by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week
Policy/Politics
Barackobama.com releases list of “climate deniers”, encourages you to go after them. [link]
Climate change activists dismiss fossil fuel divestment push as waste of time, resources [link]
Republicans To Investigate Climate Data Tampering By NASA [link]
WhiteHouse names @dpatil first ever Chief Data Scientist [link]
Disasters wanted: “too much capital in the reinsurance industry is chasing too few risks” [link]
“8 ways Obama sucks on climate” [link]
India can lead fight against global warming, say PM Narendra Modi [link]
Climate scientist Alan Robock raises suspicions about spy agencies interest in his geoengineering research [link]
Energy
Bjorn Lomborg: Electric car benefits? Just myths [link]
Benefits of Electric Vehicles are real [link]
Electric groups warn of power shortages with power-plant rule [link]
BP says huge rise in energy demand at odds with climate change fight [link]
75% Of International Experts View Germany’s Energiewende As A Threat To European Power Supply Stability [link]
Science
Op-ed on how dietary science was “settled” and then it wasnt and how that may be true for climate science [link]
2011 email conversation with Freeman Dyson about climate change [link]
Were model predictions of #ElNiño a bust? The answer at the @NOAAClimate #ENSO blog may surprise you. [link]
What pushes scientists to lie? The disturbing but familiar story of Haruko Obokata (great long read) [link]
New paper finds Greenland ice sheet minimum extent occurred 3000-5000 years ago [link]
Australian Academy of Science quotes unusually weak solar activity as a reason for the post 2001 temperature slowdown [link]
New @eapsMIT and @WHOI research reveals hidden deep-ocean carbon cycle with implications for #climatechange [link]
Climate Wars
The paper published by Monckton et al. Why models run hot is creating quite a stir. Matt Briggs writes about the bizarre reaction by climate reporters [link] advertised by this tweet: Proof That Climate Reporters Are Uniformly Ignorant And Can’t Differentiate Science & Politics, and responds to a critique by Kevin Trenberth [link].
Climatedialogue.com has ended. Final report published on the evaluation of the controversial Climate Dialogue project [link]. The controversy is associated with the ‘false balance’ of inviting skeptics, which is discussed at ATTP. I am a big supporter of Climate Dialogue, and got into extensive twitter discussions with ATTP et al. Can you imagine a physicist or chemist refusing to participate in a dialogue about their research with a published scientist having a different perspective, over a fear of ‘false balance’?
IPCC Chair Rachendra Pachauri is in seriously hot water over sexual harassment charges:
- Delingpole: World’s Most Famous Yogic Railway Engineer in Hacking Scandal [link]
- India Today: RK Pachauri to be summoned by India police soon [link]
- Reuters: UN climate panel chief Pachauri accused of sexual harassment [link]
- Pointman’s analysis [link]
- Spotlight on RK Pachauri’s steamy literary past [link]
- Best tweet: Is this the ‘tax return’ that brings down the Capone of Climate? links to Donna LaFramboise’s analysis [link]
President Obama is surrounded by incompetence when it comes to climate and why/how it may change.
Barackobama.com: We’re the people who don’t just support progressive change—we’re fighting for it.
What exactly makes you progressive? Yesterday you had the facts on your side – what particular facts, was a closely guarded secret – today your website does not even mention facts. Progressive changers, please explain.
It reminds me of the McCarthy era in the US, when supposed Communists were called out. Some have called that a witch hunt, and the word seems appropriate here.
I just found this excellent video at WUWT Tips & Notes about how Global Warming appeals to politicians:
What politician can resist the urge to have yet another thing to tax, i.e. carbon?
I think it’s very nice of the President to also provide everyone with a mechanism to quickly contact those who are questioning the “settled” science in order to congratulate them and urge them to hold their position. Such tools can be used equally effectively by both sides in the debate.
Well, I went to the site with a mind to sign up as a denier pero no es possible. Seriously doubt you’d be able to congratulate them through that “mechanism”, but hey, maybe. Didn’t want to push the “join the fight” button to find out. Burned before.
Anyway, not too tough to contact congresspersons.
Im deeply disappointed in Obama over this.
I think i am going to email my whole company a list of the programmers in my group who dont write enough comments. That sounds real productive.
Im honestly starting to this guy is average intelligence at best.
Once you take the idea that CO2-is-bad out of the global warming equation, any reasonable person must agree that abundant, low-cost energy has been a boon to civilization. “Any biologist will tell you that CO2, a natural fertilizer,” says Fred Singer (‘Into the Brave New World of Geo-engineering,’ American Thinker), “is essential for plant life; a global increase in CO2 is desirable for agricultural success. In fact, most of the major food crops the world depends on originated at a time when CO2 levels were several times the present one. So we can agree that feeding the billions of the world’s low income people requires increased atmospheric CO2 – not less.” And yet, the slavish belief in global warming theory leads to an insane conclusion that our use of petroleum is the bane of humanity. Reality is not wrong; global warming theory is wrong: “petroleum,” says Steve Goreham (…magnificent but much maligned resource), “is the foundation of prosperity in modern
Do you know when flowering plants evolved and what the CO2 levels were when that happened?
I would go out on a limb and say that humans and the say half a dozen most important plants co-evolved over the last hundred to ten thousand years.
“In 2013 flowers encased in amber were found and dated 100 million years before present. The amber had frozen the act of sexual reproduction in the process of taking place. Microscopic images showed tubes growing out of pollen and penetrating the flower’s stigma. The pollen was sticky, suggesting it was carried by insects.” (wiki)
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/images/raw/CCC_Fig4_2_1.jpg?w=600
Wagathon,
Thanks for the very interesting CO2 chart!
I have not seen that one before.
Sources, please. There appears to be some plants that can use increased CO2, but it is not trivial which are the large-scale consequences to agriculture and environment. How much (and which crops) give better yield?
High CO2 boosts plant respiration, potentially affecting climate and crops
http://www.news.illinois.edu/news/09/0209co2.html
Excerpt:
Some of the plants were exposed to atmospheric CO2 levels of 550 parts per million (ppm), the level predicted for the year 2050 if current trends continue. These were compared with plants grown at ambient CO2 levels (380 ppm).
The results were striking. At least 90 different genes coding the majority of enzymes in the cascade of chemical reactions that govern respiration were switched on (expressed) at higher levels in the soybeans grown at high CO2 levels. This explained how the plants were able to use the increased supply of sugars from stimulated photosynthesis under high CO2 conditions to produce energy, Leakey said. The rate of respiration increased 37 percent at the elevated CO2 levels.
Read essay Carbon Pollution. Many examples and sources. Short answer, all C3 plants benefit and also need less water. 85% of all plants. C4 plants benefit lass, but still benefit. C3 and C4 are the two different photosynthesis pathways.
How much (and which crops) give better yield? My guess is Most.
One most wonderful thing is that the better yield comes with using less water to get the better yield. It makes plants more drought resistant.
There is no downside to more CO2
Reducing CO2, on the other hand, would damage world crop production.
Go look inside some greenhouses, where they take advantage of this.
World crop production increase was and is partly due to increased CO2
I don’t find any reports of any crop that have produced less while CO2 has increased.
http://plantsneedco2.org/
http://co2isgreen.org/
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/CO2plants.htm
http://rodaleinstitute.org/
There are other links inside these sites.
I have often thought that the UN’s plan for reducing CO2, worldwide, is part of their plan for Population Control.
They can limit World Population with Starvation by reducing CO2, thereby, reducing Crop Yield and requiring the use of more fresh water.
That would work. If they succeed in reducing CO2, that will work.
I am never of fan of saying anything connected with science is ‘settled’, but it seems funny that we’d listen to an oil executive rant on about how climate science is not settled. Steve Antry has huge vested interest in creating the largest Uncertainty Monster possible related to the effects of pumping carbon into the atmosphere. That’s his golden goose, and he wants it to live as long as possible.
Related to climate science not being settled. Of course it is not, but to a very high degree of certainty we can say that Steve Antry’s golden goose must die.
We know from history and should agree that the morality of scientists can be corrupted by ‘statist tyrannies’ and high-minded moralizers, be they run or influenced by despotic thinking, hatred, legends, superstitions and religious or pseudoscientific beliefs (examples being Nazi Germany, the UN, the Crusades and ISIS). “The Administrative state can be an evil enterprise when governed by the misanthropic ideology of socialism/communism.” (See, JunkScience: ‘…useless eaters and undesirables’)
Add Soviet Russia: Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.
– Frank Herbert
– Rev. Mother Ramallo
Add McCarthy, Mao, Genghis Khan and Khmer Vert
Add, Michael Mann
I have begun to automatically ignore everyone who responds to anything by accusing the person of being a part of big oil instead of directly refuting their statements. Given the recent terrible scandal of Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber it is very clear that both sides have a lot of money resting on this and money can corrupt both sides.
What’s it ‘gonna take to drive a stake through the hearts of what Tony Thomas (“You Couldn’t Make This Stuff Up”) describes as the, “careerists in the $1 billion-a-day global-warming industry,” and regain societal sanity (“So we have a policy which is exporting jobs, exporting investment, exporting manufacturing, and increasing CO2 emissions at the same time. Mr Commissioner, if that is not madness, what is?” ~Roger Helmer, speaking before the European Parliament, January 26, 2015)?
CO2 is the perfect chemical: there is no “bad” CO2, as the warmstoppers of government science are claiming: as far as all life on Earth is concerned, CO2 is “good” and yet fears about too much of it in the atmosphere persist in the narratives of the professional class of climate change calamity bell-ringers.
Gates
Do you really see any difference between the call out the Deniers efforts and the Thought Police 80 years ago? I could make other comparisons but I will let each draw their own comparisons
beyond shameful.
Can the knock on the door
in the middle of the night be far behind.
This is sick!
‘Find the deniers near you – and call them out today. ‘
( Sounds of glass breaking off stage.)
” it seems funny that we’d listen to an oil executive rant”
YAWN…
Change the record!
Steve Antry’s golden goose must die.
That is the same as saying all humans’ golden goose must die.
Life is good because we have fossil fuels. I will defend our golden goose and low cost energy that is abundant.
Steve Antry said:
“… the government is making oil and gas policy based on the theory that greenhouse gases cause global climate change and that fracking causes earthquakes, it should give us pause.”
____
The probability that GH gases do change the climate and that fracking does cause earthquakes is quite high, in the extremely likely range. It is more than appropriate that policies be adopted related to both of these. It is really only a question of the form those policies should take.
We know they will affect your business Mr. Antry, but don’t use pseudoscience in the place of real science just for your economic benefit.
That’s your opinion. And perhaps the opinion of many scientists outside the field, perhaps even in the field.
But the point of Antry’s article is that “settled” science has been wrong before, and could be wrong this time. So let’s dig a little deeper:
Precisely! And this seems (IMO) to be his point. The “uncontrolled experiment on the entire American population” seems, by hindsight, to have had very regrettable results:
By analogy, then, we should consider the impacts of the uncontrolled experiment on the entire world economy represented by drastic efforts to curtail CO2 emissions. As you yourself point out, the “question of the form those policies should take” remains open. Responses to fossil CO2 that avoid massive tinkering with the world’s economic system would seem much more desirable than drastic carbon pricing. Do such options exist? Just how serious, and urgent is the problem? How does the time-frame of drastic solutions compare to less regrettable ones?
Are you trying to sweep those question under the rug with your factually incorrect straw man?
No “pseudoscience” there, just questions you find inconvenient.
R. Gates:
==> “The probability that GH gases do change the climate and that fracking does cause earthquakes is quite hig”
Actually, I think the evidence is that it isn’t the fracking itself that is associated with earthquakes, but the related waste water injection.
==> “By analogy, then, we should consider the impacts of the uncontrolled experiment on the entire world economy represented by drastic efforts to curtail CO2 emissions.
Fascinating logic.
So we skip over the uncontrolled experiment of emitting ACO2 to the atmosphere to hand-wring about the uncontrolled experiment of “drastic” efforts to curtail CO2 emissions.
Hand-wringing, no doubt, based on unverified and unvalidated economic modeling.
I think the settled science says that there is a possibility of very negative consequences from climate change and that the possibility increases if we continue to increase our emissions. You may think the negative consequences are not possible, I think that is going to be difficult to prove. But the science and observation will tell us who is right in the end.
Injection-Induced Earthquakes by W. L. Ellsworth, Science 341, 1225942 (2013). DOI: 10.1126/science.1225942
There should probably be some insurance implications as well. If people are dumping water into the deep ground, in a way that even might have unwanted consequences, they should be required to have insurance against liability in the same way drivers do. IMO.
Nope. I’m all in favor of doing something about it. I’m just pointing out that there’s a balance of risks, and in pointing out the risks on the other side, Antry made a perfectly valid argument, and never used “pseudoscience”.
Straw man.
That’s right – fight disaster with disaster
==> “The probability that GH gases do change the climate and that fracking does cause earthquakes is quite hig”
Actually, I think the evidence is that it isn’t the fracking itself that is associated with earthquakes, but the related waste water injection.
_______
Fair enough. It not falling out the window from 50 stories up that kills you, but the landing part.
In Irving, Texas they say there are two plugged gas wells in the epicenter area, but the closest waste water injection is 8 miles away.
Personally, it’s the ghosts of the old Cowboy stadium. That is where they are happening.
Longtime residents are scratching their heads, bit it’s not established that drilling is the cause.
“Barackobama.com releases list of “climate deniers”, encourages you to go after them. [link]
…
Republicans To Investigate Climate Data Tampering By NASA [link]” -JC
This is funny.
Not at all surprising that the 2 repubs named in relation to the the NASA jihad, are named in the first too.
“Can you imagine a physicist or chemist refusing to participate in a dialogue about their research with a published scientist having a different perspective, over a fear of ‘false balance’?” – JC
The issue is in the framing – a simplistic dichotomy is presented as if it might represent the subtleties, nuances and complications of the state of knowledge in a scientific field.
It has all the sophistication of a high-school debate.
Heh, the earnest high schoolers debate school bullying and illicit power relationships, meanwhile, the schoolyard is calling out.
===============
Making a prediction about the future climate can not be accomplished until the reasons as why the climate changed in the past are known. The climate models for example can not even explain or show why the climate may have changed in the past in hindsight with the data showing the direction of change.
I would challenge any of President Obama’s, climate advisors to answer the following questions I have posed, before they start trying to convey the skeptics don’t know what they are talking about.
.
QUESTIONS:
Why is it when ever the climate changes the climate does not stray indefinitely from it’s mean in either a positive or negative direction? Why or rather what ALWAYS brings the climate back toward it’s mean value ? Why does the climate never go in the same direction once it heads in that direction?
Along those lines ,why is it that when the ice sheets expand the higher albedo /lower temperature more ice expansion positive feedback cycle does not keep going on once it is set into motion? What causes it not only to stop but reverse?
Vice Versa why is it when the Paleocene – Eocene Thermal Maximum once set into motion, that being an increase in CO2/higher temperature positive feedback cycle did not feed upon itself? Again it did not only stop but reversed?
Salvatore, do you really know what climate is?! You are referring to the phony global warming / when talking about climate…
Sahara and Brazil have same amount of CO2, but completely different climates! Therefore: CO2 has nothing to do with the climate -H2O regulates the climate! If you don’t know what’s good or bad climate – ask the trees!!! One oaktree knows more about the climate than all of you Skeptics &Warmist combined… What’s the IQ of an oaktree?.. even the earthworm knows more about the climate, than you guys… Tragic…
Sahara is on the NH, Brazil near the equator. Adding CO2 does not change this major qualitative difference. However, this is non sequitur. The fact there are warmer and colder places does not disprove CO2 can affect their temperatures.
Hugh said: ”Sahara is on the NH, Brazil near the equator.”
Hugh, if you did ask the trees, they would have told you: it doesn’t make any difference S/H or N/H, for good climate is heeded H2O in the soil and in the atmosphere!!! Because trees have some intelligence – most of thew commentators here have none… They are a collateral damage from the aggressive / misleading propaganda…
Pick a place in Brazil and Sahara that are on same latitude / same distance from the equator and polar caps, and ask the earthworms: why they prefer one place to the other?! Because earthworms know what good climate is, they depend for life on climate. People with lower intelligence than an earthworm keep parroting ”climate change, climate change” because that’s how they have being preprogrammed – because they cannot think for themselves… They don’t have enough functional brain cells, to comprehend the damages they are doing – because: if the public knew what regulates the climate – on many places on the planet the climate can be improved, by saving extra stormwater for dry days! Example: turning floodwaters of Congo river north -> Sahara would turn into Savannah, as it was in the past, before human invented how to make fire artificially.
Unfortunately, the big city maggots on the blogosphere think that: climate is something that comes from Met office and from IPCC
Ms. Curry, you follow this stuff. I’d like to hear your opinion about whether NOAA/NCDC are fabricating past and present global temperatures. The evidence seems solid to me that they are. I think it is scandalous and an affrot to science.
affront
Joshua,
do you still have problems with the phony ”skeptics”?! You have to know that: -the skeptics are like the distant stars… not one of them is very bright, but there are lots and lots of them…
I would say there is no fabrication, although there is potential for bias in the way NASA/NOAA approach the problem (and I think the Berekeley approach is more objective). However I would say that the issue of how to adjust past temperature records is very much open to debate, and all of the groups assembling global temperature records have underestimated their uncertainty.
Judith –
==> “I would say there is no fabrication,…”
Glad you “would say” that…
So what do you think, then, about the accusations of fabrication and frzud seen far and wide from “skeptics” all over the “skept-o-sphere,” including your blog.
What do you think about Republicans in Congress, at whose request you give testimony, making accusations of fraud and fabrication? Perhaps if you made more of an effort to straighten them out, it would help in your bridge building?
The magnitude of the adjustments raise serious questions about what was actually done and why, and also the error bars/uncertainty estimates used in these data sets. It is very legitimate to question these things.
I think it is the height of arrogance in science to think you can adjust past temperature records with some sort of artificial algorithm and approach anything resembling the facts.
The only way to answer the uncertainty question is to dig deep into the code. Then one would probably have to modify it and run it as a test of whatever hypotheses are bought out. It is difficult to see how the uncertainty, even in BEST, is so narrow given the uncertainty of each thermometer reading and the large geographic spread.
Then you throw in the BEST snipping method. If you have a series of snips in a station record, and each of them differ in the “offset” of temperature, then how do you know which is closest to the true temperature. By offset, I mean if you look at the record after the snips, each snip sequence is above or below another, implying the “new” instrument is systematically reading higher or lower than the previous.
If the uncertainty is low because the manufactured temperature at grid points without a station, then that is wrong. But I haven’t dug into the code and don’t see that kind of free time in my future any time soon.
I think it is a wonderful idea to get the public interested in past temperature history. The more interested the better, the further back the better. What denier thought that one up?
================
It is very easy to determine how much the wiggles are uncertain by taking mutually exclusive subsets of the stations and seeing that they both produce the same set of wiggles. This is done routinely as a check, as I am sure Mosher could tell you. Therefore even if it looks noisy, it is real. Don’t let the size of the wiggles fool you. This is natural variability and those are mostly ENSO cycles. The low-frequency signals are equally verifiable.
The 2014 switch from Drd964x to nClimDiv by itself suffices for Congressional investigation into what and why. One of several examples in essay When Data Isn’t that should elicit interesting testimony.
Judith –
==> “It is very legitimate to question these things.”
I wouldn’t suggest that it isn’t legitimate to ask questions about methodology.
The issue is whether it is legitimate to make charges of fraud and fabrication, as we see are ubiquitous in the comment threads of your blog, and in the original posts and comment threads throughout the rest of the “skept-o-sphere,” and from leading Republican politicians and “conservative” pundits.
Seems to me that the role of a public intellectual would be to argue for an elevated discussion.
Seems to me that a role of a public intellectual, when asked by Congress to give testimony, would be to focus on elevating the discussion. In other words, when you give testimony at the behest of Republicans in Congress, don’t you have some sense of follow-on responsibility for speaking out about their conspiracy-mongering?
When you host a site full of comments from “skeptics,” who look to you for your leadership as a public intellectual, don’t you think it makes sense for you to provide leadership by denouncing conspiracy-mongering?
You have a role to play here, Judith, as a public intellectual – if you choose to do so.
In the unlikely event I am asked to testify on this topic, I will provide a carefully researched and measured assessment of the situation. In the meantime, I provide a fair and safe space for people to debate/discuss these issues.
Joshua
Please do not tar all sceptics with the same brush. See the comment by Mosh here followed by one from Scott and then myself.
http://judithcurry.com/2015/02/19/the-intermittent-little-ice-age/#comment-676523
tonyb
I can imagine a glazed look coming over the House Science committee when TOBS adjustments are explained to them. While entertaining it is hard to see how this would be productive. The best way is for the people who don’t like the surface temperature record to create their own from scratch. This was done once already with BEST, but maybe they want to try again because that didn’t give a much different result from previous records.
tony –
==> “Please do not tar all sceptics with the same brush”
I don’t think that I have. If I have, point to it and I’ll make a correction.
It is clear to me that some “skeptics” are asking legitimate questions. Others, are clearly conspiracy-mongering. With other still, it’s kind of hard to tell because there’s not always a clear dividing line.
