by Judith Curry
Well, this is an interesting twist on climate denialism.
The National Review has an article entitled Liberal denial on climate change and Energy, subtitle A new poll reveals conservatives are the open-minded ones.
Excerpts:
According to the Hoover Institution’s recently completed Golden State Poll, many Democrats and liberals are in denial when it comes to reality on energy and climate policy, endorsing both science and political fiction.
Respondents were concerned about climate change — and that concern crossed party and ideological lines. But not a single liberal in our survey dismissed climate change as a “not at all serious” problem,” and a scant 4 percent were open to the idea that global climate change might be a “not very serious” problem.
Conservatives were far more open-minded about climate change, with 39 percent considering it a somewhat or very serious problem and only 31 percent saying it was not at all serious. This view was far closer to the view of political independents, who presumably have no partisan axe to grind in the climate wars. Fifty-one percent of them thought climate change was a very or somewhat serious problem, while 41 percent felt that it was not very or not at all serious. One can draw two plausible conclusions from this: Either liberals alone have the intellectual acuity to definitively determine the magnitude of the problem presented by climate change, or, alternatively, unlike conservatives and independents, liberals are engaged in climate groupthink from which no dissent is brooked.
Perhaps this apocalyptic tendency is a result of the liberal knowledge gap. This became apparent when we asked our respondents about hydraulic fracturing. A just-released Environmental Defense Fund study showed that leakage of methane is likely to be an even smaller problem than the EPA’s modest estimates. [C]urrent energy secretary Ernie Moniz recently said he has still “not seen any evidence of fracking per se contaminating groundwater,” a finding supported by three separate EPA investigations.
Yet 53 percent of California Democrats surveyed wanted to ban fracking in the state, and just 5 percent “definitely” wanted to avoid such a ban. Republicans by a three-to-one margin.
Taken as a whole, the Golden State poll suggests that many liberals have a deeply ideological view of energy and climate and policy, one in which certain “truths” must be accepted to show one’s moral virtue while genuinely inconvenient truths are ignored. Conservatives, always appropriately skeptical of liberal utopianism, have reacted against that by redoubling their skepticism. While the media and liberal politicians attack them, conservatives know that it is hard to have a rational argument with a fanatic about the subject of his fanaticism.
JC comment: I’m just about to leave for travel, so little time for posting, but I thought this is something the denizens would find interesting.
Thats OK , Liberals feel that they are right.
Reality is not important.
► Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away (Philip K. Dick)
Ode to liberal climate modelers:
Yesterday, up in the air
I modeled heat that wasn’t there.
It wasn’t there again today,
I wish, I wish it came to stay…
When I logged in last night at three,
The GCM heat greeted me.
But when the measurements were called,
I couldn’t see it there at all!
Go away, measurements, no warming’s such a bore!
Go away, measurements, I trust my models more…
Last night I claimed up in the sky,
Great heat that none identified,
It wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish heat came my way…
(adaptation of Antigonish, or The Little Man who wasn’t There
1899 poem by Hughes Mearns, about a haunted house in Nova Scotia Canada)
A careful read of the linked article, which is from a most conservative magazine, shows how midleading it is. What I don’t understand is WHY the conservatives, GOP, etc, cling to the antiAGW point of view?? Could it be that alot of the very rich give big bucks to the Republican Party, but don’t want any government rules interfering with big business, no matter how much it could harm the public??
AGW is a pissant progressive movement that is ultimately an insane aberration in social and economic policy based on little but pious narrative – groupthink in the most pervasive delusion in human history.
But… conservatives are skeptical? Duh!
CH…wonderful rant you posted. Care to substantiate some of it?? For instance, why do all the worldwide climatological and meteorological associations, let alone the IPCC, endorse AGW?? And, why should I give any credence to your rant??
Maybe you should check the science? Just suggesting.
“midleading”??? I cannot find that in a dictionary. Please define.
As for some people sticking to science and rejecting the hype, isn’t that what is supposed to be done? While I am sure you can find isolated examples of people rejecting that climate changes, I find it a bit incredulous that you would then use them as poster boys to brand an entire segment of the population who merely expresses skepticism. But I guess whatever moves the meme, right?
Phil…I’ve been trying to find some of the ‘facts’ you claim to have presented….stll looking for them. All I find is your statements. I gave you a reference (Soucewatch) for campaign contributions from fossil fuel corps to Senator Inhofe. IF you were interested in why the Republicans in Washington are antiAGW, you could do a little research to ind out why or where their huge donations come from. Good luck.
Walter, I gave you the link. Do you need it again? I stated A fact. And that is that “Big Oil” has given far more to the cause of AGW. This was not from someone’s opinion site. This was from their public disclosure forms.
I can copy and paste it if you like. But I thought you would have more faith if I provided you a link. You can follow the link, can you not?
BTW: I cannot find any “Soucewatch” on the internet, nor can I find any links to a “sourcewatch” on this page.
Walter Carlson,
What you ought to ask yourself, is WHY the liberals, Democrats etc, cling to the CAGW point of view?? Could it be that those with far-left / totalitarian views, want more money and controls going government no matter how much it could harm the public??
Gail…I didn’t mention liberals, you attempt to divert the discussion away from the Republicans by doing so!! What you really ought to do is ask yourself how you think about Republicans?? My personal investigation into their financial supporters leads me to conclude that funding for conservative think tanks comes from the uber rich which results in legislation favorable to them. Unfortunately they seem to have little regard for the rest of us.
Yea, Soros and Jobs were/are penny poor.
Walter, yes I fully realize your attempt to avoid talking about the corruption inherent in the liberal position. That’s why I draw your attention to it.
Well,Gail, it probably has to do with the overly substantial scientific evidence presented by rational scientists. The concept of AGW has little, if anything to do with political philosophy. However, the fight AGAINST recognizing AGW as a threat to human existence is, from what I’ve found, well supported by conservatives and the National Republican Party.
Hm, no. Last i checked, most skeptics could give 2 hoots about politics. However, all those scientists you love to quote are all paid by government.
Conflict of interest?
Phil..are you suggesting that the world’s climatologists and meteorologists are all government employees?? What about the antiAGW scientists, who pays their salaried??? And do you have anything indicating support by Soros?? I’d like to see it.
RIF – I said PAID by government. e.g. Mann works for PSU, but he is PAID by government grants.
And the Soros comment was in response to your reference of conservative think tanks all being funded by the mega wealthy. Last I checked, Soros is mega wealthy. So is Buffet. Yet neither fund conservative think tanks. Jobs use to be. And he funded no conservative think tanks. Perhaps you have evidence that they did? I would love to see if so.
WHY do the liberals, Democrats etc, cling to the CAGW point of view??
Walter Carlson > probably has to do with the overly substantial scientific evidence presented by rational scientists.
No, obviously because it panders to their totalitarian sympathies, by arguing for more taxes and government interference.
The concept of AGW has little, if anything to do with political philosophy.
Espousing and over-egging it, and feigning confidence in its findings, has EVERYTHING to with political philosophy.
However, the fight AGAINST recognizing AGW as a threat to human existence is, from what I’ve found, well supported by conservatives and the National Republican Party.
The fight you mention is largely one of your own imagination. The real fight is to remove the corrupting effect of the vested interest of the primary funder – government.
Regarding money spent on climate science, how much does government pour into universities and research etc (broadly to advance alarmism), compared to what private parties spend (broadly, to question it).
10,000 times as much ?
Phil…I’m not concerned with Mann as he is a scientist. However, have your read Senator Inhofe’s statements?? He is NOT a scientist, yet he is vehemently antiAGW. Would be nice if he had a few of the meteorological or climatological societies behind him, don’t you think??
Gail…It is obvious from your statement:
No, obviously because it panders to their totalitarian sympathies, by arguing for more taxes and government interference.
that you have sociological/psychological/etc disturbances with which rational discussion cannot compete. Goodbye.
Walter – what makes you think Mann is a scientist? Some letters behind his name? That is a poor standard given his lack of civility and also competence.
Inhofe does not proclaim knowledge that he does not possess. But like all people, he can still question things that do not make sense or are proven false. Mann doubles down on them.
I care not what a bunch of bureaucrats, few with any credentials in the science their society purports to represent, think. I am only interested in reproducible results. And by that measure, Inhofe is a lot smarter and a lot more correct than someone who blindly accepts a premise that has yet to demonstrate any degree of accuracy.
Everyone can be, and at times, has been, wrong. I trust someone who admits fallibility and moves on seeking truth over those who think they are omniscient and can learn no more.
A true progressive denialist cult of AGW groupthink space cadet. Bye Wally – you have contributed nothing that isn’t utterly tribal. Worthless and simple minded nonsense.
Walter, there is a disturbance in the Force.
======================
Goodbye chiefy…I agree, what you contribute is worthless, simple minded rsnts !!
Phil…sccording to OpenSecrets, Inhofe receive the bulk of his campaign donations FRKM the oil and gas industry. Do you need a guide dog to see why he so antiAGW ??
And the Oil and gas industry is the largest private donor to the AGW backers,. So by your logic, he should be following their lead and be the BIGGEST supporter!
Shock shock, I guess your assumptions are all wrong. Stick to facts, and leave your opinions out of it.
Phil…you seriously have a screwed up moral compass !!! In fact, the oil & gas, plus the coal industries, are the primary SOURCES of AGW. You really do need s guide dog. What I have been trying to do is open your eyes to how these industries fight global warming science. But, come to think of it, you deniers don’t care about how hot our world becomes in a few decades. Do you have children or grandchildren?? Does it bother you that temps could be over 90 degrees for half the year?? That all our East Coast cities could be under water?? Is the risk worth your negativism??
I present facts to you, and you comment on my moral compass? How are facts moral or immoral? They are simply facts. For your edification, try this link to begin with: http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/Files/gcr_contributions_environment12.pdf
I have many more sources as well. But figured you may want to eat your words or at least back off and calm down as your response was totally irrational.
As for your beliefs, they are fine for your faith, but hardly appropriate in a science discussion. Perhaps you intend to move to Venezuela (where their carbon footprint is shrinking even though they are a member of OPEC). And there you can have your 90 degree days over 6 months of the year.
But I will stick with facts and science. And I will leave out questioning what your motives are, your sanity is, or your intelligence level. I suggest you stick to the facts as well
The fossil fuel industry has no reason to oppose climate policy, because there is no threat to their profits. Just read the forecasts on the use of fossil fuels in the coming decades. “fossil fuels continue to supply almost 80 percent of world energy use through 2040”, etc. http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/
Walter, may your legacy be optimism and courage, not fear and guilt.
=======================================
Phil…I’ve been trying to find some of the ‘facts’ you claim to have
presented….stll looking for them. All I find is your statements. I gave you a reference (Soucewatch) for campaign contributions from fossil fuel .corps to Senator Inhofe. IF you were interested in why the Republicans in Washington are antiAGW, you could do a little research to ind out why or where their huge donations come from. Good luck.
Walter Carlson,
Even you know almost all the funding of climate science is from government. Do you need a guide dog to see why it is so firmly CAGW ??
Walter Carlson
In fact, the oil & gas, plus the coSol industries, are the primary SOURCES of AGW. You really do need a guide dog.
You really do need a guide dog – the issue is not AGW but CAGW. And as yet noone knows how catastrophic AGW is, and over what timescale. Decades, centuries, millennia?
What I have been trying to do is open your eyes to how these industries fight global warming science.
What we are trying to open your eyes to, is that global warming ‘science’ is beyond all doubt rotten to the core, riddled with fraud and vested interest of the funder (government). So what is being fought is rotten, politicized climate science.
But, come to think of it, you deniers don’t care about how hot our world becomes in a few decades.
Not even you believe that drivel.
What is true though, is that you alarmists and totaliarians just don’t care how much poverty and tyranny you inflict on the world’s various people, just as long as taxes and government can be enlarged.
Read literally, Judith Curry’s original post asserted a core axiom of climate-change denialism, namely, that AGW is *not* the most likely scientific explanation of the Earth’s sustained energy imbalance.
Whether Judith intended her original assertion to be read literally, it is plausible (even inevitable) that the denialist community would have *quoted* her literally.
That’s the common-sense scientific reason why Judith’s reconsideration/redaction was well-advised. Well done, Judith Curry!
Some abstracts are self refuting:
“We show that in an environment emphasising diffusion and learning-by-doing, the impact of combinations of policies does not correspond to the sum of the impacts of individual instruments, but that strong synergies exist between policy schemes. We show that worldwide carbon pricing on its own is incapable of breaking the current fossil technology lock-in, but that under an elaborate set of policies, the global electricity sector can be decarbonised affordably by 89% by 2050 without early scrapping of capital. “
A fan of *MORE* discourse: Judith Curry’s original post asserted a core axiom of climate-change denialism, namely, that AGW is *not* the most likely scientific explanation of the Earth’s sustained energy imbalance.
Read literally, Prof Curry’s post expresses the possibility that the theory might not be true. Since most skeptics of the proposed CO2 theory do not deny climate change, no one holds what you call a “core axiom”.
Fanny swallows at least one of the core axioms of CAGW credulity hook, line and sinker; namelly, THAT the Earth has a signoficant, sustained energy imbalance.
Bizarrely, WordPress has recycled an old post of mine! Let’s try again:
————–
Fortunately, recent articles on the arxiv server are providing ample common grounds for rational scientists *and* rational skeptics! See for example:
► Economic benefits of decarbonising the global electricity sector
► When to Bite the Bullet? – A Study of Optimal Strategies for Reducing Global Warming
► The dynamics of technology diffusion and the impacts of climate policy instruments in the decarbonisation of the global electricity sector
Conclusion Climate-change is real, serious, accelerating … *AND* tractable!
That’s *good* news, eh Climate Etc readers?
So perhaps liberal-conservative distinctions are becoming … moot?
Are you GLaDOS?
Yeah, yeah. Blame it on the web developer. There’s a lot of that going on these days.
It’s all been run from a little green house jes’ t’otha side of Dallas,
Dontcha, dontcha, dontcha ever doubtcha dubya dunnit.
====================
Kim, Waco not Dallas. Waco’s a funner word anyway. :)
Out by the South Dallas town of El Waco,
Dubya the Dabbler in greenest Art Daco.
===============
FOMD: “Bizarrely, WordPress has recycled an old post of mine!”
+1000
A hearty thanks to Fan for the accidental hilarity.
How are we supposed to know if it is “WordPress” or if it is the FOMD program recycling old posts??
+10^6. Ironic a bot blaming a blog, huh?
Skiphil,
We know now that at least one person reads Fan’s comments. Let us know if he says anything else that is mildly interesting.
It’s pretty remarkable how many Climate Etc readers possess a knowledge of science that is so vast and certain, they never read the contemporary literature at all!
How *do* these always-certain folks sustain their knowledge, the world wonders?
A fan of *MORE* discourse: It’s pretty remarkable how many Climate Etc readers possess a knowledge of science that is so vast and certain, they never read the contemporary literature at all!
When Prof. Curry posts a current paper, do you think the aforementioned nonreaders never read it?
A fan of *MORE* discourse: It’s pretty remarkable how many Climate Etc readers possess a knowledge of science that is so vast and certain, they never read the contemporary literature at all!
Who are they and how do you infer that about them?
If contemporary literature refers to consensus peer reviewed stuff, it is really easy to not read that stuff.
Knowledge is not contained in consensus opinion.
Knowledge comes from skeptic research.
Matthew and Herman and others,
Please Do Not Feed the Troll
David Springer – who made you prefect while teacher is away?
