THE PEER REVIEW PROCESS. WE ARE SAYING IT IS CORRUPT AND NEEDS TO BE REFORMED!”
How would you propose reforming it? I’m genuinely curious. Lewandowsky and others point out that some folks are complaining about the peer review process, that their papers aren’t getting published while “low quality” papers by the “Team” are – what solutions might there be?
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Mark D says
Perhaps you should ask “Poptech” since one of his “900 papers” uses them to for apparent evidence against AGW.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2000/00EO00076.shtml
Funny how “skeptics” rubbish one method, then try to use it themselves!
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A little off topic but CAGW loses in court, again. This time, it was not in the UK but in Montana, USA!!!
http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=87b74a936c723115dfa298cf3&id=9f3db141e5&e=a504314008
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Mark D. @ 65 – re: ‘Climategate’
Yes, they did state that. In private emails. Nobody has any evidence that they took any action other than complaining to one another – if such evidence was found it would be another matter entirely.
It says that they b*****d to each other.
I’m greatly pleased that my private emails, text messages, and especially comments at the local pub don’t get published – they often reflect my emotional reactions, and do not belong in a public, professional context. Given the very few cherry-picked quotes from the stolen emails that have been published, I’m rather surprised at the restraint shown; I expect a similar harvesting of my private emails would be rather colorful…
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Be warned! The last time I saw a troll tangle with Poptech it wasn’t pretty. Poptech had his ass for breakfast so many times I thought the amount of cooking was going to cause a natural gas shortage in OZ!
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No, they did it on the taxpayer’s dime! They were not at the pub. In some instances they may not have been at the office. So, if i talk about collusion, corrupting the peer review process, how to get others blackballed or terminated from their employment does it really matter if it is a “private email’? If I plan to rob a bank and my fellow conspirators and I plan it via “private” emails does that mean I wasn’t planning on doing something illegal?
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KR,
The emails weren’t stolen. If so, prove it!
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KR @ 71
I believe Nixon tried the same defense and it didn’t go very well for him.
Further, you might try to separate the moral “public life” from the “private life” but I do not excuse them for saying it and it clearly indicates a willingness to manipulate the peer system. To me it doesn’t matter if it was said in a confessional or pub. IT IS IN THE HEART OF THE SPEAKER!
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Before you can discuss or debate a theory you need a valid hypothesis.
Here’s how science is supposed to work.
A scientist comes to a realisation that a group of events or occurences appear to be liknked or are causing or influencing something and establishes a tentative explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation and experimentation. This is a hypothesis.
After conducting indepth research into the percieved links and causations and prleiminary experimentation or observation, a set of statements, including laws that form the foundation (eg laws of thermodynamics) and hypotheses, that explains a group of observations or phenomena in terms of those laws and hypotheses are defined and detailed. This is a theory.
Having progressed an hypothesis to a theory the scientist now designs, conducts and records the results of further observational or experimentation reigemes that investigate alternate or contributing factors that may effect the basis of the theory. The data is analysed to ascertain whether the theory is inherently correct of if there are levels of interaction or complexity previously unexamined. It is assumed that any science concerned with natural systems will always contain factors not fully understood and so assumptions of fact become part of the theory. The aim is to reduce the assumptions in the theory to the extent that the proportion of observable data far outweighs the assumes in a theory thus reducing the level of uncertainty. This is validation.
Once an acceptable level of validation is achieved and research papers published and reviewed preliminary acceptance acceptance of the theory is achieved. After the experimental methods used, the formulae and moddeling are released along with all assumptions and uncertainties examined, other scientific organisations conduct research on the theory in the attemps to disprove, enhance, expand or further validate the theory. This is co-operative research.
Broad acceptance, a consensus, is only achieved once a theory has been tested repeatedly on new data and has be validated against past know occurences and been use to accurately predict future occurences.
This is the scientific method.
At any stage in this process, the failure of predicted results to occur require the hypothesis to be scrapped or reworked.
The hypothesis that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are driving dangerous climate change stands of falls on the accurate predictions of future ocurrences and the ability to validate past occurences. The validated fact that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere lag rises in temperature, the inability to define the causes of climatic shifts pre-indudtrialisation and the singular failure of even the mildest of the cataclysmic predictions to occur, hand in hand with the abysmaly failure of various organisations to release the assumptions, uncertainties, data sets and source code of their moddeling or experimentation goes against the foundations of principled science and soundly puts the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis firmly in the domain of religon and faith based ideology.
Theology does not equal science.
Most important for Mr Lewandowsky, Peer Review is not part of the scientific process, it is part of the publication process, after all if we are to take his word for it such advances such as Newtons laws of motion, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and such things as antibiotics, radiation therapy, much of the foundations in engineering around fluid dynamics, structural engineering and flight were proven long before the Peer review process began as part of mainstream scientific publication in the mid 20th century.
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Blimey your link says this:
Apparently you are good at checking for “quality”…………
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Eddy Aruda @ 74
Stolen? Leaked from someone with an issue or grudge inside the organization (difficult, as it was only 6 people in the CRU)? The forensic analyses I’ve seen on the data indicate that it was stolen by outside hackers, as it was a fairly incomplete set of available data and emails, but it really doesn’t matter one way or another.
Only a tiny, hand-picked fraction of the emails were published (can you say “cherry-picked”?), chosen for the express purpose of embarrassing the CRU.
I suspect that if I wanted to, I could go through the (religious text of choice) and put together something horrible, just by choosing strongly stated phrases and passages out of context or from emotionally laden personal statements from one person to another. Couldn’t you?
—
Jones and Mann did not and do not, as far as anyone can establish in any way or form, interfere with peer reviewed publications. That’s the baseline, Eddy. If they do, well, lock and load. But despite personal expressions of frustration with what they perceived as bad science, they have not. Which I consider professional behavior.
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We’ve drifted pretty far off topic – Peer review.
Anyone have any methodological, statistical, or evidentiary issues with recently published papers they consider “pal review”? Or papers rejected due to the “Team” conspiring (shades of the Illuminati) against skeptical opinions without justification?
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manalive @19
Quite so. Not to mention that of these mythical thousands (well, 18,537 to be precise – if one considers the dense fog surrounding such central estimates) of so-called “peer-reviewed” papers cited in the IPCC’s AR 4, a significant number (5,587) were not peer-reviewed.
It’s also worth noting that, of the balance, 4,163 were cited in a chapter of which the author (or co-author) just happened to be an IPCC Coordinating Lead Author, Lead Author, Contributing Author or Review Editor:
Is the IPCC conflicted? Let us count the ways
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Mann’s hockey stick not only “disappeared” the MWP but the LIA, as well. The Godfather would be proud, I’m sure. The fact is, if Mann’s reconstruction is correct than the MWP and the LIA would be present, but they aren’t. As I wrote previously on the thread, Mann used the same methodology and techniques to create his hurricane reconstruction which was also disproven by empirical evidence and objective third party data. Perhaps you can cite a paper that agrees with this reconstruction of hurricane intensity and frequency?
If Mann’s reconstruction (MBH98) has been “corrected” why does it still not accurately represent the LIA and the MWP? Hundreds of peer reviewed papers show that show that the LIA and the MWP did occur and that it was global.
What say you KR?
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That is what you claimed earlier so produce the evidence (links, papers, etc.) or retract the statement!
And the US didn’t drop the A bomb on Japan to kill anyone, we were merely trying to provide some extra illumination! They not only interfered with the Peer review process but did everything in their power to squelch dissent. If you think otherwise I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale. Professional behavior? Geez, maybe you should rais your standards a bit?
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KR @ various ad nauseum.
You are just a troll here for feeding, aren’t you.
You keep asking for somebody to offer a workable alternative to the current so-called “peer-review” process (as it applied to “Climate Science”).
I gave it to you at #33, and you just ignored the alternative, and went on asking. Typical troll behaviour. So I will repeat it for you one last time. Then feed time is over.
The answer is for “Climate Scientists” to start writing papers that bear some passing semblance to actual “science”, with verifiable, reproducible, and/or falsifiable hypotheses, supported by full disclosure of data, methodologies, code etc, to allow others to attempt to verify, reproduce and/or falsify the claimed results.
Anything else is just a fancy “op-ed” opinion piece, and getting a couple of friends to agree with it is NOT “peer-review” in anything remotely like the scientific meaning of the term.
Even the basic CAGW concept of “rising atmospheric CO2 will cause runaway planetary warming” has never been presented in such a manner. Just lots of “coulds”, and “mights” and “maybes”.
Oh, and the mandatory “computer model”, with code and raw data with-held.
As for the much-shattered Mann hockey-stick graph: Simple question:
Do YOU believe the evidence supports the existence of an MWP and LIA?
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For those that havent seen this!..OH dear Dr Hansen 🙁 haha
http://www.atinstitute.org/ati-law-center-asks-court-to-force-nasa-to-produce-ethics-and-outside-employment-records-of-dr-james-hansen/
Also
http://skepticalswedishscientists.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/sun-sun-sun/
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Here is an interesting article for you to read KR. If this doesn’t illustrate how rigged the “peer reviewed” process is then I don’t know what does.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/a_climatology_conspiracy.html
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Eddy Aruda,
Further to your 81:
Concerning the peer review of MBH 99 (and similar hockey-team papers), and maybe to a lesser degree to peer review in general, it would seem that the reviewers tend to be elite members of a group. However, scientists from different fields, are probably just as capable of reviewing the data and perhaps making alternative considerations than those apparent in the elite group. If I as an engineer I had been asked to review MBH99, I’m sure, (if I could have stopped laughing), that I would have had plenty of suggestions that seemingly Mann et pals were unable to “see the wood from the trees“. For instance, one of the six silliest fundamentals is that in defence of the cancellation of the MWP and LIA, the argument was that these well proven historical events were confined to a relatively small area and of lesser significance than their proxies. However, the proxy data used were confined to an even smaller spatial sample AND most of them were also temporally incompetent. For instance, presumably their trees didn’t grow at night or in winter, and diurnal and seasonal temperatures (growth rates) are to be taken into account in any so-called global average. Most treemometers also tend to be in remote higher latitudes and/or altitudes where snowfall/rain/cloud cover etc is assumed to have been fairly constant in the past. Oh boy, it’s hard to know where to stop.
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I read some fantastic news … a solar industry expert said they were on track to produce solar PV panels that would produce electricity at the same cost as pulling it off the grid within 5 years:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/national/9688619/greens-independents-push-solar-cause/
This story has only upsides IMO. That means no more feed-in tariffs will be warranted within 5 years, so we can scrap the rort. It also means we can retire all those nasty coal-fired power stations and pop solar systems all over the country within 5 years. We will meet our Kyoto, UNIPCC … or whatever targets… heck the world will live happily ever after (except for the odd border skirmish – some people just have a hard time being nice to each other /shrug).
No need to blog about cabron (dioxide) taxes anymore … solar is here to save the day!
PS> I have a bridge for sale, with solar panels to power the electrics… any takers?
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*Crickets*
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Heh. Stephan Lewandowsky.
The guy who got pwned by Alene Composta.
Now he’s denying data because he doesn’t like it.