Jim D, if you take mutually exclusive subsets of a large random sample set and get identical results then something is very likely wrong. The odds of that happening by chance are very, very low. It would be like flipping a coin in two sets of 1000 tosses each and getting the same ratio of heads to tails each time.
Judith –
==> “In the unlikely event I am asked to testify on this topic, I will provide a carefully researched and measured assessment of the situation. In the meantime, I provide a fair and safe space for people to debate/discuss these issues.”
As a public intellectual, who “skeptics” blog-surfers, and Republican Congrescritters, and “conservative” pundits all look to for leadership, why don’t you reach out to some of the Republicans at whose behest you gave Congressional testimony previously, and proactively speak to them about the counterproductivity of conspiracy-mongering?
Or have you done so already?
Dr. Curry’s following statement captures my view as well (except for the Berkeley part). She says above: “I would say there is no fabrication, although there is potential for bias in the way NASA/NOAA approach the problem (and I think the Berekeley approach is more objective). However I would say that the issue of how to adjust past temperature records is very much open to debate, and all of the groups assembling global temperature records have underestimated their uncertainty.”
The problem seems to be similar to that with the models, namely the adjustments are so technical and intertwined that precise discussion is difficult, if not impossible.
David Wojick, I didn’t say they would be identical. I said that the difference is much smaller than the magnitude. This is a measure of the error bars.
Jim D, I have no idea what you mean by “this is a measure of the error bars.” I do not even know what you mean by “this.” What formula are you invoking? There is a formula for calculating confidence intervals, but it has nothing to do with partitioning the sample set into multiple non-overlapping subsets. It uses variance and sample size. So what are you talking about? Whose method is this?
David W, the analogy is polling the population. The difference between independent polls give you an idea of the error bars. Have you heard of out-of-sample testing? It is like that.
What do you think about widespread accusations of scientific “ fraud and fabrication” in accepting money from “big oil” then doing research?
Wait! Wait!… Don’t tell me: “Mommy! Mommy! they did it first!”
After reading excellent contributions by Zeke Hausfather, Steven Mosher, and Brandon Shollenberger I got an uncomfortable feeling that no one actually understands what the homogenization algorithm does. I don’t believe that we have to change yesterday’s data to incorporate today’s measurements. Claims that the algorithm itself is a proof I heard fifty years ago to defend some of the worst software ever written.
How do you homogenize data elsewhere? A meeting of a commission on geophysics discussed a new set of gravity measurements. One point was clearly out of sync with the rest and an author moved to delete it. The commission remembered that six months ago they had deleted a geomagnetic measurement at the same location. They ordered detailed surface exploration of the location and found a textbook geophysical anomaly.
Lesson: Discarding or changing data should be only done after a careful examination – not by an algorithm. Especially not by an algorithm which insists on changing past data each time. (There should be a special metadata, “an officially approved change”, for the purpose).
I understand the desire to include all available data. But it should be done only once, to establish a baseline – let’s say 1600-2014. Then there should be an algorithm to add a new month of data. If the new data establish a doubt about the past, the proposed changes should be listed and scrutinized. And then a new baseline may be created.
CG, are you thinking of TOBS corrections that have to be applied retroactively, or is there another type of adjustment you have in mind?
I see Jim D, so you have “an idea of the error bars.” You do know that statistics is a branch of mathematics, right? There are formal ways to estimate error and yours is not one of them, not so far as I know. The difference between two polls in no way bounds the error of polling, far from it.
AK –
==> “Wait! Wait!… Don’t tell me: “Mommy! Mommy! they did it first!””
Well, yes.
But personally, when I see someone making arguments grounded in implausible conspiratorial ideation, I have to wonder how well that person thinks their arguments through.
Therefore, when that same person makes technical arguments that I’m neither smart nor informed enough to evaluate, I use their past reliance on conspiracy ideation as “information” to help me evaluate the probabilities related to their technical arguments.
You know, like all that “fellow travelers” stuff. :-)
Thanks for your input, David W.
Joshua just exposed one cause of his warp.
=========
Heh, the logical fallacy of ad suspiciens. Joshua gets mention for exemplary use. Lewandowsky, you say? Hey, wasn’t he discredited in the 17th Century or so?
=====================
@Joshua…
Yeah, maybe you really think it’s “implausible conspiratorial ideation,” and maybe you know full well it is plausible. And true.
You couldn’t possibly be talking about me, could you? All my arguments are aimed at an audience capable of thinking for themselves. And even doing a little arithmetic, and perhaps even a search on Google.
And when it comes to conspiracy, I look at you, and Wilber, and Michael, (and WHuTster, when he still hung around) and guess what I think?
Jim D – from http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/07/understanding-adjustments-to-temperature-data/ :”Diligent observers of NCDC’s temperature record have noted that many of the values change by small amounts on a daily basis. This includes not only recent temperatures but those in the distant past as well, and has created some confusion about why, exactly, the recorded temperatures in 1917 should change day-to-day. The explanation is relatively straightforward…”
Regarding TOBS adjustments, I have not studied them in detail. However, there is a study of a German transition from traditional glass mercury thermometer measurement stations to the new electronic measurement system, http://notrickszone.com/2015/01/14/germanys-warming-happens-to-coincide-with-late-20th-century-implementation-of-digital-measurement/, where a side-by-side run of the old and new equipment for 8.5 years found that the new equipment yielded a temperature reading 0.93C higher on average.
I wonder if this finding is represented in BEST, GISS, or NCDC metadata. Please let me know of any similar side-by-side comparison for TOBS adjustments.
Jim D, “I can imagine a glazed look coming over the House Science committee….”
It will, indeed, be a circus!
The only way for them to find out what Nasa has done is to have both Rs and Ds to appoint real statisticians in an ad hoc committee to look at their methods. The house committee could, however, probably go over the chronology of when policies were put in place such as when and why US temperatures were changed.
Dr. Curry,
I’d like your opinion. Leaving out how the “predicted” global temperatures are derived I have an issue with the presentation. We’re expected to accept the “consensus” based scientific confidence levels w/r/t (for example) the highly likely attribution of current warming to anthro CO2. Yet, when NASA/NOAA put out a statement such as 2014 is warmest year and they ingore their own confidence levels of “more unlikely than likely” that seems disingenous and bordering on…………….ah, I’ll leave that alone. Would you offer an impression of that dichotomy. That’s bothered me since the announcements. My impression is the confidence levels are an attempt to address uncertainties.
Hi Danny, NOAA did a pretty nice uncertainty analysis of ‘warmest year.’ However, how that was communicated to the public was rather misleading. Note, the formal confidence levels used by the IPCC is not necessarily the same verbiage used in the NOAA/NASA press release, which provides further confusion to people try to pay attention to this. To make matters even more confusing, the uncertainty guidance provided for the IPCC distinguished between levels of
confidence in scientific understanding and the likelihoods of specific results, i.e. there is a difference between likelihood and confidence. If you would like to read more about all this, i recommend my paper Reasoning About Climate Uncertainty http://www.climateaccess.org/sites/default/files/Curry_Reasoning%20about%20climate%20uncertainty.pdf
Dr. Curry,
Thank you. I had assumed that confidence levels were the same across the scientific spectrum. Seems logical, but I guess that’s a poor assumption on my part. Will read your latest offering. I very much appreciate your guidance and tolerance.
CG, OK, that is another similar example. If your dataset is for climate trend purposes and you find that the instrument changed type or siting in 1900 leading to a jump, you would go back and correct for that to give a continuous trend. This would affect all the site’s data points before the jump, but results in a more accurate station trend spanning 1900. You seem to be saying leave the jump in the data which makes it worthless for trend analysis.
ordvic, in science what you do when you doubt someone’s results is do the analysis your own way and see if it comes out differently. Calling a House committee is not the scientific way of resolving these things. It resolves nothing. They will spend half an hour talking about some station in Tennessee, for example, then what?
Danny
The British met office was much more equivocal about the warmth of 2014
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/release/archive/2015/2014-global-temperature
On the whole I find the met office put out more understated and equivocal messages than the American agencies although BEST was also somewhat equivocal
Tonyb
Tonyb,
I appreciated both MET and BEST’s approaches as addressing uncertainties more fully (as far as I understood it). I was disappointed to find that there is no continuity across the scientific spectrum w/r/t likelyhood/confidence. But when I read NOAA/NASA I recall seeing “more unlikely than likely” and that NASA when confronted with their own definition remained silent. Reduced my trust, and to what end if still one of the warmest. Propaganda was the only answer I could see, but at the cost of scientific credibility. And I don’t get it. Then at SkepSi I saw C&W said 2014 was 2nd. Dueling science. Where have I seen that before?
JimD, I agree with you there that’s why I descrided it as a ‘circus’ and suggested a remedy.
“The magnitude of the adjustments raise serious questions about what was actually done and why, and also the error bars/uncertainty estimates used in these data sets. It is very legitimate to question these things.”
The adjustments are publically disclosed. NOAA are not hiding raw data and only showing adjustments.
The method NOAA use ( PHA ) has been posted for YEARS, going back to the loudest fraud charges made in the SPPI report. Those Accusations of fraud against NOAA were made because People wanted to tie climategate to NOAA. Period.
The method has been independently tested.
Other methods give similar results
There is no evidence that they constructed the method to give desired approaches.
They are not hiding data. they are not hiding methods. There is Zero evidence that there method has been created to “slant” and answer
Are there Good questions about the accuracy of the method?
Yup
Is having a medicore method fraud? yes or no. I say no.
Finally, if you want an answer to why a particular adjustment is made,
WHEN exactly will the fraud charges end? after one explanation?
two? twenty?. 2000? And why is the best explanation ( the code) ignored? Historically, guys like me demanded the code, because the verbal descriptions of what was done.. were just that.. Descriptions.. and those descriptions were never good enough to answer all the questions. So we demanded code. And we got it, from hansen. And then we could see for ourselves what the code did. In other words Why accept the uncertainty of a verbal description when you have the very code itself to look at.
You want to slay the uncertainty monster in adjustments? look at the code. Otherwise you are left wondering “well did they describe what the code does accurately” who would demand a less certain explaination when the more certain has been provided.
My concern stands, given what I regard as uncertainty estimates that are way too low, relative to the magnitude of the adjustments not to mention the inherent uncertainties in the measurements.
I really isn’t fair or right to accuse people of fraud without evidence.
curious george there are these questions related to TOBS
1. does changing the Time of Observation Bias the record.
2. Can your correct it.
#1 Yes. and SKEPTICS agree. if your change the Time of Observation
you CAN and often DO bias the record.
here is a simple post on the issue
http://moyhu.blogspot.com/2014/07/tobs-pictured.html
#2. Can you correct it. yes.
TOBS is a issue for people who have not read the literature or even blog posts on it.
George
” I don’t believe that we have to change yesterday’s data to incorporate today’s measurements. ”
Bullshit.
Case 1. My house today costs 1 million dollars. If you wanted to create an inflation adjusted price history of it, you would RAISE the historical data.
case 1. http://hfgapps.hubb.com/asxtools/Charts.aspx?asxCode=BHP&compare=comp_index&indicies=0&pma1=0&pma2=0&volumeInd=2&vma=0&TimeFrame=D6
Adjustments – The charts are adjusted to smooth out the effect of bonus issues, rights issues, special dividends, share splits, consolidations, capital reductions, or to link historical values that represent the company’s primary equity security. The chart also assumes that all company issued options and convertible securities are converted into ordinary shares.
case 3. I use a sensor X. I replace it with a better sensor Y.
In a side by side test, X is cooler than Y. I adjust the PAST DATA
so that X can be unbiased to the better sensor.
Or lets take TOBS.
for 100 years I record at noon. Then I switch to 7AM
7AM temperatures. Suppose 7am temperatures are biased
COOL.
What choices to I have.
Adjust the Current data warmer.
Adjust the past data cooler.
If I adjust the current data warmer then my metadata is wrong.
because my metadata says I recorded at 7AM, but I am really adjusting my data to represent a noon temperature.
Now suppose I compare two CURRENT stations.
One that has always been recorded at 7AM, versus one that
went through a TOBS change.
Both will record a 7AM tobS in their metadata
but one will have its data SHIFTED to represent a noon temperature.
what will happen to their correlation?
You will impose a JUMP.
The reason for changing the past is that if you dont, there will be cases were you introduce discontinuity.
Steven Mosher “TOBS is a issue for people who have not read the literature or even blog posts on it.”
Not really, TOBS adjustments aren’t required, best doesn’t do TOBS. If NOAA, Met or GISS placed emphasis on the majority of the data, LIG max/min, the adjustments would be made to the minority of data, the ASOS, MMTS etc. which required more adjustments anyway.
With just LIG Max/Min you had a “possibility” of a split min or a split max if the reading was taken just before dawn or a few hours after noon. For monthly data before dawn would have a minor cool bias and afternoon a minor warm bias.
The goal of a highly trusted and scientifically revered agency should be to provide the best data quality with the least amount of adjustment instead of playing CYA over new “digital” miracle equipment that didn’t perform as specified. That abrupt transition to “new” equipment without a planned overlap period for both types of instruments while bugs were being worked out was the problem. Who planned that?
This is natural variability and those are mostly ENSO cycles. The low-frequency signals are equally verifiable.
Enso is a redistribution of mass (the external forcing being the annular mode without a preference of sign el nino/ la nino) The Southern annular mode is the largest distribution of mass ( an order of magnitude or so greater) and explains 67% of the variability in the SH,as opposed to ENSO 7%.
This introduces constraints on the length scale of variability in the SO and Antarctica where in the latter case the millennial record is long term cooling.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n7/fig_tab/nclimate2235_F1.html
captain
the US was stupid. we had volunteers recording a good portion of the record.
That right it was citizen scientists who screwed this up.
The change happened gradual over a long time. Zeke has a long post on it.
IF you estimate by averaging stations you need TOBS
We dont estimate by averaging.
Joshua
Steve Mosher clarified a query I had about homogenisation in another thread where he explained that they do not treat UHI directly rather they exclude outliers using regional expectation.
I understand trying to work out a value for UHI is probably unrealistic and they have probably selected the best way of addressing it.
However surely you must acknowledge people would still have concerns. For example I would assume most weather stations around Tokyo would be affected by UHI though this method would average surrounding UHI affected stations and applying them to Tokyo.
Now I am not being critical of them as I think they are between a rock and a hard place on that but such methods, unavoidable as they are, can be open to criticism.
Most layman would reasonable conclude homogenisation is required primarily to address UHI and there for addressing rising temperature bias however we see the opposite happening.
Perhaps that is over simplistic but they would argue is is logical.
Waltheof –
==> “However surely you must acknowledge people would still have concerns…such methods, unavoidable as they are, can be open to criticism.”
Concerns and criticisms seem fine to me. Accusations of fraud and falsification not so much.
==> “Most layman would reasonable conclude homogenisation is required primarily to address UHI and there for addressing rising temperature bias however we see the opposite happening.”
Not sure I’m following you there. Near as i can tell, they controlled for UHI and found no significant effect. I see no reason to trust intuition over science on this matter. Doesn’t seem very skeptical to me to do so.
First let me clarify I am talking from a position of ignorance and am not claiming fact merely positing where my logic stream leads me
Let me try an example
We have three stations
All three affected by UHI
The 2nd station is unexpectedly higher in temp
Solution
Use the other two to correct the 2nd one
Conclusion UHI has been addressed
Reality – it has merely been reduced
Now my logic my well be wrong but people on your side of the argument rather than throwing a blanket on me and suggest I am a using people of fraud when all I can say is it is a result of the limitation of original data and no real viable solution
Steven – thank you for a prompt reply. Unfortunately you replied only to one of my questions, in a puzzling way. I’ll try again:
1. TOBS. Can you point me to an experiment running two temperature stations side by side, with a readout of min/max at 7 am in one and at 2 pm at the other, for a year at least? What differences have been found? Or are we just guessing? Were you surprised that a change of instrumentation in Germany resulted in higher temperature readings? Almost by a 1 degree C?
2. I don’t believe that we have to change yesterday’s data to incorporate today’s measurements – “Bullshit.”
Do you mean that Zeke’s point of changing temperatures recorded in 1917 on a daily basis today is a bullshit, or that this is the best thing we can do?
Do you recall how long it took to delete an extreme temperature 58 degrees C recorded on Sept. 13, 1922, in El Azizia, Libya by Italian army?
I am surprised how nonchalantly you treat experimental data. I proposed an experiment – two empty greenhouses, side by side. Fill one of them with CO2, record temperatures for a year, then switch them. It should be a piece of cake, definitely much cheaper than running a supercomputer for two years. Reaction: This would prove nothing. It is the Effective Radiative Level that matters. But even people for whom the ERL is a center of their religion can’t tell how high it is today. And, apparently, radiative physics would not work in a greenhouse. Who would wast time on such a silly idea?
ERL is one way to describe the greenhouse effect, but it is one that can not be confirmed experimentally. Is it why it is widely used?
Steven Mosher, “That right it was citizen scientists who screwed this up.”
Mosher, there is more than 100 years of data provided by those screw ups. The general bias in the screw up data isn’t a lot different than the “pristine” data other than the screw ups generally didn’t report “unprecedented” records whenever a spider find a new place to build a web.
Steven, thank you. I wrote a long reply, but it disappeared instead of posting – maybe it is in a moderation penalty box.
Regarding TOBS, can you point me to an experiment showing how a change from a noon observation to 7 am influences data? I mean running two thermometers, side by side, one under an old regime, one under a new regime, for a year at least? Do we have real data, or are we guessing?
Oops…
http://judithcurry.com/2015/02/21/week-in-review-44/#comment-676782
Why would the Berkeley approach not agree with the satellites if it is so objective? IMHO Bayesian error bars are a crock. If you don’t know the certainty, the uncertainty is certainly unknowable.
Let’s just say for the sake of argument that human nose height thermometers in a box record a different time series than TLT as a whole. The thermometers in a box record higher temperatures. Warm air rises. Why would the satellites not pick this up?
https://geosciencebigpicture.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/uah-giss-best.png
Curious, here is some stuff from NOAA.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_pg.gif
Most of the TOBS adjustments happen when the new MMTS instruments are installed..
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/ushcn.html#QUAL
It looks like most of the TOBS adjustments could have been applied to MMTS adjustments if Karl et al 1986/9 hadn’t already included them in the TOBS adjustment before Quayel et al. 1991 found out MMTS adjustments were needed.
Personally, if I wrote an algorithm that changed past temperatures by say 1.5 C, I would at least put an estimate of half that value (0.75 C) as the uncertainty plus any uncertainty from other sources.
this is exactly what I am concerned about
Bill,
If it’s not a measurement there should be truth in labelling. Derived, projected, predictive, something, even (ugh) modelled. If it’s an “uncertainty” it should be disclosed and standardized IMO. Sad that it must come to this and not handled “in house”. Maybe this will come from the congressional review. That may be a governmental regulation that one can get behind.
The magnitude of the adjustments raise serious questions about what was actually done and why
So, they are trying to cheat, or they don’t really understand climate or climate data. I really don’t know which choice I consider worse.
I love the smell of concern in the morning.
The better question is if the certainty of the temperature record is sufficient to make sweeping and costly energy policy decisions.
Dr. Curry
I find it interesting that in the discussion of Tony Brown’s piece, Mosh and others denigrated the relevance of the CET to the climate in general, saying that it even if Tony were right it was merely local, while on other threads they extoll the power of kriging to establish precision temperature anomalies of locations a thousand km or more from any actual thermometer.
stay tuned, my next post (posted tonite), includes a brief argument as to why CET is relevant
oops, this post is coming tomorrow, stay tuned for a new post from Zeke
Oh come on Judith you advertised a post on CET. I’ve got the sandwiches and popcorns organised and told my large research team to hold the calls.
We don’t want to be fobbed off with Zeke.
I may need to consult my lawyer about false pretences..
tonyb
actually its not a post on CET, but I do have one CET slide. keep the popcorn warm til monday :)
To establish fraudulant manipulation of the data I think you’d have to demonstrate something like the following
1. That the adjustments are not disclosed. That is, that raw data is adjusted and that this fact is hidden.
2. Or that the adjustment methodology is hidden.
3. That the adjustment methodology is PURPOSELY written to bring about a favored result.
I have no idea why people not just be forthright and either
make a claim of fraud and Back it up, or assert that there is no evidence of fraud and call out those people who make false charges.
There is no evidence that NOAA have secretly adjusted data and kept that fact from people. They publish raw data and adjusted data. They are not hiding the fact that they adjust
There is no evidence that they Hide the methods the use to adjust. PHA, the code, is available for all to see. That code describes EXACTLY what was done. There is no hiding of the method.
There is No evidence that this code was written to purposely forge a record into being warmer rather than colder. No evidence whatsoever.
And still the alarmism over data forgery runs rampant.
We have seen adjustments in past science. There is nothing unprecedented about scientists adjusting data . Fricken Dyson and Happer
were ROCK STAR adjusters back in the day.
There is no evidence of hiding the adjustments. There is no evidence of hiding the methods. There is no evidence of people deliberately creating an adjustment method to deliver a desired approach.
So what will it take to get people, say Judith, Dyson, Watts, McIntyre,McKittrick, Monkton, to end the silence of the lambs and speak up and say clearly and forcefully that “skeptics who claim fraud have no evidence of fraud.” Zero evidence. They are just fear mongering.
