by Judith Curry
Its your turn to introduce topics for discussion
I am in the throes of working on a big proposal due Feb 4, so not much time for blogging until then. Fortunately, several interesting guest posts are forthcoming.
by Judith Curry
Its your turn to introduce topics for discussion
I am in the throes of working on a big proposal due Feb 4, so not much time for blogging until then. Fortunately, several interesting guest posts are forthcoming.
Sensitive points. Evvybody’s got tetchy lately.
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What’d you mean by THAT!? ;op
Bayesian, Bayesian mucho!
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I can’t decide if I’m uniform or uninformed. Mebbe Joshua can help me out.
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I’ll be happy just to form…with occasionally updating.
mwgrant,
As the Auditor saith:
> Does everything have to have a point?
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/31343170778
Heh, my question always is, does anybody get the point? I can always reach into the ice crypt for a cold one.
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Skeptics are not afraid of nature. The curious skeptic respects nature and gains strength by understanding limitations and breaking down barriers to the unknown. It is superstition and fear that freezes the weak — logically and spiritually – and, fear of climate change has frozen Western academia to death: government funding of global warming alarmism is a fraudulent inducement to deceive the public and academia has been a willing accomplice.
Wagathon, on the whole I agree. But skeptics need to agree that AGW has occurred. The global warming between 1910 and 1940 did happen and there is no other credible explanation than man-made CO2. 15 million model T Fords, electricity in every town…..etc. But why did it stop and reverse so dramatically in 1940? Because CO2’s specific heat was never responsible. It must have been one or more of CO2’s vibration nodes that were swallowing the energy. When it mysteriously stopped in 1940, quantum mechanics carries the secret wraped in its theories. After all, no one would argue that the CO2 molecule could not lose one photon of energy in the right conditions and that is all it takes to close a major vibration mode. But the 1910-1940 heat was still in the atmosphere and by 2000 had worked its way through the oceans, almost doubling the 1940 increase in temperature (0.45 to 0.9C). The IPCC ignored all this.
It’s the sun stupid.
“Carbon dioxide is 0.000383 of our atmosphere by volume (0.038 percent) … Only 2.75 percent of atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic in origin … If the atmosphere was a 100-story building, our anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor.” ~Reid Bryson
Those numbers are wrong Wagathon
Proof of the failure of the Western educational system is the difficulty global warming alarmists have understanding simple concepts like–e.g., ‘parts per million.’
hilarious coming from someone who doesn’t understand percentages.
“There is no dispute at all about the fact that even if punctiliously observed, (the Kyoto Protocol) would have an imperceptible effect on future temperatures — one-twentieth of a degree by 2050.” ~Dr. Fred Singer
[Source: Dr. S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service; in a Sept. 10, 2001 Letter to Editor, Wall Street Journal
Science magazine reports hot, hot heat from the magnetic Sun.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/01/magnetic-sun-produces-hot-hot-he.html?ref=em
omanuel | January 26, 2013 at 7:54 am | Science magazine reports hot, hot heat from the magnetic Sun.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/01/magnetic-sun-produces-hot-hot-he.html?ref=em
I really don’t understand these arguments, looking to find ‘heat sources’ for the increasing heat from the photosphere layer.
I’ve only been thinking of this for a couple of months and then not a lot, so perhaps you’ll indulge me as I think it through a bit more with you here..?
Ignoring the quite frankly silly AGWScienceFiction narrative that gives the Sun’s temperature as 6000°C which they take from the narrow 300 mile wide photosphere band and claim, as Pekka confidently tells me, that the Sun produces very little longwave infrared (radiant heat) as they show proof in those interminable planck diagrams, the Sun is actually considerably hotter, 15 million degrees hot at its core.
The Sun is around 15,000,000°C not 6,000 – and something that hot must be giving off a lot of heat. [27 million degrees Fahrenheit]
Because, this heat is the Sun’s thermal energy, it’s great heat energy, on the move in transfer by radiation.
(Which in the real world is thermal infrared, aka heat, aka radiant heat, aka the Sun’s thermal energy in transfer via radiation which AGWSF calls longwave infrared, so AGWSF says that the Sun gives off very little heat…)
Why would the relative heat flow from the Sun be any different in principle from, say, an incandescent lightbulb which radiates out 5% visible light and 95% thermal infrared, heat? Or a steel billet at white hot which radiates most of its energy as heat?
(And just to add here, ignoring the equally frankly ludicrous idea from AGWSF that visible light is heat.., to make clear I’m sticking with traditional physics which is that light is light and heat is heat, light is not a thermal energy.)
In the real world physics the hotter something is the faster the heat from it flows and its movement is always spontaneously from hotter to colder.
I think, what we could be seeing in the bands outward is residual layers left behind as what must be an enormous heat flow from the core rushes out at great speed into cold space. This is 15 million degrees of heat, longwave infrared, rushing out from the core with nothing more than the Sun’s gravity to contain it. [“the Sun blasts more than a billion tons of matter out into space at millions of kilometers per hour” *1.]
What is creating this gravity? It can’t be the 300 mile wide photosphere, it takes mass to create gravity and visible light is tiny and isn’t a solid surface [though AGWSF likes to pass this off as a “surface”, it is actually considered where the Sun’s atmosphere starts], it can only be primarily the core which is some 150 times as dense as water.
Actually, let me go back to the issue of calling it “surface” when it is really atmosphere – http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/Curric_7-12/Chapter_2.pdf
The “surface” which we see is simply a thin layer of light which is the solar disc, which is the visible layer and “There is nothing hard, or definite, about the solar disk that we see; in fact, the matter that makes up the apparent surface is so rarified that we would consider it to be a vacuum here on Earth”.
However, there is something “hard or definite” about the core which is a plasma 150/160 times as dense as water, and “The energy output of the Sun’s core is so large that it would shine about 1013 times brighter than the solar surface if we could “see” it.”
Now, it goes on to say “The immense energy produced in the core is bound by the surrounding radiative layer. This layer has an insulating
effect that helps maintain the high temperature of the core.
Is that really what it is doing?
The radiative layer is much less dense than the core, there may well be light bouncing around it “for a hundred thousand years”*2, but, is it really stopping that 15 million degrees of invisible heat.., all or most of which could be the ‘thousand times brighter energy we can’t see’? And if it can’t, than neither can the other layers.
Isn’t this layer more likely to be similar to our own atmosphere for example, which molecules of nitrogen and oxygen bounce around visible light but which cannot stop the more powerful, bigger, thermal infrared heat energy from travelling through?
Isn’t this radiative layer simply a residual layer left behind the great 15 million degree radiant heat which is travelling at the speed of light and so a heck of a lot faster than the billions of particles are travelling..? Kept in place by the core’s gravity.
Anyway, ditto the other layers. I see these simply as effects from the immense thermal energy generated by the dense core, in effect all of them “atmospheres” of the core under its gravity relative to their mass as on Earth we have the different layers of atmospheres from the surface out- in other words the core is the real surface of the Sun. [what would 150 times denser than water equate to on Earth?]
So, the typical angst scientists have about the Sun trying to work out why it goes from hot to colder until the photosphere and starts heating up again and trying to find what is ‘creating the heat in these hotter outer layers’, is, I think, backwards, because it seem to me the natural flow of heat from hotter to colder through different densities and amounts of the atmospheres around the core can explain it all, these are simply effects, what the heat left behind.
Ah, I’ve just found how dense the core is – “The Sun’s core is about 16 million K and has a density around 160 times the density of water. This is over 20 times denser than the dense metal iron which has a density of “only” 7 times that of water.”*3
*1 http://beyondweather.ehe.osu.edu/issue/the-sun-and-earths-climate/the-sun-earth%E2%80%99s-primary-energy-source
*2 http://www.thesuntoday.org/glossary/layers-of-the-sun/
*3 http://www.astronomynotes.com/starsun/s2.htm
Comments on this new animation of Arctic sea ice volume from PIOMAS, created by Andy Lee Robinson (courtesy of Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice Blog):
Yikes, curves flying through space like magic carpets. And how many polar bears died creating the sound effects?
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looks like the canary in the coal mine is leaning awkwardly
Wonder when AGW skeptics expect this trend to reverse and their new glacial advance to begin?
2007
A reasonable skeptic might not make a prediction, but would evaluate the data upon which others predictions were based and form a conclusion based on that evaluation.
R. Gates,
It’s a guess, no more wild than the consensus ‘disappearing arctic ice soon’ prediction, but I think at the latest by 2020 we will see the likely overblown and misattributed trend reverse.
By the way, global sea ice is almost on average now.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
R. Gates, forget about overblown and misattributed (sorry). It will reverse by 2020.
40+ years of Arctic sea ice volume decline to reverse in 2020? Must be something very substantial to reverse this very strong negative trend. Let me guess the thinking here: (tongue in cheek, okay, so chill)
The long-awaited and much anticipated cool phase of the AMO?
The Maunder Minimum II?
The Iron Sun rusting?
A. Watts long-awaited and much anticipated “major” paper is so many pages long that it covers the planet, reducing global albedo?
R. Gates
You missed something.
The study cited by Edim was on global sea ice, which is back to close to the baseline value.
This includes Antarctic sea ice, which is growing and Arctic sea ice, which (as you pointed out) is receding.
The former gets almost no press coverage, while the latter gets lots of ballyhoo, like the article you posted.
Whether or not global sea ice reaches the baseline by 2020 is anyone’s guess.
Max
If the Earth were naturally warming following the LIA, wouldn’t you expect a continuing decline in sea ice? Add to that natural variability and whatever cyclical changes may exist with regard to Arctic sea ice (why are all the scary graphs just ASI? Why not use total average global sea ice, like you all do with temps?) And if so, how much loss would be attributed to which?
When the canary in the coal mind starts having trouble breathing, it would be of less concern if the cage were hung next to gas powered generator, in a chamber full bat guano.
But hey, don’t let complexity of attribution or uncertainty bars get in the way of a good, scary graphic.
Appeals to global sea ice are just a lame deception attempt to mislead people into missing the fact arctic sea ice is rapidly approaching summer zero.
Appeals to only Arctic sea ice are just a lame deception attempt to mislead people into missing the fact global sea ice likely is a better measure of globaclimarewarmingchange, and much less dramatic.
R. Gates – Look at the cooling after the Roman Warm Period and look at the cooling after the Medieval Warm Period. The next glacial advance and the cooling will arrive on a similar time scale, just like it always does.
Earth warms, the oceans warm, Arctic Sea Ice melts, the snows start, the ice rebuilds, the earth and oceans cool and the Arctic freezes, the sea ice maxes out, the snows stop, earth warms, ice retreats and you can repeat this process, over and over and over and over. This has repeated in the same bounds for ten thousand years.
Yes.
Little to do with CO2 and a lot to do with ‘polar amplification’
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CO2-Arc.htm
Polar amplification should work at both Poles. And the same theory predicts an atmospheric hot spot which isn’t there.
I love the magnetic correlation though.
See:
http://www.mikereyfman.com/photo/photo.php?No=6&Gallery=Polar-Bears-Svalbard-Spitsbergen-Norway
See the pale area on the sea surface behind the bear? that is a smooth, oil and/or surfactant polluted water which is less rippled than clean. It has lower albedo and less emissivity than a clean water surface. At a larger scale it would produce fewer aerosols and less cloud would form above it.
Enough light oil spill — that is the oil needed to make smooths — comes down the rivers of Siberia to equal one Exxon Valdez every four weeks. It’s big oil, it’s anthropogenic, what’s not to like?
JF
Got screw? I got hammer….
Julian, interesting point re pollution from Siberia. Do you have any citations please? BTW the bears seem healthy, at least for the time being.
The sea ice thing is an interesting study in how scientists interpret the accuracy of their predictions.
If the sea ice shrinks 50% less than anticipated, the predictors (perhaps with some rationalization and backpedalling), conclude that the predictions were wrong.
If the sea ice shrinks 50% more than anticipated, the predictors claim victory. Somehow, because it’s moving in the anticipated direction, it’s “righter”. Even though the prediction is just as wrong.
I just find that kind of interesting.
Yep, that’s what four cm/yr in thickness by 33 years will get you (per PIOMAS). I think Gates is a bit frightened when that is spread to be extent. It’s ok Gates, the open water area per day in 2012 was, get this, LOWER than in 2011. It’ll come back, but black soot might keep it suppressed a bit with so many starting to burn wood with prices of energy so high. That doesn’t help.
1979 huh?
Wasn’t that about the time when the ‘hot news’ was ‘Catastrophic Global Cooling’ and that catastrophe could only be avoided by ‘doing something right now’. And wasn’t the most powerful piece of evidence the record HIGH levels of Arctic sea ice?
Well, whatever we did must have worked, because sea ice apparently began declining right away. Luckily.
No Bob you are just getting a bit carried away making things up.
@Lolwot:
Silly me, I KNOW that the ‘Great Global Cooling Myth of the ’70’s’ has been thoroughly debunked (See Wikipedia and multiple debunking papers by climate experts) and all agree that there never was a ‘Cooling Scare’ or calls for action to stave such a thing off and since I am well along in my dotage I am sure that all the stories on the subject that I remember reading in the popular press and major news papers at the time are simply figments of my overheated denialist imagination.
Nevertheless, the memories are persistent and apparently I am not the only codger who has conjured them up out of whole cloth, as several other fogies commenting on this piece:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/25/the-cia-documents-the-global-cooling-research-of-the-1970s/
(yeah, I know, another totally discredited denialist rag, but references are included) seem to imagine that they remember much the same thing. I know that us old folks are supposed to have ‘tricky’ memories, but for some reason, a false memory of stories sounding the global cooling alarm seem to be amazingly widespread among those of us who followed (or imagined that we followed) science reporting back in the 70’s.
Of course most of us were not climate scientists, so when all the major media, the CIA, science textbooks, and scientific periodicals were ballyhooing the imaginary cooling problem, how were we to know that REAL climate scientists were ridiculing the whole idea and trying, with no initial success, to warn us of our TRUE doom: WARMING. (See Wikipedia for reports, written by climate experts, on their efforts.)
Fortunately, they were able to turn THAT little publicity faux pas around, once the politicians understood that an existential threat to the planetary biosphere justified unlimited political power to combat it, and now enjoy the multi-billion dollar economic rewards and near infinite political power that they so richly deserve for their unceasing efforts to spread the warning of our true nemesis: Anthropogenic CO2 driven Global Warming/Global Climate Change/Global Climate Weirding/ Global Bad Thing to be Named Later. Whoda thunk it?
It would be even more informative if you made the animation go back to 1959, or 1910, or 1850. Oh wait, we only have satellite data since 1979.
That’s the problem with much of our new data, be it seal level from TOPEX or sea ice by satellite or Sea temp.’s from Argo. They are measurements from new techniques that often can’t be directly compared to the older data.
For example, is the sea level data actually different? From memory, I think the the sea level from satellite I just saw earlier today was 3.2 mm/year +/- 0.4 mm The older data is 2.5 mm/year (I read this; it seems a bit higher than some I’ve seen like 1.8 mm/year) plus/minus error bars. If it was 2.5 +/- 0.4, you could not really be sure that the 3.2 mm/year was really higher than the 2.5 mm within error, especially given that they are different techniques. I just need a bit more, which time will tell one way or another.
The Romans entered the Blue Grotto by rowboat, two thousand years ago. The Italians enter the Blue Grotto by rowboat now. The sea level now is in the same ball park as it was two thousand years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Grotto_%28Capri%29
Cherry picking.
Keep your fork, there’s pie, and the crust is wavy at the edge.
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If you take a look at the global sea ice area, the present condidtion is close to the 1979 – present mean. Don’t know about whether antarctic sea ice volume is also more. My guess is it would be proportional to the area in the absence of contrary factors.
It isn’t always the case that everything about a hoax is false. Skeptics of Western global warming are really aware of obvious mistakes that fall within their particular areas of expertise and most skeptics take issue with the picture of impending calamity that global warming fearmongers always try to paint. Climate scaremongering may win a few headlines but facts are facts. The truth always has appeal and no matter how well-funded a hoax finally dies when lying lynx are finally spotted and the public sees it has been lied to and feels tricked, manipulated and deceived by supporters of the hoax.
As usual, Wagathon is right: Much, but not everything, about AGW is a hoax.
NASA has information to discriminate anthropogenic global warming (AGW) from solar-induced climate change but to do would require NASA to acknowledge the Sun’s iron-rich interior and pulsar core [1-5].
_ 1. This month NASA admitted that the fraction of UV (ultraviolet) radiation varies by orders-of-magnitude (factors of 10) over a single solar cycle. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08jan_sunclimate/
_ 2. A group of former NASA scientists and engineers recently admitted there is no convincing evidence of AGW:
http://www.therightclimatestuff.com/SummaryPrelimReport.html
_ 3. It is well known that cosmic rays produce ion-pairs as they traverse the atmosphere and induce nucleation of water vapor on the ion tracks that triggers cloud formation
https://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/cern-experiment-confirms-cosmic-ray-action/
Cosmic rays are continuously emitted from the Sun’s pulsar core [1-5]. Most are absorbed and remitted many times as lower energy radiation in the ordinary material that surrounds the solar core (Fe, O, Ni, Si, S, Mg and Ca) and then finally emitted from the top of the solar atmosphere (91% H + 9% He) as ordinary visible light in sunlight.
The number of events that absorb higher energy radiation and re-emit lower energy radiation changes in solar disturbances, solar eruptions, and also over a normal solar cycle:
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
[1] Peter Toth, “Is the Sun a pulsar?” Nature 270, 159-160 (1977):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v270/n5633/abs/270159a0.html
[2] Carl A. Rouse, “Evidence for a small, high-Z, iron-like solar core”, Solar Physics 110, 211-235 (1987): http://www.springerlink.com/content/k26825872rv64411/
[3] V. A. Kotov, “A pulsar inside the Sun?” Radiophysics and Quantum Electronics 39, 811-814 (1996): http://www.springerlink.com/content/j549440457107v36/
[4] “Super-fluidity in the solar interior: Implications for solar eruptions and climate”, Journal of Fusion Energy 21, 193-198 (2002): http://www.springerlink.com/content/r2352635vv166363/
[5] “Yes, the Sun is a pulsar,” Nature (submitted 12 Dec 2012):
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/Yes_the_Sun_is_a_pulsar.pdf
Happy Hominans are some of the benefits of a decision on 24 Oct 1945 to establish the United Nations – as Brady noted:
http://skepticalswedishscientists.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/best-year-ever/
Veracity in science and in democratic government were sacrificed for those benefits, as George Orwell forecast in the futuristic novel he wrote on his deathbed in 1946:
http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/
I am preparing background information on 1945-46 events that generated the current debates over AGW, constitutional limits on government, illegal immigration, etc.
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-2204
Most of the institutional scientists have to protect their patch from any outside predators.
For years we are told:
-It is CO2
-It can not be the sun
-The TSI is nearly constant
There is more to the solar or whatever drives it than the TSI. Only few days ago I went to some old geomagnetic data from 1990s and guess what: the Earth’s magnetic field has a strong magnetic ‘zing’ fully synchronised with the sunspot cycle:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GMF-SSN.htm
I doubt that any institutional scientist would whish to follow the above finding, despite fact that it is totally unknown to the either the solar or the Earth sciences.
vukcevic wrote: “Only few days ago I went to some old geomagnetic data from 1990s […]”
Please save us some precious time by linking directly to the data. IF you do so: thanks sincerely.
SWH = Significant Wave Height
Climatology Animations (average annual cycle – monthly resolution – global) …
Maximum SWH
http://i46.tinypic.com/2mot9c7.gif
Mean SWH
http://i50.tinypic.com/o0pk50.gif
Color Scheme:
Small = ~5m = magenta
Medium = ~8m = royal blue
Large = ~12m = bright green
Credit: Significant wave height climatology animations have been assembled using Australian Department of Defence [ http://www.metoc.gov.au/products/wms_M10_swh.php ] images developed from data provided by the GlobWave Project [ http://www.globwave.org/ ].
That’s awesome. I take it that the biggest waves in each hemisphere generally occur in that hemisphere’s winter?
Yes sir.
I hope nature-appreciating readers will take the time to comparatively study a whole pile of climatology animations — summary list here …
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/unprecedented-third-consecutive-la-nina/comment-page-1/#comment-40885
Beginners: To quickly understand annual global SWH patterns, start with the 850hPa wind animation and note how it lines up with annually cycling average sea level pressure (SLP) gradients.
Everyone: Be aware that the solar cycle modulates terrestrial circulatory morphology and multidecadal meridional integration. I’ve invested time in the construction of these animations in the hopes that they will foster stronger awareness of the role of geometry in flow modulation. Without strong awareness of asymmetries, paradoxical misinterpretation of solar-terrestrial statistics is inevitable.
This week saw a startling claim by Willis Eschenbach
Wilson’s work is pretty familiar to me, and I did not recall him ever using a phrase as imprecise as “Sixth Wave”.
A bit of digging establishes that (apparently) *none* of the Ed Wilson references that Willis Eschenbach cites ever use this phrase (for example, the phrase “Sixth Wave” appears in *none* of Wilson’s books) Doh!!!
Hmmm … so perhaps Willis should either (1) provide a scholarly reference to support his quotation, or else (2) retract his (mistaken?) “viral” claim. `Cuz hey, those “viruses” do spread pretty freely, eh? Willis Eschenbach, please don’t be a viral carrier of incorrect quotations!
A free-as-in-freedom, non-viral reference that (verifiably!) *does* use the phrase “Sixth Wave” is John Cairns excellent The Unmanaged Commons – A Major Challenge for Sustainability Ethics. Cairns’ article is a very good summary of what biologists like Ed Wilson are really writing about. Highly recommended … because Cairns’ reasoning, scholarship, science, and economics *ALL* are sound.
Conclusion Your “gut extinct” should warn you to be wary of poorly-referenced, cherry-picked, out-of-context (pseudo?)-quotations on WUWT!
Perhaps Anthony and Willis should post another apology for their scholarly missteps?
Why don’t you go to WUWT and address Wilis directly.
Yeah and at least there leave the annoying hearts, exclamation marks and smileys behind, so maybe somebody there will take you seriously…
John, it’s the scholarly references, that document WUWT‘s various errors, infelicities, and illogicalities, that Willis and Anthony should take seriously, eh?
And of course, everyone here on Climate Etc should take them seriously too!
As for smileys, they do no harm … and they cheerfully signify that a logical argument and/or a verifiable scholarly reference may be lurking nearby!
As in the present post, eh?![\scriptstyle\rule[2.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}\,\boldsymbol{\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}\,\heartsuit\,{\displaystyle\text{\bfseries!!!}}\,\heartsuit\,\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}}\ \rule[-0.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cscriptstyle%5Crule%5B2.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D%5C%2C%5Cboldsymbol%7B%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%7B%5Cdisplaystyle%5Ctext%7B%5Cbfseries%21%21%21%7D%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%7D%5C+%5Crule%5B-0.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D&bg=ffeeff&fg=0000ff&s=1&c=20201002)
@smileyface,
Through all the smileys, bold fonts and exlamation points I vaguely catch something about the phrase “sixth term” being used, which apparently is distracting some from the core of Willis’ argument about the ridiculous percentage of 2,7% of all species disappearing yearly….try writing “red herring” in bold-italic-blue-color-with-a-smiley-face-clown-hat-before-and-aft.
They ran out of emoticons.
fan,
either you enjoy posting bs or you are simply incompetent.
It doesn’t take but a few minutes to confirm that Wilson has used the term sixth wave. Whether he was the first isn’t relevant. What is relevant to the discussion is that the term is widely in use and the idea that the planet is facing mass extinctions of species is repeatedly expoused.
http://old.fnps.org/palmetto/taylor_syd_does_life_on_earth_have_a_future__notes_from_the_conference_keynote_address_by_stuart_l_pimm_phd_vol_21_no_1_november_2001.pdf
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/earth-faces-catastrophic-loss-of-species-408605.html
http://science.blogdig.net/archives/articles/November2006/11/Eremozoic_Era.html
The consensus is that ‘fan’ is a weak kneed coward who won’t address his BS at the appropriate blog … like sniping from behind the curtain and giggling like a school girl … all that smiley rubbish!
That’s odd … precisely *none* of your links document Ed Wilson’s use of the term “Sixth Wave.” Why is that, Timg56?
Note An academic “quote” has a standard meaning: the person used that phrase verbatim in a verifiable publication. `Cuz otherwise, careless and/or forgetful and/or agenda-driven writers could just claim any old phrase was a quote, eh?
For folks who don’t like to read Ed Wilson’s scientific works (Willis, is that you?), here’s a Library of Congress video Ed Wilson speaking about his deepest (mixed conservative/liberal/scientific/religious!) beliefs.
What Climate Etc readers will see is the real Ed Wilson, who is a wider deeper broader person than the narrow-minded/narrow-hearted imaginary Ed Wilson that WUWT tries to fob off on its readers. Enjoy!![\scriptstyle\rule[2.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}\,\boldsymbol{\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}\,\heartsuit\,{\displaystyle\text{\bfseries!!!}}\,\heartsuit\,\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}}\ \rule[-0.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cscriptstyle%5Crule%5B2.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D%5C%2C%5Cboldsymbol%7B%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%7B%5Cdisplaystyle%5Ctext%7B%5Cbfseries%21%21%21%7D%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%7D%5C+%5Crule%5B-0.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D&bg=ffeeff&fg=0000ff&s=1&c=20201002)
fan,
looks like you are out to show us it is incompetence.
The first linked article is a keynote address where Dr Pimm quotes Dr Wilson. Now, is it possible that Dr Pimm was in error? Perhaps.
The second article references Dr Wilson’s claim or 30,000 species a year going extinct. OK, there is no direct quote regarding “sixth wave of extinction”, but it is clear that Dr Wilson is of the opinion that species are disappearing at an unprecedented rate.
The third linked article includes a defintion of a term – from a Wilson paper, that uses the phrase sixth wave.
So your claim above is in error. Which is not surprising, as you are often in error here. Only one of the links can be said not to document his use of the term. One could possibly be argued whether it does, but that would be one of those semmantics thingy’s you mentioned elsewhere as being on a check list for moderating away posts. That leaves one that is undeniably documentation of his use.
I must say that one thought I repeatedly return to whenever I see you trying to argue a postion (at least I’m assuming that is what you are doing) is that our son made a smart choice in attending WSU.
• Links reviewed by timg56 : three
• Links authored by Ed Wilson: zero of three
• Usages by Ed Wilson of “sixth wave”: zero of three
Still, it’s never a mistake for folks to read, for themselves, Ed Wilson’s own words — not pale ideologically-distorted filterings of those words — or listen to Ed Wilson lecture in his own voice.
So thank you, timg56, for working so effectively to cultivate *more* rational discourse here on Climate Etc!![\scriptstyle\rule[2.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}\,\boldsymbol{\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}\,\heartsuit\,{\displaystyle\text{\bfseries!!!}}\,\heartsuit\,\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}}\ \rule[-0.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cscriptstyle%5Crule%5B2.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D%5C%2C%5Cboldsymbol%7B%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%7B%5Cdisplaystyle%5Ctext%7B%5Cbfseries%21%21%21%7D%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%7D%5C+%5Crule%5B-0.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D&bg=bbffee&fg=4400ff&s=1&c=20201002)
fan,
care to tell us what my ideology is?
fan,
from Dr Wilson’s book The Creation:
Eremozoic Era (ehre mo ZO ik) [Origin: EO Wilson, 2006]
noun.
the age of loneliness.
the upcoming biological age after the sixth great extinction, when earth will be depauperate of nearly all life due to human activities.
Usage: The human hammer having fallen, the sixth mass extinction has begun. This spasm of permanent loss is expected, if it is not abated, to reach the end-of-Mesozoic level by the end of the century. We will then enter what poets and scientists alike may choose to call the Eremozoic Era — The Age of Loneliness.”
Dr Wilson sounds like someone I’d like to meet.
You sound like someone to toss the scraps of organic waste at which my wife puts in zip lock bags and makes me take down to Portland to use as compost.
LOL … Timg56, please let me confess plainly, that I am no more qualified to speak to your ideology, than Willis Eschenbach/Anthony Watts/WUWT is qualified to speak of Ed Wilson’s.
The main difference is, I’ve got sense enough not to guess about your beliefs. Whereas with regard to Ed Wilson’s beliefs, well … Ed speaks plainly enough for himself, eh?
morediscourse@tradermail.info
A fan of *MORE* discourse
Yah, sure, you betcha (as we Swedes say). Beginning at minute 8:20: “The ideal scientists first thinks like a poet, then works like a bookkeeper, and finally, writes like a journalist.”
It doesn’t get much better than that, does it tim56?![\scriptstyle\rule[2.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}\,\boldsymbol{\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}\,\heartsuit\,{\displaystyle\text{\bfseries!!!}}\,\heartsuit\,\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}}\ \rule[-0.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cscriptstyle%5Crule%5B2.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D%5C%2C%5Cboldsymbol%7B%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%7B%5Cdisplaystyle%5Ctext%7B%5Cbfseries%21%21%21%7D%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%7D%5C+%5Crule%5B-0.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D&bg=ffeeff&fg=0000ff&s=1&c=20201002)
The following are excerpts from E.O. Wilson’s acclaimed book The Diversity of Life. In this 1992 work, Wilson reflects on the evolution of life and man’s destruction of the natural world.
