by Judith Curry
The extension of the “denier” tag to group after group is a development that should alarm all liberal-minded people. One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment—the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma—is quietly being reversed. – Edward Skidelsky
From the Prospect Magazine, an article titled “Words that think for us.” It is very short, I reproduce it here in entirety:
“Denial” is an ordinary English word meaning to assert the untruth of something. Recently, however, it has acquired a further polemical sense. To “deny” in this new sense is to repudiate some commonly professed doctrine. Denial is the secular form of blasphemy; deniers are scorned, ridiculed and sometimes prosecuted.
Where does this new usage come from? There is an old sense of “deny,” akin to “disown,” which no doubt lies in the background. (A traitor denies his country; Peter denied Christ.) But the more immediate source is Freud. Denial in the Freudian sense is the refusal to accept a painful or humiliating truth. Sufferers are said to be in a “state of denial” or simply “in denial.” This last phrase entered general use in the early 1990s and launched “denial” on its modern career. “Holocaust denial” was the first political application, followed closely by “Aids denial,” “global warming denial” and a host of others. An abstract noun, “denialism,” has recently been coined. It is perhaps no accident that denial’s counterpart, affirmation, has meanwhile acquired laudatory overtones. We “affirm” relationships, achievements, values. Ours is a relentlessly positive culture.
An accusation of “denial” is serious, suggesting either deliberate dishonesty or self-deception. The thing being denied is, by implication, so obviously true that the denier must be driven by perversity, malice or wilful blindness. Few issues warrant such confidence. The Holocaust is perhaps one, though even here there is room for debate over the manner of its execution and the number of its victims. A charge of denial short-circuits this debate by stigmatising as dishonest any deviation from a preordained conclusion. It is a form of the argument ad hominem: the aim is not so much to refute your opponent as to discredit his motives. The extension of the “denier” tag to group after group is a development that should alarm all liberal-minded people. One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment—the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma—is quietly being reversed.
A different perspective from David Burgess in the Comments:
Denialism, anti-denialism, and anti-anti-denialism (this article) are part of politics and journalism, not part of science. And the rules are different. As it has been said “Politics ain’t beanbags,” and the term for those who think otherwise is “losers.”
In politics you need short pithy terms to help your point rise above the noise. Such terms always involve a degree of oversimplification, but using pithy terms will get the general populace closer to the truth than not using pithy terms. By demanding the purity of scientific discourse in the rough and tumble of politics, scientists defend their own perfectionism at the cost of losing vastly important political battles on health, the climate, education, and indeed just about any public policy issue.
Political skills are vastly different from scientific skills. By all means give qualifying details once you you have a particular audience’s attention. But if you don’t know how to persuade a more general audience, please either learn how or stay out of the battle.
As to charges of “denial” being “ad hominem,” in ordinary language it isn’t–it is a simple empiricial description of a position that denies something. What makes it seem ad hominem to educated people is the invocation of the psychological defense mechanism of denial. And indeed saying that someone is being defensive can be an ad hominem argument. However it can also be a legitimate if rather rough way of criticizing arguments (rather than people) by pointing to evasiveness or rejection of evidence.
Political language almost always involves an element of dramatization by personalization, making it seem like a personal attack. The reality is more subtle: we attack persons partly as symbols of the ideas we are contesting. “Denial” is legitimate political shorthand, and not using it makes the world a worse place.
JC comments: This article appeared in this morning’s twitter feed, it was published Feb 12, 2010. David Burgess suggests a distinction between the use of ‘denier’ vs ‘denial’, whereby denial refers to the argument and denier to the person. I don’t think this distinction is meaningful: when used in a political debate, the main objective seems to be a personal attack.
When used in the context of the climate debate, particularly when scientists discuss another scientist or their arguments (e.g. Mann calling JC a ‘denier’), the use of denial is intellectual tyranny at its worst. Scientists bullying their opponents is not new; Isaac Newton provides a prime example. When a scientist uses the word about the arguments of another scientist or the scientist themselves, they are giving the public a message that they don’t need to think for themselves, but rather they only need to listen to the person that is claiming a consensus and is screeching the loudest.
The overuse of the word ‘denial’ has arguably diminished its impact in public debates. So does this mean we no longer have to worry about its use? No, and I think Skidelsky has it exactly right with his title “Words that think for us.” Oversimplifying a complex problem such as climate change and oversimplifying its solution has brought us to a position between a rock and a hard place -where the pause is leading to the growing realization that we don’t understand the climate system very well, and we have an urgent mandate to adopt a solution that has little chance of actually influencing the climate even if it were to overcome the seemingly unsurmountable political barriers of being adopted.
And finally, I repeat Skidelsky’s final statement:
One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment—the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma—is quietly being reversed.
He has one point. Prejudicial words(such as denial) have a place in politics, where attention spans rival that of gold fish memories. But I reject his supposition it is not an ad hominem attack. It indeed is. It is meant to silence the opposition without addressing the substance of the arguments.
It is pigeon holing at its worse. And yes, I agree, we are reversing the achievements of the age of enlightenment.
Short cartoon about denial and I’m not talking about a river in Egypt.
:)
+100 Every time I see Mann’s name this tune pops into my head…
When you host a blog site which attracts the ‘denialosphere’, does it not follow that you, also, are a ‘denier’??? (Birds of a feather, etc..)
The short answer is no. The longer answer is, ‘who here do you characterize as a denier and on what basis?’ The better answer is why do you feel you have a license to use language felt by those characterized as insulting and pejorative?
Blaming a blogger for her commenters’ opinions would result in every blogger with traffic being tarred with a very sticky brush. It doesn’t make any sense at all and is just a convenient excuse for another attack on our hostess.
Since you cannot attack Judith Curry on her publications, either in academia or here on her weblog, you resort to guilt by association. It is a crude political attack–but anyone following the climate wars is by now accustomed to such.
Henry V: Act 4, Scene 1, Page 7
So, if a son that is by his father sent about
merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the
imputation of his wickedness by your rule, should be
imposed upon his father that sent him: or if a
servant, under his master’s command transporting a
sum of money, be assailed by robbers and die in
many irreconciled iniquities, you may call the
business of the master the author of the servant’s
damnation: but this is not so: the king is not
bound to answer the particular endings of his
soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of
his servant; for they purpose not their death, when
they purpose their services. Besides, there is no
king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to
the arbitrement of swords, can try it out with all
unspotted soldiers: some peradventure have on them
the guilt of premeditated and contrived murder;
some, of beguiling virgins with the broken seals of
perjury; some, making the wars their bulwark, that
have before gored the gentle bosom of peace with
pillage and robbery. Now, if these men have
defeated the law and outrun native punishment,
though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to
fly from God: war is his beadle, war is vengeance;
so that here men are punished for before-breach of
the king’s laws in now the king’s quarrel: where
they feared the death, they have borne life away;
and where they would be safe, they perish: then if
they die unprovided, no more is the king guilty of
their damnation than he was before guilty of those
impieties for the which they are now visited. Every
subject’s duty is the king’s; but every subject’s
soul is his own. Therefore should every soldier in
the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every
mote out of his conscience: and dying so, death
is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was
blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained:
and in him that escapes, it were not sin to think
that, making God so free an offer, He let him
outlive that day to see His greatness and to teach
others how they should prepare.
Badminton/Bofors
=============
When you have no rebuttal to the facts, you usually resort to useless ad hominems, full of rage, signifying nothing.
Walter, try imagine what, if I followed your logic, I’d be forced to call Dr. Curry because her blog attracted you.
Mickey…I come here to see what posters are presenting as cogent (?) arguments !! But, from what the bloggers write, I find a few knowledgeable posts, but most either attempting to overwhelm readers with techno-phrases with no good science behind them, or long winded paragraphs which offer only smoke. I submit that some real scientists are legitimate members of the ‘denialosphere’, and state good science to support their concerns. BUT those who blow smoke do not contribute meaningfully to the discussion !!
Walter,
It is juvenile remarks like this that identify you as a non-serious commentator. I have repeatedly challenged people to identify exactly what it is I am denying with my comments and opinions. To date nothing. In other words, it is nothing more than a means to attack and degrade the person you disagree with.
When AGW fundamentalists show up and pretend to be authorities on climate due to their CO2 obsession, is it fair to point out that they are kooks?
Boom, boom, boom!
===============
When you say something that attracts and appeals to morons, does it not follow that you also, are moron?
*a* moron
Moron horde can’t resist. Mebbe ‘ain’t resistable’.
==================
If you read the comments above here, you can see what I mean: Doc M, kim, Tom F, philj, pokerguy, et al, blow smoke . No doubts there. If some, like hunter or timg offered a clear scientific statement and backed it up with a link to a peer reviewed source, that might carry a convincing argument. Otherwise…smoke!!
Really Wally? Please show me where I have blown smoke. If you are going to make accusations, you have to back them up.
I would love to see your justification for your useless ad hominems.
“When you host a blog site which attracts the ‘denialosphere’, does it not follow that you, also, are a ‘denier’??? (Birds of a feather, etc..)”
Guilt by association? Not everyone who states they reject the evidence for human-caused climate change are deniers: if they make the claim out of political and/or greed reasons, they are disavowers, not deniers. Ms. Curry is upset at deniers being called “deniers:” if deniers have a better word, they should ask people to use it instead. The mental health care profession calls deniers “deniers:” why isn’t that good enough?
And if polecats have a better word, they can use it, but everyone else will still use polecats instead of their chosen word.
“He has one point. Prejudicial words(such as denial) have a place in politics….”
How is the word “denier” and the word “denial” in any way “prejudicial?” The mental health care community has been using these words for decades when discussing the rejection of evidence for things like evolution, drug addiction, domestic violence, human-caused climate change, the heliocentric model of the Solar System— if deniers object to “denial,” what word or phrase would they like to see used instead?
Again, your ignorance of the term denier is your problem. You want to try to make it a label where it does not apply. For whatever reason, only you know.
Clearly your first example showed that the ones objecting to the label were not deniers since they objected to the label. To continue to use it when corrected, means you are merely trying to dismiss the people you are mislabeling without addressing their positions, facts or data.
Accusing scientists of being “deniers”, when they are but exercising the necessary and proper functions of skeptical inquiry, just reveals how weak are the accusers’ models, which appear to be failing the scientific test of validation against evidence.
Albert Einstein:
Richard Feynmann:
We now see 17 years of failure for the “Accusers” models, as summarized by Fred Singer.
Of course, the whole point of science is the continual refinement of models, knowing of course that models will always be wrong and never reflect what will actually happen in the real world in specifics– especially when trying to model chaotic systems over any length of time. Lorentz and his development of Chaos Theory showed exactly why even the best dynamical models will not get reality right (except perhaps occasionally by chance), but the models still might have the basic dynamics correct.
That does not justify using unprofessional gutter politics of calling other scientists “deniers”, when Mann et al. themselves are “denying” the magnitude of the natural variations and how badly their climate models are performing. Using “denier” politics further exposes climate alarmists ignorance of climate.
Stochastic models
The current poor performance of climate models emphasizes the importance of stochastic models to understand the full range of climate variations. e.g., note:
Koutsoyiannis, D., Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics and uncertainty, Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 47 (3), 481–495, 2011.
If the models cannot get reality right, then stop increasing my energy costs, and legislating my woodstove!! That is THE POINT, your models are not good enough to drive legislation, GET IT??!!!? Your guys have long since wanted to move off their “science” to social engineering, the science was settled…..
“…even the best dynamical models will not get reality right (except perhaps occasionally by chance), but the models still might have the basic dynamics correct.”
This is quite an acceptable position in the case where you are using, eg and to stay somewhat on the topic of climate, a 0d or 1d climate model. In such a simple model, accurate definitive predictions of such a complex system are quite obviously unlikely to be exactly correct or to contain sufficient detail to decide on which complex solutions work and which don’t – in this case, a simple climate model says mitigation works, but this is obvious and self evident. It would also show that some sort of geo-engineering would work (change albedo etc) – but again, this is obvious and not worthy of much in the way of comment.
However, consider, say, individual CMIP 5 models. These are considerably more complex than the simple 0d or 1d models and produce (and in some cases reproduce) very realistic looking weather features – indeed, such features are often lauded as evidence that they are on the right track. Yet they do not appear to be providing more accuracy in results or more understanding of climate dynamics and/or processes. They may make such contributions in the future, but currently, they do not – at least, they don’t outside of the “climate science 101” classroom.
This is not meant to be derogatory, merely factual – climate is complex. Many “parameters” used by the models are currently best described as stochastic, which not only specifies their behaviour, but also helps define our ignorance on this complex subject. Furthermore, the responses of many variables of interest appear to follow chaotic paths. Worse, some parameters are both “forcing” (they create a change) and “feedback” (the value is they assume is dependent on other variables and processes), and we simply do not know which is more significant – it’s not just “what came first, the chicken or the egg”, it’s the same question in a world where chickens turn into eggs, as well as eggs turning into chickens! Even worse, some feedbacks may be not only non-linear, but chaotic in and of themselves. “Wicked” doesn’t seem, well, complex enough to describe such a system – “wicked squared” or even “cubed” is perhaps more accurate.
Given the above, basing public policy that affects the lives and livelyhoods of every person on the planet on the output of such (again not trying to be derogatory) inadequate models is, at best troublesome and at worst negligent. This is not to say the models should be ignored – I would certainly agree that their results are concerning and worthy of consideration, just not at the same level as, say, the projection of the path of a comet, for example. Perhaps the level of attention paid should be similar to that paid to economic models – certainly useful exploratory tools when the limitations and assumptions are understood, but hardly in the “pronouncements from God” class.
YMMV
Of course, the whole point of science is the continual refinement of models, knowing of course that models will always be wrong and…..
Really?
Who “denies” the high uncertainty in Climate Sensitivity?
Uncertainty expert Judith Curry has declared equilibrium climate sensitivity to likely be 0 to 6 C at a 90% probability.
Satellite and statistics specialists Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell now find that including ENSO and Clouds results in a climate sensitivity of 1.3C.
New study: ‘…climate system is only about half as sensitive to increasing CO2 as previously believed’
Alarmism is sputtering and falling, despite the “denier” rage from those obviously falling.
PS WebHubTelescope. What happens if you include clouds and a solar Pi/2 lag in your CSALT model?
Roy Spencer is a Christian and so will be vilified as a biased worshiper of sky-faeries.
Doc.
Don’t worry. Those who so accuse will be held accountable as will be the accuser.
Spencer is one of those smarmy scientists that deserves to be ripped to shreds. This latest piece of work of his is an example of deliberate misdirection:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/11/our-new-paper-el-nino-warming-reduces-climate-sensitivity-to-1-3-deg-c/
He comes up with a sensitivity of 1.3C per doubling of CO2 by using the temperature change of the 0-50 m layer of ocean surface. Note this is not the change of global surface temperature or any measurements to do with land. This is only ocean temperature.
I know exactly what he is doing because I have the CSALT model which I can compare against. The following pic shows the CSALT model on the top panel and Spencer’s below.
http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/9851/3h3.gif
He uses the ENSO MEI whereas I use the SOI to map the fluctuations. I use the HadSST which is the sea-surface temperature, which gives a slightly higher temperature anomaly than the 0-50 subsurface average.
I get 1.55C per doubling of CO2 with my fit which is comparable to Spencer’s 1.3C for his 0-50 m layer.
But realize that his is not an ECS — it is a TCR and it is only for the ocean surface. In comparison, the land generates a TCR of 3C which is closer to the eventual ECS.
Do you understand this? Do you now understand how scientists such as Spencer try to manipulate their findings?
I understand this is the reason most ignore your posts. You do not do hysterics well (or is that you do it well, and are very hysterical? just not funny).
Yes, WHT, the Earth is composed only of land. Brilliant!
Hey Doc it seems to me that believing in a creator isn’t half as silly as believing the finely tuned universe and all the organization within it is just random happenstance. As far as I know Roy Spencer uses the bible to guide his moral and spiritual life while using knowledge of math, science, and engineering to guide his professional life. People who can’t understand that are shallow thinkers at best.
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | November 11, 2013 at 10:37 pm |
“Spencer is one of those smarmy scientists that deserves to be ripped to shreds. ”
As opposed to Paul Pukite who’s a smarmy climate blog troll who sits at BAE phucking off all day and deserves to be fired so he isnt’ robbing the BAE shareholders of the time they’re paying him for.
Big boy pants David.
ESAD Michael.
No, that’s not them.
How do anonymous cowards know what big boy pants look like?
Still not.
http://tinyurl.com/qxmfgh4
A material reminder to act like one.
Big boys aren’t afraid to associate their name with their opinions. Start there “Michael”.
References: Curry on 0-6C Climate Sensitivity
Our new paper: El Nino warming reduces climate sensitivity to 1.3 deg. C
The role of ENSO in global ocean temperature changes during 1955–2011 simulated with a 1D climate model
Roy W. Spencer, William D. Braswell, Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences November 2013
Murry Salby showed that conventional ice core CO2 concentrations are “only” off by an order of magnitude too low. Might that have impacted CurryJA’s probable climate sensitivity range?
PS It is curious that 5 of 13 CMIP5 models show periods of COOLING in 1955-2010.
PPS Spencer reveals that CurryJA has a “heavyweight” in her corner to back her up against Al Gore.
It is a continual problem in all fields to remain fresh. The status quo is just so pleasant and comfortable. One example is evolution. There is a book ” scientists confront creationism” that pertains to this discussion. It has essays by different experts addressing the arguments in their field. An IPCC of evolution. Some essays are slam dunk such as the one on geological time (No the earth is not 6000 years old and here is how we know) Others not so good. I always think that god is a better explanation for the universe than multiverse theory because of Occam’s raisor (need only one god instead of an infinite number of parallel universes.) In the end the book does not work because it insufficiently addresses the very well posed crifical questions from intelligent design proponents such as Behe. It does do a good job debunking naieve bible based theories. However, those were perhaps not so hard to debunk. So the surprising situation is that the most difficult and challenging questions in evolutionary biology come from religion inspired deniers of certain aspects of the theory of evolution. (Behe is a micro biologist. He just questions the power of random variation to do what is observed.) Not in this fight myself but interesting nonetheless. Let there be more deniers.
Will K
Try a logical thought experiment challenge.
If a tree was created, how old did it appear to be vs how old was it when created?
See CS Lewis, the Magicians Nephew, Ch 9, The Founding of Narnia
How would you objectively test to distinguish between 6000 years of actual time and 6 billion years of apparent time?
Secondly, how do you provide a scientific argument for the origin of communication with stochastic processes?
See Werner Gitt, In the Beginning was Information.
I look forward to your actually addressing issues rather than illogical rhetoric.
Are there any real ‘scientists’ (i.e.meteorologists, climatologists with advanced degrees) in the denialosphere, or on this blob??
Oh, and I forgot to include those real scientists who have published original work in peer-reviewed journals??
Hmmm…like Lewandowsky? Who draws conclusions from sample sizes of zero? But he does not have a degree in meteorology or climatology.
But then neither does Mann, Trenberth, Jones, Pachauri, Gore, Schmidt, et. al.
Walter,
There is exactly one person in the entire denialosphere that has anything interesting to say, and that is Clive Best.
http://clivebest.com/blog/
He actually gets his hands dirty and tries to understand the physics. Not surprising given his credentials.
Of course this is my opinion, but all the skeptics are free to nominate their own “real scientist”.
Seek and you shall find professional and amateur scientists working on climate, regardless of their degrees or of how they are accused or not.
Start with our host, Prof. Judith Curry.
Dr. Roy Spencer, Anthony Watts, Craig Loehle etc.
Quite a number of the 9029 PhDs on the Global Warming Petition project. See the ClimateChangeReconsidered.com by the NIPCC, CO2Science.org Check out the blog rolls in major sites such as above.
Others prefer to remain incognito.
(Why do you ask? Science is based on comparison of models against evidence, not on authority, despite the accusations “denier”.)
Clive Best? Are you schitting me?
Try Richard Lindzen a National Academy of Science member whose pedigree in atmospheric physics is from Harvard and whose professional life is Alfred P. Sloan professor of Meteorology at MIT.
For those who are on this blog the owner Judith Curry is no slouch in the credentials category.
These two are both AGW deniers in the broad sense as they are highly critical of the consensus climate science bandwagon. Get a clue.
So only meteorologists and climatologists are “real” scientists? Guess we will have to down grade Einstein and Bohr.
Clive & Euan seem curious.
===========
post on this coming fri
Walter,
At least half of meteorologists have serious questions about the disasterious impacts attributed to global warming / climate change / today’s flavor / etc / etc. Two who come to mind are former state meteorologists for Oregon and Washington, George Taylor and Cliff Maas. Hell, I have an advanced degree in Environmental Science, with coursework in both Atmospheric Physics and Atmospheric Chemistry.
The changing terminology, arguments that the debate is over and the science settled, labeling anyone who disagrees as a denier or anti-science, all should be warning signs.
“Accusing scientists of being deniers, when they are but exercising the necessary and proper functions of skeptical inquiry….”
Nobody is doing that. The problem is scientists who are deniers. If they dislike being called “deniers,” what would they rather be called?
You appear to understand neither the debate nor the uncertainties involved. Check out Spencer’s exposing the IPCC’s ‘bad hair” day for the warming predictions of global warming from 1979 to present which are more than 2 sigma above the actual unpredicted global temperature “pause”. “Denier” invokes those who deny the WWII holocaust in which 13 million people including 6 million Jews were murdered.
See, there you go! You have just labeled some scientists because you are either too afraid to address their facts, or because you are not smart enough to. If someone decides that all “desertphiles” are just “polecats”, we would have to ask you why you do not want to be called a polecat? Does that make you a polecat because some ignorant boob decided you were? or would you want to be described how you position yourself – as a desertphile?
Stop using the term pejoratively and perhaps that will be your first step in understanding. The only deniers are those that slam their fingers into their ears and yell to prevent knowledge from entering. IN other words, those who use erroneous labels instead of facts.
Even Joe Romm has questioned the use of “denier.” See http://www.masterresource.org/2012/07/league-conservation-voters-denier/
Big boy pants. Michael, you should remember who originated that phrase in climate discussions and how it was used.
“When used in the context of the climate debate, particularly when scientists discuss another scientist or their arguments (e.g. Mann calling JC a ‘denier’)” – JC.
Time to put on your big-boy pants Judith.
“And finally, I repeat Skidelsky’s final statement:
One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment—the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma—is quietly being reversed.”
Oh, what hysterical nonsense.
Don’t need no stinkin big boy pants
I am a laser toting babe
http://www.cartoonsbyjosh.com/download/Right_of_reply.jpg
clad in armor
http://diggingintheclay.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/jude-of-arc.jpg?w=340&h=338
Come on Judith, put them on…
No, you put them on, Michael.
Very enjoyable cartoons Judith. You have tremendous amount of respect for your stands in defence of the science process of open inquiry. Plus fun images of the cartoons. We can only hope the new statements acknowledge the pause and the likely causes of natural variables for this and the prior increase in temperatures from 78 to 98.
Scott
How ’bout a cartoon portraying Judith as Galileo? – that would really appeal to her self-perception.
“Michael” is “Robert”.
Andrew
Andrew is obscure.
While the Phillipines is devastated, “The Hostess” parades her cartoon gallery and discusses the finer points of the word “denial”.
Read my previous post on hurricanes and global warming.
http://judithcurry.com/2010/09/13/hurricanes-and-global-warming-5-years-post-katrina/
Then read the more recent IPCC SREX on hurricanes and global warming.
For your penance, spend 6 hours figuring out something you can do to actually help the impacted people in the Phillipines.
Throw yourself on your sword! You cannot go on living while others are dying. You display all the characteristics of an uncaring hypocrite.
Scott said:
“We can only hope the new statements acknowledge the pause and the likely causes of natural variables for this and the prior increase in temperatures from 78 to 98.”
____
Your giddyness is unwarranted. The fact that dozens of studies have looked at the “pause” in tropospheric temperature rise over the past 15 years shows that it has already be “acknowledged”, and even more so, looked at in great detail. Moreover, some extremely valuable research has gained new insights into the causes of the “pause” and what it may mean for tropospheric temperatures going forward. Finally, the “pause” has shown that the use of sensible tropospheric heat as a the prime metric for Earth’s energy balance has serious flaws.
curryja: I am a laser toting babe
http://www.cartoonsbyjosh.com/download/Right_of_reply.jpg
clad in armor
http://diggingintheclay.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/jude-of-arc.jpg?w=340&h=338
Excellent. It’s hard to respond appropriately to stupid comments, but that was well done.
As is your comment. Wish I had thought of it!
“While the Phillipines is devastated…”
Check your history – such storms have been happening in all of the recorded history of the region. The suggestion that this is “a taste of what’s to come” is polemic, nothing more.
Typhoon Cobra vs. Task Force 38 in 1944; losses USS Hull, USS and USS Spence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Cobra_(1944)
Conveniently ignoring the quiet ‘cane season in the western hemisphere…
And inside of that armour and behind that laser is another very vulnerable persona that can be and no doubt has been very deeply hurt when she was attacked by her peers for doing nothing more than trying to mend fences and create a reasoned debate between opponents, both scientific and otherwise in her field of expertise.
It takes more than armor and some laser hefting to accept, deal with and come back from that sort of deeply hurtful personal denunciation by those you once believed were your peers and your equals and who you believed in and trusted to meet the same personal moral and ethical standards you set for yourself.
I doubted you greatly when you first appeared on WUWT Judith but now you have the deep respect of many including myself for your relentless pursuit of the truth in science regardless of where it takes you.
ROM, very well said.
A modern day Joan of Arc!
philjourdan comments:
But no burning at the stake, please.
Max
PS I like the “Annie Oakley” or “Pistol Packin’ Mama” depiction better.
@Max – Good choices!
“Hysterical nonsense” only if you’re not paying attention OR if you choose to agree with those doing the reversing. We’re seeing way too much of this substitution of mindless cacophony for reasoned discourse. The attempts by the “hockey stickers” to silence critics rather than engage them is an example in the climate change venue. The recent shouting down of a conservative speaker at Yale is another. When PC prevents the free flow of information we all take a step back from enlightenment toward a medieval-like state in which the New Church does our thinking for us.
That the word ‘denier’ is reversing the enlightment is hyperbolic hysterical nonsense.
Or maybe the writer doesn’t really understand what the Enlightenment was about.
Or maybe is just a rhetorical device utiilising a cultural symbol as critique, rather than, you know, making a well reasoned, rational argument.
And maybe “Michael” does understand “what the Enlightenment was about” and is battling fiercely to end it.
Yes, i’m going to bring 400 years of intellectual development to it’s knees all by myself – damn we ‘warmists’ are omnipotent!
No wonder we control the world.
As part of a large choir. Trying. The outcome is still sub judice
Yes, my comrades and I are coming for you.
Michael
‘That the word ‘denier’ is reversing the enlightment is hyperbolic hysterical nonsense.”
except that isnt what he claimed.
he most certainly did not argue that the enlightment was being reversed.
he asserted something different. Go see what that is and restate your hyperbole.
Steven,
If all you are referring to is this ” The extension of the “denier” tag to group after group…” than we’ll need more than handwaving to support the idea of reversing the Enlightment.
Thankyou for your concern.
Michael
‘Steven,
If all you are referring to is this ” The extension of the “denier” tag to group after group…” than we’ll need more than handwaving to support the idea of reversing the Enlightment.
Thankyou for your concern.
#########
Nope you still have it wrong.
he doesnt argue that the use of denier is reversing the enlightnement.
READ HARDER.
“The recent shouting down of a conservative speaker at Yale is another”
The universities of the West are resolutely opposed to free speech. Shut them down, they serve no purpose any more.
Great quibble Steven. I like your work.
Skidelsky v Michael? No contest. And no hint of surliness, carping or negativity in Skidelsky’s work.
Gotta go with Mosher on thiis one. Michael clear has a comprehension deficit.
Heh, Brownout of the ‘Lightenment.
==========
Hey “Michael” whoever the phuck you are, put on your big boy pants and stop being an anonymous coward. You jerkwad.
I’m sure Ive heard ‘skeptics’ say, when it’s convenient, that’s it’s not the identity of the author, but the content of the argument that counts.
Only in your own mind. Perhaps instead of repeating innuendo, you can back it up with facts?
You impotent little dweeb. Come out of the closet.
Well, at least you have your identity….
Michael says “I’m sure Ive heard ‘skeptics’ say, when it’s convenient, that’s it’s not the identity of the author, but the content of the argument that counts.”
When you hav esome arguments, please let us know.
Sorry, two breaches of my “ignore Michael” policy, no more transgressions.
“……………but the content of the argument that counts.”
and what exactly is the ‘content of your argument’?
As far as I can tell, Michael’s argument is that an argument that Skidelsky didn’t make is hyperbole. Yet Michael makes the argument well, I, um, er, ummm , guess?
Michael is a Judith Curry denier.
Oh noes – the end of the Enlightenment!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Is Michael “da Mann”?
Sounds kinda like it.
Maybe. If he threatens to sue somebody that’ll be the clincher.
Come on Micheal, use those remaining brain cells. The current “Dogma” is related to improper use of linear no threshold modeling. Linear “Assumptions” are so over played even you should have noticed how they have been politicized.
Gate even reference a paper that started with a “linear” estimate using a reductionist model to determine Climate Sensitivity would be 6.6C quickly followed by the “but only 0.8 C is evident” then uses simplistic reductionism to “prove” that solar has virtually zero impact on climate.
That is letting your dogma drag you around.
Judith thinks CS could be 10.
JC looking at the various estimates said that CS could be anything from nearly zero to 10 C. You just used selective linear no threshold modeling to pick you point :)
You think that is a reasonable bound??
I didn’t peg you as a hyper-alarmist.
Micheal, “You think that is a reasonable bound??” No, Judith was using it to illustrate the gray/white area in her Italian Flag. I tend to more agree with Annan that anything over 4 C should be dumped and his 4C would include ~1C of warming from LIA conditions. That makes 3C from a modern baseline the likely absolute maximum.
