November 27, 2018

"What happens when our greatest living scientists disagree with our greatest living authority on what bullshit looks like?"


193 comments:

Gahrie said...

I hope he was being sarcastic when he called the hack scientists working for the government "our greatest living scientists".

rhhardin said...

Social scientists hold the edge over climate scientists in analyzing group behavior.

Robert Cook said...

I think Adams means "our greatest bullshitter."

Kevin said...

[Outside, at the side of a barn]

(there is a large pile of shit on the ground)

Father: Son, now that your going out into the world, there's
something you should know. You see that?

Navin: Yeah.

Father: That's shit. And this: shinola.

Navin: Shit, shinola.

Father: Son, you're going to be all right. Now what town are you
going to try for first?

Navin: Well I thought I'd try to go to St. Louis, because that is
where that radio program was coming from.

(as they walk away, Navin walks through the shit)

Kevin said...

"our greatest living scientists"

Full emphasis on **living**.

rhhardin said...

There's a new Gresham lecture on the mathematics of climate science by a guy who works a lot in partial differential equations and meterology, and he definitely buys into everything. Oddly, he's paid for it.

http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/mathematics-climate-change

Gresham lectures are high quality interesting stuff, say in astronomy, cosmology and math (look up really old ones), but getting paid seems to be a killer.

MadisonMan said...

I think it's possible -- more likely than not -- that extreme weather events in the near future will have a big impact. It's very likely those events will be blamed on a changed climate.

I think the change in climate will cause the economy to change, so that there will be winners and losers. I do not agree on the dire assessment -- because the economy is always evolving and changing to meet demands.

rhhardin said...

The opposite of Gresham lectures is TED lectures. The Gresham guys don't play along with the "We're all really really smart" attitude.

JPS said...

Robert Cook:

"I think Adams means 'our greatest bullshitter.'"

Wouldn't that make him, therefore, our greatest living authority on what bullshit looks like? Two sides of the same coin.

gilbar said...

'They' 'say' that man made climate change will Cost BILLIONS
and That is why 'They' 'say' we need to spend TRILLIONS

'They' might be 'scientists' but 'They' sure aren't mathematicians

gilbar said...

Or, as my supervisor Proudly Stated (More Then Once!) during IT meetings...
"G's M's and K's; i don't know what those mean"

JPS said...

Gahrie, 8:06:

Calling them "the hack scientists working for the government" is as challengeable a generalization as "our greatest living scientists."

Some of them are damned good indeed. Some are hacks. Most are rather good but are in some sense following their leaders.

Chris said...

What you can tax: Men who sometimes produce CO2. What you cannot tax: The Sun - the driver of climate.

What climate absolutists know, you cannot tax the sun. But you can tax men.

AllenS said...

Yes, there will be climate change. First, there will be winter, then, spring, which will turn into summer, followed by fall, and once again winter will take over. Kinda like what's been going on for a long, long time.

AllenS said...

In the future, winters will be really snowy, or hardly any snow will fall. Some of them will be really cold, and other years the winters will be mild. I could do the other seasons, but you can guess what it will be like.

M Jordan said...

I spent quite a bit of time researching global warming about a decade ago. IOW, I “edumacated” myself on the subject. I discovered the entire global warming argument, top to toes, is built on bullshit. Talk to me about any aspect of it and I can show you the bullshit it rests upon. I’m not a genius nor a scientist. I was an English major and writing teacher/prof. I taught students to create a terse thesis statement and support it with strong evidence. They learned to create a bullshit thesis statement and support it with bullshit. It was bullshit all the way down.

Global warming is bullshit.

Dan said...

Coldest November on record here in Wisconsin.....global warming???

Dave Begley said...

This is extremely interesting to me and in cases like this I wish Trump was articulate. The two morning news readers on CNN spun this story this morning all full of snark and condescension.

Their take is that this is all science (!) and these predictions about events in the far distant future are just like gravity. Newtonian gravity. We must act now! Carbon dioxide is just like smoking! Deadly. Certain.

The real laugher was this woman professor guest from Texas Tech (former astrophysics prof) who got a million dollar grant and after paying all of her bills, she only got $2k. My response? Texas Tech made a bundle that it otherwise wouldn't have and whose fault is it that this woman didn't figure her costs correctly in her grant proposal. A SMART professor would have had her in for $200k off of the top.

Trump should say the following, "There is a climate change industrial complex. It extends from Wall Street, to Tesla, the academy and the Deep State. They are biased and have a financial interest in promoting this scam. There is no way Elon Musk could raise the money for Tesla if it weren't for federal tax credits. And the federal tax credits were based on academic studies."

"The academic studies have been wrong for decades. According to the Fake Scientists, the Statute of Liberty should be under water today. They use corrupt data and flawed models to make predictions about events that are supposed to happen after we are all long dead. What if they are wrong?"

"The Obama EPA admitted that even if all of the Paris mandates were imposed on the United States, the Earth would only avoid less than .5 temp increase by 2100."

"This global warming business is not a hoax. It's a scam."

Stephen Miller: Feel free to use this in Presidential speech.

William said...

Just because you shovel out the stable and smell like horseshit, doesn't make you an authority on horses. If the handicapper smells like horseshit, would you make a smaller or larger bet based on his advice? I'm sure that there are many horse experts who truly do smell like horseshit. It's a real conundrum........I'm sure women have better sex under socialism and that bad weather is caused by capitalism. If we had not elected Trump, all those fires in California could have been avoided.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

LOL.....I'll take the guidance of the bullshit detector every time!

Theory...over reality. The ability to detect bullshit is a survival instinct, otherwise, we wouldn't be here.

And as Cook, kinda sorta said, the ability to know bullshit, shovel it and use it for your own survival...... also makes you an expert in being able to recognize it.

stevew said...

"our greatest living scientists"

This is a subjective, and disputable, assessment, just like their predictions.

AmPowerBlog said...

Althouse, you coulda used the "civility bullshit" tag, lol. :)

William said...

We should use phrenology to determine which of these experts is a bullshitter. Freudian analysis is sometimes useful in these cases too.

tcrosse said...

And as Cook, kinda sorta said, the ability to know bullshit, shovel it and use it for your own survival...... also makes you an expert in being able to recognize it.

Or, Don't Bullshit a Bullshitter.

Jess said...

"Greatest living scientists" is subjective, and I have a feeling fist fights would be common if you asked our current living scientists: "Who is the greatest living scientist?" It would be like "The Big Bang Theory", except there would be at least one violent death.

Original Mike said...

Blogger Dan said...”Coldest November on record here in Wisconsin”

Really? It seemed chilly, but a record?

Dust Bunny Queen said...

I meant....theory OR reality.

"Who are you gonna believe? ME or your lying eyes?"

Hmmmm?

Original Mike said...

”The real laugher was this woman professor guest from Texas Tech (former astrophysics prof) who got a million dollar grant and after paying all of her bills, she only got $2k.”

I don’t know what this means.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

What EXACTLY is the proper temperature range for Earth, and why? Show your work.

Humperdink said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Darrell said...

William just beclowned himself. Irreversibly. Sad.

traditionalguy said...

Climate Change is real. It's getting colder and colder. Meanwhile the poor CO2 causes Warming acolytes are 100% total fools that rely on Big Lie propaganda to empower a new religion worshiping World Government.

chuck said...

I remember the ozone emergency, and it has made me skeptical. That hypotheses basically collapsed within the first year when a crucial reaction rate was remeasured and found to be (IIRC) a factor of 70 to 100 lower than was used in the original calculations. The models never recovered, about the time Freon was outlawed the latest hypothesis was that reactions might be catalysed on the surface of ice crystals. Later, about 2005, another reaction rate was remeasured and found to be smaller by a factor of 10. Last time the ozone hole over the Antarctic grew, it was blamed on an influx of cold air due to weather patterns. I haven't followed developments in many years, but we don't hear much about ozone anymore. Nevertheless, whole careers were launched by funding for ozone research, funding that suddenly disappeared.

JPS said...

M Jordan,

"I can show you the bullshit [the global warming argument] rests upon."

I don't doubt you can make a strong argument, but I disagree that it's all bullshit.

They start with a solid foundation: CO2 traps heat that would otherwise be radiated back to space; other things being equal, more CO2 means more trapped heat, means a warmer atmosphere. This is not reasonably disputed.

The bullshit, as you may have discovered in edumacating yourself, is in the feedback loops: If it's warmer, there will be more water vapor in the air, which will absorb more heat, which will multiply the warming several-fold.

Wait, you could ask: Won't some of that increased moisture condense to clouds that block incoming light and heat? The answer is, Shut up, denier; who's paying you? No, sorry. That's what the activists say. A sane and sober scientist might say, Well, we've modeled that, and most of our models say that on balance the effect will be some increased warming on top of the CO2 effect. Truth be told, we're really far from sure how much, but probably some. And a cautious scientist might reply, But what about the models that didn't show that at all? What assumptions underpinned those, and how do you know those were wrong?

And at a certain point of saying Hey, wait a minute, not so fast, scientists start to raise eyebrows among their peers. Whose side is she on, anyway? (See also, Curry, J. A. - who accepts all the basic premises of AGW but believes scientists who should know better are getting careless and neglecting natural variability, which gets her called "a traitor to the cause." When you hear scientists talking about The Cause, reach for your wallet.)

Lewis Wetzel said...

In his latest column Krugman says that people who do not believe in CAGW are depraved, and that the prominent scientists and pundits who say they do not believe in CAGW are lying, they really do believe in it, but they are willing to destroy all life on earth for a little money from the oil companies.
Krugman has a pair of liberal arts degrees.
I suppose if he was prez he'd have me shot or tortured or something like that.

traditionalguy said...

Of course the real Greatest Living Scientists are all skeptics of the CO2 the warms atmosphere models. When Trillions of dollars are at stake, only the older great scientists are immune to offers to get rich from massive UN Bribes to create a Fake Science.

Sebastian said...

"Rising water temperatures, ocean acidification, retreating arctic sea ice, sea level rise, high-tide flooding, coastal erosion, higher storm surge, and heavier precipitation events threaten our oceans and coasts."

So "retreating arctic sea ice" threatens "our oceans and coasts"?

Dave Begley said...

Chuck:

But think about how much money was made in changing Freon out and building new stuff. That's the whole scam.

CAGW had to be created by the academy and industry. The REAL air pollution problem was solved so what were they going to do. They had to invent a new pollutant: carbon dioxide. And JP Stevens was the critical fifth vote on that. So now lots of money has to be spend solving a problem that doesn't exist. Scam.

chuck said...

