by Judith Curry
It’s your turn to introduce topics for discussion.
-
Search
Denizens
Recent comments
- Wie die Klimajournalisten zu Aktivisten wurden – KlimaNachrichten on NETZERO is impeding progress on UN Sustainable Development Goals
- jim2 on NETZERO is impeding progress on UN Sustainable Development Goals
- ganon1950 on NETZERO is impeding progress on UN Sustainable Development Goals
- jim2 on A bad recipe for science
- sherro01 on NETZERO is impeding progress on UN Sustainable Development Goals
- jungletrunks on A bad recipe for science
- ganon1950 on A bad recipe for science
- jungletrunks on A bad recipe for science
- ganon1950 on A bad recipe for science
- ganon1950 on A bad recipe for science
-
Recent Posts
- NETZERO is impeding progress on UN Sustainable Development Goals
- A bad recipe for science
- Net-Zero Targets: Sustainable Future or CO2 Obsession Driven Dead-end?
- Hansen’s latest overheated global warming claims are based on poor science
- Solving the Climate Puzzle: The Sun’s Surprising Role
- Climate Change: A Curious Crisis
- State of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the NE U.S.
- Arctic sea ice: the canary in the coal mine
- The ‘Holy Grail’ of social predictors of public attitudes toward climate change
- New Zealand grid
- Causality and climate
- Comment and Reply to GRL on evaluation of CMIP6 simulations
- Australian Electricity Generation – 2023 Update
- Controversy surrounding the Sun’s role in climate change
- Do CMIP5 models skillfully match actual warming?
Categories
Blogroll
- A chemist in Langley
- AndThenTheresPhysics
- Bill Hooke
- Cliff Mass
- Climate Audit
- Clive Best
- Ed Hawkins
- HeterodoxAcademy
- Kahn: Environmental & Urban Economics
- Paul Homewood
- Pragmatic Environmentalist
- Saravanan: MetaModel
- Science of Doom
- The Ethical Skeptic
- Watts Up With That?
- WoodForTrees
- Wx & Climate @ Reading
Archives
Email Subscription
Join 5,148 other subscribersMeta
Who cares about climate change consensus? The Guardian got it all wrong. The climate community destroyed its credibility. No one believes.
“Who cares about climate change consensus? The Guardian got it all wrong. The climate community destroyed its credibility. No one believes.”
Yes, the climate community has soiled its creditibility with those who study the science carefully. But what of the policy makers? With some exceptions, the consensus community and the environmental activists have the ear of public officials and US Federal Agencies who make policy and manage the budgets and grant making system. Mitigation is heavily favored over adaption by those in power. A fools errand in my opinion. Until the average citizen feels the pain from this misguided direction, the Federal Agencies will sail the ship toward consensus thinking. The money keeps flowing.
Adam Corner of the Guardian is fundamentally dishonest.
Actually the US House is on the skeptical side, so there is a big fight going on. There is even some hope that the Republicans will take the Senate in November over this issue. How it plays out remains too be seen of course.
At $75,000 per American family, the costs of the disastrous, oil-driven, Iraq and Afghanistan wars *ALREADY* are enormously greater than any and all conceivable costs of a carbon-neutral energy economy.
Conclusion The grotesque incapacity of denialists to grasp the carbon-energy origins of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars is a symptom of denialism’s moral and economic bankruptcy.
Nowadays these realities are ever-more-obvious to *EVERYONE* … scientist and voter alike, eh Climate Etc readers?
That report was painfully stupid. They should’ve run it past an accounting student. If the study is correct, every single soldier wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan, however slightly, will be provided with a lifetime staff of ten live-in nurses and two jet helicopters. In reality, they have to wait six months for an X-ray.
Just say “No to Keystone XL” and Canadians will ship all that filthy oil sands crude to China India Korea and Bangladesh where they cannot afford the high priced stuff
As far as I know the USA went into Afghanistan to get Osama. Osama claimed he was the USA enemy because the USA was helping Israel, attacking Iraq, and backing Arab dictators. Osama never mentioned oil. Oil is used as a cover excuse with the USA public because the idea that USA soldiers are fighting wars defending Israeli interests isn’t acceptable to the powers that be.
“At $75,000 per American family, the costs of the disastrous, oil-driven, Iraq and Afghanistan wars *ALREADY* are enormously greater than any and all conceivable costs of a carbon-neutral energy economy.”
So much ignorance in a single paragraph. The entire post WW2 hegemony is based on free global trade regardless of the financial abuses of fiat currency and the cheating associated to it. If 30%-40% (The end of the SA) of the worlds oil reserves fall to terrorist (anti-West) interests your delusions would be clearly exposed.
“Renewables” have lost market share to carbon in the past 20 years. The Neo-Isolationist solution in a global system is impossible largely due to the massive imbalances that have supported your existence Fanboy. Factor out $300 a barrel in your inane theory and what that would mean to the worlds poor in particular or imagine the results of greater Asian powers filling the void of the failed Obama foreign policy.
You really have little idea of how the worlds works. You l might try this as a start;
http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Works-Gateway-Contemporary/dp/0895263440/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1403449432&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Way+the+World+Works%2C+Wanniski
Neoconservative bafflegab by cwon14, voices of reason by FOMD!
Ronald Reagan’s REAL Enduring Legacies The Reagan-Gorbachev START Accords restricting thermonuclear armament and the Montreal Protocol on Ozone-Depleting Substances.
Good on `yah, Ronald Reagan! Yah did good … except economically that is. And oh yeah, the US Marine have not forgotten nor forgiven the Reagan cut-and-run after the Beirut Barracks Bombing, either. Yeah, terrorists won *THAT* one.
Conclusion History shows voters that that achieve balanced-budget governance and rising middle-class prosperity, what America needs is another Clinton Era. And when it comes to successfully bringing justice to terrorists, what America needs is another Obama Era
FOMD’s Four Simple Lessons of History
• To successfully achieve balanced-budget governance and rising middle-class prosperity, what America needs is another Clinton Era;
• To effectively bring justice to terrorists, what America needs is a continued Obama Era;
• To foresightedly avert Tragedies of the Global Commons, what America needs is a return to the Reagan Era;
• To foolishly rush toward disaster, the *LAST* thing that America needs is yet another stupidly Neoconservative Era.
These historical truths are incredibly obvious, eh Climate Etc readers?
Dr. Bouldin has some concerns on how forest fires in CA are covered in the guardian post-
http://ecologicallyoriented.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/yeah-who-cares-about-climate-change-consensus-anyway/
The first thing you read is a caption which as you say is dishonest. And, it doesn’t get better from there: just the reverse. The premise of the article is as dated a pack of lies as was first delivered by the lifetime, hypocrite and Leftist politician Al Gore. There is not a single actual fact in the entire article. It’s nothing but barefaced propaganda. That’s the reason the public doesn’t care. That’s what the Guardian does not get and they look like fools with a printing press.
Given the recent interest in financial correlations with the economy and inspired by a link Don M posted on the financial thread, here are some interesting links. Essentially both show a rather robust negative correlation between world economies and their average temperature. Why is that? These offer some clues, and also what climate change may mean.
http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/and_the_poor_get_poorer/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106697286
Another example of the disconnect between science and how it is portrayed in the media.
The lede in the media report:
“The concept of free will could be little more than the result of background noise in the brain, according to a recent study.”
What the researcher said:
“[Though] purposeful intentions, desires and goals drive our decisions in a linear cause-and-effect kind of way, our finding shows that our decisions are also influenced by neural noise within any given moment.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/free-will-could-be-the-result-of-background-noise-in-the-brain-study-suggests-9553678.html
No discussion, as usual, of the assumptions that went into the study either.
Ever notice how some scientists use made up words and phrases to imply they know what is unknown? The terms “back ground noise” as related to brain activity, and “syndrome” when related to medical conditions are two examples.
Check out this article in the Washington Post on the pause:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/06/20/global-warming-of-the-earths-surface-has-decelerated-viewpoint/
good article, interesting to see it in the WaPo
HELP THE STUDENTS
A young climate-science student comes to you and asks:
Oddly enough, when FOMD raises these (entirely reasonable) questions, Climate Etc’s skeptics *NEVER* answer:
Another Reasonable Question Why is Climate Etc’s skeptical cohort (including Judith Curry herself) proving to be utterly incapable of generating probabilistic Fermi Estimates? Instead, skeptics post feeble excuses and vague ideological bafflegab. Do skeptics suffer from some obstruction to quantitative cognition, or what?