Then when you consider that CS is not really linear, you get in the current 1.5C range as a rational estimate or about 50% efficiency. Personally I think it is lower with respect to “WMGHG” equivalent forcing because the statistics used to determine the paleo baselines are abysmal. Something else Annan noted.
A clarification point: my statement 0-10 C was made in 2010; i would now bound it 0-6C for 90% confidence.
The 10C doesn’t make sense without some dragon king event, which is precluded by this kind of linear thinking of climate sensitivity.
No, it was in a discussion about what could be agreed on – Judith first gave a bound of 1-6 and when questioned abou thigher probabilities, suggested a bound of 0-10 at the 90% level.
Way way more alarmist than the IPCC.
Judith, that still allows for negative CS – any evidence to support this?
Probably as much evidence for 0 as there is for 6; climate model simulations have produced both numbers. For small perturbations, possible mechanisms would be negative cloud feedback or increased snowfall at high latitudes.
That’s a no?… so a 90% bound including zero doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.
Uh, maybe the distribution is not normal and write skewed. Who knows? My point is that even with bound of 0-6C, maybe 10% chance of being wrong.
There is no support for 0C CS from the paleoclimate data. Given that the paleoclimate data contains all the feedbacks, the probability of 0C would seem to be extremely small, not impossible of course, but very unlikely.
‘The 10C doesn’t make sense without some dragon king event, which is precluded by this kind of linear thinking of climate sensitivity.’
At least I got a dragon king giggle. I’d put an AMOC event as a possibility this century – which extends the possible SAT range into negative territory.
‘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
“curryja | November 11, 2013 at 10:32 am |
A clarification point: my statement 0-10 C was made in 2010; i would now bound it 0-6C for 90% confidence.”
This before 2100?
I am interested where one would suppose you could get a 6 C rise in temperature.
Would be equal heating of ocean and land?
Or would be more heating of tropics? Or rest of the world other than tropics?
So tropics is 40% of the world- this part warmer than rest world [60%]?
Or more of uniform warmer world? So 6 C warmer in tropics and 6 C warmer in rest of the world.
And also does day and night equally warm, or does one warm more than the other?
referring to equilibrium sensitivity
Regarding Dragon King events and the trajectory of future climate change– there are two types of Dragon King events, those that come about as a result of inherent feedbacks inside of a chaotic system leading to tipping points, and those that come about as the result of an external forcing to a chaotic system that bring about an instant tipping point. The big debate, for example, regarding the Younger Dryas Dragon King cooling event was which kind of tipping point was this cooling event? Thus, in regards to the next century of climate change, we can only look at the known forcings to the system, and by use of models and paleoclimate data try to constrain the likely range of climate change, knowing that we can never predict Dragon King events (either internal or external) but, as an internal Dragon King event approaches, a series of Black Swan events of the right order often do foreshadow an internal Dragon King event.
Little mikey is not wearing his nappy today and he is stinking up the place.
Judith said: (regarding the 0C to 10C sensitivity range)
“referring to equilibrium sensitivity”.
____
As such, the paleoclimate data would be an even stronger source to begin to assess this, and I know of not one piece of research that would constrain ES (for CO2 at 560 ppm) to be 0C. Please direct me to any that do. (honest request from a rational skeptic)
‘We develop the concept of “dragon-kings” corresponding to meaningful outliers, which are found to coexist with power laws in the distributions of event sizes under a broad range of conditions in a large variety of systems. These dragon-kings reveal the existence of mechanisms of self-organization that are not apparent otherwise from the distribution of their smaller siblings. We present a generic phase diagram to explain the generation of dragon-kings and document their presence in six different examples (distribution of city sizes, distribution of acoustic emissions associated with material failure, distribution of velocity increments in hydrodynamic turbulence, distribution of financial drawdowns, distribution of the energies of epileptic seizures in humans and in model animals, distribution of the earthquake energies). We emphasize the importance of understanding dragon-kings as being often associated with a neighborhood of what can be called equivalently a phase transition, a bifurcation, a catastrophe (in the sense of Rene Thom), or a tipping point. The presence of a phase transition is crucial to learn how to diagnose in advance the symptoms associated with a coming dragon-king.’ http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.4290
Climate is an example of a deterministically chaotic system. Such systems are characterised by control variables and multiple negative and positive feedbacks. A small change in control variable leads to a large and abrupt change in system state.
e.g http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/bifurcations.png.html?sort=3&o=72
In the broad class of complex dynamical systems ‘slowing down’ and ‘noisy bifurcation’ are defining characteristics. An increase in autocorrelation and what Didier Sornette defined as dragon kings to make the distinction between ordinary fluctuations and extraordinary events at tipping points. In climate – John Adams characterised tipping points as the result of ‘tremendous energies cascading through powerful systems.’
see – http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
‘ The Younger Dryas occurred during the transition from the last glacial period into the present interglacial (the Holocene). During this time, the continental ice sheets were rapidly melting and adding freshwater to the North Atlantic. Figure 6 shows the reconstructed freshwater flux from the melting Laurentide ice sheet through the St. Lawrence River. Just prior to the Younger Dryas, meltwater fluxes into the North Atlantic increased dramatically. In addition, there was probably a short-lived period of particularly high freshwater flux about 13,000 years ago that is not shown in this figure, resulting from a large discharge of freshwater from a glacial lake in North America. Scientists have hypothesized that meltwater floods reduced the salinity and density of the surface ocean in the North Atlantic, causing a reduction in the ocean’s thermohaline circulation and climate changes around the world. Eventually, as the meltwater flux abated, the thermohaline circulation strengthened again and climate recovered.
The record from Dome C in Antarctica supports this explanation. If the thermohaline circulation were to slow, less heat would be transported from the South Atlantic to the North Atlantic (Crowley, 1992; Broecker, 1998). This would cause the South Atlantic to warm and the North Atlantic to cool. This pattern, sometimes called the “bipolar see-saw”, is observable when comparing the GISP2 and Dome C records for the Younger Dryas.’ http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data4.html
The reduced heat transport caused a resurgence of snow and ice – and the world abruptly cooled.
‘More was at stake than simple dating. A graduate student in the Lamont group, Wallace Broecker, put a bold idea in his doctoral thesis. Looking at Ericson’s work and other data, Broecker saw severe changes around the world all dated to about the same time — “a far different picture of glacial oscillations than the usual sinusoidal pattern.” Like Brooks, he suggested that “two stable states exist, the glacial state and the interglacial state, and that the system changes quite rapidly from one to the other.” This was only one passage in a thick doctoral thesis that few people read, and to those few it must have sounded much like Brooks’s speculations on cataclysmic changes, long since dismissed by scientists as altogether implausible. They were right to be cautious, for later studies found that the coincidence of changes that Broecker saw at different locations was an artifact of inaccurate dating. (This was not the last time he would glean a valuable idea from foggy data.)(15)’ http://www.aip.org/history/climate/rapid.htm
There is really no such thing as internal and external dragon kings there is only the system characterised by control variables and feedbacks – there is no debate about which the Younger Dryas was – black swans do not presage a tipping point – black swans are something else entirely – tipping points are presaged by an increase in autocorrelation.
How easily does incoherent nonsense pass for rational comment? That’s the question.
curryja: For small perturbations, possible mechanisms would be negative cloud feedback or increased snowfall at high latitudes.
This just seems so deeply counter-intuitive. It would suggest the possibility that if CO2 was held constant, the current state is metastable and that small fluctuations should be sufficient to prod the system into a more stable lower temperature state.
Annan thinks Murry Salby is as silly as the TimeCube guy.
Funny watching how desperate the denialists have become that they will hitch their wagon to anything that comes down the pike as long as it is ABCD.
Particularly shocking is Lindzen’s seeming embrace of Salby, per Monckton @WUWT:
I had first heard of Murry Salby’s work from Dick Lindzen over a drink at a regional government conference we were addressing in Colombia three years ago. I readily agreed with Dick’s conclusion that if we were causing neither temperature change nor even CO2 concentration change the global warming scare was finished.
I guess you could call it a “skeptical confirmation” phenomenon.
–curryja | November 11, 2013 at 11:26 am |
referring to equilibrium sensitivity–
Oh. Kinda makes me think you are not putting definite time range of say by 2100. Or you may have large uncertainty of delay of “forcing effect”.
I see equilibrium and I assume ocean, though I assume what you talking about is how much CO2 can warm the atmosphere- which I regard as sort of irrelevant to equilibrium global temperature.
I was mainly fascinated in how someone imagined the world could warm by 6 C by 2100. Or wouldn’t matter if even by 2200.
As don’t see such warming as possible in the current climate conditions in such a short period of time. And I don’t assume CO2 plays significant role in global temperature of glacial and interglacial periods.
But still wondering regardless of time involved [though excluding longer than a million years] how +6 C in temperature is tacked on to global average temperature. Is tropics mostly? Or Oregon becoming tropical. Extreme warming of polar regions. Or whatever. Is mostly uniform or uneven in some manner.
“RB | November 11, 2013 at 1:21 pm |
Particularly shocking is Lindzen’s seeming embrace of Salby, per Monckton @WUWT:
I had first heard of Murry Salby’s work from Dick Lindzen over a drink at a regional government conference we were addressing in Colombia three years ago. I readily agreed with Dick’s conclusion that if we were causing neither temperature change nor even CO2 concentration change the global warming scare was finished.
I guess you could call it a “skeptical confirmation” phenomenon.”
Or skeptics are interested in rational dialogue, rather kindergarten antics
and need to silence people with different views.
Don’t feel the need to intimidate and outlaw free speech.
Or tend not to be eager totalitarians. Aren’t fans of Cuba and gush about it’s health care system. Don’t get tingles in their legs, having speech codes, and believe only duly assigned reporters should have special protection under law. Etc.
I think it’s pretty funny when the skeptics resort to plagiarizing witty insults from those of us that know how to deliver them.
RB | November 11, 2013 at 12:49 pm |
“curryja: For small perturbations, possible mechanisms would be negative cloud feedback or increased snowfall at high latitudes.
This just seems so deeply counter-intuitive. It would suggest the possibility that if CO2 was held constant, the current state is metastable and that small fluctuations should be sufficient to prod the system into a more stable lower temperature state.”
Hypothesis have to make sense. Facts don’t.
Write that down and abandon the notion that your intuition is worth a tinker’s damn. The fact that for the past 4 million years the earth has shifted between two metastable states every 100,000 years or so prodded by orbital anomalies that slightly moderate (ends interglacials) or intensify (starts an interglacial) the difference between winter and summer insolation in the northern hemisphere proves the point you believe to be non-intuitive. Your intuition is obviously starved of facts otherwise it would be working better.
http://tinyurl.com/qxmfgh4
Re: Springer
The tipping point in the case of the orbital anomalies is in the direction of the expected movement i.e., the small increase or decrease in warmth due to the sun being greatly amplified. What Judith seems to suggest is a cooling effect that is amplified from a change by adding something (CO2, FYI) that is normally warming i.e., amplification in the opposite expected direction.
. Gates
While I would agree with you that it is unlikely that a doubling of CO2 would result in no GH warming at all, there are two basic problems with the conclusion from the paleo data you cite.
– First of all, these are interpretations of dicey paleoclimate proxy data for carefully selected geological periods.
– And then, the interpretation is based on the “argument from ignorance”, i.e. “we can only explain this if we assume…” (fill in the blank with anything you want to “prove”).
Crystal balls, tea leaves or animal entrails are in the same category, Gates.
What is missing is empirical scientific evidence (based on actual physical observations or reproducible experimentation, i.e. the “scientific method”)to support a high CS as postulated by IPCC.
Max
RB | November 12, 2013 at 1:22 pm |
“The tipping point in the case of the orbital anomalies is in the direction of the expected movement”
Wrong again. The orbital anomaly that triggers an ice age begins with warmer winters. Warmer winters are the predecessor of colder winters in that case. The warmer winters have more snowfall which makes for deeper snowpacks which take longer to melt in the spring beginning a vicious cycle of positive feedback with increasing albedo driving the snowline to lower altitudes and latitudes. If you write that down perhaps you won’t make the same stupid mistake again in the future.
Denier is without doubt, one of the many extreme low points in the AGW movement.
I’d like to point out another – which is the countless academics, scientists, professionals and other persons whose careers took major hits for not supporting AGW. Trashed, harassed, and even fired in many instances, how do they get whole again ?
Please, I ask for a moment of silence for those who became collateral damage to a movement based on a false concept and marketed via deception. Whatever AGW was when this all started, it became an agenda driven religious-like cult movement that has left a trail of damage worldwide.
Leave yours off, Michael. Nobody will be frightened.
Donkey,
Exactly what does one’s attire have to do with their opinion or expertise? No one here brings up the issue of you liking to wear panty hose.
Goldfish memory study … deniable
As much as the word “denial” is used to avoid a proper scientific argument, it doesn’t bother me.
I still stand by the challenge of settling the science of the unanswered physics questions relevant to earth temperature in the physics lab. To start with:
1. predict/demonstrate/quantify thermalization of IR by any GHG free to radiate to space
2. demonstrate/quantify that any change in surface material composition can change the radiative thermal equilibrium temperature of a blackbody in space, exclusive of albedo/reflectance changes.
“As to charges of “denial” being “ad hominem,” in ordinary language it isn’t–it is a simple empiricial description of a position that denies something.”
Right. Methinks this guy’s in denial.
He’s denying that “denial” is more than denying “something”; it’s denying something that is in some way sacrosanct.
That’s correct. :)
Warmists are in denial over the need to adapt to a changing environment.
The “denier” label is a fallacy of relevance. Both are denying the other’s point of view and both are affirming their own. The climate in “climate denier” is a non sequitur in that neither is saying there is no climate. It’s like saying someone is a color denier because they prefer blue and you prefer green. I agree there is a shading of ad hominem due to the holocaust denier comparison.
Denego ergo sum.
Cogito ergo denego.
Illegitimi non carborundum
“Few issues warrant such confidence. The Holocaust is perhaps one, though even here there is room for debate over the manner of its execution and the number of its victims.”
This bothered me, and I have to ask myself why. Not sure what he has to gain rhetorically by using the word “perhaps” WRT to a well documented historical event. Am I being inconsistent? Not sure. The holocaust certainly happened…which is how the he term climate denier derives much of it’s pejorative bite..
Historical fact is one thing Scientific theory is another. I suppose one could ask concerning the former, “well how can we know anything with certainty?”
But that’s a philosophical question, and as such something else entirely.
Wish he hasn’t gone there…
The whole piece is bonkers.
Its only redeeming feature is brevity.
As is yours.
Touche.
Tutu, Michael
reviewing your own comments now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial
Thanks Edim.
First line per your link is accurate imho “Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in the Holocaust during World War II”
Skidelsky’s point seems to be that we can’t necessarily use “denier” WRT to the holocaust (recall he would only allow that “perhaps” we can), because there are (as always when speaking about historical events), some uncertainties around the edges: He writes “… though even here there is room for debate over the manner of its execution and the number of its victims.”
That strikes me as a silly, rhetorical stretch which does not serve the man’s credibility.. Whether there were 6 million or 5.9 or 6.1 is in an historical sense, insignificant. He needs a good editor.
And this illustrates another difficulty with the “denial” label – that “holocaust denial” can be further taxonomized. For example, there are people who question the numbers. Suggesting 5.5 million instead of 6 might be reasonable. Claiming 1 or 1/2 million isn’t. And then there are the Wannasee deniers; various variations on “the Poles did it” and such.
It’s like conspiracy theories. There’s never one – there’s always a whole family of theories; often contradicting each other. And maybe that’s the real point of the “denier” label – to paint opponents as conspiracy theorists.
It seems like that’s been tried, too.
Obama is a Freedom and Liberty Denier.
Rand Paul might not appreciate such treatment:
> I think I’m being unfairly targeted by a bunch of hacks and haters. And I’m just not going to put up with people casting aspersions on my character.
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/rand-paul-wants-challenge-haters-maddow-gunf
Liberty and Freedom Denier,
Healthcare Liar,
Obama
Rand Paul.
Rand Paul.
Rand Paul.
Says something about your character ole Willy, i.e. you seem to be threatened by Rand Paul more than Obama. What are you afraid of Willy?
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/08/rand_paul_makes_plagiarism_joke_in_debut_column_for_breitbart/
+100
I come back to the point I have been trying to make ever since the AR5 was published. No-one who matters is listening. Everything our hostess writes, on this sort of subject, makes complete sense, and nothing is actually happening.
When will a scientist, who really matters, and, in Roy Spencer’s words, has some gonads, stand up and tell the world in words of one syllable that science, physics, is being raped by all the learned scientific societies, and the whole of scientific academia?
Think about how mushrooms grow.
AK, I don’t see the relevance of mushrooms. Mushrooms grow in the dark when you feed them horsesh*t.
Mushrooms can grow out of sight for months, then pop up overnight. Changes to the political climate can (probably) do likewise. Many people may be listening but doing nothing, until one day they do: tipping point.
AK | November 11, 2013 at 12:30 pm |
..and some tipping points will be reached before others…
Australia says “No” to UN wish list of billions – will “not support socialism masquerading as environmentalism”
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/11/australia-says-no-to-un-wish-list-of-billions-will-not-support-socialism-masquerading-as-environmentalism/#comment-1339223
Jim C,
That is not true. I spent several days with students in Mt Hood National Forest studying fungi and lichen. The areas with the greatest diversity and were those which received more sun. Total numbers were about the same, but the open areas also had greater bio mass.
And AK is correct. What you see above the surface is the fruiting body.
‘When will a scientist, who really matters, and, in Roy Spencer’s words, has some gonads, stand up and tell the world in words of one syllable that science, physics, is being raped by all the learned scientific societies, and the whole of scientific academia?”
When? well, when someone shows that C02 will cool the planet rather than warm it. that is, when hell freezes over.
“Physics” is more than just spectra.
“…when someone shows that C02 will cool the planet rather than warm it.”
Considerably later than that methinks – after all, a comparison of the dry vs moist lapse rate is a convincing argument that water vapour feedback is negative, not positive. Yet many (most?) climate models show (and many/most climate scientists believe) it IS positive. This is, of course, not “denial” – it’s “consensus”!
“…when hell freezes over” – or a sufficient number of the current supporters of the CAGW theory die off, whichever happens first.
“when someone shows that C02 will cool the planet rather than warm it. that is, when hell freezes over.”
Hell is cold;
“Mars ain’t the kind of place toAnnotate raise your kids
In fact it’s cold as hell
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did
And all this science I don’t understand
It’s just my job 5 days a week”
Bernie Taupin and Elton John
“When? well, when someone shows that C02 will cool the planet rather than warm it. that is, when hell freezes over.”
____
Same odds…if there was a hell, but the center of the Earth at 6000C is a reasonable substitute for the odds of it freezing over or CO2 cooling rather than warming.
Harold | November 11, 2013 at 2:23 pm |
“Physics” is more than just spectra.
#######
yes, to a first order Spectra is all you need to know and all that is known well.
1. All that we we know well tells us that doubling C02 will lead to 1.5C of warming
2. If you want to argue that stuff we know less well REDUCES this, then
you better bring that argument. Because few have
3. If you want to argue that stuff we know less well INCREASES this,
then you better get in line, cause the number of people with good arguments here is pretty long.
Now of course we dont decide whether #2 is correct or #3 is correct by counting heads or looking at pedigrees. But we might consider this
1. The Best known physics, the physics that actually gets
used in enginerring sets a value of 1.5C, as a first order, no feedbacks
number.
2. If you want to replace that first order estimate with something else
you need more fundamental physics. You’ll get a nobel prize.
3. If you want to improve on that first order estimate, understand that
all of your improvements will be less certain than that fundamental number.
“When? well, when someone shows that C02 will cool the planet rather than warm it. that is, when hell freezes over.”
Who says it has to cool the planet. All CO2 has to do is play its’ part, i.e. 2nd base on a nine man team. When did you become a CO2 control knob freak?
Steven Mosher: 1. All that we we know well tells us that doubling C02 will lead to 1.5C of warming
What has been “shown” is that doubling the CO2 concentration will increase the estimated equilibrium temperature of the Earth. That “showing” has problems of its own: there is no “showing” that the equilibrium temperature accurately measures anything on Earth; the “showing” assumes that the entire Earth surface and atmosphere are at the equilibrium temperature, obviously counterfactual; and the showing ignores the non-negligible amount of heat transferred away from the Earth surface by thermals.
What hasn’t been “shown” is that doubling the CO2 concentration will do anything in particular to any of the well-studied energy flows, so that the temperature changes in any regions of the environment can be calculated. The biggest unknown might be the effect of increased downwelling LWIR on the balance of temp change and evaporation change on the 70% of the land surface that is ocean (and the other 20% or so that is “non dry”.) Taken all together, what we know well does not tell us whether increased CO2 will increase or decrease cloud cover, or the times, locations, and local conditions under which those changes might occur.
Every attempt to estimate the effect of a doubling of CO2, starting from what the climate is like now, has to make unchecked assumptions about some unknowns, or some obvious counterfactual assumptions such as a hypothetical equilibrium or the negligibilty of non-radiative energy transport.
Surely if the words “denier” and “denial” are to be used in any insightful sense they have to be used to refer to all denials of what is well-established in the science, and to denials that some assumptions are unchecked.
Jim
Do you accept the posibility that more CO2 will result in some warming, but that the IPCC was incorrect on the timescale or do you believe that it is impossible for it to lead to additional warming? As I have read your position, it seems to be that you have not read reliable evidence, but I have not read that you have eliminated the possibility.
Rob, you write “Do you accept the possibility that more CO2 will result in some warming”
On the contrary, I insist that it is almost certain that CO2 is a GHG, and the more there is on the atmosphere, the more the earth will warm. What I dispute is how much this warming is.
What I object to is that it is impractical at the moment to MEASURE climate sensitivity, because we cannot do controlled experiments on the earth’s atmosphere.. This has been obvious to me for some years, and it must be obvious to anyone who has thought about the subject. Without such a measurement, the IPCC has absolutely no basis whatsoever to be certain about anything to do with CAGW, and they have deliberately deceived our politicians into believing that there is sound science to support the hypothesis of CAGW. There can be no such sound science until CS has been measured. When the IPCC first started this must have been obvious, and so, IMHO, CAGW is a hoax.
To continue, since Beenstock et al and Mora et al have shown that there is no CO2 signal in any modern temperature/time data set, it follows that there is a strong indication that the CS of CO2 is indistinguishable from zero,
Jim
Thanks
So Jim agrees that more CO2 will lead to some warming if all other conditions remain unchanged, but denies that there is a means to MEASURE sensitivity.
That does not seem an out of the norm position.
Now his further comment–“shown that there is no CO2 signal in any modern temperature/time data set, it follows that there is a strong indication that the CS of CO2 is indistinguishable from zero” might well be disputed as reaching a conclusion not fully supported by the facts
Rob, you write “might well be disputed as reaching a conclusion not fully supported by the facts.”
What facts, i.e. empirical data, do not support my conclusion?
References please.
Will the real Jim Cripwell please stand up? Back in August:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/08/28/overestimated-global-warming-over-the-past-20-years/#comment-370934
He said: “Therefore there is no reason whatsoever why a change of CO2 concentration has to make any difference to global temperatures.”
Now he says:
“I insist that it is almost certain that CO2 is a GHG, and the more there is on the atmosphere, the more the earth will warm.”
____
So Jim, in your mind, is there no valid reason for CO2 increases to make a differenc in global temperatures, or are you “almost certain” that the more there is the more the earth will warm? You seem a bit conflicted on exactly what you believe Jim C., or is your position “evolving”? Yes is a perfectly valid answer by the way.
R. Gates. Talk about being super observant. This is a blog. I don’t vet everything I write to ensure that it is pedantically accurate. My position has been clear. The CS of CO2 is positive and cannot be zero, but it’s value is probably indistinguishable from zero
Jim C.,
“Cannot be zero but probably indistinguishable from zero” etc. is great waffle batter. It can’t be zero but I can’t tell if it is because it is indistiquishable from zero. A poltical career would have been a good choice for you. But thank you for clarifying your current position, but I can’t tell if you clarified it or not because it is indistinquishable from zero…I think.
One final thought Jim C., maybe you should write an autobiography. I think you know what the title would be:
“My Life: Indistinguishable from Zero (but it can’t be Zero)”
Just kidding Jim, I am sure you have many friends and family who think your life has amounted to far more than zero. :)
R,
Jim is perefectly clear on this – the earth will warm, but the warming will probably be indistinguishable from no warming.
” R. Gates, Skeptical Warmist | November 11, 2013 at 6:57 pm |
Jim C.,
“Cannot be zero but probably indistinguishable from zero” etc. is great waffle batter. It can’t be zero but I can’t tell if it is because it is indistiquishable from zero. ”
I this can explained if compare Urban Heat Island to CO2.
We know UHI effect causes large regional affect on temperatures
and increases rainfall [a rain shadow]. You must assume that UHI effect adds something to global temperature, so it’s more than zero.
But which causes more effect CO2 or UHI effect?
Obviously it’s recognized the UHI effect has had some effect
on measurement of air temperature. How want to quantify or
adjust is different topic. Or one say that UHI effect has more
effect upon temperature measurement than on actual global
temperature which being attempted to be measured.
Or the effect upon temperature record is one conversation,
and it’s actual effect global climate and temperature is
another conversation. So in the latter, which is more
UHI effect or CO2 and quantify it, how much more?
Gates and Donkey,
What has been shown to date is that any impacts from warming have been shown to be indistinguishable from natural variability.
Anthropowarmists deny climate change and global warming (to various extents) in order to make room for the Orwellian Climate Change and Global Warming. Consequently they project their denial on skeptics. It’s basic psychology.
If there was a theory called NGW (Natural Global Warming) that claimed to explain most of the recent warming, I would be an NGW denier, and not mind being called one. The reason being, I am certain NGW is wrong in this context. Indeed the N effect is downwards during this part of the Holocene, and only explains cooling trends. AGW on the other hand explains upward trends since pre-industrial times, and provides predictions of more, while if NGW had a prediction, it would be continued cooling for many more millennia, just like the last 8000 years. Therefore I believe in NGC as a background Cooling component that is being dwarfed by AGW.
“If there was a theory called NGW (Natural Global Warming) that claimed to explain most of the recent warming, I would be an NGW denier, and not mind being called one. The reason being, I am certain NGW is wrong in this context. Indeed the N effect is downwards during this part of the Holocene, and only explains cooling trends. AGW on the other hand explains upward trends since pre-industrial times, and provides predictions of more, while if NGW had a prediction, it would be continued cooling for many more millennia, just like the last 8000 years. Therefore I believe in NGC as a background Cooling component that is being dwarfed by AGW.”
If your theory, you call NGW which you are a denier, only has cooling as possibility, how does your NGW theory which you are denying account for the numerous warming periods during parts of the Holocene?
It is easy to conclude that all of the post-1970 warming (the “hockey stick”) was due to natural global warming.
It is a fact of nature that warming will naturally occur whenever a significant amount of pollution settles out of the air. This has been proven over and over after the cooling from a large volcanic eruption ends, and temperatures return to their pre-cooling levels.
All of the post-1970 warmng occurred for the same reason, as it had to, due to the implementation of the Clean Air Act et al.. There was no room (or need) for any CO2 contribution.
In the above context, are you still a NGW denier?
gbaikie, solar and volcanic effects are also natural and can lead to variations on top of the Milankovitch cooling trend. In fact, I think the sun could have provided 0.2 C of warming in 1910-1940. This is small compared to either AGW or NGC however, when long-term effects are considered, because they can be a degree or more in amplitude, which these other wiggles don’t do so much, although it can’t be ruled out completely for volcanic effects. The sun also has a long-term but very slow warming trend due to its life-cycle that is understood from astrophysics.
“gbaikie, solar and volcanic effects are also natural and can lead to variations on top of the Milankovitch cooling trend”
Well, instead, Natural Global Warming, I want to see your Natural Global Cooling theory.
What was the natural cause of LIA?
We would not now think humans caused the cooling periods [it’s not actually caused by witches- or coal/wood smoke- correct?].
So generally I have not seen evidence the long term Holocene cooling
has ended or will end. Which doesn’t mean we can’t have warming for next couple centuries. Or our current temperature is insignificant blip on long trend.
A recovery from LIA but so far nothing more.
I think it might possible that elevated CO2 level over enough time could appear check this downward trend, but I would say up to up to now it hasn’t.
Natural global cooling is expected from Milankovitch, and the earth’s tilt direction currently favors the growth of Arctic sea ice relative to the early Holocene when the northern glaciers were melting. Clearly that is not happening, but up until the LIA, that was the trend. The LIA also was helped by a solar inactivity period and several large volcanic events. When those ended, the recovery was completed a century ago, and what we see now with warming and sea ice is an independent forcing kicking in. Just since 1970, the forcing has risen by 1 W/m2, which is twice the negative solar forcing of the LIA. Over the whole period it is approaching 2 W/m2, and is rising now at a rate of 1 W/m2 per 25 years. These are large amounts and rates of change compared to natural forcing changes that might have occurred in the same period.
“Natural global cooling is expected from Milankovitch, and the earth’s tilt direction currently favors the growth of Arctic sea ice relative to the early Holocene when the northern glaciers were melting. Clearly that is not happening, but up until the LIA, that was the trend. ”
Let’s unpack this.
Earth’s axis tilt has precessional period:
” Earth goes through one such complete precessional cycle in a period of approximately 26,000 years or 1° every 72 years”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession
So as I understand it 26,000 years ago the sun was in same position it is today. And 13,000 years it’s in exact opposite position as today.
Currently:
January 02, 2013 06:00am ET
“If the sun looks a little larger than usual today, you’re not seeing things. Today (Jan. 2) marks the time when the Earth is at perihelion, the point in its orbit at which it is closest to the sun.”
http://www.space.com/19090-earth-closest-sun-perihelion-2013.html
So in terms of hemispheres of Earth, the southern hemisphere
summer is receiving more wattage, than Northern hemisphere’s summer.
Or our winters are receiving more wattage than southern Hemisphere
winters.
And above was reversed 13,000 years ago.
