The anti-climate movement has been successful in triggering each of these barriers in its battle against climate science. But inadvertently, climate communicators have activated them, too, for instance by conveying climate facts through abstract graphs and long time lines, using framing that backfires, not linking risks to opportunities for action, relying on bad storytelling, and provoking self-protective and cultural cognition by unnecessary polarization....
April 4, 2015
"These five barriers, or Five D’s if you will, are all substantial and unyielding."
"Taken together they may seem invincible. They are interrelated, but still distinct. Think of them as concentric circles around the citadel of the self, with distance as the first line of defense and identity as the final, innermost defense."
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Shorter version: exaggerating and lying.
But the messages are not working, sometimes not even for the most receptive audiences. This qualifies as the greatest science communication failure in history: The more facts, the less concern. Over the last twenty years, the messengers have encountered not only vicious counterattacks but also what seem to be impenetrable walls of psychological backlash or indifference. And in response to a sense of futility the messengers are, understandably, growing despondent and exasperated."
Pretty much sums up the AGW nonsense. Too bad they are blind to their own conclusions.
This, too, shall pass.
If the AGW folks had suggested that we carpool a little more, recycle a little more, and consider buying solar panels for our houses, they might have gotten more traction for their cause.
But instead they went the Chicken Little route, and shrieked that we were all going to die unless we implemented Cap & Trade.
When asked to prove their extraordinary claims, they hid their numbers, took people to court, and started calling everyone names.
Apparently they're still in the name-calling phase.
That the "climate communicators" are often carbon pigs doesn't help either.
If AGW is real, the mistake was making it a political issue that has made the fear mongerers wealthy beyond what any average person could ever imagine. When someone who has the environmental footprint the size of Al Gore's and the bank account he's accumulated from fear mongering is your spokesperson, it's not unreasonable for reasonable people to say, "Follow the money." When you look at the huge amount of money to be made trading carbon futures while the rest of us cut back on the things that make more pleasant, it's not unreasonable for reasonable little people to say to the fear mongerers, "OK, you go first." If scientists had kept this "science", maybe more of us would believe them. But I think that ship has sailed.
What you do when your fraud is exposed. Psychological Warfare.
The tell on articles like this are claims like "eating beef causes global warming". It's just laughable.
It could be an interesting study if psychiatrists would examine why the global warming debate tends to split in librul vs conservative factions.
Is it simply because libruls believe all problems [real or perceived] must be solved by more guvmint? While conservatives believe that to be false?
What every Marxist true believer learns is that the wonders of the dialectic allow one to blur the distinction between judgements of fact & judgements of value. Unfortunately, when the true believer tries to convince the non-believer, the non-believer thinks that the believer is talking shit, that facts & values are on two sides & there's the Grand Canyon between them.
This mix-up of facts & values, like the accursed idea of "false consciousness", is one of those ideas that has just crept into the background noise of leftist discourse to the point where it's just automatic. They're not even conscious of the distinctions or the baggage. They just assume it. Of course, when you bump into someone who doesn't share those critical philosophical assumptions, basically, the conversation just grinds to a halt.
Like, e.g. AGW. Even if it's true (and there's going to be wiggle room in any modeling of a hugely chaotic & complex physical system), that doesn't mean your policies follow from the science. One is fact, the other value.
Actual science has spoken.The oderless and colorless trace gas CO2 has NO effect on the climate and no effect on the sea level rise, and no effect on stormy weather. It's only effect is increasing plant's growth.
The sun's radiation is the only driver of the climate change. Always has been and always will be.
Climate changes when sun's heating is blocked more or less by clouds over the oceans or volcanic dust.
Every other statement is a well known lie.
"anti-climate movement"
it's not unreasonable for reasonable little people to say to the fear mongerers, "OK, you go first."
Eleanor, I think that's what the author is admitting, as did Franzen in the New Yorker article. They (the warmists) are coming to grips with the fact that they are part of the problem. Articles like these are how they're trying to cope with their own sinful pasts, and purify themselves for the future. His psycho-analytical approach to circumventing your own brain function will play well with that crowd. These are all things, that when divorced from their cause, would likely strike them as very "religious". Ann has highlighted a very strategic twist in their tactics.
At this point the warmists remind me a lot of Scientologists. Big ol' Puritan-Scientologists all worked up about the wages of eco-sin.
We're in a time of power struggle centered on sacred beliefs. Post-rational, almost, and reaching for post-democratic. When there are truths that must never be questioned - and one way to tell what these are is by listing topics about which jokes are never funny - at the same time as epistemology is reduced to the subjective and personal, what you get is Harry Reid; Machiavellian corruption open and proud with power the exclusive concern - instead of just being the main but not the only thing as it is in better times.
Sooner or later the doctrines of the warmist religion will shift, probably without any noticeable disruption, into a new channel. Such types are always around. It's our tragedy that power has slipped its restraints so completely and can be captured by whichever flim-flam camp is most useful in aggregating more of it.
The sun's radiation is the only driver of the climate change. Always has been and always will be.
Typical moronic conservative. We know for a fact that volcanism led to the Permian-Triassic extinction event as well as the ending of the "Snowball Earth" 650 million years ago. So the earth itself can drive climate by releasing copious quantities of CO2.
I am curious - how many people here do not agree that the earth is currently warming?
Is there any debate about this? Or is this accepted and what is at debate whether or not humans are contributing to that warming?
IOW, how to advertise.
They don't seem to appreciate the limits of the scientific domain. Since the system is both incompletely, and in fact insufficiently characterized, and unwieldy, their philosophical hypothesis must be considered as a component in a risk management model. The issue then becomes integrated among all known and forecast risks, and weighted with prevailing political, social, economic, religious (i.e. moral), and scientific evidence. The effort to counsel consent with an orthodox establishment does not lend, and in fact undermines the legitimacy of their pseudo-scientific claims.
Hey Alex...Try using your mind. I said the Sun's rays are the sole climate driver. But dust in the is air blocking the sun's radiation is what you came back with.
Now try and think that through.
I am not a conservative. I am a realist. Join me and join UW Madison Climate Scientist (now at Ga. Tech) Judith Curry. and do some real climate science. Why be a fool spouting last years false propaganda?
MayBee said...
"anti-climate movement"
I'm also strongly anti-weather.
Sorry ARM, but the earth's temperature is not rising. It is cooling after an 18 year flat lining while CO2 went up 30%.
That is reality.Deal with reality.
Alex:
We don't know that as a scientific or self-evident fact, but through inference and correlation. The observed evidence is circumstantial and does not distinguish between cause and effect. So, we don't know if CO2 leads or lags systemic heat volatility; although the physics indicates the latter. We don't even know the actual circumstances of the events we are modeling or estimating. There does not exist a probable path to ever observe and replicate the events.
ARM, AGW is a three part (at least) statement; the Earth is warming, humans are causing it, humans can abate it. You could add that warming is a bad thing or that the planet has a single best state that is natural and natural = good, etc.
Most people I know at least suspect that part one is or may be true but also wonder whether the next ice age dip, whenever that comes, won't be the real disaster. The rest of it is seen as either false (we don't cause it or can't stop it or both, or even if it's true it's not a disaster or even necessarily bad) or an outright power grab.
Who can look at politics as a benign exercise with even a particle of common good as the motive? That's what I don't get about warmists, for one thing.
Pseudo-psychology to go with pseudo-science.
The anti-climate movement has...
But inadvertently, climate communicators have activated them, too, for instance by ... unnecessary polarization....
Nothing unnecessarily polarizing about referring to your opponents as anti-climate...
"anti-climate movement"
I deny climate.
I deny it utterly.
Heck, I'll even deny it thrice.
An ecopsychologist. (No words for that, just eyes rolling)
The fallacy of the [Anthropogenic] Global Warming/Climate Change hypothesis is the liberal frame of reference and statistical averages. A critical feature that distinguishes between science and other philosophies is the frame of reference that is encouraged with the scientific method. Notably, in the scientific domain, the frame of reference is conservative, and characterized by an open boundary defined by accuracy that is inversely proportional to the product of time and space offsets from an established frame.
A climactic period is arbitrarily established. The sources of weather or short-term atmospheric volatility can be observed locally and perhaps regionally with human and enhanced perception. The effects of this volatility can be reasonably forecast or estimated in narrow windows.
I love the "About The Author" on this piece:
Per Espen Stoknes is an eco-psychologist ... With three horses and two small children, he takes time for long, solitary walks whenever possible – it is these walks that nourish his ongoing work exploring the wild dimensions of the soul.
Oy Vey. Talk about self-involved. And what IS an "eco-psychologist" anyway? Anyone here ever heard of such a thing before today?
So, it seems many people do not believe that the earth is warming. Why is this?
How else do you explain glacial retreat? This doesn't require any fancy instrumentation, you just look at old photos. Climate scientists are not intermediaries, the photos were taken by regular people. There is no doubt that glaciers have retreated all over the world. Other than the earth getting warmer what would explain this?
The biggest tipoff that the "climate debate" is all about power (and not climate) is that there is almost never any reasoned discussion of cost/benefit or risk/reward. It's all, "do this now, or die!"
(I write as a scientist who understands numbers, simulations, the grant application process, and also a little bit about advocacy and legislation.)
YoungHegelian said...
Even if [AGW is} true (and there's going to be wiggle room in any modeling of a hugely chaotic & complex physical system), that doesn't mean your policies follow from the science. One is fact, the other value.
Nailed it.
Hey Alex,
You seem to overlook this part of the post you selectively quoted: Climate changes when sun's heating is blocked more or less by clouds over the oceans or volcanic dust.
This is why you have no credibility - you cannot be trusted even to quote honestly. His assertion either was or was not factually correct, but you would rather lie about his assertion and address your lie than address his assertion. Either that or you have poor reading comprehension.
And ARM, you are behind the curve - your cide ceded the warming battlespace and retreated to climate change. It was A in AGW that you lost on. No one debates that the climate changes. As for the warming inquiry, you need to define your time frame. For some time frames yes and others no. What is your point, other than attempting to establish more state control?