How strange it is to listen to folks who demanded that people “call out” mann for his behavior, refuse to call out skeptics who make unfounded claims about fraud. Just weird.
So what is there in the adjustment debate, really what is there?
1. A generally difficulty in explaining the details of adjustments.
take TOBS. we’ve explained that MANY TIMES, but people
dont understand. YOUR ABILITY to understand is not evidence of someone else committing fraud.
2. A feeling that adjustments should “balance out”. In general people
argue that adjustments “go in one direction”. they dont, However,
The belief that they should balance out IS TESTABLE. If you believe
they should balance out, then write a method and test your belief.
in fact, what we find, across MULTIPLE adjustment approaches
is this: adjustments dont balance out. Some places warm. some places cool. The FACT that adjustments didnt balance out is not evidence of fraud. It is evidence that your NOTION that they should balance out is wrong. Ditch that Null baby. you got a theory they should balance out?
Did some one test that theory by applying a method and getting results?
Yup. Did you theory hold up? NOPE. and now instead of ditching the theory, you want to question the adjustment method. Question:
What Evidence will falsify your belief that adjustments should balance out. or is that your religion.
3.We have Evidence, here and there, that an adjustment procedures got something wrong or have weird results. Guess what. Adjustment methods are GOING TO get things wrong. When you adjust 10,000 stations, a small error rate is a treasure trove for anecdotalists. Here’s a clue: Getting something wrong is not Fraud. Getting something wrong means you are human, not criminal. The question is are people working at improving their approach? Publishing a method and then improving it is not fraud.
4. Concerns that people are over confident in their adjustments. Are NOAA over confident? I dunno. probably Let’s see. Internally there was a debate between the guys who do TOBS adjusting versus the guys who use PHA. One thought was PHA could do everything. Pro’s and cons are debated.
Im sure someone is over confident. Being over confident in your method is not fraud. defending your method is not fraud. being unwilling to explain it to every person who asks is not fraud.
Summary.. You have some people who are over confident in their belief that fraud has been committed. And you have the lambs.
The lambs are people who remain silent about this overconfidence amongst the skeptics.
The lambs are people who bleat about a few 1/100ths of statistical error, while they ignore the uncertainty in proclamations of fraud.
Mosh
I sent an email to several british journalists pointing out your last thread and that fraud needed far more proof than has ever been provided.
It would help if organisations like BEST could put up a single page rebuttal couched in simple language that we could refer the MSM to.
If homewood and others want to persist with this we really need to see a much longer list of ‘fraudulently’ adjusted stations and see them debated.
Tonyb
Thank you tony
Homewood appears to have walked back from any fraud charges.
Thanks for not being silent. I’ve been pushing for an editorial piece.
we will see
Steven, while I disagree with an accusation of fraud, I have a serious problem with scientists who propagate changes of data backwards in time.
George.
You almost always change the past when you adjust.
See my examples above.
I will do a simple one here.
two stations. A and B
A, starts with a Time of observation of 7AM and keep its
B starts with Noon and shifts to 7AM
The shift from Noon to 7AM will be defined at a cooling.
Assume these stations are close to each other ( This is HOW we figure out the tobs bias
A: Data 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10
Tobs 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7
B: Data 11 11 11 11 11 11 10 10 10 10 10 10
Tobs 12 12 12 12 12 12 7 7 7 7 7 7
Now what do you do?
B: Data 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11
Tobs 12 12 12 12 12 12 12* 12* 12* 12* 12* 12*
* indicates an adjustment
What does that say? Well do you adjust the current reading at 7AM
to be consistent with the past Time of observation. and you have to
indicate changes in metadata
or do you do this
B: Data 10* 10* 10* 10* 10* 10* 10 10 10 10 10 10
Tobs 12 12 12 12 12 12 7 7 7 7 7 7
Here the tobs record is left intact, but the data is corrected to reflect
the CURRENT PRACTICE
Now suppose you adjusted the metadata. and you went to check on the observer. And you found he was ACTUALLY checking at 7AM.
What would you think?
Hey? he records at 7AM WHY are they adjusting the metadata????
can they check that he records at 7.. I saw it with my own eyes!!
They are changing current reality!
Mr Mosher
I for one do not expect the adjustments to balance out. I actually expect to see them bias in favour of the effect of UHI
I understand you have selected a regional expectation solution to UHI and that makes sense as assigning a value to stations is impossible.
Where am I going wrong in my thinking?
Is UHI trumped as a factor by more serious issues calling for adjustment
If so what are these?
Incidentally thank you for taking the time to reply to my questions as sometimes your replies are a eureka moment for my understanding.
Stephen,
It is a very fine line between systematic bias and fraud. In the legal system it might boil down to the perspicuity of the perpetrator. If it could be established that the perpetrator is incapable of understanding the consequences of their actions, they might be excused.
That might work for Michael Mann, not so much for Gavin.
To the best of my reading you may find some resonance with this.
Evangelism is another factor again. Is that an excuse?
There is no evidence that NOAA have secretly adjusted data and kept that fact from people. They publish raw data and adjusted data. They are not hiding the fact that they adjust.
Really?
They don’t explain that they added many more stations in places that are warming and not very many in places that are not warming and not in places that are cooling.
A couple of weeks ago someone on CE posted a press release by NOAA from 1997 stating that it was a record warm year. In the same link was the recent NOAA press release stating 2014 was a record warm year.
The problem was that the 1997 temperature was higher than the 2014 temperature.
Mosher said relax don’t get your petty coat in a twist, NOAA only makes estimates.
Ok, I accept his explanation. They may do that and it doesn’t show fraud.
But it just adds another reason why every clear thinking individual ought to be raising their own internal error bars.
I immediately broke out into a rendition of “Oh, What Kind of Fool Am I.”
1. That the adjustments are not disclosed. That is, that raw data is adjusted and that this fact is hidden. True, they only disclosed after they got caught
2. Or that the adjustment methodology is hidden. True, again, they only disclose after they got caught.
3. That the adjustment methodology is PURPOSELY written to bring about a favored result. That is clearly true.
waltheof –
I am not a spokesperson for people on my side of the argument. I don’t say people are making accusations if they aren’t making accusations.
Sorry Joshua
I must have unfairly mistaken you with one of the others.
Will check more carefully in future.
But back to my post does my simplistic explanation of my concern make sense?
From the article:
…
The number of likely voters who blame global warming for extreme weather events such as blizzards and hurricanes is dropping as disagreement in the scientific community continues.
…
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/19/voters-less-likely-blame-global-warming-weather/
Now that the government is paying for our healthcare, they are going to want to run our lives for us like never before, and government infringement on personal liberty has been really bad already. And notice what they are using as an excuse.
From the article:
…
The government’s effort to combat climate change is moving toward Americans’ dinner table.
A federal advisory committee this week urged that the government’s next generation of dietary guidelines for the first time take into account environmental factors, specifically recommending more fruits and vegetables and less meats.
…
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/20/us-dietary-guidelines-advisory-committee-fight-cli/
Nice little flap here: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/021015-738779-climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism.htm
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UNFCCC says “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
But perhaps she means changing the development model to one without emissions, not destroying capitalism. Probably. I guess. Maybe not. The UN is not a big fan of capitalism.
“changing the development model to one without emissions”
There ain’t such a thing.
They want to change the development model to one without development.
She and her buddies (a trusted body of better types known as “we”) are changing the development model of the last 150 years for the first time in the history of mankind.
Offer someone big tax-free dollars to be pompous, sinister and silly at the same time and…guess what they’ll do!
From the article:
…
As oil inventories rise and crude prices drop yet again, Jim Cramer thinks it is worth pointing out that oil has become a major battleground, and most of Wall Street is clueless.
“There’s a huge disparity in what we call sell-side forecasts right now, perhaps the largest lack of consensus I have ever seen,” said the “Mad Money” host on Thursday.
Cramer speculated that the discrepancies are partially due to oil analysts at large firms chasing oil as it went down, and reducing targets dramatically once the price dropped.
The reason why the significant range of estimates is important is because commodity projections are the most important key data point used when energy analysts issue ratings and estimates. Money managers use this information to conduct business, and it can make a big difference.
…
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102439886
Oil is still hanging in around $50/bbl. The military action in Libya buoyed the price briefly.
The year-out WTI contango is still around $10/bbl and puts downward pressure on price. Inventories continue to build which also tends to lower prices. Prices are likely to go down unless another unexpected event, like Libya for instance, occurs.
11/27/14
OIL________68.92___-4.77
BRENT______72.49___-0.09
NAT GAS_____4.22___-0.1357
RBOB GAS____1.91
1/16/15
OIL_______48.69
BRENT_____49.90
NAT GAS____3.127
RBOB GAS___1.3588
1/23/15
OIL_______45.59
BRENT_____48.55
NAT GAS___2.986
RBOB GAS__1.3479
1/30/15
OIL_______45.68
BRENT_____50.11
NAT GAS____2.684
RBOB GAS___1.3641
2/6/15
OIL_______51.69
BRENT_____58.16
NAT GAS____2.579
RBOB GAS___1.559
2/13/15
OIL_______53.17
BRENT_____61.53
NAT GAS____2.686
RBOB GAS___1.6192
2/21/15
OIL_______50.81
BRENT_____60.10
NAT GAS____2.951
RBOB GAS___1.6407
==> “Best tweet: Is this the ‘tax return’ that brings down the Capone of Climate? links to Donna LaFramboise’s analysis”
Yes, i can see why you think it was the “best tweet.”
After all, what could be better for building bridges than name-calling and comparisons to mass murderers?
From the article:
…
Although coal and oil will decline relative to other energy sources, the three carbon fuels will still dominate the supply market down from 86% now to 81% by 2035 – not exactly a low-carbon future.
…
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2934726-bp-energy-outlook-2035-shows-more-work-needs-to-be-done-on-carbon-reduction
Can Algae Power Our World?
From the latter link:
The climate models are NOT going to be able to predict the future climate because they have incomplete, inaccurate data in addition to not having the complete Initial State Of The Climate being fed into them accurate or complete enough.
Not to mention the biased that is probably given to the data. I dare say CO2 ifs falsely emphasized in contrast to other items such as solar (probably not in ) and certainly the earth’s magnetic field strength(which I know is not put into the models) which have a vastly greater influence on the climate then their precious CO2 scapegoat.
They want us to believe that a trace gas with a trace increase of some 100 ppm over the last 100 years is going to somehow direct the whole vast climatic system of the earth powered by the sun. Next joke.
Making matters worse data has shown time and time again that CO2 concentrations are in response to the climate, not the cause of the climate to change. This is why CO2 always lags the temperature when the data is presented. I have yet to see data showing otherwise.
Second victim comes forward against Pachauri… http://scroll.in/article/708597/IPCC-chair-RK-Pachauri-cancels-trip-to-Nairobi-after-second-woman-complains-of-sexual-harassment
This sounds strangely familiar!
Bob,
That depends on what the definition of Th(is) is. :)
He needs Bill Clinton’s press agent. Two allegations were chump change for Clinton.
We should ask Bill what did the Chinese government get in return for the campaign cash.
Chairman of climate change panel accused of sexual harassment
Amy Kazmin in New Delhi and Pilita Clark in London
Head of UN climate panel steps down amid harassment case
Note David Karoly’s response.
=====================
Thanks for this information. He is but another pawn, like Mann.
New paper shows the economy grows faster when the President of the United States is a Democrat
Presidents and the Economy: A Forensic Investigation
http://www.princeton.edu/~mwatson/papers/Presidents_Blinder_Watson_Nov2013.pdf
Pachauri know porn when he lives it. according to his books.
Ed
I always thought Blunder was more astute than his study indicates. This is a little like some of the debates on historical temperatures. Buried in formulas and statistical significance and little attention to what actually happened.
Truman left Ike with a war & inflation. Ike cut spending & Fed raised interest rates-recession. Inflation caused next 2 recessions under Ike per Fed hiking rates.
Demographic shift and war & inflation in mid 1960s. Increase in Labor Force Participation rate, unemployment dropped from kids in military and inflation. Nixon inherited inflation, eventually reduced defense. Then Oil Shock and recession.
Fed raised interest rates to combat hyper inflation. Reagan recession due to that.
Clinton benefitted from technology and internet boom with stocks exploding.
Bush got stock market bust with GDP drop and Capital Gains fall of 70%. Labor Force Participation Rate leveled off under Clinton & dropped under Bush.
While the paper addresses some of the factors, an astute reading of history can attribute some of the difference to luck.
The bottom line is Presidents get too much credit and blame for the economy. The world does not revolve around the Federal Government.
Correct. Not just for the US but for governments get too much credit and blame for the economic conditions of the times they preside over.
ALL governments.
Is it unintended irony that barackobama.com has copied Nazi tactics to go after their nemesis?:
https://ivarfjeld.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/jewish-boycott-april-1933-200px.jpg
Geoengineering will just be like a morphine drip to the human species. Doesn’t change the outcome but sort of flattens the glide slope in 80-120 years.
http://judithcurry.com/2015/02/12/open-thread-24/#comment-676528
If one would look at our nuclear weapons budget (trillions) I would say we are already planning to terra-form the planet. :)
Judith Curry, notably absent from your “Week in Review” are science-respecting voices that unite the *BEST* climate-science with humanity’s *BEST* economic and moral objectives.
Summary *ALL* Climate Etc readers can usefully take a lesson from Katherine Hayhoe’s perspective on the “wicked problem of climate-change”
Good on `yah for outstanding science *AND* outstanding civility *AND* outstanding public service, Katherine Hayhoe! Truly you are achieving at Climate Etc Levels I, II, and III!
“Best” is such a relative term that it really has no place in science. As for balance, Curry allows and encourages balance. Both sides, and those in the middle, are permitted to speak freely. I wish I could say the same for most of the “best” places.
Few if any practicing scientists would agree with tumbleweed’s claim!
Objectively speaking the *BEST* scientific works are those that attract (sooner or later!) the *MOST* colleagues (young ones especially!) who work hard to *VERIFY* and *EXTEND* that work. And this evaluation process is entirely voluntary, open, and public … as colleagues cite strong works as a basis for their subsequent works.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXS6X3P0sVU&t=8h7m10s
Practically speaking when a scientist gives a talk and the room is filled with enthusiastic colleagues (students especially!) — who are listening *VOLUNTARILY* and are *INSPIRED* to work along similar lines — then that scientist’ work has achieved top-rank scientific status.
Otherwise, not.
*EVERY* young scientist appreciates these professional realities, eh Climate Etc readers?
Dr. Hayhoe is correct, climate change is real, as she has testified before the congregation, and we must do something, anything, to stop it.
Climate must not change! Thow shalt not change the climate!
==>? “75% Of International Experts View Germany’s Energiewende As A Threat To European Power Supply Stability”
Another day, another appeal to “consensus” at Climate Etc.
I’ve found two fairly recent exaggerations of Germany’s Energiewende. Bill Maher says, “Germany gets 74 percent of its electricity from renewables” in this video @3:45:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6phMonavhw
Donald Prothero makes the same mistake in this post (I correct him in comment 12):
http://www.skeptic.com/insight/eine-andere-welt/
From the Climate Progress post Prothero linked to:
Energiewende has been so successful they decided to build at least a half dozen brown coal power plants over the coming decade. France had the better plan. 75% of their electricity source is derived from nuclear energy. It’s plentiful and cheap and they’re the leading exporters in Europe. Meanwhile Germans are laying 41 cents per kWh.
Poland (that rich state) is installing expensive power equipment to shield its power net from sudden surges of wind energy from Germany.
Joshua, did you even read NoTricksZone’s post? Or the article behind it? Do you know about the German grid operators (TSOs in English translation) warnings about growing instability thanks to Energiewende, and the absence of a major north/south connector stopped by green NIMBY despite the urgency for it described in Netzentwicklungplan.de?
Or did you just do another kneejerk spout off? Putzing with grid operator experts (like Planning Engineer) is not like criticizing a climate consensus that falls apart fsctually at every touch (troposphere hot spot, model temp divergence (aka the pause), and so on). It is putzing with engineers who know how to make stuff work reliably, and know when it won’t, and know there is an engineering consensus about these things because they get fired when it doesn’t work. But it usually does.
Another one of your sophist contortions, here folding two notions of consensus into one overly broad rhetorical brush.
If you want to have meaningful impact on denizen thinking, up your game. And see my comment below having read the post, the underlying article, and having studied both Germany and UK in the process of researching what became essays California Dreaming and Tilting at Windmills. Read them, then get back with something interesting to say on Energiewende.
I note that Climate Dialogue proposed two topics for which they were unable to find consensus scientists to discuss, so they were abandoned. I wonder what those two topics were.
========================
I would love to debate Katherine Hayhoe. It would be fireworks.
Yeah, start of with your temperature always leads CO2 so you can play from behind.
Well, yeah, that would be sort of amusing if one of the neglected topics was Salbian Stuff.
===============
Yes the Salbian Stuff is very interesting, how well it models reality is another story.
Too much evidence that it is the human race that is causing the increase in carbon dioxide levels.
If you want to lead with your chin, go ahead, but usually not advised.
How could it have been missed?
The simple proof that change to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) does not cause climate change has been hiding in plain sight. Here it is:
CO2 has been considered to be a forcing. For a unit area, the units of a forcing are Joules/sec. Energy change for that same unit area has units Joules. Average forcing times duration equals energy change (analogous to average speed times duration equals distance traveled). Energy change divided by effective thermal capacitance is temperature change. Thus equivalently, the appropriate scale factor times the time-integral of the CO2 level would produce the average global temperature (AGT) change attributable to the CO2 change.
According to widely available data from Vostok, Antarctica ice cores, during previous glaciations and interglacials, CO2 and AGT went up and down nearly together (as so dramatically displayed in An Inconvenient Truth). If CO2 is a significant forcing (scale factor not zero), temperature could only increase and it would increase with the time-integral of the CO2 level. Because instead AGT and CO2 go up and down nearly together, this actually proves CO2 change does not cause significant average global temperature change. Because CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere, if CO2 change does not cause temperature change, it cannot cause climate change. THUS THE CO2 CHANGE FROM BURNING FOSSIL FUELS HAS NO SIGNIFICANT EFFECT ON CLIMATE.
Application of this analysis methodology to CO2 levels for the entire Phanerozoic eon (about 542 million years) (Berner, 2001) proves that CO2 levels up to at least 6 times the present will have no significant effect on average global temperature.
See more on this and discover the two factors that do cause climate change (95% correlation since before 1900) at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com . The two factors which explain the last 300+ years of climate change are also identified in a peer reviewed paper published in Energy and Environment, vol. 25, No. 8, 1455-1471 or search “agwunveiled”.
The Briggs posts on the kerfuffle “Why Climate Models Run Hot” (the irreducibly simple model paper Briggs coauthored) has caused are must reads. MSM as hom reporting, and Trenberth trying to debunk without having read/understood.
I commented on the great utility of this model in a previous Weekly review. With better estimates of two of the 5 parameters (r and fsubt) it outputs an effective sensitivity of about 1.75, remarkably close to new estimates using IPCC AR5’s own data, as in Lewis and Curry (2014).
Perhaps that is why the ‘consensus’ reaction has been so violently negative. The model derivation is mathematically sound. The paper’s discussion of how to derive all five parameters is clear. The issue of the magnitude of indirect feedbacks becomes transparent. The model tropical tropospjere hot spot that isn’t shows the watervapor feedback is too high. And positive cloud feedback is highly uncertain. See the essays on humidity and clouds. Trenberth’s dismissal because the simple model because it is simple and not an AOGCM is ludicrous nomsense. Worse that missing heat hiding in deep oceans where it cannot be measured.
The paper’s denial of the current imbalance that everyone else is measuring was one of its odd aspects that Trenberth picked up on and wasn’t answered.
The model has nothing to do the current radiative imbalance, which merely shows that neither you nor Trenberth read the paper. It is the simplest algraic derivation of effective sensitivity ( effective rather than ECS only because there is no direct consideration of therime frame (anout which there is no agreement). Nor did it deny that there might be a radiative imbalance (current sat measurement 0.6w/m2 with some error margin). The only radiative input is lambda sub0, totally uncontroversial. The paper discusses its derivation and then uses the generally accepted IPCC value.
JimD, you just lost enormous face and value as a commenter. As did Trenberth with Briggs. Churchill said, “It is better to remain quiet and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.”
Rud, they hid their assumption rather well, but by setting a parameter (rt) to one it implied no transient effect could exist, somewhat contrary to the data. Having assumed that, then there would be no imbalance, but it is their assumption. Many were fooled. They have this way of just plugging their own numbers. The other was the maximum loop-gain parameter of 0.1 that they drew out of some process engineering heuristics, again no basis in science or data.
Also, they had the statement ” there is no unrealized global warming in the pipeline” in their abstract. This is a statement of no imbalance consistent with the assumption they plugged in.
Jim D – are you referring to a CERES measurement imbalance?
It comes from both satellite budgets like CERES and the rise rate in OHC, which are independent methods of assessing the imbalance. Lewis and papers like that have the imbalance estimates in their analyses. The error range for this term does not extend to a zero imbalance.
