Six months ago, Deutsche Bank was overcome with concern about the planet—bless its soul–and launched this 70 ft. vision of climate doom opposite Madison Square Gardens, New York. You can feel relieved. The bank paid for the carbon credits (no doubt through one of its own funds), so the 40,960 low-energy light-emitting diodes are “carbon-neutral.”
Kevin Parker for Deutsche Asset Management said: “We hope with this sign that it is going to foster a sense of urgency about the problem, raise public awareness, create a need for education and really spur a call for action”
Spurring action indeed. “Sign Copenhagen; Sign Cap N Trade; Give us that $2 trillion dollar market based on meaningless paper permits, and funded by consumers everywhere. Please!”
In a more candid moment, Parker said: “Well, what we’d like to see is a price on carbon. That is absolutely foremost in everyone’s minds involved in the climate change debate. The governments around the world have to get on with regulations…”
Yes, the real agenda is the legislation: forced payments from citizens. We all know we aren’t going to see the Deutsche Bank Top-Soil Clock coming soon highlighting the problem of erosion, or the Deutsche Bank Falling Fish Stock Clock…or the Deutsche Bank program to save the spotted quoll.
In a brazen ambit, Parker suggested we all might like to invest more in renewable energy: $45 trillion more (over 40 years), and that’s only going to solve half the problem”. There is no end to the audacity.
Is this anything other than blatant advertising for a Cap N Trade scheme? Ponder if Exxon launched a similar billboard with the “costs” of carbon mitigation, it would be vandalized, scorned, and disparaged even by august associations like the Royal Society.
A NASA official would call for corporate heads to be jailed for crimes against humanity.
It’s ok for bankers managing $695 billion-dollar funds to take sides in a science debate…. That’s not the same as corporations trying to influence policy.
A Handy Deutsche Bank Widget is also available.
You, too, can add a piece of moving propaganda to your site to let people know just how much bankers really want us to trade carbon…
“We believe that enabling all web site operators to easily display the Carbon Counter ahead of the Copenhagen summit will continue to raise awareness of this very serious issue,” said Kevin Parker, Global Head of DeAM and member of Deutsche Bank’s Group Executive Committee. “Major global investment is essential to preventing catastrophic climate change, and it is imperative for governments to build the regulatory and policy frameworks that accommodate and encourage that investment. We are hopeful that world leaders will make significant strides in that direction in Copenhagen.”
www.know-the-number.com
Go on, click on that widget. Wonder how long it will be before the dollars in the carbon market tallies up to be more than the mega-tonnes of gas.
You can see the bank officials launch the carbon counter and stand in the rain, telling everyone there will be even more rain like this in flood-prone NY in the New World…
So exactly what does it count?
The “Number” on the Carbon Counter is based on measurements developed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that include all long-lived greenhouse gases covered under the Kyoto and Montreal Protocols (24 gases excluding ozone and aerosols).
According to the IPCC AR4 Synthesis Report, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were 379ppm in 2005. The estimate of total CO2-eq concentration in 2005 for all long-lived GHGs is about 455ppm
Global carbon goes up and down on a seasonal basis, but it wouldn’t help if people saw the numbers fall for months on end, so they’ve “helpfully” made it seasonal (though wrong), so punters don’t get confused.
The next time DeSmog tries to paint Big Oil as the nasty guys influencing policy with money, you can ask how many 70ft live ticker billboards the skeptics control in New York.
BTW: If you are interested in carbon emissions trading markets, you can download a Market Insights Report from SBI for only $3,995.00. (And for another $800 they’ll post you a hard copy to go with that.)
There are no arguments that stop religious believers, but as I said in October, it only takes six words to slow down the dutiful supporters: Banks Want Us To Trade Carbon.
Since when were banks “environmental”?
…
About: Deutsche Asset Management
With approximately $695 billion in assets under management globally as of September 2009, Deutsche Bank’s Asset Management division is one of the world’s leading investment management organizations, not just in size, but in quality and breadth of investment products, performance and client service. The Asset Management division provides a broad range of investment management products across the risk/return spectrum.
The company, as of March 2009, has about $4 billion under management involving climate change. Its assets include renewable energy projects in Europe and as well as a climate change fund that invests in companies involved in clean technology, energy efficiency and environmental management.
Carbon markets are designed exactly the same way as sub prime mortgage markets. And any means toward establishing global carbon currency will do. The common denominator in this bait and switch game is fear.
““OCEAN ACIDIFICATION” – THE EXTREMISTS’ FALLBACK SCARE
First, they called it “global warming”. Then they noticed there had been no warming for 15 years, and cooling for 9, so they hastily renamed it “climate change”. Then they noticed the climate was changing no more than it ever had, so they tried “energy security”, and even named a Congressional Bill after it. Then they noticed that most Western nations already had bountiful energy security, in the form of vast, untapped domestic supplies of oil, gas, coal, or all three, so they switched to “ocean acidification”.”
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/acid_test.pdf
20
I am sure these guys are very bright. Most have probably got three digit IQs.
But they are insane. The definition of insanity being: doing something you have done before, in exactly the same way you did it before, and expecting the outcome to be somehow different.
Carbon trading is a bubble. Pray tell what are you buying and selling? Oh, a piece of paper that says you have the rights to use or sell part of the atmosphere?
Oh well that’s all right then.
20
If I’m reading that right, there are 3.6 trillion greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. I didn’t think humans made that many gases.
10
My post #2
I wanted to include this reference to the South Sea Bubble, but could not find it at the time.
10
About time the banks asked for more rigorous Regulation.
Regulations they’re asking for – sure thing – Obama, Merkel, Brown etc – Let’s regulate the banks the properly – let’s start by reintroducing the glass seigels act and propogate that to the other banks around the world- you know, the one that was introduced by Roosevelt during the last depression which limited the ratio of assets to debt for banks – the one citibank and other lobbyist mongrels got that repealed in the 1990s didn’t they.
Well let’s reintroduce that along with a new bretton woods, STAT.
Our Dear Leaders have currently failed to show they can effectively regulate a simple banking system on a global scale. Let’s start by regulating the worlds banks properly then it might be worth having a debate the hubris that is Cap N trade.
20
Errr, what makes you think they are looking for a different outcome? They got rich on bubble trading last time round, they expect to get rich on bubble trading this time round. Go find a big banker who got hurt in the recent crash.
Small bankers in the US got it in the neck, that’s part of the policy of forced consolidation of the banking industry, making it more centralised and easier to control.
10
[…] Douche Bank – scamming the masses, Green government propaganda banned, More here, Bermuda data on a holiday, Global warming destination discarded, […]
00
Gee.. the alarmist movement isn’t backed by much big money, is it?
Michael: I think it’s supposed to mean “tonnes of CO2”. Completely misleading of course, since they’re not comparing it with the natural portion, nor are they comparing it against the non-greenhouse gases.
10
INVESTORS Representing $13 Trillion Call on U.S. and Other Countries to Move Quickly to Adopt Strong Climate Change Policies
Have a look at the INSIDIOUS AGENDA promoting this global warming HOAX.
It’s ALL ABOUT THE MONEY!
Nothing to do with SCIENCE!!
http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=608&ArticleID=6446&l=en&t=long
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Remember these guys dont care if it goes up and then down because you can make just as much money selling them short when the bubble bursts. That way they make money on the way up and money on the way down.
All they want is the bubble
00
The Deutsche Bank mantra sounds a lot like the KRudd-Turnbull mantra. It’s high time Politicians’ investments were put in the spotlight, not just their own but family, extended family and remote connections. Following the money is fine but following the noise might be a bit more proactive!
00
The collective noun for “Bankers” is “wunch”.
00
Can someone hit them for false advertising? That sign says greenhouse gases not C02. Given that the major green out gas is water vapour. I find it highly unlikely that all greenhouse gases including water vapour has increased anywhere near the extent that graft suggests. The British government has been forced to withdraw, their Montee Python-esque Rubba Dub Dub three men in a tub, advertisements on the basis of inaccuracies.
00
remember Crikey used Maurice Newman’s time at Deutsche Bank (studying climatology in the evenings?) against him:
11 March: Crikey: Kim Serca: The REAL Newman bio … getting the ad/subs mix right
His career spans forty years in stockbroking and investment banking, including as Managing Director in 1984, and Executive Chairman from 1985 until 1999, of what is now the Deutsche Bank Group in Australia, during which busy time he studied climatology in the evenings…
http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/03/11/media-briefs-the-real-newman-bio-getting-the-adsubs-mix-right-googles-advice-to-papers/
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Not “bankers”, “banksters” as in “gangsters” as Karl Denninger calls them.
00
calling maurice newman. for starters, australia is not ‘global’:
CSIRO boss says climate change is real
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2010/s2845580.htm
it’s way past time for ABC to stipulate that all reporting must refer to “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming” and not generic “climate change” which no-one denies.
00
calling maurice newman. now it’s attack the person time.
ABC Four Corners: Abbott’s climate stance pure politics: Turnbull
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/15/2845484.htm
00
Morning All.
I wonder if the gazillion tonnes of greenhouse gas that Deutche are wringing their hands over includes that incidious gas “Oxygen Dihydride” (aka H2O). From memory I think it accounts for 90% of the infra-red absorption, so it would be odd (if not either illogical or hypocritcal) if it were not.
Have Deutche looked at options for water vapour trading as yet? It could be the next big game in town…
Cheers,
Speedy
00
PETITION: Strip Al Gore and The UN IPCC of Their 2007 Nobel Peace Prize
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nomorenobel/
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Was this why our old mate Rajendra Pachauri was hired as a consultant. From ecopolitoligy 28th Jan 2010,
The IPCC’s credibility aside, though, some opponents have been calling for Pachauri to step down in light of his advisory positions with Toyota, Deutsche Bank and others.
00
Did anyone else notice the bank spelling in #7 (TWAWKI) I could laugh if it was on purpose 🙂
00
Guilty as charged – it was intentional 🙂
00
Jo,
Thank you so much for your awesome and continuing effort to expose not only the facts about climate change science, but also the motives of those pushing these dangerous schemes.
Regards,
Matt
00
Tel @ 6
Australia has 4 major banks and a few minors. Call it 10 for the sake of argument. Australia has a population of 22 million, give or take a few.
USA has something like 3000 banks (give or take a thousand). Population of about 300 million (give or take 10 mil or so).
See a pattern here?
Australia did OK from GFC by having a small number of strong and fairly well run banks. The USA did not, with some huge bank failures, and a lot of small banks suffering terribly. Sounds like a market ripe for consolidation to me.
00
Oh. Thats not an argument for trading carbon.
Thats an argument for a small number of large strong, conservative boring banks without spivs and traders and bullshit.
00
That great big sign says, “Climate Change Affects Everyone.” So-o-o-o-o true! I’ve just had the best laugh ever at their expense! It’s too bad they’re so serious.
A while back under the nom de plume of “The Professor” I theorized that the real cause of global warming was all the hot air from these nut cases bloviating about the subject. Douche Bank, I’ll buy $10,000 worth of your hot air today and another $10,000 next month.
twawki, that fits perfectly!
00
That’s right Joanne. Especially “banks” want to be in the “clique” of things associating with AGW! A lot of money is to be made here… Of course all “Realists” know this as the “base” of AGW…NOT CO2!
I know the term “deniers” is not really condoned here by Joanne but there’s an article about “Deniers”!