Yet Another Question Are students (and young voters) correct in regarding innumerate skepticism as irrational skepticism? Are young researchers (in particular) wise to adamantly reject innumerate climate-change skepticism?
One Final Question Supposing that the troposphere ‘pause’ ends in 2014 or 2015, how should the odds that ‘the energy-balance worldview is right’ be adjusted?
The world wonders. And of course, students need answers *NOW*!
Skeptics be brave and answer What are the odds?
Do you want to be a part of the climate change ‘consensus,’ which was never more than a made-up idea to make government experts look impressive? Who could disagree? No one disagrees who wishes to align themselves with crooked marketers and Leftist politicians. All scientists rightly ought to be more skeptical than credulous by now.
a fan of *MORE* discourse: ‘Hansen’s climate-change worldview is correct’?
He has seriously underestimated the natural variation in the climate; he has overpredicted the warming rate; he has ignored the effect of changing temp and changing CO2 on the hydrologic cycle; he has ignored the evidence that rainfall increased in the US; he has ignored the evidence that increase CO2 will enhance plant growth; he has cited claims of heat-induced disasters that have no evidence.
The probability that “Hansen’s climate change world view” is “correct” is 0. I have quoted from Hansen’s writings and speeches in links you have supplied before, and have referred directly and indirectly to his works that you have not cited.
Another Reasonable Question Why is Climate Etc’s skeptical cohort (including Judith Curry herself) proving to be utterly incapable of generating probabilistic Fermi Estimates? Instead, skeptics post feeble excuses and vague ideological bafflegab.
Still no quotes of “bafflegab” or evidence that the unquoted “bafflegab” is “ideological”. N.B. Your bafflement is not the deciding criterion for “bafflegab”.
Why is it “feeble” to suggest that there is no reliable information for developing a prior probabilities, or to direct attention to scholarly books such as Samaniego’s “A Comparison of Frequentist and Bayesian Methods of Estimation” where it is explained that “accurate” priors are necessary for Bayesian inference to be superior to “fiducial” inference?
Fan
You cite the hottest ever year averaged land and ocean temperature record but link to a surface temperature only. Can you link to the actual chart that represents the citation you have made?
Has China now come up with their May figures as the data was only provisional until that came in?
tonyb
Matthew R Marler, you are the first-and-only Climate Etc skeptic to post any odds at all. Congratulations!
Question It it *REALLY* good advice, to say to a young climate-scientist (what amounts to) “The odds are 9-in-10 that energy-balance climate-science is wrong”?
Your reasons don’t seem all *THAT* strong, Matthew R Marler.
Especially given the evidence that ‘the pause’ is ending and warming is accelerating!
a fan of *MORE* discourse: Young students (like me) have to make career choices *NOW* (not later) … and so we asking for advice.
Q1 What should we set for the odds that in the short term (as soon as 2014 or 2015) ‘the pause’ will end?
Q1 What should we set of the odds that in the long term, the energy-balance climate-change worldview is fundamentally correct?”
My answer 1: your career choice should not depend on anyone’s opinion on whether the pause will end, or any other short-term climate prediction. Meanwhile, no summary of all evidence supports the IPCC AR4 published warning that the mean Earth temp will increase at a rate of 0.2C per decade. For your career be alert to this: if the solar output declines in the next decade while the CO2 continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, in 10 – 20 years time there will be much better assessments of the inaccuracies of the extant models.
My answer 2 (sic): in the long term, energy inflow and outflow will be closely matched. It can not now be known how much the CO2 will increase mean temp, or how much the natural fluctuations in small mismatches will increase or decrease Earth mean temp. For your career, do not bet that the laws of thermodynamics are wrong. For your career, do not bet that the equilbrium-based calculations are complete and accurate.
For your career, I’d recommend that you study 6 semesters of statistics, beginning with a calculus-based course, and including multivariate statistics and multivariate non-linear non-stationary time series with nonlinear estimation of high-dimensional non-linear models.
a fan of *MORE* discourse: “The odds are 9-in-10 that energy-balance climate-science is wrong”?
No wonder you are baffled: I wrote that Hansen’s view of world climate change is wrong. Of course when all of the energy flows are accurately tallied they will “balance”.
You probably have not lived through enough inaccurate and dire scientific predictions; the scares of overpopulation, widespread famine, and global cooling come to mind. More recently, as one example, please explain the hysteria over the polar bear.
Fermi Estimates.
Dont talk to guys here about that.
I remember a little exercise i used to make my engineers do.
I made them do fermi estimates. drove them crazy.
The rapid response of temperature to day and night, to cloudy and sunny and to summer and winter, proves that temperature is always very near to in balance and there is no heat hiding anywhere.
moshe says ‘Estimate fer me’, Cripwell pleads ‘Measure, please’.
========================
Mosher: Another great point.
Those of us who went to public school called Fermi Estimates “Back of the Envelope Calculations” . It’s what you do after the conceptual model and prior to constructing a numerical model. It is also loosely known as a mathematical model. The purpose of which is to provide boundaries which define the “straight-face test”.
Take ECR for example. The temperature goes hyperbolic as the feedback factor approaches unity. Since we know that the climate never cascades into the blackhole of positive feedbacks, it is reasonable to assume that the ECR feedback factor does not exceed 0.5, which gives a maximum ECR of about 2.5K. The negative feedback is an asymptote from 1K to 0K, so it is reasonable to assume that the minimum ECR is about 0.5K.
Therefore the expected ECR is 0.5K to 2.5K. Also, based on the way the earth behaves in a quasi-chaotic seeking dynamic equilibrium, the TCR is likely to be 0.0K to 5.0K.
The question then becomes, what sort of weather impacts will transient temperature spikes have on human health, the environment and economic well being?
Note: Transient, based on a fubar swag means less than 100-years
Yes Kim. Making people do Fermi estimates is a fun
Exercise. Read the page. Do a few.
Then I will tell you how I used that approach to
Predict early market size for new technology.
The problem is people have an overly narrow
Conception of knowledge justification and rational belief
A fan of *MORE* discourse Especially given the evidence that ‘the pause’ is ending and warming is accelerating!
No it isn’t.
Stop making stuff up.
Steven Mosher I remember a little exercise i used to make my engineers do.
I made them do fermi estimates. drove them crazy.
AKA “back-of-an-envelope” calculations, AKA “calculated guesstimates”.
When I was a young engineer, all our calculations were done on slide rules (I still have a number, and occasionally use them too), so it was necessary to know at least the order of magnitude of the result before you even started the calculation.
The habit has stayed with me ever since, and very useful it is too.
How times change…
I think it indicative of something that “your” engineers had lost that capability, it may explain a good deal.
If you are a programmer faced with modifying legacy code written by others, you know what a Fermi estimate is already. Sometimes it’s close, sometimes not – depends somewhat on how many hours you burn on the estimate.
IF I was a student and was wondering about the origins of any kind of “pause”, I would immediately think about what kind of oscillating natural variations would contribute to such a “pause”. Then I would come up with some multivariate model which could figure out the weighting of these factors to create such a “pause”. Then I would name it the CSALT model.
What I would learn from the CSALT model is that these oscillating factors have a zero-sum-effect on the overall trend, as whatever decreases on one side to compensate for a trend increase (and thus contribute to a “pause”), will eventually increase on the other side to completely wipe away that pause.
At that point I will wonder why skeptics can’t figure this out, until I realize that they are allergic to pencils, or don’t have the stamina to do anything but dream up bizarre theories so that they can continue to play their little rhetorical on-line games.
There is a 6.5% decrease in global irradiance between the annual perihelion and aphelion; therefore the idea of analysis based on planetary ‘Energy-Balance’ is he production of a diseased mind unhampered by any relevant knowledge of the fields of Thermodynamics and Kinetics.
WebHubTelescope: What I would learn from the CSALT model is that these oscillating factors have a zero-sum-effect on the overall trend, as whatever decreases on one side to compensate for a trend increase (and thus contribute to a “pause”), will eventually increase on the other side to completely wipe away that pause.
Personally I like your csalt model, as I like Vaughan Pratt’s model, the Tsonis et al model, and a bunch of others that I call “live”. I shall be interested to see how well in does in the upcoming 20 years. It’s a shame you won’t publish it and your enso model, where more graduate students might be encouraged to read them and critique them.
Your csalt model is one of the reasons that I bet on a less than +0.05C/decade change in the mean global T from Jan 2014 through Dec 2023.