Still if he can’t pick a hoax, I guess recognising reality is a bit challenging.
Good work Jo.
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Jannes Kleintje @ 10:
Sorry Jannes, I thumbs downed you before I realised you were doing satire. I would take it back if I could 🙂
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@ KR
Your hero Mike Mann has published a new paper on sea level rises using proxy data. Would you believe that the paper shows what somewhat resembles a hockey stick with recent rapid rises in sea level? Sadly, as with his hurricane reconstruction, it flies in the face of empirical data. But hey, why let empirical data get in the way of the biggest scam ever foisted upon the human race?!
See http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/06/sea-level-hockey-stick.html Lubos Motl is spot on!
What say you KR?
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Eddy Aruda: “Poptech had his ass for breakfast so many times”
Personally, and this is no judgement on Poptech, but I prefer Weetbix.
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That true believers put their faith in peer reviewed climate science of the alarmist variety and hold “peer reviewed” up as proof of the alarmist hypothesis is very telling.
The only conclusion one can draw from that gesture is that they like the alarmists reviewed and their alarmist peers haven’t any substantial scientific evidence to offer for what at best is an hypothesis based on circumstantial evidence.
What skeptics are asking for is not an imagined authority but a scientific explanation backed up by hard empirical evidence.
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Mark D. says “Apparently you are good at checking for “quality”…………”
LOL. That’s POPTECH’s list, not mine. 😉
Perhaps that should be another item as to why his list is crap.
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@KR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0sftrzOQ_Y&feature=related
Judging from your approach to science, it’s no wonder we won’t give you 20 bucks.
Pointman
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As I have noted on other threads on this site trolls avoid questions and then disappear only to return later as if nothing happened. A troll is second cousin to the artful dodger.
Allow me to illustrate!
KR Responds
Then, after getting several excellent questions from various commenters which he studiously avoids he ends with
Gee wiz KR, maybe that is why people tend to think you are a troll? Answer the questions put to you or lose the argument by default!
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LIAR! What I wrote was:
Are you that obtuse or are you out of medicine? Do you enjoy embarrassing yourself?
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@ Blimey
Anything intelligent or meaningful to say?
Que stupid response from the dumbest troll to visit this site in a month of Mondays.
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The debate is settled. “Science” is decided by toting up the number of published, peer-reviewed papers.
http://theconversation.edu.au/whos-your-expert-the-difference-between-peer-review-and-rhetoric-1550
It must be true – Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said so. Yes, the same Ove H who has been predicting the demise of the Great Barrier Reef over and over these past twenty years – and all THOSE papers were “peer-reviewed” too.
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From the new CSIRO website showing readings from Cape Grim.
Dr.Paul Fraser from CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric research.
“The measurements testify to a steady rise in carbon dioxide concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere, mainly caused by the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation,” he says. “The graphs we’ve made available online will enable people to examine the evidence about the major driver of recent climate change.”
The major driver of recent climate change? No ifs no buts! What about bringing a legal action against Dr.Fraser to have him prove his unequivocal claim in Court? I would gladly contribute to any fund towards such an action! Any legal eagles in the house?
http://www.csiro.au.news/Record-grenhouse-gas-levels.html
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Keith H @ 99
Ah yes, the new CSIRO site.
Unfortunately Professor Fraser “forgot” to include temperature so we could all “see for ourselves” the
Fortunately Professor Sinclair Davidson has corrected that oversight.
http://catallaxyfiles.com/files/2011/06/Make-up-your-own-mind.jpg
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Sorry. Left out the extra ‘e’ in greenhouse in my 99 Post.
http://www.csiro.au.news/Record-greenhouse-gas-levels.html
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Keith H; there’s a disclaimer see here
http://www.csiro.au/greenhouse-gases/
4.Disclaimer
If you use or download any Content from this site you accept all risks and responsibility for losses, damages, costs and other consequences resulting directly or indirectly from using the Content.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, CSIRO excludes any and all liability to any person for any consequences, including but not limited to all losses, damages, costs, expenses and any other compensation, arising directly or indirectly from using the Content.
Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the Content on this site, however CSIRO does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the Content and, to the extent permitted by law, does not guarantee or make any express or implied representation regarding the accuracy, reliability, correctness, fitness for use for any purpose whatsoever of the Content. Any use and/or interpretation of the Content is done so entirely at the user’s own risk.
That’s the end of the disclaimer; the Govt and its agencies are immune from legal action so far as I can see
Willing to be corrected
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Eddy in 96. Ok so he quoted only one bit of what you said, but the whole post does not change the context in that so and so had somone’s ass for breakfast.
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val majkus @ 102.
Yes val, I commented on 20/6/11 on the “get out” clauses and I’m sure you’re right. I knew it was a faint hope.
I just wonder if any of these CSIRO grants gravy-train scientists ever get a slight twinge of conscience when unequivocally telling us all what we should do based on their “evidence” but then hiding behind disclaimers like this on their site:
“•should not be relied upon as the basis for doing or failing to do something”. (Such as imposing a useless, destructive carbon tax?).
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Val @ 102 and Keith @ 104
When the dying starts in earnest over the next couple of years (from the cold) and the public start to scream for blood by way of trials for crimes against humanity, I have a feeling these “product disclaimers” tacked onto the end of what are supposed to be “scientific reports” will not carry much weight.
The “useless fools” responsible seem to miss the point that they are, in fact, “dual purpose” useful fools.
For the present they serve the purpose of furthering their paymasters’ political agenda, and when the time comes, they will provide the perfect scapegoat.
I can just see Gillard (or Abbott) making the following speech now:
Of course, the various CSIRO and BoM scientists, the university professors and the journalists involved would undoubtedly have a different point of view. However, since they will all, at the time, be in held in custody, without charge, and without access to legal representation, under any one of several “counter-terrorism” laws passed over the few years, there will be stuff-all they can do about it.
It’s a pity they don’t see that.
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Kieth@104
Did you check my post at 62
Chap I was talking to not affected , however two of his friends rely on grant money !
That’s my understanding of their position ,they do not wish to be guilty by association ,even though their research has nothing to do with climate voodoo !!!
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“KR”,”Blimey”,
Please quote a reference to even one, just one, Peer Reviewed Scientific Paper, which PROVES, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that human beings and carbon Dioxide (Plant Food), are/is causing global warming.
PS Computer Models do not constitute either Proof or Evidence.
Since you both have all the Evidence and Proof then go to “The Punch” and claim the $10,000 by winning their global warming challenge !!
http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/10k-for-the-first-person-to-prove-weve-caused-climate-change/
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Damian: Psst, make that:
Please quote a reference to even one, just one, Peer Reviewed Scientific Paper, which supports
beyond a shadow of a doubtthe idea that human emissions of carbon dioxide (aka Plant Food), are causing significant global warming.Nothing will prove anything much beyond a shadow of a doubt in a highly complicated field like this.
We just want some evidence that strongly, reasonably supports it.
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Eddy, so good to see you are back 🙂
Jo
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Raven @ 106
Your 62 post is further indication of the sad state of science since becoming so politicised by the UN and compliant governments.
There must be many ethical scientists in the same position you described. It is significant that many older scientists are speaking out immediately they retire and are free of such constraints.
The scientists I fear for are the young ones trying to make their way in such a toxic professional environment. As Professor Vincent Courtillot inferred in his video highlighted in Jo’s post on 31/3/11, younger scientists wouldn’t get funding or a job if they worked on science which did not conform with the AGW theory.
Those who instigated the AGW hysteria have a lot to answer for!
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Memoryvault @98
Concerning the timorous Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, I don’t know much about him, but I was not much impressed by his scientific argument or rationality when watching a BBC TV doco; something about human threats in the ocean ecosystems. I actually thought it was surprisingly rational about over-fishing and stuff until dear ol’ Ove came on towards the end. He demonstrated, with great flair, how, shock and horror, when he blew air from his lungs through a tube into a container of sea water, that the pH dropped to just below 8, which of course is still rather alkaline. (Not acidic, as alarmists prefer to imply). There! That is why the oceans are dying, proof positive!
Anthony Watts also has an endearing memory of him when Anthony toured Oz, not long ago, as follows:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/15/formal-complaints-against-professor-ove-hoegh-guldberg/
Do taxpayers fund this guy?
Do you remember that some years ago, a modest Chinese (?) freighter did a naughty, and tried to take a shortcut through the reef, and ran aground. A team of scientists descended on the scene to “repair the damage”, and the shipping company had to pay the bill of $40,000.(?) I think the reef is some 2,000 Km long! Compare with the damage caused by natural storms over comparatively vast areas! Wasn’t the crown-of-thorns starfish going to destroy the reef some time back, and is there not indigenous history of fishermen describing coral bleaching long before CO2 got naughty? And, the reef recovers and, and……..
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If I was attempting to sell a marginal idea like mankind causing the world to warm up, I’d employ a consummate spin doctor with a history of persuading the masses, such as Al Gore, and I’d find a psychologist who knows how the average mind works, so he could design a format for delivering the information and combatting opposition. Any scientific proposal is going to attract criticism, -that’s part of the process.
When I studied psychology and sociology it was evident that in these “sciences”, facts were “half-cousins” to the facts we dealt with in physics and chemistry. It takes a lot to earn a psych degree but it is perhaps not relevant to climate.
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Behavioral science is not called BS for nothing!
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Eddy Aruda: says “Anything intelligent or meaningful to say? Que stupid response from the dumbest troll to visit this site in a month of Mondays.”
Oh so elegantly spoken Eddie; who’s thoughts let us know exactly where his head is at. the “ass” man. Let me quote thee once more, in full. “Poptech had his ass for breakfast so many times I thought the amount of cooking was going to cause a natural gas shortage in OZ!”
I’ll just wait for you to post again. Cue the embarrassment.
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Joanne Nova: says “Dear Stephan, deny this: 900 papers that support skeptics. What is it about these hundreds of papers published in Nature, Science, GRL, PNAS, and Journal of Climate that you find impossible to acknowledge?”
One minute you’re promoting how impossible it is for anti-AGW peer-review science to get to be published -> http://joannenova.com.au/2011/06/when-top-scientists-take-2-years-to-publish-its-time-to-give-up-on-old-peer-review/
Now you’re telling us there are 900 papers!!
That’s the thing I find most stupid about your arguments. The number of times you guys contradict yourself in the urgent rush to deny all AGW science is the one thing that strikes me as insanely odd.
In your list there are papers that try to deny the existence of the greehouse effect, then there are those that readily accept it. You support both in your desire to have a great number of “papers” but fail to absorb, or simply wish to ignore the stupidy of such an act.
That’s in stark contrast the IPCC report in which the papers do not contradict each other. There’s no need to cherry pick bits out of one report and ignore the rest of it. The science works, your cherry picked list of 900 do not.
Joanne Nova: says “Please quote a reference to even one, just one, Peer Reviewed Scientific Paper, which supports beyond a shadow of a doubt the idea that human emissions of carbon dioxide (aka Plant Food), are causing significant global warming.”
[readers please note this is a quote of Damian not Joanne] ED
Oh, back to that game hey.