It’s called: Six Myths About “Deniers” A pretty good read I might say! Check it out!
http://www.globalwarminghoax.com/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?2136.last
Oh, my article “The Gate’s: When Shall I Open? Further? is posted on the SPPI Blogs…Amazing and Thrilled! Thanks for all those who read it! You all deserve nothing but the “best”! Right Joanne??
00
Bob Malloy,
If Pachauri has been advising both Toyota and Deutsche Bank I’m wondering if Deutsche Bank will soon be having unexplained sudden acceleration problems like Toyota has.
Sorry! I just couldn’t resist the temptation.
00
Roy Houge: @29
I love it very quick and very clever.
00
some dubious comments follow lomborg’s article, including one that brings up a book by Howard Friel called “the lomborg deception”:
15 March: Australian: Bjorn Lomborg: Fixing climate change shouldn’t cost the Earth
FOR the better part of a decade, I have upset many climate activists by pointing out that there are far better ways to stop global warming than trying to persuade governments to force or bribe citizens into slashing their reliance on fuels that emit carbon dioxide.
What especially bugs my critics is the idea that cutting carbon would cost far more than the problem it is meant to solve…
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/fixing-climate-change-shouldnt-cost-the-earth/story-e6frg6zo-1225840644967
the comment does not include a link to Lomborg’s response:
pdf: A Response by Bjorn Lomborg to Howard Friel’s “The Lomborg Deception”
A Response by Bjorn Lomborg to Howard Friel’s‘The Lomborg Deception’
Page references are to the advance copy of Friel’s book
http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20reply%20to%20Howard%20Friel.pdf
Friel’s book has a foreward by Thomas Lovejoy, who is chief biodiversity adviser to the president of the World Bank, senior adviser to the president of the United Nations Foundation, and president of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment:
Terrestrial Carbon Group
International Science, Economics & Policy to Support the Effective Inclusion of Terrestrial Carbon in the Climate Change Solution
Members include: Thomas Lovejoy, Tim Flannery
http://www.terrestrialcarbon.org/Who_we_are/Members.aspx
Newsweek’s Sharon Begley positively reviewed Howard Friel’s book, yet late August 2009, Begley was still unquestioningly reporting:
27 Aug 2009: Newsweek: Sharon Begley: China and India Will Pay
Though others started global warming
The Himalayas have been warming three times as fast as the world average, with the result that their glaciers are shrinking more rapidly than anywhere else and could disappear by 2035.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/213967
00
This is just the beginning.
The Bankers did not invest millions to be brought down inches from the finish line. I’m beginning to sense that Carbon Trading is an essential part of the next financial bubble in the making.
There are over a Quadrillion of derivatives (USD $1,000,000,000,000 or USD $190,000/person on the planet)***,still effectively, log-jamming the capital markets.
Without continued exponential growth the system will stagnate and collapse as the underlying debts prove worthless.(Think of ARM mortgage rates, rising in a collapsing US/World employment market). These guys are desperate.
*** http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2008/10/the_size_of_der.php
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And I’ll bet Westpac are of a mind with DB. I guess they put their rates up more than the other banks because the clobbering of CnT ruined their forward income projections – which would have been heavily based on drawing brokerage commissions from this lucrative scam.
00
Sorry, made a mistake. A quadrillion is way bigger than the figure I showed,(ie $1,000,000,000,000 thats a mere trillion)
The real size is of course $1,000,000,000,000,000. Phew, I’ll never make a banker.
00
UK Government rebuked over nursery rhyme ads ovestating AGW:
Link Here
Gee, now that one was really going to catch on with the under 5 agegroup. Sure…. Look out iggle piggle….
I’m sorry, I actually laughed at some of this stuff… I know it’s insidious, but really, it sounds just soooo pathetic!
00
Someone is making something up, surely – or theory by supposition??? Link to Quiggin`s blog at the bottom of the article…McIntyre did it…
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/03/smearing-steve-mcintyre
00
Why is anyone really surprised? Since when did governments and banks ever have the public at the forefront of their concerns? They are there to milk us of as much money as possible. The AGW scam is just one such exercise. If they fail this time, they will succeed elsewhere. At the moment they are succeeding with the AGW scam since no one has yet been put behind bars for perpetrating a hoax on such a massive scale that I would class it as a crime against humanity. All we need is to see a small increase in world temperatures sometime in the near future, and it will all be over. They will implement their policies at such lightening speed that resistance will be futile. All we can hope for is a cooling period for some years so we can at least have some chance of destroying the AGW hoax.
00
If Deutsche Bank is so graveyly concerned shouldn’t they lead from the front. Shouldn’t all their employees (executives and Board of Directors included) pledge to reduce their carbon footprint to the individual average of say Germany, just as a benchmark. Then they could reduce that to the targeted reduction for a 2 degree cooling, before the next great modeled catastrophe. And just to make it real world, they could tie their bonus’ to their targets.
00
Don’t forget that Rajendra Pachauri is an advisor:
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/pachauri-deutsche-bank-connection.html
00
This guy has a sense of humour:
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/58139/very-indian-flatulence-factor.html
Let us admit that we are the champion farters on this globe. There is not a place in India that is free from this phenomenon. I am sure that I can clip at least five minutes from jogging timings if I did not face the combined headwind effect expelled by walkers ahead of me. I have changed parks and running routines but nothing has helped.
No place is free from this activity. The priests in the temple do it; company CEOs do it, as do the workers. Guests in the living room do it although some of them have mastered the art of muting the sound effect. You can blame this on Indian cuisines of pulses and grams but that will not wash with the international community. They will say it in our face. It is your problem. You solve it or face the penalty for carbon additions. Period.
I believe the government has to wake up to the reality and allot funds for a massive, time-bound research to study this phenomenon and take steps to find a remedy. If we don’t do it fast, the next summit on global warming will tell us loud and clear terms — cap your gases, or else…
That’s 1 billion veggies plus 200 million cows that are mainly for ornament and then we have Pachauri telling us to cut down on our emissions!
00
I recently discovered that Joe Hockey’s wife Melissa is the head of foreign exchange and global finance at Deutsche Bank in Australia which may explain Joes position on the ETS SADLY.
00
Kevin Parker of Deutsche Bank thinks we humans are without question going to become extinct unless the government mandates a price for carbon so he can shift trillions and trillions (less commission) of dollars. See my post here:
http://thedogatemydata.blogspot.com/2009/12/extinction-of-human-race-forecast-by.html
Does anyone actually take these pedlers of doom (and massive self interest) seriously?
00
The bubble business is so sweet. Banks make billions on every bubble from dot.com bubbles to mortgage bubbles, stock market bubbles and carbon trading bubbles. I left out hedge fund and commodity trading bubbles.
00
I think if they stripped out the water vapour (it’s hard to get the public worked up about water vapour) the figure would look a lot more presentable.
Perhaps they could then show the figure for the remainder of the gases in the atmosphere for comparison – in the interests of scientific accuracy.
Of course they’d need a stupendously large digital display – I think the public would have to walk right around their shiny little building to see it all.
I’m not holding my breath!
00
DougS: There’s no water vapor in that figure. It’s “long lived” greenhouse gases. Basically they just wanted a big number that would awe inspire the crowd to gasp, point and promise to buy carbon credits.
And Joe Fittler, yes, I can confirm that Joe Hockey’s wife is the head of foreign exchange and global finance at Deutsche Bank in Australia. We need a major rethink of how we divvy up the incredibly powerful privilege of “creating money” and then charging interest on the money that was blinked into existence. If we are not on a system that manages itself (ie some standard like gold or silver or something real) then why couldn’t the people control and profit from the issuance of their own money? If not that, then we need absolute separation of power. No bankers in government…
00
Well in the end there is no excuse for any civilian having money creation power at all, unless its the extraction industries. Where it becomes a matter of civilisational insurance. The search for the premium priced monetary metals, absorbs the costs of the search for the base metals. If we have some sort of catastrophe, the rebuilding is easier, since the base metal locations are known decades in advance.
The only other example of someone rightly being granted the money-creation privilege might be localised providers of non-digital money. Notes and coins. You might want to privatize that function, so that you have someone to keep the coins in good order and perfect weight and so forth. So you could give them a sixty-six and two-thirds reserve asset ratio. Meaning one third of the value was in the coin itself. One third in the vault, and you’d let these guys lend out the other third into the money market to finance their coin maintenance and production operation. That way we’d still have stable money and the government out of it bar the licensing itself.
00
The existence of any underground economy that has to be based on the existence of some independent item of intermediary exchange, vis. money, attests to the possibility that the market itself can supply that function without government input.
The Australian Fabians published a newsletter last year in which they were considering the idea of digital money! I’ve got that issue in PDF form if anyone wants it. Basically a load of nonsense of course.
00
The better position re the creation of money was given by Hayek (The Denationalization of Money): Let anyone (typically banks, of course) create their own money and leave it to competition to sort out the best currencies. In that world Carbon Credit Money would quickly find its true value: zero.
00
I don’t think Hayeks option made much sense. Its being used as an excuse for the status quo. Transition to a better system is a harzardous thing. If the banks reserves are three per cent then spending on that basis can crash at least 15 times given that historically there have been times when banks were too scared to keep less than 40%.
And then spending could crash three times more again, as the demand for money for holding reasserted itself. So that spending could almost disappear. Having a downside of implosion possibility of about 15*3=45 times. In other words spending could collapse to less than 3% of what it was before the transition started.
I think this was just loose talk after Hayek got the Nobels. You want to go to 100% backing before you do anything else. Otherwise you are just asking for trouble and even sabotage.
We get this two-step in the money and banking business. Where people who don’t care a toss about tens of thousands of cartelization regulations, suddenly get religion with regards to the reserve asset ratio. They suddenly become holier-than-thou libertarians, thou in point of fact they are feeble centrists. Mention Hayek and they have ammunition for not being limited by the reserve asset ratio on the basis of some odd speculation from Hayek when he hadn’t been involved with monetary theory for decades.
Suddenly these subsidised-cartelized crony-banking socialists get religion with regards to Hayek. They also find allies with Macromancers in both the Keynesian and Neoclassical schools.
There is simply no payoff for the rest of us in allowing private bank money-creation. We have a whole generation of arrogant and corrupted bankers in opposition to the public welfare in this matter. They are motivated, cunning, sneaky and really quite nasty pieces of work. Also they have global backing.
Mention some loose words from Hayek and you might as well look forward to another 1000 years of banker-exploitation of the public. Another thousand years of the bankers and government being bundled up together, and none of us quite being able to figure out who is the junior, and who is the senior partner.
00
Pat @ 16:
I just read through the short transcript of the ABC’s lightweight interview of the head of the CSIRO (Megan Clark). I quote the following Q&A:
Is it just me or did she:
a) not answer the question; or
b) jump to the very basic fallacy of correlation equals causation?
Maybe both… this from the head of our top scientific organisation? For shame… but them she used the robust IPCC word “likely” so I guess any comment is allowable when you say this. I remember me Dad saying (3-4 decades ago) you can say anything you want if you start the sentance with “Many scientists belive…”
* From: http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2010/s2845580.htm
00
Louis Hissink: The Australian Fabians published a newsletter last year in which they were considering the idea of digital money! I’ve got that issue in PDF form if anyone wants it. Basically a load of nonsense of course.