**
The sixth great extinction spasm of geological time is upon us, grace of mankind. Earth has at last acquired a force that can break the crucible of biodiversity. The creation of that diversity came slow and hard: 3 billion years of evolution to start the profusion of animals that occupy the seas, another 350 million years to assemble the rain forests in which half or more of the species on earth now live. There was a succession of dynasties.
One can hardly doubt that global extinctions are continuing – but they are are not anything to do with global warming. Indeed – we have lost a generation in framing the wrong responses to the wrong problem.
http://eowilsonfoundation.org/the-diversity-of-life
E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation
“The sixth great extinction spasm of geological time is upon us, grace of mankind. Earth has at last acquired a force that can break the crucible of biodiversity. The creation of that diversity came slow and hard: 3 billion years of evolution to start the profusion of animals that occupy the seas, another 350 million years to assemble the rain forests in which half or more of the species on earth now live. There was a succession of dynasties.”
http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldredge2.html
“There is little doubt left in the minds of professional biologists that Earth is currently faced with a mounting loss of species that threatens to rival the five great mass extinctions of the geological past. As long ago as 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth is currently losing something on the order of 30,000 species per year — which breaks down to the even more daunting statistic of some three species per hour. Some biologists have begun to feel that this biodiversity crisis — this “Sixth Extinction” — is even more severe, and more imminent, than Wilson had supposed.”
http://www.rewilding.org/thesixthgreatextinction.htm
“A few biologists—including geneticist Michael Soulè (who was later the founder of the Society for Conservation Biology) and Harvard’s famed E. O. Wilson—put these worrisome anecdotes and bits of data together. They knew, through paleontological research by others, that in the 570 million years or so of the evolution of modern animal phyla there had been five great extinction events. The last happened 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous when dinosaurs became extinct. Wilson and company calculated that the current rate of extinction is one thousand to ten thousand times the background rate of extinction in the fossil record.
That discovery hit with all the subtlety of an asteroid striking Earth: RIGHT NOW, TODAY, LIFE FACES THE SIXTH GREAT EXTINCTION EVENT IN EARTH HISTORY. ”
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/overpopulation/extinction/index.html
“We’re in the midst of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction crisis. Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that 30,000 species per year (or three species per hour) are being driven to extinction. Compare this to the natural background rate of one extinction per million species per year, and you can see why scientists refer to it as a crisis unparalleled in human history.”
http://www.myhero.com/go/hero.asp?hero=Wilson_EO
“Edward Osborn Wilson is working to merge evolution and faith in a desperate attempt to save the planet from what he calls the sixth extinction, the greatest catastrophe to hit earth since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. ”
You are a disgrace.
• Links supplied by DocMartyn: five
• Links authored by Ed Wilson: one out of five
• Usage of the term “Sixth Wave”: zero out of five
It’s surprising that so many folks here on Climate Etc have trouble grasping what the word “quote” means … fortunately, whenever Ed Wilson writes or speaks on subject of extinction, what he says is well-worth reading … because Wilson’s deep wisdom shows us plainly the scientific shallowness and moral short-sightedness of WUWT-style rate-quibbling and cherry-picking.
So thank you for those excellent thoughtful links, DocMartyn!![\scriptstyle\rule[2.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}\,\boldsymbol{\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}\,\heartsuit\,{\displaystyle\text{\bfseries!!!}}\,\heartsuit\,\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}}\ \rule[-0.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cscriptstyle%5Crule%5B2.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D%5C%2C%5Cboldsymbol%7B%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%7B%5Cdisplaystyle%5Ctext%7B%5Cbfseries%21%21%21%7D%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%7D%5C+%5Crule%5B-0.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D&bg=ffeeff&fg=0000ff&s=1&c=20201002)
The opening line of the E. O. Wilson FOUNDATION begins
“The sixth great extinction spasm of geological time is upon us, grace of mankind. Earth has at last acquired a force that can break the crucible of biodiversity.”
and you quibble. You are utter scum.
Doc,
fan will argue that this does not meet his standard for being a quote
http://raysweb.net/specialplaces/pages/wilson.html
It is true that he does not use the exact phrase sixth wave, but he does talk about a new era of extinction. If one counts the previously identified waves, they should hit the number 6. Amazing, huh?
The fact that Dr Wilson is renowned in his field of study, has had an impressive career and is by all accounts I’ve read, a wonderful human being (and who knows, perhaps even more pleasant company than Willis), is not proof that he is incapable of making statements or holding opinions that may not be well supported by the evidence. And that is Willis’ point. That claims by Dr Wilson and others regarding the planet facing a new, unprecendented, wave of extinctions do not add up.
To expect fan to address that point is likely a futile wish.
DocMartyn, it appears that you (and Willis Eschenbach) are having great difficulty in locating even *one* use by Ed Wilson of the imputed (by Willis) phrase “Sixth Wave”.
Gee … maybe that’s because Ed Wilson’s real messages are quite different from the messages of ignorance and hate that Wilson’s cherry-picking ideological opponents impute to him?
So why not open your mind and your heart, DocMartyn? You might like the result!![\scriptstyle\rule[2.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}\,\boldsymbol{\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}\,\heartsuit\,{\displaystyle\text{\bfseries!!!}}\,\heartsuit\,\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}}\ \rule[-0.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cscriptstyle%5Crule%5B2.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D%5C%2C%5Cboldsymbol%7B%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%7B%5Cdisplaystyle%5Ctext%7B%5Cbfseries%21%21%21%7D%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%7D%5C+%5Crule%5B-0.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D&bg=ffeeff&fg=0000ff&s=1&c=20201002)
In the words of anthony, Wilson never said sixth wave
Well, Bindi is not afraid too…
http://www.news-mail.com.au/news/bindi-irwin-clashes-hilary-clinton-population-cap/1730034/
tell you too.
What a lapse that he never said it. Does he still have time?
============
E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation
“The sixth great extinction spasm of geological time is upon us, grace of mankind…. There was a succession of dynasties.”
Made in China
or
you know the one
Help me here Fan, is a wave worse than a spasm?
So which is sillier and more absurd, the ‘sixth-wave’ concept, or Phan One’s defense.
===========
Here’s a YouTube video about it;
As best I can figure out John Cairn’s article “The Unmanaged Commons – A Major Challenge for Sustainability Ethics” promotes maintaining a static environment. This argument ignores the proven fact that “the environment” never was and never will be static. One only has to look at the geologic record to see that major ecolgical changes have taken place many times in history- starting before the first stirrings of life and continuing in until now. The scale of past environment changes is staggering- the earth has a mass of ~5.8 x 10^24. The mass of carbonate- CO2 ion, is ~ 0.2 x 10^24kg. The amount of CO2 produced by man, ~12 gigatons/year 1.2 x 10^12 kg, isn’t even a rounding error by 7 orders of magnitude. Crustal movements process something like 50 cubic kilometers a year- 20 x 10^12 kg/yr. So at best we can say that woman’s and man’s impact on the earth approximates that of plate tectonics.
Point by point-
-oppose any activities that impair the integrity of the global commons….?what constitutes the “integrity” of an ever-changing complex system? I have no idea either.
-improve my environmental literacy so that I am aware of threats to the global commons….there are few things that can threaten the global environment- a large meteor impact, a super-volcano eruption, a nearby supernova, a major change in the sun. Even explosion of every nuclear device on the planet would affect the environment for only a few thousand years. Extremely uncomfortable for mankind perhaps, but life and the environment would survive..
-oppose any further increase of the human population on this finite planet….the population is on track to stabilize at ~9 billion if the underdeveloped nations are allowed to continue their development. Easily within manageable carrying capacity and likely to occur within the next 50 years if it is not stopped.
– oppose a laissez faire market system ruled by conscience alone, since it rewards for lack of conscience….Global management of the economy by an uncontrolled(i.e. unelected by the people and not otherwise controlled) organization also rewards lack of conscience. One only has to look at the rapacious corruption in the United Nations and the threat of its uncontrolled expansion.
-oppose all activities that diminish posterity’s use of the commons….barring a catastrophe mentioned above, the commons will always be there.
-country that attempts to solve its population problems by exporting people….countries don’t export people. People are the most valuable resource they have. People export themselves seeking better conditions.
-social arrangements that enhance responsibility for the global commons…..see comments on the UN. Unrestricted control by any entity group, or social arrangement is far more likely to damage the future environment than any individual actors.
-global commons is effectively limited in its capacity to accommodate use……capacity is determined by technology. Even applies to the stone age. They traded choice flint for weapons and other valuables like shells, pearls, gold and silver across thousands of kilometers. More technology and more use of energy increases the size of the global commons.
-the “right” to use the global commons must be matched by an operational responsibility to nurture and care for it-…..only if you can come up with an operational definition of “nuture and care for it”.
-global tragedy is the price that will be paid for misuse of the commons…..global tragedy would also come from over-zealous centralized controls that limit us from expanding our economies into space.
-I will not be misled by accusations of uncertainty and “unsound science” by those who benefit from the status quo…..I also will not be misled by uncertain, unsound science promulgated by those who benefit from it.
-on a planet with diminishing natural capital, humankind cannot be governed by ethics that ignore natural systems (ecosystems) and posterity…..the natural capital only diminishes when new technology is not allowed to flourish. Mankind has shown a remarkable capacity to enhance and improve the environment and correct actual hazards of new technologies.
-the basic theorem of ecology that one can never do merely one thing…..trying to maintain a static ecology is inherently impossible. It is the one thing that will guarantee a disaster through restriction of adaptability.
-that access to the resources of the global commons must be controlled (i.e., managed) so that the unscrupulous do not destroy them….the access to the global commons must be managed by free trade and interchange between individuals to limit the damage done by uncontrolled and unscrupulous large groups.
-that food and other resources should never be sent to any population that has exceeded the carrying capacity….this is patently ridiculous. It would mean the abandonment of every area with a population of over 2-3 people per hectare.
-Management of the global commons now appears heretical, but, as the ecological collapse continues, it may increasingly appeal to common sense…..I see little sign of collapse but many signs of unrestricted self aggrandizment from groups and organizations. The best approach to maintain a desireable environment is to increase the use of energy and spread it’s use as widely as possible to increase the quality of life and the adaptability of people to the changes that will inevitably occur in the environment.
There are currently 1.9 million identified, with a total of 9 million guesstimated. According to E. O. Wilson, the average time of a species is a million years; at steady state we should be able to observe 10 speciation events a year and the extinction of 10 species per year.
logicalchemist, I propose that you be made head of all Green organisations, with unlimited powers to determine their policy. That should fix it.
Fan,
Using your line of logic, one could say that Willis never meant to “quote” Dr. Wilson. If you’re so hung up on “verbatim” and “quote”, then how do you get the idea that Willis was doing this? In your first post you wrote, “I did not recall him ever using a phrase as imprecise as “Sixth Wave”(my emphasis). Did you really mean “precise”?
From the links and paragraphs from his books above Dr. Wilson clearly talks about a “sixth great extinction” . It is also clear that Dr. Pimm thought Dr. Wilson used the phrase because he wrote, “E.O. Wilson,…….., calls it the “sixth wave of extinction”” . Do you think Dr. Pimm owes Dr. Wilson an apology or has Dr. Wilson demanded that Dr. Pimm correct the quote? Any reasonable person would think that Dr. Pimm was paraphrasing the quote, “sixth great extinction” and it seems others have used this phrase because it might be more of a catch-phrase and has become more like a simile or metaphor with the word “wave” being the metaphor.
Willis wrote “He claimed there was a “Sixth Wave” of extinctions going on”. He didn’t use the term “said” like Dr. Pimm did. He used “claimed”. Willis did use quotation marks but like Dr. Pimm he was probably paraphrasing the concept, “sixth great extinction”, and Dr. Wilson was clearly one of the first to be outspoken about the issue.
You really sound like a criminal defense trial lawyer who is trying to get a defendant caught red handed and has confessed to a crime but now has a change of heart because his lawyer can’t stand to lose a case. If the denizens on Climate Etc are the jury, it sure doesn’t look like you’re going to win this one but no one can say you didn’t earn you fee, counselor.
DCA posts “If the denizens on Climate Etc are the jury [on whether Willis quoted and/or summarized Wilson properly] it sure doesn’t look like you’re going to win this “ LOL … it’s a pleasure to accept your advice DCA!
Climate Etc readers are hereby encouraged to carefully compare:
• Ed Wilson’s real views on extinction, with
• WUWT‘s distorted summary of those views.
All who read both accounts carefully, will learn much about Ed Wilson and the practices of science from the former … and much about WUWT and the practices of denialism from the latter!
Now let the Climate Etc jury commence deliberation!![\scriptstyle\rule[2.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}\,\boldsymbol{\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}\,\heartsuit\,{\displaystyle\text{\bfseries!!!}}\,\heartsuit\,\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}}\ \rule[-0.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cscriptstyle%5Crule%5B2.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D%5C%2C%5Cboldsymbol%7B%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%7B%5Cdisplaystyle%5Ctext%7B%5Cbfseries%21%21%21%7D%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%7D%5C+%5Crule%5B-0.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D&bg=ffffbb&fg=ff0055&s=1&c=20201002)
Willis wrote about this two years ago here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/04/where-are-the-corpses/ and Dr. Craig Loehle rewrote and developed the ideas, and got it peer-reviewed and published in Diversity and Distributions, available here: http://www.ncasi.org/publications/Detail.aspx?id=3463
The jury has already rendered its verdict not only at the D&D journal but the vast majority of the 321 comments of WUWT along with practically all the comments here on Climate Etc.
Sorry counselor, you lose. I guess you can always appeal the verdict again because it’s already been appealed three times now, once at the D&D journal, once at WUWT last week and a third time here on Climate Etc.
Fan,
There is an old trial lawyers’ saying “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither is on you side, pound the table.”
I hope you don’t hurt yourself pounding your fists.
“The sixth great extinction spasm of geological time is upon us,”
I think you need some more hairs to split. This just makes you look sillier than you normally do, Fan.
Chip Knappenberger in the Wall Street Journal today looks at the tempeaature effect from the Keystone XL pipeline oil being burned in the U.S.: 0.00001 C/year.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323940004578256270618537596.html.
And assuming that the oil would be burned in part or total outside of the U.S. if Keystone XL were not built, this number would be much smaller.
So what is the fuss about, again?
There is not temperature effect from the Keystone Pipeline.
Pipelines are merely the ‘preferred method’ to move liquids. Rail works equally well.
The discussion about Keystone isn’t whether the oil gets burned…it’s whether it gets hauled by railroad or pipeline.
The cost differential is at most $3/barrel.
Wouldn’t it have a lower carbon footprint by pipeline? Efficiency is a big consideration.
cap’n
You are right, of course.
More fossil; fuel based energy is required to move oil by tank truck, rail car or tanker ship than by pipeline.
Don’t have the rail plus tanker (via Vancouver and the Panama Canal to Houston or Vancouver Long Beach and Houston by rail car), but.
Moving the 830,000 bbl/day crude to Houston by:
tank truck would generate around 3 million tons CO2 per year, and by
rail car would generate around 1.8 million tons CO2 per year
You’d have to subtract the CO2 generated to pump the oil via pipeline, but this is a relatively small number.
So the Keystone pipeline would reduce CO2 emissions compared to moving Canadian crude to Houston via rail car or tank truck.
Max
Speaking of extinctions the UN is cloning the IPCC with a new biodiversity assessment group. http://www.ipbes.net/about-ipbes.html says this:
“Biodiversity from terrestrial, marine, coastal, and inland water ecosystems provides the basis for ecosystems and the services they provide that underpin human well-being. However, biodiversity and ecosystem services are declining at an unprecedented rate, and in order to address this challenge, adequate local, national and international policies need to be adopted and implemented. To achieve this, decision makers need scientifically credible and independent information that takes into account the complex relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem services, and people. They also need effective methods to interpret this scientific information in order to make informed decisions. The scientific community also needs to understand the needs of decision makers better in order to provide them with the relevant information. In essence, the dialogue between the scientific community, governments, and other stakeholders on biodiversity and ecosystem services needs to be strengthened.
To this end, a new platform has been established by the international community – the ‘Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ (IPBES).”
Robert Watson, who helped found the IPCC, is helping found IPBES. Many scary assessments to follow. All unprecedented of course.
Sir Robert “the science is settled” Watson, the guy also who pulled a “7C warming by 2100” prediction out of a dark spot where the sun never shines, in order to frighten the AGU attendees in San Francisco last year?
Wow!
Like General Douglas MacArthur, some of these “old soldiers (in the war against global warming) never die”.
Max
Watson got his start organizing the big scary science report on stratospheric ozone that put the Montreal Protocol over the top. That became the model for the IPCC and so it goes, year after year, decade after decade, green without end.
But now it’s become an ‘Open Threat Weakened’.
==================
Global warming increases sustaining capacity for all life and increases the diversity of life. To the extent there is an anthropogenic component to the increase it is all to the good. Besides, the fertilizing effect of this anthropogenic CO2 seems to be even more effective than its warming effect, thus increasing total life and diversity of life by synergy.
Atmospheric CO2, in virtually perpetual free fall, has just had a dead cat bounce, fortunately rebounding off the resilience of the human species and spirit.
==============
“…Co2, in virtually perpetual freefall..”
On the mark, spot on and in the bullseye. How many ppm back in the ‘old’ days? 200,000? 300,000?
There has been a long, chaotic, variable – but relentless – decline throughout the history of the planet..
And Lo! We unwittingly (but fortuitously) provide a temporary boost for the benefit of not only ourselves, but the generality of life on earth.
And what cries do we hear?? “All change is bad! Change due to Hom Saps is necessarily terrible and catastrophic!!!”
***
Methinks they doth protest too much.
You know a religion is doomed when the heretics have the ear of Gaia.
=========================
On the mark, spot on and in the bullseye. How many ppm back in the ‘old’ days? 200,000? 300,000?
Citation needed.
“Citation needed”
Indeed not – it was a question. How many ppm?
Perhaps you’d be better thinking (yourself) when your best guess is as to when the CO2 content of the atmosphere was 250,000ppm? And if you haven’t got a clue or don’t want to guess it really doesn’t matter. The (important, in case you didn’t get it) point is that it is a mere fraction of what it once was.
Which leads to the undeniable statement “It has been falling” [relentlessly]
Well it certainly hasn’t been anywhere near that level in the last 500m years, in fact it probably hasn’t been above 7,000ppm during that time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere
We have pushed up CO2 levels to the highest they have been in more than 10m years. It’s true that CO2 levels have been higher during much of the time before that, but then the world was different in many ways and that was long before humans came onto the scene, so it doesn’t say anything about our ability to withstand the effects of current (and increasing) levels.
Actually that last remark may not be totally true. If, for example, the historical record were to indicate that we are likely to see a substantial rise in sea levels with higher CO2 levels then that would be relevant.
Fair points aa, but when you say that sea level rise would be ‘relevant’, my feeling is that in reality it would be relatively unimportant. We’ve had an average of about 6mm per year over the last 15,000 years (300 feet) and humanity has barely noticed. Of course, it’s easy to imagine problems – catastrophes, even – but human adaptability is immense, and I think sea level rises will always rank low on the list of things human beings have to worry about.
3000 children die every day from diarrhoea, and our imagination concerns itself with the fact that some people may (or may not) have to move from where they are living in 30 or 40 or 50 years time? For me it is always a question of perspective – and recognising that however powerful is the force of imagination, [see the long and embarrassing history of scares, and predictions of imminent disaster] reality trundles along regardless – with much more significant events passing us by.
Anteros,
First of all, it’s a bit misleading to say we’ve had 6mm slr a year for the last 15,000 years when the large majority of that happened prior to 7,000 years ago. For the last few thousand years sea levels have been fairly stable.
And it’s nothing to do with imagining problems, it’s about making observations which lead to the conclusion that such problems are a real possibility, likelihood even.
It’s perfectly possible to worry both about problems that are occurring now and those that might occur further into the future. The thing is, if you don’t worry about future problems then suddenly they become today’s problems and you run out of time to do anything about them. And people having to leave their homes is a problem if there are very large numbers of them and there are not many places for them to go, especially if they are relatively poor.
As I haven’t yet seen a simple computation with the new data, I tried it by myself. My result is very close to Nic Lewis’ estimate. I also included the new black carbon forcing estimate which will further reduce CO2 sensitivity by almost 20%. Computations are based on IPCC data + additional estimate with latest black carbon forcng..
The estimates including black carbon are
Transient climate sensitivity : 0.83 K
Equilibrium climate sensitivity : 1.35 K
Remarks:
Transient sensitivity below AR4 “very likely” range.
Equilibrium sensitivity in AR4 “very unlikely” range.
Computation
CO2 Climate Sensitivity from Instrumental Temperature Record and based on IPCC Data
What is the best time span for an estimate ?
1945-2005
Why ?
1. CO2 increase from 1750-1945 was only 30 ppm (280-310 ppm) but took off after 1945.
2. Minimizes influence of PDO/AMO decadal oszillations, as they were in very similar phases at 1945 and 2005.
CO2 @ 1945: 310 ppm
CO2 @ 2005: 380 ppm
380/310 = 1.226
1.226^3.4 = 2.
Due to logarithmic temperature increase, temperature difference has then to be multiplied with 3.4 to compute sensitivity for CO2 doubling.
HadCrut global temperature increase 1945 –2005: 0.4 Kelvin
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl
How to compute equilibrium sensitivity from transient climate sensitivity ?
Quote IPCC AR4
“Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely to be in the range 2°C to 4.5°C with a most likely value of about 3°C, based upon multiple observational and modelling constraints. It is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C. {8.6, 9.6, Box 10.2}
The transient climate response is better constrained than the equilibrium climate sensitivity. It is very likely larger than 1°C and very unlikely greater than 3°C. {10.5}“
Take quotient of mean values:
S(equilibrium) / S(transient) = 0.5*(4.5+2) / 0.5*(3+1) = 1.62
Sensitivity Estimates
—————————-
IPCC AR4 Estimate
IPCC AR4 total net forcing was assumed to be about equal to CO2 forcing.
Attribute all incease to CO2.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/fig/faq-2-1-figure-2.jpeg
AR4 transient climate sensitivity : 0.4 K * 3.4 = 1.36 K
AR4 equilibrium climate sensitivity : 1.36 K * 1.62 = 2.2 K
IPCC AR5 Estimate
CO2 forcing only about 0.75 of total forcing due to reduced aerosol cooling.
http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j237/hausfath/ScreenShot2012-12-13at43419PM_zps4a925dbf.png
AR5 transient climate sensitivity : 0.4 K * 3.4 * 0.75 = 1.02 K
AR5 equilibrium climate sensitivity : 1.02 K * 1.62 * 0.75 = 1.65 K
Remark: transient sensitivity at the edge of AR4 “very likely” range.
State of the Art Estimate
Due to black carbon forcing doubled, CO2 forcing is only about 61% of total forcing
(Black carbon forcing about doubled to about 1.1, add 0.55 to AR5 total forcing)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgrd.50171/abstract
http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j237/hausfath/ScreenShot2012-12-13at43419PM_zps4a925dbf.png
Transient climate sensitivity : 0.4 K * 3.4 * 0.61 = 0.83 K
Equilibrium climate sensitivity : 0.83 K * 1.62 * 0.61 = 1.35 K
Remarks:
Transient sensitivity below AR4 “very likely” range.
Equilibrium sensitivity in AR4 “very unlikely” range.
Possible further corrections:
Temperature increase 1945 –2005: 0.25 K instead of 0.4 K
Reasons:
Overwriting of SST meta data without proper reason after 1941 (increased SST warming from about 0.2 K to 0.3 K)
http://climateaudit.org/2011/07/12/hadsst3/
See “The new HadSST3 dataset still contains some seemingly arbitrary assumptions…” and subsequent text.
UHI warming not accounted for (about half of land warming since 1979 due to UHI / non-climatic contamination):
http://www.webcommentary.com/docs/rrm-pjm-1207.pdf
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/
Best Transient climate sensitivity : 0.25 K * 3.4 * 0.61 = 0.52 K
Best Equilibrium climate sensitivity : 0.52 K * 1.62 * 0.61 = 0.84 K
Best estimate probably still too high due to missing solar amplifier consideration. (IPCC forcing universe cannot explain Medieval, Roman, Minoan and other Warm Periods.)
Manfred
Interesting calculation.
Let’s see if one of the CAGW supporters takes a crack at refuting it.
Max
Manfred
OK. I’ve gone through your calculation.
There are a couple of minor “typos” in the text, which do not change the results, however.
In the “IPCC AR5 estimate” for ECS:
AR5 ECS = 1.02K*1.62
*0.75= 1.65KIn the “State of the Art estimate for ECS:
ECS = 0.83K*1.62
*0.61= 1.35KIn the “Possible Further Correction” estimate for ECS:
Best ECS = 0.52K*1.62
*0.61= 0.84KYou will probably get some flak from CAGW supporters on the adjusted “warming since 1945” and/or the “UHI correction”, but the rest seems pretty straightforward to me and hard to argue with.
Let’s see if anyone tries.
Max
Auditors might appreciate this brief, via Rattus Norvegius at Eli’s:
> [A] audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclusive-billionaires-secretly-fund-attacks-on-climate-science-8466312.html
Willard
Are you referring to BEST donors?
Max
PS Thank God they are not using taxpayer funding.
I am shocked. This is likely just the tip of the iceburg, as long as they have money they are likely to do more. It is time to take control of Koch Industries and all the other Big industry giants and make them state owned since they obviously know nothing about science, the environment and likely are white, male and Christian.
You’re mad, Cap’n. That’s OK.
willard,
try following the embedded links.
The one where some guy at Drexel “estimates” $500 million in funding – it leads to another Independant article dated 1/25, which is basically the same story line as the article from the 24th, only with Michael Mann making another of his usually whiny appearances. Nothing in support of the $500 million estimate is provided.
I could estimate the length of my tallywacker at 10 1/2 inches. Doesn’t make it so. I’m willing to bet my estimate, though off, is closer to being accurate than the $500 million one.
I believe you are referring to this cameo appearance, timg56:
> The trust has given money to the Competitive Enterprise Institute which is currently being sued for defamation by Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania University, an eminent climatologist, whose affidavit claims that he was accused of scientific fraud and compared to a convicted child molester.
Now, where was the last time I heard someone talking about scientific fraud?
Willard, Mann’s affidavit claims he was accused of scientific fraud. I think he was actually accused of being a scientific joke with no sense of humor which is more like defamation of Nobel prize almost winner character.
It’s OK for you to think that, Cap’N. You’re just mad.
Willard, “It’s OK for you to think that, Cap’N. You’re just mad.” Must be because of all the Coke I was forced to drink due to deceptive advertizing :)
Willard
Let’s see how “eminent climatologist” and Nobelist, Michael (the “shtick”) Mann’s, libel suit ends up.
I’m not taking any bets.
The US tort law system is even wackier than the GISS temperature record.
Max
I don’t believe your madness is related to my high-fructose-syrop beverage of choice, Cap’n.
Tony’s Making Me Do It.
Hey, I once nearly bought a cell of that cola’s Ice Bear.
===========
Ah yes, the Koch brothers conspiracy. They are definitely at the root of evil climate denialism. How far and wide thier reach, only astute auditors will know.
The truth is out there, John.
Willard
We have finally identified the previously elusive “conspiracy” (you and others have been talking about).
It all starts with evil industrialists , like the Koch brothers, right?
Max
The Independent suggests the Kochtopus:
> Each of the Koch brothers has his own charitable foundation and they have given generously to organisations that share their free-market outlook. They have both funded opposition campaigns to many of the policies of the Obama administration – so many, in fact, that their opponents have dubbed their ideological network “The Kochtopus”.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclusive-billionaires-secretly-fund-attacks-on-climate-science-8466312.html
Yeah… Sort of like the Sorostopus, except its blue instead of red.
Sorry, the kochtopus is Red and the Sorostopus is blue…. My apologies.
Have we found a purple octopus yet, John?
C’mon, it’s the Giant Squid and the Great White Whale. willard is not the whale, he’s the ah aha ahahaha a bab ab ab ababble bull.
==============
Obsessively pursuing the Great White Elephant of the Sea of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. moshe is chief harpoon chucker.
===========
It’s not the Koch brothers what control the climate, nor CO2, it’s … the Chinese!
For reference, here’s the 25/1 article timg56 kindly suggested we read:
> Commentators believe that it is becoming increasingly common for wealthy individuals with vested interests in fossil fuels to fund climate-change scepticism anonymously through labyrinthine financial arrangements. The Donors Trust is one way of doing this. It is a “donors-advised fund” and has special status under the US tax system, giving its wealthy donors anonymity as well as highly beneficial tax concessions.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/top-climate-scientist-denounces-billionaires-over-funding-for-climatesceptic-organisations-8467665.html
Absolutely open science. Labyrinthine financial arrangements. What would be the average?
Willard
Oooooo!
More “conspiracy”.
Max
A not so old study by Drexler:
> A new study conducted by Dr. Robert Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science in Drexel University’s College of Arts and Sciences, along with Jason Carmichael of McGill University and J. Craig Jenkins of Ohio State University, set out to identify the informational, cultural and political processes that influence public concern about climate change. The study, which was published today in Climatic Change, one of the top 10 climate science journals in the world, reveals that the driving factor that most influences public opinion on climate change is the mobilizing efforts of advocacy groups and elites.
http://www.drexel.edu/now/news-media/releases/archive/2012/February/Bob-Brulle-Climate-Change-Study/
If that conclusion is OK, no wonder there are so many ClimateBallers. Which is OK, since they’re all mad.