PS: Joanne Nova. We’re STILL waiting for your explanation of the magical “recovery from little ice age” force, post 15 -> http://joannenova.com.au/2011/05/climate-scientists-who-were-right-30-years-ago/
PPS: Joanne Nova. We’re STILL waiting for your confirmation that your think “McKitrick, McIntyre, and Herman 2010” is the magic bullet that kills AGW as I think you claim in post 134 -> http://joannenova.com.au/2011/05/the-worst-cookbook-interview-ever/
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Jo,
Carbon itself does not produce heat. It is a by product of combining elements and changing their structure through igniting these elements generating heat and by-product material.
Interesting that heat is NOT followed. Just CO2 and in labs put under different types of radiation.
A lab misses many points of what is actually happening on the planet from different gases mixing, heights of gases laying out in the atmosphere, winds, evaporation, etc, etc, etc.
So far science has missed that the mass density of the planet has changed as it ages with escaping gases that under pressure added weight to this planet. They missed the interesting connecting of all the planets except 3 are in sequence with the sun rotation even though a vacuum separates them. This then changes what gravity must be as motion of being moved by the suns magnetic field has a role.
Science believes not a single drop of water vapor has escaped yet planets that have had water are dry. Interesting when a meteor or debris hit the atmosphere that we have not studied the splash effect of the atmosphere.
Just trying to open your mind that with a single minded focus on garbage science, many interesting points of science have been missed and will be as the peer-review is not about new science, just what currently is chosen as science.
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Bob_FJ@111
Jo gives the URL(at head of thread)to Ove’s embarrassing attempt to finger some Aussie skeptics, in his “Who’s your Expert…..?”
Of course apart from this biologist being an ocean acidification crackpot alarmist he’s about as ignorant of what’s involved in assembling credible proof for anthropogenic climate change as is Tim Flannery or Karoly or Steffen etc etc.
If you check Ove’s expert “Climate Scientists” you will find that possibly not one of the easily forgotten names is a climate scientist but like Ove an aggrieved (with humankind’s activities) marine biologist or something or other but not any within a bull’s roar of being a respected climate scientist. Ove’s plea to us all is in effect, please… please do as I do. Believe everything a peer reviewed alarmist scientist says because they are in fact gods and who do you think you are, you miserable little peer(less)person.
The most enjoyable parts are the responses from Ove’s arse licking cronies for a good laugh and more so Ove’s nonsense being torn apart by a few skeptics, who don’t even need to get out of first gear to deal with Ove in the comments section.
http://theconversation.edu.au/whos-your-expert-the-difference-between-peer-review-and-rhetoric-1550
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What I want to read from our present “believer” guests is what evidence in the real world would it take to change their minds. Models and convoluted theories are not acceptable as evidence.
Attempts to turn the question back on us will be taken as admission of falsification. It is not up to us to provide an alternative hypothesis when the present “warming” (which ceased after the ’98 super El Nino) falls within the range of previously observed changes. They know all too well that over 9,000 of the past 10,500 since the Holocene began have been warmer than the present.
Protestations of Jones being cleared by several enquiries are laughable. Enquiries where no inconvenient witnesses are called and no inconvenient questions are asked. Get real!
And by the way. Don’t be bashful KR. Post your words re Wegman and McIntyre (#68) at Climate Audit and have it out there. But you won’t, will you?
PS:I like to shove this in the noses of “believers”.
OTTMAR EDENHOFER (IPCC WGIII): First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.
Anyone who wants to align align themselves with “scientists” like this is free to do so.
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It is the saddest fact of the sorry CAGW fallacy that the entire course of human progress has gone into complete reverse, a devolution caused directly by staring into at the abyss of a never ending sequence of manufactured mythical pseudo-catastrophes. Trolls like Blimey and KR act as enthusiastic ushers and urgers for we poor lemmings as we rush headlong for the cliff, sailing over the edge and plunging headlong into the rocks below in a tangled bloody wreckage, the corpses of a once promising humanity. Gone is scientific curiosity, wonder at the glories of the universe, optimism for the future, desire and ambition for self improvement and enlightenment. Our spiritualism and our thirst for knowledge has been eviscerated by these hand wringers and bedwetters who seem only capable of encouraging the belief among their fellow humanity in their culpability in events on a global and cosmic scale that is several orders of magnitude beyond human capacity.
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Eddy Aruda:
I will second that. But next time, let us know before you go walkabout fella.
The troll count is way up on this thread – somebody or something has touched a raw nerve – they are real twitchy today.
Perhaps it is all to do with the recent peer reviewed and corroborating papers that show the sun is moving into a significantly cooler phase that is predicted to last for at least a decade or two.
That is the sort of news that they do not want to hear. It doesn’t much matter what the atmospheric energy budget says, if the source input goes down then the whole anthropogenic dimension to the climate change argument is stuffed. If the climate gets significantly colder due to a quiet sun, then it is reasonable to propose that the climate gets warmer when it is more active. No human intervention required in that scenario.
So, if this comes to pass, the climate “scientists” will be forced to include solar variations into their models. Watching them do that using the mathematics of fluid dynamics will be kinda interesting. I can hardly wait.
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Hi Bob@111
Would that be like …. The years 1815 to 1819 or so when the earth managed a miraculous recovery from Catastrophic global cooling due to the eruption of Mt Tambora .
Our planet is an extremely resilient place don’t you think ? Let’s hope Mt Puyehue doesn’t take a leaf out of Tamboras book ! Then we will need real scientists with real answers . 🙂
Cheers Raven
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Hi Rereke @120
The stench of panic is overwhelming me .Looks like they’ve got nothing and are all out of ideas !
🙂
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Mark @ 118
While I am in total agreement with the thrust of your post I do believe it is time we stopped using terms such as “believers” to describe these people. It confers a thin veil of completely unearned acceptability on them – like one ascribes to a noisy but harmless religious fanatic.
These people are not just arm-chair fanatics; – let us count the tote:
Several million already dead due to the prevention of use of DDT in malaria-inflicted countries;
Several million dead due to the prevention of use of cheap mass-produced energy (fossil fuels);
Several million more dead due to the diversion of arable land to the production of biofuels.
These are just the tip of the iceberg – and our fanatics haven’t even started in earnest yet.
The world is about to go into an entirely predictable and predicted prolonged cooling period.
It does so bereft of energy-producing capacity due entirely to these people’s attitude to energy generation;
It does so bereft of any surplus food production due entirely to these people’s attitude to biofuels;
It does so in a bankrupt economy due solely to the efforts of their partners in crime in the banking sector (eg Goldman Sachs).
The end result is that hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion or so, people are going to die, and the truth is, there is stuff-all we can do about it now.
It is time to put aside the niceties and start calling these people exactly what they are – mass-murderers.
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Hey Blimey, can’t you spell? @115:
Yes I deny the greehouse effect but if you can find a peer reviewed paper on the greehouse effect provide a link.
also I ignore stupidy at every opportunity
How embarrassing……..
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OMFG …..just watched the reich marshal for govt scientists ( chump) basically said he’d have to go away and study weather trees could help the earth out , but he’ll get back to us on that one , apart from spewing more lies about a couple of degrees c check this bastards eyes out , you can always tell a deceitful liar by his eye movement and angles chosen . This new minister for govt propaganda does not even believe his own lies ,evil, evil
Bag of hot air ! Have to keep an eye on this one could have been junior vice president of the Spanish inquisition in a past life .
Can anyone post a link or a transcript to lateline for all those that may have missed the show or act would be a better description .
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Raven @125
I noticed that whilst he said Lord Monckton has a right to speak he was upfront about criticising him for calling his mate Garnault a facist. Safe to assume, seeing he said nothing about it, that he has no problem with skeptics being called deniers and paid up shills of big oil. I also note that not once did he pull Jones up for saying skeptics deny climate change is happening when in fact what we deny is that anthropogenic CO2 is driving climate change outside of normal variance. Also noted that for him it appears that despite his protestations that its about evidence his main argument for his belief is that more climate scientists believe in it than don’t, what a surprise, Gillard appoints another science by concensus advocate as chief scientist.
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Winston @ 119
Well spoken, Sir! (Or should I say Lord?)
Cheers,
Speedy.
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Eddy Aruda @ 95
I don’t have a lot of free time today, although I’ll try to get back to this discussion tomorrow – but…
Well, Eddy, I do try to discuss real issues. But “that “Climate Science”, together with its fatally-flawed “pal-review” process, has more in common with prophecy, alchemy, soothsaying, astrology and tea-leaf reading than it does with the “real” sciences” is a rant, not an issue, so if that’s the ‘question’ you think I didn’t address, I’ll wait for an actual issue.
Either that, or you didn’t like my reply about the FOI and data access, which I can’t do much about.
—
A couple of people have suggested publishing named reviewers and all reviews along with the papers – that’s not a bad idea, although I can see a lot of unpleasantness over it. Authors treat their works like their children, and get quite emotional about it, and in cases where the reviewers were public there have been some dustups accordingly. But the idea certainly has some merit.
“Review boards” were also suggested – who’s on the boards? Also, there are a lot of papers published, which already have a 6-18 month lead time; I suspect this might bog. Also, this means treating climate science differently than any other field of science. I don’t (personally) believe that’s appropriate, but I’ll readily note that not everyone (ahem) agrees.
—
As to “troll” – naturally, I don’t consider myself as such. I see multiple iterations of (what I consider) bad science, disproved hypotheses, lousy statistics, and argument by emotion put forth by bloggers, Emeritus faculty, lobbying groups, and the occasional experienced scientist in op-eds, books, and minor journals, accompanied by claims of biased peer review keeping them out of the mainstream literature – I just get really tired of it.
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Take a group of people who want to understand something. One of them comes up with an idea, and they all talk about it. After a while, they either accept or reject the idea. Or, most likely, they recognise that the idea has merit, but is not the whole story. Then someone else contributes their work for assessment by the group. And so it goes. Over time the groups understanding advances.
Clearly if you are part of this group, you would welcome others from outside to join, provided they took the time and effort to get up to speed on what the group had already done. Outsiders who attempt to join the group with the sole purpose of undermining the groups work will not be welcome. Indeed, one would expect a healthy skepticism of any new group member, until it became obvious that they understood the groups existing body of work, and that they were genuinely interested in furthering the work and helping improve the groups understanding.
This doesn’t mean its all hugs and kisses. People have egos and will strongly put their points, and attack those with which they disagree.
Peer review is a formalised version of the process outlined above.
Unfortunately the persistent attacks on climate science seems to have polarised science. The bulk of climate scientists are more wary and skeptical of the motives of others than they should have to be.
The strident, ideologically motivated, and largely unjustified criticism of climate scientists on this and other denialist blogs does not help at all.
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Mark @118
Talking about acidification of the oceans, I went to pick up my nephew after soccer training today, he was asking their gr9 “Science” teacher, looked all of 21yrs old about things she had told the class. Mainly that we are killing the oceans by pumping carbon pollution into the air and driving the temperature of the planet up.