> They start with a solid foundation: CO2 traps heat that would otherwise be radiated back to space; other things being equal, more CO2 means more trapped heat, means a warmer atmosphere. This is not reasonably disputed.

Not how it works. The troposphere is dominated by convection: top of the atmosphere radiates and cools, cold air sinks, warm air rises and radiates in turn. That stabilizes the temperature profile at the adiabatic lapse rate. As a rough approximation, the temperature at the top is fixed by energy balance, so the temperature at the ground is determine by the height of the "top" of the atmosphere. That height goes up a bit when the concentration of CO2 increases. Note that the dominant greenhouse gas is water vapor.

traditionalguy said...

The truism that CO2 traps heat in a glass jar is totally not applicable to the Atmosphere where all tests have shown conclusively that NO HEAT has been trapped by a doubling CO2 levels.It is a Fraud. Heat comes from oceans that are either being more or less shielded by clouds. Clouds are increased or decreased by the happening of more or less Solar Storms ( also called Sun Spots).

Wince said...

It's not the heat, it's the stupidity.

JPS said...

chuck,

"Note that the dominant greenhouse gas is water vapor."

I do note that. When I'm in a bad mood I tell the alarmists, Get back to me when you understand clouds.

JML said...

”The real laugher was this woman professor guest from Texas Tech (former astrophysics prof) who got a million dollar grant and after paying all of her bills, she only got $2k.”

I received my MS From USC through the AF - USC would send real world experienced individuals to teach the class. In one, we had a consultant give us an elaborate and complex issue involving a family owned business. One son wanted to do this, the father wanted to do that, and the other son wanted to do something different as well. After discussing what could be presented to them, he asked us what was the most valuable lesson from the whole thing? We all had our theories, and they were all wrong. The lesson you need to learn is to get paid up front, because no matter what you give them, one or more will be pissed and won't want to honor the contract.

Temujin said...

Try this one.
Super Grand Solar Minimum

Dust Bunny Queen said...

I see you have all fallen for the lead in to the con. Arguing about Global Warming, which cannot be proved or disproved.

Wasting time, while the grifters pick your pockets.

narayanan said...

if you talk to me about Thermal gradients/differentials you can make sense in physics to explain processes involving transfer of heat energy - Sun being major-major contributor.

if you bring up Average 'global" "temperature' - indicates ignorance of thermodynamics.

Fernandinande said...

Here's a picture of our greatest living scientists, exercising their white privilege. Howdy, gals!

(Background pic to https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/credits/)

JML said...

"Wasting time, while the grifters pick your pockets."

Agreed. I also have a MS in Environmental Studies. The field is full of fraud and feel good BS programs that don't do a damn thing but spend money or grab taxes.

Original Mike said...

”The lesson you need to learn is to get paid up front,...”

She doesn’t pay herself. Texas Tech pays her salary.

steve uhr said...

Can someone give me the names of the top climate scientists who share Trump's position on climate change?

Nonapod said...

Scientists are human beings, human beings are fallible. Human beings have agendas. Human beings have politics. Human beings have desires, wants, and needs that can often override their capacites for fair and objective analysis.

And even in the absence of politics it would be difficult to conclude anything about long term about such a massive and deeply complex system as the Earth's long term climate prospects. Politics just makes everything even more dubious.

What's more, various predictions of our climate doom have been made over the past several decades that have proven less that accurate. Various claims have been made over the years that by now our sea levels would be much higher and our winters would be much warmer. These things have not come to pass. We just had the coldest Thanksgiving day in over a century in the northeast.

Given all that, being somewhat skepitical of climate doomsayers seems like a sensible position.

Lewis Wetzel said...

It was just 50 years ago that the theory of continental drift began to be accepted. Before that time they treated Wagner (who came up with continental drift theory) as a crank and a heretic. Where does the energy come from to move trillions of trillions of tons of rock, huh, Wagner? Huh?

Seeing Red said...

There’s a decline which the greatest living scientists hid. There are very few sunspots. We could be in for a few years or a decade or 2 solar minimum. Shorter growing seasons and colder.

That should screw up their numbers but good.

chuck said...

> Can someone give me the names of the top climate scientists who share Trump's position on climate change?

Not all climate scientists, but all distinguished: Lindzen, Curry, Dyson, Happer, Akasofu, others whose names I don't immediately recall.

Seeing Red said...

Can someone give me the names of the top climate scientists who share Trump's position on climate change?

Why are you limiting it?

There have been a few who’ve left the I think it’s United physicists Union?

You should look at Canadians and Freeman Dyson.

Are you saying to riff off of The Right Stuff the Russian scientists aren’t better than our scientists?


...Global warming is now defined by the IPCC as a speculative 30-year global average temperature that is based, on one hand, on the observed global temperature data from the past 15 years and, on the other hand, on assumed global temperatures for the next 15 years. This proposition was put before the recent IPCC meeting at Incheon, in the Republic of Korea and agreed as a reasonable thing to do to better communicate climate trends. Astonishingly, this new IPCC definition mixes real and empirical data with non-exiting and speculative data and simply assumes that a short-term 15-year trend won’t change for another 15 years in the future.

However, this new definition of climate and global warming is not only philosophically unsound, it is also open to speculation and manipulation. It is one thing to speculate what the future climate might be; but for the IPCC to define climate based on data that doesn’t yet exist and is based on expectations of what might happen in the future is fraught with danger.....

Lewis Wetzel said...

If the CAGW people were serious they would push for protecting us from the next Carrington Event (i.e. super solar flare). One will likely happen in the next few hundred years, and hundreds of millions or billions will die.
But doing that only requires making our electrical grids a little less efficient by isolating them, and making the clads inside silicon chips brawnier. Not nearly as exciting as reordering the world economy.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Of course the climate changes. To say life should be Camelot is an absurdity.

The insanity is the elite left insist they WEEN EVERYONE OFF FOSSIL FUELS - by taxing everyone. Who gets hurt? Middle and lower income folks. Do you think the elite left care?

Will the ELITE wealthy left stop driving cars, SUV's, Limos, airplanes, private jets?
Shouolnd't the weening start at the top?

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

France is a great example of the elite wealthy left taxing fuel to the point where the common man suffer. The regular Joe cannot make ends meet. Screw the regular Joe. Regular Joe needs to learn a lesson. He must be weened.

- Will the elite wealthy left suffer? No way.
- Will the elite wealthy left cut back on their use of fossil fuels? No way.

A gallon of gas in France is 8.00.

Democrats in America are salivating. Let the WEENING begin.

MountainMan said...

Climate and Human Civilization Over the Last 18,000 Years

The single most useful work I have seen on the history of climate and its impact on civilization. Worth reading in its entirety. The PDF poster is worth downloading and looking at it more detail. Too big to print unless you have access to a large format color printer. Lots of links to sources for further reading, both in the text and on the poster.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Darkisland said...

So Cookie,

Have these great scientists been right about one thing with climate change so far?

Hurricanes?

Tornadoes?

Snow?

Arctic ice cap Every year it will be gone in 5 years since Algore's 1992 book.

Temperatures? Yes, if you believe the data. No, if like me, you have looked at the temperature record and how it was and is collected. They may have increased. May have decreased. The record is so crappy that anything closer than +/-5 degrees is pure unadulterated bullshit.

Predicting the future is hard. Predicting the past seems even harder for climate scientists.

John Henry

Dust Bunny Queen said...

It was just 50 years ago that the theory of continental drift began to be accepted. Before that time they treated Wagner (who came up with continental drift theory) as a crank and a heretic. Where does the energy come from to move trillions of trillions of tons of rock, huh, Wagner? Huh?

So....? Are you proposing that we spend billions of dollars, impoverish people, create worse living conditions, collapse economies in order to Stop Continental Drift? SCD.

How do you propose we stop this horrible tearing apart of the surface of the Earth? If we don't stop it, continents will collide!!! People will DIE!!!! (in a few billion years or so). Animal species will go extinct.

Oh wait. All this has happened several times in the past and life does go on......but...... but....but.... that was the past....this is now and it is US the most important species of all....evah!

We must do something NOW....Anything. Just do SOMETHING!!!!!! Ban light bulbs. Yeah!!!! That will stop the continents from moving. Eliminate cow farts. THERE you go. The SOLUTION!!!!

Need I add this /s sorta

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Ever notice the answer to climate change is always a TAX.

The left acquire great power with their ability to destroy you through punitive over-taxation. (& over-regulation)

*Why Nancy Pelosi and the left went ape shit with the R's piddly little tax cut.

Henry said...

Is the word "dire" actually in the report?

Think of the two stories at play:

Economic growth has a dire impact on the environment.

The environment has a dire impact on economic growth.

Therefore: We must stop economic growth before the environment does.

Seeing Red said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Henry said...

The best way to combat the costs of climate change is to eliminate Federal flood insurance.

That, I will support.

Seeing Red said...

Wasn’t Reagan asked what’s causing all the CO2 in the air and he said trees?

Has anyone really looked at the effects of reforestation after the 1800s deforestation?

Maybe the Cali fire did us a favor. At least it might change policy to not let kindling build up.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

GM was given a tax payer bailout under Bush. A tax payer bailout to survive.

Did they use that bailout well?
GM neglected to modernize their fleet of cars. They are making tired passenger vehicles no one wants to buy. This of course, is all Trump's fault. I heard it on the media.

M Jordan said...

JPS, Chuck,

Good points, both. I’m not saying the entire idea of climate change is B.S. I’m saying it’s a bad student essay, replete with facts and quotes but essentially rendered null and void by its shoddy scholarship. Yes, carbon helps keep heat from radiating outward as freely ... but water vapor much, much more. Further, our carbon numbers have risen steadily the last number of decades but temperatures have not correlated. Further further, we don’t even know if we have good temp data to work with: it’s been unevenly acquired across the globe, massaged by present “Scientists” to cool the past, and ocean temps have been compromised by including ship-water.

And data is suspect, cherry-picked, and incomplete. The conclusions are politically-driven, unverifiable, and insane. The whole thing is so full of bullshit we should just start over.

Jupiter said...

steve uhr said...
"Can someone give me the names of the top climate scientists who share Trump's position on climate change?".

Inasmuch as all "climate scientists" work for the government, and Trump is the head of that government, Trump is the top "climate scientist". I put the term in quotes, because actual scientists don't go around making absurdly confident claims about what are at best wildly speculative and entirely unproven computer models with large, well-known theoretical flaws.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Should we clean up our air and water and the environment? Yes.

