Open thread weekend

Posted on August 23, 2013 by | 333 Comments

by Judith Curry

It’s your turn to introduce topics for discussion.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

333 responses to “Open thread weekend”

  1. Bill | August 23, 2013 at 9:04 pm |

    Zippiddity-da! Discuss.

    • Wagathon | August 23, 2013 at 10:42 pm |

      Honesty in academia has been an epic fail and a love of honesty is STEP No. 1 in the scientific method. Because of the high degree of anti-science that we have seen in America and in the bureaucracies of government and in the media and most especially in the halls of the government-education complex it is useful to take a step back for a skeptics’ moment and practice being an observer of global warming as an example of a pathological science gone mainstream and have the courage to be honest about our limitations.

  2. johanna | August 23, 2013 at 9:08 pm |

    I’ve been following the anti-fracking demo at Balscombe in the UK over at the Bishop’s with interest and amusement. If you want a good laugh, go over there and read the “Oodles of Noodles” post and follow the link. Note that the site of the demo is where oil drilling, not shale gas fracking, is proposed. Details,details! It’s the Cause that matters! :)

    Anyway, since there are mostly North American readers here, I was wondering how the anti-frackers are going over there. Any goss?

    • Harold | August 23, 2013 at 9:22 pm |

      Depends on the state. In the coastal states, they’re preventing it. There’s a lot of gas in both Pennsylvania and New York State. They’re fracking like mad in Pennsylvania, and it’s illegal across the border to the north. They’re preventing it in California, even though they’ve got astronomical reserves. In the center of the country, from the Canadian border to the Mexican border, they’re drilling all kinds of oil.

      I’m sure Putin smiles every time the anti-frackers succeed, but they seem to be on the losing end these days. It puts them at cross purposes with the unions, for one thing. It’s all a big mess.

      And speaking of big messes, don’t forget that the Canadian oil pipeline hasn’t gone away, either. The antis are expending so much energy on that that they can’t quite handle opposing fracking at the same time. The pipeline, like CAGW, is the hill they’ve decided to die on.

      • johanna | August 23, 2013 at 9:41 pm |

        Thanks Harold. Another example of why unitary systems of government are a Bad Thing. At least some of the population have a chance of getting decent decisions.

        As for California, I just don’t understand how they keep defying the laws of gravity (and economics) with the decisions they make. Why, if the Gold Rush of the mid C19th happened now, I bet my house they’d ban gold prospecting and mining. As they still seem to be afloat, I can only conclude that they started out a long way ahead of the pack.

        Re the pipeline, the news coverage is very confusing to this overseas reader. Some people say that Obama is trying to weasel his way into allowing it while pretending otherwise, and others say he will never allow it. Any insights on that?

      • Harold | August 23, 2013 at 10:07 pm |

        California is a very complicated topic. I’d recommend reading some things by Victor Davis Hanson to try to understand that knot. A more naturally endowed place on this planet doesn’t exist, but for the first time in history, the last census showed a decline in population.

        Obama’s getting pressure from the green groups to hold the line against the pipeline, and pressure from the unions to allow it. It’s hard to tell who’ll win that tug-of-war. However, technically, it’s John Kerry’s decision. Kerry’s a very rich hard-core Massachusetts green. If he ends up approving it, it’s going to be because he’s forced to.

        I’d expect that fight to go on until the Canadians finally get sick of it and build the pipeline to the Pacific instead. But who knows? I sure don’t.

      • RiHo08 | August 23, 2013 at 10:09 pm |

        Johanna

        Re: Keystone Pipeline. The reality is the refineries for the Canadian oil sands type of crude are in Texas. These are the same ones used to refine Venezuela oil from Lake Maracaibo. The Canadian supply is much more stable than the Venezuela supply.

        The important weasel words from POTUS is “carbon neutral”. The case for Canadian supply is that it will be mined and transported someplace. Stopping the Keystone Pipeline does not stop Canadian oil from being used; therefore, the pipeline is “carbon neutral.”

        Unions and Republicans see Keystone as a private jobs program. The military see a supply of oil that does not require keeping a Arabian Peninsula force in place. Win Win.

        Environmentalists, at least the billionaire ones who helped bankroll Obama are the only obstacle. Obama is stalling for time, and, “time wounds all heels.”

      • johanna | August 24, 2013 at 12:03 am |

        Harold, thanks for referring me to Victor Davis Hanson. I am working my way through his columns, and they are excellent. He writes wonderfully, as well as having some great insights into contemporary culture.

        Haven’t come across anything about California specifically yet, but look forward to reading about it in due course.

      • johanna | August 24, 2013 at 12:49 am |

        OK, I found one Harold.

        “Here in central California there are predictable themes to the new environmentalism: Land that could produce food and provide jobs will be idled to protect a bait fish in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta. Rivers that are critical to irrigation and are anchors of the economy will be diverted to their 19th-century course in order to fulfill the dream of salmon runs through a desert-like San Joaquin Valley, and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of gas and oil that could be fracked and provide jobs for communities suffering 10-plus percent unemployment will be ignored. On one side, there are academics, lawyers, high government officials, those with inherited wealth, and those with enough capital to easily afford the higher taxes and higher costs of fuel, power, and food that are the inevitable wages of their own boutique ideology. On the other side, there are the apparent losers and clingers who are out of work, who pay over $4 a gallon for gas for their silly used Dodge Ram trucks, and who stupidly splurge by turning their air conditioners on for an hour or two a day in 108-degree Fresno.

        In the real world, the tiny delta smelt is a good psychological totem for a well-paid Google exec in Mountain View, who doesn’t mind paying a little more for his arugula or paying higher sales taxes. But the worship of a bait fish is not shared by Manuel Lopez, a tractor driver in Bakersfield who has no more fields to disc this summer. Those in breezy, cool Malibu hate coal, and apparently believe those who mine it would be better off on food stamps and unemployment insurance, which the generous seaside denizens would so selflessly be willing to pay for.”

        (From “Liberal Apartheid”, July 2, 2013)

        I think I get the drift. :)

      • Faustino | August 24, 2013 at 2:52 am |

        johanna, “As they still seem to be afloat, I can only conclude that they started out a long way ahead of the pack.” My recollection is that for many years California’s per capita income was way ahead of other states, if it were a country, its GDP would have placed it as about sixth or seventh richest country in the world. So, yes, it could afford some insanity.

      • Harold | August 24, 2013 at 10:20 am |

        As I was suspecting:

        http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/318507-inquiry-by-state-dept-internal-watchdog-could-delay-keystone-xl-decision-until-14

        This will be kicked town the road until after the ’14 elections, and then killed. Canada needs to wake up and build the pipeline to the Pacific. Now.

    • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | August 24, 2013 at 9:08 am |

      ” johanna | August 23, 2013 at 9:08 pm

      Anyway, since there are mostly North American readers here, ”

      Are you delusional?

      A post goes up on Friday night. No one in North America is going to read the comments or fully participate until the next morning! So during the night, all we get is crazed theorizing by a bunch of Australian larrikins, and a few Europeans that are six hours ahead.

      For once, I would like to see a post go up around 9AM in the morning, Georgia time !

      The point is that the initial commentary is very imbalanced.

    • Mickey Reno | August 24, 2013 at 9:45 am |

      Here’s a Canadian version of Balscombe.
      http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/video/2609351212001

      • jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 9:55 am |

        That is absolutely true. A member of my family was a professional protester – progressive in nature. His special interest group would team up with other progressive groups to organize the protest. If his was the “point” group, members of his group would decide up front who would push to the limit of getting arrested. He once chained himself to the fence of a nuclear power plant. He budgeted for bail money. The right needs to do the same – it has gotten to that point.

      • DocMartyn | August 24, 2013 at 3:25 pm |

        Jim2, the right can’t do the same, we have jobs.

      • johanna | August 24, 2013 at 6:10 pm |

        Mickey, thanks very much for that. It takes a lot for me to sit through a 45 minute program via an anonymous person on the internet, but I was riveted from the start.

        A slight cultural digression – whereas the Bishop Hill link on “oodles of noodles” depicted serial protesters in an Monty Pythonesque way – without any need of assistance by the compilers – this was a more serious, Canadian approach, albeit with a dash of Penn & Teller.

        It is, of course, a polemic – and a very entertaining one. But it is also a much better forensic examination of protest movements than the MSM ever gives us.

        My question is: how do these professional protesters afford room and board, let alone international flights between the UK and Canada?

        I might add that the sight of the professional protestrix shushing the indigeneous fellow lest he say the wrong thing was truly disgusting.

      • jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 6:54 pm |

        @DocMartyn | August 24, 2013 at 3:25 pm |
        That’s true, Doc. Most conservatives do have jobs and it really sucks that the leeches of society have so much spare time travel around and protest. The family member I know took up protesting at retirement. The odd thing was he served in the Army, the Marines, and worked all his life.

        Anyway, for any given protest, the various interest groups attend each others protests. So, for an anti-nuke protest, the anti-nuke group would lead the protest and some of them would go to jail. The other groups; gay rights, anti-coal, animal “rights,” what have you; were there just to make it a bigger group – good for the image in the press and for politicians.

        A scam is still a scam in my book, however.

  3. jim2 | August 23, 2013 at 9:12 pm |

    The USA slips further down the slippery slope of the Police State.
    **********************************
    Forced Exposure ~pj
    Tuesday, August 20 2013 @ 02:40 AM EDT

    The owner of Lavabit tells us that he’s stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we’d stop too.

    There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum.

    What to do?

    What to do? I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure it out. And the conclusion I’ve reached is that there is no way to continue doing Groklaw, not long term, which is incredibly sad. But it’s good to be realistic. And the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no matter how “clean” we all are ourselves from the standpoint of the screeners, I don’t know how to function in such an atmosphere. I don’t know how to do Groklaw like this.
    …
    I sound quaint, I suppose. But I always tell you the truth, and that is what I was feeling. So imagine how I feel now, imagining as I must what kind of world we are living in if the governments of the world think total surveillance is an appropriate thing?

    I know. It may not even be about that. But what if it is? Do we even know? I don’t know. What I do know is it’s not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7.
    …
    If you have to stay on the Internet, my research indicates that the short term safety from surveillance, to the degree that is even possible, is to use a service like Kolab for email, which is located in Switzerland, and hence is under different laws than the US, laws which attempt to afford more privacy to citizens. I have now gotten for myself an email there, p.jones at mykolab.com in case anyone wishes to contact me over something really important and feels squeamish about writing to an email address on a server in the US. But both emails still work. It’s your choice.

    My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it’s possible. I’m just an ordinary person. But I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I can’t stay online personally without losing my humanness, now that I know that ensuring privacy online is impossible. I find myself unable to write. I’ve always been a private person. That’s why I never wanted to be a celebrity and why I fought hard to maintain both my privacy and yours.

    Oddly, if everyone did that, leap off the Internet, the world’s economy would collapse, I suppose. I can’t really hope for that. But for me, the Internet is over.

    So this is the last Groklaw article. I won’t turn on comments. Thank you for all you’ve done. I will never forget you and our work together. I hope you’ll remember me too. I’m sorry I can’t overcome these feelings, but I yam what I yam, and I tried, but I can’t.
    *************************************
    http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175

    • Jim D | August 23, 2013 at 9:43 pm |

      Who is this person, and what is he doing that he is worried the government will find out?

      • jim2 | August 23, 2013 at 10:53 pm |

        The Groklaw web site came into being when a company named SCO acquired the right to Unix code and sued Linux sellers. A paralegal, a woman, started the blog and was joined by Linux geeks. They discussed the law and code surrounding Linux, examining the claims of SCO. As a sidebar, SCO was funded in part by Microsoft. At any rate, SCO eventually lost the law suit and Groklaw moved to discussions of security. Discussions of web security can be, well, sensitive. But the Groklaw lady is concerned more generally with her loss of privacy. I’m with her.

      • Jim D | August 23, 2013 at 11:00 pm |

        How about privacy from corporations like Google, Facebook or your phone company, or is it just government? We are in a world where the government via law enforcement can know as much as these corporations already do.

      • Harold | August 23, 2013 at 11:03 pm |

        If you don’t like Google, don’t use Google. Kinda hard to do that with the government, huh?

      • Jim D | August 23, 2013 at 11:37 pm |

        I have no reason to think this is a problem. Find some (true) scare stories and see if you really believe it could happen to you too. Otherwise it is just some form of paranoia.

    • Joshua | August 23, 2013 at 10:05 pm |

      jim2 –

      Are you using poured concrete or concrete blocks on your shelter?

      • timg56 | August 24, 2013 at 12:04 pm |

        Why bother when one can simply take from you whatever you have?

      • Joshua | August 24, 2013 at 1:27 pm |

        First, a logical problem:

        Why bother when one can simply take from you whatever you have?

        Huh? I have no bunker – whether it be poured concrete or cinder block – so how does taking anything from me relate to the question?

        Next, the ideological problem:

        If you think you’re being robbed, seek alternative arrangements. I hear that the weather in Mogadisihu isn’t too bad this time of year. It may take a little while, but you should be able to get Internet hookup there, so while we’ll miss you for a short while, it shouldn’t be for too long. Thanks God.

        Maybe Don can wave your pom-poms for you while you’re out of the pocket.

      • jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 1:47 pm |

        Americans ARE canceling their citizenship and moving to other countries. From what I have read, there are three main reasons:
        1. The wealthy move to escape taxes.
        2. Entrepreneurs move to escape onerous regulations that make starting and running a business very difficult.
        3. Retirees looking for a cheaper cost of living to extend their nest egss.

        In any case, the US loses wealth and talent.

    • Peter Davies | August 23, 2013 at 10:14 pm |

      The quotes from the Groklaw website seem to be a refection on the status of free thinking in the US at the moment.

      The successful prosecution of the junior army officer who leaked sensitive information to Wikileaks is an indictment of the standards of morality of certain US troops during the Iraqi war which had been exposed for the world to see.

      The fact that the US authorities chose to view this as an act of treachery rather than an act of whistle blowing is telling.

      It is obvious that much surveillance activity is more concerned with hiding unacceptable behaviour on the part of the countries that employ them than in maintaining security.

      What in the hell has happened to the freedom of speech in such countries? The age of political correctness is upon us and it all depends on where you live whether you have committed a crime or not.

  4. Diag | August 23, 2013 at 9:20 pm |

    One more quality so often lacking in the CAGW team members: dignity.

  5. M. Hastings | August 23, 2013 at 9:21 pm |

    I agree, you’ll need to use oversea servers that won’t release the info and may I add the data should be encrypted. But, does doing that make you a bigger target?

  6. Robert | August 23, 2013 at 9:24 pm |

    I begin to think that solar-based solar may be practical with current technology: http://theidiottracker.blogspot.com/2013/08/space-based-solar.html

    There are a number of interesting engineering problems, but they all seem to have practical solutions:

    1. Lifting the mass to LEO — current & proposed heavy lift rockets.
    2. LEO to GEO — ion thruster “tugboats” or similar.
    3. Lightweight, radiation-resistant PV — got it.
    4. Returning the power to earth — a microwave array.

    All very doable.

    • Robert | August 23, 2013 at 9:25 pm |

      Typo! Space-based solar.

    • LogicalChemist | August 23, 2013 at 9:59 pm |

      If you think there might be problems with nuclear waste what will you think about multimegawatt microwave transmitters pointing down at cities? If its aim wanders who gets cooked? We already have many folks questioning the current amount of radio frequency emissions in the air.

      • Robert | August 23, 2013 at 10:17 pm |

        You don’t need to aim the transmitters at cities. Wouldn’t be practical — the receiving array would have to be too large.

        And the radio emission worries are groundless.

      • k scott denison | August 23, 2013 at 10:38 pm |

        Yeah, nothing could possibly go wrong be deliberately beaming microwaves at the planet.

      • lolwot | August 24, 2013 at 5:24 am |

        haha simcity

      • AK | August 24, 2013 at 9:26 am |

        If its aim wanders who gets cooked?

        This is as stupid a scare story as the ones about the sea-level rising 10 feet next year (or whatever). The actual energy density of the proposed beam is no more than 10 times that of the sun (total), sort of what you might get standing next to your microwave.

        As for aim, an antenna that size will be a phased-array antenna, “aimed” by software-controlled timing of the signal in various parts of the antenna.

      • Tom | August 24, 2013 at 12:17 pm |

        Robert, How large would your subsidy be for all the aluminum hats?

      • David Springer | August 24, 2013 at 4:39 pm |

        The concern with microwave footprint on the surface (again, discussed to death decades ago) isn’t an issue as the power level isn’t high to enough to harm anything. There was some possibly valid concern about disrupting weather patterns with small amount of heating of the air column above rectenna farms. I doubt that would be significant but I’m sure the usual suspects back then, most of whom now seem to be climate scientists, would add that to their collection of negavities to nabobingly natter about.

    • David Springer | August 24, 2013 at 7:56 am |

      Chemical rockets for lifting mass into LEO is a deal breaker for any heavy industry in orbit. Space elevator makes it practical otherwise it’s a non-starter. There’s enough sunlight reaching the surface. Synthetic biology is the answer. See here for IMO the leading example:

      http://www.jouleunlimited.com/news/videos

      • AK | August 24, 2013 at 9:38 am |

        Chemical rockets for lifting mass into LEO is a deal breaker for any heavy industry in orbit.