A special election. You were asleep and no one dared wake you up for it.
If you want to participate in the next election you can register vote here. Don’t forget to bring a picture ID.
What Fanny means when he talks about global warming “literature”, is the hiding of declines etc etc produced by pal-reviewing government shills. ie all the material he himself needs to sustains his own credulity.
David Springer: Please Do Not Feed the Troll
I don’t care who you think is a “troll,” a word that I think lacks an operational definition.
FAN writes lots of baseless stuff, and provides links that don’t support his assertions. I think these facts should be pointed out. He did once post links to vortex sheets, and those links were worth following. He posted a link to an archive of research papers in that post, only the made an unsupportable claim.
AFOMD,
Would you mind providing links to papers that are a bit more solid than model based attempts to see into the future?
If you can provide some facts, I will be pleased to look at them.
I cannot see how climate change is “tractable”. The climate changes, that is trivially obvious. If it behaves chaotically, arbitrarily small changes to the system may create profound changes. For better or for worse, neither you nor I (nor, I warrant, anyone else,) can predict with certainty.
Do you realise that nobody is capable of foreseeing the future, in any more useful way than I?
Unfortunately, every time I follow one of your links, it turns out to be rubbish, in any useful sense. Do you have any facts?
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Department of Modelling, Crystal Balls & Chicken Entrails
Fourth Floor. Room 42.
apropos the model forecasts if the models could project the future outcome of the climate then it should be easy for them to predict the result of the Grand National a horse race that takes place in Liverpool, UK once a year. There are about 40 horses and 40 fences over the 4+miles and we know a lot more about the course and the horses than we do about the climate system. So come on modellers let’s figure out whose going to win, bankrupt the bookies! It’s got to be trivially easier than forecasting the weather in Connecticut 50 years from now. Hasn’t it?
It is a pleasure to assist you Mike Flynn!
• Geophysical Research Letters Unprecedented recent summer warmth in Arctic Canada
• Catholic On-Line New research shows the Arctic is practically baking under anthropogenic global warming, hottest in 120,000 years
This is mighty sobering climate-change science, eh Mike Flynn?
FOMD, Interesting, the Arctic according to that study has cooled twice as much as expected in the past 5000 years and now it has warmed an “unprecedented” amount when compared to expectations that may be twice or three times as uncertain as the two time miss to begin with. The paper uses the obligatory “GREENHOUSE GAS” caused it all mentioning “Arctic Amplification” but most of the amplification is actually in the 30N to 60N band. It is almost like there might be more to the story. Nothing like a good cliff hanger doncha know.
Another day, another Hockey Stick!
Summary The “best available climate science” is affirming, over-and-over again, that Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick is real, and that James Hansen’s climate-change worldview is broadly correct.
These are scientific facts, to which rational skepticism must yield, eh Mike Flynn?
FOMD, The paper makes the same over simplifications. Warming from a LIA depression will create a similar ln(2) response curve as CO2 equivalent forcing with the same water vapor feedback only with overshots of the mean on the road to recovery. You get weakly damped recurrent responses to natural variability and more critically damped responses to GHS “forcing”. WOW! You can actually separate the two with things like the stadium wave. Imagine that?
The rest of the story will be much more entertaining :)
Steve McIntyre reviews how Nick Brown smelled BS
Liberals appear to be so enamored with “positive psychology” that they rarely try to validate the models. Seems to carry over into their view on climate science.
Fanny would have us believe that “Summary The “best available climate science” is affirming, over-and-over again, that Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick is real, ”
So iow, the “best availale climate science” goes along with algorithms that find hockey sticks in red noise, and home-brewed PC analysis. Truly, calling climate science a “soft” science like sociology, is an insult to honest soft scientists.
“Bizarrely, WordPress has recycled an old post of mine!”
This happened to me before. I had hit “reply” and the the reply field appeared already filled with a post I had written and posted earlier on the same day.
I’ve had the same happening but usually it is the text I just posted, you can see both copies, one in the thread and the other copied back in the edit box again. Half the time it just hangs till I hit refresh never knowing if it ever posted. I think WordPress is still having some problems programming the new NSA mandates (“we’re copying, we’re listening, we’re reading, we’re watching all”) into their system. ;)
It’s your browser not WordPress and it’s usually due to hitting the back button which may refill web forms to a previous state. I take advantage of that when replying to the same thread more than once. After hitting post instead of finding the reply-button in the top level comment for the same thread just hit the back button on the browser, find the comment form filled with your previous reply, delete the previous replay, and type in a new one.
GCMs have from the beginning been tuned to fit the course of climate. Moreover, all of the parameters used to tune the models (as dictated by AGW theory) have been founded on carbon fetishism. The Left has turned global warming into a function of CO2. Capitalism deals in real not phony providers of real not phony commodities–e.g., the productive seek to associate themselves with providing goods and services that others value. The clearest example of Karl Marx’s commodity fetishism is not fresh baked goods from the ovens of your favorite Baguetterie. Rather, it is the Climatism of the Left with its central focus on CO2 where all social relations between men and women have no meaningful value beyond the rise and fall of an esoteric average global temperature that results from consensual activity. Essentially, the economy of the Left is an alienation of humanity.
GCMs have from the beginning been tuned to fit the course of climate.
No, if they were tuned in that way they would actually hindcast better than they do. They are tuned to MATCH the historical record.
arrg They are not tuned to MATCH the historical record.
Poor Ol’ Jeff Dog,
The dog what had four eyes.
Two in front,
To see ahead.
Two in back,
To see behind,
Poor Ol’ Jeff Dog,
The dog what had four eyes.
================
Bah, lines 4&6 should be:
To see where he would go.
&
To see where he had been.
===================
‘Atmospheric and oceanic computational simulation models often successfully depict chaotic space–time patterns, flow phenomena, dynamical balances, and equilibrium distributions that mimic nature. This success is accomplished through necessary but nonunique choices for discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupled contributing processes that introduce structural instability into the model. Therefore, we should expect a degree of irreducible imprecision in quantitative correspondences with nature, even with plausibly formulated models and careful calibration (tuning) to several empirical measures. Where precision is an issue (e.g., in a climate forecast), only simulation ensembles made across systematically designed model families allow an estimate of the level of relevant irreducible imprecision.’
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.long
Models are not tuned? It is called calibration.
This is just serial liberal idiocy from the moshpit.
Steven and they never adjusted aerosols :)
Shhh, Cap’n, the model control knob.
=========
GCMs have been tuned to simulate the history of 20th century climate.
“The predicted temperature in 2100 by the IPC is simply an extension of the warming trend between 1975 and 2000… As a result, the IPCC prediction during the first decade of the present century has already failed.” ~Syun-Ichi Akasofu
Them fore-eyed dawgs shore are good at hind-castin’
Reckon it kinda reminds me o’ them modelin’ fellers – ‘cept they ain’t got no eyes in front.
Mosher, they must have been tuned; they do so much of a better job on the past than the future. Perhaps what you mean is that they weren’t intentionally tuned, or it would have a been a trivial exercise to curve-fit a much better in-sample error. But there are lots of ways to data-snoop by not being careful enough.
I don’t particularly want to wade into the models literature, so is there a good place to read about the parameters of these models that need to be instantiated by some kind of measured fundamental physical invariant, and the parameters that are instantiated by some other measurement that is of a less fundamental sort? Obviously some of the parameters will just be numerical approximation things… I don’t mean those. When I say “fundamental physical invariant” I mean constants that appear in the physical theory. Is there literally nothing in these models other than such fundamental invariants?
Read me carefully. They are calibrated. They are tuned. They are not ttunedto match the temperature record. They clearly dont match. Different groups will use different parameters to tune and they will close budgets on various parameters. In some cases ive seen them use a 2 decade peroid to close budgets but nobody uses t he entire historical period.
Somewhere I have a paper ddetail ing various approaches. But for now it up to you guys to prove your case.
Show that they twist knobs and compare the output to the full temperature series.
Hint. What is the wall clock time for a 160 year run
Idiot progressive quibbling around an unstated premise – that tuning occurs only from the 1970’s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9ob9WdbXx0
So there it is – proof positive that we are in the midst of the greatest delusion in human history.
Actually the models are “trained” on some given time period which I understand to usually be two decades beginning in 1961, 1971, or 1981 depending on the generation of model.
Empirical Correction of Toy Climate Models
Nicholas A. Allgaier, Kameron D. Harris, and Christopher M. Danforth
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Vermont Advanced Computing Center,
Complex Systems Center, The University of Vermont
(Dated: March 9, 2011)
So when they are talking about the inverse method and adjusting aerosol forcing to produce the observed temperature change, what would you call it? Attribution? I would call it tuning but that’s just me.
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap2-3/public-review-draft/sap2-3-prd-ch3.pdf
“GCMs have from the beginning been tuned to fit the course of climate.”
“No, if they were tuned in that way they would actually hindcast better than they do.”
Well yes and no. It depends on what data was used to do the fitting. If the hindcast was made to an early hold-out sample not used in fitting to the course of climate, we’d expect shrinkage of the fit quality on the hold-out sample.
All I want to know is whether the parameters that need to be instantiated are all high-quality, highly replicated physical constant measurements with practically zero standard errors. How hard can it be to say Yes or No?
All I do with my CSALT model is train it with historical data , going back the past 130+ years. The only explanatory (regressor) values required are :
C — log(CO2) concentration, which picks up the trend
S — Southern Oscillation Indes (SOI) which generates the subdecadal fluctuations
A — Aerosols from volcanoes, only about 10 major volcanic events explain the sporadic dips in temperature not covered by SOI
L — Length of Day (LOD) proxy for multidecadal oceanic temperature fluctuations (this has less of a factor on land warming).
T — Total Solar Irradiance (TS) which makes up a small but predictable fraction of the fluctuations.
When all these are incorporated, the historical correlation with the observed time series is excellent:
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
To predict the temperature at some point in the future, all the SALT terms will disappear from the trend and all we need to know is the TCR/ECS and CO2 concentration.
That is the essential scientific view of AGW.
WHT. Come on. If “the scientific view” simply built a model of trending dependent variable Y on one other trending independent variable Z and four other nonmonotonic independent variables X1-X4, and claimed that because it fit well, it proves that Z causes Y, every observing statistician would fall on the floor laughing. For several trenchant reasons.
I know you would fall on the floor laughing, because you are an ECONOMIST. You as an economist can’t predict anything because you have no theory apart from the confounding game theory, which will lay waste to any predictions you make.
On the other hand, the five factors that I invoke are all related to physical laws and they all make sense taken independently. When put together, the impact to deniers is devastating.
C — log(CO2) concentration, known very well since 1979
S — Southern Oscillation Indxs (SOI) can’t support a sustained differential so any fluctuation it gives has no impact on the trend.
A — Aerosols from volcanoes, very well understood because of the ability to do event-driven experiments [1]
L — Length of Day (LOD) is the only real mystery but this seems to effect oceans more than land.
T — Total Solar Irradiance (TS) follows the theory closely
So those well understood contributors make for a very good aggregate model.
[1] T. J. Crowley and M. B. Unterman, “Technical details concerning development of a 1200-yr proxy index for global volcanism,” Earth System Science Data Discussions, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1–28, 2012.
Web has outlined his model whose “impact to deniers is devastating”.
Sure. But while the components thereof may all make sense on their own, this does not mean that his overall picture is complete, calibrated or validated.
Does it, say, predict the standstill?
WHT, I’m sorry you feel that way about all economists, but you aren’t alone and this is a prejudice I don’t know how to fix. I am sorry, too, that I lost my patience and said that stuff about falling on the floor laughing.
If you would like my to explain some of the trenchant reasons this estimation doesn’t accomplish what you (and Mosher, who claimed you had shown someone the CO2 signal with this work) think it accomplishes, I am happy to do the work and engage with you seriously on this. But I don’t want to make the effort if you are predisposed not to listen to me because of the field it says on a certain piece of paper I have around here somewhere.
NW, I did this blog post specifically for you:
http://contextearth.com/2013/10/26/csalt-model
What Mosher said. As Kosha and Xie have shown, if you tune by forcing the results in the equatorial Pacific you improve the match globally. GCMs do not do this.
Distinctly eccentric comparison of a 3 legged – distinctly wobbly – multiple linear regression – i.e. – with an AOS. AOS don’t need any friggin’ ENSO to tune to post 1976 warming.
Let’s try that again.
Distinctly eccentric comparison of a 3 legged – distinctly wobbly – multiple linear regression with an AOS. AOS don’t need any friggin’ ENSO to tune to post 1976 warming.
OK, so the GCMs are wrong. As I’m sure Eli will stipulate, all models are wrong. The GCMs can’t simulate natural variability nor geographic variability, ergo, GCMs cannot possibly simulate feedbacks. Wake me up when the GCMs are useful.
Both Mosher and you are addressing the wrong point. Only conspiracy theorists think that the modelers sit down and turn dials to get the results to match the temperature record. But
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2012/tuning-climate-models-a-group-discusses-how-its-done/
“Climate models ability to simulate the 20th century
temperature increase with fidelity has become
something of a show-stopper as a model unable to
reproduce the 20th century would probably not see
publication, and as such it has effectively lost its purpose
as a model quality measure.”
It’s necessary to refine models based on the data, but it’s also data-snooping. That particular set of data can’t be used for validation.
And I don’t know what else there is: what have the models predicted correctly? If I would hypothesize that global surface temperature is chaotic and cannot be predicted at all on a decadal scale, is there evidence that I’m wrong?
“Only conspiracy theorists think that the modelers sit down and turn dials to get the results to match the temperature record.”
Tune their models?? Heaven forfend.
No, it’s much more subtle than that. Most just just derive more innate satisfaction from, and hence follow up, ‘answers’ turning up that gel best with their politics and career prospects.
If you start with a preconceived understanding that CO2 is essentially a wall switch that determines warming when it’s flipped, and you then apply parameters to manipulate or simply ignore other causal factors, you are tuning the model — to say exactly what you want it to say — and, that is not science nor good tuning. It’s nothing more than a waste of time and taxpayer money and it is not an honest mistake: it is done for no purpose other than to perpetuate the global warming hoax and to provide support for scary Leftist propaganda.
Of course the left focuses in CO2 and not H2O for example.
CO2 not H2O is the money molecule.
Cha-ching!
Don’t you mean H2O is the money molecule?
CO2 is the volume knob, H2O is how close the guitar is to the speaker.
CO2 is more like the hair on the knuckle of the rapper holding a microphone because he can’t play the guitar.
Wagathon, I would suggest that a better example of Marx’s theory might be in the reification of the models. “reification, invariably used to indicate an error, refers to the perception of human concepts as relations existing independently of humanity. Thus, the natural scientist who believes that Hook’s Law exists in Nature as such, rather than expressing relations of human practice in dealing with Nature, reifies this Law,” http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/cyc.htm
Re CMS, 10/26/13 @ 2:39 pm:
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification
Reification may refer to:
• Reification (computer science), making a data model for a previously abstract concept
Tuning GCMs to make them demonstrate AGW, the conjecture.
• Reification (fallacy), fallacy of treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing
Twin examples are Earth’s surface and its temperature, a process which is not a fallacy in thermodynamics.
• Reification (knowledge representation), used to represent facts that must then be manipulated in some way
As in using selected MLO CO2 concentration measurements to calibrate other measuring stations into agreement with MLO, and then claiming confirmation that MLO measurements are global.