Continuing from space.com:
“During perihelion, the Earth is exactly 91,402,560 miles (147,098,161 kilometers) from the sun” And it says:
“So what is the difference for the inhabitants of Earth when our planet is at perihelion instead of aphelion? The Earth is slightly warmer than it would be otherwise, about 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 degrees Celsius).”
So according to this currently our winters are about 2 C warmer than they were 13000 years ago. Or 13000 years ago our summers were 2.3 C warmer on average than today.
Or in terms of wattage at top of atmosphere: perihelion has 1412 watts: “from 1.412 kW/m² in early January to 1.321 kW/m² in early July”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant
So a maximum difference of 91 watts per square *before* it enters our atmosphere. And less difference at the surface.
And you say “Natural global cooling is expected from Milankovitch, and the earth’s tilt direction currently favors the growth of Arctic sea ice relative to the early Holocene.”
So Northern arctic summers would have been warmer in early Holocene and colder during winter. Or presently our [northern hemisphere] are cooler summers and winters warmer.
Does this favor growth of arctic sea ice? It seems in early Holocene ice melts more in the summer and freezes more in the winter.
It seems unclear that we that should currently be more towards growth of arctic sea ice.
It seems our northern hemisphere arctic should cooler in summer as compared to early Holocene, and in early Holocene trees were growing further north [we have the tree stumps].
Of course there is other things going on with milankovitch cycles, as our glacier periods are much longer then intergalactic periods.
But with warmer summers in the early Holocene this would tend to melt the large glaciers in the northern hemisphere.
And it seems warming the Earth oceans is more significant factor
of milankovitch cycles in regards to glacial and intergalactic periods.
Burl Henry | November 11, 2013 at 11:49 pm |
“All of the post-1970 warmng occurred for the same reason, as it had to, due to the implementation of the Clean Air Act et al.. There was no room (or need) for any CO2 contribution.”
Did the various clean air acts get enacted at different times in the US vs Eurasia?
You can see in this min daily temp anomaly that they have different profiles of temp change. http://dkue3ufa3e1f8.cloudfront.net/files/images/Northern%20Continents_0.png
The southern Continents
http://dkue3ufa3e1f8.cloudfront.net/files/images/Southern%20Continents_0.png
gbaikie, 12000 years ago the northern hemisphere got more solar radiation especially around the critical Arctic latitudes due to perihelion being in the summer. This favored the loss of northern ice. Now the northern hemisphere summer is further from the sun, so it favors growth of Arctic ice. It is the summer distance that is dominant for the Arctic response to the sun, because in the winter there is not much sun anyway.
“A different perspective from David Burgess in the Comments”.
Spelt ‘Burress’ at the head of his comment.
@ MICHAEL
The purpose of Postmodern speech is to change the meaning and value of terms in order to create a secular religion of totalitarian humanism.
That you don’t grok this a statement about you, not a statement about the assertion.
It’s not like it’s uncommon knowledge.
I find a religion of humanism to be a problomatic construct.
That is not a criticism. :) And you are not a measurement. :) Only your arguments are.
But, then lets look at Denial? The impossibility of material equality? The impossibility of political diversity? The impossibility of equality of ability? Or, my favorite: the evidence that the peer review process is nearly ineffective, and that the requirement for a book length treatment written in operational language appears to be the only empirical test of ideas? How about my favorite: The denial that mathematical platonism is an obscurant means of preserving verbal shortcuts and numerous errors?
Knowledge of facts in a domain, and mastery of a specific discipline can compensate for a lack of intelligence. However, mastery of the art of thought, and the identification of true, utilitarian, and false statements appears to be a matter for experts in that field.
The most important denial is this: the Dunning Kreuger curve. The inability for the incompetent to judge their own ability. :)
A postmodern comment to say that Michael is an idjit.
Michael is no idiot. He just has a talent for sounding like a donkey.
> It’s not like it’s uncommon knowledge [i.e. that “the purpose of Postmodern speech is to change the meaning and value of terms in order to create a secular religion of totalitarian humanism”].
If we accept this as common knowledge, then every roads lead to humanism, since humanism rests on the ideals of Modernity.
“The purpose of Postmodern speech is to change the meaning and value of terms in order to create a secular religion of totalitarian humanism” is itself quite postmodern, by the way.
(a) Not unless you arbitrarily define common knowledge as universal rather common knowledge of those who criticize the culture of critique. :)
(b) Not unless “Postmodern” is an era rather than an argumentative technique for the propagation of falsehoods using obscurant language.
Postmodern argument requires obscurant language. One can create scientific and rational sociology of knowledge or one can create irrational unscientific sociology of knowledge. :) It is postmodern to create an irrational sociology of knowledge. It’s premodern to create mystical meaning, and modern to create scientific meaning.
And so, your ARGUMENT is postmodern (obscurant and irrational), my argument is modern (empirical and rational). :)
Cheers.
> Not unless you arbitrarily define common […]
I don’t even need to define “common knowledge”, Curt, since “Common knowledge” is common knowledge. But if you need a definition, there’s the Lewis definition:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/common-knowledge/#2.2
Since Lewis’ definition is universal (logic has this strange property), you might find it too post-modern for you. Try this.
TL; DR – Curt’s (a) is irrelevant and false.
***
> Not unless “Postmodern” is an era rather than an argumentative technique […]
It refers to neither, but to a criticism of modernity, e.g.:
http://foucault.info/documents/whatisenlightenment/foucault.whatisenlightenment.en.html
In case Curt does not grok what Foucault says here, let’s simplify: ideals of modernity are easier said than done. That all post-modern authors reject all the ideals of Modernity is a useful myth for good ol’ fashion reactionary contrarianism.
TL; DR — Curt’s (b) rests on a common misrepresentation.
No way to reply to Wlllard’s nonsense. So I”ll just have to let his nonsense rest.
Apparently “being adults” and Foucault’s obscurant experiential drivel is somehow argumentatively meaningful, rather than a literary illusion. :)
But this isn’t worth my time. :) I’ll stick with naturalism, operational language, and correspondence with reality, thanks. Everything else is loading, framing and deception. :)
Sadly lacks
Curious acts.
=========
huh.
Some of the most notable post modernists are anti humanists.
jeez, start here with Heidegger.
did you even go to school?
http://pacificinstitute.org/pdf/Letter_on_%20Humanism.pdf
Steve, ‘post-modern’ is like ‘equilibrium’, it now means what you want it to mean.
“Post-modern” is mostly used as a derogatory word in ClimateBall. It signals anti-rationalism, relativism, and left extremism.
Something to do with intellectual tyranny.
Of the worst kind? Like using epithet?
Doesn’t putting on big boy pants provide immunity from intellectual tyranny?
It’s all a big mistake; they meant ‘mode’, not ‘modern’.
========
Chomsky on “postmodernism”:
[…]
Posted on Usenet on 13 Nov 1995 and written a few months earlier, according to the header text.
Note that I don’t particularly agree with it, or most of Chomsky, but I found it thought-stimulating.
Clooney the indiscriminate …
“Actor George Clooney declared global warming skeptics to be “stupid” and “ridiculous.” Clooney made the remarks to reporters on the eve of Typhoon Haiyan hitting the Philippines. He was attending the BAFTA Britannia Awards in Beverly Hills on Saturday night November 9.
“Well it’s just a stupid argument,” Clooney said on the red carpet, referring to the dissenters of man-made global warming.
“If you have 99 percent of doctors who tell you ‘you are sick’ and 1 percent that says ‘you’re fine,’ you probably want to hang out with, check it up for the 99. You know what I mean? The idea that we ignore that we are in some way involved in climate change is ridiculous. What’s the worst thing that happens? We clean up the earth a little bit?”
“I find this to be the most ridiculous argument ever,” Clooney explained.”
http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/11/10/in-wake-of-typhoon-haiyan-actor-george-clooney-declares-global-warming-skeptics-to-be-stupid-and-ridiculous-watch-video/
I find it sadly amusing when masses of people pay attention to actors who spout opinions about matters of science. Hmmmm… let’s think….When I am faced with trying to understand something of consequence, do I:
A) Do some research into the subject and weigh the data and facts for myself
or
B) Get a predigested opinion from a person who has spent a lifetime making his living by being recorded while playing “Let’s pretend I am a character living in a fantasy world!”
I found it interesting he’s morphed the fabled 97% into 99%. He knows all and sees all.
The issue of the use of the term “denier” or “denialist” is a bit more complicated than might be suggested here. I fully agree that the use from one scientist to another (Mann towards Curry, for example) is very bad form. It should be assumed that both scientists are well aware of the facts and are not in denial of anything, but have simply come to different conclusions as to what those facts mean or how certain any conclusions based on those facts are.
But the use of the term in a more general sense can be quite accurate, and even on CE we have proudly sefl-admittted “deniers” (Jim Cripwell for example). He’s not just uncertain about AGW, but is completely certain that it is not even possibly happening. This would be akin to a true un-believer, 100% certain of the un-truth of something.
This issue of the term “denier” then leads to the use of the term “skeptic” as many in the general population who don’t think that AGW is happening like to be referred to as a “skeptic”. Now it really depends on what they mean by that term. They might in fact, be like Jim Cripwell, 100% convinced that AGW is not happening, in which case they are actually not a skeptic, but denying the truth of something, and should more accurately be called a denier or denialist. This is why I like to say that skepticism is s tool not a destination. Once you become 100% convinced of anything, you no longer are using the tool of skepticism, but have arrived at a destination and maybe would like to wear a badge of “skeptic”, but once you have arrived and are 100% convinced of the un-truth of something, you are more accurately a denier.
Thus, while I’m a “warmist”, in the sense that I think it is more likely than not (though maybe not at the 95% level) that human activities are changing the climate, warming the oceans and atmosphere, etc., I am still open to looking at all data using the tool of skepticism to alter my position as the data warrants.
“The issue of the use of the term “denier” or “denialist” is a bit more complicated than might be suggested here”
No it isn’t. Ad hominem is ad hominem. The use of ad hominem is not situationally fallacious, as you assert via blatant equivocation.
JJ,
For those who are 100% certain that AGW or CAGW is not happening, the term “skeptic” is not appropriate. Please let me know what you think is a better term.
Who is 100% certain of most things?
R. Gates aka Dishonest Warmist
For those who are 100% certain that AGW or CAGW is not happening, the term “skeptic” is not appropriate. Please let me know what you think is a better term.
It is your use of the term that is inappropriate, involving ad hom and equivocation. You can do that with any term, and you will.
“For those who are 100% certain that AGW or CAGW is not happening, the term “skeptic” is not appropriate. Please let me know what you think is a better term.”
RG, I take issue with your implicit premise that they somehow must be labeled. Why? To make you feel better? To buttress your sense of yourself as smart and educated? We have a fundamental right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This includes the right to have opinions. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it turns out that any AGW warming is inconsequential. That makes me what? A denier? An idiot? A lunatic?
I don’t see how any of those epithets are useful. Or even moral.
R. Gates – Ad Hom Denier
So using epithets is immoral?
Fascinating.
positive externalities for fracking
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-08/there-would-be-no-iranian-nuclear-talks-if-not-for-fracking
The negotiations designed to give both governments cover while allowing Iran to follow North Korea into the nuclear club? Those nuclear talks?
“So using epithets is immoral? Fascinating.”
Hi Josh,
all sneer and no content. No surprise there. Naturally, it depends on the epithet and the context in which it’s used. I do find the use of certain words like “denier” in the context of climate discussion, deeply insulting. Moreover, it’s purpose is to marginalize perfectly rational people and stifle debate concerning an issue of profound importance.
So yes, I’d say the use of this term is ultimately immoral. Not to mention cowardly, ignorant, and nasty.
I thought you liked “nasty”, Poker. Is that word meant to be insulting?
Right. How about epithets that you use, and those used by people who agree with you? Ubuquitously.
Useful? Moral? Brave? Knowledgeable? Sweet?
Interesting logic:
So without our increased access to domestic sources of fossil fuel, despotic tyrants and theocratic governments would have less power than that they attained by virtue of supplying us (and others) with access to fossil fuels.
Please note – I don’t doubt, not a bit, that there are positive as well as negative externalities associated with fracking.- economic as well as environmental.
oops. “….would have more power…”
Double negatives. Get me every time.
As a group these people define themselves by what they are against, or deny. They aren’t pro any theory in particular, so you can’t label them by a specific term like AGWers or anthropowarmists.
pokerguy,
RG, I take issue with your implicit premise that they somehow must be labeled. Why? To make you feel better? To buttress your sense of yourself as smart and educated?
Labels can be useful in discussions – it is sometimes necessary to refer to groups of people with (more or less) shared opinions on a particular issue.
R. Gates
You have got it wrong when you write that Jim Cripwell is “100% convinced that AGW is not happening”.
He has stated often on this site that he has seen no empirical evidence to convince him that GH warming from CO2 is different from zero.
That’s a pretty definite conclusion, but it is NOT the same as saying he is “100% convinced that AGW is not happening”.
He’s just “not 100% convinced that it IS happening”.
Get the difference?
Max
Well Max, I asked him directly to clarify his position, and he stated without hesitation that he was proud to call himself a denier. Why don’t you ask him, and maybe he”ll deny he ever said that– in which case I’ll have to go through the effort of finding exactly where he did.
“Well Max, I asked him directly to clarify his position, and he stated without hesitation that he was proud to call himself a denier. Why don’t you ask him, and maybe he”ll deny he ever said that– in which case I’ll have to go through the effort of finding exactly where he did.”
Why, what an outrage. Proud of being a denier, you say? I recommend the rack, or perhaps water boarding. Or you can just beat the hell out of him.
If he he doesn’t confess his climate sins after all that, you can just burn him at the stake
You seem to have serious control issues, RG.
“he stated without hesitation that he was proud to call himself a denier”
Some African-American’s call themselves the ‘N-word’ as a way to reclaim and redirect its venom, however, I suggest that it should not be used.
No control issues, just accuracy and accountability.
Max, you must be one of those nuancy boys.
I have also said repeatedly I have no problem with being called a denier.
I deny that anyone knows the global average temperature to within tenths of a degree in the present.
I deny that anyone knows the global average temperature to withing tenths of a degree 10 years ago, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago etc.
I deny that anyone knows what the global average temperature will be within tenths of a degree 10 years from now, or within a degree 100 years from now, 1000 years from now, etc.
I deny that anyone knows the rate of sea level rise to within a few millimeters per year, decade, millenium, etc.
I deny that anyone knows enough about the global climate to model it with sufficient accuracy as to future temperatures to justify decarbonizing the global economy.
I deny that decarbonization is science, rather than a political movement.
“…the term “denier” then leads to the use of the term “skeptic”…”
Heh – definitions of terms can be ugly.
For instance, I once had an argument with someone that I could expect one thing, while assuming the opposite and that this was not just acceptable, but something people do all the time. The example is this:
when I am approaching a “STOP” sign in a line of vehicles, I assume the vehicle in front will actually come to a stop. But experience leads me to expect that it won’t. I need to assume it will, because it might and if I assume it won’t, then I will likely hit it, even though I expect (from experience) that approximately 90+% won’t actually stop. My expectation that it won’t stop does not change my assumption that it will stop because the consequences of acting on the expectation when that expectation is wrong are significantly more detrimental than acting on the assumption.
The point I am trying to make is that the assumption that added CO2 will warm the planet (all else, yada yada) is fine – the expectation that it will does not logically follow from this assumption, and furthermore, when evidence presents itself that the assumption may not be correct (as “the pause” does), it’s evident that it’s unwise to base your (high cost) decisions on the underlying assumptions (it never was, but most people need to learn this for themselves).
Stephen Schneider justified telling lies for political expediency.
David Burgess gives the AOK to personal attacks, ad hominem arguments, and marginalization of those with differing scientific opinion.
Stephen Lewandowsky demonstrates how to make it happen, and how to double down by applying the same tactics to anyone who points out what’s going on.
These are the mindsets operating in “climate science”. No conspiracy necessary, just a sufficient quantity of immoral actors, acting immorally.
There’s some nice truth denial in the first sentance.
My sentence is truthful.
Your sentence denies both the truth and the veracity of the spell checker.
A full quote of Scheider’s statment would be interesting to see, wouldn’t it JJ…..or will you start the walkback now?
Michael
Not really “truth denial”, Michael.
Schneider did say a scientist had to weigh whether or not he wanted to tell lies for political expediency or not.
Essentially the same as JJ wrote above.
Max
Michael
Here’s the full quote with bold face by me:
“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”
“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider
“tell[ing] lies for political expediency” – hmm, he seems to have fogrotten to say that.
Snap.
His personal take – ” I hope that means being both [honest and effective]”
Ah, what a tangled web we weave….
Denial, denial, denial.
Michael
“I hope the data come out such that I don’t have to lie”
Oops! If they don’t, pants on fire!
Max
“Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
You can only make Schneider’s statement ambiguous by ignoring what immediately precedes it:
“To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”
Honesty is thus made a matter of choice, not an objective standard to be followed. The end is elevated to the extant that the means is simply a matter of “tactics” as Mosher has said. There is no practical difference between telling the truth and telling a lie.
No one with integrity would say what Schneider said.
If you like your climate belief, you can keep your climate belief. Period.
Until HHS says you cannot.
If you like your economy, (which has lifted more people out of poverty than any system in the history of mankind), you can’t keep it.
We want to play with people’s lives like they were so many Leggos.
‘…deciding what is the right balance between being effective
and being honest.’
Remember Plato’s ‘necessary lie,’ his Myth of the Metals
in Men,’ justifying a political system, but it’s alright because
it’s a ‘noble lie’ for ‘noble ends?’
The ol’ ‘ends justify the means’ kinda morality. (
“This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. ”
the unexamined premise is that presenting one’s honest doubts and caveats is not effective.
“To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”
1. he assumed that one needs broad based support to engage in effective policy. Wrong.
2. He assumed that scary scenarios are required. Wrong, we now
know that you cannot sell the fear message. Hope sells better.
3. He assumed that all simplified dramatic statements would be effective.
Wrong. if you shade the truth too much you destroy your credibility.
4. he assumed mentioning doubt would destroy the effectiveness of the message. Wrong. you can sell on uncertainty.
In short, here you have a scientist stepping outside his area of expertise. He doesnt understand communication. Doesnt understand what’s required to get policy changed. And his misunderstanding leads him to pose a false dilemma. Choosing between being honest and being effective. When your position puts you at odds with a cliche– honesty is the best policy– then you better have your position more well thought out and more clearly expressed than Schneider.
More proof progressives lie to get elected. (Did anyone seriously doubt it?)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/363605/secret-obama-rich-lowry
“But my plans aren’t anything like the plans I ran on in 2008. I had a universal health-care plan then. Now I’ve got . . . what? A manufacturing plan? What am I gonna do on education? What am I gonna do on energy? There’s not much there.”
Please, please, please let Obama be Obama. let him and all the other CAGW nut cases come out of their closets, stop using euphemisms, and tell the American people they want to stop the use of all fossil fuels in the very near future. Tell those stupid voters that they, unlike the climate cognoscenti, will no longer be allowed the cheap energy that has so improved their lives. Tell them the plan is to deindustrialize the west. Oh, and de-populate much of the undeveloped world before they start exhaling too much CO2 too.
Steven Mosher
In short, here you have a scientist stepping outside his area of expertise. He doesnt understand communication. Doesnt understand what’s required to get policy changed. And his misunderstanding leads him to pose a false dilemma.”
Schneider justified telling the truth half the time. You answer by justifying the telling of half truths all the time.
Scary spin. Hopey spin. Same same, anjin-san.
Mosher,
That’s a nice dissection of what Schneider said but I don’t think you can just put it down to his inexperience at communicating. If you assume your audience has a brain then what you say is true. On the other hand if you come from a position where the audience is inhabited by children then delivering Disneyesque absolute truths start to make sense. There is something more sinister than just being wrong.
Michael, if you could spell, you’d be dangerous.
Steven,
You’ve got it completely wrong.
Schnieder wasn’t talking about policy issues at all, so your ‘analysis’ is just way off the mark.
And Schneider was quite a good communicator of science to the public, having has the pleasure of seeing him in action once.
Michael
A full quote of Scheider’s statment would be interesting to see, wouldn’t it JJ…..
Yes. The full quote confirms my assertion. Far too many warmists pretend he only said the last sentence, as you do in your further commentary below. It is the full quote that demonstrates its duplicitousness. Thanks for posting it.
Well, let’s compare the full quote (which you avoided providing) with what you originally said;
“Stephen Schneider justified telling lies for political expediency.” – JJ
That looks like someone telling lies for expediancy.
Michael
Well, let’s compare the full quote (which you avoided providing) with what you originally said;
OK, when do you start? Be sure to use the full quote, and not just the last sentence, as you lot are wont to do.
And sweetie, I didn’t avoid anything. I made a statement, and that statement stands:
“Stephen Schneider justified telling lies for political expediency.” – JJ
That statement was made about Stephen Schneider, and it is accurate. The quote by Schneider that you refer to proves that, which is why you talk about comparisons without making any.
That looks like someone telling lies for expediancy.
Yes, and its name is ‘Michael’.
The mentioned quote that Stephen Schneider made, I think ended up hitting two targets, himself and climate scientists. His statement about ‘hope’. We can hope the Science survives sufficiently unscathed. We hope we are wise enough to know just how much of our capital of integrity we can trade away to achieve other goals.
Once you’ve eliminated the problem of identifying opponents of socialist CAGW with Holocaust denial, there remains the fact that the psychological use of the term generally implies (or even denotes) that “deniers” really know the “truth” of what they’re denying. So, technically, anybody who has made an informed judgement that CAGW is bunk isn’t a “denier”. Calling them that is calling them lairs: saying they really know CAGW is true but refuse to admit it.
It depends on their level of certainty that AGW or CAGW is “bunk”. Someone who states that either of those is “likely incorrect”, would be more accurately called a skeptic, whereas when someone states that they are 100% certain that anything is incorrect, then they are stating they deny the correctness of something, and denier is an accurate term and skeptic is not.
R. Gates
I would say that I (as a “skeptical warmist”) can accept that AGW is real (i.e. that increased levels of GH gases could result in some global warming), but I am fairly certain, based on the evidence I have seen to date, that the IPCC premise of CAGW (as outlined in its AR4 and AR5 reports) is not real (or “bunk”, if you prefer that word), because there is no empirical evidence, based on physical observations or reproducible experimentation to support this premise.
IOW, I am “rationally skeptical” of IPCC’s CAGW premise.
Does this make me a “denier” or a “rational skeptic” (in your eyes).
Max
Max,
As long as you are not certain (as in 100% convinced) and hold truths as “provisional”, then skeptic is appropriate. Even the IPCC 95% percent certainly is a perfectly skeptical position– they are not stating complete certainty. There are those who are completely convinced of their positions, either as True Believers, or True Un-Believers, and skeptic is not longer appropriate. The other word for True Un-Believer is Denier, and is descriptive of position.
“Accurate” depends on context. If they actually believe what they’re saying, they aren’t in “denial” in the psychological sense.
AK said:
“they actually believe what they’re saying, they aren’t in “denial” in the psychological sense.”
_____
Uh, wow. Have you been paying any attention here? Belief has everything to do with being in denial in the psychological sense. You go to 3 different doctors who each tell you that you are dying of cancer. You convince yourself that they are all wrong…you really believe they all are wrong. A month later the cancer kills you. You were in denial. Denial is all about what you believe to be true, irregardless of whatever the facts or the experts may be telling you.
Depending on what you mean by “belief”. AFAIK the psychological definition of denial is:
[…]
This comes from Urban Dictionary, tho I admit it took me some searching to find a definition with this explicit discussion.
But I’ve seen denial, up close and personal, and the people doing it quite clearly (IMO) are capable of subconsciously dodging circumstances where the truth they’re hiding from themselves would become undeniable. So a person who lacks that “seed of truth still buried within their heads” isn’t in denial.
AK,
All very interesting, but I think you are splitting a finer hair than is necessary, as additional modifers of the general term “denial” are all that is required to get precisely the meaning. Whether some “seed of truth” is still buried in their head is far too subjective and rather unscientific to be useful for a common sense and more broad approach to denial.
So, we can say in a broad and useful way that being in denial (and for a specific issue, being a denier or denialist) is simply a state of mind in which you are certain, beyond all doubt, that something that has been presented to you as a fact, is not actually or factually true. Note, there is no value statement placed on the “denier” in this instance. The denier, might be correct in their position– that is, the facts presented to them as such, are not actually true. For example, if you suggested to me the sun was actually made of burning butter, and presented some research and models to that effect, and after looking at them I decided they were nonsense and denied these “facts”, being 100% certain you were wrong (and possibly crazy if you really believed the sun was made of buring butter), then, with regard to this issue, I would be a denier or denialist. If it somehow turned out that some future research proved beyond all doubt that the sun was indeed made of burning butter, then my denial of those “facts” would have been proven incorrect. Thus, even some people here on CE fully accept their AGW/CAGW “denier” status, and even with pride. They might, in the end, be proven as justified in their denial, or they might be proven to be incorrect in their position.
The more important issue is really not about what denialism is, for I think it is pretty clear, and pretty clear that there really is nothing wrong with it. It is a valid psychological position to take on an issue or family of issues. The more important problem is confusing denialism and skepticism, and having professionals call each other “denialists” in a pejorative fashion– a kind of nasty professional “branding”, when in fact, the person being called such is really simply being quite rationally skeptic, and in being such, upholding the most sacred heart of science.
Belief in belief
“I know very well, but…”
“People often don’t believe in something, but pretend to believe in order not offend the idea that other people might believe in it.”
“… they believed in the ‘big other’ which holds society together.”
We can see this in the climate debate – “do you believe in climate-change.” And perhaps explains why MPs won’t attend our climate sceptic meetings.
“A social environment can neither force a man to think nor prevent him from thinking. But a social environment can offer incentives or impediments; it can make the exercise of one’s rational faculty easier or harder; it can encourage thinking and penalize evasion or vice versa”
~Ayn Rand
There’s a lot of denial going on when 47% of the US population believes an academic is capable of running America like a czar and if elected everything will be hunky-dory.
There was a lot of spin going on to create that situation. A lack of vetting allowed the left leaning media to create a profile that people would elect.
Same with CAGW/AGW, it was spun out of false concept and into a “cause” by the same group. In both cases, the objective was agenda driven.
Sure, people like–e.g., Socialists (that is, anti-capitalist Leftist Ideologues); Secularists (that is, atheist fundementalists, anti-Judeo- Christian contra-cultural hedonists and abortionists); Enviro-Wackpots (trust fund liberals and liberal Utopians); purveyors of anti-Americanism (that is, the haters of the ideals of individual liberty and personal responsibility—i.e., Marxists); and, AGW Catastrophists (that is, hypocrites).
https://twitter.com/phdcomics/status/399780636354826240
This is why workshops are so exhausting. We’re cooped up for two days with bitter enemies. But we keep going to them.
I thought you experimental econ types still had enough common outside enemies in the traditional econ and social psych communities to feel like part of the same team. It’s good news for your field if you’ve developed to the point that your primary energies are directed at your internal disagreements rather than establishing the importance of your field.
As a lawyer, I understand the concept of innuendo — using a term with multiple theoretical meanings (think of the term “fruit”) as a destructive weapon against others, while dishonestly claiming that the innocent meaning was intended. Using the term “denier” in the climate debate is a classic example of innuendo, where the speaker is trying to associate the defamed person with Nazis.
If someone was legitimately claiming that an opponent was willfully resistant to real science the term “rejectionist” could be used.
Some use the term “denialist” to pursue slightly more plausible deniability.
Innocently using the term “denier” for sceptics is as likely as innocently using the term “pedophile” for CAGW proponents. After all, they are only trying to save the world because of their love for the children.
“Rejectionist” is an interesting suggestion.
I find David Burgess’ comment rather strange. He seems to be saying that, in public pronouncements, there is no space for nuance – there can only be right and wrong, black and white.
I hope he is wrong, because in my too many years I have come to understand, often without wanting to, that things are almost always more complicated than they seem to be at first sight. If complication cannot be entertained, then rational discourse is impossible, and unintended consequences inevitable.
It also means, if he is right, that we are wasting, in the West, most of the money we are spending on education, if the general public just wants soundbites instead of real information. Why bother to send them to school if the results are so poor – there are still some chimneys that need sweeping.
I happen to believe he is wrong, but also that politicians and the media – the people who control the public representation of these issues – are trying to make him be right.
+11++
“Why bother to send them to school if the results are so poor – there are still some chimneys that need sweeping.”
I mourn the end of the blog “A Gentleman’s C” and its blogess “Angry Professor. The blog motto? “The world needs ditchdiggers too.”
So what epithet could be applied to those who loudly and persistently assert something to be true when the evidence is lacking? Perhaps they are in “proclaimal”.
I would say they are indiscriminate.
Rejectionist
Delusionist.
Climate naifs.
One of the first things that clued me into the general state of so-called “climate science” was that so many of its proponents kept claiming that the action of CO2 in the climate was “simple high school physics!” ANYONE who thinks that the actions of CO2 in the atmosphere are simple, is someone who does not understand the problem.
About the word Denial — somebody ought to change the Wikipedia entry if you are trying to remove it from our vocabulary. In fact, It brilliantly explains the tactics that denialists use with the following bullets
— simple denial
— minimization
— projection
Read that and you understand the majority of the skeptical arguments posed and how they are framed.
Simple denial is to ignore either subconsciously or deliberately the reality of the situation.
Minimisation is to admit to the possibility but then rationalize the consequences, such as when lil Kim welcomes a warmer climate, rationalizing that it would be a net benefit.
Projection is to accuse the scientists of acts that the desperate deniers are themselves involved in. You can see this every time that The Chief calls someone a ‘space cadet’, forgetting that he himself is a cardboard cartoon character set on creating a circus atmosphere.
Webster, that is so correct. Take you for example. You assume that ocean heat transport has no significant impact on climate on any relevant time scale. That is like saying that as long as the boiler works every apartment has to have the same temperature. Could be why engineers and HVAC guys think the pie in the ERL sky assumptions are worth less than the paper they were printed on.