Glacial retreat? Which pole? What is happening at the other pole?
"Scan any given day’s media and Internet coverage of Iran, and you’ll see all those modes of distancing and self-defense on display. For more than three decades a host of messages from well-meaning policy experts, advocates, and others have tried to not only bring the facts about Iran's nuclear program home but also break through the wall that separates what we know from what we do and how we live."
FIFY
The left is fixated on climate as a type of religious belief, along with homosexuality.
"how many people here do not agree that the earth is currently warming?"
ARM, I agree that warming was going on for decades after the end of the Medieval Warm Period (denied by Michael Mann) but it has ended about 15 years ago.
What comes next has me worried as we approach what could be another Maunder Minimum.
Scientifically, the meteorologists, climatologists, and atmospheric physicists, who were responsible for ``discovering'' the human contribution to the terrestrial greenhouse effect, have been the most consistent champions of its importance, while the solar physics community, and especially those interested in solar-terrestrial relations, have increasingly stressed the possible importance of the long-term variations of the solar constant as the chief cause of climate change. Both communities tend to take the change for granted, and to neglect any purely statistical or chaotic effects which could lead to excursions of the Earth's surface temperature during periods of a couple of decades, without requiring a secular change either in the solar constant or in atmospheric transparency.
The solution is still not here because politics has taken over, along with grantsmanship.
How else do you explain glacial retreat?
Glaciers have been retreating since the end of the last ice age at 10,000 BC. What does that have to do with humans?
I get a kick out of this claim of "denial". Every news story about bad weather includes the claim that it is because of global warming. Never mind the fact that there has been no statistically significant warming in something like 18 years...
They have been using scare tactics, presenting ever-scarier scenarios, and we, the people, have become used to this and tune them out.
Also, as the sainted, puppy-blending professor sayeth unto us, "I will believe them when they start living like they believe it." Sea-side homes. Owning multiple gas-guzzlers. Owning one or (often enough) more huge houses.
AReasonableMan said...
I am curious - how many people here do not agree that the earth is currently warming?
Is there any debate about this? Or is this accepted and what is at debate whether or not humans are contributing to that warming?
It is meaningless to speak about any of this without first defining the the time scale and geography of interest, and having a good estimate of the "normal" variance across both. It also is important to understand that what is significant in a human life may not be significant at all in terms of climate, e.g. any twenty year span may seem unusually cold (or hot) as a fraction of a human lifespan, but it is not even a rounding error on a planetary time scale.
It's very clear that human activity changes local weather and climate. A simple example: the average temperature of a city is higher than the average temperature of its nearest suburb, sustainable over significant periods of time, and often by a larger amount than what we speak of for "catastrophic" climate change. How human activity impacts global climate over time is actually far more complex than simple measurements of greenhouse gases. For example, particulate matter released by human activity can reduce temperatures in some circumstances. There is also the question of how biological systems react to temperature changes or changes in atmospheric gases. The bottom line is that there are an extraordinarily large number of variables that interact with each other in ways that we don't really understand. I used to model single biological cells for a living, and they are far less complex than the climate. Even today, no one really trusts cell models for anything truly important. The reason people believe the climate models as forcefully as they do has more to do with politics and funding than it has to do with statistical/scientific rigor.
The sacred trinity; race, sexuality, ecology. Dissent and even skeptical inquiry are indecent and equivalent to violence. The moral imperatives are stark and the moral panic is sharp. Power is rendered purely good in the right hands. Ends are all and by any means.
Eco-psychologist indeed. Eco- priest, more like.
Interesting times.
The earth surface is mostly water and we living beings are mostly water.
We are going to be just fine.
I thought Ronald Bailey asked an important question of climate skeptics in Reason magazine: what evidence would convince you that man-made climate change was real?
http://reason.com/archives/2015/04/03/what-evidence-would-persuade-you-that-ma
I'm very skeptical about AGW, but I object to being called a "denier". That's strictly a pejorative used to delegitimize any who don't espouse the dogma. I am a mechanical engineer, and by training I tend to deconstruct problems with a view to actual solutions. I have always found it interesting that the warmist Jeremiahs completely reject engineering solutions, for example fission energy production, in favor of social solutions. In any case, this is how I break down the AGW "threat";
Is warming actually happening?
Apparently not for the last two decades or so. This question is fogged about by questionable interpretation of data from climate history as well as the proven mendacity of climate "experts" It's certainly possible that the earth is in a warming trend, but these cycles are a permanent feature of earth's atmosphere.
If warming is real, is it caused by humans?
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a very small percentage of the total. The amount of carbon dioxide added to this by humans is a small percentage of that small percentage. The only "proof" that this is leading to disaster lies in computer modeling, which is woefully inadequate to the task.
If warming is actually happening, is it necessarily bad?
I have never seen anyone on either side actually tackle this question. It is quite possible, even likely, that warming would make the earth more fruitful and habitable, not less.
If warming is real and caused by humans, are we doomed to be passive victims of it?
Of course not. Humans have adapted to an incredible range of habitats on this planet, even without advanced technology. We will adapt again.
The bottom line is this; nothing in the pro-AGW argument convinces me that the huge costs associated with the quixotic suppression of the economy is actually worth it.
There is no doubt that glaciers have retreated all over the world.
There is also no doubt that other glaciers are growing all over the world
Michael K said:
"... I agree that warming was going on for decades after the end of the Medieval Warm Period (denied by Michael Mann) but it has ended about 15 years ago.
I think you meant the warming was going on since the Little Ice Age (roughly 1350-1850).
Some have speculated that grapes being grown farther north in Europe than they are found today is evidence that the Medieval Warm Period (roughly 950-1250) could have been warmer than today.
Alex said... [hush][hide comment]
The sun's radiation is the only driver of the climate change. Always has been and always will be.
Typical moronic conservative. We know for a fact that volcanism led to the Permian-Triassic extinction event as well as the ending of the "Snowball Earth" 650 million years ago. So the earth itself can drive climate by releasing copious quantities of CO2.
Uh, yeah, sure we do
The bullshit is another barrier, after the Navier Stokes equations and the mathematical inability to tell trends from cycles.
I stopped reading BoingBoing when they went nuts with conspiracy theories after the 2004 election. Vans full of republicans driving around Ohio stuffing ballot boxes and intimidating Blacks at polling places. There is no truth in Doctorow or Fraunfelder when it comes to politics, they are fascists hiding behind left-libertarian labels.
...the greatest science communication failure in history.
That's almost as funny as Obama saying that "...we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right."
Anyway I've got a great solution for increasing CO2 levels. Plants.
The last image in the article looked like a skee-ball board.
Do they score 50 points if they manage to affect the person's iDentity?
Tyrone Slothrop wrote:
"I have always found it interesting that the warmist Jeremiahs completely reject engineering solutions, for example fission energy production, in favor of social solutions."
That's because it is about politics, and not climate. Specifically, it is about who gets their hands on all the lovely money, and who gets to order people to do things that are against their self-interests.
Typical Saturday night:
Option A-After I'm done with some top-shelf 'brownstone activism' from the New Yorker, I really let-loose and watch a hipster concert broadcast from the Kennedy compound complete with a John Lennon tribute.
Option B-Maybe I read a Jorie Graham poem, chase it with a Eleanor Roosevelt biopic, and then fall into a shame spiral at all the dying brown people around the world.
Or do I have too many choices? What do I do? How should I live? What should I think?
n.n said...
The fallacy of the [Anthropogenic] Global Warming/Climate Change hypothesis is the liberal frame of reference and statistical averages. A critical feature that distinguishes between science and other philosophies is the frame of reference that is encouraged with the scientific method. Notably, in the scientific domain, the frame of reference is conservative, and characterized by an open boundary defined by accuracy that is inversely proportional to the product of time and space offsets from an established frame.
A climactic period is arbitrarily established. The sources of weather or short-term atmospheric volatility can be observed locally and perhaps regionally with human and enhanced perception. The effects of this volatility can be reasonably forecast or estimated in narrow windows.
Took the words right out of my mouth
There are causes and results that get conflated in this discussion.
1) Natural climate change vs human-assisted climate change.
Most people believe the climate changes, but it always has been changing. The issue is how important is the human-induced portion?
2) cost/benefit ratio of any proposed "fixes", with those costs majorly borne by the USA.
Bjorn Lomborg wrote in "The Skeptical Environmentalist" that dealing with global warming would the at the bottom of over 30 environmental issues due to the extreme expense to produce change in atmospheric CO2 levels.
3) The use of the climate issue to drive political choices that are polarizing and mostly anti-US in a worldwide sense, and anti-conservative in the US.
The political right in the US does not trust the political left with this issue as they see it as a way for implementing more government regulation, intrusion and taxes along with a lowering of our standard of living.
Needs the "bullshit" tag.
Gahrie said...
There is also no doubt that other glaciers are growing all over the world
Who believes that a majority of glaciers are advancing rather than retreating? Retreating in a spectacular fashion in many cases.
Sixth D - massive hypocrisy by Democrats. If global warming threatens to be catastrophic, we will just have to find a technological fix (see Freakanomics). In the meantime, I will cut back on my extremely moderate carbon footprint when Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi reduce their carbon footprints, and Obama stops using Air Force One for golf trips. Until then - AGW alarmists can fuck off.
Per Espen Stoknes is an eco-psychologist, author, and educator working closely with organizational and business leaders throughout Scandinavia and the European Union. With three horses and two small children, he takes time for long, solitary walks whenever possible – it is these walks that nourish his ongoing work exploring the wild dimensions of the soul.
The authors profile reads more like an on line dating ad, rather than someone to be taken seriously. Without the Climate Change hoax, this "eco-psychologist" is out of business. What a bunch of bu__ sh__.
If Mann wants to prove his case, release his documents. But he fights to keep them secret.
It was admitted that temperatures are tweaked.
The oceans are absorbing the heat selling point was also proven by 1 scientist to be something the earth has done for thousands of years.