Dr, Curry,
I have not read the Monckton article for the superficial reason that I get stuck at the name Monckton as first author. I already have prejudices against this man since I cannot find any evidence of any scientific skill except the invention of a mathematical puzzle (wiki). I am very much a supporter of independent research but find it hard to believe that he was one of the “four researchers” mentioned in Briggs’ blog. It won’t be the first time that the name of the first author is the leader of the laboratory and not the one who does the actual work. But still.
Are my views unfounded? Should I ignore my prejudices and pay attention to the paper’s results? (Looks like I have to log in to the journal).
Does this not bother anyone else?
Rose
The quality of having an open mind is of inestimable value. The quality of reserving judgment until the evidence becomes irrefutable is also something of inestimable value.
These qualities are seriously lacking in the field of climate science and in the blogosphere in general. IMO Monckton would have to have one of the highest IQ’s of anyone alive and to purposely ignore his work seems to me to be a dumb thing to do.
You don’t necessarily have to agree with everything people say in order to respect them and Monckton has mine. This link shows a comparison table of Monckton and some of the scientists who claim he is misrepresenting their work. I consider that very few of the rebuttals were effective in demononstrating that misrepresentation had occurred. http://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Monckton_vs_Scientists.pdf
So, Rose, I believe that indeed, you should be paying attention to the paper under consideration.
I have reached an age where if someone tells me to wear socks, I don’t have to.
Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)
A. Voip,
But wasn’t Einstein a “maverick”? h/t Dr. C!
Actually, Monckton is the lead author. I had lunch with him once; he is definitely not a ‘dummy’. I haven’t read the paper (got stuck trying to download it). But I suspect that it is worth reading, now having read several blog posts about it. My cursory assessment is that I suspect that the authors did not make any ‘math’ mistakes or any other stupid mistakes. The main question is what can we infer about the climate system from such a simple model? I suspect that this paper does not decisively address the issue of explaining WHY climate models are running too hot.
Found this link if it’s the correct one: http://wmbriggs.com/public/Monckton.et.al.pdf
thanks for the link
Judith –
==> ” I suspect that this paper does not decisively address the issue of explaining WHY climate models are running too hot.”
Seems like a pretty generic comment – a way to say something without saying anything – that could probably apply to any given paper.
Why would anyone expect any single paper to be “decisive” on complicated issues?
Is that Mr. T in the corner?
Uh no, the title of the paper is “Why climate models are running hot”
So you suspect that a single paper that claims to be decisive about such a complicated issue is not likely so. OK. Really going out on a limb there, aren’t you?
“Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model
” by Monckton, Soon, Legates, and Briggs.
Using words like that it must be right, right?
Nope! Using words like that it’s highly likely to be wrong. And even if it’s right, it’s for the wrong reason.
The first sentence of the abstract:
That reminds me of a quote from Heinlein:
– Jubal Harshaw
“Actually, Monckton is the lead author. I had lunch with him once; he is definitely not a ‘dummy’. I haven’t read the paper (got stuck trying to download it). But I suspect that it is worth reading, now having read several blog posts about it. My cursory assessment is that I suspect that the authors did not make any ‘math’ mistakes or any other stupid mistakes. ”
No the mistakes were sneakier.
and devastating.
wait for it….
This paper needs a serious critique, not the slimeball attacks it has been getting.
I’d sure like to see Tomas Milanovic’s take on it.
jimd
I had meant to read this so thanks for providing the full details. I note the first graph uses RSS.
Not intended to be a trick question, but do you believe in the Satellite sea level data? If so, presumably you also believe the Satellite temperature data?
If not, why not?
tonyb
==> “wait for it….”
I look forward to the audit. Lewis? McIntyre?
If I recall the explanation (perhaps it was you?) the reason that McI only audits “realists'” work is because he’s only got time to focus on peer-reviewed articles?
tonyb, for satellite temperatures, they are not really measuring surface temperatures, but some atmospheric layer, so they do not correspond to what you get at screen level. You take them for what they are, but they don’t replace in situ surface temperatures for any location.
==> “This paper needs a serious critique, not the slimeball attacks it has been getting.”
So this paper has been getting “slimeball attacks,” but calling thousands of scientist frauds for fabricating data? Are you similarly concerned I wonder?
Nic Lewis saying that the M & L paper is so fundamentally and obviously flawed that from it we can conclude that the authors, Nature reviewers, and climate scientists in general don’t have basic-level statistics skills? Slimeball attack?
Careful, Judith. Your double-standards are showing again.
Pattern…ankle-biting…fellow-traveler…
jimd
Do I take it from that comment that you believe the satellite calculations are correct for sea levels?
tonyb
Yes, and they’re correct for whatever thing they measure in the sky, including all the myriad adjustments they have made to their data.
Some day maybe they’l mount a polaroid camera that can take pictures of surface thermometers. Then they can add the surface air temperature to their package.
Are they accurate on sea level? Do RSS and UAH do measure sea level?
tonyb, I have not looked into how satellites measure sea levels, but if it is by radar or suchlike, it would be a direct measurement, which is as good as it gets, allowing for possible orbital drift errors that satellites are prone to. Presumably they can calibrate for that by using land as a reference.
JimD,
JCH offered this u-tube and in it is a description of the SL via satellite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uibjA2VCf6A (+/-58 minutes, but I don’t recall the time stamp, sry)
Joshua
CRU are funded b y BP and Shell amongst others.
Is this argument therefore about Soon being funded in part by oil companies so his research is automatically wrong, or that he is funded by oil companies and provided he mentions it that means his research is acceptable?
tonyb
Jim, I am new as you know. What is the reasoning that warming would not first be seen first in the nearest layers under the TOA? On same note, why are people thinking that heat can be sneaking past the sea surface and hiding in deep sea? Doesn’t the gradient logically predict the parts closest to the TOA responding quickest and deep ocean slowest?
tony –
==> “Is this argument therefore about Soon being funded in part by oil companies so his research is automatically wrong, or that he is funded by oil companies and provided he mentions it that means his research is acceptable?
This is a situation where people are filtering information to confirm biases, IMO.
There might be a question of ethics, transparency, conflict of interest, and accountability, but that seems to me primarily to be an issue between Soon and those who publish his work/employ him. AFAIC, Soon’s work should be evaluated on its on merits. I don’t think that we can reliably draw conclusions about Soon’s science from who funds it.
Speculation is natural and not completely unfounded, of course, but these issues blow up because people are looking to confirm biases.
It is not different than when Soon’s associates, if not he himself (I wouldn’t know), and many “skeptics” more generally who are supportive of Soon’s work are constantly making accusations that they can discount the work of other scientists on the basis of their funding sources.
R Graf, what you say is correct for the land, but the ocean has a circulation and is not always able to lose the heat it gains before that gets submerged by the circulation. Typically colder water comes to the surface to replace it. The whole ENSO cycle is one of storing and releasing heat over multiple years, but it only releases that heat when it has a chance to come back to the surface. So the ocean heat content can rise for long periods as the surface temperature may not be changing on average because the circulation has a trend in the opposite direction in certain phases of the ocean circulation. Without global warming effects, the ocean would have been cooling over the past decade or so, as used to be seen regularly in the historical ocean temperatures. So we have gone from warming and cooling to warming faster and flat, because now there is the background trend.
Joshua
Good answer.
I believe we should play the ball and not the individual, whether that is Soon or Mann.
Tonyb
Energy sneaks into hiding places in the deep ocean on these arrow things:
http://mpe.dimacs.rutgers.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Climate-System-Energy-Balance.jpeg
JCH,
The uppy pointing ones or the downy pointing ones? Or both?
rmdobservations: Should I ignore my prejudices and pay attention to the paper’s results?
My opinion is “Yes”. Much of what he writes is solidly based on peer-reviewed literature and the updates of curated data sets. His writing style loses him some of the people who might otherwise read past his name and invective to the solid commentary within. That paper does not have such junk.
He is not a CO2 “denier” (as shown in the article) but has written of holes in more extravagant claims. In a response to me at WUWT he hypothesized that the response to the next doubling of the concentration of CO2 would be about 1C of global mean temperature increase (iirc.) I think that makes him a “lukewarmer”.
I second Rud Istvan’s praise of the paper; he critiqued the paper most intelligently when it was put up at WUWT and had a productive exchange with Christopher Monckton.. Like Lewis and Curry, it is based on careful reading of and parameter estimates from the IPCC reports, and in that sense the model is at least as reliable as they have been.
JCH says:
…
Energy sneaks into hiding places in the deep ocean on these arrow things:
…
And other than possibly clouds, the ocean is one of the biggest moderators of surface temperatures – where we live.
R Graf holds some rather strange notions about the oceans. Almost every spec of energy, coming either straight from the sun or “BACK” radiated, that goes into the oceans has to come back out. If not, we die Robert Frost style. Right now the arrows going back out have .6 fewer seats.
> In a response to me at WUWT he hypothesized that the response to the next doubling of the concentration of CO2 would be about 1C of global mean temperature increase (iirc.)
This qualifies as lukewarm as far as the upper bound is concerned. However, I’m not quite sure what would be the lowest bound to qualify. Do we have a map of the northest peeks of Sky Dragon lands?
In any event, this does not establish the lowest bound justified disingeniousness can buy.
Tonyb: Joshua
Good answer.
At that I had to page back and read it, and I agree.
Willard: This qualifies as lukewarm as far as the upper bound is concerned. However, I’m not quite sure what would be the lowest bound to qualify. Do we have a map of the northest peeks of Sky Dragon lands?
I do not understand what you are getting at. In my readings Monckton has never claimed that humans have no effect on climate or that CO2 is a GHG. Maybe someone has quotes? I have not read anything close to his complete works.
“Energy sneaks into hiding places in the deep ocean on these arrow things”
Thanks Jim and JCH. It is obvious that if one assumes that it takes over 50-200 years to turn over the ocean that the warming of the sea surface will continue to warm the deep ocean for decades after the sea surface temp stops rising, or even if it fell slightly, as long as the surface temp remains above the moving average temp for whatever the ocean turnover rate is. But I think this is misleading to announce to the public that yes there is a pause in surface temp for 16 years but the oceans are still warming, without adding:
“because the current sea surface temp is in the slow process of lifting the whole ocean to a new equilibrium. And this has nothing to do with the 16-year pause. And, BTW, the record indicates the deep ocean is just now recovering from a few hundred years of Little Ice Age. “
Joshua are you saying that you wouldn’t be skeptical of the motives of a politician who receives a substantial amount of campaign from fossil fuel interests and then argues that climate change is not that bad and not really a problem? Isn’t there sufficient reason for doubt? And if so why are you not skeptical of Soon’s motives?
Joseph clearly doesn’t understand the difference between a politician and a scientist.
You gotta take a Darwinian look at it: even a scientist (or politician) who honestly believes his position will gain (or lose) stature depending on who funds him because of what he says.
Personally, I see no reason not to give Soon the benefit of the doubt. He doesn’t understand how hyper-complex non-linear systems work, so he thinks a simple linear model can contribute something besides confusion. And because he says such things, people give him money. Why assume any sort of dishonesty, or effort to solicit money?
To
quoteparaphrase Napoleon, “never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.”Joseph –
==> “Isn’t there sufficient reason for doubt? And if so why are you not skeptical of Soon’s motives?”
Not that I wouldn’t be skeptical. I wouldn’t draw any conclusions. It’s information that speaks to probabilities, but drawing conclusions would be fallacious. ‘Tis fallacious all the tens of thousands (?) of times that we’ve seen the argument made in the “skept-o-shere.”
Just like it would be fallacious to conclude that just because Monckton’s a birther, his science is flawed. It’s information about his tendencies to let his political beliefs influence his reasoning – but nothing conclusive.
Here’s my thinking on motives. I think that most likely, Soon fully believes his science. I’d say that the executives and scientists who lined up in Congressional testimony to say that they didn’t think there were harmful effects from cigarettes probably, mostly, believed what they said.
I don’t think that people are likely to get up before Congress and flat out lie about how they view scientific evidence merely because of who signs their paycheck. I just haven’t met many people that work that way. Most people I know, are reluctant to just flat out be frauds.
But I see the evidence of motivated reasoning on a daily basis. People are influenced in their reasoning by cognitive (pattern-finding) and psychological (identity protection) factors all the time. In fact, it’s kind of the baseline in how people reason. People have to go out of their way to control for those influences. That’s what the scientific method is all about.
Anyway, judging people’s motives is very, very difficult without a lot of quality information. The tendency towards judging motives is, IMO, ironically, more often insightful about the reasoning of those judging motives than it is about the motives of the people being judged.
It seem more plausible to me that Soon could be completely wrong about his science because of his ideological identification than because of the financial rewards he’d get from peddling science that he knows if fraudulent.
Steven Mosher : “No the mistakes were sneakier.”
Something you are rather of an authority on, eh?
MRM:Monckton has never claimed that humans have no effect on climate or that CO2 is a GHG.
Oops. I meant that he has not in my reading denied either that humans affect climate or that CO2 is a GHG. His criticisms have been directed toward what I call “alarms”, exaggerated claims of the sizes of the effects or their threats.
Joshua I think it is ethically wrong to take money from vested interests to fund one’s work and apparently hid it. Whether or not he actually believes in what he is doing, I am still suspicious of his reasoning and his ethics. You seem to be looking at this from a position removed from ethical considerations or common sense while I am not. .
And Joshua do you think we need to have more “skeptics” funded by fossil fuel interests because well we don’t really know if it’s a problem.. I guess you could encourage by saying it is no big deal…
> I do not understand what you are getting at.
I don’t know where to draw the line between the Lukewarm waters and the Sky dragon lairs. Do you?
***
> In my readings Monckton has never claimed that humans have no effect on climate or that CO2 is a GHG.
I don’t care much about Monkton, Matt. Do you?
If it suffices to say that CO2 is a GHG not to be a Sky Dragon, does it mean a claim that there had been or will be almost no warming for reason X would be lukewarm?
If 1C per doubling is lukewarm, how about 0,1C and 0,01C?
How about a very cloudy negative warming?
Jushua wrote: Soon’s work should be evaluated on its on merits. I don’t think that we can reliably draw conclusions about Soon’s science from who funds it.
I agree with that.
All work should be evaluated on its on merits. Fossil fuel companies need to know the results of the best science there is to help make the technical and business decisions to make their companies survive in a business that has much competition and government interference.
They hire Willie Soon because he is one of the Best!
To believe they hire the best scientist they can find, just to muddy the water, is really not something that is believable.
They can hire the best there is and get the best answer there is and pay to get it published and then the other side will assume just the opposite, because fossil fuel paid for it, and then the others make bad decisions. The fossil fuel companies have a wonderful position. They can get the best and the others don’t trust it.
I have met Willie Soon several times. He has been in Houston and talked with our Climate Study Team. We have been out to Dinner with him. We consider Willie Soon an honorable person and a great scientist and someone who will publish the truth as best he knows the truth. He has been in Texas, in Houston and at Texas A&M for lectures and Debates.
Attacks against Willie Soon are just plain sick.
stay tuned: a post on the Monckton et al. paper is forthcoming (later today)
I suspect that this paper does not decisively address the issue of explaining WHY climate models are running too hot.
The climate models are running too hot because they believe the output of their models and ignore that the output exceeds the bounds of past climate and they do not go back and try to figure out why. They just go back and try to change the data from history to make their models look better. The models cannot look better as long as they do not even get close to what really happens..
I liked the paper and indeed, the simple model provides a much better match with observations than the GCM’s that have been the subject of too much unwarranted funding IMO.
Thank you for a superb summary and update once again. I very much appreciate these posts.
From the NYTs, relevant to climate science: “How did experts get it so wrong? Certainly, the food industry has muddied the waters through its lobbying. But the primary problem is that nutrition policy has long relied on a very weak kind of science: epidemiological, or “observational,” studies in which researchers follow large groups of people over many years. But even the most rigorous epidemiological studies suffer from a fundamental limitation. At best they can show only association, not causation. Epidemiological data can be used to suggest hypotheses but not to prove them.
Instead of accepting that this evidence was inadequate to give sound advice, strong-willed scientists overstated the significance of their studies.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/21/opinion/when-the-government-tells-you-what-to-eat.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0
Too bad the Hansens, Manns and Trenberths don’t have an understanding of the weakness of science (am speaking of 100 year predictions/projections) that can’t be tested and replicated.
JD
Utter foolishness.
JD, there are several examples iincluding ‘bacon and eggs’ in the statistics chapter of The Arts of Truth. The worst recent epidemiological blunder was HRT.
Exercise, one among many which can’t be blinded, hence, relatively neglected. The urine of pregnant mares was supposed to protect both bones and heart, but oh how the expectations crashed.
===========
JD – precisely the problem. If you have modeled a chemical reaction and developed a deterministic model (x1, x2, x3, x4, …xn) –> causes Y modeled as modeled Y = f(x) = f(x1, x2, x3, x4,…xn) via multiple regression best fit R2 = 0.75 within the data range, and your boss asked to predict 1000% outside of the range of available input independent variable data for the explosive reactor operating conditions starting tomorrow at 6:00 a.m. in the morning ….how nice and comfy would you feel recommending the plant to use those operating conditions. Even though the boss probably will fire you if you don’t do it. That’s about what we are doing with the climate models.
in reference to Obama’s deniers list…
once upon a time, in a faraway kingdom. I produced a piece of work very similar to that
can’t recall what the issue was
it’s comforting to see that they are just as silly and ham fisted as I was
back then It was rejected by the DNC for being silly and ham fisted
that was then, this is now
From the article:
…
Two hugely important statistics concerning the future of employment as we know it made waves recently:
1. 85 people alone command as much wealth as the poorest half of the world.
2. 47 percent of the world’s currently existing jobs are likely to be automated over the next two decades.
Combined, those two stats portend a quickly-exacerbating dystopia. As more and more automated machinery (robots, if you like) are brought in to generate efficiency gains for companies, more and more jobs will be displaced, and more and more income will accumulate higher up the corporate ladder. The inequality gulf will widen as jobs grow permanently scarce—there are only so many service sector jobs to replace manufacturing ones as it is—and the latest wave of automation will hijack not just factory workers but accountants, telemarketers, and real estate agents.
That’s according to a 2013 Oxford study, which was highlighted in this week’s Economist cover story. That study attempted to tally up the number of jobs that were susceptible to automization, and, surprise, a huge number were. Creative and skilled jobs done by humans were the most secure—think pastors, editors, and dentists—but just about any rote task at all is now up for automation. Machinists, typists, even retail jobs, are predicted to disappear.
And, as is historically the case, the capitalists eat the benefits. The Economist explains:
…
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-rich-and-their-robots-are-about-to-make-half-the-worlds-jobs-disappear
Jim2
The middle class property owning democracy are gradually disappearing as robots/automation/internet/overseas workers increasingly taking the jobs for poor wages that the middle class did for good wages.
I don’t know the solution.
Tonyb
Only a dozen more years for the Centennial of ‘Metropolis’ per Lang et von Harbou.
==============
Tony, it is quite worrisome. I had personal professional experience as an expert witness to an ITC antidumping/fair trade case.
One partial solution (only partial, because it does not address relative competitive advantage, only susidized ‘unfair’ advantage), is bilateral reciprocity rather than pure free trade. Do unto others as they do unto you. Block trade when blocked. That sort of thing. India blocks imported medicines, ignores pharma patents. Yet we allow their pharma companies like Ranbaxy to sell generics here. That is just crazy.
The inequities and difficulties associated with such trends can only worsen as the most vulnerable segments of the population are priced out of the energy market. In a feared dystopia the wealthy would be able to afford efficient, “clean” energy to meet luxury uses, while at the otherv end the costs will be crushing for basic sustenance needs.
Those with and those without independent, dependable, power supply.
=================================
The thing is, if more and more of the middle class sink into poverty, there are fewer and fewer consumers. What will the robots of the rich make if there is no one to buy it? It is a conundrum.
More from that article:
As the Economist piece notes, there’s typically a disruptive cycle when new technologies displace old ones, and replace old jobs with new ones. But this time, that cycle is one-sided—so far, there are a lot fewer jobs being created in the new information-based economy than the old manufacturing-based one: Last year, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook were worth over $1 trillion combined, but employed just 150,000 people.
@ kim
“Those with and those without independent, dependable, power supply.”
Jerry Pournelle says often, and accurately, that cheap, plentiful energy is the key to freedom and prosperity.
So would someone like to explain why EVERY energy proposal from the progressives/greens/leftists/liberals/Democrats/socialist/euphemism du jour, for the amelioration of Climate Change or any OTHER purpose has, or will have if enacted, the direct effect of increasing the price of energy while restricting its supply.
Or, alternately, explain why Jerry is wrong and that a steadily decreasing supply of increasingly expensive energy is actually GOOD for us.
Something to keep in mind…As a % of the US workforce, manufacturing jobs have been dropping since 1944. Between 1944 and 1979 manufacturing jobs went from 16 million to 19 million. For same period non manufacturing jobs increased by 45 million
to 71 million.
1979 was the high point, now manufacturing is about 12 million out of over 140 million jobs.
Just like Tony, I don’t have an answer.
Become an Amish – and your future will never change.
Who knew that serfs were so good at scoring own goals, Beth?
That was highlight reel stuff. Get ESPN on the phone.
Similarities People and robots alike consume resources and produce goods and services.