Deducing from the fact of observed coincident rises in atmospheric CO2 and surface temperature that CO2 was the Cause and temperature the Effect, when the reverse is true under Henry’s Law. Continuing, IPCC next uses the ratio of the rate of rise of temperature to that of CO2, the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity, to predict the temperature for a doubling of CO2, instead of predicting the temperature rise necessary to double the concentration of atmospheric CO2. IPCC and AGW rely on the fallacy that correlation determines cause.
• Reification (linguistics) in natural language processing, transforming a natural language statement so actions and events in it become quantifiable variables
Assigning numbers to subjective feelings of expert confidence in their models, as in extremely unlikely (5%) to virtually certain (99%), to goad scientifically illiterate policymakers into action.
• Reification (Marxism) (German: Verdinglichung), the consideration of an abstraction or an object as if it had living existence and abilities; sometimes called objectification.
Assuming that climate has a preference for, and hence is drawn to, some global average surface temperature (equilibrating) for any particular state of the vector (TSI, OSR, and OLR) when in fact the surface can have any temperature from 0K to well above the present for a given vector.
[In biology, Darwin’s assumption that Natural Selection has a direction.]
[In Marxism, the notion that people can be made to produce for the good of the state. In Democrat party thought, the notion that a free people will voluntarily buy Obamacare coverage for risks to which they are not exposed, and for pre-existing conditions they do not yet have, in order that others might have insurance.]
• Reification (statistics), the consideration of a ‘perfect’ model which is used to make inferences connecting (imperfect) model results with experimental observations
Using established equilibrium carbonate chemistry equations to manufacture a bottleneck for the surface layer of the ocean to absorb only anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere (fractionate), when the ocean surface layer is never in equilibrium. This bit of reification establishes a pair of financially attractive calamities: that only fossil fuel emissions accumulate in the atmosphere, sufficient to cause life-threatening warming, and that CO2 causes ocean acidification.
A corollary is the IPCC excuse that the nonlinear and chaotic behavior of their GCMs, which have no predictive power, is a faithful reflection of the nonlinearity and chaos in the real climate, where the respective definitions did not apply in the first place.
• Reification in Gestalt psychology, an object perceived as having more spatial information than is actually present in the original stimulus
Assuming that the existence of a configuration of atmosphere lapse rates of GHG mixtures, pressure, and temperature from which the nonlinear equations of Radiation Transfer will produce a meaningful average in time even locally, much less globally.
Assuming that cloudiness can be meaningfully represented as a local constant (parameterized), to approximate the fact that it is a variable, and neglected the fact that it is the most powerful feedback in climate, positive with respect to the intensity of solar radiation and negative with respect to the surface temperature. Earth’s climate is governed by its albedo, not radiation equilibration, cloud albedo stabilizing it in the warm state and surface albedo latching it in to the cold state.
Assuming that the average ocean absorption and temperatures by layers are sufficient to account for the climate effects of the complex heat and carbon pump effects of the surface layer alone. Old water surfaces in the tropics to absorb heat and emit CO2, flows across the surface back to the poles, emitting longwave radiation and reabsorbing CO2, and then descends back to the deep ocean to re-emerge centuries to a millennium later.
Reification is all around us.
Jeff, I was very specific about the use of reification when responding to Wagathon. Having extensively studied the idea of reification or thinghood in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscript of 1844 for my dissertation many years ago, I very intentionally passed on the Wikipedia discussion as it was weak and more focused on his economic theories than philosophical. The major example in that work was the concept of money taken in large part from Shakespeare. I think the example I provided is directly to the point. I suggest you reread it. In this case a model, a theory, even a scientific law, is not a fact, but a limited approximation thereof, always subject to change, adumbration and falsification. A less radical concept along the same lines would be treating models as the territory and not the map. And by map, I mean the kind that have large blank sections labeled dragons lie here.
CMS 10/27/13 @1:49 pm
Deduction suggests you were responding to Wagathon’s post of 10/24/13 @ 4:04 pm, where his subject was the left’s conversion of global warming as the effect of man’s CO2 emissions. Wagathon identified temperature variations caused by voluntary CO2 emissions as “Climatism of the Left”. He claimed it was the clearest example of Marx’s commodity fetishism, a subtype of reification under Marx. Regardless of whether Wagathons’s analogy was apt, you turned the subject inside out, converting Wagathon’s analysis into a search for examples of reification within climate. At that point, you, as a student of Marxism, understandably hit on Marx’s reification as a better example than Wagathon’s analogy. And you gave us a Marxist publication for authority to boot.
Preferring by far to rely on Groucho over Karl as authority for anything substantive, I chose a convenient, and by all intents and purposes, an unbiased, encyclopedic definition of the rare derivative, reification, of an ordinary English word, reify, over your source, Marx, to show just how pervasive the concept was within AGW, where the term reification is never used. In no way was I trying to perfect Marx’s philosobabble.
By the way, I disagree with Wagathon’s model that the Left by any reasonable definition converted global warming into carbon fetishism. The first to compute the ECS for a doubling of CO2 was Guy Callendar. That was in 1938, and it earned him the honor of having the so-called Greenhouse Effect named after him. The Callendar Effect traces back and forth over almost a century in each direction to notables published in the field, including J. Fourier (1824), Pouillet (1827), Tyndall (1859), Arrhenius (1896), Chamberlin (1899), Revelle (1957), C. Keeling (1958, et seq.), and IPCC, among others. From Revelle on, the driving force was the lucre of government laboratories, and grants given on the flimsiest of pretenses or scariest of alarms. These came into full bloom at the same time as universities were replacing Modern Science with Post Modern Science. These things, money and soft science, added to populism are the fabric of today’s Left.
It shows that, whether liberal or conservative, people generally see only what they want to see. What else is new?
You didn’t read Judith’s post. Try again.
What is it I am missing from Judith’s post? The propensity to see only what we want to see is common to all humans with very few exceptions. And this includes scientists, and even the best climatologists. Many comments in this forum sound like “shooting from the hip” and are examples of “scientific reasoning” filtered by unconsciously biased ideology. When dealing with complex systems, scientific wisdom requires giving up any pretension of absolute certainty. In particular, the dichotomy between “liberals” and “conservatives” is not helpful. Rather than being liberal or conservative, perhaps we should try to be *both* liberal and *conservative* and, more generally, think less in terms of either/or and more in terms of both/and. Else, we are discussing “Climate” and ignoring the “Etc.”
CORRECTION (last two sentences): Rather than being a liberal or a conservative, perhaps we should try to be *both* liberal *and* conservative and, more generally, think less in terms of either/or and more in terms of both/and. We often discuss Climate and ignore the Etc or vice versa. May I suggest we should try to discuss *both* Climate *and* the Etc., together.
Luis, Follow the link in Dr. Curry’s post to the NRO piece–the whole thing. You will see that the author (Jeremy Carl) is making a stronger claim, that the Repubs and Independents (as a group) seem to reflect truth and uncertainty better than others (one the surveyed GW and energy questions). This is like “Chris Moony On His Head.” I'[m not sure I agree with Carl’s conclusion–just saying what it is.
Luis,
I’ll summarize the post. Democrats are consistent in their views towards Global Warming. Republicans are not consistent. That’s an indication that Republicans are not using partisan information to determine their view towards global warming.
Bolstering this view is that Independents, those least swayed by partisan rhetoric, tend towards the split seen in the Republican party.
“It shows that, whether liberal or conservative, people generally see only what they want to see.”
No, it shows that if you a Democrat, you think what your party wants you to think, and if you are a Republican, you have a greater chance of coming to your own conclusion,with regards AGW. Provided you think the Democrat platform is pro AGW, and the Republican platform is anti-AGW.
Ed, this point is most briefly put with the evil/wrong dichotomy.
============
Ed Barbar said:
“Democrats are consistent in their views towards Global Warming.”
___
Maybe that’s because the laws of physics don’t change and the Earth has been consistently gaining energy over the past 40+ years.
Except in the last 17. Domage.
Obviously phil you’ve not studied this as much as you need to by making such a statement. Only a very small portion of energy in the Earth system exists as sensible tropospheric heat. Please try another “skeptical” rebuttal.
Obviously Gates, you deal with conjecture and not facts. Try sticking to the facts, and leave the conjecture to politicians.
Warmist,
I’ll try the straight-forward approach. You obviously have a large amount of information on which to base your viewpoint. Most people haven’t the first clue about global warming, and have little actual technical information on which to base their viewpoint. So from where do they get their opinions? The answer is if you are a Democrat or a Liberal, you “Believe.” If you are an Independent, you aren’t quite so sure. And if you are a conservative, you might believe what your party is telling you, but still, you aren’t so sure.
From this you can conclude what many of us have always known: Liberals and Democrats have found their new religion in Government, and being told how to think. Present company excluded, naturally.
Gates : the earth has been consistently gaining energy over the past 40+ years.
An item of pure faith for the cagw credulous. We have robust data for neither the radiation budget, nor the oceans. The only thing we do have robust data on – the atmosphere – has said quite the opposite for some 17 years.
Prof. Curry, I suspect there’s part of a quote missing prior to this fragment.
The whole quote is:
Thanks. I actually found it in the original article, I was just letting our hostess know part was missing.
I suspect the finish is ‘don’t want to ban fracking’. Whether the ‘definitely’ is there or not, I don’t know.
===========
Max be nimble, Max be scrote,
Max jumped over the slight misquote.
=================
Taken as a whole, the Golden State poll suggests that many liberals have a deeply ideological view of energy and climate and policy, one in which certain “truths” must be accepted to show one’s moral virtue while genuinely inconvenient truths are ignored.
This is kind of a stretch. Moral virtue?
“This is kind of a stretch. Moral virtue?”
Try it.
It seems less liberals are not as fanatic, recently, but try saying to a dem that sea level rise is not a problem. {Sea level rise is not a problem- Al Gore would not buy a house on the beach if he thought it was.}
Or how, temperature in next 30 year will not warm by amount would be noticeable, and idea that we could be doomed from global warming within
30 year is nonsense. Or it will probably not be much different than rise in temperature in last 30 years [which in last 17 years, all measurements have been globally measured as statistical flat].
The future in terms of centuries forward in time, is uncertain, as it’s always has been uncertain, but Dems think the near future, within decades, is
filled with end of world type stuff.
I don’t think that liberals are the only ones who own morale virtue is all. Are conservatives the only ones who own intellectual virtue for instance?
This is one of the reason the trappings of religion hang so throttlingly from the alarmists, this chimera of ‘moral virtue’. Well, they’ve been through the desert on a climate with no name, and any oasis in a drought. Lessons beaming from a mirage.
========================
Now I like ‘been through the desert on a model innomate’, better.
=============================
As a recent refugee from the Golden State and a confirmed liberal far to the left of most in California I can only say that many of the boilerplate liberals are goodhearted souls who having adopted a party years ago no longer feel the need to think about subjects in depth and are not really all that interested in reading anything that would challenge their belief system.
Which is why the sorely needed real Left is either disappearing or atrophying, much to the loss of our country. Hey, though–Shanghai is nice.
Proof of the disappearance of the real Left can be found on comment threads everywhere, when Barack Obama is actually characterized as being a leftist. Sigh. Would that he were.
I agree. My experience is that they fall for the binary questions and perhaps through intellectual laziness just want to jump to conclusions fitting their preconceived ideas.
I agree too.
I’m not sure a resurgent “real left” would be any more helpful to Democrats than a resurgent “real right” is for the GOP. Both fringes seem to be rejected by events and public opinions.
Shanghai is “nice” because it’s moved away from “real left” principles- a trend that’s happening globally with exceptions like Venezuela.
The Golden State is “nice” because it’s not run by social conservatives.
Texas is “nice” because it’s not run by fiscal leftists.
What makes this important is that, because the trend behind what makes Shanghai “nice” is so successful and spreading, this old globe is going to need a whole bunch of energy. Somebody estimated it at 3000 quads once :)
Hey, Tom:
Flying to PVG on Monday…
Tom, aside from the rhetoric, I fear that Obama is at best a moderate Republican as was Clinton before him. Hard to believe otherwise, no matter what his race, given that Obama care is essentially Romney care writ large, not to speak of all he has continued in the name of National Security. Though I see the glimmer of possible emerging of a radical populist reanalysis. The intransigence of the Republican party gives us all some hope, that there may be room for something a little more insightful than simply moving into the space vacated by the demise of the liberal Republicans.
Re CMS, 10/26/13 @ 3:57 pm:
Consistent with your model, you can divide both houses of the US legislature into two parts: those there to perpetuate themselves in office, and those intransigents sent there as Constitutionalists to resist what their constituents see as the grave threat of a Marxist takeover of the country.
This model is bipartisan because only the Republicans are: moderates vs. an infection of uninvited, intransigent anti-Marxists. The battle is being waged over the 2014 election.
If you want to see almost universal denial, do a poll on the ability of technological development to solve today’s problems, and how soon they might do so. Quite a few on both “sides of the controversy” here seem not to realize how likely it is that technological developments will render the “problem” of anthropogenic CO2 emissions solved an obsolete within 3-5 decades if not sooner.
On the other hand, government has the solution.
For i=1 to infinity
Spend money
Next i
US politics in a few lines.
while (1) {
if (republican) borrow();
if (democrat) tax();
if (tea) break;
spend();
}
The Orwellian ‘climate change’ again… Furthermore, it’s obvious that warmists deny the real climate change and project their denial on skeptics.
I think there is an interesting demonstration of denial in an article about how to talk to “deniers”: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115022/how-talk-climate-change-deniers
The author says that “The [IPCC AR5] writers focused on their “confidence in the validity” of their findings rather than on the findings themselves. In short, this was no neutral act of scientific communication. It was a rebuttal to those who have done nothing to mitigate the risks of climate change, because they refuse to admit its plain facts.”
It appears she has discovered that this is a politically massaged message masquerading as pure science. In other words, dishonest. But she is unable to ask the obvious question: Why, then, should anyone believe it?
It seems to me that a lot of discussion about so-called “climate communication” is like this. Going around in circles, trying to use research to understand, while overlooking the obvious, since really understanding the audience is not really compatible with the message of absolute certainty (“plain facts”) that’s being communicated. Cognitive dissonance and denial.
Cognitive dissonance, denial, projection, false virtue; a perfect storm of hubris in harness with confusion. Hey, I’d wanna communicate, too.
===============
In a human developmental perspective one may partition liberals from conservatives on their belief system and value of human capital. Overlaying one’s values and beliefs upon the developmental psychology of childhood, adolescence, adulthood and eventually elderly. One may ascribe the liberal to be an enthusiastic but out of control adolescent, still wet behind the ears.
Conservatives, having been knock around a bit, view purportedly dire world changing events and beliefs from a more sanguine frame of mind.
Conservatives may be able to “give it a bit more time” looking more than once before one leaps.
I guess that is why drivers’ licenses are provisional at first.
I would highly recommend:
http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials/dp/006124189X
It explains that why that type of behavior occurs.
When the climate bubble explodes as it surely will, can we please have our money back ?
“When the climate bubble explodes as it surely will, can we please have our money back ?”
No problem.
Just need to increase taxes and/or more quantitative easing.
Money? Money? You don’t get no stinkin’ money! Root, hog, or fry.
===========
Do you mean the money borrowed from the Chinese?
“Hoover Institution.. Conservatives were far more open-minded about climate change..”
It’s amusing to say it makes you “open minded” to not agree with the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change due to CO2 is happening and that if we don’t cut our carbon emissions it will have severe consequences for our planet. I don’t think that rejecting that consensus makes you “open-minded.” The Hoover Institution’s slip is showing with that one..