Send the Congress home, they can meet by video conferencing and let them fly to DC 2x a year. There's no reason for them to congregate and have 2 houses. Set up dorms for the short time they're in DC.
Judith Curry, Bishop's Hill blog, Watt's Up with That are all interesting reading.
Probability is certainly mathematics but prediction of future events is not science. As W.C. Fields once asked in the Bank Dick, "How did Gum Legs come out in the Fifth?" Bartender (Moe Howard), "He came in Sixth." So it goes with so called climate science.
If Mr. Eco-psychologist were serious he'd kill both the horses.
ARM, you keep asking the same question. I has been answered multiple times. Biff was particularly instructive.
AReasonableMan said...
So, it seems many people do not believe that the earth is warming. Why is this?
How else do you explain glacial retreat? This doesn't require any fancy instrumentation, you just look at old photos. Climate scientists are not intermediaries, the photos were taken by regular people. There is no doubt that glaciers have retreated all over the world. Other than the earth getting warmer what would explain this?"
Your problem is that you view climate changes in terms of human lifetimes instead of the earth's cycles. The earth has been both warmer and colder in the past long before any human activity. Your observation is meaningless.
If astrology had linear regression, it would look like climate science.
Biff said...
I used to model single biological cells for a living, and they are far less complex than the climate.
This is a debatable statement. The climate system is certainly much larger physically, but this makes it more accessible for study. Cells deal with flows of both physical matter and information, which adds a considerable degree of complexity to the system. Despite its vast complexity the climate system is dumb, it has no memory and no regulatory processes. As the climates on the other planets show, it can shoot off in a myriad of different directions because it is an unregulated system. In contrast, cells have a vast evolutionary history of accretion of regulatory function, which tightly constraints their fates.
The AG Warmists should never have explicitly linked carbon taxes and wealth redistribution. That was the biggest tell that they were frauds.
Surprise! Glaciers appearing in Scotland
British Botanists conducting a Summer survey of Scotland’s tallest mountain, Ben Nevis, have been stunned to find evidence of recently formed multi-year ice fields, areas of compacted snow, some of which weigh hundreds of tons.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/24/surpise-glaciers-appearing-in-scotland/
Back in the days when I was pro-climate, I was very excited at the thought of gazing out at my lovely, pricey oceanfront property in Wisconsin. Oh sure, they'd suffer in Manhattan and LA, but that's the breaks. I was really looking forward to being a coastal elite like Titus.
Alas, unfortunately, I figured out that AGW was a crock of bs and the biggest scam of our time.
That made me anti climate.
AReasonableMan:
"How else do you explain glacial retreat?"
This is a good example of the reasoning that lies behind a lot of AGW alarmism. I call it "What else could it possibly be?"
I don't remember whom I'm stealing this from, but the answer is, "It could be anything else that you don't understand."
I remember when the disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro (and I love snowcapped mountains, so this one makes me sad) were cited as Yet Another Result of global warming. Then some damn fool collected the temperature data and found the summit of Kilimanjaro hadn't gotten any warmer, while those snows were disappearing so fast. They weren't melting. They were subliming.
OK, so why did things get sunnier and drier, though not warmer, around Kilimanjaro? I'm not sure anyone knows, but to the extent that human activities played a role, and I think they did, it may have more to do with land use in the region than with global CO2 trends.
Now, I'm not grinding an axe here. I'm not saying that this means you're wrong about glaciers. I just think it's a good example of a "You see?!" that turns out to be a lot more complicated than, Humans emit CO2, CO2 causes more warming, snow is disappearing, quod erat demonstratum.
It was AGW proponents who changed the packaging to "climate change" from "global warming".
Before ARM poses any more stumpers, he should muster convincing explanations of (or disavowals for) the AGW advocates' highly-suspect data mischief (e.g., IPCC/East Anglia's source dataset "normalization", NOAA's groundstation data exclusions, Michael Mann's memory-holing the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age when creating the Hockey Stick).
It's like I asked my father-in-law about Dan Rather's Texas ANG story: If Rather's telling the truth, why'd he have to make sh*t* up?
And if, if, you're making sh*t up, which should anyone trust your conclusions?
So there is no consensus, within this group, about global warming over the last century or even whether glaciers have generally retreated over this same time period.
Doesn't this tell us something about who actually politicized climate science?
Computer models are facts.
Actual temperatures are not.
Got it.
Katrina, which is probably good for you since you'd have been looking at that shoreline from the underwater side. Kansas used to be a seabed.
For the record, ARM, I believe:
- There is a long-term gradual warming trend.
- We had a remarkably steep rise from 1979 to about 1998, and that global temperatures have largely flatlined from then until now.
- Other things being equal, yes, CO2 causes warming.
- Global climate is a hell of a lot more complicated than "CO2 is the control knob." I think it's likely a minor perturbation.
- The field of climate science has done itself a disservice by focusing so intensely on CO2 that they've had to be dragged, largely kicking and screaming, into looking into other factors.
- "The Pause" [in temperature rise] is acknowledged even by those convinced that man-made activities are driving climate. The central debate now is between (a) those convinced that the CAGW theory was absolutely correct, that the Pause is just a freak effect of natural variability, and that temperatures will start rising again with a vengeance; and (b) those starting to acknowledge that maybe CO2 never was quite as central as they mostly jumped to believe. Why they mostly jumped to believe this is a subject for social, not physical, science.
Slight correction: I didn't mean to suggest that "The Pause" is acknowledged by all on the CAGW alarmist side. Michael Mann, for example, strives heroically to disprove it. But it is acknowledged by many who would never be called "skeptics", notably Kevin "The Deep Ocean Ate My Excess Heat" Trenberth.
And about the glacier retreat, ARM:
Many more are retreating than advancing. The next question to ask is, Has this ever happened before? The answer seems to be Yes. In the high Canadian Arctic, Alaska and Greenland, there were dramatic retreats in the early 20th century, well before CO2 had accumulated to the point where it could reasonably be blamed.
Let me turn this around on you:
- "The Little Ice Age": Did it happen, or is it an invention of the Deniers?
- If you believe it did happen, why did the world emerge from it?
They grew wine in England, held winter carnivals on the frozen Thames, and The Great Lakes were forged by glaciers. We had The Dust Bowl 80 years ago, hurricanes hardly ever happen here lately - they were wrong again!! And parts of the Sahara have been greening awhile now.
We've gone from think of someone shouting waving their hands in the air wildly -- MMGW MMGW to GW GW to AGM AGM to Climate Change Climate Change to YOU HERETICAL WHORE DENIER.
It's a religion.
STOOPID PEOPLE, the climate's always changed. Anyone who calls me a denier to my face will get a are you daft off your meds question because the climate has always changed.
They finally admitted a few yeazs ago the sun (may) play a part and also volcanoes.
I am not equipped to say if glaciers are retreating today but I have seen with my own eyes that they have been retreating for thousands of years.
I did a lot of backpacking in the Pacific NW in college. I saw moraines forming among the glaciers and I saw old moraines. The old moraines were thousands of vertical feet below the current glaciers and surrounded by old-growth forest.
If glacial retreat is happening, it certainly has been doing it for a long time.
The article speaks of 5 defenses of the climate deniers. Here's a few from the opposite side, against the global warming hoax.
1."Global warming" was so easily disproved in a way that even the average person could understand that the term was quickly switched by the climate hoaxers to climate "change." For me and many others the global warming enthusiasts have destroyed what credibility they originally had by this type of flimflam. They had a theory, that theory was proven false so they changed the name and premise of the theory. This is not science – this is pseudo-scientific crap.
2. Always remember that belief in global warming comes largely from the Left, who as a group are forever citing various and sundry bogus justifications for picking the pockets of the taxpayers. The global warming scheme is merely one of the current manifestations of this mindset.
3. The global warming hoaxers have been caught time and time again in outright fraud. From the famous rigged "hockey stick" chart to the false polar bear "extinction" it has all been fraud.
4. The hoaxers are unable to explain past climate fluctuations with their theory. The "little ice age" in particular is problematic for the hoaxers.
Part of the problem is the messengers. You have people like Gore, who uses twenty times as much electricity as the average American, and Prince Charles, who uses a helicopter for an eighty mile trip.
Glenn Reynolds is right - it's hard to treat AGW like a problem when the people telling you it's a problem don't act like it's a problem.
AReasonableMan said...
So, it seems many people do not believe that the earth is warming. Why is this?
How else do you explain glacial retreat? This doesn't require any fancy instrumentation, you just look at old photos. Climate scientists are not intermediaries, the photos were taken by regular people. There is no doubt that glaciers have retreated all over the world. Other than the earth getting warmer what would explain this?
How do you explain not all of them are?
""These five barriers, or Five D’s if you will, are all substantial and unyielding. Taken together they may seem invincible. They are interrelated, but still distinct. Think of them as concentric circles around the citadel of the self, with distance as the first line of defense and identity as the final, innermost defense."
Replace "citadel of the self' with 'vagina' and a lot of these defenses disappear on Prom Night.
I am Laslo.
Rusty wrote:
"How do you explain not all of them are?"
You can't. It's called 'global warming' because its effects are global. Once you've postulated that global temperature is proportional to the value of atmospheric CO2, and the value of atmospheric CO2 increases every year, you have to show that the global temps are increasing every year.
The theory is driving the data. Because establishment climate scientists are wedded to what may be an incorrect theory, they will ignore other variables that may affect climate. It's not science, its politics.
Whoever corrected me on The Little Ice Age, thanks. That's what I meant and the Medieval Warm Period that preceded it.
"It's very clear that human activity changes local weather and climate."
It's possible that the development of agriculture has interrupted the Ice Age cycle.
I will take seriously the people blatting on about global warming when they support nuclear power. In the absence of that conversion, this remains the old anti-nuclear communist ploy of the KGB with new strategy.
@AReasonableMan,
I believe that the globe has been warming since circa 12000 years ago.
Human agriculture, which didn't really happen before then, might be part of the cause. Or might not.
The globe as a whole may have cooled somewhat during the years 1400 B.C. to 1200 B.C. It's hard to tell.