        All the significant proposals for major space-side industry, including power, involve getting most of the mass from the moon, where it can be lifted directly into orbit from the surface using mass-drivers. Only seed technology (and people) need to be lifted from the Earth. This was demonstrated to be feasible as long ago as 1980.

        The argument about sunlight at the surface is valid, for the moment. However, in the long run (5-12 decades IMO) the value of “natural” surface will probably rise to the point that the price of surface-based solar power crosses that of space-based coming down.

        And the space elevator proposals involve an assumed “breakthrough” in materials technology that cannot, at this time, be predicted. There are other options, however, including building inflated structure high enough to lift a mass-driver above the atmosphere. Such things wouldn’t be practical near-term, however they wouldn’t require any significant breakthrough in materials or any other technology.

      • M. Hastings | August 24, 2013 at 10:13 am |

        I like the idea too will start investigating it more. One thing may be certain though, if this idea comes to fruition, people will start complaining we are not putting enough CO2 in the air.

      • David Springer | August 24, 2013 at 4:28 pm |

        Mass drivers on the moon were analyzed and costed back in the 1960’s and 1970’s. There have been no significant technological innovations since then to decrease the cost of doing it. This is the kind of stuff that Freeman Dyson, Carl Sagan (and many colleagues) were doing 40-50 years ago when they were in their prime. We all knew even back then (hard as it may be to believe) that fossil fuel was a finite resource and in 1973 the point was hammered home particularly well then reinforced again in 1979.

      • David Springer | August 24, 2013 at 4:54 pm |

        There’s way more than enough non-arable land available. Just a fraction of the Texas panhandle can supply the entire US at current consumption level. Plenty more where that came from on every continent except maybe Antarctica.

        The next step isn’t mass drivers on the moon it’s small ion propulsion pushes on asteroids and comets to capture them in earth orbit, LEO or GEO, whatever you want. Much larger range of industrial inputs on comets and asteroids than on the moon and cheap to get you just have to wait a long time for tiny propulsion units to nudge them into an earth orbit.

        We have a long way to go before we need to begin exploiting extra-terrestrial sources of materials. Again, this was all worked out many decades ago but at least something changed – there are practical ion-propulsion motors here now which were deemed doable but not done 40-50 years ago.

      • AK | August 24, 2013 at 4:57 pm |

        We all knew even back then (hard as it may be to believe) that fossil fuel was a finite resource and in 1973 the point was hammered home particularly well then reinforced again in 1979.

        In 1975 I attended the Space Resources Utilization Conference in Princeton, where the feasibility was discussed. There actually have been some relevant developments since then, especially in the field of high-temp superconductors. But the most important development has been the reduction in cost/price of IT for control systems, which was already expected back then to come down.

        The exponential reduction in costs involved in Lunar sourcing for materials with experience and technological development was already factored in to the proposed plans. It remains a completely feasible approach, given the will and a 2-3 decade lead-time. IMO (also the opinions of many with much experience in space technology.

      • David Springer | August 24, 2013 at 5:14 pm |

        Yeah yeah yeah. I heard it all before. I recommend you don’t hold your breath, so to speak, waiting for the program to get beyond the drawing board. If you think mining and refining and building shit is cheap enough to do on the moon because of robotics and factory automation try it first on a small scale proof of concept project somewhere way more friendly like Arizona or New Mexico. Keep track of how much mass you need to import to git ‘er done. Good luck.

      • David Springer | August 24, 2013 at 5:16 pm |

        Yeah yeah yeah. I heard it all before. I recommend you don’t hold your breath, so to speak, waiting for the program to get beyond the drawing board. If you think mining and refining and building stuff is cheap enough to do on the moon because of robotics and factory automation try it first on a small scale proof of concept project somewhere way more friendly like Arizona or New Mexico. Keep track of how much mass you need to import to git ‘er done and make sure everything is spec’d to work in vacumm and a 500F temperature swing including any people. Good luck.

    • timg56 | August 24, 2013 at 12:16 pm |

      Interesting link Robert.

      It might also have the benefit of getting a new generation excited about space.

    • RC Saumarez | August 24, 2013 at 1:05 pm |

      Amazing!

      Robert usually pops up to fulminate against electrical engineering. Having scanned the NASA document which describes this there seem to be a few problems with this concept that Robert saya is all very doable.

      It’s a lovely idea, and I hope that it might happen but there really seems to be quite a long way to go.

      If Robert knew a bit more about engineering, he might not be so so completely taken in by a theoretical study.

      • AK | August 24, 2013 at 1:39 pm |

        If Robert knew a bit more about engineering, he might not be so so completely taken in by a theoretical study.

        Quite a bit of it has been verified by actual proofs-of-concept.

      • RC Saumarez | August 24, 2013 at 4:28 pm |

        If you read the NASA document, there is some proof of concept already done, but there is a very large body of work that hasn’t. For example 1000 assembly robots work to build the array (supervised by 100 astronauts).

        The mass is enormous and even with new mass lifters, getting the assembly into orbit is a huge undertaking.

        I’m not saying it isn’t possible, but the remark that it’s all doable is pretty glib.

      • David Springer | August 24, 2013 at 5:06 pm |

        Here’s a good place to start looking into everything that was done in the 1970’s:

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Studies_Institute

    • Harold | August 24, 2013 at 1:08 pm |

      That’ll be great until the first study comes out claiming those terrawatt space rays cause cancer.

  7. Peter Lang | August 23, 2013 at 9:27 pm |

    What policies make sense?

    What is the probability the proposed policies would succeed in delivering the claimed benefits?

    What are the claimed benefits?

  8. A fan of *MORE* discourse | August 23, 2013 at 9:51 pm |

    July Adds To Globe’s Unbroken String of 341 Warm Months

    The year-to-date has been the sixth warmest on record globally, and July was also the sixth warmest such month since global surface temperature records first began in 1880, according to new data released on Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The figures show that July 2013 was the 37th straight July, and the 341st straight month, with warmer-than-average global temperatures — a more than 28-year timespan that reflects the significant warming observed worldwide since the 1970s.

    Gosh, it’s looking like James Hansen’s climate-change worldview is right, eh?

    Purely on the evidence, that is.

    \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}

    • Herman Alexander Pope | August 23, 2013 at 10:29 pm |

      The Roman Warm Period had a string of warmest months.
      The Medieval Warm Period had a string of warmest months.
      The Current warm Period has had a string of warmest months and this is not over yet.
      Every Warm Period has a string of warmest months. This is a warm period. This is normal and natural and necessary. It has to get warm and open the oceans to produce the snow for the next cold period. Hansen’s Climate-Change Worldview does not even have a clue to what really happens in normal natural climate cycles. He is an expert on reading and believing computer model output and no matter if it is right or if it meets the test of common sense.

      • A fan of *MORE* discourse | August 24, 2013 at 12:00 am |

        Herman Alexander Pope claims (wrongly)  “He [James Hansen] is an expert on reading and believing computer model output and no matter if it is right or if it meets the test of common sense.”

        Climate Etc folks are invited to download and read for themselves Hansen’s 1981 “started-the-CAGW-debate” article Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

        All of Hansen’s main conclusions follow from (relatively) simple thermodynamic arguments, and (relatively) simple data-plots, and (relatively) simple slide-rule-level calculations.

        Summary  Thirty-two years later, Hansen’s 1981 climate-change worldview has held up better than any computer model. Even today, Hansen’s style of climate-change science is not mainly driven by computer models, but rather is driven by basic thermodynamics, basic data inputs, and common-sense reasoning.

        Perhaps that’s why Hansen’s scientific work has proven to be pretty reliable, eh Herman Alexander Pope?

        \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}

      • Herman Alexander Pope | August 24, 2013 at 8:55 am |

        In the PDF it was written:

        For example, if the ocean warms but the
        air above the ice sheets remains below
        freezing, the effect could be increased
        snowfall, net ice sheet growth, and thus
        lowering of sea level.

        This is in fact what does happen during every warm period. It snows more and ice on land increases and sea level drops.

        Problem is, now this is happening and Consensus People either don’t realize it is happening or just don’t acknowledge it is happening.

        I finish reading the pdf to see if they got anything else right

      • Herman Alexander Pope | August 24, 2013 at 9:03 am |

        Last Paragraph in the PDF

        The climate change induced by anthropogenic
        release of CO2 is likely to be the
        most fascinating global geophysical experiment
        that man will ever conduct.
        The scientific task is to help determine
        the nature of future climatic effects as
        early as possible. The required efforts in
        global observations and climate analysis
        are challenging, but the benefits from
        improved understanding of climate will
        surely warrant the work invested.

        I am looking forward to this “improved understanding”
        They have a long way to go. two decades of failed forecasts is more than enough evidence to show there is something really important that they don’t yet understand. It is simple and the arctic will continue to open while the oceans are warm and the snow will fall and give them evidence they will be able to see.

      • Herman Alexander Pope | August 24, 2013 at 9:16 am |

        When the oceans are warm, the warm water flowing in the Polar Arctic melts the sea ice. That is the thermostat for earth. When the Polar Waters are warm and wet the snowfall is turned on and it stays on until the oceans get cold enough to allow the sea ice to form multi-year ice again and that is when the thermostat turns the snowfall off.
        If CO2 caused any warming, the cooling system will just run a little longer. It always snows as much as needed to bound and reverse every warming. This has happened every time in the same bounds for ten thousand years and is happening again now. Go look at actual data.

      • M. Hastings | August 24, 2013 at 2:55 pm |

        Fan, your link Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. is broke.

      • Herman Alexander Pope | August 26, 2013 at 10:57 am |

        Hansen believes in the Consensus Stuff. A Consensus Scientist is not Skeptical. Anyone who is not Skeptical is not A Scientist. What Hansen practices is more of a religion and not any kind of science.

        They do not understand that the Polar Ice Cycle is driving temperature and is not driven by Milanokivch and CO2 influence on temperature.

        The energy differences arriving at earth due to Milankovitch cycles are very small and CO2 influence for doubling is very small. The Consensus Clique does admit this. I have attended many lectures since April 2008, by the different sides. The numbers calculated by the Consensus Clique match well with the numbers calculated by the Skeptic Scientists and with the numbers calculated by others who are studying this. The Consensus People get the extreme heating from Feedbacks. Their so called Polar Ice Feedback is really in control of regulating earth’s thermostat. Radiation Cooling by Greenhouse gas dos the most of the cooling. Water Vapor and water drops take care of all of this except for a trace that the trace gas, CO2, takes care of and a tiny trace of other green house gases. The consensus cooling and heating does not have a thermostat with a set point. Earth clearly has a set point. The set point is the temperature that Polar Sea Water freezes and thaws. When oceans get warm, the polar ice melts and that turns on snowfall that puts an upper bound on temperature. It snows as much as necessary to cool the oceans enough that the Polar Oceans freezes and turn off the snowfall. When the snowfall is off, it don’t snow enough to replace the ice that melts every summer. The sun melts ice and warms the earth and the lower bound for temperature is established. The Albedo of earth is adjusted to maintain the Temperature near the Set Point. Just like the thermostat in my house, a small amount of energy can be used to maintain the temperature by turning on the AC when needed and turning it off when not needed.

        Earth turns on the snowfall when needed and turns off the snowfall when not needed. Small changes in energy maintain the temperature near the set point. The much larger cooling by The Radiation of Greenhouse Gas, mostly Water Vapor and Water Drops in Clouds, does not have a set point and before the Polar Ice Cycle evolved into the current configuration Radiation Cooling was bounded in a much larger range with no set point in between.

        Someday, some of the Skeptic Climate Scientists will put this Polar Ice Cycle into their Climate Models and they will start forecasting realistic Climate.

    • Donald Rapp | August 23, 2013 at 11:58 pm |

      This year I am the tallest I have ever been. In fact it is one of the tallest years I ever experienced.

      • angech | August 24, 2013 at 7:16 am |

        Fan first a pause, top of the hill, then down the slope. 17 year pause, that’s 204 months, next 139 months should be all (more or less) downhill.
        No hockey stick up is there, what a shame.
        I mean to imagine one in the first place.
        I would imagine the first months with cooler than average global temperatures will be in January or February 2014 so not too late to wait is it . Unlike Nevin who now ties ice free arctics to the IPCC 2100 estimate of 2100. How he must be laughing at some of his follower’s guesses of zero ice this year.

      • pokerguy | August 24, 2013 at 7:32 am |

        “tallest”
        This is simply a dumb analogy. There are so many persuasive, logically sound skeptical arguments. Why not choose one instead of this drivel.

    • DocMartyn | August 24, 2013 at 9:24 am |

      Just like Elaine Benes, the NOAA’s data presentation is fake, fake, fake.

    • DocMartyn | August 24, 2013 at 1:06 pm |

      Hansen is one of the very few people who talks more crap than FOMD.
      Just how well did Hansens predictions match reality.

      http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0177432c0621970d-pi

      • Bob Droege | August 24, 2013 at 2:18 pm |

        Hansen’s 1981 article put climate sensitivity between 2 and 3,5 C for doubling between 300 and 600 ppm CO2, how does that compare to more recent estimates?

      • David Springer | August 26, 2013 at 10:03 am |

        Frickin’ excellent, Doc. This is exactly where the rubber meets the road. We are -below- Hansen’s projected temperature for the “CO2 reduced to zero impact by 2000”. Looks like we overshot the mark. I think congratulations are in order. I’m crediting windmills, compact flurescent bulbs, and the Prius. But we’ve done enough of these things.

        Here’s a real gem from realclimate.org, the same graph only posted in 2007 with real-world data ending in 2005 before climate change clowns grokked the stoppage in global average temperature rise.

        http://www.realclimate.org/images/Hansen06_fig2.jpg

        Absolutely precious. I’m surprised they haven’t thrown this proof of stupid down the memory hole yet.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 26, 2013 at 10:54 am |

        Bob Droege, “Hansen’s 1981 article put climate sensitivity between 2 and 3,5 C for doubling between 300 and 600 ppm CO2, how does that compare to more recent estimates?”

        Still high, current best estimates are closing in on 1.6C so Hansen was still way high with an average 3.25 C degrees. They screwed up. Not that hard to say. “Oopsy, we got a sign wrong.’

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 26, 2013 at 10:57 am |

        David Springer, we should give them nifty little gold stars and merit badges then end that no climate scientist left behind program. They deserve “special” projects in the future.

  9. Mike Flynn | August 23, 2013 at 9:57 pm |

    All,

    I had posted this on an inappropriate thread, so here it is again in hopefully a better place.

    It occurs to me that the Earth’s average surface temperature, (however defined) must have been at some point 2C higher than now. I know I am stating the obvious, but some people refuse to accept that the Earth has cooled from its creation to now, and you can’t skip temperatures on the way down. The average surface temperature had to pass through 1000C, 500C, 300C, and so on.

    Is there any research that indicates what the conditions around the globe were during the periods of higher temperature regimes? If not 2C hotter, then 10C, or something in between.

    It would be interesting to know this, as there seems to be some trepidation about a future rise of temperature of a couple of degrees. As it has certainly happened in the fairly recent past as the Earth cooled, what were conditions like throughout the world.

    I have searched as best I can, but I don’t have academic access, which at least some of the commenters on this blog obviously have.

    There are some studies about localised archeo climate, but given a particular date BCE, research shows only that one locality was warmer, another was colder, and so on. Nothing about the global temperature.

    Can anybody help?

    Live well and prosper,

    Mike Flynn.

    • Jim D | August 23, 2013 at 10:10 pm |

      It is more useful to look when CO2 levels were last 500 ppm or higher in the Eocene, twenty million years ago. The levels generally declined from something in excess of 1000 ppm to those levels from 50 million years ago, a period known as the Eocene hothouse with no Arctic ice (or Greenland), just lush vegetation and evidence of reptiles, and the Antarctic only glaciated as it cooled towards the end. Deep ocean temperatures were 14 C warmer in the warmest part of the Eocene that coincided with the highest CO2 levels. We can learn a lot from parallels with the Eocene.

      • Jim D | August 23, 2013 at 10:32 pm |

        Correction: the Eocene was actually prior to Antarctica’s glaciation, ending about 35 million years ago. It was the warmest part of the current Cenozoic Era.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 23, 2013 at 10:46 pm |

        JimD, “Correction: the Eocene was actually prior to Antarctica’s glaciation, ending about 35 million years ago. It was the warmest part of the current Cenozoic Era.”

        Right, Since then the Antarctic became Isolated, submarine ridges formed, Panama closed, there were about 20 magnetic field reversals, man figure out the fire thing. Now CO2 is going to shove South America back into the Antarctic ripping central America a new one and Iguana will rule the world.

      • Jim D | August 23, 2013 at 10:53 pm |

        Look at the Cenozoic paper I linked. See what you don’t like there. I don’t think anyone claimed that ocean circulation changes can lead to 14 C warming, but go ahead and look for it. Mike probably will want to believe you, but he may need evidence first.

      • Herman Alexander Pope | August 23, 2013 at 11:13 pm |

        Jim D
        Ocean circulation changes is a key factor in the development of Polar Ice. The Polar Ice Cycle was a major player in the Major Ice Ages and Major Warm Periods and the Polar Ice Cycle is a major player in the Modern Warming and Cooling Cycles. I look for it and I find it in the Ice Core Data.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 23, 2013 at 11:17 pm |

        JimD, The abrupt change due to the Drake passage is only on the order of 4-6 C but that doesn’t include the gradual change before that.

