by Judith Curry
Until recently, there was little recognition within Japan’s science policy circle of the need to discuss the role of science in government policy-making. A rather innocent notion that the established knowledge and wisdom of scientists would ensure proper decision-making was prevalent. – Arimoto and Sato
There is an interesting article in a recent issue of Science: Rebuilding Public Trust in Science for Policy Making, by Tateo Arimoto and Yashusi Sato. Some excerpts:
Until recently, there was little recognition within Japan’s science policy circle of the need to discuss the role of science in government policy-making. A rather innocent notion that the established knowledge and wisdom of scientists would ensure proper decision-making was prevalent.
The great earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident that occurred in March 2011 induced a radical alteration of such a simple, optimistic view on science in policy-making. In the nation’s bitter struggle for recovery, scientists sometimes cre- ated confusion by supplying divergent rec-ommendations on evacuation, food safety, and cleanup. Public confidence in the impartiality of scientists faltered when peo- ple suspected that some of them were too easily endorsing government views. Scientific societies did not have access to critical information and failed to be systematically involved in the national effort. Polls have shown that public trust in science in Japan was damaged.
Installing a proper framework for ensuring its effectiveness and integrity to secure public trust in, and support of, science is becoming an urgent task in Japan.
In Japan, the fourth 5-year Science and Technology Basic Plan, adopted by the cabinet last August, specifically stated the need to set up basic principles with regard to the relations of science and technology to policy-making. Recently, the Japan Science and Technology Agency’s Center for Research and Development Strategy, a semipublic think tank, issued a policy proposal calling for measures to ensure the effectiveness and integrity of science- based policy-making in Japan. The proposal features a draft of general principles on science-government relations. Formulated by referring to foreign examples and also taking into consideration Japan’s particular situa- tions, the draft includes 10 principles:
The role of scientific advice in policy- making. Scientific knowledge is an essential element in the policy-making process, and the government must duly respect it. At the same time, scientific advisers must recognize that scientific knowledge is not the sole basis of government decision-making.
Seeking scientific advice in a timely and pertinent manner. The government shall endeavor to identify policy issues that require scientific knowledge in a timely and pertinent manner and act to acquire the best scientific knowledge available.
Ensuring the independence of scientific advisers. The government must not intervene in the activities of scientific advisers. As a means to ensure objectivity and fairness, scientific advisers shall declare their own conflicts of interest.
Awareness of responsibility as scientific advisers. Scientists shall always provide scientific advice for the public welfare and with the awareness of the large influence scientific advice has on the process of public policy formulation.
Achieving broad perspectives and balance. When the government seeks scientific advice, it should strive to secure the participation of scientists with appropriate insight and experience matched to the nature of the issues and to obtain balanced advice based on broad perspectives.
Ensuring the quality of advice and integrating viewpoints. Scientific advisers shall strive for a balanced treatment of observational and experimental results and of cited papers and should seek to improve the quality of scientific advice through peer review. The Science Council of Japan and academic societies shall, where appropriate, endeavor to present high-quality scientific advice by integrating views of the nation’s scientific community. The government shall ensure, as needed, that scientific knowledge used in policy-making has gone through independent peer review by qualified experts.
Proper handling of uncertainty and diversity. Scientific advisers shall provide policy-makers with clear explanations of uncertainties and diversity of views asso- ciated with scientific knowledge. The government shall respect such uncertainties and diversity of views.
Free disclosure of scientific knowledge. In principle, scientific advisers are free to make their scientific knowledge public. They shall do so responsibly, however, in awareness of the large influence that scientific knowledge can have on policy-making and public opinion, as well as on society as a whole.
Even-handed treatment of scientific advice by the government. The government must treat with fairness the scientific knowledge it acquires. It must not approach scientific advice with any preconception, distort scientific knowledge when making it public, or intentionally add wrong interpretations when using advice in policy-making. The government should explain how scientific advice was considered when drawing up policy. It is especially important for the govern- ment to explain the rationales when making policy decisions that are in conflict with the scientific advice obtained.
Ensuring transparency of the scientific advice process. To improve the quality and reliability of policy-making based on scientific advice, the government shall ensure transparency of the scientific advice process.
JC comments: This situation reminds me of the cacophony of scientific advice following Hurricane Katrina. These are some good recommendations. How do you think the IPCC and the climate science-policy interface stacks up against these recommendations?
The problem with the UN is that nobel-winner Al Gore would be appointed to determine what scientific advice to follow–e.g.,
“It’s time for the UN to formally apologize for having legitimized Gaddafi’s regime by electing Libya to its Human Rights Council last year, to the Security Council in 2008-2009, and as General Assembly president in 2009,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based watchdog organization.
“The UN should also apologize for choosing Gaddafi’s regime to head the planning of its 2009 world conference on racism, and for designating Col. Gaddafi’s daughter Ayesha a UN Goodwill Ambassador.”
Tateo Arimoto and Yashusi Sato succinctly stated the key issue:
The “innocent notion that the established knowledge and wisdom of scientists would ensure proper decision-making” was shattered by Climategate revelations in Nov 2009.
Perhaps the remedy is as simple as requiring a few moments of silent meditation, preferably in sunlight, on the source of energy that powers creativity before hurrying to work to try to fit Earth’s constantly changing climate to a computer model that ignores the energy source.
I hope to expand on that issue this weekend here:
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-1292
In Japan nominally, it’s the rising sun, Aho.
“Before anyone noticed, this hypothesis [IPCC’s theory that atmospheric temperature has risen since 2000 in correspondence with CO2] has been substituted for truth… The opinion that great disaster will really happen must be broken.”
~Kanya Kusano
Yes, Wagathon, the rising sun (the crack of dawn) is an almost universal time for making connection with reality before starting the new day.
Since loss of contact with reality is the root of the AGW story, . . . nothing would improve climatology more than meditation as the sun grants each one of us another quantum of life: http://tinyurl.com/yev4ewq
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-1127
I worked with Japanese scientists and engineers on the MITI CCS Programme. They accept consensus assuming experts who adjudge it are competent, not the case for the IPCC ‘consensus’.
There can be very little GHG-AGW by a ‘GHG blanket’ because GHG thermal emission from the atmosphere annihilates most of that band emission from the surface. The physics is simple and is taught process engineers in decent engineering schools: e.g. MIT, Imperial, Cambridge.
The most basic axiom from Maxwell’s Equations is that the net IR energy flow at any point is the vector sum of the Poynting vectors arriving at it. Engineers calculate it as the difference between the theoretical S-B emission for the bodies in radiative equilibrium taking account real emissivity, in the case of the atmosphere defined by GHG IR bands. Kirchhoff taught that this has to be done for every wavelength interval.
There is also a reduction of emissivity because of parallel convection from the same emission sites: the processes are coupled and it is impossible to separate the two heat transfer coefficients analytically.
Anyone who believes that the Earth emits IR as an isolated black body in vacuum betrays lack of basic physics understanding. The real GHE is mostly the rise in temperature needed to overcome reduced surface emissivity.
Us engineering professionals expect a heartfelt apology from those in climate science and other disciplines who persist in their calamitous heat transfer and generation mistakes, born out of ignorance!
Exactly… “A hypothesis that cannot be falsified by empirical observations is not science. The current hypothesis on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), presented by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is no exception to this principle. Indeed, it is the job of scientists to expose the weaknesses of this hypothesis …” (William DiPuccio)
Agreed: it’s junk science, a perpetual motion machine by which the ~40% extra energy gives the imaginary positive feedback yet temperatures are corrected by exaggerated cloud albedo.
Still, it was good value for the politicians, which is they got what they paid for, junk science.
“How do you think the IPCC and the climate science-policy interface stacks up against these recommendations?”
Is that a rhetorical question?
Japan’s scientists warned of extraordinarily high risks of disaster … on a time-scale of centuries.
Businesses and politicians found it expedient to “harvest profits” … on a time-scale of decades (or shorter). :oops: :oops: :oops:
Yikes. :cry: :cry: :cry:
Japan has paid a colossal price for short-sighted business-driven discounting. :shock: :shock: :shock:
The sole force preventing similar business/political short-sightedness in future decisions is not policies or white papers … but rather public anger at short-sighted businesses, and public rejection of short-sighted politicians. :!: :!: :!:
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-202_162-20051370.html
That warning predated the construction of the plant, the one you linked was long after the plant was in operation. Sometimes all you have to do is look around to find out if people are BSing you.
The Government of Japan also had some of the world’s most conservative radiation limits, kinda like the EPA is doing now, which lead to a great deal of confusion when reality sets in. A shipment of sweet potatoes were banded because tests indicated 100Bq per kg of “contamination” which is normal background for sweet potatoes.
Setting limits ridiculously low, the linear no threshold mentality, is just a bad as ignoring history. Seems there is a parallel in there somewhere smilie.
Considering that the CAGW consensus does not wish to allow anyone, especially policy makers, to hear the skeptic viewpoint they fail spectacularly.
“the skeptic viewpoint”
What exactly is that? Do you want your government listening to people who claim the earth is flat? Who claim that they know the sun dunnit, but cant say how? do you want the government listening to people who claim that C02 cannot warm the planet, when the government uses that same physics to build weapons that defend our liberty?
what viewpoint? all of them? Wagathon? Oliver?
here on climate etc we have 30 crack pots, should we waste time listening to Joe’s world?
When skeptics stand up and clearly state that they agree with the facts as we know them– It is warmer; Green house gases cause warming– then they deserve a seat at the table. Until then they are arguing up is down.
The educated skeptical view of one trained in electrical engineering and the practical application of scientific knowledge.
That view is comprised of the following:
1. Climate change with some global warming is true.
2. That CO2 is most definitely a “greenhouse” gas.
3. That the contribution of the greenhouse effect of CO2 to warming is likely a third or less than the consensus view of main stream climate scientists.
4. That today’s climate models even as complex as they are are too dependent on human best(?) guesses at the value and direction of key processes(clouds anyone?).
5. That engineers and scientists in other fields, physics for example, understand the limits of their computer models while it appears climate scientists don’t wish to admit their models are not yet up to providing the answers they are espousing.
A reasonable reply made Mosher go away.
Stephen Singer
Thanks for a pragmatic “engineering” viewpoint. A major cause of Japan’s difficulties was in NOT listening to engineers. e.g., over the problems of locating backup generators where they would be destroyed by tsunamis.
Suggest clarifying ambiguities in point 3. e.g.,
3a) CO2 is commonly held to contribute to global warming, giving a generally accepted contribution of about 1 deg C.
3b) Most projected warming is attributed to amplified water vapor feedback over which there is major controversy.
3c) The greatest uncertainty (>97%) is over the effect of clouds.
3d) Published estimates of climate sensitivity vary by an order of magnitude.
5) could be expanded to include:
5b) Models of global warming are systemically hotter than actual global temperature trends for three decades.
5c) Models inadequately represent natural variations, including missing the probable global cooling over the last decade.
PS Steve Mosher
Springer provides a reasoned “skeptical viewpoint” that I believe are reflective of most scientists who are skeptical on catastrophic global warming claims. e.g., see the Petition Project. IN 2009, the
With their training and responsibilities to society, engineers have good BS detectors! You destroy your own credibility by falsely castigating these as those “who claim the earth is flat”.
Understanding of underlying causes is NOT required to progress science. e.g., Newton accurately modeled gravity – but had no explanation for it. Note that scientists are still trying to come up with experiments to actually measure gravity waves.
We do not have to fully understand HOW the sun caused natural variations to be able to identify that it did so. Discovering those mechanisms is obviously the next major step.
You can’t possibly know how many of those 9,029 signers of the petition project are cranks who do believe the nonsense ideas that Mosher pointed to. It could be 90% of them.
The science document that went along with the petition project was full of pseudoscience. Evidently the 9,029 signers didn’t spot that (although perhaps many of them didn’t read the document).
We’ve already have Burt Rutan who has a document up on his website exposing his ignorance of the subject of climate change with countless errors. He’s a poster-boy for the kind of engineers you are advocating.
From what I’ve seen of assorted engineers on the subject of climate change I have to say keep them well away from the subject. Their BS detectors tend to be extremely faulty. Id rather have scientists, not engineers. Let them build bridges and planes, they don’t seem particularly able when it comes to theory and research.
1. If you think you understand the Sun, then explain the observations and data our government purposely hid or ignored after 1946:
http://tinyurl.com/7t5ojrn
2. Nobody gets to choose participants at the table of life, Steven.
We are all inhabitants on the third ball of dirt orbiting the Sun, a planet covered with water and remarkably excellent conditions for life.
Many skeptics are unwilling to trust our lives and our planet to those who hid, manipulated and/or ignored experimental observations and data like these [1-4] to obtain favors (grant funds) from the government.
1. Peter Toth, “Is the Sun a pulsar?” Nature 270 (Nov 1977) 159-160 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v270/n5633/abs/270159a0.html
2. “Isotopes of tellurium, xenon and krypton in the Allende meteorite retain record of nucleosynthesis”, Nature 277 (1979) 615-620
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v277/n5698/abs/277615a0.html
3. Carl A. Rouse, “Evidence for a small, high-Z, iron-like solar core”, Solar Physics 110 (1987) 211-235
http://www.springerlink.com/content/k26825872rv64411/
4. P. K. Kuroda and W. A. Myers, “Aluminium26 in the early solar system,” J. Radioanal. Nucl. Chem. 211 (1996) 539-555
http://www.omatumr.com/Data/1996Data.htm
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
When “climate scientists” learn stand up and clearly state that they agree that these “facts as we know them” include the knowledge that human generated CO2 has not been empirically proven to be the primary cause of this increase in greenhouse gases, then they will have stepped into the arena of trustworthiness.
Until then, IMHO, they are merely activists – indistinguishable from Greenpeace, WWF etc – and no more (and no less) deserving of a seat at the policy table than anyone else.
As Donna Laframboise has indisputably shown, the IPCC is riddled with activists pretending to be scientists; one of whom, climate modeller and Lead Author, Andrew <climate change is a barrage of intergalactic ballistic missiles> Weaver, has recently declared his candidacy for the Green Party in British Columbia’s spring 2013 provincial election. He claims to have been “informing policy” – and now he wants to “shape policy”..
YMMV, Steve, but in my books Weaver’s views are no more deserving of trust (by government – or anyone else for that matter) than those very few who express the extreme (and non-representative) views you depicted in your opening “volley”!
As Judith noted in a recent comment:
Call it confirmation bias, if you will; but it seems to me that Judith’s views place her in the arena of trustworthiness – and are far more deserving of consideration than those of activists such as Muller, Mann, Gleick, Trenberth, Stocker, Weaver et al and their self-appointed (and/or media-appointed) status as “experts”.
“include the knowledge that human generated CO2 has not been empirically proven to be the primary cause of this increase in greenhouse gases”
There’s overwhelming evidence that the CO2 rise is primarily driven by man.
Ya, moshe, the temperature curve was going up and now it’s going down.
===========
What exactly is that? Do you want your government listening to people who claim the earth is flat?
You know full well that the problem is that the table is already overloaded in the other direction. Green activists protesting nuclear power and pesticides and cell phones and even human presence itself have latched on to the climate argument in an attempt to legitimise their pet concerns.
To that end the sane answer to your attempt at rhetorical question is HELL YES; if you allow the green extremists a seat you’re obligated to seat their equal and opposite counterparts. As with all things the truth is in the center, so if it takes seating the extremes to better illustrate what this is, so be it.
SM says: Do you want your government listening to people who claim the earth is flat?
Who are they exactly? Alarmists keep talking about them; nobody else can see them. Perhaps they should see a therapist instead.
Steven Mosher | October 2, 2012 at 11:35 pm | Reply
“Do you want your government listening to people who claim the earth is flat?”
Do you want your government listening to people who think the earth without greenhouse gases is a flat black body with a temperature of 255K?
Don’t answer. It’s rhetorical. We already know that’s what you want.
Steven,
…… here on climate etc we have 30 crack pots………
When skeptics stand up and clearly state that they agree with the facts as we know them– It is warmer; Green house gases cause warming
The problem for skeptics is that, to admit what you suggest, they’d have to know that the amount of warming has to be insignificantly small. As Judith never tires of telling us the uncertainty doesn’t really allow that conclusion.
The objective of most sceptics is not to understand the science in such a way that allows them to make rational arguments in favour of the safety of continuing with exponentially increasing CO2 emissions, its to stop what they see as a scientific interference in a process which should only be decided by the laws of free market economics.
So I’m not sure if ‘crackpot’ is the right word to describe them. Political ideologue is probably better, but I guess there are those who would argue that these terms are synonymous.
tempterrain…no, you are the ‘crackpots’.
Tom,
You’re probably right. Its a hopeless cause trying to connect with people like Peter Lang and Wagathon and I tell myself I must be mad to even try.
But I’m torn between a desire to just leave the ‘crackpots’ to it, and an unwillingness to just let their unsubstantiated assertions just pass by without comment.
tempterrain, why not take a break and watch the movie Zorba the Greek. Learn about the meaning of the books of this world. Won’t that make you happy? All the best.:
Not true tt – as usual. The direct evidence suggests a roll for greenhouse gas warming that is very much less than natural. Newton’s 4th rule for natural philosophy says we that we should accept this as true or nearly true. If there is uncertainty it is about why and what it means for the future. The next decade or three seems likely not to warm – as is certainly in the literature.
I would certainly gues that you are the political ideologue and that drives you into the cult of AGW groupthink space cadets. If you are quoting webby it confirms – if any is needed – your idiocy.
The direct evidence suggests a roll for greenhouse gas warming that is very much less than natural.
Does this sentence make any sense? If you are saying it is less than mainstream science says it is, then surely this contradicts your assertion that climate is a non-linear chaotic system and future states can’t be predicted?
Maybe, some millions of years ago, a butterfly somewhere flapped its wings and has made the Greenhouse effect exactly what it is right now.
tempterrain, I am glad to see that you took some time off…
“Maybe, some millions of years ago, a butterfly somewhere flapped its wings and has made the Greenhouse effect exactly what it is right now.”
now have some fun and relax for a bit. Glad to see that you enjoyed the flick too.)
As I have said before to you – the system is highly dissipative. The turbulence from the wings dies out within a few centimetres. The concept derives from the name of a 1972 Lorenz paper – His paper “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” introduced the butterfly image, courtesy of meteorologist Philip Merilees, who came up with the title.’
‘Lorenz would thus equivocate when asked whether a butterfly can really cause a tornado. “Even today I am unsure of the proper answer,” he said in a 2008 lecture. The value of the question is the larger point it evokes: that nature is highly sensitive to tiny changes. “The idea has now entered the everyday vision of many scientists across all disciplines,” says Rothman. “They understand that some things are chaotic, and that there’s exponential divergence from initial conditions. They may not voice it, but they know it because it’s in the air. That’s the sign of a great achievement.”‘
http://www.technologyreview.com/mitnews/422809/when-the-butterfly-effect-took-flight/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45727263/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/can-butterfly-brazil-really-cause-tornado-texas/
But at TOA things are very much simpler.
(1-α)H/4 = σ T ^4
Where – α is albedo, H is TSI and, σ is the SB constant and T is the temperature. It is not quite as simple as this – but this is commonly cited – e.g. http://www.geo.utexas.edu/courses/387h/Lectures/chap2.pdf
The major change in the satellite era was in reflected SW – i.e. 2.4W/m^2 less reflected SW and 0,5 W/m^2 cooling in the IR between the 80’s and the 90’s.
‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ AR4 3.4.4.1
This is not about predicting anything but looking at the evidence. You need to have other evidence that is stronger to make any inroad into this idea. You don’t. All you have is repetitive trivialisation.
The current conditions are very much in a cool mode – and these last for decades. Beyond that – there be dragon-kings.
I am a little bore with repeating the same thing over and over to a moron. Do me a favour and make a new point.
OK how about an accusation that you want it both ways?
When you want to present the argument that the climate is unpredictable it all highly non-linear and chaotic. When you don’t, suddenly ” things are very much simpler” and we can show that “it won’t warm for the next decade or three”.
Its all verbal salad of course but highly contaminated with BS.
tempterrain
“Maybe, some millions of years ago, a butterfly somewhere flapped its wings and has made the Greenhouse effect exactly what it is right now.”
Maybe it was a sky dragon instead of a butterfly…
And maybe a flapping black swan wiped it out.
Max
Steven,
You have gone to a strange place, that is non-scientific and ignores the evidence you yourself wrote about regarding climategate.
Skeptics are not, as you should know, monolithic. It is no more reasonable to hold all skeptics responsible for what a few say than it is to call you a kook because Hansen is still rambling about Earth becoming Venus or Chris Mooney claiming Republicans are genetically inferior.
And skeptics, in the traditions of science, only need to show a theory is flawed.
Why are you so lost?
“Republicans are genetically inferior.” ?
I’m a republican so would have to disagree with Chris Mooney. We’re definitely superior to monarchists!
I like this one.
“Ensuring the independence of scientific advisers. The government must not intervene in the activities of scientific advisers.”
Let’s free the poor oppressed scientists from government intervention. No more public funding.
Hear, hear.
GaryM, modern science affirms the Biblical principle that short-sighted political and economic environmental decisions visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”
A specific molecular mechanism by which this trans-generational harm is wreaked is laid out in Dioxin (TCDD) induces epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of adult onset disease and sperm epimutations.