Mine was ivory and bamboo. I hadda follow along in order to keep track of the decimal point. I needed the accurate rapidity and the three digit precision. I always beat the ones with the calculators(GCMs), because they had a much poorer idea of when their fingers slipped than did I.
==================
moshe, that wuz enuff fer me.
=================
jim2.
ya. that’s the context in which it would come up.
COCOMO type contexts.
the other context was in market demand forecasts for products
that are novel.
Marler said:
What the heck does “live” mean ??? Is that the opposite of “dead”??
Maybe you ought to publish what you mean by that.
har har … it would help in trying to figure out what you are always passive-aggressively belly-aching about.
WebHubTelescope: What the heck does “live” mean ??? Is that the opposite of “dead”??
Maybe you ought to publish what you mean by that.
I am always happy to post again what I have posted before, especially when asked. “Live” means (and this is only my current judgment) not yet strongly disconfirmed by evidence. “Dead”, applied for example to Hansen’s 1988 alarmist warnings, means strongly disconfirmed by evidence. I believe that I first applied the appellation “live” to the csalt model. Think of it as “faint praise.”
Web, one is safe to touch,
the other not so much.
==============
Isn’t it neat how dead-on Hansen was in his predictions? He was able to predict the OHC heat sink which would compensate the overall temperature increase. His predictions of 3C for ECS and 2C for TCR are still right on the money — dead-on.
fomd, You are wrong. In “On the AR4′s projected 0.2C/decade temperature increase” Judith and I give a Fermi estimate of about 0.1C/decade.
The problem I see here fomd, is that you ask questions but do not follow or remember what others answered. Then you start repeating yourself.
The answer is that the student needs to recognize that with physics as it is, and the Fermi estimate, it is likely that the product has been oversold. However, given the timeline necessary to complete the curriculum and establish oneself professionally, the student will likely be entering their professional best at the time when the interest will be growing again. Remind the student that humans compete at spitballs, so be prepared to compete.
as any fule kno Fermi estimates are only as good as the initial guesses that went into them. Kinda like GCMs. No substitute for actual knowledge.
My advice to your young student friend would be to study something else. The best option, if he or she can manage it, is to study electrical engineering and specialize in robotics.
The odds that earth’s energy gain in 2014 will be less than the equivalent of 0.5 watts per square meter are 3 to 1. Do you bet in British pounds or euros?
a fan of *MORE* discourse: Another Reasonable Question Why is Climate Etc’s skeptical cohort (including Judith Curry herself) proving to be utterly incapable of generating probabilistic Fermi Estimates? Instead, skeptics post feeble excuses and vague ideological bafflegab. Do skeptics suffer from some obstruction to quantitative cognition, or what?
According to WebHubTelescope, Hansen predicted that the TCS to a doubling of CO2 is 2C and the ECS is 3C. Do you agree that Hansen made that prediction? A citation would be useful. How long (you can try a Fermi estimate or other estimation procedure) will it take for the increase in CO2 to produce the 2C increase, starting now? After the 2C increase represented by the TCS, how much longer will it take for the Earth mean temperature to increase 0.95C?
My view is that no one is responsible for answering other people’s questions, but if the questions are of general interest and the theory or theorists can’t answer them based on solid science, then the theorists lose some credibility. I gather you agree, since you mock people who are unwilling to answer your questions.
Which brings me back to another I have asked a few times: What are some examples (direct quotes only) of “bafflegab”? And the related question: How is it feeble to point out when information necessary for an improved estimate (e.g. a Bayesian improvement on a fiducial inference) is unavailable? Surely, at least one aspect of wisdom is to recognize what new evidence is needed in order to support some plan to achieve a describable goal.
Back to Hansen, when has one of his predictions regarding the rate of mean temperature increase been accurate?
WebHubTelescope: Isn’t it neat how dead-on Hansen was in his predictions? He was able to predict the OHC heat sink which would compensate the overall temperature increase. His predictions of 3C for ECS and 2C for TCR are still right on the money — dead-on.
A citation of Hansen would be useful here.
If the time to double the CO2 concentration is 140 years (you may supply your own estimate, that one was provided by a reader of ClimateEtc a while ago, and it’s in a range that I estimated from some published graphs and posted here), what is the urgency to reduce CO2? After a 2C increase caused by the doubling, how much longer will the public have to wait for an additional 0.95C? The rates matter. With continuous technological investment and continuous agricultural development, that such changes should on the whole do more damage than has been experienced over the last 140+ years.
And of course Marler changes the argument from science to policy as soon as his back is against the wall. Typical denier approach — marginalize / rationalize / minimize — see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial
Good point. This strong annual signal can constructively interfere with the lunar tidal phase to generate periodic forcing at a period of approximately 2.7 years — also known as the “once in a blue moon” period. This is what can drive ENSO to produce its erratic oscillations.
Thanks for the own goal Doc!
WebHubTelescope: And of course Marler changes the argument from science to policy as soon as his back is against the wall.
In what way is my back against the wall?
Who changed the argument from science to policy in the first place? I merely remind every one that the policy debate is there even when we write about science. You can always remind everyone of how the science supports the policy, when you think it does.
WebHubTelescope: Isn’t it neat how dead-on Hansen was in his predictions? He was able to predict the OHC heat sink which would compensate the overall temperature increase. His predictions of 3C for ECS and 2C for TCR are still right on the money — dead-on.
When exactly did Hansen first write or testify in public that the surface warming of the late 70s to late 90s would be replaced by a nearly flat surface temperature profile as the deep oceans began to warm up instead? Two “dead on”s in one paragraph without a citation for either.
Hansen’s classic papers from the 1980’s were dead-on.
How do you like them apples?
Wally Broecker was well ahead of the game in 1975 and still.
http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/files/2009/10/broeckerglobalwarming75.pdf
Shall we call it a Camp Century Cycle?
‘Camp Century
Three cores were attempted at Camp Century in 1961, 1962, and again in 1963. The third hole was started in 1963 and reached 264 m. The 1963 hole was re-entered using the thermal drill (US) in 1964 and extended to 535 m. In mid-1965 the thermal drill was replaced with an electro-mechanical drill, 9.1 cm diameter, that reached the base of the ice sheet in July 1966 at 1387 m. The Camp Century, Greenland, (77°10’N 61°08’W, 1885 masl) ice core (cored from 1963–1966) is 1390 m deep and contains climatic oscillations with periods of 120, 940, and 13,000 years.[3]
Another core in 1977 was drilled at Camp Century using a Shallow (Dane) drill type, 7.6 cm diameter, to 100 m.’ Wikepedia
WebHubTelescope: Hansen’s classic papers from the 1980′s were dead-on.
How do you like them apples?
I have quoted from them from time to time in response to FOMD. Hansen’s predictions were big misses. No place did he predict that the surface warming of the late 70s to late 90s would be followed by a period of no surface warming as the accumulating energy imbalance was redirected mostly to the deep ocean. If he did and I missed it, please provide an exact reference. Had he done so, Trenberth would never have written his “travesty” and “missing heat” comments; or if he had, he’d have been immediately answered by references to the extant predictions.
‘I was in a hurry and had in my hand an object that I sat
on the counter while I signed things.’ ..
‘The clerk asked me, ‘What is that?’
Then I explained …that it was an antique computing device
called a slide rule and that in ancient times, like when I was
in high school, all Engineers, Chemists and Physicists, in fact
everyone in Science learned to use them.’
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/concise-fun/
Hansen was dead-on.
What don’t you understand about ECS=3C ?
WebHubTelescope: Hansen was dead-on.
What don’t you understand about ECS=3C ?
Had Hansen stuck with ECS = 3C at least he would not have been so clearly wrong. Instead he made a number of predictions for the next decades, and those have all been wrong. Like everyone one else in the alarmist camp, he did not predict that the rise in the surface temp from the late 70s to the late 90s would be followed by a 15 year or longer period of little surface temp change while the deep ocean warming continued. Put differently, he did not predict the “travesty” of the “missing heat” that Trenberth wrote of (“travesty” was used by Trenberth in private; “missing heat” was used in a peer-reviewed publication.)
If Hansen was “dead-on”, that implies that Trenberth has been in error, along with other writers on the “pause” in the surface heat warming.
Hansen was dead-on with his predictions. If the curve was steeper than it is now, the ECS would be higher than 3C. As it is, the value is 3C, which is dead-on with Hansen’s predictions.