        Van de Wal et al produced a 20 million year CO2 reconstruction
        http://www.clim-past.net/7/1459/2011/cp-7-1459-2011.html

        and you have seen the Toggweiler / Brierley references to the meridional and zonal impacts of ocean heat transport, but I am sure you are so convinced it is useless.

      • Jim D | August 23, 2013 at 11:46 pm |

        captd, the period since 20 million years ago was quite flat until the Ice Ages started. Check out what happened in the Eocene between 50 and 35 million years ago. A better signal to noise ratio back then with temperature and CO2.

      • Mike Flynn | August 24, 2013 at 2:53 am |

        Jim D,

        Thanks for the info. The Period covers the temperature range of interest. I’m not so interested as CO2 levels, but rather to see if there is any useful data about land conditions, sea heights and so on.

        It still doesn’t look it. This is not really surprising, given the difficulties inherent in looking into the past.

        Thank you anyway.

        Live well and prosper,

        Mike Flynn.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 24, 2013 at 7:41 am |

        JimD, “captd, the period since 20 million years ago was quite flat until the Ice Ages started. Check out what happened in the Eocene between 50 and 35 million years ago. A better signal to noise ratio back then with temperature and CO2.”

        Picking an arbitrary starting point isn’t likely to be very helpful. Working back from today, which we are more concerned about, is a better approach giving you a better chance of figuring out the impact of overall forcing change with time.

        The opening of the Drake Passage for example changes the ocean mixing rate which changes the response time to forcing. Since you have a precessional cycle of ~20,000 years, you can use that as one reference and back track until it doesn’t have a significant signal. That gives you an estimate of the change in sensitivity for a ~20,000 year time constant. The higher CO2 sensitivity is, the longer a +/- 40 Wm-2 forcing change should be clearly seen in the record. When you get past the Ice ages, the ~20,000 signal should decrease since ice albedo is a major feed back for that signal. That makes it pretty obvious that “Sensitivity” changes.

        Another way if you must start at the least understood time is to consider using CO2 as your reference or tracer gas. With say 700 ppmv change and 14 C temperature change you can figure out how long it takes on average to realize the full estimated sensitivity. Take your best shot at getting a fit that works for the longest time period without creating those unfortunate cause/effect switcheroos.

        You should find out that over that long a time frame something else must have changed other than CO2, Solar and land/ocean orientation, because there is not one single theory that fits every period accurately enough to estimate climate sensitivity to CO2 forcing using paleo without considering changes in ocean heat transport.

        http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/w4937/Readings/Brierley%20and%20Fedorov.2010.pdf

        Since it could take 20 to 30 million years to transition into another alarming hot house Earth, perhaps we should prepare for major impact events instead of worrying about CO2?

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 11:00 am |

        Mike Flynn, I think a melted Greenland would provide about 10 meters and Antarctic 60 more meters of sea level, so that is where it would have been 50 million years ago. The Tropics plus 10 degrees would be humanly uninhabitable in the more humid areas, so this would include large areas that are now populated. Beach resorts would be on the Arctic Ocean. There is a lot of interest and understanding in paleoclimates because of obvious analogies. If we see that the last time we had 700 ppm Antarctica was not glaciated, and the next time might be 2100, we may see that Antarctica would be on its way to irreversible melting. Worth a passing thought at least.

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 11:08 am |

        captd, there are some long-term feedbacks that increase the sensitivity. It takes a long time for the large glaciers to melt and provide their albedo feedbacks, and also the Arctic tundras tend to vegetate towards darker forests giving another positive albedo feedback, so unsurprisingly they have come up with long-term sensitivities of 5-6 C per doubling using the Eocene conditions as a measure. The transient phase is quite long, but not reversible without removing CO2.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 24, 2013 at 11:51 am |

        Jimd, “The transient phase is quite long, but not reversible without removing CO2.”
        There are ways to reverse it without CO2. If sensitivity is high, volcanic events would have no problem driving the NH high latitudes toward an ice age. The snow/ice coverage is a stronger albedo factor than vegetation. There are plenty of places where CO2 lags cooling. With more CO2 is just takes a little bit bigger event.

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 4:49 pm |

        captd, as this progresses, snow/ice will be a thing of the past, so that simplifies things a bit.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 24, 2013 at 5:28 pm |

        JimD, “captd, as this progresses, snow/ice will be a thing of the past, so that simplifies things a bit.”

        So you got a part time job with MET? Annual snow cover will likely be around for quite a while but hold over snow cover is unlikely any where there is human activity. That hold over snow at progressively lower altitudes is what provides the largest feedback. If you assume everything is due to CO2 you get a “sensitivity” of about 4.5 to 10 C per doubling provided you use the full glacial minimum to interglacial maximum. Once the snow ice feedback slows down, “sensitivity” decreases. Since Solar is considered the most likely trigger for deglaciation, it is unlikely that all of that “sensitivity” is “mainly” CO2. The standard guess has been half or less, but the various feed backs are too complex and non-linear to confirm.

        What we do know pretty well is that a doubling of CO2 will produce ~3.7Wm-2 of added resistance to heat loss and that 3.7Wm-2 of added resistance will be less efficient than the 3.7Wm-2 applied before it. That makes the no feedback “sensitivity” ~0.80 to 1.12 C per 3.7 Wm-2 per forcing. Anything more than that has not been verified. 1.6C per doubling is becoming popular and since scientists are a sensitive lot, it will decrease slowly as more evidence comes in so the apple cart doesn’t get upset. Scientific inertia is a strange but real phenomena.

        Fewer of the “mainstream” climate scientists with career ambition are using past hot house or Snowball Earths as illustrations of the Power of CO2 because there are quite a few paradoxes that have to be resolved that likely involve other than simple radiant forcing, ocean heat transport, biological activity, dust/ash and land mass orientation/altitude for a few.

        So your referencing conditions 30 to 80 million years ago is about as current as Mann’s hockey stick.

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 5:44 pm |

        captd, yes, there are even skeptics who believe ice albedo can be a positive feedback while water vapor can’t. Both respond to warmer temperatures, so it is inconsistent thinking at best, isn’t it.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 24, 2013 at 5:54 pm |

        JimD, “captd, yes, there are even skeptics who believe ice albedo can be a positive feedback while water vapor can’t. Both respond to warmer temperatures, so it is inconsistent thinking at best, isn’t it.”

        Combined, ice and water vapor are regulators more than simple stand alone feed backs. When there is more ice there is less water vapor and vice versa. That makes 0C a control set point. With the current atmospheric specific heat capacity and barometric pressure, 30 C water vapor set point. Climate will operate between those two H2O set points. Simplistic discussions of generic feed backs are a bit tired.

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 5:59 pm |

        The only thing setting a limit on the water vapor is the temperature. It acts as a lid on vapor globally. Raising the lid (temperature) allows the water vapor to increase. More specifically it is the ocean surface temperature that sets the column water vapor. It’s thermodynamics.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 24, 2013 at 6:23 pm |

        JimD, “The only thing setting a limit on the water vapor is the temperature. It acts as a lid on vapor globally. Raising the lid (temperature) allows the water vapor to increase. More specifically it is the ocean surface temperature that sets the column water vapor. It’s thermodynamics.”

        That must be a special type of thermodynamics for liberal arts majors. Temperature, pressure and volume are the major limits with purity also a consideration. As temperature increases with a constant pressure the latent heat content at saturation increases exponentially. You reach a point at ~300K 1000mb where the latent heat loss per C equals the energy required to increase the water by 1 C. That makes water vapor a regulator not a linear feed back.

        That is one of the reason I thought most of you were nuts to be assuming the average SST is ~16 to 17 C based on engine intake or buckets. The average SST of the NH oceans is nearly 20 C and the SH oceans nearly 17C. If you underestimate the average SST you would over estimate “sensitivity”. Guess by how much?

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 6:45 pm |

        captd, so your conclusion would be that you can’t boil water because of the latent heat loss keeping it to 20 C? It doesn’t look like any scientific idea I have seen before. Do you have proof?

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 24, 2013 at 7:11 pm |

        JimD, “captd, so your conclusion would be that you can’t boil water because of the latent heat loss keeping it to 20 C? It doesn’t look like any scientific idea I have seen before. Do you have proof?”

        No, it is more like if you are boiling water you can add all the heat you want but the temperature of the boiling water stays at 100 C unless you add pressure. Tell that you need proof of that.

        So to increase average “surface” temperature, the area at ~30 has to expand poleward. Then you have the two “surface” problem. With ~88Wm-2 global 24hr average latent heat loss the atmosphere absorbs 150Wm-2 during the day period with 330 Wm-2 absorbed on average at the true surface during the day period. Most of that is due to H2O so increasing H2O in the atmosphere changes the atmosphere/surface SW absorption rate.

        If you want to do a ballpark check, 30C has about a 478Wm-2 effective energy and 0C about 315 Wm-2 effective energy, the difference is ~163Wm-2 or about equal to the 24 hour average “surface” absorption. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for CO2 forcing to drive H2O. Then if you consider the atmospheric boundary layer where CO2 does have an increasing impact, you have ~315Wm-2 the average temperature of condensation in the atmosphere plus the ~20Wm-2 of actual atmospheric window radiation from the true surface resulting in ~335Wm-2 or the average DWLR value. Hmmm, DWLR is pretty much H2O related at current conditions, even the average energy of the oceans at ~4C is 334.5 Wm-2. If you start removing water vapor, you give CO2 a chance to have an impact which increases as moisture and surface temperature decreases toward 0 C degrees. Lots of regulating feed backs JimD.

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 7:25 pm |

        captd, can’t say I understood that, so lets simplify the problem. Say the sun increases by 1% and warms the earth by 1 degree. Does that increase the atmospheric vapor content, and if not why?

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 24, 2013 at 7:49 pm |

        JimD, “captd, can’t say I understood that, so lets simplify the problem. Say the sun increases by 1% and warms the earth by 1 degree. Does that increase the atmospheric vapor content, and if not why?”

        The surface would not warm uniformly. Water vapor content would increase away from the equator, but since the equator is near the 30C maximum convection temperature it would warm less or not at all. In fact you can get slight tropical cooling and mid latitude warming with more solar. Then where atmospheric water vapor increases atmospheric SW absorption by water vapor would increase.

        Think of it as a flat pan of water instead of a pot on the stove. One end on a burner and the other end in an ice bath. If you add heat you change the gradient not necessarily the peak temperature or the temperature of the ice bath. A small increase in input energy would have less impact. Adding CO2 can change the gradient, but it doesn’t change the heat source or the sink temperature since the sink temperature is fixed at the condensation temperature/freezing point of water.

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 7:55 pm |

        captd, so you think the tropical ocean can’t warm above 30 C. Why, and how is this different from your bathtub?

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 24, 2013 at 8:16 pm |

        JimD, “captd, so you think the tropical ocean can’t warm above 30 C. Why, and how is this different from your bathtub?”

        Your bath tub doesn’t have an Antarctic ocean by the drain. Now if the Antarctic circumpolar current was blocked, the sink temperature would be higher and you could have a larger area of 30 C expanse. You have to think in three dimensions.

        That is where the Atmospheric boundary layer comes in handy. Where the ABL has moist air the condensation/freezing point temperature is fixed by the properties of water vapor. Adding heat above the ABL, increases convection or radiant heat loss but has little impact on temperature. Since 0C is a triple point in parts of the atmosphere you can get into atmospheric heat pipe loop that drives stronger ABL convective mixing.

        I think Dr. Curry is doing a paper on Ice clouds, maybe she will touch on mixed phase clouds.

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 8:24 pm |

        captd, why 30 C and not 35 C or 40 C?

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 24, 2013 at 8:49 pm |

        JimD, Specific heat capacity versus lapse rate. Lapse rate fixes the pressure so more energy means more poleward heat transport/convective mixing. If you add mass to the atmosphere or increase the polar sink temperature you can increase the 30C, but as it is more energy just increases convection. The opening of the Drake passage improved ocean mixing efficiency pretty much fixing the 30C temperature.

        This is one of the things most of the skeptics have being pointing out. The advective energy flow reduces the efficiency of the Greenhouse effect just like cross ventilation with outside air in a real greenhouse kills the efficiency. You have to have a uniform surface temperature or isothermal shell to get the maximum GHE.

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 8:57 pm |

        captd, so how does this supposed circulation change help the earth to radiate more IR through the extra CO2 given that you have fixed the lapse rate and constrained the surface temperature from rising?

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 24, 2013 at 9:15 pm |

        JimD, “captd, so how does this supposed circulation change help the earth to radiate more IR through the extra CO2 given that you have fixed the lapse rate and constrained the surface temperature from rising?”

        Ice and water have a much larger lower temperature spectrum than CO2 and water vapor. So at the top of the ABL you have a surface with a nearly fixed temperature due to water/ice/water vapor. That surface can expand or contract changing the “average” true surface temperature but not the average ABL top or capping layer. During the day you have entrainment convective capping and at night you have inversion capping provided there is “normal” wind shear. It is the ABL that is the true surface greenhouse. Since that “surface” temperature is nearly fixed, CO2 forcing doesn’t have as much impact, it is close to the no-feeback sensitivity because there is not much actual surface temperature impact.

        http://www.met.rdg.ac.uk/~swrhgnrj/teaching/MT36E/MT36E_BL_lecture_notes.pdf

        That was one of the issue I had with the K&T budgets. They never clearly defined which surface, the true surface or the top of the ABL surface they were using as a reference. To get a reasonable estimate of “Sensitivity” you have to consider a lot of layers both in the ocean and in the atmosphere. The Stephens et al budget was much better.

      • jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 9:19 pm |

        ************
        @Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 8:57 pm |
        captd, so how does this supposed circulation change help the earth to radiate more IR through the extra CO2 given that you have fixed the lapse rate and constrained the surface temperature from rising?
        **************
        The lapse rate may determine the height of the equilibrium shell , but if the surface gets hotter for any reason, the volume of air moved from the surface to TOA will be greater per unit time. That is, more heat will be moved from the surface to TOA in a given amount of time. This will speed up heat dissipation, cooling the surface. Think of it as a Carnot engine.

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 9:53 pm |

        captd, so somewhere on earth you have a fixed-temperature ABL that will expand just enough to cancel out CO2 effects, and that expansion won’t affect surface temperatures and it is opaque to surface temperatures. Will this opaque ABL show up some time between now and 4 C warming, or does it exist in the IR signal already?

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 10:12 pm |

        Jim2, if the surface gets hotter, that raises the effective radiating level temperature, which alone is sufficient to oppose the added radiative effect. You don’t need any more steps.

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | August 24, 2013 at 10:21 pm |

        Capt. D said:

        “If sensitivity is high, volcanic events would have no problem driving the NH high latitudes toward an ice age.”

        —–
        Not really. Volcanic events in general cause short-term cooling only. Once the sulfates are gone the extra GH gases remain, and there can actually be a longer-term warming from large volcanic events when enough CO2 is emitted. Of course, the current human carbon volcano is off the scale in terms of the amount of GH gases emitted.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 24, 2013 at 10:23 pm |

        JimD, “so somewhere on earth you have a fixed-temperature ABL that will expand just enough to cancel out CO2 effects, and that expansion won’t affect surface temperatures and it is opaque to surface temperatures. Will this opaque ABL show up some time between now and 4 C warming, or does it exist in the IR signal already?”

        It has always existed and it has expanded mainly into the northern higher latitudes. It is just running out of room to expand. Now that extra energy being pumped to the top of the ABL is creating stronger sudden stratospheric warming events which will likely trigger a shift in the AMO if it hasn’t already.

        You for some reason have this outdated 4C on the brain. You really should try to get current, 4C requires 3C of water vapor feed back and a true surface atmospheric window of 40 Wm-2. There is only a 20 Wm-2 atmospheric window from the true surface, there goes 2 C of that 4 C of warming. It was a mistake, an accounting error which is corrected in the more current Stephens et al budget and more estimates of sensitivity are in the 1.6C range which I personally think are high based on current conditions.

        If you just want to keep spouting outdated data like it is the Gospel of St. James, go ahead.

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 10:58 pm |

        captd, if it exists we should see it. How does it know how much to expand to cancel global warming? Before you add another epicycle, I am going to call it off. You have an explanation for why a CO2 increase doesn’t go with global warming when (whoops) it did in several well known periods of paleoclimate. As a skpetical physicist, I have lots of questions about your ideas, but I think AGW is a far more elegant idea that better explains past climates with no need of bells and whistles like yours.

      • jim2 | August 25, 2013 at 12:13 am |

        @
        Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 10:12 pm |
        *************
        Jim2, if the surface gets hotter, that raises the effective radiating level temperature, which alone is sufficient to oppose the added radiative effect. You don’t need any more steps.
        *****************
        You seem to believe the surface of the Earth is in equilibrium with the Sun – Sun side, that is. Is that what you mean?

      • Jim D | August 25, 2013 at 12:24 am |

        jim2, the sun is part of the forcing, yes. Other parts are changing faster at this point.