When I read that fast I thought you meant you have that issue (of currency) as a PDF. That could be handy! (likely I could be as fiscally responsible as my government lately) 🙂
00
Mark D.:
10/10 🙂
00
Surely this is about declining resources and global control. Every year the Oz Govt is happily allowing the odd billion $ of fossil fuel exports to China and India which drowns out any micro savings of domestic CO2 emissions. Climate is an irrelevant side-show. I think we have a real problem looming if the world wants to continue feeding fossil fuel into power stations and automobiles after 2050 becos human society might not adjust to the rapidity of cost increases.
In the 80s my father, (Alan K) retired from an engineering career and wrote a paper on energy requirements for the 21st C which high-lighted the issues of rapidly increasing Chinese and Indian population and the decline in energy reserves. He said that even if we were to fully implement the nuclear options he’d been working on, the world would see conlicts over declining energy resources.
I’d prefer to see the real problems discussed in a open and honest fashion, -then all those billions wasted on climate guff could be applied to something progressive.
00
Sure. This nonsense is drowning out all real concerns and threats. Energy, environment, strategic. You name it. Its a great big weapon of mass distraction.
00
Jo @ 44
Well if that figure is net of water vapour – why is the effect of water vapour not identified and considered separately? Surely water vapour contributes significantly (very) to the overall “greenhouse” effect? in this context are increased concentrations of CO2, methane etc relevant to the global heat balance?
I don’t think further CO2 is relevant except in a very academic sense. And it is dishonest for Deutsche et al to pretend otherwise.
Cheers,
Speedy
00
Speedy,
Not only does water vapour contribute very significantly, I’d say most significantly, it is the only way the modelers get the large catastrophic warming they project by calling water vapour a feedback… just like the dog is merely an appendage of the tail I guess. (Somebody mind telling me the difference between a prediction and a projection BTW?)
Anybody talking about “greenhouse gases” without talking about water can be ignored as not knowing the least thing about the subject.
00
Just heard about this one today – interviews with Judith Curry and Michael Mann. Draw your own conclusions in relation to their respective tones, hey…
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/10-it.s-gettin-hot-in-here-big-battle-over-climate-science/article_view?searchterm=michael%20mann&b_start:int=0
00
BTW the CSIRO/BoM statement can be found here:
http://www.csiro.au/resources/State-of-the-Climate.html
The pdf file:
http://www.csiro.au/files/files/pvfo.pdf
Once again I find it amazing how they cherry-pick the items they wish to discuss. Take rainfall, for instance, which I mentioned when the BoM put out their last climate statement (for 2009). As opposed to all the other climate factors rainfall gets one short paragraph in the statement, to wit:
Want to know why? This is because rainfall has been steadily increasing in Australia as a whole (not stable as stated), as the last BoM climate report clearly showed (it was ignored there as well):
http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/climate/change/20100105.shtml
So yes, we have been getting more rainfall across the continent, but it hasn’t been falling in the places we would like it to – i.e. the SE and SW, as opposed to the northern end of Australia.
I am disgusted at the way the message is politicised through the BoM and CSIRO to slant the observations to fit a pre-determined narrative.
00
Mike (55)
Thanks for that – I thought the water had a bit to do with it but it seems to be pulled out by the IPCC only when it suits them.
As the difference between Prediction and Projection. The IPCC are careful never to use the word prediction because it has an implicit responsibility attached to it – it means that they are saying something is going to happen. A projection is more a “hypothetical” associated with a specific set of input assumptions – often including the water vapour feedback you discuss. However, most of the public (and the media) don’t understand the subtle distinction. By calling it a projection, the IPCC can wriggle out of responsibility by disowning the input assumptions. Whereas if they called it a prediction, they had blanket ownership of the results and the dodgey consequences.
Cheers,
Speedy
00
Thanks for the link George @ 56:
Got to like Mann’s answer to one of the questions:
Paranoid much? It took weeks before the Australian mainstream media even said peep about the emails. Yeah… that was real coordinated Mike…
00
Speedy: #58
March 16th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Spot on about predictions and projections Speedy. But guess what? In the AR5, the IPCC will make predictions. But they will stress that the margins of error will be higher than in the previous AR’s.
So then, imagine if they get a “prediction” correct within their wide margins of error. The “see we told you so’s” will be unbearable.
00
Bulldust @57 Your comments re rainfall are irrelevant pedantry obscuring real effects and impact on peoples lives.
Melbourne for example has water storage at a very low historical level and despite usage restrictions has been forced to build significant infrastructure in a short period of time to keep the city a viable concern.
There’s a lot more here than just rain “where we would like”. These preferences of ours are not simply a choice between the mousse and the cheese, they have real impact on our lives.
What should the 4 million people in Melbourne and surrounding areas of Victoria do? Become nomads following the rain around?
00
BullDust #59
It is not paranoia, but an attempt by Mann and his cohorts to create another “KrystalNacht”. If they can convince the over all population of such a dreaded conspiracy – the thinking goes – then they can sway opinion to their side without resorting to any dirty work like actual scientific study, testing and research.
00
NO JM, you should work them up into a frenzied mob and get them to stampede the AU parliament. All on the flim-flam you are trumping up to be climate change. In another thread you made comments about an observation being “weather not climate”. Why don’t you define what time frame “weather” becomes “climate”. Is it 50 years trend? 25 years? 19.345 years?
Or is it only when it helps you in politics?
00
JM@61,
The current water storage levels for melbourne are at their highest level for this time of year than they have been for the last 3 years JM. This is despite the massive amount of population growth Melbourne has experienced over the last decade or two.
00
Speedy:
At #58 you say:
Ten years ago I gave a briefing at the US Congress and in response to my description of AGW activity it was suggested to me that “the IPCC reviews literature, does not do science, and does not make predictions”.
I replied saying;
“Sir, I agree much of what you say, but not all. You say the IPCC does not make predictions. The IPCC says the world will warm. I call that a prediction.”
There was no response to my reply.
Richard
00
“Not only does water vapour contribute very significantly, I’d say most significantly, it is the only way the modelers get the large catastrophic warming they project by calling water vapour a feedback…”
Its this that really ticks me off. We who come from the temperate zones have to know what a refrigerant this water vapour is. It robs the ocean of heat, travels up to mid-troposphere, and blasts at least half of its latent heat into space.
I mean I could understand if we were talking about the tropical areas alone. Or if it was a case of the tropical areas spreading really quickly. But this idea that water vapour is always and everywhere this great big cumulative warmer is extremely annoying. Ones great-grandmother, probably sometime or other, kept the meat cool by covering it with wet cloth and leaving it out in the shade and the wind.
These people are just so stupid. They have a model wherein it is implied that the molecules are all fixed in place, and they fall for it.
With some exceptions, water vapour is the oceans sweating. Proof of refrigeration. The ultimate negative feedback. Thats not going to hold always and everywhere. But these blockheads average and aggregate all things and they don’t see this fact holding in any time and place at all.
00
Graeme, @66 that was nicely none. I think all the Believing Warmists will read this and suddenly have heart burn. Imagine a compound that makes up XXX% of the globe surface and atmosphere having any impact…..
Naa Who am I kidding-H2O is just a minor player (and always a positive feedback too).
00
God Bless Joanne Nova for seeing the banksters tentacles behind the global warming fraud. Hey Jo, closer to home Rothschilds Australia have their slimmy tentacles out wanting our hard earned wages under the guise of ‘carbon taxes’.
http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=90090
00
Mark D: In another thread you made comments about an observation being “weather not climate”.
No Mark, I said fog (etc) was weather. Since when is fog not weather. And I have consistently across many threads and sites pointed out the climate is 30 years. That’s the WMO standard.
MadJak, you can’t read. I said “very low historical levels”. I did not say “this year they are the lowest of all time”.
What I said is true. Your mischaracterization of it is false.
00
Mark D: Imagine a compound that makes up XXX% of the globe surface and atmosphere having any impact…..
Well if you’re going to discuss the role of the oceans try at least to get the percentage right. School children know it, anyone who’s watched a science documentary knows it. It’s 70% (give or take)
And you could also try boiling a kettle to understand the difference between a liquid and a vapour. There you go, real science you can do in your kitchen.
00
Richard @65 you are obviously very proud of your retort to be repeating it 10 years later.
But riddle me this Batman, how can the IPCC (or anyone else) do a review without coming to a conclusion?
00
From Bishop Hill’s blog:
Talking about conspiracy, why is the Pope supporting AGW? Did the vatican buy into carbon emission funds or something? Also, did you know Obama is one of the persons responsible for the Chicago Climate Exchange?
All the world leaders seem bent on pushing through some form of carbon tax or emissions scheme. Some bankers and politicians will become mega-rich, on the backs of the taxes we ordinary folk will be forced to pay. Are we going to be taxed and metered for every breath of co2 we exhale? I fear for my kids and our way of life. Feels like something big is on the horizon which will change life as we know it.
March 16, 2010 | Paul Z.
===
Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change includes
Roman Catholic Diocese of Plymouth
Roman Catholic Diocese of Salford
Roman Catholic Diocese of Portsmouth
Well, they are only doing what David Miliband (atheist) told them, who was at the Vatican spreading his propaganda in 2007:
“I think it is appropriate to address these themes at the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace…well before climate change gained the profile it currently holds, the Catholic Church was warning of its consequences. In 1990, Pope John Paul II…warned us of the dangers of irreversible damage caused by the greenhouse effect…We need to mobilise governments, businesses and citizens across the world to act – what Pope John Paul II described as an ‘ecological conversion’…You first invited the Chancellor Gordon Brown to address this conference. I know he has worked closely with you…and I know he sends his good wishes to this conference and your continued engagement in this agenda…we must establish carbon markets which put a price on carbon emissions…a carbon market in which credits are bought overseas will help enormously…Let me finish with an observation by an organization called the WWF…”
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20070506115906/http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/ministers/speeches/david-miliband/dm070426.htm
March 16, 2010 | ScientistForTruth
00
Actually, it’s not the WMO standard, merely a standard for reporting, and if you want to use this particular standard properly, it only applies to a particular set of 30 year periods being 1931 to 1960, then 1961 to 1990, 1991 to 2020, etc. These are largely arbitrary as explained in the “GUIDE TO CLIMATOLOGICAL PRACTICES” which is about the closest thing to a standard document you can download from the WMO website (and all told, not such a bad outline for data collection, in vague and general terms).
See also:
http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/documents/Guide2.pdf
The only other magical thing about the 30 year period is the Bruckner Cycle which is one of a great many climate cycles covering any timescale you care to suggest.
00
How about frontal passages? How about downslope winds? Or thundershowers? Or cloud cover? Or fog?
JM.
Excuse me that is not just fog you included. Not that it matters to my point: The lack of rain anywhere (or abundance) IS weather NOT climate change! Here in this thread : “What should the 4 million people in Melbourne and surrounding areas of Victoria do? Become nomads following the rain around? You seem to suggest that the good folks of Melbourne are suffering from climate change (and by implication AGW). I say no, and anyone that points to any weather anomaly as evidence of AGW is wrong.
Stay with me could you?
Then:
Thank you for the answer. Now tell me why I should use anything that is a product of the UN? Why 30 years? why not 31 or 29 or 45?
Then you get downright silly @70:
Seriously are you making an issue of my XXX%?
00
Just a quick note to say thank you for all your hard work.
00
Tel: it’s not the WMO standard,
Tel quoting the WMO The 30 year period of reference was set as a standard …
Comprehension not your strong point?
Mark D, your assertion that fog (and other local phenonoma) at a particular site on a particular day can alter the global climatic record to any significant extent was a remarkably stupid comment that I treated leniently. I’m amazed you want to defend it.