WebHubTelescope: Hansen was dead-on with his predictions. If the curve was steeper than it is now, the ECS would be higher than 3C. As it is, the value is 3C, which is dead-on with Hansen’s predictions.
I’d tell them to be skeptical, as a good scientists should always be; that there is something seriously wrong with the models; that the idea we could solve the climate by throwing a supercomputer at it was doomed from the start; that actually the true energy balance is unknown and is effected by many things other than CO2; that the sun is doing very interesting things right now and to watch that space carefully; that much of the data in the area is unfortunately fudged and very unreliable and to be extremely careful in using other people’s data; that some skeptics are worth listening to; that many mainstream figures are not; that people like Mann are toxic and should be avoided; that if the current models continue to fail the outlook for funding for the field as a whole looks poor and jobs might be scarce in future; that the reputation of climate science as a profession is very uncertain; that all the interesting unsolved questions tend to be on the skeptic side of the fence; that the current paradigm is dying and as a young scientists the opportunities lie in building the next paradigm and not defending the failed one; and so on.
Good enough for you?
Consensus Climate Theory and Models show a decreasing Albedo as Ice continues to recede.
Earthshine data shows Albedo has been mostly flat since during the pause. The Pause occurred because Ice stopped retreating. That is because now that the Arctic Opens more, it snows more. This will continue as long as the oceans are warm and they do not cool quickly.
http://www.bbso.njit.edu/
Under Projects, click on Earthshine
The new report is due to come out. Watch for it.
Heh, a Nittany not lyin’.
===========
The trend since 1980 has been lessening, but that is slowing. What is the definition of the end of the pause?
The named (“diseased”?) originators of energy-balance climate-science are extracted from James Hansen’s (free-as-in-freedom) survey article “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications” (arXiv:1105.1140, 2011), which references (among many articles) Knutti’s “Why are climate models reproducing the observed global surface warming so well?” (2008) and Lohman et al’s “Different Approaches for Constraining Global Climate Models of the Anthropogenic Indirect Aerosol Effect”, all of which draw upon the foundational science-and-history that is surveyed Spencer Weart’s (free-as-in-freedom) “The Discovery of Global Warming – A History” (2008).
It’s good for *EVERYONE* — young researchers especially! — that all of these fundamental energy-balance analyses are available on-line.
We can all hope that DocMartyn’s “diseased mind” claims inspires Climate Etc readers to read this wonderful centuries-deep history and science, and consider for themselves the role of “diseased minds” in climate science.
All who perceive “diseased minds” as the agents of this body of history-and-science … or decline learn from it at all … are particularly invited to a close reading of .
Enjoy learning energy-balance climate-science, Climate Etc readers!
Whoops! The last line should have read
Enjoy learning energy-balance climate-science, Climate Etc readers!
Raising eyebrows in MSM newsrooms all over America. I wonder if the courage will spread.
fat chance
The trend from 2001 to just into 2012 was slightly negative. The trend from 2001 to today is positive, and the rebound was fueled most by a predominance of negative ONI numbers: 22 of 28 reporting periods were negative ONI. Those are conditions conducive to cooling; instead it warmed aggressively. We are on the verge of passing into positive ONI, and that is all it will take for 2014 to compete for hottest year in the instrument record. No El Nino is required, just warm sea surface temperatures.
JCH, how true. All one has to do is monitor the SOI. This will oscillate in to regions that are equivalently high temperature, but may not be classified as officially “El Nino” . But they are higher temperatures nonetheless so will contribute to transient global warming.
The skeptics and deniers live by hope and desperately clinging to cliched memes, instead of looking at the physics and the data.
The article appears to be seriously flawed. Funny that none of the skeptics were even remotely skeptical.
Yes, it is a lot like the typical David Rose articles so often linked here. Nothing on sea ice, or land temperatures, or sea levels, and a wrong account of how ocean heat content figures into things. Par for the course.
Actually, what i think i should start doing on the sat open thread is to post my retweets from the previous week:
Latest from Mark Steyn: http://www.steynonline.com/6430/hockey-sticks-over-hasakah
Matt Ridley: http://business.financialpost.com/2014/06/19/ipcc-climate-change-warming/
Dan Kahan on messaging the climate consensus: http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/6/17/messaging-scientific-consensus-ruminations-on-the-external-v.html
Energy related posts:
http://www.vox.com/2014/6/19/5821250/these-5-charts-show-why-the-world-is-still-failing-on-climate-change
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/peak_coal_why_the_industrys_dominance_may_soon_be_over/2777/#.U6L9tccppbE.twitter
http://www.robertstavinsblog.org/2014/06/19/what-are-the-benefits-and-costs-of-epas-proposed-co2-regulation/
Agree, it’s definitely a better idea than an open thread which tends to run in predictable ruts.
I’d like to see Climate etc greatest hits. Some of my favorites were your postings on Climategate and the little back and forth you had with Gavin Schmidt and other climate scientists when you mention their work.
Who cares about climate change consensus?
Bickering over precise figures is pointless until the climate issue resonates with the general public, not just an informed few
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/behavioural-insights/climate-change-consensus-who-cares
The author of the piece belongs to an organization “sustainable living”; and here’s me not knowing that anyone had cracked the problem of eternal life.
RE the coal article, many analysts I follow are saying the sell off of coal stocks is overdone. When it comes to freezing or watching ones economy go down the drain, riling up the serfs, coal will be burned.
Good link on energy
China will install high efficiency coal plants to reduce total costs.
I’m posting this even though I believe this guy is highly biased against nuclear energy. I suspect he is biased based on the obviously irrational comments in the second article. I also suspect he is against nuclear because it fears it will take money from wind and solar – a dubious argument because it doesn’t require that the government supply the money. In the proper regulatory environment, private industry could take on the cost. At any rate, for you reading pleasure …
From the article:
Evaluating the impact of the so-called Clean Power Plan requires a clear view of how the new rule will work. The plan centers on performance standards, which have yielded effective outcomes in other energy areas—such as appliance efficiency standards and fuel economy standards for light-duty vehicles. It sets a moderate, mid-term target for carbon reductions, but allows for flexibility because it does not dictate the use of specific technologies or products. States are allowed to design programs in response to local conditions.
The EPA plan picks a loser: coal. It does not, however, pick winners among the low-carbon options available. It does not offer much in the way of sweeteners for any specific technology. Assuming that states generally adhere to the prime directive of public utility resource acquisition—choosing the lowest-cost approach—the proposed rule will not alter the dismal prospects of nuclear power, which will therefore play no role in the reduction of carbon emissions from power plants.
EPA’s analysis of the proposed carbon pollution guidelines reflects this reality. EPA forecasts for nuclear power are flat-lined, which means that other resources—including energy efficiency, natural gas, wind, and solar—will carry the full weight of carbon reductions.
It is unlikely that the states will act irrationally enough to make the EPA analysis miss the mark by a wide margin. The marketplace and 48 of the 50 states have declined to embrace nuclear energy during the past decade, despite the incentives included in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
(end of quote)
http://thebulletin.org/epa-carbon-plan-coal-loses-nuclear-doesnt-win7253
From the article:
Cooper notes in the report:
Scaling up of SMRs would soak up financing for wind and solar power: “While each individual reactor would be smaller, the idea of creating an assembly line for SMR technology would require a massive financial commitment. If two designs and assembly lines are funded to ensure competition, by 2020 an optimistic cost scenario suggests a cost of more than $72 billion; a more realistic level would be over $90 billion. This massive commitment reinforces the traditional concern that nuclear power will crowd out the alternatives. Compared to U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates of U.S. spending on generation over the same period, these huge sums are equal to: three-quarters of the total projected investment in electricity generation; and substantially more than the total projected investment in renewables.”
Costs of SMRs will be higher than large reactors, not lower: “Even industry executives and regulators believe the SMR technology will have costs that are substantially higher than the failed ‘nuclear renaissance’ technology on a per-unit of output. The higher costs result from: lost economies of scale in containment structures, dedicated systems for control, management and emergency response, and the cost of licensing and security; operating costs between one-fifth and one-quarter higher; and decommissioning costs between two and three times as high.”
Focusing on SMRs would heighten the growing war between nuclear power and renewables: “The physical and institutional infrastructure to support an active 21st century electricity system is markedly different from and antithetical to the passive, one-way grid on which nuclear relies. In response, even though nuclear technologies have received 10 times as much subsidy on a life-cycle basis, nuclear advocates attack the much smaller and more productive subsidies received by renewables. To save nuclear power they propose to jerry-rig markets with above-market prices to increase nuclear profits and remove the regulatory institutions that have allowed alternatives to enter the electricity resource mix.”