With the average “shelf life” of climate science papers dropping to years, the few papers that actually should have made it on to the shelves are obsolete almost before they are published.
Luckily you have absolute confidence in your abilities to “Fit” reality to your models.
Web-“Simple denial is to ignore either subconsciously or deliberately the reality of the situation.”
And as to Global Warming, what is the reality of the situation? There is no reality. We only have our hypotheses and perceptions. Using denialism or denier in these contexts is just intellectual laziness without any use of deductive reasoning but loaded with inductive reasoning. I see these kinds of tactics every day here and at other places where the attempt is to demonize or marginalize those who may have legitimate questions about the strength of the science. Sorry, but you dont have a monopoly on the truth. You only have your perception of the truth. Used by the warmists,. denier is close to use of the word “heretic” 300 years ago. Bring on the stockades.
Cappy, you fit into the Professor Irwin Corey slot of denialism. This is a peculiar niche that involves you making up scientific word salad gibberish and sloppily constructed charts that merely add to the FUD. You not only deny reality, you live in your own little world of fabricated reality.
I am in on your joke.
Dennis Adams, Why are you not attacking the scores of denialists making up their own versions of reality with these fantastically faulty models of climate?
Take Lord Loudmouth Moncton who now has apparently jumped on the fruit-loop Murry Salby bandwagon, and is pushing Salby’s unpublishable Mentaculus-like theory.
Denial goes overboard when it jumps the shark and begins to create alternate realities based on fantasies. How do you deal with that?
Web-
Attack the science. Attack it point by point with robust science and not just someone else’s unproven hypothesis. I have seen some scientists who appear to have had long and illustrious careers dismissed as crackpots. How is crackpot a scientific term? Attack the guys science but it is just lazy to write him off as a crackpot or any other ad hominem. I am not referring to Lord M. I see dozens of unproven theories thrown around on both sides of the issue, so it is not one sided.
There is denial among some on both “sides”. The IPCC is denying uncertainty for very understandable reasons.
keep in mind, Dagfinn, that Judith will be concerned. there is no real distinction between calling someone a denier and saying they are in denial. she is going to think thar you are guilty of “intellectual tyranny at i’s worst.”
put on your big boy pants – she’s coming after you.
There are at least 75 alternative theory commenters here with their own version of ABCD.
There is but one prevailing theory of CO2 as the control knob, with the only uncertainty on the high side.
The approach of an academic professional is to not waste time on the 75 and place a big red X over their work and flunk them out. You just can’t afford to argue with these people as that is likely their intent — to create FUD and derail positive discussions.
Face it, these are F students that we are dealing with here.
If this was a real classroom, the denialists would be the students that had previously flunked out but kept on coming back to try to disrupt the learning process.
In a real classroom it would be easy to keep them out but it is not so straightforward in the wild west blog environment. Here, the goal is to put on a show and capture the eyeballs so you can match WUWT in readership.
Could we actually reverse this natural tendency and reach a tipping point whereby discussions were fruitful? I am here to see that happen but am uncertain that it ever will.
WHUT,
“In a real classroom it would be easy to keep them out but it is not so straightforward in the wild west blog environment.”
Yeah, it’s just too bad that you can’t keep dissenting voices from being heard like the good old days.
Thanks for flashing the iron fist of totalitarian speech control that lurks behind the progressive velvet glove of concern for the climate.
GaryM is one of those types that thinks every idea is as good as the next and that everyone should be able to play on the soccer team.
I wonder what law school he went to?
As long as we are talking about deniers, take a look at Roy Spencer’s latest where he is obviously double counting and incorrectly calculating the sensitivity to 1.3C.
He embarrassingly uses one temperature profile to gauge another one, forgetting that the original has the AGW signal baked into it.
What is wrong with these people?
WHUT,
Don’t tell the Mosh and Josh show that I am one who ” thinks every idea is as good as the next ” I am regularly castigated for actually believing what I write, for actually believing the tenets of my philosophy and faith are superior for the advancement of humanity, and for actually believing that those who disagree are wrong.
Unlike the enlightened like yourselves who think all thoughts are equal, that there is no such thing as objective morality. (Until of course someone disagrees with you.)
The chief calls someone a space cadet when they are obviously a member in good standing of the Borg collective cult of AGW groupthink space cadets.
We had a discussion just yesterday about the carbon cycle staring here. Excuse me for getting the units wrong – gigaton of course.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/11/10/the-52-consensus/#comment-411622
Salby seems to have hit a nerve – but his actual views – opposed to the seriously distorted versions from the usual space cadets – are supported by all the science. For which of course they have no answers but personalised nonsense.
Fit a pattern? I think so.
Salby hit a nerve alright — it was the funny-bone. Murry can’t tell the difference between CO2 outgassing and anthropogenic emissions, which is good for a few yucks.
Seriously, you would think one of his climate science colleagues would pull him aside and patiently try to explain this to him, but from his videos, it appears that Salby has also flipped out. I doubt anyone wants to get near him now that he has gone paranoid..
I agree with this observation by Pierre-Normand in the 52% thread:
What ails the fool to laugh? Does something please
His vain conceit? Or is ‘t a mere disease?
Fool, giggle on, and waste thy wanton breath;
Thy morning laughter breeds an ev’ning death.
FRANCIS QUARLES, Emblems
Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools — guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus — THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!
RICHARD FEYNMAN, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman
Read more at http://www.notable-quotes.com/f/fools_quotes.html#kLBLstjSih2Aetrx.99
Has Professor Renata Salecl ever known hunger? America owes denier William Gray and Kyoto-fighter George Bush so many kudos for standing tall against the nihilism of the Left — whether it be its Doomsday Global Warming Machine or its fear of free man or woman — when it was the most hard for anyone to do that. There is a lot of despair and suffering in doing the right thing when others won’t.
“But then I stopped once more. I must be unbelievably thin. My eyes would soon be all the way through my head. I wonder how I actually look? What in the hell is going on that a man has to turn himself into a living freak out of sheer hunger? I felt rage one more time, its final flaring up, a muscular spasm. “What’s wrong with your face, eh?” Here I was walking around with a better head than anyone else in the country, and a pair of fists that could, so help me God, grind a longshoreman into small bits, into powder, and I was becoming a freak from hunger in the middle of the city of Christiania! Was there any sense or reason in that? I had slept in the harness and worked day and night like a minister’s mare; I had read till my eyes fell out of their sockets, and starved my hairs out of my head—and in hell’s name, what for? Even whores on the street fled so as not to have to look at me. But now that was going to stop—do you hear me—stop, and hell take the whole thing! . . . With steadily increasing rage, I ground my teeth in despair, and with sobs and oaths I went on and roared wildly, paying no attention to the people going by. I started once more to punish my flesh, ran my forehead deliberately against lampposts, drove my fingernails deep into the backs of my hands, bit my tongue madly every time it failed to pronounce clearly and then laughed wildly whenever I caused a fairly good pain.” ~Knut Hamsun, Hunger
The global warming debate has become so divorced from reality its like monks washing each others’ feet in a monastery high on a hill distant from the law on the commons while Vikings row ashore looking for adventure and treasure and a lot of blood on the blade of a battle axe.
https://twitter.com/AndrewDessler/status/399921177205813248
This is so cool! First we get to do GHE experiments on corpses now Andy gets a dose of Grogg Laden. BTW, According to the people on the ground in the Phillipeans, the measured wind speeds were 147mph sustained with 175mph gusts making Haiyan a strong 4 to weak 5 at land fall. One official in the Phillipeans district hardest hit estimates the death toll “may reach” 10.000 pretty much like Nawlins initial Katrina estimates where in the “Tens of Thousands”
Prior to landfall NOAA “estimated” the central pressure at 858 mb which it that estimate were correct would make Haiyan the strongest Pacific Typhoon of the satellite central estimation era.
The LA Times take,
http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-officials-typhoon-haiyan-death-toll-could-soar-to-10000-in-philippines-20131109,0,6461436.story#axzz2kLyolzo1
Hurricanes and Typhoons aren’t much fun, been through a few.
> Hurricanes and Typhoons aren’t much fun, been through a few.
Yup.
On the Internet, it’s just another ClimateBall day where we audit speed radars, shoe horn deaths or whine that children are not what they used to be.
But give to the Red Cross if you please.
‘Weather officials said Haiyan had sustained winds of 235 km/h with gusts of 275 km/h when it made landfall. By those measurements, Haiyan would be comparable to a strong Category 4 hurricane in the U.S., nearly in the top category, a 5.’
http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/about/intensity.shtml
In Queensland we build houses to withstand cyclones. Mine is ties down with steel rods to the foundations. We have disaster plans – emergency facilities situated well above flood zones – well trained emergency personnel. I have a personal Tsunami evacuation route. Preparedness is the answer.
The situation in the Philippines is dire but the politics of lies and fraud in the service of AGW ideology is not merely deplorable on any ethical standard – but distracts attention from the real problems and the real solutions.
Willard, “On the Internet, it’s just another ClimateBall day where we audit speed radars, shoe horn deaths or whine that children are not what they used to be.”
Right, that’s why you posted Andy “Balloons are Thermometers” Dessler’s rehash of Grogg Laden’s ill-informed missives.
Thank you for reading my mind, Cap’n.
Here’s Paul Homewood:
> Personally I don’t like to comment on events such as these until long after the dust has settled. Unfortunately though, somebody has to set the record if we cannot rely on the BBC and others to get the basic facts right.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/09/super-typhoon-haiyanyolanda-another-overhyped-storm-that-didnt-match-early-reports/
Unfortunately indeed.
Considering his updates and deleaturs, we can thank Willard Tony that Homewood is in the house to set the record over again and again about all the news reports.
Willard, right so you Andy “Balloons are Thermometers” and Grogg Laden think Willard Anthony is a moron with an agenda for allow a post noting that the source of all “true” science the BBC botched the kmh to mph conversion.
I would think that some of the most intelligent people on the planet might note that 395kph is “almost” unbelievable which might tip the educated off that something was amiss.
It think Willard Anthony scores in this case. But is nice to see we are spending our education dollars wisely :) Enjoy the groupthink.
> It think Willard Anthony scores in this case.
The article was written by Paul Homewood, Cap’n.
We can’t rely on you to get basic facts right.
Willard, Reading comprehension on blogs without edit features sometimes require filling in the (ing)s.
“Willard Anthony is a moron with an agenda for allow a post noting ”
I never said Willard Anthony penned the post :) Are we having a slow day?
> I never said Willard Anthony penned the post :)
Quite right, Cap’n. I was mistaken in thinking you were following my point, which was about Holmewood’s op-ed, whence you simply followed through your “Grogg” idea.
We can convene, though, that Tony wrote the headline, with its own updates. An headline which shares Homewood’s point, a point Tony reiterated in the comment thread:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/09/super-typhoon-haiyanyolanda-another-overhyped-storm-that-didnt-match-early-reports/#comment-1470724
Note that this comment is a bit less expansive than the BBC can’t be trusted to get basic facts right, as Paul Holmwood concluded.
***
Since we’re having a slow day, I might as well state my point: to claim we cannot rely on the BBC and others to get the basic facts right in a post that deplores hype and incompetency is suboptimal, to say the least.
Playing Gotcha games is silly. Worse, it can sometimes backfire. For instance:
When used in the context of the climate debate, would you think the use of “hater” is intellectual tyranny at its worst, Cap’n?
Fulfilling Muprhy’s law, I can’t type “Homewood” anymore.
Willard, FFS, Fat finger syndrome. So Willard Anthony is still a moron with an agenda and Grogg “AGU Meltdown” Laden and Andy “Balloon Thermometers” are the salt of the Earth by responding with “10,000+ people Killed are breathing a sigh of relief” in what should be a laughable over reaction.
I don’t think I would call Grogg a “hater” since I try to avoid the unstable and I think it is sad that Grogg’s cheese slipped off his cracker, but he is a tad on the snippy side. Andy “Balloon Thermometer” Dessler tweeting what should be obviously an incorrect “10,000+ dead” isn’t all that surprising either. Your leaping to their side like they wear some cloak of academic invincibility while trying to get a dig in on Willard Anthony isn’t particular news worthy either. What is eye opening is that none of the academic super heroes seem to know squat about what they are talking about.
Watts is a weather guy and the obvious screw up on a weather related BBC post is something that he would find blog worth. Score one for Willard Anthony.
It was nice of you to provide evidence of Willard Anthony’s second point, Hype. Perhaps he should get credit for that own goal?
> So Willard Anthony is still a moron with an agenda and Grogg “AGU Meltdown” Laden and Andy “Balloon Thermometers” are the salt of the Earth by responding with “10,000+ people Killed are breathing a sigh of relief” in what should be a laughable over reaction.
The tweet was referring to Willard “Hater” Tony’s, Cap’n. I could not care less about Grogg. Yet you keep inserting Grogg in the conversation. Why is that?
As if Grogg made Willard “Hater” Tony hyperventilate about hype anyway.
***
So, what’s up with the 10k number? Just 18 minutes ago, the BBC reported:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24887337
The BBC’s emphasis. If you look at the story, you’ll see it takes information from Reuters and AP.
“According to officials” sounds like it’s according to officials, Cap’n Smiley. Would you rather expect Andrew “Balloun” Dessler to go count to corpse himself? Time for Willard “Hater” Tony for another update about these estimates or do we wait until we have the numbers officially confirmed to whine a bit again?
***
Our sorry story is quite simple. Willard “Hater” Tony pussyfoots about some knotty figure and Paul “distrust the BBC” Homewood earns his temporary nickname. Grogg goes berserk because he finds this indecent. Willard “Hater” Tony epilogues about hype and hate, then Andy “Balloun” Dessler reminds us to keep the eye on the ball in the most paternalistic way while using the D word. And now you’re here trying to follow suit in this never ending blaming game.
If you really want to blame, Cap’n, I think we should do it the good ol’ way. A pox in all the houses.
I sincerely hope you have a better idea where I stand on this.
Good evening,
w
Willard, “According to official Sources.” means I didn’t fact check. Listing an official source means, I checked. No journalist is going to do the leg work and not crow about his superior attention to detail.
If you look at the time line for the 10,000+ that came from one “official” “The Associated Press quoted regional police chief Elmer Soria as saying that Leyte provincial Gov. Dominic Petilla late Saturday told him there could be about 10,000 deaths in the province, mostly by drowning and from collapsed buildings.” and that was second hand. That kind of stuff happens in crisis situation. That 10,000 dead second hand “According to official sources” is the headline for several dozens of articles with down in the body the “could reach 10,000” since if it bleeds it leads you don’t want to waste sales with silly facts in the headline.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303309504579187241144224808
That is a pretty nice piece of journalism. Since you think “According the Official Sources” means more that it does, I can understand why you tend to be on the gullible side.
Past high death tolls in the Philippines have been due to flash flooding, it is a mountainous country. The average death toll in the Philippines is close to 2500 per major storm with huge rainfall. Haiyan was moving at nearly 40 MPH meaning it was less of a rain event with a tight, ~100km hurricane force wind diameter. Could the toll reach 10,000+? Yes, but it appears that is a high initial estimate pretty much like the initial intensity was also higher than actual.
I mention Grogg Laden because of this, “He further claimed that we were “disrespectful” for not immediately updating the death toll to the new estimate of 10,000, which was the result of a political meeting in the governor’s office.” Grogg said referring to Willard Anthony which Anthony posted in a follow-up. That’s Grogg’s equivalent of “According to Official Sources”. Not unexpected with Grogg, you however are supposed to more on top of your game. K-Mart should have fresh batteries for your BS detector.
BTW, there is a new “Big Coke” study that seems to find that “According to Official Sources” has been overly utilized in federally funded nutritional studies. That should give you a nice little run for a while.
Chief Hydrologist | November 11, 2013 at 2:41 pm |
“In Queensland we build houses to withstand cyclones. Mine is ties down with steel rods to the foundations.”
Lucky you. In Texas we get twisters that suck roads and concrete slab foundations clean out of the ground. The only defense is building below-ground emergency shelters. Check this out. It hit just a few tens of miles up the road from me in 1997.
https://www.google.com/images?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4LENN_enUS461US461&q=jarrel+tornado+damage
To get a better idea of the Jarrel F5 tornado imagine an orbital sander with a disk a mile wide and grit up to the size of automobiles scouring the earth’s surface. Nothing above ground level is spared.
Who is holier-than-thou?
Assistance or at least prayers if you’re so inclined first, analysis of the storm later:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/09/world/iyw-how-to-help-typhoon-haiyan/index.html?iid=article_sidebar
I like this argument. I think I’ll steal it:
Me: the world is cooling
innocent victim: no, it isn’t
Me: you just don’t care about the tens of thousands of people that die every year from hypothermia related deaths
> I think I’ll steal it.
Try Deaths and Taxes.
…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes and that people will use appeal to emotion fallacies.
… and people who respond to these appeals by blaming hype not without hyping a bit themselves and by getting indignant with the namecalling that ensues while dishing some more, because they sure can put their boys pants.
Willard, if you have a complaint about how someone responds then do tell what the complaint is. Be specific.
Complaining is boring, steven.
Judith Curry
You quote Skidelsky’s final statement:
It is true that “agenda driven science” and “forced consensus” can quickly lead to “dogma” taking over at the expense of scientific inquiry.
This is obviously occurring today in climate science as a result of the IPCC/UNFCCC constellation, as Sidelsky notes.
And, to make matters worse, the billions of taxpayer dollars spent annually to keep the “dogma” alive, plus the prospect of substantially more if a universal carbon tax is imposed, add to the problem.
Money talks. And big bucks talk very loudly.
There is a whole network of independent interests, who all hope to benefit from the multibillion dollar CAGW industry. They depend on the “dogma” being kept alive.
Add to this that, with the help of the media, IPCC has been able to frame the “dogma” as the politically correct “in” position.
The only thing that can destroy a false dogma is exposure to light.
And, Dr. Curry, I’m optimistic enough to believe that efforts such as yours here and elsewhere will be able to bring scientific inquiry back to climate science despite the forces cited by Sidelsky.
Truth will prevail in the end – and scientific inquiry (not dogma) will establish what that truth really is.
Max
Modern Western Academia had a choice — either build upon a culture of ethics or don’t. They chose the latter.
https://twitter.com/NautilusMag/status/399896257952378880
I don’t think the Enlightenment ever did his way down to the masses. I also think “liberal”-minded people don’t care about any lesson the Enlightenment can provide. Particularly lessons on dogmas. I was one of them; I should know.
Burgess may be happy as an activist, but his argument has an easy answer:
– But if you don’t know how to persuade a more general audience, please either learn how or stay out of the battle.
This is exactly the point. Keep science clean, and let the clowns play their own fights.
“One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment—the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma—is quietly being reversed.”
Quietly reversed my a…..
The substitution of dogma for historical and scientific inquiry is in full throated roar. And “denier” is nothing. Does someone dissent from the “consensus” on any progressive policy? All you have to do is label him one of the following, and there is no need for anyone to even consider what he thinks:
Racist
Sexist
Homophobe
Conservative
Christian
Creationist
Tea party
Or you can use longer phrases like:
War on women
Wants to poison our air and water
Wants children to starve
Wants to push grandma over the cliff
I say again, it’s funny to watch people who have slung around such nonsense without a second thought suddenly wax philosophic over the death (I would say murder) of critical analysis.
I remember when Dr. Curry first began blogging in earnest. In order to maintain her politically correct bona fides, she had to occasionally sprinkle in the occasional “you can write off anyone who listens to Rush Limbaugh” comment. Given that his audience generally exceeds 20 million, that “meme” was typical of progressive rejection of contrary thought. The same dismissiveness was common against WUWT and Climate Audit,
And so it has been for decades. But now, those who find themselves rejecting the rank politicization of “science” in the pursuit of decarbonization, find themselves subject to these same, typical, every day progressive tactics. And suddenly we have the “quiet reversal” of enlightenment style inquiry. Oh please.
Oh well, to quote John McClain (after tossing a corpse out a window to get the attention of an oblivious cop):
Welcome to the party pal.
Back in 2006 or so, Rush Limbaugh’s take on climate change was extremely naive and uneducated, to say the least. Since then he has taken a substantial interest in the topic and apparently Roy Spencer advises him on this topic. So the time derivative has been Limbaugh’s education on the topic, not my dismissal of people who spout complete nonsense on the subject.
Your comments were not about not listening to Limbaugh. They were about ignoring anyone who listened to him (which frankly includes a lot of progressives). I believe the quote (more than once) was “We can forget about the people who listen to Rush Limbaugh….” Just as reading WUWT and Climate Audit should be avoided for the enlightened. Somehow I think the 20 million+ people who listen(ed) to him, are not impressed.
Your views have quite apparently changed on the value of such dismissiveness, as evidenced by this post and much of your comments over the last several years. But dismissive you were. My only point is that many who decry such close mindedness now, engaged in it themselves in the not too distant past. The question is whether those who were formerly members of the tribe can cast off their blinders entirely as to the tactics, or can only see the anti-enlightenment tactics when they are applied to themselves. And the jury is out.
My statement was made in context of people that were listening to Rush Limbaugh circa 2006 and using that as the main source of their information about climate change.
Rush Limbaugh is purely entertainment (and a bit of pep talk and affirmation for those whose memeplexes need their daily dose). He may get consulting from experts in the field– but those experts are carefully chosen to be from a certain preselected position on the issues (i.e. he would not get Mann or Trenberth to be his consultants), so that his knowledge of the issue would be positional knowledge to reinforce the memeplexes of his listener faithful.
Dr. Curry,
I read the comments at the time, and responded to them. You did not limit your comment in any way in response. In fact, you didn;t just reference listeners, you said voters who listend to him could be forgotten. The problem was you ASSUMED anyone who would listen to the dreaded Rush Limbaugh was getting their information from him as their “main source.” Just as not long before that you were dismissive of Climate Audit and WUWT. Until you met Steve McIntyre.
You were as dismissive of conservatives in general. That only stopped (mostly) after you were called as a witness before Congress by those neanderthal conservatives.
It strikes me as odd that you admit that you were once a member of the consensus tribe, but seem to need to believe that you never engaged in the group think that made it a consensus in the first place. I can assure you, your early comments on Kloor’s site were just as anti-conservative as any other continuing member of the tribe. (Kloor finally asked me in two emails not to comment on his site any more after I pointed out to him that his off hand comments about the racism of conservatives was devoid of any actual evidence, and told him posting opinions of fellow progressives to that effect was not evidence.)
It is easy to point out the logical fallacies and group think of others. It’s harder to see it in ourselves.
Oh, I see groupthink in myself especially looking back, but the comment about Rush Limbaugh and your interpretation isn’t correct. I have listened to Rush Limbaugh and still do sometimes when I am driving in the car at the time his show is on. And I have never been dismissive of Climate Audit – I had never heard of it until Aug 2006, when I landed there by accident and was very impressed. Note, prior to landing at climate audit in 2006, i had made a few comments at RC and RP Jr; my engagement in blogs began when I landed at CA.
R. Gates,
Limbaugh served (serves) two functions for conservatives.
When he first started, he was the only voice in any mass media with a wide spread audience who said the things millions of conservatives had been thinking and saying pivately for years. It was not his opinions that mattered to people. It was that he was voicing their shared opinions, which they had never heard in mass media before.
First, in the media, it was as if the US had already become Europe. Everybody agreed on the increased centralization of power in the government, and an increasingly hedonist culture, except those dismissed as racist, stupid, evil, deranged or all four. There was the Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review and a couple of other conservative publications, but their reach mas minor. Limbaugh changed all that.
Second, he was and is a clearinghouse for conservatie thought. Heritage, CATO and ofther conservative/libertarian thiknk tanks existed, but no one in the general populace heard about them. Until Limbaugh. He was to conservatism in general what WUWT later became with respect to climate. In fact, the debate about the politicization of the SPM of the AR4, and the AR4 itself, was aired early and often on Limbaugh’s program, while the most of the world remained oblivious.
He says some dumb things. More often, things he says are taken ouy of context. Those who have never actually listened to him don’t know the difference. And reading excerpted transcripts on the Huffington Post and Think Progress do not count.
I rarely listen to him any more because of time constraints. But he was a breath of fresh air when he arrived ont he scene. When I occasionally have some time in the car to listen, he is still funny as hell, and a good spokesman in general for conservatism.
I don’t expect any of you progressives/moderates/independents to believe or understand it. You had to be there, and have an open mind, to understand.
that’s beautiful, Judith.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3762978/
‘if you beleive in god…you cannot believe in manmade global warming”
Roy Spencer is advising Rush? Would that be the “activist” Roy Spencer, who sees his role to be an advocate?
Put on you big boy pants, Judith.
Selective reasoning is selective.
Try a primary source – not one that is admittedly biased and proven error prone.
GaryM
While I agree with your assessment of Limbaugh reaching the mass audience and being the only so called conservative voice, I disagree on it’s affect. To me Rush Limbaugh is a trogladyte who professes no more than a readers digest worth of knowledge on an unwitting audience that is the reason for his success. Politics boils down to talking points anything intellectual is verbotten (on both sides). He has destroyed (eviscerated) any of the hard work of Buckley; who was able to debate and have a lifelong friendship with George McGovern. He is a simpleton who has misrepresented Austrian School economics in a most embarrassing fashion. Conservatism was better left alone than to be so impuned. I sometimes think Limbaugh is actually an uber-liberal in disguise; what better way to make a mockery of it. Barry Goldwater, in his later years, wanted to kick the religious nut jobs out of the party and realized he erred on civil rights and also proclaimed that gay people have the same constitutional rights as everybody else. To me Limbaugh is a national embarrassment.
So Judith says:
“Since then he has taken a substantial interest in the topic and apparently Roy Spencer advises him on this topic. So the time derivative has been Limbaugh’s education on the topic, not my dismissal of people who spout complete nonsense on the subject.”
So then, let’s examine Rush’s “education,” the “time derivative” that explains why Judith was previously critical, but is now not critical as a function of the input of the non-activist activist, Roy.
“You must be either agnostic or atheistic to believe that man controls something he can’t create.”
This statement by Limbaugh earlier this year:
“See, in my humble opinion, folks, if you believe in God then intellectually you cannot believe in man-made global warming.”
Is a great hint at the memeplex of a certain group of AGW skeptics. But in Limbaugh’s quote above, the word “believe” is very telling, and get’s back to the notion of the “True un-believer”, who “cannot believe in” man-made global warming. This doesn’t sound like doubt or skepticism, but rather, God wouldn’t allow puny humans to muck up the planet like this, and thus we see the blending in Limbaugh’s mind of reason and faith as in “intellectually” your cannot “believe”. Most revealing.
As a theologian, Limbaugh makes a great radio commentator.
But his comment in full does not come across as ridiculous as you would hope. Which is, of course, why progressives never post the whole ting.
“You must be either agnostic or atheistic to believe that man controls something that he can’t create,” he continued. “The vanity! These people — on the one hand, ‘We’re no different than a mouse or a rat.’ If you listen to the animal rights activists, we are the pollutants of this planet. If it weren’t for humanity — the military environmentalist wackos — the Earth would be pristine and wonderful and beautiful, and nobody would see it. According to them we are not as entitled to life on this planet as other creatures because we destroy it. But how can we destroy it when we’re no different from the lowest life forms?”
“And then on the other end, ‘We are so powerful. And we are so impotent — omnipotent that we can destroy — we can’t even stop a rain shower, but we can destroy the climate.’ And how? With barbecue pits and automobiles, particularly SUVs. It’s absurd.”
His point about the vanity and hypocrisy of CAGWers in believing that humans are the center of the universe is spot on. I think of the “scientists” who ruminated about whether the Large Hadron Collider would destroy the Earth. But his lede left a lot to be desired.
Gary
Imo, if anyone believes that an individual human or group of humans COULD NOT POSSIBLY impact the climate they are either stupid or insane.
The comment– “You must be either agnostic or atheistic to believe that man controls something that he can’t create,” is ridiculous. There are many examples. It is much easier to destroy things than create them. You don’t have to “control something” to impact it or destroy it.
I actually rarely listen to Rush Limbaugh, only by accident or extreme boredom. It’s all entertainment to me. But this statement by Limbaugh is even more telling of his general mindset (if indeed he actually believes it and isn’t just pandering to his listening faithful):
““You must be either agnostic or atheistic to believe that man controls something that he can’t create,” he continued. “The vanity!”
___
Of course, every day, people control something they can’t create. Having babies and creating a human life isn’t something people control..It’s all quite natural. Yet, with a single bullet everyday, or in variety of other ways,people take human lives. Very much controlling something they did not create. Limbaugh is illogical and worse still- if he really believes the nonsense he spews he is mixing up that lack of logic with a kind of faux-religion that’s even worse.
The human capacity for evil and destruction is only limited by our imagination, just as is our capacity for love, generosity, and creation.
Babies? last I checked virgins do not get pregnant. Abstinence is the greatest contraceptive, even if it is rarely used.
Seems caught taking something out of context, you beclown yourself trying to equivocate yourself out of it. And still fail to understand what was said.
Gates, “I actually rarely listen to Rush Limbaugh, only by accident or extreme boredom. It’s all entertainment to me. ”
Exactly. His job is to push peoples buttons and he does it well.
Yes, it’s a dumb sentence. You talk extemporaneoulsy, three hours a day, five days a week, and let’s see how many stupid comments come out of your mouths. I see them in bunches around here every day.
And by all means, look for any excuse you can to rule out anyone you disagree with as stupid, evil or mentally ill. Nothing has stopped y’all so far. Ignorance is your friend.
Just to stir the usual suspects up,
Sarah Palin.
“… Would that be the “activist” Roy Spencer, who sees his role to be an advocate?…”
Ok, so forget these guys and look at RPJr – on what basis is this man a “denier” (as he has been labelled by many)? It’s rather the reverse IMO – if you read what he writes, he is more “consensus” than “sceptic” based, but he recognises the part that politics plays in getting policy enacted. Should we not listen to an expert in their field? RPJr is a political science expert – if we shouldn’t listen to what he has to say on the politics of (climate) science, then there is no reason to listen to what (climate) scientists have to say on (climate) science!