:shock: :shock: :shock:
What is your next morally sobering question, GaryM? :?: :?: :?:
discourse; is this morally sobering, enough for you?
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2012/10/Radicalization-FINAL090911.pdf
Bill of Rights.
check please
Tom, don’t a prudent market regulations serve better to protect present and future generations of children? :?: :?: :?:
The Bible states clearly that this is the proper moral path, eh? :?: :!: :?:
Fan, I think you’d best not try to use scripture.
Old testament teaching holds that the sins of the father can result in pain and suffering for the children, and blessings as well can be bestowed upon children. But, This has nothing to do with individual responsibility and is quite outside what we would call “morality”
More interesting is to question whether there can be a crime against the earth ( not unless its a rational being) or whether I have moral responsibilities toward future ( unborn) generations.
Where did you see a question mark in my comment?
Can you say “non sequitur?”
I knew that you could.
“IAC [InterAcademy Council] came under the spotlight in 2010, when it conducted a review of the operation of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) and made recommendations to reassure its scientific credibility”
So how did that work out? Any lead authors reviewing their own work? Executive Director? Genuine controversies reflected?
[A]t the heart of the IPCC is a cadre of scientists whose careers have been made by the IPCC. These scientists have used the IPCC to jump the normal meritocracy process by which scientists achieve influence over the politics of science and policy. Not only has this brought some relatively unknown, inexperienced and possibly dubious people into positions of influence, but these people become vested in protecting the IPCC, which has become central to their own career and legitimizes playing power politics with their expertise. ~Judith Curry
Thanks, Wagathon, for repeating this quote. To understand the problem:
1. Identify the United Nation’s IPCC properly, UN’s IPCC
2. Find deception led to UN’s formation on 24 Oct 1945
a.) Japan was building atomic bombs to compete with those being built by Allied forces during WWII.
b.) Japan lost three months development time in moving its A-bomb production facility from Nagoya, Japan to Konan, Korea to avoid firebombs.
c.) Japan therefore lost the war. USSR forces captured the site in Konan, Korea soon after Japan’s first atomic bomb exploded on 12 Aug 1945.
d.) USSR leaders kept that information secret so guilt-ridden Allied leaders would endorse formation of the United Nations on 24 Oct 1945.
e.) The USSR gained access to “nuclear secrets” directly from Japan’s A-bomb project, without spying on our Manhattan project.
References: http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-1127
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former Student of P.K. Kuroda
http://tinyurl.com/ojsqkv
“Scientific knowledge is an essential element in the policy-making process, and the government must duly respect it.” “Duly” is critical here. Respect must be earned, it can not be given merely on the basis of the alleged authority of particular scientists or scientists in general. In the CAGW field, many would argue that respect has in many cases been demanded but not earned.
“The government must treat with fairness the scientific knowledge it acquires. It must not approach scientific advice with any preconception.” The latter condition is almost impossible to conceive, there are few subjects which one can approach totally without preconceptions. The onus on policy advisers and decision-makers is to be aware of their pre-conceptions, and take account of them. That is, to be open to the evidence and argument offered, rather than be dogmatic.
All know exactly what nature is doing albeit mostly after the fact. If we do not ignore history we also have far more robust explanations for how Nature really works (e.g., the climate theory of Ferenc Miskolczi and the radiative equilibrium rule) than what is offered by a slavish obedience of Climatists to the blockheaded science of AGW theory.
We also know enough to realize that there are some among us who will be advantaged by wanting the rest of us to live in fear of climate change. Scientific reality says that we can as easily fear global cooling as warming. Philosophically, we know that we should not fear either; we know that fear cannot help us but fear can hurt us.
To what “role of science in government policy-making” are you referring? The tsunami killed tens of thousands of people and caused hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage. What “science policy” would have prevented that? Not building on the coast? That is not a science policy.
If the reference is to nuclear energy, in point of fact, the Fukushima disaster killed no one. Science policy is not germane. Rather, engineering design and economics are the drivers. The pointed headed elitists are irrelevant.
What “science policy” would have prevented that? Not building on the coast? That is not a science policy.
No, it’s not a science policy, but it is a policy which can be informed by science, which what JC was referring to.
Actually it was known widely before the accident that the plants were built based on unbelievably limited resistance against Tsunamis. It would have been fully possible to improve both the protection against Tsunamis hitting the plants and the resilience of the plants after a Tsunami has hit them in spite of the improved protection. Required changes would have been such as improving the supply of reserve power by relocating or duplicating the diesel generators and protecting better the access to certain safety critical components as pumps. At least part of these changes could have been made any time with reasonable cost.
Furthermore there were other weaknesses in the safety planning and those had been noted by international groups which had visited the plant following common procedures for nuclear plants. There was something wrong with the Japanese safety culture.
Pekka Pirila,
Every time you write something about nuclear you display you nuclear phobia. Your arguments are illogical. The Fukushima nuclear accident killed no one as a result of radiation releases. Nuclear, even with the occasional accident, is safer than any other electricity generating technology [1]. Yet all you want to do is spread FUD. Why do you do that?
[1] http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/deaths-by-energy-source-in-forbes.html
Peter,
Perhaps the difference between you and me is that I get much of my knowledge about nuclear from people who operate, regulate or study real operating nuclear plants – and those plants have been among the best performing plants in the world.
You may know also that Finland is presently building one more plant and that two more units are in the bidding / bid evaluation phase.
I’m not a nuclear opponent in a country that does all this.
Pekka Pirila,
Pekka Pirila,
That argument is irrelevant. Everyone knows someone who knows some one in an industry. Listen to the renewables guys and they pull the same argument so support their knowledge. If that’s all you’ve got to back up your arguments, its irrelevant. BTW, you haven’[t a clue about what my experience is.
You are spreading FUD! Therefore, I take with a grain of salt your pontifications about what policies we should pursue.
I think perhaps the issue is not just what actually did happen at Fukushima, but what might have happened.
Just how bad could it have been ?
Peter,
I’m not opposed to nuclear power but I do share the worry of the nuclear industry on the damage that every serious nuclear accident has both directly on local population and environment and indirectly on the industry itself.
My comments on the Fukushima were largely based on information provided by Finnish nuclear safety professionals, several of whom have had direct connections to the Fukushima case.
Without better safety culture than that shown at Fukushima the period of nuclear power will soon be over. With a needed attention to all safety issues the future is much brighter.
Right now the case seems to be that Fukushima was enough to end nuclear generation soon both in Japan and in Germany. Some more accidents would widen the trend to further countries.
Is it impossible for you to understand the importance of an exceptional safety culture for the future of nuclear energy?
Yes the future of nuclear in Japan and Germany has been severelyset back.
But was that sensible or ignorant alarmism ?
And if the latter, does it make sense to pander to it ?
Pekka Pirila,
Your question shows arrogance, lack of objectivity, irrationality and nuclear phobia. You have a perspective that is common for those locked into nuclear phobia. But it is not rational.
I’ve said over and over again that I recognise that there is widespread nuclear phobia. It is a result of 50 years of anti nuke advocacy. I accept that is a fact.
I also recognise, which you do not, that it is an irrational phobia.
Objectively, nuclear is the safest of all electricity generation technologies.
I’ll ask you: is it impossible for you to understand that you are suffering from nuclear phobia? Is it impossible for you to recognise that your arguments are irrational?
You can screech Chernobyl and Fukushima as long as you like. The world cannot run on renewables. So, it will be either nuclear or fossil fuels. Is that too hard for you to understand?
The longer people like you – the CAGW advocates, continue spreading your anti nuke FUD, the longer it will be until the world starts seriously cutting CO2 emissions. It should be clear to you by now we are not going to go the carbon pricing route, so until we have a cheap alternative to fossil fuels, we’ll keep using them. Is that too hard for you o understand?
You yapping on about the consequences of nuclear phobia are irrelevant. What is important is how long it will take until we get over it. Your anti nuke FUD is unhelpful.
Yes there is a back lash against nuclear at the moment. We’ll get over it, just like we go over the fact that planes crash.
It’s so bleeding obvious I don’t understand why people like you can’t understand it.
No industry will ever be free of industrial accidents. So stop trying to pretend we will. Instead, focus on the objective facts. They accidents are rare and they cause few casualties when the do occur. Most of the rest of the costs of nuclear accidents are due to nuclear phobia and a response that is out of all proportion to the actual damages.
Its temporary response and fanned by anti-nukes and people making the utterances you are making. This is the wrong response. We’ve been saying they’ll be safer in the future for 50 years and trying to imply accidents cannot happen again. Of course they will happen again. There will be more accidents as more nuclear plants are rolled out (but less per TWh and less fatalities per TWh). To try to imply otherwise is stupid or dishonest. And to think that more regulation will make them safer is even more stupid. What will make them safer is to allow development and competition so they can go through the equivalent of the development phases passenger aircraft have gone through over the past 50 years.
But all this talk about wanting more safety on the technology that is already the safest of all is just stupid. What the continual FUD is doing is preventing us getting a technology that is far safer than what we have now. How stupid is that?
I do get frustrated with people who suffer radiation phobia. Just as drug addicts do not recognise they have a problem, so do people suffering from an irrational phobia not realise they have it.
Pekka and Tomcat
Yes. Fukushima did add a final nail in the coffin for nuclear power in Germany (and maybe Japan?). It has spilled over into tiny Switzerland, as well.
But the Germans have a history of looking at things through a prism of warped idealism, which sometimes blurs out pragmatism.
The politicians there now refer to “die Energiewende”, a grandiose sounding term reminiscent of the big “Wende” (when Helmut Kohl brought about the integration of East Germany into the Federal Republic – and finally united a nation that had been divided for over 40 years).
What is meant by this “Energiewende” is less clear: (fear-based) getting away from nuclear is a key part, (guilt-based) cutting back on coal (maybe?) is another, (pie-in-the-sky) projections of a wind- and solar-driven power grid is another.
Yet everyone talks about the “Energiewende” like it was the second coming of Christ and there are only a few pragmatical voices that are saying, “Huh?”
[In the background deals are being signed with Poland to construct coal-fired power plants there for supplying Germany, with France for purchasing nuclear power from across the Rhine, etc.]
“Eine verrückte Welt” – or as Asterix said in “Asterix chez les Goths”, “Ils sont fous, ces Allemands”.
Max
Peter Lang
Our posts crossed, but you are right, of course. Nuclear power is the long-term future.
The irony is that the same fear-mongering knuckleheads that are screaming about catastrophic CO2 were the ones screaming about disastrous nuclear mishaps.
Now they have screamed themselves into a corner.
And they have managed to get the entire population frightened out of their wits with the politicians following suit.
The real question for me is: Will the lights have to go out before the light goes on?
Max
Several years ago I was under the impression that Pebble Beds were the future and that the Chinese had a stark technology lead. Franchise the plants and fuel and recover the glass beads was the idea, I thought. What’s become of that?
===========
Atomkraft, ja, danke.
==========
Pekka and Peter Lang,
Can GHG emissions be sufficiently well controlled and at the same time sufficient energy generated to meet modern day human needs without the use of nuclear power?
There’s much discussion about the use of renewable sources, which may, if we are being optimistic, supply 20% of total power needs. What about the other 80%? That’s the real question which politicians don’t want to address. And if it is 80% , may as well it not be 100%?
Of course there are safety issues with nuclear power, but is there any viable alternative to making nuclear power as safe as it possibly can be?
Max,
The irony is that the same fear-mongering knuckleheads that are screaming about catastrophic CO2…..
You’d be terming James Hansen as a “knucklehead” no doubt. Yet he’s adamant that the nuclear option is our only option.
I suppose these kinds of comments are an indication of how ill-informed you guys are.
Max,
I completely agree with your comment.
Tempterrain,
Maintaining a balance between demand and supply of energy at a level of energy price that doesn’t influence economy and well-being seriously is not likely to be easy. The more alternatives are excluded the more difficult it gets. Nuclear power seems to be a very important part of all favorable solutions.
What I have been discussing here is not the objective severity of the risks of nuclear energy in comparison of it’s alternatives or the value the energy produced by nuclear power plants has. The evidence tells that nuclear energy has had a favorable ratio of health and environmental impacts to the societal value of the produced energy even when the accidents of Tshernobyl and Fukushima are included. The fears related to radioactive waste from spent fuel and other materials created by nuclear power are not based on objective facts even to the extent of risk of accidents at power plants. (Nuclear waste can be disposed off with little risks of serious future releases of radioactivity, only the decisions are missing.)
Nuclear power is environmentally a good choice as long as it’s produced responsibly. The nature of the risks is, however, such that maintaining (and getting back) the political acceptability requires an exceptional safety record. As the plants are large and relatively few in number, it’s also objectively justified that exceptional emphasis is put on safety. One of the problems in that is that a good safety culture is more important than very strict regulation, but maintaining a good safety culture is difficult. With the right culture the regulation may be more generic and allow for more flexibility where that does not increase risks. Conversely even an extreme and very detailed regulation is often less efficient in reducing risks than the right safety culture.
Nuclear energy is needed as one of the most promising sources of energy in coming decades (who can tell about centuries). It’s future must not be risked by faulty approach to safety. Both objective safety concerns and general acceptability of nuclear power must be taken into consideration.
Pekka Pirila,
I say you are wrong on this:
That is demonstrably the wrong approach. It has been demonstrated as the wrong approach by 50 years of trying it, yet the fear and paranoia about nuclear power is as widespread and intense as it ever was. The safety record of nuclear is exceptional. It is better than any other electricity generating technology, yet people like you and most of the rest of the CAGW alarmists, demand even more safety. In other words, you want to make it even more expensive than it is now. It wouldn’t matter how safe it is there will always be accidents – not necessarily anything to do with radiation – perhaps just a bus crash with nuclear workers on their way to work. And such accidents will always be spun by the anti-nukes and the media as evidence of terrible nuclear and how deadly dangerous it is.
The plants have 40 to 60 year lives. You cannot make major changes to them during their lives. You may argue idealistically as you do that you can improve the safety culture. It is already exceptional. But too argue the culture in nuclear plants can be made much better than other industries and sustained as such over the long term is unrealistic. There are humans involved and mistakes will be made. Just as planes crash, so there will be accidents and design flaws in nuclear power plants. Trying to pretend there won’t be, or getting idealistic about improving the humans that work in NPPs is idealistic and unrealistic.
Nuclear is more than safe enough already. It is 10 to 1000 times safer than coal generation. Yet we accept coal generation as safe enough. This should make it obvious that safety is not the real problem.
No, the problem is, firstly, widespread, irrational fear of nuclear. That fear cannot be reduced by saying “well make them safer”, because no one believes it. The way to reduce the fear and paranoia is education. But it needs to start with people like you, the CAGW Alarmists and other anti-nuke groups. It is you that needs to change your message and stop encouraging this fear of nuclear and reiterating the nonsense about nuclear being not safe enough and we need higher safety standards.
The second part of the problem is that nuclear is too expensive. It needs to be allowed to compete on the same basis as all other electricity generating technologies. The reason it is too expensive is excessive regulation for negligible benefit. And this is a result of the public fear (stoked and reinforced by the messages people like you propogate). That fear needs to be reduced by education. It could be achieved. The best and fastest way to do that would be for the anti-nukes to change their stripes and lead the way. People like you should be taking the lead to educate them, not reinforcing the message of fear, which is what you are doing.
IMO, the way to reduce costs and improve safety is to remove the unnecessary shackles on nuclear and allow it to compete. Nuclear power needs to go through the development phases like passenger aircraft went through over the same time period (since the 1950s). Consider how many people have been killed in aircraft crashes in that time and consider how the technology has improved its safety record over that time. That is a result of a combination of factors including:
• Competition between manufacturers and countries to build planes that cost less to operate, thus reducing air fares, thus more passengers and more passenger miles, thus more aircraft sales, thus further reducing costs;
• Because of increasing production, more are built and the lessons learnt from earlier models are built into the next model more quickly, so the technology improves faster, costs come down faster and safety improves faster;
• The development of the excellent aircraft crash investigation practices which has had an emphasis on ‘no blame’ so they can find and address the systemic problems;
• Appropriate regulation – appropriate means that a high priority is cost of air fares.
I intentionally put the first two dot points first. The equivalent is needed for nuclear to:
1. reduce costs
2. improve safety
3. get nuclear rolled out across the world fast enough to reduce CO2 emissions at the rate CAGW advocates demand.
Pekka, your advocacy of more safety for nuclear is wrong headed. That is just more of the approach the nuclear advocates have been doing for the past 50 years.
If we keep doing what we always did
We’ll keep getting what we always got
Pekka Pirilla,
Here is how we could get to low cost nuclear:
We need as much competition as possible. Competition improves the technology and reduces costs. We need competition from companies in the manufacturing countries – USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Russia, China. Korea, Japan – building small modular nuclear power plants on production lines like aircraft.
Focus on development of small nuclear power plants is important for several reasons:
• only small power plants can fit easily into most electricity grids around the world
• small units can be ordered ‘just in time’, once demand is assured
• small can be constructed and installed quickly, thus reducing investor risks
• small can be built in factories, shipped to site, returned to factory for refuelling
• small can be manufactured on production lines like aircraft, turned out rapidly and with good quality control
• small leads to faster rate of improvement because more are manufactured and lessons learned are built into the next model more quickly.
• More competition between more manufacturers leads to faster rate of improvement
Examples of small modular nuclear reactors here (see also the ones accessible from the left margin):http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/advanced/hyperion.html
Pekka,
“Maintaining a balance between demand and supply of energy at a level of energy price that doesn’t influence economy and well-being seriously is not likely to be easy.”
Well no it isn’t! And I would suggest that the “not likely” in your sentence can be replaced with ‘absolutely certainly not going’.
If it was going to be easy, there wouldn’t be any sceptic/deniers. The Peter Langs of this world have never shown any intrinsic interest in the science of the atmosphere, or the science of anything else unless there was a financial or military aspect to it of course. So, no prizes for knowing why they suddenly have acquired a concern now.
Neither has Peter Lang the slightest desire to promote the nuclear option. He really doesn’t care one way or the other, but he does like the idea of using the issue to deflect the blame, which will inevitably come, away from ultra right wing climate deniers, like himself, towards those on the left who may disapprove of the use of nuclear power.
Its fair enough to say things like “nuclear energy is needed as one of the most promising sources of energy in coming decades” but, overall, you don’t sound quite so enthusiastic. It’s not that there are decades to spare, giving us time to make this decision in a leisurely manner. We all need to decide if James Hansen is right in what he’s saying, and if we think he is, we need to say the same thing too.
Probably more accurate to say : the government climate scientists of this world have never shown any intrinsic interest in the science of the atmosphere unless there was a financial or political fiddle to it. Same goes for old temp.
tempterrain
You should expand your thinking beyond simply political left/right debates, scientific musings and doomsday scenarios to the field of E-CO-NO-MICS (as Peter Lang does).
There are courses available, I’m sure, where you live.
Max
Max,
Economics is more than just the operation of the free market. Peter Lang’s thinking doesn’t extend beyond that. There is the interesting question of how resources in the world which aren’t owned by anyone should be valued in economic terms.
For instance fish stocks in the oceans. Or the large tracts of rainforests, and their contained ecosystems, which don’t have a well defined ownership.
Of course, the atmosphere is the issue in question on this blog. We all depend on the atmosphere for our survival, yet it has no conventional economic value. I haven’t seen any sensible analysis of this conundrum from a right wing perspective.
Temp
The answers seem strightforward.
The rain forests belong to the country in which the rain forest is located and they can do to it whatever they wish.
The oceans are covered by US law.
http://www.gc.noaa.gov/documents/gcil_crs_oda.pdf
tempterrain
The air we breathe is free.
It’s there for us all to enjoy, man and beast.
It should not be polluted with real pollutants, either toxic to plants or animals or causing irritation, asthma, or other respiratory ailments if inhaled.
In most developed countries, regulations exist (and are enforced) to prevent air pollution. This is unfortunately not always the case in developing or underdeveloped nations
There has been no despot or totalitarian state, to date, that charged its subjects for the air they breathe.
From the posts I have seen, Peter Lang appears to have a fairly good grasp of the most important aspects of climate science as well as the economics of the decarbonization proposals, including the cost to switch to nuclear power, which seems to be the only economically viable alternate for major electrical power generation today.
His analyses tell him that CO2 mitigation can only occur if an economically viable alternate to fossil fuels (such as nuclear) is installed for all new power generation, where nuclear competes with coal (for most locations) – not by simply slapping a tax on carbon (which achieves nothing but adding cost).
The problem here is that Greenpeace and other knuckleheaded green lobby groups have done so much fear-mongering on nuclear power generation (even before the Fukushima incident), that the populace is scared out of its wits and this option is not politically viable in many countries today.
Even if this were not the case, switching to nuclear will have a very limited impact on our climate in 2100, as I pointed out to you with the Hansen et al. scheme to shut down all US coal fired plants by 2030 – this would have a theoretical global temperature mitigation effect of 0.08 degC. Not even measurable.
The truth of the matter, TT, as I have explained to you many times in the past we are unable to change our planet’s climate, no matter how much money we throw at it.
We could completely “shut down” Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Norway plus the EU tomorrow (the only nations still committed to CO2 reductions), and it would have an imperceptible impact on the global temperature in 2100.
Sorry, tt, to burst your bubble – but that’s just the way it is (and Peter Lang seems to understand this).