Now, this young fellow is a bit of a science nut & bookworm, so he asks this bint, Don’t the oceans become more acidic as they absorb more CO2? Yes she says, and the more carbon pollution we produce the more acidic the oceans become. So he asks, doesn’t all water, fresh and marine release stored CO2 as it warms? So how can the oceans become more acidic by warming and releasing absorbed CO2?
I couldn’t help myself, gave him a pat on the back and said, good lad, you just keep thinking for yourself and asking questions and you’ll do alright.
She of course objected sayin the interaction isn’t that simple.
“Of course it isn’t.” I answered, “Just like explaining changes in any complex, chaotic and fundamentally dynamic natural system of which we have little true understanding isn’t simple, you know, like global climate… now lets get out of here kiddo before her head explodes.”
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John Brooks @129
Better get that foot wound looked at.
Hypocricy and idiocy writ large in one line.
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KR @ 128
I told you feeding time for trolls was over.
Since you are obviously not prepared to answer the questions posed at posts #33 and 83# you have just come back for another “feed” and are only entitled to contempt.
You contribute nothing here – so p^ss off.
Blimey @ 129
Ditto above.
Both of you – go read my post at #123.
Don’t you mass-murdering fools understand this is the internet and EVERYTHING you post is recorded for posterity?
“Useful fools” should be bad enough, but you two seem to be striving for an insanity defence.
It won’t work.
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John Brookes et al.
Climategate.
Cheers,
Speedy
XXXOX
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At Mattb 103
Thank you for the correction, Isee your point. Still, Blimey is a troll who takes up valuable oxygen that someone else could be breathing. You have heard of the latest green oxygen scare, haven’t you? 😉
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Speedy: Climategate? Don’t be stupid.
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To quote those immortal words of Phil Jones to Michael Mann:
Truth is a pretty malleable commodity in the hands of these guys.
Sweet dreams,
Speedy.
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The ignorance of these fools is astounding. This idiot is whining about peer review and then does not fact check himself. Lefties!
The Deep Water Horizon was the FIFTH largest oil spill in history, and much much MUCH smaller than numbers one and two. One three hundredths the size of the largest. The BP spill was less than 5 million barrels, whereas mumbers one and two were over 1 BILLION and 50 million barrels respectively and possibly as high as 1.5 BILLION and 100 million.
Is there any fact a lefty cannot screw up?
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Further to my rave about chump and to further the point of creating mass delusion , I’m reminded of a conversation I read read years ago between General Wilhelm Burgdorf and General Feldmarschall Kesselring in Italy during WW2 , Kesselring was protesting his disbelief they would get away with atrocities the Nazis were committing , whereas Burgdorf replied .” The numbers are too great for them to really shock anyone , the ordinary person will be incapable of grasping them …. In two days in Russia we shot 34,000…. In Poland we are executing around 5,000 daily……in the death camps since 1940 we have killed 2 million ….the world has heard these ghastly figures long ago , to the average person the journalists who have written about them are liars .but if instead we had executed 800 children and not 150,000 the world would have raised an outcry , because 800 is a figure people can grasp ” ………. I don’t think it was historically accurate but it’s a first class demonstration in how propaganda functions .
Makes one think …. No matter how you twist it it’s all about numbers and denial … Don’t know what you think but the above gives me the same feeling as listening to our recently appointed commissar of science !!The following another of Burgdorfs comments ( who does this remind you of )
We are a national socialist state. We shrink from nothing in order to reach our goal
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Paul @ 126
Mmmmmmmm … Yes …. Good balanced interview …….
Gets the puke flowing . 🙂
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STRAW MAN! What Jo wrote Wasn’t, as you lie, impossible to get published but:
Here is a little exercise for that tiny two watt brain of yours, if the peer review process is rigged then there should be a lot more skeptical papers published, right? Can your teeny tiny brain handle that?
You implied that Jo is stupid? That shows what an imbecilic moron you truly are. You remind me of a primordial slime that oozes out from under a leaky garbage bag. The only solution for you is a double strength hefty bag and a conveniently located garbage dump. Hell, you are such a low lifer that you wouldn’t even qualify for the recycle bin! Speaking of a que, you do know where you can stuff it, don’t you? Or, are you so stupid that I have to lay that out for you, as well?
Of course they don’t contradict each other! The IPCC isn’t interested in a meaningful search for the truth but is instead engaged in promoting a failed hypothesis. Anyone who tries to get a skeptical paper published will meet stiff resistance. See my link at #85.The fact that there is no disagreement should be a red flag to any person of reasonable intelligence which, of course, excludes you Blimey.
A list of 900 papers is not cherry picking. When the IPCC assembled a list of papers were they “cherry picking”? Speaking of science, cite the evidence!
This isn’t a game, pal! Millions of lives hang in the balance.
Regarding your “requests” of Jo, be careful what you wish for, you just might get it!
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Unfortunately, in Trollville tomorrow never comes! If you got the time to comment here cite papers, provide links, etc. Do it right or don’t do it at all. As my dearly departed father once said, “Sh*t or get off the pot!
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@ John Brooks
I think your comment at # 129 needs a little “proofing”! Allow me to help. I will “embolden” the changes I think will help.
Take a group of people who want to
understand somethingrip off the taxpayer. One of them comes up withan ideaa hypothesis , and they alltalk about itconspire to rip off the taxpayer because without funding they would have to get real jobs. After a while, they either accept or reject the ideathey become addicted to the money power and prestige.Or,mMost likely, they recognise that theideahypothesis has been falsified and has no merit, but isnot the wholea story fabricated from whole cloth. Then someone else contributes their work for assessment by the group. If it is a skeptical paper they do everything they can to prevent it from being published as it would endanger their tax funded gravy train. And so it goes. Over time the groupsunderstanding advancesgrow in number as liberal journalist sell the hype and politicians gain more power and money through scams such as cap and trade and carbon taxes.Clearly if you are part of this group, you would welcome others from outside to join, provided they took the time and effort to get up to speed on what the group had already done. Once they grasp that they will be dead for years before the fraud is proven they jump on board to bleed the taxpayer even further.
OutsidersSkeptics who attempt tojoinexpose the group with the sole purpose ofundermining the groups workbringing the truth to light will not be welcome. Indeed, one would expect a healthy skepticism of any new group member, until it became obvious that they understood the groups existing body of work and how much money they could scam the taxpayer for, and that they were genuinely interested in furthering the work and helping improve the groupsunderstandingability to stifle dissent.This doesn’t mean its all hugs and kisses.
People have egosThese scam artists will do anything to destroy anyone who challenges the orthodoxy and endangers the gravy train and willstrongly put their pointshave their lapdogs in the liberal media, andviciously attack those with which they disagree.Peer review is a formalised version of the process outlined above.
Unfortunately the persistent attacks on
climate scienceskeptics seems to havepolarisedbackfired on thesesciencecriminals. The bulk of climate scientists aremore wary and skeptical of the motives of others than they should have to bestill milking this scam but the smart ones are beginning to jump ship.The strident, ideologically motivated, and largely unjustified criticism
ofby climate scientists of skeptics on this and otherdenialistblogs run by people dedicated to the truth and often working pro bono, usually through their surrogates in the media does not help at all.Fortunately, the public is becoming more aware of this scam because it is starting to hit them in the wallet. It is just a matter of time before this scam fades away. The only real question is: will it be swept under the carpet or will those responsible be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Your welcome, John!
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@Rereke and Jo
Thanks for your kind words. It is great to be healthy again and I always enjoy this site and the friends I have made through it!
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The CSIRO pulled its sponsorship of the conference because of Lord Monckton’s presence at the forum, which examines scientific issues around exploration and mining, according to the Seven Network.
Geee are they sure it didn’t have something to do with …oh the climate ,,
10
memoryvault @ 132
I read both of your referenced posts – I didn’t see much worth responding to. @33 is simply a rant, not a set of questions. I’ve read a lot of climate papers, and they are (gasp) actually science – hypotheses, evidence, uncertainty ranges, relationships to previous work, repeatable and testable data, etc.. The state of raw data disclosure has improved over the last 15 years, largely due to skeptical pressure, which is good. As to your opinions, I disagree, but there’s really no point in arguing a rant. You did not propose any concrete solutions to any issues with peer review, simply bad-mouthing existing work on grounds I find unsupportable.
@83 contains much the same. As to few questions at the end of that post: “rising atmospheric CO2 will cause runaway planetary warming” is a strawman argument – nobody is seriously suggesting that. Positive feedbacks can amplify warming, but “runaway” is a boogy-man raised by skeptics. As to the MWP and LIA – yep, they certainly occurred, and they show up in the more recent temperature reconstructions. The MWP appears to have been slightly cooler than now, and may have been regional – we don’t have great proxies from the Southern Hemisphere for then. Both support a moderate (but not low) amount of climate sensitivity to forcings. So – any other off topic questions?
—
Eddy Aruda @ 85
I’m responding as I have time – real life often interferes with the enjoyment of the interwebs, sad to say.
I thought I had remembered the Douglass, Christie, Pearson, and Singer paper; looking back at it, that’s an interesting and reasonably written paper on a very narrow topic covering uncertainties in particular measurements. In detail, I feel there’s over-reliance on the accuracy of some measurements that isn’t justified, leading to much stronger and different conclusions than I think are justified – it could use some rewriting. But I’ve certainly seen worse.
The issue was that right after publication of DCPS the authors (Singer in particular) went on the media warpath claiming that their paper had invalidated all of climate science. That conclusion was not justified by the paper, and represented a serious PR push unsupported by the science.
While I have not personally discussed this with the Santer et al writers, I suspect responding to the overblown media claims was their primary motivation in a fast and highly critical response.
—
Damian Allen @ 107
“Please quote a reference to even one, just one, Peer Reviewed Scientific Paper, which PROVES, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that human beings and carbon Dioxide (Plant Food), are/is causing global warming.”
How about a bunch of them? I would suggest The Discovery of Global Warming, which has a good overview and plenty of references on each detail.
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Jo Nova @ 108
“Please quote a reference to even one, just one, Peer Reviewed Scientific Paper, which supports the idea that human emissions of carbon dioxide (aka Plant Food), are causing significant global warming.”
Again, I would refer you to The Discovery of Global Warming, which contains numerous references along with an excellent overview of the development of the the theory.
A single paper, quite frankly, probably won’t cover everything: radiative physics of CO2, spectroscopy data on various GHG’s, tracking of GHG levels, isotopic attribution and mass balance, temperature records, top of atmosphere and surface IR changes, etc., all add up as evidence that our CO2 contributions are significantly warming the planet.
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Eddy Aruda @ 90
Regarding the recent Kemp et al (including Mann as one of 6 authors), it’s actually a pretty interesting paper – using foraminifera species ratios to establish sea depths, back-correct for isostatic rebound, and use that to calculate historic sea levels. That’s followed with demonstrating the correspondence to various temperature reconstructions, considering the causal link of warmer -> more melting and sea rise, and they show considerable agreement between sea rise rate and temperature. There are uncertainties regarding exact isostatic and non-isostatic sea level changes at that location, but I believe the included error bars for depth show that pretty clearly.
Foraminifera/sea level proxies have been used for quite some time by multiple researchers – I don’t see anything methodologically wrong with this paper.