You know what - start with 3rd world nations who are desperately behind on this.

Funny - Tom Steyer, super hero faux-greeny, has ZERO interest in helping 3rd world nations advance into the 21st century. No room for graft.

M Jordan said...

@Seeing Red: “Has anyone really looked at the effects of reforestation after the 1800s deforestation?“

There are more trees now on planet earth than in 1800. And they’re gobbling up carbon like PAC-Man gobbling energy dots.

Bushman of the Kohlrabi said...

We have to destroy our economy to save our economy!

Bill Peschel said...

FWIW: Climate Depot offers climate scientists' reaction to the report.

The story cites Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., Dr. Pat Michaels, and Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore.

Chris N said...

At Peace Pavilion West, it’s a condition of the Community that we help Gaia heal, grant the biomass full legal and political rights, and gather together at The Human Pagoda for worship.

Namaste.

Birkel said...

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/11/winter-is-coming-super-grand-solar-minimum.html

Interesting talk.
A theory that can be applied to the known past and be used to make near-term predictions.
Testable.

Actual science might be happening!

Dust Bunny Queen said...

Wasn’t Reagan asked what’s causing all the CO2 in the air and he said trees?

I don't know about Reagan.

However. Trees absorb CO2 and respire Oxygen which we breathe. Trees, and other plants are a CO2 sequestration process. When the trees die, decay, decompose...the CO2 is gradually released or converted to things like Coal and Peat.

When a forest burns, the CO2 is dramatically and quickly released into the air.

When the Earth's atmosphere is high in CO2 the plant life responds by growing, expanding, becoming larger and more lush and respiring more Oxygen.. Just like in the ancient ages of the dinosaurs. Coal anyone.

The idea that we can stop this continual and NECESSARY cycle is the height of HUBRIS. And we know what happens in Greek literature when a character develops excessive Hubris and thinks they can challenge the Gods. It isn't good.

Robert Cook said...

"Yes, there will be climate change. First, there will be winter, then, spring, which will turn into summer, followed by fall, and once again winter will take over. Kinda like what's been going on for a long, long time."

Those are seasonal weather changes, which is not climate change.

MadisonMan said...

Blogger Dan said...”Coldest November on record here in Wisconsin”

Really? It seemed chilly, but a record?

Of course it's not a record cold November. I don't know what Blogger Dan is smoking.


So "retreating arctic sea ice" threatens "our oceans and coasts"?

Actually, yes. There was a very large storm over the Bering Sea, next to the US state of Alaska, in November a couple years back. Because the pack ice had retreated, the waves from the storm did a huge number on the coast. Previous early season storms that occurred didn't damage the coast because the pack ice was there as protection.

A web search tells me there was one such storm in 2011. I thought it was more recent. There was also a big storm -- originally Nuri -- in 2014.

chuck said...

> Wasn’t Reagan asked what’s causing all the CO2 in the air and he said trees?

No. He was asked about pollution, and indeed, many trees emit hydrocarbons, eucalyptus trees for instance.

chuck said...

> Those are seasonal weather changes, which is not climate change.

A sense of humor isn't strong in this one.

Matt said...

Trump disagrees with the projected economic impacts of climate change. He disagrees with economists, not actual scientists.

If I were playing the odds, I would always disagree with dire economic forecasts. I'm guessing they turn out to be wrong at least 80% of the time. Remember peak oil?

Kevin said...

Sun activity increasing, planet warming, scientists: "We've accounted for that!"

Sun activity decreasing, planet cooling, scientists: "Where did the warming go?"

Robert Cook said...

"What EXACTLY is the proper temperature range for Earth, and why? Show your work."

*Sigh*

There is no "proper" temp range for Earth. There are, however, temperature ranges that are conducive to the proliferation (or survival) of some currently existing planetary life forms but will also be adverse to the proliferation (or survival) of many other currently existing planetary life forms.

Sebastian said...

"So "retreating arctic sea ice" threatens "our oceans and coasts"?

Actually, yes. There was a very large storm over the Bering Sea, next to the US state of Alaska"

OK. Why is an occasional storm worse than being stuck in ice?

Wouldn't retreating arctic sea ice also benefit our oceans and coasts?

What are the relative costs and benefits?

As always, the report goes heavy on the costs, but barely touches on the benefits--which in the case of retreating arctic sea ice can be very large.

Robert Cook said...

"I spent quite a bit of time researching global warming about a decade ago. IOW, I 'edumacated' myself on the subject. I discovered the entire global warming argument, top to toes, is built on bullshit. Talk to me about any aspect of it and I can show you the bullshit it rests upon. I’m not a genius nor a scientist. I was an English major and writing teacher/prof. I taught students to create a terse thesis statement and support it with strong evidence. They learned to create a bullshit thesis statement and support it with bullshit. It was bullshit all the way down."

Can you show your work? You might be invited to speak before scientific conferences.

Sebastian said...

"There is no "proper" temp range for Earth. There are, however, temperature ranges that are conducive to the proliferation (or survival) of some currently existing planetary life forms but will also be adverse to the proliferation (or survival) of many other currently existing planetary life forms."

An honest statement

Of course, alarmists never go there. For then they'd have to justify their alarmism in one of two ways: 1. there is a proper temp range after all, namely the one of the 1950s or 1900s, or whatever (but I have never seen any principled defense of the "right" global climate), or 2. some current planetary life forms are more important than others (but I have never seen any principled defense of species favoritism either, or even why human mitigation should favor one global habitat over another).

mandrewa said...

Temperatures are rising by 0.13 degrees C by decade. If that trend continues then the world will be 1.0 degrees C warmer by 2100 than now.

That's based on the best data we have, the satellite data on temperatures in the lower troposphere, which is not the surface, but the layer of air above the surface.

Since the climate models from the 20th century have all failed, that is the actual temperature increase (not to mention other predictions) has fallen far short of what was predicted, then I think the trend data is our best guide for what to expect in the future.

It's debatable what this means. The 1 degree C increase would not be evenly distributed. It would be more than that over land and less than that over the ocean. It would be more than that in the polar regions and less than that in the tropics.

Higher temperatures probably mean more rainfall and that would be part of how increasing CO2 would shrink the deserts.

More rainfall in the right places would mean a growing Antarctic ice cap and an increasing ice mass over Greenland. But then again it might go the other way.

The real practical issue is the possibility that a significant amount of the Greenland ice cap might melt. If that happened, then sea levels might rise five or more feet (I'm talking about a partial melt) which would be a real problem on many coastlines.

Or that might not happen at all, as I've already said.

We do have a practical, safe, and inexpensive way to stop increasing CO2 emissions and even reverse them. It's called molten salt reactors. They are much, much safer than conventional nuclear reactors, and with sensible regulation would cost no more than coal power plants.

In other words, give the go-ahead and molten salt reactors would just naturally replace the fossil fuel industry.

The only reason this is not already happening is high regulatory barriers, which in effect price the technology out of the energy market.

Those high regulatory barriers are in turn driven by people who are afraid of anything nuclear.

Robert Cook said...

"The idea that we can stop this continual and NECESSARY cycle is the height of HUBRIS."

No one says we can stop the natural change in global climate over time, (just as we cannot stop the periodic reversals of the magnetic poles); those issuing warnings say we must try to curb our own behaviors that are accelerating the process.

narciso said...

yes, they don't want to do that:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/27/what-was-earths-preindustrial-global-mean-surface-temperature-in-absolute-terms-not-anomalies/

Bruce Hayden said...

@MountainMan - nice poster. A lot of interesting stuff. Then I saw mention of Jericho, in Israeli occupied Palestine, and knew that it wasn't to be trusted. Israeli Occupied Palestine? WTF. Got to be IPCC, since the UN is really the only place that sort of nonsense exists. And then noted that the modern short term graph that is so scary looking is based on HADCRUT4 data. That was what ClimateGate was all about - a whistle blower showing that much of what came out of the Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia is bogus. HADCRUT4 couldn't be reconstructed from scratch, if their lives depended on it. Not only was much of the underlying data lost over time, supposedly as result of moves, but the programs generating their databases are also garbage. They brought a programmer in for a couple years to try to fix and document the code, and he eventually quit in despair. The programs tweak the data, but don't explain why, and they say that they are doing one thing, but do something quite different. All the time. Much of it seems to be gross programming ineptitude. Programming was bad enough that the original programmers probably would have flunked a CS class. GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out. But it was ok, since the Climate Scientists likely writing the code apparently had their PhDs in counting tree rings (that probably also helps explain why they were such bad statisticians). Besides the code dump was the email dump, which, among other things, showed the fetid underbelly of how the consensus was formed and enforced, through gross manipulation of the peer review and IPCC processes.

Nonapod said...

In the northeast of the country there's a fairly reasonable chance that we could be seeing a colder and snowier winter than we've had in quite some time. This would be due to the combination of us currently experiencing a La Niña pattern and being in a relatively inactive period of an unusually inactive solar cycle. We've already had more snow and cold than is usual this November.

RK said...

It's pretty clear to me that the climate in Madison is changing, although perhaps not in St. Paul or Chicago. /s

zipity said...

I'm fairly sure the climate on this, the third rock from the sun, IS changing.

As it has since the dawn of time. Only question is, was it because of man made actions.

Liberals swear it is. They have computer models, after all. But climate history also indicates there were periods on earth where it was much warmer, and with little to no increase in CO2 produced by man.

In the final analysis, NONE of the proposed "solutions" would make any difference in the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The vaunted Paris Accord would make a negligible difference. Basically a rounding error. And the US is the ONLY country whose CO2 emissions are actually DOWN, mostly due to the use of natural gas in place of coal to generate electricity.

Liberals/Democrats are pretty much the same as ancient Mayans, pulling the hearts out of sacrificial offerings to appease the sun gods. Not one whit of difference.

It's a religion. Period.

Bruce Hayden said...

"No one says we can stop the natural change in global climate over time, (just as we cannot stop the periodic reversals of the magnetic poles); those issuing warnings say we must try to curb our own behaviors that are accelerating the process."

And we might start believing them if they acted like they believed their own predictions. It is said that a number of the private jets bringing participants to Hopenhagen (Denmark) had to be parked one or two countries away, because there were so many of them. I have a cousin who was with NOAA until he retired a couple years ago. He was good friends with the ClimateGate bunch, and would stay with one of them whenever he was in England. And seemed to average one international CAGW confab a year. From AlGore down to the lead "scientists", none of them act like they really believe in it.

Big Mike said...

"Greatest Living Scientists" in their own minds and nowhere else.

mandrewa said...