We also note the name of Dr. Shaun Lovejoy’s alma mater.
Willard
You are hitting the jackpot with your “conspiracy” theories!
Max
Look, those evil brothers have amplified the effect of their money with a global temperature standstill. Isn’t that against the tax code or should be?
============
Perhaps you should stick to your eyeballing, demands for future evidence, model bashing (except for your precious Lewis) and talk of CAGW assumptions, MiniMax.
I’m no Zeke.
kim
It’s shocking!
Not only is this “conspiracy” trying to thwart communication of scientific concerns about rampant human-induced global warming, it is undermining the very foundation of the scientific consensus by stopping the warming itself.
Glad Willard brought this “conspiracy” to our attention.
It must be squashed immediately!
It is of urgent priority that global warming be made to resume immediately, even if this requires a massive use of taxpayer funding.
Max
Willard
You state that you are no Zeke.
No.
You sure as hell aren’t.
Max
You have been forewarned, MiniMax.
Thank you for playing.
Kim, Max, Willard is on to something. Koch is pronounced “coke” and Willard has already discovered that Coke is trying to get future generations to consume there products. It is almost like people in business like to stay in business. What bast$$ds!
Cap’n
You write that “Willard is on to something” and mention “coke” in the same sentence.
Is that what he’s on?
Does that explain his erratic posts?
I thought he’d just OD’d on IPCC hubris.
Max
Nice catch, Cap’n!
Why do we talk of the “bitter truth” when it tastes so sweet?
Willard, “Why do we talk of the “bitter truth” when it tastes so sweet?” Luckily Pepsico can be trusted, they donated about 5% more to the DNC.
Seems that the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation agree with you there, Cap’n:
> Many of the arguments were drafted on behalf of the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation by Coca-Cola’s law firm, King & Spalding. For years, each group has received donations from Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc., but Hispanic Federation President Jose Calderon told the Daily News that those contributions had no impact on their decision to join the lawsuit against the city.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/naacp-hispanic-federation-fight-soda-restrictions-article-1.1247187
Dr Brulle’s (et al) study sounds reasonable. What i didn’t see was any reference to the $500 million figure. Nor did I see anything about advocacy being one-sided. But then the article didn’t link to the paper (or I missed it.)
Is the average citizen swayed by advocacy groups? If they weren’t, we wouldn’t see so many of them or so much money being spent. The question is, Is one side dominating the debate? The argument for Big Oil / Fossil Fuel / Koch brothers appears to have more basis in conspiracy thinking than fact.
timg56,
There is no immediate relationship between Brulle’s estimate and its other study. Strange that this estimate is not backed up by anything more substantial.
I cited the study because I found its result surprising. I also wished to mention McGill U by pure chauvinism.
I’m not sure to which debate you are referring, though. What do you have in mind?
De bait and switch.
=====
“… the driving factor that most influences public opinion on climate change is the mobilizing efforts of advocacy groups and elites.”
They got that right.
From the UN IPCC, through ‘all the world’s Scientific Academies’ via myriad NGOs and activist groups, pliant politicians, Common Purpose and the state controlled education systems of the first world.
Nice work if you can get it. Oh, yeah, you can. Merely state that climate change has adversely affected (insert field of interest here). Grunt, grunt, pop. Another paper to be quoted as proof that global warming is ruining all our fun. Easy really.
I wonder who funded thatstudy?
Makarieva has been accepted and published in its final form
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/13/1039/2013/acp-13-1039-2013.html
Guest post coming soon!
Great!
We’ll have something sensible to talk about again.
Max
Now some, not Eli to be sure, might think you would mention the grounds on which it was published. The editor who accepted the paper wrote
——————————–
The authors have presented an entirely new view of what may be driving dynamics in the atmosphere. This new theory has been subject to considerable criticism which any reader can see in the public review and interactive discussion of the manuscript in ACPD. Normally, the negative reviewer comments would not lead to final acceptance and publication of a manuscript in ACP.
After extensive deliberation however, the editor concluded that the revised manuscript still should be published – despite the strong criticism from the esteemed reviewers – to promote continuation of the scientific dialogue on the controversial theory. This is not an endorsement or confirmation of the theory, but rather a call for further development of the arguments presented in the paper that shall lead to conclusive disproof or validation by the scientific community. In addition to the above manuscript-specific comment from the handling editor, the following lines from the ACP executive committee shall provide a general explanation for the exceptional approach taken in this case and the precedent set for potentially similar future cases: (1) The paper is highly controversial, proposing a fundamentally new view that seems to be in contradiction to common textbook knowledge. (2) The majority of reviewers and experts in the field seem to disagree, whereas some colleagues provide support, and the handling editor (and the executive committee) are not convinced that the new view presented in the controversial paper is wrong. (3) The handling editor (and the executive committee) concluded to allow final publication of the manuscript in ACP, in order to facilitate further development of the presented arguments, which may lead to disproof or validation by the scientific community.
=====================================
Eli confidently looks forward to the avalanche of crank papers from the Oliver Manuals and Tallblokes of the world which will soon inundate ACP. They asked for it, go give it to them guys. The predictable outcome, of course, is that people are going to cite this example as a reason to throw ACP invitations to review into the trash pit.
A guest post from Makarieva and Shiel should be coming within the next few days, best to defer discussion on this until the topical post.
Microclimate is what Makarieva can you get.
============
+1
The Bunny’s twitched its ears it’s wrong, but the editors aren’t convinced Makarieva’s wrong. So who are the curious, Bunny? Cats, mebbe?
==========
Eli, if you think that this getting into ACP is bad, you should see some of the stuff that is getting into IPCC. Its proof, prooooof that IPCCS voodoo science, etc.
Is that a megaphone problem? or is that different?
From the Abstract:
“Phase transitions of atmospheric water play a ubiquitous role in the Earth’s climate system, but their direct impact on atmospheric dynamics has escaped wide attention.”
If it’s true that phase transitions impact has escaped wide attention (driving winds), it should be interesting discussion.
She got eaten alive @ Id’s, and has risen cyclonically from the boney ashes. A Fire Bird.
=======
Nice comment here>
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/10/C15085/2011/acpd-10-C15085-2011.pdf
kim she got eaten alive everywhere. eli makes a good point above.
Eli’s point is, “heretics!” and “I am afraid of scientific scrutiny”.
Go tell Aunt willard that the Old Grey Goose is dead, and the little ones chew on the bones, oh.
=============
From the Rabett’s mouth:
> Eli confidently looks forward to the avalanche of crank papers from the Oliver Manuals and Tallblokes of the world which will soon inundate ACP. They asked for it, go give it to them guys.
http://rabett.blogspot.ca/2013/01/atmospheric-chemistry-and-physics.html
Eli’s point is not heretics, it’s cranks. You, of course are welcome to debate science with the dragons.
Eli’s projecting. I am looking forward to the guest post.
http://thd.pnpi.spb.ru/~makariev/
I thought Eli’s best point was the difficult of getting reviewers. scientists will just ignore bad science that gets published, not a problem. The deeper issue I thought he was pushing at was reviewer blowback. I have less of a problem with crankery and more of a problem with good folks wasting their time ( I think reviwers should be granted the right to have a rebuttal published.. full stop no negotiation )
on the positive side I wish more cranks would spend time detailing their crankery. it would keep them off the street …
More or less what Steve said, although there is the megaphone problem, see, here appearing in this distinguished journal is proooof, prooooooof, that Dr. Makarieva’s majic medicine, etc.
As far as I can tell, reviewers like Isaac Held here didn’t get a second shot at responding to the responses to their first comments. These responses just blew off his main points, and I am fairly sure Isaac Held would have had more to say on them given a chance. This is the unfortunate thing about the ACP procedure. If you know the reviewers aren’t going to get it back, you just have to make a half-way convincing argument to the non-expert editor, and it gets accepted. The editor is a respected aerosols guy, but this is not his field. Other journals would for sure send it back to someone who rejected it first time before publication.
Eli Rabett | January 26, 2013 at 6:17 pm |
If I undertand you correctly: you imply an apparently coherent but radical theory should be rejected on principle — because it will attract questions from some ill defined group. If I read you correctly this would seem to suggest that science cannot be open to radical ideas as they will waste too much time and the effects are disruptive. Right?
My view is that science should embrace new and stimulating ideas. That is what we do! Doesn’t mean that they will all be right — but some might might be. Its our job to find these ideas and evaluate them properly.
I remember you gave some useful suggestions on vapour dynamics in a previous discussion.
Thanks again for those!
Best wishes
Douglas
This does not sound like anything new, but guess we’ll see …
From a discussion elsewhere between Jim Cripwell and oneuniverse
on the CO2 signal being indistinguisable from zero by observed data
and a request for data – http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/12/open-thread-weekend-6/#comment-288467
I posted a link to Bob Tisdale
And I’ll add another, an in a nutshell precis of Miskolczi by Arno Arrak
Any more to add to these?
yeah I think Fan (or was it someone else?) has compiled a whole list of these “ideas”
Myrrh
That’s a compelling list of evidence supporting a GH effect of (near) zero, but I think that oneuniverse has got the scientific method backward here.
“Null” = “zero” (in German)
The “null” hypothesis is that increasing CO2 has “zero” effect on our planet’s climate.
In his exchange with Jim Cripwell, it is up to oneuniverse to refute the “null” hypothesis by showing empirical evidence, which falsifies it.
It is NOT up to Jim Cripwell to provide evidence for the “null” hypothesis – it is always the other way around.
As I understand it, this is what Jim Cripwell has requested and, so far, it has not been forthcoming.
Max
PS If either Jim Cripwell or oneuniverse disagree with what I have just written, they should comment giving reasons.
Max, to repeat :
Since I haven’t made a claim that increasing atmospheric CO2 will lead to an increase in global temperature (although I’ve explained why I think it’s plausible that it might), I’m not sure why you and Jim are looking to me to provide evidence to support the claim.
Jim, one the other hand, has made this claim: “the climate sensitivity for CO2 added to the atmosphere form current levels, has been proven to be indistinguishable from zero, by observed data.”.
How can the data have ‘proven’ it when there are large uncertainties in the magnitudes of non-CO2 forcings and their effect on the measured observables? This would be big news if true – I’m highly skeptical of his claim, and it’s reasonable to ask him for the data and quantitative analysis ie. the details of the proof, which he hasn’t provided.
oneuniverse
You have clarified your position.
You do not necessarily support the “consensus” claim that CO2 is a GHG, which has caused and will cause a significant increase in global average temperature with increased concentrations, therefore you do not feel the need to support this claim with empirical evidence.
Good. So be it.
Looks like you and I might not be that far apart.
I also do not support the IPCC claims, especially those leading to CAGW, as outlined in its AR4 report, as they are not backed by empirical scientific evidence, as discussed earlier.
Max
manacker: I happen to think that the IPCC reports don’t support CAGW. There’s a certain subjective element to that, since CAGW is not really a well-defined concept, but still, at least 95 per cent of CAGW claims are rhetoric, propaganda and exaggerations on top of the IPCC reports. So I’m curious as to which IPCC claims you think “lead to” CAGW.
manacker: You have clarified your position.
I just repeated, using cut-and-paste, what I’d written earlier. I did make it clear, from early on in my conversation with Jim, that I was asking him to back up his own claim of negligible climate sensitivity to CO2. (Your suggestion that I’ve got the scientific method backward is incorrect, by the way)
Dagfinn, statements such as these from the SPM of AR4 WGII have a catastrophic aspect IMO.
Dagfinn
You write:
adding
The concept “CAGW” (for potentially catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) is not a term that was invented by me.
It is a commonly used expression for the IPCC premise that most of the observed warming since around 1950 has been caused by increased human-induced GHG concentrations and that these could lead to a potentially serious threat to humanity and our environment unless human GHG emissions are sharply curtailed.
More specifically, IPCC outlines this premise in its AR4 report, as follows:
1. human GHGs have been the cause of most of the observed warming since ~1950 [AR4 WGI SPM, p.10]
2. this reflects a model-predicted 2xCO2 climate sensitivity of 3.2°C±0.7°C [AR4 WGI Ch.8, p.633]
3. this represents a serious potential threat to humanity and our environment from anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the range of 1.8°C to 6.4°C by the end of this century with increase in global sea level of up to 0.59 meters [AR4 WGI SPM, p.13]
4.resulting in increased severity and/or intensity of heat waves, heavy precipitation events, droughts, tropical cyclones and extreme high sea levels [AR4 WGI SPM, p.8],
5. with resulting flooding of several coastal cities and regions, crop failures and famines, loss of drinking water for millions from disappearing glaciers, intensification and expansion of wildfires, severe loss of Amazon forests, decline of corals, extinction of fish species, increase in malnutrition, increase in vector borne and diarrheal diseases, etc. [AR4 WGII]
6. unless world-wide actions are undertaken to dramatically curtail human GHG emissions (principally CO2) [AR4 WGIII]
That’s CAGW, as outlined by IPCC, in a nutshell.
Max
Well, I think that’s an alarmist spin on the IPCC results. But I will admit that the IPCC itself is partly responsible since the SPM focuses one-sidedly on negative impacts, neglecting to mention some of the positive ones from the full report.
My version is more like this:
Water access: net gain from AGW.
Direct effect of heat on humans: net gain from AGW.
Effect of heat on crops: I don’t think this is a major issue if farmers are smart enough to grow different crops when the climate changes.
Sea-level rise: expensive adaptation but manageable.
Hurricanes: projected changes are not that great and adaptation is possible.
Diseases: I’m not sure how scary this looks if we take the IPCC projections at face value. So this might be somewhat debatable.
“My version is more like this:
Water access: net gain from AGW.
Direct effect of heat on humans: net gain from AGW.
Effect of heat on crops: I don’t think this is a major issue if farmers are smart enough to grow different crops when the climate changes.
Sea-level rise: expensive adaptation but manageable.
Hurricanes: projected changes are not that great and adaptation is possible.
Diseases: I’m not sure how scary this looks if we take the IPCC projections at face value. So this might be somewhat debatable.”
In the above I would replace AGW with Global warming [as in being in a warmer period rather than being in a colder period].
So water access: net gain from being in warmer periods.
Though it’s obvious that humans create dams and these are greatest factors in water access. But that goes without saying [it’s not vaguely disputable] and is not the issue. Though it relates to this water issue in regard to a loss the storage water due by having glacier recede, in that the area occupied by a glacier can replaced with an area used for dam.
And obviously a dam is a better way to
store water for human use [life in general grow better in water as compared to ice]. Or lake is a generally improvement over the same size chunk of glacial ice.
The single greatest effect which seems mostly related to human activity
is the increase in global CO2 [or one can not argue the human activity has reduced global CO2 levels- and only question is how much increase in CO2 is due to human activity]. And this increase in global CO2 has significantly improve the growth of plants- whether crops or in nature.
This is small reason millions to billions of people have enough food to eat- a larger factor is an improvement in farming technology and market type distribution of food to people who need food.
Miskolczi had his fingers on the scale. To get his result (and there is some real question about how he did that) he used the wrong version of the TIGR database, one that is much too dry.
And he defines his optical depth in just the IR window region, where by definition little or no effect is expected. His optical depth truly is only in terms of radiation from the surface that is emitted to space, ignoring that the GHG effect is emitted from the atmosphere, and not seen in the window region.
SOD has an interesting series on that point (although not in relation to Mis) with some revealing graphics. He is up to part 10
http://scienceofdoom.com/2013/01/23/visualizing-atmospheric-radiation-part-ten-back-radiation/
SoD has built a Matlab model that’s fairly good in calculating clear sky radiative effects and has some additional features like imposing the stability requirement on the lapse rate that it cannot exceed the adiabatic value. I have downloaded the model and made some modifications to it to learn more on quantitative details. The overall picture has not changed much from the use of the morel but now I know much more about some important quantitative details that I haven’t seen discussed or described elsewhere.
This exercise has confirmed also that Miskolczi had done a fair part of the same radiative calculations, but for some reason stopped short of doing the next step that would correct the error Jim D mentions. He did calculate the altitude profile of the point of emission of radiation to space, but he did that for one CO2 concentration only. Repeating that same calculation with a higher concentration and comparing the results would produce the correct result that most of the radiative forcing comes from changes in radiation originating in the atmosphere rather than at surface. I really cannot understand, why he didn’t do and report the results of such a simple additional step.
Professor of Sociology and Environmental Science,
… say no more lol. When east meets west.
Via Planet3, Jon Foley on pet theories, which might explain why ClimateBallers disagree with one another:
> [P]eople are reluctant to give up their pet hypothesis, and never develop a real theory. For example, people who love technology, markets and economics will usually persist in believing those change the world, even when they don’t. Others strongly believe in political change, and persist in believing that, even if evidence suggests otherwise.
http://planet3.org/2013/01/23/jon-foley-on-why-environmentalists-disagree-with-each-other/
#YouQuarterbacks, stop coveting your pet theories!
Willard
Foley is right.
“Human nature” is the reason why nobody agrees with anybody else.
But I also think that (especially in our western culture) we are taught as children (or at least used to be) to challenge the status quo.
Max
Here’s a better way to challenge the status quo than to keep repeating your eyeballing, your model bashing, and your meme hammering, MiniMax:
> We produce new reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere temperature anomalies over the last millennium, based on a model which includes the e ects of external climate forcings and accounts for the long-memory features displayed in the data sets. Our reconstruction is based on two linear models, one in which the latent temperature series is linearly related to three main external forcings (solar irradiance, greenhouse gas concentration, and volcanism), and the other in which the observed temperature proxy data (tree rings, sediment record, ice cores, etc.) is linearly related to the unobserved temperatures. Uncertainty about the
linear relations is modeled using additive noise (errors). We have carefully investigated the correlation structure in regression errors using rigorous statistical tests, and we nd that a long memory fractional Gaussian noise is proper for both linear models. We then use Bayesian estimation to reconstruct the past unobserved land-air temperature anomalies and combined land-and-marine anomalies over the period 1000-1899. In addition, we show that the long memory model helps to quantify the uncertainty of the reconstruction more precisely,
and the use of external climate forcings is crucial in substantially reducing uncertainty levels. Our reconstruction compares favorably with previous results, as measured via the validation metric of empirical coverage probability for 20th-century observations. Finally, we provide
a measurement of equilibrium climate sensitivity over the last millennium based on our posterior reconstruction samples.
http://www.stat.purdue.edu/~viens/publications/BLTV.pdf
Please note that the full expression is status quo ante bellum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_ante_bellum
Hey, wiley willie, I’ve got an even better way to “challenge” things.
Manfred has done some calculating based on the post WWII temperature and CO2 record to come up with some estimates for CS
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-289107
He’s “challenging the status quo” based on (oh horrors!) actual physical observations.
Why don’t you take a crack at challenging his challenge, if you feel up to it.
If you feel it’s a level too high for you, I’ll understand.
Max
http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-emotion
Willard, me boy
Aren’t you going to take on Manfred’s challenge?
Should be easy for a guy as intelligent and eloquent as you.
C’mon. Have a go.
Max
manacker
‘“Human nature” is the reason why nobody agrees with anybody else.’
Species Survival is why no one agrees with everyone else.
Let’s examine the case of misidentifying a wolf.
Well it could be a wolf…or it could be a harmless little puppy dog.
If we all agree it’s a harmless cute puppy and we are wrong…then we will all be eaten. Our species will become extinct.
The only rational solution from a species standpoint is that some of us have to disagree about everything…that way some of us will survive in the event that the ‘consensus’ is wrong.
I always find it interesting that various people get themselves all worked up over the ‘anti-vaxers’…if we didn’t have the ‘anti-vaxers’ the government would have to randomly select a control group to insure species survival in the unlikely event that a vaccine proved deadly.
It’s good that some people voluntarily forgo their vaccines and risk personal illness or death in order to guarantee species survival in the event a vaccine ends up being faulty.
Harry –
Or you could follow the Precautionary Principle, and kill the puppy. Just in case.
harrywr2, I am very happy that you took the shot for your cat too.
MiniMax,
I have no commitment regarding Manfred’s napkin. A napkin is a napkin is a napkin. If Manfred wishes to turn this napkin into a more formal calculation, he can ask for your help, or submit it to climate scientists for feedback.
***
Speaking of commitments, here was the last time you challenged me with numbers:
> I think we’ve beaten this dog to death and should move on.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/12/04/multidecadal-climate-to-within-a-millikelvin/#comment-283851
It did not turn that well for you. Nor did it turned that well when we read together, for instance:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/17/pause-waving-the-italian-flag/#comment-256539
When someone challenges your point, MiniMax, repeating it does not suffice. Repeating the same thing over and over again is called an argumentum ad nauseam:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_nauseam
***
More generally, you do not seem to understand how scientific discussions work, MiniMax. I believe Vaughan noticed the same thing not so long ago:
> Max doesn’t really believe all this stuff he comes up with, he’s too smart for that. He’s just having fun seeing whose leg he can pull.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/20/berkeley-earth-update/#comment-288772
I don’t mind much your misdemeanours, MiniMax, as they are par for the course. (Go, Team Denizens!) I could mind. Then I’d wonder about other hypotheses than that you’re simply pulling legs. Even you should expect by now that I’d start looking for evidence of these hypotheses.
If that is what you want, please do continue.
Thank you again for playing,
w
My hands, kim, my hands.
But you can go first, if you do care about lukewarm symbology.
I thought you thought that CS was a round zero.
my pet theory is that people who own pets are nicer than people who dont own pets.
Pet’s rock. Rah rah pet rah.
=======
My Swedish friend has this pet theory:
> It’s not the fart that kills, it’s the smell.
Since we’re on the subject of essential knowledge of Scandinavian languages: in Norwegian, we also have the word “gangfart”, which means walking speed.
There is a danger in switching back and forth between languages.
There is a danger is switching back and forth”
That’s why I always go forth and back
Yeah. Pet’s rock.
Unless they’re pet rocks.
In German we have a whole series of common “farts” (spelled “fahrts”):
Ausfahrt = exit
Einfahrt = entrance
Auffahrt = trip up
Abfahrt = departure
Rundfahrt = round trip
Hinfahrt = trip to somewhere
Rückfahrt = trip back
Himmelfahrt = Ascension
etc.
No matter where you go in Germany, you’re “fahrting” (one way or the other)
Is that why Germany is so keen on wind power?
From David Wojick, ‘The UN is cloning the IPCC with a new
biodiversity group.’
Hey, a shiny new Yew – Nighted – Nay – shuns bureaucracy,
The Inter – governmental Platform and Bio – diversitee and Eco –
system Sirvices,” The IPEBS, that should get the message across
and make the serfs sit up. Oh Gaia!
Beth
Who’s picking up the tab for this new UN offshoot and in what resort locations will they have their global “pow-wows”
Ouch! (Don’t tell me.)
Max
Max,
Who’s paying? Why, the looooooong suffering public, of course.
Quiet down there, u serfs.
Beth, (one of the serfs.)
Beth
You got that right.
Serfdom ain’t much fun.
Be much better to get to travel to exotic places to meet in air conditioned meeting rooms and figure out how to squeeze the serfs a bit more.
Max (a fellow serf)
Judith says a new post is coming on A Makarieva’s new paper,
‘Where do winds come from?’ That’s great, it was discussed
over several days at The Air Vent in October 2010. Fascinating
thread with insightful comments by the scientist and posters.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/where-do-winds-come-from/
You can hit the reply button, Beth. Just sayin’.
I believe she has success at microclimates by the Indian Ocean.
========
Beth doesn’t do reply buttons Willard, she is a cowgirl and can’t sew.
Had I known her real name, I would not have kept my suggestion to myself.
Sorry, Bruce.
I would
nothave kept.OK. Bed time.
Iceland’s Prime Minister explains the recent resurrection of his country:
Yep, sometimes you have to think outside the box and not bailout everyone :)
Indeed, they even go so far as helping the poor.
The horror!
Willard, yes they do help their poor and before the bank crisis, their 2.25% unemployed. In the US we of course do squat for the poor and our 8% unemployed and the 5% unemployable.
Indeed, Cap’n, that must mean something.
Indeed, “In the 1990s Iceland undertook extensive free market reforms, which initially produced strong economic growth. As a result, Iceland was rated as having one of the world’s highest levels of economic freedom[8] as well as civil freedoms.”
Looks like they deregulated and let them sink or swim :) Odd that. 20% capital gains and the lowest corporate tax rate in the world.
yes, sometimes the free market works
Speaking of Scots:
ya, set them geeks free from working at banks.
Pass Book Savings…
The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks were to be located in major cities. Each bank was to operate autonomously in its region. A Fed Bank had a board of directors and an executive structure similar to that of any commercial bank or business firm. Commercial banks in a Federal Reserve district could become members of the Federal Reserve if they fulfilled certain requirements, including buying stock in their regional Fed Bank according to a formula based on their capital value. The Fed Bank then paid them a statutory annual return of 6 percent on the value of this stock. Member commercial banks therefore became the “stockholders” of the Fed banks.
their ought, to be a law.
A half a tenth is a dollar, right?
=========
Guess it serfs us right , fellow serf, we should’a fought back more.
Say, goin’ surfin his weekend…well some tame swimming. Wish a
few of us Denizen Serfs could get to one of those ex-ot ic con-
vention places fer a sceptics week-end, lol. Any oil money grants
available …say, where’s Tony B ? (irony tag.)
Beth the serf.
Beth, make sure you get in touch with the serf-livesavers. ;-)
They also surf who only stand on waves …
The Fire-Ready-Aim C02 policy of government scientists in the EPA is a dramatic realization of self-defeating bureaucratic authoritarianism. What shall we call government-funded global warming fearmongers who would condemn the third and developing world to misery, poverty and death if not an army of Liberal Fascists who would deny nature to spread their secular, socialist doomsday?
In Nassim Taleb’s ‘Prologue to The Black Swan’ Taleb observes that
‘the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be
lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or ‘incentives’ for skill.’
The government’s role would therefore seem to be providing a milieu favourable to aggressive trial and error, not bank rolling via the public purse, likely inefficient businesses or banks. We win, regardless of
which competitors fail, by the provision of better technologies and
produucts at *no cost* to us.. Cool eh?
Check out “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” on Netflix and you might change your opinion about–e.g., Asians being good at math is because they’re lucky.
From Bart Verheggen’s tweets:
> A record of the past written in an ancient ice core now reveals that Greenland’s ice sheet is not melted as easily as some fear. But the message is not entirely reassuring: it also implies that Antarctica has much greater potential to raise sea levels than previously thought.
http://www.nature.com/news/greenland-defied-ancient-warming-1.12265
They find out they were wrong about Greenland Ice. They quickly arrive at new, different conclusions, with even more declarations of the new thoughts being right with no doubt expressed. I would expect them to look at new evidence that is different and increase their uncertainty. Finding out that they made a mistake makes them press on with less uncertainty.
Finding out that Greenland is more stable than they thought makes them certain that Antarctic is more unstable than they thought.
Antarctic is judged to be unstable based on Arctic being more stable. That does not make any sense.
The Antarctic could easily loose enough ice to make up for what Greenland did not lose and still be very stable.
Before, they judged Antarctic to be more stable, based on Antarctic data, and now they have changed that based on data from somewhere else.
This NEEM data is very important, but the conclusions that they derived from it so far are very suspect.
When they found that they made mistakes, that they should report their mistakes and go back and reconsider what else that they may have wrong.
> When they found that they made mistakes, that they should report their mistakes and go back and reconsider what else that they may have wrong.
Yup.
Something’s rotten in the state of Greenland.
All that theorizes must die, passing through nature to the Internet.
Just as we doubted it in a recent thread, researchers found evidence of the existence of leprechauns:
http://www.rovingbandit.com/2013/01/taking-sen-seriously.html
Correlation or causation?
Internet Explorer vs Murder rate:
http://i.imgur.com/h2JClux.jpg
#YouQuarterback — be the judge!
why have I being censored? is the truth so scary?
Same here!
That makes you nine, simple.
FOMBS cites a false dichotomy between a market that is regulated to death – the heart’s desire of pissant progressives – and so-called laissez faire economics. Not having done a political rant – in the service of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – for a while here it is.
The reality of the scientific enlightenment and libertarian thought in our great western tradition is far different. To quote from that exemplar of libertarian thought – F.A. Hayek.
‘There is no reason why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom…there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody…Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of the assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong….To the same category belongs also the increase of security through the state’s rendering assistance to the victims of such “acts of God” as earthquakes and floods. Whenever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself or make provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken….There is, finally, the supremely important problem of combating general fluctuations of economic activity and the recurrent waves of large-scale unemployment which accompany them….’ Hayek – The Road to Serfdom
I think perhaps Hayek is the impetus for Beth’s ‘serf’ jokes. But in seriousness – Hayek’s views encompass health care and welfare – as opposed to the US conservative impulse. In the libertarian worldview the state exists to protect the weak from the rapacious in defending the rule of law, to vouchsafe democracy, to provide services that the market can’t or won’t provide, to defend the populace from external aggression. There is no reason in principle that laws should not encompass – for instance – laws against pollution, laws to set aside wilderness areas or to legislate against child labour. The line is indistinct – but the potential to cross lines into egregious limitations of personal freedoms exists at all times and require vigilance to identify and resist. One line concerns the optimum size of government taxes and expenditure. Beyond a nominal share of about 30% of GDP – government begins to stifle economic growth and unfairly gather to itself too many of the fruits of labour and production.