It’s my impression that the blogosphere is very active on this one because (1) it’s supporting evidence for global warming, and (2) it’s supporting evidence linked to Mann, a constant target for skeptics – an Ad hominem dismissal of the work. Not because of any actual scientific errors in the paper, mind you…
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Eddy Aruda @ 90, memoryvault
Note that the Kemp paper on sea level rise, which they show corresponds to temperature records, includes changes related to the ~1500 MWP and the LIA.
If the image didn’t come through (it doesn’t show on preview), a link to a copy is: http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/North_Carolina_SLR_1024.jpg
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KR
The Kemp paper came out with the usual dire warnings in the PR such as :
“Sea-level rise is a potentially disastrous outcome of climate change, as rising temperatures melt land-based ice and warm ocean waters,” Horton said.
“Scenarios of future rise are dependent upon understanding the response of sea level to climate changes. Accurate estimates of past sea-level variability provide a context for such projections,” Kemp said.
But this bit of common sense from a local on WUWT would seem to put alot doubt on the work :
Wade says:
June 20, 2011 at 12:35 pm
As a resident of North Carolina and a love of the barrier islands (the Outer Banks), I have to cry foul.
Why was the shifting sands of the North Carolina chosen? The barrier islands are formed because of the Gulf Stream current. That means they didn’t exist at one time. The sands are never, ever still and new inlets are being formed all the time. Take a drive on NC highway 12 and see for yourself. There is an inlet called Oregon Inlet which was formed after a hurricane. (It is named after a ship that went through the newly formed inlet.) The sand is so unsteady there that our tax dollars go to keep Oregon Inlet an inlet to save time for commercial ships. The bridge that goes over Oregon Inlet, the Bonner Bridge, is rated a 2 out 10 in the quality of bridges. It is impossible to keep it in good shape because of the constant shifting sand.
My point in all this is simple. Blackbeard the pirate didn’t hide off North Carolina because of the weather. He hid there because the sands are always shifting. North Carolina, like Florida, is a hurricane magnet. Furthermore, North Carolina also gets Nor’easters. Both of these cause tremendous amounts of erosion. The tidal gauge measurements aren’t exactly the most reliable on this earth. I will bet money North Carolina was chosen, and not some other state or provence just because it would deliver the desired results.
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So KR, you’ve found a paper measuring the sea level on the shifting beaches of N. Carolina and think that proves, not only GW but AGW?
Let’s compare with some hard data from around the world:
Here’s the average sea level height from the ARGOS float system, which used global positioning satellites to get the altitude. Note that sea level has been, on average, dropping for the last 6 years. (It’s a really complicated job trying to figure out how to “adjust” the ARGOS system believably, so we still can look at the actual data.)
Here and here are NOAA’s satellite altimetry data — roughly agreeing with ARGOS.
Here’s the data from state-of-the-art tide gauges (GPS corrected) in the South Pacific, for about the last 20 years. No sea level rise seen.
Some other data from less technological sources:
Here’s a tide gauge in Tasmania that still accurately marks mean sea level after 170 years.
Here is a story on some interesting maps of Antarctica made in the 1500’s but which show the land outline that today is hidden by large floating ice sheets. How do you suppose they did that without massive CO2 emissions?
And then there’s the Maldives. How often have your heard alarmists claim that they will soon be uninhabitable? How often have you heard them say the sea levels in the Maldives have been dropping for 30+ years?
So, who you gunna believe? KR, or the data? The models or your lying eyes?
Which brings up the question, KR — why do you lend your energies to supporting a corrupt, politicized establishment (official climate “science”)? What do you think is in it for you? Are you completely blind?
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“KR”,
Were you actually born on Plant Stupid?
Claimed your $10,000 prize yet ????????
Thought not !
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Meet New Zealand’s ETS: costly, corrupted and useless………
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/meet_new_zealands_ets_costly_corrupted_and_useless/P60/
Alan Jones talks to Rodney Hyde – New Zealand MP on the impact of an ETS:-
http://www.2gb.com/podcasts/alanjones/alanjoneshyde120810.mp3
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Just for YOU “KR”………….
An interview by one of the top IPPC men given to NZZ am Sonntag on November 10 2010.
Ottmar Edenhofer is a German economist who deals with climate change policy…….. He is currently professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Technical University of Berlin, co-chair of Working group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and deputy director and chief economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research…… In 2004 he was a lead author for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President of the United States Al Gore.
In the interview Edenhofer freely admitted that the goal of Climate Policy is to transfer wealth from the West to the Third World by imposing economy eviscerating carbon caps on the West.
http://www.libertarianadvocate.blogspot.com/2010/11/ottmar-edenhofer-co-chair-of-uns-ipcc.html
=============
IPCC Official: “Climate Policy Is Redistributing The World’s Wealth”
http://thegwpf.org/ipcc-news/1877-ipcc-official-climate-policy-is-redistributing-the-worlds-wealth.html
THAT SAYS IT ALL!
THE TRUE AGENDA IS REVEALED !!!
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BobC @ 150
Talking of sea levels, I have been watching a BBC TV series doco entitled “Coast” in which the ever changing + &- shorelines around parts of the British Isles have commonly featured. The most recent episode included a visit to an English castle in Welsh Wales, which revealed evidence that supply boats once moored on the seaward side below. However, nowadays, the sea is not at all nearby, and there is a nice green scene. Your #150 prompted me to Google on it, and here is a quote in part from one source:
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I’m not at all offended or surprised that KR/Blimey and his/her admirers have not responded to my #58, but here it is again for consideration, between the wiggly lines:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I wonder if our wise Lewandowsky can explain this statement in the IPCC’s 2007 report, concerning global warming:
For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emission scenarios. Even if the concentrations of all greenhouse gases and aerosols had been kept constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.1°C per decade would be expected.
That is a higher rate of decadal warming than has ever been observed in the temperature records, however, for the past decade or more there has actually been a slight cooling, or if you prefer a plateau. Just a simple point, but I wonder if he or Blimey or KR and the like can clarify it for us. It IS after all, a fundamental aspect of the catastrophic AGW hypothesis.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Can any rationalists here explain why maybe there has been no response?
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I haven’t chimed in for a while, but KR’s recent re-appearance and his “proof” he promoted at “The Discovery of Global Warming” needs some comment.
1. at one point about half way down the page the following quote appears – “They found that the level of atmospheric CO2 had gone up and down in remarkably close step with temperature.(48)”. What is not mentioned at any point on this web page is the unalterable FACT the CO2 concentrations in the Vostok Ice Cores LAG (!!!!!) temperature by ~800 years. So this site is trying to claim the Vostok Ice Cores as PROOF of CAGW while in actual fact (not CAGW PR and fear-mongering) they PROVE the opposite!!!
2. Let’s assume that the Vostok Ice Cores do show that CO2 levels LEAD temperature (they DON’T). Where did all the extra CO2 come from???? Mysterious alien intervention???? Atlantians burning fossil fuels??? Too many gaseous bovine emissions???
You can’t have it both ways, and in this case neither way!!!
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Further my 155, SORRY, I hit the Submit button instead of Preview. The IPCC quote was:
And the link is:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html
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You’ve mis-read Rereke’s remarks. What he said was:
[My emphasis]
Nothing about the reviewer’s opinion that the paper is “stupid” — that is an example of corruption of the peer review process (the reviewer trying to direct which lines of research get published) which you are perfectly happy with, apparently.
Rereke has a somewhat idealistic view of peer review himself:
Yeah, like when Nature passed on the paper describing the first laser? Didn’t seem to do their reputation much damage.
In reality, it is interests of the Journal Editor not to alienate the people who buy his journal, since that will have a bad effect on his bottom line. This is a much more short-term concern than the idealistic one Rereke proposes (and in fact is one of the methods the CRU scientists proposed using to influence journals that didn’t toe the line).
In the case of Nature and the first laser, well-known emminent scientists had been publishing theoretical papers on the laser and trying to build one for years (and millions of dollars). A lowly engineer from Hughes built the first one (pulsed ruby) in a few months by noticing that all the scientists were missing some obvious (to him) facts. Later, some of these scientists wrote books about how they “invented the laser”, even though they didn’t build it, and had dismissed the method Ted Maiman used as “obviously impossible”.
(To add “insult to injury”, Maiman went to a talk by one of these scientists to find out what a “LASER” was — during the talk he realized that the scientist was unaware of many potential methods well known in engineering that could be used to create a laser. He talked Hughes into giving him $50,000 and a couple months of a techhician’s time in order to build one.)
By not publishing Maiman’s paper, the editor of Nature prevented these emminent scientists from intiating a vendetta against the journal. Too bad email didn’t exist back then — the archives might make for interesting reading.
The problem with peer review is: You can’t use it for anything that matters, since it is so easily corrupted, as a moment’s reflection should tell you. (If not, just read the Climategate emails about how our “elite” scientists conspired with each other to subvert it.)
If peer review is such a good way to determine truth, why don’t we use it in our society for anything that matters?
For example, why not let other mine owners review and decide on permits for new open-pit mines? After all, they are the only “peers” in a position to really understand all the factors. We don’t do this, because the potential for corruption and collusion is way too high.
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Re: Ross, BobC, various comments
Regarding the Kemp et al 2011 paper, I was asked by Eddy @ 90 to comment on it, and I did; I had not brought it up. But looking through the Results and Discussion section on their methods, they do appear to have paid considerable attention to calibrating their sea level data against sedimentation and coastal level changes. Read it yourself if interested.
Overseasinsider @ 156
Yes, the ice cores show CO2 going up and down with temperature, lagging initial temperature changes by ~800 years over the glacial cycles. That would be CO2 absorbed and released primarily by the oceans, as CO2 solubility is inversely related to temperature. Those CO2 changes acted as feedbacks, amplifying the initial Milankovich cycle insolation changes, as without that feedback the Earth would have seen peak-peak changes of maybe 1.5-2°C globally, rather than 5-6°C evident in the records.
Now, of course, we’re burning fossil fuels, putting 29-30GT of CO2 into the atmosphere per year, at a rate higher than the paleo PETM event, where temperatures rose 6°C over 22,000 years (we’ve seen ~0.8 increase over natural forcings over 150 years!). So CO2 is acting as a ‘first cause’, rather than orbital variations, and we can expect feedbacks such as H2O change, ice melt, and eventually CO2 emissions back out of the warming oceans as time goes on – amplifying the initial forcing by a factor of 2-4 depending on climate sensitivity.
Forest fires in the past don’t rule out arson in the present.
Bob_FJ
I’ve seen the 0.2°C per decade projections as well – they do seem reasonable considering the CO2 forcings we’ve caused.
I don’t expect that every decade, but as an average over ~30 year periods. Right now we’ve had a strong La Nina and low solar cycle over the last 8-10 years, if the solar cycle were to continue as normal, the rate should pick up.
The 0.1C / decade warming if we stopped CO2 emissions right now would be the unrealized warming as the climate comes to equilibrium with the current CO2 levels – how high it would go really depends on how fast we cut back, what happens with aerosols, etc.