Temujin said, "Try this one. Super Grand Solar Minimum"

See https://principia-scientific.org/why-a-super-grand-solar-minimum-is-upon-us/

Yes, I saw that lecture too (I mean on YouTube). That's the real climatic news for this month and maybe this year. It's unfortunate that Valentina Zharkova is kind of hard to understand. She has a substantial accent and she's an older person, which makes things harder. But really she deserves a great deal of credit.

To sum up briefly she, and the people working with her, have proved that the sun's behavior is ruled by a function, which almost exactly matches what the sun has done over the last couple of decades and that extrapolating this function back we can correlate temperatures on Earth with the behavior of the sun.

If this function and the connection to the earth's temperature holds, then the earth is about four years from going into a cold snap that will be substantial and will enough to cause many crop failures and will last for about 50 years.

She has made a specific, testable prediction and we will know within ten years whether she was right or not.


Big Mike said...

Liberals swear it is. They have computer models, after all.

And Robbie Mook had a computer model that predicted that not only would Hillary Clinton win in 2016, but that Arizona was in play.

John henry said...

And I had such high hopes for you, M Jordan. (sigh)

Seriously, you and I are in agreement on most of this until you stary talking about "trees gobbling carbon" and carbon in the atmosphere.

You have swallowed the propaganda trick.

Everyone knows carbon is icky. Think pencil leads and coal.

Carbon dioxide, which is what the supposed issue is is clean and inoffensive. Beer & fire extinguishers are two examples.

I realize you know better. Don't do the propagandists work by saying "carbon" when you mean co2.

Please.

John Henry

Big Mike said...

She has made a specific, testable prediction and we will know within ten years whether she was right or not.

And that is where the "Greatest Living Scientists" break down. They have made predictions based on their models, those predictions have not come to pass, yet instead of reevaluating their models they double and triple down with more predictions that also do not come to pass.

wholelottasplainin said...

MadisonMan said...

So "retreating arctic sea ice" threatens "our oceans and coasts"?

Actually, yes. There was a very large storm over the Bering Sea, next to the US state of Alaska, in November a couple years back. Because the pack ice had retreated, the waves from the storm did a huge number on the coast. Previous early season storms that occurred didn't damage the coast because the pack ice was there as protection.
***************

A storm is not a statistic, and by itself proves nothing.

A seasonal or periodic retreat of arctic ice as a helluva lot different than a permanent retraction, which is what the Green Weenies keep predicting, year after year.

2012 marked the lowest extent of arctic ice since it's been measured via satellite, but the ice is again within a standard deviation of its historical mean. It hasn't gone away or retreated.

Look here for evidence:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/

Further, the argument is that oceans will rise if polar ice melts. But if all that arctic ice were to melt it would have no impact on ocean levels, because it's floating in the oceans and already displaces its volume. It's a different story for glaciers or Antarctic ice sitting on the continents underneath it; if they were to all melt the ocean levels would rise significantly. But they haven't. Antarctic ice continues to increase, not decrease.

Finally, both Greenland and Antarctic are bowl-shaped, and thus their ice would collect in many places as lakes if they were to melt, and not contribute to sea level rises. On top of that there's a lot of vulcanism underneath the ice in both places, believed to cause localized melting of the ice above. So it's Nature, not humans that is the culprit.

Hey Skipper said...

[Robert Cook:] Those are seasonal weather changes, which is not climate change.

Thanks for the reminder. Kind of like weather isn't climate, until it is a hurricane, then it is.

Clearly, though, we do have some reasons to be alarmed:

If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit from the year 2100 to 2125, according to these projections. This rise in temperature is not expected to be uniform around the globe but to be greater in the higher latitudes, reaching as much as 20 degrees ...

...

The rise in global temperature is predicted to cause a thermal expansion of the oceans and to melt glaciers and polar ice, thus causing sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century.


Oh. Wait. I'm sorry. I misquoted The Science™. The warming, and the sea level rise, will happen not by 2100, but rather sometime between 2025 and 2050.

Except that it won't. Not even close. Any chance the NYT will learn humility from decades of hysterical, propagandistic "reporting"?

And progressives wonder why the rest of us are waving the bullshit flag.

CWJ said...

"Can someone give me the names of the top climate scientists who share Trump's position on climate change?"

No true scotsman, right steve uhr?

FIDO said...

Here is the deal: Trump says things that a lot of us suspect.

About 5 times a year, we get an article about how Climate Scientists screwed up some big mathematical input into their theory...and we have 20 more years. Or they forgot to factor in cloud cover. Or that instead of the expected 3 mm rise in the oceans, we got 1.1.

We have John Kerry tell us that we can spend 5 Trillion dollars in progress to offset .02 of a degree of global warming in 50 years...maybe...he promises.

And we have Al "Me Give You Happy Ending" Gore who tells us the world is about to end in 2000...or maybe 2008...or maybe 2025...or maybe


Every year, EVERY year, the crisis is critical unless you give Candidate Harrumph power.

Well, Candidate Harrumph doesn't get power so the crisis year moves to the NEXT election cycle.


I can't say whether global warming is a scam or not. I do not have the science and frankly, I don't care.


But I can doubt the PEOPLE involved in global warming. Michael Mann is not nailing Warmer Groupies, given plush private jet trips, and put into the Waldorf because 'everything is boring'.


Gore sold us a bill of goods on carbon credits and made BILLIONS off that Indulgence Game.


So Trump can call them on their questionable motives and their wildly changing estimates. A REAL scientist wants the best answers...an ideologue wants to shut down debate.

JPS said...

John Henry,

"you stary talking about "trees gobbling carbon" and carbon in the atmosphere.

"You have swallowed the propaganda trick."

I don't think it's a propaganda trick. It's just a habit. Carbon in the atmosphere is pretty much carbon dioxide (carbon monoxide is fortunately a much smaller fraction). Carbon sequestered in the earth can be carbon, hydrocarbons, carbohydrates, or complex mixtures thereof. To a chemist, thinking in terms of a cycle, it makes sense to think in terms of carbon as the carrier for varying proportions of hydrogen and oxygen. No negative connotations intended or implied (I have none for carbon).

rehajm said...

The story cites Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., Dr. Pat Michaels, and Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore.

Pielke shows his work on his blog page and twitter feed, too. It's disturbing he can debunk on a twitter feed expensive Steyer studies that MSM accepts as fact.

FullMoon said...

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has released its latest doomsday climate report. This organization, part of the federal government, has been in business for a long time, releasing nonsense reports concerning the supposed global warming threat.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

There is no "proper" temp range for Earth. There are, however, temperature ranges that are conducive to the proliferation (or survival) of some currently existing planetary life forms but will also be adverse to the proliferation (or survival) of many other currently existing planetary life forms.

In other words....shit happens.

Always has. Always will. If we (humans) as a species can't adapt and go extinct, then it is just a part of the cycle. If species DIDN'T go extinct we would Velociraptors running through our yards.

If the Continents didn't move or tectonic plates collide, the area where I live at 3500 ft elevation would still be under the ocean.

Shit happens and we are not necessarily a part of it.

Sebastian said...

"Those are seasonal weather changes, which is not climate change."

Except that Michael Mann said yesterday--the only expert, of all people, invited to comment on NPR, shameless as they are--that we can see climate change in current weather.

Hey Skipper said...

About a year ago, the NYT loudly splashed an article claiming that Tybee Island, AL, is succumbing to AGW induced sea-level rise.

There is no doubting that flooding is becoming increasingly common there.

What the NYT failed to mention, either through incompetence or mendacity, is that Tybee Island has a flood control plan. In it, round about page 9, is a tide gauge record going back 150 years or so.

Sea level is doing now what it has been doing the entire time. It was obvious in 1900 that starting around 2000 there were going to be problems.

FIDO said...

Remember the 'scare' movies of the 70s like Soylent Green.

We had that arboretum with 10 whole trees in the entire place, the 'largest arboretum left' or some nonsense.

What year was that set? 2022 with 40 million people in NYC alone.

But frankly, this isn't any different than the people who tied to set policy based on 'The Population Bomb'...which did not come to pass. Or 'Day After Tomorrow', which did not come to pass.

Or the dozens of disaster movies all caused by global warming.


Sigh.

The problem is that MOST people aren't making judgments on global warming by reading IPCC reports...they are making judgments based on MOVIES.

FIDO said...

tried, not tied

Yancey Ward said...

I grew up in Eastern Kentucky, and even as a child (I am 52 today) I was fascinated by the weather, the seasons, and the reasons for all of it. I was the sort of teenager who could watch The Weather Channel in the early 1980s for hours at a time- I would change the channel just to see the Tropical Update at 8 til the top of the hour during hurricane season. For me, I got excited at the prospect of record weather events, especially those I got to experience directly- things like giant blizzards, record cold outbreaks, and record heat waves. To this day, I remember these events and even the details of them.

Were my memories of these events accurate- particularly the temperature events? Yes- at times between 1998 and around the mid oughts, I could verify my memories of these events by going to Weather.com and looking through the monthly calendar data at which one, at the time, could get the record highs and lows for any date on the calendar for a given Zip Code. I would do this whenever a particular memory of a particular time would come into my mind- for example, I would remember the last days of February 1976 as being unusually warm in Eastern Kentucky. However, just recently, I had an occasion to remember the Summer of 1988 in Eastern Kentucky and a particular week in mid July in 1995, my first Summer in Danbury, CT which I will describe below.

I lived in Eastern Kentucky from 1971 til 1988. There were two particularly hot Summers during that time- 1980 and 1988, but 1988 was the memorable one. The area set all time record highs for both the months of June and July that Summer, and the heat continued right into late August. As reported at the time, we were well over 100 degrees multiple times from late June until the end of August. I verified this at some point after 2000 by visiting the historical data at Weather.com- and the data there confirmed my memories of that Summer- the records at that time showed three 100+ F record days in June, 6 record highs of 100+F in July, and 10 such days in August of that year. However, last week, when I investigated these months at Weather Underground, I could find zero stations in the area that reflected these confirmed memories. Indeed, the closest match I could find was a station in Prestonsburg, KY that had exactly one day over 100F in June of 1988, just 2 days in July, and two in August. And let me be clear here- these are the only days of that year where it was reported to be over 100F, not just the record highs for any date as the older data I had looked at showed. Now, am I crazy? Well, no, because if I actually go to Intellicast.com and punch in Pikeville, KY, I can still find the listed record highs for every date on the calendar, and there it shows exactly what I used to be able to find at the NWS stations listed on Weather.com and today at Weather Underground- that the Summer of 1988 in Eastern KY set a total of 19 record highs. I don't know where Intellicast gets those records, but they don't seem to be accessible on either Weather.com or Weather Underground- on the latter two, the Summer of 1988 in Pikeville, KY and the surrounding area is nearly unremarkable.