The rule of law extends to the regulation of markets – rules about prudential oversight of banking, information flows in markets, anti-monopolistic laws, the regulation of interest rates to prevent asset bubbles and other such rules as promote the efficiency of markets.
There is no reason at all why the succouring of populations in need as a result of natural disasters, war, famine or plague should be limited to the national boundaries. Should aid promote free and fair markets, trade, economic growth, democracy and the rule of law – the much need maximisation of human welfare is guaranteed. As is population management, environmental progress, advances in health, education and human happiness. There is no collectivist agenda that can work a fraction as well as the balanced implementation of libertarian ideals – freedom, democracy, the rule of law and free markets. Progress in human development, the elimination of international conflict and the realisation of sustainable environments this century requires that the libertarian agenda be pursued with clarity in objectives and the fervour of heroes of freedom of the past. All good comes from human freedom and that is challenged today by the Godless hordes of green neo-socialists barbarians inside the walls of western civilisation.
Your rational and spirited advocacy, here on Climate Etc both of carbon markets and of ObamaCare is noted and appreciated, Robert I Ellison!
It’s nice to see science, economics, and morality so nicely reconciled, eh?
Much appreciated too is the wise recognition — that is very much in the tradition of the Founders and Framers of the US Constitution — of the absolute scientific, economic, and moral necessity for wise compromise that the sobering realities of globalized climate-change are now requiring of the 21st century!
PS: today’s XKCD holds substantial lessons for the many “outsider science” advocates who post here on Climate Etc!
FOMBS,
We are reminded of the clarity of analysis that emerges form the Hartwell Group – something that you would do well to learn.
‘The old climate framework failed because it would have imposed substantial costs associated with climate mitigation policies on developed nations today in exchange for climate benefits far off in the future — benefits whose attributes, magnitude, timing, and distribution are not knowable with certainty. Since they risked slowing economic growth in many emerging economies, efforts to extend the Kyoto-style UNFCCC framework to developing nations predictably deadlocked as well.
The new framework now emerging will succeed to the degree to which it prioritizes agreements that promise near-term economic, geopolitical, and environmental benefits to political economies around the world, while simultaneously reducing climate forcings, developing clean and affordable energy technologies, and improving societal resilience to climate impacts. This new approach recognizes that continually deadlocked international negotiations and failed domestic policy proposals bring no climate benefit at all. It accepts that only sustained effort to build momentum through politically feasible forms of action will lead to accelerated decarbonization.’ http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/climate_pragmatism_innovation
We want of course workable, pragmatic solutions that increase human dignity and the resiliance of global communities.
And though I suggest that libertarians would endorse social health insurance – the devil (or barbarian as the case may be) is in the detail and I know too little about obamacare to comment. I was recently in a public hospital in Australia – an infected toe is no laughing matter apparently – paid for by my private health insurance. The facilities were top notch and the staff too attentive. The food was bloody awful. I felt a little aggrieved that I was denied the most expensive antibiotics for purely bureaucratic reasons as my insurance was paying. All in all I am happy that the service is available universally. My private insurance – however – assures me that I avoid long waiting lists for many types of treatment.
Hayek as well talks about the accomodations that are unavoidable in a democracy – although I suggest you read and reread Hayeks words quoted by Faustino above. Wise words indeed on the fine balance between freedom and tryranny. I will certainly attest that America was founded on the libertarian ideals I hold dear – that America is the greatest and purest example of individual freedom and must continue to succeed and be a beacon of freedom for the world. It remains only for you to rediscover your libertarian roots aye FOMBS? Else I would suspect you of merely mouthing platitudes while being complicit in the overthrow of liberty.
The pragmatism of America’s Founders and Framers, as interpreted by America’s great jurists like Learned Hand, has withstood every trial — even the harshest! — for more than two hundred years.
Whereas new-fangled ideologies like “libertarianism” have not been tested even as sternly as Marxism … isn’t that true Robert I Ellison?
Libertarianism and Marxism both are simple-minded ideologies that sound wonderful in principle, and both are highly entertaining as fiction … and yet it is exceedingly doubtful that either can be made to work in practice!
When it comes to the grappling responsibly with the sobering, accelerating, globalized reality of climate-change, it is imprudent to repose much trust in untested economic and political ideologies. That is why it is reasonable to repose 10X more trust in the tried-and-true pragmatic principles of a jurist (say) Learned Hand, than in the untested theoretical principles of (say) Ayn Rand. And as for the “Hartwell Group” … their pure-minded theoretical ideals have never been tested at all!
Shall we not prudently embrace pragmatic principles that are tested-and-true, Robert I Ellison, and alike reject the seductive-yet-shallow temptations of ideological Marxism and ideological Libertarianism?
Fan
Your words appear to make sense.
– Marxism is a freedom stifling dead-end.
– “Ideological Libertarianism” (as you imagine it) is the “wild West” variety, where anything goes and there is essentially no rule of law. This is also bad.
– The ideal is somewhere in between (as the Chief, Faustino and Beth have all also stated), with individual freedom plus responsibility to the overall society as the key criteria.
But, from your comments on this site, I believe that you would draw the “ideal line” much closer to the “Marxism” side than the other three I have mentioned above (or than me, for that matter).
So to me you might appear to be a “Marxist”, while to you I may appear to be a “wild West Libertarian”.
Where you stand depends on where you sit, as they say.
Max
Although we may wrangle about the details, overall your post’s informed historical perspective, rationality, and good manners, all are (IMHO) wholly commendable manacker!
If it should come to pass that James Hansen’s scientific worldview proves to be correct — supposing for example, that the Earth remains in sustained state of energy imbalance throughout the coming decade, such that the sea-level rise-rate accelerates (as Hansen’s thermodynamical models predict) — then local economic ideologies will have to be supplanted by global economic ideologies … at least insofar as sustaining the planetary commons is concerned.
To insist “No! That can’t happen! That’s impossible” is mere futile irresponsible denialism, eh?
Soberingly, it’s becoming evident that no established economic ideology grapples effectively with this global-scale challenge and responsibility, eh Manacker? So we are all of us going to live in interesting times, eh?
Fan
Yes. Times are (and will continue to be) interesting.
Where you and I have our largest disagreement, it appears, is whether or not “James Hansen’s scientific worldview proves to be correct “.
Only time will tell.
As you know, there are hypotheses, scientific papers and model studies, which either support or refute this “worldview”.
The “null hypothesis” is that human GHGs will have no appreciable impact on our planet’s future climate. (“Null” = “zero”)
“Hansen’s scientific worldview” is that the “null hypothesis” is incorrect and that (among other things) the rate of sea-level rise-rate resulting from AGW will accelerate so that the rise can be measured in meters in this century, wiping out coastal cities and settlements across the globe.
As a rational skeptic, my point of view on this is quite simple: The “Hansen scientific worldview” is not corroborated by empirical scientific evidence, which would falsify the “null hypothesis” (Feynman and Popper).
Until this is the case, Hansen’s premise remains an uncorroborated hypothesis in the scientific sense, nothing more.
The good news is that we do not have to wait until the sea level has really risen by meters to test Hansen/s premise.
The premise is all based on a posited mean 2xCO2 ECS of 3.2C and rapidly accelerating human CO2 (and other GHG) emissions, leading to collapse of major landed ice sheets (Greenland, Antarctica) and the meter-high sea level rise.
Recent studies (Schlesinger 2012, Gillett 2011, Lewis – not yet published), which are based on actual observations rather than simply model predictions, are showing that the 3.2C value for ECS is likely to be too high by a factor of at least 2:1, with a big open question still being the amount of natural climate forcing.
Satellite observations by Spencer&Braswell 2007 and Lindzen&Choi 2009/2011 are confirming a low 2xCO2 ECS.
More work is needed, of course, but if added actual physical observations confirm these recent findings, we may have a major breakthrough in falsifying the “null hypothesis”, at the same time also falsifying the “Hansen scientific viewpoint” of a highly sensitive climate.
If, at the same time the controlled experimental work at CERN validates the hypothesis proposed by Henrik Svensmark and others that natural changes in galactic cosmic rays influence cloud nucleation thereby also affecting our climate, we could have added constraints on natural forcing as well as on the 2xCO2 effect, enabling an even closer estimate.
As you write, the times are interesting.
Max
Reply is above, I hope, Manacker!
The ‘hockey stick’ is the smoking gun that the Left has been using fear, propaganda, practicing practicing black arts – say anything they believe works for them, demonize all who oppose their political agenda, do whatever it takes – to plunder the savings of the productive and gain political power over the people and the witchdoctors of academia have been a willing accomplices. The fundamental challenge of our time is surviving liberal fascism not AGW.
FOMBS knows little of the history of the scientific enlightenment. The libertarian ideals are indeed the ideals on which America was founded – individual freedom, free markets, the rule of law and democracy. Who could argue with that. They are ideals to be defended by each new generation with the fervour of the heroes of freedom of the past.
The economic principles on which free markets should be founded are likewise confirmed by history. At the centre of prudential management of markets is the managment of interest rates to prevent asset bubbles and the maintenance of balanced government budgets. It is clear that the relative success of the Australian economy over decades – for instance – is founded on the management of these two things. This owes much more in the rational scheme of things to Friedrich Hayek than Any Rand. Common sense and the tried and true rather than inflexible ideology.
From FOMBS we get obfuscation rather than clarity – something that seems a defining quality of the modern pissant progressive. It stems from a need to hide their true agendas. Nothing less than the complete dismantling of industrial economies in many instances. What about you FOMBS – are you a closet wrecker hoping to take advantage of catastrophe to coast to ideological supremacy and world domination? Planet Earth to FOMBS…
What we have seen is failure over more than 20 years to move on carbon mitigation. What we get from FOMBS is more arm waving propaganda. What we get from the Hartwell Group is pragmatic proposals on black carbon and tropospheric ozone, technological innovation and cheap renewable energy, the consevation and restoration of agricultural land and ecosystems, health, education and development initiatives that inevitably reduce population pressures. The difference between arm waving and clarity in policy objectives couldn’t be more stark.
All I can say is, the earthlings must never master PSI climate-change theory!
Willard linked to an article that talked about droughts and floods as an impetus to transformative economics – and the need to prepare the rhetorical and political strategies in advance.
Again – you seem to deal in obscurantism, misdirection and deceit.
These behaviours are a far greater blight on effective communication than any misguided theories of the so-called dragon slayers. Your science is hardly any better being barely recognisable as such consisting of misunderstanding and confusion – and perhaps quite deliberate obfuscation.
If you want to deal in honest discourse by all means – but I fear that is a bridge too far. Climate Pragmatism – on the other hand – ‘offers a framework for renewed American leadership on climate change that’s effectiveness, paradoxically, does not depend on any agreement about climate science or the risks posed by uncontrolled greenhouse gases.
The new report brings the Hartwell framework into an American perspective, and it is authored by a broad group of 14 international scholars and analysts representing a diverse range of political and ideological positions — from the conservative American Enterprise Institute to moderate Democratic think tank Third Way and the liberal Breakthrough Institute.’
http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/climate_pragmatism_innovation
You instead seem obsessed with so called economic transformation as a panacea for all ills of the world – and are content to peddle climate apocalypse as a vehicle for dideological purposes. If you want progress on mitigation – by all means. If you want the wars of values that is the climate war – by all means again.
The world is still not warming for a decade ot three more – according to the science. So sad too bad.
Hey Chief, Since you are on the topic of floods and chaotic stuff, you might get a kick out of this :)
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/01/tidal-forcing.html
Kind of a hoot if it’s right :) There are a couple of papers on the lunar orbital cycles, but I haven’t see one that included lunar and precessional.
Capt’nDalla
Again, my little brain does not compute the variance between lunar cycles and deep ocean mixing. I need a boost. I’m still stuck on the surface.
Polar sea ice is the boundary of the coldest sinking water that drives part of the deep ocean thermohaline currents. Change the rate of the sea ice formation and the location of formation, changes the flow characteristics of the sinking highest density salt water. Slow, more stable sinking produces less mixing since its flow is more laminar. Increase the rate and there is more mixing. Mixing efficiency determines total ocean heat capacity.
Also breaking fixed sea ice free allows it to move away from the pole and melt more quickly. That releases a good bit of stored energy. Higher tidal flooding also increases evaporation which in turn increases precipitation relocating glacial mass if you have a place to park it.. The poles are the real heat sinks of the planet, mess with them and stuff happens.
What is funny is the correlation with vocanic and geomagnetic. Solar forcing obviously can’t cause volcanoes, but shift enough water and ice and things get entertaining. So it kinda looks like people are looking at a lot of effects instead of causes :)
Vaughan Pratt may get a chuckle since he is trying to figure out the volcanic part of his millikelven model.
Chief,
There is no need to use my name as a hook to repost your Breakthrough discovery. It does not suit you well and messes with initial conditions to which you are most sensitive.
If you want to comment on that study you’re exploiting right now, you can reply to it in a nested comment. Readers would not need to search to see how gratuitous are your remarks. Or perhaps is this your own peculiar way to deplore obscurantism?
OK. The comments are broken, yet again.
Judy, please snip comments instead of deleting them. It might help keep the arborescence intact. Keeping a trace of your moderation might also have a dissuasive effect.
Willard
Two good suggestions from you, snipping shows intent and effect
tonyb
Hi Tony, glad that you enjoyed your skiing holiday.
Problem for Judith is that she doesn’t have the time to read everything that is posted and to snip will take even more time.
Apparently she is reluctant to allow others to assist in the moderation role.
I reach for my toggle wheel when the ad homs start to fly.
Peter
Thank you, I had a very nice holiday
Hopefully things will be a bit calmer on the ad homs front with periodic reminders and civility will rule the day. If Judith will not set up some sort of light touch moderation team however things might slip. We shall see.
tonyb
tony b
Welcome back from your holiday in the mountains.
Did you learn more about that medieval silver and gold mine that was covered up by advancing snow and ice during the LIA?
(Or did you spend all your time “schussing” down the mountainside?)
Max
Hi max
Unfortunately it was much too cold and snowy to search for silver mines this time round. I did dome downhill and some langlauf and ate too much sacher torte.
Tonyb
‘It’s an old worry about the viability of democracy that lies at the heart of our fixation on disaster: that people are too irrational and unruly to cope with complex issues or distant futures; that they’re neither timely nor decisive enough to act prudently in good times or resolutely in bad. Only educated, farsighted actors are capable of such things, the story goes, whether in service of aristocracy, monarchy, or technocracy. We fervently hope that disasters can compel a moment of truth, because otherwise we fear those emergency measures will come to pass — and, in darker moments, we think we need them.’ http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-flood-next-time/
Wee Willy – yes I have reverted because your minimax and don don habits do nothing to compel respect. Nor does the link you so approve of. Or the gratuitously vacuous snark passing for comment.
It astonishes me far we are from rational discourse. This study that I am exploiting now? Seems to suggest that ‘Pragmatic Climate’ says something other than what I directly quoted. But no – it seems rather that the commodity of catastrophe is peddled to ‘compel a moment of truth’ that leads to a radical reorganisation of rational economic principles. The goal it seems is more the old revolutionary one of the overthrow of power structures however they are formulated. Economic ‘degrowth’ and fiscal redistribution requiring suspension of democracy and the rule of law. Emergency measures concieved in ‘darker moments’ indeed. Arising out of fears of technocrats unjustly gathering to themselves all power and wealth. In the nonsensical fantasy of the pissant progressive there is no solution but the ultimate solution – the overthrow of of established power seeded by a climate of manufactured catastrophe. It seems unlikely – it seems more likely that in the moment of a destabilised polity that the ruthless opportunist waiting in the wings pounces and inevitably imposes a rule by brute power.
I would rather avoid the risk and devise solutions – at the risk of questioning the value of your lofty idealism – rather than wait for the ever more hysterical declarations of climate disaster.
One of the quite simple approaches is conservation agriculture – http://www.fao.org/ag/ca/5.html – please note the graph of production and income over time. It is the most dynamic social movement in global agriculture since the Dust Bowl spurred the soil conservation movement in America and thence the world. It relies on building soil carbon. A 1% increase in soil carbon is easily achievable in carbon depleted agricultural soils – and would sequester 500 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. Nearly twice human emissions thus far. This seems too simple, practical and positive – and far from conducive to a climate of fear. So I am inclined to think that such a popular movement would lack support from the typical pissant progressive.
You’re mad, Chief.
That’s OK.
Wee Willy,
You seem to have run out of steam prematurely. I suggest you take the Kim masterclass in one line profundities.
Cryptic is good but I prefer a more earthy medium.
I am mad as a cut snake and flash as a dunny rat with a gold tooth.
All it really takes is a soupcon of equanimity and a modicum of couth.
In case readers do not get the context of “That’s OK, you’re mad”. Here it is, courtesy of Tony:
> I’d point out that Zeke has his interpretation but nowhere did I say “fraud”. He’s mad, and people don’t often think clearly when they are mad. That’s OK.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/23/a-question-for-zeke-hausfather/
I believe that Tony wins an Internet with that line.
This is the line of the week.
***
In case readers are mad at pissant progressives while citing the Breathrough Institute’s, let’s recall its mission statement:
http://thebreakthrough.org/about/mission/
looks like pissant is in the eye of the beholder, eh willard?
Of course, Chief gets to determine which progressives are pissant, because he, like many “skeptics,” has an eye that only beholds truth (justice, and the American way).
It reminds me of how slaveholders shared the clear vision seen in Chief’s simplistic jinogism:
It’s that fireball in the sky. The sun is the only independent variable: changes in solar energy explain both global warming AND global cooling (it happens, really!). “If the Earth determines that Canada should freeze again, the best response would simply be to sell your Canadian real estate. The Earth moves on… So should we.” (Neil Reynolds)
Joshua,
No need to rub it in. Focus instead on his interesting idea of conservation agriculture. Think of it as conversation culture.
***
Folowing up on uncertainties, here’s what I just found:
http://climate.nasa.gov/uncertainties
The NASA has a website to talk about uncertainties.
Have any Denizens ever cited this resource?
If not, auditors ought to wonder why.
Willard, that is an incomplete list. One of the largest uncertainties is the THC.
http://www.whoi.edu/science/po/people/rhuang/publication/2008JPOGuanHuang.pdf
That is a step in the right direction, but since Hansen and the “gang” assume that natural “unforced” variability range is virtually inconsequential, that ASS U MEs certainty that does not exist. With the growing TIDE of circumstantial evidence that the certainties are over estimated and uncertainties not even known unknowns, this looks like a train wreck in progress. It really looks like it is going to be incredibly entertaining :)
Progress…
http://blogs.phillymag.com/the_philly_post/2013/01/29/philadelphia-egopo-theater-stage-uncle-toms-cabin-white/
what was once old, becomes new.
Joshua
You may have missed this bit of US history but (unlike in many places where slavery is still practiced today) it was abolished by law in the USA in 1865.
So the “rule of law” there no longer condones slavery.
Nor do the “libertarian ideals”, to which the Chief referred.
And, yes, Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder 60 some odd years earlier. But that does not detract from his thoughts on individual freedom, free markets and the rule of law and democracy.
Max
Thanks for the update, manacker,
No, I hadn’t realized that slavery has been abolished in the US. Thanks for filling me in (imagine my embarrassment).
But it seems that I didn’t make my point sufficiently clear. So allow me to elaborate:
The Chief referred to the individual freedom, free market, and rule of law that were the founding ideals of the US. Well, those founding ideals were viewed by the founders as specifically endorsing the view of human beings as property, and the systematic denial of those human beings any degree, whatsoever, as dignity.
To elaborate further, it is all fine and good to write empty and jingoistic platitudes about the value of those founding ideals, for the purpose of elevating one’s own ideological perspective (as Chief regularly does), and to further leverage that personal sense of superiority to denigrate hundreds of millions of your fellow human beings as “pissants” and as “the enemy.” But such exploitation of those founding ideals ignores the reality that the devil is in the details. What is important is how those ideals are manifest, specifically. No jingoism and self-congratulatory denigration of other humans will further those ideals, and no matter how important Chief feels his keyboard battle against his imagined adversaries might be, the reality is that his comments on blogs will have zero impact on anything of any real substance.
And so you support my point. You reference “libertarian ideals” as being variable over time, changing depending on circumstance, being used to justify different phenomena by different people at different times. What those “libertarian ideals” once condoned, they condone no longer. In your opinion. I’m sorry, manacker, but I see no particular reason to see your interpretation of those ideals as being inherently more valid than the interpretation of slave-holders. In some areas I might agree with your interpretation and ins some areas I might disagree. Until such time as you show me some evidence that you are a supernatural being (let alone a rational skeptic as opposed to a “skeptic”), I’m afraid I will not accept your interpretation (or that of the Chief) as being definitive.
I must say, although you have written many classic posts, that one may take the cake. The fact that Jefferson was a slave-holder does not detract from his thoughts, say, about the nature of individual freedom?
Beautiful!
@Joshua | January 29, 2013 at 2:08 pm –
What a crock! The Rule of Law has nothing to do with slavery. You can say that SOME people did not apply the rule of law with perfection, but that isn’t the same thing. A lot of rules are violated, that in no way means the rule in question isn’t necessarily a good thing. You need a logic lesson.
The devil is indeed in the details – of which Johua has a typical trivial command.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290193
The libertarian challenge is as I say to frame a positive narrative for the future of the world. The essence of this future is free markets, free peoples, economic development, sustainable environments, democracy and the rule of law as defined in the best contemporary practice. Times change and the Whig ideal with it. I am not mad but it is that challenge and how it may be expressed that engages my attention from time to time.
Although I note that there is some understanding dawning in Willard about conservation farming and the many on site and downstream benefits. With Joshua it is just fun to call him a pissant progressive and say he looks like a monkey and smells like one too.
Robert I Ellison, it is good to know that rational libertarians will be abandoning free-market ideology.
After all, it’s completely apparent, to every citizen with common-sense, that computerized trading at micro-second speeds, by computer programs that are written by PhDs in mathematics, that are employed by giant corporations … has nothing to do with cultivating Jeffersonian virtues in the body politic, eh?
Uhhh … the efficient cultivation of civic virtue *is* what free markets are all about eh?
And so it’s obvious, that free markets are *not* a virtuous end-in-themselves, right? `Cuz putting markets first — in the modern computer era especially> — would be ack-basswards, willfully ignorant, ideology-first crazy-talk, eh?
Seems to me, that today’s main challenge for strict libertarians, it to appreciate that strict libertarianism nowadays makes very little sense!
Perhaps that’s why strict libertarians do poorly in elections nowadays … it’s because voters have learned plain common-sense? And as for non-strict libertarians … they’re not easy to distinguish from Bill and Hillary Clinton, eh?
Free markets are a virtuous end in themselves but they are and never have been moral. Although one can argue that the actor in markets should have an ethical frameworks in which to make decisions – this is not always guaranteed. It is not always guaranteed in society that people will act justly or honestly. This is why we have courts and jails – a core function of the government in imposing the rule of law – and why we have rules for markets. You deliberately and falsely conflate libertarianism with laissez faire economics. Laissez faire economics is an object lesson in economic theory – not to be confused with the real world. Libertarianism is a practical and pragmatic and ongoing reflection on laws and rules, methods and means, the roles of government, industry and the polity. There are some fundamental tried and true techniques for economic managment – chief amongst these is the management of interest rates, the balancing of budgets, reasonable restraint in government taxation and expenditure, and effective and transparent banking and market regulation.
It is a shame that America is relearning these lessons – at some considerable cost to the ordinary person and American power. But you will find that free markets will not be abandoned any time soon.
“Free markets are a virtuous end in themselves but they are and never have been moral.”
Half right. Free markets are not moral. Nor are science, governments, corporations, education, hammers…. But free markets are also not a virtuous end in themselves, and for the same reason.
That which is not human is not moral or immoral, virtuous or sinful. A free market is a mechanism. It is the economic mechanism of what has been the freest, most powerful, most generous culture in history. But “free markets” also existed on a limited scale in the trading of slaves and sale of horribly addictive drugs, hardly virtuous ends in themselves.
It is people who are moral or not. What we are witnessing now is an experiment in attempting to retain a free market, while jettisoning the moral framework of the society in which it developed. We shall see what the law of unintended consequences has to say about that.
“Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
No doubt:
If only we had retained that moral framework – eh?
And there we go. No morality without faith. No confirmation bias there. Nosireebub.
Say, Gary, I may have missed it, but I still don’t recall seeing your explanation for how you were so completely wrong in your conspiracy theorizing about how the pre-election polls were rigged to give Obama the advantage. Did you see how, contrary to your unhinged analysis, in fact the vast majority of polls underestimated Obama’s performance?
Surely you provided an explanation, right? I mean you couldn’t have possibly ducked the issue for this long, could you?
The virtuous end is the provision of sustenance and shelter – which is best achieved with free markets.
‘Jefferson and other members of the founding generation were deeply influenced by the 18th-century European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophy stressed that liberty and equality were natural human rights.
Colonial Americans argued that King George III and Parliament had denied them the basic rights of British citizens. Despite the pervasiveness of slavery in their society, the revolutionary generation envisioned a new American government that secured the rights and freedoms of its citizens. However, these rights and freedoms did not extend to slaves.’
In resulted in the paradox of slavery – but the fires of freedom are not quenched that easily and ultimately emerged in the formation of the Republican Party.
‘In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened the new territories to slavery, was passed. Southern Whigs generally supported the Act while Northern Whigs remained strongly opposed. Most remaining Northern Whigs, like Lincoln, joined the new Republican Party and strongly attacked the Act, appealing to widespread northern outrage over the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.’
Ultimately – the US paid a heavy price for the abolition of slavery. .
Felons indeed David Springer – some poor sode were transported for failing to meekly starve to death and the population was salted by Scottish enlightenment freedom fighters. We quickly grew taller, stronger, smarter and much more assertive to those who might otherwise assume that they are our betters. Australia is our place in the sun – Australis felix.
That’s sod of course – mysterious appearances and disapearances are occurring. I must say it makes posting intersting.
Robert I Ellison | January 29, 2013 at 7:04 pm | Reply
“We quickly grew taller, stronger, smarter and much more assertive to those who might otherwise assume that they are our betters.”
In other words you quickly became more American. A noble goal indeed. Maybe someday you’ll get there.
Well it is this way Springer – we might accept Texans as fellow travellers – but the rest of the country is all hat and no cow.
So let’s recap wee willie,
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290058
First the repetition was of course accidental – and to make some point of it is most ungenerous.
> I’m not sure in which way Stern was wrong. Here’s a thought experiment to settle this.
So this example was not serving as an analogy to climate modelling, but as an analogy for the use of the word “wrong”. Since you insisted so much about the chaotic nature of weather and the intrinsic indeterminacy of climate modelling, I played along, for conversation sake. But I had no commitment to do so.
I also played along because even if you were to prove that climate modelling is not like poker modelling, we’d learn something. It provided me the incentive to do some digging (to draw some more cards, to keep with the theme) and found some interesting stuff about chaos theory, which I’ve not touched since at least a decade. My old thesis advisor was quite fond of attractors.
Surely the point was that Stern ‘had a good hand’. My response by reference to a considerable scientific expertise was that the quality of the hand was unknown as past some time there was no longer a single deterministic solution and that – realistically – we don’t know how to estimate the spread in solutions with confidence (McWilliams 2007).
So there is no realistic basis for either the original or upwardly revised claim. The foundations of the prognostication evaporate and what we are left with is the fallacy of assertion. Asserting something without proof is an error.
You should think more about chaos as the core of models and as identified both phenomenonologically and numerically in climate.
My point is that: poker is a game played by using models, we can model weather forecasting as a game, and this game would share structural similarities with the family of poker games, since it relies on models to make decision under uncertainty.
I am quite bored with poker analogies. Models rely on equations that propagate through time. Weather models initialise conditions providing a window of some veracity for a few days until the solutions diverge from reality. Longer term probabilistic forecasts rely on similarities of current to past conditions. Stochasticity is in play in poker but the uncertainty in climate and weather is a different animal. There is uncertainty in data measurement and in representing processes at very small scales. These lead to structural instability and sensitive dependence in models – leading to what is perhaps best understood as ‘irreducible imprecision’ (McWilliams again). Poker does not assist in comprehending the fundamental maths of models or understanding their nonlinear behaviour.
Thought experiments help visualize complex problems by setting up a simplified representation. Climate projections have the same utility: they help simplify what would otherwise be intractable. Both could be considered cognitive amplifier:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification
Cognitive amplifiers are not required to have predictive skills to have their use. (We could ask for potential economic value alright, pending further specification of that concept, but let’s not digress.) If that’s the only weapon you got, you try to make the best of it.
No one is suggesting that models not be used to explore conceptually how climate works – nor indeed that probabilistic forecasting will not be feasible at some time in the future as Palmer – and many others – suggest.
You have progressed from Stern has a good hand to climate models are not deterministic but chaotic in the sense of theoretical physics and don’t have predictive skills. Congrats – I doubt that Stern understands that.
> Surely the point was that Stern ‘had a good hand’.
No. Try again.
I’m not sure in which way Stern was wrong. Here’s a thought experiment to settle this. Suppose I tell you I have very, very good chances my next Poker hand just after having raised.
You’re logical fallacy is splitting hairs. All that’s left in the tank wee willie?
Chief brings up a nice flush:
(1) The Devil are in the details.
(2) You are splitting hairs.
Procrustes would fold with envy.
‘And though I suggest that libertarians would endorse social health insurance – the devil (or barbarian as the case may be) is in the detail and I know too little about obamacare to comment.’