Mind you, we may well be heading for an extended solar minima – that might cool things by about 0.3°C. Not enough to cause an ice age, about as much as ~15 years of CO2 driven warming, but it would be a nice break. Of course, the problems with solar minimas in this case is that they come to an end, and that 0.3°C will kick right back in again.
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Of course, another possibility is that the CO2 lag is exactly what it seems — that CO2 concentrations respond to temperature changes, rather than cause them, and that there are, in fact, other climate drivers besides CO2 and orbital insolation cycles.
Your “storybook logic” above is false, since it requires us to assume a number of things that we know (or have strong evidence indicating) are untrue.
For example, you assume that there are no significant climate drivers other than Milankovich cycles and the theoretically calculated effect of CO2. But just in the last 25 years we have been able to accurately measure changes in the Earth’s albedo, and have found that they represent (in 25 years only) three times (link) the (theoretically calculated) forcing of the atmospheric increase in CO2, over the last 100 years — which you claim is “…a rate higher than the paleo PETM event”. So, for your story above to be true, we have to assume that there were no significant changes in albedo over the last 400,000 years except for the last 25 years.
Furthermore, you have to assume that changes in the state of the Sun’s cycles are largely irrelevant to the climate. Besides being unbelivably arrogant (by assuming that total light output is the only way the Sun affects the Earth, despite significant evidence to the contrary), this assumption fails spectactularly when the Solar state is compared to past climate. The correlation is far, far better than between CO2 and climate. (See here for one of many studies showing this correlation).
Your story above requires so many unlikely (and just false) assumptions that it is nothing but a fiction designed to promote a political agenda. Which, again, raises the question: Why do you debase yourself to support it? What’s your game? (You can’t claim ignorance, since you have heard these arguments many times before and haven’t been able to produce a logical response.)
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BobC @ 160
The Palle 2004 data has a lot of issues, in particular serious disagreements between their “Earthshine” values and satellite values, particularly clear for 2003. While interesting, I consider this a “first pass” at using this particular technique, and rather uncertain in it’s value at this time.
I would disagree, that’s not anything I’ve said – CO2 operated as a feedback historically, and the Milankovich cycles are only one of the many forcings. Quite frankly, though, solar output and orbital variations (Milankovich) are the major ones over the (pre-industrial) glacial era, with continental placement operating as a forcing over longer time periods. Albedo changes due to ice coverage and plant coverage, not to mention cloud levels, are a feedback.
First and foremost, I don’t consider unpublished, unreviewed web articles by people not trained in the field as scientifically credible – if you do, take a look at the Time Cube.
If you feel that solar magnetic or solar high energy particles have more impact than total light output on Earth’s climate, show it. No study I am aware of indicates any correlation over a fraction of a percent of the insolation.
What I’ve described, BobC, is the state of science as I see it. The arguments against the data we have, against anthropogenic global warming, are so contrived, so far fetched, that they make Kiplings Just So Stories look like well established facts.
Aside from the insults inherent in that last quote from you, why are you so firmly skeptical? Convinced of a worldwide conspiracy, when facts are the arbiter in science, and will catch such conspirators out?
Every argument against AGW that I’ve seen includes such a conspiracy, over the last 150 years, and including thousands of scientists. To me, that kind of thinking indicates a need for improved medications. Not a valid scientific view of the world.
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BobC @ 160
Looking at my last post, it’s rather harsher than I generally prefer to write.
But.
I’ve honestly presented supportable data, testable opinions, and the clearest view of the current state of science that I can. This issue of climate change is vitally important to us, and to our children – it behooves us to get it right; that’s my motivation. I would hate to look at my descendents and have to say “Oops! Sorry we screwed you over…”
You, and any number of other posters, have replied (among some interesting presentations of some interesting other opinions, I’ll note) with a series of insults – some at the 5th grade level. Those not only don’t convince anyone, they hurt and degrade your position.
I’m going to stick with the science. Including evaluating things like Palle 2004, Kemp, Lindzen, Trenberth, Spencer, and others with a view as to how well they have established their conclusions.
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Who said anything about conspiracy, KR? That’s your fantasy. I happen to understand Human nature better (apparently) than you. (Else, why not let mine owners decide on other owners’ permits? According to what I can see of your “logic”, anyone who opposed that would be a wild conspiracy theorist, not worthy of consideration.)
That’s just what you’ll have to do, unless you start to understand that, just because you don’t know something, it can’t matter. You decide that, because you can’t prove any other forcings, then M. cycles and CO2 are it. After that leap of faith, any rationalization is OK, no matter how bizzare. (CO2 lags temperature? Well that proves it is a major driver, because you can make up a story that concludes that. Where’s your proof?)
Sorry if I’m too harsh, but I am having a hard time seeing how someone with your evident intelligence can be so blind to simple logic. Everyone else must prove you’re wrong — you just have to make up a story that goes where you want. I conclude you can’t be a working engineer — at least one who has to get things right.
Then you better start advocating for the use of best practices before committing trillions of dollars and (potentially) endangering millions of lives in the third world — demand the same due diligence that society routinely performs before releasing an aspirin substitute: An independent audit of the science. I’m willing to live with the results — are you?
Too bad you don’t have to bet your life on it — it might change your attitude (which, frankly, I don’t have much respect for — you’re too smart not to understand what I’m saying).
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BobC @ 163
Well, BobC, considering the arguments against the AGW point of view, I simply cannot take the ‘skeptic’ point of view seriously. I have seen more bad science pushed against CO2, sea level measurements, temperature records, paleo data, etc., than I have seen in any realm of science including creationism.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here. Personally, I believe on taking the best choices possible based on the knowledge that we have. Not acting is a decision itself, and is not always the best idea.
And who would you have run this audit? Hopefully, people who understand the science, and can evaluate the data and results. Whoops! That’s already being done, by publishing, citing, and responding to papers in the public arena, an ongoing cycle of development of knowledge!
Do you have a better idea? Who would you put on the audit team? Would they be chosen simply from people who already agree with you, despite their qualifications? Or would you choose people who are actually studying the data, i.e., publishing climate scientists??? If you pre-select from the subset (2-3% of scientists) who already agree with you, that’s not an audit, it’s a lynching.
All the data I’ve seen indicates that addressing global warming sooner rather than later will cost less, hurt less, and save more people than waiting. What I’ve seen in the ‘skeptic’ community are people who have ideological reasons to dislike government involvement, who feel that regulations are an imposition on their liberties, and (not a small subset) feel that some mass conspiracy of climate scientists are fudging the data to deprive them.
The lack of a tropospheric hot spot isn’t a story? (Data clearly shows it now, and re-evaluating the earlier radiosonde data indicates that it’s there historically) “Fudged” temperature records aren’t a story? Multiple reconstructions of temperature (a dozen+) over the last 1000 years agree, including a couple by prominent skeptics, such as Muller. TOA and surface IR show an imbalance – certainly by your standards that’s an illusion?
I really won’t claim to understand your point of view. But insults don’t make a logical argument – data does, causality does, and actual measurements too. The ‘skeptic’ point of view fails there.
Enough. Peer review isn’t perfect, but facts will always come out in the end – bad science simply doesn’t last against the real world. If you think the publishing scientists are wrong, write your own papers and demonstrate it.
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Llew Jones @117
Thanks for the info on Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.
It’s worse than I thought.
Do Oz taxpayers fund this guy?
Does his university approve of his BS?
I feel like writing a complaint.
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KR @ 159, part 3
I had until now dismissed you as a troll, and even possibly the same person as Blimey. However, it seems that you may have a sincere belief in your alarmism, so will comment briefly on one point.
Since the IPCC say somewhere that forcings other than CO2 have a net effect of about zero, I assume you refer to CO2. However, to achieve 0.2C/decade, which is greater than anything seen in the T record, (even short term), it would need a significant positive feedback. Even the elitist alarmist Andrew Dessler, (an atmospheric physicist), agrees that if a significant negative feedback can be found, then AGW is not a problem. The trouble is that we are struggling to understand clouds and water vapour behaviour, whilst there are strong indications that net feedbacks are much less than the values assumed by the IPCC and modellers. Spencer, Norris, Svensmark, and CERN CLOUD, are things that spring to mind, and I suggest you watch this space.
Oh, BTW, Trenberth shows in his/IPCC’s ‘Earth’s Energy Budget’ diagram that the greatest cooling effect from the surface is from evapotranspiration, so intuitively one would expect a major negative feedback here. However, after discussing this with Roy Spencer, it seems that everyone is too busy competing on radiative issues to spend time on convection and thermal stuff. Roy agrees it’s important though.
Cheer up KR, it’s not as bad as you think.
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KR further my 166
Perhaps I should add that the IPCC projection was wrong, and that the models must have failed to include some important parameters.
For your contemplation, compare the plateau at ~1940, and the subsequent cooling period:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nhshgl.gif
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Bob_FJ @ 166, 167
Fair questions all. I won’t claim to have all the answers, but from what I understand:
– Current temperature rise rates since ~1980 are about 0.16 to 0.17°C per decade (UAH as an outlier, at 0.13°C, but there are issues with how they account for the poles).
– CO2 levels are increasing faster than exponential (http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/jerk/, http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/co2-shame/), which means forcings from CO2 are increasing more than linearly.
– Given reasonable projections of CO2 output from our sources (with the large caveat that we could choose to change that CO2 output) temperatures will increase a total of ~2.0°C by 2100.
It doesn’t need a positive feedback, it just needs a greater than exponential increase in CO2 (and hence an increasing rise in forcing and temperature change). And if you take the log of the CO2 increase over the last 100 years, it’s still got a positive second derivative, which means it’s rising faster than exponentially. So while we shouldn’t see average rates reaching 0.2°C in the early 2000’s, the projections look like considerably higher than 0.2°C/decade by the end of the century.
Oh, I am. But so far Spencer and Svenmark are not convincing for me – the CLOUD experiments are really quite interesting, but he still hasn’t shown a significant correlation between galactic cosmic rays (GCR’s) and temperature, while Spencer, well, his idea that “clouds cause the ENSO” has made many people, including me, choke with disbelief.
I’m not familiar with Norris – do you have a link or two?
—
At any rate, the paleo record including the glacial cycles seems to indicate something around 3°C/doubling of CO2 (3.7 W/m^2) as long term climate sensitivity – that seems to eliminate any serious negative feedback from clouds, as it includes everything in the environment over thousands of years.
Re: @167, the plateau at 1940 seems to correlate well with heavy aerosol levels from post-WWII industry, changing slope upwards in the 1970’s with the US Clean Air Act and similar legislation around the world. That’s actually an issue if we were to stop CO2 output, because that means we’d also stop aerosols from fossil fuels – we could expect a rapid short term rise in global temperatures since aerosols (negative feedback) drop out within a year or two, while CO2 takes decades to centuries.
So – I’m genuinely worried, and even more worried because so many people put a lot of effort into rejecting the evidence at hand. Personally, I think the faster we act on this, the less of a problem we’ll have… as I watch the plant growth zones moving north around me…
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Do you understand anything about the world you live in? If this were the attitude of the FDA, they would just take the drug company’s scientists’ word on whether the drug works and is safe — after all, they are the ones who have the most knowledge! And sure, let’s let those mine owners give themselves permits for new mines — who else has their breadth of knowledge? What could go wrong with that?