Max
Rob Starkey,
“The rain forests belong to the country in which the rain forest is located and they can do to it whatever they wish.”
That’s not quite so simple. For example in Brazil the forest can be considered also to belong to the native tribes there, who may not actually realise they live in Brazil and have no concept of ownership in the western sense. Unless we consider them to be sub-human, or untermenschen, we can’t just ignore their prior rights.
The oceans are covered by US law. That’s just a joke , right?
Max,
To say that the “The air we breathe is free” is to just underline that you have no concept of value except in the economic sense of dollars and cents. Yes, some countries, but not all, have laws regarding pollution but you can’t make laws governing the movement of that air from one place to another.
Furthermore to say that “we are unable to change our planet’s climate” underlines your denialism. You seem to adopt a lukewarmer position, when it suits, but this statement is incompatible with even that position. That would be ‘ we are only slightly able to change our planet’s climate’.
But even if we accept that it’s slight, does that mean anyone can change it for free?
Thanks, Kellermfk. Needs repeating.
Interesting. Cacophony from a relatively homogeneous culture. Sounds vital.
================
Japan was deeply involved in the strange sequence of events in 1944-45 [1,2] before the United Nations was formed on 24 Oct 1945.
After the War, Japanese scientists were not in a good position to address fraudulent government science before it finally surfaced in the Climategate scandal of late Nov 2009.
As a former student of Professor Paul Kazuo Kuroda [3], I know that he was deeply troubled by both:
a.) The use of nuclear energy to destroy human life, and
b.) The post-war decision to destroy the integrity of science (and our form of government) in order to hide this most powerful source of energy.
Here’s the rest of this still unfolding story: http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-1127
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
1. David Snell, “Japan Developed Atom Bomb; Russians Grabbed Scientists,” The Atlanta Constitution (3 Oct 1946)
http://www.my-jia.com/The_Flight_of_the_Hog_Wild/Atlanta_Constitution.htm
2. Joe Crankshaw, “Veteran’s spotlight: Vero Beach veteran was crewman on B-29 Superfortress,” TC Palm – Florida’s Treasure Coast & Palm Beaches (29 Sept 2012)
http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2012/sep/29/veterans-spotlight-vero-beach-veteran-was-on-b/?partner=RSS
3. Paul Kazuo Kuroda, “My Early Days at the Imperial University of Tokyo” (10 Jan 1992)
http://www.omatumr.com/abstracts2005/PKKAutobiography.pdf
I regret my failure to close the bold properly.
I will correct and repost this message as a comment on my own web page, together with an expanded reply to Steven Mosher’s dishonest attempt to discredit climate skeptics as “people who claim the earth is flat”,
A claim not uncommon to those who mistakenly assume Earth’s changing climate can be deciphered in total ignorance of the geological record of past climate changes and any understanding of the energy (E), stored as mass (m) in cores heavy atoms and stars.
“act to acquire the best scientific knowledge available.: Good principle, but how?
“act to acquire the best scientific knowledge available.”: Public servants amd politicians may not realize that there is a scientific problem.
“scientific advisers shall declare their own conflicts of interest.” But how do governments ensure they do?
“The Science Council of Japan and academic societies shall, where appropriate, endeavor to present high-quality scientific advice by integrating views of the nation’s scientific community. The government shall ensure, as needed, that scientific knowledge used in policy-making has gone through independent peer review by qualified experts.”: the government should be aware that the universities do not represent all scientists. Universities have their own agendas.
“Scientific advisers shall provide policy-makers with clear explanations of uncertainties and diversity of views asso- ciated with scientific knowledge”: Hopefully.
“Scientific advisers shall provide policy-makers with clear explanations of uncertainties and diversity of views asso- ciated with scientific knowledge”: Governments need to be aware that ‘commercial-in-confidence’ could constrain good advice. Even ‘need-to-know’ in defence matters.
In general we should be prepared to help other countries with adminstrative matters like these.
This is all wonderful.
At the end of the day though, climate science is paid by politics and has huge political significance. Hence politics will tend to get the climate science that serves politics best. By and large, climate science will endorse the claims politics makes in the name of science, since that is how the scientists and projects were selected for funding and promotion in the first place.
This is a funny subject for anyone who has worked for a Japanese company. There is a lot of cultural issues of course, but in a small essence, the Japanese culture is roughly 10-20 years behind fashion of the West. In the early 80s of the US, one could see that early 60s engineering types in Japan. In the 90s of the US, the gap closed.
Anyhow, being part of a Japanese company located in the US, we got our share of visiting engineers providing advice and all that. There was a very small fraction of these guest engineers that I could not get along with or persuade with data in hand to not make a fool of themselves (They have a serious baka adversion). I managed a working relationship with one of engineering, “office” cultural deplomacy and general understanding. He hated my Jeep though.
So, eventually there was an yield improvement project that swept through the company, all regions. This project focused with particulate contamination. Even though we were rated at 10 particles @ 0.1um per cubic foot of air per minute, without personnel activity, we routinely operated at 2 particles (without personal air filters). Anyhow, after Dr. Kirean gave his “pep talk” we were assigned our Kirean trainee and our management told us to support and give the Kirean understudy the red carpet.
We did and after many, many, many tests, studying the particles for every square foot of the fab, the data did not fit a predetermined conclusion. The bag of tricks had a another set of gloves (that he was going to recommend) that actually increased the particulate contamination. He looked bald face at me and said in very rough japanese-english, “Well, it is still a good recommendation.”
I just left the clean room and sought out the visiting engineer and found him in the observation hall (where you can look into the cleanroom). Before I could protest frustration he said “Dr. Kirean’s fab now.” and he walked away.
Wrap up meetings had no challenges and everyone knew the data was crap. Dr. Kirean was the expert.
WebTeleScope
You have quite a lot to say, so tell us your view on what take the layman might reasonably have on
– the endemic, unrepentant alarmist fraud in the higher echelons</iu of climate science as a whole, typified by the Climategate revelations (hiding data, hiding the decline, destroying evidence, etc)
– refusal/reluctance of the remainder of the profession to expel, punish or even really censure the Climategate crooks
– the efforts of the Climategater's universities to bury these attempts to sabotage science by means of official coverups ('Inquiries')
Are you too prepared to overlook all the above as long as it yields the correct answer politically speaking ?
Or are you on the side of science, no matter where it leads ?
I guess no answer means : Webby stands firmly on the side of politics against science, but doesn’t want to say it outright.
Webby don’t wan’t no stinkin’ politics – webby want’s to move out of his mother’s basement but can’t find his stinkin’ pants.
Public confidence in the impartiality of scientists faltered when peo- ple suspected that some of them were too easily endorsing government views. Scientific societies did not have access to critical information and failed to be systematically involved in the national effort. Polls have shown that public trust in science in Japan was damaged.
The government deliberately played down the effects of the disaster and instead produced a catalogue of misinformation, denying that there were any significant problems health then or would be in the future.
The pr for this downplaying of the danger went into overdrive immediately, we had radiation levels compared to taking a plane journey and eating bananas from manipulation of radiation level data, and still in the current public relations misinformation in the example above, ‘that there were no deaths’ from the disaster, and still subliminal in attributing deaths to other causes as here: “But the paper also notes that nearly 600 deaths were reported as a result of the evacuation process itself, mostly due to fatigue and exposure among the elderly and chronically ill.” http://www.newsroomamerica.com/story/262851/stanford_researchers_calculate_global_death_rate_from_fukushima_nuclear_disaster.html
And Chernobyl got a re-airing, again claiming that there were few deaths and the problem was of stress from fear of the disaster. The deformed orphans and huge loss of population notwithstanding.
That the Communist government in the USSR went into overdrive to suppress information and manipulate reporting of deaths and health problems not unexpected, but that these manipulations are now being presented by the non-Communist countries after the Fukushima disaster as if real science data gathering shows there is some common agenda.
That the japanese government continued to expand evacuation radius was of course because there was no danger from the nuclear radiation levels..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/14/fukushima-mutant-butterflies_n_1777180.html
What we need is a dose of reality here. While scientists continue to work to the agendas of governments working to the agenda of the nuclear industry we will continue to be misinformed about the immediate, short and long term affects of radiation. If they won’t tell, find out for yourselves.
So the problem here is not the people distrusting of the science, but distrusting of the science in cahoots with the government, which on investigation is itself doing the bidding of the nuclear industry against the interests of its own people.
And please, physically restrain yourselves from quoting from ‘official science reports’ downplaying the dangers of nuclear radiation, these are produced by the nuclear industry. If you haven’t even noticed that then you’re going to get into a terrible muddle trying to sort out fact from fiction in this.
The real science continues to leak out and spread over Japan. That’s how the distrust of government controlled science became distrusted.
How do they propose to re-build trust in science after that? It’s rebuilding trust in government which is their real problem.
That was Japan, but the parallel is strong. Elsewhere, we still have Climategate deniers and mendacious coverups by the government-funded universities involved. And as long as that state of affairs persists, trust simply makes no sense.
The principles are good principles but difficult to apply. The fundamental difficulty of choosing the right advice or choosing the right people to give advice remains. Purposeful impartiality may in most cases be recognized in when the interaction last over a long enough period but identifying scientists who are sincere but err seriously may sometimes be more difficult.
Accepting all views with equal weight on controversial issues like the climate change is certainly not a good choice but how to get the right balance?
Increasing the number of people involved and doing that in a way where sufficient interaction of knowledgeable people helps in figuring out how the views of each of the advisers should be used would be useful. The willingness to extend the advisory process in such a way may, however, be lacking.
Judith Curry
You ask:
I’ll pick four bullets:
Ensuring the independence of scientific advisers. The government must not intervene in the activities of scientific advisers. As a means to ensure objectivity and fairness, scientific advisers shall declare their own conflicts of interest.
Huh?
Proper handling of uncertainty and diversity. Scientific advisers shall provide policy-makers with clear explanations of uncertainties and diversity of views associated with scientific knowledge. The government shall respect such uncertainties and diversity of views.
Oops! (Looks like neither is “handled properly” by either the “scientific advisors” or the “government”.)
Even-handed treatment of scientific advice by the government. The government must treat with fairness the scientific knowledge it acquires. It must not approach scientific advice with any preconception, distort scientific knowledge when making it public, or intentionally add wrong interpretations when using advice in policy-making. The government should explain how scientific advice was considered when drawing up policy. It is especially important for the govern- ment to explain the rationales when making policy decisions that are in conflict with the scientific advice obtained.
Ouch! (No further comment needed.)
Ensuring transparency of the scientific advice process. To improve the quality and reliability of policy-making based on scientific advice, the government shall ensure transparency of the scientific advice process.
Yikes! (Ask Mosh…)
Max
Judith Curry
Further to above post, the topic here is “rebuilding public trust in science for policy-making” (as it relates to climate science today).
Public trust is easy to lose – but extremely hard to re-build, once it is lost.
Recent polls showed that close to 70% of the US respondents felt that climate scientists fudged the data. (One can rationalize this, explain it away as the result of “big oil propaganda campaigns” or argue that the poll is not representative or skewed, but these are simply denial techniques.)
You have indicated in past posts that a key contributing factor has been the IPCC “consensus process”.
The Climategate emails plus ensuing evidence of IPCC falsifying data has been disastrous for the credibility of climate science; the attempted “whitewashes” have only made matters worse.
The behavior of IPCC Chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, has not helped its credibility; yet he remains Chairman.
Then there has been the strange denial of the most recent global cooling (or “lack of warming”) – or its rationalization as a “speed bump”, “signal noise” from temporary natural variability, etc.
I’d go a step further in identifying the real underlying root cause for the loss of trust as IPCC itself (Tony Brown contributed a post on that here, questioning whether IPCC had lost its relevance.)
The cold, hard fact IMO is that the only way for “climate science” to regain its credibility and public trust is for it to be completely dissociated from IPCC.
IOW for IPCC to be abandoned and replaced by a non-political grouping of climate scientists, representing all scientifically-based views on the relative importance of human versus natural climate forcing, rather than simply looking for evidence to support a preconceived political premise of CAGW.
Just my opinion, of course – but I am certain that there are others who share it.
Max
How do you think the IPCC and the climate science-policy interface stacks up against these recommendations?
Not anywhere close. Not even after they took out the Hockey Stick do they make recommendations that recognize the lack of warming since 1998. How long can the king have no clothes on and fool so many.
In direct response to Judith’s rhetorical question as to how does the IPCC et al stack up? Like a worm stacks up against an elephant.
The issue or problem in Japan related to nuclear power does NOT seem related to a lack of trust or knowledge in science. It is:
1. Poor engineering management that should be severely criticized for not having built the proper protection to prevent a flood from shutting down back up power.
2. Poor infrastructure planning in using 40 and 50 year old designed plants well past their intended life.
3. Emotional reactions to a problem/disaster that has influenced the public to make fear based decisions regarding meeting Japan’s future power needs. Japan still has the basic issues that made implementation advisable when initially implemented and they should rebuild with more modern facilities.
Correct. Conventional reinforced concrete buildings (not super-strong bunkers) withstood the tsunami. If the back-up generators had been appropriately housed, the meltdown would not have happened.
The failure was by engineering management and their superiors. Following the Indian Ocean tsunami, and with the historical knowledge in Japan of 50m tsunami, this disaster was entirely predictable.
Corporate somnabulance is the problem. Not technical issues.
I’d suggest it was a combination of bad planning by both the company running the plant and the government oversite that did not require a simple plan to be implemented that would have prevented the back-up power from being flooded. The back-up power could have been protected quite inexpensively.
We agree on this, but I think the responsibility is corporate. Even if the government was asleep at the wheel (surprise?), TEPCO’s engineers should have been on the ball, instead of turning up for work and hoping to collect the pension.
Definately poor engineering management/risk management.
To elaborate slightly. In 1890 (something or other, my partner is away and I can’t confirm the actual figure) Iwate suffered a 50 metre tsunami. This is a fact of historical record. A hundred year event.
Greens and engineers may choose to discount historical records (unprecedented since the advent of rap), so it didn’t happen. Just like the MWP and LIA.
Hector
You realize it would not have been necessary to build a 50 meter high structure to protect the back-up power don’t you?
You miss my point. Fukushima failed becase the engine shed washed away. That is, if the backup generator was housed in a concrete building, it could have survived and continued to work.
The fact is the backup emergency generator system (for when the entirely predictable earthquake and tsunami hit) was housed in a tin shed on the beach.
I live in Tohoku, suffered the earthquake and the loss of services. I have visited the tsunami affected areas. I’m not pissing into the wind. Standard reinforced concrete structures survived the tsunami. A concrete engine shed would have survived the tsunami and prevented this disaster.
There is/was no need to build a 50 metre wall.
HAP 3/10 @8.37am:
Lacking clothes, the king should soon begin ter feel quite chilly. )
Shiver me timbers
Right out of mine eyes.
=================
The problem I have, as a layman, is this.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Ever since I started on my journey of discovery (re AGW) I have swung from one side of the argument to the other. I have reached a point, now, where I err on the sceptical side simply by dint of the rhetoric (mostly vitriolic) put out by the proponents. It seems that any time I’ve asked for clarification on certain points, all I generally get is some kind of ad hom attack and accusations of being in the employ of big oil. Hardly accurate, as I retired over 3 years ago. And yes, I do have grand-children who’s futures I worry about.
I’ve now reached a point, unfortunately, where I assume every MSM article I see that tells me of another impending disaster is just so much BS. This can’t be good for the average man/woman in the street, can it?
Ultimately instructive, though.
=============
How to rebuild public trust in science for policy making – for dummies:
Don’t lie.
Don’t exaggerate.
Don’t hide data and code.
Don’t defend any who do the above three.
> We’re all liars. What I’m going to do today is I’m going to show you what the research says about why we’re all liars, how you can become a liespotter and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from liespotting to truth seeking, and ultimately to trust building.
http://www.ted.com/talks/pamela_meyer_how_to_spot_a_liar.html
If we need to wait until we won’t be able to spot lies to believe that trust is being built, we might as well presume that the audit will never end.
By saying so, I’m not condoning nor “defending” any particular liar.
And you’re not exacty truth seeking willard. The condoning you do is rather obvious. don’t lie
Moshpit,
If I have to choose between truth and reason, if that means anything, I’d settle for reason:
> Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason. We all need to take a cold, hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/hope-for-reason/
At least Denial Logic is coherent:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.0389
More so now that the new version of the paper is much improved.
***
And to include Tom in our conversation, I will tell that I acknowledge bringing a sword hereunder, and will never say that I’m defending anyone whence I have the initiative and am resolutely in attacking mode.
In the Way of Words, only honor matters.
You were wrong about the Old Testament, the other day. You’re such an impostor that I wonder why I would waste any more time with you.
Please wipe up this half-smile of duping delight from time to time.
Adieu,
w
When someone says “If I have to choose between truth and reason, if that means anything, I’d settle for reason,” you should never trust anything that person says, ever.
This view, in a nut shell, is why progressive climate scientists have lost the public trust. Principles are irrelevant when they get in the way of your goal, ie., the end justifies the means.
But at least Willard is honest about his lack of principle. Or wait…maybe he’s not…how would one ever know?
Moshpit,
If I have to choose between truth and reason, if that means anything, I’d settle for reason:
#######################
hard to trust someone who lacks honor when you promote truth seeking and then fail to stand behind your promotion. I wonder if its true that you settle for reason or if its reasonable to set the truth as second place.
#################
At least Denial Logic is coherent:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.0389
More so now that the new version of the paper is much improved.
###############################
hopefully they fixed the obvious flaws. You think what they say is true?
#################
In the Way of Words, only honor matters.
willard you have no honor. You can never have honor. You do not seek the truth although you promote it.
######################
You were wrong about the Old Testament, the other day. You’re such an impostor that I wonder why I would waste any more time with you.
Please wipe up this half-smile of duping delight from time to time.
No I was quite right about the old testament the other day. See the exilic prophets for statements about individual responsibility.
Eze. and Jeremiah try Jeremiah 30.. around there somewhere.. verse mentions sour grapes.. hmm that parable gets picked up here I believe
12 years of religious studies buddy
https://www.lds.org/scriptures/ot/ezek/18?lang=eng
14 “But suppose this son has a son who sees all the sins his father commits, and though he sees them, he does not do such things:
15 “He does not eat at the mountain shrines
or look to the idols of Israel.
He does not defile his neighbor’s wife.
16 He does not oppress anyone
or require a pledge for a loan.
He does not commit robbery
but gives his food to the hungry
and provides clothing for the naked.
17 He withholds his hand from mistreating the poor
and takes no interest or profit from them.
He keeps my laws and follows my decrees.
He will not die for his father’s sin; he will surely live. 18 But his father will die for his own sin, because he practiced extortion, robbed his brother and did what was wrong among his people.
19 “Yet you ask, ‘Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?’ Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. 20 The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them
This will be my last showdown with Moshpit. Since it is, I’ll take time to pay due diligence to all his spitballs. I’ll take them one at a time. Here’s the first one:
> hard to trust someone who lacks honor when you promote truth seeking and then fail to stand behind your promotion.
1. The wording begs the question by presuming the conclusion.
2. “Promoting truth seeking” has no clear referent.
3. Recalling that the audit will never end does not amount to defend any particular liar.
4. “Standing behind my promotion” has been done in the sentence dedicated to Tom and regarding bringing the sword to the table, i.e. this is not about defense, and certainly not about defending anyone in particular.
5. Moshpit’s overall argument is refuted by the possibility to be against all parties involved, which is incidentally the model promoted by the Ancient Testament.
6. My favorite scene to express this Wrath of God is this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJaIHQSOfgY&feature=related
7. This debate has something to do with this other blog post:
http://climateaudit.org/2011/02/17/n-g-reviewers-may-need-to-be-disingenuous/
My favorite sentence is this one:
> End of story.
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/13691877650
8. Moshpit’s overall comment rests on a very disingenious interpretation of this sentence:
> By saying so, I’m not condoning nor “defending” any particular liar.
9. Moshpit’s overall comment amounts to an ad hominem that is quite “repugnant”, to borrow an adjective that auditing scientists deem proper to use in a scientific debate.
10. This ad hominem ignores the main position expressed in the comment to which it is supposed to be a reply: that there is no reason to believe that the audit will ever end if what we need to end it is to make sure nobody ever lies.
> When someone says “If I have to choose between truth and reason, if that means anything, I’d settle for reason,” you should never trust anything that person says, ever.
When someone is a true skeptic, one never has to trust anything anyone says, ever. One should never trust anyone saying that someone should never be trusted over anything that person says, ever. Auditors who favor truth over reason should never be trusted, ever.
Trust without reason only offers chancey truths.
Truth without reason never leads to truthfulness.
Reason without truth might lead to the Humean predicament, which is the human predicament.
Here’s the second spitball:
> hopefully they fixed the obvious flaws. You think what they say is true?
2.1 The paper offers a logic of an agent who can’t believe anything true. This provides a model of someone who has reason, but no access to truth. This means that even when being false is guaranteed, a logic is possible.
2.2 Moshpit talks as if he understands that paper, and yet does not seem to understand that Denial Logic kinda proves my point. Moshpit was also wrong the first time he talked about that paper too, but we should not care less.
2.3 Again Moshpit presumes what begs to be shown. This happens when someone claims having to truth without standing to reason.