Your second point about water vapour confused water vapour and water liquid (ie. the oceans). Both play a significant role in climate, but they are very different roles. You’re confusing them.
00
JM What we have here is a failure to communicate.
I did not make that assertion (comment). I in fact was suggesting you implied that through your statements. Please re-read what I said. Then compare to your statement about the people of Melbourne. I may have misread your meaning but it reads to me that the people of Melbourne are dry (a weather condition) and would have to become nomadic to follow where the water went (because of man caused climate change).
You say “Your second point about water vapour confused water vapour and water liquid (ie. the oceans). Both play a significant role in climate, but they are very different roles. You’re confusing them.”
Again, I didn’t confuse the two. This is the quote:
no where is the word vapor. What I was doing is having is fun at a warmists expense by mocking. I’m saying is that something as plentiful as water (in all forms i.e. what is on the surface AND in the atmosphere) Mocking the warmists thinking that H20 would not have the ability to transport heat in sufficient quantity to offset any dangerous amount of heating form the surface to a point where that heat could be radiated to space. Hence the added (more mocking): “Naa Who am I kidding-H20 is just a minor player(and always a positive feedback too)” .
By the way XXX% is a clue to what I was trying to say because the only three digit percentage is 100% which means I was including (conceptually) ALL the water on the surface (of the globe) AND in the atmosphere.
00
JM:
You demonstrate that you are an obnoxious fool when you write at #71:
No! The sin of pride has nothing to do with it. My comment was pertinent to the discussion concerning the non-difference btween “projection” and “prediction”.
However, I will forgive your offence because you have repeatedly demonstrated that you fail to understand what pertinence is.
Indeed, little Robin, perhaps you will explain what pertinence you think your silly question has to anything I said. Or do you ask the question because relevance is something you completely fail to understand because relevance is not part of your experience?
Richard
00
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/european-emission-trading-rocked-by-scandal-over-recycled-carbon-permits/story-e6frg90o-1225842148852
European emission trading rocked by scandal over recycled carbon permits
* Carl Mortished * From: The Times * March 18, 2010 8:32AM
EUROPE’S emissions trading system was in uproar yesterday amid a mounting scandal over “recycled” carbon permits. Two carbon exchanges were forced to suspend trading as panic hit investors fearful that they had bought invalid permits. BlueNext and Nord Pool, the French and Nordic exchanges, suspended trading in certificates of emission reduction (CERs) when it emerged that some had been illegally reused. Concern that used and worthless permits were circulating caused the spot price of the certificates to collapse, from €12 ($17.87) a tonne of carbon to less than €1.
00
Mark D. If you read that into my comment “That’s weather” then I’m a very much more succinct speaker than you or anyone else I’ve ever heard of. But you have twice now clearly asserted that micro-climate (not siting) issues account for the warming we observe. You’re wrong.
Richard, I would have thought my meaning was clear. You are proud of retorting (essentially) that the IPCC does make predictions because it reviews and reaches conclusions. Not the same thing.
The IPCC reviews and concludes.
The rest of your Jesuitical comment is worth unpicking.
00
Sorry: The rest of your Jesuitical comment is not worth unpicking.
00
See I read all the words that as written and understand what the paragraph is saying. You might want to go back and try it again.
I’ll say again, the 30 year periods are a standard, largly arbitrarily chosen for the purpose of reporting. They have no particular magic.
00
Correction: the IPCC reviews, filters, and concludes. Then creates summaries for policy makers that are further filtered.
Take for instance the issue of evaporation, rainfall and energy balance. The main AR4 report says:
… and …
The summary version completely ignores the massive uncertainty mentioned above, skips right over the problem and starts making bold claims about changes in rainfall. I’ll add that various media releases have made almost opposite claims to what the AR4-SPM makes and none of these climatologists seem to upset about the inconsistency.
The Australian CSIRO report claimed “dry areas will get drier, wet areas will get wetter” but the AR4-SPM shows the entire zone around the Mediterranean getting drier (see figure SPM.7 just happens to cover about half of Europe’s major food growing areas) — hardly a dry area getting drier and more of a blatant attention grabbing device.
00
Tel firstly a minor point. The zone around the Med is bloody dry. You might have noticed that Spain, southern Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel etc are all semi-arid (or nearly so) and you can’t have missed that big desert called the “Sahara” on the southern edge.
hardly a dry area getting drier
Don’t make me laugh.
But to my major point:
the 30 year periods are a standard, largly arbitrarily chosen for the purpose of reporting. They have no particular magic.
Firstly you obviously don’t understand what a standard is supposed to do – it puts everyone on the same playing field so there are no irrelevant arguments or misunderstandings between people using different “standards”. Temperature scales are an example. The entire scientific world uses Celsius even in countries where Fahrenheit remains in use. (Don’t bother raising the point that the US continues to measure in F, that’s an historical thing they haven’t got over yet – the fact remains that the scientific community do all of their work in Celsius.)
Secondly, the 30 year period does have a sort of magic. At that point the monthly and annual variation is washed out and you can be confident that you are looking at long term trends. In fact, in mathematical terms the low frequency noise just about disappears around 15 years, so 30 is a pretty safe bet.
But you’re right, 30 years is arbitrary. However it has the advantage of putting everyone on the same page.
00
JM:
At #180 you say:
Bollocks! You offensive little twit. There is and was no pride.
As I said,
If you think an assertion that the Earth is going to warm is not a “prediction” then what do you think a “prediction” is?
I will try to explain this to you.
The Earth will warm or cool as it always has. And a coin will fall heads or tails as it always does. A statement that the Earth will warm is a prediction of exactly the same kind as a claim that a coin will fall heads.
Now, some people claim that a coin will fall heads because it has fallen heads 5 times in a row. They conclude that the coin is biased (by weight balance) so it will continue to fall heads every time. Then the coin falls tails for a short series of falls. Thus, their conclusion is proved to be wrong because their prediction turned out to be wrong.
And the IPCC claimed that the globe will continue to warm because it had warmed for 28 years in a row (from 1970 to 1998). They concluded that the global climate is biased (by anthropogenic GHG emissions) so it will continue to warm every year. Then the global climate peaked in 1998 and fell after that so it has not again reached the high of 1998 and, indeed, has fallen since 2002. Thus, their conclusion is proved to be wrong because their prediction turned out to be wrong.
Surely, even you can understand this.
1.
The IPCC asserted that the Earth will warm.
2.
That assertion is a prediction whatever the putative reason for the assertion.
3.
The real world has demonstrated that the prediction was wrong.
4.
The failure of the prediction proves that the reason for the prediction was wrong.
And don’t give me the ‘weather excuse’. The prediction was wrong, period.
Richard
00
Richard, a coin falling heads or tails is a process that leads to white noise. It’s the model underlying a random walk.
Climate on the earth is not a random walk, or a coin toss. There is an underlying physical process. Part of that process – the radiative physics and thermodynamics bit – we understand exactly. Other parts, like where the increased retained heat goes and what it does are imperfectly understood.
But it is still a physical process and not a casino.
The earth is warming and it is warming because we have increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by about 40% over the last 100+ years.
Face reality.
00
JM:
March 18th, 2010 at 8:23 pm
“…The earth is warming and it is warming because we have increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by about 40% over the last 100+ years….”
Surely the CONCENTRATION of CO2 in the atmosphere hasn’t increased by 40%. The amount of CO2 may have, but the concentration has only increased by a minuscule amount.
If the increase is from, say 280ppm to 390ppm that’s from 0.028% to 0.039%, an increase of 0.011% – about one hundredth of one percent.
00
JM:
At #86 you again try to change the subject instead of simply admitting you are wrong. I cannot recall a single assertion you have made here that is right. But you keep changing the subject in hope that by chance you will eventually get something right.
Your non sequitur at #86 asserts:
You are factually wrong on both counts!
Face reality.
Even Phil Jones admits there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 15 years.
And there is no evidence – none, not any, zilch – to support your assertion that
“it is warming because we have increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by about 40% over the last 100+ years.”
I repeat – because your lack of reading comprehension skills seems to have prevented your grasping it despite my having already posted it twice on this blog – that the evidence says the opposite of your assertion.
Importantly, global warming of itself is not evidence for the AGW hypothesis because the existence of warming is not evidence for the cause of that warming. Everybody except Michael Mann agrees the Earth has been warming as a recovery from the LIA for the past 300 years.
However, global cooling is evidence against the AGW-hypothesis because the hypothesis says increased anthropogenic emissions of GHGs are overwhelming the natural climate system such that global temperature will rise.
The Earth has been cooling for 8 years.
Face reality. Admit your errors or go away.
Richard
00
JM: #86
March 18th, 2010 at 8:23 pm
Got any proof to back up that statement?
p.s. Richard I don’t know why you bother. Unless ofcourse these lightweights amuse you. Then amuse away, the rest of us enjoy seeing these fools geting an intellectual beating 🙂
00
JM:
In my disgust at your behaviour I omitted to refute another of your errors at #86. You assert:
Understanding a part of a complex physical process is no help to understanding the process and is often very misleading. For example, knowing how a differential gear works tells nothing about how and why an automobile moves. If the only thing a mechanic considered about the mechanism of a car was its differential gear then he would have great difficulty getting it to work properly if its fuel line was partially blocked.
And the radiative physics may be as irrelevant to recent climate change as the hypothetical car’s differential gear is to to its performance.
The basic assumption used in the models is that change to climate is driven by change to radiative forcing. And it is very important to recognise that this assumption has not been demonstrated to be correct. Indeed, it is quite possible that there is no force or process causing climate to vary. I explain this as follows.
The climate system is seeking an equilibrium that it never achieves. The Earth obtains radiant energy from the Sun and radiates that energy back to space. The energy input to the system (from the Sun) may be constant (although some doubt that), but the rotation of the Earth and its orbit around the Sun ensure that the energy input/output is never in perfect equilbrium.
The climate system is an intermediary in the process of returning (most of) the energy to space (some energy is radiated from the Earth’s surface back to space). And the Northern and Southern hemispheres have different coverage by oceans. Therefore, as the year progresses the modulation of the energy input/output of the system varies. Hence, the system is always seeking equilibrium but never achieves it.
Such a varying system could be expected to exhibit oscillatory behaviour. And, it does: mean global temperature rises by nearly 4 deg C from July to January and falls by nearly 4 deg. C from January to July each year.
Importantly, the length of some oscillations could be harmonic effects which, therefore, have periodicity of several years. Of course, such harmonic oscillation would be a process that – at least in principle – is capable of evaluation.
However, there may be no process because the climate is a chaotic system. Therefore, the observed oscillations (ENSO, NAO, etc.) could be observation of the system seeking its chaotic attractor(s) in response to its seeking equilibrium in a changing situation.
Very importantly, there is an apparent ~900 year oscillation that caused the Roman Warm Period (RWP), then the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP), then the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), then the Little Ice Age (LIA), and the present warm period (PWP). All the observed rise of global temperature in the twentieth century could be recovery from the LIA that is similar to the recovery from the DACP to the MWP. And the ~900 year oscillation could be the chaotic climate system seeking its attractor(s). If so, then all global climate models and ‘attribution studies’ utilized by IPCC and CCSP are based on the false premise that there is a force or process causing climate to change when no such force or process exists.
In reality, harmonic oscillation and chaotic attractor seeking probably both occur.
