by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this last week.
Actually this past week was a virtual firehouse of interesting analyses and material, unfortunately I am short on time and can’t do much in the way of analysis. I’ve pulled a number of articles to include in future main posts. I hope you will find these articles interesting.
Fabius Maximus has an article Cutting to the heart of the public policy debate on climate change, that picks up on themes raised in my recent ‘absence of evidence’ post.
Bloomberg has an article Scare tactics fail climate scientists and everyone else.
Another excellent rant: A Long Rant on the Politicization of Science.
Keith Kloor responds to the lynching of RP Jr with A Climate Mob.
Cli-fi gets a plug in this NYTimes article Using the arts to teach how to prepare for climate crisis.
JoNova has a post Journal admits Lewandowsky paper retracted because it failed twice.
Mark Steyn’s latest: Climbing off the hockey stick and Celebrating Conformity.
From Sowell’s Law blog: Are climate skeptics legally liable for criminal negligence?
Here’s one for Uncertain T. Monster: Rethinking fat: the case for adding some into your diet.
Matt Briggs in CBSnews.com: Ivy league statistician debunks NASA funded ‘socialism or extinction’ study.
Nature has an article Streamline IPCC reports.
NYTimes article: Facing rising seas: Bangladesh confronts the consequences of climate change.
As a preview of what we can expect from the forthcoming WG3 Report: U.S. sees danger UN may overstate costs of global warming fight.
JC note: This week I am in Boulder CO to participate in the Conference on World Affairs. The panels I will serve on are listed [here]. Of particular interest, I will be giving a talk on Friday entitled Climate Change: It’s About the Data. The discussant for my talk is Kevin Trenberth. That should be interesting!
please ask Dear Kev if he can explain whatever happened to Dr Wagner, the first and only journal editor who resigned (asking forgiveness to Dear Kev) for having published a paper that has not been retracted.
What’s the betting Kev turns up without any data at all and says that it’s a travesty that he can’t find it.
But then proudly declares that even if he had any he wouldn’t show it to anybody who might want to find fault with it?
A true Team Player
Data might be “hiding” in the ocean depths.
As a change of pace from the stories of backbiting, the solution to the ENSO SOI is here:
http://contextearth.com/2014/04/05/the-chandler-wobble-and-the-soim/
WHUT–unrelated to this thread, but what might be of interest to you with regards to a previous post of yours.
I am looking at fishermen who have driven (with four wheelers) to their fishing spots on the lake here in southern MN. Unusual because the average ‘ice out’ here is between March 27th and April 4th. Ice out defined as somewhere between the lake is almost completely navigable to the ice is completely gone.
Of course there is only one possible conclusion: 97% of us are sick and tired of the long, hard winter!
From the post:
http://contextearth.com/2014/04/05/the-chandler-wobble-and-the-soim/
WebHubTelescope: http://contextearth.com/2014/04/05/the-chandler-wobble-and-the-soim/
I didn’t see a plot of model vs data with corresponding R^2. The plotted curves seem to go in and out of phase more or less at random.
The Aussie can not accept the fact that underlying quasi-periodic factors can drive phenomena such as ENSO, thus crushing his ridiculous fantasies of a chaotically driven world.
There really is a reason for everything that happens on this grand a scale. A butterfly flapping its wings is no match for the forces exerted by the moon and the orbit of the earth as it continues to spin.
There is a reason for everything – and in a dissipative system it doesn’t include butterflies. The butterfly is a metaphor suggested by the Lorenz ‘strange attractor’. In reality it is a system composed of cyrosphere, atmosphere, aquasphere and biosphere with tremendous energies cascading through powerful subsystems with shifting states as an emergent property of the collective behavior of the system. Changes in conditions elicit nonlinear responses in climate. This is the utterly mainstream theory – and dominant paradigm – of the essential mode of climate operation.
The SOI it has characteristics that are not related to the tidal pulse or the wobble of the Earth – there is little that is more absurd than webby’s fringe blogospheric science than this. Mind you I haven’t tried following the fractured math and fantasy physics – it s inevitably a waste of time.
ENSO is stochastically initiated with conditions on the Western coast of the Pacific favouring cold water upwelling. La Nina propagates across the Pacific with a series of feedbacks in wind, cloud and currents pushing warm water up against Australia and Indonesia. Ultimately the trade winds falter and the Indo-Pacific warm pool flows east across the Pacific. The system shifts aperiodically between ENSO states but also with changing frequency and intensity – nonstationarity – on decadal to longer timescales. The ‘Great Pacific Climate Shift’ of 1976/1977 and the shift of 1998/2001 are examples of the latter – and these are abrupt changes that are emergent behavior of the global system.
With webby it is inevitably fractured curve fitting math vaguely linked to fantasy physics. The failure to understand the essential elements of the system – and imposing a Procrustean fit – means that it will ever be thus.
Cue tedious, repetitive and immature prattling from webby. Bizarre really.
The Aussie understands little of oscillating systems. He apparently can’t even acknowledge that it is called Southern Oscillation. An oscillation emerges from a property of the system that is resonant and/or a forcing function that oscillates.
What I did was a straightforward analysis modeling the system as a Mathieu equation, which is a simple sinusoidal modulation of the wave equation. The solution of the Mathieu equation yields an oscillating yet chaotic-looking waveform which mimics the behavior of these systems.
The fact of the matter is that the SOI waveform matches the characteristics of the Mathieu equation uncannily.
‘In mathematics, the Mathieu functions are certain special functions useful for treating a variety of problems in applied mathematics, including:
– vibrating elliptical drumheads,
– quadrupole mass analyzers and quadrupole ion traps for mass spectrometry
– wave motion in periodic media, such as ultracold atoms in an optical lattice
– the phenomenon of parametric resonance in forced oscillators,
– exact plane wave solutions in general relativity,
– the Stark effect for a rotating electric dipole,
– in general, the solution of differential equations that are separable in elliptic cylindrical coordinates.’ Wikipedia
There is no simple application to a hugely complex basin and a phenomenon involving multiple physical processes. Webby’s fringe blogospheric science involves poor curve fitting using fractured math and fantasy physics.
It is that simple.
Web-Scope
Integrated SOI and its ‘proxy’ (or the driver ?)
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SOI.htm
MAV, certainly the envelope of the integrated SOI is puzzling as this period is much longer than the Chandler Wobble beat period of 6.4 years.
MAV, certainly the envelope of the integrated SOI is puzzling as this period is much longer than the Chandler Wobble beat period of 6.4 years.
Web-teleScope
No need to despair, most of us quasi-scientists have favourite pet theory, some work, most do not. Tectonics is a relatively random sequence of events, and my pseudo-science suggest that the ENSO is somehow related to it, IF so then no regular cycles would be observed. Pack in your tele-Scope and get a seismo-graphing apparatus.
MAV, you are forgetting to consider the Markowitz wobble, which has a long term period.
Rupert Ellison, you forget that the Mathieu function formulation was first applied to large volumes of water in 1929 by Goldstein IIRC.
It was applied to waves in an idealized elliptical lake of constant depth – equivalent to motion in an elliptical drumhead. There is first of all not a chance of realistically applying it to the Pacific basin. Secondly – there are many ocean and atmospheric processes that are significant in the phenomenon that are unrelated to surface waves – the latter being a minor consideration. Fantasy physics and disjointed math all round.
WebHubTelescope: The fact of the matter is that the SOI waveform matches the characteristics of the Mathieu equation uncannily.
Where was that shown? Figures 1 and 2 do not display a very strong relationship. Figure 3 clearly shows the functions going in and out of phase. It’s nice to know that you can do phase plots (figures 7 and 8), but you do not show that the function and data are actually correlated, or that their derivatives are correlated.
You wrote: Yet, the evidence points to the even more plausible explanation of a limited set of periodic or quasi-periodic factors interacting with a nonlinear wave equation (i.e. Mathieu equation) to produce the fluctuating pattern in the SOI profile.
All you actually have in evidence is a bunch of curves that do not look highly correlated, and you have correlation coefficients or R^2 values.
oops, you don’t have correlation coefficients or R^2 values.
Web-Scope
Didn’t even know that it existed, so looked it up
http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/models/PM/Markowitz.html
I gather that you think you are a telescope, but really, do you need to resort to astrology?
Markowitz wobble average period (from the above link) = 29.625 years
Saturn sidereal period =29.657
.
The integrated waveform exaggerates the long periods. When differentiated, they are not as strong as they look in an integrated form.
The authority on the connection between the Chandler Wobble and oceanic and atmospheric effects is Gross from JPL.
Again, the issue is that everyone is looking for periodic effects as sinusoidal waveforms. My own experience with modulated periodic potentials ala semiconductor physics lead me to use Mathieu or Hill equation formulations to model the oscillations. Better keep up with math that has been around for ages.
Rupert Ellison, so I see you dug up the reference and scored an own goal. Nicely played!
The beauty of coming up with a more deterministic view of ENSO is that climate scientists will be able to incorporate this determinism into their medium and long term models and thus be able to reduce the uncertainty on outcomes and projections.
Wobbles are effects and not causes and impossible to relate to specific pressure and wind fields. The connection between idealized motion in an elliptical drumhead and Earth wobbles is nonsense. Trying to extract reality from Webby’s fringe blogospheric nonsense is a monstrous task.
I do have correlation coefficients in the graphs.
Your problem is apparently that you need to read harder.
I looked at the 1929 paper when webby first raised it. It concerns an idealized elliptical lake with constant depth. It was an exercise in pure math and bears no relation to real physics of the Pacific basin or the real and multi-faceted surface ocean, deep ocean and atmospheric dimensions of ENSO. Utter nonsense from webby as usual. Fractured math and fantasy physics very poorly fitting a curve. I think he specializes I wasting everyone’s time with theoretically impossible nonsense.
ENSO is the same as semiconductor physics? Yeah right. It is just (very poor) Procrustean curve fitting. Utter nonsense in other words.
WebHubTelescope:I do have correlation coefficients in the graphs.
Not figure 1.
Figure 2 has something called R=cc “correlation coefficient”? with value 0.937 is that it? You were right: I had to enlarge it.
Figure 3 also has R=cc with a figure of 0.937
Those two figures do not appear compatible with a correlation coefficient of 0.937 for either of them, much less both.
Figure 5 top and bottom also have R=cc with identical values of 0.95236.
Fig 5 has the caption: Adding the lunar tidal periods of 6, 8.85, 18.6, and 16.9 years tentatively improves the fit.
It does not look like much improvement.
More from the text: Then if we plot the ratio of the SOI index measurement and its second derivative, we can conceivably extract the varying periodic factor from the graphed profile:
−d2Φdη2Φ=a−2qcos(2η)
If we make the assumption that dΦ/dt is the SOI index, that means we can use the first derivative of the SOI and its integral to find any periodic values. The tricky part is that the integral wanders away from zero, so I filtered out the low frequency modulation, leaving behind only the subdecadal fluctuation. Although a bit messy with singularities, since the denominator passes through zero as the index wanders through inflection points, the fundamental frequency is clearly discernible, see Figure 1:
I do not see the fundamental frequency at all, sorry.
WebHubTelescope:
I thought that you did better on this page, where you worked with the numerically estimated second-derivative from the SOI data, and the data-model fits had R^2 values of under 0.25.http://contextearth.com/2014/02/10/the-southern-oscillation-index-model/
On this page you didn’t seem to me to make much sense:http://contextearth.com/2014/04/05/the-chandler-wobble-and-the-soim/
For example, as you noted, putting 1/phi on the lhs led to singularities. You wrote that the pressure index of the SOI is essentially a differential measure, so the derivative of the Mathieu function should be fit to the pressure [presumably you meant “pressure difference”]; I don’t see how that is justified.
But as you wrote, I might be missing something.
The model is essentially that of water sloshing back and forth in a basin. This doesn’t have to be large. Just enough of a perturbation to be measurable, with the exchange of colder deeper water with warmer surface water. The strength of the El Nino depends on how fast this occurs. If it happens slowly, pressure differentials are not as large. If it happens quickly, the differential can not dissipate locally and vast amounts of warmer or colder air gets pushed to other parts of the world.
The issue with quality of fit is that taking a derivative will exaggerate the noise. The correlation coefficients represent the integral formulation.
Don’t worry about it, this model will improve over time. One gets a feel of how well a characterization works, and this one is very effective given its maturity level.
“If it happens quickly, the differential can not dissipate locally and vast amounts of warmer or colder air gets pushed to other parts of the world.”
—–
Could you please explain this dynamic? I am not sure how colder air gets pushed anywhere by an El Niño.
Rupert Ellison doesn’t realize that I was doing this kind of math in my early 20’s, early enough that one can develop an intuition and see how it can apply to various disciplines.
The wave equation describes the natural response to the system, characterized by resonant frequencies. Lay on top of this a modulation, either by an elliptical geometry or a cyclic perturbation related to the Chandler Wobble (see Gross JPL) and the outcome is a quasiperiodic waveform.
I would be surprised only if this did not occur.
High pressure can push. Low pressure acts like a vacuum and can pull.
The SOI is the pressure differential between Tahiti and Darwin that determines the directional sense of the flow, east and west.
webnutcolonoscope seems to imagine that ENSO is a matter of water sloshing around the Pacific. Still the math is not a matter of applying physical principles to a problem.
‘These functions appear in physical problems involving elliptical shapes or periodic potentials, and were first introduced by Mathieu (1868) when analyzing the motion of elliptical membranes. Unfortunately, the analytic determination of Mathieu functions “presents great difficulties” (Whittaker 1914, Frenkel and Portugal 2001), and they are difficult to employ, “mainly because of the impossibility of analytically representing them in a simple and handy way” (Sips 1949, Frenkel and Portugal 2001).’ http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MathieuFunction.html
This is fairly common for differential functions – actual analytic solutions are limited to specific cases of elliptical membranes in this case. The ones that we really want to solve are done numerically on a grid using actual continuity equations.
There is no sense in which the Pacific Ocean basin is elliptical or of constant depth – or that the ENSO evolution is even nearly restricted to wind waves. The webby solution is therefore an utter sham that only purports to apply physical principles to the system – a system that goes well beyond wave dynamics. The webby ‘solution’ merely uses a form to poorly fit a curve. This is all he ever does. Curve fitting masquerading as fractured math and fantasy physics.
This is fringe blogospheric science of the worst kind.
Rupert Ellison is stuck in a mathematical no-man’s land, unable to comprehend anything beyond copy-and-paste clippings of google searches.
It really is just a manifestation of jealous rage on Rupert’s part — lashing out in whatever way he can.
Got anything relevant to say – webnutcolonoscope – or just the same old crazed rant?
Rupert, how is it living in that anti-science rat-hole that you occupy? Must be a miserable existence to wake up every day and figure out who you can slime next.
I just call you on the theoretical impossibly of your fractured math and fantasy physics – webnutcolonoiscope.
The crazed gerbil impersonation is all yours which seems to be what you do best.
Rupert, you really are a sociopath aimed at laying waste to progress.
The indications are that the oscillations behind ENSO are not chaotic and that drives poor Rupert into crazy Murdoch territory.
The trouble for webnutcolonoscope is that science – as opposed to blogospheric fantasy physics – is clearly that climate is chaotic and he clearly has no rational response to this.
The fractured math and fantasy physics are another matter however. Poorly fitted curves do not a physically realistic model make – and webby’s is about as far from physical reality as you can get.
Unlike the delusional Rupert, the data does not lie.