Worse – the one area where RPJr does have expertise and is published in climate science (disaster losses) is not just ignored, but the reverse of what the science says is touted (by IPCC lead authors, no less!) as a reason for acting in a particular way! And those that perform this denial have the gaul to suggest HE is the denier?
I do not recall you defending RPJr on this issue – perhaps I missed it, but if you have not, then either YOUR selective reasoning is on display, your own motivated reasoning is on display, or you are even more of an “activist” than anyone you accuse of the same “sin”. Or perhaps none of the above and it’s just never come up where you felt you needed to make a comment on it. Seems unlikely to me, but I’ll leave you that “out” as “good form”.
R. Gates: “He may get consulting from experts in the field– but those experts are carefully chosen to be from a certain preselected position on the issues.”
You mean, like a president’s economic advisors?
> Sarah Palin
https://twitter.com/TheTweetOfGod/status/400026081429700608
Yes, I recall about ten years ago when I was still a starry eyed warmist, listening to Limbaugh pontificating about how God would never have created an atmosphere that man could screw up in any dangerous way. Such moronic comments only served to strengthen my beliefs at the time, that conservatives were generally idiots and that of course global warming was a serious problem.
I still can’t abide the man, but I must say that I now find myself nodding in agreement at times.
An interesting story. Perhaps you are just looking at things more critically now.
“Roy Spencer is advising Rush? Would that be the “activist” Roy Spencer, who sees his role to be an advocate?
No that would be advisor roy Spencer. There is a difference between advising and advocating, although they can shade into each other.
Here is a good example.
When we looking at the science of Star Wars there were many advisors
Advisors say things like: Lasers wont work. Brilliant pebbles is better.
Detecting missiles at launch is hard. Spotting decoys is troublesome.
Advocates, like teller, say things like : we must build missile defense.
The line of course is blurry, just like the line between cups and glasses,
but there are exemplars that serve as centroids of reference.
Claiming climate sensitivity is low looks like what advisors say.
Strapping yourself to a power plant looks like what an activist does.
Conflating the two is always “defensible” in isolated instances, however, its a practice that makes the language less expressive. and if you were successful in getting others to conflate, language would just generate a new term to describe a difference that has proved useful in the past.
For example. If we conflate advisor and advocate we lose the ability to express the following: “he was a great economic advisor to the president, but a lousy advocate.”
When in doubt ordinary language is a good guide. If you have an insight or argument that conflicts with ordinary language, then chances are the language is smarter than you.
“Conflating the two is always ‘defensible’ in isolated instances, however, its a practice that makes the language less expressive.”
I should stop arguing with Mosher. I need to just wait a couple hours, and he’ll contradict himself for me.
How did that go? Oh yeah.
“oh go whine about the language changing, you putz.”
You guys are hilarious sometimes.
“oh jeez another dolt who thinks that language degrades.
Language changes. Always has; always will. Language doesnt get better or worse. it just changes.”
Semantic relativism at its finest. Until we doesn’t like someone else’s obscurantism, sorry, language changes.
> You guys are hilarious sometimes.
Isn’t that Joshua’s line?
“captdallas 0.8 or less | November 11, 2013 at 4:36 pm |
Gates, “I actually rarely listen to Rush Limbaugh, only by accident or extreme boredom. It’s all entertainment to me. ”
Exactly. His job is to push peoples buttons and he does it well.”
It’s amusing how crazy the lefties who want to control the narrative,
react to Rush. Rush is a national treasure, but don’t listen to him.
But I am perfectly happy that other people like to listen to him.
Whenever I do hear Rush, he seems as good as Jon Stewart,
I watched Jon Stewart more than I ever spend time listening to
Rush. Rush is smarter than Jon, but Jon is a funnier clown.
Jon has the tragic idiot thing going. Jon is Saturday Night Live
of daily shows. He’s goofy lefty trying to grasp reality- that he
makes some effort makes it bearable to watch. So Jon Stewart
is also national treasure that I happen like to watch a lot more
than Rush, but because Rush is more informed, more edgy, and more aligned with the American public he more than just entertainment.
Jon Stewart only in minor and superficial way a threat the establishment,
Rush Limbaugh is more of clear and present danger to the
establishment. He is the MSM’s opponent who laughs at them and too
many people listen to him.
Willard –
Nope.
I don’t say “sometimes.”
Logical fail.
He is an advisor and he is an advocate/activist.
Surely, you have seen this before:
Surely, you remember your concern about the negative impact of his advocacy/activism.
Rush Limbaugh simplifies subjects, and does so in a entertaining way. He takes agendas that exist behind the curtain and brings them out on his stage, shines a light on them in simple terms. Some people need simplification – they need things boiled down for them.
What Rush did on CAGW (well prior to 2006) was call it out for the agenda driven movement it was long before most figured that out or would admit to it. You say he used naive rationale (and later cleaned that up with Roy’s help), but the point is he called out the agenda correctly.
CAGW is a political animal. The left leaning media was certainly not going to unmask the agenda behind it. Without individuals and entities willing to at least shine a light on a subject that was being called “settled science”, we wouldn’t have the new environment where common sense seems to be questioning the original false concept and the agenda driving it forward…
Mosher: “When we looking at the science of Star Wars there were many advisors”
Ah, the good old days, when good partisan liberals were arguing that scientists who received government funding – in this case from Defense dept. – couldn’t be trusted due to the loss of prestige and money if they told the truth. My favorite from the era was the series of Bloom County cartoon strips where Opus accidentally receives $600 million for Star Wars research.
Here’s the best in the series, the Line “physicists need Porches too!” Gets me every time. http://www.thecomicstrips.com/store/add.php?iid=83800
Limbaugh still uses the word ‘hoax’ pretty liberally through his tirades, such as here.
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/09/17/global_warming_scientists_we_were_wrong
This puts him more in the conspiracy theorist sub-category of deniers.
That Opus thing was good Jeffn. Why do lefties hate to fund defence but love to fund global warming? In the US, at least, defence is a Constitutionally approved function of the Federal government. I don’t recall the founders mentioning “global warming” as a mandate. They WERE a smart bunch of guys after all!
Jim and Jeff are very confused – in the 2 cases cited, govt wanted progress on one issue and on the other, has swayed between active avoidance of any action and,at best, doing the absolute minimum.
What if he satisfies all of the criteria?
Rush Limbaugh:
Racist (check)
Sexist (check)
Homophobe (check)
Conservative (check)
Christian (check)
Creationist (check)
Tea party (check)
BTW I believe Coast to Coast with George Noory has a large nut job audience too (probably many of the Rush listeners). I guess I have to include myself though since I occasionally listen to both. Coast to Coast is sometimes great entertainment on the night shift
Thus illustrating Gary’s point marvelously.
“Racist (check)
Sexist (check)
Homophobe (check)
Conservative (check)
Christian (check)
Creationist (check)
Tea party (check)”
Food for thought, nothing more:
Am I a racist if I oppose “positive discrimination” (aka “affirmative action”) ? IOW, how can I be a racist for suggesting that people should be treated equally regardless of race?
Am I sexist if I oppose more spending on breast cancer and support more spending on prostate cancer (prostate cancer kills more men than breast cancer kills women, BTW, so it is certainly arguable that it should get more funding)?
Am I a homophobe for espousing the view of christianity, islam and zionism on this subject? (personally, I don’t actually do this BTW) If so, then perhaps the consensus of the majority is actually wrong. What this says about arguments from consensus is, err, interesting, innit?
When you allege traits without evidence, they are nothing more than ad hominems. Check.
“Am I a racist if I oppose “positive discrimination” (aka “affirmative action”) ? IOW, how can I be a racist for suggesting that people should be treated equally regardless of race?”
It seems that temporary discrimination that favors “types” that government has discriminated in the past- is reasonable. But it’s equally reasonable that with government, temporary becomes an institution.
It seems the results of government policy of “positive discrimination”
was a wrong choice.
That as temporary remedy it’s become a habit.
A person could argue that “positive discrimination” has not continued long enough to “fix” problem of discrimination, but such policy can’t achieve this. It’s purpose was two fold, a matter of “justice” and matter of changing “bad habits”. The only way long term way to stop discrimination
is that people under law should be treated equally regardless of race.
“Am I sexist if I oppose more spending on breast cancer and support more spending on prostate cancer (prostate cancer kills more men than breast cancer kills women, BTW, so it is certainly arguable that it should get more funding)?”
Well, either type funding should depend upon what results one expect from the government funding. One might be able to prove that more funding on breast cancer would result in a diminishing return and that more funding for prostate cancer would have more return on with this public spending.
Whether one measure this in terms of number deaths may not be a correct metric. The comparison of death of breast vs prostate may not be comparable. One also compare government costs [or public costs] from either disease, and try to determine the cost savings that either research may achieve. It it could easily be that cancer in general is better
thing to spend government funds on in general.
One could also make the case [if it were actually the case] that breast cancer x amount of dollar has not been getting results, and lessor amount on prostate may get more significant result if there were some
increase in government funding.
But all this is in the weeds- seems quite difficult to make judgement on,
and isn’t something that government policy can really address by merely adding dollars in one bin or the other. That government making the process of innovation less encumbered by poorly managed agencies is
probably a better route.
“Am I a homophobe for espousing the view of christianity, islam and zionism on this subject? (personally, I don’t actually do this BTW) If so, then perhaps the consensus of the majority is actually wrong. What this says about arguments from consensus is, err, interesting, innit?”
Government trying to alter religion, is a government out of control.
And the federal government would in violation of it’s constitution.
Pingback: Edward Skidelsky: Words That Think For Us | The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)
I would like to know what the SOLAR DENIERS think of this paper:
Shindell, D.T., G.A. Schmidt, M.E. Mann, D. Rind, and A. Waple, 2001: Solar forcing of regional climate change during the Maunder Minimum. Science, 294, 2149-2152, doi:10.1126/science.1064363.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/sh05100g.html
concluding paragraph:
These results provide evidence that rela-
tively small solar forcing may play a signif-
icant role in century-scale NH winter climate
change. This suggests that colder winter tem-
peratures over the NH continents during por-
tions of the 15th through the 17th centuries
(sometimes called the Little Ice Age) and
warmer temperatures during the 12th through
14th centuries (the putative Medieval Warm
Period) may have been influenced by long-
term solar variations.
If those worshipers of the holy grail of CO2 could come to this conclusion why do I keep hearing that the suns got nothing to do with it?
Here comes the sun; Here comes the sun
do-do-da-do do-do-da-do He’s a Sol Mann
Ordvic,
Thanks for pointing out that climate scientists have never denied the sun’s role in the climate. The only denial has been from a group who would like to deny that climate scientists fully accept the sun’s role, but also, fully accept the role of many other factors as well, such as in this recent paper that looks at both the sun and volcanoes in the Dalton Minimum cooling event:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/13/10951/2013/acp-13-10951-2013.html
Gates,
Thanks for the article I’m collecting them (solar) right know.
The point is not that science ignores the Sun – e.g. http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Goode_Palle_2007_JASTP.pdf – but that progressive science denialists do. This is no longer about science Toto.
Got it, thanks chief, it looks like a good one
“The point is not that science ignores the Sun, but that progressive science denialists do. This is no longer about science Toto.”
+100
Deniers exist. See the latest His Lord Monkton of Blenchly’s post on WUWT promoting the denier savant Salby and his CO2 3-card Monte parlor tricks.
However, the broad application of denier to everyone not in a hysterical (or should I say prostrate as most are males) panic about CAGW [along with the pause] is helping to implode their ^political^ !movement!
See, something for everyone.
Judith, there weren’t too many comments on the blog post you linked us to, but that isn’t the issue: the mindset is the issue.
So I left a comment there, which perhaps might be moderated within the week and read by virtually no one. I did so in order that I could copy and paste my reply to David Buress, who made the comment you called out, the comment that treats climate change science issues as purely political. Here is my comment to Buress:
“David Buress thinks of climate change science issues as political, not scientific.
That is exactly the problem Skidelsky is getting at. Burgess thinks that whatever science issues there might be, the people who bring such subjects up need to be marginalized, shut up, shunned.
But what if there are actually some science issues that are important?
How can such issues even be brought to the fore, if the people who dare to try are shunned?
For those few who might still have somewhat of an open mind on the subject, I encourage you to visit the website of Judith Curry, an atmospheric scientist, head of her department at Georgia Tech. She has written for the IPCC, but because she thinks that there is greater uncertainty on various climate issues than the IPCC says, she launched her website to explore some of these issues. She has been duly excommunicated. She can’t be called a denier, she’s a very good and widely published scientist, so she becomes merely apostate. Link:
http://judithcurry.com/
Sorry, this is like the Salem Witch trials, and David Buress is a lead prosecutor. It’s for our own good, folks, these Witches have to be killed.
https://twitter.com/curryja/status/398435945612992512
‘Religion’: useful tool in political debates or something that should alert Denizens?
Wrong tweet:
https://twitter.com/curryja/status/398460527535333376
This article appeared in this morning’s twitter feed, it was published Feb 12, 2010. David Burgess suggests a distinction between the use of ‘denier’ vs ‘denial’, whereby denial refers to the argument and denier to the person. I don’t think this distinction is meaningful: when used in a political debate, the main objective seems to be a personal attack.
A particular pseudoscientific and pernicious usage of “denial” was introduced and promoted by Sigmund Freud: here “denial” is an unconscious mental process that “denies” the existence of a strong and likely sexual motive. It was popularized and used loosely to refer to any act of denying some belief as an indication of strong belief in the denied proposition. In the popular usage, if you deny a belief or motive, someone will disparage your statements and simply assert with no evidence that your denial itself is proof positive of your belief in that which you are denying. It isn’t just proof that you are wrong (with no need of people who disagree with you to substantiate any of their assertions), but proof that your motives make anything you say ignorable or dishonest.
It’s just one of a set of concepts that Freud introduced into popular usage: projection (attributing an unconscious motive to someone else) and rationalization (making up justifications for one’s actions that disguise the underlying desire) are the other two most popular. In principle, these “psychopathologies of everyday life” are universal, and everyone must be cautious of his or her own unconscious psychodynamics. Working out an understanding of the psychodynamics takes much time, effort and guidance. However, Freud also began the unconscionable practice of asserting the existence of these processes as the reasons why other people wrongly disagreed with him (based on no evidence whatsoever), and this practice following his example is common. You can hardly find a political or intellectual discourse in which some disputant does not accuse someone else of being in the grip of one of these psychodynamic processes. Then when someone who disagrees with you is asserted to be so undermined, you do not have to provide justification for your own beliefs. Despite the claimed universality of these psychodynamic processes, people believe themselves and their cohorts (intellectual, political, religous, etc) to be immune, and claim to identify the psychodynamic processes only in people who disagree with them.
In their inception the hypothetical psychodynamic processes were subjected to a sort of loose scientific examination. They were intended as and taken as an epistemological improvement over accusing money or the devil of fostering evil thoughts and actions. Following the example of Freud, they are widely used to enforce an intellectual tyranny, with no evidentiary basis at all..
I agree with Prof. Curry: there is no useful distinction between referring to the person with “denier” and referring to the process with “denial”. Both are pernicious and baseless attempts to stigmatize the people who mispronounce “shibboleth”.
Matt, do you think it is pernicious when “skeptics” call “realists” “warmists” or any other in the assortment of denigrating termsseen so frequently here. at Climate etc., including when they call “realists” “deniers,” which has become rather popular?
warmista is the correct term
Yes, but Freud:
> Recent studies in social psychology are reviewed for evidence relevant to seven Freudian defense mechanisms. This work emphasizes normal populations, moderate rather than extreme forms of defense, and protection of self-esteem against threat. Reaction formation, isolation, and denial have been amply shown in studies, and they do seem to serve defensive functions. Undoing, in the sense of counterfactual thinking, is also well documented but does not serve to defend against the threat. Projection is evident, but the projection itself may be aby-product of defense rather than part of the defensive response itself. Displacement is not well supported in any meaningful sense, although emotions and physical arousal states do carry over from one situation to the next. No evidence of sublimation was found.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-6494.00043/abstract
willard: Reaction formation, isolation, and denial have been amply shown in studies, and they do seem to serve defensive functions.
Maybe. What I have read has led me to believe that what has been “rediscovered” is not what was described by Freud in his analyses of psychodynamics. For Freud, they were unconscious processes suppressing awareness of sexual and murderous desires. The overt expressions that can be measured in studies were only a tiny part.
More importantly for my point, the “pernicious” use is to assert that someone else is in the grip of one of these psychodynamic processes, and thereby to attempt to discredit what might be insightful criticisms of one’s own assertions.
“What I have read has led me to believe that what has been “rediscovered” is not what was described by Freud in his analyses of psychodynamics. For Freud, they were unconscious processes suppressing awareness of sexual and murderous desires.”
Yup. And the Baumeister et al. paper above says pretty much the same thing: Some of the devices are there, but “kill the father, f**k the mother” isn’t what they’re protecting.
> [T]he “pernicious” use is to assert that someone else is in the grip of one of these psychodynamic processes, and thereby to attempt to discredit what might be insightful criticisms of one’s own assertions.
Maybe.
Maybe blaming in on Freud was an attempt to discredit what might be an insightful concept.
Wilalrd(@nevaudit): Maybe blaming in on Freud was an attempt to discredit what might be an insightful concept.
No. Freud did accuse disputants of disagreeing with him only because of their unconscious motives, using his concepts in an undisciplined manner and ignoring his own claims that actual understanding require extensive psychoanalysis.
> Freud did accuse disputants of disagreeing with him only because of their unconscious motives […]
Not that it matters much for the fecundity of the concept of denial in contemporary psychology, but I’m curious: care to back that claim with some specific examples?
***
There’s no need to return to Freud to show that the D word can be used to label someone. Lots of words can be used to label. The problem lies not in the use of the D word inasmuch as the castigation implied by the label.
That a word can be used to castigate does not diminish its theoretical merit.
Willard(@nevaudit): That a word can be used to castigate does not diminish its theoretical merit.
I agree. However, “the D word” is used to absolve the user of the responsibility of responding to what might be insightful critiques by the “identified denier”.
The example I remember was his castigation of Alfred Adler at one of the meetings of psychoanalysts. I shall spend at least some time trying to track down a published citation.
There is a follow-on problem: the related self-victimization from folks might consider putting their big boy pants on and get past the castigation long enough to stop castigating others.
I think that “playing the ‘denier’ card” will prove a useful term for the phenomenon,.
BREAKING NEWS: RADICALISM UNRESTRAINED
!!! “Denial of justice” decried !!!
Author “Publius” shelters behind anonymity
!!! Conservatives outraged !!!
Summary Agents of the Enlightenment have long shone the light of reason, science, and universal justice upon reactionary elements who sought to deny the rational, scientific, and moral legitimacy of the Enlightenment.
Observation Who’d `ave thunk that The Federalist would so ably defend (in #38) the common-sense principles of ObamaCare against the forces of denialism?
Conclusion May the Enlightenment’s battle against denialism be prosecuted with the same cheerful vigor in the 21st century, that it has been prosecuted in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries! And may the modern Enlightenment’s forces win comparable victories!
Acknowledgement Appreciation and thanks are extended to the denialist elements of the Climate Etc forum, for helping to clarify the pro-Enlightenment historical foundations of counter-denialism!
Amazing.
A fan of *MORE* discourse: Observation Who’d `ave thunk that The Federalist would so ably defend (in #38) the common-sense principles of ObamaCare against the forces of denialism?
You “went off the deep end” there, Brother.
Wow!
that’s beautiful, Judith.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3762978/
‘if you beleive in god…you cannot believe in manmade global warming”
Roy Spencer is advising Rush? Would that be the “activist” Roy Spencer, who sees his role to be an advocate?
Put on you big boy pants, Judith.
Selective reasoning is selective.
I can understand your need to divert attention away from the Liar-in-Chief.
“Wow!
that’s beautiful, Judith.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3762978/
‘if you believe in god…you cannot believe in manmade global warming”
Roy Spencer is advising Rush? Would that be the “activist” Roy Spencer, who sees his role to be an advocate?”
Don’t you think it would good idea for more climate professionals to talk
to the media.
Rather than being limited to reporters getting a sound byte from climate professionals.
If you want to make climate an issue which costs the people in the world trillions of dollars- increases in surcharges, subsidies, endless regulations,
etc, etc does this require the climatic experts make sure the public is properly informed in these matters?
It seems that Roy Spencer thought that Rush was not doing as good as
representing facts regarding climate issues as well as he might, and
so considered it necessary to advise him in these matters.
Is the something wrong with this.
It’s as though Roy Spencer was the director NASA and doing something illegal to get himself arrested for breaking the law. There different ways
one could be activists. That Roy Spencer makes himself available to give advice, seems like a duty of people involved in public service.
So is using biased sources to prove your own bias. Put on some big boy pants and try going to the primary source.
Several questions pop up in mind when “denial or denier” are hurled my way: who is talking? is it me in particular or am I just a part of a category? what kind of response is wanted or expected from me?
If I am accused of being a denier or in daniel and the accusation is from the usual suspects whom I consider buffoons like Mike, Gavin & Jim, the deflector shield has already poped up and I continue to cruise at warp 5.
If I have a developing and mutually shared values relationship and the person says: “you are just not getting it” regarding, at least for this blog some aspect of science I am trying to understand, I will pause, formulate a question and be prepared to listen further. My emotional response is usually: work harder.
In a long and sustaining relationship when I am told I am a denier or in denial, for instance: “Its time to take the car keys from mother”, then my response is both cognitive and emotional, recognizing that I have to change perspectives and acknowledge something I am having difficulty with.
When “denier” or “denial” come out of the blue, I assume the worst connotation, ask what is meant by that accusation and demand an apology on the spot if the answer is not satisfactory to my intellect and/or emotional state at the time. Raw emotion.
“Denial is the secular form of blasphemy”
Sometimes I am just willing to show a little blasphemy if you know what I mean.
I ask what specifically is it that you believe I am denying.
“Politics and the English Language” (1946) is an essay by George Orwell which criticises the “ugly and inaccurate” written English of his time and examines the connection between political orthodoxies and the debasement of language. It was originally published in the April 1946 issue of the journal Horizon.
Orwell said that political prose was formed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language#Critical_reception
Climate etc. = “YES, BUT DENIER.”
In science ad hom is not a substitute for knowing how to add.
Joshua
The point of your comment was what? Do you now feel better?
actually, doc, sunshine has me pegged. my main goal is to see poor people starve, preferabky children (if we can’t kill them with malaria first).
Joshua, you are just being a Nazi.
This is not in anyway a personal attack; I am just pointing out that you are a representative of a genocidal racists group of thinkers, and though you personally may not to wish to murder on the basis of their ethnicity, you aid the modern hate-filled fascists in their goal.
How easy this progressive stuff is.
OK. That was way overboard. You’re going to give Godwinism a bad name.
Godwin’s idea of what web discourse should be couldn’t concern me any less that it already does.
Jim2,
Me either. But I am very much against the degradation of the language.
“You are just being a Nazi,” when used for those who are not…being Nazis, is dumb.
Being a Nazi is sending people to death camps for the purpose of gassing them or burning them alive.
If being a default progressive (defending policies that are often in fact being pushed by fascist activists because you don’t understand them), is being a Nazi, you have to condemn roughly 40 percent of the US population. Which neuters the term.
Sarcasm exemption. Godwin overruled.
“But I am very much against the degradation of the language.”
oh jeez another dolt who thinks that language degrades.
Language changes. Always has; always will. Language doesnt get better or worse. it just changes.
Do you get a salary? does the person who gives you the salary adhere to the traditional meaning of that word?
Obscurantists always defend their obscurantism. There is a difference between language “changing”, and the intentional degradation of the language to advance a political movement. You love quoting obscure writers and philosophers. So you may have heard of this little known guy called George Orwell….
Sceptics > Deniers > Dismissers > Sceptics
John Gummer (promoted to Lord Deben, heaven only knows why) now uses the term “dismissers”.
Chief’s citation to Sornette (2009) brought to mind a disturbing thought. Many of Sornette’s examples relate dragon king events in financial markets. If Black Swans can’t be predicted or avoided there, what are the chances that we can predict or avoid them for something like climate?
You should check out his TED talk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_eFjLZqXt8
Blacks swans are observations that invalidate previous experience. All swans are white is the classic example. Invalidated when they saw black swans on the Swan River in Western Australia.
Dragon kings are extreme events at tipping points.
Different things entirely.
Thanks, Chief. Looks interesting.
Oh dear, oh dear. Firstly there is nothing new in this talk. He makes the mistake of relating trends in nature over time with huge changes in error to laboratory measurements of stress related failure (with constant error). BTW for every example he shows of this, one could show shear-stress failure that does not follow his “model”. He’s found something useful then looks for it everywhere. It’s the same thing that happened in the use of fractals; at one point, once a statistical fractal was found in one branch of a discipline you get a “bubble” of papers explaining everything as a fractal.
cd “The Fractal Bubble” I like that.
What is interesting is that fractals and rounding errors are related. Pi, e and Phi (golden ratio) are common in natural because they are stable, unchangeable values. Planets and stars are round because over eons that is the only stable shape so we are stuck with Pi. Then gravity which causes Pi to be common has that inverse square law, but stars and planets aren’t point in space they are volumes in space, so masses cannot be perfect whole numbers and orbit stably. You need almost 2, but not quite. so Phi (1.618…) and its companion 2.618… are more likely to be stable over billions of years than any “normal” ratio that fits our perception of math.
If we programmed in Phinary instead of Binary, then there would be less rounding error and we would never notice Phi. But since we are simpletons we like base 10 and will force nature to our will even though we are introducing error.
if numbers did not exist we would have to invent them.
========
cd said about Sornette:
Yes, sometimes a fat-tail is just a fat-tail. It most often has to do with greater amounts of disorder reflected as an uncertainty. And especially if the uncertainty is located in the denominator of an operand, the outcome gets related as a power-law fat-tail.
That is what often happens in shear-stress failure, which I described here
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2009/10/creep-failure.html
The failure point is dispersed mainly because of uncertainty in the characteristics of the material — not all materials have the same makeup of defects, etc, .
Sornette knows this because he describes the effect in his earlier book “Critical Phenomenon in Natural Sciences”. It’s called a ratio distribution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratio_distribution
Yet he decides to go on with the Dragon-King metaphor because he wants to emulate his buddy Nasim Taleb and get some of that Black Swan fame.
The fact is that all these idiotic deniers such as The Chief Hydrologist and Cappy Dick keep on referencing Dragon-Kings as if they know what they are talking about instead of contributing even more to the FUD,.
The denialosphere will grab any talking-point to further solidify their belief system, no matter how dishonest that makes them.
Webster, “The fact is that all these idiotic deniers such as The Chief Hydrologist and Cappy Dick keep on referencing Dragon-Kings as if they know what they are talking about instead of contributing even more to the FUD,.”
Actually, Chief is the dragon kings guy, I am the “parsimonious reasoning” guy. The first thing you check for is errors.
Hubris and rounding errors make for great comedy.
““Denial” is legitimate political shorthand, and not using it makes the world a worse place.”
Except he doesn’t tell us what it’s shorthand for. “I tolerate only my own viewpoint and no others” is pretty close in my experience. It’s typical of people who use the D word. They claim it has a specific meaning; in practice, it doesn’t.
The market dynamics for the global warming alarmist meme has changed dramatically. In the past — for example, before 2006 when Joel Achenbach wrote his article, The Tempest) — the AGW movement was so threatened by William Gray they felt justified in using any means including Leftist propaganda techniques to marginalize Gray.
That was when labeling Gray as a denialist had power to bring the credibility of skeptics into question. But now, the lack of credibility of the UN-IPCC and its supporters in Western academia is the real issue.
R Gates’ earlier comment about Rush Limbaugh gave me pause to think:
In the UK, much the same could be observed in the reverse sense about the output of pro-AGW media such as The Guardian newspaper – and more sadly, about the BBC and the New Scientist, when it comes to coverage of climate change.
It is the unwillingness to admit that there are topics worthy of debate, that there are alternative, reasoned viewpoints, that is the cause for greatest concern. The biggest denial is the denial of free speech. That way lies tyranny.
Rather than anything to do with science, bringing a personality like Rush Limbaugh into the debate is a tacit admission by the Left that global warming is ideological –i.e., yet another Left vs. right issue driven by the Left’s unstated desire to undermine Americanism.
Surely you meant to say David Rose of the Daily Mail or James Delingpole of the Telegraph?
A “Trembling Liver-Spotted” Conclusion Chris Monckton is a leading contender for a special 2013 climate-change IgNobel Prize in the category “florid demagoguery by a denialist.”
Surely, the reds and pinkos are far more florid, no?
Florid. That’s good, coming from FoMD.
Certainly surprising if intimating a preference for science over florid demagoguery.
LOL … Wagathon you are entirely correct!
The *right* term for climate-change that elicits demagogic language like n*z*z, c*mmi*s, gr**nies (and hybrids like eco-n*z*s) is undoubtedly Floridian climate-change.
Thank you for this amusing yet economically and scientifically well-considered suggestion, Wagathon!
Didn’t you ever study the classics when you were just a little Fraud?
Vercotti Doug. (takes a drink) I was terrified of him. Everyone was terrified of Doug. I’ve seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug.
Interviewer What did he do?
Vercotti He used sarcasm.
He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire.
It is ironic how some people cannot understand irony, so that we must use tags.
He was a cruel man, but fair. And knew how to treat a female impersonator. :)
> It is ironic how some people cannot understand irony, so that we must use tags.
Are you implying that Fan will never grasp irony as long as there are colors in his comments, Doc?
A fan of *MORE* discourse: A “Trembling Liver-Spotted” Conclusion Chris Monckton is a leading contender for a special 2013 climate-change IgNobel Prize in the category “florid demagoguery by a denialist.”
Yes. That was an especially awful screed, and an embarrassment to read.
THIS ENTIRE COMMENT THREAD is a Dunning Kruger Case Study.
Argh.
http://explorativeapproach.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Dunning-Kruger2.jpg
Please leave truth and falsehood to philosophers.