But the assumption that climate change is driven by radiative forcing may be correct. If so, then it is still extremely improbable that – within the foreseeable future – the climate models could be developed to a state whereby they could provide reliable predictions. This is because the climate system is extremely complex. Indeed, the climate system is more complex than the human brain (the climate system has more interacting components – e.g. biological organisms – than the human brain has interacting components – e.g. neurones), and nobody claims to be able to construct a reliable predictive model of the human brain. It is pure hubris to assume that the climate models are sufficient emulations for them to be used as reliable predictors of future climate when they have no demonstrated forecasting skill.
Admit your errors or go away.
Richard
00
Back on topic and focusing on the “carbon” criminals.
July 6th 2007 scum bag David Rothschild’s when asked said his family (that is rumored to own half of the worlds wealth) had no plans for a global carbon dioxide tax.
21 Apr 2009 Whoops, the same Rothschild bankster family are setting up carbon tax “banks” here in Australia and abroad!!
Learn more
00
Baa Humbug:
At #86 you say:
Thankyou. You are right. I shall ignore the troll from now on.
Richard
00
the link in my last post showing Rothschilds lying didn’t work. try again..
http://www.australiamatters.com/david_rothschild.html
00
JM says:
JM I’ll give you every chance to explain yourself:
please explain in detail what you meant here @61:
After you have explained what you meant there we’ll proceed.
I have NEVER asserted that micro-climate (not siting) issues account for the warming we observe. Prove by reference where I have done so.
00
DougS @87 Your mathematics is a bit out. (And this response addresses BH’s concerns at a couple of other comments here)
say 280ppm to 390ppm that’s from 0.028% to 0.039%
Go and get a calculator, divide 390 by 280. That’s about 1.39 and a bit. ie 40%. The concentration of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere has increased by around 40% during the industrial and post industrial age.
Mark D, if you have “NEVER asserted that micro-climate (not siting) issues account for the warming we observe.“, what was your citing of fog, downslope winds etc all about? I’ve obviously misunderstood it. Sorry about that.
Richard @90 Harmonic oscillation? You can’t be serious. There is a good model based on radiative physics and thermodynamics that proposes the hypothesis “increase CO2 and you will increase temperature”.
The data supports it.
What’s your alternative hypothesis? Where is the data that supports that alternative hypothesis?
00
Tel:
At #82 you say:
Yes, and it is a point that ‘warmers’ repeatedly misrepresent and they fail to understand that their misunderstanding would demolish their case if it were true. The estimates of mean global temperature (HadCRUT,GISS,GHCN) start from 1880. So, if climate data is only acceptable as 30-year periods there are only 4 data points for recent global temperature. Nothing can be inferred from so little data.
In fact, the 30-year standard period was adopted as a decision that was part of the Geophysical Year in 1958 because – as your quotation at #73 from the WMO says – “The 30 year period of reference was set as a standard mainly because only 30 years of data were available for summarization when the recommendation was first made.”
The piece you quoted from the WMO also explained that
“The early intent of normals was to allow comparison among observations from around the world.”
And, importantly,
“The use of normals as predictors slowly gained momentum over the course of the 20th century.”
So, there is no standard period for climate data except as a basis for comparison. But, the standard period is 30 years of average data for comparison purposes so, for example, the HadCRUT, GISS and GHCN data are each reported as “anomalies” (i.e. differences) from an average value of a (different) 30 year period.
The “use of normals as predictors” means that some (who have “gained [the] momentum”) choose to forecast for 30 years in the future (which conveniently will be after most of them have retired).
And the use of 30-year periods is not adopted for assessments of climate data.
In fact, climate scientists use various time periods of a year to millennia for assessments of all climate data – including temperature – depending on the intended purpose of an assessment. For example, the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 1994 Report from its Working Group 1 (WGI, its science working group) used 4-year periods when comparing climate data for trends in hurricane frequency. Also, for example, the HadCRUT, GISS and GHCN data are each provided as annual data so individual years can be considered (e.g. the “x warmest years on record were in y decade”).
I hope you find this additional explanation helpful and supportive of your point.
Richard
00
Richard, stop blathering.
What’s your alternative hypothesis? Where is the data that supports that alternative hypothesis?
00
Friends:
The troll demands an “alternative hypothesis” to AGW. This demand turns science on its head.
The null hypothesis is that the cause(s) of recent climate change are the same as the cause(s) of previous climate change.
Those who dispute the null hypothesis – and claim AGW or anything else unusual is now causing climate to change – need to prove their case. And they cannot because there is nothing observed in recent climate behaviour that has not been observed to have happened in previous millenia.
So, AGW advocates need to disprove the null hypothesis. Until they do then others only have a duty to demand that they disprove it.
And the evidence for the null hypothesis is that nothing has been observed in recent climate behaviour that has not been observed in previous millenia.
When they
(a) show something unprecedented in recent climate behaviour
that
(b) is predicted by the AGW hypothesis
then – and only then – will they have a scientific case for claiming the null hypothesis needs to be justified.
Richard
00
No Richard
The null hypothesis is that temperature increase is not correlated with increased CO2.
This violates proven physics.
00
Troll:
Learn some physics.
Until then, admit your errors or go away.
In all science the null hypothesis is that an effect has the same cause as previously unless shown to be otherwise.
Any other suggestion is a claim to magic and not science.
Admit your errors or go away. If you do not then I shall ignore you because your contributions here are an assemblage of factual error and silliness.
Richard
00
Learn some statistics.
My statement is accurate. The null hypothesis when comparing temperature increase against CO2 increase (both of which have happened) is that there is no relationship.
The null hypothesis however violates established physics.
00
JM: @ 95
“DougS @87 Your mathematics is a bit out. (And this response addresses BH’s concerns at a couple of other comments here)
say 280ppm to 390ppm that’s from 0.028% to 0.039%
Go and get a calculator, divide 390 by 280. That’s about 1.39 and a bit. ie 40%. The concentration of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere has increased by around 40% during the industrial and post industrial age….”
I did get a calculator! I worked back from the current concentration of approx. 390ppm to get the 280ppm figure using your (“about 40%”) figure.
I rounded it a bit to keep it simple for you.
Again: the increase in CONCENTRATION rather than AMOUNT is 110ppm, which equates to 0.011%.
00
Friends:
This thread demonstrates three established principles of ‘warmers’: viz.
1.
They attempt to usurp any discussion away from its subject.
2.
They think that telling a lie often makes it true.
3.
When their lies are exposed they do not retract and/or apologise but, instead, they change the subject.
Richard
01
PS For an example of “telling a lie often” see #99 and #101 then refer to pints numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4 in my pst at #88. I anticipate the troll responding to this whith yet another irrelevance, but I shall ignore whatever he/she/it says.
00
Richard your point 1 says: 1. The anthropogenic emissions and global temperature do not correlate.
Points 2,3 and 4 are more elaborate versions of the same thing (although point 3 introduces another doozy Global temperature is now similar to that of 1990.)
You constructed your argument that way. You’re backing the null hypothesis.
But it violates physics.
00
That’s a clock connected to the bank account of the Deutsche, clear to see.
“JM:
March 19th, 2010 at 1:27 am
Learn some statistics.
My statement is accurate. The null hypothesis when comparing temperature increase against CO2 increase (both of which have happened) is that there is no relationship.
The null hypothesis however violates established physics”
Semantics won’t save AGW’s behind, JM.
00
A new peer reviewed study shows MWP T’s higher than current warm period. (In the Southern Hemisphere no less)
From CO2Science via C3headlines
I wonder if I can get the graph up
Nothing new about current temps JM. Nothing to see here folks, move along
00
It’s not semantics Dirk. It’s fundamental. In statistics the “null hypothesis is not rejected”, so you have to be careful of what the null hypothesis actually is.
If it is “the moon is made of green cheese” then it’s unphysical.
If it is “CO2 does not warm the earth” then it’s unphysical. Never mind the statistics and all the blather about “significance”, his null hypothesis requires the rejection of all of physics since circa 1800.
Richard has made a fundamental blunder and stated his submission to the Parliamentary inquiry as “The anthropogenic emissions and global temperature do not correlate”
I don’t care if there’s no correlation. Accepting that conclusion from failure to reject the null hypothesis means that you are using statistics to overrule physical laws of the universe. Which is fundamentally stupid. If you’re going to do that I can use statistics to “disprove” gravity.
The problem is with Richards framing of the null hypothesis (the “question” in other words).
He’s asked a garbage question and got a garbage answer. GQGA if you like. (It’s sometimes said that science is about asking the right questions – Richard has asked a ludicrous one).
00
BTW Richard, since your submission has now been publicly shown to be wrong headed, I presume you’ll be withdrawing it?
Now that you know you’ve made a mistake you can no longer mount your argument in good faith. I believe the Parliament takes a dim view of people who knowingly mislead it.
00
JM:
March 19th, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Now you’ve gone too far. You have no right accusing anybody of knowingly misleading parliament, which is a crime.
Richard S Courtney uses his real name. You do not. Now either produce evidence to back your assertion of crime or repeat it under your real name.
Failing those, apologise or I will hound you from this blog like the little coward that you are.
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Liar:
At #108 you assert:
No such statement – and nothing like it – is included in my Submission.
Anybody can check your lie because all Submissions to the Select Committee are published at
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/contents.htm
Then at #109 you provide a libelous lie concerning my Submission when you say
That Submission is factually correct in each and every detail. It has not been shown – or indicated – to faulty in any way by anybody either in public or in private.
Your lie is an accusation of criminal activity provided from behind a shield on anonymity. Withdraw it!
You make a profound error or a state blatant lie at #105 when you say:
My points at #88 are each different.
Point 2 concerns coherence (not correlation).It says:
“Change to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration follows change to global temperature at all time scales. ”
Point 3 considers correlation of global temperature to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. It says,
“Recent rise in global temperature has not been induced by rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.”
Then it explains that statement.
Point 4 considers effect of anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide on global temperature. It says,
“Rise in global temperature has not been induced by anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide.”
Then it explains that statement.
You repeatedly assert the lie (e.g. at #99) that
But if that lie were true – which it clearly is not – then it would be empirical evidence that “established physics” is wrong. And such a finding would elevate you to the scientific stature of Aristotle, Newton and Einstein. Your lie is breathtaking arrogance that has no support of any kind.
Liar, you are pathetic. Lacking sense, morality and logic you attempt to justify yourself by lies and untrue assertions concerning others. However, I hold you in surprisingly high regard: indeed, I rank you only two places below a slime mould.
Richard
00
Richard, I agree the phrase I quoted does not appear in your submission and only here during our discussion. That is my mistake – I was trusting that you had quoted yourself accurately. Apparently you did not. I’m sorry for that and I apologize and withdraw.
However, I think your submission does actually say the same thing (although you’re very elliptical about it).
You seem to be saying that the mechanism – proven through countless pieces of physics of engineering and physics – cannot be trusted because of a single statistical analysis.
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But if that lie were true – which it clearly is not – then it would be empirical evidence that “established physics” is wrong. And such a finding would elevate you to the scientific stature of Aristotle, Newton and Einstein. Your lie is breathtaking arrogance that has no support of any kind.
I think Einsteins Noble would be good enough support don’t you?
He didn’t get it for Relativity. He got it for his 1905 paper on the Photoelectric Effect which gave physical reality to Plank’s “hack” of quantization (aka Black Body Radiation). This effect is the basis for the “quantum leap” and the Bohr model of the atom which in turn explains the radiative behaviour of CO2.