There is a 6.4 year modulation underlying ENSO and when the wave equation is solved, the Mathieu quasiperiodic signal emerges.
This drives poor Rupert into fits of uncontrollable rage.
Rage seems more a projection by webnutcolonscope of his characteristic and quite monotonous diatribes.
ENSO has an aperiodic 2 to 7 year periodicity with characteristic 20 to 40 modulation of frequency and intensity. As well as longer scale modulation – centuries to millennia – that emerges from the proxy records.
Solving a Mathieu function for the Pacific basin is impossible analytically – even if it were it is not especially applicable to the physics of ENSO. Webby’s method is fractured math and fantasy physics in the service of poorly fitting curves. It is fringe blogospheric science of the worst kind.
… 20 to 40 year modulation …
I wouldn’t be listening to what Aussie Rupert claims to be impossible.
He really is not to be taken seriously and has never shown any facility in working through the math.
‘These functions appear in physical problems involving elliptical shapes or periodic potentials, and were first introduced by Mathieu (1868) when analyzing the motion of elliptical membranes. Unfortunately, the analytic determination of Mathieu functions “presents great difficulties” (Whittaker 1914, Frenkel and Portugal 2001), and they are difficult to employ, “mainly because of the impossibility of analytically representing them in a simple and handy way” (Sips 1949, Frenkel and Portugal 2001).’ 1
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MathieuFunction.html
So which bit exactly don’t you listen to? Common sense analysis by a practicing numerical modeler with decades of study of ENSO – or some knob of an electrical engineer who thinks it is equivalent to a semiconductor or an elliptical drumhead?
Don’t listen to the dunderhead Rupert beating his head against the wall over something he clearly doesn’t understand.
Mathieu kernel solutions called MathieuC and MathieuS (for the cosine and sine ) and are available in Mathematica.
There is nothing “impossible” about this.
Has Rupert provided one piece of evidence against this model? It seems more an exercise in poisoning the well.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/apr/08/fox-news-28-percent-accurate-climate-change
Oh, would there were an automated and dispassionate way to objectively generate the sort of statistics from UCS for blogs and their commentators. Not that argument ad hom is terribly useful, but I’d like to see how I personally fare, and compare to others, to see if I could discover which posters are least misleading and discover how to better my own comments.
Wouldn’t you use such a tool such a way?
There may be solutions for special cases – and the Pacific basin is not one. Even if it were solvable – ENSO is much more than wind waves on an elliptical lake.
Plugging numbers into an inapplicable function to arbitrarily and very poorly fit a curve – and calling it science – is an example of the worst of blog science. Poorly fitting a curve is one thing – but calling it physics is something else.
Robert I Ellison: webnutcolonoscope
Quit it. You are wasting my time and attention.
seems to imagine that ENSO is a matter of water sloshing around the Pacific. Still the math is not a matter of applying physical principles to a problem.
It’s just a rough approximation, a heuristic, to start with some modeling. It isn’t merely “sloshing”, but all modeling starts with heuristic arguments.
WebHubTelescope: Rupert Ellison doesn’t realize that I was doing this kind of math in my early 20′s, early enough that one can develop an intuition and see how it can apply to various disciplines.
It doesn’t matter how long you have been doing it. You saw a similarity in the dynamics (which you avoided articulating), and took it as a guide. I don’t believe your high R^2 values, but I await further developments.
The Chandler Wobble is 30X smaller than the forced nutation from lunar effects. That is not the tall pole in the tent.
The forced nutation has a period of 18.6 years, though, and it is elliptical, so that the radius of the polar migration has a period of half that at 9.3 years. The beat of that with the 11 year solar cycle is 11*9.3/(11-9.3) = 60 years, which is rather portentous.
Matthew
Your imprecation is noted and disregarded. It is about as informed as the rest of your comments – that is not at all. I will continue with webnutcolonoscope just as long as webby continues to have his head up his arse – i.e. the silliness of Rupert.
Heuristics refers to a solution that is a speculative formulation leading to an approximate solution. It does not mean blundering down a blind alley.
Bart | April 9, 2014 at 5:57 pm |
Except it isn’t 11 years, but 10.66.
That’d be 10.66 * 9.3 / (10.66 – 9.3) ~ 73 years.
And really, it’s not even 10.66, but a pseudocycle varying without pattern from about 14 years down to possibly less than 8 years. Which means you can’t apply your formula at all.
Something that is causing the Chandler Wobble also impacts the deep ocean. That is what R,Gross at JPL is asserting.
IOW, the Chandler Wobble is a side effect of movements or density changes in water. This emerges as ENSO with the same fundamental frequency as determined by the mathematics of sloshing with periodic horizontal and vertical displacements.
http://contextearth.com/2014/04/05/the-chandler-wobble-and-the-soim/
It is actually an elegant model, hampered by the typical denier anti-science fury. :)
Migrated back I see. It is not even science – it is mathematical homeopathy.
Gross suggested pressure changes at depth in oceans caused by changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation as the major mechanism for wobbles. Perhaps this is so – but it is at any rate an effect rather than a cause.
Linking it to ENSO is so farfetched as to be indistinguishable from fantasy. As indeed is the extension of elliptical drum head maths to the Pacific basin.
And I suppose that a dose of reality will now be declared to be raging against the light. It really all fits the profile of a compelling internal narrative of the farsighted scientist battling against the forces of darkness from a lonely outpost on the fringe of the blogosphere. Buy it? No – me neither.
Bart R | April 9, 2014 at 10:39 pm |
“Except it isn’t 11 years, but 10.66.”
Except it isn’t 10.66 but a triple of harmonics at 10, 10.8, and 11.8 years. And, the forced nutation is not really a single harmonic at 18.6 years, either.
You’re being way too persnickety. In general, the result is in the neighborhood of the ~60 year climate cycle observed. That makes the relationship worthy of further investigation and serious consideration.
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | April 9, 2014 at 10:49 pm |
Oh, for crying out loud. The Chandler Wobble works out to less than two microradians of angular motion. Get a grip.
And that is a lot of energy and momentum change that has to dissipate somewhere.
It is 30 times – read 3 – 0 times smaller than the induced nutation. you are telling me a snowball has an effect, but the avalanche does not.
Come on, WHT. Stop playing dumb.
Bart is the guy with the claim that CO2 increase is caused by a temperature rise and not by fossil fuel combustion. He has zero credibility.
The Chandler wobble is not the force but the outcome of the motion of the ocean, according to Gross of JPL.
It is an empirical fact. But, obviously, you feel yourself losing the argument, and so must resort to ad hom misdirection from the argument at hand.
You think the forced nutation leads to no oceanic response when it is 30X larger? Set your analyst on danger money, baby.
The money is on the Chandler Wobble being an indicator of the motion.
From N. S. Sidorenkov, The Interaction Between Earth’s Rotation and Geophysical Processes. Wiley, 2009.
An indicator. But a small one. As I said before, not the tall pole in the tent. Look to the forced nutation, if you really want to make headway on this topic.
Bart | April 10, 2014 at 4:10 pm |
Still wrong.
Listen to music scaled to the same ‘harmonics’ you claim, and you’ll be forced to shut it down due the dissonance.
You’re worshipping at the altar of Numerology, not demonstrating reason.
Bart R | April 19, 2014 at 1:50 pm |
Nope.
Our hostess is discussing “It’s About the Data. ”
Of course it is all about the MEASURED data. That is what I have been trying to say ever since Climate Etc. started, and even before that. The measured data was, is, and always will be, the final arbiter of which hypothesis is right, and which is wrong. That is the heart and soul of The Scientific Method, which I maintain, is the ONLY scientific way to determine if the hypothesis of CAGW is correct or not. The IPCC and the warmists have NEVER used The Scientific Method.
I would love to discuss whether the science that has been used to try and establish that CAGW is real, is, in any way, conclusive. But, unfortunately, we cannot have this discussion unless and until the warmists agree that The Scientific Method has NOT been used in the study of global warming, climate change, CAGW or what you will.
Jim:
The problem with measuring climate sensitivity is that it is not possible to measure the effect of a doubling of JUST CO2, while holding all of the other factors constant.
So we can wait until CO2 hits 560 ppm and measure the mean global temperature and subtract the mean global temperature when CO2 was 280 ppm and arrive at a measured CS.
However, all of the other variables will have changed. So people will never accept that measurement as the “true” value of TCR (transient climate response). They will point out that the sun was more or less active, that carbon black had increased/decreased, that land use had changed, that volcanoes had been more or less active, that clouds had decreased/increased, etc.
I guess my point is that it is impossible to measure the effects of JUST doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere. Whoever defined CS came up with a concept which was impossible to measure in the real world.
I do think that measured CS (allowing all other factors to vary) will come in around 1.2C – but we will have to wait to see.
RickA, you write “I guess my point is that it is impossible to measure the effects of JUST doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere. Whoever defined CS came up with a concept which was impossible to measure in the real world.”
Of course you are absolutely correct, and I have been saying this ever since Climate Etc. started. ” Whoever defined CS came up with a concept which was impossible to measure in the real world.” That should have been the front and center of the very first IPCC report, but it wasn’t.
And so we come to the vital question. Why did the original people who first suggested that CAGW was valid, not point out that it is impossible to measure climate sensitivity? If it is obvious to you, and to me, it should have been blindingly obvious to people with names like Houghton, Watson and Hansen. They are the experts. Yet they said nothing even when they must have known.
That is why I am convinced that CAGW is a hoax. The people who started this knew they could never use The Scientific Method, and so prove they were right, but they persisted in selling snake oil.
Shame on the scientific community for letting them get away with it!
RickA you also say “I do think that measured CS (allowing all other factors to vary) will come in around 1.2C – but we will have to wait to see.”
From the King James Bible. John 20:29 “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
Rick A. You are clearly blessed, as are those who think they know what the numerical value of climate sensitivity is. All estimates of the value of climate sensitivity, including mine, and nothing more than guesses.
Jim, even Sagan said to be sceptical!
Jim, there is no way to determine the ‘C’ in CAGW. It has never been measured in a laboratory. It has never been observed in nature. It is not supported by any scientific method. It is indistinguishable from ‘0’. As a hypothesis it can not be proven in any way. Why do you continue to use this term despite it never appearing in any IPCC report anywhere as CAGW. It is a made up concept by those who want to demonize climate science as a hoax. It has no basis. Based on your own idea of dismissing terms that are not real or are meaningless (CS) why do you continue to cling to the meaningless idea of CAGW?
Apparently, John Kerry thinks there’s a ‘C’ in the equation:
My office was in the same building as John Kerry’s Senate Office. I frequently saw him in action. A catastrophe for John Kerry is having to carry his own bag or pay for his own drinks. I leave it to you to determine which was the bigger catastrophe.
Jim Cripwell
+100
John Carpenter, you write “Jim, there is no way to determine the ‘C’ in CAGW.”
I have stated over and over again that I would love to use an expression other than CAGW. The trouble is easy to explain. AGW, to my idea, is any increase in temperature caused by additional CO2 in the atmosphere, however small. The rise in temperature can be so small as to be negligible. So we can not use AGW to describe what the IPCC claims is happening, namely a significant rise in global temperatures caused by additional CO2.
So what do you propose I should use to express the idea that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes a significant and potentially catastrophic rise in global temperatures? I am prepared to use any expression you select.
“So we can wait until CO2 hits 560 ppm and measure the mean global temperature and subtract the mean global temperature when CO2 was 280 ppm and arrive at a measured CS.”
That wouldn’t be a measure of CS at all. CS is about attribution. Even R.Gate swill agree that correlation does not equal causation. The change in temperature after CO2 has doubled would tell us nothing about causation.
CAGWers keep trying to transform what they call “climate science” into a form of epidemiology. No science needed, just statistical massaging of data. Correlation to them is proof of causation, so long as the correlation is in the warmists’ direction.
The only time man will know what CS is, is when man can model the climate. In my opinion, we will likely never be able to do that. So we will never know what CS is. (Not to mention that whatever CS is, it will change as the climate changes.)
CS is the end result of climate modelling, or should be – not an independent aspect that can be “measured.”
DeNihilist Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Correlation is not causation, but correlation is evidence of causation, and the gradient shows evidence of transient sensitivities of over 2 C per doubling. All observations are evidence not proof. No evidence should be ignored, and proper explanations should explain the correlation, as AGW does, for example, and not dismiss it.
Jim D. you write ” and the gradient shows evidence of transient sensitivities of over 2 C per doubling.”
What gradient?
The 0.9 correlation gradient between temperature and CO2 that is predicted by AGW is evidence in favor of this theory.
“I am prepared to use any expression you select.”
Jim, just plain old AGW says it all for me. The notion that it may or may not be catastrophic is in the eye of the beholder. Alarmism has no basis in this debate AFAIAC. Up to now alarmism has not worked as a strategy for getting people to take any action deemed necessary. It probably will not in the future either.
It appears we agree there is an ‘A’ component to GW. The amount of ‘A’ and it’s affects are debatable. Arguing over whether some of it may be catastrophic at some future time is largely unknown. We can’t recognize now what future catastrophe might look like. It is not a metric that can be measured or even estimated. If the climate changes due to anthropogenic CO2, it will happen relatively slowly to human life. Future generations will be more affected, yet they will not realize to what extent since they don’t experience the here and now. They will not have a personal frame of reference to compare. My grandpa used to tell me about ‘the good ol days’. I can’t really tell if they were better compared to now. If I tell my grandchildren the climate was better when I was a youngster, they won’t know if that is true or not. But it doesn’t mean we should be static or complacent about our position either.
We certainly can’t live our lives solely by precautionary principles, however, it is not prudent to assume that if temperatures do continue to climb from CO2, that at some point there won’t be some detrimental affects to some people or regions. We understand there is a possibility of this based on how we understand the science of our climate. Should we should ignore that? Should we ignore some unknown population in some unknown location that at some unknown point in the future a changed climate may significantly change their way of living? Is there really anything we can do about that? Yes and no.
Since there are many unknowns, both for and against taking actions to prevent future catastrophe, assume that regardless of anthro CO2 playing any role in it, there will be some extreme weather in the future similar to the past. Assume there will be catastrophes (local) due to these events as has occurred in the past. Should we not prepare for those, regardless of what causes them to occur? Further, we know fossil fuels are not limitless. We know at some point they will become much more scarce. We know they are not part of long term energy stability for generations to come. Should we ignore that?
Knowing these things, why not take adaptive and mitigative measures that local governments feel are right? Why not explore energy alternatives that local governments feel might work? If some want to believe they are saving the planet from AGW, so be it. If some want to frame it as evolving to the next better solution, so be it. Arguing that there is no evidence for CAGW does not change that conclusion. Arguing there is no evidence for AGW does not change that conclusion. Obey the Boy Scout motto… ‘Be prepared’. We are going to face extreme weather catastrophes in the future equal to or worse than any in the past whether or not they are influenced by mankind. We are going to need to expand our ways of producing energy despite potential climate change. We need to prepare ourselves for those problems regardless of how we frame them.
Jim D. you write “The 0.9 correlation gradient between temperature and CO2 that is predicted by AGW is evidence in favor of this theory.”
Sorry, that is far too vague. Do you have a reference? For example over what time period are you talking? Who produced the data? And all sorts of other details.
John Carpenter, you write “Jim, just plain old AGW says it all for me.”
But it is not good enough for me. I agree that AGW is true, providing any rise in temperature is negligibly small. So I need an other expression. CAGW works fine for me, and if you don’t like it, I suggest you either ignore what I write, or come up with something that I can agree with.