2.4 Paying due diligence is more about reason than about truth. In other words, if we accept truth as validity and soundness, the auditing sciences are more concerned about validity than soundness. More so when soundness is an empirical matter. What we’re saying right can be formulated in basic truth theory: just ask Vaughan Pratt.
Perhaps an anecdote can elucidate what I mean:
http://faculty.randolphcollege.edu/tmichalik/feynman.htm
They never did figure out how I did it.”
Since this post did not appear yesterday, here’s a link to the what might be the last installment of this last showdown with Moshpit:
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/32876581636
willard, you must be happily married.
GaryM : Building Public Trust in Climate Science for Dummies
Good but needs more. Not only should would-be trust-seeking climate scientists not defend any of their fellows who lie, exaggerate and hide data and code, they must openly and strongly criticize and ostracize them
It’s the ongoing deafening silence from the broad majority that has done the really big damage – leading everyone to think the abovementioned crimes are far too commonplace within Climate Science to even warrant comment.
Punksta,
I am ambivalent on the need for public denunciations. If I had to make a public pronouncement every time one of my fellow lawyers did something dishonest, I would have time for nothing else.
But there should be consequences for dishonest behavior. And on this ground, my profession is no better than “climate science” in policing its own.
Courts do not enforce their rules against filing false or frivolous pleadings because when they did, they found out that it took over their dockets. But had they actively enforced the rules, over time dishonest conduct would have been significantly reduced, to everyone’s benefit.
So too, if Hansen, Mann and others had suffered repercussions (other than Hansen’s sabbatical) for their dishonesty, others may have paid attention.
Mmm. Yeah.
The spectacle of people who have never been to Japan, learned to speak Japanese, studied Japanese history or had first hand experience of Japanese culture or of Japanese scientists pronouncing and pontificating about the situation in Japan is only slightly less odious than, for example, Australians or Europeans doing the same about the US Presidential election (which we have had much too much of here lately) and only slightly more ridiculous than the habitual knee-jerking of people who have no actual experience of science or of being trustworthy, policy or rebuilding preaching about rebuilding trust in science for policy makers.
I’m seeing propaganda, fallacies, Big Lies, innuendo, paranoia, pronoia, and people who can’t tell the difference between criticism of their errors and bad methods and criticism of themselves in the 50-some comments so far, and scantly anything else.
Anyone with something useful to say?
1%ers, travel to much too.
Bart, You don’t need to study climate (or any other) science to know that lying, exaggerating and hiding data is unacceptable and wrecks science. A Dummies-level issue really.
Punksta | October 3, 2012 at 11:36 am |
Ah, but if you do study, especially if you study techniques of propaganda, the topic of fallacies, practices of marketing, methods of salesmanship, and other areas devoted to deception, you will know that the name-calling, innuendo, mud-slinging, repetition and invective floating about from people who claim lying is the significant problem on the part of Scientists who don’t happen to get their data from the Bible is simply a Big Lie itself.
If you look at the exaggerating done by WUWTists and Murdoch-owned media presenters, and compare it to the milder overstatements of even those like Al Gore who go a bit far in at most a quarter of what they say about climate, then you come to believe the public are being manipulated by people purposely seeking to downplay the severity and seriousness of the costs they are made to bear by a few special interests.
And really.. aren’t you hiding data by not evenhandedly reporting on those exaggerations and lies? Isn’t that a more than Dummies-level of hypocrisy?
Why else would we see such false representations as “SEAS WILL RISE due to CO2 … but not for centuries” (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/03/sea_level_rise_barely_30cm_by_2100/) for the 6.8m rise modeled in http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/4/045401/article with a minimum committed rise of 1.1m due human activity?
Also, why are we seeing freaking YesButClimategate(tm willard) in a topic on Japanese trust lost due to nuclear reactor leaks?
Has no one paid attention to the actual topic at hand, simply used it as an excuse to retread polemics?
Tch. In case you missed it, the trust in Science was lost because so many politicians and businessmen were able to use the deferential nature of Japanese scientists to obscure their ample and timely warnings.
The natural remedy for this is to remove politicians and businessmen from positions of influence over the communication of Science to the public, no?
> Anyone with something useful to say?
All this self-serving crap gets tiring.
Indeed. See Fingoism.
Reminds me of the spectacle of people who’ve never calculated an volume integral, who’ve never heard of Dansgaard-Oeschger events, and who’ve never published original scientific work in any field, pontificating repeatedly on the latest ‘final nail in the coffin’ of climate science.
What is it this week?
UHI effect?
Cosmic rays?
An engineer has some doubts?
The obvious-to-bloggers-but-otherwise-secret global hoax?
Anything but the anthropogenic CO2 it seems.
With so many confessedly smart people thinking so hard on such a public topic and producing so little of practical import, one is left wondering if there isn’t a significant bias against utility here.
If you are looking for pythonesque absurdity, however, this is the blog to beat.
Beautiful plumage!
Bernard, is that you?
Fingoism: (n) extreme denialism or deception marked especially by belligerent feigning [Lat. “fingo”] of pseudoscientific hypotheses. cf. jingoism. orig. Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica 1713, Newton, Isaac; with regard to violation of Rule 4: “In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, not withstanding any contrary hypothesis that may be feigned, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.” qv.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo
Scientists have names for everything it seems,… you got your own ways Bart R. I will stick with Christ.
”
Scientists have names for everything it seems…
”
The same way that theologians have names for nothing, it seems.
Tom | October 4, 2012 at 12:41 am |
Where have I heard that before? Oh yes. Matthew 15:3-6
You could take some guidance from Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, who renders unto God what is God’s, and unto Newton what is Newton’s.
I don’t see your point Bart R. I am not a Jewish, scribe or Pharisee. We now live in the age of grace. Just that easy.
Tom | October 4, 2012 at 10:47 am |
Oh. You’re one of those. You’ve been taught and come to believe that there’s an invisible bearded old man who lives in the sky and sent his son to die by torture so you can get away with whatever the heck you want whenever you like, and you call that ‘grace’.
No wonder you appear to feel no qualms about saying whatever pops into your head as if it were fact with no thought of consequence.
How many of you from that little club are there here?
Tom | October 4, 2012 at 12:55 pm |
More every day? http://xkcd.com/1102/
Hope you’re all happy with the place you’ve chosen; because I see in you no effort to be without blemish, therefore must conclude you prefer to reject the grace offered you for the sake of, what? Some short-lived reward? Some glib overconfidence?
You really shouldn’t skip 1:4, as all of 1:3-3:21 depend on you living up to your end of that bargan.
Rock on…
I have something valuable to say: Your assertion seems to utterly lack value.
It is generally accepted practice in human experience to be able to hold opinions (including developed ones) on subjects with which we lack direct empirical experience. In fact, there’s even a field of study dedicated to this effort you’ve probably heard of. It’s called history.
For example, I will assume that you and I would share a horror at the events associated with the Holocaust. Yet, neither of us were subject to Nazi tyranny, torture and death. Going forward however, we will rightly consider ourselves free to express opinions and even when need be, generate policy that works to preventing such horrors from occurring in the future. All this will be based on…wait for it…history.
And BTW, the mess you see above is the sausage making process of how historical view is created.
I invite you to engage on points of fact and logic rather than presuming to place yourself above it. In point of fact, you cannot place yourself above it any more than a fish can jump out of the ocean. You can only pretend it doesn’t exist or effect you and that road is the path to narcissism.
It might be insensitive to point out here that fish do, in point of fact, jump out of the ocean quite often.
In point of fact, if fish were always completely confined to oceans, we would not be here to belittle them so. Speaking of narcissism.
jbmckim | October 3, 2012 at 1:35 pm |
What a twistedly belated and ironical invitation.
There are many, many today descended within one or two or three generations from people subject those same horrors directly you relate as history. For many, it’s not a matter of history, but of flesh and blood.
Frankly to my ear the opinions of people who care less than those whose care comes from flesh and blood, opinions of those who form opinion out of ignorance, tohse often speaking not from fact, who use the suffering of those they are entirely unrelated to to score points in a debate so utterly divorced from the original suffering are more often mistaken and misleading than genuine and useful, and often abhorrent exploiters.
I say that it is a matter of fact we can readily confirm that some 50 comments previous to mine were off-topic, uninformed, paranoid, pronoiacal, propaganda, fallacy-ridden and essentially worthless. Do you want to go through the timestamps with me one by one, or can I trust you to do it yourself, and compare my categorizations to the ideas contained in the comments?
So while you label my statements of fact as mere assertion, I label your claims as lies.
There were 55 comments before my own in this thread. Go ahead, find five of them that weren’t as I described. Prove me wrong. If you can.
Bart R | October 3, 2012 at 10:11 pm | Reply
“I say that it is a matter of fact we can readily confirm that some 50 comments previous to mine were off-topic, uninformed, paranoid, pronoiacal, propaganda, fallacy-ridden and essentially worthless.”
You’re projecting. Classic. :-)
David Springer | October 4, 2012 at 12:55 am |
So, we can all agree from the contents of your reply that either you’re not up to the challenge of counting to 5, or you’ve proven me right.
I find myself challenged in taking you seriously!
Hmmm. I think the title and subsequent arguments miss the point a bit. The issue in applying science to policy does not rest on either science or policy creation process. Rather, it rests on two points: Character and morality.
1) Morality is requisite so that scientific process is truly followed (not just given lip service) and that conclusions are not faked or exaggerated to the point of meaninglessness.
2) Character is required in that scientific conclusions will not always be popular…and PARTICULARLY in the context where the scientist has to utter the phrase dreaded above all others: “I don’t know.”
That’s why in the light of the AGW soap opera of the last 18 months, discussions about character and value are ascendant in determining what kind of science will be turned into policy. This has been the way of human kind for recorded history. I don’t look for it to change soon although denial of all types seems rampant.
So true. When talking to the government schoolteachers of global warming it is merely an act of good faith on our part to assume they believe in the scientific method. We feel comfortable interacting with them based on that assumption. There is however honor in candor when dealing with charlatans. Our lack of candor in dealing with academia is costing dearly.
Science now has the same credibility problem as the government because scientists who should have known better did not stand up and confront the pseudo-science of the AGW True Believers and government science authoritarians and so much of our hard-earned dollars have been wasted chasing rabbits down their holes.
What is really alarming about global warming is the unprecedented academic dishonesty of the ‘official’ inquiries regarding the academic dishonesty that serve to demonstrate only the complete lack of institutional honor. Anyone who may have thought a generation ago that the US and the UK and all of Western civilization in general for that matter was invulnerable to an academic integrity crisis such as the one that has struck the secular, socialist Education Industrial Complex must surely awaken from their slumber.
“Integrity crisis”?
Not ANOTHER one…
We haven’t even finished defending the integrity of science yet!
INTEGRITY ™ — From Crisis to Crisis
Dr. Curry,
I hope you’ll consider joining this panel!
Interior Department seeks climate change advisers
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/259959-interior-department-seeks-climate-change-advisers-
The Interior Department is creating a panel of outside experts to help steer its scientific work on the effects of climate change on natural resources.
The department, in a notice to be published Thursday, will seek nominations for the new, roughly 25-member “Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science.”
Perhaps pertinent to the discussion:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/oct/01/tenfold-increase-science-paper-retracted-fraud?CMP=twt_fd
Rebuilding public trust in science for policy-making:
Judith Curry
”How do you think the IPCC and the climate science-policy interface stacks up against these recommendations?”
‘Proper handling of uncertainty and diversity. Scientific advisers shall provide policy-makers with clear explanations of uncertainties and diversity of views associated with scientific knowledge. The government shall respect such uncertainties and diversity of views’
The main problem is that because of ‘deep uncertainty’, the advisers’ information based on IPCC declarations are not able to make decision-makers understand why the warming has taken place; they have blindly to believe what advisers are saying. The main objective should be in what way we can make politicians as decision-makers understand the proper cause of the recent warming. Otherwise they are not able to reach a view of their own.
I have tried to understand what Latimer Alder in a neighbour thread says:
”To be truly ‘thought leaders’ a wider perspective than simply having published papers is needed.”
If any plausible idea on cause of the warming is not available, in my opinion, that means that one himself has to use his own creativity in order to find the real reason for the recent warming. Yet it is not sufficient that you yourself understand the issue. You have to make decision-makers as laymen understand it, too. Otherwise they don’t know what they are deciding.
To make even decision-makers as laymen understand the minimal role of anthropogenic control on the present CO2 content in the atmosphere I have written in my comment http://judithcurry.com/2011/08/04/carbon-cycle-questions/#comment-198992 among others:
”As far as I am aware the CO2 content in the atmosphere is controlled together by both all CO2 emissions from sources to atmosphere and by all CO2 absorptions from atmosphere to sinks. After any change of CO2 emissions from sources or of CO2 absorptions to sinks makes the atmospheric CO2 content strive for a new level in order to reach a new dynamic balance between the CO2 emissions and the absorptions. As to the influence of human CO2 emissions on the atmospheric CO2 content it is determined by the proportion of the human CO2 emissions to the total CO2 emissions. Nowadays when the yearly total CO2 emissions are little over 200 GtC (CO2 as carbon) and the yearly human CO2 emissions are about 8 GtC, the influence of the human CO2 emissions on the CO2 content in atmosphere is approaching 4 % at the most. For instance, when the CO2 content in the atmosphere is 390 ppm, the manmade share of it is about 16 ppm at the most.”
As you see recently the manmade content of CO2 in the atmosphere has been, at the most, about 16 ppm CO2 of about 390 ppm, whereas in the model calculations adopted by IPCC the anthropogenic share in the total content of CO2 is assumed to be a little more than 100 ppm; the anthropogenic share is so minimal that it, for now, can not be found by measurements in reality.
Thus we can conclude that human CO2 emissions can not be any proper cause of the recent warming. Instead the increase of CO2 content is controlled by natural warming: rise of CO2 content in the atmosphere is controlled by the warming of sea surface waters. If you do not understand that, I ask you to read all the comment of mine mentioned above.
“rise of CO2 content in the atmosphere is controlled by the warming of sea surface waters.”
and those sea surface waters have just by chance decided to warm up higher than the past 800,000 years?
http://zipcodezoo.com/Trends/Trends%20in%20Atmospheric%20Carbon%20Dioxide_2.gif
That’s quite some sea surface warming. Looks like a hockey stick!
David L. Hagen | October 3, 2012 at 1:22 pm |
Thanks. Check is in the mail.
Judith,
Arimoto and Sato use the words “integrity” and “conflict of interest”. I doubt that the climate science community could accept the same standard that other professions try to adhere to. Otherwise how do they accept the fact that Jim Hansen is permitted to be a political activist and at the same time receive government funding? Then of course there is Rajendra Pachauri of the IPCC who is still in a powerful position despite his attempt to discredit those who oppose his point of view with his “voodoo science” attacks. Climate scientists have a long road to travel to become trustworthy.
Academia will grow in irrelevance in so much and as long as ideas of limits to growth dominate thinking. This warps into ‘economic degrowth’ , suspension of democracy and sending sceptics to the Gulag. Capitalism doesn’t work – let’s try Karl Marx again? Please.
No one objects to cheap energy. Although many will disagree with Teryn about the need for a carbon price. Unless perhaps, but not necessarily, it was relatively small and hypothecated to energy research.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/teryn-norris/want-to-save-the-world-ma_b_173482.html
No one objects to progress in agriculture. Human emissions of CO2 thus far total about 300 billion tonnes. Conservation agriculture has the potential to sequester 500 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.
http://www.fao.org/ag/ca/doc/CA_SSC_Overview.pdf
http://www.fao.org/sard/en/sard/2001/index.html
Frankly both sides seem inordinately sure of themselves and it has nothing whatsoever to do with a scientific appreciation of complexity and uncertainty.
‘Although it has failed to produce its intended impact nevertheless the Kyoto Protocol has performed an important role. That role has been allegorical. Kyoto has permitted different groups to tell different stories about themselves to themselves and to others, often in superficially scientific language. But, as we are increasingly coming to understand, it is often not questions about science that are at stake in these discussions. The culturally potent idiom of the dispassionate scientific narrative is being employed to fight culture wars over competing social and ethical values.’ (The Wrong Trousers: Radically Rethinking Climate Policy)
Too many climate scientists are too deep in the trenches of the climate war. I would guess that the ideological differences between us and them are too great to bridge and we will just muddle on lobbing our words from trench to trench. I suspect that events will move on and the issue will never be resolved in our lifetimes. The cult of AGW groupthink space cadets will insist that they saved the world from carbon emissions – the sceptics will insist the mitigation made no difference at all. The argument will continue for a 1000 years becoming ever increasingly arcane.
How long can you keep this up Judith?
Say tempt, @ 3/!0/ 7.07pm, ‘that’s how the light gets in’ … Open is better than closed.
For those of a technical bent:
http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/documentlibrary/safetyandsecurity/reports/special-report-on-the-nuclear-accident-at-the-fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-power-station
Rebuilding trust I am afraid is predicated upon not only what scientists do or don’t do, but upon the shifting mores of society in general. In the current social moral climate, there is less absolutism and more relativism. In the sciences in general, there has been more deception and fraud as outlined in a paper on retractions in peer reviewed journals like Science, Nature, etc.
Particularly destructive was the Autism/Immunization link that persisted for decades with mothers refusing to get their children immunized. More local impacts were in Northern Nigeria where Imams prohibited polio vaccination believing vaccination to be a Western/religious plot to control, usurp the Imam’s authority.
In one case, deception and fraud was implicated, and in another, mistrust of established Western medicine has led to untold pain.
In this environment of moral relativism and its associated fraud and mistrust, the solutions are not obvious. What is more likely, that the issues will become more irrelevant and people, and society in general will move on. Those mothers who “don’t believe in immunizations” will suffer the pain of some of their children being devastated. In terms of Northern Nigeria, the polio victims will suffer their handicaps as legacy markers of a by-gone belief system.
With regards to climate science, I believe you are fighting a rear-guard action, trying to preserve some resources for a stand and fight tomorrow; all, to no avail. I believe climate science will become less and less of a societal issue. People will go back to focusing their attention upon what is in their immediate life and immediate future. After this global economic recession, global agendas will emerge that are characteristic of the immediate challenges people face. Saving the world types will again recede into the background of drum beating evangelists, jihadists, and other reckless minded people. Society will move on with immediate issues.
Climate scientists will be a footnote in history, soon to be forgotten. Those creatures that survive being left alone and plodding along in their science will likely be less glamourous, less public in nature, and ultimately, more productive, adding their grain to the pile of accumulating science.
‘I believe climate science will become less of a societal issue.’
I would like to think so, RiHo08 … but then trere will be the next issue between authoritarian totalitarian and parliamentary democracy groups.
The long, long war between freedom and authority never ends.
‘..the question is no longer [ as in the Enlightenment] how we can make the best use of the spontaneous forces found in a free society. We have in effect undertaken to dispense with the forces which produced unforseen results and to replace the impersonal and anonymous mechanism of the market by collective and ‘conscious’ direction of all societal forces to deliberately chosen goals.’ (Hayek ‘Road to Serfdom’ Routledge p21)
Changes in direction as stated by Karl Mannheim in’ Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction,’ 1940 p175:
‘We have never had to set up and direct the entire system of nature as we are forced to do today with society … Mankind is tending more and more to regulaate the whole of its social life …’ (Sigh.)
Beth,
“The long, long war between freedom and authority never ends.”
To me this societal tug-of-war is also reflective in what our hostess struggles with: uncertainty. She is not alone obviously. What the current climate science paradigm seems to have conjured from the earth, those who can live with uncertainty, and those who cannot. So in a sense, the query: how to restore trust in science policy making? boils down to who is talking. Those who find uncertainty so uncomfortable will bend and twist all sorts of science, logic, and emotions to displace their inner tension and are the current talking heads for climate science. To restore confidence in science and to be believable to the public in general and policy makers in particular, right now what is needed: a brooding, dark cloud over their head figure, consumed by self-doubt, with articulations brief, to the point, and reassuring us all that everything will be OK; we will survive. If this figure wore a dark frock and top hat, smoked cigars and drank excessively, all the better.
Western societies have had some kind of millennial or apocalyptic movement at work through most of human history, said Lorne Dawson, the chair of department of sociology and legal studies at the University of Waterloo, who has been studying apocalyptic movements for the past decade. There are also more secular apocalyptic movements today, he said. ~Sarah Boesveld
Yes – I have called it the cult of AGW groupthink space cadets. It is a bit of a mouthfull – I sometimes shorten it to space cadets. They have a magical incantation – carbon price – that if implemented will save the world and can convince themselves that there is nothing more scientific and rational. Most of them are eggegiously clueless and impractical. Hence the space cadet.
AGW has been falsified as a science. We all now know it is nothing but the story of a wacky enviro-religious-Leftist political movement.
Tthe AGW True Believers are simply engaging in a mental trick to excuse their lack of contribution to society. Now as ever the AGW religion is the new age belief system of hypocritical Western urban elitist snobs complete with fantastic predictions by doomsday prophets about rivers running red! You can’t make this stuff up: reality really is stranger than fiction.
You guys are truly hilarious.
Taking all this verbal fluff seriously must be even more exhausting than writing it up in the first place.
Onward skeptic soldiers, marching as to war!
With the cross of Judith going on before!
Victory declared is victory assured!