Besides to know if they were truly “open minded,” they would ask if there was a possibility they could be wrong. That would be a better measuring of being “open-minded” as I understand the meaning.
Jos, you can have your overwhelming, but open your mind to the thought that ‘severe’ is more likely to be ‘beneficial’ from the evidence we’ve seen so far.
Remember, the higher the climate sensitivity to CO2, the colder we would now be without the effect of HumanGHGs. So pick a number for sensitivity that frightens you into ‘severe’, and calculate how cold we would now be without man’s effect. Now reconsider ‘beneficial’.
Open open open, up up up;
It’s so easy, yup yup yup.
===============
Joseph,
Fair is fair Joseph, why not consider just how partisan the “consensus” actually is at the same time;
http://climateshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/chap_4_table4.3.jpg
Do you really think science hasn’t become another left-wing enclave like “journalism” or “Hollywood”?? Do really think “Environmental Studies” which includes “Climate Science” is more or less left-wing than an already partisan base of AAAS members?
It’s a sad joke alarmists coloring dissent as partisan while keeping their own I.D. obfuscated and/or buried in imagined “professional” science. Try some critical thinking.
“Fair is fair Joseph, why not consider just how partisan the “consensus” actually is at the same time;”
It’s one thing to say that a person has certain political beliefs and another to say that affects your interpretation of the science. Do you have any evidence that their research is purely for political purposes?
On the other hand, what about the skeptics? Do you think being a conservative means one should be skeptical of their interpretations?
Joseph, it’s fair to say that the faculty of most western universities are far to the left of the median voters in their countries. I’ve read about several surveys documenting this. The science, math, engineering and economics faculties are less so, but even the economists (widely viewed by other faculty as somewhat to the right of Barry Goldwater) tend to be left of the median voter. I think it’s quite understandable why right and right-center citizens do not entirely trust the academy to be objective and fair.
“On the other hand, what about the skeptics? Do you think being a conservative means one should be skeptical of their interpretations?”
I would say being conservative would justly include skepticism over all politically driven memes presented by progressives. Certainly the partisan corruption of various societal segments which now include “science” merits initial skepticism. The cultural divide over AGW validates most legitimate grievances in false authority based on the non-empirical claims of “experts”. AGW is a belief system, post-normal and politically precise for advocates but it isn’t a hard science regardless of certain subset features. It’s abstract quality is what gives it political use. If two physicists were debating string theory there would be no policy or tax implication in the real world, correctly so since there are no physical measurements to consider. AGW is similar science abstraction, there is no quantifiable evidence of it’s existence. Only a political hope that is does to rationalize authority.
The climate community advocating AGW is overwhelmingly to the left (far left) of the general population in the west. Yet like the NY Times editorial board would describe themselves as “moderate”. This is the alternate universe the debate is carried out in. Michael Mann wants to establish a climate authority terror state so we should be grateful Dr. Curry wants to find a “third way”???? Not likely.
I think if one considers hypothesis, evidence and observation regardless of political inclinations you “should” be skeptical. It’s just the general softening of so many principals of logic and I would argue proliferation of state funding waste that assisted AGW along the way. There are so many more imagined “scientists” than 100 years ago and they all needed something to do. AGW costs about 1 billion dollars a day globally. It’s the equivalent of the WPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration) for the science community among others. This has increased the amount of soft science as well as turning say the membership of the AAAS into another paid pressure group for global collectivism. It’s a fantastical social decline of even the marginal “science” community.
We really are on the edge of the Soviet/Orwellian science model, Dr. Curry’s non-committal is outrageous in false equivalency of arguments and obfuscation. Again, look at her comment on this article. “but I thought this is something the denizens would find interesting.” She typed at least 2 million words rather than state the obvious; AGW is a left-wing activist agenda from inception and I in fact am left-wing in culture. That’s the core fact involved here by which all claims should be reviewed, always consider the source.
cwon14
WPA was known as “We Piddle Along” at the time. Some public works were built. Some were even good. But the waste was enormous. And politics dictated which projects would be built.
It was created out of nothing to give millions of unskilled unemployed workers a job before WWII solved the unemployment problem of the Depression. And it accomplished that purpose.
The problem with AGW is that there does not seem to be any tangible result – other than taxpayer funded subsidies for crony green industries, which might result in a few more windmills or solar panels being built (most likely in China). It’s all waste.
It was also created out of nothing and it is giving thousands of climate scientists a taxpayer funded job. But these guys are not building public works that have an inherent residual value.
They’re just busily cranking out wiggly graphs and wordy reports that warn us of certain climate disaster if we don’t allow our politicians to enact a direct or indirect tax on “carbon pollution” (= energy).
So it’s much worse than the WPA.
Max
You’re right Max, I was just trying to be “third way” and “moderate” in my analogy. You’re right it’s worse than the WPA but of the same vine of a tree.
How partisan is the Consensus? Well,
– they all work for the same employer (the state)
– their findings argue for greater enrichment and empowerment of their employer (the state)
– studies show them to have a totalitarian ideological bias
So, they’re about as objective as the tobacco company scientists who told us smoking was harmless.
Government cagw shills, tobacco shills, all cut from the same cloth.
“climate change due to CO2 is happening and that if we don’t cut our carbon emissions it will have severe consequences for our planet”
Evidence?
Andrew
I think its ironic that the word Liberal actually means more open-minded.
It looks like joshie has somewhat modified the spelling of his name. Same BS though.
Same ‘J’, same hay, or is it straw?
=============
Well, I’m sort of a conservative (I’m certainly in the conservative camp on economic policy) and I am quite prepared to change my mind about climate science if the evidence warrants it. I mean, it’s not part of my personal identity or anything like that.
How about you?
If the consensus changes, I would change my opinion. The scientific research will continue and there will be ample opportunity to overturn the theory, if the skeptic’s position is correct. That fact should not be overlooked.
What consensus?
Strange. I would not change my mind just because someone else does. I rely on the science to help me decide what is true, and what is not.
Lol.
“If the consensus changes?”
See, that’s the difference, as highlighted in the head post.
First, there’s no such “consensus”. There is a large spectrum of views, which in fact is not just two-dimensional, but three-dimensional. Scientists agree about some things, not others, across and between the “received wisdom.”
I am not interested in a confected “consensus”. It is irrelevant.
What I want are hard facts, something which even the politically driven IPCC has not been able to produce in support of CAGW.
If they (or anyone else) could do that, I would have no hesitation in changing my mind. And I would not be embarrassed about it either.
Joseph relies on what he perceives to be an overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion on AGW as would most lay people would be expected to do. The problem with this type of paradigm thinking is that the science supporting it seems far from settled and that only decades of global climate stasis will eventually force this to change.
Joseph,
Consensus is politics not science.
Joseph : scientific research will continue and there will be ample opportunity to overturn the theory, if the skeptic’s position is correct.
—
So you seriously believe that government funding agencies would ever give significant tax money to scientists and projects not conforming to the alarmist consensus from which government stands to gain so much?
“CWON: AGW is a belief system, post-normal and politically precise for advocates but it isn’t a hard science regardless of certain subset features. ”
Such a sweeping generalization with hardly anything said to back it up. Yawn..
My cats are running my smart meter.
======
They seem to be moderating the thread, too. When Judy’s mouse is away, the cats do play.
=========
Global warming groupthink serves only to drag the West down like a stone. AGW True Believers demand that we share their faith and if we refuse they demand that we share their fears. We don’t need more serial fearmongers who enjoy scaring little children with hot doomsday stories in the classrooms about a global thermal Armageddon caused by evil capitalists: school teachers teach terror when all they have left is the power of fear.
Are Keynesian economics, central planning and AGW causes of decline or merely symptoms of decline?
Despite achievements it was all heading on this road for the U.S. from the Civil War on. War necessity and success seeds most social declines by building the tools that are later turned on its own people. here is also the massive credit imbalances to be rationalized (Keynes). The naive never thought the government funding (Keynes and debt) of science would lead to a machine like AGW with a goal of total carbon regulation (central planning) on a global basis.
AGW is a symptom of decline not the cause. It’s true social rot but not a final topic, it’s a subset as large as it is.
True, true–just symptoms… of the Fall of Western Civilization.
In my opinion the left has embraced climate change so absolutely because it fits into a number of preexisting narratives.
1. The narrative of big corporations as exploiters.
2. The narrative that growth and capitalism are unsustainable.
3. The narrative that the west is culpable.
4. The narrative of technology as sin.
5. The yearning for a simple agricultural communal lifestyle.
The left also invented political correctness. A conformity of belief has always been in important part of left wing politics whereas while the right has within it a considerable number of individualists who deny that anyone has the right to tell them what to think.
Ian H
+100
What’s politically correct in calling someone a denier? Isn’t ‘denier’ a discriminatory term? Isn’t it used to denigrate an ideology? To make the ideology of those it is used against to feel lower than their own? How is this congruent with the liberal ideology of being PC?
It’s not… Liberals have double standards too.
Political correctness only matters when directed at liberal interests. When comments are directed at conservatives, anything goes. Note the language used by liberals re: palin, bachman, etc. Then look at the justified yet hypocritical outrage at limbaughs description of sandra fluke.
I consider myself liberal, but I scored 88.5 radical on that survey linked a few weeks ago.
But I am not in agreement with your 5 points at all.
1. This is the one that is closest to being true, but the real world is not a Clive Cussler novel. Sometimes the workers have the upper hand, sometimes the bosses and it swings back and forth. I would hope for balance between the two, something like Henry Ford paying his employees enough to buy his product.
2. I basically believe in free enterprise and capitalism. Is it a coincidence that there hasn’t been a real depression in the US since the New Deal era of Roosevelt? A medium sized government is useful. Medium sized growth is nice as well.
3. The east is evil and the Beatles would have been a better band had they come to America again instead of going to India. They should have spent some time with the real masters. Several guys with the last name King come to mind.
4. Technology is great.
5. In the US, most liberals live in cities
“Is it a coincidence that there hasn’t been a real depression in the US since the New Deal era of Roosevelt?”
How about the law of averages? A once-per-500-year bad event happens, on average, only once in 500 years.
But the real answer is that government meddling with the market created the Great Depression, and it’s going to create the next one, too. Policies that remove the feedback from the system to smooth out modestly bad market responses feel great as long as the underlying perturbations stay modest. But when they exceed the capacity of the shock-absorber to absorb, then the car you’ve been driving recklessly, in a sense of false security induced by the smooth ride, breaks an axle. With a macroeconomic model that inherently biases policy towards government spending over private spending, and overspending now locked in at a level guaranteed to end with an interest rate death-spiral, it won’t be long now.
Actually, the analogy between climate science and economics is a good one. I just wish people would turn the same skepticism on macroeconomics.
Bob D. What do you call the economic state we are in? The labor participation rate cotinues to decline. Small business formation is paltry. The stock market is up only because buisnesses can borrow money cheap to buy back stock and pay dividends. They drive up their stock price, then the executives cash in on their stock options. Eventually, the little stock holder will be left holding the bag when the bubble bursts. Then inflation will eventually kick in due to government borrowing, hurting those who were prudent and saved/invested a nest egg.
There is a new term, fourty-niners, in the US that means businesses stop hiring at 49 employees so they don’t hit the Obamacare trip-wire.
In short, the economy sucks. And it sucks because of what you generously term “medium sized” government. The government is huge and intrudes into every part of our life in the US. The government is overdue for a down-sizing. Then we might see some real growth.
These kinds of science-free political spews are typical of the right in the debate. It is all about political framing to them.
Not sure that I’m a denizen, but I find it interesting. Here’s why:
After a couple of years now of reading “outrage,” “outrage I say” from “skeptics” about the use the term denier – much wailing and pearl-clutching about how the term means that they were being compared to holocaust deniers, but “concern” from Judith about her being called a denier, we now see that all that “concern” was faux “concern,” because those very same folks are now starting to use that very same term for those they disagree with.
Imagine my shock.
And imagine how stunned I am to realize that all along, “skeptics” were, in fact, exploiting the issue of holocaust denial for expediency in the climate wars.
Well, anyway, now that they’ve signed on board to calling people “deniers,” I’m sure that Judith and “skeptics” more generally will no longer pearl-clutch and handwring about having the term applied to them.
Yup. I’m sure that’s going to happen,.
Judith and the Skeptics
…heh, good name for a band
Excellent!
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23climatebands&src=hash
Have a good trip, Josh
Max
Take a navigator.
========
Navigators are standing by now. Call 1-800-censored.
I thought it was Judith going on the trip. Should she take a navigator too?
???
After years of use to describe climate skeptics the term “denier” has become considerably devalued. I can still remember the shock I felt when the word “denier” was first fired in anger at skeptics. The equation to holocaust denial at that time was very strong and very powerful. Today the application of the D word to climate believers does not invoke such a direct comparison to holocaust deniers. Instead the comparison is clearly being made to previous the use of the word to describe climate skeptics.
So while I do see your point, the application of the word today to warmists who refuse to concede the existence of the pause is nowhere near as nasty as its original application to skeptics. Today it is essentially an invitation to recognise the hypocrisy of the warmist position. Back then it equated skeptics directly to evil nazi scum.
The irony is that it was originally applied to a whole class of the ‘different’, a bizarre mirror of the use of ‘holocaust denier’.
==============================
Ian –
The constant refrain from “skeptics” complaining about the term denier, and claiming that it references holocaust denial has not diminished, in my view. So I don’t think that your description of the change over time is accurate.
Further, I don’t think that it is true that the term was ever a reference, primarily, to holocaust denial – just as I don’t think that is the case now in the increasingly common usage of the term by “skeptics” to brand “realists.” It is a denigrating term, for sure, just as is “warmist,” “cultist,” “statist,” “eco-Nazi,” etc., etc., etc. But it is all par for the course – many people engaged in this debate are very much focused on identification with groups, with validating a sense of victimization, with pointing fingers at “the other,” etc. It is an attribute shared, abundantly, on both sides – just as the faux “outrage” about the denigrating terms. People who honestly think such terms are invalid don’t then turn around and use them to describe others.
Just more of the junior high school mentality that characterizes the climate wars.
Joshua
You are wrong once again when you write:
Check:
https://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/goodman-ellen-1
Ellen Goodman, “No change in political climate”, Boston Globe, 9 February 2009: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/02/09/no_change_in_political_climate/
Max
Heh, not too shocking to turn a pejorative term around on the user.
Also, you do fit the definition of a denizen here at CE…. Love it or leave it.
Denizen is defined in dictionaries as “an inhabitant” so like it or not, people who regularly comment here, as you do Joshua, should be so described.
OK. How about denizen’?
You mean “denizen” as fake denizen? :)
How about denyzen?
Joshua,
Please feel free to be outraged if you’re called a denier. You may even feel free to quote trite expressions like “two wrongs don’t make a right”. But the fact of matter remains that what goes around comes around and AGW alarmists are the new deniers as contrary data accumulates into a more and more compelling falsification of the AGW narrative. The most interesting thing is that for catastrophists it should come as good news to them that they might be wrong. But it was never about catastrophe. It was culture vs. culture all along. Science, like Elvis, left the building quite some time ago.
Springer –
Actually, I think that “Mommy, mommy, they did it fiiiiirrrrssst” captures the situation much more closely.
That’s trite enough and your choosing it exposes your experience as a child and lack of experience as a parent. I tend to think of it as “What goes around comes around’ or alternatively as “When in Rome do as the Romans do” or maybe even the vulgar “Payback is a bitch”.