      • Herman Alexander Pope | August 25, 2013 at 12:31 am |

        hold over snow cover is based on flawed theory. hold over snow cover is based on the idea that something makes earth cold and the snow cover at the bottoms and edges of ice packs and glaciers don’t melt. That would put new ice at the tails of glaciers and at the edges of ice packs. Ice at the tails of glaciers and edges of ice packs is always old ice. I dare you to find a documented exception. There would be no way to compact it. Snow falls on top and then the ice advances. this thing of adding at the bottom is an impossible idea.
        It snows on top when oceans are warm and wet and then the ice advances and earth cools.

    • Robert | August 23, 2013 at 10:14 pm |

      Sure, Mike, that’s very astute. If you want to know what the world will look like at +2C, look at the past.

      An entire branch of climate science, paleoclimatology, is dedicated to exactly the question of what we can learn from the climate of the past.

      The last time temperature were +2C relative to preindustrial was the Pilocene (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliocene_climate). That was 2.6-5.3 million years ago. You can imagine that it’s not easy to establish what conditions were like millions of years prior to the emergence of human civilization. But the wikipedia page is a good introduction to what we know.

      • k scott denison | August 23, 2013 at 10:41 pm |

        Robert | August 23, 2013 at 10:14 pm | Reply

        The last time temperature (sic) were +2C relative to preindustrial was the Pilocene
        =====
        And you know this how?

      • Robert | August 24, 2013 at 1:40 am |

        “And you know this how?”

        I take the time I don’t spend sneering at science and attacking stuff I don’t understand — and I study.

      • David Springer | August 24, 2013 at 8:03 am |

        You don’t know jack diddly squat. Temperature was higher in the Eemian than today. The Eemian is the interglacial prior to the one we’re in now in the very likely event you didn’t know that either. Sea level in the Eemian was 6-9 meters higher than today too.

    • A fan of *MORE* discourse | August 23, 2013 at 10:25 pm |

      The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)

      [During the PETM], average global temperatures increased by approximately 6 °C (11 °F) within about 20,000 years.

      The PETM is accompanied by a mass extinction of 35-50% of benthic foraminifera (especially in deeper waters) over the course of ~1,000 years – the group suffering more than during the dinosaur-slaying K-T extinction. Contrarily, planktonic foraminifera diversified, and dinoflagellates bloomed. Success was also enjoyed by the mammals, who radiated profusely around this time.

      Ocean Anoxic Events

      Oceanic anoxic events most commonly occurred during periods of very warm climate characterized by high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and mean surface temperatures probably in excess of 25 °C (77 °F). The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which was characterized by a global rise in temperature and deposition of organic-rich shales in some shelf seas, shows many similarities to oceanic anoxic events.

      Gosh, it’s looking like James Hansen’s climate-change worldview is right, eh?

      Purely on the paleo-facts, that is.

      \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}

      • jim2 | August 23, 2013 at 10:55 pm |

        +(-1)^0.5

      • DocMartyn | August 24, 2013 at 9:46 am |

        The mass extinction preceded the changes in global chemistry, which is not surprising given that
        1) The composition of the atmosphere is a biotic product
        2) The prior mass extinction of marine photosynthetic organisms was generally considered to be the cause for ocean hypoxia and elevated CO2 levels.
        3) One notes that evolution and the filling of vacant niches occurred when the Earth was hot, humid and had lots of CO2 in the atmosphere. When the biosphere had restocked all the niches that had been vacated during the ELE, the atmospheric CO2 again fell as biotically driven mineralization of organic/inorganic carbon returned the world to its former state.
        4) The ELE devastated life on land and it took 10’s of millions of years for life to reconquer the devastated lands that had previously been matted with viable ecosystems. When will your ‘Thermogeddonists’ examine species change and albedo?

      • RC Saumarez | August 24, 2013 at 1:18 pm |

        @Jim2

        Does your post +(-1)^0.5 mean that you think Fan of more… is imaginary or that is posts are so profound they can only be expressed as a complex number?

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 1:31 pm |

        I think we concluded i is orthoghonal, so it means he wants to change the subject.

      • jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 1:34 pm |

        @RC Saumarez | August 24, 2013 at 1:18 pm |
        A complex number is composed of an imaginary part and a real part. In the trivial case, one could call (-1)^0.5 complex as it could be written as (-1)^0.5 + 0. However, it is still purely imaginary even written in this form. I prefer (-1)^0.5 as it is more clearly imaginary.

    • Herman Alexander Pope | August 23, 2013 at 10:57 pm |

      Mike, There is a lot of really good data. Temperature for the past 650 million years have been tightly bounded, but in a much wider range than the most recent 800 thousand years. Temperature for the most recent ten thousand years have been much more tightly bounded than the past 800 thousand years. The evidence of CO2 driving temperature is not really evident anywhere. There are some periods of correlation but correlation is not causation. There are more correlations that show that temperature can drive CO2 than the other way around.

      Look at some of the really good data, Data from the Consensus Camp.
      http://popesclimatetheory.com/page6.html
      http://popesclimatetheory.com/page24.html
      http://popesclimatetheory.com/page9.html
      http://popesclimatetheory.com/page38.html
      http://popesclimatetheory.com/page52.html

      • Jim D | August 23, 2013 at 11:04 pm |

        Everyone agrees, a consensus if you like, that the Milankovitch cycles drove the Ice Ages, not CO2.

      • Herman Alexander Pope | August 24, 2013 at 1:22 pm |

        Everyone agrees, a consensus if you like, that the Milankovitch cycles drove the Ice Ages, not CO2.

        everyone who agrees is in for a huge surprise. Not Milankovitch and not CO2. Ice Cycles drove the Ice Ages. They think the Ice Cycles were driven. They got the very basic physics wrong.

      • Herman Alexander Pope | August 24, 2013 at 1:28 pm |

        Milankovitch and CO2 have the same problem. Their influence is very small and together or separate, they don’t work without feedback. These so called feedback’s are not well understood. One of the major feedback’s is the Polar Ice Cycle and instead of a feedback, it is in control.

    • Herman Alexander Pope | August 23, 2013 at 11:02 pm |

      To exceed plus two C you can exceed that 130k years ago.
      To get close you can almost do that in the past ten thousand years.

      http://popesclimatetheory.com/page27.html

    • Faustino | August 24, 2013 at 3:02 am |

      Mike, I do know that when the Earth was 10C hotter, no one bothered about internet privacy.

      • Peter Lang | August 24, 2013 at 3:18 am |

        And life thrived!

        So what’s wrong with the tropical climates extending to Europe, Russia, Canada, China. IPCC says the area of deserts shrinks when the planet is warmer and expands when colder (AR4, WG1, Chapter 6). Looks good to me.

        So what’s the enormous issue that would justify the damage that the proposed policies (like carbon pricing and high cost renewable energy) would bring to the world (and are already bringing to Europe and Australia?

      • lolwot | August 24, 2013 at 5:29 am |

        “So what’s the enormous issue that would justify the damage that the proposed policies (like carbon pricing and high cost renewable energy) would bring to the world (and are already bringing to Europe and Australia?”

        What damage? There is no damage except failed predictions by economists.

  10. jim2 | August 23, 2013 at 10:56 pm |

    ******************

    NSA paid millions to cover Prism compliance costs for tech companies

    • Top-secret files show first evidence of financial relationship
    • Prism companies include Google and Yahoo, says NSA
    • Costs were incurred after 2011 Fisa court ruling
    …
    The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency’s activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian.

    The technology companies, which the NSA says includes Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, incurred the costs to meet new certification demands in the wake of the ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court.

    The October 2011 judgment, which was declassified on Wednesday by the Obama administration, found that the NSA’s inability to separate purely domestic communications from foreign traffic violated the fourth amendment.

    While the ruling did not concern the Prism program directly, documents passed to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden describe the problems the decision created for the agency and the efforts required to bring operations into compliance. The material provides the first evidence of a financial relationship between the tech companies and the NSA.
    ***********************

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs-tech-companies-paid

  11. jim2 | August 23, 2013 at 10:59 pm |

    ******************
    National Security Agency intelligence analysts knowingly and purposely broke rules meant to prevent against unlawful spying on US citizens, the agency said in an admission that contradicts President Obama’s claim that violations were accidental.

    A report from the NSA inspector general – an internal, independent watchdog – found that analysts ignored “minimization processes” meant to curb any violations. The incidents in question are expected to fuel current conversations about bolstering oversight of the NSA’s surveillance apparatus.

    “Over the past decade, very rare instances of wilful violations of NSA’s authorities have been found,” the NSA confirmed to Bloomberg, which first published word of the inspector general report. “NSA takes very seriously any allegations of misconduct, and cooperates fully with any investigations – responding as appropriate. NSA has zero tolerance for wilful violations of the agency’s authorities.”

    Officials told The Wall Journal analysts have used their position to spy on lovers, although claimed such events were rare. Intelligence agents use a variety of suffixes when referring to their activity.

    Signal intelligence, for instance, is expressed by SIGINT. Analysts monitoring their lovers so often was apparently popular enough to be designated a code of its own: LOVEINT. Officials told The Journal that all employees discovered to have engaged in such activity were either reprimanded or terminated.

    NSA Director General Keith Alexander told a New York conference on August 8 that “no one has wilfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacy.”
    *****************
    http://rt.com/usa/nsa-willfully-skirted-policy-admits-928/

  12. jim2 | August 23, 2013 at 11:03 pm |

    *******************
    On Friday, Bloomberg reported that NSA analysts have “deliberately ignored restrictions on their authority to spy on Americans multiple times in the past decade.” According to Bloomberg, an average of one case of intentional abuse per year has been documented in internal reports. Given that the NSA intercepts billions of communications weekly, the number of reported deliberate abuses is small. However, that there are any documented cases at all is highly significant because of how this contradicts statements made by both current and former senior officials in the aftermath of a series of stories about vast NSA spy programs based on leaked secret documents.
    …
    Last week, a Washington Post scoop revealed how the NSA had committed more than 2,700 privacy violations involving surveillance of Americans and foreigners over a one-year period. And a 2011 secret court opinion declassified on Wednesday showed how the agency unlawfully collected tens of thousands of Americans’ electronic communications, misleading the secret surveillance court about the scope of major monitoring programs three times in three years.
    **********************
    http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/bloomberg_report_nsa_employees_have_deliberately_abused_their_power.html

    • Jim D | August 23, 2013 at 11:16 pm |

      Regarding abuse, the analogy I would have for that is when a police officer abuses his right to a gun in public and shoots someone illegally, should all guns be taken away from all officers? No, they are there to protect. Individual abuse cases, while they should be prosecuted, can’t affect things as important as national security.

  13. jim2 | August 23, 2013 at 11:04 pm |

    ***********
    The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens’ email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

    The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans’ communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing “warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans”.

    The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA’s dragnet surveillance programs.
    ***************
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/nsa-loophole-warrantless-searches-email-calls

  14. jim2 | August 23, 2013 at 11:08 pm |

    ****************
    (Reuters) – A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

    Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

    The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
    ************
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805

  15. Theo Goodwin | August 24, 2013 at 12:14 am |

    NPR’s story on Trenberth is up at:
    http://www.npr.org/2013/08/23/214198814/the-consensus-view-kevin-trenberths-take-on-climate-change

    Seems to me that it contains nothing new.

  16. Philbert | August 24, 2013 at 12:32 am |

    NPR Trenberth

    We have terrestrial temperatures for the past 100+ years.
    We have upper air temperatures since the 1930s.
    We got walloped by the 1983 El Nino and decided the ocean was worth sampling beyond the surface.

    So let’s see what NOAA says about the ocean.
    http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/exploration.html

    “To date, we have explored less than five percent of the ocean. The ocean is the lifeblood of Earth, covering more than 70 percent of the planet’s surface, driving weather, regulating temperature, and ultimately supporting all living organisms. Throughout history, the ocean has
    been a vital source of sustenance, transport, commerce, growth, and inspiration.

    Yet for all of our reliance on the ocean, 95 percent of this realm remains unexplored, unseen by human eyes.”

    “You can observe a lot by just just watching.” Y. Berra

    Mother Nature deals from any part of the deck she wishes and always bats last.

    The ocean is the critical link in this planet’s climate and always will be.

  17. johanna | August 24, 2013 at 2:16 am |

    They put Trenberth up against Dr Curry? Is that the best they could find?

    I daresay that most NPR listeners wouldn’t appreciate what this means. But, Trenberth espouses the theory that the dog ate his homework, since he can’t find it just now. Dr Curry says that nobody knows what happened to his homework, if indeed he ever did it.

    Oh, dear.

    • Beth Cooper | August 24, 2013 at 2:26 am |

      Next thing theyll put the blame on Rosie, boys!
      Tsk!

    • lolwot | August 24, 2013 at 5:31 am |

      I take it you are one of these climate deniers who deny the world is heating up.

      Despite glaciers and ice sheets melting, sea level rising and observations indicating the ocean is heating.

      Hmm.

      • timg56 | August 24, 2013 at 12:36 pm |

        Lolwot,

        I haven’t denied anything.

        Just as you have never provided evidence for all the bad stuff that is supposed to happen.

        Could you enlighten me as to why anyone needs to worry that much about 10 inches?

      • Harold | August 24, 2013 at 12:43 pm |

        Lots of guys talk a lot about 10 inches.

  18. Beth Cooper | August 24, 2013 at 2:17 am |

    OMG Peter, 2011-2013 a hockey stick in reverse!
    http://wind.carboncapturereport.org/cgi-bin/topic?#activitytimeline
    bts

    • Peter Lang | August 24, 2013 at 2:35 am |

      Perhaps the doomsayers could turn the chart upside down to give them the picture they want. Isn’t there a precedent for that? So it must be acceptable in climate science, right? :)

    • lolwot | August 24, 2013 at 5:33 am |

      Full context shows your period to be too short:
      http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore?q=climate+change#q=climate%20change&cmpt=q

      • angech | August 24, 2013 at 7:44 am |

        The missing Trembath.
        A report in from the AGU raised more concern in scientific circles today. A spokes man said the Trembath views are missing and it is a travesty that they are.
        Witnesses stated that he was approached by a strange Mann in 1996 and has never been the same since . A spokesman who wished to be identified from a skeptic site has stated that his old views had disappeared and it is a travesty that we cannot find them.
        Reports have surfaced that they were last seen in the Mariembard Trench and may take thousands of years to resurface and add fuel to the warming debate.

  19. Beth Cooper | August 24, 2013 at 2:24 am |

    Halcyon Days. 2010 will be remembered with nostalga by
    green activists.
    http://alternative.carboncapturereport.org/cgi-bin/topic?#activitytimeline

    • Peter Lang | August 24, 2013 at 2:30 am |

      Yes, Beth. The day the Gillard Government announced the Australian Carbon Tax. What a brief period of glory, eh?

    • Peter Lang | August 24, 2013 at 3:05 am |

      Beth the cow girl,

      I was expecting (hoping for) a poem from you about Kelpies and their loyalty on the NPR thread – perhaps a recital of the ‘Dog on the Tucker box’ or something
      The dog on the tuckerbox
      http://members.canb.auug.org.au/~stmcdona/tuckrbox.html

      See discussion of kelpies (by those in the know) on NPR thread here:
      http://judithcurry.com/2013/08/22/jc-on-npr/#comment-368310

      • Chief Hydrologist | August 24, 2013 at 3:31 am |

        How M’Dougal Topped the Score – is a favourite and M’Dougal was a “Scotchman” after all.

        So we sent for old M’Dougal, and he stated in reply
        That he’d never played at cricket, but he’d half a mind to try.
        He couldn’t come to practise – he was getting in his hay,
        But he guessed he’d show the beggars from Molongo how to play.
        Now, M’Dougal was a Scotchman, and a canny one at that,
        So he started in to practise with a pailing for a bat.
        He got Mrs Mac. to bowl him, but she couldn’t run at all,
        So he trained is sheep-dog, Pincher, how to scout and fetch the ball…

      • Chief Hydrologist | August 24, 2013 at 3:41 am |

        Red Dog – a favourite doggy movie. Such a talent.

      • Beth Cooper | August 24, 2013 at 4:14 am |

        I could tell you a reel story not a pome from when i wus
        a teen-aged lassie, about a sheep dog that came home …
        Me family had this border collie name of Kishga that we
        loved dearly. When me father had ter do a trip up north
        and asked me mother ter come too they arranged fer me
        aunt and uncle ter stay with me, sister was away at the time.

        In the weekend, busy Saturday night, when i went ter stay
        with another cousin fer the week end, they drive to their own
        home takin’ our dog with them During the night Kishga
        scratches on the door ter go outside and they let him out…
        Tten minutes later, no Kishga in the back yard.., Oh no!
        Two anxious relatives rise at dawn, drive along the busy
        highway over intersections, rail crossings, …. the 20 km
        or so back to my joint. Kishga hobbles down the drive ter
        welcome them.) Lassie come home. Laddie in this case.
        Bts

      • Beth Cooper | August 24, 2013 at 4:18 am |

        That red dog cood do Shakespeare lol.
        bts

      • Peter Lang | August 24, 2013 at 4:32 am |

        Chief, thanks for the poem. I love them. And great photo of a red kelpie.

        So many stories to tell. I’ve asked them what they think of CAGW, and they look at me as if I am a loony to even consider discussing such nonsense.

