Fans of man-made global warming frequently tell us seas are rising, but somehow forget to mention the rise started 200 years ago, long before our coal-fired electricity plants cranked up, and long before anyone had an electric shaver, or a 6 cylinder fossil-fuel-spewing engine. Something else was driving that warming trend.
Here is the data from tide gauges going back 300 years from a paper by Jevrejeva et al 2008.
[Graphed by Joanne Nova based on data from Jevrejura et al located at this site PMSML]
This graph was calculated from 1023 tide gauge records [Jevrejeva et al., 2006] going back to 1850.The 2008 study extended the record further using three of the longest (though discontinuous) tide gauge records available: Amsterdam, since 1700 [Van Veen, 1945], Liverpool, since 1768 [Woodworth, 1999] and Stockholm, since 1774 [Ekman, 1988]. Obviously since there are only three old records, the error bars are a riot.
The Jevrejeva paper is also useful for portraying the 60 year rolling cycle. The regular ups and downs are obvious when the rate of change is plotted (see below).
Source: Jevrejeva 2008
But wait… there must be a tipping point?
While the graph itself seems like it was made for skeptics (how can anyone say that linear warming trend was started by CO2?) some back-seat critics will say that Jevrejeva et al claim that “it will be worse than the IPCC thinks” — which they do say. But that’s the name of the game isn’t it, to find “acceleration”. Are sea levels are rising faster because of CO2?
Here’s where Jevrejeva et al make the “it’s worse than we thought” statement. Look closely at the reasoning:
“We show that sea level rose by 28 cm during 1700 – 2000; simple extrapolation leads to a 34 cm rise between 1990 and 2090. The lowest temperature rise (1.8°C) IPCC [Meehl et al., 2007] use is for the B1 scenario, which is 3 times larger than the increase in temperature observed during the 20th century. The IPCC sea level projection for the B1 scenario is 0.18– 0.38 m. Our simple extrapolation gives 0.34 m. The mean sea level rise for B1, B2 and A1T is below our estimate. However, oceanic thermal inertia and rising Greenland melt rates imply that even if projected temperatures rise more slowly than the IPCC scenarios suggest, sea level will very likely rise faster than the IPCC projections [Meehl et al., 2007].”
Have I got this right, it appears they predict that:
a/ Based on the acceleration in the last 300 years, they expect seas to rise by 34 cm this century anyway (without man-made global warming).
b/ That the IPCC reckons it will all get much warmer (frying-hot) on top of that trend, thanks to CO2.
If so, this would be double counting, and they can’t have it both ways. The IPCC assumes that all the warming since 1780 is man-made and then extrapolates that wildly. These authors (between the lines) say the sea level rise (a proxy for warming) was natural, and then extrapolate that trend and add it to the IPCC extrapolation. Both extrapolations are based on the same trend — with opposing assumptions, and added together. No No No.
If the warming so far was natural, then CO2 has little effect, so there would be nothing much to add on top of their extrapolation.
Finding curves in short lines
Part of the problem with calculating acceleration with this data is the 60 year cycle of rises and falls. Basically, if we had a nice long record we could figure out the current cycle and see whether it was accelerating. But given that the cycle is 60 years long; we only have good records going back 160 years, and sparse records going back another 150, we really don’t have much at all to work with. Worse, it’s a multivariate system of which we don’t even know all the factors.
Hence I’ve drawn a straight line trend through the top graph. Jevrejura used a polynomial fit to calculate a small acceleration. When we have such short records, who can say which fit is the winner? Wait 100 years and find out.
Since sea levels rose 19cm in the last century and the trend is linear, so we don’t need an intergovernmental panel, $200,000 grant and 5 year study to project a rise for the 21st Century of… 19cm, more or less.
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REFERENCES
Jevrejeva, S., A. Grinsted, J. C. Moore, and S. Holgate (2006), Nonlinear trends and multiyear cycles in sea level records, J. Geophys. Res., 111,
Jevrejeva, S., J. C. Moore, A. Grinsted, and P. L. Woodworth (2008), Recent global sea level acceleration started over 200 years ago?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L08715, doi:10.1029/2008GL033611. [PDF]
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Additional thoughts on the Jevrejeva paper from Lionell Griffith
The one thing that pops out the most is the typical trick of picking convenient dates as starting and ending points for their so called curve fits and using an arbitrary order for the curve. Then they extrapolate that curve beyond all rationality. They would be better off flipping a coin and guessing. At least that way they have a finite chance to be right. The way it is, they are not connected enough to reality to be wrong.
You can fit any order of curve to any set of data as long as you have more data points than orders of your curve. All that does is give a more or less accurate way to interpolate between actual data points used in the curve fit. You can even get high values of goodness of fit but it is all quite meaningless outside of the specific data set. Statistical significance is not always significant in terms of real world validity. Without grasping ALL of the meta data, you can draw no conclusions about reality other than that is what the calculations applied to the numbers produced.
Extrapolation from a random (non causal) curve fit is 100% a dangerous thing to rely on. The error bars explode the further away from the end points you are. Even the ability to estimate the error bars decays to nearly zero at some short distance from the end points. This is a process that should NEVER be relied upon to make judgments about the future PERIOD! Only if you have a causal bases for your fitted curve does extrapolation have any reliability. Even then, the reliability is heavily dependent upon the quality of the input data AND the degree that all causes are included in the curve you are fitting. This alone should be sufficient to discredit anything they conclude. Their statistics are no more valid than those of the Hockey Stick Mann. However, I will give them one point for disclosing as much detail as they did.
Now taking the plot below at face value. The first thing I see is the presentation of two dissimilar data sets (1700 to ca 1860 and ca 1860 to 2000). They may be incommensurate and quite inappropriate to use in ANY kind of curve fitting over the entire time series. From the data itself you cannot determine the cause of the discontinuity at ca 1860. You must have a massive amount of meta data that gives the full context of each time series. Then and only then do you have even a remote chance of blending them into a coherent pattern.
I suggest two things go a long way to explain the discontinuity. The first is that ca 1860 was about the time the little ice age started to resolve itself. The second is that the data set was likely differently instrumented and with greater attention to consistency, frequency, and quality control over the process.
It is quite likely that there is a lot of selection bias hidden behind the graph. There is no way to prove it one way or the other. Check into the exacting work of determining the mass of the electron. The pattern of the results show some interesting things going on even with honest hard working scientists. This even when there was no government financing to stimulate a given end result.
I also find that the second data set shows NO visible response to CO2. It is simply a continuation of whatever the cause of the resolution of the little ice age. There is no visually significant change in the trend line between ca 1860 to ca 1945 and ca 1945 to 2000. You could select starting and ending points such that there were two different trends. This too is a source of selection bias that is invalid. There must be a reason independent of the data itself that is used to choose the starting and ending points.
The null hypothesis (natural process is the cause) is sustained and ANY man produced CO2 causality remains undetectable. You don’t need 100,000 words to say it. You need only a legitimately produced graph and a few supporting words.
The fundamental principle here is one cannot properly go beyond the evidence and call it science. It becomes speculation at best and demagoguery or fraud at worst.
Yes Sir! I count only 26 words right there.
41
I have figured out a way to fine tune my “Bovine excrement” meter which measures the bullshit level of a study. Here is the difference between a study conducted by real scientists and pseudo scientists trying to debunk them. The real scientists operates in the real world and only deals in facts for example they will measure and report what the sea levels were once and are now but will not offer an opinion of what they might be in the far future.
A pseudo scientists on the other hand will take the same data then put it into a model to produce the desired output, a model who’s output is solely dependent on another parameter that has no connection to sea level. This way the pseudo scientist can say “Yes the real scientists may be right for now but look what i predict for the future” thus allowing them to maintain some skerrick of integrity. Generally they are long dead by the time the gullible (Matt and John) realise they have been had.
61
It is this sort of science and the publication of it that has Christine Milne so fired up. If you can’t agree with the bought and paid for government scientists then the people must be protected from such disclosure. Turnbull says we should respect science but is he referring to Jo’s science or of Will Steffen who speaks of “carbon pollution”. This battle has been won but the enemy don’t know they are beaten yet. There are more scientists speaking out and this is what is of concern to the adherents. The public are finding it hard to believe that an increasing number of scientists are wrong while the number of chosen tends to shrink.
Keep up the pressure because they are starting to falter. The more ridiculous their claims when opposed by considered facts leads to more questioning and demands for answers.
21
Sea level claims by the Global Warming proponents was what got me started on the road to being totally against the “Science” of MM AGW.
Sea level moves as we learned in Uni Geology. After the big melt at the end of the last ice age (12,000 years ago) there was a temporary high reached about 6,000 years back which carved out our local rock platforms. About 4,500 ya the water level receded by 1.5 metres to near its current level.
Current estimates of sea level rise of 130 mm per hundred years are inconsequential by comparison with the rates that occurred during that last big melt.
Given that at the height of the last ice age, 20,000 ya, New York’s Central Park was under 1500 metres of ice and that ice sheet has retreated way up North, we don’t have much ice left to melt.
So, even if the Earth heats up because of solar variation, the remaining melt rise would be inconsequential compared with the full 118 metre ocean level rise of the last 15,000 years.
31
Crakar24 @ 2,
Yes!
31
How do they know it’s not the level of the land sinking & not the level of the sea rising?
I remember watching a show on how the British Isles are tilting along a east west axis so parts of southern coastal UK are being more regularly inundated.
21
I should add that the earth itself is dynamic so land levels changing is not unfeasible.
There is an excellent book written by Lance Endersbee, A Voyage of Discovery – A history of ideas about the earth. I thoroughly recommend it & I’m a B.Sc (biology) so I have some understanding of these things.
31
Can someone help me here? There’s something I don’t understand with this one.
Unless the Aborigines, Maori, Pacific island, south asian and south african peoples measured tide levels empirically, how can people talk about global sea levels before the victorian age without also accepting the LIA and MWP being a Global phenomenum
Please clarify this for me as I just ain’t quite dun got dat yet.
21
JMD,
In short they dont…well not enough to boast millimeter precision but you must understand in most/all fields of science they make assumptions. This is not a bad thing because over time their assumptions will be fine tuned to give a clearer picture of what is happening, however when it comes to policy making based on these assumptions it is a bad thing. If you went to Unley high school you will not understand the ramifications of this and anyone familiar with the standard of public education in South Australia will know full well what i am talking about.
Hence we have a PM wanning too tork to uz ’bout rizing see levees.
11
Actually the millennial charts show that sea level goes up and down like a yo-yo in the long term. The usual range is about 100 metres and it tends to be going up or down not horizontal. Get used to it.
21
Madjak,
Please refer to my post 2, by the way i have a spare bovine excrement meter i can lend you.
11
Crakar, thanks for the offer, but my bovine excrement filter got clogged up the other week with the ABCs war on the letter C
11
Hang on a second. What about the logarithmic effect of CO2? Wasn’t the first 15% (or whatever) of anthropogenic CO2 we put into the atmosphere before 1945 far more effective as a GHG than CO2 we added later?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/
The arrow “something caused seas to start rising” points right to the bottom of the Dalton Minimum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Minimum
We might expect sea levels to start rising as it naturally warms coming out of the Dalton minimum. Then the warming stalls before taking up —right at the beginning of the Industrial Age!—a remarkably consistent linear upward trajectory…. It’s this remarkable timing and linear correlation between rising sea levels and rising atmospheric CO2 that seems fits the implications of the AGW hypothesis perfectly. Correlation isn’t causation, but it looks pretty suspect…
Yet while this graph, does seem to support the AGW hypothesis, it only supports the mild version, not its CAGW cousin, since extrapolation of the trend doesn’t cause catastrophic sea-level rises. Furthermore, in your last post (and in Jevrejeva figure 3 here) you show that sea level rise acceleration has plateaued, which is also what the logarithmic effect of CO2 would predict. There’s no more significant warming to come from adding more CO2 to the atmosphere. So extrapolating the past trend forward might even overestimate the rise in sea levels, especially if another downturn in the ~60-cycle was to coincident with a new minimum.
Obviously, I’m not an expert, but I see don’t see this data as evidence against AGW hypothesis, in fact, it’s data like this that the AGW hypothesis was first created to explain. However, it also seems to show that AGW is a minor climate phenomena of little threat to humanity or the environment, much less worth scuttling the world’s economy over.
20
Madjak @ 8,
Mostly they make some stuff up, misrepresent the rest, prance and dance, and hope you don’t notice that there is no there there.
Consider that Anthropologists have built conjectures about whole societies from a knotted vine, a potsherd, a few broken bones, and pile of charcoal. Now imagine what a Climatologist could do with a few reports from the log books of pirates and stories written by random adventurers from the 16th and 17th centuries. The Anthropologist story is about the dim past and the Climatologist is about the distant future. Neither story can be validated and verified in the here and now so they both feel safe from being found out.
21
Madjak,
You need to get that fixed, dont try and clean and then reuse the filter because it wont work, once a filter has been clogged with BiaS you cant get it out.
11
wes george @ 13
Sea level rise causes industrial revolutions maybe?
11
LG,
You remind me of the story i heard not too long ago where the say they have found the first homosexual cave men, there reasoning was based on the fact that they found two sets of remains in the same hole (burial) and they were of the same sex. As this has never before been seen logic or lunacy in this case meant they must have been as camp as a row of tents.
11
Jo, take as given that sea levels are rising & not land levels sinking – what makes you say that sea levels are rising due to a warming trend?
What if there’s just more water in the ocean? I’m serious, what evidence is there that the amount of water on the earth is some fixed quantity?
11
I considered that. 😉 More likely that warming causes civilisation.
11
wes george @ 13,
The “rising sea levels” also correlates well with the price of postage stamps, the consumption of gin, teachers salaries, miles of highways built, and the progression of the years. I suspect we can find countless other things with a high correlation. So what?
Correlation is simply another statistical manipulation that you can perform between any two sets of numbers. The interpretation of which cannot be based upon neither the numbers nor the degree of correlation. The interpretation must be based upon a vast array of facts outside of the data itself.
Keep in mind, doing statistical calculations is easy. Most any scientific calculator or PC with Excel can do them. Validly interpreting the results of those calculations is the really hard part. You actually have to know something about reality to do it. Making up a story and then finding something that has a correlation with is not the way.
I suggest you get one of Crakar24’s BS meters. You might find it helpful. Quoting myself.
21
Or we could just be on the upward leg of a 400-500 year sea level oscillation.
11
oh look, Holocene temp charts have an oscillation of about that same time period, how strange, must be just coincidence I guess
11
I thought it was the melting glaciers that the IPCC told us would cause rapid? catastrophic sea level rises not global warming per se. Instead of using the sea level proxy can a plot of global warming V melting glaciers be arranged? We seem to be getting ahead of ourselves a bit.
11
A sea level rise could also be caused by a gradual crustal cooling and land subsidence process – and then the problem is what is going up and what is going down and is anyone measuring what the ocean basins are doing at depth, which implies that ocean floor bulging of barely detectable amounts could also cause the sea levels to rise.
The problem is that everyone assumes a static volume earth on which a couple of factors vary.
11
Good observation by Lionel.
11
Exactly! So you agree with me?
And that’s exactly my point… the rising sea levels correlate exactly with the rise of consumer-based capitalism. Rising sea-levels and the remarkably linear progression from 1850 there on also correlates with the massive global explosion in population. Europe went from about 140 million to 400 million in the space of 70 years. At the same time vast tracts of forest were cleared on a global scale and burnt or used for shipping and building. Agriculture practices of the day literally returned top soil carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by the meter. People heated themselves by burning wood. I suspect the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere pre-1945 is underestimate in this post.
The single most striking feature of the graph Jo posted is the pre-modern sideways meander of sea-levels (a proxy for temperature) until about 1860 then the stunning take off and linear progression thereafter. Exactly what the AGW hypothesis predicts…not surprisingly this is the t-record reconstruction that the original AGW hypothesis was intentionally designed to explain.
IMO the CAGW hypothesis has been falsified on many other grounds, but in this case the weak AGW hypothesis seems to have yet to be seriously challenged, as far as I know. (which is limited indeed.) I would enjoy hearing a rational explanation why AGW can be excluded from consideration as model for this particular dataset.
11
Yeah…but only if we are discussing sea levels over the course of millions of years. In this case we are talking a few decades. That’s a timescale below tectonic resolution.
11
AGW proponents have a real problem when it comes to sea level rise projections.
One would think projecting sea level rise due to thermal expansion was a simple equation, i.e. surely we know how much water expands for any given degree increase in temperature.
However, as usual, mother nature throws a spanner in the works that AGW proponents can’t come to grips with.
For example, sea ice is less dense than liquid water. If the ice at the North Pole is melting away as claimed, then surely this will contribute to sea level DECREASE.
Any thermal expansion in the temperate and tropical regions will be counteracted (to some degree) by thermal contraction at the poles.
Furthermore, if the globe is retaining more energy, and this energy is currently missing (hiding in the deep oceans possibly, a very special hello to that giant among climate scientists Kevin Trenberth) then the warming deep oceans would actually contribute to a DECREASE in sea level.
The thing to remember is that the overwhelming majority of our deep oceans are below 4DegC, (at between 1-3DegC.) Water which is warmed from 1DegC to 4DegC actually gets denser, that is, it shrinks.