Dave Springer, does this “compelling falsification” appear anywhere in the scientific literature … or is it presented solely on late-night talk radio and internet weblogs?
The world wonders! (and increasingly, investors wonder too)
Fanny
Regarding his claim that the AGW narrative is being compellingly falsified you ask David Springer:
Naw, Fanny.
It comes from all those thermometers out there (even the ones next to AC exhausts in summer or heated buildings in winter), which are telling us that it has stopped warming despite unabated human GHG emissions.
After a period of denial, the mainstream “scientific literature” has now acknowledged this “hiatus” (even your idol, James E. Hansen, has done so), although various rationalizations are being suggested to downplay its importance (and many “scientists” are trying to distract from the pause with dire warnings of “just wait’ll next year!”)
(But it’s not working. People are not all that dumb, Fanny. And when a rationalization smells bad, people detect this.)
Max
Speaking of bitches…
Yes John Sidles the evidence is scientific and is referenced in a jillion papers. It’s simply the global average temperature over the past 15 years (no significant increase) compared to the global average CO2 partial pressure (increased in a business as usual manner over the same 15 years).
Thanks for asking and let me know if you need help finding the data!
CO2 fits a hell of a lot better than the Sun
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:60/from:1970/plot/esrl-co2/mean:60/normalise/from:1970/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:132/normalise/from:1970
Say, why aren’t you guys as passionate at attacking solar theories?
lolwot, with 2 to 3 hundred year lags to consider and nearly 200 years of data, your ignorance is likely to show pretty soon.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-KST5l-AgXIg/UmrSj9vWuHI/AAAAAAAAKLA/P9kjjVLRO9Y/s781/sol%2520y%2520vol%2520with%2520oppo%2520to%2520800%2520ad.png
The ground swell of alternate theories based on more intricate non-linear interactions on decade and century scales is leaving ya in the dust bud.
“Mama do let babies grow to be liberal wingnut scientists…”
max –
Get out your glasses and reread.
Perhaps this time you will find the word “primarily.”
ouch!
Do you have any evidence that Judith “primarily” compares you to a holocaust denier? So far, Max is the only one with evidence on the issue. How surprising.
For a useful reminder of how deep in denial progressives are, here’s Pielke analyzing the lie that is Australia’s decarbonization “plan.”
http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2013/10/25/Australias-carbon-policy-debate-mirrors-global-follies.aspx
Enjoy
Heh, Fils, not only old, but cold. Pickle it or plow it under.
===================
???
?????
First, in speaking of “primarily,” I am not speaking of one individual usage. Yes, there are isolated, singular usages of “denier” by “realists” that are comparisons to holocaust deniers. There is no question about that. That does not justify the faux “concern” from “skeptics” that the term was used, primarily (meaning for the most part), thus.
Second, whether or not Judith uses that term to compare me, or anyone else, to a holocaust denier is a non-sequitur.
The point is that anyone who authentically finds it so “offensive” that “realists” use the term (often justified by a bogus explanation that the term is primarily being used to make comparisons to holocaust deniers), would not then turn right around and use that “offensive” term to describe someone else.
In other words, all this “concern” is either faux (and exploiting the problem of holocaust denial), or folks are hypocrites.
Or, folks are operating at a junior high school level.
Or some combination thereof.
There is evidence that the warm use “denier” as a weak attempt at a sneering connection to holocaust denial as well as its dictionary definition.
There is evidence that the rational use “denier” as it’s dictionary definition but object to the idiotic holocaust denial reference.
Where’s the hypocrisy again? Other, of course, than in your attempt to weasel out of a progressive theme, which is becoming a habit (“when we said global warming, we meant global change”, “when we predicted warming we meant it was a projection, not of warming but of cooling or warming or no change”, “when we said you could easily power all of England with windmills – and the U.S. too! – for less than the cost of coal, we meant that you could power maybe 10% of England with wind, sometimes, at three times the cost of coal.”
Meanwhile, Al Gore denies (in the proper use of the term) the science again, this time in Australia: http://www.france24.com/en/20131024-al-gore-wades-australia-debate-linking-bushfires-climate
Exactly. Still, we face the fantasy of a hot apocalypse.
“Anyone with a shred of self-respect who had predicted The End Of Snow would surely now admit that he was wrong. But no. Perhaps the most revealing thing about the snow crisis is that it was held up as evidence, not that the experts were mistaken, but that the public is stupid. Apparently it’s those who ask `Whatever happened to global warming?’, rather than those who predicted `no more traditional British winters’, who need to have their heads checked. Because what they don’t understand – ignoramuses that they are – is that heavy snow is also proof that our planet is getting hotter, and that industrialized society is to blame, just as surely as the absence of snow was proof of the same thing 10 years ago.” ~Brendan O’Neill, ‘The icy grip of the politics of fear,’ 4-Jan-2011
No more snow, ever? Just political rhetoric and isn’t to taken seriously except by idiots? Is that what government is all about these days? Is that what Obamacare is all about too — just overpromise and under-deliver on solutions to non-problems and blame the credulous for believing? Fear of global warming is a giant screw up.
Suggest you do a search on the word ‘denier’ in the comments
Note the differences betweeen
denier
‘denier’
denial
Suggest you read all the comments and present a case. you might have one. then again..
here josh
http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/24/liberal-denial-on-climate-change-and-energy/#comment-403727
Joshua
A simple count is showing thatthe denizen who uses the word denier more than anyone is YOU.
1. the article did not call people denier. it mentioned denial
2. a few commenters raised issues with this word
Then all uses after that are largely due to YOU, oh and people quoting ellen goodman back at you.
neat trick. accuse the article and denizens of calling liberals deniers, when they havent. and then turn the whole thread into a bash Josh affair.
There is a giant kick me sign on your back. enjoy
He doesn’t need a sign. It’s a natural reaction.
Joshua was all for the “denier” label, right up to the moment it was turned against him.
Re: Liberal denial on climate change and energy, 10/24/13
Yesterday Jeremy Carl, National Review Online, wrote:
>>According to the Hoover Institution’s recently completed Golden State Poll, conducted in partnership with the nationally respected polling firm YouGov, many Democrats and liberals are in denial when it comes to reality on energy and climate policy, endorsing both science and political fiction. Bold added.
Neither HI’s poll of 9/5/13 nor its press release of 9/26 used the word reality, or anything like it. National Review’s reporting is no better than the poll it explained.
For a poll to qualify as scientific, a large number of criteria have to be met. But focusing just on the phrasing of the questions, the HI poll uses the highly politicized phrase Climate Change without explaining either its objective meaning in Modern Science, or its usage in politics and Post Modern Science.
HI’s questionnaire provides subjects a short explanation of fracking. Then it adds one sentence each on its pros and cons, using such vague, vacuous, and over-qualified terms as some studies have suggested and critics … express concerns about potential harms they believe may cause undesirable effects. Then it asks how positive the subject’s view on fracking, and whether it should banned.
This is a factless and fectless survey to test the penetration of two current thrusts of political activism into objective knowledge as they might have penetrated the scientifically illiterate public consciousness, sorted by age, race, gender, education, party ID, ideology, employment and family income.
An old saw on reality: “Things are not as they are, they are as they seem to be.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouGov
“More recently, during the 2012 US Presidential Election, on the basis of one of the most extensive opinion polls ever conducted, YouGov predicted that Barack Obama would win the national vote by 2%. This prediction proved to be one of the most accurate out of all pollsters covering the election.”
“This is a factless and fectless survey…”
Feckless: Lacking initiative or strength of character; irresponsible.
“a feckless mama’s boy”
Too funny.
The most interesting part was where the independents are closer to the conservatives.
Jeff Glassman,
What is the objective meaning of Climate Change in Modern Science? Where is the authoritative defintion of “Climate Change”?
Peter Lang
Manacker,
Wiki seems to make a clear distinction between climate change and human-induced climate change. But it seems the climate activists, including most climate scientists, usually do not make the distinction. The fact they do not distinguish (usually) between them seems to imply they do not see a difference, or are trying to mislead with scaremongering. That is dishonest and it is part of the reason their credibility has been so seriously damaged.
But first one must give a working definition of “Climate” before one can say what changed.
“The standard averaging period is 30 years,… but other periods may be used depending on the purpose.” IPCC: “The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).” — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate
Forty years ago discussions about “climate change” were in terms of another ice age. I am old enough to remember shoveling out driveways, only to have snow plows fill them in again. Streets were blocked because office towers were shedding sheets of half-inch ice.
Is the 30-year average obsolete? I can not tell from the temperature graphs whether the flat trend is a pause, or the peak of a 60-year cycle. Evidence one way or the other? (Assertions are not evidence.)
“What is the objective meaning of Climate Change in Modern Science? Where is the authoritative defintion of ‘Climate Change’?”
In the climate debate, the CAGW advocates do not have an”authoritative definition” of climate change. It is one of their more common obscurantist tactics. “Climate change” is like “fairness”, it means whatever they want t to mean at the moment.
That way they can make the outrageous, albeit common. charge that skeptics “deny climate change.” They know the public at large will read that one way – “How can anyone deny climate change, I see it with my own eyes.?” When called on their dishonesty, they then can reply “Oh, “climate change” means AGW.” And of course AGW means either AGW or CAGW. depending on the argument they want to make at the time as well.
Intentional ambiguity is one of their favorite polemical ploys.
That is why they fight tooth and nail to keep their terminology as obscure as possible. “Consensus”, “global warming”, “climate change” “mitigation”, all seeming so innocuous. All with the single actual meaning of a policy of centralized control of the energy economy and decarboinzation.
GaryM. I agree.
Peter Lang 10/25/13 @ 7:30am
Peter Lang asks a pair of questions that relate to science literacy:
>> What is the objective meaning of Climate Change in Modern Science? Where is the authoritative definition of “Climate Change”?
Modern Science imposes neither definitions nor authorities. However, since 1620, when Sir Francis Bacon introduced Cause & Effect to create Modern Science out of ancient Greek science, every word has had to have an unambiguous definition. Meaning, though, has always been situational, that is, according to the context of a discourse. It is the responsibility of the speaker to provide that definition, and the default is to any mutually agreeable authority.
Not so Post Modern Science. That model of science is traceable in each of its tenets to Karl Popper, a 20th Century Humpty Dumpty who said,
>>In science, we take care that the statements we make should never depend upon the meaning of our terms. Popper, OSE, p. II-17.
and
>>[D]efinitions do not matter. Popper, K., “Objective Knowledge: A Realist View of Logic, Physics, and History”, 1966, Section 4: Realism in Logic, p. 24 of 31.
IPCC provides two definitions taken from climate science, definitions of universal breadth and reasonable, objective starting points for Modern Science:
>>Climate Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the average weather, or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period for averaging these variables is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization [WMO]. The relevant quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system. AR4, Glossary, p. 942.
>> Climate change Climate change refers to a change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g., by using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties, and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer. Climate change may be due to natural internal processes or external forcings, or to persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use. Italics added, AR4, Glossary, p. 943.
At the same time, IPCC explained that climate change had two different meanings:
>>Climate change in IPCC usage refers to any change in climate over time, whether due to natural variability or as a result of human activity. This usage differs from that in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC], where climate change refers to a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and that is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods. AR4, Ch. 4, Introduction, p. 2.
The first definition is unqualified Climate Change, and that was objective of study for IPCC in its original, 1988 charter, when founded under UNEP and WMO. The second is Anthropogenic Climate Change, with Anthropogenic intentionally and misleadingly silent. It was the objective of UNFCC when that organization was created in 1992, and when it came into effect as the international authority for addressing climate change in 1994. IPCC revised its charter in 1998 to study (anthropogenic) Climate Change, but maintained unqualified climate change as the ostensible (in name only) objective of its study in its Assessment Reports. IPCC is formally conflicted as to the meaning of the words in its name, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
To the naïve human mind, a brief introduction to the existence of the Ice Ages, of the glacial cycles, of the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age (major climate events IPCC tried to erase), leaves no reasonable doubt that climate change exists, and that it is known to exist by natural events. These are objective teachings of Modern Science. It takes a special indoctrination, a belief system, the kind rampant today in the populist media, in K-12 curricula, and in university training in Post Modern Science, to respond to the phrase Climate Change with the meaning of the conjecture, Anthropogenic Climate Change.
The Hoover Institute questionnaire asks ambiguous and misleading questions, resulting in another poll, popular in the media across the political spectrum, that is, propaganda with only negative scientific value.
Jeff Glassman,
Thank you for detailed and thorough answer to m you question.
The National Review article by Jeremy Carl looks at the ongoing scientific and policy debate surrounding human induced climate change (AGW) through the optics of a liberal versus conservative political debate.
No doubt it is partly this, and the examples cited demonstrate this pretty accurately.
AGW was pre-programmed to become a political movement when IPCC, a political body under the UN, was founded.
“Progressive” politicians, such as Al Gore, saw this as an avenue to save the planet from the evils of perceived overconsumption and over-industrialization in our economically developed world. It became the “politically correct” progressive movement “du jour”.
The science was clear. To suggest that man was not causing our climate to change and that this might not become a serious potential problem requiring a change in our excessive life style became “politically incorrect”.
But as AGW gradually became CAGW, it also morphed into a taxpayer-funded multibillion dollar big business, which was quickly embraced by a loose collusion of several totally independent interest groups that each saw a potential benefit.
On his “Harmless Sky” blog, Tony Newbery described this as “A very convenient network”, showing the symbiosis and interconnection between the various groups involved in “creating climate change hysteria”.
On the same blog site, Peter Taylor, author of the book Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory refers to this “coalition of interests” as the “corporisation of environmental activism”.
It is true, as Carl writes, that in the USA and elsewhere the politicians who benefit most from the CAGW scare are the “liberals” (progressives, greens, etc.), who generally believe that more government involvement, regulation and taxation is required to control the pace of industrialization and conserve the planet.
However, there are many corporations and other interest groups that have jumped on the bandwagon for purely apolitical reasons.
Are “conservatives the open-minded ones” as Carl suggests?
It seems only logical that those who believe “the science is settled” on whether AGW represents a serious potential threat to humanity and our environment requiring action now, are, by definition, less “open-minded” to diverging or dissenting views than those who are rationally skeptical of this premise.
It appears to me that the comments on this site only confirm this.
Max
“The National Review article”
You mean right wing opinion piece, right?
Joseph, of the mind of many openings.
======
Joseph,
AGW is a left-wing opinion piece by and large.
How can there be a reasoned argument about global warming If you don’t understand that global warming is a Left versus right issue? “While the media and liberal politicians attack them, conservatives know that it is hard to have a rational argument with a fanatic about the subject of his fanaticism.” ~Jeremy Carl
“If you don’t understand that global warming is a Left versus right issue?”
It’s only a left right issue in terms of what to do about it. Conservative don’t trust the consensus view and instead trust the minority view. Since they don’t believe in the theory they want nothing done. Liberals trust the consensus view and want to do something about it.
But the issue is the science and what the scientists that do the research say. Science is not a left versus right issue.