I have shown this to you before.
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~emamajek/images/co2.jpg
They are not accidentally correlated. AGW explains this in terms of cause and effect.
Jim D. you write “I have shown this to you before.”
That only goes up to 2005. Let us see the same plot out to 2013.
This one is more up to date, but is drawn in a more obvious way with both against time.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1950/mean:12/offset:0.05/plot/gistemp/from:1950/mean:12/offset:-0.05/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.01/offset:-3.3
I do think that measured CS (allowing all other factors to vary) will come in around ZERO plus or minus some undetermined amount. First off, you cannot measure CS. You can only use your favorite bias and guess in you favor. There IS NO MEASURED CS. ALL CS COMES FROM CLIMATE MODELS OR THEORIES. NONE OF THESE HAVE PROVIDED PROJECTIONS FOR TEMPERATURE OR SEA LEVEL THAT MATCHED REAL ACTUAL DATA.
Jim D. Many thanks. Let me think about it.
Jim:
My guess on CS of 1.2C is totally a guess.
I didn’t mean to imply divine knowledge.
GaryM:
You are absolutely right.
The delta T we measure between what the mean global temperature is at when CO2 is at 560 ppm and what it was when CO2 was 280 ppm is only a delta T.
We will have no idea whether the delta T is due to the doubling of CO2 or increased activity in the sun or more carbon black or whatever. So I agree with you.
However, it will be a measurement we can make and CO2 will have doubled if we measure at 560 ppm. I called it measured CS in other posts. To me, measured CS is the delta T when CO2 has doubled, but allowing all other forcings and feedbacks to vary (as they are).
As I said above – it is impossible to measure CS while holding all other forcings and feedbacks constant – so we cannot attribute the delta T to only CO2.
Which kind of makes this entire debate pointless.
Even after CO2 has doubled – we will not be able to agree on what CS is (either transient or equilibrium). Transient because all other variables changed from 1850 till whenever we hit 560 ppm and equilibrium because we will never arrive at equilibrium.
When an asteriod the size of texas hits the earth there is no way we can measure the effect it will have. We can only estimate it.
Since we cannot measure it, the effect it will have is indistinguishable from 0.
We all know that cutting taxes , everything else held constant, will stimulate economic growth. But because we cannot hold all other variables constant we cannot measure the effect of cutting taxes. Therefore, the effect is indistinguishable from zero.
Mosher now engages in argumentum ad absurdum. Par for the course I guess.
Jim Cripwell
Yes.
Our hostess is right. It “is about the data”.
And IMO the debate is not about whether or not CO2 could theoretically cause an increase in global temperature but rather whether or not the premise commonly referred to as “CAGW”, which has been specifically outlined in some detail by IPCC in its AR4 and AR5 reports is valid.
That is the premise which allegedly justifies costly “mitigation” actions to “hold global warming to no more than 2C”.
It is based on a 2xCO2 ECS which could be as high as 4.5C, with a mean value estimated by models at 3C.
It postulates that there is a 95% certainty that “most” of the observed global warming since 1950 can be attributed to the increase in human GHG concentrations in the atmosphere.
It postulates further that with no mitigation actions CO2 levels will increase to the point by 2100 to result in a temperature increase of 3.7C.
This premise and the underlying hypothesis which supports it, has not been put to an empirical test to date by empirical measured data.
Some say this can never be done, because of the many uncertainties regarding other climate forcing factors beside human GHGs.
But it is clear to me that the current pause (or actually slight cooling) despite unabated human GHG emissions and levels reaching new records is beginning to constitute such a test.
If this pause continues for another two decades, reaching the arbitrarily defined “statistically relevant” time period of 30 years despite continued unabated human GHG emissions, the CAGW premise of IPCC and its underlying hypothesis regarding 2xCO2 ECS will have been de facto falsified by empirical physical data.
So yes. “It’s About the Data. ”
Max
Jim D
The CO2 temperature correlation curve looks good for the time “blip” you showed.
Not so good for the early 20thC, when there was very little CO2 increase yet a statistically indistinguishable warming period.
Even less obvious for the LIA or MWP when there was no change in CO2 but major temperature swings.
It also looks pretty poor for the new century but admittedly we only have around 13 years of slight cooling so far.
Just to set the record straight.
Max
Stephen Mosher,
You say –
“When an asteriod the size of texas hits the earth there is no way we can measure the effect it will have. We can only estimate it.
Since we cannot measure it, the effect it will have is indistinguishable from 0.
We all know that cutting taxes , everything else held constant, will stimulate economic growth. But because we cannot hold all other variables constant we cannot measure the effect of cutting taxes. Therefore, the effect is indistinguishable from zero.”
I agree you are correct, as the future is unknowable. What is the point you are making? I agree you can’t measure that which has not yet occurred.
You can make an assumption, and take present action based on that assumption, but you still can’t predict the future.
If assumptions were reliable indicators of the future, countries would be prosperous, the US would win wars, Governments would work as they should, and world peace would break out. Of course, this would only happen if everybody agreed on the assumptions, and the future followed meekly along.
But the future is unknowable, and science used to be about a quest for knowledge. Times change, the future is still unknowable, and science is now just a word used to justify bullying, browbeating, and transferring the maximum amount of money from the pockets of the taxpayers into the insatiable maws of the scientists.
All in the best interest of the world citizenry, of course. Global warming is a fact, except it isn’t. Climatologists are scientists, except they aren’t. Science is based on fact, unless it isn’t. It’s a pretty flexible moving feast.
So back to Stephen Mosher’s statements. The known impact of something that hasn’t happened is unknown, and therefore is indistinguishable from zero, if zero is a possible outcome. Does any of this contribute to our understanding the weather, or its average, climate?
Not as far as I can see! Maybe Stephen Mosher can prove his ability to peer into the future, but allow me to express skepticism for the moment.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
manacker, the CO2-temperature relation since the 1950’s not just “looks good”, it looks rather strongly connected, with a gradient of 1 C per 100 ppm corresponding to a 2 C transient sensitivity over this period. It is a common deflection tactic to say “good, but…” then some meme about uncertainty for a poor-data period in the foggy distant past. Go with where the data is good. We don’t know how much influence solar variations had when sunspots tripled from 1910 to 1940, but I would not infer too much about the causes of warming in that period because we just don’t have the data. 75% of the CO2 has been added since 1950, so this is where the CO2 forcing has changed fastest. The IPCC central estimate is that all the warming since 1950 is due to CO2, GHGs and aerosols with natural variability having either sign around it. There is no evidence for net positive natural variability over 60 years, which the reluctant skeptics are demanding should be present. Therefore the IPCC central estimates make more sense going forwards with transient to equilibrium values of 2-3 C per doubling that account pretty well for the last 60 years.
Mike, you write “Not as far as I can see! Maybe Stephen Mosher can prove his ability to peer into the future, but allow me to express skepticism for the moment.”
Mike, you need to realise that this discussion between Steven and myself goes back a long way. He insisted that there was no “categorical difference between estimates and measurements”, and we had a long handbag fight over the issue. I know that measurements and estimates are completely different things. I finally realised he didn’t know what he was talking about, and I now ignore these attempts of his to bring the issue back into discussion.
John Carpenter – I don’t think anyone is arguing against a sane approach to addressing the potential impacts of climate change – whatever the cause. The argument is around the corruption of climate science to satisfy politically motivated agendas, or if you want to be kinder, horribly misguided environmentalists. A sane approach does not include artificially raising the cost of carbon based and nuclear energy via onerous regulation while providing massive subsidies to technologies that can not possibly be used to replace current, much less future, baseload power requirements. That approach will in fact harm everyone, and will harm those the left professes to care so much about – the poor – since that approach leads to increased energy costs that ripple throughout the economy and raises the cost of everything. If we think Obamacare is bad, it will look like peanuts if Obama and the EPA have their way with the energy sector.
RickA. you write “Which kind of makes this entire debate pointless.”
You would be correct IF and it is an enormous IF, but IF the warmists had presented CAGW as an unproven hypothesis. But they did not. In Chapters 9 of both the AR4 and AR5, they claim that there is a 95% and 90% certainty, extremely likely and very likely, that certain things about CAGW are true. Those claims are scientific nonsense in the absence of a measured value of climate sensitivity.
I have absolutely no objection to CAGW being presented as an unproven hypothesis. Certainly, I cannot prove that it is wrong. But to claim it is more than an unproven hypothesis is simply not scientifically valid.
Mosher says:
“When an asteriod the size of texas hits the earth there is no way we can measure the effect it will have. We can only estimate it.
Since we cannot measure it, the effect it will have is indistinguishable from 0.
We all know that cutting taxes , everything else held constant, will stimulate economic growth. But because we cannot hold all other variables constant we cannot measure the effect of cutting taxes. Therefore, the effect is indistinguishable from zero.”
But Mosher previously argued that British Columbia was showing success by taxing carbon. I guess he doesn’t need to hold all things equal when he chooses not to.
BC in fact has great enterprise and economic gain from indoor pot growing, which, it’s said, relates to great amounts of CO2 emissions.
All things being equal :)
*BC in fact has great enterprise and economic gain from indoor pot growing, which, it’s said, relates to great amounts of CO2 emissions. *
If US and Canada can’t win the war on drugs, how would UN win war against breathing?
John Carpenter, without the “C” before AGW, it would not be the huge, costly and (for some) lucrative and career-enhancing creature that it has become. No other issue has so dominated policy in advanced countries, to the great detriment of common sense and good public policy.
You say we should prepare in respect of AGW. To repeat myself, (a) there are far more pressing issues, (b) all we know of the future is that it is highly uncertain and will surprise us, and (c) the best policies are therefore those which increase our capacity to deal well with the future, whatever befalls, This would include policies which enhance entrepreneurialism, flexibility, innovation, self-reliance and economic growth, increasing the resources we have in future rather than, as with the response to (C)AGW, reducing them.
Judy:
Any thoughts on this rather strange piece in the Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/apr/04/climate-change-uncertainty-stronger-tackling-case
bernie, just stop after reading “a team of scientists led by Stephan Lewandowsky.”
Quite a few people, including yours truly, have been demolishing that piece of junk posing as serious science for the past week or so.
I just hope Bristol think they got good value from Lew, as this is the second paper of his that I have heard about that seems to assume that everyone else is stupid and can’t see through the thinly veiled agenda. Also, there’s still the nagging question as to whether he just fancied a change coming to the uk, or was he pushed ?.
Reminds me of that old Penguin book title “The Use and Abuse of Psychology”, though don’t remember the content…
Chris Quayle | April 8, 2014 at 12:30 pm |
I for one would be eager to read this demolishing of what is, after all, merely a restatement of most of the central facts of textbook Game Theory as applied to Uncertainty and Risk.
It would be exciting to see Nash’s Nobel prize winning work overthrown.
Please, links to these wonderful demolishings.
BartR:
The game theory diversion is irrelevant and I don’t need to know anything about Nash to see that the paper was unethical, in that it detrimentally identified named individuals as having adverse psychological conditions. An obvious smear job specifically targeted at so called climate “deniers”. Ie: Some of the most vociferous skeptics. Then cheerleader Nuttytelly and sidekick come up with a supporting rubbish article in the Grauniad.
If you don’t’ understand why personal ethics and integrity are fundamental to science, then perhaps you are in the wrong profession…
Chris Quayle | April 9, 2014 at 9:36 am |
Ah, so it isn’t the data, reasoning or conclusions, merely the fact that if you apply tie data, reasoning and conclusions to people named as having contributed by interviews in another section of the study and draw your own inferences you can conjecture that they have these conditions, that you call demolishing?
Huh.
I’d call that .. what is the psychological term?
Projection.
From the article:
…
China – A new hope
China is a markedly different and refreshing story. Though the China General Nuclear Corporation (CGN) and China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) secured a large minority stake in the recently announced multi-billion dollar Hinkley C project in the UK, the real growth market for nuclear is in China. Given China’s favourable nuclear power performance since 1996 and continued commitments, we anticipate 23.6 GW of capacity additional capacity by 2020. With air quality becoming a serious concern within China, and less opposition to the politburo policies, there is no reason to expect growth of nuclear generating capacity in China to slow. Even with more modest growth for Chinese electricity generation, the forecast total net 40.5-44.7 GW of nuclear capacity will likely represent approximately only 4% of total electricity generated in 2020.
…
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2126803-in-a-difficult-uranium-environment-the-athabasca-basin-is-a-clear-winner
5401 Climate Change: It’s About the Data, Not the Politics
12:00-12:50 on Friday April 11, 2014
UMC 235
Panelists:
Judith Curry
Discussant: Kevin Trenberth
So is there a different format for this? Other sessions have 3 or 4 panelists, so it looks a bit odd. What do they know that you don’t?
Have you ever seen a film called “The Wicker Man”?
;)
Oh my, it is too bad I am not in Boulder to watch Kevin’s body language as he hides the 17 years of unobserved heat in the deep oceans!
Perhaps Roger Pielkie, jr will attend adding more flavor to the discussion.
Love or vengence?</b
When will climate commentators restore the foundations of our civilization:
Jesus: "Love your neighbor as yourself" Mark 12:31
Instead of Lamach’s ” I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me.” Gen. 4:23
Well that was weird. A bible verse version of Turette’s Syndrome.
A Dr. Richard Lindzen quote from Roger Sowell’s article:
This reminds me of a dialog I had with a noted Warmer who told me the bottom line was that we are warmer that we were.
Amazing what decades of research and untold $$$ will find out for you, huh?
Andrew
It seems to me a lot of time was devoted in the past to drawing a big distinction between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ (i.e., decades of weather). It is that difference that climatologists claim excuses the lack of forecasting capability of GCMs –e.g., these models are climate forecasts not weather forecasts (maybe not in just 20 or 30 years but our GCMs will be proved right in 50 or 100 years, just trust us, trust the government, we’re scientists and we’re here to help you save the world from burning up).
“The
discussantdisgustante for my talk is Kevin Trenberth.”Fixed that for ya!
Oncologist: “Here are some photoshopped ‘x-rays’ and some TOBS adjusted vitals to help you with your decision.”
Andrew
bernie1815
We could rewrite the piece as the meeting of a patient with their oncologist.
Oncologist: Well, the latest tests make me more not less certain. It could be fatal and rapidly progressive malignancy. Or it could just be a slight thickening of the tissue of no particular interest.
Patient: OK, lets have the leg off then. I mean, obviously the more uncertain it is, the more urgent it is to act now! That is right isn’t it?
Oncologist: Well…. not exactly…. Let me start again….
Michel +1000
I agree. Commonsense indicates that Cook’s cartoon has an ounce of sense and a pound of bs. For example, the cost of using a seat belt is zero. The benefits of stopping smoking when you are 70 or have one cigarette a day are likely to be de minimus. Insuring your house in Detroit may well hardly be worth it. The supplementary material for the two pay-walled articles is on the surface an analysis of the pdfs. However, it is beyond my grasp and I was hoping that someone could address the papers from both the commonsense and mathematical perspectives. For example, how do represent a pdf when you are uncertain as to its properties.
Michel,
I like it.
Maybe you have been a bit cautious.
Wouldn’t it be more logical to do away with yourself just in case the tissue thickening turned out to be a sign of secondary disseminated metasteses, (I hope I got that right), and not only were you going to suffer a long lingering painful demise, but also your insurance might run out, and your spouse, offspring, aged parents and grandparents, yea, even unto the grandchildren would be cast into abject poverty because of your obstinate refusal to apply the well understood precautionary principle.