(I suggest you call the FDA immediately and let them know what they have been doing for the last 50 years is impossible.)
Who would go on the audit team? People who could decide if a model’s predictions were accurate or not. How about statisticians? They are generally far more knowledgeable about testing for significance than the efforts I’ve seen in climate papers. The models would also be subjected to the same kind of testing that all complex, critical software goes through. (Hard-coded “data” wouldn’t be allowed, such as the CRU engages in.)
Since the only crisis is a predicted crisis, a key element of the audit would be to determine if climate models are capable of accurately predicting climate. This cannot be established theoretically, or by facile arguments such as you engage in. Predictive skill can only be established by demonstration. If only “friends of AGW” can determine this, you have established one of the major indicators of junk science.
One or two accurate predictions amid a bunch of wrong ones doesn’t cut it — you can get that result with dice.
Well, if you’d actually read any of the background material in this blog, you would know that the ‘skeptic point of view’ is very much based in data and “actual measurements” (what’s the difference anyway? Is this part of the conceit in climate science that models produce ‘data’?)
At any rate, the details of the scientific arguments matter little. (Like most published science matters little — which is why peer review is tolerable. My experience in designing new instrumentation using published science is that ~25% of it is just wrong — it only matters to people like me who want to use it, and I always test it first.) What matters is whether the AGW hypothesis can demonstrate that there will be a crisis, using data and “actual measurements”. The AGW point of view fails to do that.
You want to remake the world, at great expense and risk? Submit the climate models to an audit and prove they can predict climate.
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KR- From a subsequent thread – “Professor Garnaut’s carbon trading scheme will cost $11.5 billion a year, rising at 4% above the annual rate of economic growth. He wants another $2.5 billion a year – again, rising at 4% above the growth rate – spent on “renewable” energy and “innovation”. And the Climate Change Department is already spending $1.6 billion a year. These are not the only costs, but let us assume they are.
Applying Professor Garnaut’s own discount rate of 2.65%, the cost of his policy over the next ten years will be close to $200 billion, with the aim of forestalling 25% of Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions, which in turn represent 1.2% of global emissions, which – if the policy worked at this cost – would accordingly fall by just 0.3%.
In the absence of any mitigation, CO2 concentration by 2020 would be 412 ppmv, but Australia’s near-$200 billion of spending would cut this to 411.934 ppmv, forestalling 1/2750 of a degree of warming by that year – less than 1% of the threshold below which modern methods and instruments cannot measure any global temperature change.
If the whole world were to pursue Australia’s proposed policy, the cost of forestalling each degree of warming would be $545 trillion, or $18,500 from everyone on Earth. Preventing the 0.24 Cº global warming predicted to occur by 2020 would cost $130 trillion, or 18.3% of global GDP over the period.
The cost of the climate damage from doing nothing, however, would be just 1-4.1% of global GDP. Doing something would cost more than four times as much as doing nothing.”
Please, I’d LOVE to hear your justification for the above??? I’m sure it will be riveting.
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I think I’ve figured out KR’s problem — he can’t really think for himself, but needs some “authority” to tell him what is permissible to believe.
Once he gets the ‘all clear’ on what to think, he can argue and sound like he understands it, but he can’t do the analysis and due diligence himself.
Hence, his only real argument is ‘argument from authority’ — why he can’t really address criticisms of peer review directly, but must whine about being ‘insulted’.
Here he is, sniffing at ‘un-approved’ sources of information:
Apparently, KR can’t distinguish between reasoned argument with verifiable data sources and an insane rant (‘Time Cube’), without one of his chosen authorities telling him what to think. He apparently thinks everyone else (except his ‘experts’) suffers from the same disability. (How, then, does he choose the ‘experts’?)
One wonders how KR would respond to being requested to review a paper? (Assuming he is qualified, that is.) After all, no one would be telling him what to think about it — he would be on his own. The quote above tells us that he has no ability to do that.
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BobC @ 169
And right there is the disconnect, BobC. The drug companies and mining companies profit from selling their product, and it’s in their interests to minimize their costs and maximize their sales.
Scientists, on the other hand, whose salaries do not increase with grants (grant money goes to the research, not into their pockets – ask any scientist driving his new
Porscheancient used Ford)? Scientists profit by being correct. If they are wrong, swarms of post-docs starving for paper topics will attempt to make their names by proving them wrong.Being correct about the world around us, being factual, leads to citations, to new papers, and quite frankly to obtaining new grants to continue work in the field. Being proven wrong, or worse yet shown to have faked your data, which is a common accusation here? Grants dry up. Collaborators can’t be found. Grad students look for someone else. And nobody asks you to speak at the conferences. Being wrong has a high cost for a scientist – the profit comes from being right.
The idea that scientists profit from lying about their data is completely bogus.
Peer review certainly isn’t perfect – I suggest you read about it being a ‘necessary but not sufficient condition’. But it’s a good start.
—
Overseasinsider @ 170
I don’t know the details of the Australian proposals, or anything at all about the political actors involved.
But investing in renewable energy is really only reasonable. Coal is cheaper – if you don’t count the external costs of pollution and GHG emissions. Account for those external costs, which we pay as a society while the coal companies skate free, and renewables are cheaper. We end up paying the costs of coal one way or another…
Carbon pricing appears to cost very little, and in some estimates actually saves money. Note that I’m not too trusting of power company reviews, but there are a number from less biased sources.
—
The issue with Australia (and Australia only) imposing limits is the Tragedy of the commons – “in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen”
The only solution (and I’m certain many here will object on principle) is coordination among nations to conserve climate stability. Perhaps that’s wishful thinking, but I believe that’s what it’s going to take.
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BobC @ 171
Looks like our posts crossed in editing.
I judge by the data, not authority, Bob, despite your Ad Hominem’s. It appears, though, that I have a more critical eye as to the quality and consistency of that data than you do.
I have, incidentally, both written and reviewed papers.
Meh. I believe I’ve expressed myself fairly clearly here, and that the continuing discussion is degenerating into a series of snipes. I’ll keep an eye on the thread, but I don’t think I’ll reply to any more ‘insult’ posts.
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BobC @ 160
I have to apologize – the Lassen link you pointed out did at least refer to published material, namely Friis-Christensen, Lassen 1991, not just someone’s web writing.
However: when updated with the latest data, in Thejll, Lassen 1999, they came up with the opposite conclusion – “since around 1990 the type of Solar forcing that is described by the solar cycle length model no longer dominates the long-term variation of the Northern hemisphere land air temperature”.
So I believe that web page is rather out of date.
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KR: We definitely have a disconnect, but not what you think it is.
James Hansen has received at least (from open records, and I’m not talking about his salery) $1.2 million over the last 4 years due entirely to his advocacy of CAGW, which has included illegal activities.
Your description of “how science works” could have come from the pages of “Boy’s Life” 50 years ago — it has no relationship to what I see working with the class of grant funded scientists and researchers (which, unfortunately, I am now a member of). (In fact, that description was probably never correct, as the history of science shows, if you read the memoirs instead of the “official” versions.) Currently, grants in climate science are available to those who keep coming up with the “politically correct” answers, not so much for scientists who value the truth.
Far from an anomaly, this pattern has repeated itself over and over in the history of science.
I have no idea whether your naivety is real or feigned. It does make your statements on other matters much less credible, on their face. You might educate yourself somewhat by reading Eisenhower’s “Farewell Address to the Nation” — note the section on the capture of science by government money.
Your denigration of selling [your emphasis] and profits and your exaltation of scientists as unselfish truth-seekers simply confirms my judgement about your basic knowledge of our civilization and what makes it work. If you think that’s an insult, so be it. I base my opinion on your statements.
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http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2011/06/incredible-mann-uses-upside-down-data.html
Help me out here KR. I have read that even if we roll back our global footprint to prehistoric times we would, assuming the IPCC is correct, shave maybe a tenth or two of a degree form an inevitable 2 to 4 degree temperature increase? If this is true wouldn’t the real “screw job” be to have your granddaughter living a short and brutish life for the sake of “moral superiority”?
You have my sympathy, KR. You have posted very few links and have dodged a plethora of valid questions. You prattle on about “cherry picking” and yet you hypocritically cherry pick the questions you answer. Your answers are usually your “professional” opinion and are delivered in a patronizing and condescending manner. But what else can you do?
Perhaps you are like most scientists who would like to tell the truth but live with the reality that your family has to eat. You wrote about scientists who receive grant money and yet receive no increase in pay. The fact is that without the grant money they would be unemployed and hard pressed to feed their family let alone keep that old “Ford” on the road. Prior to receiving taxpayer funding to research the global warming “crisis” the team at the CRU was told that there may not be enough money in the budget to pay their salaries.
I give you credit for being polished and I no longer consider you to be a troll. Rather, in my opinion, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place. If you vary from the “party line” you would soon find yourself defunded, unemployed and ostracized.
Why else would you make a statement in support of Mann’s sea level paper and avoid commenting on his hurricane reconstruction? Increases in hurricane intensity and frequency as well as huge rises in sea levels is an integral part of the IPCC gloom and doom mantra. Yet, you studiously avoid addressing legitimate questions posed to you on the subject as anyone who reads this thread will observe. Unlike his temperature reconstructions where empirical data is nonexistent for most of the period in question as there was no accurate temperature measurement devices prior to the invention of the thermometer, there is a wealth of empirical data that contradicts Mann’s conclusions on his hurricane and seal level papers. One has to wonder how, in view of Mann’s ludicrous conclusions which flies in the face of empirical evidence, one could possibly support Man and still claim to maintain any semblance of integrity?!
What profit does a man show if he gains the whole world only to lose his very self in the process? Do you want to live on your knees with your knee pads and chapstick ready to “service” your global warming master’s at a moments notice KR or do you want to be remembered by history as a principled man who had the courage to stand up and tell the truth? I am no better than you because I am sure I have my price, too. The difference between us is, I am well off enough to where the price to purchases my honor and integrity would be too prohibitive to seriously consider.
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You mean the way you completely ignored the evidence I linked to at post #150?
Perhaps you get some ad hom here because of the conceit you project that you are the only one here without an agenda — just a scientist in a
white hathalo — at the same time you vigorously pursue your agenda.As Eddy put it:
You imply that there is no difference between an unpublished reasoned argument and the (insane) “Time Cube” — then turn around and claim that you “have a more critical eye as to the quality and consistency of [the] data” than I do. What is one supposed to conclude from inane juxtapositions like that? It certainly doesn’t follow that you are driven by logic and a quest for the truth, like your mythical scientists.
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So, what does that imply for the assumptions used in calculating high climate sensitivities from ancient ice cores? Note that the solar forcing is not denied before 1990, and all the ice core data (greatly) predates that, and solar forcing (due to solar cycles) is ignored.
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KR @168
Just a few points
1) Me no understand ‘faster than exponential’
2) Grant Foster, (Tamino), is an authority that I recommend that you not waste your time on. Unlike this website, from my experience, he does not accept comments that are critical of his commonly bizarre assertions. I doubt if many rationalists go there and try any more.