There's better historical data during the years 800-1350. The globe might have been warmer during that time than what it is now. It was at least as warm as what we see now.
The globe was definitely colder during the years 1550-1750 that it is now.
When you say "globe is warming", which time in the past are you referring to?
When you say that it is a problem, I ask a problem compared to what? (I'd prefer global warming to another ice age, if I have the choice.)
The most significant defects of the warmist argument are rooted in three areas that are unfortunately not susceptible of easy, concise discussion and proof to the average listener:
1. Multi-proxy data sets that span hundreds or thousands of years such as bristlecones, river sediments, tree rings, etc, cannot be easily combined nor aligned with modern temperature measurement devices. Right now, the only really reliable measurements are from satellites and that data record only goes back to 1980 or so.
2. The statistical analysis of multivariate data sets is truly the work of experts in econometrics and statistical mathematicians. Not the likes of Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt. Just check out the statistical critiques from Steve McIntire on climateaudit to see what this is all about.
3. Fraud. If the results do not conform with the warmists' intentions, then they...."hide the decline". And when the data sets of the last 150 years from thermometer readings do not help out, then they make "adjustments" to the temperature records of various stations around the world and promptly destroy the original data records. And those adjustments are, invariably, increases in the historical record.
The East Anglia emails revealed the truth of all of this...and more, such as the attacks on anyone who tries to publish dissenting analysis or any editor who would dare to publish it.
It's a scam. It's a hoax. And it's ideologically motivated. Like most other lefties, they are also nasty little shits.
- Krumhorn
AReasonableMan,
I am curious - how many people here do not agree that the earth is currently warming?
Is there any debate about this? Or is this accepted and what is at debate whether or not humans are contributing to that warming?
As I understand it, there hasn't been any warming in about the past 19 years. There has been considerable warming before the "pause," but the cause of the pause is unknown.
Whether human activity is a bigger contributor than (say) sunspots is another question. Let's just say that climate has varied widely over time, and most of the variation long predated any human activities remotely able to change climate.
I love the author's conclusion. Since coercion and ridicule aren't working, you should put on a happy face so the haters and deniers will want to join you in your climate-friendly neighborhood!
Moving towards forms of mind-control makes you a cult, not a science-based movement.
ARM,
So there is no consensus, within this group, about global warming over the last century or even whether glaciers have generally retreated over this same time period.
Doesn't this tell us something about who actually politicized climate science?
Well, no, not really. "No consensus" tells us exactly nothing.
anti-climate movement? Do I need to even read the article? They prefer to be called "skeptics", and any reporter who bothered to get their side of this story would know that.
I just always ask people who call me a "denier" to answer me some questions and I'll stop being a denier.
Blogger J. Farmer said...
I thought Ronald Bailey asked an important question of climate skeptics in Reason magazine: what evidence would convince you that man-made climate change was real?
http://reason.com/archives/2015/04/03/what-evidence-would-persuade-you-that-ma
He's playing at obtuse.
Read through the comments in this very thread, lot's of questions without answers. Answer those questions.
But here is what I like to ask those who believe in the warmists theories unquestionably.
1) What is the ideal temperature?
2) What is the proposal if we go above the ideal temperature?
3) What is the proposal if we go below the ideal temperature?
If you don't have answers to those questions, why are you bothering me with this nonsense?
A thought experiment:
Suppose we had irrefutable proof that global temperatures were going to increase catastrophically over the next couple of centuries. And suppose we also had irrefutable proof that this increase was being caused, not by human emissions of CO2, but by changes in the sun's radiance.
So what would we do? We can't stop the sun from shining brighter.
We would adjust. As human beings have always adjusted to changing climates. If sea-levels rise, we may build dikes and dams, more hi-tech than Dutch windmills, but with the same purpose. If Kansas gets too hot for growing wheat, the newly warm lands around Hudson Bay may become the new bread basket. Etc.
The thought experiment is useful because, even if the climate alarmists are right, and human activities are starting to cause catastrophic global warming, THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT.
Oh, sure, in theory we could reduce carbon emissions, but the West would first have to conquer India and China and force them to give up their development plans and regress to their pre-modern standard of living. We'd have to do much the same with most of South America. In the West, we'd have to ban most "non-essential" travel (including travel to environmental conferences), drag the middle class kicking and screaming out of their suburbs and make them live in 19th century style tenements from which they can walk to whatever jobs may still be available (mostly muscle-power jobs), drastically expand nuclear power production, install a world government with dictatorial powers to enforce these policies, etc.
We can't do that anymore than we can change the brightness of the sun. So, if you really think the world is warming, then start thinking about how we can live in a warmer world.
"How else do you explain glacial retreat?"
Which one are you talking about?
The Climate Alarmists made a big stink about a glacier in Antarctica that was retreating. That was their proof of Global Warming.
When *real* scientists investigated, they discovered it was volcanic activity under the glacier that was warming it.
As to your other question:
1) yes, the earth has been warming. Has been since the ice age. But there is an 18 year pause in the warming trend that the computer models did not predict. Since AGW theory rests on those models... I mean seriously, when real world observable data doesn't match computer model predictions, which do you adjust? Reality or the models? If you are a climate "scientist", you go back and alter the historical record to make the present seem warmer.
2) yes, humans have an influence on that warming. But the recent science indicates AGW models have overestimated climate sensitivity to CO2 by a factor of 3. Its looking like human induced warming is not significant enough to install Global Socialism.
A Reasonable Man:
Did you really write that climate is unregulated?
Taking into account the countervailing effects of clouds versus water vapor, isn't this one heck of an assertion?
Just skimmed the article. The author intends to make "anti-climate" a mental disease so we can be rounded up into re-education camps.
Another fricken Nazi. At what point am I allowed to put a bullet in his brain? Asking for a friend.
I would also note that there are now 52 different peer-reviewed papers all written by climate alarmists, giving 52 different excuses for where the predicted warming went (all of which have been debunked, so they keep putting out new excuses)
Does that sound like "settled science" to you?
So there is no consensus
Science proceeds by experimentation and hypothesis-testing and re-produceable results, not by acclamation.
1. Do we have reliable data going far enough back in the past to be certain of it and to be able to count on it to show trends?
2. Are the models that will be predicting future scenarios accurate enough to do that?
3. In what year do the future models predict that a breakthrough clean and abundant energy invention will happen?
4. Is it better (and for whom) that the planet be cooling, warming, or staying the same?
There is no answer to any of those.
This whole issue is a farcical useless abstraction distraction.
And there never was "consensus". That was a made-up poll (the 97%)that's also been discredited.
The author polled ~3,000 scientists, but used his *interpretation* of their papers as evidence, instead of asking them directly.
He also culled down the ~1,300 responses he got to 79 to meet his 97% lie.
Basically, anyone who brings up the "97% consensus" lie is someone who is admitting they don't understand how science works and should be disregarded.
Despite its vast complexity the climate system is dumb, it has no memory and no regulatory processes
Really?
before we go any further, what is "anti-climate"?
AReasonableMan said... "I am curious - how many people here do not agree that the earth is currently warming?"
It's certain that between 1820 and 1990, the Earth warmed somewhat. There used to be "frost faires" on the frozen Thames river.
It's equally certain that from the mid-1300s until about 1820, the Earth was in a cooling period. And before that, there have been 1000-year cold/warm cycles. We don't live long enough to experience them, but reading "ancient history" depicts them pretty well. In the 900's, the Vikings settled the coast of Greenland - and CALLED it "green land" - and set up dairy farms. We know where, because the ice has melted enough recently for us to see the foundations of their buildings - down through the ice.
When the "coming ice age" stories of the '70s and '80s share the same political prescriptions as the "global warming" of the '90s; that is to say, massive government and totalitarianism - then we're well advised to have considerable doubt about whether they are correct about the science.
Even if it is happening, we are supposed to hand our money, and or personal choices over to Algore and/or the government?
Besides, the human race can adapt to changes such as this. Earth has had warm spells and ice ages even before it had human inhabitants.
So what would we do? We can't stop the sun from shining brighter.
Actually, there are probably a lot of things that we could do, and many of them would cost a lot less than the masses (but not the elites) limiting their CO2 emissions. The problem though is that those technical solutions don't solve the real problem that the left has here - which is how to divert more and more of our GNP to their ends.
Of course, that implies that AGW is a bad thing, and not really a good thing, which is historically probably more likely. But, again, that option is not allowed or discussed because it doesn't lead to approved and desired solutions.
OK, so why did things get sunnier and drier, though not warmer, around Kilimanjaro?
The answer I saw was that the locals had cut doen the forests around the mountain for firewood, which exposed more of the surface to the sun, and reduced the amount of water stored in the soil.
Fen - you forgot to include the fact that only certain specialties were considered "climate scientists", and those didn't include some of the most useful like physicists and astrophysicists (or mechanical engineers who best understand fluid dynamics). Instead they included tree ring counters (like many of the original cabal like Mann), geologists, etc. Moreover, the "climate scientists" didn't need a doctorate degree, nor even a master's degree to be included.
"Moreover, the "climate scientists" didn't need a doctorate degree, nor even a master's degree to be included."
Doctorates are easy for these guys. The real PhDs are run out of town by fake ones for sale on the internet.
CARB’s preferred scholar in this cause was Hien Tran, author of the report “Methodology for Estimating Premature Deaths Associated with Long-term Exposure to Fine Airborne Particulate Matter in California.” Tran had been with CARB since 1994 and in 2007, when he was appointed manager of the Health and Ecosystems Assessment Section in CARB’s Research Division, the agency announced that Tran had recently earned a Ph.D. in statistics from UC Davis. Actually, that wasn’t true.
Tran’s Ph.D. came from Thornhill University, located in a New York City office of the United Parcel Service (UPS). Legitimate scholars did not think much of Tran’s report, either. Dr. S. Stanley Young, assistant director of Bioinformatics at the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, told a CARB board member that the reasoning in Tran’s report was “too flawed to be done by a capable statistician.”
The guy being fired by UCLA for objecting is a real Stanford PhD in Physics.