Efficiencies Robots increasingly are more efficient (by all economic measures) than people are.
Consequences Narrow-minded short-sighted amoral market fundamentalism increasingly favors (efficient) robots over (inefficient) people.
Outcomes Accelerating moral and political rejection of market-fundamentalist ideologies.
http://cdn.inquisitr.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Pope-Francis-environment-665×385.jpg
*THAT* long-term outcome is evident to pretty much *EVERYONE*, eh Climate Etc readers?
Luddite.
Fan
There is a direct correlation with the Luddites
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
I can’t see how your link deals with the matter being debated on this sub thread. Can the hollowing out of the middle classes be reversed. Should it be reversed?
Can the pope hold back the tide of history?
Would we be seen as Luddites if we tried to prevent ‘ progress?’ the lessons of history seem to suggest that what is happening is irreversible.
Tonyb
Fan
I am not shouting Luddite merely pointing out that is what people who question the wisdom of where we are heading will be accused of.
Luddites tend to lose the historical argument but the way we are headed must give us all pause for thought
Tonyb
Here yer go, Fan. A Tale of Cities. A serf’s overview of
an important book by Jane Jacobs.
https://beththeserf.wordpress.com/2014/10/19/21st-edition-serf-under_ground-journal/
Beththeserf, please appreciate that FOMD approves of *EVERYONE* who reads for themselves, thinks for themselves, and discusses the implications civilly! From yer website:
FOMD wonders Why do faux-conservative ideologues bray so relentlessly (and futilely) against RomneyCare/ClintonCare/ObamaCare … which is modeled so carefully upon the outstandingly successful SwissCare system?
The world wonders! Rational conservatives especially wonder!
Fun Fact No nation that has implemented Swiss-style healthcare reforms has ever rolled-back those reforms … and to date (rhetoric aside) there is no reason to expect that the USA will provide an exception to this economic rule of history.
Question Why is the nonrational rhetoric of climate-change denial so closely correlated to the nonrational rhetoric of SwissCare denial? Is it simply the case, that willful scientific ignorance correlated with willful economic ignorance … and (arguably) moral ignorance too?
The world wonders about this correlation!
Hererwith, Fan.
http://news.yahoo.com/public-versus-private-swiss-mull-health-system-shift-073917245.html
LOL … Beth, the plan that Swiss conservative citizens just voted overwhelmingly to keep (after decades of experience with it) is a universal-coverage/private-implemented/state-regulated plan that structrured like RomneyCare/ClintonCare/ObamaCare.
Good on `yah, sensible Swiss conservatives!
A significant difference between the Swiss and American
health care systems is the Swiss ability to consume health
care in cost conscious ways. Everybody buys insurance for themselves. Only one tenth of Americans buy insurance for
themselves. The rest get coverage through their employers
or government.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/04/29/why-switzerland-has-the-worlds-best-health-care-system/
Kudos to kim and Forbes for showing Climate Etc readers the plain-talking common-sense approach to solving “wicked problems” … like climate-change and health-care!
From kim’s link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5bsz_oewDA
Good on `yah, Switzerland (and kim too!) for showing the world the common-sense non-ideological path by which “wicked problems” like climate-change and health-care solved get in practice
Do you really understand so little about economics? Do you know what labor productivity is? Do you know what it has been doing for the last century? Have you EVER attempted to understand why? Or it’s impact on standard of living?
Those evil capitalists. Can’t somebody come up with a system where everything is shared equally? I bet that would work great.
It’s interesting that the more commerce is regulated by government, wealth distribution controlled by elites and the more handouts are given to the unwilling-to-work, the greater the divide between haves and have-nots and the smaller the percentage of “middle class”.
The Great Society isn’t called The Great Failure by those in-the-know for nothing. This formula of destruction is now being applied to western society at large.
Harkin
For all the whining about the Bush tax cuts, taxes on individuals as a % of GDP were still 35 to 40% higher than the average during the “good old days ” of the 50s, 60s and 70s.
It is clear to me one of the impediments to growth is this secular trend of higher taxes on the individual.
While income inequality is something that bothers me, this article is statistical drivel. For instance in Number 1:( 85 people alone command as much wealth as the poorest half of the world.), its analysis places the wealth value of owning a subsistence farm with a stunningly beautiful vista and to-die-for climate in the hinterlands of Guatemala at almost nothing, while making the speculative value of stock owned by the various billionaires as actual wealth. Let them try selling a big chunk of it or have any of the corporations project poor forward guidance to find out how real that wealth actually is.
This kind of silliness reminds me of how during the Japanese land bubble extremely expensive downtown real estate was sold at such a high price that somebody calculated at that rate Tokyo’s real estate was worth more than all of the United States. It may be good fun with statistics, but is a limited perspective of the real world.
Number 2, is even worse. (“47 percent of the world’s currently existing jobs are likely to be automated over the next two decades.”) The headline says “disappear.” Perhaps in 47% of job categories some automation will occur in the next 20 years. Any other interpretation flies in the face of reality. Does anyone here actually think 47% of the world’s jobs will disappear in the next 20 years? Feeding and keeping yourself and your family safe is the only real job that matters and that’s not going anywhere. If robots start doing ever more of the dirty, repetitive and dangerous jobs connected to manufacturing that is good thing. Jobs that involve service to others will pick up the slack and are potentially infinite. The personal trainer for my dog groomer’s life coach told me that. Dystopia coming? I think not. Things are getting better almost every day in almost every way.
Read harder John. Automation will, more quickly than you apparently think, take over higher and higher skilled jobs. Machine intelligence is increasing and there is no practical limit to it. A hotel in Japan has replaced clerks with somewhat realistic human-looking robots. You may think this is just a one-off stunt, but it’s not. It’s the trend.
In the US, it is clear that the growing wealth gap means that the trickle-down assumption is not working well, and now the Republicans are starting to at least talk about other ways to support the middle class.
Measures of income inequality are typically household income.
Households are remarkably different ( fewer incomes per household ).
Possibly there is no income inequality but decisions not to marry:
http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/52b1b4e6ecad04746fd6dfb0/income-inequality.gif
Wages are stagnant as well. It has nothing to do with marriage.
Jim D
Clinton created the greatest income inequality of any president. The number of those earning more than $1 million quadrupled under Clinton going from 60,000 to 240,000. The number increased by 80,000 under Bush.
The share of aggregate median family income for the top 5% of families went from 17.6% to 21.1% after remaining under 18% from 1947 until 1992.
Liberals are having a fit the Fed may increase interest rates. Low interest rates and QE is trickle down economics
simply with another name.
Can’t have it both ways.
After Clinton raised taxes the millionaires exploded. Let’s see what happens to the number of millionaires now that Obama has raised taxes. They also are going through the roof so far.
It would be ironic to have 2 Democratic presidents in office after raising and then witnessing the greatest increase
of millionaires in US history.
So much for income redistribution.
.
The stock markets do better under Democrats which probably is why rich people do well. Go figure.
http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2012-02-25/0222_stock_chart_405inline.jpg
There is only one place that multi-billionaires can egregiously exploit tax laws and preserve and compound their wealth. It is called the derivates market ie futures and options trading through the Chicago Board of Trade. It was listed as being worth $615 trillion in 2009. It is said to be worth close to a quadrillion now.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivatives_market
You can easily add up a small transaction tax that would pay off the US debt. The protection they’ve had is now in a state of flux as the laws have expired. It was a republican Dave Camp who first proposed taxing derivatives. He retired at the end of last term.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/a-sensible-change-in-taxing-derivatives/?r=0
The current congress is taking up tax reform but whether or not Camp’s main reform is enacted is not known to me. They mention his reforms here but I don’t see mention of that specific reform that IMO is the only one that would be truly productive:
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f1a57b7b-bde7-4dfd-9d59-3c5142879649
Trickle down is only an assumption by progressives who, not understanding the actual arguments, use “trickle down” (successfully)
as a term to label their political opponents. This has worked so well, they now routinely come up with other insults and ways of confusing voters about their opponents views such as the term “den-ier”.
As the economy has become progressively more regulated and government has grown (in the US) over the last ~90 years, the gap between rich and poor has grown. Correlation for sure. I suspect causation as well.
Plus there is the fact that as the population gets larger and larger, a good invention by someone, even if they only net a few pennies per person, can make them billionaires if they have enough customers (think Bill Gates).
Joseph
If you want to say it has little to do with marriage, then fine. But you should study the demographics and learn how many more single households there are today and thus more single incomes per household than 50 years ago, before you say it has nothing to dowith it.
There are many cultural and demographic changes affecting household incomes. Books have been written about them. Brush up a little.
That’s right Nottawa like more women (especially married women) entering the work force which should raise household income.
I also think you have to consider household debt which has increased substantially over time.
Jim2
I read that article also, very interesting. There is definitely a “hollowing out” of the distribution of income. The hole in the donut is the middle class. The social consequences are a known unknown. Here is an example of what the future might look like:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/resentment-flares-over-google-buses-in-silicon-valley/
Arguments that the poor in the first world are actually rich are missing the point. Humans are not rational actors or economic robots – they have emotions and thoughts like envy, shame, loss, and anger. People compare themselves to each other. It is not looking good.
For another perspective, try The Lunch Question by Ian Morris Is the world moving into an era of too much inequality?
[…]
[…]
[…]
Ian Morris is an archaeologist, author of many books, including Why the West Rules–for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, a book I have read and found thought-provoking, but have many disagreements with. Anything he says on this subject is well worth reading and thinking about (IMO), though maybe not agreeing with.
This is a very good fair site. I am glad I have finally come across it.
Judith Curry ,has an open mind as is evidenced by this site.
I find her fair and balanced in her approach to the climate.
Interesting – lefties and righties unite:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/02/21/florida-sees-unlikely-bedfellows-in-fight-over-solar-power/
No doubt to be attacked by the Kochs and the Denizens.
Nice link to an article fighting to ease up on government regulation!
Now if they can filter out the scam artists like Obama/Gore/Steyer/Solyndra and solar panel companies that exaggerate savings like M Mann does future temps they may be on to something…..
Joshua, you paint a broad brush! There are many ‘pro solar’ Denizens such as AK, myself, and others. We have discussed it many times. If you bothered to check back you’d find, on many posts, a favorable view. There may be some again’ it but heck even Peter Lang has a % component of solar in his energy models.
You have a fair criticism of the Kochs slamming solar and I agree with you there. That is obviously driven by their vested interest. Solar will proceed based on viability economically regardless of Koch stupidity.
==> “Joshua, you paint a broad brush”
Fair ’nuff, Ordvic.
There are a smattering of Denizens who don’t see solar energy as a reincarnation of Lysenkoism, McCarthyism, Genghis Kahnism, eugenicism, and communism all wrapped into one, in the interest of starving poor children in Africa.
I stand corrected.
Ordovician
I am also pro solar provided it is in the right place.
The uk is not the right place especially in winter when most needed.doesn’t work well at night either…
It’s a technology that urgently needs a storage solution.
Tonyb
Ordvic
Your new name came courtesy of my iPad, but it’s a good name so perhaps you can keep it and make my iPad happy
Tonyb
Tony, yes the name is a derivative.
England not so good thumbs up for Florida though.
New battery technology is solving the storage problem. California is heavily invested in it.
http://m.utsandiego.com/news/2014/dec/12/worlds-biggest-battery/
Ordvic
Whilst looking around to see if there were any other solar batteries planned I came cross this domestic solution
http://bosch-solar-storage.com/
I have no idea as to it’s cost effectiveness or practicality
Tonyb
Well, England has plenty of deep ocean for undersea pumped hydro just a few hundred Km from the southern tip of Ireland (Porcupine Seabight).
Let’s assume a 10% capacity factor, for solar PV with a 20% efficiency, times ~1000 watts/square meter works out to 20MW/Km^2. The UK has 56,604 Km^2 of agricultural land (2005). Let’s say 5000 Km^2 (roughly 1/10th of that amount) is used for PV as described above, that’s an average of 100 GWatts.
The UK used about 323,300,000 MW-Hrs in 2012, which divided by 8766 hours/year averages to about 37 GWatts (36881.13164499201 MWatts). Lots of room to grow.
One key problem, IMO, is thinking of PV as rooftop-scale, rather than agriculture-scale. One of the downsides of rooftop PV.
AK,
I’ve been watching your work and offerings and find them of interest. I’ve wondered about incorporation of solar via existing rooftops (thinking large residential areas in sunny locales) but designed and installed by enegy companies and controlled by them as part of a grid, leaving agricultural scale land area available for agriculture. Issues, sure, but concept? If all the panels, inverters, and grid considerations are controlled by the utility as opposed to the current piece meal might something like this work?
Tony,
That battery is very cool.
I favor independent, non-grid, oriented energy but alas big government and big business will spend their time on grid stuff. To be fair, since industry requires a grid solotion and use the most energy I can see where they’re going.
@Danny Thomas…
Here’s the problem I see with your approach: there just isn’t enough rooftop. Oh, perhaps for domestic needs, but not for the whole ball of wax. The amount of surface area needed is more in line with agricultural scales than rooftop scales. Especially for urban dwellers in multi-level buildings, not to mention industry, fixed-plant transportation (electric rail, etc.), and so on.
I don’t have any special problem with rooftop solar, beyond the fact that I don’t see how it can provide more than a fraction of the total energy needed, and the fact that subsidies that penalize other rate-payers or captive utilities are a boondoggle. You’ve probably seen my efforts to dig into how to make the thing a win-win situation for residentials and utilities.
But it’s not going to solve the major energy problems. For solar to do that, it needs area on an agricultural scale. Run the numbers yourself, using the 20MWatts/Km^2 number I provided, or whatever other number you think appropriate.
But notice that agricultural scale is not agricultural land. No reason to displace good land. For that matter, IMO within a decade or two, floating it on the ocean will actually be cheaper than using land.
AK,
Thank you. I should have asked what you meant by Ag. scale (meaning size). In my mind (that you couldn’t see) I was thinking a city such as Houston, Texas (627 sq. mi). Using exisiting poles, and much of the other infrastructure providing cost savings. (Atlanta 132 sq mi)
Part of the prompt for my thinking was the net metering issue and other concerns you’ve raised. Localized proximity, design, installation, consistency of materials, control and grid cohesiveness would seemingly be addressed. Didn’t know if you’d considered, but know you’re very involved. Just a thought.
AK,
I don’t want to be negative, but anything built on/in the ocean is dreadfully expensive to build and maintain.
You mean something like this?
http://cnet4.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2008/02/14/f47c370d-f4d6-11e2-8c7c-d4ae52e62bcc/resize/620x/5de823bfa383f60b8f90f1ecb2320daf/multiple-640.png
That’s a concept from Cool Earth Solar, that seems to be on hold right now, but could fire back up any time. I sort of like it, although I have some ideas how to make it better. In fact, how to make it lighter-than-air, so it could be floated above the level of clouds in certain parts of the world.
@Mark Silbert…
Well, I think we could expect that to change with Learning curve, along with synergies from robotics, economies of scale, and better materials. Remember, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of square kilometers here. Plenty of scope for all those effects.
AK,
Do you envision floating or on pylons? CaptDallas might appreciate the fish habitat side benefits.
Either way, whichever’s cheaper. It would depend on whether they’re out there by themselves, or if the surface is being used for something else as well. Tall pylons, supported by underwater floats, would probably eliminate much of the motion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=ZyGYxF1gGmM
But I also envision using the ocean as support for floating farmland. In fact, I have a number of different ideas how humanity might lighten its footprint on the existing ecology, many of them involving moving much of agriculture, industry, and energy to parts of the ocean currently almost free of life.
Always assuming there’s time before we move it all to space.
AK,
All while reducing incoming IR via alternative use, and if you add a “bubbler” run via solar of course, who knows the result: http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2010/03/could-tiny-bubbles-cool-planet.
Regarding your Ag offshore, I wanna drive one of the tractors, please.
What tractors? I’m thinking of growing crops on large pallets, sort of like giant grow boxes.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-73j61p4mFOQ/UYhWvvr5WCI/AAAAAAAAHZQ/pVIy0gKmf_8/s1600/IMG_8334.JPG
The pallets have a soft gasket of fabric around the edges, and can be lifted off the floor with a little air pressure, then pushed around the growing space, including under factory-style harvesting and soil working equipment.
The larger structures where the pallets normally grow would be covered with transparent material, making them into greenhouses, which could be cooled by sea-water, yielding extra fresh water. Being isolated from the surrounding atmosphere, they could have much larger amounts of CO2 (without the need to raising the entire atmospheric pCO2), and be isolated from most airborne insects, birds, weed seeds, fungal spores, etc.
AK,
Nice. Fun toy, but I was envisioning a above surface bouyant tractor that would be fun to buzz around in. Ah well. Air hockey has it’s entertainment value also.
Like the fresh water side benefit, and salt as a byproduct if desired.
@Danny Thomas…
See here.
AK,
Noted, and thanks. Technology fulfills need and at times creates (see cell phones and internet, so why not alternative energy, eh?).
@Danny Thomas…
Well, I looked briefly here
[…]
I don’t know if I could be fairly described as “very involved”, my background is IT, and my involvement in power planning is entirely amateur, as certain ad hominem‘ers are quick to point out. I do have a good deal of professional experience in drilling down into the key details of problems, necessary for any good business analyst. One of the IT hats I’ve worn.
AK,
I’d forgotten about the discussion with PE and only follow lightly (otherwise focused on seemingly inumerable tangents and moving goal posts) , but I for one appreciate your efforts. I’m polyanna by genetic design and think if we all work together who knows………………but that’s me.
AK – “how to make it lighter-than-air, so it could be floated above the level of clouds in certain parts of the world.” That would make also a splendid weapon.
How?
Well, farmer Rud is weighing reluctantly in. Some of you all have no concept of agricultural scope and scale. Can vegetables and herbs be grown in small scale/hydroponic vertical gardens? Sure. Already are on many condo balconies.
Can wheat, corn, soy, rice, or many other major caloric row crops? NO!. Nor can meaningful meat protein be produced that way. Well, you could have a few free range back yard chickens and eat chicken meat about once every quarter…like my Slovak immigrant ancestors actually did. But they immigrated because they were starving. My grandfather drew (literally) the lucky emigration straw in his family. Name is inscribed in Ellis Island.
Please, get your arguments into scaled context. Understand how our world actually works to provide what it does for the people on it.
Rud, your take on the book ‘Omnivore’d Dilemma’ ? I thought this book laid out the issues very well.
I’ll keep that in mind, and remind you when it happens.
From The Hall of Innovation
Speaking of meat, have you tried using Azolla? In a deep tropical environment (with consequently greater sunlight than US):
Which means that 16 sq m can meet 100%
Of course, it’s not as simple as that, it never is. But:
Assuming 20 sq m for 2 animals, that would mean a square Kilometer would be able to support 100,000 animals. I wonder how that compares with dairy/meat farming in the US? (Assuming there isn’t something wrong with their numbers. They do seem a little high…)
Consider also that large amounts of azolla could probably be cultivated using otherwise unsuitable land, such as swampland, with appropriate separation from the underlying sog/soil. Could it be cost-effective in place of using normal fields to grow fodder that otherwise could be used for human food?
> It’s a technology that urgently needs a storage solution.
Not unlike very old climatic records.
At least solar power doesn’t require interpretative solutions too.
Willard
You are right, there is a storage problem with old temperature records.
There are so many of them that the Library shelves and archives of such places as the Met office are bursting at the seams. At the Scott Polar institute they are considered so valuable that they are kept in a giant walk in safe.
That was astute of you to note the quantity AND value of such records.
tonyb
> That was astute of you to note the quantity AND value of such records.
H/T the auditing sciences, TonyB.
In return, I’d agree with you that solar power is good when it’s good and bad when it’s bad.
Judith, Omnivore’s dilemma is an excellent book. Recommended reading to all. It would be impossible to feed the world without industrialized agriculture, including chicken, pork, dairy, and beef. That said, it can be done better or worse.
I worked one summer picking plums and oranges with migrant labor. Another summer on the fourth largest hog operation in Germany, semi automated, with its own breeding operation. A distant relative runs the largest apple orchard in the Shenendoah valley, complete with his own cold storage. Three years ago we completely rebuilt our milking parlor from stall to walk through. Instead of three hands taking nearly three hours to milk 120 head (which must be done twice a day), two hands now milk 150 head in 1.5 hours. We are now producing over 2 million pounds of milk annually off just 600 acres and about 350 animals. No bull; we artificially inseminate. Whether we raise the steers for two years then sell them for beef or sell them immediately for someone else to raise depends on market price.
The article is not quite right. My permanent residence is in Florida. Tea partiers just want no rules period, even when protecting grid connections nd rate bases. Greenies want feed in connection rules in ways that strongly favor solar, but would push up rates for everybody else. Of course, third party installers want rules that will create a business for them, so will ally with both to push their private commercial interest agenda. Already a major issue in Arizona and Southern California. The ‘left right’ Venn diagram overlap is small, not large as the article implies.
If you think this is a big deal in the Sunshine State, then sadly mistaken. Failure to follow through on the Everglades restoration deal, invasive pythons and lionfish, Obamacare and Medicare, wet foot/dry foot immigration, … Now those are big deals.
Rud,
I think you are correct – The Florida solar issue is a confluence of vested interests.