–e.g., Unconscious incompetence – The individual neither understands nor knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit, nor has a desire to address it… and when it comes to climate change Western academia has shown no inclination or desire to address its scientific shortcomings.
This type of superior performance (by experts) does not exist for complex-systems forecasting: whether its long term consumer trends or capital markets movement. Studies show even “top” money managers are no better than blind ape with a dart board (over a sufficiently long period of time and taking into account fund fees).
So attempting to square the circle (“GW is all the sun”) may be DK syndrome, but being wary of someone who claims to have squared the circle is not DK – in fact it is wise, especially when like with investing your money directly (or indirectly thru tax and spend) there are always many people willing to sell you their brilliant method.
curtd59: THIS ENTIRE COMMENT THREAD is a Dunning Kruger Case Study.
Care to back that claim with some specific examples?
Burgess is right:
“Denialism, anti-denialism, and anti-anti-denialism (this article) are part of politics and journalism, not part of science. And the rules are different. As it has been said “Politics ain’t beanbags,” and the term for those who think otherwise is “losers.”
the question is does the term “denier” serve any useful purpose.
I’ll explain why it sucks… in a bit
Politics aint bean-bag. No “s”.
It’s like saying “There’s no crying in baseballs.”
oh go whine about the language changing, you putz.
Oh go whine with your mini-me, for hours, about who is more obscure.
Gresham’s law. Bad money drives out good money. The bad money is, however, still bad money.
From what I’ve been able to see, there are two “purposes” – although I would call neither “useful.”
(1) it serves a “purpose” for “skeptics” who can see support for their self-victimization via “Yes, but denier.” (Of course, some might respond to them by saying that they should put their big boy pants on – although not Judith, eh?)
I would suppose that some “realists” think that somehow using the term marginalizes “skeptics.” I’d say that they would be wrong about that. I see no evidence that the term has increased the marginalization of “skeptics.”
More operational for most “realists” who use the term, would be my guess, is it serves a function of helping to solidify their identification of “the other,” and as such helps coalesce their own self-victimization and their own group identification.
But IMO, none of that is “useful” in any meaningful sense.
“the question is does the term “denier” serve any useful purpose”
Yes, it is a tribal identifier. The person who uses it identifies themselves as part of a group that values the political consequences of ‘fighting’ cAGW. Class warfare collapsed with Scientific Socialism, so social engineers require a new overarching meme. What could be better than ‘saving the world’? Urging action to stop cAGW also means that your opponents want to destroy it.
In the same way that early Christians used the fish to identify one another, so the modern day redemptionists may be known by labeling their latter-day polytheists, deniers.
“Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.”
–from In Praise of Limestone, WH Auden
doc –
Evidence of the selectivity of your approach:
The term is being used by people on both sides in the climate wars. Since you read these threads, you have no doubt seen it used by both sides.
Two types of evidence go in. One registers in your brain so as to stimulate a conclusion. The other evaporates in the eithernet.
Same ol same ol.
Josh meet Haloperidol, Haloperidol meet Josh, you can have a long sane time together.
I gots news for you. Class warfare is alive an well and residing in Chicago.
And so here we see evidence of Doc’s consistency in attitude towards ad homs.
Selective “concern” is selective, Doc.
Josh, its not like you haven’t got form as a word wrangler.
You ever studied what happened to supporters of Malcolm Muggeridge, George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens after they made the switch from left to right? In all cases they were attacked and their historical work, praised on released, was reanalyzed to find the worms in the apples, missed the first time around.
“…The term is being used by people on both sides in the climate wars. ”
Sure. At the risk of “mommy too-ism”, where did it originate?
In any case, I suggest you carefully read CA from start to finish and then ask “How did Steve Mac get labelled ‘denier’?” Did he not find fault with various works? Did he not play the ball, not the man? Does he not continue to provide technical arguments against certain aspects of papers where he could rightly be said to have at least as much expertise in the area criticised as those who defend the same mistakes and would rather he just went away?
If you can defend these actions against SM by suggesting that while he is not himself a denier, but that he does provide “fodder” for denialists, then surely your sense of fair play, selective reasoning and motivated reasoning would suggest that those who label him “denier” are at least as politically motivated as they claim he is and are worthy of the same treatment? Surely if this is the case, then the whole RC crowd can legitimately be labelled “deniers” themselves!
Mosher Burgess is wrong.
Science is very much part of politics. In some spheres it appears to be driving the process. Trying to suggest the two can be separated is dishonest. It’s like the bleeding-hearts who found themselves supporting wars against religious zealots and dictators but believe they have nothing to do with the collateral damage and destroyed countries.
The more interesting discussion would be how science has found itself in this position now rather than trying to deny that science has anything to do with the process.
In science a failure to reject the null hypothesis does more than establish doubt — it requires that the hypothesis be denied.
Type II error.
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”
~Charles Darwin
When I use the term “Climate warming pause deniers” I am not associating anyone with Nazis – I am associating them with idiots. The warming has paused (and is another example of climate change). It is a good fit – far better than the abused “climate change denier” since nobody is denying climate change. Climate change is in fact normal and if it did not change we’d be in deep poo.
The warming of the surface air temperature has paused. The warming of the oceans has not paused.
21st Century
2000 to 2010.33 – plus .17C per decade
2010.33 to 2012 – minus 1.6C per decade
2012 ’til now – plus 1.0C per decade
Read it and weep. The PDO signals a climate shift in 2012!
The warming of where we have thermometers has stopped. So the warming has continued where we have no thermometers.
The warming in the oceans has not stopped, so therefore “global warming has paused” because of a relatively short-term trend in surface air temperatures (in a relatively small % of the earth’s surface).
Same ol same ol.
PDO monthly values.
‘2012** -1.38 -0.85 -1.05 -0.27 -1.26 -0.87 -1.52 -1.93 -2.21 -0.79 -0.59 -0.48
2013** -0.13 -0.43 -0.63 -0.16 0.08 -0.78 -1.25 -1.04 -0.48’
It is always impossible to see what JCF is on about – but the AGW delusion is strong in this one.
‘In simple terms, the climate system is chaotic, capable of causing global warming (or cooling) all by itself. There probably is no magical normal average albedo, keeping the same amount of sunlight coming in to the climate system year after year. As I keep reminding people, the increase in ocean heat content over the last 50 years is equivalent to a 1 part in 1,000 change in average radiative energy flows. Do we really think nature cannot cause such small changes all by itself? ‘ Roy Spencer
The temperature (oceans + atmosphere) follow net TOA energy flux. Net flux is by convention shown positive warming. The large variability is to do with cloud cover change and outweigh both changes in greenhouse gas forcing and TSI.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_EBAF-TOA_Ed27_anom_TOA_Net_Flux-All-Sky_March-2000toJune-2013_zps99821859.png.html?sort=3&o=1
Cloud is inversely correlated to sea surface temperature – variability in which is mostly PDO+ENSO = IPO.
Ben Laken and Enric Palle (2013) use tropical SST to validate older data and cross calibrate with MODIS.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=40
Where does it go now? LOL
BTW – the energy budget suggests a peak in 1998.
Lyman and Johnson’s (2013) work suggests a peak pre-ARGO and a warming in ARGO (for the period) consistent with net TOA flux
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=40
Pre-ARGO is very uncertain.
e.g. – for coverage – http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/OceanHeatCoverage_zps6cb294af.png.html?sort=3&o=19
And I notice that Joshua has learned some lines good little parrot that he is.
@ Joshua | November 11, 2013 at 4:36 pm |
“because of a relatively short-term trend in surface air temperatures (in a relatively small % of the earth’s surface)”
But you warmists used a shorter term trend in surface air temperatures warming (in a relatively small % of the earth’s surface) to drive your cult movement ???
Have you know dignity ? How low will you go with the spin ?
Dr. Curry’s larger point is sadly true. I think of the closing scene from “Cabaret” for a cinematic metaphor of this change in action.
One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment—the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma—is quietly being reversed.
Not just America — even the Enlightenment — has been stabbed in the back by Western academia: the integrity of science sacrificed on the altar of secular, socialist dogma.
Geez Wag, you use terms like “Western academia” like a Marxist uses “Industrial Proletariat.” You have a future in Sociology.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~econjeff/Papers/econ_soc_phrase_original.pdf
You mean, socialist (anti-capitalist, Leftist, liberal Utopian ideologues), secularist (atheist fundamentalists or simple reflexive anti-Judeo-Christian contra-cultural hedonists and abortionists), envirowacko (trust fund liberals) purveyors of anti-Americanism–i.e., Eurocommie-AGW-catastrophist-hypocrites?
Too much!
I think we are concerned with those factors, over which we have some control, that are contributing to global warming over,say, the past century. For certain our energy use has increased more than tenfold and 80% of it is being supplied by fossil fuels. All energy eventually becomes heat, but with fossil fuels heat is immediately released upon combustion and a by-product of that is the release of carbon dioxide. CO2 is a gas (greenhouse) that absorbs infra red radiation and may contribute some heat gain. However the heat of combustion is the significant contributor. Heat emissions from our energy use are four times the amount that can be attributed to the actual measured rise in atmospheric temperature. Where does the rest of the heat go? To the oceans?,to the troposphere? Who knows? The point being it is enough to raise the question: “how much does CO2 really add”?. Will the CO2 continue to rise? Certainly as long as we continue burning fossil fuels. If we remove CO2 through CCS it will require the expenditure of more energy, time and money. To reduce the CO2 by one ppm will require the capture and storage of 18,000,000,000,000 pounds. How much could this reduce temperature. It makes little sense to capture CO2 after the heat has already been released. We need a realistic reassessment of the individual contributions of HEAT and CO2, but it is clear that fossil fuels must be mostly eliminated either because of HEAT or CO2. If HEAT is the major contributor, then Nuclear power, though CO2-free, is not an option since it emits ore than twice the total heat as its electrical output. The answer must ultimately lie with “renewable” energy sources such as, solar, wind, hydroelectric, etc, which add no additional heat to the environment.
So, France also should be held accountable for global warming because of all the heat that nuclear power plants generate?
philohaddad,
I agree. Seven billion billion people in 2013, and all their works generate considerably more heat than about 1.6 billion people in 1900 on a day to day basis.
As you point out, the majority of heat generated comes about as a result of the oxidation of carbon.
Why this should surprise anyone is a mystery to me.
Fortunately, this generated heat cannot be easily trapped or stored, and unerringly finds its way off the planet to the cold sink that surrounds the Earth. Lucky us, or we would all be well roasted by now.
I disagree, however, with eliminating heat. There is nothing like heat to cook your food, keep you warm, pump your potable water and so on. Our puny heat generating efforts are ephemeral. Douse the fire, and pretty soon you’re cold again.
I like comfort. Unfortunately, keeping cool in a warm climate requires the generation of heat, if my air conditioning condenser is anything to judge by. So please, more energy, not less. If that makes me a warmist (not a Warmist), I’d rather be warm than cold.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Actually the use of the word denier by the bullies shows how low they have sunk but more importantly that they have lost the argument?
+1000
I have deep emotions about the American people. If I were to cry for anything, I would cry for them and the policies that they’re about to face.
Nancy Pelosi
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/n/nancy_pelosi.html
The Left demonstrating its hatred for humanity: We must stop deniers presenting themselves as the rightful regulators of scientific debate. Denial of the science of climate change is eroding public understanding of the issue and seems to be undermining trust in scientists.
“After saying she had “concerns about some of the language” in the current political debates, the speaker got emotional while discussing the rhetoric that “created a climate” that led to violence in San Francisco in the late 1970s — a seeming reference to the murders of Harvey Milk, the gay activist and member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and the city’s mayor, George Moscone, in 1978.
“And so I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made, understanding that — that some of the people — the ears it is falling on are not as balanced as the person making the statement might assume,” Mrs. Pelosi added.”
Harvey Milk was murdered by a fellow Democrat because Milk would not give him a high paying local government job. Milk was not murdered for his left-wing politics or because of his sexuality, but because he wouldn’t pony up on a kick-back to a Union crony.
Ignoring his cynicism and misanthropy – since when did we all agree politicians could manipulate us, I don’t remember ticking that particular box – the real problem with Burgess’ argument is that you really can’t separate science and politics that easily. Science really is now a significant part of the political discourse in a completely unmediated way. Suggesting that science and scientists are aloof and pristine while the rest of us are wallowing in the cesspit of politics is a pure fantasy.
Case in point.
http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/189854-dems-demand-issa-withdraw-subpoena-of
Basically, “you can’t question us, we’re experts and we’re busy fixing this thing that we screwed up”.
Never let a crisis go to waste. And if there isn’t a crisis for you to take advantage of, create one.
Furthermore, we believe that health care reform, again I said at the beginning of my remarks, that we sent the three pillars that the President’s economic stabilization and job creation initiatives were education and innovation – innovation begins in the classroom – clean energy and climate, addressing the climate issues in an innovative way to keep us number one and competitive in the world with the new technology, and the third, first among equals I may say, is health care, health insurance reform.
Nancy Pelosi
America will be far safer if we reduce the chances of a terrorist attack in one of our cities than if we diminish the civil liberties of our own people.
Nancy Pelosi
The impact of climate change is a tremendous risk to the security and well-being of our countries.
Nancy Pelosi
What every liberal fascist believes: “Climate change is already having pervasive, wide-ranging effects on nearly every aspect of our society.”
From my position and observations, the “green” driven CAWG movement has cost jobs. This healthcare policy will cost more jobs and ultimately most left based policies end up costing jobs.
Without jobs economies collapse. Without healthy economies all these policies will also collapse. You might say it will self correct, but you would be in denial about all the human suffering this process will cause…
Oh my gawd, Obamascare!
Oh my gawd. Oh my gawd, it’s terrifying.
LMAO.
Yet another comment. Yet another alarmist at Climate etc.
Perhaps Obama should be awarded another Nobel for his cash-for-clunkers economics.
We could call extended unemployment the “cash for drunkards” program.
“We could call extended unemployment the “cash for drunkards” program.”
The next shoe is social security disability. Especially in “Coal Country” where they are feeling a little oppressed by Greenies lack of compassion.
O know, it’s really freakin’ awful. They still make zombie Obama cars at dead American auto companies, and that’s frightening to the point I’m a afearedy of it draggin’ us down down down.
Cap. Dall. says: The next shoe is social security disability. Especially in “Coal Country” where they are feeling a little oppressed by Greenies lack of compassion.
Don’t worry, Obamacare includes mental health benefits. It’ll have those hillbillies drooling all over themselves what with all the Thorazine and all.
Maybe some cultura translation is required for us non-Americans – what is so terrifying about some basic health care?
Before you know it, Thorazine will be renamed Obamasoma. Brave new world we have entered! We could name it PelosiLand!
We have to weather it to see what’s in the climate.
===============
“What every conservative believes: “Demand to respond to climate change is already having pervasive, wide-ranging effects on nearly every aspect of our society.” ”
There – fixed it!
“A charge of denial short-circuits this debate by stigmatising as dishonest any deviation from a preordained conclusion. It is a form of the argument ad hominem: the aim is not so much to refute your opponent as to discredit his motives.”
Excellent and thank you.
What is the “fix” for an admittedly Left vs. right issue–Eurocommunism?
Skidelsky
Yes. he is right and Judith, thanks for bringing his views to our attention. I have never accepted the term myself, believing that poor science will eventually be recognized as such and I need no special label for condemning it as such. History is full of attempts to fool the public, usually to support political ends.
Actually when I first heard the term ‘greenhouse’ gas it took only seconds for me to realise that this was just a label to cover up their ignorance. but support their view of dire consequences..A neat trick that supported the ‘science is settled’ argument. Was it a legitimate trick? No. but it worked.
Unfortunately there is some truth in the IPCC science, but carbon dioxide’s powers of heat absorption are not supported by its specific heat as usually measured. So they failed to investigate the properties of the many versions of the CO2 molecule (the science is settled) Had they done so, they would have realised that their models were wrong in failing to predict the on/off nature of global warming.
..
The use of the term “denier” in relation to climate change has further dimensions. It infers that the evidence in support of predicted human-caused climate catastrophe is as strong as for HIV causing AIDs or smoking causing lung cancer. In both cases there are, unfortunately millions of past examples, each an individual tragedy. Climate change might be real but trivial. But there are no past examples and the indicators are necessarily faint amongst normal climatic noise. Use of the term “denier” helps the user in seeing as inferior anyone who questions their beliefs.
There is another false association as well with the two medical conditions. Knowing the cause of a disease unfortunately does not give knowledge of the cure. I only wish it did. But “denial” of climate is also applied to anyone who questions policy.
Yeah, cry me a river about the term “denier” used against poor moderates, independents and lukewarmers.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/363678/anti-gun-activist-shannon-watts-open-carry-texas-taliban-might-shoot-and-rape-moms
“At the end of my conversation with Shannon Watts, of gun-control group Moms Demand Action, Watts said something rather astonishing. The reason that the moms in Dallas were so intimidated by the counter-protest outside, she told me, was that Open Carry Texas is ‘like the Taliban’ and could feasibly have planned to open fire.
…
‘You never know with these mass shootings. I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know if these people have had background checks. Or if they have had any training.’ Watts also suggested that Open Carry Texas was full of people who might rape the women involved in Moms Demand Action.”
The writer’s entirely reasonable response: “I don’t know too much about OCT, I grant you. But I do know that one is probably unlikely to plan to shoot up and then rape a restaurant full of mothers after one has alerted the press to one’s presence and brought along one’s wives and children for good measure.”
I saw the title and expected the thread would be about denial of nuclear energy and nuclear energy deniers.
Alas, nothing important here, move along :)
Well – I am packing my SUV and heading for NSW – south of the border – hasta la vista baby – don’t miss me too much.
Stay there and bend bananas Chief – and enjoy the subsidy us mexicans provide you ;-)
Bon Voyage!
Go north young man.
Down here;
It’s cold .
It’s raining.
It’s November
It’s summer.
The New Ice Age has started south of the border[s] in the land of the AFL and the home of snow and ice and sleet and hail in the state called Victoria.
For every Leftist solution there must be a problem…
If I had a hammer
Ever’y problem’d be a nail
Ever’y problem’d be a nail
All over this land,
I’d hammer down freedom,
I’d hammer down lib’rty,
I’d hammer down voting by,
My brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.
If I had a sickle,
I’d swing it in the morning,
I’d swing it in the evening,
All over this land,
I’d cut down freedom,
I’d cut down lib’rty,
I’d cut out voting by,
My brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.
I always suspected Peter Paul and Mary were communist spies. They just have a look.
They probably were, but theirs was just about the only music I could play on the guitar.
They were hippie progressive lites. But they were active in the civil rights movement, at times and in places where that took some serious They were like a lot of idealists who did not, and do not, see the iron fist of centralization behind the slogans of “fairness” and “for the children”.
should be “some serious cojones.”
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No conscience inside us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the Leftists
Living for free lunch…
GaryM, for the children indeed. Peter Yarrow (of Peter Paul and Mary) pleaded guilty to taking “immoral and improper liberties” with a 14-year-old girl on Aug.31, 1969 at the Shoreham Hotel in New York City.
Denier. Denial. Denialist. Denialism.
Is that the best you Warmists can serve up? How about demonstrating some inventive use of language?
Pour on some vitriol. Spew some bile. Lay on some sarcasm laced with irony. Vent some vile invective. Toughen up, guys! Be creative, and don’t hold back!
Oh, and while you’re at it, get Nature to start some warming. You might have noticed that the people denying that the Earth is warming at present seem to have a point.
Don’t let facts get in the way. If it makes you feel better, call me anything you want. I don’t mind. It worries me not at all.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Reblogged this on pdx transport and commented:
the final line of this story:
And finally, I repeat Skidelsky’s final statement:
One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment—the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma—is quietly being reversed.
Another comment. Another alarmist at Climate Etc.
Also, maybe the enlightened should just put their big boy pants on.
Excellent news!
Published climate sensitivity of 1.3 deg C for doubling of CO2
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/11/new-study-climate-system-is-only-about-half-as-sensitive-to-increasing-co2-as-previously-believed/
And the warmists wonder why there are skeptics. Every week a new reason to at least reassess the consensus view pops up. It is becoming easier and easier to be a skeptic these days.
Dennis, you know Spencer only looked at the top 50m of the ocean for this – we have more recent data covering to 2000m. And he ignores the land completey.
A real sceptic might employ some scepticism before cheer-leading.
Just an idea.
Spencer was looking for elements of climate that could significantly affect air temperature. I don’t think anything below 50 meters will exert much of an effect up here.
And the land won’t – interesting.
I don’t think the land has the same capacity, and it storage would mostly cancel itself out each year.
Michael – Spencer’s model was based on RCPs …
http://tntcat.iiasa.ac.at:8787/RcpDb/dsd?Action=htmlpage&page=welcome
There’s little good basis for only considering the top 50m – except perhaps that it gives a low CS value.
Go Team Skeptic!
Michael
“Dennis, you know Spencer only looked at the top 50m of the ocean for this – we have more recent data covering to 2000m. And he ignores the land completey.
Wrong. you MORON. he looked at the ocean IN 50 METER LAYERS.
40 of them, you stupid dolt.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/APJAS-1D-model-Fig-6.jpg
“Global average ocean temperature variations to 2,000 m depth during 1955–2011 are simulated with a 40 layer 1D forcing-feedback-mixing model for three forcing cases. The first case uses standard anthropogenic and volcanic external radiative forcings. The second adds non-radiative internal forcing (ocean mixing changes initiated in the top 200 m) proportional to the Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) to represent an internal mode of natural variability. The third case further adds ENSO-related radiative forcing proportional to MEI as a possible natural cloud forcing mechanism associated with atmospheric circulation changes. The model adjustable parameters are net radiative feedback, effective diffusivities, and internal radiative (e.g., cloud) and non-radiative (ocean mixing) forcing coefficients at adjustable time lags. Model output is compared to Levitus ocean temperature changes in 50 m layers during 1955–2011 to 700 m depth, and to lag regression coefficients between satellite radiative flux variations and sea surface temperature between 2000 and 2010. A net feedback parameter of 1.7Wm−2 K−1 with only anthropogenic and volcanic forcings increases to 2.8Wm−2 K−1 when all ENSO forcings (which are one-third radiative) are included, along with better agreement between model and observations. The results suggest ENSO can influence multi-decadal temperature trends, and that internal radiative forcing of the climate system affects the diagnosis of feedbacks. Also, the relatively small differences in model ocean warming associated with the three cases suggests that the observed levels of ocean warming since the 1950s is not a very strong constraint on our estimates of climate sensitivity.”
Mosher,
Thanks.
The top 50 meters of the Oceans is arguably the most important driver of the climate. It is where the action is in my opinion.
“Here’s the model response by year for the three Cases, for the 0-50m layer ocean temperature (note how stronger La Ninas explain the lack of recent warming, Case III vs. Case I):” Spencer on Monday.
Always a pleasure to chat with you Steven.
Yes, Spencer looked at 50m layers,but his ECS calculation only used the 0-50m layer.
As he said himself – ‘it’s a very simple model’
Michael (a real honest bloke from down under) has got it right concerning Spencer.
Old RoyBoy deliberately looks at the top 50 meters of ocean temperature to get a measure of climate sensitivity. Of course this will be close to the measure of SST anomaly, which is known to be half that of the Land temperature anomaly. Yet he doesn’t mention this because he is a master of deception.
I do the same analysis as Spencer with my CSALT model and come up with a 1.5C sensitivity for SST, which compares to his 1.3C
http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/9851/3h3.gif
Land is twice this value for TCR, giving an eventual value of 3C for ECS.
Now one has to ask why Spencer is so deceptive. He obviously knows that CO2 and other GHG’s have infrared absorption properties, otherwise his UAH satellite readings that employ infrared sensors would be totally off. He must know how to calibrate the readings to offset the infrared radiation that the atmosphere’s GHG concentration absorb, right ?
Yup, he knows all this.
So his deceptiveness has to be fairly clever. He decides to take potshots from the sidelines, showing these graphs that although not wrong are completely misleading. Spencer is a horrible waste of space as a scientist. He truly needs to be shunned.
Plot of the 3 models runs from Monday:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/APJAS-1D-model-Fig-51.jpg
Interesting how model number 1 completely whiffed on the roughly 1998 dragon king event.
The RCP model as shown is based only on forcings such as volcanic aerosols, which you can associate with these specific eruptions:
agung 1963
augustine 1976
elchichon 1982
pinatubo 1991
“whiffed” ? If you need to model those, one uses the SOI like I do here:
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
This is much better than what a practiced manipulator like Spencer can do because it is based on logic and reason.
To top it off, you evidently have no clue what a “dragon-king” is. Quasi-periodic El-Nino events that happen every few years are not “dragon-kings”. That is just something that the stupid “Chief” character claims as being important, but in reality is a stupid gimmick that Sornette dreamed up to to try to one-up his Black Swan buddy Taleb.
Ragnaar, truthfully, you being an accountant is not adequate preparation for the rough-and-tumble world of science.
Micheal
still wrong
you wrote
“Dennis, you know Spencer only looked at the top 50m of the ocean for this – we have more recent data covering to 2000m. And he ignores the land completey.”
Data down to 2000 meters was used. he did not only look at the top 50 meters. The real issue is that he has estimated TCR.
Spencer’s science doesn’t matter anyway.
What’s really important is that Spencer is an “activist,” and therefore not only should we dismiss his science, but in fact, we should denounce him, fret about how he is destroying the public’s belief in scientific integrity, and hand-wring about how he is reversing the enlightenment.
Perfect example of a denier
Do not debate the science, dismiss it!
Joshua
First, we can discount Spencer’s science without having to crowbar new meanings into the term activist. now, you may have to resort to bad rhetorical tactics, but if you understand what Roy actually did, you dont have to go down that path. Roy advises Rush Limbaugh. That’s a good thing insofar as it gets a powerful voice in the marketplace saying less crazy things than before.
And add this to the list of various externalities
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20131112/DAA11OTG2.html.
Yes, he’s calling it ECS when it’s TCR and only for the 0-50m ocean layer.
Mosher makes a good point:
Who could possibly see that as activism without wielding a crowbar?
And one good point after the next:
Yes. Good things and less crazy:
Thank goodness for that “time derivative” and “education” that have led Rush to say less crazy things, and that have enabled Judith to see his input into the climate wars in a different light.
Because otherwise, we might have to call Rush’s input “intellectual tyranny at its worst.” I mean otherwise, we might be inclined to see Rush’s rhetoric as suggesting that anyone who thinks that ACO2 might be causing climate change is a heathen.
Stephen Mosher: Data down to 2000 meters was used. he did not only look at the top 50 meters. The real issue is that he has estimated TCR.
Close to the surface and within the atmosphere the energy transfer processes are rapid, so TCR is nearly equal to ECR. Only through the layers of the ocean are the transport processes sufficiently slow that the TCR is much different from the ECR.
Maybe.
We do know that day/night temperature changes and annual temperature changes in response to insolation changes occur much faster at the surface: indeed, the surface begins to cool very rapidly after the sun passes the zenith, whereas the ocean below a few tens of meters is hardly affected at all.by day/night changes, and deeper water is hardly affected by annual changes.
Steven Mosher:The real issue is that he has estimated TCR.
Near the Earth surface and throughout the atmosphere the energy transfer processes are rapid, so the TCR near the surface is nearly equal to the ECR near the surface.
Maybe.
Certainly we know that at the surface the temperature begins to rise as soon as the sun comes up, and begins to decline as soon as the sun is about an hour past the zenith. Ocean deeper than a few tens of meters hardly changes temperature at all through the day night cycle; deeper than a few hundred meters there is hardly any change to the annual cycles in the NH and SH.
Matthew,
There’d be no problem if Spencer didn’t keep referring to it as CS, when what he’s calculated is TCR, and in fact only a portion of TCR.
What defines “abrupt” climate change?
There are essentially two definitions of abrupt climate change:
1) In terms of physics, it is a transition of the climate system into a different mode on a time scale that is faster than the responsible forcing.
2) In terms of impacts, “an abrupt change is one that takes place so rapidly and unexpectedly that human or natural systems have difficulty adapting to it”.
(National Research Council, 2002)
Looking at Spencer’s UAH data: http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_October_2013_v5.6.png
I see the roughly 1998 Dragon King, but let’s call it a temperature bubble instead, like a housing bubble. Temperatures before 1998 are primarily below the zero and those after are primarily above the zero.
“When the decadal oscillations synchronise and the coupling increases, then the system destroys the synchronization and jumps to a new very different (unknown) state.” – Milanovic.
Using Milanovic’s description, it fits with a temperature bubble as in about 1998.
We may say 1998 was just a statistical blip. We might also say the system was shuddering prior to a break up of the old regime.
An interesting part of the NRC’s definition above is with the their 2nd one, that seems to fit in another way. An abrupt climate change around 1998 that takes place unexpectedly and Climate Scientists have difficulty adapting to it. Of course we know of some who have adapted better. And perhaps that’s a worthwhile question. Which ones show greater adaptability?
Agree, three blatant misdirections by Spencer
1. He did TCR only but called it ECS.
2. He didn’t include Land temperatures in the average.
3. Using the subsurface layers confuses everyone.
The first two are obvious blunders but the last one is aggravating because it makes him look like he is doing extra effort, but in fact all it does is add FUD.
WebHubTelescope: 1. He did TCR only but called it ECS.
2. He didn’t include Land temperatures in the average.
3. Using the subsurface layers confuses everyone.
1. At the ocean surface, TCR and ECS are nearly equal, for the reasons that I outlined. I would welcome a good demonstration otherwise, with assumptions clearly expressed and justified. All the ECS calculations that I have seen treat the equilibrium temperature as equal to the mean temperature, and the temperature constant across the whole earth (in order to use the Stefan-Boltzman law applied to the mean temp.)
2. Clearly a limit to the model, but the ocean surface is the part that warms the deep ocean, and it is 70% of the Earth surface. I am sure that this successful modeling effort will be expanded to a more realistic model, with dry land, forests, savannahs, agricultural land, and high mountains.