Later on, this leads to sodium lamps, flouresent lights, microchips etc.
Our understanding of the atom is based on that. And our understanding of heat and thermodynamics is based on Kelvin’s work in the 19thC which was partly justified at a micro level by another of Einstein’s great 1905 papers, the one on Brownian Motion (which you really should read sometime, it’s stunning).
Your null hypothesis rejects all of that.
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Liar:
At #112 you say:
That is another lie.
At no time have I ever said here or anywhere else that statement is in my Submission to the Select Committee.
Go away you malignant little troll.
Richard
00
Liar:
At #112 you say:
That is another lie.
My Submission to the Select Committee does not even mention the anthropogenic emissions.
Go away you malignant little troll.
Richard
00
Liar:
At #112 you say:
That is another lie.
My Submission to the Select Committee does not even mention, state, suggest or imply anything of the sort.
Go away you malignant little troll.
Richard
00
Liar:
At #113 following much completely irrelevant twaddle you say:
That is another lie.
The null hypothesis is what every null hypothesis is; viz.
an effect has the same cause as it had when previously observed unless there is evidence to the contrary.
Your fixation on one small part of the climate system such that you think – despite all evidence to the contrary – that it will overwhelm all other effects in the system is superstitious nonsense. Take your belief in magic and your disdain for science elsewhere.
Go away you malignant little troll.
Richard
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Richard: My Submission to the Select Committee does not even mention the anthropogenic emissions.
I’m astonished that you dare say this. Your submission includes the word anthropogenic 4 times. These instances:
1. Anthropogenic (i.e. man-made) global warming (AGW) is assumed to be indicated by any rise in MGT that occurred in reality but is not accounted by the known effects in the model
2. Of course, they phrase it differently saying they can’t match historical climate change with known climate mechanisms unless an anthropogenic effect is included.
3. But evidence for this “anthropogenic effect” is no more than the evidence for witches.
4. Differences between the model results and the observed changes to MGT are usually attributed to anthropogenic climate change (AGW).
Further, it quite clearly discusses the concept throughout. If it did not, it would be of no relevance to the terms of reference of the inquiry. Are you just wasting Parliaments time now?
BTW – Statement #1 is equivalent to “CO2 has no relationship to temperature”, or more succinctly “modern physics is wrong”. Hence my comments about the implications of your null hypothesis.
00
Umm, as are statements 2,3 and 4.
Sprung Richard. (This is a little bit of colonial vernacular you may be unfamiliar with – it means “caught”).
00
Deutsche should thank you for writing about the issue – if their point was to ‘raise awareness’ you’ve done the job for them.
And you do realize that asset management divisions at banks are required by law to be separate from the investment banking divisions which trade carbon credits? So your argument is moot — unless you want to argue for the sake of arguing — Parker’s business doesn’t trade in/profit from gains in carbon credits.
And as a parent, I don’t see the problem here…a future with clean energy, powering the economy cleanly and sustainably. God forbid we teach our kids to respect the environment.
00
It’s hard to keep up around here, but with regards to the 30 year “standard”, I am well aware that standards are made for a purpose within a particular context. The problem is when people ascribe additional importance to a standard above and beyond the applicable context (e.g. to start pretending that the 30 year standard is the uniquely significant measure of climate).
Regarding random variable and coin toss. If I saw a coin produce 5 heads in a row and that’s all I saw then I’d start betting on heads. If I found a run of 5 heads within a sequence of a thousand samples then I’d not be shocked in the least.
Somewhat unrelated is the game where player A repeatedly throws a perfectly fair coin counting the number of throws and noting the sequence of results until the three element sequence Head, Tail, Head is achieved. Then player B does the same as player A but stops when the sequence Head, Tail, Tail is achieved. Whoever stopped in less throws wins the game, if they did it in the same number of throws then it is a draw. Is it a fair game?
Anyhow, random walk is of course the first integral of white noise so we get high energy in the low frequencies and arbitrarily higher amplitude as the frequency gets lower. Nothing in the real world can be a truely random walk (i.e. the walker always bumps into a wall or falls off a cliff eventually).
Climate processes are chaotic time series. The troposphere is chaotic, the sun is chaotic, the orbits are chaotic and the interplay between ocean and atmosphere is chaotic. We know of 11 year cycles, 22 year cycles, 30 year cycles, 1000 year cycles, 10k year cycles and 100k year cycles, none of which are really periodic but do show behaviour that is close to periodic most of the time. Thus we have significant energy in the series at a very wide range of frequencies. If you toss a coin once an hour and then average the result over 30 years you get a result with almost no variation. If you measure temperature at a point on earth once an hour and average the result over 30 years you still see significant variation on timescales longer than 30 years.
Going back to the rainfall. AR4-SPM shows Greece, Italy, the South of France and Spain all losing more than 20% of their winter rainfall (pretty much all the major food producers). Admittedly these are not the wettest countries on Earth but they are far from the driest. Mind you the dry spell seems to avoid Iran and Saudi Arabia. The same chart shows Brazil predicted to lose 20% of it’s summer rainfall, no one is going to tell me that Brazil is a dry country. It predicts that Mongolia is going to get a whole lot wetter, and no way is Mongolia a wet country now. It does show the North of Aftrica getting drier and yes this does include some dry countries but it also shows the Northwest corner of Africa gettin drier including Guinea and Senegal which are generally considered wet countries. South Africa is supposedly also going to be getting drier, even Madagascar is supposedly drying out!
Go to a rainfall map of Australia such as this one:
http://www.aussurvivalist.com/images/c1900-95_mean_rainfall.gif
The CSIRO and BOM are telling us that the Southeast of Australia is getting drier while the Northwest is getting wetter. However the Southeast has been in the past one of the wet parts of the country. The West is generally the dry part.
AG4-SPM is trying to tell us that the Southwest is going to get very dry, but this is usually a wet part too.
The predictions are all over the place, they are inconsistent with each other and apparently quite arbitrary. The most likely outcome is that half of these predictions will be correct (at least with regards to the direction of change).
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JM #118, you really are a liar. I thought your debate with Richard was just heated, but then you deliberately lied about his submission and what he said here.
My question is why? What have you to gain by making bald faced lies that are easily checked? Clearly this is not a blog of sycophantic sheep (you are confusing it with realclimate.org). Yet you treat us like those with no intelligence to prove your point? Again, why? Why are you lying and insulting us with your lies?
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JM – You don’t believe your own stuff enough to put your name to it. That leaves you free to throw mud. Time to stop.
Time for a dose of humility. You’ve been rather rudely presumptuous about people here, but your reasoning betrays your ignorance. You seem to think that carbon is what causes most of the catastrophic warming Hansen the IPCC and co want us to be afraid of.
The null hypothesis you quote is meaningless. None of us are declaring that carbon has no effect. We point out there’s no evidence it causes a major effect. Our point does not violate any laws of physics. It’s all a question of quantity isn’t it? There’s no law of physics that says carbons effect has to be 3.3 degrees instead of …1.
The catastrophe is not due to carbon, it’s due to amplification of feedbacks, and most of that is due to water in some form. You keep fallaciously stringing irrelevant points together.
Yes, carbon causes 1 degree of warming, and yes all the laws of physics will be just fine if co2 doubles and things get only slightly warmer.
You’ve swallowed the line that “carbon” causes the major warming, but even the IPCC says it will only cause about 1.1 degrees. They assume any form of warming will trigger a whole lot of changes in clouds and humidity which will further warm the planet. They got CO2 right, but clouds and humidity wrong. Hence all your puffery about spectroscopy, Plank, and co is irrelevant.
I’ve discussed this fatal flaw before
JM – you can’t come here more ignorant than most other commentators who use real names, and call them liars when you are anonymous and making logical errors. It is destroying any semblance of a reasonable conversation – it’s off topic, arrogant and … might be forgiveable if you weren’t so wrong.
Your comments will be held in moderation until you acknowledge that your null hypothesis quote 1 above is irrelevant, that none of us claim that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas, and apologize unreservedly and/or reveal your name.
Time for you to reveal your real name, retract your illogical accusations and apologize properly and stop dominating the thread with nonsense.
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Friends:
I ask those who want to know the truth of the contents of my Submission to the Select Committee to read it themselves.
At #111 I provided a link to a UK Parliament web page that gives links to all the Submissions. To help checking of the contents of my Submission I provide the direct link to my submission: i.e.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0102.htm
None of the points “JM” states at #118 is in my Submission but they are in an Appendix to the Submission.
This is not a legalstic point: an Appendix is not part of a Submission but is supporting information that the Committee may – or may not – want to consider.
The first paragraph of my Submission explains its purpose. It says:
The remainder of the Submission concerns those points.
The pertinent Appendix is a draft of the paper that was blocked from publication by nefarious method as explained in my Submission. (Prof Bob Carter – a co-signatory of that paper – has found a final version of it in the archives of his university and has forwarded that to me).
If I had wanted to include the points cited by JM at #118 in my Submission then I would have.
They are not part of my Submission.
Richard
00
Friends:
I write to provide correction and an apology.
JM is right in one point he made in #118.
As explanatory detail, I wrote this at the start of Section 11 of my Submission:
This is part of my Submission but is clearly not a substantive point of that Submission.
I again ask those who want to know what my Submission is really about to read it for themselves.
Sorry.
Richard
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Richard S Courtney: #125
March 20th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
Richard you’ve gone beyond the call of duty.
Those of us who “know” you via your many posts here and elsewhere and via your papers, know you to be an honest and honourable man.
No amount of trolling by the likes of JM and others will change those facts.
To those of us layman, like me, you show courtesy and inform our scientific ignorance with patience and easy to understand explanations. For that I thankyou very very much.
p.s. Not to mention the pleasure watching you intellectually beat the trolls who pass through here 🙂
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Richard,
Taken out of context this sentence might seem wrong, but within your paragraph it’s obvious “this effect” you are referring to is the way models assume ALL the unexplained warming is anthropogenic. The paragraph is about argument from ignorance, and is absolutely correct.
You don’t need to apologize for anything. JM ignored the meaning, and didn’t ask for clarification. It was obvious in JM’s posts over and over, that he (like many others) didn’t realize how much the powers-that-be have exaggerated the effects of amplification.
JM – sheepish polite comments will be welcome. Show you’re a man and can admit you’ve been mislead… you assumed authorities were giving you the whole story. Bummer eh to find out they’ve been carefully not mentioning the important modelling parameters?
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Baa Humbug:
Thank you for your generous and kind comments at #126.
I have stated my views on the AGW hypothesis elsewhere but – considering what has happened here – I think I need to state them here for all to see. They are as follows.
If I say something then anybody has a right to demand that I justify/explain it and they are entitled to draw their own conclusions if I fail to do that.
Importantly, I like to be proved wrong because then I learn. But problems arise when people (e.g. JM) assert I am wrong by pretending I have said other than I have: I take umbrage at that.
And that brings us to my considerations of the AGW hypothesis.
Human activities have some effect on global temperature.
For example, cities are warmer than the land around them, so cities cause some warming. But the temperature rise from cities is too small to be detected when averaged over the entire surface of the planet, although this global warming from cities can be estimated by measuring the warming of all cities and their areas.
Similarly, any global warming from man’s emissions of greenhouse gases would be too small to be detected.