So thermal expansion of oceans is very difficult for the alarmists to quantify and explain. To date they haven’t.
This leaves the melting of terrestrial ice as the main contributor to sea level rise, and since most of that ice is trapped in year round temperatures well south of the freezing point of water, the globe would need to warm in the order of tens of degrees before 1% of the global population would need to start packing up for higher ground.
Just like ocean acidification (either CO2 is in the air warming us, or it’s in the ocean acidifying poor crustaceans, it can’t be in both places at the same time), sea level rise is a non-problem created to scare people and politicians to do something, usually the bidding of advocates and rent seekers.
11
JMD at #18
This graph which I came across recently is a rather good answer to your question. The sea level is not on it but you can see the general rising trends. Sea surface temperature rise implies expansion of the ocean, therefore sea level rise. The assumption is that 0-700m mixing is reasonably good, which looks to be supported by the data.
I can’t verify the graph, but it is consistent with the similar graph in Figure 1 of this paper.
11
Wes George,
But Jo’s data suggests something else, and ignoring Martians and UFO’s what else could be? Mind you it is also linked with the end of the LIA and no one has put up a plausible explanation for that catastrophic cooling period either apart from some rhetorical flourishes around disappearing sunspots, and orbital wobbles. It has to be geological and since geological uniformitarianism only started to become popular after 1832………….one has to deal with the previous belief of the geological timescale.
21
That’s a really good question, JDM. But always Google first…. You know. RTFM.
Top search results for “Is the amount of water on the Earth fixed?”
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090810125247AAjRblS
Answer: Yes. (which is interesting, because I woulda thunk some tiny amount of it leaks into outer space, kind of like it has on low gravity Mars, but lesser so.)
11
Wattsup has a post on this topic which is to the same point:http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/21/the-battle-over-sea-level-in-jcr/
The Bureau of Meteorology puts out a sea level report annually here: http://www.bom.gov.au/oceanography/projects/abslmp/reports_yearly.shtml
In these they correct for movement of the local datum, and for atmospheric pressure, for their 16 station network which commenced work nearly 20 years ago. While that is barely long enough (you need 18.6 years minimum) to get a meaningful estimate, it is clear that the trends around Australia have negligible acceleration.
Sea level predictions by Brownies have a really poor record. Hansen (2m in New York by 2010) and Flannery are serial offenders. Their predictions are not credible, a point emphasised by the UK High Court in 2009.
Where is the CSIRO in all of this? Will they and the Climate Commission withdraw their ridiculous sea level claims, which are unsupportable by any evidence whatsoever?
21
“Here’s where Jevrejeva et al make the “it’s worse than we thought” statement.”
but then………(wait for the chorus!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NIh-2B46vk
11
wes @31….
try using that reference in a scientific paper 😉
There are theories that the core and the mantle could easily contain materials that are slowly leaking extra water to the thin layer we call the surface and atmosphere. Not saying that the ideas are correct, but certainly many rocks contain water. I mean, what happens at subduction zones, where does that water go?
One of those questions we are a LONG way from knowing the real answer to.
30
Lionell Griffith @ 20
Don’t forget the inverse relationship to the number of pirates.
21
wes george @ 27
I wouldn’t discount ocean basin shape/volume changes out of hand.
The recent earthquake off Japan apparently moved the islands several metres in a matter of moments.
Given that in the period 1815 to 1912 we had four of the largest volcanoes ever known, ALL on the Pacific Rim of Fire, suggests that in the period in question a lot was happening geologically in and around the Pacific Ocean basin.
11
Louis, the data Jo presented doesn’t suggest “something else” the arrow labelled “something caused…” does that for us.
And the arrow points to the bottom of the Dalton minimum, moments before the biggest volcano in recent history went off in Indonesia. So it seems pretty obvious that warming coming out of that anomalously cool period could be a natural return to the means. No special “something else” hypothesis required.
Then sea levels don’t continue upward in any decisive way, but meander sideways until a REAL something else, something really pronounced and remarkably steady kicked in and forced marched sea-levels (a proxy for temperature) upward on an extremely uniform and therefore “unnatural” looking trajectory.
Maybe it was Martians? Maybe it was pirates? Sarc instead of rational argument, eh?
Instead, what we do have circa 1860 is the greatest phase shift in human activity in the 200,000 year history of Homo sapiens habitation on this planet.
Coincident? Don’t know. I’m asking you.
What I do know is that what has occurred with human cultural evolution in the last 200 years is arguably the most important single moment in planet Earth’s 3.8 billion year history of biological life.
21
This topic of sea level rise brought to mind the late, great John Daly of Tasmania, one of the first of the global warming sceptics – certainly the first I followed closely. A great loss when he passed away so suddenly.
11
One of my current speculations about sea level rise is that when the oceans’ biota exlodes in warmer periods the amount of detritus which buids up on the ocean floor displaces the ocean above it. It could take a number of decades for this matter to compact enough to no longer displace the sea level. In warmer times there is more detritus building than there is compacting thus, a rising sea level. Of course, without a super computer, I couldn’t ‘proove’ this.
11
wes george:#37
July 26th, 2011 at 5:57 pm
Gee Wes, you make it sound like my ankles are about to be inundated with sea water any minute now, and I live 5kms from the coast.
I wouldn’t have thought 300mm in 150 years was all that ‘pronounced’. Rate of rise certainly wouldn’t look pronounced if the y axis was changed to cm instead of mm. It’d essentially be a flat line.
11
wes @ 37
“No special “something else” hypothesis required”
love the wording !!
11
Thats the dogiest looking graph Ive seen on here! So exactly what is it trying to show..melt since the LIA perchance. Ho Hum.
11
You should on such a short time scale. Geology is big and slow. Velikovsky is fun, but we’ll be sure to notice when geologic catastrophism strikes. And it will dwarf the recent earthquakes in Japan. Got any references to show otherwise?
Andy notes my links about Earth having a fixed H2O content aren’t peer reviewed then speculates that the Earth’s core might be leaking water into the oceans….. No reference provided, peer reviewed or otherwise, alas…
The ocean’s living biota is already in the ocean so when they die and some bits accumulate on the ocean floor they aren’t displacing anything since every molecule in them came from the ocean to begin with.
Come on guys, lift your game. 😉
21
Heres a thought mmmm.. a graph showing increase of shipping vers sea levels. Since mid 20th cent shipping has gone up by huge numbers!
11
wes george @ 37
Okay wes, I’ll play.
You seem to be implying that, because of a correlation of timing, mankind’s activities must somehow be responsible for increasing sea levels. How on earth could mankind have accomplished this?
I think it is a safe bet that mankind is not causing the rise by heating sea water directly. Since precisely 1860 we have not been using ocean water as “cooling water” in power stations and such, in any growth pattern that would manage to correlate with the even rate of growth in the graph. Nor have we been dumping garbage (or anything else into the oceans to cause this even upward trend. So direct causation is out.
Nor can it be that we are “warming the atmosphere”, and the “warmer” atmosphere is “warming the oceans”, since this violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, regardless of what Travesty Trenberth may say to the contrary to try and account for his “missing heat”.
Could it possibly be, just maybe, that the world warming out of the LIA and freeing humanity from the the slavery of day to day survival, happened to coincide with a period of invention that led to the industrial revolution?
Or put another way, maybe sea-level rise and industrialisation were caused by the same thing – the end of the LIA and all the benefits that brought to humanity and the rest of the planet.
Just asking.
11
Humbug,
I didn’t say you’re going to get wet. In fact, if you read back, I said it’s evidence that AGW requires no government response at all.
But if you look at Jo’s graph, you gotta admit there was an obvious phase shift about 1860 and it appears that whatever that forcing was has continued in a anomalously steady fashion until quite recently. It’s a real break from the “natural” chaotic sideways pattern before 1860.
We get so use to dissing the modern CAGW-fear scam that we forget originally back in the 1980’s honest researchers suggested the AGW hypothesis to explain the data in Jo’s graphic. As skeptics we also get so use to fighting politically driven psuedo-science that we forget that before the pollies appropriated the weather as a weapon to wield against their political opponents it was once all about explaining this very unusual dataset that Jo has presents here.
Moreover, we have forgotten that it isn’t good enough to just be against something. Ideally, we should be able to suggest our own alternative hypothesis to explain the observational data before us. It’s not good enough to slag the modern climate technocracies and NGOs as scam artists in cahoots with a corrupt government. This data and the AGW explanation for it pre-dates all the politicisation of science that came after 1999 and Michael Mann’s hockey stick and climategate, etc.
This dataset will be here after Gillard and Brown and their carbon tax fraud are consigned to the dustbin of political history. And it will still beg an answer.
You got one?
21
wes george @ 43
You mean I need a “peer-reviewed, published scientific paper” to “prove” Japan shifted in the last earthquake?
Or a “peer reviewed, published scientific paper” to “prove” that four of the 20 largest recorded volcanic eruptions occurred between 1815 and 1912 (Mt Tambora 1815, Krakatoa 1883, Santa Maria 1902, Katmai 1912)?
Or a “peer-reviewed, published scientific paper” to “prove” these were all on the Pacific Rim?
So help me, I’m beginning to believe you cultists wouldn’t believe water ran downhill unless there was a “peer-reviewed, published scientific paper” to “prove” it, AND, of course, attributing it to warming caused by human activity.
Any other kind of “peer-reviewed, published scientific paper” is, of course, pure rubbish and the product of corrupt scientists in the pay of Big Oil / Big Tobacco / Koch Brothers / (insert bogeyman of the week).
11
Julia Gillard was touring the oceans off Queensland in a chauffeur-driven speedboat inspecting sea level rise.
Suddenly, a sea-cow (dugong) jumps out in front of the boat, they hit it full on and
the boat comes to a stop. Julia, in her usual charming manner, says to the chauffeur
‘Yu go out and check – you were steeering.’
The boat captain go to the bow, checks and reports that the sea cow is dead but it was old.
‘You were steeering, go and teell the the local triibe what hepppened!’ says Julia.
He leaves in the little dinghy
Two hours later, the captain returns in the little dinghy totally plastered, hair ruffled with a big grin on his face & rubbing his stomach.
‘My God, what happened to you?’ asks Julia.
The captain replies:
‘When I got there, the elders opened their best bottles of Bunderberg Rum, the wives gave me a slap-up meal’
‘What on earth did you say?’ demands Julia.
‘I went to the chief elders, and I said to them:
I’m Julia Gillards boat captain and I’ve just killed the old cow out in the ocean.’
11
Apologies to MV for going off topic.
I just heard on the joyous ABC news that RM Williams Co. is (with a ~2/3 hepling hand) buying a large cattle station in Central Australia. It will be de-stocked & set up for native veg carbon farming.
They will have to make up a few new ring events at the Royal Easter Show
I guess a few competitors will be getting a boost in the real bush market. However I am sure Malcolm will still choose RM moleys to go with his sheep cocky AcuBra.
What was that song line again :- “Big Hat – No Cattle”.
11
wes george:
July 26th, 2011 at 7:13 pm
Yeah I got one….
It’s irrelevant, it’s NOT a problem, it doesn’t matter.
You see that first graph and the 1860 mark that you believe “begs” an answer?
The answer is ERRORRRRR
Overwhelming numbers of measurements in the modern and pre modern times were made by fallible humans using eyes and hands. measurements for the purpose of shipping mainly, where a MILLIMETRE or TWENTY makes not an iota of a difference for their purposes.
Now, if there are some alarming measurement in the modern era that BEG an answer, I’d be glad to know about them. But alas, we still cannot measure sea level accurately enough, nor roughly enough for long enough, to know if the data is just data or data that begs borrows or steals.
So, this isn’t about just being against something, this is much ado about nothing and rightly does not deserve an alternate hypotheses. Ridicule yes, pointing the finger and calling ahaaa!! yes.
I hope that clarifies my position.
Ocean acidification anyone?
11
The amount of water in the oceans is not constant. Over 200km3 of fossil groundwater is extracted each year for irrigation. Virtually all of this eventually reaches the oceans.
11
memoryvault(Mt Tambora 1815, Krakatoa 1883, Santa Maria 1902, Katmai 1912) You missed one Tawawera 1886. Well it was pretty darn big. With Karakatoa and that one both in the mid 1880s would have been a fair amount of ash around the globe not sure if theres any data to show any cooling detailed enough from those times.
10
wes #27
“Yeah…but only if we are discussing sea levels over the course of millions of years. In this case we are talking a few decades. That’s a timescale below tectonic resolution”
excuse me ?? the tectonic movement is estimated at somewhere between 50-100mm per year (iirc).
even with a slight vertical component this is well enough to cause a 3mm rise in sea level.
basically WE DON’T KNOW.. and any move to attribute these very minor changes in sea level to any specific cause is purely speculation !!
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Real @ 52
Your mention of ash from these volcanoes adds a new dimension to Waffle’s post at #39.
We know these eruptions threw up millions of tons of ash, and we know at least 70% landed on water and settled to the bottom. How much volcanic ash settling on the ocean floor does it take to raise sea levels one tenth of a millimetre?
Don’t get me wrong. I stick by my post at #45 as probably the most logical answer.
Namely that the current rise in sea levels, AND the concurrent rise in industrialisation were both caused by the same thing – an end to the LIA.
However, considering all these other factors and our lack of knowledge of them simply highlights how little we do really know, and how arrogant and ignorant it is to ascribe what is happening to CAGW.
10
It was even warmer during the medieval warming period a thousand years ago and that didn’t cause an industrial revolution. So the industrial revolution was probably caused by European cultural evolution which led to the renaissance and the subsequent Enlightenment. Both of which fought up hill battles against bad weather, at least at times.
In fact, although civilisation does tend to thrive during warm periods, civilisation evolves culturally or technology more quickly when it is forced to adapt to harsh circumstance by poor climate conditions.
As for how industrial civilisation may have effected the Earth’s climate. Maybe the massive global population explosion, clearing of forests, the expansion of modern agriculture and the invention steam and combustion engines released CO2 and changed the albedo enough to create the striking pattern we see in Jo’s graph. Jo thinks the phase shift starts too early, but she has yet to produce much evidence for this opinion.
As for the ocean basin steadily rising over the last 150 years due to volcanism or plate tectonics to account for the steady, smooth rise in sea-levels you’d think modern geology might have detected something this massive occurring. But I’ve never heard this suggested. I thought Memoryvault might be aware of some research we had missed.
Now that’s a good point, Banana, but I doubt much fossil groundwater was being extracted before the 1950’s, and probably almost none before the 1900. So that can’t possibility account for the phase shift with see in Jo’s graphic back in 1860.
My intention is to provoke some serious thinking about the dataset Jo has presented here. It’s not good enough to hand wave it off as the work of aliens or volcanoes or water leaking from the mantle. Or to say it doesn’t matter because it’s not catastrophic. It’s still an interesting phenomena, which assuming it’s real, begs an explanation.
I’m looking for a rational argument, a reasonable hypothesis that usefully describes why the climate data from after 1860 has phase shifted away from what came before. The afternoon has come and gone without a single serious suggestion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9peZ5WOtL0&feature=related
I’m unimpressed.
20
Lawrie: #3
I wouldn’t be so sure that they are beaten. Following on from the horrific incidents in Norway this past week, there are now calls in Europe for, “Controls to be placed on the Internet, and particularly on the moderation of ‘unofficial news and comment services’.” Guess how the politicians would like to respond to that suggestion.
10
Yeah, but…tectonic movements are moving in a multitude of directions on every continental plate to mid-ocean ridges all over the planet. The chance of all of these motions moving in the same direction uniformly while pulsing in 60-years cycles is radical suggestion…not to mention something that you’d think would be of extreme interest to geologists if true…perhaps you have some evidence for this conjecture?
10
Lionell Griffith: #20
That is an interesting point. It seems that Climate Science has a close correllation with Epidemiology. Or might the correlation in the other direction? 🙂
20
wes george @ 55
Excuse me? We were talking about a graph that purports to show that sea levels started to rise in a fairly distinct pattern from about 1860. Exactly when and how did a purported sea-level rise transmogrify into a “phase shift away from what came before”?
And what exactly is this “phase shift” (apart from the alleged sea-level rise for which I offered a perfectly rational possibility at post #45) – namely:
And you STILL haven’t offered any explanation of how mankind heats the oceans – CAGW doesn’t cut it – Second Law and all.
10
As MaryFJohnston @ #4 has pointed out, about a centimeter per year of sea level rise per year is the average. As usual the lie is the context. By the way the warmenists seem to have control of wikipedia again with a certain fraud, M. Mann featuring rather prominently here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_warm_period.
20
Bananabender @51
Yes! and what about erosion of land into the seas? How many cubic meters each and every hard rain to displace an equivalent volume of water?
What about coral growth and subsequent displacement? How about the volume of marine life in total?
If you level a square Kilometer of rain forest what happens to the water contained in those plants?
Would someone also tell me how many liters of H20 are in the atmosphere today? What about last week? Last year?
10
I forgot one more thing: the tons of cargo on board and the total displacement of ships each day? Yes that is it! the apparent slowing of sea level rise is due to the world wide economic slowdown. Less cargo, therefore less displacement.
10
Wes George! Well done. I gave you a thumbs up, because you looked at a graph and saw what was there, and didn’t pretend it wasn’t. I may not agree with you about AGW, but its great to see someone who sees black and calls it black.