3. Why? Once you grasp the idea of compartment models there is no confusion in having a long chain of them (a “catenary” compartment model.) For something like the ocean, there is more likely an approximately linear transfer of energy from compartment to compartment the thinner they are.
Of course! These model results are not definitive; the authors have another of what I have been calling “live” models that may eventually be shown to be accurate enough. It is a success because it shows how the cloud changes can be incorporated into other models based on historical data.
Marler said:
The first thing out of your mouth is blatantly wrong and so I didn’t read further. Until you clean up your premises, it is pointless to discuss physics with you.
WebHubTelescope: The first thing out of your mouth is blatantly wrong and so I didn’t read further. Until you clean up your premises, it is pointless to discuss physics with you.
So you say.
Then what is the lag, and how do you know that?
Your model shows no lag. Daily evidence shows rapid response at the surface to changes in insolation. Surely, sooner or later, someone has to justify the claims that (a) “equilibrium” refers to something in the Earth climate and (b) the long-term response of the surface to a doubling of CO2 is at least 0.2K more than the response after 1 year.
I don’t “believe” your model, but if you think it might be accurate (as I do) then you ought to seriously consider its consequences.
I think you have too much confidence in baseless assertions.
Webby’s model is wrong.
Webby, how would you calculate a regional temp profile for any specific area of the planet?
All you’ve managed to do is curve fit a poor facsimile of the Earths global average surface temp.
Unless you can correctly calculate at the regional level what you have is worthless.
A timely paper by Caldeira and Myrhvold backs up what I am doing.
The land responds quickly to forcings.
The ocean is slower is slower to respond yet it still has a quick transient response followed by a slower diffusional, I.e. equilibrium response.
I wrote it up on top post http://ContextEarth.com
Read it and weep.
Also check out Cowtan & Way. More sorrow for the denialists.
WebHubTelescope: The land responds quickly to forcings.
The ocean is slower is slower to respond yet it still has a quick transient response followed by a slower diffusional, I.e. equilibrium response.
What rates are we talking about. Say the ECS to a doubling of CO2 is 3C and the concentration of CO2 doubles: how long does it take the ocean surface to warm up by 2.8C? A year? two years?
Relax Girma. It was output from a model, and we know how skeptics feel about models.
OK – just finalising my facebook updates – and I am out of here.
Dragon kings are characteristic of complex systems undergoing bifurcation.
They are otherwise known as noisy bifurcation.
e.g. – http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.1376
webby is an rank amateur and a bombastic fool. He imagines that electrical engineering is an excellent preparation for Earth sciences. H is an excellent driver. Climate is just like a CPU heat sink – and he can solve with one line of simplistic algebra. He is in other words a colossal idiot that no right thinking would ever contemplate agreeing with. I don’t think anyone actually does.
H says:
“H is an excellent driver”
Amazing that the Hydrologist compares himself to Raymond, the idiot savant character played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie RainMan.
Much like Raymond, who mumbled to himself that he “was an excellent driver”, all that the H-man does is make references to chaotic processes in the ocean. Like an idiot savant, that’s all he knows yet he doesn’t have the faculties to take this innate “knowledge” that he thinks he has towards a productive path.
Compare that to the recent Caldeira and Myrhvold paper on simple climate modeling. They use similar 1D diffusion models that I have used to model ocean heat content.
In contrast to the idiot savant Hydrologist, Myrhvold is renowned as the boy genius who started Microsoft Research and is now tackling climate science topics as a hobby. That is too cool for words.
Google “Projections of the pace of warming following an abrupt increase in atmospheric co2 concentration”., Read it and weep, an instant classic.
Strange Doings on the Sun
Sunspots, Which Can Harm Electronics on Earth, Are Half the Number Expected
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304672404579183940409194498
What Can We Do About It
Libertarianism isn’t just another political view that can coexist with other political ideas. Libertarianism seeks to destroy other political ideologies entirely by attacking the foundations of our liberal democracy: our government. Without a state or central bank, other political ideologies have no tools with which to build a prosperous and equal society. Libertarianism simply has to be eliminated because it fundamentally cannot coexist with legitimate political ideologies.
There are a number of things that we can do to rid the world of libertarianism. The first thing we can do is to introduce laws against criticizing the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States of America. This is clearly an act of terrorism and cannot be tolerated in a modern democracy. Next, we can encourage the NSA to start profiling and monitoring the most influential libertarians. It’s important to make sure that libertarian views to do not get out of hand because before we know it, it might be too late. Lastly, something we as progressives can all do is continue to expose the underlying corporate interests such as the Koch Brothers that lurk behind almost every libertarian initiative. When the American people find out the corporate interests are behind the many libertarian policy initiatives that were sold to them as selfless attempts to save the economy, libertarians will lose all credibility overnight.
We as progressives need to join together in a crusade against this bigoted and nihilistic ideology before it consumes our society. It is up to those with the vision and courage to eliminate libertarianism to do so now, so that our children have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of our equal society just as we have.
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http://accredited-times.com/2013/11/11/libertarians-exposed/
There certainly are some strange people on the internet.
Don’t turn around, but some of them are here!
You said it, not me.
There are different types of libertarianism but any notion you have of it becoming mainstream is an unfounded fear. Anything even approaching that died with big government expansion of Johnson/Nixon and every president since. The only use Austrian school ever had is in predicting the temptation of big government stimulus causing bubbles and busts. The rest is just a fantacy notion of economics that has really never been implemented, It’s too draconian for a representative democracy. The current big bubble is the $700 trillion dollar derivatives market financed by the Fed via the huge margin puts and call buys by banks and large institutions and to a lesser degree the current Dow bubble about to burst. Yours is a fantasy straw dog IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/01/what_is_austrian_economics_and_why_is_ron_paul_keep_obsessed_with_it_.html
But “Austrians” in Paul’s sense refers to something narrower, specifically the thought of Ludwig Von Mises and his student Murray Rothbard. It is a form of capitalism that is even more libertarian and anarchic than that espoused by many libertarians. Rothbard‘s followers, most prominently longtime Paul associate and founder of the Mises Institute Lew Rockwell, have been waging a decades-long war against the Koch brothers and the more mainstream form of libertarianism the Kochs represent.
“Austrian economics,” in this sense, goes beyond standard-issue free market thinking in a number of ways. Most notably, it seeks to build a strong ethical case for strict libertarianism without admitting that this would lead to any practical problems whatsoever. Therefore, along with rejecting the legitimacy of any intervention to protect the poor or regulate anything (a position much more extreme than even the Hayek of Road to Serfdom), Austrians reject the idea that there is anything at all the government can do to stabilize macroeconomic fluctuations. This, to be clear, is different from the mainstream Republican view that the stimulus bill enacted by Congress in 2009 and signed into law by President Obama was wasteful or ineffective. Austrians also believe that cutting taxes to boost economic activity doesn’t work either. And they disagree with Milton Friedman that appropriate monetary stimulus by the Federal Reserve could have prevented the Great Depression. Indeed, they disagree with even the least controversial of all stabilization measures, the ordinary tweaking of short-term interest rates that all modern central banks use to try to prevent either inflation or deflation. In the view of the Austrians, practically every economic policy pursued by the federal government and Federal Reserve is a mistake that distorts markets. Rather than curing recessions, claim Austrians, stimulative policies cause them by producing unsustainable bubbles.
DERIVATIVES MARKET:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_%28finance%29
THERE’S YOUR 1%
Just a tiny percentage of that would pay off the national debt!
ordvic – You should read The Road to Serfdom before you spew BS about it. Hayek advocates a social safety net in that book, something you would have known if you had actually read it. I’m not believing anything you say from here on out.
I have and I do Know about Hayek. I do know about the social safety and the fact that his principles are used in economies around the world. I was talking about Von Mises and the fact that it’s never seen the light of day plus the fact that we’ve had a Keyensian type economy sine the 30s whether anyone likes it or not it’s just reality. I studied austrian school at FEE the foundation of economic education straight out of high school in the early seventies. It’s all just a fantasy it doesn’t actually exist except on paper.
The Reagan revolution was another fantasy the only thing that came of it was the stimulus bubbles created by Keyensian supply side. Government just continued to grow unabated.
“In the view of the Austrians, practically every economic policy pursued by the federal government and Federal Reserve is a mistake that distorts markets. Rather than curing recessions, claim Austrians, stimulative policies cause them by producing unsustainable bubbles.”
I’d agree with the Austrians here. One of my profs, teaching about how to account for foreign transactions got into how currencies are ‘controlled’ by governments. For instance, the Yen versus the Dollar and our government trying to control that. His conclusion, all a bunch of B.S. Not the accounting, the attempt to do so.
For just about every smart government guy including Greenspan (though I do not find fault with him on this day) trying to control aspects of the economy, you have a bunch of gunslinger private finance guys, capitalizing on the governments arrogance. When a government tries to push a market where it wants it to go, be it the Fed or another government agency, you have these bright gunslingers just skimming the cream off. Saying please do that some more. I have my eye on a Villa in Switzerland.
Take the latest stimulus package. Check out the conclusions you find on what it did. Life is more complicated than borrowing money to pay for the package and spraying it all over the place. If it were that easy, I could do it.
What I quoted above, I don’t find anything to disagree with.
It’s just reality.
ordvic and Jim2, if you haven’t read anything of the neoclassical view, it is interesting if for no other reason than to provide an alternative perspective on government attempts to manage market economies, a contrast to the way the Austrians talked about these things; there are some deep paradoxes here. This paper by Kydland and Prescott is a classic on these deep paradoxes:
http://www.sfu.ca/~kkasa/prescott_77.pdf
thanks i’ll look at that tomorrow.
Ah, time inconsistency in economic policy. Even worse with asymmetric information. Soviet planners and utility regulators ran into the ratchet effect–firms would be deliberately inefficient in order to not have their productivity targets raised, so the planners and regulators need a way to bind themselves not to tighten the ratchet. Companies grapple with it too when they ask project participants to estimate completion times–if they can’t commit themselves not to punish people who come in late, everyone pads their estimates, resulting in longer planned deadlines (and lower payoffs).
Sounds like that nut case Charles Johnson. I hope his lizards aren’t here. But that just might explain Fanny.
Ayn Rand was an atheist and the Left hates her too. Shocker.
More bad science. Josh and willard might like this
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37918/title/Opinion–A-Wolf-in-Sheep-s-Clothing/
“Because the NHANES collected dietary data over the period in which the population prevalence of obesity was increasing, these data have been used (despite the widely acknowledged issues [17]) to examine the association of trends in EI with increments in mean population body mass index (BMI) and rates of obesity (e.g., [18]–[20]). Given that implausible rEI values and the misreporting of total dietary intake render the relationships between dietary factors, BMI and other indices of health ambiguous [21], and diminish the usefulness of nutrition data as a tool to inform public health policy, this report examines the validity of U.S. nutrition surveillance EI data from NHANES I (1971–1974) through NHANES 2010 (nine survey periods) using two protocols: the ratio of reported energy intake (rEI) to basal metabolic rate (rEI/BMR) [22], [23] and the disparity between rEI and estimated total energy expenditure (TEE) from the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) predictive equations [24].”
While we are on the topic of bad science, how about the root cause of the problems? From Willard Anthony no less :)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/12/raising-the-bar-on-statistical-significance/
Does Linear no threshold modeling ring a bell?
The real issue is statistical determinism – while a favourable significance result gives a nice warm feeling, a plausible mechanism / explanation is better.
Micheal, “The real issue is statistical determinism – while a favourable significance result gives a nice warm feeling, a plausible mechanism / explanation is better.”
Without a doubt. But once a “plausible” mechanism is “selected” unrealistic confidence intervals eliminates other individual or combined plausible mechanisms. You become trapped in an endless loop of confirmation. Change your limits a touch or your “metric” and nothing can reject your hypothesis. Everything “looks” copacetic, but you have managed to fool yourself.
An informed prior is fine.
Micheal, “An informed prior is fine.”
Sure, but an informed prior should have a more conservative confidence interval to allow for unknowns. Annan did a fairly good paper on informed or “expert” priors using just the climate sensitivity estimates which he has indicated had a general “Warm” bias. That reduces the upper end of the fat tail. Then you just work back to a more responsible level of confidence.
Micheal, the Charney compromise is a great example. By averaging estimates all climate science following was automatically biased. That produces a “pseudo” informed prior. Everything following requires greater uncertainty even though it is supposedly “informed” To move back to a realistic interval requires a great deal of introspection and humility which is not a common commodity in Climate Science :)
Plausible mechanisms work for me.
The uncertainty bounds are essentially 1.5C for the ocean due to transient heat sinking. 3C for land where there is little heat sinking and TCR~ECS. The upper range is slow feedbacks, aerosol masking, and whatever is difficult to estimate until we get more data. That is more arbitrary but choosing 4.5C gives it symmetry.
That’s interesting because I have worked with someone who has done advanced statistical analysis with NHANES data, and her analysis always includes an extensive discussion of the limitations of the dataset (such as social desirability bias in self-report data) and the need to calibrate findings with measures such as those taken with pedometers and accelerometers.
The main civilizing influence of Obamacare is to spread out costs in a fair manner that negates the disadvantages of what sex you were born with and whether you had pre-existing conditions. If you are a man, it’s time to suck it up and pay for medical care that you will never need such as maternity care, abortion and birth control pills. It was just pure luck that you were born that way and you must stop whining. Women must not be asked to pay more even though they use more health services. Get with the new form of feminism or get left behind and laughed at. If you’re libertarian, a piece of advice: Don’t ever mention your opinions in civilized conversation or if you’re trying to get laid.
If you are an insurance company, you have the privilege of operating in our great nation, so you must take $100 a month premiums and cover $1 million procedures. Don’t whine that insurance is meant to cover events that haven’t already occurred. Most Americans aren’t interested in your legal mumbo-jumbo. You can reduce your CEO’s salary by $1 million for every such deserving patient can’t you. Stop being greedy.
This brings me to Doctors : You with your Ferraris and multi-million dollar pay cheques. If the reports that you are cutting back on work and not participating in this great health experiment are true, I’m truly ashamed of you. You spent years in Medical school and racked up 100s of thousands of dollars of education expenses for the privilege of serving the needy. Their needs and wants are your calling to service. Shirking your duties is akin to treason and I can only hope that one day you are forced into mandatory labor or face the fate of other traitors like Bradley Manning.
http://accredited-times.com/2013/11/06/obamacare-civilizing-our-society/
(Jim2): the French wise up …
France Won’t Shut Down Any More Nuclear Reactors, Minister Says
By Tara Patel – Nov 11, 2013 6:01 PM CT
The French government won’t shut any more of Electricite de France SA’s nuclear reactors after the country’s oldest plant closes in three years, Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg said.
“My answer is no. My answer is clear,” he said in an interview in Paris. “It’s not our strategy.”
…
Nuclear offers a competitive advantage for the performance of France’s industrial base,” Montebourg said in the interview. During the discussion, he defended a long-held view, expressed by some French lawmakers, chief executive officers and unions, that consumers and factories should be allowed to benefit from EDF’s existing atomic fleet, funded by previous generations of tax and bill payers.
Biggest Polluters
“I have no doubt we will continue with this tradition,” the minister said. “The Germans who have abandoned nuclear are now forced to reopen coal plants and they are now the biggest polluters of Europe. Our nuclear investment allows us to have competitive energy costs, less than elsewhere.”
…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-12/france-won-t-shut-down-any-more-nuclear-reactors-minister-says.html
Faculte nucleaire, oui, merci.
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proud to be a ”Denier” I’m correct and everybody else is wrong – climate is in constant change, BUT Global Warmings are phony: http://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/climate/
“Words that think for us”
Um… those would be memes then ;)
Dangit, I knew I misplaced one around here somewhere.
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Lucia has some interesting graphs showing analysis of models vs reality. For most models, the reality is outside the range of the error bars.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/leaked-chapter-9-ar5-musings/
Surely, defending the models is denial of reality.
There is a commenter here (WHT) who loudly declared that the warming pause was illusory when it was fashionable to deny it’s existence. Yet now not just skeptics disagree with that position but every climate scientist bar Stephan Rahmstorff – because it became impossible for them to deny the truth any longer and not be laughed at.
So did WHT obtain humility and apologize to the rest of us for calling us deniers when we were correct and he was wrong? Not a bit of it – he doubled down and called the entire world deniers except him, Tamino and Stephan Rahmstorff.
So what do you call a person like that?
JamesG-
I call him WellHellTubby especially since he is humoring himself with analyzing a true scientist’s (Roy Spencer) paper with his homemade, garage built CSALT model derived from his spice cabinet over the stove and trying to pass it off as science. He has no shame. Too much SALT plays havoc with one’s metabolism, thus his nickname.
Ordure of magnitude excess of asafoetida.
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Of course the pause is illusory.
It is illusory because you actually did not do the analysis to show how it comes about.
http://entroplet.com/context_salt_model/navigate
The pause is simply a masking or compensation of the temperature rise by a noise component composed mainly of oceanic disturbances such as ENSO and PDO. These have occurred over the last 130+ years and the most recent pause can be matched by backfitting to all the pauses that have occurred in the past:
http://imageshack.us/a/img41/1231/1gfq.gif
See the Wyatt and Curry “Stadium Wave” model for more info on this phenomenon. Wyatt and Curry are also believers in these natural oscillations as the basis for the pause, and Curry applauded Kasaka and Xie for their peer-reviewed work as well. Are you expecting W&C to apologize as well?
Webster, “Of course the Pause is illusory.”
That depends on you perspective. Everything can be a statistical illusion.
Willard Anthony spotted a new paper that highlights poor statistical choices.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/12/raising-the-bar-on-statistical-significance/#more-97293
Since you tend to praise and link to some of the worst statistical offenders of the linear no thresold modeling “in crowd” perhaps you should get off your fat tail and check out the relevance of fat tails :)
There’s gotta be a pony in there somewhere. Just gotta.
The Stadium Wave is all ponies.
About a tenth of a degree is all it takes to generate a pause.
That depends on how big your stadium is Webster :)
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-chicken-or-egg-which-came-first.html
Webster, you are absolutely right. I would not dare do convolution or cross-correlation on my blog. You are the convolution master :) You are after all positive that atmospheric forcing causes the “Effective Diffusivity” of the oceans to be on the order of copper and capable of leaping density layers in a single bound. I on the other hand just notice how 334.5 Wm-2 effective average ocean energy is remarkably close to 335 Wm-2 of effective down welling long wave radiation and wonder if perhaps some relationships are convoluted :)
The D word has entered the hiatus lexicon,that when solar,volcanic’s, and enso are removed the remainder is a deceleration in SAT.
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/1065/2013/esdd-4-1065-2013.pdf
maks, thanks for the link to Troy’s new paper. He is very impressive.
http://troyca.wordpress.com/
You probably know already but his blog is excellent.
That paper by Masters is not very good at all. Why would he only go back to 1980? He also doesn’t know how to characterize thermal diffusion.
This is the way to do it, see Caldeira and Myrhwold
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034039
Webster, “That paper by Masters is not very good at all. Why would he only go back to 1980? He also doesn’t know how to characterize thermal diffusion.”
LOL he doesn’t know squat about ECS either.
http://troyca.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/relative-importance-of-transient-effective-and-equilibrium-sensitivities/
You need to go over there and tighten him up.
don’t look back
Everything has context. In the climate debate context, I am an unabashed denier of the consensus, as it was clearly fraudulently and venally formed and shaped.
I hear embarrassingly little among the wamers around here, that is critical of the way many climate scientists and their propaganda spouting activist toadies conduct themselves. ONce in a while, I see something critical of Mann whose behavior has been so egregious even they can see it. And I’d say many of them can see through Al Gore’s schtick. But by and large, they seem pretty oblivious to the fraud and the lies, and the obvious financial and career inducements in the stinking swamp otherwise known as establishment climate science.
There are some pretty smart warmists here. But how can I not ask myself, if they can’t see this, what else can’t they see?
It’s funny how on this issue conservatives are unconservative and liberals are illiberal. Talk about name-calling; we don’t resemble the labels we give ourselves.
I think it is in the nature of the narrative to diverge from Nature.
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“Liberal” is an absolute. The fact that “liberals” are illiberal is simply semantic hijacking. “Conservative” OTOH, depends on the civilizational context. The word means different things depending on the heritage.
Everyone is a conservative. Each just wants to conserve different things. Mao wanted to conserve the state of revolution, for example.
Everyone is a reformer. Each just wants to reform different things. Rick Perry wants to reform the universities and the welfare state.
Everyone is a progressive. Each just wants different forms of progress. Rush Limbaugh wants progress toward greater individual self-reliance.
Everyone is a radical. Each just wants to attack a different root. Wendell Berry wanted to get rid of consumerism and materialism. Ron Paul wants to get rid of central banking. President Obama wants to get rid of American exceptionalism and individualism (“you didn’t build that”). Michael Bloomberg wants to get rid of personal autonomy in eating habits. Scott Walker (or at least many of his supporters) wants to get rid of public employee unions.
As a proud conservative/reformer/progressive/radical surrounded by so many like-minded others, I wonder why we can’t all just get along.
+1.
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> I wonder why we can’t all just get along.
Not enough trust earned, perhaps.
I agree with the sentiment of the comment, but these are just wrong:
More motivated reasoning from Joshua. Read Dreams of my Father. Read Obama’s comments on American exceptionalism during the debates. Look up Bloomberg’s attempts to engineer the eating habits of everyone he can get power over.
Please, Steve. The joke was fine, but you’re engineering a libertarian claptrap, now.
Also beware that selling American exceptionalism might be tougher to an audience that is not exclusively American.
steve – I suppose the exceptionalism might be debatable, but the notion that he wants to “get rid of …individualism” is just laughable.
Likewise, the assertion that Bloomberg “wants to get rid of personal autonomy in eating habits, or attempts to engineer the eating habits of everyone he can get power over.” Giving an example of wanting to regulate super-sized sodas or a few other examples doesn’t prove your assertion – which is far, far more extensive in nature. Your certainty of your ability to divine his intention, or “wants” as with Obama, is a perfect example of motivated reasoning. How do you know that it isn’t simply that he “wants” to implement policies that will help address an epidemic in childhood obesity?
David Burgess – what nonsense you speak. Amid your waffle is this priceless statement:
By demanding the purity of scientific discourse in the rough and tumble of politics, scientists defend their own perfectionism at the cost of losing vastly important political battles on health, the climate, education, and indeed just about any public policy issue
What has this to do with science. Science should not be concerned with policy; as if, somehow it should be in the back of every scientists mind when making a hypothesis, designing an experiment and presenting results. When scientists move into the realms of policy they become activists like every other lobbyist. Their scientific credentials don’t matter.
Rev 20:4 And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.
Tom thanks for that but I’m not sure why you’re quoting the Book of Revelations.
Just to get back to the original question, lets take a look at the dictionary:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/denier
“One that denies: a denier of harsh realities.”
in denial
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/in+denial
“in a state of refusing to believe something that is true. Mary was in denial about her illness and refused treatment. Tom doesn’t think he’s an alcoholic because he’s still in denial.”
So it doesn’t have to be anything to do with the holocaust. It is, though, to do a an unwillingness to accept something is true.
Does that term apply to some of the denizens of this blog?
Well, I’d have to say it does. For example:
Jim Cripwell:
When I first heard about CAGW, maybe 12 years ago, I knew it was wrong.
If Jim Cripwell is “in a state of refusing to believe something that is true” as he well seems to be , by his own admission, then he’s a denier.
By definition.
Well, no, he’s not an alarmist.
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I agree about the Holocaust connection, but disagree about AGW, let alone CAGW, being true. In fact, you have to deny a lot in order to believe in (any significant) AGW.
Peter, you write “If Jim Cripwell is “in a state of refusing to believe something that is true” as he well seems to be , by his own admission, then he’s a denier.”
I agree completely. I have absolutely no difficulty with anyone calling me a denier. I wear the label with pride. Over my career, I learned to trust my intuition. It was right far more often than it was wrong. And in this instance, I am certain that it will be proven by the empirical data to be correct. It is just that I am not sure we can afford the time before science, physics, is inflicted with irreparable damage.
Maybe I could add a little anecdote. When the Vietnam war was coming to the end, there were major, peaceful,, demonstrations against the war in major US cities. Both the demonstrators and police wanted to keep the demonstrations peaceful;. So they sent up joint headquarters to oversee the events. When the police were in uniform, there was no problem with identification. But when in plain clothes, the police wanted to be instantly recognized. They needed a symbol for this. The chose a lapel pin . And what was this pin?
A silver pig.
Where can we read about this, Jim?
Roy Spencer’s latest piece of work of his is an example of deliberate misdirection:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/11/our-new-paper-el-nino-warming-reduces-climate-sensitivity-to-1-3-deg-c/
He comes up with a sensitivity of 1.3C per doubling of CO2 by using the temperature change of the 0-50 m layer of ocean surface. Note this is not the change of global surface temperature or any measurements to do with land. This is only ocean temperature.
I have the CSALT model which I can compare against. The following pic shows the CSALT model on the top panel and Spencer’s below.
http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/9851/3h3.gif
He uses the ENSO MEI whereas I use the SOI to map the fluctuations. I use the HadSST which is the sea-surface temperature, which gives a slightly higher temperature anomaly than the 0-50 subsurface average.
I get 1.55C per doubling of CO2 with my fit which is comparable to Spencer’s 1.3C for his 0-50 m layer.
But realize that his is not an ECS — it is a TCR and it is only for the ocean surface. In comparison, the land generates a TCR of 3C which is closer to the eventual ECS.
Old RoyBoy deliberately looks at the top 50 meters of ocean temperature to get a measure of climate sensitivity. Of course this will be close to the measure of SST anomaly, which is known to be half that of the Land temperature anomaly. Yet he doesn’t mention this because he is a master of deception.
Now one has to ask why Spencer is so deceptive. He obviously knows that CO2 and other GHG’s have infrared absorption properties, otherwise his UAH satellite readings that employ infrared sensors would be totally off. He must know how to calibrate the readings to offset the infrared radiation that the atmosphere’s GHG concentration absorb, right ?
So his deceptiveness has to be fairly clever. He decides to take potshots from the sidelines, showing these graphs that although not wrong are completely misleading. Denial has many flavors and can be disguised as in Spencer’s tepid lukewarmerism.
Webster, the SST and 0-50 meter layer are different due to difference in internal lags (mixing efficiency) Since ENSO impacts mixing efficiency and OHC is the new “metric” you are comparing apples and oranges. Then when you compare your 1.55 derived for SST which is really SSBLT (Sea Surface Bulk Mixing Layer Temperature). to Spencer’s 1.35, there is no statistically significant difference. You have basically verified Spencer’s model. Good job.
And Roy Spencer is in complete support of the ECS of 3C if the gaps are filled in. Therefore.
Also, if you look at his 1.3C blog post, he is also in support of effective thermal diffusivities of greater than 1 cm^2/s. This puts it in the range of copper, silver, and gold, which I recall you seemed to laugh at, along with DocMartyn.
The issue isn’t that Spencer is dumb, on the contrary, it is that he constantly misrepresents. Like Lindzen who Gavin Schmidt called out as “seriously irresponsible”, Spencer has agenda issues.
Webster, “Also, if you look at his 1.3C blog post, he is also in support of effective thermal diffusivities of greater than 1 cm^2/s. This puts it in the range of copper, silver, and gold, which I recall you seemed to laugh at, along with DocMartyn.”
“Effective” thermal diffusivity varies with mixing efficiency. Mixing efficiency is not a fixed variable. If you look at the actual standard error of the regional OHC and the regional vertical temperature anomaly you might find that as if by magic, the standard error of the OHC is as good or better from 1955 to 1960 as it is during the ARGO error.
So my chuckles have nothing to do with there being an “Effective” diffusivity, but with your simplistic assumption that it is “exactly” equal X based on a fit to an erroneous Y.
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/9/6179/2013/cpd-9-6179-2013.html
That is a paper in discussion. Hurry over there and set them straight :)
Cappy
I use a formulation for effective diffusivity that accepts a wide range or spread in diffusion coefficients.
That’s why my model works so well, and you are left with your hands in your pockets whistling dixie.
Scientists such as Spencer are constantly skating on thin ice, trying to create FUD while at the same time trying to avoid falling through themselves. It is fascinating watching them construct these fantastical artifices that can be knocked over with a feather.
What you think this is worse than testing a hypothesis related to surface temperatures to temperature in the deep ocean – as the warmest clique often do when when they’re squirming.
Webster, if your model works as well as you think it should find more blemishes in the data. Instead it nearly perfectly fits data with known blemishes. Too good should be Occam’s first rule.
Web’s car travels at 1.37 mph.
It’s always the same tune, with just the lyrics varying.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/the-nigger-word/
Pointman
Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.
Whoever you are.
Somebody wrote :
yes, to a first order Spectra is all you need to know and all that is known well.
1. All that we we know well tells us that doubling C02 will lead to 1.5C of warming
Actually it is by forgetting all we know that one arrives at this figure (1.5°).
It uses a naive model of an isothermal body with constant albedo and emissivity (e.g spatially and temporally invariant)
.
Now the real Earth is anything but isothermal with constant albedo.
So do we at least know if the difference between the irrealistic isothermal model (1.5°C) and the real Earth (X unknown) is 50 % ? 100 % ? Any other number ?
Of course we don’t. If we knew that then wed’have an effective climate field theory and the science would be indeed (more or less) settled.
.
So I don’t remember who it was who wrote that knowing the (absorption) bands of CO2 was definitely not enough to understand the climate dynamics and not even a simple purely theorical (imho useless) construct like ECS but he was absolutely right.
It is often impressive how much physics one would have to forget to take seriously things like an Earth “approximated” by an isothermal body with constant albedo and no hints on error margins which may be huge depending on the time and space scales considered.
Going from a known temperature field towards mass and energy transports is relatively easy because it’s about differentiating.
Going the other way round from energy fluxes to temperatures and mass transport what is the case in this ECS matter is extremely hard because it’s about integrating.
The difficulties of Navier Stokes are there to remind us of that when the hubris gets strong in the young Padawans.
.