Procrustes of course changed the length of his guests to suit the bed.
The logical fallacy is distraction.
> Let’s try the more direct way: I don’t think Stern was saying that his calculations were incorrect, but that, in retrospect and considering the new game state, they might have been a bit too optimistic. Twas a figure of speech, really.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-289613
Chief simply equivocated the word “wrong” to coatrack his pet topics on Stern’s back, starting with the assumption that none but him and his coterie realizes that weather is chaotic and that climate models can’t predict anything.
‘Chief’ merely commented that Stern was wrong in the first instance and that there was no confidence that he was right in the second.
Twas merely a flippant comment.
But I hate to be mischaracterised – and the endless shifting sands of arguments with wee willie.
What I argued was that models are chaotic – as they most certainly are – and that there is no single deterministic solution to climate models. Therefore was was as yet no rational basis for using models to claim something about the temperature in 2100. Did I not say this? Weather and climate are chaotic as well – but I digress. This is the logical fallacy of assertion without proof. So Stern was and is wrong to make a claim to knowledge that can’t be obtained from models. At best models can estimate probabilities of future temperatures – and that is a project for the future still.
I will quote again from James McWilliams. ‘McWilliams’ primary areas of scientific research are the fluid dynamics of Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, both their theory and computational modeling. Particular subjects include the maintenance of the general circulations; climate dynamics; geostrophically and cyclostrophically balanced (or slow manifold) dynamics in rotating, stratified fluids; vortex dynamics; planetary boundary layers; planetary-scale thermohaline convection; the roles of coherent structures in turbulent flows in geophysical and astrophysical regimes; numerical algorithms; statistical estimation theory; and coastal ocean modeling.
In the past several years he has helped develop a three-dimensional simulation model of the U.S. West Coast that incorporates physical oceanographic, biogeochemical, and sediment transport aspects of the coastal circulation. This model is being used to interpret coastal phenomena, diagnose historical variability in relation to observational data, and assess future possibilities.’
‘In each of these model–ensemble comparison studies, there are important but difficult questions: How well selected are the models for their plausibility? How much of the ensemble spread is reducible by further model improvements? How well can the spread can be explained by analysis of model differences? How much is irreducible imprecision in an AOS?
Simplistically, despite the opportunistic assemblage of the various AOS model ensembles, we can view the spreads in their results as upper bounds on their irreducible imprecision. Optimistically, we might think this upper bound is a substantial overestimate because AOS models are evolving and improving. Pessimistically, we can worry that the ensembles contain insufficient samples of possible plausible models, so the spreads may underestimate the true level of irreducible imprecision (cf., ref. 23). Realistically, we do not yet know how to make this assessment with confidence.’ McWilliams 2007.
There is no single solution. The individual model ensemble members are chosen after the fact on the basis of ‘a posteriori solution behaviour’. It looks good so it’s in. Confidence evaporates entirely.
So this is hardly unknown except to me and ‘my coterie’. A very nice coat it is too. It is just that Stern – and by extension wee willie – is utterly clueless.
Nicolas Stern admits he was wrong:
The Stern review, published in 2006, pointed to a 75% chance that global temperatures would rise by between two and three degrees above the long-term average; he now believes we are “on track for something like four “. Had he known the way the situation would evolve, he says, “I think I would have been a bit more blunt. I would have been much more strong about the risks of a four- or five-degree rise.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jan/27/nicholas-stern-climate-change-davo
This of course your original comment wee willie. The argument remains that there is no credible way to estimate either the 2 or 3 degrees rise or 4 or 5. And it becomes a rationale for wild claims about wars for food and water other imminent catastrophes. To somehow suggest that he then embraces uncertainty or that his much criticised zero discount rate is the soundest of economic principles is – apart from being utter nonsense – your logical fallacy of shifting goalposts. We were discussing the logically impossible temperature predictions. You make and can make no possible challenge to this charaterisation of models that is self evidently the way it is. Except to make silly little disparaging exclamations abotu chaos.
The simplest and most rational way to project temperature is simply to accept that there are natural decadal variations and assume that all the warming in the instrumental record is from greenhouse gases – unlikely to be sure – and to project the trend of the instrumental record forward. We get a 0.7 degree C rise this century. Not nearly dire enough for catastrophists lke Stern I realise.
We can of course undertake risk mitigation. Risk exists. As the dreaded Tsonis points out – a chaotic system is intrinsically sensitive and the risk is both ends of the cooling/warming spectrum and may exceed comfortable limits. Risk mitigation I have addressed elsewhere and shant repeat myself just yet.
But yes both you and Stern continue to be relatively clueless – but you at least are rich in red herrings.
(This ended up in the wrong spot so am re-posting)
Chief and Willard
It doesn’t take a genius to see what Stern is doing here.
When Nature is working against your doomsday predictions by interjecting a “standstill” in global warming as measured by thermometers all over the globe, and general public confidence in catastrophic climate change science is beginning to wane, the best thing to do is go on the offensive and ratchet up the fear factor with the old “it’s worse than we thought” ruse.
It’s so obvious it hurts.
Max
Manacker,
Your comment was worth repeating :)
Thanks, Peter
Max
Chief’s claim against Stern (and other progressive pissants) is this:
> The argument remains that there is no credible way to estimate either the 2 or 3 degrees rise or 4 or 5.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290295
Chief’s sole argument for his incredibilism is this:
> What I argued was that models are chaotic [which leads to] logically impossible temperature predictions.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290295
Following suit on red herrings can be relevant to a discussion. Most of my arguments tackled this sole argument. Nobody disagree that weather is chaotic are that models are not predictors. Chief’s argument against Stern (and other progressive pissants) has no merit and, standing aside that Chief seems to have borrowed Don Don’s vocabulary of rhetorical terms, his claim that I’m moving the goal posts is false.
***
More on incredibilism over there:
http://planet3.org/2012/08/24/incredibilism/
“incredibilism”?
versus
“credulity”?
Go Team!
‘The global coupled atmosphere–ocean–land–cryosphere system exhibits a
wide range of physical and dynamical phenomena with associated physical,
biological, and chemical feedbacks that collectively result in a continuum of
temporal and spatial variability. The traditional boundaries between weather and climate are, therefore, somewhat artificial’. A UNIFIED MODELING
APPROACH TO CLIMATE SYSTEM PREDICTION by James Hurrell, Gerald A. Meehl, Davi d Bader, Thomas L. Delworth ,
Ben Kirtman, and Bruce Wielicki
To quote myself – in context his time – What I argued was that models are chaotic – as they most certainly are – and that there is no single deterministic solution to climate models. Therefore there was as yet no rational basis for using models to claim something about the temperature in 2100.
I know I have quoted this before from Slingo and Palmer 2011 I know.
Lorenz was able to show that even for a simple set of nonlinear equations (1.1), the evolution of the solution could be changed by minute perturbations to the initial conditions, in other words, beyond a certain forecast lead time, there is no longer a single, deterministic solution and hence all forecasts must be treated as probabilistic.
This really seems to be a clear cut – and quite eveident if you understand the maths – statement in peer reviewed science.
Tim Palmer is of course well known as the head of the ECMWF. ‘My DPhil was in general relativity theory from Oxford in the mid 1970s, after which I moved into the field of weather and climate dynamics and prediction, first at the UK Meteorological Office and then at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts. I have been a visiting scientist at the University of Washington and more recently was the Rothschild Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge.’
And you reply with some article or other on a space cadet blog site claiming that sceptics bear some similarity to the cartoon Incredibles? Your credibility is zilch and incredibily attains a new high. .
> Twas merely a flippant comment.
Indeed, but let’s not forget that it also helps Chief divert the discussion into Stern’s cluelessness.
Here’s thy wiki page for Nicholas Stern:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Stern
No award or recognition can prevent Stern from being clueless about models uncertainty, of course. But here’s evidence that he acknowledges them:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/24/climate-what-you-need-know/?pagination=false
The topic of that book review might help explain Chief’s beef.
The only occurence of “chaotic” is in this sentence: “In the absence of such basic preparations, negotiation by international bureaucrats on issues that require technical underpinnings and the evaluation of complex policies risk being unproductive, misguided, and chaotic.” This book review does not provide any evidence about Stern’s knowledge of chaos theory.
Chief is welcome to have a ball. Chaos, chaos, chaos. Perhaps he could copy-paste his McWilliams’ quote again.
***
Besides the usual criticisms (Nordhaus, Tol, etc.) of the Stern Review, here’s one from Dan Dennett’s alma mater:
http://ase.tufts.edu/gdae/pubs/rp/sterndebatereport.pdf
This comment by Chief:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290278
has been answered there:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290281
The research reported over there:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290270
might be of interest.
Let’s try replying to this comment instead:
This comment by Chief:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290278
has been answered there:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290281
Last try.
A research program from Princeton U:
http://www.princeton.edu/piirs/research-communities/communicating-uncertainty/
Note the presence of Peter Singer, yet another Aussie.
***
This spring, there are meetings. Note the one on Wednesday, April 24:
Kunreuther’s publications’ page:
https://opimweb.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/37/research
Searching for “Tipping Climate Negotiations, Climate Change and Common Sense: Essays in Honour of Tom Schelling. R. Hahn and A. Ulph (eds.) Oxford University Press” made us find this other page:
http://www.opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/papers/
There is a title under the name of both Kunrenther and Weber. Here is the abstract:
> Utilizing findings from psychology and behavioral economics, this paper proposes strategies that reduce individuals’ cognitive and motivational barriers to the adoption of measures that reduce the impacts of climate change. We focus on ways to encourage reduction in carbon‐based energy use so as to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and encourage investment in adaptation measures to reduce property damage from future floods and hurricanes. Knowledge of individual decisionmaking
processes can guide these prescriptive interventions, such as choice
architecture in combination with effectively‐framed economic incentives.
http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WP201219_HK-EUW_AidingDecisionsAdaptCC.pdf
We forecast that the meeting will be around this idea.
Joshua
Your last comment is as confused as your usual drivel related to climate change.
I’m not going to get into a silly debate with you on Thomas Jefferson or libertarianism.
It’s pointless.
Max
manacker.
Because there is so much “point” to your many other comments at Climate Etc. They show others how they were wrong, and you were right. They convince people of your viewpoint.
Yes, that’s why you didn’t respond to my laughter at your notion that Jefferson being a slaveholder is irrelevant to his views on individual freedom. Because there would be no “point” in trying to justify such a ridiculous statement. I mean it’s not like you’re ducking having made such a lame comment, or anything like that.
No. Of course not.
Too funny.
@Joshua
Thomas Jefferson was against slavery, kind hearted, and pragmatic.
He thought it would be cruel to free slaves before projects could be built and a welfare system established. He proposed locating the projects outside the United States sort of like what England did with felons in Australia. That worked out well for Australia. We’ll never know if Jefferson’s plan would have worked as well.
Really, David?
Tell me, how did Jefferson treat those slaves – in his work at upholding chief’s libertarian ideals of individual freedom, a (virtuous) free market (of slave trade?), and the rule of law? Did he rape a women that he enslaved, perhaps, in a kind-hearted and pramgatic way? I mean what better way to demonstrate his concern over a woman’s individual freedom than to rape her, eh?
I wonder if he struggled against slavery as did the Quakers, who Willis thinks just “sit around and quake?” What do you think?
Ah yes, those “libertarian free-market ideals,” in support of “individual freedom,” and consistent with the “rule of law.”
More of the “libertarian” ideals: “Free market,” “individual freedom,” and the “rule of law.”
But hey – who could think that whipping black boys should have anything to do with Jefferson’s views on individual freedom?
Oh. My aching sides.
And their free descendants today murder each other over NOTHING. Is that an improvement of some kind over being whipped, Joshua?
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/01/29/15-year-old-girl-shot-and-killed-in-kenwood-neighborhood-park/
Weather and climate are both chaotic,
So let’s throw linear fits.
Joshua | January 29, 2013 at 6:12 pm | Reply
A letter has recently come to light describing how Monticello’s young black boys, “the small ones,” age 10, 11 or 12, were whipped to get them to work in Jefferson’s nail factory, whose profits paid the mansion’s grocery bills.
But hey – who could think that whipping black boys should have anything to do with Jefferson’s views on individual freedom?
Oh. My aching sides.
——————————————————————————-
Maybe you could arrest the side splitting laughter by realizing those wielding the whips were as black as those doing the whipping. Black on black violence using whips in Montecello 250 years ago has become black on black violence today using guns instead of whips. And the reasons for the violence far less clear. The Monticello boys could have avoided the lash by doing what they were told. This girl here was doing everything right and she still died at the hands of members of her own race:
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/01/29/15-year-old-girl-shot-and-killed-in-kenwood-neighborhood-park/
Ah. The hilarity continues. Jefferson wasn’t responsible for the violence because it was blacks who did the whipping. No matter that those blacks who did the whipping were freakin’ slaves owned by Jefferson – with no rights of their own, and whose very existence was owed to them doing as their master bade them to do.
I mean I’m sure that those doing the whipping merely decided to do it on their own, that it had nothing to do with productivity and Jefferson’s income, and that no doubt, Jefferson never heard anything about it, as being “kind-hearted and pragmatic” surely he’d want the people he held in bondage – and systematically denied the rights that he dedicated his life in fighting to obtain for white people – to only be denied human rights, and not be whipped.
Is there no end to your ability to avoid accountability?
Say – willard, if you’re reading, what would you call David’s attempt to transition the discussion of Jefferson’s slave ownership to his feelings about violence in 21rst century in black communities in Chicago?
The point you seem unable or unwilling to grasp is that violence against blacks didn’t diminish with abolition. Instead of a black overseer’s whip in southern slave states it’s a black gang banger’s gun now in every state and the problem is arguably worse because even innocent little girls doing everything right like the one in the article are not safe in a northern state.
At any rate slavery is illegal in all 57 of these United States and little black girls still aren’t safe but it isn’t white people who are killing them. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
The hilarity continues. The problem is worse than when blacks were relegated to slavery, systematically denied any component of human rights, whipped with impunity, raped with impunity, fed just enough scraps to keep alive, chained, sold, punished for learning how to read, not allowed to vote, etc. The problem is worse than when every black person was subjected to violence with no need for explanation and no legal accountability for doing so.
Spectacular!
Illinois was never a slave state.
A truly spectacular comment unto itself. Imagine the ignorance required to make such a statement!
At least Springer reminds us all that you are not such a bad guy after all Joshua ;^)
> Violence against blacks didn’t diminish with abolition.
Since violence only applies to people and not furniture, this statement is trivially true.
We could even claim that it has increased, since at the time of abolition it was zero.
Wrong again, Wee Willie. Your command of language leaves a lot to be desired. Simple referral to a dictionary once in a while would improve your writing tremendously. Violence is by definition not confined to free men. I might concede its confinement to living things but even that’s arguable.
vi·o·lence
/ˈvī(ə)ləns/
Noun
1.Behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
2.Strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force.
A dictionary won’t give you the legal term, Big Dave.
Go fetch, big boy!
If you have access to Jstor, here’s something that might help you, Big Dave:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/1228541
No, I’m not helping you rehearsing an old Internet claptrap.
Perhaps you can start from the beginning, Big Dave:
> Personhood is the status of being a person. Defining personhood is a controversial topic in philosophy and law, and is closely tied to legal and political concepts of citizenship, equality, and liberty. According to law, only a natural person or legal personality has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personhood
In the spirit of full disclosure, here’s where we’re heading, Big Dave:
http://www.thecorporation.com
Please do continue.
I guess I failed to realize this blog is actually a court of law.
But you’re still wrong:
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/violence
Law: the unlawful exercise of physical force or intimidation by the exhibition of such force.
While the exercise of physical force agains the slave was legal the exhibition of force was clearly to intimidate the slave and thus still falls under the definition of violence. One can’t intimidate furniture but only a complete imbecile would argue that a slave could not be intimidated. Thanks for playing. I hope your game improves but until it does you’re just not in my league.
> Collectivist – limits obsessed – redistributive – dangerous – naive.
Chief for the win!
Yea – willie for the pissant progressive hall of fame. We have these two ideas. Optimal economic growth – which we know how oto engineer. And it is not with the reckllessness of the US and Europe. This is contrasted with ‘economic degrowth’. This seems an example of utterly incompatible aspirations. So prepare to be further marginalised as the world declines to warm.
The world belongs to the builders and architects – the future is conceived in love and joy – hope is the last human attribute to perish – freedom is the unquenchable fire within.
Much better – it packs another meaning into the sentence by conflating birth and invention – family and the creative soul.
These postcards from the Climate War have been fun. In the real world the rivers are rising and there is no fresh food, bread or milk in the shops. Amazing how fragile our systems are and how much care and luck it takes to maintain them. Eh – let them eat lasagna. Speaking of which – I can smell it – it’s cooked. Bye.
> If you want to do a check on “climate uncertainty” […]
After replaying his CAGW card using other words, MiniMax now returns to his other pet card: CS.
Here’s what I already said on another subthread:
> But you can go first, if you do care about lukewarm symbology.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-289429
MiniMax should already know that I don’t care much about lukewarm symbology.
Readers will notice MiniMax’ silence on that subthread.
Willard
“Lukewarm” is a good expression.
Doesn’t change the fact that several new papers and articles are suggesting that that model derived (2xCO2) ECS in AR4 was exaggerated by a factor of two.
Maybe it is telling us that future warming from CO2 will be “lukewarming”.
Ever thought about that while you contemplate your navel and ponder “uncertainty”?
Max
wee willie linked to a couple of articles recently – one was discussing war and famine and other dire outcomes of global warming and the other using weather related disasters to create a revolution in society. It seems disingenuous in the extreme to then quibble about CAWG.
Neither of these articles has any relevant science but are simply the usual litany of catastrophe from cult of AGW millennialist space cadets. Neither of them is worth a second glance.
Climate sensitivity is of course variable both spatially and temporally – and actual warming from CO2 seems quite minimal. This is not is not to say that abrupt and nonlinear is not potentially an issue. But the politics of carbon mitigation is problematic – principally as the world is not warming for a decade or three more at least. Just so long as the space cadets hold on to their agenda to use wether disaster and ever wilder declarations of dire futures – documented in the Jacobin article – to create a social and economic revolution will be just as long as practical responses elude us.
It’s a bit unnerving to think about how often I find myself nodding my head in agreement with a curmudgeon like you. An acquired taste perhaps. Like beets or horseradish.
Damn broken threading. Lest there was any doubt the curmudgeon is Ellison.
I assure you the feeling is quite mutual Springer – and please tell me when you get the urge to dance naked so I can avoid the hemisphere.
You should be so lucky.
Actually Robert there is a minuscule net cooling effect from carbon dioxide, the main cooling being from water vapour which reduces the thermal gradient in the troposphere, and thus leads to a lower surface temperature. Without water vapour, the Second Law of Thermodynamics may be used to show that the surface temperature would have been at least 300K, rather than only about 288K. This is because the thermodynamic equilibrium state of maximum entropy is necessarily that for which a thermal gradient evolves, which is the very gradient they thought they had to explain with the old late 20th century conjecture of a radiative greenhouse effect, which was postulated and promulgated by those who were unfortunately unaware of the implications of the laws of physics. Just the biggest scientific mistake the world has ever seen – but don’t worry, evidence will smash it later this year and it will pass into the history books – and remain there as a reminder that valid science always wins out, sooner or later.
Actually Doug…that was as far as I got because I have added you to the list of those I simply pass over. Your physics are simply a mish mash of nothing much at all. And you take yourself way too seriously as well.
“We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.” David Attenborough
timg56 did some other useful research – ‘http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290381
There are at least two world views. For one the equation is people and the use of resources and the need is to reduce one or preferably both. The other understands that there are things that can be achieved in population essentially through economic development, health, education and there is much we can do with resources with technological innovation. Indeed that there is much that can be achieved in ecological conservation and restoration and in carbon mitigation. Progress that has eluded us for decades. We believe that sustainable economic growth is not just possible but is the key to a bright future for humanity.
Let’s call the two world views – in absolutely neutral language – pissant progressives and liberal defenders of freedom, justice and democracy. The world views are of profoundly incompatible. In the method of Marcuse – liberal truths are buried in obfuscation and vilification. There are expressions that are not allowable in the public spaces. Quite literally in some laws proposed for Australia – proposals that are almost universally rejected and that will never see the light of day. It was proposed in a government appointed review of media laws – for instance – to make publication of climate scepticism illegal in the media and on the net. A laughable attempt to curtail free speech. There is however this urge to totalitarianism that is always an undercurrent in the progressive zeitgeist. As Hayek said – from “the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.” We have seen it before.
One side wants a rich, resilient world building on our technologies. The other side promulgates dire prophecies in the hopes of creating a revolutionary moment in which societies and economies can be radically reshaped. The choice between hope and despair seems a simple one.
I repeat in the correct place..
Myrrh | February 1, 2013 at 5:46 am | Reply
Gosh, and I thought it was AGW/CAGWs who took themselves way to seriously, believing in fantasies and passing themselves off as scientists.
And I’m sure your physics would be as you describe, Robert T Ellison if you were to attempt to explain the 720K temperature at the Venus poles which receive less than 1W/m^2 of direct insolation..
Try reading Dr Hans Jelbring’s peer-reviewed 2003 journal paper http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/FunctionOfMass.pdf
Clicking on MiniMax’ name still brings me bad luck.
Here was the response above:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290389
Here it is again:
> Ever thought about that while you contemplate your navel and ponder “uncertainty”?
After playing CAGW and CS, now MiniMax plays AdHominem, or perhaps in this case AbdHominem.
As if searching for resources and sharing them amounted to navel gazing.
Readers should wonder what pontificating around a few pet cards sounds like, then.
Let’s hope Big Dave will bring me luck again.
willard (@nevaudit) | January 30, 2013 at 2:03 pm | Reply
After playing CAGW and CS, now MiniMax plays AdHominem, or perhaps in this case AbdHominem.
As if searching for resources and sharing them amounted to navel gazing.
Readers should wonder what pontificating around a few pet cards sounds like, then.
“Let’s hope Big Dave will bring me luck again.”
Normally people have to rub my tummy to bring them luck. I can hardly begin to say how glad I am that you were able to reap the benefit absent physical contact. Overjoyed is too mild to express the emotion. An urge to dance naked in the moonlight thanking any and all pagan gods who might be listening is perhaps a better way to convey it.
P.S. re; AbdHominem/navel gazing.
Clever and stupid at the same time. I wish you’d focus on learning the definitions of real words, words like ‘violence’ instead of this self-indulgent wordplay that a precocious fifth grader could best you at.
> Normally people have to rub my tummy to bring them luck.
Clicking on the reply button next to your name suffices for me, Big Dave.
> I wish you’d focus on learning the definitions of real words [.]
You were supposed to bring back a real definition of the word violence, Big Dave. Something with more bite than your some Random dictionary. Have you lost your way to the library?
Here’s one just for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence
Slaves does not meet this definition, Big Dave.
So in effect you’re saying Webster died and gave the job of authoritative definition of words in the english language to the the world health organization.
Interesting point of view you have there. Interesting in how stupid it is.
Chief should have paid due diligence to that Jacobin article before saying this:
> Just so long as the space cadets hold on to their agenda to use wether disaster and ever wilder declarations of dire futures – documented in the Jacobin article – to create a social and economic revolution will be just as long as practical responses elude us.
Here’s how the author of the article underlines her take on the problem, with our emphasis:
http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-flood-next-time/
Chief’s beef is unjustified.
Yet again.
‘Crises and disasters are of particular interest to politics that seek to transform embedded institutions and practices, whether radical or reformist. They bring underlying processes and patterns to the surface and shake the foundations of the status quo, offering a view of how things might be reconstructed differently — and the chance to do so.’
‘Climate change fundamentally challenges the hyper-individualist, growth-obsessed tenets of modern American liberalism, to say nothing of conservatism.’
The thrust is bitingly clear to a jaundiced eye such as mine. Collectivist – limits obsessed – redistributive – dangerous – naive. Nothing that offers means of increasing the wealth and resilience of societies.
That was of course a reply to wee willie and his self serving quoting.
I will close my weekly review of searching for “climate uncertainty” results in my search engine, tweaked so that it will give me the weekly hits.
There’s this one by Frank Ackerman, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, advertizing a forthcoming book:
http://triplecrisis.com/climate-economics-the-state-of-the-art/
Yet another economist that remains skeptical of model projections.
***
Since I have no real dog in this economists’ fight and am more interested in issues of Open Access, I tried to post this comment:
I will try later.
Willard
You comment on your search for “climate uncertainty”.
If you want to do a check on “climate uncertainty”, check out all the recent papers and articles pointing to a (2xCO2) equilibrium climate sensitivity around half of that previously estimated by IPCC based on model predictions (Judith’s “bombshell” on an earlier thread).
It will be interesting to see how IPCC reacts to all this new information in its AR5 report, to be published next year some time. (Judith felt it was unlikely that IPCC would try to “sweep this under the rug”, but we’ll have to wait and see).
Max
you might like one of my favorite authors,Carlyle. err he went way way too far this piece , but read it. Its the source of the phrase -the dismal science
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasional_Discourse_on_the_Negro_Question
Language is fluid – but the Whigs in both Britian and the US were clearly on balance abolitionist and had many more ‘progressive’ elements to their platforms. They continued in the tradition of Locke and Hume and others from the Scottish enlightenment. If you read Hayek’s essay – Why I am not a conservative – there is a little history.
This is clearly the purest lineage of modern libertarian ideals. Although perhaps we should follow Hayek is this as well and identify as Whigs. The problem with that is that no one has the remotest idea what that means and the purpose of language is utterly defeated.
There ought never be enough uncertainty communicatin’:
http://www.princeton.edu/piirs/research-communities/communicating-uncertainty/
Note the participation of Peter Singer, yet another Aussie:
http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/
***
Among the meetings scheduled for spring 2013, there is this one:
IPCC Report on Climate and Uncertainty
Howard Kunreuther, University of Pennsylvania, and Elke Weber, Columbia University
Here’s the publication page of Kunreuther:
https://opimweb.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/37/research
Searching for “Tipping Climate Negotiations, Climate Change and Common Sense: Essays in Honour of Tom Schelling. R. Hahn and A. Ulph (eds.) Oxford University Press”, we stumbled upon this other publications’ page:
http://www.opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/papers/
A paper by Kunrenther and Weber there: Facilitating and Aiding Human Decisions to Adapt to or Mitigate the Impacts of Climate Change .
The abstract:
> Utilizing findings from psychology and behavioral economics, this paper proposes strategies that reduce individuals’ cognitive and motivational barriers to the adoption of measures that reduce the impacts of climate change. We focus on ways to encourage reduction in carbon‐based energy use so as to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and encourage investment in adaptation measures to reduce property damage from future floods and hurricanes. Knowledge of individual decision‐ making processes can guide these prescriptive interventions, such as choice architecture in combination with effectively‐framed economic incentives.
We predict that the meeting will be around those lines.
Will this nest – in case not. – http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290140
So obviously Breakthrough is not the pissant progressive who believes in ‘economic degrowth’, the overthrow of democracy, mandatory tofu and compulsory sterilisation? Someone tell Joe Romm that they are not a conservative conspiracy.
Willard
From a British persective and having only just read the comment and its context, surely Anthony Watts meant Zeke is mad as in the ‘angry’ meaning, not the ‘mentally unbalanced’ sense of the word.
tonyb
tonyb,
Yes, it’s quite obvious that Tony meant “angry” when he said “mad”.
That does not excuse his ad hominem.
Willard and Josh
I agree that there no call for the Ad Homs. Accusations of fraud help no one, personally I dont subscribe to the fraud or conspiracy theories.
Joshua ; The name changes are beyond my own comprehension. I am logged in as both names for historical reasons and sometimes the ‘system’ decides to use one name and sometimes another.
tonyb
The climate is composed of many too many elements that simply cannot be added up and divided to arrive at a statistically meaningful average. The usefulness of an average global temperature has been compared to an average of all telephone numbers and calculating the world’s average currency exchange rate. Even if we could determine a statistically relevant, scientifically meaningful average global temperature, what will the gold standard of temperature be that we are all supposed to desire and work together to bring about? If we only could.
It sounds like attempting to fabricate a leaning Tower of Nazi Babel to demand that everyone agree on an ideal average global temperature–even if that were possible. And, what if we don’t? What if trying to control Earth’s climate is the real disaster? The only disaster.
tony –
I don’t think that anyone questions that. But with that interpretation, it is nonetheless a condescending remark, and unaccountable for Zeke’s objection to Watts’ irresponsible implication of fraud.
Additionally, if being “angry” were reason to dismiss criticism (assuming that Zeke even was “angry”), then Anthony would have to dismiss almost every one of Willis’ posts at WUWT.
BTW – tony – is there an explanation for when you use climatereason and when you use tonyb?
The witchdoctors of academia have been willing and material enablers in the use by their government employers of the authority of science to advance the political objectives of the Left. The promotion by Liberal Utopians that modern man is destroying the planet must ultimately be seen as a victory for Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev who years ago predicted in Russian, “We will bury you!” The modern English translation is, Choose Socialism, Vote Democrat and Stop the Seas from Rising! Global warming is nothing but a hoax and a scare tactic aimed at superstitious and gullible hypocrites to grab political power and destroy Americanism.
You seem to know little of the history of the scientific enlightenment. The libertarian ideals are indeed the ideals on which America was founded – individual freedom, free markets, the rule of law and democracy. Who could argue with that FOMBS?