      • Michael | August 24, 2013 at 4:37 am |

        Peter,

        People may take the dog-AGW comment in a way unflattering to you.

      • Peter Lang | August 24, 2013 at 4:38 am |

        Chief,

        I just watched the Red Dog audition. Fantastic. Thanks.

      • Peter Lang | August 24, 2013 at 4:40 am |

        Michael,

        Yea, I recognise waht you say is true. They are the wowsers with no sense of humour. Like you and your leftie mates who want to dictate what everyone should think, say, do and eat. Oh yea, and breathe. :)

      • Peter Lang | August 24, 2013 at 4:49 am |

        Beth,

        Great story. But a kelpie would have hitched a ride and directed the driver where to take him/her?

        So many stories I could tell too, but better not start.

      • Michael | August 24, 2013 at 5:19 am |

        Peter,

        Comments like that might lead people to suspect that your climate science ‘skepticism’ is more ideological axe-grinding than anything else.

      • johanna | August 24, 2013 at 5:31 am |

        Thanks, Chief, for putting a smile in my dial. To the great canon of Australian bush poetry (after “Said Hanrahan” and “The Loaded Dog”, could I add A B Paterson’s observations about youthful exuberance (from memory):

        T’was a dingo pup to his dam that said
        ‘It’s time I earned my daily bread
        Out in the world I intend to go
        And you’d be surprised at the things I know!
        There’s a wild ducks’ nest in a sheltered spot
        I’ll go straight out and eat the lot.”

        But when he arrived at his destined prey
        He found that all had flown away.
        But an egg was left that would quench his thirst,
        He bit the egg – and it straightaway burst!
        It burst with a bang, and he turned and fled
        For he thought the egg had shot him dead.

        ‘Oh Mother’ he cried, ‘let us clear right out
        For we’ll lose our lives with the bombs about.
        It’s lucky I am that I’m not blown up
        It’s a very hard life” said the dingo pup.

        Thanks to Mr Eric Dawson, my 4th class teacher, who did not think that teaching kids poetry was a waste of time. It wasn’t.

      • Beth Cooper | August 24, 2013 at 5:53 am |

        Sittin’ around the camp fire tellin ‘ animal stories I mean ‘yarns’,
        true ‘n otherwise. Smell of eucalypt smoke, stars bright as lamps
        hangin’ in the sky …lol …

  20. Alexander Biggs | August 24, 2013 at 2:50 am |

    How long can the pause last? Can it last for ever?

    CO2′s voracious appetite for energy can omly be satisfied in two ways: kinetic and vibrational energy. We can forget kinetic, because it is no worse than O2 or N2 and it is less than 1% of the atmosphere. The answer has to be in the vibrational modes, of which there are many. When CO2 leaves the cylinders of your car or the furnace of the power station it is over 1,000C – very hot and most of, if not all. of its vibrational modes will be excited. When it exits the tail pipe or chimney it is still very hot and we would expect it to rise in the troposphere as a plume of hot gas passing its heat to the N2 and O2 as it rises. As it rises in the troposphere (like a hot air balloon) it can more readily radiate its heat into space, because the atmosphere above is thinning. So what propottion of heat is radiated into space, instead of heating our planet?. As the CO2 cools, density increases, it will fall again, maybe having used up all its excitation modes, it can no longer heat the planet. So this simple but apparently little understood chain of events may not be such a threat?

    So this explanation of CO2′s behavior in the troposphere can explain the pause. So long as the hot, new proportion of CO2 from exhaust or chimneyremains below the presert level the pause will continue. Note that this new metric of CO2, if accepted, focuses not on total CO2, but on the proportion of new,hot CO2.

    • Faustino | August 24, 2013 at 3:07 am |

      Alexander, ask Judith’s dogs about the paws. I’m sure there’ll be a shaggy-dog story in there somewhere.

      Woof, woof!

      (Yes, I’m very tired.)

      • Alexander Biggs | August 24, 2013 at 8:25 pm |

        Faustino: Where is the shaggy dog story? Have you a better one?

        Nastings: A lot of N2 also goes a long for the ride, but the whole plume will rise just as a hot air baloon does, When it cools it falls. Do a search on hot air baloons.

        AK: Yes, cold CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere. But not as it exits the tail pipe or chimney, when it is very hot.

        Hastings: Yes, more measurements need to be made.

        Thank you all for your constructive comments.

    • M. Hastings | August 24, 2013 at 10:35 am |

      I don’t know the answer to this. Why does CO2 rise in the atmosphere? Does it always or only when warm? How much of the CO2 rises? A search on Google only gives rise as an increase in CO2 so I couldn’t find answers there.

      • AK | August 24, 2013 at 10:38 am |

        Co2 is well-mixed in the atmosphere. It only rises when the air it’s mixed with rises. If you pay attention to this type of nonsense, you’ll only get confused.

      • M. Hastings | August 24, 2013 at 11:30 am |

        Fascinating. Has the amount of CO2 been measured at the altitude it is supposed to provide a heating effect? And if yes by how much?

  21. GaryM | August 24, 2013 at 2:56 am |

    You can’t fix stupid.

    “France’s Socialist government has admitted that the country cannot cope with any further tax rises and promised no more hikes just days ahead of the country’s largest ever tax bill.

    In an unfortunate piece of timing, however, the pledge came just as the environment minister announced the creation of a new ‘carbon tax’ and amid reports that the overall tax pressure on French households will rise even further next year.”

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/10262561/France-cannot-take-any-more-taxes-government-admits.html

    Our economy is dying. We are taking almost half of all GDP to pay for our profligate government spending. We can’t afford to tax the economy any more. So what should we do?

    I know! Let’s implement a carbon tax! Yeah, that’s the ticket.

    • mosomoso | August 24, 2013 at 5:12 am |

      Let them tax cake.

    • Harold | August 24, 2013 at 10:12 am |

      Do what the US did. Build a big ritual car sacrifice machine, and start chewing up Renaults, Peugeots, and Citroens. Destroy your way to prosperity.

      Actually, they can do it even cheaper than we did. Just get the people in the “suburbs” all riled up, and they’ll car-b-cue their way to prosperity.

  22. Faustino | August 24, 2013 at 3:09 am |

    Gary, no need for France to create a new carbon tax, Australia will soon have a used one going cheap.

    • Peter Lang | August 24, 2013 at 3:21 am |

      +1

      Here is 60 second clip on Australia’s election campaign:

      • Faustino | August 24, 2013 at 3:58 am |

        Peter, in a e-mail to Des Moore on another topic, I noted that “My local candidate, Bill Glasson, expected that, locally, after a couple of weeks’ bounce, there would be a backlash against Rudd, and the the seat of Griffith was still winnable. Rudd gained about a 2% swing in 2010 – that was primarily because of boundary changes, with my area (West End/South Brisbane), the most left-wing in Queensland, moving into Rudd’s electorate. The demographic changes since then – there is rapid population growth in West End – will have worked against Rudd. Fingers crossed.

        “Many in Queensland know of the decades of fierce animosity between Rudd and Beattie, and loathe Beattie, a typical Rudd misjudgement which is proving counter-productive.”

        The latest Newspoll & Nielsen polls show Rudd 4-5 points behind. Yea!

      • Peter Lang | August 24, 2013 at 4:25 am |

        Faustino,

        I’ve been following this electorate closely. I didn’t realise you live in his electorate. there is nothing I would like to see more than Rudd lose the election by an enormous margin and lose his seat as well!! I can’t stand the slimy, dishonest b-stard, or hos team of incompetent ministers (mostly ex-union leaders, almost none of their life has been in real work, never managed any sort of business, and one has never even had a credit card, a loan not owns a house and she’s responsible for a department.

        Back to your electorate, which Rudd represents, I see two recent polls have Dr Bill Glasson ahead 52:48 and 54:46.

        He is an opthamologist and was president of the Australian Medical Association in 2003 and 2004.

        He has practised as a medical specialist in Brisbane since 1988, while also providing services to rural Queensland. He worked as a volunteer aid specialist overseas for several years, predominantly in East Timor.

        http://carindaleconnect.com.au/community/2013/03/bill-glasson-lnp-candidate-griffith/

        This is an example of the stark difference between the Labor candidates and Liberal candidates. Rudd was a bureaucrat.

      • Beth Cooper | August 24, 2013 at 4:26 am |

        Our Prime MInister says,
        ‘spend, spend, spend, spend,
        ter the power of ten ‘n then …
        spend, spend, spend, spend agen.

        ( Some serf’s wunder where
        the money’s comin’ from.)

      • mosomoso | August 24, 2013 at 5:05 am |

        I love that in all photos of Rudd and his various teams, the people in back of him, even young volunteer students, look like a grim assemblage of Russian dignitaries lining the Kremlin balcony on Mayday.

        In the clip above, Tanya Plibersek looks like Beria standing behind Joe S. No doubt she’s having similar thoughts to Beria’s.

    • GaryM | August 24, 2013 at 3:22 am |

      Faustino,

      They should have no trouble buying it. The government is only spending 57 percent of GDP so far. What’s another 43 percent?

      “The problem in France — for both the Left and Right — is that nobody has the bravery to slash state spending, which has now reached 57 per cent of GDP. Just how high can it go?”

      Europe, with its PIGS (or after this article maybe we should refer to the FIGS), is the canary in the “state run capitalism” (ie. economic fascism) coal mine. It is only a matter of time until one of the economic basket cases of the euro-socialist utopian EU implodes. We shall see how the “leaders” handle it then, since there is frankly no conservative opposition anywhere to take over after a collapse.

      At least the Communist Chinese have the benefit of real totalitarian control to keep their people under control when the economic feces hit the fan. Though they seem, to be having trouble too. “China saw 180,000 protests, riots, and mass demonstrations in 2010 alone — on average about 500 every day — a number that has likely since increased. The villagers’ complaints were common ones: local officials exploiting land sales for personal gain and violently repressing dissent (a village advocate had died while in police custody).”

      http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/how-china-stays-stable-despite-500-protests-every-day/250940/

      • Faustino | August 24, 2013 at 3:54 am |

        Gary, I hope that Steven Gaurin reads this. But we aren’t selling the carbon tax – we’ll pay to have it taken away!

    • Faustino | August 24, 2013 at 5:12 am |

      Peter @4.25, this was also Anna Bligh’s electorate, so the PM and Qld Premier were my local reps. Oh, happy days! Bligh is also a former colleague of mine, my now Canberra-based daughter was friendly with her son at high school and uni. It’s a small world in SEQ.

  23. lolwot | August 24, 2013 at 5:49 am |

    Something that caught my eye this week was an excellent piece of scientific work.

    A Scientist Explains the Mystery of Recent Sea-Level Drop
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-scientist-explains-the-mystery-of-recent-sea-level-drop

    • Chief Hydrologist | August 24, 2013 at 6:06 am |

      ENSO related as many of these things are.

      Third graph down – http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_last_15.html

      A couple of animations below that worth watching – you can see ENSO in them if you look closely.

      The sea level rise in the ARGO period seems a fraction of 3mm – 0.69mm/year. You can see the freshwater (OFC) leaving the oceans around 2008 in the third panel.

      http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/vonSchuckmannampLTroan2011-fig5PG_zpsee63b772.jpg.html?sort=3&o=39

      Perhaps your scientist can explain why the ocean heat content in ARGO is consistent with less reflected SW in CERES?

      http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif.html?sort=3&o=117

      • lolwot | August 24, 2013 at 6:08 am |

        “Perhaps your scientist can explain why the ocean heat content in ARGO is consistent with less reflected SW in CERES?”

        Positive Cloud Feedback.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | August 24, 2013 at 9:24 am |

        lolwot,
        Did you notice that Chiefy, after all this time, can’t figure out that the O in ENSO stands for oscillation?

      • Chief Hydrologist | August 24, 2013 at 4:36 pm |

        ‘The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.’ http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf

        The global energy budget is driven largely – in the satellite era – by variations in ocean and atmospheric circulation – which remain largely independent of CO2 forcing. The changability abruptly – climate shifts – from mode to mode is a clue.

        ‘What happened in the years 1976/77 and 1998/99 in the Pacific was so unusual that scientists spoke of abrupt climate changes. They referred to a sudden warming of the tropical Pacific in the mid-1970s and rapid cooling in the late 1990s. Both events turned the world’s climate topsy-turvy and are clearly reflected in the average temperature of the Earth.’ http://www.science20.com/news_articles/climate_predictions_better_hindcasts_will_lead_better_forecasts-118948

        There are a couple of ENSO theories – chaotic oscillator or stochastically forced. – http://www.pims.math.ca/files/kleeman_3.pdf – In either case the statistical series is non-stationary over decades to millennia.

        e.g. http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ENSO11000.gif.html?sort=3&o=129

        I would say it is forced but the forcing is chaotical. Here’s the Duke University ENSO presentation again. It addresses all the fundamental physical and biogeochemical properties.

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjlIeQFxdlE

        ENSO originates in the Humboldt Current region off South America. The significant variability is the South Pacific gyre – shown at the 1 minute 40 second mark. The changes in flow in the Peruvian Current are balanced by changes in flow through Drakes Passage between the tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula. The changing flows are largely determined by the state of the Southern Annular Mode. It has been suggested that SAM is influenced by top down UV/ozone interactions in the stratosphere. Solar UV variability is chaotic – like weather. QED.

        ENSO is an oscillation? Whatever.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | August 25, 2013 at 12:47 am |

        “ENSO is an oscillation? Whatever.”

        Yes Chief, an oscillation goes in one direction and then returns to the value it started.

        For Civil Engineers, the O is for oscillation,

      • Chief Hydrologist | August 25, 2013 at 1:08 am |

        Which bit of nonstationary time series don’t you understand? If it is like anything else you don’t understand – all of it.

      • Chief Hydrologist | August 25, 2013 at 1:14 am |

        For an Australian hydrologist ENSO is bread and butter. I give you a long explanation – audiovisuals included – and all you have to show for it is a deeper ignorance. I have to wonder if you didn’t read it or are just too dumb to understand.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | August 25, 2013 at 12:58 pm |

        Chief, it always reverts to the mean.
        What causes the mean value? It’s the forcing, stupid.
        What a large tool, and multiple sockpuppet abuser you are

      • Chief Hydrologist | August 25, 2013 at 3:39 pm |

        Decadal variability.

        http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/

        Centennial variability.

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Vance2012-AntarticaLawDomeicecoresaltcontent.jpg.html?sort=3&o=70

        Millennial variability.

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ENSO11000.gif.html?sort=3&o=129

        ‘Figure 12 shows 2000 years of El Nino behaviour simulated by a state-of-the-art climate model forced with present day solar irradiance and greenhouse gas concentrations. The richness of the El Nino behaviour, decade by decade and century by century, testifies to the fundamentally chaotic nature of the system that we are attempting to predict. It challenges the way in which we evaluate models and emphasizes the importance of continuing to focus on observing and understanding processes and phenomena in the climate system. It is also a classic demonstration of the need for ensemble prediction systems on all time scales in order to sample the range of possible outcomes that even the real world could produce. Nothing is certain.’ http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full

        Really – you apply apply irrelevant concepts to things you don’t understand and abusively insist on it. You do know what reversion to the mean is? You do know the difference between stationary and non-stationary time series? You have as usual stuffed the concept entirely and respond with abuse and misdirection.

        Let me spell it out for you.

        Nonstationary series have nonconstant means and variances and do not have the property of mean reversion.

        There are a lot of nonstationary series in the Earth system. Temperature, ice, windfields. It arises from nonlinear and nonequilibrium processes – again concepts that you don’t understand and rail against but are the core of mainstream climate science.

        Wally Broecker for instance.

        ‘The climate system has jumped from one mode of operation to another in the past. We are trying to understand how the earth’s climate system is engineered, so we can understand what it takes to trigger mode switches. Until we do, we cannot make good predictions about future climate change… Over the last several hundred thousand years, climate change has come mainly in discrete jumps that appear to be related to changes in the mode of thermohaline circulation.’

        Imagine what the mean is of 2 distinct climate modes. It doesn’t exist – the mean is one thing for one mode and another for the next.

        ‘What happened in the years 1976/77 and 1998/99 in the Pacific was so unusual that scientists spoke of abrupt climate changes. They referred to a sudden warming of the tropical Pacific in the mid-1970s and rapid cooling in the late 1990s. Both events turned the world’s climate topsy-turvy and are clearly reflected in the average temperature of Earth.’ http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130822105042.htm

        Here it is – La Nina (blue) dominant to 1976, El Nino (red) to 1998 and La Nina again since.

        http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/ts.gif

        It must really suck to be you.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | August 26, 2013 at 8:58 am |

        Chief, Something causes reversion away from the mean.
        You are like a believer in perpetual motion machines.

        Chief is a multiple sockpuppet abuser and believer in perpetual motion — what a combination.

      • Chief Hydrologist | August 26, 2013 at 6:00 pm |

        Something causes climate shifts?

        Idiot.

    • tonyb | August 24, 2013 at 6:41 am |

      Iolwot

      That article is based on an earlier work he carried out with Willis . At any one time there is around the equivalent of 5cm of sea level rise contained in atmospheric water vapour. It is highly unlikely that this would alter enough for any ‘difference’ to be stored in a lake.