Phew, what a sentence! I feel wrath about to envelop me!
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Rethinking fat: the case for adding some to your diet.
‘It took me a long time not to be scared of fat,” Stafford says. But, she says, she now enjoys scrambled eggs and the occasional burger.”
In the days when science was pure, food fads had not become the subject of talking heads, as many people were not, as they are today, well fed, and being well fed allows vegans and all sorts of PETA people to currently prosper, our US National Academy of Science investigated issues that might affect the national defense. This was the time of our emergence from the Dust Bowl Era, people were still starving, our nation was submerged in the Great Depression, and WW II was raging yet had not yet touched our shores.
What emerged from the deliberation of three people was the Recommended Daily Allowance.
Wikipedia: “Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA), the daily dietary intake level of a nutrient considered sufficient by the Food and Nutrition Board to meet the requirements of 97.5% of healthy individuals in each life-stage and sex group.”
For 40 to 50 year olds, 2000 Kcal/day, 35% from fat, 35% from protein, & 30% from carbohydrates.
That was then, and now? What is guiding nutrition choices is fear! The reality is, when you are well fed you can make up all sorts of stories about longevity, feel stronger fast, improve your brain function, heart, lungs, kidneys, skin color and tone, etc etc etc. Having multiple choices allows you more chances for messing things up. For instance: to obtain the same calories that are in a pound of ground meat, one needs to eat 40 pounds of vegetables, whole grains, nuts and fruits, and one still needs to supplement that diet with arachidonic acid some way, an essential fatty acid from…wait for it…meat. Those who drink milk (the Lacto people) or eggs (the Ovo people) are eating meat disguised as a “vegetarian diet.”
Sometimes it is worth while going back to the primary literature to see why RDA was formulated. Most of this literature is not “on line.” But, it exists in books and libraries and things that are tangible; and they are still relevant. So, the topic of nutrition, as opposed to belonging to the Uncertain T. Monster, is more established than we had thought. We only need to go back to the basis for the recommendation to eat a balanced diet, and most of us, even those no longer 50 years old, will live long and prosper.
“Frontiers will continue to publish – and stand by – valid research. But we also must uphold the rights and privacy of the subjects included in a study or paper.”
I’m not quite so jubilant as others. From what I can glean, the withdrawal is on the grounds of ethics …or lack there of. That’s nice as far as it goes, if a tad late. But the implication of this statement seems to be they still consider the paper valid. Even by the standards of social “science,” the methodology they used is beyond ludicrous. Of course they’ll never admit it.
Who admits mistakes these days if they don’t have to?
When I write “they,” of course I mean Frontiers.
Who admits mistakes these days if they don’t have to? pokerguy, apparently. Good lad.
No particular response beyond thinking maybe regarding the Lewandowsky paper, it would be appropriate to assign the author protesting his innocence in youtube videos and proclaiming he is a victim of a denier conspiracy, that he be required to do a review of the psychological concept of “projection” before being allowed to publish anything again. Thank you Judith for the work that goes into this blog. I appreciate your voice of sanity and reason.
When I was in college, Freud and the whole psychoanalytic approach was on the way out. But Freud’s theories always struck me as stunningly brilliant, even if without much practical use. I was certainly wrong when it comes to one of his most penetrating insights…the defense mechanism of projection. It never fails to amaze me, how oblivious people can be to their own projections. Much evil has been committed in the world by people who falsely perceive in others the very things they most dislike in themselves
A good article in the Orange County Register: the ‘debate over’ syndrome
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/media-608400-many-one.html
Sigh.
“These are the same people who historically have identified themselves with open-mindedness and the defense of free speech, while conservatives, with some justification, were associated more often with such traits as criminalizing unpopular views – as seen in the 1950s McCarthy era – and embracing canonical bans on all sorts of personal behavior, a tendency still more evident than necessary among some socially minded conservatives.”
It gets tiresome reading the regurgitation of decades of progressive historical revisionism treated as fact.
“…criminalizing unpopular views – as seen in the 1950s McCarthy era….”
Yeah, the “unpopular view” at issue in “McCarthyism” was the view that the democratic and free market system in the United States should be undermined by cooperation with the Soviet Union for purposes of installing a communist/socialist system. But don’t let history get in the way of a good dose of moral equivalency.
After all, the debate is over on this issue.
“…canonical bans on all sorts of personal behavior….”
Yes, the liberaltarian view of society writ large. Liberaltarians love to wallow in the free market system that grew exclusively in a society that regulated all sorts of behavior. Liberaltarians want to live in a world with all the benefits of a moral society, but without that annoying…you know…morals. Their dream society actually exists – places where government does not intrude into “personal” choices. Those places are in the crime infested, permanently poor, increasingly uneducated and hopeless inner cities in America filled with fatherless children and addicted “parents,” but massive government transfer payments.
And don’t bother them with anything about the unintended consequences of their social engineering.
The debate is over on that one too.
[This ended up in the wrong spot so am re-posting]
Thanks for flagging that, Dr. Curry.
The described tendency is scary, when one looks back at history – for example in the old German Democratic Republic or, even further back, at the time of the Reichpropagandaminister.
You were spot on in your interview on BBC Scotland, where you defended freedom of speech, almost catching the moderator a bit by surprise, it seemed.
It is an integral part of the democratic way of life in the USA – and it should be defended at all cost, especially against this sort of creeping censorship from top down by “well-meaning” individuals, who have decided they know best what’s good for everyone.
Max
max,
I have a response, but it has apparently been swallowed by the spam filter. Hopefully Dr. Curry will rescue it at some point.
Oops, that was for pokerguy below.
Judith Curry,
I agree with Joel Kotkin that academia has been hiring like minded people for more than 50 years. This homogeneity may in part be the reason why we see people from off shore providing energy and imagination to problem solving. Alas, soon too they succumb to the winded direction and can be found in departmental meetings nodding and agreeing having long ago learned in their former lands, that contrary ideas are to be spoken only in whispers. I see/saw some of the most vulgar and illiterate people, expressing ideology and conformity being listened to in earnest. Time to sit in the back row, be present for the head count and then exit ASAP.
I lived in Orange County, CA for 18 years. It’s notoriously conservative compared to the rest of the state.
Where are all those “Question Authority” buttons so popular in the 80s when you need them?
The article doesn’t do much to advance any cogent theory of debate being over.
Could they have picked a worse example than Mark Steyn?
Debate?? Steyn doesn’t do debate, but shrill ranting.The lawsuit against him has ZERO to do with debate and everything to do with baseless accusations of fraudulent behaviour.
RE: “It’s All About the Data”. Climate Etc. is quite different from most other blogs that at least some semblance of pro/con dialogue goes on here. But still, most of the time us layman feel our head exploding with the incredible detail arguments — but not addressing the “big picture” on science issues. An example of this is Dr. Muller and “the Pause”. While Dr. Curry (and others) discussed in detail the uncertainties that “the latest Pause” brings up — (for the life of me) I never saw any robust discussion on Dr. Muller’s “big picture argument”: that this and other “Pauses” don’t matter statistically — its the long term trend that’s important.
I read skeptics attacking the validity of the temperature record collected that he used, but not whether his statistical method was heavily peer reviewed to show any serious flaws.
Skeptics seem to get so wrapped up in detail, they lose the big picture. Warmist seem to be so wrapped up in the big picture, that they play loose and fast on the data. Muller seems to be a different animal.
Dr. Muller’s memo: http://static.berkeleyearth.org/memos/has-global-warming-stopped.pdf
Stephen Segrest
The “pause” (and previous extended time periods, during which GHG concentrations increased, but global temperature did not) are not important by themselves, but understanding why they occurred is very important in order to be able to understand the “big picture”.
Dr. Muller is right in saying that a long-term warming trend of 0.6C per century since the mid 18thC is more important than a 30 year (or 10+ year) “blip”.
But we know that over the first 150 years of that long-term trend there was hardly any increase in human GHG concentrations, so something else had to be causing the warming then.
Then we have at least one 30 year period (mid 20thC) when CO2 levels were increasing exponentially, but there was no warming.
And finally we have the current pause, which no one knows how long it will last, despite unabated human GHG emissions and concentrations reaching record levels.
Several solar studies, which Dr. Muller has unfortunately brushed over in his attribution assessment, have concluded that around half of the long-term warming trend can be attributed to the unusually high level of 20thC solar activity (apparently the highest in several thousand years), although a specific mechanism is still being debated. This trend has reversed itself with the current solar cycle.
Other studies show that the rapid rate of warming from 1980 to 2000 coincided with an observed reduced level of cloud cover, which partially reversed itself in 2000, when the present “pause” started, pointing to a natural climate forcing from clouds. Muller has not included this data in his analysis.
So it is easy to do a “broad brush” analysis, but it is extremely dangerous to ignore the “bumps and grinds” along the way, for these may provide the answers to why things are happening.
Max
Stephen Segrest
Just a comment.
In his memo, Dr. Muller falls into exactly the same “short term thinking” trap he argues against.
Check out his “long-term” trend line.
It starts in 1970.
1970?
Why 1970 and not in 1750?
He’s measuring another “blip”, rather than the whole record.
See what I mean, Stephen?
Max
“There’s a party that calls itself the “Libertarian Party”, I was even associated with it during the ’70′s, but in general libertarians insist on the liberty of thinking for themselves.”
I would rather others thought for me- so I read some books.
And I ask questions.
Stephen
Mullers extended record shows temperature rising since 1800 . Fortunately we can step further back with central England temperature maintained by the met office which reaches back to 1659 . I have reconstructed it further to 1538 and an currently working on reaching back to 1200ad.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-curious-case-of-rising-co2-and-falling-temperatures/
Cet is considered by many scientists, including phil jones, to be a reasonable proxy for at least the northern hemisphere.
We can see that the temperature has been rising for some 350 years with various periods around as warm as today. The 1695 to 1740 period shows The sharpest temperature rise in the record. The 1200 and 1350 ad period was at least as warm as today.
If you put the modern temperature record into its historic context it looks unremarkable, with previous fluctuations taking place at pre industrial co2 levels of some 290ppm
Tonyb
tony b
Excellent point.
Muller is victim of the very same “short term thinking” he criticizes in his memo.
Your historical perspective brings knowledge that is completely overlooked in the BEST study.
As a result, Muller’s knowledge is limited and his conclusion on attribution is doubtful.
It appears to be much more complicated than that.
Max
In terms of fashion or politics it is not so; but, in terms of climate, periods of 250 years, 30 years and 10 years all have one thing in common: all are blips.
250 years ago a mature Englishman would have been surprised by “all this rain”, not at all like the fine and dry conditions of his earlier life. 200 years ago his shivering grandson would have found little comfort from a suddenly opening Arctic. The NOAA think New Yorkers 200 years ago were only just beginning to enjoy something of a long pluvial, lasting till the present day, despite the horror drought of the mid-1960s. In its early centuries the Apple was pretty dry.
I’m sure there was a cleric or expert of some sort to tell them what they’d done wrong. However there was also this fad called the Enlightenment which restrained men from facile conclusions and millenarian declamations. Such a bore.
Dwight Eisenhower, there was a man for the open society.
Thankfully it’s on the record. Beware the memory hole,
the medjia’s vorpal blade … …
http://www.eisenhowerfoundation.net/president.html
Manacker seems to be arguing for the “Anti-Pause” (The RIse?): If CO2 can ramp up without any temperature rise or 15+ years, then perhaps temperature rises in the past have had little or nothing to do with CO2. Overly simplified, of course, that seems the core tenet of the Skeptical crowd.
Tony we go back to 1750.
second CET is not the best record to use. Ive explained this many times to you.
coastal sites mid latitude sites have muted responses over all time periods.
sheesh.
for fun compare with the long american records or long canadian records.
or do all long records..
and dont forget the Joseon records
Mosh said;
‘Tony we go back to 1750.
second CET is not the best record to use. Ive explained this many times to you. coastal sites mid latitude sites have muted responses over all time periods. sheesh.’
No you haven’t . In fact you have said the complete opposite or do you have a doppelganger?
“Steven Mosher | October 4, 2013 at 12:13 am |
“Odd the way your crappy BEST moving average is so far outside the data in 1780. ”
Another idiot comment from greg.
The BEST Data at 1780 is the average of the entire field. the small patch of england tony refers to as well as most of europe and some of north america.
Tony is comparing CET ( a few square miles) to a much larger area.
That location (CET) along with a few others has reasonable correlation with the entire globe, although with CET ( and others) you will find years in which it is at odds with the rest of the world.
In other words, the thing you point out is expected and not anything odd.”
—— ——–
Come on, at least be consistent. Numerous qualified scientists believe in the merits of CET as a wider proxy. I have quoted their names a number of times and from my own research it is obvious that your quote above is a reasonable representation of what can be observed.
As regards looking at extended North American sites I did that some years ago in my article ‘triplets along the Hudson.’
best regards, your bemused English chum
Tonyb
“Liberaltarians want to live in a world with all the benefits of a moral society, but without that annoying…you know…morals.”
Trouble is Gary, morals according to whom? Who’s to decide? You, I guess. This is the sticking point as far as I’m concerned,, a positive deal breaker in fact….when it comes to conservatism as you seem to embrace it. I don’t want the government in my bedroom, that’s for sure. Not do I want them telling me that I can’t ingest some plant that grows in nature…or anything else for that matter as long as I’m not hurting anyone else. The dislike of big government seems to be selective in many conservatives..
Conservatives are just people who don’t like change. However things are, they find excuses to want them to stay that way. We’ve got a big government, and have since WWII. Conservatives don’t really want to make the government smaller, they’re just willing to temporarily ally with libertarians to resist changes to what that big government does, or how it works. Changes they don’t like.
In the late ’70’s and ’80, the “Reagan coalition” brought
manymost libertarians into alignment with conservatives, including a bunch of religious fanatics who want to outlaw abortion, contraception, and any sex other than creating more children (the “religious right”). But after Reagen the Bushes betrayed that alliance, to the extent any libertarian really believed it to be permanent. (And only the st00pid ones believed that.)“Conservatives are just people who don’t like change.”
A tad reductive perhaps, not to mention a little insulting (note the “just”). but it certainly does seem to be a fundamental feature of conservatism. I find much to like in conservatism, until we get into the social realm. At that point, I can’t run fast enough in the other direction.
“But after Reagen the Bushes betrayed that alliance, to the extent any libertarian really believed it to be permanent. ”
How do other parties support what libertarians want?
pokerguy,
My response is in spam/moderation limbo, and likely misplaced in the thread by me as well. I will repost it here when it surfaces.
I wasn’t being “reductive”, or even descriptive. I was pointing out the functional definition of the word. It’s important to keep this definition in mind when considering “conservatives” in other countries/cultures. Different cultures, different situations “conservatives” are trying to conserve.
There’s a party that calls itself the “Libertarian Party”, I was even associated with it during the ’70’s, but in general libertarians insist on the liberty of thinking for themselves. Get 3 libertarians together, expect 4 opinions.
Sweeping generalities are usually wrong and AK’s definition of conservatives is no exception.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_in_the_United_States
Above is much better and the description by the historian at the opening is good for a nutshell:
“I wasn’t being “reductive”…”
If conservatism as a political philosophy consisted of nothing more than the resistance to change, I don’t see the need for what are likely many hundreds…perhaps thousands of books written on the subject. Or the need for the dozens of columns by conservative thinkers that appear every day in this country.