Depriving humanity of the possibility of being more able than our ancestors to face real not make believe challenges is the result of liberal utopianism and is the legacy of the secular, socialist government-education machine. Meanwhile the Left has produced nothing but years of roasting businesses and political opponents.
Most surely we must learn that the Leftists’ climate porn and politics of fear will not heat homes and run factories that provide jobs. The Left hated Bush because he did what the Left has long feared to do: be enthusiastic about standing up for America with his whole heart. And now, the Left hates capitalism and the productive who know better that to look to government for our economic future.
Hey dude, you won’t find it so hilarious when spatula chaos bifurcates this joint into an new climax regime. It happened once in my kitchen and it wasn’t purdy.
JCH:
No doubt.
I usually try to keep my new climax regimes away from the kitchen – too many sharp object lessons.
Wag:
Have you considered auditioning for the part of Mitt Romney’s science advisor?
What would Hugo Chavez say?
Wag asks:
”
What would Hugo Chavez say?
”
”
We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world.
”
Sound familiar?
I’m guessing that Chavez takes himself seriously too.
At least he was elected.
But, George Obama, half-brother of President Obama, now believes anti-colonialism has been bad for Africa. He’s seen the alternative.
WWHS? I really don’t keep up with the guy, but once he opted to cancel a huge cellulosic ethanol plant because he thought the land would be better used to produce food.
Obama’s half-brother on African anti-colonialism?
Wag, you have achieved the possible – You make no sense whatsoever.
The Left seems totally invested in doing whatever it can to prevent prosperity in America even if it means destroying capitalism and abandoning any desire to uplift humanity anywhere.
HC might say (checking out his ethanol operation)
Donde esta el aguardiente?
Judith,
You’re hoping that ” public trust in science for policy-making” has been successfully undermined and never will be rebuilt?
Am I being overly cynical in thinking that ?
tempterrain
You ask [climate scientist] Judith Curry if she is hoping that ” public trust in [climate] science for policy-making” has been successfully undermined and never will be rebuilt? adding: Am I being overly cynical in thinking that ?
Try a bit of logic, and see if you can answer this question:
Why would ANY climate scientist hope that public trust in his/her field (climate science) is undermined and never will be rebuilt?
Doesn’t make sense, does it?
Max
PS No, you’re not being “overly cynical in thinking that”. You’re being totally illogical.
Max,
“Why would ANY climate scientist hope that public trust in his/her field (climate science) is undermined and never will be rebuilt?”
That’s a good question. However I have to say that the thrust of Judith’s argument is that the science is too uncertain to be trusted.
There is really little or no difference between Judith’s views on the extent of scientific uncertainty and those of Kerry Emanuel. The difference between them is on policy. Judith now argues for doing nothing, whereas she once took a different view, the same one that Dr Emanuel still takes, that the risks of inaction outweigh the risks of action.
Judith has become a ‘merchant of doubt’ which is why she’s on the US Republican climate team, whereas Dr Emanuel, who although himself a life long Republican isn’t.
What an absurd characterisation. There seems to be a world of difference between Emanuel and Curry – not one that you are capable of comprehending however.
Nor is the political position one of inaction on emissions as a preferred course of action. For the most part for sceptics it translates as resistance to taxes or caps as a policy instrument. Globally and almost universally. You may categorise that as you wish – but the ongoing policy impasse consists entirely of this. Taxes on one side and resistance on the other. If you could admit defeat on this – it would be possible to advance the discussion to meaningful, pragmatic, practical and highly effective ways to proceed. Many of which I have discussed and advocated ad nauseum. It is not the sceptics – whatever their position on the science – who object to cheap and plentiful energy or to feeding the world and growing economies.
You have to ask yourself – who is the enemy of progress? I submit that it is the cult of AGW groupthink space cadets – the few percenters whose membership can of course cross the political divide occasionally. It is the green/neo-socialist overreach of the pissant progressive incapable of democratic discourse and compromise, incapable of the accepting the good but insisting on some imagined perfection of a utopian future, certain of their immutable moral virtue, champions of government control over every aspect of our social life, millenialist, dogmatist and opportunist. Is this a fight to the death tt? C’est la guerre climatique
“What an absurd characterisation. There seems to be a world of difference between Emanuel and Curry – not one that you are capable of comprehending however. ”
I don’t know the difference as not familiar with Kerry Emanuel.
Wiki, says: “He hypothesized in 1994 about a superpowerful type of hurricane which could be formed if average sea surface temperature increased another 15C more than it’s ever been (see “hypercane”).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerry_Emanuel
And I am still not familiar with Emanuel. But though a 15 C increase in surface temperature in terms of making a hurricane is interesting speculation, the problem seems it’s impractical, as tropical ocean surface temperature have no way of increasing by 15 C.
There seems to be a world of difference between Emanuel and Curry – not one that you are capable of comprehending however.
Well juts to show me that you’ve comprehended it, maybe you can give me one or two examples from your “world of difference”?
You have to ask yourself – who is the cult of AGW groupthink space cadet. You show no sign that any explanation would serve any purpose.
And really – you show no sign of being able to distinguish between substance and trivia.
Chief,
Well I can take that a “no” then can I? But don’t feel too bad. The reason why you can’t come with any significant difference is because there isn’t anything other that the question of uncertainty that Dr Curry is in the least out of step on with mainstream consensus science.
You don’t have to take my word for it. As Dr Curry herself puts it “I disagree strongly with some members of the establishment over various actions [policy]” but on the science she says “I am not in strong disagreement other than levels of uncertainty.”
http://judithcurry.com/2012/09/22/pbs-ombudsman/#comment-243214
The tactic of emphasising scientific uncertainty and equating it with scientific doubt is well established. The uncertainty argument is attractive for many
who would not wish to challenge the fundamentals of the scientific consensus, but might still seek to oppose political action on climate. So she can have it both ways. One with her skeptic/denier chums on this blog and in the Republican Party and the other way with he colleagues in the climate science world.
No one objects to simple radiative physics – there is a great deal of uncertainty after. And here we are talking dynamical complexity and decadal variability especially.
The policy question then is what rational and pragmatic actions are possible.
You part company with both scientific understanding and the rational and pragmatic.
The tactic of downplaying scientific uncertainty and equating it with established fact is well established. This uncertainty-ducking argument is attractive for many who wish to pander to the politically-funded and politically motivated climate “science” consensus, the idea being to advance politics to an even higher role in society, regardless of how the climate behaves – essentially the IPCC line.
No one objects to simple radiative physics
If you think that you don’t read the comments I do on this blog. There’s objections to the mainstream view on climate change of every conceivable kind. It doesn’t seem to matter what they are providing they are objections.
Judith says little or nothing about them. This is her blog so you’d think she might. You might want want to check for yourself what she writes in her scientific papers but you wouldn’t pick her as a climate sceptic from them. All Judith is saying is that the uncertainty is understated, and she might well be right.
So instead of 1.5 – 4.5 degC for climate sensitivity Judith says it’s more like 1 -6 deg C. (to the 66% confidence levels) So, according to her figures, there is a 1 in 6 chance of climate sensitivity being higher than 6 degC.
That’s not really an argument for inaction but its all she’s got.
No one who counts tt – which lets you out.
No one is arguing for inaction – just effective, practical and pragmatic action.
But I don’t think there is any rationale for a global – as opposed to a regional and variable – sensitivity. There is no credible evidence for sensitivity in any range in any order – nada – nothing. It is all just nonsense.
You’ve made my list tt – I have the attack smurf, delusional spice and now – wait for it – the delphic gnome of sensitivity. Good hey.
Now go away and play with someone you actually thinks anything you say makes any sense at all.
@temp
Yes, there are one or two deniers in the mix here. Unlike truebeliever sites like RealClimate, this one has a science focus and allows all views to be put across. Even intolerant wack-jobs like you. For you pretend this is an issue meriting comment by Judith or anyone else commenting one, speaks mainly to your strained efforts at misrepresentation.
And Yes, Judith’s ‘only’ argument is that hopelessly low levels of uncertainty do not justify huge costs and further steps into a more totalitarian world.
What you need to add to this, is that the ‘consensus’ emanates from endemic, rampant, unapologetic bias and corruption in the politically-funded climate science establishment (that overall still cannot bring itself to criticise the blatant sabotaging of science such as we saw in Climategate). What rational person could trust the utterances of such a body ?
Just to continue the above:
I haven’t read anything in Judith’s peer reviewed work that I would disagree with. Even if I did, I wouldn’t consider myself qualified to argue.
Where I do feel qualified to argue, in fact I would say that anyone with any intelligence is well qualified, is that holding a scientific opinion that the CO2 climate sensitivity is between 1 and 6 deg C (to the 66% confidence levels) is quite inconsistent with a policy advocacy of ‘doing nothing’.
Or, at least, doing nothing to upset the US Republican right.
@tempterrain
holding a scientific opinion that the CO2 climate sensitivity is between 1 and 6 deg C (to the 66% confidence levels) is quite inconsistent with a policy advocacy of ‘doing nothing’. Or, at least, doing nothing to upset the US Republican right.
Which means doing nothing to bring about economic decline and a lurch into an even more totalitarian world on such poor confidence levels. Too bad the Democrats don’t give a damn about those things (indeed actively seek them).
A totalitarian world could be bought about by climate disaster, in response to having to adapt quickly. Think about forced rationing during the war for example.
Yes.
But with all the political activism and money driving the alarmist gospel, systematically playing down the uncertainty issue, should we be panicked into taking action now, in the hopes this will be a (slightly?) less totalitarian outcome?
Let’s say we do that, and then it turns out CAGW hypothesis is wrong. What hope will there be of ever reversing all the taxes and bureaucracies thought to have been justified by CAGW ? The harder it is to cut taxes, the more we should resist accepting them in the first place.
The alternatives available for political decision makers on acting can be divided to three categories:
1) Doing nothing.
2) Making decisions that have a well defined immediate influence – it’s really acting.
3) Creating regulations or incentive systems that are supposed to make others to act.
The third one can further be subdivided to
3a) Incentives that have a significant immediate effect on the relative economy of alternatives that some of the supposed actors do consider regularly.
3b) Long term goals that are expected to influence the relative economy of alternatives over longer term, but with a strength that may be hard to predict.
When you compare what Judith seems to prefer to what some others prefer it’s really on the category 3). That’s the one, where major emphasis has been proposed. That’s an easy one, because decisions can be made without knowing how they will be implemented and without much real ability to predict the outcome. Both subdivisions 3a) and 3b) have been applied in many European countries and with results of questionable value.
It’s not enough to be sure that action is needed. In addition there’s the requirement of being able to choose an action that has the desired effect without excessive negative unintended consequences. In Europe we have in my view too many politicians who want to act even without the minimal required knowledge on the net value of the outcome. The past experience tells that many of the earlier decisions have had at least debatable results if not outright negative when compared with some other available real alternatives that were known to be more robust while less “ambitious” (a word that I have learned to dislike as it seems all too often mean “stupid”).
Pekka
The past experience tells that many of the earlier decisions have had at least debatable results if not outright negative when compared with some other available real alternatives that were known to be more robust while less “ambitious” (a word that I have learned to dislike as it seems all too often mean “stupid”).
I wholeheartedly agree. I even share your emotional reaction to the word “ambitious” when used in the context you describe.
The world’s history is full of fools who confused ambition with wishful thinking and lead millions to very real hells.
Pekka
You left out a fourth alternate.
– Adapt to whatever climate changes Nature or anyone else throws at us on a local and regional basis, if and when these appear likely to occur.
This is the “rational” alternate – i.e. NOT one driven by fear (an emotional, i.e. non-rational) motivation.
This is the alternate, which I, as a rational skeptic of IPCC’s CAGW premise, would favor (and vote for, if it came to a democratic vote).
Max
A child’s ditty about climate hysteria
Liar, liar – pants on fire!
Liar, liar, “Wolf!” crier
Conjured up a greenhouse pyre
Hurricanes and forest fire
Warned of flood waves rushing higher
Drowning New York’s tallest spire
Tipping points moving nigher
Leading to Venusian fire
Cataclysms not seen prior
And to consequences dire
The media were an eager buyer
‘Twas like preaching to the choir
Those who doubt were called “denier”
Branded “big oil, big coal, hire”
But his prophesies so dire
Fizzled like a punctured tire
In the end he found no buyer
And was found to be a liar
Now it’s high time to retire
Play with grandkids by the fire
(Chorus)
Liar, liar, “Wolf!” crier
Liar, liar, pants on fire!
+5 Max :-)
Say … maybe you’d be interested in helping out with some verses of “Fifty Months to Save the Planet” … a new “anthem” to help the doomsayers “inflame public opinion”. Details at:
Flogging the dead Kyoto horse in Doha … and the UK
You say:
Adapt to whatever climate changes Nature or anyone else throws at us on a local and regional basis, if and when these appear likely to occur.
So, You are suggesting that people do what people have always done to survive instead of doing something different and stupid.
I agree.
Excellent! Very applicable in Australia :)
Did you write it? If not, can you give a link?
Peter Lang
Afraid I’m the “poet”
But it’s only a nursery rhyme, nothing compared to the writings of Beth or kim.
Max
Yes it is Max, and hope yer don’t mind if I add a few lines, the cautionary ending.
So to those others who aspire
To fame from climate visions dire,
Take heed! REAL data yer require
Or you will end up in the mire
Where sullied conjurers expire
Sans eulogy or heavenly choir.
I meant ter say, yes it is ‘applicable’ (and funny.)
Beth
Thanks.
I knew you’d come through.
(Mahty purty, them po’ms of yores)
Max
Thanck yer kinely, Max, its ’cause i gradd – yu -ated in the hu – mann – itees
Beth
Duz thet mean thet yore a genuwine aki-de-mic?
This topic is not complicated:
• Japan’s foresighted scientists warned that Japan’s reactors were vulnerable to destruction by tsunamis
• Japan’s shortsighted business, political, and economic leaders argued that the probability of disaster was negligibly small.
• “Nature could not be fooled“: Japan’s foresighted scientists were proved right … Japan’s shortsighted business, political, and economic leaders were proved wrong. :shock: :shock: :shock:
That is the common-sense reason why Japan’s public now reposes zero faith in short-sighted reactor-risk denialism.
As with short-sighted reactor-risk denialism, so with short-sighted climate-change denialism, eh? :?: :?: :?:
Yes that’s about the peak of worldwide alarmist ‘thinking’ : Japan’s reactor-risk denialism was wrong, THEREFORE global CAGW skepticism is wrong.
Quick, somebody give Fan one of those Nobel prizes for Political Correctness dimwits like Gore and the IPCC got.
It is much the same. The alarmist climate stuff is much more political and not so much science. Real science is skeptical and the alarmist climate people are not skeptical and therefore what they practice is not science.
Dr Curry, with her more uncertainty, is more skeptical and much more of a scientist.
If you can’t consider the possibility that you might be wrong and consider the possibility that some other theory is right, you are not any kind of scientist.
If you look at data from the past and say it is for certain that something different will happen the next time, you are fooling yourself and all the fools who believe you.
Chucky, please reflect that math-and-science have more to say than *THAT*! ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
Fan, please reflect that math-and-science have much less input into alarmism than politics does.
Save for inessential differences in scale (both time and space) science tells us:
Fukushima
Florida :shock: :shock: :shock:
Chucky, these lessons are not complicated! ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
Thank heavens that there are no nuclear power plants in Florida! :shock:
Heinrich
Looks like you’ve got a real talent for getting it wrong every time. Here are two nuclear power plants operating in Florida today
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lucie_Nuclear_Power_Plant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_Point_Nuclear_Generating_Station
Max
So you’re back to equating nuclear-danger denialism with CAGW skepticism…
Well I guess that’s intellectually on a par with the pre-teen icon motif, hence somewhat predictable.
So heck, have another Nobel PC prize.
”
So heck, have another Nobel PC prize.
”
On behalf of ‘A fan of *MORE* discourse’ – much appreciated, Chuck.
I’ll put on the shelf between Henry Kissinger’s and George C. Marshall’s, and right in front of Yitzhak Rabin’s.
Heinrich
Talking about Nobel Peace Prizes, since you’re Norwegian you might know.
– Has the Norwegian Nobel Committee outsourced the Peace Prize medals to China or are they still made in Norway?
– Have they got one ready for Mitt Romney, to be awarded in December, three weeks after his election, in keeping with tradition?
Max
They should rename it the Piece (of crap) Prize
Actually no, the Nobel PC Prize is better isn’t it ?
manacker:
I’m Norwegian – but I’m also an elkhound.
So if you don’t mind, I’ll leave the precious political punditry to experts such as yourself.
Max,
Just on a point of information: Nobel Prizes are awarded in Sweden not Norway.
Max,
Actually you’re right. The Nobel peace prize is awarded in Oslo whereas all the others are awarded in Stockholm. I’ve broken my own rule by not checking on that one.
But anyway don’t let it be said that when I do get in wrong I do put up my hand and submit a correction. The IPCC do that too. Pity that climate deniers can’t do the same !
Chief Hydrologist | October 4, 2012 at 2:32 am |
“As I have said before to you – the system is highly dissipative. The turbulence from the wings dies out within a few centimetres. The concept derives from the name of a 1972 Lorenz paper – His paper “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” introduced the butterfly image, courtesy of meteorologist Philip Merilees, who came up with the title.’”
If it’s not physically impossible then a finite possibility exists. What is the probability that any given universe with random initial conditions would produce not one but a whole fleet of space shuttles?
Your misapprehension has been remedied, Chief Hydrologist! ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
You obviously read only the first sentence. – because if you had cared to read more and spruke less you would have seen that the comment was on butterflies and not commercial aircraft. It is a mistake to think I dote on your every word – although a direct challenge and one that is again so spectacularly incompetent – needs a considered response. Or not.
Chief, please let me commend to you Terry Tao’s weblog post “Why global regularity for Navier-Stokes is hard,” as an explanation of why your conjectures have never been proved.
I aplogise for calling you an idiot. But you made a statement that confused butterflies with commercial aircraft. As for my conjectures? On what precisely is that? Turbulence from butterflies dissipates quickly?
There is a $1 million Clay Mathematics Institute prize for making ‘substantial’ progress’ towards a mathematical theory of the non-linear NS PDE.
Navier-Stokes Equation
——————————————————————————–
Waves follow our boat as we meander across the lake, and turbulent air currents follow our flight in a modern jet. Mathematicians and physicists believe that an explanation for and the prediction of both the breeze and the turbulence can be found through an understanding of solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations. Although these equations were written down in the 19th Century, our understanding of them remains minimal. The challenge is to make substantial progress toward a mathematical theory which will unlock the secrets hidden in the Navier-Stokes equations.
Your comments are overwhelmingly irrelevant – and show not the slightest interest in exploring concepts rationally. The constant references to extraneous concepts to support some idea from the catechism of AGW groupthink is a total waste of your time and mine. We can solve NS to any degree of accuracy? It is done all the time for all sorts of purposes. It has nothing to do with climate models – for instance – where uncertainties in parameters cause divergence in solutions of the nonlinear NS PDE.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.full
Chief, what’s wrong-headed is the unjustified denialist leap-of-faith from “a few turbulent systems are unpredictable” to “no turbulent systems are predictable.”
The plain fact is, *most* turbulent dynamical systems exhibit *predictable* linear responses to small forcings.
E.g., pedal your bicycle harder and you *will* go faster … even the the airflow over a cyclist is fully turbulent! ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
Similarly, trap more solar heat and our planet *will* get hotter … even though fluid transport in the oceans and atmosphere is fully turbulent! ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
Exceptions to this rule are … well … exceptional … and most of them are artifically constructed by mathematicians, rather than naturally occurring. ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
Oh yeah … and as for Judith Curry’s topic of “rebuilding public trust for policy-making” … well … it’s pretty clear that Japan’s short-sighted risk-denying business leaders, politicians, and economists have *LOTS* more “rebuilding” ahead of them, than Japan’s scientists! :!: :!: :!:
Hmmm … so perhaps the IPCC reports aren’t the main problem … perhaps instead the *MAIN* problem is short-sighted risk-denying business leaders, politicians, and economists … who in America as in Japan, are recklessly seizing upon any and all excuses, to remain in willful ignorance, of the sobering implications of accelerating climate-change?
If only the scale of what yoo propose globally could be proportioned to Japan’s lack of expenditure on safety, most of your resistance would disappear. Would the Japanese have implemented increased safety standards given a 10-fold cost increase? How about a 1000-fold increase?
Basically, 1000-fold + climategate means your side doesn’t stand a long term chance.
Such as the ~15 years of steady temperatures.
Give Fan another yet another Nobel Prize for PC.
He’s … back!
http://climateaudit.org/2007/10/23/bristlecones-foxtails-and-ipcc-ar4/
Matches the pattern of labeling inanimate behaviors with fictitional subjects having monstrous connotations, such as Sky-Dragon, T-REX, Uncertainty Monster, Delinquent Teenagers, Iron Sun, “fisics”, and now Chucky? Did Jason wield a hockey stick or did he just wear the goalie mask?
It’s all rather silly and the reason they do this is to prey on the fears of anti-science types and all the Malthusians and Luddites and cornucopians that make up the majority of climate skeptics.
Only blinkered alarmists like Web fail to see the main anti-science types are the government stooge scientists who hide data, obstruct foi, etc etc (activities Wed thoroughly endorses as far as I have seen) .