I moved to Danbury, CT in May of 1995, and that July we had a big heat wave that last 3 days- people in the midwest will remember this because it was part of the heatwave that killed 500+ people in Chicago. Danbury set record highs on July 14th and the 15th of 101 and 106 degrees F. I can still see those records on Intellicast.com, but on Weather Underground, none of the stations with data from that era show even that the days were over 100 degrees- the closest I found was 97 on July 15th that year.

Again, I can't explain the difference between what I can see on Intellicast.com and what I find in individual stations at Weather Underground, but there is something definitely off here because I actually lived through these events, and the data that the stations listed are at odds with those memories and Intellicast.com. Can anyone explain this to me?

Jim at said...

The Earth's climate has been changing for 4.6 billion years.
Deal with it.

Bruce Hayden said...

"Wait, you could ask: Won't some of that increased moisture condense to clouds that block incoming light and heat? The answer is, Shut up, denier; who's paying you? No, sorry. That's what the activists say. A sane and sober scientist might say, Well, we've modeled that, and most of our models say that on balance the effect will be some increased warming on top of the CO2 effect. Truth be told, we're really far from sure how much, but probably some. And a cautious scientist might reply, But what about the models that didn't show that at all? What assumptions underpinned those, and how do you know those were wrong?"

What bothers me is that the models being pushed are the ones that show the desired result, and not the ones that have tge best results. The basic problem is that most of these models do a bad job at both forecasting and hindcasting. And now the IPCC is trying to use models as half of their official climate temperature reporting.

Models are simplifications of reality. Climate models are gross simplifications, since actual calculation of the present is computationally infeasible, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future, and that would be necessary to accurately even start predicting the future. Not only do we have insurmountable computational problems, but we really don't adequately understand all of the underlying natural systems. For example, one of the big spoilers is that the oceans are a massive heat sink. We don't really know how much heat is sunk there, or truly understand all the mechanisms in play when the heat is moved around, sunk, and sourced. At least they are trying to model that - a decade or so ago they weren't yet doing that.

A year or two ago, someone applied the tools that you learn in business school to the problem. They took 4 or 5 inputs, including solar radiation, El Niño/la Niña, I believe ocean temp, and CO2, with global temperature as the output, then looked for multivariate correlation. Everything except CO2 combined statistically correlated together with the resulting global temperatures. The point is not that CO2 doesn't have an effect, but rather that it doesn't appear to be one of the primary drivers, and that statistically, given the uncertainty of the data, it is probably statistically impossible to separate out the effects of CO2 from the statistical noise left over after the primary drivers are accounted for.

And talking about statistical noise - that graph I mentioned above plots yearly global temperatures. But what is really being plotted? Turns out it is the average of the daily high and daily low averaged over a year, from a thousand or two recording locations around the world that tend to be mostly in industrial countries, near big cities that have been heating up themselves through what is known as the Urban Heat Effect. There are places where data points are dozens of miles apart, and places where they are many hundreds of miles apart. And that is on land - a significant majority of the surface of this planet is water in some form, and there the recording locations are both extremely scarce, and move around a bit. All condensed into a single number per year. Any halfway decent statistician would laugh at the attempt - all this averaging of average averages doesn't eliminate the error component - it multiplies it. Esp since we know that much of the underlying data is not normally distributed (for example, just think about how temperatures are distributed around a day, or a year, and if the underlying distribution isn't normal, then the average of a daily high and low has no real statistical value, nor does the average of these averages, etc). Again, GIGO. At least over the last almost 40 years, we now have satellite data, which doesn't have these problems - except that apparently the satellite based databases were calibrated and tweaked using the unreproducable HADCRUT database discussed above that was based on these statistically questionable values.

Ken B said...

Yo, HARDIN
Thanks for the Gresham link. Looks good.
The overwhelming popularity of TED suggests a variant of a certain law at work: bad lectures drive out good.

Bruce Hayden said...

Let me correct my last diatribe a bit:

Instead of:
"Everything except CO2 combined statistically correlated together with the resulting global temperatures."
Try this:
"All of the other factors, excluding CO2, combined together, statistically predicted the resulting global temperatures.CO2 level didn't statistically help or hurt determining those values."

This is the sort of analysis, taking a number of potential drivers or predictors, and looking for multivariate correlation, that MBAs are taught to perform when they don't really know what is correlated with what, or what are the statistical drivers. It is, essentially, a reality check on the CO2 driven CAGW Theory, and it failed.

Patrick Henry said...

I think we're going to be worried about cold more than warm: https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2018/09/27/the-chill-of-solar-minimum/

Of course, the True Believers™, will say that this will "mitigate" man-made global warming. Heh... we'll be lucky if we can possibly do anything to mitigate the sun being cold.

mandrewa said...

Yancey, that's a remarkable account. And I believe you. I personally have just stopped paying attention to the alleged thermometer records on land. Even if people weren't playing games I would still think that the satellite record would be far superior given that it covers 96% of the earth and covers this whole space with the same instruments.

But people do seem to be playing games. And I just do not how to think about that. It's like what can you trust?

I don't entirely trust Tony Heller as a source. I'm aware of some flaws, but still he does a pretty good job of making it clear just how much (most of it) of the temperature rise in the data is actually adjustments to the data.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0l3tymEagc&t=165s

stevew said...

Calling it a diatribe is a bit harsh. I found your comment to be a quite clear and articulate examination of the point of view of the AGW Climate Change skeptic (aka: denier).

Comanche Voter said...

And the beat (and the bullshit) goes on. Time Magazine had a cover story in 1975 that told me a New Ice Age was coming. Well they haven't peddled that angle in the last dozen years or so.

And as for trees and carbon. In fact a tree does store a lot of carbon. The enviroweenies in California (and we've got more enviroweenies than trees) are worried about Trump's advice to clear (or rake) the forests. You see when a tree is cut down and decomposes it releases carbon to the atmosphere. Of course if it burns in a forest fire it releases all that carbon to the atmosphere in a short period of time. So what is Governor Moonbeam to do? If he has the forests "raked" carbon will be released. If he doesn't have the forests "raked" and they burn, carbon will be released. It's a quandary.

And finally--you become a "top" climate scientist when you say something the NYT would like to believe is true. Otherwise you're just a climate denier.

hstad said...


Blogger JPS said..."They start with a solid foundation: CO2 traps heat that would otherwise be radiated back to space; other things being equal, more CO2 means more trapped heat, means a warmer atmosphere. This is not reasonably disputed."

Well my friend, you are wrong - the effect of CO2 is largely disputed by scientists. There is much more water vapor than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In day to day weather forecasting, the greenhouse effect from water vapor is important while carbon dioxide is not. The atmospheric greenhouse effect from clouds and water vapor causes cloudy nights to be warmer than clear nights, all else being equal.

"The current atmospheric CO2 level is reportedly 380 ppm. Plant growth slows at 220 ppm and stops at 150 ppm.[That's the level of death for humanity.] Most plants grow 2 to 3 times faster in 1200 to 1500 ppm, but the optimum range is 800 to 1000 ppm."

drtimball.com/2011/co2-insanity-kill-the-plants-kill-the...

gadfly said...

Blogger rhhardin said...

There's a new Gresham lecture on the mathematics of climate science by a guy who works a lot in partial differential equations and meterology, and he definitely buys into everything. Oddly, he's paid for it.

Yessir - and his first love is Climate Models - which he somehow never understands because he hasn't discovered that there is no model yet devised that works when compared to reality.

hstad said...

Blogger mandrewa said..."I would still think that the satellite record would be far superior given that it covers 96% of the earth and covers this whole space with the same instruments."

Wrong! Satellites do not measure temperature - they measure radiance. They are largely mathematical inferences of the troposphere and stratosphere. If it's cloudy cannot measure surface radiance. Plus need to be adjusted to account for planet drift and other instrument measurement problems. Finally, there is no such thing as a Planet wide average temperature.

hstad said...

Bruce Hayden said....12.25pm.

You are correct all of these datasets are models. Real scientists view these models as projections with a major error set among the numbers. Question for all of the "Global Warming" believers - which model over the past 20- 40 years have been correct? Hint - NONE!

Unknown said...

"They start with a solid foundation: CO2 traps heat that would otherwise be radiated back to space; other things being equal, more CO2 means more trapped heat, means a warmer atmosphere. This is not reasonably disputed."

EOD says heat is the quality of being hot; science says heat is the transfer of energy. Could be kinetic, could be electromagnetic. That's important because 'traps energy' is a nonsense phrase. CO2 has absorption and emission responses to different frequencies of electromagnetic energy, and the sun has a spectrum that includes frequencies of electromagnetic energy some of which fall within the favored absorption spectra of CO2, some of which don't.

Patrick Henry said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dust Bunny Queen said...

Thermometer records on land are so widely varied even within a small area. Selective use of those records is an easy way to cheat or bend the data to reflect what you want

We live in a nice valley at an elevation of about 3500 to 3600ft or even higher depending on where you live. Valley floor. Foothill area. Top of a lava bench. etc.

Things that affect the temp and wind readings. Elevation. Vegetation. Proximity to water. Proximity to agricultural land. Positon of the reader on the building. Sun exposure. Shade. Reflected heat from the buildings.

There are multiple weather stations throughout the area that report to a cool website. wunderground.com and everyday we look to see the forecast and current temp.

(lol fore cast)

This morning 7:30 at our house it was 32. The station on the higher elevation was 41. Inversion layer trapping the cold air in the valley floor. The station at the Fire Hall was 28. Same elevation as our house. Why are we warmer. We are near a moving body of water which retains the heat (until a frozen sheet of ice that is) So we have a 13 degree difference IN this little valley.

One of the weather stations in the valley beyond us the temp at the same time was 19.

So....which one of those temperatures are we going to use to alter the lives and economy of the world?

Selective data manipulation has been the main reason that I look upon the "crisis" of Global Warming with a huge amount of skepticism.

Patrick Henry said...

These people really scare me... The sun will do what the sun will do. When it puts out more energy, we get warmer. When it puts out less energy, we get cooler. It's been happening since the sun and the earth began their existence.

But, to paraphrase Glenn Reynolds, I'll believe "climate change" is an emergency when those that promote it start acting like it's an emergency.