> Failure to follow through on the Everglades restoration deal, invasive pythons and lionfish, Obamacare and Medicare, wet foot/dry foot immigration, … Now those are big deals.
Some numbers to show how big these respective big deals are compared to the solar deal would be nice.
willard, “Some numbers to show how big these respective big deals are compared to the solar deal would be nice.”
18 feet 8 inches
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1147537/thumbs/o-JAMES-LEON-PYTHON-570.jpg
Or about one man’s best friend a month.
You call that a knife, Cap’n? Here’s a knife:
http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_pv_us_annual10km_dec2008.jpg
Your daily dose of alarmism …
From the article:
…
While tourists come to Antarctica for its beauty and remoteness, scientists are all business. What they find could affect the lives of people thousands of miles away; if experts are right, and the West Antarctic ice sheet has started melting irreversibly, what happens here will determine if cities such as Miami, New York, New Orleans, Guangzhou, Mumbai, London and Osaka will have to regularly battle flooding from rising seas.
…
Often, scientists find something other than what they were looking for. Last year researchers calculated that ice on the western side of the continent was melting faster than expected. Last month, scientists researching vital geology in that melting were looking a half mile under the ice in pitch dark and found a surprise: fish a half foot (15 centimeters) long and shrimp-like creatures swimming by their cameras.
…
http://judithcurry.com/2015/02/21/week-in-review-44/
Joshua,
I wonder if you would have considered the “externalities” associated with the loss of value in FF stocks w/r/t college education/finance. But since I’ve not seen your analysis, you might have: (from above) http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/19/climate-change-activists-dismiss-fossil-fuel-dives/
Actually, Danny –
==> “I wonder if you would have considered the “externalities” associated with the loss of value in FF stocks w/r/t college education/finance.”
Of course I would. It should be obvious that someone advocating for disinvestment would weight the associated cost/benefits w/r/t their desired intent.
I think that the consideration of the related “externalities” there is important. I don’t have a firm opinion; I see merits to both sides of the discussion. Seems to me that much of the balance swings on whose assessment of the economic impact to the universities you consider valid. I’m not sure I have enough information, but I’m not inclined to accept the schools’ assessments at face value. Then again, 350s numbers would also likely require skeptical due diligence.
In fact, this is an old discussion that has been taking place for a while – which undermines the perspective often found in the “skept-o-sphere” that “realists” are all blindly-loyal sheeple advocating for “economic suicide.”
Joshua,
I appreciate this more than you know: “skeptical due diligence”. Leads me to believe there’s some level of mutual understanding.
I would never had thought of the porfolios of universities and their investments in FF and the associated impacts of loss of value or divestment. Butterfly wings?
Danny –
What i saw when i watched that video that JCH linked, was a scientist exercising appropriate skeptical due diligence. That’s why, when i see “skeptics” denigrating the work of climate scientists as a group, i question the validity of those “skeptics” arguments.
Joshua,
I get it. I see broad brushes on both sides, yet there are intricate pieces of pieces all deserving of evaluation. Having just experienced the predictive nature of global tempertures, the SLR, glaciers, and who knows what else, if we do not understand the pieces how can we grasp the entirety? And anyone who’s not skeptical of the entirety doesn’t look at the pieces. If we’re all not skeptical…………….
One example was of interest. JCH refuted w/o a doubt (referencing tea leaves) Dr. Chambers theory on 60 year SL cycles. I uses Dr. Chambers paper to state that based on his work the Hays paper should be looked at skeptically if it does not include consideration of the 60 year cycle. Then, what do I see? JCH provides a link to a video by…….guess who………Dr. Chambers to substantiate the SLR. And within that video, Dr. Chambers affirmed (lightly) the 60 year SL cycle. Now take off your shoes, put on mine and look that paragraph over. I’d love your thoughts.
] Our study corroborates the work of
Church et al [2013] that SL rise has accelerated significantly
over the last several decades and that it does not appear to be
related to internal variability. In addition, we have shown that the
acceleration is increasing over time. Due to its link with anthropo-
genic activities, this acceleration may continue to grow as
greenhouse gas concentrations increase. – Quantifying recent acceleration in sea level unrelated to internal climate variability. – F. M. Calafat and D. P. Chambers 2014
It’s possible that having WUWT sort of feature the Chamber’s paper makes people think he’s a skeptic. He’s not. I doubt that was a “high water mark” of his career!
Talking about 60-year cycles attracts fruits, loops, and nuts. It just does.
I think it is entirely possible that one of the reviewers of the Hay and Mitrovica paper is Chambers. No way to know.
JCH,
WUWT deconstructed and refuted the Chambers paper, they did not accept the premise. If the author of the paper on 60 year cycles “attracts fruits, loops, and nuts” then why would offer up that same person as a source (see your u-tube video) on SLR? Heck, if WUWT refuted, I’d almost expect you to want to invest in it. Why are you taking this tact with me?
Danny,
It is not going to happen in CA anytime soon. Those stocks are going to pay for state employee pensions, including teachers via CalSTRS. If those funds pull out, state taxpayers will pay even more to cover the pricey pensioners.
http://www.calpers.ca.gov/index.jsp?bc=/about/newsroom/for-the-record/investments/issues/divestment-fossil-fuels.xml
All I know is this pathetic attempt to link extreme cold and blizzards to global warming is simply not working. Nobody is buying it anymore. How many decades has this scare continued and still we are having brutally cold winters?
Why is does it always seem to be cooling where we have good temperature history, like in the US, but warming where historical thermometer coverage was thin?
Why is the ocean warming out of range of direct measurement?
Why don’t we talk about degrees temperature change in the oceans, but gigajoules or terajoules, when they are spread over huge volumes of water? Because nobody can be trusted to properly interpret such a tiny number as the temperature changes?
Why isn’t the stratosphere cooling?
The global warming alarmists have no sense of when they have gone “over the top” with their rhetoric.
Barackobama.com releases list of “climate deniers”, encourages you to go after them.
Fantastic, now I know where to send my information to help stop this alarmist junk non-science.
It is really such good news that there are so many. This is a good day.
Thanks Dr. Curry for posting this. I don’t normally look at stuff on that website. I would have never found this without help.
The only thing they are actually denying these days is being scientists. So what you say to them will fall on deaf ears.
My message to the good people on the climate deniers list is:
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK! AND THANK YOU A HUGE MUCH!
email me if you want some good information. Please contact me and hear my theory. Temperature is inside the bounds of the past ten thousand years for good reason. That reason has not gone away.
Ya – a pretty good voting guide.
O: “Droughts, floods, wildfires, and storms ”
Drought isn’t correlated with global temperature
Floods could be conceivably but are also multifactoral ( like living in a city ) and also correlated with general increase in precipitation which we want.
Wildfires are multifactoral and are of less area than 1000 years ago according to tree-scar data.
Storms, evidenced by strong tornadoes, show a decline, hurricane energy shows no correlation.
Looks like O is the one in denial of science.
But we knew this.
Notrickszone’s post on expert doubts about Germany’s Energiewende is more than just interesting. The whole thing is such a failure that E.ON (Germany’s largest electric utility) recently announced it is splitting in two. Profitable renewables because of subsidies and forced feed in tarrifs, unprofitable base load generation. Unprofitable because forced to downcycle when renewables are producing. Bodes ill for future baseload investment. And NIMBY opposition to a needed major north/south transmission connector means the grid has become very fragile. Would be quite something if half of Germany suddenly blacked out as a result. Their own newest grid operator stidy says that probability is now substantial in severe winter conditions.
There’s something about list makers. They’re like people who refer to themselves in the third person. Just something about them which is hard to put one’s finger on. And it’s not something good.
Jim2 wonders about these things also.
And serfs.
Mosomoso will put you both on mosomoso’s list of people who agree with mosomoso. Believe mosomoso, you don’t want to be on mosomoso’s other list.
‘Yer mean yer Vorpal List?
( Shuddering. )
See Mosher’s List
(below, 6:20pm) and he doesn’t use the third person, just the Royal We :)
Royal We? Mosomoso is not amused. Mosomoso is happy to be singular. It’s an Aussie egalitarian thing. Er, mate.
“We are Bates”
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vzKELVv3XPg
mos, jim2, serf
this list is intended for fundraising
it is a product of the political money/issues industry in DC
I worked in it once upon a time
it is crafted to get base donors to send checks
button pushing, while creepy, it is just advertising
if you had seen how such things are produced you’d be amused
Amused? True. I recall an old story by Herb Caen: A retired judge, The Honorary X.Y; received a personalized fundraising letter starting: Dear The. I imagine myself vividly programming that snafu.
EROI.
From the article:
…
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/jamesconca/files/2015/02/EROI-Book-Figure.jpg
…
Weißbach calculates that this minimum viable EROI is about 7 for the United States and the European Union. Lower EROIs cannot sustain our society at our level of complexity or our standard of living. So I ask – is a lower EROI fair for a developing country?
It is critical to understand these EROI values when making difficult decisions on energy policy. The many claims that renewables alone, or in the majority, can fuel our future are not consistent with their EROI. America’s present EROI averages about 40. A mix of 50% renewables, 30% fossil and 20% nuclear gives an average EROI of about 25.
…
Because of this, coal is now the fastest growing energy source in the world. This is why serious environmentalists, and the United Nations IPCC, strongly urge the world to adopt some mix of nuclear, hydro and renewables as the best mix to can replace fossil fuels.
…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/02/11/eroi-a-tool-to-predict-the-best-energy-mix/
Jim2, EROEI is a worthwhile concept, even if fuzzy around the edges. Nice comment.
In the UK Lord Prescott is to return to front line politics as a special advisor on climate change.
The report on the BBC says “Lord Prescott has a wealth of experience in climate change and environmental issues, having served as the EU’s lead negotiator at the Kyoto talks which spawned the first global agreement on cutting carbon emissions in 1997.”
All I can say is “Be afraid. Be very afraid”
And Lord Prescotts leader Ed Miliband, who is a former energy and climate change secretary, has written in the Observer that he wants the Paris talks to set a goal of net zero global carbon emissions for the second half of this century.
I can feel the temperature rising already.
Labour are at the root of our looming energy problems although the Tories have done nothing at all to resolve it. The idea of Prescott having anything worthwhile to say is hilarious. How do these people get these jobs?
Tonyb
I don’t care how rich anyone else is, or how much wealth is concentrated in how few hands. I’m free, and the goods and services only available to the few a short while ago are now available to the many. Asians who were destitute, or too dead to be destitute, have jobs making stuff the rest of us only play at not wanting. (Their jobs are not fun…but that’s why they’re called jobs.)
I’m proud to walk through a shopping mall smelling of cinnamon donuts and see the main nutritional problem is obesity. At last!
I can make as many gnocchi as I like without ever running out of spuds, so can you. I can drench them in butter which is cheap and available everywhere, so can you. (Just what is cholesterol, by the way?)
I can flick a switch and, without smoke or flame, the magical Bamix just goes whizzz.
Thanks, coal.
What’s a Bamix?
Mark
It’s a food mixer that used to be very popular.
Tonyb
Grasshopper, you must seek the answer within yourself. Or google.
Moso, if I ever get back to Australia, you are on my must take to lunch list. Forewarned by a sometimes Wisonsin diary farmer (who does other stuff too).
Meanwhile, I’ll Bamix a banana (with full cream milk) and drink your health.
As I recall you guys down under also put pineapple on your pizza.
On the Pachauri story (I’ve also posted this on another website):
There is a hint of irony here. Pachauri is apparently claiming a huge and sophisticated conspiracy against him, in that his computer/emails/phone etc were hacked and various “communications” then presumably forged
Where is Lewanclownsky and conspiratorial ideation when they are needed ? :)
The hole deepens for Pachauri
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150222/jsp/frontpage/story_4864.jsp#.VOkQr0uUeKC
Judith, I find these revelations very depressing. But also think we should separate his official and personal responsibilities. This is on the personal side. Hammurabi’s Code first posited innocent until proven guilty. Hard as that is in such repugnant circumstances, I wish a site like yours would honor that principle and stick to the three big themes in your weekly review. Paucheri’s conduct as head of IPCC is fair game anywhere. His possible personal ‘pecadillos’ are not. Just one lawyers opinion.
The creepy guy in the workplace certainly needs putting in his place, and may deserve sacking. However, after the carry-on over the good-natured comet guy with that terrific shirt, I’m inclined to leave this to what they call proper authorities – or to any fathers/brothers of the old school.
As for Pachauri, anyone who charters a private jet from NY to India to attend cricket practice should already be toast as a climate guru. The fact that he’s come this far should tell us all we need to know about MSM cheer squads and the Herd of Independent Minds.
There again, maybe receiving an Oslo Emmy is ridicule enough.
I agree, Rud. It is best to stay focused on the science behind the global climate scandal.
Rud
I agree. Lets play the ball not the man.
tonyb
Agreed, but the issue is this. We are told to trust the ‘experts’ that are the IPCC. This kind of behavior, especially if there is an attempt at cover up, leads to loss of trust of the experts.
> Hammurabi’s Code first posited innocent until proven guilty
Firstly, my comment was aimed at the irony of claiming “conspiracy” as a defence when the silliness of Lewanclownsky’s Recursive Fury has not yet left us. I have no interest in Pachauri’s personal piccadilloes
Your attempt to occupy the high ground seems not to encompass such nuance. Sorry, but I’ll choose another lawyer
Secondly, on the “innocent until proven guilty” concept, I absolutely agree. But I had an unpleasant exchange with both Mosher and McIntyre some years ago on CA concerning whether Gleick was guilty of forgery without hard forensic evidence, cross-examined in a court. I argued for the innocent until proven guilty concept (despite strong circumstantial evidence), Mosher in particular argued that was naive or some such thing
I don’t trust experts.
I trust data and ideas that do prove to be right and then trust the people who put them forward more and trust less the people who put output and ideas that do not measure up.
Trials have certified “expert” witnesses on both sides who disagree.
When any Expert says, the science is settled, they lost me and I don’t trust them. When they say they have 97% consensus, and I can find many qualified people who disagree and not so many who do agree, I don’t trust them.
I don’t consider anyone to be trustworthy, if they have consensus and if they are no longer a skeptic.
It is a matter of honor and truth telling no matter what the implications. Having to tell the truth automatically inhibits activities like this against the light of full disclosure. Lie about that and most likely llie whenever it suits ones interests.
Judith –
Since you’re into dirt dishing and personality politics:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html?smid=nytcore-iphone-share&smprod=nytcore-iphone&_r=0&referrer=
Yes, looks like the jig is up for Willie Soon. His employers and paper publishers are looking into false disclosures.
Wow! He got nearly a 120 K a year from big oil and I only got a t-shirt.
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/CASE-STUDY-Dr-Willie-Soon-a-Career-Fueled-by-Big-Oil-and-Coal/
For someone so secretive he seems to have a lot of disclosures that Greenpeace found. Y’all still haven’t made the big Tuna connection yet.
CaptD,
By all appearances, I’m focusing my research in the wrong directions.
Ah, if you wanted to be paid by big oil you should have called your website “roughneck theoretical physics forum”.
Is anyone surprised?
JimD,
Surprised. Not really. Disappointed and a bit more disallusioned. Just like the IPCC leader, and Sierra Club’s $24 Million. No clean hands on any side from what I am seeing. Politics and climate science makes strange bedfellows, eh? And who suffers?
==> “Wow! He got nearly a 120 K a year from big oil and I only got a t-shirt”
So much for ethics, morality and principles, eh. Cap’n?
Joshua, “So much for ethics, morality and principles, eh. Cap’n?”
“Polar bear junk science funding revealed: While Dr. Soon revealed in a 2007 non-peer reviewed Ecological Complexity article on polar bears and Arctic ice that his research was funded by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, neither the corporate funders or Dr. Soon have ever acknowledged the extent, dollar figures or timing of those grants.”
Looks like Willie went the moral and ethical route. In principle, it’s nonya bidness how much he made. James Hansen also got a bit of “outside” financial assistance before he retired from government service.
Cap’n –
Because you like bacon, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you didn’t follow the link:
On the other hand ““The science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless,” Dr. Schmidt said.”
JimD,
I might have appreciated that comment had said Dr. Schmidt been fully honest when announcing 2014 being warmest year every all while knowing there was a greater chance it was not than was, according to the entitiy he heads up. And when asked by a reporter about that he remained silent. Fair is fair.
Joshua, “while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers.”
Right, the NYT alleges he failed to disclose but earlier Greenpeace work indicates that he did disclose, that is how they got the info doncha know. So the NYT appears to be re-branding something for a slow news day with those rock solid journalistic terms like “most”.
Ok, Cap’n –
So you’re on record. The Smithsonian and the journals have no reason to be concerned. Soon disclosed and there’s nothing to worry about.
I’m sure that Soon, also, will be relieved that you’re so confident about the NYT’s error.
JimD, ““The science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless,” Dr. Schmidt said.”
That would be true. There should be no need for Soon to point out that polar bears surveys and sea ice change indicating that polar bears are doomed to extinction due to “GLOBAL WARMING” were a bit over blown.
You know there is our go to polar bear lady saying the same thing 6 years later. Gavin could be 110% confidence that pointing out flaws is pointless.
Joshua, “So you’re on record. The Smithsonian and the journals have no reason to be concerned. Soon disclosed and there’s nothing to worry about.”
That would depend on how hard the “we are the 1%” NYT pushes.
Did you see the Greenpeace sources?
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/603297-willie-soon-foia-response-grants-08-08-2012.html
That is a letter from the Smithsonian in response to FOIA request dated 2012.
The warmest year announcement was completely honest. Danny, is there no sham for which you will not fall?
JCH,
Are you referring to me falling for the 2014 being the warmest year ever when the confidence level for NOAA was 32% and NASA was 38%? (may be reversed). No, JCH. I didn’t fall for that as I researched the supporting information. And I saw zero benefit to reducing the credibility of the source by promoting the headline while leaving out the confidence level. How can it harm the discussion with it being top 5? 2nd? You?
2014 is the warmest year on GISS and NOAA, and I’m not falling for the skeptical BS. I prefer to know what’s happening, and to not pay any attention to what is not happening.
JCH,
I’m assuming you’re referring to my note, but that’s a guess as you don’t address when you respond. If so, then do you equally ignore confidence levels when used elsewhere? As an example, if IPCC tells me something is very likely should I dispel same as being AGW BS, or should one consider when a provider tries to narrow uncertainty? Or is this just a matter of convenience? I tend to take them in to account when they are provided by the contributor, and since they were provided by NOAA/NASA and I assume they are professional organizations I don’t just cherry pick but take the entire offering. Then, I see that BEST, MET, and C & W each have a different interpretation. But I don’t need a bias, I only need the information.
Sierra Club took $26 million from the gas industry, mostly from Chesapeake for the Beyond Coal campaign. It was on the verge of receiving $30 million more when the kitchen got too hot.
Exxon, Chevron and Pickens have all been substantial donors to Big Green, but Chesapeake’s donations strike me as “unprecedented”, as they say in certain circles.
$26 million taken in just a few years plus another $30 million on offer in 2010? Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
It’s the oddest thing since Google took up bird-mincing in their Don’t Be Eagle campaign.
And so mosomos does his best to prove that Cap’n is only an amateur at playing the moral equivalency game.
Don’t know much about the Soon business, the quality of his work, or whether he disclosed or not.
I know of the 26 million dollars received by Sierra because they admitted it, albeit two years after shutting down the money. The MSM managed to file it all away as Sierra’s sacrifice and openness etc. I imagine there was a measure of jealousy, when you consider how Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nature Conservancy and the World Resources Institute had to divvy up their millions from BP.
Well, now that OPEC is on the fade, I guess Cap ‘n Trade is the next best thing. So expect Big Oil to more than generous to Big Green.
And if Willie Soon even burps the wrong way, it won’t be lack of funds holding back his green critics.
Of course Willie Soon’s science can’t be trusted, he took money from oil companies.
OTOH we can place full faith and credence in Gavin, and Hansen, and so on. They only took clean government money.
I put this information about Soon on about the same level of importance as the constant concern from “skeptics” about climate scientists’ funding, conference attendees using airplanes for transportation, Al Gore’s income, a few scientists in the 70s expressing concern about cooling, Michael Mann saying that he won a Nobel Prize, getting called a “denier,” statist progressives that can’t think critically, “fellow travelers.” blah blah blah blah blah….
This is all about people filtering information so as to confirm biases – as evidence in the identity-aggressive and identity-defensive personality politics.
Not so for me. If Soon has been making false pretences to publications he should be outed. Why not? If he has done something wrong or out of order we should hear of it. I’m not the slightest bit interested in defending someone because he’s perceived to be one of my gang. I don’t have a gang, and certainly not a right wing one.
I would not trust the NYT to give a clear story (because its a trashy manipulative rag), but that does not mean there is no story. There have already been lies about Soon, but it doesn’t mean he’s in the clear on the matters raised. It’s just that one lie or exaggeration makes the next accusation look wobbly.
But Soon is a well paid guy. He should cop some heat if he deserves it. Proportional to the offence, of course.