      The real world sea level changes are not the same as the theoretical satellite one which omits a large part of the worlds oceans it cant ‘see’ and more importantly doesn’t measure heights against coasts.

      http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/why-gmsl-different-local-tide-gauge-measurements

      Most coasts are changing in height relative to the sea (up or down) due to post glacial rebound, the opposite effect, earthquake/tectonics. Tide gauges are a more accurate reflection of the actual change on your local piece of coast. Sea levels generally remain below those of the Roman optimum and MWP.

      A global sea level rise is as useful as many other global averages-i.e not very. It distorts the local/regional picture

      tonyb

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | August 24, 2013 at 9:29 am |

        Tonyb said:

        “It is highly unlikely that this would alter enough for any ‘difference’ to be stored in a lake.”

        Note that the master of qualitative reasoning is making that comment.

        If TonyB would someday learn how to pick up a pencil and try to do some calculations, he could get on the track of quantitative science.

      • Chief Hydrologist | August 24, 2013 at 4:53 pm |

        Tony

        The result is based on detecting local changes in mass in the GRACE mission launched in 2002.

        http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/content/OceanStory-GRACE-2012-10-fig3_edited.PNG

        Kati Thanda – Lake Eyre was renamed after recent granting of Native Title over 70,000 square kilometres including the lake – is a wonder of the world. It is nowhere near sufficient – it is very shallow at best – to account for much of the water mass. The water is much more widespread over the entire continent. I can only guess that it was a bit of journalistic license.

        http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/content/OceanStory-GRACE-2012-10-fig3_edited.PNG

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | August 26, 2013 at 9:30 am |

        Tony said:

        “A global sea level rise is as useful as many other global averages-i.e not very. It distorts the local/regional picture.”

        ——
        Respectfully Tony, you’ve got this completely backward. Really. For a planet that has an energy imbalance, you want a global snapshot of what is happening, and it is regional variations that actually mask global changes if you focus just on those regional changes. Earth currently is losing net land ice mass and this is going into the global ocean. This is what is important, not regional variations. Regional variations are interesting for other reasons, but not when talking about the dynamics that affect the entire planet.

    • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | August 24, 2013 at 8:37 am |

      It was a good piece of research. Actually tracking these large movements of water from ocean to land and then correlating it with changes in sea level is a huge advancement over where the science was just 5 years ago. The long-term trend is if of course what really matters, and that’s clearly higher and higher, but these short-term fluctuations tell an interesting story.

      • timg56 | August 24, 2013 at 12:46 pm |

        Higher and higher.

        Reminds me of a Jackie Wilson song.

        Since I know lolwot won’t answer my question about sea level rise, maybe you will RG.

        What is so worrisome about 10 inches?

      • Chief Hydrologist | August 24, 2013 at 5:04 pm |

        Can I resist?

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzDVaKRApcg

        There is clearly no way that climate is at all predictable. I am more than a little bored with simplistic and nauseatingly repetitive posturings.

    • dennis adams | August 24, 2013 at 8:39 am |

      lolwot- wouldnt that article started off on a better foot if it had said sea levels have been rising for the last 150 years as depicted on any number of sites like NOAA. It implies a recent phenomena rather than an observed process that has been going on for a recorded 150 years and then you can fill in the blanks for as many years, decades, centuries as you want, before that.

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | August 24, 2013 at 8:53 am |

        Of course Dennis, sea level has been rising and falling over the course of the Holocene during different cool or warmer periods. In general of course the trend has been upward from the lows of the last glacial, and it is directly related to the quantity of water remaining frozen in glaciers, mainly in Greenland and Antarctica. What is being watched for is an acceleration of sea level rise based on the warmth (of both atmosphere, ocean, and lithosphere). Few realize, for example, that much of the glacial mass is being melted from below by warmer land and ocean.

      • dennis adams | August 24, 2013 at 8:59 am |

        -R Gates

        But would you agree that based on the NOAA figures the trend for many sites has not increased beyond 3 mm per year? I look at those graphs and see little acceleration in the rise for the last 150 years.

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | August 24, 2013 at 9:29 am |

        Yes Dennis, there is much variability in terms of how sea level rise is distributed around the world because of unique topography, prevailing currents, tides, etc.

        What is clear is that the overall mass of water in the global ocean is increasing as that mass is being transferred from melting land ice to ocean, and also that the total heat content of the water that is in the ocean is increasing. This is all an inevitable result of the continually erupting human carbon volcano.

      • climatereason | August 24, 2013 at 9:40 am |

        R gates

        As you say, it is not surprising that sea levels go up and down in some sort of relationship to melting glaciers. Fan has assumed a linear increase from Roman Times to obtain his 25 feet rise.

        I took the trouble to graph glaciers movements over the last 3000 years here

        http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/clip_image010.jpg

        We can see periods of warmth and periods of cold. The Roman warm period had sea level heights slightly above todays as I demonstrated in a previous article. Presumably the MWP would also have had an uptick in levels (it is the subject of Part 2 of my sea level series)
        The other lines on the graph are the Hockey stick (how did glaciers retreat and advance if the climate was static) and also CET, demonstrating the absurdity again of this static climate notion
        tonyb

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | August 24, 2013 at 9:53 am |

        Hi Tony,

        Yep, the notion of a static anything on Earth is pretty meaningless. Everything is in flux over long and short periods of time. But the laws of physics will eventually guide all trends. Add more energy to the Earth system, and you nudge the long-term trend of global land ice downward and thus sea level rise upward. And there are really only two ways to add more energy– increasing the net energy arriving to the system or decreasing the net energy leaving.

  24. Jim Cripwell | August 24, 2013 at 7:51 am |

    On WUWT at
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/23/nasa-says-arctic-sea-ice-unlikely-to-break-records-in-2013/#more-92223

    Walt Meier of NASA is quoted claiming the following
    @@@@@
    “Even if this year ends up being the sixth- or seventh-lowest extent, what matters is that the 10 lowest extents recorded have happened during the last 10 years,” said Walt Meier, a glaciologist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “The long-term trend is strongly downward
    @@@@@

    One wonders what the science is to support this claim. Unless we have something like Newton’s Laws of Motion, which allow us to predict the timing and location of eclipses into the indefinite future, past data cannot be used to predict what is going to happen in the future. So Walt’s claim seems to be scientific nonsense. What is the scientific basis for the claim that we know the long term trend of Arctic sea ice extent is strongly downward?

    It strikes me that there is a danger of there being circular reasoning. If Walt were to claim that we know the trend is strongly downward because CAGW is real, then what about the UK Met. Office and the AGU claiming we know that CAGW is real the because the Arctic sea ice extent trend is strongly downward?

    • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | August 24, 2013 at 8:43 am |

      Need to understand long-term trend versus short-term natural variations. Walt clearly does, do you? The projections of an ice-free Arctic this century would never be changed by one season, and the projected date for that has only been moved sooner and sooner over the past few years. Too much additional energy being stored in the Earth system from the GH effects of the continually erupting human carbon volcano.

      • Jim Cripwell | August 24, 2013 at 9:06 am |

        R. Gates, you write “Too much additional energy being stored in the Earth system from the GH effects of the continually erupting human carbon volcano.”

        This is precisely the circular resaoning I warned of in my last paragraph. You claim that the downward spiral of Arctic sea ice extent is being caused by CAGW. But the AGU and UK Met. Office claim that we know that CAGW is correct because of the downward spiral of Arctic sea ice extent. “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive” Sir Walter Scott.

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | August 24, 2013 at 9:22 am |

        Jim,

        Please get your terms correct. I never used the term CAGW. I prefer to be completely scientific about exactly what the effect of increasing GH gases in the atmosphere is– specifically as you increase them (and we must include methane and N2O here as well, as they are also increasing) you increase the energy being stored in the Earth system. Now this energy can be stored in a variety of locations and forms, some quite measurable and some more latent, hidden, and difficult to measure, but it will increase. The decline of Arctic sea ice is just one effect of this increasing energy and one way this energy is being stored.

      • Jim Cripwell | August 24, 2013 at 9:31 am |

        R. Gates, you write “The decline of Arctic sea ice is just one effect of this increasing energy and one way this energy is being stored.”

        I will try and use your terminology. You assume that the effects of CO2 substantially causing more energy to be stored in the earth’ system, has been proven. I claim it has not been proven. You claim that this increased energy is the cause of the decrease of Arctic sea ice. The AGU and the UK Met. Office claim that the idea that Arctic sea ice has a significant downward trend is proof that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes an increase of energy. This is just plain circular reasoning.

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | August 24, 2013 at 9:42 am |

        There is nothing circular about the basic physics of increasing energy in the Earth system. Add more energy, and you will get less total ice. The Arctic in particular is an area long noted to be highly vulnerable to additional energy being added to the Earth system. Basic physics, unique properties Earth in the advection of energy to the Arctic, amplifying effects in the Arctic itself, all lead to the conclusion that the continual eruption of the human carbon volcano will eventually lead to an ice free Arctic Ocean.

      • Jim Cripwell | August 24, 2013 at 10:37 am |

        R, Gates, you write “There is nothing circular about the basic physics of increasing energy in the Earth system.”

        Agreed. However, no-one has proven that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes increasing energy in the earth’s system. That is the issue, which you refuse to address

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | August 24, 2013 at 11:53 am |

        Jim,

        Increasing GH gases in a planet’s atmosphere that is orbiting a star like our sun at the distance our Earth is, will cause the planet to retain more energy. The basic physics of this has been proven for a very long time. This basic point is not part of the disagreement.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 24, 2013 at 12:05 pm |

        R. Gates, “Increasing GH gases in a planet’s atmosphere that is orbiting a star like our sun at the distance our Earth is, will cause the planet to retain more energy. The basic physics of this has been proven for a very long time.”

        How much exactly? The basic physics has been proven for a long time so I would imagine that should be known, right?

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 12:22 pm |

        captd, a long time. Arrhenius for the theory and later demonstrated from observations by Callendar in the 1930’s.

      • Jim Cripwell | August 24, 2013 at 1:02 pm |

        R.Gates, you write “The basic physics of this has been proven for a very long time. This basic point is not part of the disagreement.”

        Again agreed. This is where I have trouble using your terminology. The question is, how MUCH does adding CO2 to the atmosphere from current levels, increase energy levels. I claim the increase is negligible, and that there is no proof that it is anything but negligible. That is the issue which you will not address

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | August 24, 2013 at 2:12 pm |

        Jim & Capt.,

        We are of course getting to the key question of climate sensitivity, but unfortunately this question has been posed in a way that is focused entirely on the troposphere, as in “how much will tropospheric temperatures increase per doubling of CO2?”. This is, I would posit, a very narrow way of thinking about the effects of the human carbon volcano. There are many other ways, some perhaps even more useful than this myopic focus on the troposphere, which is not even the most interesting part (from an energy perspective) of the Earth energy system.

        The troposphere is the most fickle, low thermal inertia part of the energy system, subject to very rapid short term swings and wagging like the tail of the much more important and bigger ocean dogs. In short, if you really want to know where the atmosphere is headed over the long term, watch the ocean for the clues.

      • Jim Cripwell | August 24, 2013 at 3:14 pm |

        R. Gates. you write “We are of course getting to the key question of climate sensitivity,”

        Weasel words, getting out of not answering the question. The fact of the matter is that the “proof” that the effect of adding more CO2 tro the atmosphere, is the alleged “proof” that CAGW is real. And that is the circular reasoning I claim is there, and which you simply refuse to discuss, because if you did, it would blow the warmist position to hell.

        As I have remarked before I post on blogs to learn; put my ideas out and get them challenged. You have absolutely nothing to challenge my idea with at all

  25. A fan of *MORE* discourse | August 24, 2013 at 9:20 am |

    dennis adams claims (wrongly)  “Sea level rise [is an] observed process that has been going on for a recorded 150 years and then you can fill in the blanks for as many years, decades, centuries as you want, before that.”

    Your claim is wholly wrong on the facts, dennis adams!

    (1)  Sea level rise-rates have accelerated steadily throughout the past 150 years

    (2)  The present rise-rate, if sustained since Roman times, would imply a sea-level rise of twenty-five feet. We *know* the sea has not risen that much!

    Conclusion  When the strongest skepticism confronts the strongest science, the conclusion reached is that James Hansen’s 1981 worldview regarding the climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide has proven itself to be broadly correct.

    Conversely, when the goofiest, flimsiest, most ideology-driven, willfully ignorant, demagogic, and abusive denialism cherry-picks the weakest science, the result is propaganda for “gleeful yahoos and mindless oafs” … like Anthony Watts’ WUWT!

    \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}

  26. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 9:38 am |

    ********
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

    The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and defense lawyers after Reuters reported it this week, is now under review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have also raised questions about the procedure.

    A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA’s Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005 and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The IRS is among two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

    An IRS spokesman had no comment on the entry or on why it was removed from the manual. Reuters recovered the previous editions from the archives of the Westlaw legal database, which is owned by Thomson Reuters Corp, the parent of this news agency.
    ********
    http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/08/irs-manual-detailed-deas-secret-spying-program/

  27. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 9:39 am |

    *********
    Think the IRS Was Bad? Try the Spying on Occupy Activists
    50
    By Matthew Rothschild, May 20, 2013

    With all the hullabaloo over the IRS’s special scrutiny of Tea Party groups, a far worse case of political meddling and governmental overreach has been going on: The spying on leftwing activists in the Occupy movement.

    Thousands of documents obtained by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy show how Homeland Security and local law enforcement were obsessed with the Occupy movement and other activists.

    They treated Occupy activists as potential terrorists.

    They infiltrated Occupy meetings.

    They tracked Occupy activists online.

    They kept an eye on the Rev. Jesse Jackson when he visited an Occupy protest in Phoenix.
    **************
    http://www.progressive.org/spying-on-occupy-activists

  28. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 9:41 am |

    ********************
    RS to Spy on Our Shopping Records, Travel, Social Interactions, Health Records and Files from Other Government Investigators
    Posted on May 2, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog
    More and More People Are Staring Into Our Fishbowl

    We noted in March that all U.S. intelligence agencies – including the CIA and NSA – are going to spy on Americans’ finances.

    The IRS is joining the fun.

    U.S. News and World Report notes today:

    Starting this year, the IRS tools will be able to track all credit card transactions, for starters. The agency has also instructed agents on using online sources such as social media and e-commerce sites including eBay, as well as the rich data generated by mobile devices. In one controversial disclosure in April, the ACLU showed documents in which the IRS general counsel said the agency could look at emails without warrants, but the IRS has said it will not use this power.

    While the agency has declined to give details about what third-party personal data it will use in robo-audits and data mining, it has told government and industry groups that its computers are capable of scanning multiple networks at the same time to collect “matching” comprehensive profiles for every taxpayer in America. Such profiles will likely include shopping records, travel, social interactions and information not available to the public, such as health records and files from other government investigators, according to IRS documents.

    ***

    The IRS is following the philosophy of former Obama regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein [remember him?], who advocates using technology tools and behavioral science policies to “nudge” people to do the right thing. In the case of the IRS, that policy so far has fallen most heavily on lower-income taxpayers and has done little to collect substantially more tax revenue.

    ***
    ***********************
    http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/05/irs-will-spy-on-our-shopping-records-travel-social-interactions-health-records-and-files-from-other-government-investigators.html

  29. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 9:44 am |

    Nixon wanted to use the IRS to spy on people, but IRS management side-tracked it. There are no such qualms now. In my view, this is a huge danger to our political freedom and our privacy. And now, the tools available to achieve this are awesome and only getting better. I irony is that we are paying the government to enslave us. We are stupid.
    ***************
    Sorry Rush, Nixon Spied On Enemies; Viewed The IRS As A Political Weapon
    Blog ››› June 11, 2013 10:24 AM EDT ››› ERIC BOEHLERT
    242
    Print

    During Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, the president’s White House counsel, John Dean, met with the head of the Internal Revenue Service, Johnnie Mac Walters, and presented him with an envelope. Inside was a list of approximately 200 names — the names of Nixon’s political enemies and with it came the understanding that the IRS begin investigating the “enemies list” and perhaps start sending some people to jail.

    Stunned, Walters sealed the White House list, locked it in a safe and later fended off complaints from Nixon aide John Ehrlichman about the IRS’s “foot-dragging tactics.”

    Two years later, on December 22, 1974, with Nixon having resigned from the Watergate scandal, the New York Times’ Seymour Hersh published a front-page blockbuster, headlined: “HUGE C.I.A. OPERATIONS REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES.”

    Hersh detailed how the CIA under Nixon hatched “an elaborate and secret domestic” spying operation built around illegal wiretapping and the reading of mail. Additionally, the Times confirmed “that intelligence files on at least 10,000 American citizens were maintained by a special unit of the CIA. ”
    ************
    http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/06/11/sorry-rush-nixon-spied-on-enemies-viewed-the-ir/194418

  30. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 9:46 am |

    ************
    IRS spying. Where is Darrell Issa when his country needs him?
    by Gerry Bello
    August 15, 2013
    Darrell Issa he could turn the tempest of the IRS’s extra scrutiny of Tea-Party group’s non-profit application into a Teapot Dome. On August 5, Issa, who is chair of the House Oversight Committee, widened his stalled investigation of the IRS to include contracts between revenue agency and the Federal Elections Commission. On August 7, Reuters broke the story that the NSA had been sharing personnel and resources with the DEA and IRS. Issa’s aggressive grandstanding and hearings has yet to lead to the issuance of subpoenas into NSA-IRS wiretapping and data mining.