If the shoe fits AK, wear it. Getting called “reductive” isn’t an insult.
pokerguy,
“If conservatism as a political philosophy consisted of nothing more than the resistance to change….”
Conservatism is about the means of change, and the pace of change. The American Constitution was drafted to make it very difficult, and time consuming, to “fundamentally transform” the country. That is why progressives in the US have fought so hard to turn it into a “living” (ie. nonexistent) constitution.
That is why they pass massive changes to the economy and society in 2000+ page bills with the promise “We have to pass it to learn what is in it.”
Imagine a doctor who gives you a pill and tells you – you have to take it so we can find out what it will do to you. Yet to our modern default progressives, this is a perfectly acceptable form of governance.
“Conservatives are just people who don’t like change. ”
Conservatism has changed the entire world. The west (the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, Newe Zealand, etc.) is the richest, most powerful, most generous civilization in the history of the world. Technological innovation and food production have allowed us to save billions of lives across the globe.
None of that was the product of central planners cocooned in their back rooms leading society by micro-managing every aspect of life. It was and is the product of the free market and Judeo-Christian ethical culture that gave rise to it.
Conservatives resist not change, but centrally planned change where millennia of hard won wisdom regarding how to order society is jettisoned based on what someone read on the Huffington Post yesterday.
From Wiki, Conservatism (disambiguation)
The word “tradition” comes from the Latin verb “tra(ns) ditio”, meaning (very roughly) “that which is handed (given) across/down/forward”. IOW conservatives favour whatever went before. Which is pretty much what I said.
Note how the definition supplied applies only to American conservatism. My point is that “conservatives” oppose change, and if you examine the other points of “American conservatism”, they all apply pretty much to the American past, at least as imagined by “American“ conservatives.
I was thinking American conservatism and traditions are generally Judeo-Christian traditions as the historian noted and as far as government is concerned to the US constitution. For instance no g a y marriage and no abortion on demand is Christian and right to keep and bear arms, free from illegal search and seizure, due process, right to assemble, freedom of press, states rights, and things of that nature are of course constitutional not religious.
“Conservatism” hasn’t done any of that. American conservatism is just trying to conserve the social principles (“free” market capitalism, liberal freedom/democracy, etc) that accomplished those wonderful objectives.
American conservatives are trying to conserve the lack of central planners that led to that success. Some conservatives in England (AFAIK) are still trying to conserve the “rights” of the nobility. Different strokes for different folks.
Conservatives resist change to what they consider basic. For American conservatives, the Constitution enshrines the prohibition on “centrally planned change” where a few centuries of “hard won wisdom regarding how to order society” is to be abrogated in favor of a socialist agenda.
Protestant Reformation is what lay behind the success of the “western” world. That and the printing press which enabled every home to have a King James bible in it for reference purposes.
-GaryM | April 6, 2014 at 4:48 pm |
pokerguy,
“If conservatism as a political philosophy consisted of nothing more than the resistance to change….”
Conservatism is about the means of change, and the pace of change. –
Yes.
Or wise politicians.
pokerguy is describing reactionaries.
Of course, the government bureaucracies should not confused with any thing associated with “change” or confused with the will of people.
So other than dealing with armies of lobbyists and bureaucracies of say the vast swamp of Washington, DC, a politician has fairly simple job, they should follow the will of people.
And things like Occupy Wall Street is not example of the will of the people- instead it was a bunch of incoherent, disgusting, and very lost lobbyists who did manage a degree of destruction of some public parks.
And one could broadly call them reactionaries.
Or radicals, brownshirts. Or thugs, thieves, and rapists- fairly old and ill educated children.
Or “Progressives”/Lefties.
“It’s about the pace of change, and the means…”
I think that’s all well and good in a general sense. But I can also see such an approach used as a kind of obstructionism, for example in the civil rights realm.
It’s interesting that you mention Obamacare in this context. I have to tell you Gary, that guy has done more to turn me off to the Democratic party…and liberalism… than I’d have thought possible in just a few years time. My practical objection to ACA is not that it was done quickly, but that it was done badly, which I suppose you could argue was inevitable given the rush.
More fundamentally, I’ve come to think the government has no business telling people what kind of insurance they have to buy, as if it knows better. It seems fundamentally wrong to me, a huge over-reach. PLus even if it weren’t wrong in principle, government is much too blunt an instrument to manage such a massive program competently.
I seem to be a man without an ideological home these days. Libertarianism is appealing to me, but even there I have problems when it comes to totally free markets.
pokerguy,
“But I can also see such an approach used as a kind of obstructionism, for example in the civil rights realm.”
That’s an excellent example of the progressive revisionism that has permeated western education since the progressives gained control of it in most western countries.
Conservatives started a new party, and fought a civil war, to end slavery.
After conservatives took away their slaves, progressives enacted what were called Jim Crow laws to prevent black Americans from voting. When the Republican Party under Eisenhower proposed the first civil rights legislation, the Democrats, including Lyndon Johnson, stopped it dead in its tracks.
When Johnson finally saw the writing on the wall and proposed a new version of the Republican policy, his fellow Democrats filibustered it as they did the GOP version earlier. Republicans broke the filibuster and voted in greater numbers for the civil rights laws than did the Democrats.
Once progressives decided that blacks voting was inevitable, they enacted policies specifically designed to force them to become dependent on government. Davis Bacon kept blacks out of the construction and many other trades (and still does). They turned inner city schools from centers of education, to permanent jobs program for Democrat activists and a money laundering scheme for turning tax dollars into campaign contributions. They instituted tax policies in virtually every major US city that destroyed the climate for industry and small business development.
And best of all, they const4ructed the big lie, abetted by a stupid progressive Republican campaign consultant, that there was a mass exodus of racists from the Democrat Party to the GOP.
Like so much that is taught by the progressive education industry, the myth of conservatives trying to stop civil rights just ain’t so.
Oh, and welfare policy, the most racist of all. Progressives enacted massive transfer payments they called “welfare.” But they only paid benefits f there were no father n the home. An unemployed black father, faced with no job prospects due to Davis Bacon and progressive tax policy, and a p*ss poor education had to choose between remaining in the home within no income, or leaving the home and his wife and children receiving transfer payments as a result of the beneficence of the white racist progressives who implemented the policy..
This single progressive policy, based on their racist view of black men, did more to decimate the black family structure in the US than anything else.
Back before Hollywood gave up all pretense of thought, they even made a movie about it called Claudine. Progressive icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a book about it, then spent the rest of his career fighting any real reform of the welfare state.
AK, do you have a problem with evolution?
The traditions, ethics, institutions and social systems of a society have evolved, with ‘fit’ systems surviving and ‘unfit’ being destroyed from within or without. Being born into a successful society means you are handed a working set socials systems that deliver a successful civilization; thus being conservative, as opposed to revolutionary, means one is practicing the precautionary principle and sticking close to what you know works instead of taking a leap into the dark. Many European societies took a leap into the dark about 100 years ago, giving rise to Fascist Italy, Soviet Russia, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany; new and revolutionary isn’t always good.
No.
But evolution of societies, social mores, and other such phenomena, such as languages (NOT the “language instinct”, but specific languages) follows vastly different rules than those of “species”. IMO the closest analogy from “biological” evolution might be dandelions, or perhaps bacteria with lots of LGT.
“Conservatives started a new party, and fought a civil war, to end slavery.”
Hey Gary,
Well, seems to me the real conservatives in that situation was the Confederacy who resented the intrusion of big government on their cherished institutions so much that they started a war over it. I don’t think you can characterize Lincoln as a conservative by definition. With a stroke of his pen he freed the slaves, then followed up more substantively by getting the 13th amendment passed. I see him as a kind of radical pragmatist, a man willing to do just about anything to keep the Union in one piece.
In any case, the Republican party of today bears little resemblance to the party of Lincoln.
Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn (about tradition).
pokerguy,
“Well, seems to me the real conservatives in that situation was the Confederacy who resented the intrusion of big government on their cherished institutions so much that they started a war over it.”
You were a progressive too long. I know some of the concepts are foreign. But the term “big government,” even as used today, does not include enforcing the liberty of men against the elitists who claim the right to own them. See, only a progressive could get behind the notion that inferior humans are property, and therefore government has no right to divest them of their ownership.
You should not try to understand true conservatism through the prism of what you learned as a progressive. What you were taught was false. Which was the point of my earlier comment.
If you think Lincoln would not be considered a conservative in the modern parlance, that shows only that you don’t know enough about either Lincoln, or modern conservatism.
Lincoln in fact had doubts about his own actions, including emancipation of the progressives’ slave by presidential edict. Unlike our current president, to whom legislation is but a suggestion of how he should rule.
Lincoln was acting as a quintessential conservative, fighting to not just defend, but for the first time make universal the guarantees of freedom and equality in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Everything else you learned to the contrary is just progressive revisionism.
“If you think Lincoln would not be considered a conservative in the modern parlance, that shows only that you don’t know enough about either Lincoln, or modern conservatism.”
Perhaps Gary, although your arguments on the subject strike me as somewhat clever,
I am in agreement WRT to the failure of welfare…. which by any reasonable measure has been a disaster.
Find me a conservative candidate in 2016 who’s willing to stay the f*** out of my personal life and I’ll be happy to give him a vote.
When Lincoln first joined the GOP it was led by men — then considered radicals — whose primary agenda was to free the slaves. Lincoln guided it towards being a moderate progressive party with a wide appeal to the majority of Americans, which helped him win the 1860 presidential election. Of course, he was also inadvertently aided by the 1860 Democrats splitting when conservative Southern Democrats attempted to hijack their party in demanding slavery be allowed to expand nationwide. …
All people like certain traditions, and all people jump at a chance to tear down certain traditions. Political beliefs cannot be differentiated with such silliness. They oppose each other; that is what differentiates them. After that, they are almost identical, which is why they so easily slide into astounding contradictions.
Radical change versus conservative change, wipe-the-slate
-clean-sweeping change versus pragmatic reforms. One is
utopian, belief in human perfectibility through social engineering,
the other, cautious regarding human fallibility and therefore
adopts pragmatic reforms.
Sweeping institutional changes lead to distopian unexpected
consequences, the increase of arbitrary authority by a leader
or a group, whereas pragmatic trial and error reforms may be
adjustable not irrevocable.Those Romantic movements of
human master race and so on never ended well…. As the
divine ) Socrates and skeptical pessimist Michel de Montaigne
argued, better to be skeptical and try your best to be rational.
My fellow serf, have you noted that the ‘teenage’ rebellious phase allows young adults to try out a lot of social system, before the majority decide that their parents were not so dumb after all.
Biology is beautiful; neurobiology more so.
JCH,
Well, at least you found someone with a quote that supports progressive revisionism.;
Here’s the guy you are quoting. The manager of a word processing department for a law firm, with ten years as a massage therapist.
http://www.awaionline.com/freelancer-directory/?id=10259
But don’t worry, what matters is that he says something you agree with. The complete absence of evidence, to a consensus follower like you, should not be a problem.
This is the kind of facile tripe that passes for history on the left. Remember, according to the current progressive orthodoxy, Ronald Reagan was a progressive too, once he was safely dead.
Doc Martyn, ‘Yes’ to what you say on adolescent rebellion
Did it meself, trial and error before it gets serious – clever
Naychur. (Some of that adolescent runaway boys music
is pretty clever too.)
Also agree with your comment re a leap in the dark and
Gary M’s comments on the law and progressives.
A fellow serf..
Thanks for flagging that, Dr. Curry.
The described tendency is scary, when one looks back at history – for example in the old German Democratic Republic or, even further back, at the time of the Reichpropagandaminister.
You were spot on in your interview on BBC Scotland, where you defended freedom of speech, almost catching the moderator a bit by surprise, it seemed.
It is an integral part of the democratic way of life in the USA – and it should be defended at all cost, especially against this sort of creeping censorship from top down by “well-meaning” individuals, who have decided they know best what’s good for everyone.
Max
Hello, Judith,
If you are meeting Kevin Trenberth, perhaps you could mention this to him:
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/correcting-the-kiehl-trenberth-energy-budget/
Stephen
Perhaps Judith could also mention to him that temperatures have been going up and down for centuries and it s difficult to see anything out of the ordinary today when it is viewed against a proper historic context of many centuries rather than a few decades
Tonyb
“Energy being used to hold up the weight of an atmosphere via conduction and convection is no longer available for radiation to space since energy cannot be in two places at once.”
Reminds me of this
“How can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all”
Firesign Theatre
Eddy Brewer’s excellent “rant” on the politicization of science describes how “Chicago style” (win at any price) politics has moved into some fields of science.
Sad, but true.
A more subtle version is called “post-normal” science (but it uses the same approach and has the same effect).
Max
Abraham and Nuccitelli argue “The climate change uncertainty monster – more uncertainty means more urgency to tackle global warming”.
Huh?
Translation: “We don’t really know what the hell we are talking about, but that means our conclusion that we must act now is even more urgent”.
Huh?
Sorry.
Doesn’t pass my sanity test, guys.
Max
In ” Scare tactics fail climate scientists and everyone else” the author fails to credit how wrong the factual basis of the science used by the scare crowd. That failing was more important than the use of scare tactics.
It’s not just the fats. As well as the polyunsaturated fats in the “Mediterranean diet”, the leafy green vegetables are a significant source of nitrite which is considered to be cardio-protective. Cured meats are another source.
What rôle the nitrate-reducing bacteria at the back of the mouth play (in nitrite production) is an interesting avenue.
Dietary nitrates are a bit iffy. True you get NO, which is an antioxidant, but you also get nitrosamines which are carcinogens.
A high nitrate diet is probably not optimal.
The only things we know that increase life span are calorific restriction, but too little food leads to a shorter life, and a glass/glass and a half of red wine a day.
antioxidants
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/prevention/antioxidants
Bacon and eggs it turns out aren’t so unhealthy either because sugar is usually substituted for fat to make foods taste good and that causes more problems than a balanced diet.
Doc, I think there are some ongoing clinical trials investigating dietary nitrite for ischemic preconditioning.
I think the working supposition is that it works through NO pathways, which seems reasonable, but covers much territory. Perhaps by modulating the activity of gut microbes? Speculative-yes.
The role of NO as an antioxidant is becoming more and more acknowledged. What isn’t widely known is that both alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenases are also nitroso-reductases. Whenever NO stop carbon radicals doing the oxidative peroxide cascade the resulting nitroso fatty acid gets reduced almost immediately. You never see the nitroso adducts of carbon radicals in cells as the decay rate is so fast.
I would still worry more about nitrosoamines than circulating NO though.
If I ever do start to worry I will suck a stick of dynamite.
There’s the cysteine thiols too, and their roles in redox signalling. I have used ruthenium-porphyrin complexes to detect S-nitrosylation by mass spectrometry. The plan was to use them as probes for mitochondriall damage resulting from ischemic reperfusion injury. It looked very promising Alas, time and resources conspired against me.
One technically-trained EU politician questions AGW: “Let’s talk about CO2”
http://rogerhelmermep.wordpress.com/2014/04/02/lets-talk-about-co2/
Here is more on the upcoming WG3.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/06/global-warming-un_n_5099769.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/4952918/Prince-Charles-we-have-100-months-to-save-the-world.html
March 2009 we had 100 months to save the world. If my arithmetic is correct, this will run out around June 2017. Not long to wait.