20
@Rereke Whakaaro:
July 26th, 2011 at 8:45 pm
Comment 58
Funny you should mention epidemiology. No properly conducted human experiment has ever shown that saturated fat or cholesterol cause heart disease. The whole premise is based on the fraudulent Six Countries Study – the Hockey Stick of epidemiology. Yet billions have been spent on to reduce heart disease via low fat diets.
20
@Lionel and Jo,
Thank you Lionel. It never ceases to amaze me the level of expertise one finds on the skeptic blogs as compared to the alarmist ones. The commenters’ contributions are aimed at the reader’s intellect rather than their emotions.
Pointman
10
Hi RWTH:
That should be 1.3 mm per year now.
In the big melt between 12 kya and 6 kya (thousand years ago) the rate was at times up to over 30 mm per year.
10
Hilarious Mark D.
10
Reading backwards, I see that theRealUniverse @44 already covered my point at 62.
10
memoryvault: @ 54. Interesting, wes george says there was warming in the medieval period and no industrialization, hence your argument id false, but then there was not the science and mathematics that were developed in the post LIA hence the warming from the LIA end combined with the knowledge could maybe have help industrial development. BUT I am a little uneasy about that graph hence my sarcasm in earlier posts. It looks rather strange and Im suspicious of data taken pre 20th century or that of prewar data. What would the benchmark teat of reliability. I feel it all is a bit meaningless and un-analyzable to any extent.
10
It’s amazing the amount of ‘science’ you can grow from a little bit of evidence.
Indeed speculation on the possibilities is a necessary part of scientific enquiry.
However you’ve got to know the difference, while with journos & pollies getting hold of a little bit of ‘science’ to dignify their dramatisations & fantasies , well the endless possibilities take on new dimensions.
10
This site is well worth a gander:-
“Al Gores Carbon Empire:
Cashing in on Climate Change”
by Fred Lucas
http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/v1217525953.pdf
10
Real @ 69
Yes, wes chooses to ignore that development builds on itself, and that, historically, is exactly what happened.
10
Bananabender@64
You should find that this site validates your point:-
“The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics”
“Essays by Malcolm Kendrick, MD”
http://www.thincs.org/Malcolm.index.htm
10
@ 72
Link doesn’t function but tis one does:-
http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/0000000CAE78.htm
10
Well said Lionall.
20
Onya Wes. Just to add my bit it is clear that the “Something caused” but of the graph is just the upside of the regular cycle… you can see the same 1750 – 1770, and even 1700-1720… there is nothing in that graph to support the content of the post Jo makes sorry. Must be a slow news day… maybe you could make V happy and comment on Beck calling the dead Norwegian kids “hitler youth”.
10
Hey folks, a bit off topic here, but I noticed the video of Vaclav Klaus’ National Press Club address has been uploaded to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idKceFvO7AM
Good thing he didn’t need a parliament security clearance to get to the press club, eh?
Snubbed by Julia, what a sad sad joke that woman is.
10
Ahem, Wes, you must have missed it. Man made emissions of CO2 are small until 1945. 85% of all our emissions occur after then. How could CO2 emissions cause that shift prior to the 1800’s? Or even the phase shift of 1850? Since the uptrend is so linear and similar before and after the big burst of CO2 started, it’s strongly suggestive, that unless some other factor coincidentally nullified the CO2 effect, there is not much of an effect due to CO2. Damning I say.
I said nothing about any other climate forcing at all, be it solar irradiance, solar magnetic, cloud cover, geomagnetic, nor man made albedo changes.
We don’t know why the medieval warm period ended, nor what the factor was the caused the Little ice age. Was it a thing that went away in the 1700’s, or a thing that ramped up? What caused the Roman warming, or the Minoan? There are tantalising clues but in the end, we know so little and there are so many factors at work.
So when I say “something caused” I mean it in the most encompassing literal sense of the word “something” could be anything — but something changed (or several things did) in the 1700’s — indeed the proxies for temperatures suggest the air-temperature change happened in the late 1600’s, and maybe the ocean rising was delayed?
Incidentally there are many other clues that corroborate the timing. Glaciers melting, boreholes, ice cores, temp proxies…
But surely no one is suggesting the world warms up for no reason. The text line “something changed” is merely the inescapably bleeding obvious.
As for the phase change? Lionels point about melding two different data sets could explain it. The graph goes from 3 data points to 1000. Those early 3 data points are all from a similar area. I didn’t comment on the phase change because no conclusion of any sort can be drawn except that it’s dodgy, and the best data we have tells us that the warming started in the 1700’s, and it is dubious at best to use that to calculate “acceleration” and extrapolate that to 2100.
PS: Mattb “the graph is just the upside of the regular cycle…” – you make it sound like a “cycle” is a force. (The Earth is affected by the sun, moon, cosmic dust and cycles”). What causes the cycle eh? That’s what “causes” the change in warming.
10
Hmmm.
Part of the intellectual/philosophical fog that passes for thought to day is the almost universal tendency to attribute abstractions with an existence separate from and independent of the things from which they are abstracted. Thus we have floating “causes”, disconnected “effects”, random disassociated “attributes”, and “things” without identity. Having no identity, “things” can be affected by any “cause” and show any “effect” as a consequence. They can even show the “effect” prior to the “cause”. Their “attribute”s land and depart as flies on a rotting body at arbitrary whim and thus can be anything or anything else at any time.
The payoff of this miasma is that we have Popper’s poppycock that you can only know what isn’t true but can never really know what is true. Further, all you can know is what isn’t true NOW because cause, effect, attribute, and thing are all floating about randomly mixing without context. This state of things should saturate every BS detector in the universe. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Peer review doesn’t protect us from this nonsense. In fact, it is almost totally infected with it.
The fact is, you cannot make things that work out of things that don’t exist. You can’t use attributes that things don’t have to make them do things they can’t do. You can only discover truth from a foundation of truth. This is what I mean when I say: “The fundamental principle here is one cannot properly go beyond the evidence and call it science. It becomes speculation at best and demagoguery or fraud at worst.”
I agree that you can’t prove a random disconnected mix of cause, effect, attribute, and thing true. Connect those things with fact and context and you can. It’s simple. Don’t make statements that go beyond the evidence without identifying it as a conjecture or arbitrary guess. Keep your categories of thought clear. You might actually avoid doing stupid things in stupid places and thereby not suffer the cost of being terminally stupid.
20
OzJuggler @77
To be fair, it wasn’t a state visit, and with Juliar’s party in such a state at the moment she has more than enough to deal with. 🙂
10
OzJuggler @77
Nice to MoB enjoying the address:
10
Sea level rising before 1800. AGW a problem in the 16th century
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Americas-First-Great-Global-Warming-Debate.html?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=20110718&utm_content=globalwarmingdebate
“For more than two millennia, people had lamented that deforestation had resulted in rising temperatures”
10
I’ve heard “it’s worse than we thought” so many times I’m getting confused. What is “it” in “it’s getting worse”, and who are “we” in “than we thought?”
10
Jans:#80
July 27th, 2011 at 4:05 am
But she had plenty of time to meet with Tony Blair and even hold a joint press conference with him where he lauded his own efforts to introduce an ETS in GB. He even said ‘the science’ was too overwhelming to ignore.
Klaus is a current head of state, Tony Blair is just a dick head.
I guess this could be called “cherry picking” visitors.
10
Oops. I clicked on the “Submit Comment” box before I was ready (#83). I meant to comment:
I’ve heard “it’s worse than we thought” so many times I’m getting confused. What is “it” in “it’s worse”, and who are “we” in “than we thought?” But whatever “it” and “we” represent, if the statement “it’s worse than we thought” is true, then (a) “our” initial thinking was wrong, or (b) “our” current thinking is wrong, or (c) both “our” initial and current thinking are wrong. My money is on both. In any event, why should anyone give credence to what “we” think.
10
Vaclav Klaus:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idKceFvO7AM&feature=feedwll&list=WL
10
Nice article here Re: hypocritical stance on selective quoting of thatcher .
>>>>>>>>>
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/commentary/julia-and-malcolm-would-you-please-stop-verballing-mrs-thatcher/story-e6frgd0x-1226102308194
>>>>>>>>
if only every australian could read and understand the implications of this selective use of facts .
Election now!, you deceitful troll !
10
@14 oh how true Lionell
And let’s not forget that paleontologists ( aay Tim ) build complete dinosaurs from one bone , and then jump up and down if someone questions the accuracy of their findings …… Good grief !
10
So I take it that most people here agree that there isn’t much point fitting curves to data unless you have some understanding of the underlying system and consequently the functional form the model should exhbit (assuming the hypothesis is appropriate)?
Not quite sure why I was banging my head against a wall trying to explain that yesterday…
10
Bulldust @88,
I have banged my head against that same wall many times over the years so I do understand your frustration.
20
Green helmets are gathering to begin their march!
“The Rise of the eco-Imperialists – why the United Nations is wrong to depict everything from war to famine as a ‘climate change issue’.”
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10919/
10
U.N. says sea levels could rise by 3 feet [1 metre] this century and that natural disasters could “increase exponentially”.
“West,Russia divided on UN council climate role” REUTERS AFRICA
http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE76K05B20110721
10
HOw appropriate that Aussie brand R M Williams, who still manufacture some of their clothes in Australia, are setting themselves up to be amoung the first true blue carbon cowboys:
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/the-bush-outfitter-creates-a-future-carbon-sink-20110726-1hynr.html
We’re off to the races folks, yeeeehaa!
10
Better listen to Die Hard Scientist from the Pre-Post-Modern-Science era;
http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/NilsAxelMornerinterview.pdf
10
val majkus,
If you are watching, we could do with some legal/constitutional opinion and comments on this thread:
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/07/barking-mad-australian-economic-carbon-tax-doom/comment-page-3/#comment-408788
See comments 108 and 109.
10
Let’s see here:
– It’s going to get so hot I’ll die of heat exhaustion. No…
– The weather is going to get so bad a storm will kill me. No…
– It’s going to rain so hard I’ll be washed away. No…
– Food won’t grow so I’m going to starve to death. No…
– The ocean is going to turn to acid and all life on earth will die from that. No…
– The ocean is going to rise up and swallow me in a fit of pique. No…
– The world is bankrupt and money is no good so I’m going to die from riots. No…
– I’m going to die from confusion over which disaster will really kill me. Well, could be…
Fie on all this! Just stand up and fight instead of talking about it. There’ll always be another scare and more talking. Our enemy is ruthless. How far are we willing to go to win? What’s the strategy for winning? We’re organizing in this country. I hope you’re organizing in yours. 🙂
10
I left out that I might be taxed to death.
No end of ways to go…
10
Thanks for the link to the constitutional issue.
S114 may mean that states (and hence state owned power providers) cant be taxed on this CO2 furphy.
10
G.Edward Griffin, “My first book was about the United Nations -‘The Fearful Master…A second look at the United Nations’…….What is becoming very obvious and visible now – for those who wish to see – that it is an organisation to implement and provide world government based on the model of collectivism…….The U.N.is designed to control from the top down…..”
From; The Daily Bell, G,Edward Griffin on Inflation,Politics,and the Power Elite
http.//www.thedailybell.com/2516/Anthony-Wile-G-Edward-Griffen-on-Inflation-Politics-and-the-Power-Elite
10
MaryFJohnston @96,
Thank you for your brief comment regarding the possibility that the carbon tax may be able to be blocked by the states. This seems to me to be really important issue to discuss, but OT for this thread. Perhaps OT for JoNova site (I am new to commenting here so no yet up to speed with the “culture”).
Is it possible to keep several threads running in parallel? From my perspective the due “Barking Mad – …” thread about due diligence is vitally important and we should keep it going. If we could gain momentum on the need for due diligence, we’d be will on the way to exposing the issues with CAGW and carbon tax.
Mary and others, if you can provide any input on the matter raised at #108 here: http://joannenova.com.au/2011/07/barking-mad-australian-economic-carbon-tax-doom/comment-page-3/#comment-408788 , I’d urge you to add your comments.
Sorry for OT comment. I think this is important and it would be a pity to let last night’s comment pass without taking the opportunity it presents.
10
Maybe this can shed some light on the subject
http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/pdf
10
there was no repeat of vaclav klaus’ address at the NPC on ABC, it was not listed on A-PAC when i checked around 7pm, so i only saw the second half when i stumbled on it at the last moment on A-PAC. was impressed by his humility and his sober assessment of CAGW and the carbon “dioxide” tax/ETS. felt he must have surely made an impact on the “press” in attendance.
today, an online search for “NEWS” on “vaclav klaus” brings up a first grouping of 20 articles on the President not being prepared to go through security scanners at the Parliament, leading to ABC’s 7.30 program not interviewing him. Google’s excerpt from the top story of The Age article is not in fact the first para in the article:
Czech not cleared in Parliament visit – The Age
Vaclav Klaus, who gained notoriety for stealing a pen while holding a press conference with Chilean president Sebastian Pinera, yesterday refused to undergo…
Czech leader Vaclav Klaus rails against carbon tax – Joe Kelly, The Australian
(RAILS? NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH. PAINTS HIM AS IN FAVOUR OF ABBOTT’S DIRECT ACTION, WHEN HE ACTUALLY SAID BOTH PLANS WERE “ABSOLUTELY WRONG”. AT THE END OF HIS NPC APPEARANCE, HE DID ADD THAT DIRECT ACTION WAS MORE VISIBLE AND PERHAPS MORE AMENABLE TO COST/BENEFITS ANALYSIS, THO STILL “CRAZY”)
the first grouping has just one headline re policy:
Visiting Czech snubs Aussie carbon policy – SMH, AAP
Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott may finally have found an economist who agrees with him in the carbon price debate…
ABC is toxic from start to finish:
ABC: Jeremy Thompson: Czech bounced: president denied entry to Parliament
Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus, made famous in a viral internet clip showing him pocketing a ceremonial pen in Chile, was not taking any chances of souvenirs being found in his pocket at Parliament House today…
the second Google NEWS grouping for “VACLAV KLAUS” is ctually 198 results on TONY BLAIR!!! HEADLINES SUCH AS:
News Ltd: Malcolm Farr: Former British PM Tony Blair says carbon price intelligent, Czech President says it’s deluded
(INCLUDES)Mr Klaus, an economist by training, told the National Press Club – with fellow denier Lord Christopher Monckton in the audience – that the link between carbon dioxide emissions and economic development were clear…
Tony Blair tells Australia he backs carbon action – Herald Sun
Asylum-seekers, check. Now for carbon – Ben Packham, Australian
Sceptic: One of Milne’s biggest gripes is the prominence given to sceptics in the climate change debate. So she’ll probably be fairly unhappy with the National Press Club over its recent run of guests. A week after hosting Lord Monckton, the club welcomes Czech president Vaclav Klaus, who says human-induced climate change is a “false myth”.
Balance: The ledger will be squared on August 3 when Malcolm Turnbull addresses the club. It’s clear that whatever he says will offend most of his colleagues and be seized upon by Labor as evidence of Tony Abbott’s flakiness on the issue…
Ninemsn: World moving away from carbon: Blair
Blair sells out after ticket prices slashed – New Zealand Herald
SMH: Shaun Carney: As Gillard shops for time, retailers are playing a disingenuous blame game
AUSTRALIA’S retail sector is in all sorts of bother. After almost 20 years of buying up big, and borrowing to pay the bills, Australians are saving again…
Having looked overseas and seen what can happen to families and societies when they are too exposed to debt, Australians are doing the prudent thing – putting some of their earnings away and trying to maximise the value of every dollar they spend…
The criticisms of the government are, variously, that it doesn’t have a policy vision, or that it has too much policy, or that it should never have repealed WorkChoices, or that its carbon tax is creating too much uncertainty – although Labor went to the 2007 and 2010 elections pledging to put a price on carbon…
REMEMBER, THIS SECOND GROUPING RESULTS FROM A SEARCH FOR “VACLAV KLAUS” NEWS STORIES!!!
btw i guess Shaun Carney thinks the following is “disingenous” as well:
26 July: Gold Coast Bulletin: Lucy Ardern: Coast chain stores could close
Premier Investments said it would close 50 stores nationwide, but had not yet said which ones.
If stores at Pacific Fair close, it will add to the shopping centre’s woes. It has seen a fall off in trade since the opening of the new Robina Town Centre combined with the overall slump caused by the gloomy economic conditions.
National Retail Association boss Gary Black said it was likely Coast stores, including those at Pacific Fair, would be on Premier Investments’ hit list…
http://www.goldcoast.com.au/article/2011/07/26/335665_gold-coast-business.html
27 July: Gold Coast Bulletin: Lucy Ardern: Rebate change hurts Coast solar jobs
UP TO 150 jobs are under threat at two of the biggest solar retailers on the Gold Coast thanks to a problem-plagued Federal Government rebate system.
Beyond Building Energy and Ecovation both confirmed they had been forced to restructure and said other companies would soon be doing the same…
The problem for solar companies is fluctuations in the value of renewable energy certificates (STCs).
Under the Federal Government rebate system, certificates are issued to a householder when an eligible system is installed. The householder often transfers STCs to the installation company in exchange for a discount.
Companies such as Beyond Building Energy and Ecovation factor the value of those certificates into quotes, but when they go to cash them, their redemption price may have halved.