By the way, that’s a nice list of warmist shysterism and hypocrisy. Couldn’t have done better myself. Actually, I could, but…
Soon’s funding issue is this. This particular paper was not funded by anyone, apparently they all did this on their own time. Yes Soon does receive funds from fossil fuel companies, which presumably pays a fraction of his salary (from the amounts he has received and based on my guess as to his salary and the Smithsonian overhead rates), I would say that fossil fuel companies pay less than half his salary.
So I have to admit I don’t know what the ‘legalities’ here are for disclosure; I would have assumed the same thing that Soon did. This whole issue needs to be clarified. If Soon wrote a paper on food safety on his own time, would anyone care about his fossil fuel funding? Exactly what are the range of possible publication topics that might be ‘tainted’ by ancillary funding from fossil fuel companies? This whole issue of disclosure needs more clarification in my mind.
Does anyone who gets some funding from ‘green groups’ get heat for not disclosing that fact on publications that were not supported directly by that funding?
Nope. It’s more about judging motivations by results. Personally, I wouldn’t trust anything you said about science, because I (sort of) trust you when you say you don’t know anything about it. But I look at the pattern of your ankle-biting, and the occasional (probably unintentional) disclosures of your bias, and conclude “socialist or fellow-traveler”. Same as I do for Pierrehumbert:
[…]
Anything that doesn’t drastically raise the price of energy is “doing nothing”. (And notice how many paragraphs of ad hominem junk this so-called “scientist” spewed in his response before he started really talking about the science. Sort of shows where his mind’s at, doesn’t it?)
As for the paper that has all the alarmists riled up, I know enough about how complex non-linear systems work to dismiss it: even GCM’s are simplistic compared to the real climate, their “simple model”, whatever it is can’t be trusted without a lot more theoretical verification. I don’t need ad hominem or genetic fallacies to dismiss the paper. And anybody who does isn’t qualified to discuss the subject anyway. At least, unless Tomas Milanovic or somebody like that says something approving about it. Then, maybe, I’d change my mind.
For Soon, perhaps the line is crossed when he lists the paper as a deliverable to his funders. This shows quid pro quo.
AK –
Oops.
That didn’t work, and wrong place anyway. Let’s try that again:
==> “Yeah, maybe you really think it’s “implausible conspiratorial ideation,” and maybe you know full well it is plausible. And true.”
Just because I wouldn’t want you to miss it, and Judith took offense when I embedded the clip, I’ll try a different way to get you to to Kramer’s amusing parody of your argument.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D61uWowYxzQ8
Click on the first link. Enjoy. And keep up the red baiting It never gets old.
I saw it. I guess you didn’t see my response before she deleted both of them. O/T, I suppose.
I don’t want to get into personal attacks/jokes that have no relevance other than to the two people involved.
Let’s start a guessing contest
Which skeptical luminary will the committee call to make the case of fraud?
which skeptic should speak for the tribe? which one will step forward with actual evidence and raise their right hand and say its fraud?
1. Judith
2. Christy
3. Spencer
4. Lindzen
5. Watts
6. Willis
7. Dyson
8. Singer
9. Goddard
10. DAleo
11. Monkton
who skeptics? which guy do you want to be associated with. which one do you trust will make the strongest case for fraud and manipulation? Who?
A cool trick would be to have the democrats call a skeptic as a witness and say they have no evidence of fraud
In any case, skeptics wanted a debate about the science. A congressional hearing is a great place to make the case for science fraud.
Who do you want making your case? or will you run away from that debate?
oh, never mind, we were just debating uncertainty.. not actual fraud.
Mosh
Here is the wiki definition of fraud
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud
Basically it says that Fraud is a deliberate deception.
I might think that creating a global historic average is fraught with problems and is not something to bet the house on. But fraud? No.
Consequently none of the above speak for me. Those that could debate the uncertainty that surround it Are probably Judith and lindzen. Whether that could ever be understood by a Bunch of politicians is another thing.
Tonyb
“I might think that creating a global historic average is fraught with problems and is not something to bet the house on. But fraud? No.”
______
As usual, a reasonable perspective from Tony. Sadly, that won’t stop the witch hunts, especially with the extreme right now in key science positions. Oh my, what will become of ye America?
that’s reasonable. tony
Im not sure they want a congressional hearing to discuss statistics.
This is pretty simple. You have a bunch of skeptics with big megaphones
speaking for you whether you like it or not.
And congress listened.
So now they will hold a hearing. And we will see which skeptic utterly discredits themselves with false charges.
Or we will see them try to walk back the outrageous claims.
Of course both sides engage in this. Lots of owngoals.
Steven Mosher
me thinks thou does protest too much
Judith has specifically stated on this thread she does not suspect fraud
I recall your explanations for BEST being accepted by most here
manipulations are not necessarily fraudulent are unjustified
they are nevertheless still manipulations
and should be fully explained
you need not worry
Congress’s entry into the debate makes this issue eternally political
to the detriment of science
I regret to say I doubt this makes you unhappy
feel free to begin circling the wagons
between you and 1-11
I pick 1-11
Threads dont count
I want the skeptic at the witness table.
hand raised.
sworn testimony
P.T. Barnum could not design a better clown act.
Steven, fraud in the US criminal law, civil law, or colloqial senses?
Why don’t you look at the state of Maine NCDC historical climatology between 2013 Drd964x version and the new and improved 2014 nClimDiv versions in essay When Data Isn’t. Woild be interesting to get your opinion of which definition might be most apt.
Rud
Off topic, but a suggestion on your forthcoming essay on historical global temperatures. When I read the essay, it would help to have a section that compares proxy methods. Perhaps this should be done region-by-region.
Richard
I nominate Rud to speak for skeptics.
Are you willing to go before the committee raise your hand and make a case of fraud.
Simple question. If you agree to be called and make a public charge I’ll do my best to make it happen.
which sense of fraud? since you are offering to make a case, your choice.
Or
since others have made the charge you might have asked them rather than me.
I would say under no definition.
I second the nomination.
Rud would be a very good spokesperson for the fraud and fabrication crowd. Plus, he could plug his books a couple of times in front of a national audience.
Ya Joshua.
When we are discussing the supposed fraud in NOAA’s adjsutments for GHCN -M, Rud finds a hook to discuss two datasets not even in use by climate science.
Even here there is no case of fraud. Changes are made. They are described. but look at maine.. those sneaky bastards are slipping some fraud into the records of Maine.
The cool thing is the publications lay out the changes and the places that changed the most
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/GrDD-Transition.pdf
Maine being one of them.
Its genius. Sneak some adjustements in and then show people what you changed.
Such genus…committing fraud out in the open so no one will notice…
Magic.
The fraud of global warming has never been about the principle but the but the imaginary harm that politicians gleefully exploit to motivate voters.
Conservatives can thank Margaret Thatcher for using global warming fear mongering to bust up the coal strike in England.
Now liberals proved they can learn and are trying to use it to advance their agendas.
And we’re all suckers for being played by unscrupulous, pathetic little toadies of politicians.
well said
I’m still new to this
I see what I think is misleading, purposeful misrepresentation, designed to scare and manipulate the public (me)
perhaps it’s subconscious and well meaning because of strongly held beliefs
I am Joe Public and considerably less genteel than many here
but I simply cannot see how ‘hide the decline’, considering the money involved, does not rise to the level of fr@vd
doesn’t matter much what I think, the pretense will continue
Mosher
“Which skeptical luminary will the committee call to make the case of fraud?”
Not sure about the venue, but my first reaction was that it was a set-up; the skeptical luminary will be escorted to a back room under an innocent pretext, never to be seen again.
Richard
so a republican set up. interesting.
republicans want to investigate.
who will they call?
who speaks for you on the case of “fraud”? simple question. not rrocket science
Stalin died in 1953. Luminaries no longer just vanish.
Mosher
Don’t ya know? Conspiracy theories cannot be dispoved. Trying to do so only leads to more conspiracies that back up the original conspiracy.
Richard
Should be “disproved”
A little blue-collar wisdom: never pick a fight unless you are sure you are going to win.
I don’t know what the Republicans are thinking. If they screw it up, the MSM will be right there ready to make sure everybody knows about it. Looks dumb to me, but what do I know, they have high-priced political advisors.
Steven,
You appear to be studying climate science for many years. Can you answer why M&F, whose aim was to prove the pause was within the bounds of modeled variability, choose not to simply plot adjusted forcings plus variability against the ensemble model runs? Why did they need to use the difficult to diagnose radiative forcings to allow the break out of feedbacks which were not part of the question. Skeptics were not asking are the feedbacks in balance with the GHG forcings? They were asking how come the net forcings are so much higher in the models than we are seeing in observation? And, if the variability could easily have been pulled out from feedbacks why didn’t Forster do in his 2013 paper? Wasn’t variability important then? I am interested in your opinion as I am only new to climate science.
Thanks, Professor Curry, for all your efforts to solve the mysterious global climate scandal.
Fred Hoyle and Paul K. Kuroda left hints that the mystery actually began at the end of WWII, with false models of energy in, and physical structure of neutron-rich cores of
1. Heavy atoms like Uranium
2. Gaseous planets like Jupiter
3. Ordinary stars like the Sun
4. Galaxies like the Milky Way
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Solar_Energy_For_Review.pdf
This error obscured the force of creation – NEUTRON REPULSION – with unfounded claims:
1. Science Disproves Religion
2. A Standard Nuclear Model
3. A Standard Climate Model
4. A Standards Solar Model &
5. Big Bang Cosmology . . .
Conclusion: The AGW debate is over. The greatest threat to society’s now is arrogant scientists and politicians who cannot explain the data and will not admit they were wrong. The Sun made and sustains every atom, life and world in the entire solar system, including the climate of each planet and the heart-beat of every scientist and politician.
May they not be tempted to incite religious hatred or a “false flag” nuclear war to retain their delusion of control over the world!
From the article:
…
“3D bioprinting facilities with the ability to print human organs and tissue will advance far faster than general understanding and acceptance of the ramifications of this technology,” said Pete Basiliere, research director at Gartner. Already in August 2013, the Hangzhou Dianzi University in China announced it had invented the biomaterial 3D printer Regenovo, which printed a small working kidney that lasted four months. Earlier in 2013, a two-year-old child in the US received a windpipe built with her own stem cells.
…
“The overall success rates of 3D printing use cases in emerging regions will escalate for three main reasons: the increasing ease of access and commoditization of the technology; ROI; and because it simplifies supply chain issues with getting medical devices to these regions,” said Mr. Basiliere. “Other primary drivers are a large population base with inadequate access to healthcare, in regions often marred by internal conflicts, wars or terrorism.”
…
“Some retailers are already selling 3D printers to consumers, and as they become more readily available, consumers could use them to ‘manufacture’ their own custom-designed products,” said Miriam Burt, research vice president at Gartner. “We also expect to see 3D copying services and 3D printing bureaus emerge where customers bring 3D models to a retailer or provider and have increasingly high-end parts and designs printed, not just in plastics but in materials including ceramics, stainless steel, and cobalt and titanium alloys.”
The rapid emergence of this technology will also create major challenges in relation to intellectual property (IP) theft. Gartner predicts that by 2018, 3D printing will result in the loss of at least $100 billion per year in IP globally.
…
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2658315
This is going to be a major game-changer: Printed animal tissue, manufactured food, etc. Information + energy -> 3D printer -> order.
People are going to learn to love nuclear power plants when they can print everything, including food and body parts.
I wouldn’t worry too much about intellectual property theft when it is a lot easier to buy do-hicky at home Depot then spend a half a day making it, let alone searching for the one you put away in case you needed it someday.
I’ve been out most of today on the golf course so am just catching up.
I probably have a greater chance of getting my game to the point where I can play on the senior tour than Freeman Dyson has in convincing Steve Connor to open his mind. The email exchange was superb however.
My hope is that the greens will thaw out by April. Even money.
Obama should go after Curry for sure.
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
This is a big propaganda game and it is difficult to tell skeptics from believers.
Storage behind the meter: some determining factors for end consumer owned batteries By Volker Wachenfeld
[…]
[…]
[…]
Here is an interesting article about arctic sea ice from the Feb. 14 issue of “The Economist”:
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21643059-earths-northernmost-sea-stirring-consequences-are-both-good-and
Killer Corn Regs
Bjorn Lomborg highlights foolish killer corn CO2 regulations:
David,
The corn/ethanol policy is a disgrace.
Justin, yes and no. Anything more than the original blend wall E10 IS a disgrace. But the original intent was not biofuel. It was to replace toxic (ground water polluting) MBTE (which replaced lead) as a necessary octane booster to maximize gasoline production per barrel crude.
And the food impact of E10 is quite misunderstood. About 41% of the US corn crop now goes to ethanol production, true. But farmers get back 27% distillers grain, which is fiber and protein enriched, low carbohydrate ruminent feed. (Both % by volume.) On my dairy farm, we used to supplemental feed crushed corn (main diary feed is alfalfa hay). Now, we sell most of the corn to ethanol distillers and buy back distillers grain for the supplemental feed. That allows us to grow and feed less alfalfa, and put more contours into corn and soy, with some crop rotation contraints.
Except in Africa, most corn is used as animal feed, with a conversion ratio averaged across poultry, pork, and beef of 4 corn calories: 1 meat calory. Beef is particularly bad at 10:1. You want to help feed the world, eat more chicken and less beef.
The misleading hype above is just that.
To replace MTBE means not much can change. That takes a lot of corn.
On another thread somebody posted two graphs of temperatures. One graph showed natural plus C)2 forcings which reasonably tracked observed temperatures. The other showed natural effects only,which didn’t track observed temps.
Was the second model devised by skeptics of CAGW, or by the same modelers who devised the CO2 plus natural forcings. If the C02-causes warming modelers did the natural forcings -only graph, it’s invalid. They had a mission to convince people that C02 was raising temps. They were not funded to show that temperature rises were natural.
Who came up with the idea to decide that the average of many models was the guidepost? If all models were false, their average was false.
Who came up with the idea that that a rising temperature can be deduced using the method used to track temperatures? The entire land record is also fatally flawed by collecting raw data in the midst of urban heat islands. “Up to 80 per cent or more of the Earth’s surface,” reports Christopher Booker (…STILL being tricked with flawed data on global warming), “is not reliably covered.” Fewer than 6,000 official thermometers (with their individual readings being extrapolated to cover up to 1.6 million square miles) are used to arrive at the average temperature of the world; and, since about 1900 most of the official thermometers “are concentrated in urban areas or places where studies have shown that, thanks to the urban heat island effect, readings can be up to 2 degrees higher than in those rural areas.”
Do you know if its true that the sea surface temp has been rising since 1998? I looked at the Hadsst3 and it looks like sea temp is under tracking land air temp. Is that right? If so, is there any justification for the news to report that despite the pause the sea is still warming?
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/02-nino3-4-ssta.png?w=600
Apparently you can say the average sea surface temperature was down 0.26° C in Jan. compared to December but up 2/100ths of a degree over the, “threshold of El Nino conditions,” according to Bob Tisdale.
R Graf, you need to be looking at ocean heat content, Argo.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Ocean_Heat_Content_(2012).png/400px-Ocean_Heat_Content_(2012).png
The Argo network shows a drop in ocean heat content since 2003. How long will ocean cooling continue? No one knows. Perhaps until 2080, depending upon solar activity.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/loehle_ocean_heat_content.png?w=600
So, is it a matter or who’s Argo plot you choose? Does anyone have opinions about the cause of the conflict in data besides bias?
Most of the Earth is covered by water and given the depth of the oceans, we’re talking about a heat sink comprising 100s of millions of cubic miles of water. Most of the last half of the 20th century was witness to one of the most active periods of our sun in the history of the Earth; however, the sun has been ominously quiet for some time now and from what we can observe, that is not expected to change anytime soon. Instead of slowly storing heat over a long period of time, the oceans are now giving up heat and that probably also will occur over a long period of time.
R Graf, the posted NOAA chart is misleading. It purports to show ocean heat to 2000 meters. But before ARGO, there were almost no measurements below 700 meters. And before ARGO, the XBT diving dart data to 700 meters was sparce, and with many calibration issues concerning the depth at which a temp was measured. So the blue line is a model guess, not a measurement.
For all their self-aggrandizing, the data manipulators of the global warming movement have become the Brian Williams’ of science.
Scientists don’t study political history. The League of Nations was founded to end war. It failed. The UN was established to also end war. It failed.
Importantly, the UN invite every nation to become a member. Its Security Council included the Soviet Union, giving the USSR veto power.
The United States enacted the Marshall Plan, to help war-ravaged nations, including WWII enemies, to rebuild. Part of the motivation was to block the spread of Soviet communism, and the reemergence of fascism in Europe.
It was realized that international cooperation was key to establishing peace, which meant that there had to be sharing of wealth, because without this, there would be perpetual grievance.
One of the key realizations in the 1960s was that impotent resources must be shared. But there were parties who owned critical resources, chief among them energy.
It was recognized that the United States, which is to say private parties in the United states, controlled far more than its fair share of energy resources. That had to be rectified. This was the impetus behind the UNFCC and IPCC.
Catastrophic Global Warming, aka Climate Change, is a false front designed to create a planned economy in which the enlightened make all the important decisions for the ignorant masses.
You can deny it,but if you do, then explain why we need aUnited Nations. Explain why Kyoto, Copenhagen and Paris are trying to enact globally binding treaties that will determine what individual nations can do in regard to developing and using energy. The UN and its departments do not oppose the use of fossil fuels. They oppose the unfair development and use of fossil fuels by “the rich”, particularly the United States. Once the enlightened get control over fossil fuels, they will fairly dispense them.
For example, the Obama administration is shutting down coal generation plants in the U.S. So, western U.S. coal is being shipped to China. It is going to be burned there, which is not going to slow down manmade “carbon emissions””. Keystone XL is blocked. Alberta oil extraction is not being shut down, plans are being advanced to build a pipeline to British Columbia to send Alberta oil to China.
Bring material equality to the whole world. End war by creating conditions in which people share equally, and therefore have nothing over which to fight.
Except, as George Orwell said,”Some people ardmore equal than others.”
If Al Gore turned his Montecito mansion into a co-op apartment building, stopped flying on a private jet, just stopped flying at all, hand-grew his own vegetable and fruits in a co-op garden, gave his fortune away to the poor, then, heck, we skeptics might believe him.
What people need to do is measure temps where they live. Keep good records. If the local world is heating up badly, then people like Judith might want to move back north to Illinois, or even Minnesota, or if that is to too hot, Hudson Bay.
Or, if AC is shut down (uses too much energy), people could summer in the northern latitudes, and winter down south, like people started doing a hundred years ago.
Which is worse; to find out that the temperature record is fraudulent or that it has been created by machines and no one knows what it means or what to do with it?
======================
This is why the world needs driver-less cars today, so we don’t need to buy insurance tomorrow, because it was the machine what done it all for everybody.
Nothing like the smell of O zone in the morning…scientists say.
Steam is still very powerful but we have what we have today because of Diesel.
Absolutely laughable on Obama’s Climate Denier page. What a cheap mess of politics. Petulance by overpaid and overindulged operatives.
Judy, was the barackobama.com “Call out the Climate Change Deniers” page put up just this week or did you just notice it this week? Anyone know when it went up?
It was entered onto the front page between 2/18/15 and 2/19/15
Wow, I could have done that myself but I thank you sir (or madam) for such a speedy answer.
@John Smith
“so here I sit in the hottest year on record experiencing the coldest winter of my longer than expected life
perhaps with the right messaging and a little psycho therapeutic intervention I can start believing what I’m told
and be free at last”
For the last 30 days in the US, there were over 4200 record high temperatures versus 1900 lows.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datatools/records
. This is part of a consistent trend that has continued during recent years.
If you make your outlook narrow enough and close yourself off from reality it is possible to persuade yourself that it is getting cooler. This does not seem to constitute wisdom it is akin to navel gazing.
Having learned it was this week, and finished a nice roast lunch, some reflections.
First, what an amazing review of the week, Dr Curry. I won’t have time to read even a fraction but what a service to anyone into the climate scene. I went for Briggs on Monckton et al and the attempt to smear Soon. Yet again. Awful.
Second, I assume Mosh is rightly warning us not to bark up the wrong tree at a crucial moment by alleging fraud in the adjusted temperature station records. We have considerable capital and moral advantage at present. (The we is broad and certainly includes the lukewarmers.) That’s the way to throw it away.
Third, I find the barackobama.com move of 18-19th fascinating. In my view they noticed SoD’s passionate plea, Maslin’s surprise change of heart, Mosher’s pragmatic approach and Betts coming off the fence with so much good sense. It really matters to some of these people that they retain the D-word and I guess on that I slightly part company with Mosh. If they want something this bad that bad (read with care) they may not be wrong to see advantage in it. Not anything that could be interpreted as virtuous advantage. Not to persuade any but the most naively and easily manipulated. But they may think that’s enough. I still call for everyone to give it up.
If there had not not been an 18 year cessation of rising Global temps
If there had not been an undisclosed manipulation of data revealed by Climategate
we wouldn’t be here
likely no Climate Etc.,
no deniers or skeptics
the end
so here I sit in the hottest year on record experiencing the coldest winter of my longer than expected life
perhaps with the right messaging and a little psycho therapeutic intervention I can start believing what I’m told
and be free at last
Good Gaia, good stuff,
The merry band of skeptics
Drinks warmly your health.
================
Abandon care, ‘that bad that badly’.