We need reminding of the definition of science.
Sorry. That Feynman video was "blocked by BBC on copyright grounds."
Where does a taxpayer supported outfit get the right to block public information ? Just wondering.
The video is here.
Maybe BBC is too afraid to block Feynman.com.
Seems like the biggest problem with the article is its premise. What the heck is the "anti-climate movement"?
I am anti- certain kinds of climate, cold ones for example, and pro other types like tropical. But how can one be anti- climate in.
If I was anti-climate, what would I want done about it?
I suspect that he means the anti-climate change movement but even that doesn't make much more sense.
John Henry
Fen said: I would also note that there are now 52 different peer-reviewed papers all written by climate alarmists, giving 52 different excuses for where the predicted warming went (all of which have been debunked, so they keep putting out new excuses)
I think you are wrong there, Fen. I think they have stopped putting out new excuses 50+ that didn't pass the laugh test.
Now the meme is that global warming never stopped or paused. Don't you know that 2014 was the hottest year on record?
John Henry
There is no doubt that glaciers have retreated all over the world.
Feast your eyes on doubt, sucker:
"Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi."
http://tinyurl.com/yzvjvzo
AReasonableMan said... "I am curious - how many people here do not agree that the earth is currently warming?"
The intelligent and non-socialist ones.
I am a denier.
I deny Satan and all his works,
including Michael Mann and the University of East Anglia.
I remember reading Salon back in the 90s when it was full of sex and even had an anal sex columnist (Tristan Taormino)
The few times I've ventured there in recent years it just seems like a fever swamp.
It is essentially a vanity project that was paid for by Elizabeth Hambrecht's hedgefund billionare daddy. At least until she got tired of it and left.
During the nine months ended December 31, 2012, these cash contributions amounted to $3.4 million, compared to revenue in the same period of $2.7 million.[19]
I looked their 10-Q and it is kind of a hoot, financially:
We have a history of significant losses and expect to incur a loss from operations, based on generally accepted accounting principles, for our fiscal year ending March 31, 2015 and potentially for future years.
But on the bright side!
In May 2012, we adopted a strategy that has led to the most significant period of user growth in our history. In October 2014, we reached our all-time high of 18.9 million unique users as measured by Google Analytics.
And, surprise, surprise!
Net revenues fell 22% to $1.5 million in the three months ended December 31, 2014 versus $1.9 million in the same period in the prior year, and fell 19% to $3.7 million for the nine months ended December 31, 2014 versus $4.6 million in the same period in the prior year.
It currently trades at 16 cents/share.
Salon is a pure vanity project for a rich man's daughter.
How it is allowed to sell shares publicly, I have no idea.
John Henry
ARM, the claim is that Earth, all of it, has warmed .8 degrees over the past 100 or so years. (More or less, others claim different periods and slightly different rises)
I don't claim that the earth has not warmed that much. I claim that it is unknowable given the data set which was allegedly used. Here are some of the problems I have:
Huge areas, the oceans, are virtually unmeasured over that time.
Other huge areas have very limited and often discontinuous measurements. The entire northern part of Canada, bigger than the US, had one temperature station included in the data. Do you think that one station is representative of that?
Most temperature stations have been moved at least once, many numerous times, over the past century. What does that do to comparablilty?
NOAA says that only about 15% of their land temperature stations in the US are accurate within 1 degree. A large number, 40-50% IIRC, are only accurate within 5 degrees.
Nobody other than a few scientists has been able to see the original, unadjusted, data sets that global warming is based on.
Until the 1970s most temperature measurements were on uncalibrated thermometers and taken manually. (I was one of the people who took some of them)
There are a lot of other problems with how the data was collected if you take the time to look into it.
And you choose to believe that with all that sloppiness they can detect .8 degrees rise over 100 years?
Gullible doesn't begin to describe you.
John Henry
BTW, Two more pieces of recent news on the global whatsit front:
According to Congresswoman Barbara Lee, D-CA global warming causes hookers and she has introduced legislation in Congress to that effect.
And just today I read that scientists have determined that voter ID causes global warming. Or perhaps global warming causes voter ID. Or perhaps both. The article didn't make a lot of sense.
Global whatsit! The duct tape of the 21st century. There is nothing it can't do.
Or at least be blamed for.
John Henry
Ken mitchell said:
It's equally certain that from the mid-1300s until about 1820, the Earth was in a cooling period.
Wrong. Now scientists say that this was a mistake, that they used the wrong statistical methodology.
Now there was no cooling in that period.
John Henry
RecChief:
late 14c., "horizontal zone of the earth," Scottish, from Old French climat "region, part of the earth," from Latin clima (genitive climatis) "region; slope of the Earth," from Greek klima "region, zone," literally "an inclination, slope," thus "slope of the Earth from equator to pole," from root of klinein "to slope, to lean" (see lean (v.)).
-- etymonline.com
Anti-climate is the diametric complement to climate. The two concepts do not coexist in politics, society, religion, science, and nature, other than for a brief moment before their cataclysmic -- or perhaps catastrophic -- annihilation.
PuertoRicoSpaceport.com:
Statistical inference giveth and taketh away. It's an unruly manifestation of the human mind that will often spite its creator.
"Now scientists say that this was a mistake, that they used the wrong statistical methodolog"
So the people who were ice skating the Thames in the 18th century were wrong ?
I think there is enough historical information to verify the MDW and LIA. What the temperatures were in Roman times, for example. are less accurate but seem to have been warmer.
The shifting around of temperature stations, including those in obvious UHI areas, make the models ridiculous.
Here is bad news for the warmists, if they will read it.
This will lead to a drop in the temperature and to the beginning of the epoch of the Little Ice Age approximately after the maximum of solar cycle 24 since the year 2014. The increase in the Bond albedo and the decrease in the greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere
by cooling will lead to an additional reduction of the absorbed solar energy and reduce the greenhouse effect influence. The influence of the consecutive chain of the secondary feedback effects will lead to additional drop in temperature, which can surpass the influence of the effect of the quasibicentennial TSI decrease. The start of Grand Maunder-type Minimum of the TSI of the quasibicentennial cycle is anticipated in solar cycle 27±1 about the year 2043±11 and the beginning of the phase of deep cooling of the 19th Little Ice Age in the past 7,500 years in the year 2060±11 (Figure 1, 2).
Oh, oh.
furious_a said...
Really?
You are confusing material flow with regulatory function.
Excluding the hand of God, you only find regulatory function in designed or evolved systems. The global climate system is neither. This doesn't exclude some stabilizing mechanisms but they fortuitous and as such they are unpredictable in terms of their robustness and likely to be prone to runaway effects. Evidence for this are the mass extinctions, which appear to have been driven by runaway climate change. The system appears to be quite unstable, not well regulated.
In this context, concern about the effects of dumping a billion years worth of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere is not an inherently unreasonable position.
I don't understand the logic behind the claim that climate scientists politicized this field. It is clearly in there self interest to have bi-partisan support for their research, so that they get money whether the Democrats or Republicans are in power.
I can see the motivation for certain industries to politicize this area.
Michael K said...
Sorry. That Feynman video was "blocked by BBC on copyright grounds."
Where does a taxpayer supported outfit get the right to block public information ? Just wondering.
When did you start paying taxes in Britain? Sorry to be be the one to break this to you, but you won't free education or healthcare either.
AReasonableMan unreasonably wrote:
"I don't understand the logic behind the claim that climate scientists politicized this field."
Climate scientist James Hansen:
"A year ago, I wrote to Gordon Brown asking him to place a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants in Britain. I have asked the same of Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd and other leaders. The reason is this - coal is the single greatest threat to civilisation and all life on our planet."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/feb/15/james-hansen-power-plants-coal
AReasonableMan unreasonably wrote:
"In this context, concern about the effects of dumping a billion years worth of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere is not an inherently unreasonable position."
Straw man! The IPCC isn't talking about 'concern', they are talking about implementing economic policies which will impoverish millions or billions of human beings, and perhaps lead to an authoritarian super-state. Being concerned about this is not an inherently unreasonable position.
All this proves is that they genuinely believe that carbon is a threat to the planet's future. The smart strategy is not to piss anyone off.
"Excluding the hand of God, you only find regulatory function in designed or evolved systems."
I can't make heads or tails out of this. Everything gains or loses heat until it is in a state of thermal equilibrium. Usually this involves some sort of negative feedback.
Evidence for this are the mass extinctions, which appear to have been driven by runaway climate change.
Yeah, sort of. But the "runaway climate change" was caused by the impact of a large body in the Yucatan:
" The 112-mile (180 kilometers) Chicxulub crater in Mexico was made by the impact that caused the extinction of dinosaurs and about 70 percent of all species on Earth, many scientists believe. A new study suggests the crater was probably blasted out by a faster, smaller object than previously thought, according to research presented this week at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas."
http://tinyurl.com/mqars5o
"The causes of the end-Cretaceous extinction are still being debated by paleontologists. Researchers agree that a major factor was an asteroid about 10 kilometers in diameter that struck what is now the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico. The effects of the impact were catastrophic, probably including global forest fires, possibly a period of cold weather due to sunlight-blocking dust and smoke, and a subsequent period of hot climate caused by the high levels of CO2 released into the atmosphere by the impact."
http://tinyurl.com/mr9ew42
The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, or the K-T event, is the name given to the die-off of the dinosaurs and other species that took place some 65.5 million years ago. For many years, paleontologists believed this event was caused by climate and geological changes that interrupted the dinosaurs’ food supply. However, in the 1980s, father-and-son scientists Luis (1911-88) and Walter Alvarez (1940-) discovered in the geological record a distinct layer of iridium–an element found in abundance only in space–that corresponds to the precise time the dinosaurs died. This suggests that a comet, asteroid or meteor impact event may have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
http://tinyurl.com/mf8xcmv
"All this proves is that they genuinely believe that carbon is a threat to the planet's future."
This is more nonsense. People are mostly made of carbon. It's the eighth most common element in the lithosphere.