Industry experts say the problem is being felt nationwide and comes on the back of failed government initiatives such as the insulation scheme, green loans and other solar rebates.
A spokeswoman for Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Greg Combet said efforts had been made to help retailers, but the scheme would be reviewed by the new Climate Change Authority…
http://www.goldcoast.com.au/article/2011/07/27/335955_gold-coast-business.html
Shame on the MSM, and many thanks to Vaclav Klaus for your humanity.
10
“UN Security Council wants to establish UN peacekeepers with Green helmets to ‘help’ so called climate refugees”
http://www.realityzone.com/currentperiod.html
http://www.globalwarming.org/2011/07/21/climate-change-mission-creep-will-the-un-security-council-establish-a-green-helmets-peacekeeping-force/
10
European Organisation for Nuclear Research [CERN] forbids its scientists from drawing conclusions from a major experiment,because they might challenge the myth of global warming – the experiment proved that temperatures are greatly influenced by sun activity.The conclusion they do not want discussed is that CO2 emissions are harmless.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/18/cern_cosmic_ray_gag/
10
The logarithmic effect of CO2 means the first 15% was pretty important in terms of greenhouse effect while today’s emissions are worth practical nothing. We also have to consider land use changes, such as the strip clearing of forest for agriculture, the massive population explosion, etc… Furthermore, there is a chance that we might have under-estimated the percentage of CO2 released before 1945.
It didn’t. There is no evidence in your graphic that the forcing before 1860 is the same as after 1860. Pre-1860 looks like business as usual, volcanoes, Dalton’s rebound, sideways aimless meander.
It’s only the phase shift of 1860 that is strikingly “unnatural” looking. And even then the phase shift in and of itself might be nothing unusual, but then it continues on in a 140-year linear progression. It’s a total break from the pattern before. Aren’t you curious about that? Because it’s the only really interesting part of this graphic. The arrow pointing to the Dalton minimum is like being in the kitchen with an elephant and pointing out there’s sugar ants in the sink.
See logarithmic effect of CO2. We wouldn’t expect new CO2 additions at, say, 340ppm to have the same effect at the 1850 270ppm level. And we don’t actually know precisely what the pre-industrial level of atmospheric CO2 was. Could have been a bit lower, making the early anthropogenic releases that much more effective at warming. Besides, anthropogenic warming might not be all about CO2 releases, albedo changes due to land usage might contribute.
Ironically, your whole blog is about showing post-1945 CO2 emissions don’t have much of an effect (if any) on climate, but here you say if CO2 was involved we would expect the graph to arch upward after 1945? Not if you read Jo Nova’s blog, you wouldn’t.
Furthermore, it would hardly surprise if the Earth’s biosphere, the most complex nonlinear system in the solar system, which has maintained conditions suitable for life for at least the last billion years has evolved a whole series of negative feedbacks to ameliorate warming or colding trends. Although, the perfectly linear progression after 1860 doesn’t seem to show it kicking in anywhere. Which probably means we are well within the normal parameters of climate variation. Happy planet.
Absolutely true. The one thing we do know is that AGW didn’t cause the climate changes before 1860 some of which were of greater magnitude and rapidity than the post-1860 phase shift. I’ve always argued that the principle of parsimony suggests we shouldn’t create a one off theory that can only explain warming after 1860, especially one with implications that seem falsified by the MWP, Roman warming and various minimums. (which explains why Michael Mann had to erase them from history.) Rather what’s needed is a holistic theory that can explain climate variation during at least the later Holocene, not just the period 1860 to 1998.
Perhaps, the sea-level data set which starts at 1800 could be be creating an illusion of anomaly. It’s too short of a period to put the 1860 phase shift in proper perspective. Perhaps the phase shift curves into the pre-industrial warm periods would match modern warming.
But this limited data is all we got to work with and it shows an unexplained anomaly that just so happens to coincide with another global-scale anomaly, the rise of industrial civilisation, the clearing of forests and the population explosion. In fact, the recent changes humankind has made to the environment are indisputably the grandest and most rapid since the Younger Dryas, 10,000 years ago…. Curious coincident, no?
Well, next time instructed us not the look at the dodgy elephant in your graphic to start with.
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Johnny, I love you too, but you’re a prime example of everything that’s wrong with the climate debate.. You been staring at data every day for at least the last year now year on Jo’s blog and then doing a pretty good imitation of a blind mole rat. Funny that when the evidence suddenly seems to support your holy faith your eyesight becomes eagle-eyed sharp, mate.
I’ve come to expect that sort of lack of conscious self-awareness and inability to grow as new information is present from Alarmist true believers, but not skeptics.
My whole point here is not to gin up support for AGW, but to insist that skeptical minds stay curious and skeptical. It’s not good enough to post a convincing graphic that clearly shows an anomalous warming phase shift from 1860 onwards and then pretend we all can’t see it. Offer zero explanation and then claim that the early, obviously natural warming out of the LIA is part of the same post-1860 warming trend, when the evidence presented clearly shows otherwise. And then when called out, claim you forget to mention the datasets are dodgy… That’s the sort of willful blindness we are bombarded daily with by the ABC, Real Climate, et al.
What I think I am seeing is battle fatigue. We’re losing the plot. For many skeptics the debate has decayed into tribal warfare. In game theory terms, the constant dehumanisation and delegitimization of the skeptics by the climate orthodoxy has harden the skeptical response into its own nascent orthodox position, complete with unconscious blindspots and a blacklist of heretical ideas—there can be no admission of any evidence no matter how mild for AGW because like a breach in the barricade the Alarmist hordes will claim all your base belong to us. In the endless rhetorical skirmishes and smear campaigns all those simple minds who are just curious and searching for a way to better understand nature are trampled and driven out of both camps.
So we spiral down and down until the only thing distinguishing Alarmist from Skeptic are the trenches they defend with tooth and nail.
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Wes,
Sorry but i fail to see the point of your past few posts.
You seem to be honing in on “the phase shift” quite a bit but if we cannot accurately measure sea level now what makes you think this is an accurate representation of SL then?
You seem to be implying that the onset of the IR coincides with the phase shift thereby validating the AGW theory to a point at least but i have seen nothing in your posts to support this theory.
Could it be that with the onset of the IR we actually began measuring SLR much more closely? Maybe just maybe prior to 1860 the SL was indeed rising?
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wes,
I suggest you try harder to hold context.
First: That the effect of the CO2 concentration is logarithmic and thus has its major effect from the first 20% is specifically applicable to the first 20% of the FINAL concentration. That means the from zero to approximately 80 ppm and not the first 20% of man’s contribution to a level that is almost five times higher. If the CO2 level were at 80ppm or below, we would not be here. Plants could not grow and the rest of us would have no food to eat.
Second: There is no phase shift evident in the plotted data. Specifically there is no change from solid to liquid plotted. Nor is there a phase shift analogous to a current-voltage phase shift in an AC signal. What there is, is a self evident discontinuity at ca 1860. The most likely cause is from an attempt to blend two very different and likely incommensurate data sets. Much the same way the blade portion of Mann’s hockey stick chart was the result a blending of cherry picked tree ring temperature reconstructions with highly cooked thermometer data. Remember “hide the decline” and “the trick” of Climategate fame?
20
Jo and Lionel,
Thanks for this. Whether the uncertainty of SLR is coming from remote sensing with assumptions added, statistics, the inherent problems in trying to measure the real SL of a pear shaped geoid with flat spots, I am certainly not qualified to say but as a sea-front dweller for the last 70 years I have been a keen observer and have reliable benchmarks going back nearly half a century.
At the last king tides on the Gold Coast on the 15th and 16th of June, at night, the top of those tides was at least 30cm [1 foot] lower than it was 48 years ago.
I see no evidence of ANY sea level rise.
10
Crakar24,
Jo should have used a graph like Spencer’s (link below) to make her point that global warming started before industrialisation and so is likely to be (at least in part) natural:
http://65.13.81.113/GlobalWarmingSkepticism/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming_files/2000-years-of-global-temperatures.jpg
But she didn’t. And that would be the end of it except that it’s become something of revealing exercise to observe how our little skeptical community has responded to Jo’s unfortunate choice of dataset. It says a lot more about us than the climate.
Jo’s graphic shows an unexplained and striking break in 1860 away from all that came before. Those here who are emotional vested in the AGW theory can see it plain as day. (Although they are normally blind as bats when shown evidence that refutes AGW) We expect as much from True Believers.
However, at least some here who are emotionally invested in disproving the AGW theory can’t see the 1860’s phase shift at all. Nope. Nothing to see here folks. Move along. Needs no explanation. Some even seem offended that I dare mention it exists.
Then there are the rest of Jo’s audience, the silent majority, who might not be particularly emotionally invested in the debate pro or con, who might be new to the debate and are open minded and curious.
I wonder what they see in Jo’s graphic?
By the way. My link in comment 104 above is bad. But it’s relevant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer
10
I thought my low reading at the last summer king tide may have been due to the strong la nina influence at that time [I know it shouldn’t] but now with the current low SOI, SLs are still low.
10
wes, try this:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_gRuPC7OQdxc/Spu3fumvScI/AAAAAAAAALQ/WwWvsR0Wsag/s1600-h/sea+level+rise+since+1800.jpg
And this:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_gRuPC7OQdxc/Spu8gOM_6AI/AAAAAAAAAL4/jcgE1KlRmZw/s1600-h/Post+glacial+sea+level+rise.jpg
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Wes George @ 108
Svensmark says that the Sun alters the climate by influencing the cosmic ray influx and cloud formation.
I’m no expert,but it looks to me as though there is a correlation between the graph in the link I provided at 102 and “Jo’s graphic”.
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Here is something that attracted my attention a couple of days ago. It caught me unawares, but I think it was on ABC Channel 24 (news) about 15 minutes before the 7 PM news. It was an environmental piece. Part of it reported about a dozen sea turtles and some dugongs dying mysteriously off Townsville. Now here’s the thing. The experts were attributing the deaths to cooler waters than normal. This is despite a) the oceans are supposed to be warming, and b) in a La Nina year the waters are supposed to be even warmer. So not only is climate change causing Australia to have its coldest autumn since 1950 (61 years ago) according to the BOM itself, but it is cooling the northern waters. What to believe?
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Jans @ 70:
Well I’m going to suggest that one way to introduce the process of elimination in the speculation behind sea level rise is to measure alkalinity and pressure-at-depth. This would remove chemical and physical forcings which could be playing a role in decal and eonal oscillations caused by planetary and geological influences. That way, the sceptical scientist would be able to focus on temperature and volume.
@Wes:
I had thought about that but concluded that, with must of the C02 being released by volcanoes, the phytosphere would play a significant role in drawing down carbon from the atmosphere. As the detritus sinks it leaves a gap for more carbon to be mixed into the ocean. You can see the massive amount of carbon being drawn down by the the phytosphere on C02 plots. This, naturally leads me to speculate that the C02 every year is not released back into the atmosphere due to decay. Rather the release rate is constant and very high. To me the decay component of C02 in the AGW hypothesis is competely untested, unmeasured and totally flawed.
10
Wes,
Firstly let me state we are no closer to accurate sea level measurements as we are to accurate global temp measurements but for the sake of the exercise let us assume the graph you call “Jo’s graph” above is correct.
The “Jo’s graph” is in fact not Jo’s graph at all, Jo has simply reproduced it from the Jevrejeva et al 2008 paper and the paper shows a gentle rise in SL from around 1800 to 1860 and from then on we get a linear rise until present. It would seem that the initial rise (1880) is of concern for you because it has not or cannot be explained and you fear this may give the warmbots a toe grip in their quest to further push their agenda, have i got this right?
Below is a couple of links, the first is from NOAA
http://cfpub.epa.gov/eroe/index.cfm?fuseaction=detail.viewPDF&ch=50&lShowInd=0&subtop=315&lv=list.listByChapter&r=235291
I have provided this link for two reasons, firstly it shows just how idiotic the lengths we go to to develop a reconstruction of the SST and anybody that thinks we have a clue about the past is truly living in fantasy land but once again for the sake of the exercise lets accept it as accurate. The second reason for the link is to show that SST’s do not correlate well with SLR as the SST dropped from 1880 to 1910 (NOAA)but yet SLR continued in its linear trend (Jo’s graph).
The second link is fron Dr Roy Spencer
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/07/modeled-ocean-temperatures-from-1880-through-2010/
In this graph we can clearly see the SST drop from 1880 to 1910 further establishing a non link between SLR and SST but what we also see in both SST graphs is the virtual flat line from 1880 to around the late 1970’s when it suddenly goes through the roof just when we switched over to Sat measurments. Whereas with “Jo’s graph” the rise in SL began 110 years prior in the 1860’s.
Now we both know it is impossible for SL to rise in response to a warming that has not yet occurred in fact it is impossible for the SL to rise when the sea cools therefore we can logically deduce that the rise in SST did not cause the rise in SL and i suspect even a warmbot would accept this also.
So what did cause the sea to start rising way back in 1800 as Jo has asked? You seem to think the skeptics NEED to come up with an answer for two reasons:
1, Firstly if we dont then we are no better than they are and
2, We NEED an answer to keep the warmbots at bay
Nothing could be further from the truth, Jo has asked the question which means Jo does not know why, if a warmbot asked the question they would solve it by invoking some mythical CO2 sermon something which you are bordering on doing.
I suggest the data is at fault, have a look at the massive error bars that go all the way up to 1860 where they all but disappear, i think your answer Wes lies here.
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“Farting Death Camels Must Die to save the world – Carbon plan to unleash kill choppers against dromedaries”.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/08/farting_carbo_camels/
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wes george @ 110:
Unexplained?
Jo:
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Wes, As Lionell points out the Log Effect starts at 0ppm, not 280ppm. The first 20ppm counts most.
You seem to think that I say that man-made changes aren’t responsible for any changes in our climate, but I don’t recall saying that? The headline is about CO2. I agree with you that it’s believable that we’ve made some changes, but no one is trying to tax us for those, my focus remains on the big deceit that matters most.
I’ve used the Loehle proxy graph before several times, indeed I did this sea-level post as a part of a series I’m planning to show just how important the MWP and LIA are. I’m still at a loss as to why you think I shouldn’t show Jevrejeva’s data – I explained that I thought they interpreted it wrongly.
My claim that the world has been warming for over 200 years is so non-controversial its acknowledged by CAGW believers (quietly) as being true.
Frankly the most important part of this graph is the linear rise from 1850 onwards. I think it’s worth showing this just for that alone.
10
Which begs the question Kevin in 117,
Who or indeed what are we saving the planet for……………..
10
Wes, I am worried about you. You’ve been gone for most of several months and when you return you are worse than say Mattyb. Have you been abducted by warmists?
10
Latest from Watsup
“From Wiley-Blackwell, something just plain surprising. Nibbling by herbivores can have a greater impact on the width of tree rings than climate, new research has found. The study, published this week in the British Ecological Society’s journal Functional Ecology, could help increase the accuracy of the tree ring record as a way of estimating the past……….”
Puts the schtick into perspective doesnt it, but like i have said before if we think we can accurately measure the past whether it be sea level, sea temp or indeed surface temp we are living in a fantasy land.
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None of this brouhaha would be necessary if the political elite weren’t using the ruse of CAGW to justify grabbing all the productive wealth to redistribute to their favorite charities. As they are grabbing the wealth, they promise increasingly to make it difficult to impossible to create more wealth. They plan to do this by instituting a heavy handed top down totalitarian global governance in which all individual choice is eliminated. We are all to exist by permission – THEIR permission.
If they get their way, we will be lucky to be living in an insect infested mud hut along side a crocodile feeding pool. You will likely be burning dried kangaroo dung to cook bugs for breakfast. The details might vary depending upon where you end up after the global takeover but this is what they are after.
20
Mark Twain noted the same thing:
Some things, apparently, never change.
10
No comments about this paper yet from post 101?
http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/pdf
I can understand JB/Matt/Blimey/KR etc ignoring it although i did hold out hope one of them would provide me with a bit of entertainment. What are the odds it makes it into AR5?
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Lionell @ 123:
One good thing that may come out of this battle (after we win) is that many ordinary people will lose their reflexive faith in science and realize that it is technology, not scientific theories that are responsible for their living standards being so much better than that of our ancestors.
And a technology can be clearly demonstrated to work or not, independent of what anyone thinks about it.
(And to anyone who thinks that technology is nothing more than applied science:
1) Please explain why technology has historically led science.
2) You are clearly not engineers.)
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Wes George@106:
Ouch!
I will try to practice that which I applaud in others.
I will try to practice that which I applaud in others.
I will try to practice that which I applaud in others…..
10
BobC # 126
The downside of technology leading science, is for example when technology plays with explosives or nukes without an understanding of the science involved.
Genetics is the other case which has risks.
10
I hope JoNova will update her Skeptics Handbook sometime soon. The only reason I understand any of this now is because I started my AGW research with it
Thanks Jo
10
BobC,
I agree that the mindless worship of science is as bad as any superstition. It is based upon a serious misunderstanding of what science is and a confusion about the nature of the reality that science studies. However,….
A good engineer has to be a good scientists because more often than not, he has to discover and refine some critical aspect of science before he can make things that work and work well. Conversely, a good scientist has to be a good engineer to be able to design his equipment and experiments so they produce reliable results efficiently and effectively. In other words Science and Engineering are simply two facets of the same jewel.