The private marketplace is already rejecting SMRs: “Two of the leading U.S. developers have announced they are throttling back on the development of SMR technology because they cannot find customers (Westinghouse) or major investors (Babcock and Wilcox). The harsh judgment of the marketplace on SMR technology is well-founded.”
http://www.vermontlaw.edu/News_and_Events/News_Releases/Cooper_Up_to_90_Billion_Needed_to_Scale_Up_Small_Modular_Reactors_Would_Snuff_Out_Financing_for_Wind_Solar_Power.htm
Much twaddle in this article.
Twaddle: Subsidies for renewables are some 10 times more than for nuclear on a per unit of electricity supplied basis which is the appropriate basis for comparison.
The reverse is the case. The markets have been jerry rigged to favour renewables and make nuclear uneconomic.
Only nuclear power is fit for purpose, meets all the requirements for electricity supply system and can provide the energy the world will demand. Renewables cannot.
Must be joking. Energy efficiency and renewable energy cannot provide the world’s electricity as it grows throughout this century. Only nuclear can do that.
Good. And so it should. Remove the impediments for nuclear and the favouritism for renewables and we’d have cheap, reliable, secure energy for ever. Once we allow SMR’s to get going we can expect cost reductions of around 10% per doubling of capacity world-wide. In that case, nuclear could be about half the cost of coal generated electricity by around mid-century.
This is relevant.
PNAS, 2013, Expert assessments of the cost of light water small modular reactors
And where would you place all those nuclear plants? From where will you obtain materials for their construction? Professor Abbot concluded in 2011 that there simply is not sufficient materials for nuclear plants to ever supply the world’s energy.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/nuclear-power-highly-impractical-for.html
Roger Sorwell,
Sorry to hear you don’t know the answers to those questions. Some objective research would assit you. But in short, since nuclear power is the safest way to generate electricity they should be placed close to the load centres to minimise transmission distances. Citing would be done as it is done anywhere else in the world. Here’s a picture of the 8 unit Pickering power station in Toronto, Canada;s largest city: https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=pickering%20power%20station%20photos
You can see many similar pictures of nuclear power stations in and near cities, towns and villages in other countries.
[BTW, notice the Canadian’s swimming in the warm water at the cooling water outlet. No dummies those Canadians!]
Since nuclear power requires less materials than most other technologies – about 10 times less than solar and wind – per unit of electricity supplied, your question is not relevant. If there is insufficent materials for nuclear there is even less for the other technologies.
Professor Abbott doesn’t know what he is talking about. Nuclear fuels is effectively unlimited – Uranium alone is sufficent to supply 10 million people consuming at the average per capita rate of the USA for about a million years. That’s not even considering thorium or nuclear fusion.
Roger – as you yourself point out, the projection for needed power is way off. As the third world develops, their population will level off and it will be a very, very, very long time before we need 15,000 gw of electricity.
He also ignores other nuclear designs, the fact that nuclear sites are typically reused, thorium, and the general advancement of technology which far and away shoots down more doom-sayers than any other reason … yep, not buying what he’s peddling.
Here’s the EIA electricity forecast thru 2040. Not seeing your man’s electricity growth.
Evidently, we might be already dead from Climate Change.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/06/21/pbs-climatologists-predict-global-warming-will-kill-us-all-by-the-year-2000/#comments
I knew 2000 felt funny, I just didn’t say anything.
Andrew
Jon Stewart continues to have fun with Republicans on climate change.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/20/jon-stewart-republicans-climate-change_n_5514541.html
well, sure. But it is a Democratic leader who now claims that the increases in CO2 from human fossil fuel consumption are causing an increase in asthma.
Good point, MRM. I’ve never heard of ANYONE being allergic to CO2. No one.
Anyone with a CO2 allergy would never be able to breathe out.
Where do they get this nonsense from?
It is soot and smog and asthma. I think the skeptics have been taken in by their own media (again) to think it was CO2. Read what was actually said here, not what someone said he said on a blog or opinion piece.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/31/obama-climate-change-epa-power-plant-health
Jim D: It is soot and smog and asthma.
You and I know that, but do EPA and Nancy Pelosi? The new regs do not aim to reduce soot and smog, but to reduce CO2 and “global warming”. You can read Pelosi’s statement here: http://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statement-on-epa-plan-to-cut-carbon-pollution. It is possible she meant to distinguish soot from CO2 and forgot.
I think the skeptics willfully spread their own “misunderstanding” in order to mislead their more gullible members. It is a way to debase the debate into plain trash-talk which is more on their level than actually wanting to talk about smog and asthma. It is successful on one level, but makes them look like manipulators to the more savvy.
Simple solution, teach the Carbon Cycle. Heh, better learn it first, eh?
===========
Jim D, to the more savvy it may look like sceptic-bashing is about your level.
Jim D: I think the skeptics willfully spread their own “misunderstanding” in order to mislead their more gullible members. It is a way to debase the debate into plain trash-talk which is more on their level than actually wanting to talk about smog and asthma.
I gave you Nancy Pelosi’s web page and any reader can decide whether I confuse the issues or she does. It is common for CO2 alarmists to write and say “carbon” in place of “CO2”, and use other sloppy locutions. It does not “debase the debate” to point out where such sloppy language is used.
How many people are there (a Fermi estimate will do) who think, as Jim D apparently does, that the new EPA regulations are aimed at reducing soot or will reduce soot?
Surely a side effect of reducing power-plant CO2 emissions by 30% by 2030, mainly from coal, is also reducing soot. It would seem rather hard for them to maintain soot production while reducing CO2 so much. Many plants would simply be phased out in favor of cheaper energy alternatives, or replaced by cleaner new ones to meet the state-by-state goals.
Jim D:
Why has there been such a sharp increase in asthma cases in recent decades from the earlier decades when we really did have a serious soot and smog problem (at least in the UK), and cinemas etc were thick with cigarette smoke?
Lol.
wot?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/free-will-could-be-the-result-of-background-noise-in-the-brain-study-suggests-9553678.html
I see that Judy mentioned the new Matt Ridley article:
http://business.financialpost.com/2014/06/19/ipcc-climate-change-warming/
From the article:
“The IPCC commissioned four different models of what might happen to the world economy, society and technology in the 21st century and what each would mean for the climate, given a certain assumption about the atmosphere’s “sensitivity” to carbon dioxide. Three of the models show a moderate, slow and mild warming, the hottest of which leaves the planet just 2 degrees Centigrade warmer than today in 2081-2100. The coolest comes out just 0.8 degrees warmer.”
I was wondering . . . does anybody know where this comes from? I presume IPCC AR5? Chapter, verse?
Thanks!
Not in AR5 per se. There is a separate set of documents describing the four new RCP scenarios, and a bit how they relate to the old SRES. You can find them on line using Google at the IPCC website. You will also find them logically inconsistent, as Ridley did. Basically they assume CO2 rise then work backwards to justifications that are not plausible.
Business as usual falls between RCP 4.5 and RCP 6.0, closer to 4.5. One consequence is that model results using RCP6.0, and especially RCP8.5, are not only ‘worse than we thought’ but worse than any unconstrained fossil fuel reality. A not so subtle and mostly overlooked switcheroo.
an intriguing comment and link at WUWT today…. I think we must be very skeptical of any large “geo-engineering” schemes, whether they can really make enough positive difference and also of course the “law of unintended consequences” — but this seems like something that should be tested and examined more thoroughly:
Look at the ice core data; higher dust = colder world, higher dust = more bioproductivity of the oceans and more carbon mineralization = lower CO2.
This is why temperature track ice core dust levels and CO2 changes follow after 400-1000 years.
What percentage of land biota is agriculture?
This may be a more efficient use of CO2, depends on how much of the algae gets turned into fish we catch.
What do young student’s want? Here’s one answer:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380868/book-kevin-d-williamson
Ideological bafflegab replaced by real-world student concerns!
Conclusion What Terminal Lance is to the USMC … what Dilbert is to engineering … that’s what PhD Comics is to the sciences.
It is a pleasure to help enlarge your conceptions of science, rls!
A fan of *MORE* discourse: Ideological bafflegab
Still no examples, eh baffled fan?
The concerns of a nine year old student who only wants to make books more available to his friends are not real-world student concerns? How arrogant of you. When you are more mature your priorities will change, and hopefully you will no longer value a persons “conception of science”.