Unknown said...

mandrewa sasy:

"give the go-ahead and molten salt reactors would just naturally replace the fossil fuel industry.

The only reason this is not already happening is high regulatory barriers, which in effect price the technology out of the energy market."

As Maxwell Smart used to say, "Missed it by that much." As long as natural gas is cheap there isn't going to be ANY movement to nuclear of any kind. [I wish it wasn't so, I'm a nuclear engineer]

Original Mike said...

I just watched Valentina Zharkova‘s presentation. It was very good, though I wish the data slides had been more legible (not her fault, I’m sure they were legible in the room).

mandrewa said...

hstad said, "Wrong! Satellites do not measure temperature - they measure radiance. They are largely mathematical inferences of the troposphere and stratosphere. If it's cloudy cannot measure surface radiance. Plus need to be adjusted to account for planet drift and other instrument measurement problems. Finally, there is no such thing as a Planet wide average temperature."

It's a long complicated calculation to take the radiances measured by the satellites and calculate what the temperature in that patch of the troposphere was at the moment the radiance was measured. Nevertheless it can be and has been done since 1979. Weather balloons are an easy way to check the validity of the process because you can send one up with a thermometer and independently measure the temperature of a point in the troposphere that the satellite is also looking at. They match.

It's also a complicated calculation to measure the earth's average temperature at a point in time. To do it the earth's surface has to be divided up into patches whose temperature can be measured by the satellite, and each patch is fairly large, and in order to be comparable the patches have to be measured at the same time with respect to where the sun is, and that means you can't talk about the average temperature on a given day, since there aren't enough satellites to do these simultaneous measurements, so in practice the average temperature is expressed as average temperature for the month, since that will give time enough for the data to be collected for each patch at the same orientation with respect to the sum. And of course we are ignoring the top 2% and the bottom 2% of the earth because these locations are out of sight.

But still the average planetary temperature (for 96% of the earth) per month can be calculated, and we have almost 40 years of data at this point.

Bill Harshaw said...

Of course when he's in Ireland, Trump believes global warming is bad enough that the Irish should approve flood walls to protect his golf course from flooding.

gadfly said...

“If there is a causal relation between cosmic ray flux and cloud cover it is expected that the long term variations in cosmic ray should reflect variations in Earth’s temperature and should be important in an explanation of the high correlation between solar cycle length and global temperature.”~ Dr. Henrik Svensmark, 1998

Dr. Svenmark's theory was derived for correlation of sunspot activity, solar winds and cloud formations in our Heliosphere. In 2007, Danish scientists launched a project known as SKY using a high energy particle accelerator beam, which ... confirmed the Svensmark hypothesis.

In 2011, new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth. The research, published with little fanfare ... in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centers for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider which isolated a Higgs particle, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

Yepper, "they've looked at clouds from both sides now, in and out and still somehow" Sol's cosmic rays determine our climate. Somehow sunshine seems right.




bagoh20 said...

Simple question:

Which of the numerous predicted catastrophes of our lifetimes has come true? What is the record of the scientific community on these predictions of impending disasters?

I'm not saying they are right or wrong this time, but history does matter, becuase the record of accuracy is also a scientific fact that should be included in the equation, unless of course being correct in the long run isn't really your objective.

William said...

I'm just glad that I didn't die in a thermonuclear war. I used to have some worries about that. As Armageddons go, that would be far more melodramatic.

virgil xenophon said...

AGW is the biggest hoax since Piltdown Man. To even use the term "Climate Science" is a joke. "Someday" *Climate Science* might reach--at best--the accuracy, predictive value and usefulness of the "science" of Economics, but that day is not now..

bagoh20 said...

Another question:

Assuming they are right, who believes that the UN and the governments of the world will prevent climate change from happening? There are the technical challenges, which are the easiest, there are the political obstacles which are much harder, but most implausible of all is that the people in power positions at all levels around the world would not simply game the system for their own agendas at the expense of the real solution if there even was one, becuase just like me, they don't expect it to be solved either, becuase they know how they themselves operate, and why waste such an opportunity.

Prediction: We will not solve climate change via global cooperation. It will either remedy itself as always, we will adapt to this slowly changing world, or a combination of the two, but nothing is less likely than a political solution imposed on the world. That is crazy talk.

Original Mike said...

”...Global warming is now defined by the IPCC as a speculative 30-year global average temperature that is based, on one hand, on the observed global temperature data from the past 15 years and, on the other hand, on assumed global temperatures for the next 15 yearsonto. This proposition was put before the recent IPCC meeting at Incheon, in the Republic of Korea and agreed as a reasonable thing to do to better communicate climate trends. Astonishingly, this new IPCC definition mixes real and empirical data with non-exiting and speculative data and simply assumes that a short-term 15-year trend won’t change for another 15 years in the future.”

Didn’t the IPCC try this before. Wasn’t there something about tacking on projections to the end of a data series to make their hockey stick graph more menacing? Anybody remember what this was about?

bagoh20 said...

Maybe the craziest belief of all is that we can vote our way out of this "impending disaster".
We've been trying to do that with the national debt for ever, and we just make it worse. I expect the same for this problem. Hey, maybe the climate catastrophe will fix the financial one.

bagoh20 said...

I'm sorry if I seem too flippant about some people's fears. I know you really hold them dear. Bless your hearts.

bagoh20 said...

When faced with difficult questions, I always ask myself WWOCD? (What Would Ocasio-Cortez Do?)

ga6 said...

The lead "scientist" on this new "we are doomed" study is p[aid by a Steyer grant. The study was peer reviewed by another who is the beneficiary of a grant from a Steyer organization.

http://www.climatedepot.com/2018/11/25/scientists-trash-new-federal-climate-report-as-tripe-embarrassing-400-page-pile-of-crap-reports-key-claim-based-on-study-funded-by-tom-steyer/

Original Mike said...

”Can anyone explain this to me?”. Yancey Ward, 12:20pm

Apparently, climate scientists are constantly adjusting the historical temperature data set to remove systematic errors (I believe they call the process “homogenization”, but I may be misunderstanding the use of that term). As a scientist myself I understand the need to apply “corrections” to raw data. To give a trivial example, if you have two thermometers and one always reads 1-degree higher, you might subtract 1-degree from its readings to better reflect reality. Skeptics have been claiming for a long time that these corrections always go in the same direction; cooling the temperature measurements made in the past. I don’t know if that’s true and I would be surprised to find that the data available at a place like Weather Underground reflects these corrections, but your observations suggest that it may.

Two-eyed Jack said...

There are many problems with the concept of climate change in our political culture, but things are far worse in our popular culture. Consider, for example, this movie description I just read (see below). The writer says that hurricanes destroying entire towns is now an annual event.
If fact, no major hurricane hit the US between the Cat 3 Wilma in 2005 and the Cat 4 Harvey in 2017. It is an annual event only in the writer's imagination, because it happened two years in a row after 12 years of nothing. I do not see climate scientists rushing to correct this misimpression, however. In fact I never see any concern that the public is getting ahead of the evidence or relief that previous dire predictions overshot reality. Instead I see concern that anyone would seize upon mere weather events to conjure up an insufficiently alarming vision of the future.

"The Hurricane Heist" -- Budget: $35 million, Global gross: $31 million
Some films are based on concepts the general public just has no interest in thanks to recent events. Take this disaster thriller from "The Fast and the Furious" director Rob Cohen about two brothers who are caught up in a heist to steal millions from a federal facility during a Category 5 hurricane. With hurricanes destroying entire towns in real life on an annual basis now thanks to climate change, this probably wasn't many moviegoers' idea of a fun time at the movies.

Darkisland said...

Sorry M. Jordan,

I am not buying it. If you mean to talk about carbon, say "carbon" otherwise say whatever carbon compound you are talking about. CO2 in this case. It is sloppy and confusing to do otherwise. It has become a shorthand, even for scientists (I gather you are a chemist?) like yourself but it is wrong.

It would be wrong even apart from the warmist propaganda message. If you were speaking of methane (carbon and hydrogen) you would not say "carbon" and expect anyone to know what you mean, would you? Water vapor is, allegedly, an important greenhouse "gas" (yeah, it's not a gas). It is 2/3 hydrogen. Would you speak of atmospheric hydrogen and expect anyone to figure out that you are speaking of water vapor?

No, calling CO2 "carbon" is wrong on so many levels and should never be condoned. Especially by someone like yourself who knows better.

I am not trying to pick a fight with you. I think we agree mostly on the warmist hoax and I think we agree because we have both looked into the science of it and found it wanting. But I do think you are wrong here and will correct you as I correct everyone who I find saying carbon instead of CO2.

Another issue, related to the propaganda of climastrology, is how CO2 is expressed. I virtually always hear it expressed in ppm (parts per million) I've been working with gases and compressed air for more than 50 years in various capacities including distillation of air into LOX and nitrogen and mixing of diving gasses. I have never heard any component of air expressed in ppm. One could,of course. There is nothing technically wrong with doing so. It would just be a bit clumsy to express nitrogen as 780,000ppm, or oxygen as 21,000ppm, or argon as 9,000ppm (all rounded).

No, we express them as percentages (parts per hundred). 78%N, 21%O 0.93% Ar etc.

But that makes CO2, 0.04% of air, look harmlessly small by comparison. So they say "CO2 IS 400PPM!!!!! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!"

I've even seen article, by supposed "science" reporters that, in the same paragraph would talk about 21% oxygen levels and 400ppm CO2 levels as if one was high compared to the other.

None of this is anything to do with you, M. Jordan. Just another pet peeve to get off my chest while I am sitting around waiting for a tech to connect 2 wires so I can continue working.

The mountains of Costa Rica (10 degrees north) sure look beautiful out the window. No global warming here. It is cool enough that I am wearing a sweater over a long sleeve dress shirt for comfort outside.

John Henry

Jim at said...

those issuing warnings say we must try to curb our own behaviors that are accelerating the process. - Cook

Yes. And just as soon as they start curbing their own behaviors, I'll start with mine. And not a moment sooner.

But we know that day will never come.

Darkisland said...

If fact, no major hurricane hit the US between the Cat 3 Wilma in 2005 and the Cat 4 Harvey in 2017. It is an annual event only in the writer's imagination, because it happened two years in a row after 12 years of nothing. I do not see climate

Or, in the hurricane belt here in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico went 19 years without a major or a minor hurricane (Georges 98 to Irma & Maria in 17)

Normally would get one, albeit relatively minor, every 5-10 years.

John Henry

mandrewa said...