3) On the other hand, I thought it was generally accepted that the GHE is not linearly proportional to CO2, but effectively declines logarithmically with increasing CO2
4) Did you notice that the warming prior to 1940 was VERY similar to that of between say 1975 and 2000? However, that naughty anthro-CO2 was much less. I was expecting you to come up with the popular aerosol hypothesis, but might I add that I’ve not seen any sound empirical evidence for it. One problem that I see with it is that the reversal of warming from say 1935 was very sharp. (a sudden large change of slope). However, despite increasing industrial output, and world population, the down-slope remained modest compared with the violence of change around ~1935-1945. I also doubt that there are less particulates in recent times because of population growth and pollution from forest clearing, and Chinese industry etc.
You seem to have got the gloomies really bad, and I don’t think that I can help you much.
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KR,
I remember that up the page somewhere you said that it was necessary to have 30 years of global average temperature data before a trend can be determined. At the time I ignored you because I thought you were a troll, and possibly that you were the same person as ‘Blimey’. However, I’ve since been swung to thinking that you actually believe this stuff, so I’ll now comment.
First of all, as an engineer, I find it quite silly how anyone can contemplate drawing straight trend lines between arbitrary start and finish points on data which displays an inherent up and down cycle of about 60 years, that is arguably some un-nailed NATURAL cycle, not far off from an underlying (slanting) sinusoidal. (although it does seem to correlate with the PDO quite well)
I have not visited “RealClimate” website for a year or two, but back then, even David Benson, (an alarmist groupie there), was advocating the importance of the PDO.
You also stated I think, to the effect that you would not be deflated that the IPCC 2007 forecast of +0.2c/decade will possibly actually continue to be negative for some time, (e.g. sunspots), because I think you implied it would catch-up later. I have difficulty with this. What is the mechanism that will result in an acceleration of warming way above +0.2C/decade to bring it back onto net projected trend? (O’r 30 years)
OK, here is a reality check for you. Look again at HadCru3, and tell me what the 30-year warming trend is, centred on 1940. I asked that same question in different forms over at “RealClimate”, a year or so ago, and for some strange reason, none escaped moderation. I’ve since been excommunicated from that site with my current computer IP’s and Email addresses. I guess I’m part of the reducing visitors there. Oh, and did you hear that Joe Romm had to close down his unprofitable site and amalgamate elsewhere?
I’ll leave you to ponder why that might be
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BobC, You use Argo data for sea level measurement when it’s inaccurate and limited in the number of samples given. By comparison satellite data is far more accurate, has far greater coverage and provides a much larger sample.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/current/sl_ib_ns_global.pdf
But that doesn’t suit your argument so I guess you’ll ignore this evidence.
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Ah I see you are demonstrating you are as Google Scholar illiterate as Skeptical Science,
Google Scholar Illiteracy at Skeptical Science
Please provide the 1001 Search Result for any of your Google Scholar Searches.
Name the author and paper that cannot be used to support a skeptic argument against AGW Alarm.
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Really? Here are some of the “results” from your search,
Adam, Eve, and the genome: the Human Genome Project and theology [Book] (S.B. Thistlethwaite, 2003)
“This important book combines a basic primer on genetic research with ethical reflection by an interdisciplinary team on key questions and a deeper look, in light of such research, at what it means to be human.”
Tom of Twofold Bay [Book] (V. Kattooparambil, 2007)
“This is the story of Tom, Killer whale of Twofold Bay, Eden, friend to George Davidson (bay whaler) and others like him: it is based upon a true story that will live in the memory of the citizens of Eden for eternity, a museum being built in Tom’s honour upon his death.”
Around the States in 90 Days [Book] (A. Moseley, 2009)
“Determined to escape a 9 to 5 life but equally determined not to do anything socially worthwhile, Andy Moseley took the only option available to him and packed his bags and left for America. His plan was to see as much of the country as he could in 90 days. Starting in Washington and ending in San Francisco, he passed through Canada and along Route 66 taking in several places not on any logical route across the country, and eventually covering half of the States of America, and a few bits of Canada too.”
Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America [Book] (E. Robinson, 2010)
“A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and commentator explains how years of desegregation and affirmative action have led to the revelation of four distinct African American groups who reflect unique political views and circumstances, in a report that also illuminates crucial modern debates on race and class.”
Are these the high impact journals skeptics cannot get published in?
I have found alarmists to be consistently computer illiterate.
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Blimey is back with another round of spammed lies,
Rebuttal to 7 Spammed Lies
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Please list the paper that was not peer-reviewed or cannot support a skeptic argument against AGW Alarm.
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That is not used for evidence against AGW. You should know this by now Blimey we have had this discusssion many times. It is listed under the “Droughts, Floods” section to support a skeptic argument against AGW Alarm. In this case that the most severe drought over the last 500 years happened in the 16th century not the 20th. The full paper is available on the list under the PDF link.
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This has been explained to you many times Blimey. No claim is made that the list is a unified theory only that it is a resource for all the papers that support skeptic arguments, including independent theories. Skeptics are not threatened by the existence of independent thought like collectivists are.
Strawman argument, no claim was made that the list was in comparison to the IPCC report. The list is simply a resource for skeptics. If you are looking for a report that is comparable I suggest,
Climate Change Reconsidered (868 pgs) (NIPCC Report)
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Note: If anyone ever claims to show ANY number larger than 1000 using Google Scholar request the 1001 search result as Google Scholar does not show more than 1000 results and thus it is impossible to verify anymore than that number to remove erroneous results,
Google Scholar Illiteracy at Skeptical Science
I caught Rob from Skeptical Science lying using this,
I thoroughly enjoy embarrassing computer illiterate alarmists.
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@ Blimey
I warned you at #72 not to mess with Poptech but you didn’t heed my warning! Not only has he had your ass for breakfast but he has also disposed of the leftovers in an effective and efficient manner. Are you a new breed of troll? Perhaps you represent the new line, sadomasochists Trolls?
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@KR
You are an expert at evading tough questions. Please do not feign ignorance and ask me to list them. Any person who reads the thread will notice it. What is it like to live on your knees as a climate alchemist instead of a scientist? You are a shill and an apologist who will have to look back on his life and realize that you were nothing more than a well educated useful idiot who practiced voodoo science. How pathetic!
Do you really think you are going to sway anyone who is undecided on global warming/climate change/climate disruption or whatever new brand name they apply? You say you worry about screwing your descendants yet you are too smart not to know that CAGW is a scam, period. If you were standing in front of a judge who had read this thread during your trial for conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity the court would probably rule that you had scienter and a criminal mind. You reason like a propaganda artist and not like a scientist. If you were a real scientist you would have not disingenuously avoided most of the questions put to you.
Unlike you, when I look in the mirror I occasionally feel shame. That’s because I have a conscience. What probably bothers you is not that you sacrificed your integrity and honor at the altar of global warming but that you sold out for so little.
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Eddie, no matter how many times Blimey is corrected he just repeats the same debunked nonsense. He actually went around online spamming his seven lies at various sites where the list was posted after I embarrassed him here, sad but true.
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3300 floats distributed in this pattern is not what most people would call a “limited number of samples”, but I guess describing it as such “suits your argument”, so you’ll do so. Also, the ARGOS floats use satellites to determine sea level — that’s what the Global Positioning System consists of, you know.
Since the GPS system is routinely used by surveyors to locate positions on the surface of the Earth to 1/3 mm, perhaps you could refer me to a study that shows that radar satellite altimetry is “far more accurate”. (Or, is that something you just made up on the spot?)
And, how did I “ignore this evidence” by linking to it in the 8th line of my post #150:
I guess if I want you to understand anything I write, I’ll limit it to no more than 7 lines. (Obviously, I don’t care if you understand this — I just want to point out to lurkers the paucity of logic and reason in your arguments.)
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Not sure if this from Roy Spencer has been noted:
“More Evidence that Global Warming is a False Alarm: A Model Simulation of the last 40 Years of Deep Ocean Warming”
June 25th, 2011
http://www.drroyspencer.com/
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Just mining some of KR’s old comments for illogic and misinformation:
You are apparently innocent of the fact that you have just described the prime method of “social control” (defined as: “enforcement of conformity by society upon its members”) used by the “climate science community” — consisting largely of those scientists on the $80B government grant gravy train — to enforce conformity and prevent anyone from derailing the train.
Anyone who reads a fraction of the Climategate emails will see these methods in action (as well as ones crossing the boundary into illegality) — protecting the grant stream from pesky critics who don’t care who gets hurt or loses their funding if the truth comes out.
Here’s another good example, where oceanographer Josh Willis fudges his analysis of the ARGOS data in order not to contradict his colleagues’ theoretical models. What’s amazing is that, far from seeing anything wrong with what he did (which would have caused you to flunk a Sophmore lab in my school), Josh brags about it in this article. Only after he was subjected to some criticism did he start to backtrack.
I predict you will see nothing wrong with his actions either, given that you apparently don’t see that your description of “extended peer-review” (i.e., social control) above is completely incompatible with your description of scientists as brave and ethical seekers of truth (in your post #172):
Well, actually, in climate science profit comes from getting grants, and getting grants depends on getting the “politically right” answers. Eisenhower saw it coming — you can’t see it under your nose.
So, to summarize your posted opinions, one could say that climate scientists “Want to be correct, as long as everyone else in the field agrees with them.”
Either you don’t understand what you are saying, or you can’t lie effectively, since you don’t keep track of what you have already claimed. I make no hypothesis which.
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BobC re 94
It is a shame that KR is so indoctrinated. I feel somewhat sorry that he lives with such angst. Happily his progeny will likely do just fine as long as they come to Jo Nova for some “reality”.
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Lew @ 193 thanks for the reminder and the good link. I read Roy pretty often but I missed this really good one.
Thanks
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Can you cite evidence of CO2 levels ever rising prior to temperatures? Is CO2 such a weak forcing that it cannot ever “get it up” of its own accord or does it always need “a hand” from other forcings?
Here is something I am curious about, why do ALL the ice core data records show that CO2 levels keep rising for approximately 800 years AFTER temperatures decline? Shouldn’t temperatures continue to rise even after CO2 levels stop rising because of the positive feedback from water vapor posited as necessary for the runaway greenhouse gas effect to occur? Or, perhaps CO2 levels and temperatures could at least level off and drop at the same time?
KR’s response should at least be entertaining!
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@ Poptech
The only problem I have with you having Blimy’s ass for breakfast is that you are so thorough and efficient you don’t leave any “leftovers” for the rest of us commenters! 😉
Seriously, I am always impressed by your comments! Thanks, you are appreciated!
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Jo, I will take an analogy from olden day Texans in saying “ÿou will do to ride the rivers with” this was a high compliment given to someone in a trail drive who have proven themselves worthy of the greatest trust after driving thirsty cattle across a river.
You have definitely shown this to many in your writing Jo and I look forward to many more thoughtful blogs, cheers.
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All it would require now is for the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) to recognise Lewandowsky’s illustriousness by making him a Fellow ..the same as they did Flannery.
And what an insult that has been to all those well deserving people who went before Flannery.
Once they lower the standards like this, the gong is never going to have any value…so Lewandowsky is a cert.
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