We are social animals, perhaps more so than rational animals. College students often find themselves socializing with like-minded students and risk becoming part of a cult. Hopefully, that will not happen to you.
LOL … the three “little free libraries” that are within walking distance of FOMD manor (and to which the FOMD household contributes) are all stocked mainly with books for *GROWNUPs* that largely espouse *CONSERVATIONIST*, *GREEN*, *SCIENTIFIC*, and *LIBERAL* themes — precisely the literary genres for which the willfully ignorant climate-change denialists who contribute to National Review have little or no sympathy … for ideology-driven anti-scientific reasons that Krugman analyzes cogently.
So thanks for the free-library recommendation, rls … for young and old alike, the free libraries do much to combat the willful ignorance of climate-change denialism!
Thanks for mentioning Krugman. You provide an opportunity to point out his contemptible disrespect for the truth. Several years he abused his position as a noted economist and wrote that Republicans were trying to rob the Social Security Fund. He knew that the Social Security Fund was a fund in name only and was impossible to rob. HE LIED! Hope you do not trust him.
From the article:
…
Major highlights of the AEO2014 Reference case include:
Growing domestic production of natural gas and crude oil continues to reshape the U.S. energy economy, with crude oil production approaching the historical high achieved in 1970 of 9.6 million barrels per day.
…
Low natural gas prices boost natural gas-intensive industries Industrial shipments grow at a 3.0% annual rate over the first 10 years of the projection and then slow to 1.6% annual growth for the rest of the projection. Bulk chemicals and metals-based durables account for much of the increased growth in industrial shipments in AEO2014.
…
With strong growth in domestic crude oil and natural gas production, U.S. use of imported fuels falls sharply In the AEO2014 Reference case, U.S. domestic energy production increases from 79.1 quadrillion Btu in 2012 to 102.1 quadrillion Btu in 2040, and net use of imported energy sources, which was 30% in 2005, falls from 16% of total consumption in 2012 to
4% in 2040. In the AEO2013 Reference case, domestic energy production reached a total of 98.5 quadrillion Btu, and energy imports is projected to decline as a percentage of consumption to 9% in 2040.
…
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/er/pdf/0383er%282014%29.pdf
The US is undergoing a revival in direct reduction iron/steel plants, natural gas powered.
http://www.voestalpine.com/group/en/press/press-releases/2014-04-23-voestalpine-invests-more-than-a-half-billion-euros-in-a-direct-reduction-plant-in-the-us.html
That’s great news! I remember when US industry was locating to the Middle East to be near raw materials and energy.
Heh, someone on another blog remarked on the Three Hundred sent to meet the Persians.
==========
Note at the Bish’s what a retiring Nato top drawer knob has to say about the Roosians and fracking propaganda.
=========
I posted somewhere around here the Rooskie’s EU propaganda sua-vea.
I haven’t seen any comments here on Gavin Schmidt replacing James Hansen. How Gavin got an award for communication, I’ll never understand. He walked off the set instead of debating with Roy Spencer on John Stossel’s show. On the Intellegenge Squared debate he got the audience booing him at 1:09:45:
http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/559-global-warming-is-not-a-crisis
Gavin does well when he is singing to the choir. That is why he got the communication award. It says right on the little plaque:
In Honor of Gavin Schmidt, For Singing to the Choir. Amen!
Gavin is a great communicator in certain venues.
also walking off the set communicated EXACTLY what he wanted to communicate:
note, it communicated one thing to you, and another thing to scientists.
very concise communication: two different messages from the same physical act.
I think what he communicated to Stossel was kind of funny.
=============
Self deprecating humor was the fashion at the time, but it was poorly executed. Not everyone can do it well, and doing it poorly is not good communication.
‘Ultimately, XPRIZE’s Peter Diamandis believes that we will see a rise in “megaprizes,” totaling $100 million or even $1 billion in the years to come.’
http://www.uschamberfoundation.org/library/2014/02/power-prizes-incentivizing-radical-innovation-0
That’s enough to buy off 10,000 to 100,000 immigrants, at that price though why would you ever want to leave? Today, radical intervention has it’s price.
I am sure this means something to naq. I am however completely at a loss.
That is one way to put it.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/abbott-offers-asylum-seekers-10k-to-go-home-20140620-3ajr6.html
Refugees seems less than relevant to technological innovation.
History has proved you are not alone in your view.
You might like this, Judy:
http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2014/06/06/precognition-of-ep-96-oppenheimers-rhetoric/
willard: What do you recommend for a first reading on the philosophy of science?
http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/W.-V.-Quine-J.-S.-Ullian-The-Web-of-Belief.pdf
http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/Intuitions_F09/Readings/Quine_Ullian.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/The-Web-Belief-W-Quine/dp/0075536099
+1000
Anaxagoras, or one them other brother Anaxas.
================
That is a fine question rls!
For starters, it’s tough to beat the wonderful non-technical clarity of a three-course Ed Wilson syllabus:
• First Reading Ed Wilson’s scientific autobiography Naturalist plainly tells how and why scientists do science.
• Second Reading Ed Wilson’s history-of-science survey Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge plainly shows the products of science. Winner of the Heartland Prize for Fiction!
• Third Reading Ed Wilson’s often-hilarious fictional work Anthill: A Novel plainly shows the future of science in ordinary life. Winner of the Heartland Prize for Fiction!
These works will prepare folks to read with appreciation Jonathan Israels multi-volume history of the Enlightenment, of which a summary is presented in Israel’s A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy
In general, Wilson-for-science and Israel-for-history will provide you with solid foundations to *BEGIN* the study of the philosophy of science.
Summary Study first the enchantment of science, then the facts of science, then the history of science, and only *THEN* the philosophy of science. Needless to say, the opposite order of study doesn’t work!
Happy readings, rls! Happy readings, Climate Etc folks!
Thank you willard, kim, and fan for the recommendations. It’s a privilege to be in the company of the many intellectuals on this blog.
Welcome to socialism Komrade.
From the article:
…
Lawmakers are up in arms over an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposal that they fear could give federal officials expansive new powers over private property and farmland.
The EPA is seeking to redefine what bodies of water fall under the agency’s jurisdiction for controlling pollution. The scope of the final Clean Water Act (CWA) rule is of critical importance, as any area covered would require a federal permit for certain activities.
The rule is facing a groundswell of opposition from lawmakers, who fear the EPA is engaged in a “land grab” that could stop farmers and others from building fences, digging ditches or draining ponds.
More than 260 lawmakers, spanning both chambers and parties, have come out against the EPA’s action.
A group of 231 members of the House recently sent a letter to the EPA and the Army Corps asking them to withdraw the regulation. The group included almost the entire House Republican conference, as well as 19 Democrats.
“Although your agencies have maintained that the rule is narrow and clarifies CWA jurisdiction, it in face aggressively expands federal authority under the CWA while bypassing Congress and creating unnecessary ambiguity,” the lawmakers wrote.
The proposed rule is eight years in the making, and aims to clear up ambiguity in federal regulations that the EPA says was created by a series of Supreme Court decisions.
The EPA says the new rule — dubbed “Waters of the United States,” or “WOTUS” — would not massively expand its authority, nor would it create powers over back yards, wet spots or puddles.
“It would reduce the scope of waters covered under the Clean Water Act compared to the existing regulations on the book,” EPA Deputy Administrator Bob Perciasepe recently told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “It would not assert jurisdiction over any type of waters not previously protected over the past 40 years.”
Those assurances haven’t won over lawmakers, who say the rule is exceptionally broad.
“The rule would place features such as ditches, ephemeral drainages, ponds (natural or man-made, prairie potholes, seeps, flood plains, and other occasionally or seasonally wet areas under federal control,” the House lawmakers wrote in their letter.
The Senate also has a significant faction fighting the EPA’s action. Thirty Republican senators signed onto a bill introduced this week that would prevent the EPA and the Army Corps from moving forward.
“After already calling on the EPA and Army Corps to withdraw the proposed rule, I want to make sure that the expansion of regulatory jurisdiction over ‘Waters of the United States’ is shelved for good,” said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the bill’s main sponsor.
…
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/210130-fears-of-epa-land-grab-create-groundswell-against-water-rule
The EPA is now going on a propaganda campaign trying to convince farmers they won’t be regulating a drainage ditch on the farm or a man-made pond used to water cattle. They say the same bodies of water will be regulated. They are at a minimum twisting the truth and probably are outright lying. If nothing is changing, why new regs?
Even more challenging is the Heisenberg estimate.