Original Mike said, "Didn’t the IPCC try this before. Wasn’t there something about tacking on projections to the end of a data series to make their hockey stick graph more menacing? Anybody remember what this was about?"

I think I know what you're talking about -- I don't think you've quite remembered it right -- but it all goes back to the wonderful Michael Mann and his hockey stick. The hockey stick was constructed out of a combination of tree ring data and thermometer data, plus other things. The issue I think you are recalling was that Mann's tree ring data shows a significant drop in temperature at the end of his series. So he just chopped off the tree ring data showing falling temperatures and replaced it with thermometer data to make his hockey stick. (And all of this in paper that failed to adequately explain how he had generated the hockey stick.)

This was just the beginning of the absurdities buried in the hockey stock. Another part that I recall was where temperature estimates where allegedly based on the rings from something like a thousand trees (I don't remember the number) but Michael Mann had neglected to explain that he had applied a mathematical transform that flatlined the data from most of the trees so that in reality his temperature reconstruction of the world's temperature for a significant number of years was mostly coming from just one tree.

This and other wonderful examples of what real climate scientists do can be found at the website Climate Audit. It would take months to read it all because the two things I just mentioned are just the beginning.

viator said...

Judith Curry opines

Original Mike said...

That sounds right, mandrewa. I highly recommend to those interested a book entitled “The Hockey Stick Illusion” by A.W. Montford.

Darkisland said...

Blogger mandrewa said...

I would still think that the satellite record would be far superior given that it covers 96% of the earth and covers this whole space with the same instruments.

But there are still serious problems with the satellite data. The instruments degrade over time indicating hotter than actual temperatures. This can be compensated for if they knew exactly how much compensation to make. The problem is not that they degrade but that they degrade in a not perfectly predictable way. They are, with compensation, probably OK to +/- 2 degrees or so. They are not OK to make statements about an increase of hundredths or even tenths of a degree.

Even so, they are much better than the temperatures collected over the past 150 years or so based on surface readings which are total shit. May (or may not) be accurate to within +/-5 degrees or so.

John Henry

viator said...

The short answer. "Global warming" is a cult. They betray all the behavioral characteristics of a cult.

When Prophecy Fails

n.n said...

Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is a prophecy. Anthropogenic Global Warming is a political myth based on extrapolation or inference of an effect (i.e. radiative forcing) observed in isolation, sampled in parts per million, then estimated with incredible accuracy at global proportions in the wild. Global Warming is a statistical average and does not represent a real quantity. Climate Change is a truism.

Robert Cook said...

"Shit happens and we are not necessarily a part of it."

Why would you think we're not part of it? Everything that happens on the planet is part of it in one way or another, to one degree or another.

Darkisland said...


Blogger Unknown said...

EOD says heat is the quality of being hot; science says heat is the transfer of energy.

First one is just flat wrong. There is "sensible heat" which could sort of meet that definition but then there is latent heat that does not. A 1# block of ice will warm 1 degree for every @ 1/2btu transferred to it (sensible heat). Then it will get to 32 degrees (ice) and sit there until it absorbs 144 btus and transforms into a pound of 32 degree water. That 144btus caused no change in temperature or "hotness". It was latent heat.

Caveats for standard conditions, pure water and so on.

Nor would I agree that heat necessarily involves any transfer. It often does but certainly doesn't have to.

Heat is a measure of the quantity of energy contained.

Above greatly simplified.

Robert Cook said...

"I'm just glad that I didn't die in a thermonuclear war. I used to have some worries about that."

You still might.

JPS said...

hstad,

"Well my friend, you are wrong - the effect of CO2 is largely disputed by scientists. There is much more water vapor than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."

The premise of my comments is that the effect of CO2 *by itself* would be fairly well understood and surprisingly small; and that catastrophe scenarios assume that water vapor (of course much more abundant and, due to massively complicated questions of vapor concentration versus cloud formation, much less well understood) will multiply that effect.

John Henry, 3:03:

I think maybe you are answering me and not M Jordan. I answered your point on carbon even though you weren't talking to me, so to speak. That's another discussion, I have to go now and I still think referring to "carbon" is defensible shorthand. If that's what you're focused on, then you see the other elements as reversibly gained and lost in the course of an established cycle. It doesn't have to be misleading, nor is it intended to be. But I can quickly address this:

"It would just be a bit clumsy to express nitrogen as 780,000ppm, or oxygen as 21,000ppm [210,000 ppm or so], or argon as 9,000ppm (all rounded).

"No, we express them as percentages (parts per hundred). 78%N, 21%O 0.93% Ar etc."

To me that's just convenience. I express dinitrogen in percent, CO2 in ppm, and ambient CO in ppb (luckily).

"But that makes CO2, 0.04% of air, look harmlessly small by comparison. So they say 'CO2 IS 400PPM!!!!! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!'"

You're right, as far as that goes. Just remember that N2, O2 and Ar cannot absorb infrared radiation. So yes, CO2 is only 400 ppm, but the difference between 280 ppm and 400 ppm is not necessarily negligible when roughly all the rest of dry air is IR-silent

See the base I stole? Dry air. Right. Real air isn't dry, as I don't have to tell you. Which ties in with that other greenhouse gas, which absorbs much more broadly and is much more abundant, from the discussion above.

tcrosse said...

"I'm just glad that I didn't die in a thermonuclear war. I used to have some worries about that."

You still might.


Yeah, if Hillary ever gets her hands on the button.

Yancey Ward said...

Just to give some links to what I was describing above, here is the Danbury, CT data for July of 1995. It the NWS station at the municipal airport, and is designated KDXR. It is the station for which you get the Danbury, CT temperature for news reports and Weather.com. It used to be the station that reported the record highs for the dates of July 14th and July 15th of 1995 of 101 F and 106 F respectively, the latter of which was an all time record for the station itself. The last time I checked this station in the mid 2000s, it showed exactly those values at Weather.com, but today the highs are listed as 95 F and 97 F respectively accessed through Weather Underground (you can no longer get this data via Weather.com).

Now, I thought maybe I was just misremembering the data (I didn't really believe that, but humor me), but, no- if I Google "Danbury, CT record highs", the top search result takes you to Intellicast.com where you can click on the month and get a spreadsheet with the averages for a date, and the record highs and lows for those dates. Here is July for Danbury, CT, and it shows exactly what I remembered from those dates in July 1995- the record high for July 14th is 101 F from 1995, and the record for July 15th is 106 F.

Now the question is- where is Intellicast getting those record highs/lows? I used to find the exact data in the monthly records like those I linked to from Weather Underground, but those no longer exist in the data in that format- only in the list of record highs/lows published by other on line services. What I suspect has happened is that the temperatures from the past have been adjusted downwards within the data set for weather reporting station, but the separate list of record highs/lows still shows the old data.

chuck said...

> 280 ppm and 400 ppm is not necessarily negligible

Bear in mind that the effect goes as the log of the concentration if the feedback is negligible.

tim in vermont said...

Bear in mind that the effect goes as the log of the concentration if the feedback is negligible.

Of course all negative feedbacks are minimized or ignored and positive feedbacks are exaggerated. The possibility that in a hugely complex system the feedbacks on average cancel out is excluded because that’s no way to end capitalism. It doesn’t help “the cause” as they called it in the Climategate emails.

tim in vermont said...

hose issuing warnings say we must try to curb our own behaviors that are accelerating the process. - Cook

Yes, let’s end captitalism for a command economy like fascism or communism.

tim in vermont said...

Just think of how the hundreds of millions of deaths caused by collectivist ideologies like fascism and communism have lessened the problem!

William said...

Well, if I should die in a thermonuclear war, I will have lived an almost full life span. A thermonuclear war can rightly be said to have a disparate impact on young people. Even more annoying, as they sicken and die, they will have time to reflect on what a waste of time it had been to worry about global warming......There's always the possibility of some super volcano eruption or the chance hit by a stray comet. As Armageddons go, climate change is relatively benign. It's a hospice kind of death for the humans on planet earth. What if aliens land and consider us a source of protein or cheap labor?

JPS said...

John Henry, about this:

"I have never heard any component of air expressed in ppm. One could,of course."

I do it often enough, come to think of it, in reference to inert-atmosphere gloveboxes. Under 5 ppm of O2 is acceptable to us. The only time I've ever used 210,000 ppm O2 was for effect, to tell someone their box had crashed, hard. Incidentally, I was interested to read you work with these gases.

Bruce Hayden, thanks for the quite interesting "diatribe."

n.n said...

millions of deaths caused by collectivist ideologies like fascism and communism have lessened the problem

Socialism, oh my. Monotonically divergent. Wicked, even. They have certainly reduced the "burden" (hat tip Obama).

OldManRick said...

Can you show your work?

How about this? For the present Warming Period to be unprecedented (and caused chiefly by man made carbon burning activities), no similar warm period or extreme cold period can exist in the history of mankind without of course excessive amounts of CO2. That means the Minoan Warm period, the Roman Warm period, the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age shouldn't exist. These period are general accepted by historians and scientists who are not directly labeled as "climatologists". The article at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/29/climate-and-human-civilization-over-the-last-18000-years-2/ (Thanks to Mountainman at 10:09) shows the pre-Little Ice age temperatures greater than the current times.

Because this was a problem for our "unprecedented ACGW" climatologists, they had to disappear from the climate record. So Michael Mann developed a temperature proxy based on Bristlecone tree rings that showed none of the historical warming and cooling events. He because a climatologist hero, SLAPP suing critics, and getting one half a million in Obama's stimulus. (Google it for yourself.)

BUT:

Through the climategate emails we learned about "hide the decline". Any honest scientist would have abandoned this temperature proxy (and it's implications) when the proxy didn't match the temperatures of the period when we had other forms of measurement. Instead Mann and the CRU crew tried to hide the fact that the proxy didn't match known reality with the infamous "hide the decline".

So let's look at the logic train. The Minoan Warm period, the Roman Warm period, the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age did exist therefore the Modern Warming period is not unprecedented therefore there are very probably other things than CO2 "pollution" that could cause warming that should be accounted for. Oh and by the way, there is a very strong correlation between intensity of solar cycles and the Pre-Mann historical climate module.

I'm not saying CO2 doesn't effect the global temperature. I'm saying it has a small impact and any attempts to regulate it's impact will be lost in the noise of other climate drivers. Like the sun which is not a constant during these time.

Narayanan said...

I remember in middle school geography we were taught climate zones - torrid, tropical, temperate and Arctic with latitude range for each.
By climate change are we saying the zones now are changing latitudes?