However those two facets are not enough. The third and very necessary facet is philosophy. If you don’t have the right metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics you have little to no possibility of becoming either a good scientist or engineer. It is all quite interconnected. Break one side and they all come tumbling down. The result of that breakdown is what we are fighting against here and now.
20
LG,
You forgot about the good technician who has to implement the designs of the engineer, most engineers cannot be trusted with a screwdriver, akin to putting a cork on a fork.
10
That faith in technology is what the Government is now using as a distraction away from the Science, because, after all, the Science is settled they tell us.
So, they now refer to this ‘money grab’ in the name of Science by the term ….. ‘Clean Energy Future’.
Let’s use an analogy here.
Say you have a 2 year old Commodore. You paid $30K for it new. It does everything you want it to when you want it to.
Holden releases a new model, so you go in to the dealers to check it out.
Now, being something you’re shelling out your ‘hard earned’ on, they have to tell you the truth about this new car.
This new Holden has a price tag seven times what your perfectly functional Commodore has, that new price being $210K.
You’re dumbfounded as to why the huge increase in cost.
The dealer then tells you that it only works one day in four, and that one day is variable, you don’t know which day, so you have to check it out every day just to see if this is in fact that day when it will be working.
You look at the dealer with incredulous eyes, and say, “no thanks, mate, I’ll stay with the one I have. At least I know it works.”
THIS is what the Government is effectively trying to foist on us all with this supposed ‘clean energy future’, only, unlike the car dealer, we can’t say “no thanks mate, I’ll stay with what I have. At least I know it works.”
Why?
Because no one is telling us those, er, ‘inconvenient’ facts.
Tony.
10
Ahoy Tony
Thankyou for your continuing efforts to put hard numbers out in the debate. It is something seriously lacking amongst all the self-righteous green onanism.
I gather from an earlier comment about cherries in Young, you may live in the district.
I wish you would consider a trip to the press club for Malcolm Turnbull’s bunfight to ask a hard question or two.
A dose of economic reality would be well placed on national TV.
I wonder if LCM will hang around to join the audience?
10
Correction:
600km3 of groundwater is extracted each year.
10
wes,
well done. You have approached the data presented in a scientific and inquisitive manner. I agree with your line of questioning – you are behaving exactly like a skeptic should.
There have been a few genuine attempts to answer the question you asked but most people just “play the man” and get their backs up. It is not very impressive.
The inability of both sides of this debate to remain objective and scientific disturbs me almost as much (not quite) as the fraudulent science underpinning climate change (actually its the same root cause).
10
pattoh –
“economic reality” on national tv? hardly.
i think there was only a single report on Vaclav Klaus’ NPC appearance that didn’t mention his visit was paid for by the Institute of Public Affairs.
conversely, not a single article on Tony Blair mentioned:
26 May 2010: London Evening Standard: Tony Blair to earn millions as climate change adviser
The former prime minister will be paid at least £700,000 a year to act as a “strategic adviser” to Khosla Ventures, a venture capitalist firm founded by Indian billionaire Vinod Khosla…
He has told friends he needs £5 million a year to fund his lifestyle…
He has taken up several lucrative posts since leaving office three years ago. He has a £1 million deal to advise the ruling royal family of Kuwait and has been paid a £4.6 million advance for his memoirs.
Public speaking engagements, which earn him £100,000 a time, are estimated to have brought in another £9 million.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23838369-tony-blair-to-earn-millions-as-climate-change-adviser.do
nor did the MSM mention Blair’s tour was organised by Visy:
14 July: Age: Adam Morton & Peter Ker: Price scheme encourages companies to come clean
PACKAGING company Visy has launched a drive to cut its energy use by 10 per cent in a sign the carbon price could encourage businesses to cut their carbon dioxide emissions…
But Visy will get most of the carbon permits it needs to cover its recycling and paper-making operations free in the early years of the carbon scheme.
Both operations qualify as trade-exposed industries.
Visy also hopes to win some of the $10 billion funding allocated to the new Clean Energy Finance Corporation to invest in projects to convert waste into clean energy…
http://www.theage.com.au/national/price-scheme-encourages-companies-to-come-clean-20110713-1he4a.html
nor did the MSM mention:
Wikipedia: The Climate Group:
Corporate Members
The Climate Group is a non-profit organization ‘working internationally with business and political leaders to advance clean technologies and policies to cut global greenhouse gas emissions and accelerate a prosperous low carbon economy’. After launching with the support of Tony Blair, it today has offices in the UK (headquarters), US, Europe, Australia, India, mainland China and HKSAR…
Corporate Members
Alstom, Arup, Barclays, Better Place, Bloomberg, BSkyB, Broad Group, BT, CB Richard Ellis, CECIC, China Mobile, Cisco, Climate Change Capital, CLP Holdings Limited, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Deutsche Bank, Duke Energy, En+ , Florida Power and Light Company, GE Energy Europe, Goldman Sachs, Google, HDR, HP, HSBC, IWC Schaffhausen, Johnson Controls, JPMorgan Chase, Landsea, Munich Re, MWH, Nestle Waters NA, News Corporation, Nike, Origin Energy, Philips, Pratt Industries, PSA Peugeot Citroen, Smith Electric Vehicles, Skadden, Standard Chartered Bank, Suntech, Suzlon, Swire Pacific, Swiss Re, TaoBao, Tesco, Timberland, TipTop, TNT, VantagePoint Venture Partners and Veolia Environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Climate_Group
10
btw today ABC repeated NPC with Susan Greenfield from earlier this month on Alzheimers.
love this New Statesman 3-para piece by Greenfield:
New Statesman: Susan Greenfield,Neuropharmacologist: Are we all doomed?
While we are debating how to tackle the possibility of being doomed through climate change, we might be running as great a risk of a different type of peril: mind change — the prospect of cyber technologies changing the way we think and feel…
Like climate change, mind change involves a variety of questions and issues, each of which needs to be explored in its own right…
Like climate change, mind change is controversial: some insist that the potential problems are exaggerated, while others say that there is no hope. But another group may feel that if we take action now, we can exploit the current technology to huge advantage to stretch the human brain as never before.
http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2011/06/climate-change-doomed-brain
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Crakar24:
July 27th, 2011 at 1:46 pm
Comment 130
Tree rings only explains how much a tree grows but not why it grew that much.
When I was a child we had two silver birches grown from cuttings (identical genes) in our front lawn. After about 20 years one tree had a diameter (much thicker growth rings) at least twice as thick as the other despite an identical climate.
10
Sorry pattoh,
I live in Rockhampton, a long long way from Young.
For the last six years of my 25 years in the RAAF, I spent teaching the electrical trade to new guys at the RAAF School of Technical Training at Forest Hill, near Wagga Wagga.
While there I got to know the area in the vicinity quite well, and I used to love those TV ads telling us of the Cherry Festival at Young, and also the ‘Henry Lawson Festival Time’.
On car trips in the area, we used to love stopping at the farms in the area with stalls at the front selling their farm produce, like fruit and veges etc. The one we loved the most was the cheap cherries in the Young area and also picking apples directly from the trees in the Batlow area, after a day visiting Blowering.
Off topic I know, but you are dead right.
Someone does need to ask those, er, tricky questions.
An analogy similar to what I used puts it a way that people might readily recognise, because this is exactly what renewable power is.
I watched 4Corners, the repeat late last night, and was just dumbfounded.
While those medical problems are in fact manifesting and are now recognised, the ABC, in its typical even handed way (Tut tut Tony, sarc off now) found talking heads willing to say those medical side effects are figments of imagination, and psychosomatic.
The guy from Accioana was especially repugnant.
If I was the interviewer, I would have asked him only one question.
“Might you indicate the Capacity Factor of your Wind Farm.”
You see that CF is an indicator as to the time that plant is actually delivering its power.
So, if the reply comes back, confidently, as he’s sure you have no idea what you’re saying, and his reply is 38%, said without blinking, as this 38% is the maximum hoped for theoretical best case scenario, when the current World Average is closer to 20%.
Your next question is then “So, even at your best case 38%, that means you’re only delivering power for 9 hours a day.
That CF, multiply that by the 24 hours in a day.
See, even using their best case scenario, you still only come down to 9 hours a day, and that’s the yearly average.
Watch these people squirm then.
No use asking people like Turnbull, Combet, or Julia. All you’d get is a blank look with a question.
Do you work for Murdoch?
Tony.
10
Hey Tony you ever teach at RAAF base Williams (Laverton Victoria)?
10
Bananabender from Queensland in 138,
Yes i was aware thats why i called it a “schtick”.
10
“worse than MattyB” – ouch – that’s gotta hurt Wes;) Unless one takes it to mean that I’m smart, fair, and unbiased and Wes is even more so? That’s what ya meant ain’t it Bulldust?
10
“UNBIASED”!!!!!!!! Oh Matt….. you make me laugh!!!!!!If you’re unbiased then the entire world’s understanding of what “unbiased” means needs to be re-written!!! You do know what unbiased means, don’t you???
10
Thanks anyway Tony,
I apologise for the cheeky suggestion, it was just wishful thinking.
The public debate needs far more of your style of realism.
I have been linking to quite a few of your posts in emails.
They have been well received.
10
No Matt you are a disgrace. Still waiting for an apology.
10
Crakar….
Thanks for the link. Haven’t read the whole doc yet, but the bit I liked the most so far was this – “The magnitude of the surface temperature response of the climate system to an imposed radiative
energy imbalance remains just as uncertain today as it was decades ago”.
So……. the science is SETTLED. I must have missed that bit!!!
10
I know it’s off topic, but in that 4Corners program, literally everyone from establishment poured iced water on those medical problems which are in fact now recognised as ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’ (WTS).
Some of you may remember back to the 80’s and 90’s and the electromagnetic thing.
A little electrical theory first.
If you pass a wire through a magnetic field, a flow of electrons occurs in the wire.
Conversely, a wire carrying a current induces a magnetic field around that wire.
The medical problem was with those High Tension wires on those huge staunchions across the countryside, and the electromagnetic field surrounding those wires.
People living near them, er, with no real understanding of electricity, found some data on them, and in that data it mentioned electromagnetic ….. and then unfortunately, after that came the dreaded word ‘radiation’
So the general public got up in arms over that.
There was literally tens to hundreds of millions of dollars spent on Committees, research, both scientific and medical, etc, to verify that in fact there might be some truth in the matter.
Contrast that to what is happening now with WTS.
Because it is speaking out against what we are having pushed down our throats, there’s er, quite obviously no truth whatsoever in the matter.
Tony.
10
Apology for what Connolly?
10
sorry to keep interrupting your scientific ponderings, but this is what you are up against. madness. note who the writer is at the bottom:
21 July: Weekly Times: Andrew Bray: Climate change politics clouds debate
CLIMATE change denier Lord Monckton confuses opinion with facts, writes ANDREW BRAY
Someone I respect once told me you’re entitled to your own opinions, but you can’t have your own facts.
This is particularly true when it comes to climate change, where scientific fact is so regularly trumped by political opinion.
Politics is like the schoolyard bully who takes the wimpy science kid behind the bike shed every lunchtime for a beating.
The circus around Lord Christopher Monckton that descended on Ballarat this week is a perfect example…
Think what you like about the carbon tax, one thing we can no longer say is that there is no case for taking action on climate change.
Peer-reviewed scientists agree the world is warming and are convinced beyond reasonable doubt that human activities are the cause…
There isn’t a peer-reviewed scientist who thinks that climate change is not a problem we need to address…
Enter Lord Monckton, long time climate change denier.
Lord Monckton is not a scientist.
He has no scientific qualifications, has never held a position on a scientific body or research institution and has never submitted any of his ideas to criticism from the wider body of scientists through the peer-review process.
If he had, he would be politely informed that his evidence is incomplete, his arguments need work and his views would be ignored until the errors were fixed.
He hasn’t earned the right to have his own facts.
Instead, he wheels his unsubstantiated opinions out in public and relies on us being gullible enough to believe them.
He couldn’t have taken us for bigger mugs on Monday night if he’d stood up and told us that one plus one equals three…
To make sure this confusion remains as a part of the debate, financial backers such as mining billionaire Gina Rinehart – who stand to lose from any action to tackle climate change – will fund further visits to Australia this year from other climate change deniers.
They are Vaclav Klaus from the Czech Republic and Lord Lawson of the UK.
A memo from US Republican communications guru Frank Luntz in 2003 revealed that the most important aspect of climate change denial is to sow doubt…
•Andrew Bray is the community campaigner for the Ballarat Renewable Energy and Zero Emissions group
http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/article/2011/07/21/359451_opinion-news.html
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Hey Matt, I’m pretty sure that Connolly just wants you to apologise for existing 😉
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Back on the topic.
WE all know that CO2 does not cause the global temperature to rise – given. Jo’s graph shows a linear increase in sea level from around 1860 and there is a logical argument that CO2 did not cause the sea levels to rise. So what did?
I looked back at the global temperature data and it bears a strikingly similar trend to sea level rise since 1860, ie it also starts its climb at almost exactly the same moment and it is pretty linear. Now i am well aware of the mistakes of assuming correlations between two different data sets, but on a very superficial and logical level it seems somewhat likely that the two are related does it not? ie whatever caused global temps to rise in turn caused the sea levels to increase (neither of which being CO2).
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Andrew Bray is another misinformed warmist alarmist probably green econutter. Trouble is dweebs like his ilk cant see the wood from the trees. He talks about mining billionairs but he wont see the biggest quadarillionare banks financing the carbon trading scams all over the world.
Andrew..its all over bar the shouting for AGW!
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Pat @ 136 The Climate Group: Interesting criminal Corporate Members list there, hope some of them enjoy their jail time when a future US Govt actually charges them for the activities and scams that they have gotten away with for so long. To note several lawyers in (Canada I think) have filed war crimes against Mr T Blair.
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Connolly @ 145
And I’m still waiting for MattB’s Plan B.
I would advise neither of us hold our breath.
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Interesting paper here I have not seen before.
http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/files/WarmAudit31.pdf
Turns out the computer models used in the IPCC Reports failed an audit on statistical methodology. In other words, they are crap. Especially loved this little bit from the abstract:
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MV seriously I can’t be the only one here who tires of your distraction of asking for some randon Plan B… you repeat it as though I’m avoiding it and it is evidence for some sort of evasion by myself, but I still to this day have not the foggiest what you are after.
Actually I have a feeling Connolly wants me to apologise as I suggested MV is of a similar ilk to a certain Norwegian, after he wanted to knit while watching warmists get lined up against a wall and shot and buried in a trench. He slithered to try and pretend he meant legal retribution but I’m confident that was a lie.
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What do people think of this?
http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/paper_540.pdf
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MV it surprises me that a professor in marketing would not have that published in a journal that is relevent to predictions/forecasting rather than the non-peer-reviewed opinion rag that is E&E. ALamrm bellas hsi in another paper compares with a list of other “amarmist” responses… including the old DDT chestnut… computer says “no”.
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MattB
Actually MattB I said I would be there with my ball of wool and knitting needles while you were marched to the guillotine.
My sincerest apologies that you:
Are so poorly educated that the historical reference to the French Revolution went entirely over your head, and
That in your personal sense of inferiority (no doubt due to aforesaid lack of formal education) you feel the need to lie through your back teeth as to what was posted.
By the way, apart from reminding you about your Plan B, I’ve been meaning to ask you a couple of things.
1) – Will us “deniers” be tattooed on the forehead, or the wrist? – just curious from a Biblical perspective, and
2) – Where are you planning to build the gas chambers you people have been talking about as a “final solution” for us deniers?
I imagine you will run into quite a NIMBY problem.
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MV my apologies for not recollecting your preferred form of execution.
1) I am not privvy to any discussions re: tattoo locations.
2) Nor am I involved in any plans to build gas chambers, and am thus clearly not part of this “you people” group.
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MattB @ 142:
Clean your glasses … I never mentioned your name on this thread.
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MattB @ 160
When I was a lad there was a fable about a stork that wanted to hang out with the crows, and ended up getting his throat cut. The moral was, “we are judged by the company we keep”.
Do they not teach fables anymore?
The whole exchange which you just shamefully misquoted from was based on a post questioning yours and other posters “moral outrage” at some alleged activity of a skeptic, when, in fact, there was never any “moral outrage” at the mass-murder already committed by your fellow cultists, and planned and hoped-for mass-murders also planned by your fellow mass-murderers.
These include, but are not limited to:
– The effective banning of DDT and the subsequent deaths of millions – mostly children.
– The effective banning of the development and use of fossil fuel energy generation in third world countries – condemning millions more to deprivation and death.
– The redirection of (to date) at least 30% of the world’s surplus (exportable)food production to manufacture of biofuels, pushing staple food prices up and killing even more people.
– The promotion of unworkable and senseless wind and solar energy farms that are incapable of generating base-load power, while at the same time campaigning against ALL forms of workable base-load power, ensuring that wherever we are going, we are going there bereft of useful energy.
There’s lots more, but that will do for starters. Now, getting back to the fable MattB, it doesn’t really matter if you personally support any or all of these genocidal measures, the “side” you have chosen to hang out with have. Barring any dissension from these views by yourself, that makes you one of “them”.