"but you won't free education or healthcare either."
Incoherent but, as someone once said, "If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it is free."
The video was not made by BBC and I posted it in another post. Pay attention
Terry said...
I can't make heads or tails out of this. Everything gains or loses heat until it is in a state of thermal equilibrium. Usually this involves some sort of negative feedback.
A hot object just loses heat until it is in equilibrium with its surroundings. This is quite clearly not 'regulation'. No feedback, negative or otherwise.
In this respect the eco types have made another error in anthropomorphizing the earth. It is a dumb system, not a well regulated one (excluding the hand of God).
grackle said...
Yeah, sort of. But the "runaway climate change" was caused by the impact of a large body in the Yucatan:
Proving that the system is fragile rather than robust. You can walk out into the freezing cold and your core temperature remains essentially unchanged. Your core temperature, at least ,is a well regulated system.
Michael K links to a lecture by Richard Feynman on the definition of science. And, under that definition, AGC/AGW/AGCC is not science. Science must be falsifiable, and while AGC and AGW have been proved false, AGCC is unfalsifiable, and therefore cannot be proven either true or false.
Bruce Hayden said...
Michael K links to a lecture by Richard Feynman on the definition of science. And, under that definition, AGC/AGW/AGCC is not science. Science must be falsifiable, and while AGC and AGW have been proved false
Global warming has not been proven false. As in a lot of areas of science the data is currently ambiguous. If there is a prolonged decline in the temperatures then the theory is probably wrong, excluding the existence of a prolonged but transient negative driver. Stabilizing for a period at a local maximum does not invalidate the general theory even if some models are wrong.
As everyone agrees the increase in CO2 is not the only driver in the system so it is unreasonable to expect temperature to track perfectly with CO2 levels.
AReasonableMan unreasonably wrote:
"This is quite clearly not 'regulation'. No feedback, negative or otherwise."
The energy put out by a blackbody is dependent on its temperature and its surface area. Our sun is in thermal equilibrium because as it loses heat to space, it can't contract because the pressure and density will increase and this creates more heat, which prevents contraction. Sounds like a feedback system to me.
Global warming has not been proven
AReasonableMan unreasonably wrote:
"false. As in a lot of areas of science the data is currently ambiguous. If there is a prolonged decline in the temperatures then the theory is probably wrong, excluding the existence of a prolonged but transient negative driver. Stabilizing for a period at a local maximum does not invalidate the general theory even if some models are wrong."
It is unfalsifiable in other words. Duh.
Or the predictions can never be compared to reality. Or whatever.
The sun is clearly not a well regulated system, it is on a one way trip to failure. A regulated system maintains stability. Unlike the sun, in a well regulated system the state variables remain constant even in the presence of significant perturbations. This a definition of regulation that even engineers and biologists can agree on.
It warms my heart to see so many people are aware of how bogus AGW theory is.
Interesting use of the word 'aware'.
I don't understand the logic behind the claim that climate scientists politicized this field. It is clearly in there self interest to have bi-partisan support for their research, so that they get money whether the Democrats or Republicans are in power.
You don't understand because you are assuming funding is their only motivation.
Interesting use of the word 'aware'.
Well, you are clearly ignorant of the evidence that has destroyed AGW theory. Who are your information brokers? Because they have been feeding you with a shovel.
Fen said...
You don't understand because you are assuming funding is their only motivation.
But the people who claim climate scientists are all frauds constantly cite the desire to get government funding as their primary motivation for that fraud.
If true, then "We would adjust. As human beings have always adjusted to changing climates"
This a key point - if we need to adapt to a changing climate, Global Socialism is the LAST thing we want to do. Because socialism kills innovation.
The sun is clearly not a well regulated system, it is on a one way trip to failure. A regulated system maintains stability.
"The Sun started as a T Tauri star – a wildly active star that blasted out an intense solar wind. And then, just a few million years later, it settled down into its current form. The life of the Sun had begun ... The Sun, like most stars in the Universe, is on the main sequence stage of life … For the Sun, this process got going 4.6 billion years ago … You won’t notice it now, but in about a billion years, the output from the Sun will have increased by 10%."
http://tinyurl.com/3l2mxv6
For human purposes, on a human time scale, I'd say 4 or 5 billion years of the continual life of the sun in its present mode is overwhelming evidence of a "regulated system."
The question ought to be: Why are global warming alarmists so easy to refute?
Interesting use of the word 'refute'.
"But the people who claim climate scientists are all frauds constantly cite the desire to get government funding as their primary motivation for that fraud. "
That is the most practical and non ideological explanation. I don't believe that they are enemies of civilization although there is such an argument.
There are those explain it that way.
The connection between greenhouse gases and global warming has been a mainstream political issue for humanity since 1988. It was precisely the time that the Berlin Wall fell and Francis Fukuyama declared the "End of History," the victory of Western capitalism. Canada and the US signed the first free-trade agreement, which became the prototype for the rest of the world.
SPIEGEL: So you're saying that a new era of consumption and energy use began precisely at the moment when sustainability and restraint would have been more appropriate?
Klein: Exactly.
I rest my case.
Dull use of the word "interesting".
How do you believe in evolution yet think the environment in which organisms live must never change?
Pat Buchanan thought motherhood in the 50s was just right.
Al Gore feels the same about the climate.
But the world changes, sometimes with our help, sometimes without. We, and everything else, must adapt.
Alex wrote: Typical moronic conservative. We know for a fact that volcanism led to the Permian-Triassic extinction event...
Typically moronic Alex should learn (Is that even possible? I have my doubts.) that there are at least 9 different proposed mechanisms offered as contributing factors to the so-called "Great Dying". Vulcanism is one, but it has been judged to be less influential than continental drift and oxygen sequestration related to the massive crustal uplifted caused by the Pangea breakup. Alex should also learn that real scientists, i.e. those who don't earn a living from fashionable anxieties, understand that formulations like "we know for a fact that x caused y" runs up against fundamental uncertainties in any science, particular a science like paleoclimatology with error bars wide enough to let a stampeding horde of ceratopsians pass without scraping the paint.
Alex and ARM ought to learn also that so-called climate science as practiced by the likes of Michael Mann et al. is comprised mostly of models that cannot accurately postdict the recent past, and has failed to predict the climate since these models came online 19 years ago, in other words as soon as the models were designed observed climate began to deviate from predicted climate. Good science demands such models to be scrapped, but since the they all demand CO2 forcing far beyond what empirical observation can confirm, the anti-carbon Chicken Littles can't let go of their treasured spaghetti code lest by doing so they tacitly admit they don't known squat about the climate.
Interesting use of the word 'refute'.
Very, very cryptic. Readers … why must they always be so vague? Answer: They hide behind ambiguity. What else can they do? The polar bears aren't extinct, the glaciers aren't melting away, the sun is definitely, in human terms, a well regulated, stable system, the earth isn't warming and the sky is not falling.
refute:
1. to prove to be false or erroneous, as an opinion or charge.
2. to prove (a person) to be in error."
http://tinyurl.com/pbwyugr
To put it in another way: Why are global warming alarmists so easy to repudiate?
An "eco-psychologist"? That's how they list this guy. Was there ever a better example of what Bob Dylan called "your useless and pointless knowledge"? Too bad there is no way to ease him and cool him and cease his pain. But, Ann, what about ours?
grackle said...
The question ought to be: Why are global warming alarmists so easy to refute?
You didn't refute anything. You copy and pasted some irrelevant information that you apparently do not understand.
barto said...
How do you believe in evolution yet think the environment in which organisms live must never change?
You are apparently so wrapped up in right wing propaganda that you can no longer read the argument in front of you. I am arguing that climate is not a particularly stable system. Quite obviously this means it changes over time.
Blogger AReasonableMan said...
furious_a said...
Really?
You are confusing material flow with regulatory function.
Excluding the hand of God, you only find regulatory function in designed or evolved systems. The global climate system is neither. This doesn't exclude some stabilizing mechanisms but they fortuitous and as such they are unpredictable in terms of their robustness and likely to be prone to runaway effects. Evidence for this are the mass extinctions, which appear to have been driven by runaway climate change. The system appears to be quite unstable, not well regulated.
You don't mention that these mass extictinctions were initiated naturally by forces many orders of magnetude more powerful than anything humans can do short of setting off every nuclear bomb in the world.
The claim is that heat is being sequestered in the oceans. Climate scientists are a little vaugue on exactly where all this heat is being hidden. It is also well to remember that there are tectonic forces that are heating the oceans from below aas well.
Despite all the fear mongering the earth itself seems to extremely well suited to the task of moderating itself.
ARM,
" ... do not agree that the earth is currently warming?"
Scientifically, that is a meaningless question. To make it meaningful, you need to add a time-scale and a magnitude.
The earth has warmed roughly 0.7 degrees C since 1880, or about 0.05 degrees/decade. On the other hand, there is good evidence the global mean temperature has declined about 0.5 degrees C since the medieval warm period , or about 0.05 degrees/century. As other have mentioned, the temperature changes since about 2000 has been within measurement error, so a scientifically valid statement about that time has been that there has been no change since that time.
Looked at on larger time scales, there appears to have been approximately zero temperature change (i.e. within measurement error) since the mid-Holocene ~5000 years ago, and about 3 degrees C cooling since the last interglacial ~125000 years ago.
Those are scientifically valid/verifiable statements. Your question has nothing to do with science.
I am curious - how many people here do not agree that the earth is currently warming?
The satallite temperature record shows no warming for the past eighteen years while CO2 has been rising during those years.
@Roger: I could be wrong, but I doubt that ARM asked the question for scientific reasons. His followup responses indicate that he was seeking a fresh +5 Cudgel Of You're Stoopid in order to beat people's heads in.
Abdul Abulbul Amir said...
The satallite temperature record shows no warming for the past eighteen years while CO2 has been rising during those years.
As noted above, no one believes that CO2 is the only driver in the system, so perfect correlation is not expected even if CO2 is a major factor.
AReasonableMan wrote: "Doesn't this tell us something about who actually politicized climate science?"