What happened in the years 1976/77 and 1998/99 in the Pacific was so unusual that scientists spoke of abrupt climate changes. They referred to a sudden warming of the tropical Pacific in the mid-1970s and rapid cooling in the late 1990s. Both events turned the world’s climate topsy-turvy and are clearly reflected in the average temperature of Earth. Today we know that the cause is the interaction between ocean and atmosphere…
The winds change the ocean currents which in turn affect the climate. In our study, we were able to identify and realistically reproduce the key processes for the two abrupt climate shifts,” says Prof. Latif. “We have taken a major step forward in terms of short-term climate forecasting, especially with regard to the development of global warming. However, we are still miles away from any reliable answers to the question whether the coming winter in Germany will be rather warm or cold.” Prof. Latif cautions against too much optimism regarding short-term regional climate predictions: “Since the reliability of those predictions is still at about 50%, you might as well flip a coin.”
Science progresses at an exponential rate – pissant progressive denialism glacially.
From Via Media …
” … the modern green movement is no stranger to fecklessness and willful ignorance.”
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/10/24/keystone-should-be-an-easy-choice-so-whats-taking-obama-so-long/
Open-mindedness?
Consider this
Skeptics of the consensus view on CAGW (as outlined specifically by IPCC in its AR4 and AR5 reports) are often criticized by supporters of this view for not having one argument, but many (often conflicting) ones.
Wouldn’t that point to the conclusion that skeptics are more open-minded to diverging or dissenting views than supporters of the consensus view?
Thoughts anyone?
it’s individual thinkers, as opposed to a stitched together consensus view seeking to align thinking behind one goal.
Look at the data objectively and it holds no political persuasion.
The simple generally accepted model of GHG induced global warming is here
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
This matches very well the historical record starting from 1880 up until now, including lengthy pauses. Few parameters are required and they are all based on physical principles.
What would be odd is that after 130+ years, this model would suddenly stop working. To me that would be more scientifically-terrifying than if the warming were to continue.
What fake skeptics don’t seem to get is that science is built on a foundation and that this foundation doesn’t just crumble away if you poke a skeptical stick at it.
We are going to use all this knowledge that we gain from climate science and put it to good use as we try to sustain the human population in the coming years. There isn’t much more to it than that.
Webby
I look at the data objectively without any political persuasion, and I conclude that the CAGW premise (as outlined by IPCC in AR4 and AR5) is not supported by empirical scientific evidence.
So far no one (including you) has shown me otherwise.
Max
Max, I am not talking about CAGW. I gave you a simple model that assumes a TCR=2C for global and TCR=ECR=3C for land temperature data.
This simple model is not CAGW. These numbers represent AGW, with a predicted value that hasn’t changed since 1979.
So as I present the data as AGW, some members of Team Denier attack it, while you create a strawmen.
This is the way Team Denier works. An equal smattering of “good” cops and “bad” cops all working together to raise the level of FUD.
Webby
The basis for the CAGW premise is precisely the model-derived ECS of ~3C (and TCR ~ 2C), which you mention.
This basis has been seriously questioned by the several recent (partly) observation-based studies, which indicate that these estimates were exaggerated by around a factor of 2:1.
Correct TCR to 1C and ECS to 1.5C and CAGW disappears – “poof!”
Max
Again, show exactly how you get a TCR value of 1C unless you only cherry-pick a curve that goes back only a couple of decades?
If I wasn’t an engineer and as aggressively agenda-driven as Max, I would take only the downward signal of a 120V 60 Hz AC power source for a quarter of a second and claim that the DC bias was trending down at at least 100 V/sec.
That sounds really stupid but that is the level of scientific denial that we are talking about here.
The interactive model that I have built in the link below takes these natural fluctuations and illustrates the truth of what is happening in the global temperature record:
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
This has nothing to do with Max’s political leanings and everything to do with the observational evidence and waiting out the fluctuations.
Webby
You are, indeed, to be commended for your relentless pursuit of “absolute truth”.
Your ability to create models to confirm your notion of “absolute truth” is unsurpassed (at least on this blog site).
But there are other folks out there, who have recently published (partly) observation-based studies, which confirm, on average, that the previously model-predicted value for 2xCO2 ECR used by IPCC (~3C) was exaggerated by a factor of about two.
I’m sure you are aware of these studies, but let me list them for you, so you can get up-to-date on what is going on out there.
Author (year): ECS range
Berntsen (2013): 0.9-3.2
Lewis (2013): 1.0-3.0
Lindzen (2011): 0.6-1.0
Schmittner (2011): 1.4-2.8
Van Hateren (2012): 1.5-2.5
Schlesinger (2012): 1.45-2.01
Masters (2013): 1.5-2.9
Hope this helps you in your search for “absolute truth”.
Max
Whatsamata Max?
Can’t do the analysis yourself, and you have to resort to several has-been “experts”?
Max,
The reference you pick, Van Hateren 2012, says :
and then this
That is fairly close to what I say. Over that last 130 years, the change in temperature is commensurate with a 2C temperature change with doubling of CO2. The ECS is higher than this, which means that you are way off.
Why do you have this urge to make stuff up? You do this all the time.
Look at the title of the top-level post again. This malady that you possess is called projection and is explained in the Wikipedia page on Denial.
Max, since you are citing the Schlesinger, I notice that you and he differ quite remarkably about what to do with CO2 emissions.
What’s with that, you cite the diagnosis but won’t take the medicine.
WHT,
You may be unaware that records back to 1820 show a correlation between global temperature and pirates, where R^2 = 0.9839.
This includes the “pause”, which is obviously due to the increasing number of pirates over the period in question.
I cannot explain why this should be so, but there it is.
I haven’t looked at your crystal ball model, because counting pirates seems to work pretty well.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
and there is no correlation with the sun, go figure.
Of course the correlation with pirates at least gives us hope that an underlying mechanism can be found. With the sun, no such luck.
With C02 the interesting thing is the theory came before the correlation
so the correlation supports ( but does not prove) the theory.
So here is what you have
1. A correlation with pirates, but no physical theory.
2. A theory about the sun, but no observational confirmation
3. A theory about c02 ( circa 1890s) With observation confirmation.
Put on your science hat. Which theory will you work to improve?
The missing theory that connects pirates to warming?
The busted solar theory
The imperfect C02 theory.
You only have so much time on this earth as a scientist. You need to lay your bets. Which theory will you be working on? which observations do you think will help you improve your theory?
Guess what? most scientists will not work on the pirate theory. why?
because its hard to see how it connects with the rest of science.
Most scienctists will work on the C02 theory. Why? because the physics involved is already being used by engineers. It works, not perfectly, but it works. A few nuts will try to explain why its the sun. wish them luck.
“there is no correlation with the sun”
Of course there is. People can observe it pretty much any time.
Andrew
The only direct correlation can be with the changing radiative output of the sun. This is down at the 0.05C level as explainable by TSI models and data; and sure enough we can detect this with suitable inferential tools:
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
The agreement is also at the 0.05C level which is well below the 1.2C change in land warming and nearly 0.9C change in global warming since the mid 1850’s.
As Mosh said, somebody that understood that the warming of the earth from its black-body value of 255 to its present value of 289, together with the background level of CO2 and other GHGs, could EASILY have predicted this 0.9C temperature increase so far. And they would have been dead on. And they would continue to suffer people like Bad Andrew as if they were gnats.
FOMBS break the threading again?
The problem with webby is not merely that he is an ideologue and a serial disinformer with a climate science that is at least 10 years out of date – but that he indulges in the most absurd simplifications well beyond the ambit of any science at all. Accompanied of course by the obligatory sneers and abuse.
Simplistic warminista ideology cannot be reconciled with abrupt climate change, synchronous chaos, stadium waves, climate shifts or decadal variability. That’s their problem. Nor is the serial denial of the evidence amounting to much as the world continues not to warm for a decade to three more. That’s the most inclusive theory to date.
The recent warming mostly happened in 1976/1977 and 1998. The rest appears to be for the most part changes in ocean and atmospheric regimes. Yet even so – practical and pragmatic ways forward are proposed by classic liberals – and – as an aside – we should resist the appropriation of the term liberal by American pissant progressives.
As the evidence continues to mount – what we find is more desperate post-hoc rationalisations of anomalous information and scarier stories intended to terrify children. Turning the denier meme around is moderately amusing – but it doesn’t fit. They actually believe in an imminent and quite unlikely holocaust.
Chief, Your little baby PDO will generate a +/- 0.1C fluctuation to the data if lucky. That is the “Stadium Wave” that barely rises above the din of the warming signal.
Just like a Stadium Wave at an athletics event, the Stadium Wave of climate will not effect the outcome nor impact the final score. AGW will bury it at the end of the game.
What stadium wave at athletic events? It died at MLB and NFL events long ago.
Web:
“…phase changes in the PDO have a propensity to coincide with changes in the relative frequency of ENSO events, where the positive phase of the PDO is associated with an enhanced frequency of El Niño events, while the negative phase is shown to be more favourable for the development of La Niña events.”
Verdon, D. C. and S. W. Franks, Long-term behaviour of ENSO
http://www.agu.org/journals/abs/2006/2005GL025052.shtml
Count it up sunnyboy. This was posted at realclimate along with the usual post hoc rationalisations.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/rc_fig1_zpsf24786ae.jpg.html?sort=3&o=26
2/3 of the recent warming occurred in 1976/1977 and 1997/1998. Excluding this for the very good reason that in was all ENSO rather than AGW leaves a residual of some 0.1 degrees C/decade. Also excluded for the very good reason that these times of climate shifts are ENSO dragon-kings. You are saying that the IPO – we will refer to the broader pan Pacific system – contributes 0.1 degrees C. It is actually more than that – but let’s see what this means. It leaves less than 0.05 degrees C/decade for greenhouse gases. Not enough to make any difference over any reasonable time frame.
This is the simplest of calculations – that it is not recognised is a symptom of the most pervasive example of madness of the crowd in the history of the human race.
That the planet is not warming for a decade to three hence is a little more complex – and seemingly above your pay grade.
As for JCH and his habitual smarmy sneers from a position of immense ignorance – it gets a little tedious.
Chief and Girma
All their chips on one El Nino event.
Webby – a wannabe poster boy for pissant progressive denialism.
Chief said:
What gets tedious is this anti-science agenda put forward by the Chief and other deniers who assert that a mere fluctuation — an “an irregular rising and falling in number or amount; a variation.”— as important in contributing to a long-term trend in something as obvious as the global warming temperature signal.
The fluctuations of the PDO are approximately +/- 0.1C in comparison to the 0.9C warming trend since the industrial age began in the 1800’s.
I demonstrate that here:
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
Globally, This year will very likely end up as the warmest non-El Niño year on record, and the last La Niña year, 2011 was the warmest La Niña year on record. These facts seem to be unimportant to those who can only prattle on about with their “globe is cooling” meme. Denialism in full bloom. And of course, many of these denialsts are from down under, where the “pause” ended over these past 12 months. Such irony…
R. Gates you write “Denialism in full bloom.”
This is a vivid example of warmists refusing to admit that the science proves them to be wrong. The reason why what R. Gates has written is irrelevant, has been explained ad nauseum. I am not going to repeat it all over again; it would be a waste of time. the same old, same old, red herring will just reappear over and over again.
I agree with RG.
The last 130+ years of a warming trend that follows ln(CO2) and of fluctuations that largely follow the trendless SOI data suggests that this trend will not change soon.
If it does change on a dime, which is what a continued pause would indicate, then the underlying pattern no longer holds. All we can go on is based on the observational data we have. I can show how the SOI and other factors contribute to sustaining the pause:
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
How much longer the SOI can continue to sustain that large a La Nina pressure differential is unknown. The pattern has been established based on the past hundreds of years and why that would change now is something that the skeptics can’t answer, except to bring up the chaos wildcard.
Meanwhle the GHG’s continue to accumulate.
Webby
And the temperature continues to stagnate.
Max
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Gee, I know it is cooling but barely suspected CO2 as the agent.
=========
Correction. The temperature continues to fluctuate. As probably one of the few people that has actually taken a graduate-level courses in noise (from the prof that is considered the “Nestor of the electronic noise field” no less), I can tell you millions of ways that a noise source can mask a signal. Fluctuations in measured data happen all the time, and your ignorance will not change that fact.
Too bad that you can’t turn back the clock and get a redo on your education, Max.
‘“But if we don’t understand what is natural, I don’t think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand — first the natural variability of climate — and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,” Tsonis said.
The relevant period is the late century warming. Some 0.4 degrees C was ENSO in 1976/1977 and 1997/1998. Half of the rest at least was natural variability leaving 0.05 degrees C/decade from greenhouse gases. This is not difficult.
Webby prattles on about noise and gatesy babbles on about this year making a difference in the theory of climate shifts for God’s sake. It is all just such utter nonsense.
Jim C.,
You, as a self-admitted denialist of course have very little to offer that would suggest that you can be neutral to the full scope of data coming forth about changes in the energy balance of the planet. You see all of this data through your very biased denialist perspective. Now that the “pause” has ended for Australia and they are seeing their temperatures at the highlest levels on record, denialists in that country will have to find a new meme to hold on to. It is only a matter of time until global tropospheric temperatures also are at their highest levels. As it stands, 2013 will be the warmest non-El Nino year on record, and this is very significant and tells us a great deal about the underlying forcing from GH gases, but a denialisst (such as you admit to being) of course must deny the signficance of that. Even so of course, even with new tropospheric records being set for Australia, etc. this myopic focus on the troposphere to look for Earth’s energy balance is of course highly misplaced from the start, but then again, denialists such as yourself would like to pretend the dominant role and energy storage of the ocean didn’t exist.
Chief Hydro provides the following portion on his on-going diatribe against reality:
“…gatesy babbles on about this year making a difference in the theory of climate…”
____
Of course I never said any thing even close to this year making a “difference in the theory of climate”. There is nothing new happening this year that the steadily increasing energy in the Earth system doesn’t explain through solid scientific prinicples of basic thermodynamics. The Earth system continues to accumulate energy and the highly variable and low thermal inertia troposphere is reflecting where the oceans have been going continually for the past 40 years. This is basic thermodynamic science that Chief Hydro would like to ignore. He offers no explanation for why Australia has seen the warmest 12 month period on record other than his own arm waving and nutter cut-n-pasting of unrelated material. Pitiful…
What happened in the years 1976/77 and 1998/99 in the Pacific was so unusual that scientists spoke of abrupt climate changes. They referred to a sudden warming of the tropical Pacific in the mid-1970s and rapid cooling in the late 1990s. Both events turned the world’s climate topsy-turvy and are clearly reflected in the average temperature of Earth. Today we know that the cause is the interaction between ocean and atmosphere. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130822105042.htm
The rate of warming from greenhouse gases in the last warming period was at most 0.05 degrees C/decade. This is the number they want to obfuscate.
The BOM in Australia is concerned with surface temperature – 2m above the ground. The surface temperature over land responds to water availability and consequent reduced lapse rate. This means nada for tropospheric heat content.
‘September rainfall was below the long-term mean when averaged nationally (20% below the long-term average), but this disguises the contrast between the west of Australia and the remainder of the country. The majority of Western Australia recorded above-average rainfall while large areas of the remaining mainland recorded below-average monthly totals with smaller areas recording above-average rainfall, mostly across the north, New South Wales and northern Tasmania.’
The hottest year meme in Australia didn’t happen in the troposphere. It happened at the surface. It is propaganda rather than science.
The 1998/2001 climate shift is not turning around anytime soon.
Let’s try again. Judith – I have 2 comments in moderation for links. Please delete.
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.
IPCC 3.4.4.1
Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.’ Loeb et al, 2012.
Odd how they object to quoting science. The toa radiant flux is actually quite complex.