Indeed, for reasons I have repeatedly reported, it is physically impossible for the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases to induce man-made global warming that would be large enough for its detection. If something exists but is too small to be detected then it only has an abstract existence; it does not have a real existence that has discernible effects (observation of its effects would be detection of its existence).
AGW from greenhouse gases may have an abstract existence although this has not been demonstrated by observations. And global warming from elevated temperatures of cities does have an abstract existence that is observed locally and can be estimated as a global effect.
Also, it is demonstrated by observations that localised greenhouse gas concentrations do not have a discernible local effect: the AGW hypothesis is that global concentrations of greenhouse gases alter radiative forcing to induce a global effect.
Neither AGW from greenhouse gases or global warming from elevated temperatures of cities has a real existence that has effects which can be detected.
Reality impinges on peoples’ lives: abstractions do not.
I hope this clarifies my views.
Richard
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Richard,
If I may, I’ll second Humbug on your going way beyond the call of duty.
About JM – he’s always seemed to argue with an attitude of superiority that I don’t see from any of the regulars here. It’s been a turnoff for me. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed; it’s not just what he says, but the way he says it.
00
What I find funny is the number on the bank sign is wrong!
Apparently, bank officials do not know how to convert ppmv to ppmw!
00
For those of you who miss JM – He did reply once, and politely, but didn’t meet my request (even in part)(see #123)
Here is his reply and below that, my response. I’ve sent my response twice and waited a couple of days and he has not replied again.
———————————————————————————————————-
Submitted on 2010/03/21 at 1:10am
Jo, I haven’t called anyone a liar. Quite the contrary, all I’ve said is that I believe some people are mistaken.
The only person who has used the “liar” word on this thread has been Richard – 6 times – all directed at me. He has also used the word “lie” at 103, 104, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117. Again, all directed at me. That is 13 times in all. He’s also called me a “troll” several times, which for most people is abuse.
He should be apologizing to me, but I don’t really care. If he can’t make a substantive response and insists on resorting to abuse I’ll take it that he is unable to refute my point but refuses to concede.
I have already apologized unreservedly to Richard for mistakenly attributing his words here to his submission to Parliament. Those words do not appear in his submission and I was mistaken in thinking they did.
Your request that I retract a point that remains un-refuted, and not even seriously disputed in any way, I can’t comply with. I’ll retract it only when someone can refute it or substantively throw doubt on it. No-one has so far.
As to how relevant my statement is, here’s what Richard said:
The anthropogenic emissions and global temperature do not correlate.
That’s his null hypothesis, clearly stated. It states there is no relationship between CO2 concentration and temperature, which requires a repeal of fundamental laws of physics. It doesn’t say anything about the magnitude of climate sensitivity.
Correlation is not always proof of cause, but when cause is already well established, lack of correlation does not invalidate cause. In any way. The discrepancy just means your statistical analysis is flawed or inadequate – perhaps your sample size is too small.
He restates his null hypothesis in slightly weaker form in the appended paper to his submission (which I’m pretty sure does form part of the submission, but then I’m not a lawyer).
The pattern of all three MGT [Mean Global Temperature, a term of his own invention] estimates between 1900 and 2005 signally fails to correlate with the pattern of human production of CO2.
The use of the word “pattern” there is a dodge in my honest opinion. But in both forms, the null hypothesis is unphysical.
Rather than restate my own argument, I’ll let Lubos Motl (comment at 4 March 2010, 4:43:41 AM), who seems to be flavor of the month, do it for me. (He’s speaking in a different context but his point is the same as mine – my bold):
The reliability of various incompletely proved “propositions” and “discoveries” in science always has to be measured by their statistical significance. It never answers all the details – one must also choose the right null hypothesis and the corresponding new-effect hypothesis.
My argument (and Lubos’ comment) are a direct and very relevant response to Richard’s assertion. Richard’s null hypothesis is that there is no relationship between CO2 concentration in the earths atmosphere and observed warming. His “new-effect” hypothesis is that there is, and he claims that to be disproved. He’s explicitly stating that modern physics is disproved by his statistical analysis.
Tel, I don’t include you in this. Your responses have been considered and pertinent, Regarding the Med, I think we’re just disagreeing on interpretation. However, the earth’s climate system is not a random walk, it is a physical process bounded by physical law. The trend is determined by physical law. The variation around the trend can be modeled as white noise, but that doesn’t make it white noise, the variation is just the outcome of complex processes that we can’t model accurately enough, or take measurements accurately enough to predict in detail. And in no way does it make the trend itself white noise. The trend comes from a well understood underlying process.
CO2 causes warming, and humans have increased its concentration in the earth’s atmosphere.
JM
——————————————————————————————————–
JM,
Your previous apology was noted, and I was grateful. The tone of this is better. But you still have not met the points I asked.
You still have not shown you are an honest commentator. You may not have said “liar”, but that is weaselling out of the issue. You use the word “lie”. What else could that imply except “liar”?
Quote:
And you still have not acknowledged that the quantity of warming matters. (ie, does carbon cause 1 degree or 3 degrees…_) Our debate is way ahead of you. You keep trying to drag us into a non-contentious point pretending to win an argument none of us make.
Courtney is not invoking breaking any laws of physics.
They don’t correlate. There are no turning points where carbon (especially man made carbon) precedes warming (or is even coincidently rising) that is anything other than the usual 30 year cycle both in timing and in slope. Man made emissions couldn’t cause the holocene optimum, minoan warming, Roman WP, the MWP, the warming in the late 1800s, the warming in 1920-1940.
I’m over these sensationalist calls nit-picking over phraseology. From Richards body of work it’s clear he is not refuting the greenhouse effect, or that carbon has a slight warming effect.
The point that matters is MAJOR warming. Feedback. Please acknowledge that carbon only causes 1.2 degree/doubling and that we sceptics are arguing over the major claims, not the minor ones.
This is not about breaking laws of physics.
Quote him. I don’t believe you.
Jo
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Joanne:
Thankyou for publishing that.
For clarity, I point out that the message from JM misrepresents me in at least two important ways.
Firstly, the null hypothesis is not that “there is no relationship between CO2 concentration and temperature” although – as you say – there is not.
I have repeatedly stated (e.g. at #117) the null hypothesis: i.e.
And I repeatedly stated that applying the null hypothesis is not invalidated by the existence of the AGW hypothesis, and I explained why: e.g. at #90 where I wrote:
Secondly, I do not claim that any statistical analysis has disproved modern physics. The idea is pure fabrication that has no relation to – or basis from – anything I have written here or anywhere else.
Richard
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Jo:
You use the word “lie”. What else could that imply except “liar”?
Quote: [etc]
You’re not quoting me. You’re quoting Richard at #111, and he’s directing the comment at me.
They don’t correlate. There are no turning points where carbon (especially man made carbon) precedes warming (or is even coincidently rising) that is anything other than the usual 30 year cycle both in timing and in slope.
Correlation between CO2 and temperature says very little about timing – that’s a different hypothesis. It’s that CO2 is correlated with temperature but the CO2 increase lags the temperature increase. If Richard wants to mount that one, he’s welcome to. But it’s not the one he’s actually stated.
Please acknowledge that carbon only causes 1.2 degree/doubling
Fine, but that’s only the initial effect and it ignores other effects like water vapour which are also radiatively based
In any case, I stand by my description of Richards null hypothesis, it is
The anthropogenic emissions and global temperature do not correlate.
I’m sure he accepts that CO2 concentration at pre-industrial levels causes the greenhouse effect, ie that carbon does correlate with temperature.
By sticking the word anthropomorphic in there he is saying that a 40% increase (approx) in CO2 does not lead to temperature increase – ie. the laws of physics are suspended because it is a special type of carbon – human produced carbon – that doesn’t cause warming.
Quote him.
I just did
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Richard:
an effect has the same cause as it had when previously observed unless there is evidence to the contrary.
So if CO2 is the cause of the greenhouse effect (along with other greenhouse gases), the observed increase in CO2 must necessarily lead to an increase in temperature – regardless of statistical analysis?
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JM: Sorry I misread that line from #113 as being your quote, you are right.
(Please try to use the blockquote html code in future thanks…)
Thanks for acknowledging that carbons direct effect is not the major part of the projected warming. I’m not ignoring the water vapor feedback at all, that’s my point.
Please don’t drag us back into the meaningless “null hypothesis” conjecture. Richard has clarified his position above.
You are free to post, but please quote people carefully,(as in whole paragraphs with meaning), rather than single phrases or part sentences. Anyone can reduce a conversation to a slanging match if they cherry pick lines…
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JM: The log curve of carbons effect trails off towards zero but never reaches it. That means for every molecule added, theoretically there is some effect, but as Richard has already mentioned, it becomes unmeasurably small at some point. It’s guaranteed to become immeasurably small…
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Joanne:
Thankyou.
I write to ensure that everybody knows you are accurately reflecting what I have written.
Richard
00
Just up :-
Economic & political realities cause France to shelve the Carbon Tax, after crushing election defeat.
France ditches carbon tax as social protests mount
Not sure how much it’s to do with eco-scepticism ‘though, so much as just the enormous costs.
Grass roots social forces thwarting the dreams of the political elite.
00
Joe It isn’t eco-skepticism it’s DENIAL!
Really it is enormous cost with no real value.
Well Said!
00
Sorry Mark D, I was just borrowing from the language of the article itself.
I suppose the general populace aren’t as passionate about it as Deniers ‘though, and climate’s not what they’re protesting about, but in times of austerity AGW is being shown to be an expendable indulgence of the idle classes.
00
Sorry Joe, I was trying to be funny and forgot to make a smiley face after that. Since we are deniers were the only ones that can use the term about ourselves.
Thanks for posting the link, I hope Jo saw it. To me it is great news because it means the hoax is collapsing.
00
Thankyou Mark D. ‘though really I never took account of the proud Deniers who might be offended by having their Denial misrepresented as mere eco-scepticism.
As the funding of carbon initiatives in Europe is so tied up with the power structures of the EU (a microcosm of what the UN might like to become) the term has a familiar resonance, with euro-scepticism.
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Jo: @136 The log curve of carbons effect trails off towards zero but never reaches it. That means for every molecule added, theoretically there is some effect, but as Richard has already mentioned, it becomes unmeasurably small at some point. It’s guaranteed to become immeasurably small…
There’s a lot wrong with that statement.
Firstly, the effect of the last CO2 molecule added is exactly the same as that of the first – they behave identically. The last CO2 molecule doesn’t know how many others there are and doesn’t change its behaviour because it’s in a “crowd”.
But I think you mean that the Arhennius relation shows a logarithmic relationship between temperature and the ratio of CO2 increases, so I’ll be generous. I’ll come back to this point.
The relationship between forcing – increase in energy absorbed per unit area – and the ratio of CO2 increase however is not logarithmic. It’s linear.
Next, neither relationship – temperature or forcing – shows the “effect” however defined becoming “immeasurably small”. If we take temperature – which is logarithmic – the effect grows without limit. A logarithmic relationship has no horizontal asymptote. It doesn’t trail off, it increases without limit, albeit slower at the top of the curve than the bottom.
You can see this if you do a log-linear plot. The result is a straight line out to infinity.
There’s also a problem with the way you state the conclusion – you assume implicitly that the question is “how many doublings can we stand before the effect becomes negligible?”. The answer is not too many.
In fact a single doubling – reaching 560ppm – would probably unleash havoc on the worlds economy so talking about 6 fold or 8 fold doubling (which is where the situation would start to flatten out) is a bit pointless.