You had ONE opportunity to demonstrate otherwise: you were asked the simple question: – “what if you are wrong about global warming – what if it now cools for 20 – 30 years – what is your Plan B to redress the situation that has been created?” (What would you do about the situation as it now stands with lack of food, power generating capacity etc).
Instead of offering any worthwhile kind of answer you have resorted to making sick jokes about a mass-murderer of children.
And I think that action pretty-much sums up you and all you stand for in a nutshell.
Hell you don’t even UNDERSTAND Connolly’s outrage with you.
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sheesh – memoryvault – yes an interesting paper but it’s 4 years old!!
I get so annoyed when people post here their new found thing only to find that it’s 4 – 5 years old.
Please don’t do it and if you must, please state how damn old it is!!
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I do apologise Bulldust – it was Mark D.
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““what if you are wrong about global warming – what if it now cools for 20 – 30 years – what is your Plan B to redress the situation that has been created?””
I’ve definitely asnwered that before. Prety sure it was “wear a jumper”.
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“When I was a lad there was a fable about a stork that wanted to hang out with the crows, and ended up getting his throat cut. The moral was, “we are judged by the company we keep”.”
Hmm I guess I do spend a lot of time on this blog.
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“One of the most profound differences between dogs and cats is that cats focus on effects while dogs focus on causes. If you toss a pebble at a cat it will look at the pebble.If you toss it at a dog it will look at you. In this respect too many people are like cats. They are preoccupied with their loss of security,freedom and privacy,and they flutter like wing clipped pigeons,complaining about this and that without knowing why these things are happening. By contrast members of Freedom Force focus on the cause and work to eliminate it.
The degeneration of civilisation is not the result of blind forces of history operating beyond comprehension or control. It is planned and caused by a small but well defined group of people who believe this decline is necessary for what they formally call The New World Order but which we recognise as high-tech feudalism in which mankind will be condemned to live in perpetual subservience to elitist rulers….”
Taken from:- Freedom Force International
http://www.freedomforce.org/
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Cats: Watch the pebble because they are enjoying the game.
Dogs: Watch the human because they don’t understand the game.
There is no ‘decline’ in our society. Yes, a bunch of people are power-hungry and want to take over the world. We call them politicians.
Ah yes, be the thing you despise. Power corrupts… Didn’t you know? The greens are trying to liberate us from the tyranny of democracy. Just like the communists liberated the Soviets from the oppression of capitalism. Tin foil hat ideologies don’t solve any problems, they just create a bunch of new ones. The answer is accountability in government, not the establishment of the New World Order or even the New-and-improved World Order. Or, even the I Can’t Believe It’s Not The New World Order.
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Jans@80:
Oh really? I must have been mistaken when I thought I heard Klaus being introduced as the president of the Czech Republic and not as “My mate Vaclav from down the boozer”.
Sure, the Czech Republic’s majority Christian demographic prevents it from fully exploiting its main abundant natural resource (good looking women), and sure it isn’t a great industrial powerhouse like Germany or China, but it *is* a UN member state, Klaus *is* the currently elected head of that state, and since it is summer in the north he is unlikely to be here on a private holiday.
Be fair? There shall be no concessions made to The Warm Side of The Force in this cosmic-ray battle for Brownsville.
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OzJuggler:
July 27th, 2011 at 9:23 pm
The Czech Republic has a massive pornography and prostitution industry.
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The Watermelons are responsible for many crimes against humanity. However banning DDT didn’t kill a single person. Mosquitoes were already highly resistant to DDT long before it was banned. Far safer and much more effective synthetic pyrethroids had already replaced DDT for insect control.
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Meanwhile back in the real world Roger Pielke Snr summarsises the new Spencer and Braswell paper which paper sort of asks not where’s the missing water but where’s the missing heat?
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/
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Bananabender at 171
And synthetic pyrethroids are one of the many possible aetiological suspects in the rise in autism in the post 1985 era. Sometimes, what we don’t know is far more dangerous than what we do know!
Regards,
Winston
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And what we do know is really next to DAM ALL.
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Real @174
That was my point in my post at 171 exactly. Sometimes, in a great leap of ignorance, we jump from the frying pan into the fire. With DDT, we had a vilified, less than pristine solution, replaced by an unknown, possibly also less than perfect solution, that may have been more of a leap of faith into the unknown than we are led to believe, due to unforeseen potential problems given our reliance on often dodgy or biased “science” involved in assessing the safety of this or any other technology. Vested interests and corruption of the scientific process gives one little faith in the legitimacy of anything in the current state of technological advancement. I feel this is also potentially true with various alternate energy sources, particularly with wind turbines and geothermal, which may potentially have unforeseen negative environmental and human impacts beyond the CO2 non- problem they are striving to solve.
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Sorry 173, my mistake.
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Typical MattB imbecilic response. Don’t forget “Learn to live without eating”.
If we waste all our resources preparing for the chimera of Global Warming, we will have no resources left to adapt to an ice age. Wearing a jumper won’t keep you from starving, as world food production plummets.
Conversely, food production would be easier if the world did warm up — vast areas in Canada and Siberia would become productive. I know the alarmists claim this won’t happen due to predicted droughts, etc., but there are two problems with this:
1) AGW models have yet to demonstrate any predictive skill, and
2) How do you explain the fact that there are billions of trees in Canada now (not to mention millions of acres of productive farm land) when there was no plant life there 17,000 years ago — all due to global warming?
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Reminded me of an incident (long ago): We had ordered an advanced VCR for the lab that allowed the examination of recordings one frame at a time either forward or backwards. When we unpacked it, we were puzzled to find only one control — the on/off switch (this was long before the remote became ubiquitous). Then we found the flip-down panel, behind which was a control panel that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a jet airplane.
Eventually, we had three engineers playing with the thing and reading the manual. A technician walked by, looked at us for a while, then asked: “How many engineers does it take to run a VCR anyway?”
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Tony
There really is such a thing as WTS. I reckon it will have a severe outbreak in South Australia in coming years around the height of summer & the depth of winter, particularly if Hazlewood & other brown coal plants are closed down.
Isn’t it amazing that the talk is for natural gas power generation, both stand alone & spinning B/U for green power all while the GetUp inspired alarmists & the ABC Country Hour is doing their very best to demonize CSG & potential Shale Gas? Wait till they get really started on GTL.
The penny will drop sooner or later but I fear the nation will be firmly entrenched in the grip of UN treaties strangling our economy & standard of living by the time it does.
Go Julia!……………just go
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Thanks Joannenova, great article.
I wish I could find the link for it…
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Opps, I meant I wish I could find the link to the paper…
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BobC and Crakar24,
While a good technician can be quite valuable at times to even a good engineer. Is an engineer who needs one to be able to engineer stuff a good engineer? I believe that if an engineer can’t build it, he won’t be able to design it even close to right. I view that kind of engineer an engineer in name only.
I realize the goal has been thinkers don’t do and doers don’t think. That might work in some Kantian parallel universe but not in this one. I do my own thinking, my own philosophy, my own science, my own engineering, and my own construction. I make things that work as a consequence. A technician would only slow me down – even a good one. I can make it much faster than I can teach him how to do it.
I have repeatedly out produced teams of thinkers giving orders to doers. In one case, I did in three weeks what a team of 20 DIDN’T do in four years. I delivered, to six customers, a functionality they had promised was already working – IN WRITING. They were finally able to deliver after another two years.
So don’t give me that crap that an engineer needs a technician. If he does, he is not an engineer worthy of the title.
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Job one when confronted with a graph like this that shows an abrupt trend change with an informal mention that only three non-standard discontinuous records were used to carry the graph back before 1860 is to take a *look* at those three records. Yet not a single poster here demanded to see those plots, after 180 responses. Basic critical thinking is missing from online skepticism. I have to plot them then, do I? No thanks. I’m done with online effort. Over three years I count 49,600 comments by NikFromNYC in Google, that being 45 comments a day and most of those were *not* on skeptical blogs but out in the real world where non-skeptics might see them. Each was thought out carefully, not a one-liner. But the abuse I received from fanatics minus support by other skeptics put me through an interesting process of bitter wrath that transformed into a bemused yet sincere study of alarmist psychology (that led me to pity them) which finally came full circle to the point that I realized that I didn’t have a lot in common with either of two main types of online skeptics, those being the policy activists and the propeller heads. I have *never* seen a skeptic link to any of Joanne’s PDF guides in news article comments. I avoided it personally as a strategy to appear independent from skeptical blogs, since early on I found that cultists would jump on me whenever I linked to a popular skeptical blog and that would then taint the sense of sincere debate afforded to layperson readers.
Every day a dozen or more alarmist news articles are listed on TomNelson.blogspot.com and very few seasoned skeptics show up in the comment sections of those articles. Google News will find repeat versions of the same news wire story. This is PR effort gold treasure! I went it mostly alone for about three years, in the last six months spending upwards of six hours a day posting a relevant comment to every article that allowed comments that made alarmist claims. The amount of man hours wasted each day on skeptical blogs is atrocious. Judith Curry can passive-aggressively post a link to a skeptic bashing article and four hundred (!) comments appear which no laypersons will ever see, as five or six AGW enthusiasts fill online news articles with highly relevant links to essays on RealClimate and SkepticalScience. When a comment thread was link bombed thus I would often spend several hours digging into the references, and sure enough, every time they turned out to be speculative or fraudulent instead of solid claims, so I would have a ready debunking written in simple language to offer.
I used online news comments instead of a blog format to expend energy on since I don’t like to baby sit and blogs only set one up as a known target of knee jerk ridicule, however unfair that effect may be. Yet there was also the sad issue of rookie skeptics dropping quick mention of mistaken or highly eccentric skeptical arguments in news comments (it’s all volcanoes or CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas due to a page of differential equations somewhere) and again, boom, SkepticalScience to the alarmist rescue! Reigning these lightweight skeptics in, politely, was taxing, so I mostly ignored them.
I think Joanne is the most effective online skeptic by far, though I think John Ray (http://antigreen.blogspot.com) provides the best digest of not just AGW but leftist politics in general, and yet he has the fewest commentators of all. His text essay sidebar functions much as Joanne’s PDF guides in presenting a basic skeptical argument, which WUWT or CA lacks. I think it is highly unfortunate that Watts suggested that poor T station siting (and possibly UHI effects minus any peer reviewed article about that?!) explained away the global average rise in T, when for several years he was sitting on both the retracted raw data and the results of a quick evening calculation that showed that station siting did *not* effect the global average result one bit. Those pictures of T stations were used as propaganda and they snuck into Joanne’s own guides too, as I recall. This issue prevented many AGW enthusiasts from taking anything skeptics offered up seriously.
-=NikFromNYC=- Ph.D. in Carbon Chemistry (Columbia/Harvard)
P.S. Those three long tide gauge records are cited here, but I don’t think they continue them to present in the references. They are mysteriously absent from the usual tide gauge registry on that site.
http://www.psmsl.org/data/longrecords/
My take on sea level is here:
Oceans: http://k.min.us/idAw6Y.gif
NASA: http://i.min.us/idFxzI.jpg
That NASA’s web site provides an extremely misleading take on sea level as I show in the last graphic is exactly what online skeptics fail to tell the public either on or off line! An entire Heartland conference goes by and not a single skeptic posts old thermometer or tide gauge records! All you would need to do is post both thermometers (http://i.min.us/idAOoE.gif) and the reliable tide gauge record (http://oi51.tinypic.com/28tkoix.jpg) side by side in a single slide presentation and then just do a Q&A session in which you do a literal song and dance while pointing at the two graphs up on the screen for fifteen minutes or an hour. Bring in various performers to entertain the audience. Dancing girls (hello Joanne!). A juggler or two and a violinist. And just keep motioning to those two plots. Perhaps add a series of quotes from recent news articles about how things are “much worse than expected.” And you are done. Everyone can go home and both sides can slowly come to their senses and stop arguing about the weather. When all this is said and done it’s not the alarmists who will feel awkward, since they merely followed the advice of the vast majority of scientific academies. No, it will be the skeptical side that will ridiculed by future generations, since whilst sitting on those two plots, they filled their time bickering about politics and arcane mathematics. That people can stare at those two plots and not break down in laughter about there being a big “debate” tells me that the madness of crowds is still at work on both sides. I know one thing from experience though: the main reason chemists and physicists don’t speak out against AGW is because of pride! They view Climatology as being akin to Scientology and you don’t hear them railing against that cult either, do you?
My advice to policy activists? Write *stories* about one-on-one efforts to present a competent skeptical argument to people you run into. Write *stories* about how you came to question AGW claims. And go out of your way to find material for those stories in your personal life. Here, I am telling a story. My story. The lack of rounded out humanity on skeptical blogs is exactly what allowed the “big oil money” meme to flourish. *That* is the elephant in the room that skeptics fail to playfully and sincerely confront. And don’t tell your stories to other skeptics, only. Duh! Have fun.
P.S.S. I have most appreciated comments here by Lionell Griffith. On his blog he develops a striking analogy to my adolescent “Theory of All Things” (TOAT). Mine started with “Reality is. I feel like I am. You seem to be.” whereas his is: “Reality Exists. Reality is what it is. You exist. You are aware of your existence and that which exists. Knowledge of Reality is possible to you. Knowledge is obtained only by applying reason and logic to experience and experiment. Feelings do not give knowledge about that which exists.” I profoundly disagree with his last two statements. I think logic and reason are toys that run in circles on top of a vast sea of inner genetic knowledge and intuitive insight. This relates to my above statement.
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Hmmm.
Fig 1 in Jevrejeva et al 2008 shows the data fitted to a quadratic (with a positive second order), and accelerating constantly (see para 9). Jo shows a linear trend, hence implicitly not currently accelerating at all. Both these conclusions follow directly and solely from the form of the line fitted and the end points chosen.
The Watson paper also fitted a quadratic (with a negative second order).
If one extrapolates both graphs forward in time then one could be led to conclude that (a) sea levels are going to eventually fall faster and faster round Australia, (b) they will rise faster and faster globally, and (c) eventually one will need a system of pulleys to lift ships out of Australian waters onto the global oceans.
So clearly there’s an inconsistency or two.
Jevrejeva et al 2008 references Jevrejeva et al 2006, especially for methods used. I’m still digesting this but a few points. The analysis seems to have been done ocean basis by ocean basin, including the Baltic (sic), and the average of these basin averages (excluding the Baltic) is more or less what’s reported as the average ocean level. So until 1860 there is no data except for NE-Atlantic. (And a few stations added in J ett al 2008) I see no mention of weighting according to ocean basin volumes. I see no mention of latitude matching east and west ocean basin tide gauges to compensate for potential variations in wind-sheer biasing (alleged by those warming lyists as being expected under climate change). Or whatever you call that thing where the equatorial and sub-tropical winds cause an east-west differential of up to a metre of sea level rise and fall.
The data comes into the analysis in chunks over time. The NEW atlantic comes in with the NE pacific round 1860 for example, and it looks like they are cross-correlated – hence their biases do not cancel, Since the last basin only comes into the analysis (the central pacific) after 1920 the methods used are very sensitive to temporal biasing. I don’t understand how that has been fully accounted for (all jokes re argumentum non-comprehendum anticipated in advance thanks very much).
In short – two short papers – their conclusions superficially not supporting each other. Their authors clearly not understanding their own work as well journalists have.
Oh those naughty profit hungry lying warmists.
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NikFromNYC (@183):
Thanks for your effort — I agree you deserve a rest.
I think you err, though, in thinking that “bickering about politics” is a waste of time. I think that the entire CAGW scam is politically driven. Since you appreciate Lionell Griffith’s posts, I re-post his take on the political aspect (which I mostly agree with):
Being politically driven, the argument won’t be settled by science or logic — the government scientists are bought and paid for and won’t give up their sinecures so easily just because the facts are against them.
No, it will take a political uprising to change it. This has already happened in the US — the much attacked Tea Party movement which has already remade one House of Congress and will remake the other (and the Presidency) next year. The same think is apparently starting to happen in Australia right now.
This is not happening because skeptics are losing the argument, so take heart.
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Nik from NYC
well done and well said. I agree.
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LG in 182,
Have you ever seen an engineer burn his fingers on a soldering iron? Wind a potentiometer beyond its limits and break it? Forget to turn power off before measuring resistance and breaking equipment? I see it all the time.
You must be a one in a million LG.
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“The United Nations continues to spread the myth of man-made gobal warming and blames it on farmers of livestock.
Its proposed solution is an end to family based livestock operations [corporate farming is ok] and more government regulations.
This springs from the UN’s Agenda 21, which is a war against human independence and private property”.[Socialist/Communist collectives versus individualism]
http://ppjg.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/16955/
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I know a few really good engineers. They can also build stuff with their own hands. Awesome.
All this sea level stuff is bats**t boring. There isn’t a goddamn thing anyone can do about it.
Bit like the weather which is one of the reasons I found being a weather forecaster dead boring and why I take all weather forecasts for light aviation and soaring with a very large grain of salt. You get what it is, not what someone thought it would be.
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NikFromNYC:#183
July 28th, 2011 at 7:04 am
Nik
I don’t recall verbatim all of your posts over the last couple of years, though undoubtedly I would have read most of them either here or at WUWT or at Currys.
I did however read your posts with great delight on the Loehle Scafetta thread at WUWT just yesterday.