Here you go, you need a political consensus to make the “best sellers” list at the Orwellian NY Times;
http://washingtonexaminer.com/dinesh-dsouzas-america-banished-from-new-york-times-best-seller-list/article/2549991
They count climate scientists the same way.
Orange is the new Black.
=======
Here’s what the jack-boot left can do with 83% public “consensus” in England;
http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/20/uk-bans-creationism-in-schools/
It’s not even a matter of support from one abstract theory or the other, it’s about the “science” word as method to impose political will on others. You can find the same fanaticism around GMO foods, the big bang theory or the ahats with this wondrous claim;
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/free-will-could-be-the-result-of-background-noise-in-the-brain-study-suggests-9553678.html
Expected Value of Carbon Pricing Policy
Sir Nicholas Stern, William Nordhaus, Richard Tol, Ross Garnaut, Australian Treasury and other economic analysts have argued for carbon pricing and justified it on the basis of projected net-benefit. The analyses estimate the cumulative abatement costs and climate damages avoided over projection periods of 300 to 500 years in the future and many use what are arguably unrealistically low discount rates.
But all these analyses have a critical omission. They do not deal with the probability of success of the chosen carbon pricing policy. If we estimate the ‘Expected Value’ of carbon pricing in a country as NPV of the scheme if it succeeds (in delivering the projected benefits), multiplied by the probability the projected benefits will be delivered, I expect an objective analysis would estimate that the Expected Value of the policy is negligible. And the opportunity cost huge.
I’d suspect, if we estimate it objectively, we’d find the probability of success of a global carbon pricing scheme of any type is very low. I understand there is wide agreement that carbon pricing must be global and have high penetration for it to have a realistic chance of succeeding. And it must remain operating and effective for a century or more. But what is the probability that the world will agree to a coordinated carbon pricing scheme given that each country knows that domestic and international politics and disputes mean the policies will be frequently changed and probably abandoned? Each country recognises it is likely to be disadvantaged each time the policies change. They recognise it is likely countries will pull out, as several did from Kyoto Protocol, and that this will mean the costs for the participants would rise (to achieve the defined benefits). Disputes will be inevitable and likely to be frequent and ongoing. Each country knows that raising its cost of energy compared with others reduces its international competitiveness which retards its development and its ability to provide improving standard of living and improving human well-being.
Any carbon pricing scheme will inevitably be subjected to frequent tampering for political purposes. Examples:
• EU ETS
• Ireland’s carbon tax (Ireland’s PM admitted the reason he increased it was to pay off the country’s GFC induced debts)
• Chicago Carbon Exchange (collapsed)
• Australian ETS – landslide election mandate for it to be repealed
• NSW GGAS – superseded
• US EPA regulations
• Australia’s RET – although not a carbon pricing scheme it is a carbon abatement scheme and therefore is another example demonstrating how the politicisation of climate and carbon abatement policies causes such schemes to be continually changed.
“If we always do what we always did, we’ll always get what we always got!”
Conclusion:
We’ve been debating and negotiating carbon pricing schemes for a quarter of a century. There is negligible tangible progress. It seems apparent they are unlikely to succeed. It’s time to accept the realities and move on to alternatives that do have a high probability of success.
Every way we look at it, there seems low probability of carbon pricing succeeding. But there is an alternative approach with a high probability of success. In fact, history demonstrates it is almost inevitable it would succeed.
It is likely it will happen no matter what. The issue is the timing. We could speed it up if we changed our focus.
After a quarter century of failed approach, surely it is time to change the approach.
[Repost with corrected format]
Expected Value of Carbon Pricing Policy
Sir Nicholas Stern, William Nordhaus, Richard Tol, Ross Garnaut, Australian Treasury and many other economic analysts have argued for carbon pricing and justified it on the basis of projected net-benefit. The analyses estimate the cumulative abatement costs and climate damages avoided over projection periods of hundreds of years – out to 300 to 500 years in the future – and use what are arguably unrealistically low discount rates.
But all these analyses have a critical omission. They do not deal with the probability of success of the chosen carbon pricing policy. If we estimate the ‘Expected Value’ of carbon pricing in a country like Australia as NPV of the scheme if it succeeds (in delivering the projected benefits), multiplied by the probability the projected benefits will be delivered, I expect an objective analysis would estimate that the Expected Value of the policy is negligible. And the opportunity cost huge.
I’d suspect, if we estimated it objectively, we’d find the probability of success of a global carbon pricing scheme of any type is very low. I understand there is wide agreement that carbon pricing must be global and have high penetration for it to have a realistic chance of succeeding. And it must remain operating and effective for a century or more. But what is the probability that the world will agree to a coordinated carbon pricing scheme given that each country knows that domestic and international politics and disputes mean the policies will be frequently changed and probably abandoned? Each country recognises it is likely to be disadvantaged each time the policies change. They recognise it is likely countries will pull out as several did from Kyoto Protocol, and that this will mean the costs for the participants would rise (to achieve the defined benefits). Disputes will be inevitable and likely to be frequent and ongoing. Each country knows that raising its cost of energy compared with others reduces its international competitiveness which retards its development and its ability to provide improving standard of living and improving human well-being.
Any carbon pricing scheme will inevitably be subjected to frequent tampering for political purposes. Examples:
• EU ETS
• Ireland’s carbon tax (Ireland’s PM admitted the reason he increased it was to pay off the country’s GFC induced debts)
• Chicago Carbon Exchange (collapsed)
• Australian ETS
• NSW GGAS
• US EPA regulations
• Australia’s RET – although not a carbon pricing scheme it is a carbon abatement scheme and therefore is another example demonstrating how the politicisation of climate and carbon abatement policies causes such schemes to be continually changed.
“If we always do what we always did, we’ll always get what we always got!”
Conclusion:
We’ve been debating and negotiating carbon pricing schemes for a quarter of a century. There is negligible tangible progress. It seems apparent they are unlikely to succeed. It’s time to accept the realities and move on to alternatives that do have a high probability of success.
Every way we look at it, there seems low probability of carbon pricing succeeding. But there is an alternative approach with a high probability of success. In fact, history demonstrates it is almost inevitable it would succeed.
I believe what I am proposing is highly likely to succeed. It is almost inevitable; it will happen. The issue is the timing. We could speed it up if we changed our focus.
After a quarter century of failed approach, surely it is time to change the approach.
Peter Lang I would support a carbon tax if there’s an equivalent reduction in the income tax rate to keep government income at the same level.
The tax should also be introduced gradually to allow people and companies to change behavior. As has been proposed by others, it should also be subject to a correction depending on the average surface temperature in the USA over the prior decade (however, each country would be free to use its average temperature, as well as set the tax rate at whatever level it chooses).
The net effect would be a reduction in coal and oil consumption and increases in natural gas as well as nuclear power and wind power (I think).
I’m concerned over the forthcoming oil crisis and I’m not too interested in seeing coal burned because we may need it in the future to avoid falling in an ice age. Plus the whole idea makes sense if indeed the temperature does go up. If it doesn’t, then the tax stays the same and I pay lower income tax. Win win.
Fernando,
We must distinguish between revenue neutral versus the economic impact. Raisins the cost of energy disadvantages the economy compared with other countries. It retards economic growth. It forces energy intensive industries to move out of the country with higher energy costs and move to where energy is cheaper (all else equal). When energy intensive industries move out of your country, they take their employment with them and the emissions are simply shifted to another country, perhaps where the emissions intensity of energy is even higher than in the country they are being forced to depart. So global emissions are not reduced, not change to the climate, but the country that imposed carbon pricing was disadvantaged. Can I urge you to read Submission2 to the Australian Senate inquiry into repeal of the carbon tax legislation: http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Environment_and_Communications/Clean_Energy_Legislation/Submissions
History channel’s 101 inventions that changed the world, the top 5-4-3-2-1 are as follows:
transistor
steam engine
light bulb
printing press
wheel
The Left is now trying to un-create modern civilization with a new idea that trumps all others with its invention of a new devil: human-CO2.
They left out the stirrup, the bow and arrow, and metallurgy (first bronze, then steel). Which with the wheel and the printing press enabled all the rest. Of course that is all dependent on the ‘invention of agriculture and writing in Mesopotamia.
Or you could argue for the invention of zero.
But you are right it is very hard to argue for the invention of CO2 as carbon pollution.
Making fire would be my pick. I’ve done it with a bow and drill – it ain’t easy.
One of the greatest: the scientific method. The superstition and ignorance of the government experts and UN-approved pseudo-science of global warming is a reminder.