The economic principles on which free markets should be founded are likewise confirmed by history. At the centre of prudential management of markets is the managment of interest rates to prevent asset bubbles and the maintenance of balanced government budgets. It is clear that the relative success of the Australian economy over decades – for instance – is founded on the management of these two things. This owes much more in the rational scheme of things to Friedrich Hayek than Any Rand. Common sense and the tried and true rather than inflexible ideology.
From you we get obfuscation rather than clarity – something that seems a defining quality of the modern pissant progressive. It stems from a need to hide their true agendas. Nothing less than the complete dismantling of industrial economies in many instances. What about you FOMBS – are you a closet wrecker hoping to take advantage of catastrophe to coast to ideological supremacy and world domination? Planet Earth to FOMBS…
What we have seen is failure over more than 20 years to move on carbon mitigation. What we get from you is more arm waving propaganda. What we get from the Hartwell Group is pragmatic proposals on black carbon and tropospheric ozone, technological innovation and cheap renewable energy, the consevation and restoration of agricultural land and ecosystems, health, education and development initiatives that inevitably reduce population pressures. The difference between arm waving and clarity in policy objectives couldn’t be more stark.
“Libertarianism and Marxism both are simple-minded ideologies that sound wonderful in principle”
Well I’m not sure about Libertarianism, but I wouldn’t say that Marxism was simple minded. Particularly with Americans, mention of Marxism often brings North Korea into the conversation with suggestions that if anyone is even slightly sympathetic to what Marx wrote they should go and live there! Which its why its often a tricky subject to discuss – and no I don’t want to live in North Korea!
But I’d say Marxism was more applicable to our modern day western mixed economies than is generally realised. It’s not just on questions of social health care, in fact I don’t believe Marx had anything to say on that topic. But he did advocate free education and graduated levels of income tax which we all take for granted. Marx spent nearly all his time writing about capitalism and had very little to say on what socialism may be like , so I would argue that Marxism is more to do with capitalism than either socialism or communism.
It is true that Marx did predict the demise of capitalism and that hasn’t happened. But maybe if he hadn’t made that prediction it would have done. Keynes, Hayek and all other respected pro-capitalist economists will have all read and digested what Marx had to say and have, I’d say particularly Keynes, developed theories of capitalist management which have helped prevented any such occurance at least up until now.
We are living in an in-between type of society. Yes we have capitalism but there is a high degree of socialism involved in all economies too. The political debate is nearly always about just what the mix should be, and I think I , for one, am happy with that.
The battle of values is not at the fringes between slightly more or slightly less social services – but around utterly incompatible views on economic growth. You describe not socialism but any modern economy – indeed as was the prime concern of Hayek.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290732
You would find if you looked that Hayek’s view of interest rate management to avoid assett bubbles are of much more fundamental importance to the Australian economy – every month – than any Keynesian insprired rush of blood to the head.
‘‘There is no reason why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom…there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody…Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of the assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong….To the same category belongs also the increase of security through the state’s rendering assistance to the victims of such “acts of God” as earthquakes and floods. Whenever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself or make provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken….There is, finally, the supremely important problem of combating general fluctuations of economic activity and the recurrent waves of large-scale unemployment which accompany them….’ Hayek – The Road to Serfdom
Like marxism – readical environmentalism leads to peddling of a climate of disaster to creare a revolutonary moment such that economic systems can be reinvented. The success of such an endevour would be an extreme danger to the polity. The difference is between economic growth and sustainable futures and ruin.
I was replying to temp. way up above.
Hayek, as indeed were Marx and Keynes, is an economist. There is no reason to suppose he, or any of them, has any insight on the question of CO2 emissions and AGW. Or any insight on whether oil supplies will peak or on how pollution will affect human and environmental health and the growth of the economy.
Science and politics/economics are totally separate issues. Its fair enough to have political views but science has to trump them. If they don’t fit in with scientific reality change your politics. It makes more sense than trying to do it the other way around.
‘In 1950, Hayek left the London School of Economics for the University of Chicago, becoming a professor in the Committee on Social Thought. Hayek’s first class at Chicago was a faculty seminar on the philosophy of science attended by many of the University’s most notable scientists of the time, including Enrico Fermi, Sewall Wright and Leó Szilárd. During his time at Chicago, Hayek worked on the philosophy of science, economics, political philosophy, and the history of ideas. Hayek’s economic notes from this period have yet to be published. He did not become part of the Chicago School of Economics, but his recognition of the impact that demand and velocity had on money were a fundamental influence on it.[35] It can be noted that he never taught at the Economics Department which unwaveringly refused him access.’ So Hayek is much more than an economist.
The question is – despite the vagaries of climate science – what policy is what the most effective response is. And the science is very vague as you should be aware. The models are theoretically probabilisitc but in practice nonlinearity is glossed over. There are modes of natural warming and cooling that that we understand little and that are likely to shift seemingly randomly at unpredicitable intervals. Build me a climate machine and I will say it trumps something or other – if it works. But until then deliver me from the pious expressions of the cult of space cadets.
The most effective policy response is the one that works.
‘The old climate framework failed because it would have imposed substantial costs associated with climate mitigation policies on developed nations today in exchange for climate benefits far off in the future — benefits whose attributes, magnitude, timing, and distribution are not knowable with certainty. Since they risked slowing economic growth in many emerging economies, efforts to extend the Kyoto-style UNFCCC framework to developing nations predictably deadlocked as well.
The new framework now emerging will succeed to the degree to which it prioritizes agreements that promise near-term economic, geopolitical, and environmental benefits to political economies around the world, while simultaneously reducing climate forcings, developing clean and affordable energy technologies, and improving societal resilience to climate impacts. This new approach recognizes that continually deadlocked international negotiations and failed domestic policy proposals bring no climate benefit at all. It accepts that only sustained effort to build momentum through politically feasible forms of action will lead to accelerated decarbonization.’
http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/climate_pragmatism_innovation
The question is – despite the vagaries of climate science – what the most effective policy response is. The other question is how much torture syntax can take before it becomes incomprehensible.
Now explain the Venus temperatures, tempterrain using actual measurements by the Russians which were used to estimate that the mean radiation from the Sun which reaches the Venus surface was no more than 10W/m^2. So no more than 10W/m^2 of energy directly absorbed from the Sun goes back into the atmosphere. Thus no more than 5W/m^2 of that energy comes back down as back radiation. But you would need over 16,000W/m^2 to maintain the surface at over 730K, now wouldn’t you? Are you sure the atmosphere was isothermal initially?
Doug Cotton,
Unlike you I’m not claiming to be the world’s expert on both the atmospheres of Venus and Earth but for a start I’d just question this figure of 10W/m^2
The energy incident on the Venusian atmosphere is, according to my figures 661W/m^2. The figure for Earth is 343W/m^2. Venus is 0.72 of the distance earth from the Sun so applying the inverse square law this seems about right.
The abedo of Venus is given as 0.8 so this would mean 0.8 x 661W would be reflected (mainly from the the clouds in the atmosphere? ) and 0.2 x 661W = 132W/m^2 would be absorbed on the surface. Or are you saying that 122W is absorbed in the clouds?
Doug,
Just to continue with what I wrote previously, having thought about it a bit more, we can calculate that the effective temperature of Venus when measured from a point far away in space is about 210K or -60 degC which is surprising low. That is because the albedo of Venus is low.
So -60degC Is effectively the temperature of the upper layer of the Venusian atmosphere, or more correctly the upper layer of the troposphere where the convection occurs.
Now, according to the graph in Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus
The temperature of the upper layer is actually -100degC. That corresponds to the region where the temperature starts to rise again. The same as our stratosphere. Is it called a stratosphere on Venus? I’m not sure.
Anyway I agree with Roy Spencer that the presence of a lapse rate shows the existence of a GH effect. You can’t have one without the other. So we have 70 km of Venusian atmosphere with a lapse rate of approx 10K/km means the surface is warmer by some 700 degrees that the outer atmosphere.
So I’m not saying I can explain the measured temperatures to a high degree of precision but everything does look to be in the right ballpark.
Doug,
You’ve not replied so are you happy with the above explanation? Has the penny dropped yet?
I’d just make one more point: If we were to measure the Venusian temperature from some distance out in space, using its emitted IR radiation, we would measure -60degC, or close to it , which corresponds to a temperature in the upper region of the Venusian troposphere. We couldn’t measure the surface temperature directly as the troposphere is opaque to IR.
But say the atmosphere wasn’t opaque but instead was transparent to IR. In all other respects say it had exactly the same properties (albedo, mass, density etc) as the present one including its transparency to visible light. I know that’s not realistic but this is a thought experiment!. We wait a time for all temperatures to restabilise.
We repeat the experiment and remeasure the Venusian temperature and we should get exactly the same result. -60 degC. Because -60degC is the temperature that Venus needs to be in order to maintain its energy balance when it is in equilibrium.
But, now instead of measuring the temperature in the upper reaches of the troposphere we are directly measuring the surface temperature, because now the atmosphere is totally transparent to IR, and which has cooled by around 600 degC.
See http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-291341
Just to break it to you gently, Robert I Ellison, physicians commonly prefer not to prescribe expensive antibiotics except in life-or-death cases … because the microbes haven’t evolved resistance to them.
So when narcissistic patients ask to be treated with expensive antibiotics, the Hippocratic Oath requires that physicians gently fob-off these patients with administrative excuses … because explaining these considerations to narcissists never works, eh?
This medical example of the Tragedy of the Commons shows yet another reason why unregulated markets perform poorly in medicine … and why far-right economic ideologues have yet to specify any viable alternative to ObamaCare, eh?
It is a pleasure to augment your appreciation of the rich interplay of ethics and economics, Robert I Ellison!
Is this back again? No matter.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290082
Happy to relieve your further misapprehension FOMBS.
Hmmm – I tink the threading has totally lost the plot.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-290082
JC,
Robert Elliston said:
I suggest this is an example of why no nesting is worth a try, perhaps on Open Threads for a start. Just post comments in the order they are submitted and refer to previous comments by person, date and time. That part can be automated with reply buttons, but without nesting.
Peter Lang’s idea of no nesting (Jan 29 at 2.33am) is now actually being implemented.
Go team!
No nesting is not being implemented. Nesting is broken and there’s just no telling where a comment will land in the tree at this point. Near as I can tell deleting comments f*cks up WordPress nesting. When Curry went on the snipping rampage she sacrificed the nesting in the threads where the snips happened.
I disagree strongly, as you can not then have a one to one detailed exchange that is good for the two of them and it is also good for the rest because it can be easily skipped.
Girma
@ January 29, 2013 at 7:32 am
Sure you can. It’s done this way on many other web sites. In my experience it is by far the best way. You don’t have to go searching through the comments on the active threads to find what new has been said since you last looked at the thread and to try to find if anyone has responded to your comments. Instead, when you return, you start reading where you left off. It works much better than nesting, IMO.
With only three levels of nesting its utility is reduced. Without a user ability to open/close nesting levels its utility is further reduced. There’s not a whole lot of utility left at this point. No nesting is the least utility and is really only suitable for small numbers of comments. For blogs with fewer than say 25 comments per article no-nesting is the way to go. More than that and nesting is required. For hundreds of comments under a single article you need the standard features of user able to open/close nesting levels. Those are typically called forums not blogs.
Springer on nesting,
Sounds like a plan. Could you find or write an ap that works with wordpress?
captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2, there may be plugins that handle it already, but if not, one could certainly be made. Of course, one could also just fix WordPress so it doesn’t break nesting when comments get deleted.
By the way David Springer, you can actually tell where a comment will land even if nesting gets broken. There are three places a comment may land, and all three are predictable. The first possibility is if you reply to a regular comment, your reply will land where anticipated. The second possibility is if you reply to a comment that has been orphaned, your comment will land at the very bottom of the page. The third possibility is if you make a top level comment (not replying to someone), your comment will land at the bottom of all non-orphaned comments.
The comments that land at the bottom when nesting is broken are ones that are attached to trees that no longer exist. To prevent the borked nesting like happens here, all that is needed is a modification to the code which handles deleting comments.
Brandon, “Of course, one could also just fix WordPress so it doesn’t break nesting when comments get deleted.”
I quick fix would be a “snipped” place holder, just add a Snip button by the delete button
I should have said that *I* couldn’t predict where a comment would land and hadn’t put any thought into it because I really don’t care. I have enough software development problems of my own to deal with. Curry could just delete the text inside the comment instead of the whole comment to stop it from happening. Probably an extra few clicks per snip – edit / select all / delete / save.
> Probably an extra few clicks per snip – edit / select all / delete / save.
Yes. Just adding a click can become a drag and UX can be an hindrance in the beginning. OTOH, if we believe how snips work at Steve’s, it can be a time saver in the middle run.
Clicking on Big Dave’s name served me well, so far.
MiniMax, not so much.
Can the consensus of science be trusted?
This video proves *NOT*!!!
And plausible-seeming ideology-driven economic systems — Marxism, libertarianism, etc. — are comparably likely to work as these machines, eh?
Chief
There is no doubt that a line can be drawn to find the “ideal” between the extremes of a “wild West” society and one where “Mother State” takes care of everything, and that each individual might draw that line in a slightly different place.
And I agree completely with your closing statement that “all good comes from human freedom”, and, yes, that freedom is being “challenged today by the Godless hordes of green neo-socialists barbarians inside the walls of western civilisation.”
The amazing part is that at least the more naïve of these think they are doing this for the common good.
Max
The line is indistinct – but the potential to cross lines into egregious limitations of personal freedoms exists at all times and require vigilance to identify and resist.
[…]
All good comes from human freedom and that is challenged today by the Godless hordes of green neo-socialists barbarians inside the walls of western civilisation…
Ah yes indeed. Thank god that the chief is here, as a brave keyboard warrior, to fight for freedom and to stand strong against the “enemy,” – that come in the form of hordes of greens who breed like rats inside the walls of western civilization, who hold the reins of power as they attempt to crush the good intentions of “skeptics.”
Just imagine where we’d be without brave souls like the Chief, who from behind their keyboards write post after post to turn the tide against the injustice.
I mean sure, all those in western civilization do suffer terribly at the hands of chief’s enemies… but thank god he’s around because it could be so much worse.
Lol! I love these guys.
Joshua,
As usual you excel in the complete absence of any meaningful content. A litany of quite unmemorable slurs intended to marginalise and ridicule.
The truth is that you are a 5 percenter. In Australia these people live in inner city enclaves, vote green, sip latte and pontificate on the pestilence of the human race, the evils of capitalism and the limits to economic growth.
Tedious beyond words. The challenge for libertarian ideals is to frame a positive narrative for the future. The future belongs – as the past has – to those who can best articulate a peaceful and properous future. The clearest path for the human race this centruy is freedom, free markets, the most robust of democracies and the rule of law by the consent of the governed. If you object to the agenda or the rhetoric – it makes about as much difference to the world as a monkeys fart. And you look like one too.
Excuse me if I again refuse to take you at all seriously. You have simply not – again – cleared that bar.
Robert I Ellison
Chief Hydrologist
Chief,
I will acknowledge that your combining relentless pomposity with obsession about arses, farts, and cleaning off your keyboard is a rather unique feat.
I will remind you that your simplistic preaching about the benefits of freedom and democracy is bland and banal and fails to substantiate your exalted sense of self-worth.
I will point out that despite your delusions of grandeur, writing repetitive posts on blogs, full of hand-wringing about conspiracies of “pissants,” wouldn’t do squat to save the world from your imagined enemies even if they were real.
And I will promise you that at the very moment that I have the slightest concern over whether the chief (perhaps a title awarded to you for your leadership role in the 101st division of the fighting keyboard commandos?) takes me seriously, you will be the first to be informed.
Joshua,
Oh the tedium. Do you have anything but complaints about imagined (or real) slights, accusation of pomposity and vague claims of conspiracies? As for inane and banal – and here I was trying for the grand and florid oratory of past heroes of freedom. Admittedly whilst comparing the impact of your prose to a monkeys fart – and saying that you look like one too. Sadly – perhaps I owe more to the scatological humour of Rebelais than Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
As for Chief – I dropped it because of I was bored with dickwads who – in full knowledge of source of the appellation – continue to try to make some idiot point or other.
Biosketch. Robert styles himself in the blogosphere as a Chief Hydrologist. ‘Cecil Terwilliger (brother to Sideshow Bob) was Springfield’s Chief Hydrological and Hydrodynamical Engineer. He opined that this was a sacred vocation in some cultures. The more I thought about this the more it resonated with me. I am an hydrologist by training, profession and (much more) through a deep fascination with water in all its power and beauty. Given the importance of water to us practically and symbolically, there is more than an element of the sacred.’
So I am named after a would be clown in the Simpsons. Webby could never understand this – placed me on his climate clown list with a puzzling complaint that I was self identifying with a clown. As for the chances of me taking you seriously – don’t hold your breath.
Robert I Ellison
Cheif Hydrologist
Robert I Ellison humorously said:
“The future belongs – as the past has – to those who can best articulate a peaceful and properous future.”
____
O f course, this is not what the past has shown at all. The sword has proven quite an effective tool in carving out (yes out of human flesh) vast expanses of the past—nothing to do with peaceful articulation at all. The powerful and violent have swept across vast reaches of the planet with the only truth being the power of the sword itself combined with a skilled and powerful hand, killing millions of otherwise “peaceful and articulate” people and forever changing history. Think of Genghis Kahn, Alexander the Great, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, etc.
They rather prove the point Gatesy. Brief but bloody passages in history. The world belongs to the builders and architects – the future is created with love and joy – hope is the last human attribute to perish – freedom is the unquenchable fire within.
Robert I Ellison said:
“…the future is created with love and joy – hope is the last human attribute to perish – freedom is the unquenchable fire within.”
______
All very noble and poetic but only half the story. History is a process whereby creation and destruction exist side by side. Yin/Yang, love/hate, joy/sorrow, and all the rest exist in eternal conflict and balance. The lion kills the gazelle so that both species might go on. Life and death exist as a partnership as it were, and the times of destruction, death, and chaos can be equally as long as the times of love and joy and sunshine in the meadows. The wolf comes calling and will have his due.
“Robert I Ellison said:
“…the future is created with love and joy – hope is the last human attribute to perish – freedom is the unquenchable fire within.”
______
All very noble and poetic but only half the story. History is a process whereby creation and destruction exist side by side. Yin/Yang, love/hate, joy/sorrow, and all the rest exist in eternal conflict and balance. The lion kills the gazelle so that both species might go on. Life and death exist as a partnership as it were, and the times of destruction, death, and chaos can be equally as long as the times of love and joy and sunshine in the meadows. The wolf comes calling and will have his due.”
Destruction may be inevitable, but this does not mean it is something one should seek. The gazelle should run from the lion. The gazelle *should* “obey” and seek “the unquenchable fire within”. As should the lion.
And history is not up and down, there are seasons and eons. It is a dance
and song.
“The lion kills the gazelle so that both species might go on.”
That’s one of the stupider things you’ve written and you’ve written a great many stupid things. What benefit does the lion confer upon the gazelle? Forcing the gazelle to get some exercise perhaps to ward off coronary disease and diabetes?
Robert Ellison said The lion kills the gazelle so that both species might go on.”
Dave Springer That’s one of the stupider things you’ve written…. What benefit does the lion confer upon the gazelle?
Much as it pains me to admit it I have to go with Robert on this one. Gazelles exist as a species only because they have evolved to be as they are to evade capture by predators. Similarly wolves and deer, birds and cats etc. No cats means birds, like the Kiwi bird, evolve in the direction of flightlessness. Expose them to cats and they are get eaten and go almost extinct.
So if I can give Robert a compliment it would be to suggest that he’s said much more stupid things than this.
But, just because the evolution of one species is very much dependent on the evolution of another, does it really follow that humans should let GH emissions rise out of all control?
What I said was that the world belongs to the builders and architects – the future is conceived in love and joy – hope is the last human attribute to perish – freedom is the unquenchable fire within.
What I didn’t do was make any sort of dimwitted allusion to social Darwinism or make a weird little climate argument by analogy to gazelles, lions and kiwis.
As has been said repeatedly – the most effective policy response is the one that works.
‘The old climate framework failed because it would have imposed substantial costs associated with climate mitigation policies on developed nations today in exchange for climate benefits far off in the future — benefits whose attributes, magnitude, timing, and distribution are not knowable with certainty. Since they risked slowing economic growth in many emerging economies, efforts to extend the Kyoto-style UNFCCC framework to developing nations predictably deadlocked as well.
The new framework now emerging will succeed to the degree to which it prioritizes agreements that promise near-term economic, geopolitical, and environmental benefits to political economies around the world, while simultaneously reducing climate forcings, developing clean and affordable energy technologies, and improving societal resilience to climate impacts. This new approach recognizes that continually deadlocked international negotiations and failed domestic policy proposals bring no climate benefit at all. It accepts that only sustained effort to build momentum through politically feasible forms of action will lead to accelerated decarbonization.’
http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/climate_pragmatism_innovation
The people standing in the way of progress in many needs of society and the environment is not us. TT – I suggest you stop playing games and deal in good faith for a change – you may as well because the game is moving on without you.
And I would like an apology for your suggestion that you agreed with me. Defamation in my books as it implies that I am much less clever than I think I am or am about as dumb as I think you are. Whatever. It is based on something I didn’t say.
Robert
You have no empirical proof that there would be “environmental benefits to political economies around the world, while simultaneously reducing climate forcings” because “climate forcings” are all natural and primarily from extra terrestrial sources over which mankind has no control. The laws of physics fully explain this, showing how surface temperatures relate to such things as atmospheric height, gravity and mean specific heat of the atmospheric gases, and that no greenhouse effect has been responsible for raising Earth’s surface by 33 degrees or the Venus surface by about 500 degrees.
I suggest you also read this* peer-reviewed journal paper which, you may note, refers to the thesis which the author wrote for his PhD in Climatology back in 1998. No one has successfully rebutted his work with valid physics. Either be the first to do so, or stop propagating the greatest scientific mistake of all time, because it’s going to cost many lives. Think on that, even if you have a vested interest in maintaining the hoax.
* http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/FunctionOfMass.pdf
If you read the reference Doug instead of going over your rigmatole – you would note that is dicusses such things as black carbon, tropospheric ozone, sulphides, health, education, economic governance, restoration and conservation of farmlands and ecosystems. Essentially – we don’t need to know anything about climate or to have any expectations to recognise that these are goods by themelves.
This is the third time I have posted this in the past day. Pay attention.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-lqgBxcNes
We can by conservation farming increase farm productivity by 70%, decrease input costs, conserve soil, water and nutrients and improve downstream environments.
Frankly – I think your pseudo physics is not worth spending a microsecond on. On the other hand you would do well to study practical and pragmatic options such as given in the link – one that you have not bothered to open before spouting your usual nonsense.
And one of the problems of “increasing farm production” is that we deplete the minerals in the food supply (especially selenium) which are vital for good health and longevity. The soil should be rested one year in seven in order to regain it’s minerals. Instead we produce two crops a year in many cases.
We need much more intensive soil and vegetation management systems to meet the challenge of the 21st century.
Part of this is cycling nutrients in the soil – and even adding micronutrients in the form of crushed rock to soils to kick start the soil formation and soil ecologies needed to restore soil function and enhance pedogenesis.
It is not rocket science – http://www.fao.org/ag/save-and-grow/ – but you are comparing conventional agriculture with conservation agriculture. The latter is a whole new ball game for 15% of Australian farmers and growing rapidly because of the productivity increases and decreased input costs. It includes a whole range of techniques – from adding biomass, crusher dust and charcoal on smallholder farms (about 70% of global agriculture) – to high tech GPS guided farm equipment and weed recognition software that guides pin point weedicide applications.
And has the potential to take 500 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. What’s not to like.
And are they replacing such important a mineral as selenium? I doubt it. There’s a relative high level around Walcha in NSW, Australia, where there is a high percentage of people living beyond 100, as also appears the case in other selenium rich regions of the world. Selenium helps prevent cancer and works in synergy with vitamin E. Most vitamin E is removed in the process of making white bread, for example, so there are still many problems and many people being, in effect, killed by food processing and modern farming technology, which is all about saving the mighty dollar in production costs, but not looking at the end products. There are numerous studies which show long-term declines in nutrients in many fruits and vegetables, for example.
Of course it is not new Doug – http://yourorganicgardeningblog.com/rock-dust-for-bigger-better-tasting-veggies-showier-flowers/ – the importance is in soil processes. Healthy soils mean healthy foods.
http://us-rem.com/articles/soil-sustainability/
You don’t really pay attention do you?
R. Gates | January 30, 2013 at 2:40 pm | Reply
“All very noble and poetic but only half the story. History is a process whereby creation and destruction exist side by side. Yin/Yang, love/hate, joy/sorrow, and all the rest exist in eternal conflict and balance. The lion kills the gazelle so that both species might go on. Life and death exist as a partnership as it were, and the times of destruction, death, and chaos can be equally as long as the times of love and joy and sunshine in the meadows. The wolf comes calling and will have his due.”
This is just so incredibly stupid. Let’s embellish a little to illustrate the deep, deep ignorance from which it springs.
“All very noble and poetic but only half the story. History is a process whereby creation and destruction exist side by side. Yin/Yang, love/hate, joy/sorrow, Hitler/Judaism, and all the rest exist in eternal conflict and balance. The Nazi kills the Jew so that both species might go on. Life and death exist as a partnership as it were, and the times of destruction, death, and chaos can be equally as long as the times of love and joy and sunshine in the meadows. The storm trooper comes calling and will have his due.
See what I mean, Vern?
“Hayek sees interest-group politics as a threat to liberal government and the extended
order. When a democratic institution is concerned with the political distribution of
economic benefits to groups, group advantage becomes the basis of legislation, and
the rule of law is likely to be violated. Political parties become coalitions of interest
groups, and these alliances provide the legislative majorities by which such groups
gain privileges that impose costs on the public (Hayek 1979, 5–19). As government
interferes with market competition on behalf of favored groups, spontaneous order is
destroyed. Intervention distorts prices and misallocates resources, and these problems
precipitate further state direction to coordinate economic activity (1979, 89–96).
Because economic competition among groups is the mechanism of cultural evolution,
extensive state control of the economy can lead to the desuetude and disappearance of
the evolved practices that gave rise to the extended order and that support its large
population (1979, 170–73). The level of living and even the very survival of a
substantial segment of that population may eventually be threatened when state
control replaces the market (Hayek 1988, 7).
Hayek argues that a legislature empowered to violate the rule of law will grant
exploitative benefits to interest groups. If the institution that makes the rules can also
distribute favors through the design of policy, it will abuse its lawmaking authority by
serving special interests. He contends that contemporary legislative institutions have
become preoccupied with policy formulation to the detriment of the general rules
necessary for spontaneous order because framing policy offers legislators opportuni-
ties to acquire political support by awarding privileges to interest groups. When the
power to design policy and the power to enact general rules are combined in one
legislative body, the former activity will gain the upper hand, and unrestrained gov-
ernment will be the result (Hayek 1979, 15–25).
”
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&ved=0CE4QFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.org%2Fpdf%2Ftir%2Ftir_15_01_2_boykin.pdf&ei=aUEHUY_fBYSMqQGRloCQDg&usg=AFQjCNHPk06oQfdjPM3FXEob56XC2iZMNA&bvm=bv.41524429,d.b2U&cad=rja
Living proof, Australia 2007-13.
My 2.19 was meant as a reply to jim2’s @ 10.30. Getting hard to follow …
Living proof – The US too!
Jim 2
@ January 28, 2013 at 10:30 pm
+100
Thank you for those quotes of wisdom.
The current Australian government demonstrates the truth of what he says. Up until about 2 years ago, our Leftist government had add 16,000 new regulations and removed just 89. It’s add many more since and not sure if any have been removed, but if so not many.
Can anyone tell me how I apply for some of this big sceptical money apparently sloshing around the denialosphere?
I do my bit to fight the good fight against the forces of alarmism…but have never even had the sniff of half a crown. And – judging by the appearance and habits of my fellow sceptics that I have met in person – neither have they.
So where does it all go? And how can I lay my hands on my fair share? Its been an expensive winter with unexpected snow and ever-rising energy bills.
The fundamental assumption of the greenhouse effect is that back radiation has warmed the surface from 255K to 288K. But this assumption is itself based on a false assumption.
Roy Spencer (in his post about Greenhouse misunderstandings) claims in his point (6) that the atmosphere would have been isothermal at 255K in the absence of any GHG.
An isothermal atmosphere in a gravitational field would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which reads: “An isolated system, if not already in its state of thermodynamic equilibrium, spontaneously evolves towards it. Thermodynamic equilibrium has the greatest entropy amongst the states accessible to the system”
In isothermal conditions there would be more potential energy (PE) in eash molecule at the top, and, because kinetic energy (KE) is homogeneous, molecules could “fall” downwards and do work in the process. hence it was not an equilibrium state, let alone one of maximum entropy, as is required by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics has to be obeyed. So (PE+KE) has to be homogeneous, because otherwise work could be done, and so the system would not be at an equilibrium with greatest entropy, as the Second Law requires. In the process of reaching such equilibrium it is inevitable that molecules at the bottom have more kinetic energy, and there are more of them in any given volume, and so that does give a measure of higher pressure, yes. But the whole column could still cool down, maintaining the same gradient and pressure.
So pressure does not maintain temperature. The relationship in the ideal gas law only applies in adiabatic conditions, but the atmosphere can radiate heat away. If you “turned off” the Sun, Venus atmosphere and surface would eventually cool down.