Here’s some indications over a range of instruments.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=32
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Loeb2011-Fig1.png.html?sort=3&o=70
Here’s the ERBS data discussed by the IPCC.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/WongFig2-1.jpg.html?sort=3&o=65
I am happy to discuss it but gatesy and webby have nothing but confused narratives – with the obligatory insults – superficially in the objective idiom of science.
‘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. Nor is that to be seen as a defect. Of course choices between competing values are not made by relying upon scientific knowledge alone. What is wrong is to pretend that they are.’ http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/units/mackinder/pdf/mackinder_Wrong%20Trousers.pdf
People like this merely get both the science and policy wrong and confuse the issue utterly with moral and intellectual posturing. We need to move past progressive retards to make any progress at all.
I give up.
Chief Hydro confusingly uttered:
“The hottest year meme in Australia didn’t happen in the troposphere. It happened at the surface. It is propaganda rather than science.”
____
Now, for those who’d like to un-confuse their brains after reading the Chief’s message, understand that the Troposphere runs from the surface all the way up to about 15-20 km or so (i.e. to the tropopause). Unless by surface, the Chief is referring to the soil and rocks, which of course would be even more absurd than his already confused statement.
_____
The past 12 month period has seen the warmest tropospheric temperatures in Australian record (usally measured about 2 m above the surface, well within the tropsohere) This fact has a lot of the Australian denialist community rabidly trying to find a link back to the unsupportable “globe is cooling” meme.
And it has been the coldest in Poughkeepsie. SO I guess it all averages out.
A characteristic feature of global warming is the land–sea contrast, with stronger warming over land than over oceans. Recent studies find that this land–sea contrast also exists in equilibrium global change scenarios, and it is caused by differences in the availability of surface moisture over land and oceans. In this study it is illustrated that this land–sea contrast exists also on interannual time scales and that the ocean–land interaction is strongly asymmetric. The land surface temperature is more sensitive to the oceans than the oceans are to the land surface temperature, which is related to the processes causing the land–sea contrast in global warming scenarios. It suggests that the ocean’s natural variability and change is leading to variability and change with enhanced magnitudes over the continents, causing much of the longer-time-scale (decadal) global-scale continental climate variability. Model simulations illustrate that continental warming due to anthropogenic forcing (e.g., the warming at the end of the last century or future climate change scenarios) is mostly (80%–90%) indirectly forced by the contemporaneous ocean warming, not directly by local radiative forcing.
The surface temperature is defined by thermometers in standard installations – 2m from the ground.
The temperature 2m from the ground is influenced by water availability and resulting changing lapse rates.
The heat content of the troposphere is not affected by this – most sensible and latent heat eventually manifests in the troposphere.
Here’s a graph of UAH tropospheric temperatures over Australia with 12 month running means.
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/australia/uah-aust-aug-2013-graph.gif
gatesy has very little fundamental understanding – objects to my quoting science – indulges strictly in AGW groupthink narratives that are profoundly unscientific and is a dishonest and nasty little dweeb. The perfect pissant progressive denialist storm in a teacup.
So for Gates and Web, the fact that Australia alone has warmed, is sufficient to sustain their CAGW credulity.
Please don’t confuse Australian Liberals with what passes as liberalism in the US. Most Australian Liberals would be perfectly at home at a Republican convention in the US, although they might question the need for hidden weapons under their host’s jackets.. Unfortunately both sides of politics have been confused by the ‘science is settled’ statement and this simply illustrates that we are not the science led society we would like to be.
“although they might question the need for hidden weapons under their host’s jackets..”
Hah, in CA one of the biggest anti-2nd amendment people is Dianne Feinstein, (powerful US senator) who has a concealed weapons permit.
Seriously, though, there are huge numbers of guns in the US. The lawful might turn them, but the unlawful, who knows, and certain criminal elements never will. But, the UK now has murder rates similar to the US, even with their strict anti-gun laws, and all the tension in the US trying to be a cultural neutral society.
The USA has a murder rate four times greater than the UK. I wouldn’t say that was ‘similar’.
And the UK has a violent crime rate 8 times that of the US. That is not similar either.
Eh, I botched that. Sorry for sending bad information. Let me revise.
The UK murder rate is lower than in some US states:
http://libertarianhome.co.uk/2012/12/uk-murder-rate-higher-than-some-us-states/
I think this is what is referred to as “tossing a grenade and ducking”. ;-)
But it is an interesting read. However, even I have to question his numbers. Perhaps he only wanted to survey those with a strong opinion on the subject. The numbers – on both sides – seem too high given other polls that I have read.
philjourdan | October 24, 2013 at 8:28 pm
“…even I have to question his numbers.”
Me too. Any real consensus has 97%.
Herding skeptics is like herding cats.
herding leftist progressivists is
like herding sheep.
Beth, a few months ago, I believed that. After this NSA crackup, I’m seeing a weeny indication of a few capable of independent thought. But only a few.
Meeow!
Beth, I think that’s a pretty good analogy
I like that! I will definitely quote it.
Thank you.
Sheeple.
I don’t understand why this study assumes that “independents” represent reality. Perhaps American independents are relatively conservative.
Independents are posited to be the people who are least swayed by political orientation. That is, most immune to leftist or conservative group-think. It seems like a valid concept.
“Perhaps American independents are relatively conservative.”
Then why are progressive policies, not conservative ones, being foisted on the American people? Democrats make up only 31% of voters.
Bribery works in Chicago and demagoguery has worked before.
If carbon tax prevents big bushfires, how come Australians are still paying carbon tax and having those bush infernos?
If only 31 percent of conservatives think it is not serious, why has the majority not prevailed in getting some action on climate change? It is encouraging that so few are left that don’t think climate change is a serious problem, but where is the consequence of that thinking in policies? To me, this is the main thing coming out of those statistics. The ones in denial about serious consequences are in the minority. However, the article’s contorted spin against the liberals who are in that majority was a piece of work.
“getting some action on climate change?”
The only action on climate change so far is increasing bureaucracy and making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Jim D, a political scientist once told me that state-level parties in the US adjust somewhat to the local opinion spectrum (all politics is local). This means that California Republicans are substantially nearer the national “center” than is the Republican party as a whole. It is why Chris Christy sounds very different from Rick Perry, for instance.
This is actually one problem I have with the write-up of the survey. It seems to invite conclusions about opinions and beliefs on the national spectrum of opinion, which is a mistake. A nationwide, population-representative sample would almost surely produce a somewhat less dogmatic-looking picture of Democrats nationwide, and a somewhat less reasonable-looking picture of Republicans.nationwide. you
If the California party labels are indeed “left-shifted,” your 31% of Republicans in CA might easily be 45 or 50% nationwide.
Ever heard of “Polarization?” It’s the effect that occurs when you get people trying to push their garp down your throat. Conservatives in CA are quite conservative, and made more so by the liberal madness of the state. The middle may move, I suppose, but not the principled.
” why has the majority not prevailed in getting some action on climate change?”
You are getting action on climate change, it just happens to be action that partisan progressives don’t want. The United States has reduced emissions by a greater amount than Europe and has done it during economic growth. This is due to a switch to gas that partisan progressives oppose.
The US has resisted large scale expensive, worthless subsidy programs for wind and solar, and rejected European industry-killing policies- leaving the country in better fiscal shape to invest in next-gen nuclear.
All the above is thanks to an population of open-minded, thoughtful independents and conservatives who recognized that we have plenty of time to “act” and “action” need not be something stupid in reaction to hysteria.
jeffn
+100
Europeans could learn from how Americans are resisting the political CAGW pressure from the top
It didn’t destroy the US economy either to reduce emissions, so the Bush administration were wrong on that. Now it only takes a little more clean-energy policy to make coal unprofitable, and the goal of leaving it in the ground becomes attainable.
The destruction of the US Economy was the reason for the reduction in emissions. Growing economies produce more. Stagnant ones do not.
“If only 31 percent of conservatives think it is not serious,”
The NYTimes editorial board and Dr. Curry defining the “middle” again. This is a bogus claim based on likely a steered agenda poll. Maybe Conservatives from San Francisco or Berkeley? There are some bed-wetters and some like Lindsey Graham and McCain who are stuck in the 70’s anti-OPEC alliance on carbon. Both are on there way out for this and many similar reasons.
In an open debate skeptics win. In a politically correct format we are where we are. History will bury Soviet science values and framing.
Polls are often a bit of a joke. Nisbit certainly has a pro-warmer rationalization;
http://climateshiftproject.org/report/climate-shift-clear-vision-for-the-next-decade-of-public-debate/#ideology-and-perceptions-of-climate-change
88% of liberal AAAS memeber think AGW a “very serious” issue vs. 25% conservative. Again, seriously conservative people wouldn’t even send their check or belong to the shill AAAS. It’s like polling NPR or democratic “conservatives”, they do exist but any extrapolation of representation should be qualified.
AGW is opinion not science.
This has been my theory for a long time. The warmistas are the pot calling the kettle black. They are modern day Crusaders, with the exception of “convert or die,” they merely want to take your money and ruin your lifestyle.
If flip flop-wearing schoolteachers, Leftist politicians and trust fund libs of AGW ever decide to tell the truth about anything maybe it will be to tell us about their secret desires to rule over all of the rest of us.
Just consider Obamacare. Does anyone really want to argue it was about efficient health insurance reform?
So true, that’s not even wrong. Doctors planned their lives, dedicated a portion of it to an education and entered the profession based on a lot of reasoned expectations and a bunch of liberal fascists come along and turn them all into postal workers. Amazing but true: Obamacare is really about destroying the insurance industry and all free enterprise, even if it takes destroying health.
AGW is very analogous to Obamacare. Both conform to the EU statist model.
Like other Ponzi systems it can last for some time but I think we are in the 8th inning metaphorically. The left by gravitating toward extreme ideological sub issues like AGW are prepping for being out of power. AGW is heading to a more formal “incubator” status as it was in the 70’s and 80’s.
The vilification of dissent, outright anger and hatred on every left-wing medium before the next mid-term reveals they know the score. When they lose they will incite violence as they did in the later 60’s and early 70’s. I expect it to be much worse. Look no further than the new breed of radical running and will win the NYC mayors race. Watching NYC become Detroit will send the general economy into a deeper recession. So the AGW mob politics will still have a fertile base for generations to come. There is still trillions in debt finance to resolve on university funding and the academic culture isn’t going to go quietly. AGW is symbolic of the left-wing establishment and they will die in their bunkers protecting it. Dr. Curry might get the task of going to the rail car to surrender and the hatred of fellow warmists will only increase for her;
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Armisticetrain_%28slight_crop%29.jpg
I fear we will make the same mistake with the Greenshirts that we made by leaving the German high-command intact in 1918. We need the April 1945 solution to AGW extremism but I doubt it will be achieved.
Sometimes, I get an image of a big tankful of exotic fish. Dr. Curry is about to go on a trip, and just remembers to throw a handful of stinky fish flakes into the tank before she leaves. The fish go nuts for awhile.
I sometimes wonder whether the denizens are pelagic hunting fish or just bottom feeders?
some denizens (lolwot, FOMD, Joshua, etc.) appear to be mullets
Webby is more of a piranha
Beth is our goldfish
Max
Mullet are finicky feeders and are surprisingly hard to catch. Must explain your troubles Max.
Gee thanks Max.)
Some are just puffer fish.
Some fish are minnows
Some are whales.
People like dimples,
Fish like scales.
Some fish are slim,
Some are round,
They don’t get cold,
They don’t get drowned.
https://www.google.com.au/#psj=1&q=Carnival+of+Animals+Fish++Ogden+Nash+video
Only way to find is is to go trolling ;)
Some, but not me, may call this “chumming the Internet”.
never miss an opportunity to personalize.
Ironical irony at its most ironic.
The cat got de-belled.
(Could’ve been worse.)
If you read the description of groupthink you get those elements which match exactly the AGW warmist community behavior :
* Overestimations of the group — its power and morality
– Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking. (like when they announce arctic will melt in 2005, or model are right)
– Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions. (like Mann, or what climategate show about pressures)
*Closed-mindedness
– Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group’s assumptions.
– Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, impotent, or stupid.
*Pressures toward uniformity
– Self-censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus. (Judith herlsef described it)
– Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement. (97% they say – all else are fired)
– Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of “disloyalty” (thhanks Judith to say how you are disconsidered as traitor)
– Mind guards— self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information. (skeptical science, climate science blogs)
the consequences are observed:
– Incomplete survey of alternatives (like solar, clouds, , ans also about mitigation and risks)
– Incomplete survey of objectives (not understanding how good can be warming on some subjects, mixing goal to help the planet and goal to reduce temperature and recuce CO2)
– Failure to examine risks of preferred choice (no analysis of cost of proposed solution)
– Failure to reevaluate previously rejected alternatives
– Poor information search
– Selection bias in collecting information
– Failure to work out contingency plans.
what happen here with the “liberal” people (I am one, but in france it is different, and I’m an alien too) is that they behave
– to show loyalty
– they punish dissenters (mind guards)
– the stereotype dissenters
– the behave stupidly, shouting bullets in their foots, because they are too confident in their superiority : the ENRON effect.
to be honest climate skeptics are not far from that, but under attacks the defense have improved and some good reasoning start to emerge from critics.
less feeling of invulnerability, and constant pressure against skeptic arguments, make skeptics evolve in the good direction…
The Consensus = Political Science Fiction ?
“We have to protect our phoney-baloney jobs.” -Liberal Elites
Andrew
How can you be open minded about climate change if you allow for the possibility that it might not be a very serous problem?
(smile)
I’m not conservative, but I guess I must be from the reading of this poll. I took a Pew survey which placed my politics just to the left of center, but on this one, I find myself in agreement with people (real conservatives) that I only rarely agree with on almost anything.
I cannot get the “golden state poll” to open.
=”float:left;color:#a8a8a8;font-family:Georgia;font-size:300%;line-height:1em;padding-right:6px;”>“According to the Hoover Institution’s recently completed Golden State Poll… many liberals have a deeply ideological view of energy and climate and policy, one in which certain truths must be accepted to show one’s moral virtue while genuinely inconvenient truths are ignored.
averaging faces
http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/the-average-female-face-of-different-countries/
If we look at the fossil fuel reserve data objectively, we notice that it doesn’t care if you are liberal or conservative.
The following is an interactive model of the Bakken/North Dakota oil production data from fracked wells.
http://entroplet.com/context_bakken/navigate
The prediction is based on historical data that runs up to month #400 and then projects beyond that point. See my blog where we are trying to infer the limits from the available data
http://contextearth.com/2013/10/06/bakken-projections/
Do we want to comprehend what another 50,000+ wells will look like in North Dakota? We are at 9,000 now.
Again what fake skeptics don’t seem to get is that science is built on a foundation and that this foundation doesn’t just crumble away if you poke a skeptical stick at it. The non-renewable fossil fuel limits are harsh and the krank ideas of cornucopian right-wing nutjobs won’t change that fact.
WebHubTelescope: krank ideas of cornucopian right-wing nutjobs
Luckily there aren’t any of those. Who are those “fake skeptics” and what foundation do you think they are poking sticks at? To me it looks like I am finding the parts of the “foundation” that do not exist whenever someone can’t answer a simple concrete question like: What does your ln(CO2) model imply about the difference between TCS and ECS; or what does ECS refer to exactly in a system that is never in equilibrium?
If the land is warming twice as fast as the ocean, it makes sense to look at that doesn’t it? Temperature is an intrinsic measure of thermal activity and if something gets that hot and that is where people live, you might want to pay attention to it.
What do you want to know about equilibrium? The fact that the land is getting hotter and there is no reason to believe that it will turn around means that it is in a direction toward a new steady state value that is hotter than what it is now.