M Jordan said...

@John Henry: “Don't do the propagandists work by saying "carbon" when you mean co2. ”

Point taken.

Narayanan said...

Would it not be more informational if data can be used to generate *average* temperature for 1degree` latitude bands instead of global *average*?

Narayanan said...

Or plotting isotherms!!

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

@ Bagoh

Maybe the craziest belief of all is that we can vote our way out of this "impending disaster".

That's the idea. The Party knows how to punish, tax and punish until we are washed clean. Meanwhile, they drive off in their fancy fleet of cars, on their way to the airport.

Hey Skipper said...

[Old Man Rick:] How about this? For the present Warming Period to be unprecedented (and caused chiefly by man made carbon burning activities), no similar warm period or extreme cold period can exist in the history of mankind without of course excessive amounts of CO2. That means the Minoan Warm period, the Roman Warm period ...

Go to the Gutenberg Project, download Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", Volume One.

Search on [ice].

And you will find several pages describing significant climate changes in Europe during Roman times that were well and extensively documented.

But not enough for Mann, apparently.

Seeing Red said...

Wasn’t Mann quoted that he didn’t have an explanation for the decline?

OldManRick said...

Hey Skipper

There's lots out there if you look. Check out the Park Brochure for Glacier Bay provided by the National Parks - https://www.akgeo.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Fairweather-Visitor-Guide-2018.pdf and https://www.nps.gov/images/Glacier-Bay-Inset-Detail-Map.jpg In the 1600's it was a river valley. The Little Ice Age came and in about 60 years the glacier races 60 plus miles to the ocean. By 1750 to 1780, the glaciers went all the way to the Icy Strait. In the next 120 years to 1907, the glacier retreated back over 60 miles. From 1907 to present it has barely retreated 5 miles despite "unprecedented" global warming.

As far as the Medieval Warm Period, here's a bunch of studies confirming its existence.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php

Like I say, if they exist, then "unprecedented" global warming doesn't exist.

MadisonMan said...

@Yancey, 1988 was famously hot here in Madison too. Only summer with 100+ degree days in June, July and August. It 102 on moving day in mid-August for me. That was brutal. There was also a 40-day stretch with no measurable rain before Summer began.

1995 was also super hot. That was the year we had a low of 83. Only time I've ever checked into a hotel to cool down -- our house (no a/c then) was that hot .

This site is a great source for weather data. As for the vagaries of extreme records you're seeing, I suspect a change in siting. Was a new airport built?

Original Mike said...

”There was also a 40-day stretch with no measurable rain before Summer began.”

They say the sense of smell produces powerful memories. To this day I remember the delightful wet smell the evening it finally did rain.

Gospace said...

They start with a solid foundation: CO2 traps heat that would otherwise be radiated back to space; other things being equal, more CO2 means more trapped heat, means a warmer atmosphere. This is not reasonably disputed.

Not a solid foundation. It has been demonstrated that CO2 traps heat in a closed system. That is, in a box. The atmosphere is an open chaotic system. Historically, there seems to be no link between CO2 concentration and climate. Of course, both are not measurable directly 4000 years ago. Or for that matter, the 1900 or even 1910. Also, as concentration of CO2 increases, the amount of heat it can trap is reduced. With an upper limit, after which increasing CO2 has no further effect. I just tried looking that up, but search engines make that number hard to find.

Yancey Ward said...

MadisonMan asked:

"As for the vagaries of extreme records you're seeing, I suspect a change in siting. Was a new airport built?"

No, no new airport. I don't doubt the instrumentation has been updated since 1995, but that doesn't explain how 101 and 106 became 95 and 97- it isn't like the new equipment could go back in time and take the temperatures on those days- you are stuck with the old data unless you use the readings of the new equipment to adjust downwards the data collected by the old equipment. Perhaps on the day of replacement, the old equipment was showing readings 5-6 F higher than the new equipment- one could naively (I believe this, by the way) assume the old equipment was always reading high, and thus it is "correct" to adjust temperatures downward from the readings in the past. Perhaps this explains the disappearance of the extremes I remembered, but can no longer find in the data collections for a particular site, only in the extreme lists that are created as a separate file that has not been adjusted at all.

So, is there a reasonable explanation for adjusting downward those extremes from July 14th and July 15th 1995 in Danbury, CT? Was it really not 101 and 106 degrees F? Since I experienced both of those days vividly, I can assure you that it was 106 degrees F on July 15th in Danbury, CT- I spent part of the hottest time of the days outside and I lived only a quarter of a mile from the weather station itself on the other side (north) of I-84. Unless all of my experiences of temperatures in excess of 105 degrees F are incorrect, then the data displayed now is just flat out wrong by a large amount. It isn't like that day was the only 105+F temperature I have experienced- I have collected over 20 such days in my life, and they all were memorably similar.

Yancey Ward said...

When the historically memorable data has been adjusted downwards, how can I even know today what was done on the days in 1995 where, lets say, the high was only 82 F and the low was 65 F?

The things I am finding lead me to distrust the entire data sets, and I don't see how you win that trust back.

As an exercise, I did look up some of the record cold dates I remember from the past, and I don't find the same problems- the record lows I remember are still there in both type of data sets- at least the data sets don't disagree with each other when talking about record low temps from the past.

Yancey Ward said...

MadisonMan,

I took the time to compare Intellicast's lists of record highs for Madison, WI with the dataset that tops Weather Underground's list for Madison, WI. There are discrepancies, there, too, and all in the same direction- the past is cooler when you compare Intellicast's record highs from 1988 with the Dane County Regional Truax station. The discrepancies aren't as extreme as those I found for Pikeville, KY in 1988 or Danbury, CT in 1995, but the are there to the tune of about 0-2 degrees cooler in the monthly data set compared to the record high list. The problem, though, is that I have never checked Madison, WI in the past, so I don't know how closely the apples and the oranges seem to each other. In the case of the Danbury and Pikeville area stations, I am certain the data has been changed for specific stations because I have looked at them in the past.

Patrick Henry said...

Lower Case "c" Chuck mentioned the ozone and freon.

I remember doing a bit of research about this. As I recall, DuPont owned the patent on Freon and that patent was expiring. Just about the same time, "research" was produced showing that freon had an impact on the ozone hole. DuPont also held the patent for freon's replacement... something that wasn't as efficient and in some ways worse for the environment. But, by getting freon banned, DuPont was able to guarantee a market for their "improved" product.

I also recalled DuPont funded much of the research...

Since then, I've been a bit skeptical. As they say, follow the money.

Tom Grey said...

I keep waiting for the climate alarmists to explain why we had Big Ice Ages, and then the earth warmed without much man-made changes.

And, very importantly, why there was a Little Ice around 1500-1800. Age, "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

"Several causes have been proposed: cyclical lows in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, changes in the ocean circulation, variations in Earth's orbit and axial tilt (orbital forcing), inherent variability in global climate, and decreases in the human population. "

I believe its the Sun.
I believe Prof. V. Zharkova is correct about the sunspot Maunder Minimum having a big effect with less magnetic flux from the sun causing more cosmic rays to disturb low level clouds and reduce global heat retention. IOW cooling.

Plus, she says such a period of low sunspots is already coming, and we should see more of it by 2020-2053. Her models were correct about sunspot prediction for cycle 24 -- only a couple of the over 100 predictions were accurate on this.

No IPCC climate prediction has yet been accurate; each 10 year range has seen, 10 years later, lower temp than the predicted allowable range. ALL those models are too wrong to be believable.

I believe, strongly, that CO2 is going up. The climate will be changing.
A) we need more nukes for power.
B) we need more water control for droughts and flooding -- this is far more important than a carbon tax.

viator said...

“Properly supporting the contention of scientific dishonesty has been difficult, however, due to the confidential nature of much of the government’s internal communications and the obvious reluctance of civil servants to speak out. However, as a result of a recent Access to Information request, scientific dishonesty and “conclusion rigging” has been discovered in one of Canada’s largest ever science and technology projects – the effort to “manage” climate change and the science that supposedly “supports” the Kyoto Accord. This is revealed by the following analysis of the attached contract report by the consulting company, “The Impact Group”, and related internal communications by Environment Canada’s (EC) Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) and others on the department’s “ADM Committee on Climate Change Science.”
Kenneth P. Green – Resident Scholar and Chair in Energy and Environmental Studies, Fraser Institute

FIDO said...

There was a 'scandal' in Australia that the media covered...with a pillow until it died, where some weather researchers were systematically omitting the lowest temperatures recorded.

We had Mann hiding the decline and suppressing any contrary evidence.


This does not make them incorrect but it certainly makes them liars, and I won't give trillions of dollars in 'power' to unelected liars like that.

FIDO said...

Wrong! Satellites do not measure temperature - they measure radiance. They are largely mathematical inferences of the troposphere and stratosphere. If it's cloudy cannot measure surface radiance. Plus need to be adjusted to account for planet drift and other instrument measurement problems. Finally, there is no such thing as a Planet wide average temperature.

I have a scale. My scale is probably not error free. But my scale always makes the SAME ERRORS.

So while I am not sure what my exact weight is, by comparison, I can see if I am going up or down in weight just by reading the same errors.

If my wife buys a new scale, it will take me months to establish any new 'trend'

This was the same bullshit done by Obama, changing insurance metrics when he shoved Obamacare up our asses: we could no longer measure 'insurance' by the same old error filled metrics. All our old data was essentially destroyed...like Michael Mann and East Anglia did.

So while satellites are not 'perfect', I would trust their error prone average far more than English and Australian ideologues to take their measurements.

Original Mike said...

@Gospace. - This may be helpful: Doubling CO2 and basic physics

walter said...

Blogger Tom Grey said...
No IPCC climate prediction has yet been accurate; each 10 year range has seen, 10 years later, lower temp than the predicted allowable range. ALL those models are too wrong to be believable.
--
They don't realize how much in common they share with Harold Camping.

bbkingfish said...

Is it supposed to be surprising that a bullshitter would disagree with a bunch of scientists?

Really not getting Adams' point here.

Bruce Hayden said...

“Really not getting Adams' point here”

I suspect that you are being deliberately obtuse here. His point was that the master bullshitter is an expert at detecting bullshit, which he did here. Interestingly to me, it has gotten to the point at Althouse that no one seriously debates that much of what we hear about AGW, AGCC, etc by the “scientists” and “experts” is exactly that - bullshit.

walter said...

When the many other countries who sneer at Trump's take match or better our emissions reductions, then we can discuss whether this isn't entirely a ruse to diminish the U.S.