HADCRUT4 Feb 1878 0.403C
HADCRUT4 Feb 2014 0.299C
Ice Age Coming
sunshinehours1,
Don’t worry. The Warmists are hiding the heat in an airtight container. If you think Big Oil or Big Coal are a problem, just wait for Big Heat!
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Good one.
That prompted me to look for evidence of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption in HADCRUT4. Nothing to report.
Northern Hemisphere
HADCRUT4 Feb 1878 0.456
HADCRUT4 Feb 1944 0.369
HADCRUT4 Feb 2014 0.298
Oops. That was HADCRUT3 .
February:
HADCRUT4 Northern 1867 0.508
HADCRUT4 Northern 1869 0.719
HADCRUT4 Northern 1878 0.592
HADCRUT4 Northern 1935 0.484
HADCRUT4 Northern 1944 0.423
HADCRUT4 Northern 1963 0.453
….
HADCRUT4 Northern 2014 0.361
Beats a lot of skeptic arguments which I know you are making fun of. Maybe you can help them with the pause next.
michael, which volcanoes can you find in HADCRUT4?
Every time I look, you can only find volcanoes if the temperature was already going down.
I like reminding people there is a 66 cycle.
If there was the same thermometer coverage in 1878 and the same population it would be the same temperature as today.
UHI and population change can explain the fact it was warmer in February 2014 than 1878 … wait. It wasn’t.
And, I bet if Cowtan and Way applied themselves to 1878 and extrapolated the warming into the arctic, 1878 would have been 1C warmer.
I’m not sure exactly which data Jones P., et. al. have lost. If it covers the original data for the significant volcanic eruptions such as Krakatoa then that would be a shame. They might have adjusted-away the primary experimental data for fascinating climatic ‘experiments’ that may not happen again for a long time. Though there could, of course, be some others just around the corner.
Sunshine If Cowtan and Way applied there techniques to 1878 we would now be 6 degrees warmer in the Arctic in 2014 and going up exponentially.
Why was the IPCC summary catastrophically biased?
David Rose sumamrizes key biased exaggerations in the IPCC WGII summary over the WGII main report. “How IPCC Report was ramped up to pedict wars, extreme weather and famine . . .while its authors slept on the job.”
That is scientific misconduct and political fraud.
Harmful “Green” policies
The US “Green” ethanol policy which diverts some net 27% of grain corn to fuel, has a meager 2% reduction in US transportation CO2. (20% of 10%). Lifecycle carbon footprint of biofuels US & EU Grain to ethanol mandates have increased global grain prices about 250%. Brian Wright, Global Biofuels: Key to the Puzzle of Grain Market Behavior, J. Economic Perspectives, Vol. 28, Nr 1 Winter 2014 pp 73-98. Ethanol mandates appear to have has caused about 200,000 more deaths/year among the extreme poor by driving up global food prices. Indur Goklany Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons Volume 16 Number 1 Spring 2011 pp 9-13.
Return to the foundations of our Western Judeo-Christian Civilization:
Primum non nocere – First do no harm. and
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Second Climate Thoughts: The latest U.N. report tones down the alarmism but ramps up the bad economics.
EU Slashes Carbon Permits, Increasing Cost of Pollution
Facism or Freedom?
Bjorn Lomberg observes:
Lomborg references Clive Cook: Scare Tactics Fail Climate Scientists, and Everyone Else
David L. Hagen,
Thanks.
+1000 to Lomborg and
+100 to you for posting it here.
David
Agree with Peter. Thanks for posting this.
Max
While I agree with Lomborg to the extent that the messages of catastrpohe and name calling are unsuccessful in persuading the’uncommitted middle’, this needs to be looked at further.
One of the reasons the ‘selling catastrophe’ is failing is that people looking out of their window simply don’t see a catastrophe happening – if there is any change to weather and climate it has been imperceptibly slow and gradual, while the ‘extreme weather’ meme hasn’t really caught hold because the population is in the main somewhat immunised against scientific scare stories simply because we hear of so many up-coming disasters that don’t materiale (UK examples being BSE-nCJD, bird flu etc). Of course, in the UK we also have the issue of the Met Office appearing to jump on any slightly unusual weather event as evidence of climate change – as such the last three winters have seen it announced in the media that cold and dry winters (and so water shortages in spring/summer), then a mild and very wet and windy winter are all consistent with the expectations of climate change
The uncommitted middle pay lip service to AGW, but polls consistenly place it a long way down the list of most people’s key issues. Things that have an immediate effect (e.g. economic well-being) are much more important to most people’s everyday existence than something that may cayse some difficulties in the medium term future.
Ira Glickstein provides excellent graphics on Putting Human Caused Warming in Proper Perspective. When we normally accommodate 43 F (24C) annual changes, and when people move from New York to Florida explicitly to obtain 20F (11C) warming, what’s the big toot about 0.2F (0.1C) anthropogenic warming? That is easily accommodated. Alarmism is primarily to coerce grants from politicians – and to worship nature by demanding massive resources to control climate – thus starving the poor.
Environmental Tyranny or Freedom with Wise Stewardship?
Having experienced the tyranny of enforced communism, Vaclav Klaus has unusual insight in detailing: Blue Planet in Green Shackles. What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? ISBN: 1-889865-09-5
President Klaus addressed the National Press Club in Washington DC, 2008 on Blue Planet in Green Shackles
Today’s scare tactics are used to avoid that essential debate on what is the wisest use of our resources.
“US Sees Danger UN May Overstate Costs Of Global Warming Fight”
http://malaysiandigest.com/world/495876-us-sees-danger-un-may-overstate-costs-of-global-warming-fight.html
It seems the government reps (apparently with the Obama Administration out front) are arguing to have the wording beefed up to a higher level of alarmism. They want to reduce the estimates of the costs of mitigation and increase the estimates of the benefits. But on what basis?
Judith, enjoy your exchange with Kevin Trenberth. I’ll be interested in reading your thoughts about it. Please tell him that one of his ENSO students (me) says hello.
Regards
Judith, a clarification: “student” as in I’ve thoroughly studied his ENSO work.
Funny that Rupert Ellison missed the references to applying Mathieu functions to bodies of water dating back to 1929.
He does such shoddy bavkground research.
In the exchange between Trenberth and Hurricane Hunter Wm Gray in 2009 (The Global Warming Debate Continues), Gray was the convincing victor and with such aplomb that the debate is very hard if not impossible to find and all of the comments were taken down
“As a boy, I remember seeing articles about the large global warming that had taken place between 1900 and 1945,” says William Gray. “No one understood or knew if this warming would continue. Then the warming abated and I heard little about such warming through the late 1940s and into the 1970s.” What happened is a cooling spell began in the ’40s, by the ’70s Gray says, “there was speculation concerning an increase in this cooling. Some speculated that a new ice age may not be far off.” Then, there was a resumption of global warming in the ’80s and from that sprang the “current global warming bandwagon that US-European governments have been alarming us” about, as Gray says, and has been blamed on “the fossil fuel-burning public.”
~William Gray
From down under, The Uncertainty Monster is located down under the bed. :)
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/04/new-lewandowsky-study-finds-uncertainty-monster-under-his-bed-will-cost-billions/
Lewandowsky inverts the precautionary principle:
He inverts Jesus’ teaching on wise stewardship that undergirds modern Western Judeo-Christian civilization
Steven Goddard has identified the root problem: Manipulating data.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/04/06/improving-technology-generates-worse-data/
I dunno.
For a topic that uses the word “interesting” so much, not so much here (exclamation points notwithstanding) to get excited about.
More of the same spin and denial, bandaging old griefs with new complaints, varnishing turds and praising the backwards and inept for the courage to not change in the face of overwhelming evidence that they’ve always been wrong.
Perhaps Boulder is dull, and so everything seems “interesting” by comparison?
Try the skiing?
What good are two sides to an argument when the government has already taken sides and just can keep changing the rules to stay in the game. Take for example an exchange of opinions between two scientists in October 2009, as follows:
Kevin Trenberth:
William Gray:
Did Trenberth really believe what he said when he said it? What we do know for sure is that Trenberth said exactly what the government and the UN-IPCC wanted to hear.
Wagathon | April 7, 2014 at 4:40 pm |
Did Gray really believe what he said when he said it? What we do know for sure is that Gray said exactly what the Tea Party and the fossil industry wanted to hear.
There. Fixed that for you.
“…The future projections are for much more warming, but with rates of change perhaps a hundred times as fast as those experienced in nature over the past 10,000 years.”
You would think such an absurd statement would sound insane to anyone — even to a Democrat — but, that’s politics ‘ya.
Wagathon | April 7, 2014 at 6:27 pm |
In the past 800,000 years in the glacial and other paleo records, about every 100,000 years one sees evidence of a prolonged warming trend of 30-year+ averages perhaps 100 times the average of the 30-year+ rates of the tens of thousands of years before or since. The last such uptick begat the Holocene, somewhat over 10,000 years ago.
Until now. Now we have evidence of another such uptick. We understand the physics generating the uptick. We understand the inputs. The claim you call absurd is only absurd to someone in denial or in ignorance of the data we hold known and the simplest, most parsimonious, most universal explanation for it.
Climatologists are not able to reject the null hypothesis that all climate change can be explained by natural causes. Accordingly, everything you claim to be true is… totally false.
Bart R — There’s one difference. The government gives money to Kevin Trenberth, but the fossil fuel industry doesn’t give money to William Gray.
David in Cal | April 7, 2014 at 7:45 pm |
Prove it.
Dude, there are worlds of differences between Trenberth and Gray; the one you cite is not only not true, but also backwards, besides irrelevant.
Gray has been the number one guy in hurricanes, with government funding up to the eyeballs for decades. And the US hurricane program is fail.
Despite the money he’s also gotten from fossil, Gray has produced no substantive improvements in hurricane research outcomes at all on a scale proportionate to the vast resources poured into satellites and hurricane monitoring flights and ship radar and advances in computer power.
The whole hurricane field under Gray’s obstinate and backwards-looking thumb has frankly rotted and sunk to its lowest point.
Europeans had to warn US hurricanologists about Sandy turning Frankenstorm. Hurricanologists who learned directly from Gray and with his blessings completely screwed up all Katrina forecasts. Hurricanologists don’t even have meaningful ways of categorizing the nature and types of changes in hurricane behavior since Gray was born, although since that time the length of the hurricane season has grown, as has the region of hurricane origins and the mean length of hurricane paths, substantially; medicanes have doubled landfall frequency every fifteen years since the day Gray was born. You’d have trouble finding a US hurricanologist who even can explain what Period Doubling means.
If Roger Pielke Jr.’s methods were applied with regard to Gray instead of GDP, he’d have had a much smoother ride over on 538.
Trenberth’s gotten (albeit not so much as Gray) fossil money, brought money into Science from private sources for new research, been part of a revitalization and growth of the senior field of Climatology, to the point Climatologists are now doing a better job with hurricanes than dedicated hurricanologists.
Looked at in perspective, the entire IPCC in its whole history has spent less than Judith Curry’s school spends on cheerleading in a decade. You think _money_ defines the difference between Trenberth and Gray? Perhaps it does, but if so, in quite the opposite sense than you allege.
Wagathon | April 7, 2014 at 8:14 pm |
That explanation of data by inference which is most simple with regard to assumptions, most parsimonious of exceptions, most universal of application to all observations is held to be accurate or very nearly true until fresh observation require the explanation be amended.
“Natural causes” is not only a meaningless catchall of feigned hypotheses, but in all its possible and varied and sometimes contradictory components does not explain, is plagued with mountains of assumptions and exceptions, and requires multiple other explanations for each part of the climate. Calling it a “null hypothesis” is like calling lung cancer in tobacco smokers just a coincidence.
Therefore, everything you wrote is igno-rant bluster.
“Natural causes” is not only a meaningless catchall of feigned hypotheses, but in all its possible and varied and sometimes contradictory components does not explain, is plagued with mountains of assumptions and exceptions, and requires multiple other explanations for each part of the climate.
The almighty is a powerful null.
http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/0862
An is a legitimate argument for an alternative null as postulated by Ghil
The global temperature increase through the 1990s is certainly
rather unusual in terms of the instrumental record of the last
150 years or so. It does not correspond, however, to
a rapidly accelerating increase in greenhouse-gas emissions
or a substantial drop in aerosol emissions. How statistically
significant is, therefore, this temperature rise, if the null hypothesis
is not a random coincidence of small, stochastic excursions
of global temperatures with all, or nearly all, the
same sign?
The presence of internally arising regularities in the climate
system with periods of years and decades suggests the
need for a different null hypothesis. Essentially, one needs
to show that the behaviour of the climatic signal is distinct
from that generated by natural climate variability in the past,
when human effects were negligible, at least on the global
scale. As discussed in Sects. 2.1 and 3.3, this natural variability
includes interannual and interdecadal cycles, as well
as the broadband component. These cycles are far from being
purely periodic. Still, they include much more persistent
excursions of one sign, whether positive or negative in global
or hemispheric temperatures, say, than does red noise.
maksimovich | April 8, 2014 at 9:01 am |
That’s.. sad, frankly, and embarrasses us all.
Numerology in whatever form is just a superstition; dressing it up in new math terminology and hiding behind the words scientists use while lurking with some bizarre pseudo-religious ulterior agenda?
That’s to all appearances the work of a diseased mind or a confidence trickster.
Why would anyone bring such trash to Climate Etc.?
Trenberth
Gray
Bart shows his ignorance,ie the constraints implied by random variations.The highly replicable experiment of Willie Feller is a fine example.
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh133/mataraka/randomwalk-n_37231.gif
maksimovich | April 8, 2014 at 8:08 pm |
Ignorance?
Utter tosh. I’m plentifully familiar with superstitions like astrology, numerology, belief in fairies, angels, little green men from Mars (well, technically that last one is more delusion than superstition), and other puffs of nonsense and flim-flam.
Vesting numbers with supernatural qualities diminishes their true beauty and insults the intelligence of anyone who can count.
By the principle of Induction, that would certainly include insulting any Omniscience you could posit.
You may want to ponder the silliness of an Almighty who leaves you clues in strings of numbers like prizes in a box of Cracker Jacks, implying an Almighty who favors deception, confusion, waste of time, and special treatment of some raised up by their secret knowledge over all others. Is that really the kind of God you want to be made in the image and likeness of?
So, no; simplest inference reveals your claims to be slightly dangerous absurdities, most certainly anti-American and unwholesome. One is surprised you don’t have an oil company of your own.
“Take this climate matter everybody is thinking about. They all talk, they pass laws, they do things, as if they knew what was happening. I don’t think anybody really knows what’s happening. They just guess. And a whole group of them meet together and encourage each other’s guesses.” ~James Lovelock
Correction needed: The link to the Briggs critique of the Socialism or Extinction study is actually to CNS news, not CBS news. Those are horses of entirely different colors from the standpoint of media penetration, although the content of the piece stands or falls on its own.
From the article:
…
Summary
Texas crude oil production has grown from 25% of U.S. production to 35%; the Permian Basin is a driver of future growth.
U.S. shale oil (and gas) production is encouraging other countries to explore their options and become familiar with the technologies.
Numerous niche plays and opportunities exist in the shale oil and gas space, as well as the larger, more obvious ones.
New information confirms a trend that has been in the works for the last year or so. Texas had supplied approximately 25% of total U.S. oil supply. As of preliminary March Energy Information (EIA) data, Texas provided nearly 35%. North Dakota was the second-largest supplier at 12%. U.S. crude oil production grew 15% in 2013 to 7.4 million barrels per day (m/b/d). Offshore Gulf of Mexico produced 17%.