The thing is we’re looking at only a very small segment of the function, and in small segments, all things are approximately linear.
The last thing to consider is that you are assuming a linear increase in CO2 over time. But we know that CO2 is actually increasing exponentially.* Put that exponential growth rate inside the logarithm and you get a linear result over time.
The whole “argument from logarithms” is misguided. It doesn’t pay attention to reality.
* 3% annual economic growth (or any percentage at all) – which is what drives CO2 emissions on Business as Usual is an exponential function
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JM:
Please read some physics. You assert:
No! That is a misunderstanding of obscurance.
Each CO2 molecule interacts with an IR photon as every other molecule would. But the available photons diminishes as molecules are added.
The effect is like putting paper over a window. Say the paper absorbs 50% of the light. Then each layer of paper absorbs half of the light that falls on it. The light that reaches the room has to pass through all the layers.
The light that is unaffected by the paper and enters the room is
One layer – 1/2
Two layers – 1/4
Three layers – 1/8
etc.
A very few photons of light will enter the room with 100 layers of the paper, but some will. And the difference between the light that enters the room is very, very small for 100 or 200 layers because almost all the light is absorbed in the first 100 layers. Indeed, 7/8 of the light is absorbed in the first 3 layers.
Now some IR that leaves the Earth’s surface escapes to space without being absorbed by greenhouse gases (This is like the light that enters the room without being absorbed by the paper).
But there is a lot of water and some CO2 in the air. Water and CO2 molecules both absorb the IR that can be absorbed by CO2. The IR that leaves the Earth’s surface and can be absorbed by CO2 is almost all absorbed in the lowest 100 metres of the air. So, there is very little IR for additional CO2 to absorb. (This is like the light that enters the room being almost all absorbed by 100 layers of the paper).
Hence, doubling the CO2 in the air makes very little difference. (This is like adding an additional 100 layers of the paper to a window that is already covered by 100 layers.)
So, additional CO2 molecules in the air make trivial difference to the IR absorbed in the atmosphere (as adding an additional layer of paper on the window covered with 100 layers of paper makes a trivial difference to the light absorbed in the paper).
I hope that is clear to you now.
Richard
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Richard: . But the available photons diminishes as molecules are added.
You’re ignoring re-emission. After absorbing a photon and being excited, the molecule shortly afterwards falls back into a low energy state by reemitting another photon. In CO2’s case, that is also an IR photon.
The paper analogy is false, it’s more like a thickening fog. All that happens is that the mean path length between interactions shortens.
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JM:
I can only repeat my request that you read some physics.
As you say at #145
Yes!
Please try to think about it. The MFP reduces but the number of photons (and excitation states of molecules) is negligibly altered in the atmosphere.
1.
The IR photons that can be absorbed by CO2 and H2O molecules are emitted (upwards) from the Earth’s surface.
2.
Almost all of these photons are absorbed by CO2 and H2O molecules in the lowest 100 m of the atmosphere.
3.
Most of this absorbed energy is transferred to O2 and N2 molecules by collisions, and this transfer heats the O2 and N2 molecules.
4.
The heated molecules rise up through the air by convection.
5.
Exchange of energy occurs by collisions in both directions between N2 & O2 molecules and the CO2 & H2O molecules.
6.
CO2 & H2O also (as you say) re-emit IR photons.
7.
So the energy of the photons emitted from the Earth’s surface is transported up by convection and by re-radiation.
8.
Near the top of the atmosphere the energy is radiated to space by the CO2 and (at that altitude very few) H2O molecules: there are more than sufficient CO2 molecules to do this.
Please note that if there were not sufficient CO2 molecules in the air for the radiation to space then lack of CO2 molecules would be restricting the radiation to space so additional CO2 molecules in the air would cause global cooling (n.b. cooling).
The important point is:
Almost all the IR photons that can be absorbed by CO2 and H2O molecules are absorbed by CO2 and H2O molecules in the lowest 100 m of the atmosphere.
You cannot absorb more than all.
The photons are the energy: not their MFP. Alteration to their MFP does not change their number. Almost all of them are absorbed in the lowest 100m of the atmosphere. Assume an extreme case so their MFP halves (yes, I know that is impossibly extreme) then they would be absorbed in the lowest 50 m of the atmosphere. Nobody would be able to detect any difference.
I have tried to explain it as simply as I can.
For more info. see
IPCC WG1 (2000)
Nobody disputes the logarithmic effect I have described except – it seems – you.
The dispute over the magnitude of resulting global warming concerns the magnitudes and signs (i.e. + or -) of the feedbacks.
Richard
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Richard you say:
“The important point is:
Almost all the IR photons that can be absorbed by CO2 and H2O molecules are absorbed by CO2 and H2O molecules in the lowest 100 m of the atmosphere.
I’d dispute the 100m because CO2 is a well mixed gas and water vapor is not, so that means CO2 absorption continues throughout the troposphere.
You then say:
You cannot absorb more than all.
The spectrum of the sun is concentrated in the visible region to which the earth’s atmosphere is transparent, so there are plenty of photons incoming available. The returning IR comes from their re-emission off the earth’s surface (from rocks etc) as IR, these encounter CO2 molecules very quickly* and are then re-emitted. In other words while visible light gets in through a transparent atmosphere, IR has some problems getting out. Can we agree on that?
Next, have a look at the sun t/row. That’s a lot of visible photons. And a lot of them get converted to IR photons by encounter with the earth’s surface. I don’t think there’s any shortage there.
Do you?
Lastly, my comments re. logarithm’s are purely mathematical and related to what I think is an unfortunately common misunderstanding – would you like to dispute them?
* I haven’t done the calculation myself but I was talking to someone who I trust a couple of weeks ago who has, and he suggested the mean path length (which I think you are calling MFP) is somewhere between 2 and 5 meters.
In other words, your paper and window analogy is false. Paper blocks visible light, air does not. The earth’s atmosphere is a fog to IR but transparent to visible.
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Richard:
The MFP reduces but the number of photons (and excitation states of molecules) is negligibly altered in the atmosphere.
Your parenthetical statement here is ludicrous – of course the excitation states of molecules are altered in the atmosphere. It contains greenhouse gases.
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JM:
I have wasted much time responding to you. Please learn some physics. You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. For example, you say:
Almost all the pertinent IR is absorbed in the lowest 100 m of the atmosphere. It is a fact. Look it up.
If you wish to “dispute” the fact then write up your dispute in full, publish it, and collect the inevitable Nobel Prize that publication would obtain.
As for your writing:
That comment of yours is plain daft!
In context it is clear that I was talking about the total energy emitted from to the atmospher as IR photons that can be absorbed by CO2 and H2O molecules.
It is very clear that you know nothing about this subject and understand less than nothing about it. And, of course, there is no reason that you should.
But your ignorance and misunderstanding does not entitle you to claim that the entire field of atmospheric radiative physics is wrong.
Learn some physics before you pontificate about it. Then, if you choose, use that knowledge to revolutionise the science. But all you are doing here is saying the science must be wrong because you lack the intellectual capacity to understand it. Your behaviour makes you look very foolish.
Richard
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Richard, I assure you that I do know this topic.
If you are so sure that I am wrong, then you’ll be able to do better than Look it up.
Since you can’t, or won’t, I can only assume that your knowledge is pretty poor and you can’t refute (or, I suspect, even understand) what I’ve said.
The rest of your comment which consists entirely of abusing me about my level of knowledge (in your opinion) isn’t worth dealing with.
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JM:
I insert my responses to your points within your text from #150:
Para. 1 of your #150.
Then why at #147 did you say:
“I haven’t done the calculation myself but I was talking to someone who I trust a couple of weeks ago who has, and he suggested the mean path length (which I think you are calling MFP) is somewhere between 2 and 5 meters.”?
No scientist accepts something because it is asserted by “someone I trust”. If you had any understanding of science and if you had the capability then you would have checked it yourself because you trust him/her. Anybody can make a mistake and he/she would have been grateful for your having checked (unless, of course, it was Phil Jones).
Para. 2 of your #150.
Say what!!?? You insulting and offensive little jerk.
I have explained the matter to you repeatedly in as many ways as I can think of, and I have referred you to the IPCC Reports.
When all of that has flowed over you like water from a duck’s back I told you to “Look It Up” (which anybody with more than two brain cells to rub together would have done without having to be told to do it).
Para. 3 of your #150.
Withdraw and apologise for that in abject terms!
I can explain it, I have explained it to you in several different ways, and I have cited explanations of it by the IPCC. I have repeatedly explained that you are plain wrong and why you are wrong.
Assume whatever you like. The clear fact that anybody who reads this exchange can see is that you are too thick to understand the issue.
Para. 4 of your #150.
.
Bollocks! You offensive little twit.
I told you that you need to learn some physics and when you have an elementary grasp of this subject then you can say whatever you like. For now, your ignorance causes you to assert obvious nonsense as fact that you expect others to agree.
For example, in #147 you “dispute” my factually accurate statement saying;
“Almost all the IR photons that can be absorbed by CO2 and H2O molecules are absorbed by CO2 and H2O molecules in the lowest 100 m of the atmosphere.”
But in that same post you say;
“the mean path length (which I think you are calling MFP) is somewhere between 2 and 5 meters.”
OK. If the average distance a photon travels before absorbtion is – as you say – “somewhere between 2 and 5 meters” why is it so hard for you to understand that – as I tell you – “almost all” of the photons are absorbed in 100m?
It should be easy for you to answer this question when you proclaim you are such a genius that your opinion is sufficient to overthrow all atmospheric radiative physics.
I am done with you. You are silly, abusive and insulting. I have wasted to much time “casting pearls before swine” and will let you post whatever nonsense you want without wasting my time to rebut it. Reality remains what it is regardless of how you want to pretend it is.
Richard
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Richard, you’re ignoring re-emission.
And your paper analogy is wrong (although I’ll concede it’s a clever sleight of hand – if you actually do know what you’re doing, rather than simply being mistaken.)
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JM:
Apologise. Then, having done that, GO AWAY.
Richard
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Richard I think the basic misunderstanding here is that you appear to think that an IR photon once absorbed is never re-emitted. ie. that CO2 molecules remain permanently in an excited state.
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Sorry Richard, just to pick up on a side issue:-
No scientist accepts something because it is asserted by “someone I trust”.
Wrong. All scientists trust other scientists results (if peer reviewed and not refuted through other peer reviewed results). They have to, they don’t have time or resources to repeat all the work done by others.
And it’s an “ethical community” (as Lee Smolin described it), so there is a demand for a high level of integrity.
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‘Wrong. All scientists trust other scientists results (if peer reviewed and not refuted through other peer reviewed results). ‘
It is quite clear there are a Hell of a lot of scientists who don’t trust the ‘peer’ reviewed newspapers, anecdotes of hikers and leftist bloggers of the IPCC papers.
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Let’s see…
I don’t trust scientists that
ARE Political activists for a leftist (or rightist) agenda.
ARE constantly using fear and propaganda to further their cause.
ARE unwilling to allow other scientists to openly discuss, review, test or argue a differing view.
ARE constantly mouthing “peer review” as though Peer is a God.
Scientists are humans and cannot be more ethical than any other large group of humans. That was a particularly STUPID thing to say…….Show me the Peer reviewed study on that would you?
Arrogant, elitist, blog troll.
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Otter @156
Anecdotes, newspapers and bloggers are not peer reviewed. Don’t be silly.
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