It is obvious to me that your mind is a hell of a lot better organized than mine (and some other regulars here I’d venture to say).
Rather than “chucking it in” as we say in Oz, I’d implore you to keep posting for my benefit (probably that of the rest of us).
I’m old, but not too old to learn new “tricks”.
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Jo
May I request that you put up Niks graphic from the link he provided at #183
http://i.min.us/idFxzI.jpg
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So what seems to be coming out here is that there is a need for a place where people can discuss what is actually happening without anyone having an axe to grind. Which is much easier said than done!
So how can reasonably intelligent (but *not* expert) people have a sensible discussion? Have you ever watched people argue about something you were expert on? They might end up heading in the right direction, or they might not. If experts agree (e.g. 2nd law of thermodynamics claptrap) then its silly to do otherwise. If experts disagree (e.g. feedbacks and climate sensitivity), then how the hell are we non-experts going to contribute?
Its almost as though you need climate science exams, set at, say, levels 1, 2 & 3. Then you’d have to pass the level 2 exam to join the level 2 discussion. That way people who think that x(y+z) = xy + z won’t be mixing with people who know that x(y+z)=xy+xz.
But maybe this would be counterproductive, and take all the fun out if it….
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NikFromNYC @ 183:
What is it that enables you to know this?
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John Brookes:#192
July 28th, 2011 at 10:47 am
Hi John
It depends on what ‘contribute’ means to each person. For me, I don’t expect to be “the one” who busted the AGW scam.
I take part in the blog discussions because
A) I enjoy it.
B) I’m passionate about the subject and it’s consequences.
C) My participation lifts the numbers who partake, hence keeping the subject alive and kicking.
D) If at anytime I can be of help to a blog owner, I do so because I admire their willingness to put the time, effort and cost into the very subject I’m passionat about. If I was rich, I’d kick a bundle into their can. I wouldn’t be able to participate if it wasn’t for them.
I also get to cyber meet interesting characters like Brookes and MattB.
By the way, you should witness how the “experts” debate with each other. Some of the offensive and rude remarks would put you me and MattB to shame.
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Read Heathcote William’s epic poem Whale Nation. This will give you a feel for the size of the whale oil industry, the one that existed before the oil and coal industry got underway. This might give some explanation behind the sea level rise preceding the start of the oil industry.
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Just speaking for myself, Lionell; Sometimes one has experiences that a) Can’t be denied, and b) Don’t fit within the current scientific paradigm. A rational response to this is to decide that the current scientific paradigm is incomplete.
I’ve had a scientist (a German, BTY) stand up during a presentation to a large group of scientists and declare that we (my co-author and I) were idiots who knew nothing about the subject (A proposal for the first-ever all-digital holographic cloud camera), then duck out of a face-to-face confrontation. He then began a campaign to denigrate us to every one who might review the proposal.
I saved the proposal by ambushing him into a public confrontation: I asked to come to his office. When I arrived I suggested we go to the conference room down the hall because it had larger white boards — not mentioning that it also had a fairly large audience I had arranged for to witness the duel. Kind of like the Gunfight at the OK Corral, except no one told him to bring a gun. (I’m usually not this cruel, but I felt he deserved it.)
To his credit, he actually became one of our boosters after I arranged a private showing of the first prototype a few months later.
It’s a totally unfair stereotype, but since then I have always thought of mules when seeing Geman scientists: It was an old saying down on the farm that mules were complient and easy to train — as long as you first got their attention by whacking them in the head.
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BobC:#195
July 28th, 2011 at 12:25 pm
great little story, thnx
From first hand experience I can tell you that unlike horses, mules and donkeys are notoriously difficult to train.
It is said that a horse never forgets, but forgives.
A donkey never forgets and never forgives.
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Global Governance Archive – links info etc.
http://www.ggarchive.org/index.html
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TO BobC@195,
The first? So these other guys were copycats?…
http://www.mendeley.com/research/airborne-digital-holographic-system-for-cloud-particle-measurements-1/
Very interesting. Amazing actually. I usually think of holograms for large, human-sized scenes, but for individual cloud droplets down to 1μm in size, wow. That is some precision optics there.
I imagine the camera had to fly in a drogue dangling out the back of the C-130 ??
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Tonyfromoz,
You are right about that Accione character. Wind advocates NEVER tell the capacity factor for wind. On average around the planet it’s about 20% at best. Solar’s not much better. Those two together currently give the world 0.6% of its energy. Could reach 2.8% by 2030 according to some. Base load power from renewables? Just plain garbage. I contacted ABC Four Corners on the strength of the programme and complained about the Accione guy and Mark Diesendorf both renewable freaks. Told ABC they need to get someone to tell viewers some of the truth about the inadequacy of the renewables and offered to come on their programme to put the truth out there. They replied that they would pass my offer on to the programme committee. Not holding my breath. Also, recorded a 13 minute talk for Robyn Williams Ockham’s Razor the other day entitled, “Climate Change and Australia’s future energy supply” Not sure when it’ll go to air BUT all of you bloggers who might be interested in hearing it could do worse than to send Robyn an email asking for it to be aired soon. I’d appreciate your support folks.
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I wouldn’t say “copycats” — rather they continued in the path we had blazed. (Except they don’t seem to have as effective a reconstruction algorithm as we used — the boss wouldn’t let us publish it.)
The incident I described took place in 1993. We flew on a NASA U2 in 1995.
(In between there was another interesting episode where I was forced (by two Canadian Customs Agents) to stand in a bare room under bright lights from 1AM to 7AM while being interrogated and threatened with prison for bringing an “unregistered scientific instrument” into the country — even though I had a letter from the head of the Canadian National Wind Tunnel Lab requesting I do so.
I confess that I worsened the situation by laughing at them — but that’s another story…)
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BobC: A rational response to this is to decide that the current scientific paradigm is incomplete.
In fact the “current” scientific paradigm is not only incomplete it has almost totally disconnected itself from reality. Especially since nearly every field of science is contaminated with Postmodern Philosophy aka Kantian Philosophy.
The basic assumption is that knowledge of reality is not possible to acquire and that the best one can do is reach a consensus of belief. If that were true then no one could ever do anything for the first time. They would have to wait until the consensus had formed.
If that were the case, how did modern technological civilization come about? EVERYTHING we have was at one time thought impossible yet someone invented it and made it work. Then it was thought that those things could not be better yet someone did make them better. So it goes. It did not happen by accident or mystical revelation. Someone observed, thought about what he saw, tried some things, and made it happen.
I know because I have done it. I have made things that work that people with the highest credentials in the field thought impossible. They see it working and still some think it impossible. I know how I did it and it wasn’t by luck. It was done on purpose with my knowing how to get the maximum out of my mind.
Here is an essay I wrote 16 years ago that gives a sketch of the how: http://arationalhuman.blogspot.com/2008/11/source.html
It’s not mysticism, magic, universal mind, or genetic knowledge. Anyone with at least a three digit IQ can learn to do it to some degree.
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Winston:
July 27th, 2011 at 10:09 pm
The “rise ” in autism is far more likely due to increased awareness and a resultant massive over-diagnosis. Medicine and behavioural sciences regularly goes through phases of faddish diagnosis.
Modern society has very little tolerance of children that don’t fit into the 80%th percentile mainstream.A very large percentage of computer programmers, physical scientists, engineers and medical specialists would currently be diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder and be be sent to therapy classes these days despite being quite functional human beings.
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Banana bender at 203
As the father of an autistic child who is a typical, severe Kannerian variety autistic, I can say without fear of refutation that over diagnosis is only a minor factor in the increasing number of these children. As a medical practitioner also, I can tell you that the number I encountered personally amongst my patient’s children increased suddenly in the early 1990’s and has leveled off recently in spite of increased diagnostic sensitivity especially in the last 5 years. Something else was responsible for this increase and vaccinations to me don’t cut it as a prenatal insult ( ?ultrasound, ? Environmental toxins are much more likely to combine with genetic factors for such a severe disability. My son was conceived, in utero and born while living in a small street in semi rural environment with an government run experimental orchard at the end of the street. The only other child born at this time died at the age of 3 from a severe, non-genetic neurodegenerative condition which gradually paralysed him, leaving him to die a miserable death from respiratory failure. Coincidence, maybe, but 2 out of 2 with severe neurological disorders in the same street not 50 metres from experimental orchard seems suggestive of possible correlation. And do you think I could possibly find out what sprays or chemicals were being used, not likely- facility since closed.
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Sorry, should be a comma after “don’t cut it” and closed bracket after toxins. Pressed submit by accident. Thanks for your replies in this off topic discussion. My personal experiences don’t make me right, but the argument you present, while valid and commonly held, I don’t think fully explains what I have seen with my own eyes among those in a similar boat to myself.
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NikFromNYC: I knew that graph posted on here is bogus. It doesnt make phyical sense with its ad-hoc pre 1860 variations with the 1860 kink to a straight line, not worth the paper its written on.
And the others that think the AGW scam is bankster driven (and pushed) well there plenty of evidence that the big name banks are cashing in on “carbon” scams thats when stupid countries take up these schemes.
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Winston, I also feel uneasy with the “over diagnosed” argument. When I was a kid I don’t recall any autistic kids. I’m not saying there weren’t any, but none of my school friends or their siblings were. Two of my son’s friends in primary school (90’s) had autistic siblings. One of my friends has an autistic kid (again born in the 90’s). You could never mistake any of the autistic kids for normal.
Of course looking for causes for autism or food allergies or type 2 diabetes is terribly difficult. There are all the little changes that no one notices much. Like the change in exposure to sunlight, increased computer use, increased incidence of wearing shoes, hyper clean environment etc, etc.
Just what causes what in who is real detective work. If I had my time over again, I’d look at epidemiology as a career.
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John B, Thank you for your interest in this non climate topic. Bananabender’s comments were well said and may be correct, but I firmly believe that there is more to it than that, granted over diagnosis for funding definitely does occur. Your gracious comments are greatly appreciated. There is a need for people to approach this from a similar perspective to the approach to SIDS, with a set of risk factors identified and a checklist approach – eg Vit D supplementation/sun exposure, reduced exposure to needless non-diagnostic ultrasound, nutrition advice, avoidance of pesticides/sprays/chemicals during pregnancy, etc, etc, because it is highly unlikely that one overwhelming factor will be identified in my lifetime because there is sadly little or no political will to even investigate the causes of this incredibly costly, lifelong disability with its inordinate pressures on the public purse and resources it subsumes to palliate it. Why a simple trial of several thousand people could not be performed comparing say one group with no ultrasound or doppler heart sound monitoring, versus one with serial exposure and then comparing rates of autism, ADD, ADHD, Dyslexia, Language apraxias, etc is, to be frank, absolutely beyond me, and beyond the pale.
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This is hilarious from C3headlines..what happenes when someone actually does the numbers. OF course its obvious!
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Winston, Real and others.
Simple observable facts:
Unvaccinated kids don’t develop Autism.
Just for instance, go look at the studies involving Amish kids and Autism, or lack of it.
While you are at it, try comparing Childhood Diabetes to Whooping Cough vaccine programs.
Not drawing any conclusions – simply pointing out what IS.
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Lionell Griffith (@202):
Interesting post (and essay), thanks. I see some of my own creative process in there, but haven’t analyzed it in near as much detail. I get solutions to problems by A) Studying them intently for several months, and B) Getting an “Ah-Ha” moment while driving (nearly always) or walking (sometimes) when my mind is relaxed and focusing on other things. (I always have a notebook in the car, so I can pull over and jote things down. Now that I carry an iPhone, perhaps I should switch to “voice-notes” and stop being late to meetings.)
Much harder than having the ideas, however, is the effort required to turn them into working things. As you point out in your essay, however, many people so constrain their minds by subservience to authority that they never have the ideas in the first place.
When I talked of having experiences that didn’t fit within the current scientific paradigm, however, I wasn’t referring to having creative ideas. I was referring to having actual physical experiences that had no possible explanation within current scientific knowledge.
If you’re never had such an experience (most people), they are easy to dismiss. If you have (and I’m alive today because of several), it is not so easy.
Many people respond to having such an experience by latching on to a convenient explanation (often quasi-religious or occult). This is a mistake — the true scientific attitude (skeptism and empirism) is the best way forward. As a result, I am more tolerant than many in the scientific community of studies of weird phenomena done in a scientific manner, for instance the PSI research at the Univ of Colo where I work.
Refusal to scientifically research phenomena outside the scientific paradigm simply guarentees that the scientific paradigm will never expand — analogous to your explanation of how conformism and acceptance of authority suppress the creative life of the mind.
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MV @ 210 Are you sure?
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa021134
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2796520/
There are many more to read here:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=autism+in+unvaccinated+populations&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
The Amish do appear to have lower rates (not the same as NONE) of autism according to some. Since autism is considered a “broad spectrum” condition, I would speculate that the Amish way of life could easily mask the highest functioning autistic.
The subject is fascinating, the whole study of epidemiology is perhaps the most rewarding and daunting of all medicine. Human behavior, contact with pathogens, relatively long exposure times (over 75 years) innumerable contacts with chemicals, make for very difficult understanding of the causes of imperfect health. Throw in a few not-so-well-understood phenomenon like the placebo effect and spontaneous remissions from terminal cancer, and you have even more fun.
BTW I make my guess (prediction) that the causes of autism and the recent rise of severe food allergies are both related to something in our foodstuffs. If you want to wander down the path a bit more look up aflatoxins or mycotoxins. Have a field day letting your memory vault fill up with what you’ll find.
Particularly interesting (if you spend some time on it) you’ll come across a patent for drying tobacco leaves to minimise the very dangerous (and well understood) production of cancer causing aflatoxin. These toxins are known to survive the heat of a burning cigarette.
But I am WAAAY of topic
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memoryvault @ 210
This site is convincing:- Age of Autism, Daily Web Newspaper of the Autism Epidemic
http://www.ageofautism.com/2011/07/testimony-to-massachusetts-legislators-on-h1055-right-to-school-for-vaccine-exempt-children.html
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BobC @ 112: PSI Research
As long as my tax dollars aren’t being used to fund it, I don’t have a problem with such research. I would say, however, if such effects exist, they are physical, they are reproducible, and they can be measured instrumentally. Subjective evaluations and consensus reports from true believers no matter how numerous need not apply for admission into the halls of science.
There is a finite and positive probability for any highly improbable event to occur if given enough opportunity. That you can’t explain it does not mean it is paranormal (whatever that means). It simply means you don’t know what caused it. It is simple ignorance so admit you don’t know rather than give it a meaningless scientifically sounding label. The best explanation for such events is “stuff happens.”
Measure the effects with hardware rather than subjective opinions. Produce a reproducible experiment and show reliable results. Then and only then is it science. Until that is done, it is NOT science. It is most likely only a delusional fantasy based upon the well known human ability to see things in noise that aren’t there.
I have enough to worry about dealing with real and substantive things rather than other people’s ephemeral delusional fantasies or things more properly discussed on the late night radio talk shows such as Coast to Coast.
Obviously, until you can show the instrumented and reproducible experiment that gives reliable results I am emphatically NOT interested.
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Lionell Griffith @ 214:
Like I said; It’s easy to dismiss…
Two points:
1) Everyone I know of in this field trys to stay away from subjective opinion and rate results on objective criteria, insofar as possible. Before you tar the field with your prejudices, you should educate yourself at least a little about it.
2) A science that limited itself to instrumental effects would be a limited and impoverished science indeed. (No psychology, for instance.)
Indeed, that is obvious — and your business. I’m curious, however, if you would be interested if your test was met?
It turns out that Prof. Garrett and his students have developed a “mechanical precognition” experiment that is entirely instrumental and reproducible. (Although, I’m not sure that ‘cognition’ is the right term for a mindless instrument that detects the future.)
I won’t bore you with the details, as I assume you won’t be interested (and I’m not really interested in your speculations on it, unless of course you are interested in attempted reproduction.), but in case I’m mistaken here is the reference:
BTY: If you’re ever in Boulder, I’ll introduce you to Garret — he’s always looking for people with strong doubts (about PSI) in order to do experiments on the “skeptic effect”.
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Has anyone had time to recheck the numbers from the analysis referred to in J et al 2006?
1. Although these papers (J et al 2008 and J et al 2006) refer to sea level, bear in mind it is *inferred* sea level. Until I get time to check the work I can have no confidence that the sea level is rising at all,
2. The analysis is based on data collected from shore lines and one side of each basin is brought in decades before the other. The “phase shift” is almost certainly due to the sudden entry into the analysis of NE pacific and NW atlantic just prior to 1860. The “something must have started in 1800” coincides with the point at which J 2008 extended the work of J 2006 back in time using just a handful of gauges.
Bear in mind that the AGW reason for estimating SLR is to detect changes in total water volume. Given that oceans slop about a bit over annual, decadal and super decadal time scales…
3. Two things need to be checked IMO. (a) How much can one know about the total water volume from measurements solely in one hemisphere? (b) How much can one know about it solely from measurements on one side of the ocean basin given that variation in prevailing wind circulation relates to surface temperatures, *and* can account for a metre or so of tide gauge differential across the pacific (so an engineer told me).