…
Shale oil (aka tight oil) production averaged 3.22 m/b/d at the end of 2013. U.S. crude oil production, averaging 7.84 m/b/d, grew to 10.4% of total global oil production. Shale oil was 4.3% of the global total. The EIA notes that in February 2014, 63% of shale oil production came from the Eagle Ford (36% for 1.21 m/b/d) and the Bakken (28% for .91 m/b/d). The “other U.S.” shale plays are increasingly contributing to U.S. production.
…
The EIA’s reporting of tight oil indicates that Russia is using hydraulic fracturing to produce 1% of its total oil production, mainly in Western Siberia. The technique is taking hold in other shale basins across the world – in Canada, Argentina, Ukraine and others. In the UK, with ample shale gas resources, the debate about accessing resources through fracing is being waged. Again, this adds opportunity for oilfield services firms like Halliburton (HAL), Schlumberger (SLB) and Weatherford (WFT), and nimble drilling companies that can find ways to reduce the environmental footprint, especially with respect to water resources, to gain acceptance. In Argentina, Chevron (CVX) is partnering with YPF SA, the state oil company, with plans to spend $16 billion to unlock shale oil and gas in the Vaca Muerta formation; this would change Argentina’s resources calculus considerably. As written about in the recent past, the shale genie is out of the bottle. Countries with shale potential want to learn how to produce unconventional resources and not be left behind the technology curve.
…
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2129373-u-s-crude-oil-shale-oil-supply-alters-oil-markets-and-opportunity
From the article:
…
In addition, LPG fracking neatly solves the problem of produced water pollution and disposal. Unlike propane, water is a polar, inorganic molecule, making it a ready solvent for underground salts and minerals. As a result, as water makes the trip down a wellbore, into a rock formation, and back again, it may pick up unwanted “passengers” such as seabed salts, heavy metals, and radioactive elements3. While these substances are naturally occurring, they are not usually found on the surface and are potentially harmful to plant and animal life. This polluted water must then be either filtered and treated or disposed of through injection back underground. Conversely, as a non-polar hydrocarbon, propane does not dissolve such substances and will return to the surface unpolluted.
Production advantages of LP gas fracking
LP Gas Fracking Production AdvantagesIn addition to alleviating environmental concerns, LPG fracking may also offer production advantages. When a well is fractured using a water-based fluid, some of that water inevitably remains behind causing “damage” to the formation. That is, the residual water blocks tiny channels in the rock, reducing permeability and inhibiting gas flow8.
Using LPG as a fracking fluid offers an elegant solution to this issue. Propane is pumped down the wellbore in a liquid state under high pressure and low temperature. However, as the fracturing of the rock alleviates pressure, and the liquid begins to heat back up, the propane reverts to a gaseous state. Rather than blocking gas flow, the propane then mixes with the natural gas and they flow up the wellbore in solution. Unlike water, propane and natural gas mix well and have similar flow properties. In fact, propane is often a natural component of natural gas in small concentrations. Upon reaching the surface, the propane can then be separated and sold, rather than incurring treatment and disposal costs like water4.
…
Since used LPG technology to frack its first well in 2008, GasFrac has performed 1,863 fractures of 657 locations as of spring 20134.
…
http://frackwire.com/lp-gas-fracking/
Texas, the socialist antidote anecdote.
From the article:
…
Perry told Breitbart Texas, “We’ve been below the national average of unemployment for over 80 months. We have 1,000 plus people moving into the state per day. So even with the influx of people moving to Texas, we’ve been able to absorb them and to keep as many people employed as we can.”
According to the most recent statistics from the State of Texas, the state’s unemployment rate stands around 5.7 percent. Furthermore, as Breitbart Texas previously pointed out, the state’s sales tax collections have continued to increase for 47 straight months. The booming oil and natural gas industry has undoubtedly helped increase sales tax collections, but so have retail sales. All factors indicate that Texans have been successful in acquiring jobs that are providing them with excess money to spend.
Nationally, however, the economic outlook is not so bright. According to an April 4 jobs report, an average of 183,000 jobs are being created each month; this figure is far below one that would indicate significant economic recovery, according to Politico.
…
While the recent disappointing economic figures have been largely blamed on this year’s long, cold winter, Perry insists the real issue is over-regulation and over-taxation.
Perry argued that while the rest of the country is supporting weak job numbers, low taxes have helped attract both businesses and workers to his state.
“Our approach to dealing with jobs is about enhancing the quality of life,” Perry said. “One of the reasons people want to be in the state is because they can keep more of their money.”
It comes as no surprise that Texas cities dominated Wallet Hub’s new ranking of America’s best cities for job seekers. Fort Worth was named the nation’s number one city for jobs. Arlington, Dallas, Austin, and Houston also made the top ten. Wallet Hub compiled the list “using 13 unique metrics, ranging from job openings per capita and industry variety to cost of living and the prevalence of employer-provided health benefits.”
“What we’re doing in Texas is keeping America afloat,” Perry told Breitbart Texas. “I want this country to be stronger. I want California, New York, and Illinois to be vibrant and strong. But you can’t over-tax, over-regulate, and over-litigate, then expect people to stay in your state. So I hope we can have a good, thoughtful conversation about these policies.”
Perry added that Richard Fisher, Chairman of the Federal Reserve in Texas, found that if you eliminated the middle class jobs created in Texas, the entire country would be “underwater.”
“There are 50 labs of innovation,” Perry concluded. “I get it, not everyone wants to live in Texas, and that’s okay. But let’s honestly have a conversation in this country about tax, regulatory, and public school policies that have worked. Then let the people decide: [Texas’ policies] are good policies. We need to put those in place in Illinois, we need to put those in place in California. The unions cant continue to [inhibit] our ability to keep more of our money. The private sector can decide how to best spend it–not the government.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Texas/2014/04/06/Governor-Perry-Unemployment-Figures-Show-Texas-Keeping-America-Afloat
Socialist Cost of Carbon policies – how would they work?
I’ve been wondering how would the ‘Socialist Cost of Carbon’ policies work? What would be the actual mechanism for collecting the money and distributing it? What would be the basis for voting on the rate of collections? And what would be the basis for voting for the rate of distributions of the moneys collected?
I suspect the socialists would want to collect money in proportion to GDP and distribute it in proportion to population.
So USA would pay say 30% of the total funds and get say 1% of the voting rights as to how it’s distributed.
That would seem to be a fair way of doing it to 97% of the world’s population.
Perhaps the UN could arrange to run a vote of the world population on this basis.
Others, in the minority, might suggest, if taxation is on the basis of GDP, then countries would vote on the distribution of the funds on the basis 1 vote per $ contributed.
That would encourage countries to get their acts together, and implement good governance and law and order for a start.
The UN would do what the Dimowits in the US do. Take money from the responsible, democratic, least corrupt, and therefore successful societies and give it to the corrupt dictators that keep their people down.
You’re describing socialists as blood-sucking ticks on the backs of the productive, when they’re not in Cancun sucking on margaritas.
Who is John Galt?
Peter Lang | April 7, 2014 at 10:56 pm |
Thanks for your insights into how the Australian economy works. Should the USA ever find Capitalism wanting, we’re sure this Australian model will be given all due consideration.
Uh oh;
“Some researchers have in the past attributed a portion of Northern Hemispheric warming to a warm phase of the AMO,” said Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann. “The true AMO signal, instead, appears likely to have been in a cooling phase in recent decades, offsetting some of the anthropogenic warming temporarily.”
Who is Michael Mann, Al Gore’s numerologist?
Double uh oh:
“The climate stadium wave supposedly occurs when the AMO and other related climate indicators synchronize, peaking and waning together. Mann and his team show that this apparent synchronicity is likely a statistical artifact of using the problematic detrended-AMO approach.”
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-04-slowdown-global-fleeting.html#jCp
Mann does know a lot about statistical artifacts. He has a closet full of them.
Wagathon,
Uh oh,
Michael Mann’s qualifications suit him to be employed as a phrenologist and numerologist, amongst those who require undergraduate qualifications in
Physics and Applied Math from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.S. degree in Physics from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Geology & Geophysics from Yale University, as a prerequisite.
Michael Mann appears to reject or ignore possible vertical tectonic plate movement not due solely to isostatic rebound, as his paper “Climate related sea-level variations over the past two millennia.” indicates. This is reasonable from one point of view, as such things as :
“satellite positioning by GPS and other such systems,
Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI)
satellite and lunar laser ranging
Regionally and locally, precise levelling,
precise tacheometers,
monitoring of gravity change,
Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) using satellite images, etc”,
all of which may be required for studying geodynamic phenomena on the global scale, and some of which are indispensable, were notably lacking or completely absent over much of the last two millennia, even in the USA.
Such impacts on sea levels as vertical changes in the basin levels of the oceans connected to upwelling magma or its converse, are apparently dismissed in favour of estimates and models. Although he might raise the objection that he is only referring to “. . . sea-level reconstructions for the past 2100 y based on salt-marsh sedimentary sequences from the US Atlantic coast. . . .”, he then makes completely arbitrary assumptions about their applicability to global sea levels.
Completely normal Warmist fare here. Make unsubstantiated local guesses and assumptions, and then extrapolate these to the global environment as fact.
The statement from the paper that :
“This analysis suggests that our data can be expected to track global mean sea level within about ±10 cm over the past two millennia, within the uncertainty band shown for our analysis.”
– is of course meaningless, being one set of guesses compared with a different set of guesses!
No wonder he’s the Michael Mann of Climate Science! Next he’ll be aiming for the title of the Michael Mann of Geodynamics!
Oh well, gullibility is never in short supply amongst the Warmist crew.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
“Mann does know a lot about statistical artifacts. He has a closet full of them.”
Then again he might not see statistical artifacts except when they aren’t there- he did manage to turn temperature record upside down.
And I seem to recall him saying something about not being an expert in statistics.
But then again, it’s possible he is learning, and could have got some professional help.
Lol. The excuse du jour. I wonder how many he can come up in the next 3 decades. He will need them.
Support for Nuclear in South Australia
“More South Australians support the use of nuclear energy than oppose it, according to a new public opinion poll. The majority of respondents also expressed support for uranium mining in the state.
The poll – conducted by market research company ReachTel on behalf of the South Australian Chamber of Mines and Energy (Sacome) – questioned 1216 randomly-selected South Australians on their attitudes towards uranium mining and nuclear energy.
Some 48% of respondents said they supported the use of nuclear energy, while 33% were opposed to it. The remaining 19% were undecided.
Sacome chief executive Jason Kuchel commented, “A key aspect of responses to this question was the level of strong opinions expressed, with 29% strongly supporting and only 20% strongly opposing nuclear power – in other words, there are more staunchly pro-nuclear than anti-nuclear advocates.”
When asked to consider the current debate about climate change, 63% of those questioned saw nuclear power as either being an important contributor or as an alternative to be considered while only 23% said they saw nuclear energy playing no role in fighting climate change. Some 45% of respondents considered nuclear energy as a “sustainable and environmentally sound power alternative,” while 35% disagreed.
The survey results indicated that more than half of respondents (54%) think that nuclear power will eventually be introduced into Australia, while 22% disagreed.”
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-Support-for-nuclear-in-South-Australia-0704144.html
Now Michael’s an ignorant fellow,
His role is to bluster and bellow,
No need to invite him,
It seems to excite him.
You think that he’s brave? Nah, he’s yellow!
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Climate humour :
Q: Got anything relevant to say – webnutcolonoscope – or just the same old crazed rant?
A: Rupert, how is it living in that anti-science rat-hole that you occupy? Must be a miserable existence to wake up every day and figure out who you can slime next.
Has this been plagiarised from Monty Python, or is it original? The world wonders!
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
WebHubTelescope | April 8, 2014 at 1:46 am |
Rupert Ellison is stuck in a mathematical no-man’s land, unable to comprehend anything beyond copy-and-paste clippings of google searches.
It really is just a manifestation of jealous rage on Rupert’s part — lashing out in whatever way he can.
Robert I Ellison | April 8, 2014 at 1:52 am |
Got anything relevant to say – webnutcolonoscope – or just the same old crazed rant?
WebHubTelescope | April 8, 2014 at 2:47 am |
Rupert, how is it living in that anti-science rat-hole that you occupy? Must be a miserable existence to wake up every day and figure out who you can slime next.
Robert I Ellison | April 8, 2014 at 4:01 am |
I just call you on the theoretical impossibly of your fractured math and fantasy physics – webnutcolonoiscope.
The crazed gerbil impersonation is all yours which seems to be what you do best.
Mike Flynn | April 8, 2014 at 12:03 am | Reply
Now Michael’s an ignorant fellow,
His role is to bluster and bellow,
No need to invite him,
It seems to excite him.
You think that he’s brave? Nah, he’s yellow!
What Flynn does best is garrulous screeds about warmists and scientifically incoherent diatribes about this or that.
The point is that rational science takes a back seat with these types – and when Judy is away the rats will play.
Robert I Ellison,
Thank you so much for your assessment of my accomplishments. You have no idea what it means to me, to be noticed by such as yourself.
I will treasure your thoughts, even though I suspect your intent may be to damn me with faint praise.
I support the intellectual rigour you apply in support of your fact based arguments, and admire the polite and restrained way you address other commenters. I am sure that Professor Curry appreciates your assistance and advice on the conduct of her blog.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
I am sure Flynn acted in perfect good faith by quoting out of context – the context of course of webby’s persistent abuse.
Flynn’s so-called science is totally out to lunch – and the garrulous screeds lack any substance of any sort at all. The comment I copied seems typical – no content at all and a feeble attempt at wit – or perhaps more an attempt by a feeble wit.
Really, really, bad comparison :
Spouse beater’s excuse : I couldn’t help myself! He/she made me do it!
Blog commenter’s excuse for intemperate behaviour : I couldn’t help myself! He/she made me do it!
My excuse : I couldn’t help myself! The Devil made me do it / I thought it was funny – choose one or more.
I’ll stop for now. Otherwise I might start laughing.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
I wasn’t aware I needed to excuses for anything – least of all being quoted out of context. by the ever disingenuous Flynn.
This shows the current state of the soon-to-be El Nino. It seems to be clearly moving into a new mode now. h/t WUWT ENSO page (lots of info there).
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_update/sstanim.gif
Jones: [to Hansen] Keep up the good work! […] Even though it’s been a mild winter in the UK, much of the rest of the world seems coolish – expected though given the La Nina. Roll on the next El Nino!
Joking aside, the next El Nino is gonna be weak and short, the next La Nina (2015/16) deep and long and will make the global temperature indices plummet.
‘Stay tuned for the next update by April 12th (probably earlier) to see where the MEI will be heading next. El Niño came and went during the summer of 2012, not unlike 1953. This was followed by two ENSO-neutral winters, and occasional dips into weak La Niña conditions over the last 1.5 years. It appears that this is about to change, although we have a long way to go to reach full-fledged El Niño conditions.’ http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
The cool Pacific mode means weak El Nino.
As they say, it’s about the data. Judith can discuss this directly with Trenberth in that session later this week. This could derail any idea she had of talking about the pause, because I am sure Trenberth will be up to speed on ENSO developments.
El Nino do occur in Pacific cool states – just less intensely and less frequently over 20 to 40 years.
Lol. During the last 2 years and 2 months, during which the Pacific dipped into La Nina “lite” conditions, the surface air temperature went up at ~.5C per decade.