    Issa’s hearings and compulsive subpoena behaviors focus on IRS questioning of tax-exempt organizations’ involvement in electoral politics in ways that are not permitted within the framework of permitted non-profit charters. Issa’s concerns are that certain conservative groups may have been subjected to greater scrutiny.

    According to documents acquired by the Free Press [view here], conservative groups were targeted if they had words like Tea-Party, 9/12, or Patriot in their name. The document also called for scrutiny of progressive groups, but the terms to be targeted were redacted under IRS rule 6103, which requires the IRS to protect taxpayers’ identity. The redactions seem to indicate the IRS is more sensitive about who was targeted on the left as opposed to the right.
    ************
    http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/20/2013/5133

  31. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 9:48 am |

    ***************
    The indispensable libertarian journalist James Bovard pointed out in the Wall Street Journal this morning that since its inception, the IRS has often used its enormous power and information-gathering skills for explicitly political ends.

    Bovard explained how President Franklin D. Roosevelt, often revered as a hero by political progressives, used the tax collecting agency to pester those who opposed his enormous expansion of the federal government under the New Deal. During his three-and-a-half terms as president, the Roosevelt IRS took swings at anti-New Deal publishers like William Randolph Hearst and political rivals like prominent Republican Andrew Mellon and radical populist Huey Long.

    Naturally, the fun didn’t end there. Another beloved president, John F. Kennedy later “raised the political exploitation of the IRS to an art form,” Bovard wrote, by launching an Organizations Audit Project that specifically targeted right-leaning groups like the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education.

    Bovard notes how Republican President Richard Nixon later picked up where Kennedy left off: “More than 10,000 individuals and groups were targeted because of their political activism or slant between 1969 and 1973, including Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling (a left-wing critic of the Vietnam War) and the far-right John Birch Society.” In the 1990s, Bill Clinton‘s IRS was found to have audited many conservative groups that were named in a White House report on groups and individuals critical of the Democratic president.

    Was this current administration the next big culprit in line? Nope. Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald points out that Obama’s predecessor, Republican George W. Bush, oversaw a great deal of IRS political harassment of left-leaning groups that criticized the administration. Progressive churches were targeted for their “political” sermons against the Iraq War while conservative pro-Bush churches were left alone under the same rules. Bush’s IRS also deliberately targeted Greenpeace, the NAACP, and other progressive NGOs.
    ******************
    http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/05/the-irs-targets-political-opponents-under-both-liberal-and-conservative-administrations.html

  32. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 9:50 am |

    *************
    This again comes down to definitions. The FISA laws require at least one point of the communications to be outside of American territory so that the government can claim that the espionage targets a foreign source. However, the point of the collection appears to be watching what people in the US are discussing and with whom they are communicating. One could argue that such scrutiny is essential in the war on terror, and a number of people have made that argument.

    However, let’s not pretend that it’s something other than having the NSA — an agency whose charter was originally to intercept foreign communications in the Cold War — turn into a domestic spy service, with all of the potential for abuse that creates.
    *****************
    http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/08/nyt-no-spying-on-americans-au-contraire/

  33. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 9:51 am |

    They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
    Benjamin Franklin

  34. Bad Andrew | August 24, 2013 at 10:03 am |

    “People get positions like hers because they are politically reliable.”

    Well, at least one other person is paying attention.

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/23/a-change-in-the-agu-policy-on-presenting-alternative-scientific-viewpoints/

    Andrew

  36. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 10:38 am |

    ***********
    My Fellow Users,

    I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

    What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

    This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

    Sincerely,
    Ladar Levison
    Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC

    Defending the constitution is expensive! Help us by donating to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund here.
    ****************

    http://lavabit.com/

  37. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 10:41 am |

    This is what Lavabit used to be.
    ******
    Privacy
    Transport Layer Encryption

    Here at Lavabit we take privacy and security seriously. To ensure that no one intercepts your e-mail while it is being downloaded or sent to our servers, we support and encourage the use of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. SSL was created specifically to eliminate eavesdropping and ensure that information could be transported securely over an untrusted network.
    Secure Mail Storage

    The secure mail storage process uses asymmetric encryption to ensure the privacy of messages while being stored on the Lavabit servers. Asymmetric encryption is a process that uses public key and private key encryption to make messages unreadable without knowing a user’s plaintext password. Presently we use Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) with 512 bits of security to encrypt messages. The private, or decryption, key is then encrypted with a user’s password using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and 256 bits of security. The result is that once a message is stored on our servers in this fashion, it can’t be recovered without knowing a user’s password. This provides a priceless level of security, particularly for customers that use e-mail to exchange sensitive information. You can learn more about our asymmetric encryption technology by reading our white paper on the subject.
    ******
    http://web.archive.org/web/20130806040906/http://lavabit.com/features.html

  38. Drflip | August 24, 2013 at 11:07 am |

    A couple of days back someone stated in the reply section that we should never lie to anyone about anything. I don’t lie often but there are times when it is an appropriate alternative to the truth.
    For example my wife walks in the house with a new hairdo from her beauty shop and I think it is absolutely horrible. Am I going to tell her what I really think? Of course not. “That’s really lovely, dear” or something like that is going to be my comment.
    These sort of lies have allowed me to stay married 55 years..

    • jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 11:08 am |

      It is my belief than pretty much any human, with the possible exception of the retarded, have lied and will lie in the future.

    • timg56 | August 24, 2013 at 12:56 pm |

      No wonder I manage to get my wife pissed off at me so frequently.

      I should just stop giving her my honest opinion.

    • Faustino | August 24, 2013 at 7:46 pm |

      Drflip, in such instances I will never lie, but make an honest comment which will not give offence. When I do offer praise, my wife knows that it is sincerely intended. Works for us.

  39. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 11:07 am |

    @Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 11:00 am |
    ” If we see that the last time we had 700 ppm Antarctica was not glaciated, and the next time might be 2100, we may see that Antarctica would be on its way to irreversible melting. Worth a passing thought at least.”

    The larger cycles are governed possibly by Milankovitch cycles and possibly by our position relative to the Galactic spiral arms. (I would be interested to see how NASA intends to control THOSE!) At any rate, the CO2 levels, when elevated at certain times in the past, are probably in large part due to out-gassing. The adding of CO2 to the atmosphere in our current Galactic configuration would be expected to behave differently, I would think.

    • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 11:20 am |

      The Milankovitch theory only works for CO2 less than 400 ppm when glaciation is possible. Prior to those CO2 levels there were no Ice Ages. We have probably seen the last of those.

  40. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 11:46 am |

    ************
    President Barack Obama, on his first full day in office in 2009, said, “Let me say it as simply as I can: Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

    Time has given the lie to this bold statement. Repeatedly.

    In fact, what America has seen is unprecedented secrecy. Judicial Watch has had to file over 1,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and well over 100 lawsuits against the Obama administration seeking information about:

    Obamacare;
    the continued funding of the criminal ACORN network;
    tracking Wall Street bailout money;
    the czar racket;
    immigration policy;
    election integrity;
    information on Operation Fast and Furious (which led to the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and countless Mexican citizens);
    records concerning the illegal appointment of Richard Cordray to the NSA-esque, personal consumer credit data drilling Consumer Finance Protection Board;
    the images of the capture, killing and burial of Osama bin Laden (that might upset the terrorists);
    disastrous green energy loan guarantees;
    Benghazi;
    Billions of dollars of spending on Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac (the government takeover of the mortgage market);
    Hillary Clinton’s ethics compliance records (from an administration that has probably perfected the “ethics waiver,” but that’s another story).
    *********************
    http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/24/The-Unprecedented-Secrecy-of-the-Obama-Administration

  41. M. Hastings | August 24, 2013 at 12:00 pm |

    Anyone familiar with Saber?

    http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/22mar_saber/

    “Carbon dioxide and nitric oxide are natural thermostats,” explains James Russell of Hampton University, SABER’s principal investigator. “When the upper atmosphere (or ‘thermosphere’) heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space.”

    • captdallas 0.8 or less | August 24, 2013 at 12:19 pm |

      M. Hastings, That doesn’t count. The TOA is only 10 to 20 kilometers in the models. Heck above that there is only ~15% of the mass of the atmosphere which is obviously negligible. /sarc

      • Jim D | August 24, 2013 at 12:31 pm |

        I don’t know where you get that from, but climate models contain at least 99% of the atmospheric mass below their top, in some cases up to 99.9%.

    • A fan of *MORE* discourse | August 24, 2013 at 12:30 pm |

      M. Hastings asks “Anyone familiar with [NASA’s TIMED satellite and its SABER instruments]?”

      Links added by me!

      The capabilities and limitations of satellite radiometric thermography are surveyed at-length by Hansen and colleagues in the (lengthy) Section 13.6.1 “Measuring Earth’s energy imbalance” of the (lengthy) review article Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications. For scientific reasons that Hansen reviews in-depth, the conclusion is

      “There can be no credible expectation that this [satellite] tuning/calibration procedure can reduce the [present] error by two orders of magnitude, as required to measure changes of Earth’s energy balance to an accuracy of 0.1 W/m2.”

      The gist is that radiometric thermography is well-suited to studying local short-term changes (hurricanes and e.g., currents); not so good for global long-term changes. For long-term/global satellite assessments it’s more accurate to rely upon altimetry/(e.g. TOPEX) satellites and gravimetry/(e.g. GRACE) satellites rather than radiometry/(e.g. TIMED) satellites.

      A careful reading of Hansen’s survey is commended to you, M. Hastings!

      \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}

      • Harold | August 24, 2013 at 12:34 pm |

        I wish I had a nickel for every time Fanny says “Hanson”.

      • A fan of *MORE* discourse | August 24, 2013 at 12:58 pm |

        LOL … Harold, it’s a plain fact that whenever the strongest skepticism matches itself against (in Judith’s phrase) “the best available science”, the phrase “Hansen’s work” is gonna appear pretty often.

        The reasons is simple: when it comes to climate-change science, Hansen (and his colleagues) got there “firstest with the mostest“

        ▷  Hansen got there “firstest”  with his 1981 article Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

        ▷  Hansen got there “with the mostest”  namely, scientific analysis focussing upon (relatively stronger) thermodynamic considerations of radiation transport and global energy balance, as contrasted with (relatively weaker) dynamical computer models and surface temperature analysis.

        Conclusion Climate-change skepticism that chooses willful ignorance of Hansen-style “best available science” amounts to a particularly feeble variety of climate-change denialism.

        That’s pure common sense, eh Harold?

        \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}

      • timg56 | August 24, 2013 at 1:01 pm |

        I wish fanny was hooked to one of those dog collars which let out a small current every time he mentioned Hanson.

        Might keep the rest of us from wading through his crap.

      • timg56 | August 24, 2013 at 1:03 pm |

        Harold

        that’s 25 cents by my count just from his reply to you. You may be on to something.

      • A fan of *MORE* discourse | August 24, 2013 at 1:19 pm |

        LOL  Harold, that shoulda been a thirty-cent bounty for SIX mentions of “James Hansen”. And heck, yah deserve a nickel-bounty too, for each mention o f“Pope Francis“, “Wendell Berry“, and “Tom Jefferson“!

        \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}

      • DocMartyn | August 24, 2013 at 1:27 pm |

        Hansen does not use “scientific analysis focusing upon (relatively stronger) thermodynamic considerations of radiation transport and global energy balance”, he applies equilibrium thermodynamics to non-equilibrium steady states. Essentially, Hansen and FOMD think a Boeing 747 is the same as a helium filled balloon.

      • M. Hastings | August 24, 2013 at 1:51 pm |

        I’m new to this and obviously learning, but I don’t see the connection you are trying to make. Perhaps you went too far thinking I knew more on satellites? I looked up TOPEX it measures sea level within an accuracy of 2cm and GRACE measures the earths magnetic fields. Are they also used for other things? Do scientists agree James Russell?

      • A fan of *MORE* discourse | August 24, 2013 at 2:24 pm |

        Wikipedia is a great friend to climate-change techWikipedia is a great friend to climate-change techno-learners!

        ▷  GRACE: Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment

        ▷  JASON-2: Ocean Surface Topography Mission

        (includes links to the similar preceding Topex and Jason-1 missions)

        ▷  ARGO: Argo Ocean Profiling Network

        Among other things, these programs provide redundant global-coverage measures of ice-mass, sea-level, and energy-balance. These observations constitute the broad-and-deep foundation of (what Judith Curry calls) “the best available science” regarding climate-change.

        Denialists commonly ignore this work, precisely because it is strong.

        Which is willfully ignorant goofiness, needless to say!

        \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}

      • M. Hastings | August 24, 2013 at 2:51 pm |

        Fan, I was curious about the CO2 and the NO2 in the Thermosphere and how it reflected the energy back into space as I didn’t know that before. I still don’t understand what you are trying to tell me about the statement Dr. Russell made, is it that the SABER program sucks? Is useless in value, tells us nothing?

      • A fan of *MORE* discourse | August 24, 2013 at 2:56 pm |

        Summary TIMED/SABER observations are outstanding space-science, but they aren’t directly relevant to climate-change (and Dr. Russell’s interview did not claim any such relevance). I hope this helps, M. Hastings!

      • M. Hastings | August 24, 2013 at 4:30 pm |

        Neither did I, you were the one who introduced climate science into this discussion. Building blocks first.

      • Chief Hydrologist | August 25, 2013 at 1:01 am |

        “There can be no credible expectation that this [satellite] tuning/calibration procedure can reduce the [present] error by two orders of magnitude, as required to measure changes of Earth’s energy balance to an accuracy of 0.1 W/m2.”

        Absolute values of energy imbalance are quite difficult. Anomalies – changes in relatives values – are another matter entirely.

        ‘This paper highlights how the emerging record of satellite observations from the Earth Observation System (EOS) and A-Train constellation are advancing our ability to more completely document and understand the underlying processes associated with variations in the Earth’s top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation budget.’

        http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf

        This is the best and most reliable evidence we have for such things as the ‘missing energy’. However – it says entirely the wrong thing about the nature of this energy and must be discredited or subverted. Trenberth in fact notes that the net toa flux is consistent with ocean heat content. So it is – but the net trend is all in the shortwave trend.

        e.g. http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif.html?sort=3&o=117

        The whole thing seems to be built on a tissue of lies – with the gullible too dumb to understand.

      • Jim D | August 25, 2013 at 1:24 am |

        CH, the longwave trend due to CO2 cooling would be offset by that due to surface warming, so what you are left with is the shortwave trend due to a positive cloud feedback.

      • Chief Hydrologist | August 25, 2013 at 1:55 am |

        ??? Never mind – the short term variations like this are all natural. It is stuff and nonsense to suggest otherwise.

        And I would have another look at the graph if I were you.

    • Pekka Pirilä | August 24, 2013 at 12:49 pm |

      According to that NASA article global power from thermosphere is around 1 TW. That’s 0.001 % of the solar radiation that hit’s the Earth.

      The numbers are large for the thermosphere but essentially negligible for the global energy balance.

      • M. Hastings | August 24, 2013 at 3:48 pm |

        Pekka, is the way CO2 acts in the thermosphere in reflecting energy back out to space a different phenomenon then the way CO2 absorbs energy in the atmosphere? I’m missing something but am unsure of what.

      • Pekka Pirilä | August 24, 2013 at 3:59 pm |

        No, it’s not any different except that the absorption peaks are very narrow in absence of pressure (collisional) broadening. CO2 and NO do not reflect any radiation, they absorb it and re-emit much later isotropically to all directions.

        Because the absorption/emission peaks are very narrow the likelihood of re-absorption of the photons by other molecules is much higher that otherwise typical in the very rare gas. That adds to the likelihood that a photon will ultimately escape to space.

        On the other hand the narrowness of the peaks means that most IR radiation will pass trough the thermosphere with very little absorption. Thermosphere is somewhat opaque at a few wavelengths but almost fully transparent at most.

      • M. Hastings | August 24, 2013 at 4:36 pm |

        Thanks Pekka, I’ll have to do some work on your statement to understand it. But its a start.

    • Edim | August 26, 2013 at 2:55 am |

      Yes, CO2 is atmospheric coolant (radiator to space), the bulk of the atmosphere (N2 and O2) are the insulators (GHE).

      • WebHubTelescope (@whut) | August 26, 2013 at 11:50 am |

        EDim believes that CO2 in the atmosphere acts as a coolant.

        Motivated reasoning is rampant among the contrarian denialists. They want to believe that CO2 acts as a coolant so therefore they make the assertion.

        It takes no effort and the denial team is happy that eDim can add to the FUD with his casual assertions.

      • Edim | August 29, 2013 at 7:07 am |

        Whut, no motivated resoning, just an observation. The bulk of the atmosphere cannot radiate to space (consensus agrees) – only the so-called GHGs (and clouds) can. Another observation is that more than 90% of the planetary cooling power comes from the atmosphere, not surface.
        http://science-edu.larc.nasa.gov/EDDOCS/images/Erb/components2.gif

      • Pekka Pirilä | August 29, 2013 at 7:14 am |

        The better the protection against cooling, i.e. the stringer the GHE the larger is the share of GHG’s as the source of OLR.