Tomas, Mosher has been reminded of that on a number of occasions along with others that use “Ideal” models without considering the “real” limits of their models.
To get them to consider that every real response reduces the efficiency of their “ideal” model will require one of the greatest scientific face plants of all time.
Mosher’s a smart English major but has no business arguing with physicists, chemists, and chemical engineers about modeling. Tomas is dead on. The greenhouse effect, by itself, means bupkis. I don’t mind dilettantes exploring new areas of knowlege, but bold pronouncements like that are just ridiculous.
To back up “all we know” with “we don’t know” (or to ask an equivalent rhetorical question) might not be the best way to argue with English majors.
Formal people argue with formal people, not with English majors anyway. It is more constructive, and formal people tend to be more lenient with argument from ignorance.
Willard, the trick with argument from ignorance is figuring out who is ignorant on that particular subject.
> [T]he trick with argument from ignorance is figuring out who is ignorant on that particular subject.
Equivocating “ignorance” for the sake of an ad hominem might be suboptimal, Cap’n.
But if you want to go there, let’s see when Tomas will put his big boys pants and argue with someone like Vaughan before making judgements about such competence.
Willard would the subject be chaotic interaction or overfitting?
Willard, Assume you mean Vaughan Pratt and not P. Vaughan, who seems to occupy a mirror universe to logic.
Speaking of logic, why don’t these brilliant minds like Tomas ever address the logical conundrum that 75 alternative theories to GHG can’t all be right?
These guys are not “deniers”. They are “acceptors”, and they will accept anything as long as it is ABCD.
Anything But Carbon Dioxide.
The subject can be anything they please, Cap’n, as long as the audience can figure out who’s constructive and who epilogues about Padawans’ hubris.
Williard, based solely on Stars Wars, climate to a milliKelvin would take that round.
Harold
‘Mosher’s a smart English major but has no business arguing with physicists, chemists, and chemical engineers about modeling.”
sorry, I spent from 1985 to 1993 working in physics modelling.
including
1. flight controls
2. fluid dynamics
3. IR and RCS
4. War.
take a look at callandars 1938 model. very simple, first order. tells you all you need to know.
Same with fluids, same with almost every complex phenomena.
Now, I used to not believe this. but a nobel prizing winning physicist convinced me otherwise.
go figure.
Nobel prize winner? Like that vitamin C dude? Or the racial superiority guy? Or Mann? Or that dead guy with all the polonium after 14 half lives? Or the profit Al-Gore? Or…
Make that 24 half lives.
> Or…
Physicists, chemists, and chemical engineers, all of whom we must suppose have an inner model theorist.
Harold said:
“The greenhouse effect, by itself, means bupkis.”
___
True, it’s nice to have a star around to supply the initial energy source, but without the greenhouse effect of triatomic gases, life on Earth would be very very limited.
Willard, since you are more into the logic than the dynamics, let’s consider V Pratt’s Multidecadal Climate to a milliKelvin. To get his fit he removed a SAW pattern in the data not particularly knowing what caused the SAW. Then he assumed that after removing the SAW and smoothing (by the way his filter rocks) that what was left over was AGW influence since CO2 equivalent forcing has an A*ln(Cf/Ci)/lin(2) shape. Atmospheric response to any forcing also has an A*ln(?)/ln(2) shape initially that decays to more of a A*(1-e^(-t/RC)) response as the oceans charge recovers.
So “logically” thinking, Dr. Pratt determined that the “Climate” likely has a 2.6C ish “sensitivity” to 2xCO2 equivalent forcing. Simple right? That is linear no threshold thinking.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-chicken-or-egg-which-came-first.html
If you are not wedded to linear no threshold thinking you might investigate the cause of the SAW and question the authority that says it “has to be CO2” . Knowing that CO2 equivalent gases do have an impact but the only “known” impact is 0.8C to 1.5C you might reconsider assigning attribution according to group think and look at the more interesting picture.
Cap’n,
From false premises, one can infer about anything, e.g.:
> If you ASSUME that atmospheric forcing is completely caused by something other than natural recovery […]
Also, smileys don’t replace hypotheses:
> Should you wonder why the SAW exists, you might find an alternate theory :)
If you have something to put on the table, please do it.
Finally, that something should be for Vaughan, not me. Your “Grogg” diversion is too recent for me to appreciate the “here’s something for you” overburdening trick.
Nice tries, though :-)
Oh, and it’s “Rabetts” – please mind your sideswipes.
Willard, “Oh, and it’s “Rabetts” – please mind your sideswipes.”
Thanks, fixed.
The hypothesis is not all that exciting. It is simply that the time lag and impact of synchronous solar and volcanic forcing is grossly underestimated.
You see the problem is that the evidence of a longer term secular trend seems to have been over-looked, purely by accident I am sure, by assuming that “natural” variability is negligible. Since the actual duration of volcanic impact is closer to 20 years instead of 2 it just means that the majority of instrumental warming is due to recovery from previous more intense volcanic forcing synchronous with prolonged solar forcing reduction. That was exacerbated by the total unreliability of the sun spot number index TSI conversion which completely misses spectral changes especially in greater than 250 nm range.
Let’s call it the pooch got screwed hypothesis.
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/9/6179/2013/cpd-9-6179-2013.html
Thanks, Cap’n. I’ll mention next time I have the chance.
I’ll mention the hypothesis, that is.
“Assume a spherical chicken of uniform density…”
I think that’s supposed to be a cow, but a chicken probably works just about as well.
As a projectile.
And all of that doesn’t even take into account the 3/4 of the earth’s surface that’s covered by water. That’s a rather different analysis, when we don’t even have a very good idea how much heat goes up and how much goes down.
one of the funniest things is the mixing of “surfaces”.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Water_infrared_absorption_coefficient_large.gif
That is the spectrum of water. The atmospheric boundary layer has clouds which are super saturated h2o as water, ice and water vapor. That is a radiant surface that only covers ~78% of the globe at any given moment and has the radiant shape of an oblate spheroid and is the elephant in the radiant physics room. That produces effectively a resonance cavity at the true “surface” which totally screws up the efficiency of dry WMGHGs. Since the elephant in the atmosphere advects at a different rate than the elephant at the surface, the efficiency of the H2O resonance cavity varies in what some might call a chaoitic manner :)
Pingback: These items caught my eye – 12 November 2013 | grumpydenier
The center-left magazine The Atlantic takes note of the truth about the “anti-science” label. Cognitive dissonance breaks out in the comments there.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/the-republican-party-isnt-really-the-anti-science-party/281219/
Somebody wrote:
> I think I’m being unfairly targeted by a bunch of hacks and haters.
More interesting stuff:
Revkin notes that poverty, population growth along the coast, and substandard housing are the biggest contributors to damage in the Phillipines:
“Meteorologists point to extreme poverty and huge growth in population — much of it in vulnerable coastal areas with poor construction, including storm shelters that didn’t hold up against Haiyan.
More than 4 out of 10 Filipinos live in a storm-prone vulnerable city of more than 100,000, according to a 2012 World Bank study. The Haiyan-devastated provincial capital of Tacloban nearly tripled from about 76,000 to 221,000 in just 40 years. ”
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/the-poverty-and-population-factors-behind-vast-typhoon-losses/?_r=0#more-50986
So, clearly the solution is to build a windmill in Texas. Or is it? Well, no, they have a different idea at the latest climate confab. The NY Times has the story:
“Developing countries want the West — historically responsible for emissions, for the most part — not only to take the lead in reducing the use of fossil fuels, but to put up huge amounts of money to help poorer countries adapt to climatic changes that have already become inevitable. Western governments, which in some cases are already starting to consider their own adaptations to climate change, agree in principle that they should help poor countries. But they have committed relatively small sums, and they are wary of letting fast-growing countries like China off the hook on emissions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/world/asia/typhoon-in-philippines-casts-long-shadow-over-un-talks-on-climate-treaty.html?hp
Ah. So we send a big check. ‘Cause everyone knows that if we send a big check to poorer countries, they’ll use it to build sea walls and stronger storm shelters. It’s not like poor countries have any other priorities. And it’s not like we have trillion-dollar deficits or anything.
The US spends about 1.5 percent of its budget on foreign aid. The budget this year was, I think, around 3.4 billion dollars. For those of you handicapped by Mannian math, that works out to around 51 billion (though I have seen it reported as anywhere from 24-58 billion).
The problem in undeveloped countries is not that they are not getting enough aid from the west. It is that they live under dictatorships and kleptocracies.
GaryM
Many undeveloped countries have rulers with a positive genius for syphoning off aid for themselves, friends and families.
A local to us charity recognised that many donors were getting fed up with seeing their money disappear into a corrupt big hole rather than be sent to the people it was intended to help. This is their solution.
http://www.shelterbox.org/about.php
These big boxes contai9n such practical things as tents, blankets, cooking stoves etc which have little intrinsic value to anyone but the people they are intended to help-the victim at the sharp wed of the disaster..
tonyb
tonyb,
That’s looks like a great operation. Temporary direct aid is the best way of lifting people up, without making them even more dependent on government, their own, or ours.
A lot of fund raising by progressives used to take that form, direct care packages. But then they realized they were wasting an opportunity to make some bucks themselves by forming getting government jobs distributing “aid”, and by forming NGOs. Not to mention exercising control over the funds allows them to exercise power over other people’s lives (which is their raison d’etre). The IMF and World Bank are the best examples of that particularly heinous form of “charity”.
When conservatives want to help the poor, we send money or donate our time. When progressives want to “help the poor”, they get a job, or a grant, to get some of the funds for themselves.
The poverty industry is alive and well in the US, and internationally.
Sometimes you’re fuller of chit than a feed lot.
It’s actually worse than that. Since “adaptation” can be defined as anything- food aide to medicine to “poverty reduction” this is really just redefining which UN hacks and NGOs get a cut of the graft before it goes into the dictator’s pocket. Greenpeace and the UN have found their new “oil for food” scam to run and they’re going big.
And remember, the good lobs said this wasn’t going to cost anything. So…. Where is this huge pot of cash from the west, on top of local mitigation, going to come from?
Lies all around.
Tony, but what happens to the boxes? cf Haiti @ http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidblair/100245657/the-un-came-to-haiti-and-left-behind-a-disaster-lets-hope-they-dont-do-the-same-after-typhoon-haiyan/
It seems that most effective help in Haiti came from US military personnel. Similarly, Australia chooses ex army generals to run post-disaster relief and recovery, with excellent results.
I noted at the DT that “The qualities of US military personnel I have met can be summarised as competence, confidence and courtesy – ideal for disaster relief work. If available, they should always be preferred to NGOs, private contractors and local third-world bureaucrats.”
Excellent post, Dr. Curry. I am not surprised that you place great importance on this quotation from Skidelsky:
“One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment—the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma—is quietly being reversed.”
There is one active political movement that has sought this reversal for more than a century and that is Marxism. Marxists hold that the truth is found in the last ideology standing.
I do not mean to put words in your mouth, Dr. Curry. What I have written is my take on the crisis in Enlightenment thinking.
+1
Karl Popper’s ‘Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol 11’ is a damning
critique of modern enemies of the Enlightenment, Hegel and Marx.
Vol 1 Plato’s Philosopher King in The Republic, his distopean
proposal to arrest change by means of authoritarian government.
bts
https://archive.org/details/opensocietyandit033120mbp
If we programmed in Phinary instead of Binary, then there would be less rounding error and we would never notice Phi. But since we are simpletons we like base 10 and will force nature to our will even though we are introducing error.
This is an interesting but wrong observation.
OK this is partly out of topic (even if relevant for fractal attractors) so for those inquiring and curious minds that visit this blog follows a short development about irrational numbers only because I find it interesting.
We knew for more than 2000 years that square root of 2 was irrational (e.g cannot be expressed by a fraction) and Pythagoras was pretty upset by what his younger collegue found. Denial followed :)
Today we know that there is an infinity of irrational numbers and Pi is among them.
How do we know ?
Well there is a subtile and simple construct – a continued fraction.
A continued fraction [a,b,c,….] with a,b,c… integers is 1/(a+1/(b+1/(c+1/ ….).
Now if the continued fraction is infinite, one can prove that the number it represents is irrational. Only finite continued fractions can be (obviously) expressed by a fraction.
Even better – one can prove an isomorphism between the set of irrational numbers and the set of infinite continued fractions.
As the set of infinite continued fractions is a set of n-uplets of integers with n infinite, it shows among others that there is N^N more irrationals than integers and leads to the Cantor’s transfinites.
And because there is a constructive way to express this isomorphism, one can see that Pi is equal to an infinite continued fraction hence it is irrational. QED.
It is also because of this isomorphism why your observation is wrong.
Indeed do you know what is the continued fraction [1,1,1,1…..] ?
Yes, your “phi”, the golden mean. The simplest infinite continued fraction containing only ones is equal to phi (actually phi – 1 but that’s a technical detail).
So only binary 1 and 0 is enough to represent Phi and there would be no advantage to program in “phinary” :)
Of course the irrationals are infinite continued fractions but that is (almost) irrelevant.
Tomas, the error is more likely in the conversion to decimal from binary or Phinary changes your precision. In nature you are just going to have structures and relationships that have a higher probability of lasting and those tend to fit irrationals. That leads to fractals ala Selvam’s Penerose and universal inverse square law relationship being common to just about everything including the stock market and DNA.
So while there is no difference in 1s and 0s relative to binary or Phinary, the conversions along the way to decimal tend to add up in interesting ways.
I wouldn’t like to extend it unnecessarily far but there is no difference in (rounding ?) error depending on the representation of a number.
It is also proven that if you stop an infinite continued fraction at some finite level P, you will obtain the best rational representation of an irrational number.
When one teaches to kids that 22/7 is the best rational representation of Pi with denominator smaller than 7, it doesn’t come out of a hat – it is just that the continued fraction is stopped for P=2. You could decide to stop it later at P=4 or later and would obtain rationals with a larger denominator and better accuracy.
So if one admits that the accuracy of counting with rational numbers is independent of their representation (it is always p/q with p and q integers) what is quite obvious, this then means that any number expressed by a continued fraction is known with a a fixed accuracy depending on P where P is where you stopped the developpement of the continued fraction.
Right, but level P in binary, phinary and decimal have different rounding choices dependent on the programmer/user. Add enough bits you can get whatever level of P you like but when limited by space the rounding errors can differ. If you are doing calculations where some power of phi is common you have a default greater level of precision than you would using 1.62.as an approximation. There is no difference in binary or phinary programming, just different choices of what is close enough for the programmer. That is why it is more perception than pure math.
Tomas, I have been having some fun with “BASIC” fractals because of Selvam. I am not sure I want to get too crazy with them, but most of the basic internal frequencies she finds are very close to what you can find in any data set. When people start using terms like “universal” I have to check :)
I can’t resist to add that as you seem to be interested by fractal attractors in the chaotic systems, I would recommend to study continued fractions.
Indeed a continued fraction is a simple autoreferential process where always the same map f is applied on the previous result.
You take some x and do f(x). Then you take f(x) and do f(f(x)) etc.
The result in the infinite limit is generally a fractal.
This is exactly what the Mother Nature is doing too.
She takes some simple rule and applies the same rule over and over on the results.
And as she’s not bothered with convergence, an approximate fractal is the end product.
This is the case for the vascular system, clouds or leaves.
The Lorenz attractor which is an approximation of convection flow is fractal too.
The continued fractions are conceptually extremely close to these natural processes and enable (imho) the best understanding of what happens in the chaotic systems.
I would recommend to study continued fractions.
The geometric mean of the experiments on climate sensitivity is bounded by the Khinchin constant ie we have limit.
When climate scientists (and their followers) make accusations of denial, what THEY are denying is the right and the duty of scientists who disagree with their findings to present alternative findings without being subjected to scorn, malice and loss of professional standing.
In that sense, it’s the climate science clique who are the deniers.
potter,
Denial and skepticism are two different things. If three doctors all tell you that you are going to die from cancer in a month and you are skeptical about that (that it, you are not 100% convinced of their diagnosis), then that is simply being skeptical. If, however, you refuse to believe any of them and are in fact 100% convinced they are wrong, and then you do go ahead and die from cancer in a month…it is clear you were in denial.
The point is, being 100% certain that the other side is wrong, is the threshhold for being in denial of their position. It’s a valid position, but should not be confused with skepticism, which only takes “provisionally true” positions (i.e. something is more or less likely than something else), and is always open to being corrected or outright being proven wrong.
R Gates,
And if you survive longer than a month, you are right, and the doctors are either incompetent, stupid or both. At the very least, wrong!
Enough of stupid analogies.
Just explain how the Earth is magically warming, when for four and a half billion years, the total internal and external heat generated by all processes has not managed to stop the Earth cooling?
While you’re at it, give us a date when the cooling stopped, and the warming began.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike Flynn,
Absolutely nothing I say will make any difference to anything you think about climate, and your statements alone indicate that even if you wanted to try and grasp anything I had to say, the learning curve for you exceeds my available time.
Your analogy is bogus. What would be more analogous would be if two doctors said you were going to die from cancer in 20 years and the other doctor said your cancer is not that serious, we can likely remove it, and you will survive if you take care of yourself and have regular check-ups.
That is a far more accurate analogy by which to characterize the current diagnoses regarding global warming/climate change.
Somebody wrote:
When used in the context of the climate debate, particularly when scientists discuss another scientist or their arguments (e.g. […]), is the use of “you’re such an alarmist!” intellectual tyranny at its worst?
http://www.sfgate.com/business/energy/article/Prairies-vanish-in-the-US-push-for-green-energy-4977288.php
New ‘pause’ attribution:
Global Warming Standstill Attributed To Montreal Protocol
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112999685/global-warming-plateau-credited-to-montreal-protocol-111113/
Statistically derived contributions of diverse human influences to twentieth-century temperature changes
Francisco Estrada, Pierre Perron Benjamín Martínez-López
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1999.html
Fukushima is really really disasterous.
Somebody wrote:
When used in the context of the climate debate, is the use of “you’re anonymous!” intellectual tyranny at its worst?
When used in the context of the climate debate, is the use of “you’re a coward!” intellectual tyranny at its worst?
Somebody wrote:
How do anonymous cowards know what big boy pants look like?
David Springer
http://judithcurry.com/2013/11/11/denial/#comment-412310
If you want to know where to post that.
Thanks, ordvic, but I know where to post my comments.
It’s where it should be.
My big boy pants make ‘anonymous cowards’ water off a ducks back.
You got that wrong. You cowardly anonymity is proof that you aren’t wearing big boy pants. You can’t have your big boy pants on and hide them too.
DOI Secretary Sally Jewell told employees on July 31st of this year that combating climate change is a “privilege” and “moral imperative,” adding: “I hope there are no climate change deniers in the Department of Interior…”
Is there tyranny worst than this? Telling 70,000 DOI employees that they’d better “believe” or else!
Another somebody wrote:
Is there tyranny worset than using a figure of speech which amounts to say “you’re all a bunch of religious bigots!”, when used in the context of the climate debate?
This is something fan might do.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/11/12/college-plaque-in-land-lincoln-labels-abe-democrat/
No, no, no. Fan would change the name “Abraham Lincoln” to “James Hansen”.
> David Burgess suggests a distinction between the use of ‘denier’ vs ‘denial’, whereby denial refers to the argument and denier to the person. I don’t think this distinction is meaningful: when used in a political debate, the main objective seems to be a personal attack.
Acknowledging Judy’s evolution of her stance regarding personal attacks may be welcome, e.g.:
https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/statuses/392684102396416000
If only to earn more trust in climate change debate.
People don’t trust big boy pants, so by failing to don them Judith increases her trust.
Strange that Judith hasn’t considered adopting the same strategies when debating her scientific colleagues.
Apparently she thinks that calling them names will ‘earn trust’.
My ‘colleagues’ are intolerant of other opinions and perspectives. Why would I be interested in their ‘trust’? I’m sure they trust me absolutely to look out for the interests of research integrity in climate science; when this conflicts with their own interests, they shout denier. And then when they whine and claim victim, i suggest putting on their big boy pants. ‘Trust’ as you seem to define it is irrelevant in this particular conflict.
Judith
Look forward to the post by Euan and Clive. Presumably this relates to the interesting debate we had with them on a thread a week or so ago concerning part 1 of their trilogy.
tonyb
It is impossible now for Dr Curry to be looking for trust. As far as name calling you have to ask yourself who has the bigger bully pulpit. The media generally hands out great accolaides to climate heroes like Hansen and Mann usually by referring to them as distinguished etc. They also hand out Peace prizes to error ridden documentaries. No, Dr Curry can’t even begin to compete with that. Getting her message out via conservative media is the only means she has. The only thing left to do in this debate is wait and observe only time will verify at this point. Since most of this crop of scientists will be dead by the time we see the results it’s all moot and we are left with hardened views and pontification.
> ‘Trust’ as you seem to define it is irrelevant in this particular conflict.
This claim is false, as it is not Michael’s definition, but a reference the what is opposed to Jean’s downward spiral:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/11/12/how-to-earn-trust-in-climate-change-debates/
Considering that the audience may witness the downward spiral that is going on in this “particular conflict”, trust as characterized by Jean and her colleague might very well be relevant.
***
> My ‘colleagues’ are intolerant of other opinions and perspectives. Why would I be interested in their ‘trust’?
I’m sure your “colleagues” ask themselves the same questions about yourself, Judy, hence their dismissiveness, which you now reproduce, spiced up with victimhood claims, tough acts, and rationalizations of labels.
Have you ever met a tyran, Judy?
***
Nobody makes no one enter a downward spiral of inappropriate communication, which may also be considered strategical, contrary to what Jean seems to presume.
And apparently your ignorance of the written word is your badge of honor.
Perhaps you might want to learn to read and then actually LEARN what she has written.
I quote: “…Oversimplifying a complex problem such as climate change and oversimplifying its solution has brought us to a position between a rock and a hard place – where the pause is leading to the growing realization that we don’t understand the climate system very well….”
Let me say that you are between the rock and a hard place because you refuse to apply scientific reasoning. This is hard but you have to bring yourself to it. What you do now is the opposite. You simply call the cessation of global warming a “pause” and then use this in conversation as if it were a commonplace needing no explanation. Let me repeat: there is no “pause.” There is a CESSATION OF GLOBAL WARMING and if you had applied yourself to the data you would know it by now. Warmist scientists use either “pause” or “hiatus” just to avoid the unthinkable. Some of them are so desperate that they seriously claim that the missing heat is hiding in the ocean bottom. I am talking of a reputable journal like Nature, not some tabloid. I have no idea why they published it. Nature has accepted a few comments from me where I criticize this concept so it is not their reviewers but their editors who accepted the paper. As an experimental scientist I regard the observed lack of warming as an extremely important scientific observation that must be understood, not buried in code-talk. It goes to the heart of this issue: is there or is their not anthropogenic global warming? It makes no sense to talk of subsidiary issues deduced from existing doctrine if the validity of existing doctrine has not been confirmed. Currently accepted doctrine of anthropogenic global warming asserts that buildup of greenhouse gases we release into the atmosphere will warm the air. That assertion is simply contradicted by today’s absence of warming even though the amount of CO2 in air is the highest in history. This would be a complete mystery if it wasn’t for an alternative theory of greenhouse gases published by Ferenc Miskolczi. His predictions contradict the predictions from current greenhouse doctrine. Since both cannot be correct they must be re-evaluated in the light of empirical observations of nature. I have done that before and may bring it up again in a future comment.The actual climate history of the world must also be re-examined to discover if the current cessation of warming has any precedents. It turns out that it does. There was an 18 year period of no warming in the eighties and nineties but nobody knew about it because in official temperature curves it was covered up with a phony warming. This was called “late twentieth century warming” and existed in the eighties and nineties. The cover-up started about 1980. By the way, James Hansen joined GISS and started his work in 1978 by introducing a “GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Studies) Surface Temperature Analysis method.” I discovered the fake warming by comparison with satellite data while doing research for my book “What Warming?” and put a warning about it in the preface of the book. Apparently you did not do your homework with my book. Nothing happened for two years but then the big three of temperature, GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC, all in unison, decided to stop showing this fake warming and aligned their data with satellites. You should have copies of graphs about it that I sent. It was done secretly and no explanation was offered. It required cross-Atlantic cooperation. Now that there are no objections to it we can add that “liberated” no-warming section to the current 15 year section and find that there has been no greenhouse warming at all for the last 33 years. While fifteen years of no greenhouse warming is pretty darn convincing 33 greenhouse free years shoots down any remaining arguments that cessation of greenhouse warming cannot be real. It is real, get used to it. It cuts the legs right out from under the theory of anthropogenic global warming. It follows that trillions spent on mitigation are money totally wasted, and legislation for emission control, green energy and similar restrictions has been passed for irrational reasons. Many thousands of scientific papers that treat anthropogenic greenhouse warming as real and go on to deduce its supposed consequences are thereby relegated to the category of pseudo-scientific nonsense. This is not a pretty picture and there is no doubt that there will be defenders of that bastion of funding that has been a cornucopia supporting their work. I feel sorry for them and lay the blame squarely on poor science that leadership of the global warming movement has permitted to flourish by suppressing all dissenting work. This is a total scandal and leaders of various scientific organization that took part in it bear a large part of the blame. Actually, this has happened before. When the idea that the earth was the center of the universe turned out to be wrong it gave the Copernican system a chance. And when phlogiston turned out to be as imaginary as global warming is it gave thermodynamics a chance. Giving up imaginary global warming should unleash some really important climate research that has been suppressed by true believers in global warming. These believers in false science include politicized science functionaries and journal editors, politicized and rich NGO-s controlled by true believers and activists, and the agitprop of a misdirected gaggle of journalists who propagandize the general public. The sooner they all get exposed and expelled from their power bases the better for us.
just say, ok i am a denier and so what?
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Alinsky, Saul David. Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1989
Pooh, Dixie pegs it. AGW exists only because corrupt Alinsky tactics are tolerated.
“AGW exists only because corrupt Alinsky tactics are tolerated.”
That does not make any sense.
desertphile: Look up “Rules for Radicals” on Google. Beck has a short list; Wiki confirms it.
The Alinsky scheme is designed to silence dissent by any means possible; excluding physical harm, but allowing attacks on reputation. If you are radical left, it does make sense. Read up on it; you will then recognize it when you read it.
JC’s article begins:
Was the full title “American Prospect”?
This is reasonable and fair. However, what do denialists like Ms. Curry wish to be called? Creationists do not mind being called “Creationists;” Flat-Earthers do not mind being called “Flat-Earthers;” Geocentrists do not mind being called “Geocentrists.” If deniers have a word they wish to be known by, what is it?
Go find some deniers and ask them. Apparently you are confused by mislabeling.
Desertphile,
Depending on yr point of view, ‘skeptic’ or ‘heretic.’
I consider meself a CAGW skeptic, not ‘climate’ sceptic.
Climate change is a silly term. Who on earth thinks
climate doen’t change, tsk!
bts
The real denialists are those who continue to pretend that carbon dioxide has the power to heat the Earth, denying the physical properties and processes of real gases.
“Climate” scientists cannot even describe how we get our winds and weather.
I’m always pleased to be called a “denier” or “climate change denier”, & profusely thank whoever does this for the compliment. The fact that I appear so grateful to them for them praising me in this way usually shuts them up, or makes them feel foolish – or both.
Try it out. It always works!
Thank you David Burgess, for showing that there is no problem with labelling AGWers as ecofascists. This is simply an over-dramatisation needed for a statement to rise above the “noise” of rational and non-hysterical (and thus by your definition irrelevant) debate.
Yes in politics it is only winning the argument that matters, as Goebbels taught us. And the most effective politicians are drama queens and compulsive liars. Inspiring insights indeed.
Wow, Dr Sidelsky your real antisemitic POV comes out here loud and clear and I am sure Dr Curry does share this feeling. Tell this to the remain Holocaust survivors before they all die out. re “Few issues warrant such
confidence. The Holocaust is perhaps one, though even here there is
room for debate over the manner of its execution and the number of its
victims. ” There is ROOM for debate on the manner and the numbers? Yes, but white supremacists and neo-Nazis, Sir, you need to get your head examined. Sad you would write that re climate change issues, too. Ouch.
What a load of rubbish this Sidelsky guy is, one look at his photo face you can see he is nothing but a long line of British antisemites. this his denail of Hokloacust methods and numbers, Dr Curry u should be ashamed for assocaitingf youraelf with him. Not printing his article that is fine, free speech and dfall that. but this man is rabid antisemite and you let taht com ments stand? shame on you Judy! AND.
This is nothing more than a feeble attempt to shift the focus of disapprobation from the denialists to those who use knowledge and critical thinking to call them out on their intellectual dishonesty and emotional immaturity.
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“Political language almost always involves an element of dramatization by personalization, making it seem like a personal attack. The reality is more subtle: we attack persons partly as symbols of the ideas we are contesting. “Denial” is legitimate political shorthand, and not using it makes the world a worse place.”
So, to simplify in a “pithy” manner, the users of “denial” and “denier” are clearly drama queens or politicians. I believe that really does cover the ground.
Even worse for climatologists, is that their use of the word “Denier” in the blanket way that it’s being used today, makes folk suspicious that they’ve got something to hide. Similarly, the use of the word “Consensus” for scientists is wrong – all scientists should be sceptical. And should also be aware that each human brain is extremely fond of it’s own ideas – to the extent of starting wars over them. Climatologists seem not to be aware of that. So they’ve started a war on anyone who tries to understand what they’re doing. How long will it be before some group (e.g. GreenPeace) start trying to force countries to stop using fossil fuels?
How long will it be before some group (e.g. GreenPeace) start trying to force countries to stop using fossil fuels?
Haven’t they already always done that?
Title of Oliver Stone opinion piece in today’s USA Today:
“JFK Conspiracy Deniers are in Denial.”
Why didn’t he just say that they are akin to those who claim that the holocaust never happened?
http://pbsamerica.co.uk/cold-case-jfk
Evidence looked at again in the JFK shooting.
Mention of the controversy as a Rorschach test.
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Groundskeeper?
Can’t be him. Too logical and not enough shirt-ripping.
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