We just call you guys clowns. Open data is useful for analyzing renewable and alternative energy strategies, another thing that the climate science skeptics have heartburn over. Not surprising since climate skeptics are a mix of Malthusians and Luddites and cornucopians.
Well of course unapologetic advocates like Web of politically-motivated-fraud-science call its critics clowns, and knowingly miscategorize them as Luddites etc. Fundamentally opposed to openness and honesty, what other ‘argument’ can you come up with ?
And joke technologies like wind and solar energy give every who isn’t on government money heartburn.
See what I mean? Bait a clown and they show their true colors. By ridiculing alternative technology energy schemes you are exposed as a Luddite, Malthusian, and cornucopian.
Luddite because you are afraid of employing high tech to the schemes.
Malthusian because you aggressively don’t want to see progress made.
And cornucopian because you think that conventional approaches will suffice.
I can bait these clowns all day and their response is predictable. I just guessed that Chucky would respond that way.
Forgot the threading was stuffed.
Well let’s stick to the script here – rather than in webnutcolonoscope’s imaginary universe.
No one objects to cheap and abundant energy.
Malthus was of course the original millennialist prophet of doom. He was wrong and will continue to be wrong even as the space cadets make ever more repellent comparisons to humanity as a plague on the planet and soon to face ultimate collapse of the global civilisation.
A cornucopian is of course anyone who suggested that peak oil was not an existential problem because economic substitution and technology would ensure continued supplies of liquid fuels. The ‘cornucopian’ has of course been shown to be entirely correct and webby entirely wrong – again.
Must be groundhog day again.
Malthusian carries the connotation of excessive pessimism and inhumanity. There is also a fraction of skeptics that hold apocalyptic religious visions that could fit well within that pessimistic frame of mind.
I believe in investment in human innovation because I am excited about seeing possible new technologies put in place. You can scoff but a carbon fiber road bike is an amazing piece of technology and one that keeps me optimistic on how far we can go with the fundamental pieces.
Try to find anywhere in my writings where I am a doomster. You can’t. It is all massive transference and projection on your part.
So the webster thinks that human ingenuity can feed the world, grow economies, sequester carbon and provide cheap and abundant energy?
There are in fact many technologies that are cost effective, have multiple benefits and are being deployed. There are many other technologies close to realisation and probably many others I don’t know about.
But really – the cult of AGW groupthink attack smurf changing his spots? I doubt it.
Chief. The historical record is there. I wrote The Oil Conundrum book two years ago. Half the book is on innovative approaches to environmental modeling, suitable for alternative technologies.
You just make up stuff for whatever reason. I haven’t changed my spots.
I am talking about technological innovation for energy – you are talking God only knows what economic intervention for a catastropic civilisation changing proble. Sorry can’t be bothered with your loser site – or loser modelling.
Malthusian to anyone who lives in this reality connotes overpopulation – http://thegeorgiaguidestones.com/WWF.htm
I have been taking an overview of webby’s website.
We don’t have to take webster seriously – he does that enough for all of us.
More Songs About Oil and Gas
–Update: A Pilgrim’s Progress–
I have several objectives for my approach to modeling fossil fuel depletion, any one of which I don’t mind achieving.
1. Introducing something fundamentally new to the discussion.
2. Going beyond the heuristics and empirical relationships that I see plastered everywhere, to an approach mathematically-inclined people can understand (the rub).
3. Resurrecting some old but perhaps forgotten techniques buried in the literature (so far nothing has shown up, or has it?).
4. Showing analogies to other physical processes, like an RC circuit in electronics or a 1st order damped system in mechanical dynamics.
5. Using the formulation to historically analyze or make predictions based on current data.
6. Demonstrate an alternative to and weaknesses of the conventional approaches such as the logistic curve and gaussian (questioning empiricism).
7. Come up with an open-source modeling environment, where I can make all source code and data available to the public.
And above all, try to make the constituent parts fit together tighter than a litter of suckling piglets. Because therein lies the way to making progress in a purely meritocritous blogosphere.
So this blog entry once again contains categorized oil depletion modeling posts that I have written over the last half-year. By and large, I have proceeded from a micro world view to a macro view, while adding interesting details that help me gain insight into how other mathematically-inclined people understand our current Peak Oil predicament…
No doubt we will get more shocks in the future. The crucial finding in my mind: the shocks serve to delay significantly the onset of peak oil. Before the 70’s, we used oil as if it came out of the tap; we have since made significant corrections in the extraction rate and our more conservative use of oil. We will likely get a shock fairly soon — this will not invalidate the model results and it will not disprove the peak oil hypothesis. It simply will serve to delay the peak a bit more. I really believe (and the model shows) that we would have hit a peak several years ago without these shocks in place.
Recession is good? How about that for back-handed insight?
From the realm of the almost poetical.
“Like strange bulldogs sniffing each other’s butts, you could sense wariness from both sides”
Imperialistic house of prayer. Conquistadors who took their share.
“My life’s the disease that could always change
With comparative ease, just given the chance
My life is the earth, ‘twixt muscle and spade
I wait for the worth, digging for just one chance
As prospects diminish, as nightmares swell
Some pray for Heaven while we live in Hell” – E&TB
And from his most ardent admirer.
Three passions,warcraft leveling simple but wow lvl overwhelmingly strong,wow power level have governed wow power level my life: the longing wrath of the lich king power leveling for love, the search for knowledge,World of warcraft Power Leveling and unbearable pity WOTLK Power Leveling for the suffering wlk power leveling of mankind. These passions,wlk power leveling like great winds,age of conan gold have blown me hither and thither,cheap aoc gold in a wayward course,aoc power leveling over a great ocean ffxi gil of anguish, reaching final fantasy xi gil to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed FFXI Gil all the rest of life for final fantasy gil a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, wow gold because it relieves loneliness–that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness dog clothes looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss.
Webby
You are doing a bit of fancy footwork to fog up your previous silly statement about CAGW skeptics being “Luddites, Malthusians and cornucopians” (mutually exclusive terms, as was pointed out).
But let’s go through your logic.
Are global fossil fuel resources finite? You bet they are
Are we about to run out anytime soon? Nope.
We’ve used up 15% of all the fossil fuels that were ever on our planet, leaving 85% to go (WEC 2010), and these should last us 250-300 years at present consumption rates (or 130-150 years if average per capita consumption increases by 30% and population from 7 to 10.5 billion).
So the essentially “Malthusian” concept that there aren’t enough fossil fuels left to supply a growing world population over the foreseeable future is not correct.
And (here’s the “cornucopian” talking): there is no doubt that new cost effective technologies exist or will emerge to replace fossil fuels (improved nuclear fission or fusion for power generation, improved electrical vehicles, plus other technologies not even thought of today).
No room for “Luddite” thinking here: it’s all about new technologies.
“Forcibly curtailing CO2 emissions by cutting back the use of fossil fuels” (by top-down government edict) could be argued to be a “Luddite” approach to fighting the imaginary “CAGW problem”.
Allowing the free market and human ingenuity to develop new. cost-effective alternates to fossil fuels (as these become more difficult and costly to extract) is an “anti-Luddite” approach.
The belief that this development will occur could be seen as “cornucopian” by some – others would simply say that it reflects human history – and there is no compelling argument that history will not repeat itself.
Max
@web
‘By ridiculing alternative technology energy schemes you are exposed as a Luddite, Malthusian, and cornucopian.’
To whom was this remark addressed? The threading problem makes it even harder than normal to extract your meaning.
If it was a reply to my question about evidence for sceptics being ‘Luddites, Malthusians and cornucopians’, or about the meaning of ‘anti-science’, then it is entirely inadequate, since it presents nothing better than assertion.
Fail :-(
I see – so, extolling politically correct comically inadequate technologies like wind and solar is “baiting” is it?
Luddites
These guys opposed technology that was more efficient, not less efficient (like wind and solar).
Mathusians
We’re still awaiting your ‘explanation’ of how concern about growing population maps somehow to CAGW scepticism.
Conucopians
Wiki says : Fundamentally they believe that there is enough matter and energy on the Earth to provide for the ever-rising population of the world.
So (a) how does this link to CAGW scepticism?
And (b) it is pretty much the opposite of Malthusianism. So only a paid-up moron would describe anything/one as both Malthusian and Cornucopian.
I can bait these clowns all day and their response is predictable. I just guessed that Chucky would respond that way.
Ooooh so let me try this “baiting” trick too.
HEY EVERYBODY!!! 2+2=5
Ho ho ho, I can just guess how baited suckers out there will respond. Ho ho ho.
Who is ‘we’ in this context Kemo Sahbee?
You are the only poster that I know of who uses that term..in your ‘Handy Hints to Sane Voices in the Climate Insanity’ post. Or maybe you have an imaginary friend called Wynthrop Hub Telescope who agrees with you?
Threading stuffed again?
We just call you guys cult of AGW groupthink space cadets. But webnutcolonoscope can’t even get the groupthink bit right.
Malthus was of course the original millennialist prophet of doom. He was wrong and will continue to be wrong even as the space cadets make ever more repellent comparisons to humanity as a plague on the planet and soon to face ultimate collapse of the global civilisation.
A cornucopian is of course anyone who suggested that peak oil was not an existential problem because economic substitution and technology would ensure continued supplies of liquid fuels. The ‘cornucopian’ has of course been shown to be entirely correct and webby entirely wrong – again.
Luddite is a bit of a mystery term. The Luddites were weavers who destroyed textile mills early in the industrial revolution. The only luddites I can see are those space cadets calling for de-industrialisation and economic de-growth. These green/neo-socialist untopians object to any economic activity at all and in the meantime the natural world goes to hell in a hand basket because they are unutterably incompetent at what they claim is their core value.
Nor is the sceptical political position one of inaction on emissions as a preferred course of action. For the most part for sceptics it translates as resistance to taxes or caps as a policy instrument. Globally and almost universally. You may categorise that as you wish – but the ongoing policy impasse consists entirely of this. Taxes on one side and resistance on the other. If pissant progressives could admit defeat on this – it would be possible to advance the discussion to meaningful, pragmatic, practical and highly effective ways to proceed. Many of which I have discussed and advocated ad nauseum. It is not the sceptics – whatever their position on the science – who object to technological innovation and cheap and plentiful energy or to feeding the world and growing economies. We call for massive investments and billion dollar energy prizes and the pissant progressives are silent. We call for modest investments in global agriculture to feed the world, conserve soil and water and sequester the 500 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. Again the pissant progressives are silent.
I get Vaughan Pratt making a silly comment that 1 tonne of carbon in the soil is 1 tonne of carbon taken from the atmosphere – a joke I guess because he must realise that carbon is not the only atom in a molecule of carbon dioxide. But the webnutjob – inserts himself with a comment that the chief kangaroo has got the sequestration numbers wrong. Except he typically pretentiously calls it a model. It is a simple calculation. A 1% increase in soil organic matter per hectare removes 100 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The sceptics are all for it – because it feeds the world.
You have to ask yourself – who is the enemy of progress? I submit that it is the cult of AGW groupthink space cadets – the few percenters whose membership can of course cross the political divide occasionally. It is the green/neo-socialist overreach of the pissant progressive incapable of democratic discourse and compromise, incapable of the accepting the good but insisting on some imagined perfection of a utopian future, certain of their immutable moral virtue, champions of government control over every aspect of our social life, millenialist, dogmatist and opportunist. Is this a fight to the death webnut? C’est la guerre climatique.
In fact I am not quite sure that webby has a political position – he is really just a smurf they feed steroids to wandering about the climate war battlefields barking abuse and dissimulation. He is clueless and always wrong but – to the pissant progressive – an amusing attack smurf.
Yes Judith, it is.
@webbie
Wow.
That’s quite a sweeping set of statement..
Where is your evidence that there are a lot of Malthusian sceptics? I know of plenty Malthusian alarmists…and I’d speculate that with your witterings about ‘Peak Oil’ you are pretty much one yourself. But sceptical Malthusians? Name a few with some proof of their views
Next let’s try Luddite sceptics. Any evidence here?
And what is an ‘anti-science type’. Please be specific. Include a definition of ‘science’ rather better than ‘science is what self-declared scientists do’. And then show how one may be ‘anti’ it.
Thanks as ever.
Latimer,
Web can’t even bring himself to criticise blatant anti-science practices like hiding data. So how can you expect him to know what science IS ?
But yes, Malthusian climate sceptics….wtf are those ? People who think a growing population will induce a reluctance to believe what dishonest government climate scientists steeped in ulterior motives want us to believe ? Let’s put out an emergency call to WebColonoscope to please explain …
Yes Mr Web does seem rather inclined to produce colonic produce.
[For some reason, my post ended up up-thread, so am re-posting it here, where it belongs]
Latimer Alder
You quote Webby as having said up-thread somewhere that skeptics [of the CAGW premise of IPCC] are ‘Luddites, Malthusians and cornucopians’, or ‘anti-science’,
You are correct that Webby’s comment appears to bear little resemblance to reality, but let’s analyze it anyway.
First, let’s define his terms (on-line dictionary and Wiki)
Luddite
one who is opposed to especially technological change [one might interpret this to be “anti-science”]
Malthusian
one who advocates for population control programs, to ensure resources for current and future populations
Cornucopian
one who believes that continued progress and provision of material items for mankind can be met by similarly continued advances in technology [this could be interpreted as the diametric opposite of “anti-science”]
These three terms are contradictory and in some cases even mutually exclusive, to start off with.
Many “rational skeptics” of the CAGW premise may actually be “cornucopians”, but this is not necessarily the case, even though it might be likely (using IPCC wordsmithing).
I know many “rational skeptics” of the CAGW premise, but none of these is either a “Luddite” or a “Malthusian”. In fact, many “doomsday” fear sufferers are “Malthusians” (Schneider, Ehrlich, environmental lobby groups, such as WWF, Greenpeace, etc.), so this description most likely fits better for the CAGW supporter than for the skeptic..
“Luddites”? Don’t know any of those in either camp. In the CAGW group we have guys like Holdren, who want to “geo-engineer” our climate by shooting sulfuric acid into the stratosphere, others who support carbon capture + storage, so these are definitely not “Luddites”. There may be some fruitcakes in the CAGW camp that simply want to turn the clock back to the 19th century, but I would guess that these are in a minority.
So we see that upon analysis Webby’s statement bears no semblance to reality, and – as he has been unable to demonstrate otherwise – we can discard it as BS.
Max
FOMBS
Your quotation marks attribute to me things that I have never said. What I said was that fully turbulent flows in fluid dynamics are described well by the NS PDE and are solvable with numerical finite element methods. The question around this – as evidenced by the Clay prize – is why? That should be simple enough.
What is in principle deterministic but in practice incalculable – is a dynamically complex system subject to control variables and multiple negative and positive feedbacks.
Fllod flows are an example off the former – the simple three body problem of Poincaré is an example of the latter. The Poincaré problem is not solvable by classical mechanics.
But what of warming. In this case the causation is explicit.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-3-23.html
So the argument that sun and climate parted company in 1950, or 1980 or whatever is either irrelevant – something else caused the cloud changes – or the sun is more subtly driving climate. Either way the simple cult of AGW groupthink space cadets meme doesn’t hold water vapour.
We know that Pacific variability causes cloud changes, we know that conditions in the Pacific varies on interannual to millenial timescales. The satellite evidence is consistent.
At any rate the planet is not warming for a decade or three because of a climate shift from a warm to a cool mode after 1998.
Unlike El Niño and La Niña, which may occur every 3 to 7 years and last from 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain in the same phase for 20 to 30 years. The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate, affecting Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, the productivity of marine ecosystems, and global land temperature patterns. #8220;This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool’ trend can intensify La Niña or diminish El Niño impacts around the Pacific basin,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The persistence of this large-scale pattern [in 2008] tells us there is much more than an isolated La Niña occurring in the Pacific Ocean.” http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703
It feels like grounhog day again – why is that eh FOMBS?
:cool:
:cool:
:cool:
:cool:
:cool:
Despite the descent into incivility that characterises not a few comments – those of webnutcoloscope are especially eggegrious – a civil site is much preferable. And much more likely to lead to a civil and productive dicourse.
Webby is not at all intersted in a civil discourse – nor are you FOMBS.
Is it all an expression of evangelistic fervour in the cult of AGW groupthink space cadets. Still crude and abusive insults should be unwelcome.
One first must define Science. The word science is to often used ad nausea when people really mean knowledge.
Before science can claim to be done there must be a falsifiable experiment and if the experiment gives a positive result this result must be independently replicated and verified !!
‘OK how about an accusation that you want it both ways?
When you want to present the argument that the climate is unpredictable it all highly non-linear and chaotic. When you don’t, suddenly ” things are very much simpler” and we can show that “it won’t warm for the next decade or three”.
Its all verbal salad of course but highly contaminated with BS.’
This was the response to the the comment below. I don’t what it is. Climate is nonlinear, nonequilibrium, chaotic. That is what science says – and there is a great deal of confusion about just what this means. But it also driven by radiative flux at top of atmosphere. The relevant section from A4R is quoted – along with the conceptual energy budget and a link provided to how it is derived. The satellite evidence is what it is. This is of course a different matter to cooling regimes – http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703
i>’Unlike El Niño and La Niña, which may occur every 3 to 7 years and last from 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain in the same phase for 20 to 30 years. The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate, affecting Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, the productivity of marine ecosystems, and global land temperature patterns. This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool’ trend can intensify La Niña or diminish El Niño impacts around the Pacific basin,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The persistence of this large-scale pattern [in 2008] tells us there is much more than an isolated La Niña occurring in the Pacific Ocean.” ‘
As I have said before to you – the system is highly dissipative. The turbulence from the wings dies out within a few centimetres. The concept derives from the name of a 1972 Lorenz paper – His paper “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” introduced the butterfly image, courtesy of meteorologist Philip Merilees, who came up with the title.’
‘Lorenz would thus equivocate when asked whether a butterfly can really cause a tornado. “Even today I am unsure of the proper answer,” he said in a 2008 lecture. The value of the question is the larger point it evokes: that nature is highly sensitive to tiny changes. “The idea has now entered the everyday vision of many scientists across all disciplines,” says Rothman. “They understand that some things are chaotic, and that there’s exponential divergence from initial conditions. They may not voice it, but they know it because it’s in the air. That’s the sign of a great achievement.”‘
http://www.technologyreview.com/mitnews/422809/when-the-butterfly-effect-took-flight/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45727263/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/can-butterfly-brazil-really-cause-tornado-texas/
But at TOA things are very much simpler.
(1-α)H/4 = σ T ^4
Where – α is albedo, H is TSI and, σ is the SB constant and T is the temperature. It is not quite as simple as this – but this is commonly cited – e.g. http://www.geo.utexas.edu/courses/387h/Lectures/chap2.pdf
The major change in the satellite era was in reflected SW – i.e. 2.4W/m^2 less reflected SW and 0,5 W/m^2 cooling in the IR between the 80′s and the 90′s.
‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ AR4 3.4.4.1
This is not about predicting anything but looking at the evidence. You need to have other evidence that is stronger to make any inroad into this idea. You don’t. All you have is repetitive trivialisation.
The current conditions are very much in a cool mode – and these last for decades. Beyond that – there be dragon-kings.
It is certainly not about science anymore – it is about the psychopathology of groupthink – what I have called elsewhere the cult of AGW groupthink space cadets. It is an inability to process information that is nor consistent with the set of ideas that make up the groupthink.
There are many resources on groupthink on the interweb – http://www.disinfo.com/2012/06/conformity-and-the-elevator-experiment/ – and this is a major theme in discussion of globl warming.
I am not sure there is a solution.
Chief,
You’re not the first person to peddle the theory that of the dynamics of the climate being complex and chaotic that it is totally unpredictable. Christopher Monckton has had a go with this one as well. See the link below which also contains the rebuttal from the mainstream scientific POV
http://www.skepticalscience.com/chaos-theory-global-warming-can-climate-be-predicted.htm
I know I shouldn’t say that because X is an idiot and argues Y, that therefore Y is wrong. I know it’s logically incorrect to do so. Even when X is Christopher Monckton. But you’d have to at least think that Y is highly likely to be wrong , wouldn’t you?
It is much more likely that John Cook is incorrect. Really – you have made the same argument about average conditions in june or whatever. The possibility is – however – is for abrupt and nonlinear change – locally 10’s of degrees even within a decade.
Large, abrupt climate changes have affected hemispheric to global regions repeatedly, as shown by numerous paleoclimate records (Broecker, 1995, 1997). Changes of up to 16°C and a factor of 2 in precipitation have occurred in some places in periods as short as decades to years (Alley and Clark, 1999; Lang et al., 1999). However, before the 1990s, the dominant view of past climate change emphasized the slow, gradual swings of the ice ages tied to features of the earth’s orbit over tens of millennia or the 100-million-year changes occurring with continental drift. But unequivocal geologic evidence pieced together over the last few decades shows that climate can change abruptly, and this has forced a reexamination of climate instability and feedback processes (NRC, 1998). Just as occasional floods punctuate the peace of river towns and occasional earthquakes shake usually quiet regions near active faults, abrupt changes punctuate the sweep of climate history…
The new paradigm of an abruptly changing climatic system has been well established by research over the last decade, but this new thinking is little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of natural and social scientists and policy-makers.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=1
This not so new paradigm of climate science is widely appreiated in the scientific community.
http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=nonlinear+dynamics+climate+journal%3B&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=hb5uUNrsG4WZiAewy4DQDw&ved=0CBoQgQMwAA
Come back when you understand any of it.