If it never gets to a new equilibrium in the ocean, it won’t matter because the land will get arbitrarily close to the steady state.
What about that do you have a problem with?
If I was designing a heat-sinked system and didn’t place the heat sink close enough to the area that is heating up, it won’t help too much. That’s the problem with the earth, the ocean heat sink is not conveniently located to every land area of the world.
Oceans maintain temperatures over land by acting as a reservoir and warming and cooling.
e.g. http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/DIETMARDOMMENGET_zps939fe12e.png.html?sort=3&o=27
The differential between land and sea surface temperature is a result of relatively limited and variable water availability over land and the resultant reduced lapse rate. It makes no difference for tropospheric temperatures.
Another confused narrative from the webster.
Webster, “If the land is warming twice as fast as the ocean, it makes sense to look at that doesn’t it?”
If the land is warming twice as much as the oceans it likely has been recovering twice as fast as the oceans. So there is about a degree of recovery mixing in with your “nothing but CO2” model. The little Ice Age took about 500 years to reach its minimum in the oceans and has taken about 300 years to recover. Such is life.
Here is a new version of the Solar and Volcanic combo back to 1200 AD and the big chill
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-KST5l-AgXIg/UmrSj9vWuHI/AAAAAAAAKLA/P9kjjVLRO9Y/s781/sol%2520y%2520vol%2520with%2520oppo%2520to%2520800%2520ad.png
My how a planet can move so slowly.
WebHubTelescope: What about that do you have a problem with?
Can’t you answer a couple of questions without writing an irrelevant essay on something somewhat related? I have no problem with TCS being different from ECS. My questions are (a) what are the implications of your model for TCS and ECS and (b) what exactly in the Earth system without an equilibrium does ECS refer to?
Matthew Marler, ECS is where a forcing is associated with a temperature. If the forcing is a certain value, there is an equilibrium temperature for that, and if we are below that equilibrium temperature, we are in a warming phase, so ECS tells us whether we should be in a warming phase based on the current temperature and forcing.
JimD, Your answer is too logical. The answer they want has to to more with the abstract concept of equilibrium as it exists in an ideal thermodynamic setting . No matter that every equation that is used to solve any scientific or technical problem is based on non-equilibrium physics — think of the basic Fokker-Planck equation that is used to solve the transport theory for semiconductor operation.
Pppshaw! That is no good because it is not equilibrium, Marler would say. And then of course, he will then say I am putting words in his mouth by even suggesting this analogy. But that’s one way the denialists work, by setting the bar high or expecting perfection, when all they get is the pathetic output of engineers solving problems and scientists creating useful models.
Web, I am aware of their argument that there is never an equilibrium, therefore an equilibrium temperature doesn’t exist. What I gave was a practical use for an equilibrium temperature in prediction. Even if it never gets to equilibrium, it tells us which way things are going.
The climate system has jumped from one mode of operation to another in the past. We are trying to understand how the earth’s climate system is engineered, so we can understand what it takes to trigger mode switches. Until we do, we cannot make good predictions about future climate change… Over the last several hundred thousand years, climate change has come mainly in discrete jumps that appear to be related to changes in the mode of thermohaline circulation. Wally Broecker
“The winds change the ocean currents which in turn affect the climate. In our study, we were able to identify and realistically reproduce the key processes for the two abrupt climate shifts,” says Prof. Latif. “We have taken a major step forward in terms of short-term climate forecasting, especially with regard to the development of global warming. However, we are still miles away from any reliable answers to the question whether the coming winter in Germany will be rather warm or cold.” Prof. Latif cautions against too much optimism regarding short-term regional climate predictions: “Since the reliability of those predictions is still at about 50%, you might as well flip a coin.”
Climate is not just non-equilibrium thermodynamics but chaotic – which changes the nature of variability within the system. In non-equilibrium physics the concern is with rates of change and chemical reactions. In climate there are extensive properties that change entropy production.
Predictability of the climate system is discussed by both Broecker and Latif above. The facts remain that there is neither an ECS or TCS in the chaotic climate system and no way of calculating it if there were.
I have a number of times referenced Michael Ghil on sensitivity – http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/tcd/PREPRINTS/Math_clim-Taipei-M_Ghil_vf.pdf
Ghil discusses – and proposes a mathematical theory of – sensitivity in a system that has both natural and anthropogenic climate change. In this context climate sensitivity is seen as sensitivity to initial conditions. It is a fundamentally different formulation.
Progressive denial goes deep – they repeat endlessly simplistic concepts well outside the ambit of science. It is not a matter of discourse – but complete conviction in whatever stream of consciousness scienecy sounding narrative nonsense emerges from their tiny brains There is a confidence born of the fake consensus that resists any rational progress. We understand that these are symptoms of groupthink. I can’t imagine a solution – but Kool-aide seems likely to figure prominently eventually.
WebHubTelescope: Pppshaw! That is no good because it is not equilibrium, Marler would say. And then of course, he will then say I am putting words in his mouth by even suggesting this analogy. But that’s one way the denialists work, by setting the bar high or expecting perfection, when all they get is the pathetic output of engineers solving problems and scientists creating useful models.
I am not the one who asserts that the equilibrium calculations on a simplified model of the climate are relevant to the actual climate; that assertion is made by others. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert addresses directly the inaccuracy of applying the equilibrium calculations to the actual Earth climate in his book “Principles of Planetary Climate”, with reference, for example, to the disparity between polar and Equatorial temperatures. My questions are: (a) what on Earth is represented by the equilibrium calculations and (b) what are the implications for TCS and ECS of WebHubTelescope’s model with temp proportional to ln(CO2)?
If the answer to (a) is “the equilibrium represents the mean temp”, then the inaccuracy is very large compared to the small change in temperature supposedly to be induced in the future by a future doubling of CO2 concentration. As to (b), if WebHubTelescope’s ln(CO2) is extremely accurate, then there is no lag between the accumulation of CO2 and the resultant temperature change: TCS = ECS, if his model is accurate.
There is no demonstrably accurate model relating future (or recent past) changes of CO2 to future (or recent past) temp changes; much less any accurate models relating CO2 changes to recent rainfall, humidity, wind, snowfall, etc changes.
One of the facts of this debate is that a lot of “CO2 true believers” can’t answer questions or address critiques without first “framing” them to become different questions.
If model outputs based on a relationship between CO2 and temp are adequate for planning purposes. like the “pathetic output of engineers” WebHubTelescope refers to, that has not been demonstrated.
Absolutely.
Also consider that the land-based value of TCR also serves as a lower bound to ECS.
In other words, the eventual ECS > TCR(land)
or ECS > 3C.
webby has an immense potential to ignore that which he disagrees with.
Oil and gas reserves are nowhere near critical levels – http://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/worldshalegas/
It is all just narrative to scare children with.
The non-renewable fossil fuel limits are harsh and the krank ideas of cornucopian right-wing nutjobs won’t change that fact.“[C]ornucopian right-wing nutjobs” like the US Navy and the Japanese Government? Or perhaps it’s left-wing “Chicken Little” alarmists with their “krank ideas” of running out soon who are “nutjobs“. From World Ocean Review:
And a lot more of the energy in this methane is as hydrogen than in coal, or even oil.
Sorry…
“[C]ornucopian right-wing nutjobs” like the US Navy and the Japanese Government? Or perhaps it’s left-wing “Chicken Little” alarmists with their “krank ideas” of running soon who are “nutjobs“. From World Ocean Review:
And a lot more of the energy in this methane is as hydrogen than in coal, or even oil.
Marler,
The top-level post was about energy as well.
I am talking about the energy cornucopians such as Jerome Corsi, who believe that fossil fuels are abiotic and actually don’t come from biotic sources.
They use this theory to then assert that the supply of hydrocarbons is inexhaustible.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Oil-Conspiracy-Government-ebook/dp/B007VDECJ4
These guys are invariably right-wing and their believers are right-wing, as this subject matter is always discussed on the right-wing media outlets whenever talk of an energy crunch comes up.
Are you that unfamiliar with right-wing meme generation?
The usual dumbass narrative from webby – http://www.greenparty.ca/blogs/12489/2012-08-28/more-evidence-abiotic-oil
“krank right-wing nutjob” N defined as a person who remains absurdly skeptical of claims that oil ran out in the 1980s. Usage in a sentence: “I was driving my friend to the airport when it occurred to us both that we must be krank right-wing nutjobs to think it even possible that there will be airplanes there or that we are, actually, in a car.”
WebHubTelescope: The top-level post was about energy as well.
I am talking about the energy cornucopians such as Jerome Corsi, who believe that fossil fuels are abiotic and actually don’t come from biotic sources.
I much prefer it when you refer to specific claims by specific people. The abiotic processes generate very little of the methane; but there is a great deal of energy stored in the methane clathrates. Its usefulness depends on human ingenuity in reducing the cost of extracting it. Why would you intentionally bet that commercializing the suboceanic methane is intrinsically a harder task than commercializing wind, solar and biofuels?
Surely you do not believe that all “meme generation” is right-wing? Think of all the leftists/statists/Jacobins/marxists/progressives who have promoted this whole catastrophic global warming meme. Not that the theory is necessarily false, but the evidentiary base for the global movement to reduce CO2 production to save the climate is really poor.
This is a typical example
http://www.americanconservativedaily.com/2008/02/abiotic-oil-theory-the-bane-of-enviro-marxists/
They also shrink-wrap the rationale for backing the theory — i.e. that it will drive “enviro-marxists” crazy if it was true.
I have never advocated reducing fossil fuel-based CO2 production as a means to “save the climate”. I have always said that reducing fossil fuel usage is necessary because we will eventually be forced to reduce fossil fuel usage because of resource limitations. Can’t be any more straightforward than that.
However easily we can bean-count climate when it comes to keeping track of atmospheric CO2 and equate that to warming, it is just as easy to keep track of fossil fuel production and anticipate where that is heading.
WebHubTelescope: I have never advocated reducing fossil fuel-based CO2 production as a means to “save the climate”.
I am glad you wrote that.
To clarify, I did not claim that you advocated reducing CO2 production as a means to save the climate. I identified it as an example of a left wing “meme”, to go along with a right wing meme you identified.
WebHubTelescope
If we look at the fossil fuel reserve data objectively, we notice that it doesn’t care if you are liberal or conservative.
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Yes, down to only a few hundred years now.
Abstract of a paper that uses a model of the effect of PDO on cloud cover:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/new-paper-finds-natural-pacific-decadal.html
For model lovers. I wonder what evidence from measurements can be brought to this topic.
I could never make sense of the bipartisan structure of American political life. Is it true that conservatives are supposed to extend rights of private entities against state bureaucracies while liberals seek to restrict them using extended state powers?
It would be neat, however, from the outside it looks like a joint venture to destroy the very basis of US Constitution.
For government and corporate bureaucracies are but the two sides of the same coin, both are virtual artificial intelligence constructs, with immense powers, far exceeding those of any individual. Originally the Constitution was meant to let the people control them, not directly, but by using Checks and Balances and implementing judicial control over corporate charters.
Unfortunately this noble attempt have gone astray in the course of centuries, transformed into a fight over corporate control of state vs. state control of corporations, never mentioning citizen control over both.
The progressive extension of the Executive Branch of Government against the other two branches is a well known process. Much less so what has happened to corporate rights, therefore Our Hidden History of Corporations in the United States is worth a read.
The net result is a drift towards a full blown fascist state, where corporate and state bureaucracies live in an incestuous symbiosis, oppressing their constituents in a completely uncontrolled manner.
As far as I can see the political fight over climate change is kept in this frame so far.
Berényi Péter
I could never make sense of the bipartisan structure of American political life.
Neither has anyone else. The parties are constantly shifting loose affiliations of many small groups that don’t agree about much, but who unite for short periods of time over particular policies. Within groups, “expressed beliefs” may be logically incompatible with the preferences “revealed” by voting.
Agree 100%!
On faction. Actually, James Madison (a constitutional framer) forewarned of this possibility in
Madison, James. “The Federalist No. 10, The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection.” The Federalist Papers (November 22, 1787). http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_10.html
“AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced in to the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.”
Remember that the authors of the constitution put it all on the line. As Ben Franklin put it, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
Pooh, Dixie, 11/8/13, 12:11 pm:
My family has handed down such a reverence for the Federalist Papers that my 4-year-old twin grandsons have Madison and Hamilton for middle names. If their parents really cared that much, though, they would have had triplets.
In my work I needed a better definition of cult that was both pejorative and in common usage. I came up with this so far:
Cult (pejorative): A sect (a unified faction) unquestioningly obedient to a dogma (a set of authoritative beliefs and commandments).
Therefore, AGW advocates constitute a cult.
More generally, Marxists constitute a cult. Before the cult gains power, Marxism is indistinguishable from populism and the Democrat Party, and its Achilles heel is the belief that uniformity in economic outcome is feasible, desirable, and stable, when it is none of them. It is a Petri dish for economic crime, including cheating, sabotage, and black markets, seeded by hideous government restrictions. Being anti-growth, the socialist economy has negative growth. It approaches its only uniform economic state, barter: no meaningful currency, and neither measurable output nor income. A Marxist economy is like temperature in a vacuum. The Marxist state will collapse or the people will revolt before stability is reached. By design, the faction to end all factions.
On “fascist state”. A variant of “We are all in this together”. It has a long history. Once its consequences become general knowledge, wordsmiths change the name, but not its nature.
It generally runs out of resources to fulfill its promises. President Roosevelt is said to have been attracted to corporatism, but then Mussolini invaded Ethiopia.
Wikipedia contributors. “Corporate Statism.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, June 30, 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_state
Wikipedia contributors. “Criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, October 16, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Criticism_of_Franklin_D._Roosevelt&oldid=568379479
Dynamics of Technlogy Diffusion and the Impacts of Cliate Policy
I wishes were fishes we’d all be fishermen. This paper is pure specuation. The 89% reduction from 1990 emissions is obtained through a modelled projection that uses carbon pricing, feed in tariffs, subsidies, and REGULATING CHINA. This results in a 40 reduction in demand and an improbable mix if energies: Elimination of plain coal, a large increase in Coal+Carbon Capture(which hasn’t even been tested yet), significant biomas, and a large increase in hydropower(which isn’t considered renewable in most places orcapable of being greaty expanded.
I couldn’t quite figure out where the 40% reduction in demand came about, since efficiency technologies weren’t in the mix.
Have you seen this book as well entitled ‘How to Cure a Climate Change Denier’ by a former eco-activist turned sceptic.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00GA2V4KM/xvn-20
I’m reminded of the lovely, late, Lou Reed, but I won’t tell you why.
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OK, OK, he got Sexuality ECT.
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Control energy and you control the country and its population. Recall the Ploesti raid and the destruction of Japanese oil tankers in World War II. Game over.
EIA. “Total Energy – Annual Energy Review (EIA).” Governmental. U.S. Energy Information Administration, September 27, 2012. http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/pecss_diagram.cfm
Pie Chart: Fossil Fuels (Coal 20%, Natural Gas 26%, Petroleum 36%) = 82%; Nuclear 8%, “Renewable” 9% http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/perspectives.cfm
Did the pollsters define “Climate Change”? I tend Conservative, and am not too concerned that “Global Warming” is a serious problem, much less catastrophic AGW.
Now, if they mean “Global Cooling”, I probably would answer differently, particularly if they meant Dalton Minimum.
Conservatives are also much more open minded on the ‘theory’ of evolution.