We need to consider how the thermal energy actually gets into the Venus surface, especially at the poles. The facts are ..
(1) the poles receive less than 1W/m^2 of direct insolation.
(2) the atmosphere 1Km above the poles is at least 9 degrees cooler, and not absorbing much insolation either. It could have at most 1W/m^2 coming back out of the surface, which (at 0.5 absorptivity) would raise it to a mere 7K.
(3) Rather than being 7K, the lowest Km of the Venus atmosphere is around 720K, just a few degrees less hot than the surface.
If all convection (resulting from absorbed incident insolation at various altitudes) only went down the thermal gradient (ie towards space) how would enough energy get into the surface, especially if it were even just 1 degree hotter than the base of the atmosphere?
My answer is that the sloping playing field (the thermal profile) becomes a level playing field due to gravity, so all energy absorbed in the atmosphere (mostly incident insolation) spreads out in all directions, creating convection both up and down, and also diffusion and convection right around the globe producing equal temperatures at equal altitudes, but higher temperatures at lower altitudes. Then intra-atmospheric radiation reduces the magnitude of the net gradient by about 10% to 15% on Venus, (as best I can work out) but by about a third on Earth. Some of the extra reduction on Earth. though, is probably due to release of latent heat.
Here’s a thought experiment. Construct a perfectly insulated sealed cylinder filled with pure nitrogen gas. Suppose there are two insulating dividers which you can now slide into place one third and two thirds up the cylinder, thus making three equal zones. Warm the middle zone with a heating element, which you then turn off. Allow equilibrium to establish with the warmer nitrogen in the central zone. Then remove the dividers. Those molecules which move to the top zone will lose some KE as they gain extra PE, whereas those which fall to the lowest zone will gain KE as they lose PE. Hence, when the new equilibrium is established, the highest zone measures a lower temperature than the middle zone, and the lowest zones measures a higher temperature than the middle zone. Hence the highest zone measures a lower temperature than the lowest zone. QED.
So there is no need for any greenhouse effect to raise the surface temperature, simply because gravity cannot help but do so, because the atmosphere must obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Physicists had this argument in the 19th century. Claiming an isothermal column ( for an isolated column) were Maxwell and Boltzmann , on the side of a temperature gradient was Loschmidt.
They all agreed though that if there were an isothermal gradient, the implication was that a perpetual motion machine was possible and not in contravention of the second law of thermodynamics.
My money would be on no perpetual motion machine and no thermal gradient but I’d like to be wrong! If such machines were possible we’d have a very green and everlasting source of energy.
http://physicsessays.org/doi/abs/10.4006/1.3028792
Should be : They all agreed though that if there were a temperature gradient……………..
“In 1868, J.C. Maxwell proved that a perpetual motion machine of the second kind would become possible if the equilibrium temperature in a vertical column of gas subject to gravity were a function of height. However, Maxwell claimed that the temperature had to be the same at all points of the column. So did Boltzmann. Their opponent was Loschmidt, who died more than 100 years ago, in 1895. He claimed that the equilibrium temperature declined with height, and that a perpetual motion machine of the second kind operating by means of such a column was compatible with the second law of thermodynamics. Thus, he was convinced that he had detected a never‐ending source of usable energy for humankind.”
As guess, I imagine they would have thought nuclear energy was perpetual motion machine [particularly, if they were aware of
fantastical ideas like breeder reactors].
So, Maxwell saying that gravity does not affect equilibrium temperature
and Loschmidt was saying that “equilibrium temperature declined with height”.
We know temperature declines with height- but all 3 of them would known this obvious fact.
But issue is equilibrium temperature, not temperature.
So what did they mean by equilibrium temperature?
It means balanced heat.
So accordingly, Maxwell is correct and Loschmidt is wrong.
And it’s my impression that Doug Cotton also believes that with atmosphere with decreasing temperature with elevation, that there is balanced heat- or a equilibrium temperature.
Or seems that is part of what wrote paper about and continually posting about.
At least it works until you get to the stratosphere, at which point, one has continued decrease in air density, yet air temperature rising.
Of course we do know how to change the atmospheric lapse rate,
so if wanted lower equilibrium temperature with elevation, you could manage it.
So you could have Loschmidt’s “never‐ending source of usable energy for humankind”
But, it seems like an expensive way to harvest energy.
And not a perpetual motion machine. But it is practically unlimited
source of energy.
But so is wind or solar energy.
Yes, I am very aware of all that, but their argument about perpetual motion is wrong, as is explained in my paper “Planetary Surface Temperatures. A Discussion of Alternative Mechanisms” as well as in an article awaiting publication, from which I quote below …
* Rebuttal of counter arguments:
Sometimes it is assumed that a wire outside the cylinder running from the warmer base of the cylinder to the top would conduct heat back up. However, gravity also induces a thermal gradient in a solid, and we need to calculate the weighted mean specific heat of the contents of the cylinder, the wire and, to some extent, the walls. All these comprise the total system and the overall equilibrium state, which will not lead to any endless loop of energy flow.
Another “argument” starts by introducing the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics which pertains to three systems all in equilibrium with each other. However, in the form used, the Zeroth law suffers from the same approximation as does the original Clausius statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in that it ignores the effect of an external force field, usually gravity. As the initial assumption is false, so too is the conclusion.
And therefore, because a vertical column of lead (or any relatively dense solid/fluid/gas) has a larger temperature gradient than an adjacent vertical column of aluminum (or any relatively less-dense solid/fluid/gas) — as predicted by the theories of Doug Cotton/PSI — then thermocouples installed at the top and bottom of the paired columns will generate electricity for free, from the temperature difference between the two columns!
Thank you Doug Cotton/PSI, for so plainly refuting the thermodynamical theories of Doug Cotton/PSI.
And more seriously, thank you for illustrating to Climate Etc readers that contrarian/denialist cognition is impervious to scientific evidence and reason. It is well to keep this imperviousness in mind, when assessing the skeptical climate-change literature!![\scriptstyle\rule[2.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}\,\boldsymbol{\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}\,\heartsuit\,{\displaystyle\text{\bfseries!!!}}\,\heartsuit\,\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}}\ \rule[-0.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cscriptstyle%5Crule%5B2.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D%5C%2C%5Cboldsymbol%7B%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%7B%5Cdisplaystyle%5Ctext%7B%5Cbfseries%21%21%21%7D%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%7D%5C+%5Crule%5B-0.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D&bg=ffeeff&fg=0000ff&s=1&c=20201002)
” Doug Cotton posts “Gravity also induces a thermal gradient in a solid.”
And therefore, because a vertical column of lead (or any relatively dense solid/fluid/gas) has a larger temperature gradient than an adjacent vertical column of aluminum (or any relatively less-dense solid/fluid/gas) — as predicted by the theories of Doug Cotton/PSI — then thermocouples installed at the top and bottom of the paired columns will generate electricity for free, from the temperature difference between the two columns! ”
“A fan of *MORE* discourse” is correct.
And it actually might be a good energy source-
if it were true.
Unlike solar, wind, and trying use the difference temperature due variation of lapse rates- which all have low energy densities.
Doug Cotton,
So not only are you saying Planck was incorrect, you’ve now added Maxwell and Boltzmann to the list? That’s an impressive string of scalps. Anyone else you would like to add?
So you think that gravity induces a thermal gradient in a sold but it doesn’t do it water?
If that were the case then we could, in principle, sink large metal posts into the ocean floor. The water in the ocean would be warmer at the surface but the temperature gradient in the pole would in the opposite direction. So again the possibility of using this temperature difference as a power source arises.
The important point in all this is not so much the amount of power generated which could be argued would be small, but more that if any power is generated at all, then we’ve discovered a perpetual motion machine. That would be quite remarkable if it were true. It is more likely that it isn’t, though, and it is likely there is something wrong with our initial assumptions.
He has also questioned Einstein with his photons containing energy.
“If that were the case then we could, in principle, sink large metal posts into the ocean floor. The water in the ocean would be warmer at the surface but the temperature gradient in the pole would in the opposite direction. So again the possibility of using this temperature difference as a power source arises.”
Well if stick pole deep enough in the muck at the bottom, it can get warmer beneath the muck than surface waters.
But if pole is not well insulated, it be the same temperature as the water.
And of course you easier temperature gradient and closer to any market which could a vague interest buying any power one makes. Anywhere on if drill a mile or two beneath the surface. And much greater difference to temperature, unlimited heat, and almost always uneconomical to utilize- it’s called, geothermal energy.
“The important point in all this is not so much the amount of power generated which could be argued would be small, but more that if any power is generated at all, then we’ve discovered a perpetual motion machine. ”
But it’s not perpetual motion machine- it’s not generating energy from nothing, rather it’s taking energy from huge reservoir of heat which exceeds all energy needs which all humans could reasonable use. And it’s “renewable energy” [Hooray!!]. The problem is it’s a low density energy.
It’s not economical. It’s a waste of time and effort.
You could breed hamster and have run them on trendmills. Or better, horses!
But again, it’s not economical.
If you *had to be* in the middle of the ocean [*for some reason*] and the cost of getting power was hideously expensive [no good reason it should be], then maybe it’s option to look at.
Or if crazy billionaire and want to do it, as a hobby, knock yourself out.
I have never said Planck was incorrect. I used Planck curves in my paper Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
On the issue of a gravitationally induced thermal gradient, yes, Loschmidt was right and Maxwell and Boltzmann have been proved incorrect with over 800 experiments since 2002. It only takes one experiment to prove a hypothesis wrong. You don’t have one to prove me wrong.
Your thought experiments regarding wires of different specific heat are not valid in deducing endless thermal cycles. That cannot happen at thermal equilibrium when entropy is at a maximum, as dictated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You are trying to violate it yet again, and you will never succeed. I have explained how the wires become a single system – just like two water pipes of different diameter filled with water and joined at the top and bottom. Water does not flow in endless cycles, now does it.
Give up – you’ll never prove wrong what has been confirmed by over 800 empirical results with experiments done in the real world, not your mathematical world devoid of the laws of physics. Details and references are in my paper on Planetary Surface Temperatures.
Doug Cotton,
You have said “Electromagnetic radiation does not exhibit a particle like nature. Planck’s suggestion of this (made in desperation) was wrong!”
You now say ” I have never said Planck was incorrect”
So Planck was quite correct, it was just his desperate suggestion that was wrong?
Have I got it right now?
The process of diffusion (causing the gravitational gradient) is over-ridden by the high rate of solar absorption in the stratosphere. The issue is irrelevant an dthe stratosphere is merely a “hump” in the cooling, which continues in the mesosphere..
“Yes, I am very aware of all that, but their argument about perpetual motion is wrong, as is explained in my paper “Planetary Surface Temperatures. A Discussion of Alternative Mechanisms” as well as in an article awaiting publication, from which I quote below …”
Suppose you use copper which is the best and cheapest conductor of
heat [diamond is better but isn’t cheap].
So you have meter by meter by 1000 meters of solid copper.
You have it horizontal and you insulated it using best technology available.
At one end the copper is immersed in boiling water and at other end one wants use this heat of the boiling water.
How much energy can be transferred from the boiling water end to the
other end?
100, 200, 500 watts per second per square meter?
Any idea?
Now, if you put it vertical, what is the differences in amount energy
being conducted?
Does it matter if the heat is being transferred up or down?
If so, what is the difference?
And finally would the amount energy involved have any chance
of paying the cost of the 1 meter square and 1000 meter length
of copper?
Or the price of copper is:
“Current price for copper $3.68 per pound ”
http://www.ask.com/answers/42384841/what-is-the-current-price-of-copper-per-pound
The density of copper is:
“The density of copper at room temperature is 8.94 g/cm”
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/82000/density-of-copper/#ixzz2JVedWAVO
Or 8.94 tonnes per cubic meter, so total for 1000 meters is
8940 tonnes. Or say 9000 tons times 2000 [lbs] is
18 million lbs. Times 3.68 is about 66 million dollars.
You could also use cheaper steel or iron and at say $1000 per ton that is $7,800 per meter or 7.8 million dollars for this fabricated iron/steel.
So we got this thing which transfer heat 1000 meters
{Not saying using water or something else would not work better, but
could require pumping and other complications]
and transferring a heat difference of 100 C over 1000 meters
could price of energy over 100 years pay the 10 million dollars worth of capital [not including cost of money which could be more 10 times this amount] and one is being paid a generous price of 5 cent per KW hour of the electricity generated [and assuming [*somehow*] 100% of the thermal energy is converted into electrical power].
So if 5 cents electrical power is made in an hour. It’s $438 dollars per year of gross income.
Not net income.
gbaikie’s argument is wrong at this step:
So what did they mean by equilibrium temperature? It means balanced heat.
“Balanced heat” is a meaningless statement to a physicist. In any event, that is not what thermal equilibrium means. And, to make it even more clear, the physicists who carefully worded the modern statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, even spelled it out in their statement of …
“The Second Law of Thermodynamics: An isolated system, if not already in its state of thermodynamic equilibrium, spontaneously evolves towards it. Thermodynamic equilibrium has the greatest entropy amongst the states accessible to the system. ”
THERMODYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM IS NOT ABOUT EQUAL TEMPERATURE, BUT ABOUT MAXIMUM ENTROPY STATES. THERE IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE.
“gbaikie’s argument is wrong at this step:
-So what did they mean by equilibrium temperature? It means balanced heat.-
“Balanced heat” is a meaningless statement to a physicist”
If true, then they would be more stupid than most people.
Therefore as precaution when talking to physicists you instead need to use the term, equilibrium temperature.
Or talk about a high level of Entropy.
“In any event, that is not what thermal equilibrium means. And, to make it even more clear, the physicists who carefully worded the modern statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, even spelled it out in their statement of …
“The Second Law of Thermodynamics: An isolated system, if not already in its state of thermodynamic equilibrium, spontaneously evolves towards it. Thermodynamic equilibrium has the greatest entropy amongst the states accessible to the system. ”
THERMODYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM IS NOT ABOUT EQUAL TEMPERATURE, BUT ABOUT MAXIMUM ENTROPY STATES. THERE IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE.”
I think I was very clear, in saying it is not equal to temperature.
To try to be clearer, equilibrium temperature is NOT synonymous to equal temperature. Rather the term is “equilibrium temperature”
rather than “equilibrium” + “temperature”.
So this is correct :”THERMODYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM IS NOT ABOUT EQUAL TEMPERATURE”
But this is incorrect “THERMODYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM IS NOT ABOUT EQUAL HEAT”.
Though physicists may not like to use the term heat. Because there
additional form of energies other than what is called heat.
As for entire statement:
“THERMODYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM IS NOT ABOUT EQUAL TEMPERATURE, BUT ABOUT MAXIMUM ENTROPY STATES. THERE IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE.”
This “huge difference” one can only be talking about the potential energy of gas molecules at higher elevation. Or one can say [if not talking to stupid physicists] that higher molecule will get more kinetic energy if it were to travel to a lower elevation. Or simply having a gas molecule travel to higher elevation, it does not lose energy.
And one can think of it as transforming kinetic energy into potential energy.
BUT the atmosphere is not about individual gas molecules and where they go, individual molecules are constantly and every nanosecond transferring their “translation motion” [kinetic energy].
They are part of “machine” maintaining a thermodynamic equilibrium. And continue analogy of a machine, the machine can various loads that it “deals with”.
So these “loads” can be warm or cool surface. It can be convection [meaning movement of air packets]- such as wind going up, down, and side ways. Or it can be transforming liquids into gases and gases into liquids.
So, when talking about an atmosphere and it being THERMODYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM we talking about the kinetic motion
of gas molecules of the atmosphere.
And amount heat or it’s temperature depends average velocity molecules and how many molecules [their mass] are in some volume of the atmosphere.
Or in regards measuring heat or energy of gas in a atmosphere the kinetic energy equal 1/2 kg mass times average velocity gas molecules [meters per second] equals joules of heat.
Who said “equilibrium temperature” ???
The Second Law of Thermodynamics says Thermal Equilibrium which may be totally different in a vertical plane in a gravitational field.
Read Wikipedia as I really don’t have time to keep teaching you basic physics – start with “Laws of Thermodynamics” and then “Thermal Equilibrium”
Wind is not convection. Convection involves adiabatic movement of air, yes, but not all movement of air is convection. Wind completely over-rides the slow moving convection which is moving at less than 0.05 Km/hour. You will never explain atmospheric temperatures if you don’t understand the differeence.
Likewise absorption and radiation in the stratosphere over-rides convection, thus explaining the temperature inversion. The thermosphere does an even better job of it, but you won’t feel hot up there. It’s just the air that’s got a high temperature, often a few hundred degrees.
Of course everything happens at the molecular level. How do you think the temperature in a horizontal plane in an insulated room becomes equal when thermal equilibrium evolves?
All I am saying, is that is does not become equal in the vertical plane, because of the effect of gravity on each and every molecular movement between collision. At the next collision it has more or less KE to share with the other molecule. Elementary.
So we equate potential energy loss with the amount of energy required to warm a parcel of mass M by a temperature difference T after a change in height H and we get, where Cp=specific heat) …
M.Cp.T = M.g.H
So the thermal gradient (dry adiabatical lapse rate) is given by
T/H = -g/Cp
all in just two lines. Elementary!
gbaike
The Second Law is about thermodynamic equilibrium” NOT “thermal equilibrium..”
I have quoted it several times from Wikipedia, where you will also find a link to their item on “thermoDYNAMIC equilibrium” and you will note that such includes consideration of potential energy, as does entropy.
Every time you talk about “thermal equilibrium” or “equilibrium temperature” you demonstrate that you miss the whole point.
So I repeat ..
THERMODYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM IS NOT ABOUT EQUAL TEMPERATURE, BUT ABOUT MAXIMUM ENTROPY STATES. THERE IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE.
Doug Cotton | January 26, 2013 at 10:52 pm said: ”Wind is not convection”
Dooug!!! you supposed to stand up for the truth; instead, you are obsessed about: thermodynamics, equilibrium, entropy crap, same as the Warmist & Fakes!… YES, wind is THE ”convection” Horizontal winds collect the heat from the ground / VERTICAL WINDS as on a convayerbelt take the heat up and directly / personally discharge it.!!!
CONDUCTION DOESN’T EXIST!!! ”conduction” is all about smokescreen; which obviously blinded you as well. To use your words: ”You will never explain atmospheric temperatures if you don’t understand the difference”
Well every individual atom of O&N takes heat from the ground; and is personally taking it high up, to waste it = same as when individual ant takes the grain to the nest = NO conduction (from one to another)
B] CO2 is a good conductor of heat, BUT; in the atmosphere CO2 doesn’t ”conduct” any bloody heat. BECAUSE: in-between every two CO2 molecule – there are thousands of O&N atoms, as BEST INSULATORS. good insulator, prevents conduction; should I teach you English?
same as: copper wire ”conducts” electricity / plastic insulation – INSULATES!!! Therefore: O&N instead of the phony ”conduction” they directly take the heat up, the ”VERTICAL WIND” (made of O&N) is doing the convection of heat high up, to waste it personally / they become cold -.shrink / become heavier per volume -> drop down, to take more heat.
(spaced grains of copper, with lots of plastic in -between; will not conduct electricity = CO2 molecules, with lots of O2 + N2 in-between, prevent any conduction of heat. Doug, if you keep repeating the Warmist & fake’s gospel -> you will become just another ”closed parashoot brains”
See comment below about Gbaikie’s error
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/25/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-289589
As I have said, genuine adiabatic convection – the only process (apart from diffusion of kinetic energy in still air) which maintains the thermal gradient (AKA adiabatic lapse rate) is a very slow process, moving air upwards at probably less than 0.05 Km/hr. Wind is obviously normally somewhat faster, and so it over-rides convection in local areas where it occurs. You can demonstrate with a blower heater outside pointing upwards. So I confirm wind is not convection and the result of wind (temperature wise) is totally different.
After the wind passes, the process of diffusion (conduction) of KE takes over and repairs the damage to the thermal plot. This is what clearly happens on Venus and is the only possible explanation as to how absorbed incident solar radiation leads to warm air passing up the temperature gradient (from cold to hot) and into the surface – all by convection which spreads out in all directions from any source of additional thermal energy. You all have a lot to learn about just exactly how diffusion and convection function in a gravitational field. Start here!
Planck was right about the Planck function. Climatologists who think carbon dioxide can radiate at intensities reaching well outside the limitations of the Planck curve are the ones who apparently disbelieve Planck.
Climatologists also postulate that an isothermal atmosphere at 255K would be a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, which is of course garbage, because an isothermal atmosphere would be a complete violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the requirements thereof for thermodynamic equilibrium with maximum available entropy.
Second Law of Thermodynamics:
“An isolated system, if not already in its state of thermodynamic equilibrium, spontaneously evolves towards it. Thermodynamic equilibrium has the greatest entropy amongst the states accessible to the system.”
The issue of photons is not relevant, and not needed when discussing electro-magnetic radiation.
You probably can’t tell the difference between a black body and a gas. The difference is that a black body is an ideal object that radiates with the Planck curve. Gases are far from that, and only radiate (and absorb) at wavelengths consistent with their molecular properties. CO2 is mostly active near 15 microns. Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum are also evidence of absorption properties of specific gases and ions that not black bodies. Didn’t you ever look at spectral lines in flames to tell which metals were present? Lots of the interesting physics is related to spectral properties, not the bland Planck function, and that includes the atmosphere.
Keeping in the thematic of thy blog:
> A wide consensus [gasp!] of climate scientists agrees on the many underlying facts around climate science, but these facts are not widely accepted by policy-makers or the general public. [YEAH! Go Team Denizens!] Addressing this issue, the American Statistical Association formed an Advisory Committee on Climate Change Policy, with the objective of improving communication of statistical issues associated with climate change. [You wish.] This committee has been active in giving public lectures, writing nontechnical articles, and participating in visits to Congress. This symposium will focus on uncertainty. [Garlgarlgarl: more! more! MORE!] The public and policy-makers sometimes equate uncertainty with ignorance and miss the reality that statistically calculated uncertainty is a form of knowledge that can help clarify responses to environmental risks. [That’s what you say, punk!] The three speakers are statisticians with extensive published research in climate change. [Right, and I’m a ninja.] Their talks address uncertainties in observations and climate models, strategies for formulating policies, and methods for communicating uncertainty to decision-makers. [Models, bad.] The discussant is an author and journalist who has been writing for more than 20 years on climate science and policy. [Whatever, Andy.] The objectives of the session are to provide information about recent scientific developments, as well as discuss the challenges of formulating climate science for policy-makers and the general [Sure: follow the money, I say!]. This symposium will be one of the activities of Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013.
http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2013/webprogram/Session5841.html
I left a couple of comments at Jo Nova’s blog that could be summarized in two sensational headlines: “Skeptical Science goes lukewarm” (without admitting it) and “Skeptical Science revolutionizes climate science” (without admitting it).
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/01/spiegel-speculates-on-why-global-warming-stalled/#comment-1229328
The thing is that in this post, they seem to have figured out the exact human contribution to global warming with such precision that there would seem to be no need for all the complexity of climate modeling, nor for all that uncertainty that the IPCC is telling us about.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/16_more_years_of_global_warming.html
And their reason why this analysis is lukewarm is this (quoting myself):
What they seem to find is a nice linear trend of 0.15-0.16 degrees C per decade. It doesn’t look that convincing, but let’s accept it for the sake of the argument. The “problem” is that’s the trend is barely enough to break the so-called scientifically motivated 2 degree target. But they claim we will get increased warming in the future:
“Given that human greenhouse gas emissions are increasing, and that the natural influences do not show a trend on longer timescales, we must expect increasing global warming in the future.”
If that’s the case, why hasn’t it happened yet? Why is the trend until now linear? By their logic, it shouldn’t be. It should be accelerating, since CO2 emissions have been increasing throughout the period.
“Given that human greenhouse gas emissions are increasing, and that the natural influences do not show a trend on longer timescales, we must expect increasing global warming in the future.”
If that’s the case, why hasn’t it happened yet? Why is the trend until now linear? By their logic, it shouldn’t be. It should be accelerating, since CO2 emissions have been increasing throughout the period.
University of Chicago has an answer for you:
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0115707ce438970b-pi
Yes. And climate sensitivity is defined simplistically as temperature increase per doubling of CO2, which is caused by the logarithmic response to increasing levels of CO2, without going into the physics of that. That’s uncontroversial, so this is perfectly logical and natural, a fact that Skeptical Science fails to mention. And the reason why the climate models predict accelerating temperature rise is positive feedbacks, not the trend in CO2.
The reason I didn’t mention it is that it doesn’t matter to my argument. Whatever the reason that the temperature trend should accelerate in the future, it should have done so already. And if we take Skeptical Science as gospel (for the sake of the argument), it hasn’t.
So to spell it out: If the analysis from Skeptical Science is precisely correct, and we apply normal logic to that result, we get an expected 1.3-1.5 C higher temperature 2100. Since we already have 0.7 over “pre-industrial”, that’s 2-2.2 degrees, hardly overshooting the 2 degree target. Lukewarmers!
Correct me if I’m wrong.
Dagfinn, the worst part is that at the very start they make the false claim that the 16 yr myth in circulation, is about man’s contribution. It’s not about that, obviously.
The supposed “myth” is: 16 yrs of no significant trend in temps.
Plain and simple.
…but interesting that they unwittingly proved that that none of our increasing contributions changed the trend.
Skepticalscience didn’t extrapolate the trend to 2100
Only strawmen casting skeptics did that.
They fit a linear trend to their model
Strawmen casting skeptics shouldn’t take that to mean skepticalscience is saying the warming is exactly linear, or that it will be linear to 2100.
Simples.
By the way I don’t think strawmen casting skeptics who can’t even be bothered to recognize the need to correct global temperatures for ENSO or the solar cycle should have the right to even comment on what skepticalscience has done.
It’s like kids trying to comment on the adult class.
\
It hasn’t happened because they had no idea about the implications of the need for maximum entropy states, as required by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Dagfin without going into the physics of that.
It’s a good idea to go into the physics – then an experienced physicist will see that they ignored the maximum entropy conditions required for thermodynamic equilibrium.
lolwot: Skeptical Science didn’t just fit a linear trend as a random exercise in trend fitting, they claimed that the trend hasn’t changed in the last 16 years, and that this finding applies to the real world in a significant way. If that were not the case, then their analysis would have only theoretical relevance.
But what they need is an accelerating trend. If they don’t find one, and don’t give a good reason why the trend should change in the future, then the reasonable expectation is that the linear trend will continue.
Doug cotton: I’m not implying that we don’t need to understand the physics. But in this case, the analysis from Skeptical Science is independent of which physics is behind their linear trend which they claim to be anthropogenic. And my argument, taking their analysis at face value and extrapolating from it, is also independent of the physics behind it.
The whole discussion is bogus precisely because it assumes that you can ignore the physics. Which is why I say ironically that they’ve revolutionized climate science.
you are simply barking up the wrong tree
what SS demonstrated was that recent years are consistent with continued warming.
Demanding that they go beyond this and prove whether that warming will accelerate by 2100 (and why does it have to?) is a strawman to avoid what they did show.
lolwot: “what SS demonstrated was that recent years are consistent with continued warming.” I don’t even know what that means. In fact, I’m not sure that sentence makes sense. “years” (time itself?) being consistent with “warming”?
I think what they meant was to claim that there had been an actual warming trend and that that trend has remained the same. You seem to imply that they meant something weaker.
Sure SS can conclude that recent “lack of warming” (cooling?) is “consistent with warming”.
That’s SS logic.
EVERYTHING is “consistent with warming” by definition.
But outside the very special world of SS, things look a bit different.
Max
SS show that the warming since eg 1970 is pretty much still ongoing.
A lot of people are imaging global warming has stopped because they aren’t analyzing the data correctly.
This might put things in perspective. Extrapolate the green line.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/to:1998/trend
lolwot
Don’t be a “DENIER” (like the dudes at SS).
The “globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature anomaly” has not warmed over the past 10-15 years, as the Spiegel article (as well as James E. Hansen’s latest paper) confirm.
Get used to it, lolwot.
And move on to something else.
Max
lolwot, extrpolated:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/trend
That green line (the trend) is getting out of reach, don’t you think? I predict it’s gonna remain so, maybe it will be crossed again briefly (the next La Nina) and that’s it. Stay tuned.
lolwot
Is this the trend “extrapolation” you want?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/to:2001/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/trend
(It’s the one Hansen and others are talking about.)
Max
Here the decrease in the 30-year linear trend:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1983/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1981/to:2011/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1978/to:2008/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1976/to:2006/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1974/to:2004/trend
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/trend
“That green line (the trend) is getting out of reach, don’t you think?”
But by the nature of the green line we should expect the data to be sometimes above and sometimes below!
If it was always above the line would be wrong!!
sadly a lot of folk simply don’t understand what the data show. They imagine some epic pause in global warming for 16 years, when the data are actually consistent with continued warming.
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/giss.gif
While scientists mull over the decadal noise, layfolk wrongly imagine they are trying to explain that the warming has stopped!
And by the way, Tamino’s trendline also points toward a very boring lukewarm future. It’s not enough to indicate “dangerous” warming.
For a comparison, the famous alarmist Jørgen Randers has just claimed that temperatures will be 2 degrees higher by 2050. That’s three times faster warming than these leisurely linear trends indicate.