Chief,
I don’t think you’ve read my link properly. If you had you’d have known that it wasn’t written by John Cook but by Jacob Bock Axelsen who is MSc in biophysics and PhD in complexity studies, both from the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen. He has worked twice as a visiting scientist in USA and subsequently as a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is a contracted physicist at Centro de Astrobiologia in Madrid
Try reading it again. Slowly and carefully this time. If you spot any flaws maybe you can explain just how Dr Axelson hasn’t got it quite right.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/chaos-theory-global-warming-can-climate-be-predicted-intermediate.htm
It was on John Cook’s site – so I am to asume he doesn’t agree with it? Frankly I read the first sentence – which was the same seasonal average meme that you repeat to poor effect.
Try reading the NAS report or some of the msny other hundreds of references – and you may gain some credibility. You tell me why they are wrong.
Chief,
Your problem is one of interpretation rather the references themselves. You’re trying to fit them all into your pre-existing world viewpoint rather than understand what they mean and change your viewpoint accordingly.
TT, Chief doesn’t understand that the sum total of the kinetic energy of the atmosphere cannot undergrowth abrupt changes. What this means is that if the winds are calm in one part of the world, they have to be strong somewhere else.
Long term this kinetic energy level can only change due to external forcings. Chaos theory can’t change this level. The climate clowns use chaos as a crutch.
The planetary ‘forcing function’
(1-α)H/4 = σT^4
It would be pretty surprising if α didn’t change at all – particularly as the planet plunged into a glacial with runaway ice and snow feebacks.
Perhaps an attack smurf has some function but rationality isn’t one of them.
‘The new paradigm of an abruptly changing climatic system has been well established by research over the last decade, but this new thinking is little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of natural and social scientists and policy-makers.’
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=1
No I don’t so tt. I think you are a cult of AGW groupthink space cadet. You have difficulties in processing anomalies.
Stephen Mosher says: ” When skeptics stand up and clearly state that they agree with the facts as we know them– It is warmer; Green house gases cause warming– then they deserve a seat at the table. Until then they are arguing up is down.”
That would be me. I would actually refuse to sit down with anyone as ignorant of facts as Mosher. Because GHG-s, you see, do not cause warming. Let’s start with a simple case like Arctic warming. Thanks to Kaufman et al. we have an excellent temperature history that goes back for two thousand years. Their temperature curve looks just like a hockey stick: for most of these two thousand years nothing happens but then, at the turn of the twentieth century, warming suddenly starts. There is a pause in mid-century but warming resumes and is still going strong. Now I have to explain some simple physics so you understand what is going on. Greenhouse gases only warm the atmosphere when they absorb outgoing infrared radiation. The absorptivity of the gas in the infrared is a property of the gas and cannot be changed. If you want to start a warming the only way you can do it without violating laws of nature is to add more gas to the atmosphere. But we have an excellent history of atmospheric carbon dioxide and it shows that when the warming started there was no parallel increase of carbon dioxide in the air. It follows from this that it is quite impossible for greenhouse warming to be the cause of the observed Arctic warming. To get he rest of the story read E&E 22(8):1069-1083. His more general case of “It is warmer; Green house gases cause warming -…” is harder to explain without mathematics but I will try. The applicable theory is that introduced by Ferenc Miskolczi in 2005. He studied the absorption of infrared radiation by greenhouse gases at NASA and came to the conclusion that for a stable climate to exist the infrared optical thickness of the atmosphere must have a value of 1.867…. This corresponds to an infrared transmittance of 30 percent. But what happens when we add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere? If you follow Arrhenius it means that the atmosphere will start to absorb more IR and the transmittance will drop below the optimum 30 percent. But in actual fact this does not happen. According to Miskolczi this is because the greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere will correct for any deviations from this optimum by a series of feedbacks. Absorption by the actual atmosphere involves both carbon dioxide and water vapor. According to Miskolczi, when carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere the concentration of water vapor goes down and compensates for the added absorption from this extra carbon dioxide. This, in effect, is negative feedback by water vapor, the exact opposite of positive feedback that IPCC has been using in their predictions of warming. The sensitivity of carbon dioxide alone to doubling is about one degree Celsius. To get those high sensitivities they need to predict dangerous warming they absolutely must have positive water vapor feedback to produce them. And now suddenly Miskolczi tells them that they are wrong. Who is right? The obvious way is to measure the IR optical thickness as a function of time and find out whether its value depends on added carbon dioxide or not. And fortunately NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 contains the data needed to do this. Using this database Miskolczi was able to demonstrate that the IR optical thickness of the atmosphere has been constant for the last 61 years. Not only that, but the measured value of the optical thickness was 1,87, exactly what his theory predicted. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air increased by 21.6 percent during this time interval. This means that the addition of all this carbon dioxide to the atmosphere had no effect whatsoever on the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. To put it differently, the enhanced greenhouse effect that is alleged to be the cause of anthropogenic global warming simply does not exist.
LOL very good Arno Arrak! ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
Now complete your reasoning as follows:
• Therefore, CO2 only cools the atmosphere when it emits radiation.
• As humans add more CO2, we steadily raise the height to which CO2 must rise, for its emitted radiation to escape to space.
• In rising to this ever-greater height, CO2 is adiabatically cooled by air-expansion, and therefore emits less radiation.
• Because less heat is radiated by CO2, the earth warms!
Congratulations Arno Arrak! :!: :!: :!:
Your own reasoning has clearly explained the consensus physics of CO2-induced global-warming! ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
As Arno Arrak and Mosher and Fan doubtless know, very few sceptics disagree that is it warmer and that greenhouse gasses cause warming. They wouldn’t be sceptics if they did – they’d be deniers (a vanishingly small population, talked about mainly by alarmist propagandists).
So why raise the point at all? Sounds like empty posing and grandstanding to me.
In answer ter yr question, Max, guess i am a kinda, half baked, sorta aca -demic .Heck wouldya beleev i even topped me fourth year (Chinese) history subject? Fergotten more than I ever knew but )
” guess i am a kinda, half baked, sorta aca -demic ”
“”half baked’? I think you may be over-stating your abilities there. How about not baked at all ?
tempterrain
As a totally impartial observer I’d have to say that Beth has a better developed ability to thing logically and analytically, a more highly developed “esprit de synthèse” plus better writing skills (both in prose and in verse) that you do.
Did you get your ed-you-cay-shun in the outback somewhere?
And where did you learn to be such a scaredy-cat? Or is this simply feigned fear, to support your leftist “Weltanschauung”?
{I don’t expect an answer to these questions, tt. And I admit that they are impertinent, as was your silly remark to Beth.]
Max
RiHo08,
Guess we live on the littoral, nothing certain except death and taxes, one of which turkeys find out at Thanksgiving.
While Socrates and others have argued that learned ignorance is the first step in honest enquiries towards truth, as Taleb points out, later skeptics of human rationality, believing in black swans and Hume’s problem, find faith more appealing than reason or empirical research. Some of the apocalyptic climate science ( modelling and projection) consensus thinking seems like that ter me..
In all reason, should Leftists attach more liability to the government of Japan for a failure to see Fukushima than it is able to attach to God for Eyjafjallajokull? If Leftists think so then they had better always vote for the George Bush’s of the world instead of wishing for the next Stalin, Mao or Castro. If anyone on the Left had the courage to tell the truth they’d admit Katrina was a human-caused disaster because Bush was in office. In an earlier time or if under a Democrat president it would have been a natural disaster, pure and simple.
JC:
For once I disagree with you. These are dangerous recommendations. In principle, they should be sound, but in practice they won’t be.
Despite what I believe are dominantly good intentions, scientists’ understanding of science is as much a function of values as it is of data. Furthermore, the “best” scientific knowledge may or may not be useful, and scientists may or may not know the relevance of that knowledge to reality. IME, scientists (esp academic scientists, no offense;) – like most experts – have the greatest expertise at overconfidence in their own views and interpretations. Ultimately, to restrict input, or give extraordinary relevance of input, to “scientists” ( practicing researchers with “expertise” in a particular field) on scientific issues is a monumental mistake. The AGW controversy should make that clear enough.
As far as the IPCC is concerned, I suspect that they could adopt each and every one of these recommendations and charge right ahead doing exactly what they’ve been doing all along – I’m guessing that many IPCC defenders would say that these are the principles of the IPCC.
Who qualifies fer the Luddite Nobel Prize?
Has ter be someone or some collective body that best contributes ter the Back Ter The Golden Age economic life style … Have ter leave it ter others ter decide as i’m putting on a dinner party and the guests will soon be arriving …
… in this still affluent modern society where we aren’t periodically hit by famine we have these events that were once enjoyed only by the aristocracy : ) There’ll be oysters, followed by curried chicken, basmata rice, steamed green vegetables of mixed nationality, raspberries and cream and an apricot and prune upside down cake, works better that way, like a well known climate study … and the music will be international as well.
We just call you guys cult of AGW groupthink space cadets. But webnutcolonoscope can’t even get the groupthink bit right.
Malthus was of course the original millennialist prophet of doom. He was wrong and will continue to be wrong even as the space cadets make ever more repellent comparisons to humanity as a plague on the planet and soon to face ultimate collapse of the global civilisation.
A cornucopian is of course anyone who suggested that peak oil was not an existential problem because economic substitution and technology would ensure continued supplies of liquid fuels. The ‘cornucopian’ has of course been shown to be entirely correct and webby entirely wrong – again.
Luddite is a bit of a mystery term. The Luddites were weavers who destroyed textile mills early in the industrial revolution. The only luddites I can see are those space cadets calling for de-industrialisation and economic de-growth. These green/neo-socialist untopians object to any economic activity at all and in the meantime the natural world goes to hell in a hand basket because they are unutterably incompetent at what they claim is their core value.
Nor is the sceptical political position one of inaction on emissions as a preferred course of action. For the most part for sceptics it translates as resistance to taxes or caps as a policy instrument. Globally and almost universally. You may categorise that as you wish – but the ongoing policy impasse consists entirely of this. Taxes on one side and resistance on the other. If pissant progressives could admit defeat on this – it would be possible to advance the discussion to meaningful, pragmatic, practical and highly effective ways to proceed. Many of which I have discussed and advocated ad nauseum. It is not the sceptics – whatever their position on the science – who object to technological innovation and cheap and plentiful energy or to feeding the world and growing economies. We call for massive investments and billion dollar energy prizes and the pissant progressives are silent. We call for modest investments in global agriculture to feed the world, conserve soil and water and sequester the 500 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. Again the pissant progressives are silent.
I get Vaughan Pratt making a silly comment that 1 tonne of carbon in the soil is 1 tonne of carbon taken from the atmosphere – a joke I guess because he must realise that carbon is not the only atom in a molecule of carbon dioxide. But the webnutjob – inserts himself with a comment that the chief kangaroo has got the sequestration numbers wrong. Except he typically pretentiously calls it a model. It is a simple calculation. A 1% increase in soil organic matter per hectare removes 100 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The sceptics are all for it – because it feeds the world.
You have to ask yourself – who is the enemy of progress? I submit that it is the cult of AGW groupthink space cadets – the few percenters whose membership can of course cross the political divide occasionally. It is the green/neo-socialist overreach of the pissant progressive incapable of democratic discourse and compromise, incapable of the accepting the good but insisting on some imagined perfection of a utopian future, certain of their immutable moral virtue, champions of government control over every aspect of our social life, millenialist, dogmatist and opportunist. Is this a fight to the death webnut? C’est la guerre climatique.
In fact I am not quite sure that webby has a political position – he is really just a smurf they feed steroids to wandering about the climate war battlefields barking abuse and dissimulation. He is clueless and always wrong but – to the pissant progressive – an amusing attack smurf.
say tempt, did you study at Melbourne University too? Since you raised an issue of study levels well me lowest mark was a high 2A., got a few firsts, tempt and had the privilege of teachers like Prof Geoffrey Blainey so I guess i did ok. Ahem ..hope you were as fortunate with yr teachers.
Melbourne Uni? No I didn’t.
But , in any case, I think you must be confusing me with someone else. I haven’t mentioned “study levels”.
Chief
Your quotation marks attribute to me things that I have never said. What I said was that fully turbulent flows in fluid dynamics are described well by the NS PDE and are solvable with numerical finite element methods. The question around this – as evidenced by the Clay prize – is why? That should be simple enough.
What is in principle deterministic but in practice incalculable – is a dynamically complex system subject to control variables and multiple negative and positive feedbacks.
Chief why are you arguing with idiots ?
They didn’t learn anything about the concepts you mention and they are obviously unable to learn anything.
I have noticed one of the idiots linking to a seminal T.Tao’s blog aout Navier Stokes. And this was supposed to somehow contradict … what you wrote ?
I have read this blog post already 5 years ago and even exchanged on a few details with T.Tao. So I know damn well what it is about.
I was tempted to ask the poster who linked this blog entry what exactly he understood in the T.Tao post.
But then I realised that the result would only be to establish in public that the poster was an ignorant fool what everybody who studied N-S already knows anyway. That’s why it would be only stating the obvious.
As for the content and for your information.
Of course T.Tao’s blog entry doesn’t contradict in ANY way what you correctly stated.
It is actually only faintly relevant for non linear dynamics and chaotic systems.
Now T.Tao’s classes about ergodic theory would be HIGHLY relevant to this issue but it is obvious that people who live with 19th century linear equilibrium physics would not be able to link anything because this would be far above their skills and abilities.
Beisdes, and this has to be stressed on every occasion – Navier Stokes is to the climate system what a heads-tails game is to the Go game.
As you correctly stated – fluids exhibit mostly spatio temporal chaotic behaviour which is not predictable by definition.
Forcings are irrelevant because they are just one term in the N-S equation and there is no monotonous relation between the variation of the forcings and variation of the solutions. If there was, the Clay million would have been claimed long ago.
Things about local turbulence whose statistical properties are “predictable” by empirical formula fittings are red herrings but idiots seem to love them much.
Of course these formulas are only valid for small volumes, pseudo steady states and a small range of the parameter space.
This has nothing to do with large scale chaos and Navier Stokes but THIS is something that T.Tao really says ;)
Strange. My post above was supposed to appear after Chief’s post but it didn’t. Judith there is clearly room for improvement in the blog technology :)
Tomas,
Sometimes when egregiously uncivil comments – or in the case of my comments unfairly moderated – are deleted it interrupts the nesting.
You are of course right – and these space cadets seem unlikely to get it – but I am not arguing with them. Occassionally – someone admits to the epithany that is chaos in climate. It is an individual thing and the beginning of real understanding.
I have taken to calling myself a climate catastrophist (in the sense of Rene Thom) – because of course there are real instabilities in climate that can lead to dramatic change within as little as a decade. But the world is not warming for a decade or three more – and this seems likely to lead to not doing what is needful, practical and pragmatic as the world rejects the simple memes of the space cadets.
As you know – I woud rather not just muddle through but make this century
the genesis of a human civilisation to last 5 billion years.
Cheers
I just arrived to see that the thread has gone virilent and verbose. That much is relatively predictable, unlike climate.
Well let’s stick to the script here – rather than in webnutcolonoscope’s imaginary universe.
No one objects to cheap and abundant energy.
Malthus was of course the original millennialist prophet of doom. He was wrong and will continue to be wrong even as the space cadets make ever more repellent comparisons to humanity as a plague on the planet and soon to face ultimate collapse of the global civilisation.
A cornucopian is of course anyone who suggested that peak oil was not an existential problem because economic substitution and technology would ensure continued supplies of liquid fuels. The ‘cornucopian’ has of course been shown to be entirely correct and webby entirely wrong – again.
Must be groundhog day again.
God I miss bender.
Perhaps I am not alone:
> My pool is a mess since he disappeared.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/09/08/more-on-dessler-2010/#comment-302707
Chucky has big shoes to fit.
@Willard
The cheek of it – some imposter using my handle…..
Chucky,
I hope you don’t lose any sleep on it:
> October 3, 2012 at 3:19 am
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/02/rebuilding-public-trust-in-science-for-policy-making-japan-perspective/#comment-247918
Thanks I won’t. I wasn’t reading ClimateAudit at the time he wrote that stuff, hence never knew about him.
What the skeptics miss and what the topic of the top-level post exposes is that there are what are historically referred to as technocratic approaches in moving forward. It wasn’t mentioned, but the Japanese study does have remarkable similarities to the policy viewpoint known as technocracy.
Do some research on this topic and you will find a rich history.
Many of these tech advocates don’t meet your preconceptions. Were technocrats greens? No, but they shared some of the same concerns. One of the early technocrats, M. King Hubbert wasn’t a green but was an avid fisherman and obviously had concerns about future generations having the same advantages as his generation had. (p.s. Hubbert was a Shell oil research geologist who was the first to adopt a heuristic describing peak oil, though he didn’t coin the phrase).
Seriously, the logical fallacies and rationalizations that the typical ham-handed skeptic uses are so transparently phony as to be laughable.
Seriously, the stuff Web just makes up to ‘support’ his half-chewed, preconceived notions of scepticism is so transparently phony as to be laughable.
Chucky
You are broadcasting your ignorance loud and clear.
It is elementary physics that production of a finite supply begins from zero, rises, and eventually production must decline. In between the production must hit a maximum, a “peak”, a “fluctuating plateau” etc where further production growth is constrained. You can apply that principle to each finite resource.
Study the logistics curve model of M. King Hubbert. In 1956 Hubbert:
. See the graph of US 48 States oil production that peaked in 1970.
For quantitative applications to performance by state and for other regions see economist James Hamilton Oil Prices, Exhaustible Resources, and Economic Growth* Oct. 2012
David L. Hagen
We all know that the three primary fossil fuels: oil, coal, natural gas, are completely interchangeable with today’s technology, so it is silly to talk of “peak oil” alone. It makes more sense to talk of “peak fossil fuels”.
WEC (2010) has made estimates of the “inferred possible total fossil fuel resources” still left on our planet.
These are quite a bit higher than the current proven recoverable reserves (Hubbert approach on oil alone), and include such things as shale oil and gas, tar sands, etc.
Based on these estimates, we have used to date around 15% of all the fossil fuels that were ever on our planet, leaving 85% to go.
At current usage rates, this would last us between 250 and 300 years (but it is highly probable that fossil fuels will be replaced as a primary source of electrical power long before then).
So “fossil fuel availability” is not a constraint today or in the near future.
But let’s look at the CO2 problem.
15% of all the fossil fuels that ever were got us from an estimated pre-industrial 280 ppmv to a presently measured 390 ppmv or 100 ppmv added.
The remaining 85% should get us to 0.85*110/0.15 = 623 ppmv additional.
This equals 390 + 623 = 1,013 ppmv or a bit more than 1,000 ppmv asymptotic absolute-maximum-ever-possible CO2 level when ALL fossil fuels are 100% gone somewhere in the far distant future.
That’s it, David. Ain’t no’ mo’.
Max
manacker
Re: “We all know that the three primary fossil fuels: oil, coal, natural gas, are completely interchangeable with today’s technology,”
If only that were true. Think about what you just said.
Try “interchangeably” filling up with lignite, brown coal, gasoline, diesel fuel, ethanol, methanol, propane, CNG and/or LNG at your local gas station!
Try running a gas turbine on lignite or on hydrogen. Either would destroy it. And cost you “a few” million dollars for the lesson.
If everything is “interchangeable” try to understand and explain why the price of oil is about $20/GJ while that of natural gas is about $2/GJ. If they are “interchangeable”, why can’t I fill my car with natural gas?
Why has the international price of oil risen about 1000% from $10/bbl in 1998 to > $100/bbl since 2008.
Ask why Saudi Arabia used to pump oil for $0.50/bbl while Houston refineries are now eager to pump 1 million bbl/day of “oil sands” down from Alberta and pay about $100/bbl for the privilege.
Hint – see Adam Smith.
Yes coal can be converted to gasoline or diesel. But that is not “interchangeable”.
Try reading some basic texts on physics, engineering and economics.
Then study “multi cycle” Hubbert models by Tad Patzek and James Hamilton etc.
Then when you have something sensible to say, try again.
David, I don’t think Max meant economically interchangeable but rather that any of those can be used as fuel with the appropriate technological interfaces. We can generate electricity with any combustable hydrocarbon but of course we can’t put wood chips in a gas turbine but we can fuel a boiler with wood chips to produce steam for a steam turbine. Alternatively we can also use chemistry (and/or biology) to convert the chemical bond energy in wood pellets to methane and run our gas turbine indirectly from wood pellets in that manner. Comparative economics of each means is a different question and varies with the circumstance. Natural gas is only inexpensive if delivered by pipeline and there are a great many regions that aren’t served by pipelines and mobile applications can’t be served by a pipeline for some examples circumstances that change the economics. Max is a bright guy. Try to think of the smartest interpretation of what he wrote instead of the dumbest.
Springer – thanks for the reproof. Mae culpa.
Manacker
Apologies for reacting to the literal aspects of your initial statement rather than the substance of your post.
1) “We all know that the three primary fossil fuels: oil, coal, natural gas, are completely interchangeable with today’s technology, so it is silly to talk of “peak oil” alone.”