===========
Yeah sorry, I did bad.
Oh merry band
fer auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup
o’ kindness yet,
fer auld lang syne.
“Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher” On the front page of the Sunday NYTimes by Justin Gillis:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
Nothing at all about the charges against Pachauri.
Willie Soon story is picking up momentum. Heard about it on Fox News this morning and now is on Slashdot.
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/02/22/0139247/how-one-climate-change-skeptic-has-profited-from-corporate-interests
From the article:
…
You might be wondering what Soon and Baliunas had done to incur the wrath of the climate alarmist establishment. Well, they’d just published a meta-analysis of all the papers which had been written on the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). What their paper showed is that contrary to claims by one Michael Mann (the name may be familiar), the MWP was not a small, localised event but global, big and widespread.
So the memo went out from the Hockey Team (the uber-vindictive Mann and his lickspittle posse) to get Soon, and they’ve been going at him ever since: not by criticising the quality of his science — that would be too difficult because his science is impeccable — but simply by trying to make his life miserable, deny him tenure, and to smear him as compromised and corrupt.
The reason for the latest attack on Soon is that he is the co-author, with Christopher Monckton et al, of a paper published earlier this year in the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences journal Science Bulletin.
This study — Why Models Run Hot — infuriated the alarmist establishment, first because it was unusually popular (receiving over 10,000 views — thousands more than most scientific papers get) and second because it made a mockery of their cherished computer models.
…
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/02/21/nyt-smears-scientist-willie-soon-for-telling-the-truth-about-global-warming/
Calling Mr. T:
I’m sure that the authors of the article vetted the science in the article well enough to “fact-check” their assertions.
Thanks God that “skeptics” are around to get us back to appreciating uncertainty – and to point out the MSM’s burying of uncertainty to push their one-world agenda.
Paid Climate-Change Skeptic Even More Corrupt Than Previously Thought
http://gawker.com/paid-climate-change-skeptic-even-more-corrupt-than-prev-1687297073
When you are the maker of the coin of the realm…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obverse_and_reverse
it is what is inside that counts.
It looks like we all need to bow to a degree, it’s just who’s it gonna be.
Senator Malarkey weighs in. Obumbles will be next, I guess.
From the article:
WASHINGTON — Senator Edward J. Markey is calling on coal and oil companies to reveal whether they are funding scientific climate change studies after his staff reviewed newly obtained documents illuminating the relationship between a researcher for a Cambridge-based institution and energy interests.
The Massachusetts Democrat will send letters to fossil fuel companies, trade organizations, and others with a stake in carbon fuels, aiming to reveal other climate-change-skeptical scientists whose work has been subsidized by those parties, a Markey spokesman said via e-mail.
“For years, fossil fuel interests and front groups have attacked climate scientists and legislation to cut carbon pollution using junk science and debunked arguments,” Markey said in a statement. “The American public deserve an honest debate that isn’t polluted by the best junk science fossil fuel interests can buy. That’s why I will be launching this investigation to see how widespread this denial-for-hire scheme stretches within the anti-climate action cabal.”
…
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2015/02/22/senator-edward-markey-investigate-energy-companies-climate-science-funding/Ex1QsGTBrCYRYlZTmruunO/story.html
I’m thinking I need to do a post on this whole issue, might get to it tues or wed.
Of course, we have to ask if government and NGO funding has in any way biased the alarmist view. That is, do warnings of doom, funded by taxpayers, lead to accelerated funding, also by taxpayers, of “green” projects whose primary beneficiaries are the political friends of the politicians with the power to give away other people’s money?
I have to wonder about that.
Does anyone else wonder?
==> “Of course, we have to ask if government and NGO funding has in any way biased the alarmist view. ”
Yeah. Someone should “ask” that. I’ve never seen it “asked” before.
Lol!
Usually if they get government funding, they would disclose that, and maybe there are some skeptics that discount their work because of that. There is no logical path by which the government profits from climate science whichever way the results go, and remember AR4 was during the Republican tenure, so it would seem to be a silly accusation, but in keeping with conspiracy ideation about the government that we know is rampant in some circles.
Jim D. If you think the politicians, lobbyists, consultants, and staffers in DC don’t profit from government, you need to think a little harder.
From the article:
…
1. San Francisco — You’d need $124,561 to live comfortably in SF.
2. San Jose — You’d need around $115,515 here.
3. Washington, D.C. — $108,092 would be a comfortable salary in the nation’s capital.
4. Seattle — $93,634 would be ideal here.
5. San Diego — You could be comfortable with a salary of $101,984.
…
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2015/01/25/cheat-sheet-10-richest-cities/21394881/
Who are the green blog funding reciprients? BP beyond petroleum and Shell start the conversation about energy are big funders of activist programs. By raising energy prices and locking out small players they lock in profits. Buffet, train man vs keystone pipeline safer oil transportation are also in play. Tom Stayer and Sorus vs Koch or unions vs taxpayers are all conflicted. So lots to look into in propoganda sites.
Greenpeace, Sierra club and world wildlife fund have donors and don’t detail connections like corporate entitiies under SEC must. Complex and wicked problem.
Scott
Upper and lower case ‘W’, there.
====================
Scott – the oil, nat gas, and renewable entities all locked arms and sang songs against coal. Obumbles and his ilk will be coming for some of them soon, though.
jim2, you need to connect the dots. I don’t see a profit for the government from either side of the AGW science. You argue about lobbyists and paid politicians, but all I see there is the fossil fuel lobby, who seem not to have much influence on government research funding, despite controlling half the House. Although, I think they are trying to shut down some climate research the way similar lobbies have to some extent in Australia and Canada.
Jim D said “Usually if they get government funding, they would disclose that . . .”
Do they usually also disclose they get government funding when they write a paper created without government funding?
Some of them work in government labs, so it is implicit in their affiliation. There are self-funded scientists who use their home address as their affiliation, but if you are working on university computers, you probably need to put your university affiliation, which also implies an approved funding source.
So taking $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry and not disclosing it is not hiding a conflict of interest?
Joseph, “So taking $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry and not disclosing it is not hiding a conflict of interest?”
Actually, Soon has disclosed more than most would expect from an evil “big” hit man. But get this “But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests.” NYT Newly released?
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/CASE-STUDY-Dr-Willie-Soon-a-Career-Fueled-by-Big-Oil-and-Coal/
The last update to that I saw was Feb 2013, which is not what I would call new. It doesn’t look like Greenpeace had much trouble getting information either. Looks like hiding in plain sight to me.
I never looked. Does the IPCC report have a conflict of interest statement regarding their members that have received money from energy companies?
==> “Actually, Soon has disclosed more than most would expect from an evil “big” hit man. ”
Wherein Cap’n parries the attempt from mosomoso to assume the title “King of Climate Etc. Moral Equivalence.”
Apparently, they had to do some “digging” to get the information. I wouldn’t calling that hiding in plain sight. And it looks like the NY Times story adds more detail regarding the relationship.
Joseph, “Apparently, they had to do some “digging” to get the information. I wouldn’t calling that hiding in plain sight. And it looks like the NY Times story adds more detail regarding the relationship.”
Really, then bust out some specifics instead of vague smears and references to Merchant of Doubt.
I have a question for A fan of *MORE* discourse concerning the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding for carbon pollution.
The Supreme Court has upheld the 2009 endangerment finding with the result that President Obama and the EPA now have unquestioned legal authority under the Clean Air Act to pursue a very aggressive public policy approach towards reducing America’s carbon emissions.
President Obama has said that climate change represents a greater danger to the security of the United States than does terrorism. But the President’s existing climate action plan doesn’t go anywhere nearly as far as it might legally go in taking action against carbon pollution. The existing plan greatly favors natural gas producers at the expense of other competing alternatives for energy production, and virtually guarantees that the United States will eventually be covered with fracking wells from one end of the country to the other.
AFOMND, could you explain to us why President Obama and the EPA are not using their full legal authority under the Clean Air Act to pursue a series of highly aggressive anti-carbon measures, ones which can actually be effective in greatly reducing America’s carbon emissions?
barackobama.com list of climate deniers. Basic propaganda technique straight from Joseph Goebbels Nazi Germany. 97% agree – is a trumped number, listing individuals with pictures is personal smearing. Repeating the same message over and over and over. The climate consensus movement is indeed in a troubled state to stoop to such tactics. If you keep repeating something over and over people begin to believe it is true. Show me the data.
Theorists of propaganda have identified five basic rules:
1. Simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between ‘Good and Bad’, ‘Friend and Foe’.
2. Disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
3. Transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one’s own ends.
4. Unanimity: presenting one’s viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure and by ‘psychological contagion’.
5. Orchestration: endlessly repeating the same message over and over; in different variations and combinations.”
Heh, ‘orchestrated’, playing loudly on the thin ice of ad suspiciens.
=============
“Both NOAA and NASA GISS have confirmed that the January 2015 global land/sea surface temperature was the second hottest on record. Records go back to 1880.
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-blogs/climatechange/january-global-surface-tempera/42674651
Looking at the anomalies maps shows that middle Europe, Eastern Russia and Siberia, China, Western US and Alaska and Western Canada were unseasonably warm.
February also looks especially warm. The record for GISS is .86C, set in Feb 1998. Could be in range. This would make the 12 months .72C, or potentially .04C higher than 2014’s record just 59 days later.
SOI shot up this weekend is nearing the zero line. That would be the first time on the BOM graph since July 2014.
Ordvic,
More interesting detail: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national
Danny, You’re right that is very interesting indeed.
I was able to successfully download the Monckton paper and did a rather brief scan. I have two observations:
1. In comparing their model to the data, they excluded years before 1980, when the measured temperature was rising much more rapidly.
2. My experiences with Chinese scientific journals has not bee very positive. Their review standards are often highly questionable. I know that I have just opened myself up to charges of elitism, but so be it.
On the basis of item 1, the paper is unfortunately not all that compelling. This is a pity, because the use of a simple analytic model could be very useful, especially on the issue of feedbacks. So, I was very curious to read it. I admit to just scanning the paper so perhaps I have missed something….
SkepticalPhysiker
I think the paper is important, for reasons posted in a comment upthread. I commented directly to Monckton that I it unfortunate there were two extraneous ‘errors’. First, dismissing the Bode feedback model (1/1-f) over ‘grey world SB of 1.1-1.2C per CO2 doubling. (Lindzen uses 1.2). It is even simpler than the irreducibly simple equation, and stable and useful for f below the inflection at about 0.75. Second, for getting a bit confused about positive and negative feedback. The overall cloud feedback is negative (clouds cool). What meant by cloud feedback in the IPCC/GCM sense is the first derivative. With more CO2 induced warming, clouds will cool less. (BTW, there is scant evidence this is actually true. Essay Cloudy Clouds.)
This completely muddles the papers climate stability argument for overall net negative feedback. It is the change with change that is the amplifier. And any Bode f below 0.75 works fine. AR4 ECS of 3 (3.2 in CMIP3) is a net Bode f of about 0.65, itself the sum of watervapor at about 0.5 and clouds (plus any minor components) at 0.15. Both observationally too high.
I think I’ve never heard so loud
The quiet message in a cloud.
======================
Interestingly, even with their assumed negative feedback, they got 78% of the warming since 1850 as anthropogenic, so even though they were trying very hard not to, they have to say that this is mostly manmade warming. Unfortunately, the paper only makes weak heuristic arguments for its assumptions about the feedback and transience parameters, which both deviate highly from anyone else’s. They just plug these in, and, bingo, that is their new model, so we can’t take this 78% as a serious number either.
curryja | February 22, 2015 at 10:53 am |
stay tuned, my next post (posted tonite), includes a brief argument as to why CET is relevant…..
oops, this post is coming tomorrow, stay tuned for a new post from Zeke
For some time now, I’ve been ‘scrutinizing’ the CET data (daily, monthly, seasonal, annual and yes the ‘annual corrected’), so I will look forward to the article.
the CET argument is very brief; one slide in a much longer presentation. coming monday for sure
OK, who’s the grammar and capitalization freak who’s taken over kim’s keyboard?
===============
Wow: http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2015/02/that-marotzkeforster-vs-lewis-thing.html
“My first thought on a superficial glance at the paper was that it wasn’t really that useful an analysis, as we already know that the models provide a decent hindcast of 20th century temps, so it’s hardly surprising that looking at shorter trends will show the models agreeing on average over shorter trends too (since the full time series is merely the sum of shorter pieces). That leaves unasked the important question of how much the models have been tuned to reproduce the 20th century trend, and whether the recent divergence is the early signs of a problem or not. (Note that on the question of tuning, this is not even something that all modellers would have to be aware of, so honestly saying “we didn’t do that” does not answer the question…)”
OMG!
It’s the machines wot dunnit.
=====================
Rud —
I will try to read the Monckton paper more closely, especially the dynamics of the feedback processes… as I’ve said this part is interesting. However, to repeat, their “cherry picking” of the time range diminishes the credibility, unless they have a reason, which I did not see.
On the cloud feedback issue, I first became aware of this in an old paper by Harries, one of the few “review” papers I have found on the climate issue. My current understanding is that the magnitude (and possibly even the sign) of the feedback depends on the relative magnitude of increase of high altitude vs. low altitude clouds. As I understand it, the cloud/water vapor feedback is still very uncertain, probably the most uncertain thing in the current models.
Well, you also have my two criticisms of the paper, above.
Quite correct about clouds, except it is more complicated than just altutude. Cirrus always warms, because iceis opaque to infrared. Low clouds cool because albedo and warm radiating cloud tops. There are actually four main factors: cloud type, cloud altitude, cloud optical depth, and entrained precipitation. None of which the GCMs model correctly. essay Cloudy Clouds.
There must be a lot of feedback in the climate system. The ice age cycles tell the story. The Milankovitch cycles provide a tiny variation in solar irradiance, the order of a few tenths of a Watt/M2. This is a very small amount of forcing. This causes a variation in temperature of the order of 9C once the feedback due to variations in albedo, water vapor and long lived GHG’s and whatever else has varied comes into the picture. It is crazy to claim that ice ages show that feedback is largely negative.
The current forcing relative to 1750 is estimated to be about 2.3W/M2.
Hi eadler2, longtime no see. I have come to a different impression of the ice age causes as you express. I know the establishment view is M-cycles but a lot of professors that wanted to confirm that, like Richard Muller of Berkeley.
Muller could not match up eccentricity even though that has a similar 100ka year cycle to interglacials. Obliquity actually has some correlation although being 41ka yr cycle does not fully explain the pattern. More likely it is simply the trigger that lets a wire off the trigger.
@rgraf
I looked for Muller’s work on the causes of ice age cycles on the web. The last work on the theory that cosmic dust is the source was published in 1997. It was an interesting hypothesis, but no cosmic dust disk has yet been found, and I couldn’t find any more work on this hypothesis since then. It is a creative idea, but in the last 18 years, nothing has come of it.
For your entertainment, here is the complete six piece Tom Harris/ICSC attack series, from the Friends of CAGW. Tom is a leading Canadian skeptics. They hit at him with roughly 200 standard green arguments. Remarkably none touch him.
Feb 16: “Tom Harris – hypocritical peddler of deceitful climate change
editorials”:
http://scholarsandrogues.com/2015/02/16/tom-harris-hypocritical-peddler-of-deceitful-climate-change-editorials/#more-95427
Feb 17: “Tom Harris’ recent commentaries rife with errors and illogic”:
http://scholarsandrogues.com/2015/02/17/tom-harris-recent-commentaries-rife-with-errors-and-illogic/
Feb 18: “Tom Harris places absurd limits on scientific truths and elevates ignorance to equal knowledge”:
http://scholarsandrogues.com/2015/02/18/tom-harris-implores-his-readers-to-embrace-irrational-limitations-on-climate-science/
Feb 19: “Tom Harris distorts the maturity of global warming science and imagines expertise where little exists”:
http://scholarsandrogues.com/2015/02/19/tom-harris-distorts-the-maturity-of-global-warming-science-and-imagines-expertise-where-little-exists/
Feb 20: “Tom Harris’ commentaries intended to impede, not advance, public understanding of climate science”:
http://scholarsandrogues.com/2015/02/20/tom-harris-commentaries-intended-to-impede-not-advance-public-understanding-of-climate-science/
Feb 21: “Peddlers of climate change deceit have significant advantages over climate realists”:
http://scholarsandrogues.com/2015/02/21/peddlers-of-climate-change-deceit-have-significant-advantages-over-climate-realists/
Thanks, David, for confirming that the AGW debate is over and “the cat is out of the bag!”
The mystery is why so many critics of AGW overlooked adjustments made to temperature data.
Thanks for the links. I find the articles quite convincing.
Would world leaders incite racial or religious violence to stay in office?
http://jonathanturley.org/2015/02/22/islamic-scholars-present-an-open-letter-to-isis-leader-al-baghdadi/
More beehives globally, not fewer.
Bjorn Lomborg reports:
Say what???
Good news for Winnie ther Pooh fans http://bit.ly/17L7G0O
“NOAA did a pretty nice uncertainty analysis of ‘warmest year.’ However, how that was communicated to the public was rather misleading.”
Judith, right on. The error in NOAA data is +/-0.1 C. The temperature difference between the warmest and coolest year in 2001-2014 is less than 0.2 C. The temperatures are indistinguishable from each other given the error range.
How misleading is the ‘warmest year’ claim? Imagine an election survey between two candidates. Survey shows 51% voted for candidate A and 49% voted for candidate B. The survey error is +/-2%. Candidate A announced to the world that the survey clearly proves he won the election.
Bad link
It’s http://www.Climatedialogue.ORG
you wrote : Climatedialogue.com
O’Bama administration should be shamed by this. Disgusting behavior.
Not to be divisive but…In what world is it even conceivable that NASA or NOAA or alter temperature record in a way that reduces 20th century warming trend?
In Meta studies or drug effectiveness, the funnel plot tells a story of incentives vs irreducible statistical&scientific-uncertainty: The characteristic plot of a money making drug seeking the results it wants are that small studies which show the drug as ineffective tend to be “forgotten”, and so the average of all studies biases towards effectiveness.
Honestly, I’m not surprised that historical temperature records could be biased one or the other – heck we can’t get today’s ground stations to line up with the satellites – and so I always tend to think about the historical record as fuzzy within a certain range. Practically though, we care mainly about evaluating data with two hypothesized characteristics: 1. it happens in the future and 2. has a significant effect beyond even the most meaningful variation in the century past. Actual will follow predicted, or it won’t. This sideshow debate really doesn’t impact either of these, and to me seems rather moot
A couple of years ago I assumed the adjustments to GISS, BEST etc. were as dodgy as the Hockey Stick. But as I’ve followed various posts and comments on WUWT, Climate Etc. and Climate Audit I’ve come to the conclusion that they are in the main justifiable. The idea that these adjustments are a silver bullet that will kill climate alarmism is ‘clear, simple and wrong.’ The proposed congressional hearings on the subject will be at best a waste of time. I’ve written a blog post with more details here:
https://jonathanabbott99.wordpress.com/2015/02/23/clear-simple-and-wrong/
How original of Anthony Watts to place plate tectonics in the same boat as phlogiston.
I’m pretty sure you understand the intent that the
consensus rejection of plate techtonics was similar to the
consensus acceptance of phlogiston.
Wegener’s heroic personal example and the history of Wegener’s techtonicphysics ideas equally are worthy of study by Climate Etc readers!
http://i.colnect.net/images/f/137/096/Alfred-Wegener-1880-1930-geophysicist–amp–meteorologist.jpg
Summary Wegener’s 1912 hypothesis of plate techtonics was accepted by the scientific community within four decades (except for a diminishing cadre of contrarians). And similarly, von Neumann’s 1955 hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change was accepted by the scientific community within four decades (except for a diminishing cadre of contrarians).
Good on `yah, Alfred Wegener!
Another great post by Mark Steyn on Pachauri: http://www.steynonline.com/6826/fake-nobel-laureate-facing-sex-arrest-for
Just finished the paper. In short, in my opinion, this paper is poorly written and offers nothing new. I recognised some terms from the IPCC reports.
I’d have to code it myself to understand what was being done. The supplementary material does not include any code.
The discussion was very mixed. Maybe because of the diversity of the authors. Some issues were introduced which were not addressed by their “model”. For example, projections of world population, energy resources. The comparison between the temperature variability over 800.000 years paleoclimatology and the last 100 years did not make sense to me. Even within the bounds mentioned, most people acknowledge that the climate has varied over that interval. GCMs have their problems but they are the best source of insight into how the climate might evolve. (For some odd reason the authors mention several times that they are not comparing their model to GCMs).
I have no idea what Figure 4 is demonstrating. Figure 6 mentions observations but is deceptive or maybe just sloppy. The “recent” discussions about spatial resolution are not new, although there might be new results that contribute to the discussion. The uncertainty about clouds has been around for decades. I would have to go to the WUWT blog to find out what the discussion was all about.
My opinion of Monckton has not changed. He references his own articles as “results” when they are just compilations of other people’s research. I think there would be an uproar here if Al Gore decided to publish a scientific paper.
What a big can of worms we are opening. I can’t wait until every university has to detail the funding for every climate scientist in the US. I don’t see any reason to stop there. Perhaps a committee on unconsensus activities. Are you now or have you ever been a climate change denier!?