Actually, social scientists have looked into this. Prof. Kahan at Yale lead a group of social scientists who discovered that views on the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis correlate with ideology. This goes both ways. Political conservatives are skeptics and political liberals are believers. Further, the most scientifically literate Americans are split evenly on climate warming, just as they are on political ideology.
You didn't refute anything. You copy and pasted some irrelevant information that you apparently do not understand.
I understand that to refer to the sun as unregulated and unstable when the sun has been in its present mode for billions of years is ridiculous. I'm happy to let the readers judge for themselves just who lacks understanding.
I am arguing that climate is not a particularly stable system. Quite obviously this means it changes over time.
Another meaningless assertion. Readers, don't we all know that everything in the universe "changes over time?" In that sense the universe itself is unstable because, you know, in billions and billions of years the universe will eventually implode.
Roger Zimmerman said...
there is good evidence the global mean temperature has declined about 0.5 degrees C since the medieval warm period
Both the facts and the logic are faulty here. The global temperature during the Medieval Warm Period was lower than present temperatures. And, even if it was higher this does not logically imply that the current warming is not driven by the increase in CO2. Again, there is more than one driver in the system.
grackle said...
I understand that to refer to the sun as unregulated and unstable when the sun has been in its present mode for billions of years is ridiculous.
It is genuinely sad that in this nation, which was once overflowing with amateur engineers, that an educated person could write this. Don't people learn the basics of control theory anymore, or more modern ideas about robust networks?
I recommend that folks here read Kuhn's classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In it, he describes the process by which old established scientific theories give way to new ones. The old "paradigm" (Kuhn was the first to use this word in this manner) is gradually undermined by anomalies - gaps between the predictions of the paradigmatic explanation of the world, and actual observations. Eventually the pressure of the anomalies becomes too much and a new paradigm is accepted. Notably, you need a new paradigm to get rid of the old one. "You can't beat something with nothing." That's why the efficient market hypothesis still prevails as the most widely accepted theory of markets notwithstanding numerous anomalies.
In the climate area, there is a big anomaly between the predictions of the global climate models and observed temperatures over the past 20 years. Although climate scientists have offered various explanations for this anomaly, none are widely accepted. However, the global climate models apparently explain other observations. And the skeptics have not yet produced a grand overarching theory ( a new "paradigm" in Kuhn's terms) to predict climate. In the meantime, it's all in flux.
That's how I see it.
ARM-The serious dispute is not whether CO2 has some effect or not, but the degree of that effect. This is referred to as "climate sensitivity," that is, how much the global climate changes for each 1% increase in CO2. The IPCC's global climate models assume a relatively high climate sensitivity, and skeptical scientists say it is much lower.
Stipulate that Carbon Dioxide generated Global Warming is as big or bigger a problem than the long term sequester and storage of nuclear waste. (This separates "natural" warming from human-caused, and also separates Gore-recommended cap-and-trade or quota schemes on "carbon" emissions from recommendations regarding forests, land use, roof color, etc)
Is anyone so happy with government-run programs since the 1950's "solving" the problem of nuclear waste that a government-run carbon-dioxide emissions reduction program looks, to you, like a GOOD idea?
And why NOT solve the oldest problem first? Show me how small quantities of solid nuclear wastes can be managed, then come at me with proposals for managing a gas.
It is genuinely sad that in this nation, which was once overflowing with amateur engineers, that an educated person could write this. Don't people learn the basics of control theory anymore, or more modern ideas about robust networks?
Let me guess. You're an expert?
Douglas, I largely agree with both your points. Interesting science generally occurs where there is ambiguity and uncertainty in the data or its interpretation. People are forced to develop better instrumentation and re-think their ideas. Ambiguity and flux does not mix well with the Manichean nature of modern politics.
It is obviously not in the interests of scientists to politicize science rather than obtain bipartisan support. It is very unfortunate that this politicization has occurred. As noted above it is clear who does benefit from this, just as it was clear during the tobacco wars. For a very long time the case against tobacco was genuinely ambiguous but one side acted like it was impossible nonsense rather than an intriguing possibility.
Both the facts and the logic are faulty here. The global temperature during the Medieval Warm Period was lower than present temperatures. And, even if it was higher this does not logically imply that the current warming is not driven by the increase in CO2. Again, there is more than one driver in the system.
You can guess where ARM's cite is going, when the authors are many of the core players in the cabal who were at the center of ClimateGate - e.g. Mann, Briffa, Jones, etc. Which means that many of the studies involved proxies, such as the cherry picked and very controversial bristle cone pines. And, yes, the papers mostly predate ClimateGate, and so were never really challenged before publication (notably, one of the things that the ClimateGate emails showed us was how these very same players had been so blatantly manipulating the peer review process). So, no, the link that ARM cites is not really all that credible.
As for his second point - since his side is claiming the necessity of expending huge amounts of resources to address AGW, the burden is on them to prove that CO2 is a major driver, and not the skeptics to disprove it. Moreover, as pointed out repeatedly here, despite his protestations to the contrary, we really haven't seen much, if any, warming over the last two decades, which is, of course, why they are now calling it Climate Change instead.
Bruce Hayden said...
As for his second point -
You are confusing expedience and logic. The logic that you used is wrong, period. What is the most expedient course of action is open to debate, but that is not science.
In post-truth America, people who believe in nothing will believe anything.
I haven't seen the number posted here but last I read the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmoshpere was 380 parts per million or .038 percent.
By all means lets marshall all our resources to try to change that number in a place as dynamic as the atmosphere.
I don't think anyone has mentioned this either: animals exhale carbon dioxide raising the question as to when the climate hysterics will decide that a few less of us, let's say 3.8 percent, might be better in our new regulated system.
Anecdotally, I still have snow in my backyard and the ponds still have ice on them, here along the northern coast of Massachusetts but my tulips and crocii are fighting their way up for a glimpse of the sun.
Oh those pesky glaciers! They're melting, they're melting!
But readers … is it really true that the glaciers are melting? The answer is – wait for it - nobody knows.
There is a paper by Michael Zemp in 2011 that caused much joy among the global warming alarmists. It contended that the glaciers are melting. I'll provide a link to it:
http://tinyurl.com/lo7xvde
But there's big problems with the study, as summarized below:
" … if you bother to actually read the paper, you learn that Zemp's conclusion is based on measurements of "more than 80 glaciers." Considering that the Himalayas boast more than 15,000 glaciers, a study of "more than 80 glaciers" hardly seems sufficient to warrant such a catastrophic pronouncement. Especially when you learn that of those 80 glaciers, several are growing. Growing. Not melting."
http://tinyurl.com/ylj6f49
Keep in mind, readers, that worldwide there are about 200,000 glaciers.
http://tinyurl.com/nedv3m4
I said earlier: I understand that to refer to the sun as unregulated and unstable when the sun has been in its present mode for billions of years is ridiculous.
The response: It is genuinely sad that in this nation, which was once overflowing with amateur engineers, that an educated person could write this. Don't people learn the basics of control theory anymore, or more modern ideas about robust networks?
No real counter argument here – just drivel about "control theory" and "robust networks" without reference, explanation or links. The usual nonsense, substituting buzzwords for debate.
I submit again – a system in a mode that has lasted billions of years, in human terms(as opposed to cosmological terms) MUST be described as stable, regulated and robust as hell.
Grackle, you are out of sync with literally everyone else here, all of whom concede that climate regularly changes in significant ways, at least from the perspective of biological organisms.
Grackle, you are out of sync with literally everyone else here, all of whom concede that climate regularly changes in significant ways, at least from the perspective of biological organisms.
Of course "climate regularly changes in significant ways." When did I ever claim otherwise? The fact that the earth's climate changes regularly is actually an indictment of most of the wild, decidedly unscientific crap that the global warming alarmists put out for consumption.
One of the alarmists favorite tactics is to elevate the commonplace and ordinary to something ominous and special. That's why they have switched from global warming to "climate change." Global warming can easily be disproved but climate change can never be disputed because the earth's climate ALWAYS changes, sooner or later. So a natural system is falsely described as manmade. Neat, huh?
Oh just leave him be. Its entertaining for me. In 5 years he'll be muttering "NIBIRU is Coming Soon!"
grackle said...
Of course "climate regularly changes in significant ways." When did I ever claim otherwise?
When you foolishly tried to claim that it was a well regulated system. If your air conditioning system regularly changed temperatures throughout the day I doubt you would consider it well regulated, if you understand what regulated actually means.
grackle said...
just drivel about "control theory" … substituting buzzwords for debate.
Your dismissal of one of the core conceptual frameworks in engineering as mere buzz words is a feat of intellectual bravado rarely encountered in this mundane world of ours.
Those freshmen engineers laboring away on all those unpleasant differential equations should send you a present for cutting the Gordian knot and bravely consigning control theory forever to the world of ephemeral buzziness.
Gullible doesn't begin to describe you.
"Gullible" implies it took some convincing. ARM wants to believe.
ARM responds to my point about how to ask a scientific question about global temperature change with a non-sequitur: that my recitation of facts about the time-derivative of temperature change does not address the causes (in each case, I suppose).
Sorry, I try to keep my posts on topic.
OK, new topic.
Q: What is causing the most recent ~0.1 degrees/decade warming (since 1970, say).
A: Scientifically, we don't know.
I accept the basic physics of CO2 trapping heat in an atmosphere (as I do with methane and water vapor).
But the sole scientific basis for attributing specifically the recent warning (as a measurable time-derivative) primarily to human CO2 emissions are the GCMs. And, these models are becoming increasingly exposed as garbage. At each IPCC AR, the models have been tweaked to a lower forward prediction, in accordance with the failure to match the recent trend, and still, with AR4 (2007), 95% of the runs are over-predicting the measurements. This is failure.
Don't be fooled by the graphs which show how excellent the GCMs are at backward modeling. I do large-scale non-linear computer modeling for a living (automatic speech recognition, but the theory/philosophy of modeling is the same), and it is not a valid test of a model to see how it mimics observations you have already made. Especially with these many-parameter models, it is too easy to fit the data.