See previous post: Liquid fuels are still dominated by logistics type Hubbert models. See
Kjell Aleklett; Mikael Höök; Kristofer Jakobsson; Michael Lardelli; Simon Snowden; Bengt Söderbergh Future oil supply; Peak oil; World Energy Outlook 2008 The Peak of the Oil Age – Analyzing the world oil production Reference Scenario in World Energy Outlook 2008 Energy Policy 38 (2010) 1398–1414
See James Hamilton Oil Prices, Exhaustible Resources, and Economic Growth.
For “multi-cycle Hubbert” models where a logistics type curve dominates production in each geographic region, type of fossil resource and recovery technology-cost. Transport fuel is still dominated by the technology monopolies of gasoline and diesel use and so few “flex” fueled vehicles. e.g., See Tad Patzek Exponential growth, energetic Hubbert cycles, and the advancement of technology 2008.
2) “It makes more sense to talk of “peak fossil fuels”.”
For long term global warming – yes total fossil fuels production, combined with the difference between natural sources and sinks, will dominate atmospheric CO2.
3) “WEC (2010) has made estimates of the “inferred possible total fossil fuel resources” still left on our planet. These are quite a bit higher than the current proven recoverable reserves (Hubbert approach on oil alone), and include such things as shale oil and gas, tar sands, etc.”
The “Hubbert” approach still applies to each resource in each geographic area.
EROEI – Energy Recovery On Energy Investment, also underlies relative economics. See Charles Hall. and EROEI Special
4) “Based on these estimates, we have used to date around 15% of all the fossil fuels that were ever on our planet, leaving 85% to go.”
However in conventional crude oil, we are close to 50% gone. That is driving price.
Available Net Exports already down > 13% since 2005, per Jeffrey Brown’s analysis.
5) “At current usage rates, this would last us between 250 and 300 years (but it is highly probable that fossil fuels will be replaced as a primary source of electrical power long before then).
So “fossil fuel availability” is not a constraint today or in the near future.”
Recommend examining each type of resource separately. e.g. for Coal see:
Höök, M., Zittel, W., Schindler, J. & Aleklett, K. ”Global coal production outlooks based on a logistic model” Fuel, 2010, Vol. 89, Issue 11: 3546-3558 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fuel.2010.06.013
For Coal to Liquids see:
Höök, M. & Aleklett, K. ”A review on coal-to-liquid fuels and its coal consumption”
International journal of energy research, 2010, Vol. 34, Issue 10: 848-864
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/er.1596
6) “But let’s look at the CO2 problem.
15% of all the fossil fuels that ever were got us from an estimated pre-industrial 280 ppmv to a presently measured 390 ppmv or 100 ppmv added.
The remaining 85% should get us to 0.85*110/0.15 = 623 ppmv additional.
This equals 390 + 623 = 1,013 ppmv or a bit more than 1,000 ppmv asymptotic absolute-maximum-ever-possible CO2 level when ALL fossil fuels are 100% gone somewhere in the far distant future.”
OK given your assumptions. i.e. about 3.86x 280 ppm.
7) “That’s it, David. Ain’t no’ mo’.
Max”
Solar can also be used to further enhance hydrocarbon recovery that is not conventionally available. See Brightsource on California heavy oil. Similarly CO2 can “Enhance Oil Recovery” (EOR).
The heart of future fuels is in developing inexpensive fuels from sustainable resources with high EROEI. Springer enthuses about algae. I favor solar thermochemical. Others favor thorium cycles etc. All require lower cost structures.
Regards David
David Hagen and David Springer
Thanks for both posts.
When I said “interchangeable” of course I didn’t mean shoveling lignite into your gas tank.
But, as David Springer wrote the commercially viable technologies do exist.
– South Africa (SASOL) has been making motor fuel as well as petrochemical feedstocks from coal for years.
– Australia uses natural gas as a truck motor fuel. Many locations use natural gas for public buses.
Etc.
The point I was making, though, is that, while we are not about to run out of fossil fuels any time soon, they are limited.
If we accept the WEC 2010 study, we still have around 85% of all the fossil fuels that were ever on our planet. At present consumption rates this should last us 250 to 300 years.
If our population plateaus at around 10.5 billion around 2100 (as UN projects) and the average per capita consumption increases by 30%, they should last 130 to 200 years.
But, however you slice it, they place a constraint on the maximum-ever-possible human-induced CO2 level at around 1000 ppmv. (That’s what I meant by “ain’t no’ mo'”).
I do not believe that we will ever get to that level, because fossil fuel use will begin to wind down as these become more difficult and costly to extract, and they will be replaced by other less costly primary sources of energy (nuclear, renewables?) long before they are “all gone”.
But that’s what the Germans call “Zukunftsmusik”.
Max
Er … apropos what exactly ?
…ah…are you perhaps addressing yourself to the other Chucky seen over at ClimateAudit that Willard referred to ?
I’m not sure I was referring to anyone, Chucky.
Here’s another reference:
http://climateaudit.org/2008/08/03/chucky-in-washington/
Eh ? You refer to “Chucky”, but are not sure you referring to anyone .. ???
ChuckyOneOrTwo,
As bender would say:
> Read the blog.
Hint: Chucky is … something.
Latimer Alder
You quote Webby as having said up-thread somewhere that skeptics [of the CAGW premise of IPCC] are ‘Luddites, Malthusians and cornucopians’, or ‘anti-science’,
You are correct that Webby’s comment appears to bear little resemblance to reality, but let’s analyze it anyway.
First, let’s define his terms (on-line dictionary and Wiki)
Luddite
one who is opposed to especially technological change [ one might interpret this to be “anti-science”]
Malthusian
one who advocates for population control programs, to ensure resources for current and future populations
Cornucopian
one who believes that continued progress and provision of material items for mankind can be met by similarly continued advances in technology [this could be interpreted as the diametric opposite of “anti-science”]
These three terms are contradictory and in some cases even mutually exclusive, to start off with.
Many “rational skeptics” of the CAGW premise may actually be “cornucopians”, but this is not necessarily the case, even though it might be likely (using IPCC wordsmithing).
I know many “rational skeptics” of the CAGW premise, but none of these is either a “Luddite” or a “Malthusian”. In fact, many “doomsday” fear sufferers are “Malthusians” (Schneider, Ehrlich, environmental lobby groups, such as WWF, Greenpeace, etc.), so this description most likely fits better for the CAGW supporter than for the skeptic..
“Luddites”? Don’t know any of those in either camp. In the CAGW group we have guys like Holdren, who want to “geo-engineer” our climate by shooting sulfuric acid into the stratosphere, others who support carbon capture + storage, so these are definitely not “Luddites”. There may be some fruitcakes in the CAGW camp that simply want to turn the clock back to the 19th century, but I would guess that these are in a minority.
So we see that upon analysis Webby’s statement bears no semblance to reality, and – as he has been unable to demonstrate otherwise – we can discard it as BS.
Max
Yes you are Malthusian cornucopians. No contradiction there, Latie. These are the ostriches that stick their head in the ground while simultaneously crowing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” because they really want to see a train wreck. Maybe we should call them technology saboteurs. Twisted? Sure, but that’s the way it is. You will find all kinds of kooks and crackpots with all sorts of ulterior motives.
I am an anti-Malthusian realist, which is diametrically opposed to that. You do the analysis, using the real numbers, understanding full well that certain PTB want to keep business-as-usual. So you dig up the hidden statistics, purposely obscured, and push for new technologies. Simple as that. You have a problem with that?
An already pointed out, a Malthusian fears the effects of population growth, a cornucopian dismisses them.
In Webby’s World, A and ~A can both be true.
You can’t seem to figure out that perceptions are just that, perceptions. Those that hold apocalyptic world views can cloak that with a sunny outlook. Thus, the Malthusian cornucopian. The extreme example of this is of course the view from religious Dominionism. The dominionist beleives in untold riches that the earth can provide, right up to the end-times.
Don’t tell me that this world view does not exist. Yes it is contradictory, but peoples’s belief systems don’t have to make sense.
You just can’t seem to figure out that A and ~A can’t both be true. Hence it it is not possible to actually be both a Malthusian and a cornucopian, whatever anyone’s perception is.
Admittedly I refer though to planet earth. The parallel universe of Webby’s world is perhaps different. Do you have a book on it? And what is 2+2 equal to there, out of interest?
Webby
You write:
Me too!
Great!
So we can both agree that Malthusian guys like Ehrlich and Schneider, or Malthusian green lobby groups like WWF or Greenpeace are not “realistic” in their doomsday predictions.
Wonderful!
Ain’t “consensus” grand?
Max
Max,
Why do you consider the WWF to be Malthusian?
In your world-view its just too bad if various fauna and flora go extinct? The only economic value of a tiger is if it’s behind bars in a zoo?
http://thegeorgiaguidestones.com/WWF.htm
These stones aren’t anything to do with the WWF.
WebHubTelescope | October 5, 2012 at 7:45 am | Reply
“There is also a fraction of skeptics that hold apocalyptic religious visions that could fit well within that pessimistic frame of mind.”
Climate alarmists pretty much have the market cornered for apocalyptic visions and pessimistic frames of mind. Duh.
Global Cooling = dire times for humanity. Something to fear.
Even though the 1950s were the greatest of times.
Kim is a global cooling catastrophist.
Yes, he scares the holy crap out of me. I bought an Escalade, and I now do joyrides instead of jogging.
Not good enough.
Park the the Escalade at your local gas station, and leave it running – ask the attendant to top it up as required.
Jog to your dealer and buy another Escalade.
Repeat.
JCH
Huh?
World population (billions)
1950 2.6
2010 6.9
Average life expectancy (years)
Global
1950 49 years
2010 67 years
Asia
1950 42 years
2010 68 years
Europe
1950 67 years
2010 75 years
North America
1950 67
2010 77
South and Central America
1950 50
2010 75
Africa
1950 38
2010 48
Oceania
1950 63
2010 75
Looks to me like people all over the world are living longer than in 1950.
Do you have a better measure for how “great the times” are?
Max
PS I don’t think this has anything to do with the fact that it is 0.5 degreesC warmer today than in 1950, although this plus the higher CO2 levels may have contributed to the 2.4-fold increase in major crop yields from 1970 to 2010, during which time population increased 1.9-fold and starvation rates decreased sharply.
WebHubColonoscope is about to self destruct. He’s never had a firm grip on reality but calling CAGW skeptics Malthusians, apocalyptic, and pessimistic is a complete break with reality. He’s gone around the bend for sure. For his own safety and that of others someone should call the men in white coats to come collect him.
No David, he’s “explained” it all. He’s “baiting” us, see.
And – boy did we fall for it! We we all dumb enough to think he is dumb enough to believe any of this tangled tripe.
PS
Have renamed myself to avoid any more confusion…
If only this was enough to avoid any more confusion.
OK, that does it. Am now going to chucky in the towel on this handle completely.
By deed poll I shall henceforth be known as Memphis.
(Please god let that too not be some odd patois term).
Love it :-)
But have actually had Mr Charles Edward Anderson Berry in mind all along.
This document shows without a doubt that Elvis prophecized climate blogland commentariat.
Elvis is ALIVE!
Chucky has left the building.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them…
(Crichton)
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
(Vonnegut)
Hey Elkhound, you have to admit Crichton was right about al that Jurassic island crap.
I will concede this:
Hammond should never have hired Dennis Nedry.
Please let us know once you find out.
Pity those who give respect so freely. The Left’s respect for Al Gore and dispargement of George Bush is a good example. “Men are respectable only as they respect.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson …
Heinrich
Kurt Vonnegut was neither of the above. I read and enjoyed all his stuff.
East Germans, old enough to remember the censorship policies of the old DDR, will recall the “writer bound and gagged by policemen”, as will residents of other former “East Bloc” states.
Today, we have “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press”.
But there are still “censors” (or “gatekeepers”) at work, for example in climate science, where scientific views or findings that conflict with the IPCC “consensus position” are not published by certain scientific journals (see Climategate); fortunately they can get published in others, so this type of “censorship” doesn’t work.
In general, it seams that the English-speaking world has been more open to “non-PC” essays, studies, op-eds, etc. which are critical of the IPCC “consensus position”, than other parts of the world.
But the good news is that this openness is increasing everywhere, if polls are to be believed.
Max
Max
Tomas Milanovic, perhaps the too-common usage, here on Climate Etc, of abuse and profanity, acts to obscure the rather simple dynamical and thermodynamical arguments that strongly favor orthodox climate-change theory?
After all, once we strip away abuse, profanity, slogans, cherry-picking, scape-goating, selfish short-sightedness, willful ignorance, and quibbling … what’s left amounts to: “James Hansen’s climate-change worldview is scientifically correct for common-sense reasons.”
Thank you for a post that vividly illuminates this, Tomas Milanovic! & ;) :smile: :grin: :lol: :!:
FOMBS,
http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=non+linear+climate+dynamics&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5
You have no credibility – it is just game playing with no basis at all in math and physics. Why do you bother?
Malthusian is now a reference to excessive pessimism, like the Debbie Downers who continue to heap scorn on any alternative energy strategy. The connection is that they think human ingenuity has been used up and no further progress can be made.
The fake cornucopians who actually want to see the train wreck are real Malthusians at their core. I really don’t see much of a difference between those guys and the goofs waiting for the second coming. Some church network has just started a video stream watching some location in the holy land waiting for something to happen. These people exist and the problem is that you can’t tell them apart.
Only half-witted lefty trendies can enthuse about joke technologies like wind and solar power, diligently avoiding any discussion of how expensive and inefficient they are.
And, according to Web, recognising this obvious fact means one thinks all human ingenuity has been used up now. His would-be ‘lesson’, is that we should adopt his own credulous worship of every new idea anyone has, assuming of course it carries the all-important imprimatur of Political Correctness.
Astounding drivel, even by Web’s demanding standards.
“Only half-witted lefty trendies can enthuse about joke technologies like wind and solar power, diligently avoiding any discussion of how expensive and inefficient they are. ”
This reminds me of an issue.
Can we say that solar power in absolute terms is joke technology.
That “forever” in the future and anywhere in the Universe that solar energy is a “joke technology”.
We can start by saying that currently solar energy has limited uses.
That for some applications one doesn’t solar panels to be cheaper nor
that one needs government subsidies to make them economically viable- that they simply the best solution for a energy source need. PV panels are generally attractive in remote locations.
The main argument against solar energy is that it offered as global solution- the idea that it could be significant energy source for billions of people, whereas solar panels are currently a energy solution for thousands of people in somehow unique circumstances. So for very small amount of people solar energy can be a serious source of energy.
Plus there is the additional issue of using solar energy not to make electrical power, but using solar energy to make thermal energy- heat hot water. Providing the hot water needed for washing things is quite different matter than making electrical power from solar energy, but
such application is mostly matter of supplement source of energy- something that lower total energy budget of some household. And instead of heating an indoor pool with say natural gas or electrical heater [as Al Gore does with one of his houses] using solar thermal energy for this application can be a smarter and cheaper way doing this.
An off world use of solar energy is for satellites, solar panels were of course originally built for this purpose. There are about 300 satellites currently in GeoStationary orbit doing various things, and except perhaps some old soviet satellites which used nuclear fuel, all of them use solar panels in order to make them operate. And unless one going somewhere where their little sunlight, generally in space one using solar energy- ISS has currently largest and powerful solar arrays in space. And satellite maker are constantly design very large arrays for communication satellite in order to send strong signal to earth and run the electronics needed.
The solar panels used in space quite expensive and designed for most power per weight and last a long time and be reliable.
So solar panels are used and are the best solution for some applications, but can solar panels in future be used global power needs. Can solar panel provide enough energy for +7 billion people?
I think in the future solar panels [or harvesting solar energy in some manner] can provide a significant amount energy needs of all people on Earth- if it’s harvesting the solar energy in the space environment.
@gbaikie : wind & solar joke technologies
While this is certainly the case now, I did not say or imply this would be the case always and everywhere. Yes, there are now some isolated viable uses such as out in space. But as a general source of energy for the masses, they just don’t cut the mustard – ie are a joke.
That is a contradiction in terms. If they cannot survive without government subsidies, that means they are not economically viable, ie are a joke.
But who knows, perhaps some breakthroughs will one day be made in these areas.
-@gbaikie : wind & solar joke technologies
While this is certainly the case now, I did not say or imply this would be the case always and everywhere. –
Yes, I know, that was my thing.
Which leads to your statement:
“But who knows, perhaps some breakthroughs will one day be made in these areas.”
I don’t think so, unless it gets into magic land- like roofing as cheap as regular roofing and getting a 5-10% solar efficiency. Or “solar panel” paint.
But even given such “magic” it seems unlikely it would approach a global solution in terms of energy- whereas instead such things could be counted as means adding efficiency- sort like having better light bulbs or adding insulation.
And this what I meant by forever not working.
Whereas using solar panel in space is a different story. And as I said having solar panel in space can be a path of providing global electrical needs [50% or even 100% {or 2000%}], and doesn’t require magic in terms of solar panel technology.
But using solar panels in space environment for global energy has different requirements- though not really tied to technological improvements [could have used 1970 technology].
I can state this requirement in simplified way: One needs to get to point of having market value of electrical power in space being at about 100 times the price of electrical power on Earth.
And from that point the price should cascade downward over the years to the point of being less than electrical power price on Earth.
Or the hard part is getting to point of having enough market in space so one can charge about $5 per Kwh of electrical power to some consumer in space environment. And right now it’s somewhere around + $20 per Kwh but with no specialized market providing it [it’s a case of bring your own power supply :)].
This probably would not lead to shipping solar panels from Earth so to get to point having a price is cheaper than earth prices, but rather having enough market that one would make them in space environment- and not have high cost of shipping them from Earth’s deep gravity well.
Though in theory [using different space launch technology than in use currently] one could perhaps ship them from Earth.
But it seems the path to cheapest electrical power is eventually making them in the space environment.
The fundamental problems with solar energy [or wind] is it doesn’t provide electrical energy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Solar energy only provides power for about 6 hours out of a 24 hour day.
And power provided 9am to 3pm is quite different then 6 hours worth of energy per day [which you can use whenever you need it].
Such a problem can be solved by storing the energy made between 9 am and 3 pm- but doing this costs money.
One could store electrical energy without involving solar panels. Suppose an electrical company would sell you electrical power at cheaper price at certain times of the day- so that say 2 am to 8am you buy electrical power at half the normal cost. Therefore one could only buy electrical power between 2 to 8am and run off your battery storage the rest of the day.
Such energy storage may or may not be economic, my point isn’t to sell such an idea, but rather my point is if you had depend of solar energy as major part of energy source, you need some kind energy storage system in addition to costs of having the solar panel generate your power.
In the current subsidized world, the government pays you buy solar panels, and the power provider existentially pays you to store your energy- the power company is forced to pay for energy you make and for price higher than power company would pay wholesale provider of electrical.
This creates a fake reality- solar panel owners imagine there providing there energy needs and they are not.
So one of problems is solar power provides energy when electrical consumers may not need it. Or if consumers were not given electrical energy anytime consumer wanted it [24 hrs a day] and instead only provided for 1/4 of 24 hr day, that service would be less valuable [and a pain in the butt for most people].
Second problem of solar energy is you don’t always get solar energy every day at 9am to 6 pm. In some areas of the world it may be something like 90% of the time. But in large regions of the world, clouds weather may be common, and it rains or snows a fair amount of the time. In addition to weather, one has the location on the planet, one has seasonal differences of how high in the sky the sun travels in a day. Having the sun crossing the sky at low angle reduce the amount energy one can get even if it’s clear weather. Having seasonal difference in power, make energy storage over periods of months of time, far more difficult than than storing energy for a day.
Third problem, solar energy it requires large area to harvest enough energy. And if you willing to use large areas one gets imbalances of energy- a solar panel can making energy no one needs at that time or season.
Related large area needed is that one urban areas where most of the people live- you have a concentration of energy needs in a fairly small region- and land is more of premium- it’s not Kansas. And people may greatly prefer a nice park, as compared a field of solar panels. Basically if you were using solar panel for primary source of electrical needs, the solar power “needs” would be overwhelming to other human needs. The solar panels would be “running your life”. In theory people might like the idea, but in practice they would hate it.
And in space environment one doesn’t have these problems. First you get more solar energy [1360 watts per square meter] and it’s 24 hours a day. Space is equates to global access, the potential of space is one could deliver power anywhere on the surface of earth at anytime and however much power you wanted. This has so many ramifications and benefits, I will leave it to reader to imagine.
And of course space has an unlimited area of “real estate”.
Now what I am talking about is not some mega- project. But an evolution to towards using space environment for harvesting solar energy. And the first market for solar energy harvested in space is not to earthlings on earth surface, but first energy provided to the space environment for use in the space environment. As you get cheaper electrical energy in the space environment, all costs in the space environment lowers. You would be encouraging economic growth in space environment.
So I am talking about the future- a few decades into the future. And this future has unlimited amount of energy.
The draft policy statement misses the point. The problem needing resolution is of the definition of the term “science.” in the laws of Japan.The shortcomings of the current definition can and should be eliminated by adoption of the definition of “science” that has been adopted by the federal courts of the United States and by a majority of the states of the United States.
This definition is called the Daubert standard.” Under Daubert, “science” references the idea of “demonstrable knowledge.” It does not reference the idea of “the process that is operated by people calling themselves ‘scientists’.” When people representing themselves as ‘scientists’ fail to provide us with “demonstrable knowledge,” this can lead us into trouble.
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