I guess I’m dull – I didn’t see these things in the paper – but I will try to digest this more, and read more carefully. With luck I’ll get time to work through the actual data when I have time. Meanwhile I’m happy to report that a time series analysis of the gauge records at Freemantle shows an upward trend but whether this is accelerating or decelerating in the last decade of the 20th century depends on the statistical model fitted ad whether it is composed to examine this. Tidal models typically take into account around a 100 factors according to BoM.
Why is a tide gauge based analysis of SLR better than a satellite one for recent times?
Why bother?
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Vaccinations of themselves are unlikely for the reason that the timing of the autism explosion is about 30 years late. My generation were the first to be heavily vaccinated and autism was unheard of among my peers. Vaccinations have been progressively made less antigenic and with less potential contaminants ( eg Thiomersal) that does not tally with the rising incidence we have witnessed. Thanks to MarkD for the useful links. The Amish would be less likely to have prenatal ultrasound, have less preservatives in their diet and be less likely to use pesticides, while also have better Vitamin D levels due to their farming subsistence lifestyle, any or all of which could explain their apparent reduced incidence, while MarkD’s suggestion of masking of high functioning autism is almost certainly true. While I know this is way off topic, it does highlight what happens when scientists are not open to all potential causes and when they lack a passionate curiosity and relentless pursuit of the truth, the situation becomes clouded by ideology (anti vaccination vs vaccination for example) that blinds us to the solution and sends us up countless blind alleys in our search. The current climate science is similarly encumbered so how can anyone have confidence that the truth will ever be arrived upon re the drivers of our climate, assuming this was ever anyone’s intention in the first place, which I doubt.
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I seem to have missed that concern in Al Gore’s movie and the numerious warnings of SLR causing refugees, etc. Seems to me everyone was talking about SLR with respect to the shoreline. Hard to imagine refugees from sea volume increase, if the shoreline remains fixed.
Because what it measures is directly related to the dire predictions of disaster — and remember that the only crisis in AGW is the predicted one, and what is predicted is SLR w.r.t. the shore.
Here is a picture of a 170 year old tide marker in Tasmania, still accurately marking mean tide. No indication of an impending crisis there, at least.
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Thank you Winston, BTW I agree with your added comments:
For what it is worth, I have a niece that was diagnosed with rather severe autism. She has overcome most all of the difficulties and today is a delightful, bright young woman and most people that meet her would not know.
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BobC,
When you or someone can show me the thing actually working and are able to PROVE it works the way it is said to work, approach me again. Until then, I will have nothing of it nor of the convoluted pseudo scientific confabulations used to discuss it. The whole notion is so impoverished of any connection to the real world it is not even good bullshit. I have worked with paranoid schizophrenics who made more sense.
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That’s a political concern. Hard to see SLR impacting shorelines in a sustained way without total ocean volumes increasing. Although what really counts locally of course, is local water column depth. That would be a function of temperatures throughout the column (thermal expansion), plus at the very least, head from prevailing winds (at low latitudes more – I suppose) which is a broad scale ocean bulk flow effect, plus head due to local winds, plus had from integrated thermal expansion nearby, plus changes in local MSLP, plus local freshwater outflow changes(??) plus a residual slow moving contribution from continental ice-sheet melt, plus other stuff that oceanographers get involved with, salinity etc.
That’s a political concern.
Why,if one is concerned with what will happen in the physical world, would one prefer a physical technique in the basis of the political cost of believing its measurements?
No. I think the answer to my question is more pragmatic. Satellites are notoriously inaccurate in eras where they did not fly.
No sign of any SLR of the order of a metre over any time scale. Very pretty.
You’re correct of course. SLR is primarily a concern for people who have shorelines, or investments in them. The present financial threat is in the way people deal now with a perceived future threat. Can’t sell land if people think it’s gonna lose value. can’t sell coal if people think they’ll be held to account for SLR.
Oh those foolish warmists.
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Geez Lionell; Nobody cares enough about your uninformed opinion to spend any effort trying to prove anything to you — especially as you could build one of these devices for about $25 worth of parts from Radio Shack and test it yourself, if you had the slightest interest.
I predicted you wouldn’t be interested, but I didn’t think you would blow a fuse. If this issue is so threatening to you, I suggest you just ignore it in the future.
BTY: I rescind my offer to introduce you to Garrett — I don’t want to subject him to the irrational anger.
(A machinist friend of mine and I had a hobby for a number of years: We built devices claimed to be perpetual motion machines and demonstrated that they didn’t work and why. We could of, I suppose, have taken your tact and heaped invective on those who believed in that stuff — but what we did was, I think, more useful, more fun, and less harmful to the blood pressure.)
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Well…yeah. Without the politics and predictions of doom, AGW would just be another obscure scientific field. No one would be trying to remake the World’s economy, re-distribute its wealth and suppress personal freedom in that case. That’s what the field was like in the 1960s.
But that was a long time ago. Today, proponents of the AGW hypothesis are making dire predictions about rising seas and accelerating temperatures. Supposedly, the existence of half the world’s species (maybe including us) is at stake. Without continually making such doomsday predictions (and calling for draconian political ‘solutions’) the crisis-level funding of these ‘scientists’ would dry up (it may anyway).
Key to these predictions are the claim that the models used to make them are correct. However, none of these models (for sea level or temperature) have yet demonstrated any predictive skill distinguishable from chance. Hence, the data that most clearly shows that the doomsday predictions are false is the most important. I suspect that the switch to sea volume from sea level is a defensive action taken to obscure the fact that the doomsday predictions of oceans rising are failing badly.
The current rhetoric is about as far from a simple discussion of science as it is possible to get. Surely you have noticed this?
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Hi guys,
Can some one give me a quick and dirty rebuttal of ocean acidification please, i am in deep conversation with a guy at work that thinks he can prove OA is real because he has a salt water fish tank at home. Any help would be appreciated.
Cheers
Crakar
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Crakar24 – they won’t be able to give you one based in reality but it will likely be as good as your mate’s fishtank story:)
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MattB,
He reckons when he has his house closed up the fish almost die (well they would if he kept the place closed up due to a drop in PH) when he opens windows etc the PH rises. This is all the proof he needs to show OA is a real and ever present danger, this is probably a good example of how well the government PR has worked.
Maybe you could give me a good argument for OA at least i could still set him straight.
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For example,
He claimed OA is real and went on to say this
“I can show this in my loungeroom any time you like – I have a ~1000 liter marine aquarium with a coral reef in it, if I close up the house too much (or use the gas heater(unflued)) the pH of the water drops markedly, this effects the calcification ability of the corals, if allowed to continue it also affects the respiration rate of the fish – my “fix” for this is to aerate the water with air from outside the house – unfortuneateley for our oceans, we cant aerate from “outside” as were effectiveley in a sealed system…..”
Now can you see why this poor misguided soul needs help?
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BobC,
Threatened by a psychotic fantasy? Get real! I am as threatened by that as I am of perpetual motion machines rising up and attacking me tonight before midnight.
It is not my responsibility to prove anything about your fantasy. You assert it works so prove it. Don’t just talk about it and point to kooky conference papers. Since you refuse, apparently it is not worth so much to you as you pretend. It has less than no worth for me.
I don’t happen to waste my time making things I know won’t work just to prove they won’t work. Apparently you are willing do do that and have with perpetual motion machines. My focus is on making things that DO work. It is true that is more difficult to do but it is way more productive.
We shall go our separate ways on this issue.
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Crackar @ 224 and 227
Your mate’s problem is a lack of oxygen, not a surplus of CO2. Tell your mate to try this:
Open up every door and window in his house and then turn off the aerator.
See how long his fish last.
If that fails to convince him, tell him to seal up the room with the unflued gas heater as air-tight as he possibly can, with his fish being aerated from outside. Then sleep the night on the floor of the sealed room.
His fish will still be alive in the morning, but he won’t be, and the cause will have little to do with “acidification” of anything.
OR
Get him a basic book on chemistry. Find the bit where it says:
ACID + BASE = SALT + WATER
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Crackar24, You need to get your friend here so we can “take care” of him.
Aquarists have all kinds of problems that the oceans don’t. He is an idiot (MattB too).
to assume anything inside the aquarium is because he “closed up the house”.
Gawd! GAWD!! I hate how oblivious people can be…….
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@memoryvault:
July 28th, 2011 at 11:26 pm
Winston, Real and others.
Autism Spectrum Disorder has been known to the medical profession for thousands of year although it wasn’t formally described until 1943.
Autism occurs at the same rate in both vaccinated and non-vaccinated children.
The doctor who developed the vaccination-autism hypothesis was struck of for scientific and professional misconduct. His results were entirely fraudulent. The vaccination-autism hypothesis has zero acceptance within the medical community because it is completely and utterly unscientific.
However it is observed over 80% of children with autism have abnormal bowel dysfunction.
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Let’s see; Because I won’t bother to try to prove anything to you (and who would take on that thankless task, anyway?), I must not care about it myself.
Right… I spend my whole life deciding what to believe based on whether I can convince you of it.
Earth to Lionell: You are not the center of the universe (however much it seems that way to you). As you say; “Get Real”.
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Here’s a paper that attacks the issue from the theoretical end. However my favorite rebuttal is that the measured values of pH at various reefs around the world show ocean pH cycling multiple times over the last several hundred years over twice the pH range that the alarmists claim has occured since the 1800s (based on their models). Link here.
In this case, not only are the models wrong, they completely ignore (and are at total variance with) the actual data from proxies that exists. The whole thing is a fantasy.
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Hi Crakar 24 @ 233
The difference between his tank and your ocean is one of dynamics.
Runoff water coming from land dissolves minerals and carries them to the water, thinks lots of Ca calcium. This is in solution and neutralises the CO3- that occurs when CO2 enters water from air.
He is not duplicating the ocean with his static system.
There are many other factors of course but this is a start.
In any case I wouldn’t give much credence to his observations he’s obviously not going to see things that don’t confirm his view of AGW.
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I agree, but first you read it.
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Interesting. For this to work the amount of Ca2+ entering the water must have increased by some 50% in the last 50 years.
In any case I wouldn’t give much credence to his observations he’s obviously not going to see things that don’t confirm his view of AGW.
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Jiminy @ 236
accidently plagiarised
MaryFJohnston:
July 29th, 2011 at 8:20 pm
She said
And I say no-one pays much attention to anyone who disagrees with them.
A wise sceptic turns the torch of reason on friend and foe alike.
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So according to J Cricket this big fish tank has runoff water coming through a soil source nearby.
Don’t try to complicate things JC, your Red vest is showing, button up.
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Well yes. The field was obscure – a number of scientists all happily trying to understand stuff, and all happily living and debating, and all with independent lines of inquiry.
Yeah. But as we know, all one needs to do is simply go out and measure, and measure and measure; then reflect and model. Until one has actually done that, one’s opinions are just opinions.
In what sense “correct”? What defines a skilled prediction, given the limits of the many hundreds of models that exist and the many thousands of runs?
You say the theory rests on models. Jo, by producing papers whose authors believe the seas are rising and attempting to demolish them seems to think it rests on observations.
But seriously, if science is just a gravy train, then politics is a gravy fleet, and what passes as journalism is maggots in the gravy.
No – that was my thought. Seems obvious enough that thermal expansion of a body of water would lead to volume increases.
Indeedy.
The discussion about climate, at any rate, seems to be entirely fueled by money.
Those simple naive warmists.
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Why is this surprising? The AGW “science” is being used to try to remake the world’s economy and redistribute the wealth. This is not hard to grasp.
You tell me: How correct and skilled should it be before you would feel comfortable risking millions of lives and trillions of dollars on the model outputs?
For myself, a demonstrated skill of zero is insufficient.
Are you including yourself?
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Hi Guys; once again the reminder.
What’s the definition of insanity?
Arguing with an idiot.
Things like: “What defines a skilled prediction, given the limits of the many hundreds of models that exist and the many thousands of runs?” — are obviously written by someone with no scientific training after Kintergarten.
What’s the definition of insanity?
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Guilty as charged. I’m trying to recover, however.
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No. I’m making a point given that the debate was about acidification in the presence of rising CO2 – given an implicit assumption that rising atmospheric CO2 increases the oceanic surface CO2 which will end up as HCO3+.
If the theory is this; in the oceans Ca2+ is mopping up HCO3+ (which is what I thought you meant), then for no acidification to be detectable in the presence of rising HCO3+, Ca2+ has to be entering the oceans at a matching, hence increasing, rate. This is a testable prediction.
The mate’s water tank analogy is easily tested – a high school experiment – no more. The proper way to debate the science in his case is surely to make the measurements. There are plenty of analytical reference labs who will do the analysis work for a small fee.
I agree with you that the dynamics of the tank and ocean are different.
Seems to me that if the Ca2+ theory is correct, then if it is entering from land, there would be would be a detectable gradient in ocean pH levels at the surface away from the runoffs which the tank analogy misses.
As to my presumed political biases – I will not inform you. I happen to believe that argument ad hom says much about the arguer and nothing about the facts of a case.
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BobC you will notice that I have also not followed my own advice.
What does that make me?
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OK Jiminy.
My main concern is not to get bogged down in side issues. I may have mistaken your genuine comment about a mates tank for some of the usual diversion tactics of dedicated warmers.
The basic science of the AGW claim is really very simple and basic but I get the gripes when it is clouded by peripheral science.
The core issue according to the IPCC and GreenWarfare is CO2 and its role in Catastophic AGW.
Additional CO2 going to CO3- means that we get more beautiful limestone and marine life and fish get bigger shells and backbones.
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The others factors of course need to be considered.
Does your friend cook chip for instance.
If he does then the vaporised oil that precipitates out of atm onto the tank water will suffocate the fish.
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Oh it’s not at all surprising.
I don’t really get the “millions of lives” bit.
There’s a risk that AGW is false and we’ve falsely believed it and risked “trillions” on it; there’s a risk it’s true and we’ve ignored it and it’s cost us “trillions”; etc.
There’s also the unquantifiable risk of the unknown unknowns, and history teaches us that unknown unknowns can bite us, and probably sooner and harder than expected even taking into account that unknown unknowns exist.
From that point of view I guess “skilled” is only part of the equation. I’m not dodging – really I’m not. It’s just that the word has a technical meaning as well. One would normally ask of a model how skilled it is in making prediction X or Y. As the link you point to points out, GCM assessments of rainfall trends vary enormously. Look at CSIRO’s own website http://www.climatechangeinaustralia.gov.au/ for example. OTOH as the site you pointed me at and the CCIA site both indicate temperature predictions amongst models agree much more. But that’s agreement amongst models not with reality. I do think the statement “By most measures, modern AOGCMs simulate the basic structure of monthly mean near-surface temperatures quite well” http://www.eoearth.org/article/Model_Simulation_of_Major_Climate_Features?topic=49491 is defensible and indicates vaguely what I mean by skill. If you set as your criterion for skill “gimme the broad scale structure of near-surface temperatures” then you would assign skill to the models based on that criterion.
You asked how correct and skilled should it (AGW) be … and I say I am satisfied the models have some skill, enough to believe we should not risk millions of lives and trillions of dollars ignoring them, but not enough that we should believe them to the exclusion of observations, nor of refining them, nor of spending time examining the way our world works. But the AGW theory (eg Fourier) is close to a 100 years older than any computer model. Arrhenius (spp) computed a climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 of 1.6C plus 2.1C for WV feedback, and I find it slightly interesting that the estimates haven’t changed greatly in 100 years. And then there’s the observations. It might be all natural variability, what if it’s a bit of change and a bit of variablity?
But (that site) it’s not a skill demonstrated to be zero. It’s a skill not sufficiently demonstrated to be significant to the purposes of a hydrologist. May sound like a quibble.
No. I’m a sceptic. There are many naive warmists. I am not one (IMESHO)
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arrg. tag muddle
[Did I fix it to satisfaction?] ED
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It might be all natural variability, what if it’s a bit of change and a bit of variablity?
But (that site) it’s not a skill demonstrated to be zero. It’s a skill not sufficiently demonstrated to be significant to the purposes of a hydrologist. May sound like a quibble.
No. I’m a sceptic. There are many naive warmists. I am not one (IMESHO).
added
I will attempt to address only facts pertinent to issues from now on. I will endeavour not to use terms such as “warmist” “coolist” statist”. Political and religious and fashion statements I will attempt to avoid.
OK?
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Most warmers sound like Lawyers.
Lawyers are not Scientists.
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MaryFJohnston @ 250
Lawyers are skilled in the science of law.
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[…] do anything to effect sea levels, as sea levels have been increasing at largely constant rate for 200 years anyways, well before man made Co2 came […]
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http://www.psmsl.org/products/reconstructions/jevrejevaetal2008.php
So it started at the beginning of the industrial revolution? (and the Napoleonic wars.)
IPCC estimates are too low?
A frightening picture of everincreasing warming you point out there Ms Jo!
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Same link as above. So the actual start of sea level rises is a bit hard to pin down due to “decadal variation.”
Not the graph shows no sign of falling of sea levels—so much for the cooling those who just pick maxima say is happening.
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[…] have been rising in a reasonably continuous trend around the world since 1800. The last two decades are not […]
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It doesn’t take a genius to realise that the sea levels only started dramatically increasing after the industrial revolution.
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[…] rate of sea level rise is almost exactly what we have seen in tide gauge records for 200 years, long before any C02 influence, and certainly the coral Islands can cope exceptionally well with […]
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