You need to run the model forward, then see how well it matches the data. If it doesn't (as is the current case), the model is wrong. It's that simple. If we are basing our knowledge about what is causing the recent (very mild) warming on these models, then the answer I gave above pertains: we. don't. know.
Any policy conclusions being drawn from the GCMs are arbitrary. Making a single person poorer because of these garbage models is immoral.
Roger Zimmerman said...
Sorry, I try to keep my posts on topic.
Well, the topic was that your logic is wrong and your facts debatable.
furious_a said...
ARM wants to believe.
No. I am agnostic on AGW. The data is too noisy to be certain either way. Which is why all the certainty here puzzles me. You are no better than the eco-warriors. Just the mirror image partisan hacks.
It's tough out here for a moderate.
ARM - it probably looks the same from your vantage point. You come across as a full boat, avid, even crazy type, warmist. And, it is that position that so many here are reacting to. I am a skeptic primarily, I think, because I see what the warmist scientists have done, and question the ethics, and, thus, the science. And, the fact that (mostly) Dem politicians, who couldn't understand the arguments if their lives depended on it, use AGW/AGCC as an excuse for power and/or funding grab after power/funding grab. Plus, I would find it much more credible if anyone of prominence there on the pro side actually acted like there was a real crisis. These spokesmen and leaders have carbon footprints far, far larger than anyone else around (and, yes, AF1 for golfing trips is maybe the worst).
My view scientifically is that we just don't know enough yet. Not even close. Both the effects of CO2 on global climate, as well as whether humans would do better if the climate were warmer or cooler. Things have moved quite a bit since those papers were published that ARM linked to above. But, every time there is a breakthrough, even more things are opened up for questions. Back then, it seemed fairly straight forward - increase CO2 resulted in a warmer climate. The direct, or first order, green house effects. But, we now know that it is far, far, more complex, with the ocean playing a huge, previously unrecognized, role.
Maybe because I have read too much science fiction over the last 50 years, I believe that we will, some day, understand fairly well the mechanisms involved. But, I think that is decades down the road. We shall see.
Could I be convinced of AGW, or AGCC? Quite possibly. Harder though (but not impossible) to convince me that we need to spend trillions upon trillions of dollars combatting it through a reduction in the use of fossil fuels, with what I suspect would be significant starvation and disease around the world. Agnostic? Not sure. But definitely a skeptic.
Now at 11. Liberal Climate Alarmist gets frustrated, can't defend with facts, lashes out at critics.
And in related news - rain is wet.
Bruce Hayden said...
You come across as a full boat, avid, even crazy type, warmist.
Point to one statement of mine that justifies that belief.
This is why I say most people who have commented here are no different from the full blown Gaia loving eco-nuts. Neurotic partisanship completely drowns out sensible debate on this and many other issues. Blaming this on scientists is nuts. It is hacks, of all kinds, who are the problem.
Yes, by all means, lets not blame the scientists who abandoned the Scientific Method, altered the historical record, perverted the peer-review process, cast out any scientist who questioned their theory,and basically lied to us for the last 20 years.
It's Bush's fault, yes?
And right on cue a hysterical partisan nut turns up.
AReasonableMan said...
And right on cue a hysterical partisan nut turns up.
Bless your heart.
AReasonableMan said...
So, it seems many people do not believe that the earth is warming. Why is this?
How else do you explain glacial retreat? This doesn't require any fancy instrumentation, you just look at old photos. Climate scientists are not intermediaries, the photos were taken by regular people. There is no doubt that glaciers have retreated all over the world. Other than the earth getting warmer what would explain this?
4/4/15, 12:38 PM
When you ask if we believe the earth is warming, over what time scale do you mean? How do you explain Greenland?
"Scientists who probed 2 km (1.2 mi) through a Greenland glacier to recover the oldest plant DNA on record said that the planet was far warmer hundreds of thousands of years ago than is generally believed. DNA of trees, plants, and insects including butterflies and spiders from beneath the southern Greenland glacier was estimated to date to 450,000 to 900,000 years ago, according to the remnants retrieved from this long-vanished boreal forest. That view contrasts sharply with the prevailing one that a lush forest of this kind could not have existed in Greenland any later than 2.4 million years ago. These DNA samples suggest that the temperature probably reached 10 °C (50 °F) in the summer and −17 °C (1.4 °F) in the winter. They also indicate that during the last interglacial period, 130,000–116,000 years ago, when local temperatures were on average 5 °C (9 °F) higher than now, the glaciers on Greenland did not completely melt away.[63]"
So, what time scale and what makes YOU think it has much to do with us [any near time temp spike]?
AReasonableMan said...
Global warming has not been proven false. As in a lot of areas of science the data is currently ambiguous. If there is a prolonged decline in the temperatures then the theory is probably wrong, excluding the existence of a prolonged but transient negative driver. Stabilizing for a period at a local maximum does not invalidate the general theory even if all models are wrong.
As some agrees the increase in CO2 is not the only driver in the system so it is unreasonable to expect temperature to track perfectly with CO2 levels.
4/4/15, 8:47 PM
There, fixed it for you. You are welcome.
AReasonableMan said...
It's tough out here for a moderate.
4/5/15, 3:34 PM
I am actually surprised that you know any. Wait, you mean you? Now that is funny!
When you foolishly tried to claim that it was a well regulated system.
Readers, the "it" the commentor refers to is the sun, a body that has been in its present mature mode without significant change for several billion years and is likely to continue for another billion or two. I have to believe that anything that lasts that long in one mode is the very definition of stability and regularity. If the sun was NOT stable none of us would exist.
If your air conditioning system regularly changed temperatures throughout the day I doubt you would consider it well regulated, if you understand what regulated actually means.
Regulate:
1. to control or direct by a rule, principle, method, etc.: to regulate household expenses.
2. to adjust to some standard or requirement, as amount, degree, etc.: to regulate the temperature.
3. to adjust so as to ensure accuracy of operation: to regulate a watch.
4. to put in good order: to regulate the digestion.
Actually, my ac DOES change temperature throughout the day. There's a thingamajig called a thermostat that I have programmed to lower the temp as evening falls. And it's programmed to raise the temp during the morning hours while I'm away from the crib. I would certainly contend that the system is well regulated and stable.
But the commentor is comparing an air conditioner, which might last 20 years, to the sun, which counts its life in the billions of years, a time span so vast and unimaginable that to refer to it as unstable and badly regulated is truly an astounding declaration. Such a viewpoint is ridiculous on the face of it.
Your dismissal of one of the core conceptual frameworks in engineering as mere buzz words is a feat of intellectual bravado rarely encountered in this mundane world of ours.
Buzzwords are frequently thrown out in lieu of actual debate by those wishing to appear sophisticated and knowledgeable. Readers, have you seen the ING Orange Money commercial? It's about 30 seconds long. In it a consumer is considering buying one of two barbecue pits. The salesman keeps trying to steer the customer into buying the more expensive pit(with all the "bells and whistles"), because "it has a built-in sauce rack."
http://tinyurl.com/lkwh7a3
"Built-in sauce rack" are the buzzwords in that example. Buzzwords are used to attempt to deflect, obfuscate, confuse and impress. They are usually unaccompanied by any explanation of how the buzzwords might relate to the debate; they are just flung out like stones thrown into a pond. In our debate to use buzzwords as the commentor has used them is a variety of equivocation, otherwise known as the "ambiguity fallacy."
http://tinyurl.com/lelzjop
One commentor said: You come across as a full boat, avid, even crazy type, warmist.
Another responds: Point to one statement of mine that justifies that belief.
That's really difficult, to point to a statement. Why? Because, aside from terse statements containing a few awkwardly used buzzwords the reader gets very little from this particular commentor. Earlier he announced, without explanation or link, that the glaciers of the world were retreating, but can point to no evidence, other than anecdotal reference to "old photos" of some conveniently unidentified "regular people."
When offered evidence to the contrary he replies with: As the climates on the other planets show, it [the climate system] can shoot off in a myriad of different directions because it is an unregulated system.
What other planets? The commentor does not inform us. Links? Nonexistent.
Evidence for this are the mass extinctions, which appear to have been driven by runaway climate change.
Another bald statement by the alarmist. Nothing to back it up, no links, no proof.
The sun is clearly not a well regulated system, it is on a one way trip to failure.
A body in space that has existed for billions of years in its present mode is thought to be unstable by the commentor. We all know that the sun will eventually die. All things eventually die. Stars, planets, even the universe will all die. Does this prove the universe is unstable? To the commentor it evidently does.
Below is a link to an image showing estimated retreat of a glacier in Alaska via the USGS (much actually observed), which started ca. 1760 (or approx. 9 years before the patent filing of James Watt for the reciprocating steam engine).
http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2001/07/fieldwork2.html
The cirques and hanging valleys of California are further evidence of extensive glaciers that long ago disappeared. A link here: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/hazardimages/picture/show/1584
@A Reasonable Man: If:
1. The Earth and Sun are excessively unstable and therefore fragile (see e.g., mass extinctions of some types of lifeforms on Earth, not minding for a moment the presence of life on Earth); "dumping" billions of years of sequestered carbon (from where did it come?); one-way trip of the Sun - over 12 billions of years or so - to destruction)
2. They both are at extreme risk of perishing due to such fragility
3. Humans and other species are at risk of perishing along with them
To survive as a species and and to assist other species with survival, humans need to establish stable populations off of Earth and also outside the Solar System as quickly as possible.
To do that humans need to create things that do not yet exist. Hiding is not an option. This will require energy, resources, and well-nourished intelligent people, and a turning away from the current central-banking-driven-debt-growth-fiat-money-consumption-and-malinvestment-based-GDP-inflating model of State-controlled economic central planning.
Therefore, we should not regress under total State control using archaic inefficient and undependable technologies to maintain some status quo ante chosen by the State (or a grouping of States) but should instead use as much energy as possible as quickly as possible to free ourselves and our descendants as a group from these risks, having fun along the way. There is much work to be done.
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