        While the share of GHG’s in the OLR goes up the surface gets warmer and warmer.

        Curious coolants.

      • kim | August 29, 2013 at 7:21 am |

        Heh, but not impossible to imagine a manner in which CO2 acts differently than each other individual GHG. Personally, I doubt it; by Gaia I hope there is some heat in AnthroCO2. Salad alone won’t suffice, thanks.
        =================

      • phatboy | August 29, 2013 at 7:49 am |

        So what would happen to an atmosphere devoid of greenhouse gases? Wouldn’t it slowly be heated to the highest temperature attained at the surface?
        And if not, why not?

      • Edim | August 31, 2013 at 2:52 am |

        “While the share of GHG’s in the OLR goes up the surface gets warmer and warmer.”

        If atmosphere radiates more, then the net surface cooling flux (to the atmosphere) has to increase – atmosphere can only radiate what it’s gained from the surface, ignoring the directly absorbed solar. Curious GHE.

  42. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 12:29 pm |

    ”
    Ken Cuccinelli Attacked By Climate Scientist As ‘Anti-Science Zealot’

    The Huffington Post | By Danielle Schlanger Posted: 07/29/2013 2:40 pm EDT | Updated: 07/30/2013 12:42 pm EDT

    Renowned climate scientist Michael Mann has taken the unorthodox step of jumping into politics and campaigning with Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, worried that an “anti-science zealot” could win the election in November.

    In an interview with radio host Ari Rabin-Havt on Sirius XM Progress on Monday, Mann sharply contrasted Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) with his gubernatorial opponent, Democrat Terry McAuliffe. The election is on Nov. 5.

    Mann said Virginians “can either vote for an anti-science zealot like Ken Cuccinelli, who would use his authority to try to persecute scientists whose views he doesn’t agree with … versus Terry McAuliffe, a pro-science, pro-technology politician.”

    “In this case, I felt that the choice was so stark that it was my responsibility to do what I could to try to help the McAuliffe campaign, help them in drawing that contrast between the way they view science and technology and the way Mr. Cuccinelli does,” Mann later added. ”

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/29/ken-cuccinelli-climate_n_3671334.html

    • timg56 | August 24, 2013 at 1:06 pm |

      Mann had a classic comment while in Norfolk, talking about the threat to naval bases, which are right on the coast.

      Made me wonder where the good professor thinks they should be.

  43. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 12:46 pm |

    OK, so where are all those killer hurricanes? Was 2005 jumped on by the alarmists due to Katrina? Looks like one big cherry to me.

  44. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 4:27 pm |

    *************
    Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch recently obtained a Department of Defense training manual which lists people who embrace “individual liberties” and honor “states’ rights,” among other characteristics, as potential “extremists” who are likely to be members of “hate groups.”

    dodmanMarked “for training purposes only,” the documents, obtained Thursday through a Freedom of Information Act request submitted in April, include PowerPoint slides and lesson plans, among which is a January 2013 Air Force “student guide” distributed by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute simply entitled “Extremism.”
    ******************
    http://www.infowars.com/dod-training-manual-suggests-extremist-founding-fathers-would-not-be-welcome-in-todays-military/

  45. jim2 | August 24, 2013 at 6:44 pm |

    Internet Architects Plan Counter-Attack On NSA Snooping
    Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/24/2013 16:24 -0400
    **************
    “Not having encryption on the web today is a matter of life and death,” is how one member of the Internet Engineering Task Force – IETF (the so-called architects of the web) described the current situation. As the FT reports, the IETF have started to fight back against US and UK snooping programs by drawing up an ambitious plan to defend traffic over the world wide web against mass surveillance. The proposal is a system in which all communication between websites and browsers would be shielded by encryption.
    ***************
    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-08-24/internet-architects-plan-counter-attack-nsa-snooping

  46. Faustino | August 24, 2013 at 7:42 pm |

    Offence is often given and taken at CE and elsewhere. The right to offend was defended in The Weekend Australian’s Review section. My reply is pertinent here:

    It is easy to accuse others when we are offended and to demand that their words and actions be restrained, but it is not effective (“Defending the right to offend,” August 24-25). Nothing said or written ever “causes” offence: the offence lies entirely in the reaction to the words, and the offended person must look within themselves for a remedy.

    Whenever a stimulus comes to a sense door – a sound to the ear, a vision to the eye, etc – the mind evaluates it in the light of past experience – words of praise, good, words of abuse, bad. With every stimulus, a sensation arises on the body: with a good evaluation, the sensation will be pleasant, with a bad evaluation, unpleasant. The mind then reacts to this sensation: with liking for pleasant sensations, dislike for unpleasant ones.

    This momentary process of reacting leads to entrenched habit patterns of craving and aversion, of tying knots inside ourselves, in the deepest part of our mind, the so-called subconscious which dominates our surface thoughts.

    The only way to escape from taking offence, from causing oneself pain in response to the actions of others, is to end this process of reaction. This can be done only by equanimous observation of the sensations arising on the body, a process of stopping new reactions and eradicating past conditionings which lead to “being offended” and other forms of suffering. The outcome is a more harmonious and productive life, good for oneself and good for others.

    The practice to achieve this, Vipassana meditation, was taught by the Buddha; but it is not a sectarian technique or a belief system, it is a universal remedy to a universal problem, a tool each one of us can use.

  47. Ragnaar | August 24, 2013 at 9:28 pm |

    “Movie chat has rarely captured what’s at stake so effectively as this bar room banter. In a discussion on three well known apocalyptic eco-films, An Inconvenient truth, The Day after Tomorrow and Age of Stupid, a trio of guest experts take us beyond the usual finger pointing at doom-mongers. A palette of emotions: fear; loss and regret, are used to shortcut politics and convince us to change our behaviour or be seen as morally circumspect…”

    While the 30 minute video’s subject is 3 movies, it’s one of the most insightful takes on the debate I’ve seen. It includes Ben Pike of Climate-Resistance.

  49. GaryM | August 25, 2013 at 12:41 am |

    Shoot, this is probably more CO2 emissions than Algore and Thomas Friedman combined. All y’all warmists should go have a sit in in North Dakota.

    “As of 2012, North Dakota sat on a healthy $1.6 billion budget surplus that continues to grow along with the state’s oil and gas industry.

    This rapid economic growth has come at a cost exceeding $100 million per month due to a process known as ‘flaring’. Flaring, the burning of natural gas reservoirs to access oil traps, is so widespread in North Dakota and the Bakken oil fields that it can be clearly seen from space. As oil exploration and recovery continues in North Dakota, oil companies do not have the equipment or infrastructure to store or transport the gas. As a result, the gas is burned until explorers can safely access the oil. Flaring isn’t expected to go away anytime soon, as the state’s 9,000 wells are expected to hit 50,000 by 2030.”

    http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/21/North-Dakota-s-New-Energy-Boom-Natural-Gas

    This frickin’ frackin’ and flarin’ is frightenin’.

  50. GaryM | August 25, 2013 at 2:21 am |

    For all you warmists and lukewarmers who are so impressed with the sophistication of the pro-CAGW U.S. DOD when it comes to their occasional musings on climate as a threat to national security, there’s this latest from the wizards of smart at the Air Force.

    “In a section drawing inspiration from a 1992 book titled ‘Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe: Political Extremism in America,’ the manual also lists ‘Doomsday thinking’ under ‘traits or behaviors that tend to represent the extremist style.’

    Extremists often predict dire or catastrophic consequences from a situation or from a failure to follow a specific course, and they tend to exhibit a kind of crisis-mindedness. It can be a Communist takeover, a Nazi revival, nuclear war, earthquakes, floods, or the wrath of God. Whatever it is, it is just around the corner unless we follow their program and listen to their special insight and wisdom, to which only the truly enlightened have access. For extremists, any setback or defeat is the beginning of the end.”

    http://www.infowars.com/dod-training-manual-suggests-extremist-founding-fathers-would-not-be-welcome-in-todays-military/

    The manual includes the usual nonsense about those who support individual liberties or state’s rights as potentially dangerous “extremists.” But then includes the above.

    Now who can we think of who is suggesting dire or catastrophic consequences, that are right around the corner, unless we follow their policy prescriptions? Anybody? Anybody? Can you say decarbonization and tipping points?

    In trying to slam conservatives and libertarians (including in a nod to progressive historical revisionism – America’s founding fathers), these geniuses indicted their own beloved CAGW movement. You just can’t make this stuff up.

  51. mpcraig | August 25, 2013 at 1:33 pm |

    Does anybody know the global average SST vs the global average air temperature over the oceans? If the former is lower, how can heat transfer (net) from atmosphere to ocean?

    • Pekka Pirilä | August 25, 2013 at 1:35 pm |

      Heat does not transfer (net) from the atmosphere to the ocean. The direction is strongly from the ocean to atmosphere as solar radiation heats the oceans much more than they warm.

      • mpcraig | August 25, 2013 at 2:42 pm |

        I’m trying figure out how Trenberth’s “missing heat” is getting into the oceans. I suppose that the temperature of the Earth’s crust at the bottom of the ocean is also a factor (heat conduction) in ocean temperature although I’ve read nothing about that scientifically.

      • Pekka Pirilä | August 25, 2013 at 3:09 pm |

        Large heat flows are going on all the time. On the average the up and down flows cancel fairly accurately. Rather small changes make that cancellation less accurate, and that leads to a net flow in either direction. Nothing magical is needed for that, but on the other hand it’s very difficult to determine empirically that net flow.

        The most promising empirical approach is the measurement of ocean temperatures with the ARGO floats. They are technically accurate enough, and their number is large enough to give good statistical accuracy. One problem does, however, remain, that of representativeness of the sample obtained from the ARGO floats. Ocean currents do not stay the same, we have PDO, AMO, ENSO etc. Therefore the difference between the true average and the sample average varies, and it’s very difficult to tell, how much that difference varies. That’s probably the largest source of uncertainty in the estimates of changes in the ocean heat content.

    • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | August 25, 2013 at 3:17 pm |

      Mpcraig,

      Need to reverse your thinking. Net energy flow is always from ocean to atmosphere. Changes is ocean cycles can vastly alter the rate of that flow. When oceans retain a bit more, the atmosphere cools a bit, and when they release a bit more the atmosphere warms a bit. This natural cycle of ocean-atmosphere energy flow rises on top (and may be modified by) the external forcing to the system that increasing GH gases represent.

      • M. Hastings | August 26, 2013 at 5:07 pm |

        R. Gates do you have an article I can read to understand the physics? Also, what happens at night when the ocean cools, is that the time it releases its energy?

  52. jim2 | August 25, 2013 at 2:18 pm |

    Cookieless cookies
    There is another obscure way of tracking users without using cookies or even Javascript. It has already been used by numerous websites but few people know of it. This page explains how it works and how to protect yourself.

    This tracking method works without needing to use:

    Cookies
    Javascript
    LocalStorage/SessionStorage/GlobalStorage
    Flash, Java or other plugins
    Your IP address or user agent string
    Any methods employed by Panopticlick

    Instead it uses another type of storage that is persistent between browser restarts: caching.

    Even when you disabled cookies entirely, have Javascript turned off and use a VPN service, this technique will still be able to track you.

    http://lucb1e.com/rp/cookielesscookies/

  53. jim2 | August 25, 2013 at 8:11 pm |

    The year is 2015, the Earth’s global temperature has taken a significant turn colder.

    Barak Obama: I promised in my 2012 campaign that my Administration would be the most CO2 transparent ever. I have kept that promise!

    Lindsey Graham: We have to cooperate! Republicans MUST work with the Hockey Team to persuade the voters that the Earth is warming.

    John McCain – just off the plane from a meeting with the Hockey Team: The Hockey Team are THE Climate Scientists. We have to figure out how to make the sea rise 15 feet or we will look foolish and lose the liberal vote!

    John Kerry: I was for the warming before I was against it.

    Judith Curry: I just don’t know what to make of all this.

    Steve Mosher: The models say this Kant be happening!

    Steve McIntyre: Steve did have a post on this, but the complexity is beyond the scope of this parody.

    Lucia Liljegren posts to her site: This Hot Toddy recipe has been in my family for 150 years. My ARIMA model predicts we will be 14% warmer within a 95% confidence interval if we drink this daily.

    Nature’s just released a new paper authored by Michael Mann and Eric Steig, “Warming of the Mid 2000’s.” The paper’s authors apply a crack statistical technique that demonstrates that the USHCN thermometers have been read upside down lately, and apply a newly developed AlGorythm that show a steep increase in global temperature in the past two years.

    The Air Vent: “Told ya!”

    Anthony Watts’ new Web site: Get Down with That!

    Willis Eschenbach: This recalls a time that I was lost in Death Valley when, to my surprise, I was caught up in a freak blizzard in August. I ran across an old prospector who took me in. The wind cut through the clapboards …

    • kim | August 25, 2013 at 8:30 pm |

      The globe is warming, folks; for how long even kim doesn’t know.
      ====================

      • Chief Hydrologist | August 25, 2013 at 8:36 pm |

        Again – girls in rags and feathers is a better option than grizzled prospectors for shelter from the storm. What was willis thinking?

    • Faustino | August 26, 2013 at 2:34 am |

      Hidden depths, Jim, hidden depths.

  54. jim2 | August 25, 2013 at 8:26 pm |

    ****************
    Posted on Sunday, August 25, 2013

    NSA having flashbacks to Watergate era

    By KEN DILANIAN | Tribune Washington Bureau

    WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency is facing its worst crisis since the domestic spying scandals four decades ago led to the first formal oversight and overhaul of U.S. intelligence operations.

    Thanks to former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden’s flood of leaks to the media, and the Obama administration’s uneven response to them, morale at the spy agency responsible for intercepting communications of terrorists and foreign adversaries has plummeted, former officials say. Even sympathetic lawmakers are calling for new curbs on the NSA’s powers.

    “This is a secret intelligence agency that’s now in the news every day,” said Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA from 1999 to 2005 and later led the CIA. “Each day, the workforce wakes up and reads the daily indictment.”

    President Barack Obama acknowledged Friday that many Americans have lost trust in the nation’s largest intelligence agency. “There’s no doubt that, for all the work that’s been done to protect the American people’s privacy, the capabilities of the NSA are scary to people,” he said in a CNN interview.
    **********************
    http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/25/200325/nsa-having-flashbacks-to-watergate.html#.UhqgdeF2PZ8

  55. jim2 | August 25, 2013 at 8:27 pm |

    ***************
    Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) told Fox News Sunday even he was not sure to what extent the National Security Agency kept tabs on Americans, adding he wanted the NSA to brief Congress “from top to bottom” to explain the programs in place and help ensure appropriate oversight.

    CHRIS WALLACE: Let me ask you a direct question, sir. As the top Republican on Senate Foreign Relations, as you sit here today, do you feel you actually know what the government is and isn’t doing in surveilling Americans?

    CORKER: No. I don’t think there are many people work harder than I do. I’m not on the intelligence committee. Obviously, they are privy to information that I am not. But absolutely not. That’s why I wrote a letter this week to the president, ask that the head of this organization come in and brief folks from top to bottom to explain every program that’s under way, understand so we can understand its intent and to understand how appropriate oversight is taking place. Look, I appreciate efforts to keep Americans secure. At the same time, this is in front of us. We are not in front of it. Every day there are stories, as you just mentioned, that are leaked out. The American people want to know that those of us who are elected, Eliot and I, understand fully what’s happening here. I don’t think we do. I would imagine there are even members of the intelligence committee themselves that don’t fully understand the gambit of things that are taking place. It’s our responsibility to know those things, to ensure they’re in balance, and I hope as soon as we get back there’ll be a full briefing from top to bottom so that can happen.
    ****************
    http://freebeacon.com/corker-congress-doesnt-know-extent-of-nsa-surveillance/

    • kim | August 25, 2013 at 8:33 pm |

      Remind him of the timely time when the NSA mistook ’20’, a middle eastern area code for ‘202’, the DC area code. And for how long.
      ====================

  56. GaryM | August 26, 2013 at 12:29 am |

    How the anti-democratic EU bureaucracy is trying to strangle fracking in the cradle. And the voters be damned.

    http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/356681/seat-table-andrew-stuttaford

    • Faustino | August 26, 2013 at 2:41 am |

      … “And, yes, this does represent a profound corruption of the democratic process.
      Which is the idea.” Quite.

  57. R. Gates the Skeptical Warmist | August 26, 2013 at 7:16 pm |

    Sorry guys, it ain’t the sun wot done it (except the 1940 to 1970 cooling it seems):

    http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/21/1311433110.full.pdf+html

  58. Harold | August 29, 2013 at 3:31 pm |

    Here we go again…

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/08/16/hurricane-sandy-bloomberg-column/2659065/

    “New York City’s post-Sandy study concluded that infrequent “once-in-a-century” storms are likely to occur more frequently, adversely affect more Americans and cause exponentially more economic damage. Hurricane Sandy was at the time considered a once-in-70-year “loss event.”The projected impact of climate change could make Sandy a once-in-50-year disaster by mid-century. Further, rising sea levels and bigger storms could increase economic damages close to fivefold — in the case of a Sandy-like hurricane, an estimated $19 billion in damages to New York City would increase to $90 billion. “