1) Argue that global warming has stopped
2) when lolwot shows that warming hasn’t stopped, avoid any sort of soul-searching reflection on how the error in #1 was made by silently switching to #3, a different argument.
3) Argue that the ongoing global warming isn’t alarming
lolwot: except i didn’t argue your point 1). On the contrary, I started out assuming (for the sake of the argument) that the analysis from Skeptical Science was right, and showed that it implied a lukewarm future.
I’ve lost count of your straw men. This is probably the fourth or fifth. The first straw man was the straw man accusation. ;-)
The Spiegel article translated by GWPF is excellent, check it out:
http://www.thegwpf.org/researchers-puzzled-global-warming-standstill/
Surprisingly many commenters are not that puzzled.
They are shocked, shocked, to find that CO2 is not going on here.
============
Being an equal opportunity unemployer I tend to eschew GWPF as biased but it’s bias based on hearsay not witness. I was a bit surprised by the article you linked as it seemed fair and balanced. The more dogmatic on both sides can likely find plenty to dislike in it. I was wondering if you found anything at all objectionable.
Judith Curry
The Spiegel article published by GWPF is interesting more for the reaction to the current “standstill”, than to the “standstill”, itself.
Several “reasons” for the current stall in warming despite unabated human GHG emissions are suggested.
One (the most logical one IMO) is missing:
– because the GCMs overestimated the impact of CO2 on our climate (i.e. the 2xCO2 climate sensitivity)
This shows me that, while the current “lack of warming” is now generally accepted as a fact, there is still denial among the “consensus group” that it could be that the models (which predicted warming) were wrong.
Max
Their superest computers told them that 42 was the number to bet on at the Great Climate Wheel.
=============
It’s tragedy for politicians that China exists, otherwise could patting themselves on the back and declaring that they caused the US CO2 emission to lower and that is why global warming has stopped.
Here’s a fun one that Judith could comment on concerning the Sun and the stratospheric shake up this year. Jeff Weber of UCAR does not appear to be interested in GHGs or aerosols.
http://www.npr.org/2013/01/25/170267853/cold-snap-shakes-up-winter-weather-outlook
From a causality stand-point, he does not sound like he supports AGW->Arctic Ice Loss->Cold NH Winter.
Second question, is the “(unintelligible)”, heat?
“Wagathon | January 25, 2013 at 5:32 pm |
iit
it’s the sun stupid”
Are you saying that there was no heating in 1910-1940 or the sun varied its output coincidently at that time? What is the probability that the solar output would vary in sync with the greatest use of fossil fuel in history. We have no feedback loops to the sun, do you think there are? Did anyone note any other change in the sun’s output in 1940 when the rise ceased?
The Sun is the official explanation for why it warmed as much as it did in spite of relatively modest GHG emissions. Read the IPCC AR4.
“The Sun is the official explanation for why it warmed as much as it did in spite of relatively modest GHG emissions. Read the IPCC AR4.”
Then the above questions to Wagathon apply to the IPCC as well.
Juat another IPCC mistake. In any case the IPCC labeled 1961 as a year of normal temperature, when clearly 1910 was 0.5c colder and closer to the average global temperature which prevailed since 1850. I doubt that the IPCC can produce any independent evidence that the sun was warmer enough to produce a temperature rise of 0.45C betweem 1910 and 1940.
“If the earth had a static atmosphere with the same gases it has now, but with little water vapor and no ocean, the average surface temperature of earth would be 67°C (153°F). This is much warmer than our earth. The planet would be so hot because greenhouse gases in the atmosphere help keep heat near the surface, and because there is no convection, and no transport of heat by winds. Adding winds cools the planet a little, but not enough.”
This confirms the strong warming power of CO2 and confirms manmade global warming.
CO2 would be left as the primary greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere if water vapor were to be removed, so when they say the cause is greenhouse gases CO2 must be the main one. responsible for Earth’s surface temperature increasing to 67°C (153°F)!
Just because Doug Cotton has no need for an effect, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
It doesn’t exist because its a illusion created by taking out the Water Cycle.
Temperature of Earth with atmosphere = 15°C
Temperature of Earth without any atmosphere = -18°C
Temperature of Earth with atmosphere but without water = 67°C
Can you spot the AGWScienceFiction department’s sleight of hand here?
There is no “greenhouse gas warming of 33°C from -18 to 15°C”
The mechanism doesn’t exist.
Without water, the main AGWgreenhouse gas, the temp would 67°C, not -18°C.
Science fraud. That is why there is never any show and tell for the CAGW/AGW crowd, it’s not possible to produce real world empirical evidence and data to prove an illusion.
You’ve been conned.
Temperature of Earth without any atmosphere = -18°C
Temperature of Earth with atmosphere but without water = 67°C
So the second one which has CO2 in the atmosphere is 85C warmer than the case without CO2.
And you think that’s arguing against the greenhouse effect….
“Temperature of Earth with atmosphere but without water = 67°C” ???
Where have you got that from?
lolwot | January 26, 2013 at 5:18 am | Temperature of Earth without any atmosphere = -18°C
Temperature of Earth with atmosphere but without water = 67°C
So the second one which has CO2 in the atmosphere is 85C warmer than the case without CO2.
And you think that’s arguing against the greenhouse effect….
Good grief, you can’t even show how your AGW “greenhouse gases” are able to raise the temperature of anything the fictional 33°C and now you want to claim that the trace gas carbon dioxide can raise the temperature 100°C!
How can any of you claiming this possible think you’re capable of scientific reasoning when you have no sense of scale or any understanding of the power to do work?
None of you has anything of value to say about climate when you claim that visible light from the Sun has the power to heat land and water at the equator to the intensity it is heated which gives us our huge winds and weather systems so hardly surprising that you’d claim supermolecule powers for carbon dioxide – pathetic.
tempterrain | January 26, 2013 at 6:02 am | “Temperature of Earth with atmosphere but without water = 67°C” ???
Where have you got that from?
Standard industry figure in traditional science. The minus 18°C is the Earth without any atmosphere at all, compare with the Moon, and the 67°C is what it would be with the majority of atmosphere in place, which is mainly nitrogen and oxygen, but without water, think deserts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cycle
“Effects on climateThe water cycle is powered from solar energy. 86% of the global evaporation occurs from the oceans, reducing their temperature by evaporative cooling. Without the cooling, the effect of evaporation on the greenhouse effect would lead to a much higher surface temperature of 67 °C (153 °F), and a warmer planet.”
Not that you’ll find it any more on the link it gives as source…
When it finally sinks in for some of you that this really is a con based on faking physics you’ll spot more of the changes to the basics created by excising whole processes, giving the properties of one thing to another, taking laws out of context and as here, word play- but what you have now is a world completely imagined, it has not one iota of its matter/energy/ properties and processes in the real physical world.
These are magic tricks to make you believe you’re hearing real physical descriptions, beginning by changing the traditional concept of the greenhouse atmosphere around Earth which as in a real greenhouse this both heats and cools the Earth, AGW claims it only heats.
It is the heavy real gas voluminous ocean of our atmosphere AIR practically 100% nitrogen and oxygen which is the traditional greenhouse gas blanket trapping the heat from the Earth, compare with the Moon. It is the water vapour which cools this 67°C down in the Water Cycle. As water vapour is lighter than Air and rises taking away heat from the Earth’s surface and releasing it in the colder heights when it condenses back out to water or ice, coming back to Earth in rain which is carbonic acid, that is, water vapour takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in a continual cycle. You don’t have rain in the your Carbon Cycle.
You actually don’t have any atmosphere at all, let alone any water cycle..
Unless you are willing to understand the traditional basic physics here, and it is getting harder to find teachers for the masses, you will continue to believe in a fantasy world. Maybe you’re OK with that.
It’s unclear from what you wrote, exactly what you think “doesn’t exist.”
The 67C figure is wrong. Absurdly so.
Do you actually have another source for that figure than wikipedia?
David N | January 26, 2013 at 8:52 am | It’s unclear from what you wrote, exactly what you think “doesn’t exist.”
AGWScienceFiction’s “The Greenhouse Effect” doesn’t exist. Which is the 33°C warming attributed to “ir imbibing greenhouse gases without which the Earth would be minus 18°C”
Firstly, they have given, fraudulently, that minus 18°C figure to the “the atmosphere minus agw greenhouse gases”, when it is nothing of the sort, it is the temperature of the Earth without any atmosphere at all – our atmosphere is mainly nitrogen and oxygen.
So, The Greenhouse Effect 33°C doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion created by science fraud of claiming the Earth would be colder without them.
Which can be seen more clearly by, secondly, the real Earth without the main AGW greenhouse gas water would be 67°C, not minus 18°C.
The AGWScienceFiction’s The Greenhouse Effect has taken out the Water Cycle.
In other words, the real Earth would be 33°C colder minus the whole atmosphere, not minus the AGWSF “greenhouse gases”.
And. The real atmosphere also does not warm the Earth 33°C from the minus 18°C without it, there is no direct link to such an effect, it doesn’t exist.
With the whole atmosphere in place which is mainly nitrogen and oxygen but without water the temperature would be 67°C – this is the real greenhouse gas blanket keeping the heat from the surface from escaping too quickly, this is the very heavy ocean of the real gas AIR pulled in by gravity. Weighing 14lbs/sq inch, 1 stone per square inch, 1 ton/sq ft, that’s how heavy it is on your shoulders. That’s the Earth’s thermal blanket, not a piddling amount of trace gas which “thermal blanket” would be practically 100% holes..
Water vapour is lighter than Air and around 1-4% of the atmosphere, so while it contributes a certain amount to the weight of the whole real gas atmosphere’s thermal gravity blanket without which the Earth would be minus 18°C, it’s main role is in cooling the surface, think deserts.
It is the thick heavier mass of the practically 100% nitrogen and oxygen which is the blanket keeping the Earth from the -18°C temp it would be without it.
Without water the Earth would be a very hot desert, 67°C.
That’s the traditional greenhouse effect of nitrogen and oxygen warming the Earth and water cooling it down to 15°C.
Just like a real greenhouse which is both heated and cooled to get optimum temperatures for plant growth, that’s where the analogy came from in the first place.
The “33°C warming” doesn’t exist, neither in the real traditional science greenhouse gases of nitrogen and oxygen warming the planet, nor in the AGWSF “greenhouse gases warming”, the latter fraudulently claiming the Earth would be -18°C without them.
lolwot | January 26, 2013 at 11:15 am | The 67C figure is wrong. Absurdly so.
Do you actually have another source for that figure than wikipedia?
Try thinking it through.
Basically Myrrhs Fraud is based on a single erroneous and badly sourced sentence on wikipedia
and from this he fraudulently throws around the number 67C a lot.
Myrrh, thanks for pointing out that the nasa.gov source makes no mention of any 67°C surface temperature. I let Wikipedia know. Maybe it’s you who’s been conned. Hope you can find another source.
Even if the number is true, I don’t see why it’s necessary to deny the obvious (things with temperatures radiate IR) to make your argument.
David N | January 26, 2013 at 2:08 pm | Myrrh, thanks for pointing out that the nasa.gov source makes no mention of any 67°C surface temperature. I let Wikipedia know. Maybe it’s you who’s been conned. Hope you can find another source.
Leave it be, it stands as a testament to the skullduggery of AGW/CAGW takeover of our science institutions. It used to be on that page, but as we see time and time again, real world physics has been replaced by the agenda driven AGWScienceFiction’s Greenhouse Effect even at the highest science levels. NASA used to teach that the heat we feel from the Sun is longwave infrared, thermal infrared, now it teaches that this doesn’t get through the atmosphere.
Even if the number is true, I don’t see why it’s necessary to deny the obvious (things with temperatures radiate IR) to make your argument.
It’s not easy to show the clever magic tricks behind your Greenhouse Effect, if it was easy to see no one would have been fooled by it.
Radiated IR from the Earth, upwelling, is insignificant in the scheme of things, that’s why the sleights of hand have eliminated real gas and substituted empty space with the theoretical ideal gas descriptions – you don’t have any atmosphere at all! You go straight from the surface to empty space.
You have no idea how much has been taken out of the real world to create the imaginary world of AGW’s Greenhouse Effect, because you don’t have traditional physics basics with which to compare.
It’s probably lost to the general population now.. That’s why you can’t grasp the enormity of the con, the cleverness behind it.
And so, can’t appreciate just how funny this AGW world is. No atmosphere, no water cycle, no rain in the carbon cycle, supermolecules defying gravity and with no attraction so no rain, and, no heat from the Sun/Sun’s heat can’t get through some unexplained invisible glass like barrier and replaced by visible light heating land and water – it really is a comic cartoon world.
The deliberate dumbing down of basic science for the masses to promote this AGW fictional Greenhouse Effect has been successful. All I’m hoping to do here is to get some of you to think about it, because the real world physics, natural philosophy, is wonderful in itself and our understanding of it has been a very recent phenomenon in the history of mankind. It’s a shame to lose it so quickly for the general population.
“It used to be on that page, but as we see time and time again, real world physics has been replaced by the agenda driven AGWScienceFiction’s Greenhouse Effect even at the highest science levels.”
First you appeal to a 67C figure that you admit you have no idea how it was calculated and you cannot reproduce the steps.
You believe it on faith alone. That isn’t science.
You appeal to bizarre 2nd gunman style conspiracy theories to cling to your AWOL sources.
That isn’t science.
For the final time. Explain exactly how the 67C figure is calculated.
And don’t say:
Wikipedia.
Myrrh, if I read between all the bitter accusations and conspiracy theories, it seems that you are arguing that evaporation plays a much larger role in cooling the surface than radiation than the general greenhouse effect model claims (about 25%).
If I might suggest…it would be more persuasive if you produced your proposed alternative energy budget, instead of pounding the table on theoretical temperatures in impossible situations.
lolwot | January 26, 2013 at 6:06 pm | “It used to be on that page, but as we see time and time again, real world physics has been replaced by the agenda driven AGWScienceFiction’s Greenhouse Effect even at the highest science levels.”
First you appeal to a 67C figure that you admit you have no idea how it was calculated and you cannot reproduce the steps.
You believe it on faith alone. That isn’t science.
You appeal to bizarre 2nd gunman style conspiracy theories to cling to your AWOL sources.
That isn’t science.
For the final time. Explain exactly how the 67C figure is calculated.
And don’t say:
Wikipedia.
How it’s calculated isn’t relevant to my argument. That it was calculated in traditional science is relevant to my argument.
I have zilch interest in being distracted by inane posturing about lasers, magnifying lenses or this red herring you’ve introduced because you have no real science to offer in rebuttal to my challenge.
I am showing the sleights of hand used in this con by giving traditional industry physics of temperatures, I gave the wiki page which gave the traditional figure and gave its source, the Source is not wiki it is NASA.
From what I’ve been researching I think it was still carried in 2009 and expunged in 2010.
The last time I heard it mentioned was in a programme about Hawaii a couple of years ago. The geologist from the university showed the water cycle there and said that without water the Earth would be 67°C.
If you understand the Water Cycle and the properties of water this makes sense; think deserts, think heat capacity, think water vapour lighter than air becoming heated and rising to condense back to liquid water or ice when it reaches the colder heights and releases its heat and so forming clouds and coming back to Earth in rain etc. . The power of water to cool the atmosphere is well understood, evaporation is well understood. Rain is well understood.
AGWSF’s Greenhouse Effect doesn’t have the Water Cycle. It doesn’t have rain in its Carbon Cycle. All rain is carbonic acid which is water and carbon dioxide joined together by attraction. AGWSF doesn’t have attraction, it has ideal gas elastic collisions… The residence time of water in the atmosphere is 8-10 days, so, carbon dioxide fully part of the water cycle has the same residence time with water.
Carbon dioxide is being continually washed out of the atmosphere in the Water Cycle.
That why you don’t have the Water Cycle, that’s why you don’t have rain which is carbonic acid in your Carbon Cycle – because real world physics blows the AGW Greenhouse Effect to smithereens.
Real world physics proves the AGW The Greenhouse Effect is a con, a science fraud from beginning to end..
So, shrug, if you’re not interested in exploring the sleights of hand that’s up to you, but I’ve given sufficient information from real world traditional physics to show that the fisics claims you, generic, make a) are fake and b) are impossible.
Evaporation and the great capacity of water to cool –
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycleevaporation.html
“In fact, the process of evaporation removes heat from the environment, which is why water evaporating from your skin cools you.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler
Typical of the now corrupted science from those who should know better excising rain from the Carbon Cycle: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/page5.php
Read it see how they’ve avoided mentioning carbonic acid rain in the cycle after first giving the AGW narrative science fraud that carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere..
“All of this extra carbon needs to go somewhere. So far, land plants and the ocean have taken up about 55 percent of the extra carbon people have put into the atmosphere while about 45 percent has stayed in the atmosphere. Eventually, the land and oceans will take up most of the extra carbon dioxide, but as much as 20 percent may remain in the atmosphere for many thousands of years.”
Up to you.
It seems lolwot thinks 1 molecule of CO2 in 2,500 could raise surface temperature by 85 degrees. Pretty hot stuff. LOL lolwot. Then water vapour cools it back to 33 degrees above the 255K. But the IPCC wanted WV to have positive feedback, not negative feedback as is implied by the well known fact that the wet adiabatic lapse rate is only about two-third of the dry one.
The facts are that the force of gravity has to be taken into account when applying the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which requires maximum possible entropy in thermodynamic equilibrium.
In fact, the redistribution of temperature by gravity tilts the thermal gradient to a point where surface temperature is raised about 50 C degrees, and then water vapour reduces the slope so that it’s only about an extra 33 degrees. But strictly speaking, the 255K is somewhat approximate because they treated the Earth as being flat.
Doug Cotton, you were quoting the theory of your friend Myrrh, not lolwot. Nobody believes the 67 C number except Myrrh. Also 255 K comes from a spherical earth, not a flat earth, but there are some “skeptics” using a flat earth to come up with higher forcings and temperatures.
Jim D | January 28, 2013 at 12:43 am | Doug Cotton, you were quoting the theory of your friend Myrrh, not lolwot. Nobody believes the 67 C number except Myrrh. Also 255 K comes from a spherical earth, not a flat earth, but there are some “skeptics” using a flat earth to come up with higher forcings and temperatures.
The 67°C is standard industry figure in traditional science – the properties of water are very well known. Water takes the heat out of the environment – it has a very great heat capacity which means it absorbs great amounts of heat before it shows any change in temperature.
Water vapour is lighter than the practically 100% heavy blanket of nitrogen and oxygen around us, the real gas fluid ocean of Air. As water evaporates at the surface from the direct thermal infrared heat from the Sun it rises and on reaching the colder heights it releases its stored heat energy up and away and condenses back into liquid water or ice, forms clouds and comes down as rain.
This is the Water Cycle, it is continuous. That’s why it is called a cycle. The residence time of water in the atmosphere is 8-10 days.
Carbon dioixide is fully part of that Water Cycle, because, all rain is carbonic acid, because water and carbon dioxide have a great attraction for each other. Water removes all the carbon dioxide around it in the same residence time of 8-10 in the Water Cycle.
So, there are two ways water cools here, taking out heat at the surface by cooling the immediate envioronment and taking this heat up and away from the surface in the colder heights, heat always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder.
Hot air rises cold air sinks. That’s how we get our huge equator to poles winds and dramatic stormy weather, by differential heating at the surface.
The Water Cycle has been taken out of the AGWScienceFiction’s Greenhouse Effect Energy Budget – deliberately to promote the illusion of their “33°C warming by ir imbibing greenhouse gases” – to hide this 67°C which the temp of the Earth would really be without them.
to hide this 67°C which the temp of the Earth would really be without them
That is the scam.
The 67°C figure is tradition real word physics based on real world properties and processes of real gas molecules under gravity.
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-book/oceansandclimate.htm
“Earth with a static atmosphere and no ocean
If the earth had a static atmosphere with the same gases it has now, but with little water vapor and no ocean, the average surface temperature of earth would be 67°C (153°F). ”
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-book/oceansandclimate.htm
AGWSF has tweaked all the physics basics creating the biggest science fraud in history to date. It has created a completely imaginary world with impossible properties of gases, light and heat, etc. Unless one desconstructs all their basic claims one won’t see just how they have accomplished this. This is what also creates more confusion in these arguments, when some who understand what AGWSF have done in in corrupting the basic physics in one area will take for granted corruption in another area in which they are not familiar.
And deliberately introduced into the education system we have a whole generation who are totally screwed on basic physical properties and proecess in the real world around us. If you really give a dman about science at all and climate science in particular then you should be affronted by what I am trying to tell you, not with me, but with those who introduced this and with those science institutions and universities who continue to teach this fake fisics..
Myrrh,
From the webpage you cited:
and:
… the important bits being:
Most of the ocean is a deep navy blue, almost black. It absorbs 98% of the solar radiation when the sun is high in the sky.
and:
The planet would be so hot because greenhouse gases in the atmosphere help keep heat near the surface
David N | January 28, 2013 at 8:13 am | Myrrh,
From the webpage you cited:
“Most of the sunlight absorbed by earth is absorbed at the top of the tropical ocean. The atmosphere does not absorb much sunlight. It is too transparent. Think of a cold, sunny, winter day at your school. All day long, the sun shines on the outside, but the air stays cold. But if you wear a black coat outside and stand out of the wind, the sun will quickly warm up your coat. Sunlight passes through the air and warms the surface of the ocean, just as it warms the surface of your coat. Most of the ocean is a deep navy blue, almost black. It absorbs 98% of the solar radiation when the sun is high in the sky.”
So? Unless you, you, can show that visible light from the Sun heats the land and water of the Earth’s surface you have no heat from the Sun in your world. Because AGWScienceFiction has taken out the direct heat from the Sun, thermal infrared, and claims that visible light does this heating..
It’s for you to show visible light from the Sun can physically do this, and until you, and generic, really do this, you live in a world without heat from the Sun – doesn’t that bother you?
We cannot feel Light. We cannot feel shortwave infrared which is classed as Reflective not Thermal. The great heat we feel from the Sun is thermal infrared, longwave infrared, that is the Sun’s thermal energy in transfer by radiation. It heats matter by moving the molecules into vibration. Water is a great absorber of this direct, beam, heat from the Sun – and so are we as it penetrates several inches into us and heats the water in us, heats our blood and flesh and bone as we absorb it.
and:
“If the earth had a static atmosphere with the same gases it has now, but with little water vapor and no ocean, the average surface temperature of earth would be 67°C (153°F). This is much warmer than our earth. The planet would be so hot because greenhouse gases in the atmosphere help keep heat near the surface, and because there is no convection, and no transport of heat by winds. Adding winds cools the planet a little, but not enough.”
The greenhouse gases in traditional physics from which this figure comes are the practically 100% of our atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen. The traditional greenhouse is these plus water, as in a real world greenhouse designed to obtain optimum growing conditions by both trapping heat and by cooling.
The heavy voluminous real gas thermal blanket around the Earth of nitrogen and oxygen kept in place by gravity and heated from the surface first heated by the Sun, is the heating part. This thick real greenhouse gas thermal blanket keeps the heat from the Earth from being lost quickly as it is on the Moon without an atmosphere. With this in place but without water (the main AGW greenhouse gas) the temperature would 67°C, as he says, these are the traditional greenhouse gases of our greenhouse gas atmosphere in real world physics.
So what does he mean here? Is he using “greenhouse gases” in the traditional sense meaning the thick heavy blanket of nitrogen and oxygen, is he confused and actually thinks the trace ir imbibing gases that are left after water is taken out are really capable of raising the Earth’s temperature from minus 18°C it would be without any atmosphere which is practically 100% nitrogen and oxygen, or, is he being ambiguous to get past the pc consensus censors..?
You decide. I have now read countless explanations of the AGWSF greenhouse effect and most of the time there is just confused thinking of mixing and matching memes, but every now and then I come across, as here, information from real world physics but couched in seemingly ambiguous terms. There are of course also pages as I gave above the NASA page on the Carbon Cycle. This appears to me to be deliberately and cleverly written knowingly taking rain out of the cycle, because, whoever wrote it mentions carbonic acid several times, but only connecting the great absorption of carbon dioxide by water of the ocean. I don’t find it credible that the writer didn’t know that water in the atmosphere is likewise a great absorber of carbon dioxide, that the writer didn’t know that all natural rain is also carbonic acid…
Oh, and your first quote is from Robert Stewart who wrote the piece and and the second is a quote from George Philander’s book, Our Affair With El Niño, chapter 7: Constructing a Model of Earth’s Climate, page 105.
You have to bear in mind that AGW fake fisics memes have been in general education for some time now, clear references to traditional physics will be difficult to find. I’ve seen lots of pages doctored. Connolley (sp?) altered thousands of enteries in wiki to take out traditional physics which conflicted with his AGW narrative, for example.
The NASA quotes I give about the thermal infrared from the Sun being the heat we feel and that we can’t feel shortwave infrared (it’s classed with Light traditionally) was taken off line completely at one time. They gave notice that they would be doing this and I tried to save it on webcite, but it disappeared from there too. There seems to have been something of a kerfuffle at NASA over this, because a few days later it was back on line.. Still with the notice that it would disappear and redirection to a new narrative without the traditional teaching. NASA now has the full on AGWSF which claims that infrared doesn’t get through the atmosphere. If you’re interested I’ll dig out my post where I discovered this was happening.
Anyway, regardless of any ambiguity in that piece and for whatever reason, it does give the two figures from traditional physics which I’ve given.
It correctly gives the minus 18°C figures as the Earth without any atmosphere at all, and not as the AGWSF Greenhouse Effect has it, that this is the temperature of the Earth with nitrogen and oxygen in place and only minus their version of greenhouse gases, the ir imbibing ones which is mainly water.
And it correctly gives the 67°C temperature of the Earth without water but with the rest of the atmosphere in place, the practically 100& oxygen and nitrogen thermal blanket.
When you know this you can see how silly the idea that a trace gas can be substituted for the heavy weighing down on us fourteen pound on every square inch real the thermal blanket of nitrogen and oxygen ..
You should be able to see from this the AGWSF Greenhouse Effect illusion of “33°C warming ir imbibing greenhouse gases, mainly water”, there’s no connecting logic from the -18 direct to the 15. And see how this is a clever combination of sleights of hand, changing meanings from real physics etc.
Ever the optimist.., perhaps the silence from you is from intense cogitation?
WUWT has a new post on Connolley’s shenanigans at wiki, this time because the Germans have taken note of it:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/30/wikipedia-climate-fiddler-william-connolley-is-in-the-news-again/#comment-1212755
There are other links given in posts to more stories about him, but I think Caleb makes an interesting point, that the Germans in getting to know about this could be quite irate about being taken for yet another ride..
Lew Skannen, one of several giving their experiences with Connolley the conman corrupting the science and adjusting the climate narrative to his Green agenda, has a suggestion: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/30/wikipedia-climate-fiddler-william-connolley-is-in-the-news-again/#comment-1212773
There is no AGW The Greenhouse Effect – science fictions require continual corruption to keep them going, not science facts.
What happened to the December 2012 global mean temperature? I’ve been tracking Hadcrut3 since 2008 (using Tamino’s YouBet methodology, but on 1975-2004, to see if GMST can break through the the bottom of 2*SD from the trend) and this is the first time the temperature has been that low in the 21C without a la-nina influence. In fact one of the things that had struck me about GMST is how quickly it bounced back when la-nina relaxed, and this fact had convinced me that while temperatures might be flat there was also no “pressure” to bring GMST down.
December 2012 looks anomalous, and given its across all the datasets it isn’t due to methodology. Perhaps it’s connected to el-nino blowing itself out in the autumn–but that looked weird too. Any thoughts?
I agree with you on the absence of “pressure”. I think they’re underestimating arctic warming.
It is the moon, stupid
I stumbled over this
http://ansatte.hials.no/hy/climate/defaultEng.htm
A collection of papers claiming that the arctic climate is influenced by the moon’s nodal (18,6 year) cycles (the 2006 papers)
Cyclic tidal waves influenced by the moon cycles varies the vertical stirring of the surface water and it also changes the flow of the sea currents.
An interesting theory, but I am not the right person to evaluate it.
Someone here who can?
“An interesting theory, but I am not the right person to evaluate it. Someone here who can? ”
Any pseudo-theory that claims to explains warming, independently of any human influence, will be evaluated positively by most so-called sceptics on this blog. Their scepticism tends to vanish just when it would be most useful to them!
Turn it around.
OK.
Their scepticism tends to vanish just when it would be most useful to them! Any pseudo-theory that claims to explains warming, independently of any human influence, will be evaluated positively by most so-called sceptics on this blog.
It is definitely not at pseudo-theory and it is not a theory on warming, but a theory on how ocean currents are directed to different local areas in the northern parts of the Atlantic Ocean influenced by small changes in gravity.
It gives a good explanation about variations in local fishery and the extent of the sea ice, because the various sub-currents have different temperature and different plankton content.
tempterrain, you’re right, skeptics are not skeptical of the null hypothesis (no ACO2 effect basically). To miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult.
It’s the warmists who insist on mechanism if the paradigm is to be shifted.
Just looking at the graph there’s a significant possibility that the observed signal is statistically much less significant than thought by the author. The deep dip around 1920 is so strong that it alone can influence the outcome very much. Such a single strong deviation may well dominate the outcome and the observed period be determined by it’s location relative to one or two maximums.
When the outcome is determined by so few minimums and maximums there isn’t enough evidence for any conclusion about periodicity. The apparent statistical significance involves implicit assumptions about periodicity, but gives little evi