La Nina is mainlining midol. She could not be less moody.
So since the last major La Nina it has warmed a little?
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/ts.gif
Weird science.
Change in the surface temperatures will roughly follow PDO.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:240/derivative/normalise/plot/jisao-pdo/mean:12/normalise
Edim | April 8, 2014 at 7:21 am |
Let’s clean that up a little.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:191/mean:193/derivative/normalise/plot/jisao-pdo/mean:101/mean:103/normalise
If what you say is true, then the last time the PDO had a major negative phase, from the late 1930’s to the early 1950’s, was followed by its longest net positive rise on record (admittedly, not much of a record to go by), and we’re ‘overdue’ for that PDO phase change. Each successive rising period has been more sharply up, and each successive falling phase less sharply down, lately. Granted, there’s too little data to draw such conclusions, but all this tells us is PDO-worship is fruitless and contradictory. Should the PDO have any influence (which is a dubious assertion), it is likeliest to contribute to the largest ENSO we’ve seen to date, by this sort of (faulty) reasoning.
‘Thus these results point towards the possibility of routine decadal climate predictions. Using this method, and by considering both internal natural climate variations and projected future anthropogenic forcing, we make the following forecast: over the next decade, the current Atlantic meridional overturning circulation will weaken to its long-term mean; moreover, North Atlantic SST and European and North American surface temperatures will cool slightly, whereas tropical Pacific SST will remain almost unchanged. Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.’
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/abs/nature06921.html
Less faulty reasoning on Bart’s part and more bizarro world dissonance.
Back towards the beginning of this thread, Jim D. presented a couple of graphs, and the logic of what he thinks they show. As a result I wrote
“Jim Cripwell | April 6, 2014 at 8:11 pm |
Jim D. Many thanks. Let me think about it.”
I have now had time to think about it, and I have tried to find fault with Jim’s logic; I cannot. Jim D. is absolutely correct. So then I thought “What new does this tell me?” And my answer was; absolutely nothing. This is merely more conformation that CAGW is a very viable hypothesis.
But then I remembered the statements in the SPMs and Chapters 9 of the AR4 and 5, that certain things about CAGW are extremely likely (>95% certainty) and very likely (>90% certainty). What is the logic between what Jim D has written and these statements? I have read the documents, and from what I can see, these statements are merely the opinions of the authors, and nothing more than opinions.
Can you, Jim D. give me the logical arguments between your two graphs, and anything else that is relevant, and the IPCC statements of confidence. What is the solid physics and logic that connects the two things together?
“So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.”
Jim Cripwell, from this graph, it is possible to deduce a consistent transient sensitivity that would be 2 C per doubling, if AGW was to explain this close apparent relation. It is simplified because it ignores other GHGs that enhance the effect and aerosol changes that may oppose it, but assuming all the factors are absorbed in this line, this 2 C per doubling can be used as a guideline for future behavior relative to the dominant factor which is CO2. AGW says that the transient sensitivity is lower than the equilibrium one, which could still be 3 C per doubling, so this line provides a lower limit on the final warming as you add CO2. The consistency of a 2 C transient rate and AGW’s prediction is a reason for confidence in the warming so far being caused by anthropogenic factors.
When the IPCC determines how much warming you get by 2100, they use numbers consistent with how this line looks, and CO2 values consistent with projected unmitigated fossil fuel use, and some projections put it at 4 C, while 2 C can only be achieved with a major slow-down in the next few decades.
The bottom line is when you have this empirical information on CO2 and temperature from as much as 60 years of data, why not use it directly for future projections? If you don’t like AGW or models, you can still use the empirical gradient of 1 C per 100 ppm, and get similar results to the IPCC.
Jim D. you write “and get similar results to the IPCC”
I will not argue with everything you have written. It adds little, if anything, to what you have written before. I do not get “similar results’, when I look at the statements of 95% and 090% certainty. You have not addressed these in any way whatsoever.
What is the basis for the statements about 95% and 90% certainty?
(As an aside, and please don’t address this issue at this time, it might be interesting to discuss your statement ” why not use it directly for future projections?”)
If you are asking about the statement that most of the warming since 1950 is anthropogenic, you would have to look at how the AGW-predicted warming straddles the observed warming, which is almost exactly at its central probability peak. For AGW not to be most, it would have to be that the warming from anthropogenic effects is at the low wing of its AGW distribution, which is where the low probability comes in, and if it was at that wing, some other unknown factor would account for the warming making up the difference.
Jim D. you write “If you are asking about the statement that most of the warming since 1950 is anthropogenic,”
No I am NOT asking that. I am asking where the numbers 95% and 90% come from. What is the basis for the numeric values associated with the probability or certainty that something is likely to happen? Why aren’t they 25% or 10 % or some other value?
It comes from the shape of the sensitivity probability distribution which is 1.5-4.5 C for ECS, maybe lower for TCR, but to be near 50% of 0.7, you need a really low sensitivity around 1 C per doubling, with the other 0.35 C coming from something else. So, 0.35 C from CO2 is at the unlikely tail of the IPCC probability distribution that is centered at 0.7 C.
Jim D. you write “It comes from the shape of the sensitivity probability distribution which is 1.5-4.5 C for ECS, maybe lower for TCR, but to be near 50% of 0.7, you need a really low sensitivity around 1 C per doubling, with the other 0.35 C coming from something else. So, 0.35 C from CO2 is at the unlikely tail of the IPCC probability distribution that is centered at 0.7 C.”
I give up. What you have written is sheer gobbledygook. There is no measured data to support any of the numbers you have quoted; merely some value correlation between CO2 concentrations and global temperatures. I have no idea what the “sensitivity probability distribution” is, or how it was derived. Don’t bother to try and describe it, as I am sure it is meaningless.
I know you wont agree, but this discussion merely confirms my thoughts that there is a hypothesis of CAGW, with absolutely no physics whatsoever, to support it.. Just the wild guesses of a bunch of charlatans.
Sorry. For “value” read “vague”.
Jim Cripwell, OK, the idea of the IPCC range of 1.5-4.5 C is meaningless to you, so when the temperature rise is consistent with the center of this range it also means nothing. For the IPCC this is strong evidence for their range, and their theory, even being comfortably within its uncertainty limits. A first step for you to understand confidence levels, which was your question, is to understand uncertainty or error bars in estimates. The confidence was because the warming was in the middle of the error bars that AGW would produce given the changes in CO2, other GHGs and aerosols and their uncertainties.
Jim D. you write “A first step for you to understand confidence levels, which was your question, is to understand uncertainty or error bars in estimates.”
I fully understand the meaning of error bars when it comes to measurements. That is basic Physics 101. I have absolutely no idea what is meant by error bars in estimates; estimates which are, in fact, nothing more than guesses. Are there error bars for guesses? So far as I am aware, there are no such things. If you will give me a reference to some book on the fundamental physics of the error bars in estimates, I would be grateful.
In any event, this whole discussion has no meaning physics. Until actual measurements are made of the numbers involved, then The Scientific Method cannot be applied, and so there is no way that CAGW can ever become anything more than a hypothesis; which I agree it is..
Or else we need to discuss why another scientific approach, other than The Scientific Method is good enough to show that CAGW is anything more than a hypothesis.
Jim Cripwell, of course estimates have error bars. I don’t know why you expect them not to have any uncertainty. An estimate is always more like a Gaussian than a delta function. The IPCC actually uses a collection of many independent estimates by many methods, and these each have an uncertainty spread, so combining many estimates each with their own error bars leads to a consensus estimate with its error bars. Does this come as new information to you?
Jim D. you write “Jim Cripwell, of course estimates have error bars.”
I got into a handbag fight with Steven Mosher as to whether estimates are the same as measurements. They are completely different. Once bit, twice shy. I have absolutely no intention whatsoever getting into a handbag fight with you as to whether estimates have error bars. They do not. You can go on claiming they do until hell freezes over, but you will get no response from me.
Jim Cripwell, estimates given by bad scientists don’t have error bars. Scientists learn very early on that an estimate is no good without error bars, which is why you always see them, and part of the scientific method is to know how to calculate them. This is usually taught in high school science classes as part of your practical lessons. Examples of well known estimates are the age of the universe and its expansion rate, the speed of light, the mass of Jupiter, the distance to Betelgeuse. Usually initial estimates have wide error bars, and later ones refine them, and the only way you know that is by the changing size of the error bars. You also know that two estimates are inconsistent if their error bars don’t overlap. Error bars are a very valuable part of the information. Estimates are usually indirect, while measurements are direct. E.g. you can estimate the height of a building with trigonometry, or measure it with a tape. Sensitivity is therefore an estimate.
Oh my. Andy Revkin is excited about Showtime’s new series on Global warming. The series features famous actors pretending to be journalists and its chief “science adviser” is professional left-wing political activist Joe Romm. The pretend journalists is an ok experiment, Andy assures us, because it’s produced by “former 60 Minutes producers.” It’s not clear if these are the ones who faked the Bush National Guard documents.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/
If you’re unclear why this is sad, try looking at the description with a few revisions: “The new series brought on Marc Morano as science adviser and features celebrities such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck interviewing nuclear power plant operators. The use of celebrities as journalists is tempered by the fact that all sorts of former Fox News producers are actually putting the segments together, according to execute producer Anthony Watts, interviewed at the show’s premier hosted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.”
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Like_a_giant_elevator_to_the_stratosphere_999.html
So.. nutty fringe tale of no real import, or serious science?
What’s your skeptical appraisal?
Kevin Trenberth
Wm Gray
(See, 2009 debate)
Seems to me that the whole ipcc process should be conducted online, with all material available on the web to all at every step of the process. This has been done for the open source software movement very successfully for decades. Faster and more efficient debate, resolution of conflicting views and it would ensure that everyone knows what is going on at all stages of the process. Would make it easier for new ideas and draft documents to be peer reviewed as well. Open to the public as well, as there should be no need at all for secrecy.
Complete transparency, openness and an end to ego trip, jealousy and secrecy are the only way to make it work long term…
How about move the UN from NY to Africa where the UN-IPCC can lead by example with a low-carbon footprint?
The Dutch government wrote in its recommendations to IPCC
I have also written similar thoughts as have also others. The present system does not work nearly optimally. It’s, however, not easy to create a well working system online. Openness alone does not solve the problems, but some well thought of ideas are certainly needed to create something that’s not just a random collection of material of highly variable quality.
Wag,
That is brilliant. Move the UN to Africa. They need support of a rich organization and can use the publication notoriaty.
Scott
Reality 101: Implementation of the proposed international treaties restricting future greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 20 to 80 percent of current emissions would lead to a large slowdown in the world’s economic development and, at the same time, have no significant impact on the globe’s future temperature. ~Wm Gray (2009)
And it can’t and will not be done.
Economies can be hindered- just look a Cuba. No reason for that region of land called Cuba to be so hopeless backward- but government oppression
has turned the place into prison, but Cuba is not doing anything to lower CO2 emission and is destroying the natural environment.
Nor do we need to look to Cuba, the US economy is being damaged by government policy, you could count reduction in CO2 emission by few percent points, but you are not going to get reduction by 20 to 80%. And it seems certain amount of “blame” for high CO2 emissions of China can be assigned to such US government policy. So China emits twice as much CO2 as US, it seems more than than a few percent of it could be caused by US government policy. So “globally” one is not reducing you are shifting emission and increasing global emission. You causing causing a more CO2 efficient production to replaced by something that spews far more CO2 to make same amount of product.
And you got a country like Germany which has spent [in various ways] more than trillion dollars in name of reducing CO2 over decades of time and the result is not reduction in CO2. What actually is produced in vast amounts of government corruption, that than CO2 reduction. Government corruption is not important in terms CO2 emission- but rather than reduce it, it does generally involve increases CO2. And people going to climate conference creating more CO2 emission, than people who not going to climate conferences. And AL Gore manages to create more CO2 emission than other people who attempted to be a US president. The millionaires of Congress are probably creating more CO2 than similar millionaires not in Congress. The traffic jams the politicians have not prevented, are causing more CO2, than if politicans had actually bothered to govern. And Detroit city is not reducing CO2 emission, by making people flee the city.
Positive externalities exist, and are probably more common than negative externalities. But human nature leaves positive externalities almost entirely unobserved, and people who benefit could never conceivably be expected to compensate those who suffer from negative externalities.
This is the core of CAGW policy. What policy wonks also ignore is that a global average temperature sensitivity to CO2 equivalent doubling more than 3C isn’t likely more than 0C.
A little o/t: Breaking news: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378014000405
There are two versions, the one above (paywalled) and the discussion paper (open): http://grammatikhilfe.com/GranthamInstitute/publications/WorkingPapers/Papers/120-29/Mapping-the-climate-sceptical-blogosphere.pdf with different abstracts. Climate ect.: “‘In the case of main stream climate science, the
physical mechanism for climate change is clearly
posited as arising from external forcing: solar,
volcanoes, anthropogenic greenhouse gases and
aerosols. However, climate scientists have not racked
their brains anywhere near hard enough to come up
with other causal explanations. The main outstanding
causal explanation that has been neglected is internal
natural variability of the coupled ocean/atmosphere
system.’
(Pseudoscience?, 20 March 2012)”
“climate scientists have not racked
their brains anywhere near hard enough to come up
with other causal explanations”
True, <bFrank but that doesn’t mean that physicists haven’t come up with something else, as you could read here later this month.
Not sure where he’s getting the strength of it.
From the article:
El Nino Has Arrived
Apr. 8, 2014 11:01 PM ET | 10 comments | Includes: CORN, CPN, FDP, JO, NIB, SOYB, WEAT
Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. (More…)
Summary
El Nino will emerge around April 30.
It is expected to be the third strongest since 1950.
Commodities will be the first to feel its impact.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2132143-el-nino-has-arrived
This week, it seems, the bells are starting to Tol,
Lewindowski, the gift that keeps on giving, keeps on giving, apparently he has destroyed communications with ” frontiers” at the request of frontiers.
Why should he have acceded to their request, if made.
In such an important matter of potential retraction of an article.
Would not one keep all documentation .
It is all so Inspector Gadget that I am crying with laughter.
BTW in Vietnam, local papers blaming all natural weather changes on climate change.
I am not sure that L destroying emails Frontiers gave him is a problem or an issue in this matter.
I believe all the complaints were sent to Frontiers.
As part of the retraction process they sent the complaints to L.
But since they were documents sent to Frontiers they didn’t want L to keep a copy.
So they asked him to destroy them after reviewing them.
Neither party was under an FOI or any type of litigation discovery related to the documents.
So I really don’t see this as an issue.
The issue is L’s paper violated ethics, created legal issues and is really really bad academically.
Lew destroyed complaints against him??
He says he did but why would he.
Normal human reaction to worry about complaints and try to rectify therm if a genuine concern.lew response would be to keep them to put them in a new paper.
Who can feel at home on the range today? Remember to always smile.
” Lueders said. “We will euthanize an animal during the impoundment if they exhibit dangerous characteristics, threaten the health and safety of the employees, display a hopeless prognosis for life.”
“So, we do have a protocol in terms of when we would euthanize animals,” she said. “But we don’t have any answers at this time in terms of the numbers.”
Apparently from WG III:
“Experts estimate that by 2030, global gross domestic product (GDP) could be as much as 4 per cent lower through measures to combat global warming. By 2100, global GDP could be down by as much as 12 per cent; ”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10763080/UN-green-police-say-ditch-oil-and-change-your-diet.html
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