First five fire, gear, inclined plane, level and pulley.
The Coming Climate Crash
Lessons for Climate Change in the 2008 Recession
By HENRY M. PAULSON Jr.JUNE 21, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/opinion/sunday/lessons-for-climate-change-in-the-2008-recession.html?_r=0
Paulson takes on China and climate change
When he’s not fighting fires, the Treasury chief has taken on two issues he says are crucial to the country’s future.
By Marc Gunther, senior writer
September 19, 2008: 4:57 PM EDT
According to Paulson, if China today was as efficient in its use of energy as the U.S. was in 1970, it would save the equivalent of 16 million barrels of oil a day, or almost 10% of the world’s daily oil consumption.
All of the world must learn to make do with less, he argues. “There simply are not enough energy resources to allow the world’s entire population, or even the third of it represented by the Chinese, to lead the resource-intensive lifestyle that Americans currently enjoy,” Paulson says.
Paulson’s an environmentalist – he is the former chair of the Nature Conservancy and the reason why Goldman Sachs, under his watch, became the first investment bank to call for federal regulation of greenhouse gases
http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/09/laframboises-new-book-on-the-ipcc/#comment-378248
wow, simple wow, “A fan of *MORE* discourse ” and I thought it was only Mike…
Don’t be disheartened, you’re young yet…time to learn….
…well…here’s hoping
Speaking of the cabal, government handouts and cronyism;
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/opinion/sunday/lessons-for-climate-change-in-the-2008-recession.html?_r=1
Yes, Hank Paulson, interior designer of the TARP disaster that wiped out many illusions of “free market” consequences in the financial sector. Along with No-Child, expanded government spending, expanded medicare among the worst results of the pandering Bush 2 policy results. Most likely the worst appointment in GOP history but perhaps more then 50% of the population is economically challenged on policy is it grasped.
Again, Keynesian dogma married to Climate Change dogma. All leading to an ever growing state authority, the purpose behind both belief systems.
From the article:
…
When Mary Margaret Vojtko died last September—penniless and virtually homeless and eighty-three years old, having been referred to Adult Protective Services because the effects of living in poverty made it seem to some that she was incapable of caring for herself—it made the news because she was a professor. That a French professor of twenty-five years would be let go from her job without retirement benefits, without even severance, sounded like some tragic mistake. In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op-ed that broke the story, Vojtko’s friend and attorney Daniel Kovalik describes an exchange he had with a caseworker from Adult Protective Services: “The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, ‘She was a professor?’ I said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help.” A professor belongs to the professional class, a professor earns a salary and owns a home, probably with a leafy yard, and has good health insurance and a retirement account. In the American imagination, a professor is perhaps disheveled, but as a product of brainy eccentricity, not of penury. In the American university, this is not the case.
Most university-level instructors are, like Vojtko, contingent employees, working on a contract basis year to year or semester to semester. Some of these contingent employees are full-time lecturers, and many are adjunct instructors: part-time employees, paid per class, often without health insurance or retirement benefits. This is a relatively new phenomenon: in 1969, 78 percent of professors held tenure-track positions. By 2009 this percentage had shrunk to 33.5. The rest of the professors holding jobs—whether part time or full time—do so without any job security. These are the conditions that left Vojtko in such a vulnerable position after twenty-five years at Duquesne University. Vojtko was earning between $3,000 and $3,500 per three-credit course. During years when she taught three courses per semester, and an additional two over the summer, she made less than $25,000, and received no health benefits through her employer. Though many universities limit the number of hours that adjunct professors can work each semester, keeping them nominally “part-time” employees, teaching three three-credit courses is certainly a full-time job. These circumstances are now the norm for university instructors, as the number of tenured and tenure-track positions shrinks and the ranks of contingent laborers swell.
…
http://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-teaching-class/
Is this anywhere close to true?
Wow, Jim2, That’s scary. Good think Judith has her irons in more than one fire – i.e running a professional consulting business as well. Of course, the really great benefit of that is the experience of the real work it brings to her academic work, and vice versa.
That teaching college Is no longer a middle-class job is no news to professors … that scientific research is no longer a middle-class job is no news to scientists
Graduate students (especially) are keenly aware of this accelerating reality.
Far-right pundits, political operatives, and astroturfers who ignorantly imagine otherwise are a primary reason why support for right-wing conservatism approaches zero among teachers and STEM professionals … and the same is becoming true of lawyers and physicians.
*EVERYONE* understands *THESE* realities, eh Climate Etc readers?
Except for ideology-driven anti-science far-right pundits, that is!
FOMBS twists the truth once again. College professors have leaned left for a very long time. This is nothing new.
You don’t mess around with jim2.
He IS the boss of the anecdote. Don’t let science get in the way of a juicy anecdote. That’s the way these guys roll.
The far left College Professors would serve their students better by entering the realm of reality. All graduates wake up to that fact as they begin to face reality themselves.
I’m more of a radical anti communist atheist libertarian anti war pro gun and pro Palestinian peacenik. And I think this global warming brouhaha is a religious movement started by Al Gore after he won the presidential election and got robbed by W Bush, may G-d have mercy on his soul.
This would seem to contradict the above:
http://chronicle.com/article/aaup-survey-data-2013/138309#id=144050
In California, it’s not about teaching, it’s about equity and diversity:
“The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.” This position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.” – 2011
jump forward a year, they found someone to take this job!
“In September 2012, for instance, as the university system faced the threat of another $250 million in state funding cuts on top of the $1 billion lost since 2007, UC San Diego hired its first vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion. This new diversocrat would pull in a starting salary of $250,000, plus a relocation allowance of $60,000, a temporary housing allowance of $13,500, and the reimbursement of all moving expenses. (A pricey but appropriately “diverse” female-owned executive search firm had found this latest diversity accretion”
Multiply this by the staff each position requires and then again by the amount of UC campuses and you’ll see why academics is suffering, teaching positions dwindle and the number of politically-driven admins keeps growing.
They truly are Fans Of More Wasteful Spending
Here’s an anecdote for you WHT, the DE Master of Disaster.
From the article:
…
Studies based on the Carnegie data revealed that American professors were more liberal in their ideological orientations than the general population and professors in the humanities and the social sciences were
more liberal than those in the natural sciences, engineering, and business (Lipset and Dobson, 1972; Ladd and Lipset, 1973; Ladd and Lipset, 1975). Liberalism was also positively associated with professional status among the professorate (Hayek, 1949; Laza rsfeld and Thielens, 1958; Ladd and Lipset, 1975).
…
http://www.cwu.edu/~manwellerm/academic%20bias.pdf
From the article:
…
Building the necessary infrastructure and regulatory systems, which we describe as the Architecture of Abundance, can create hundreds of thousands of jobs and contribute to making energy more plentiful and affordable. This could be great news for America, but sadly the endeavor has mostly gotten the cold shoulder from the administration, and hard-working Americans stand to pay the price. Higher prices at the pump, higher electric bills, higher prices for goods and services, higher food prices — the ripple effect of high energy costs affect everyone, but they harm the nation’s poor and vulnerable the most.
When it comes to our “all-of-the-above” energy vision, we are not taking “no” for an answer. The House of Representatives next week will vote on bills to cut the red tape, get the energy flowing, and spark a jobs turnaround. This includes a bipartisan bill I authored to reform the approval process for cross-border energy infrastructure projects to ensure we don’t experience any Keystone-XL delays in the future. We will also consider bipartisan legislation by Rep. Cory Gardner to expedite approval of LNG exports, which will support increased domestic energy production and job creation while supplying our allies abroad with an affordable and reliable source of energy. And this summer, we will also take action to harness our competitive energy advantage with Rep. Steve Scalise’s bill to improve regulatory transparency and predictability, which will allow the construction of new factories.
It is time to say yes to “jobs” and affordable, abundant energy and unleash the American energy superpower.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101776663
The Immorality of Climate Mitigation
Bjorn Lomborg finds:
See full article at:The Environment of Poverty
Excellent +++++++++++++++
> The same $11 billion could be used to address even more pressing issues.
Indeed, and I can’t imagine how Björn would react if he was offered some of the 821 billions in US defense spending for 2014:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_defense_spending_30.html
***
This argument is so strong that Björn may be able to pitch is fundraisers in front of those who own 40% [Stiglitz] of the American wealth. Its household and nonprofit assets runs in the $88 trillion as of September 2013; total US assets alone amount to about $225 trillion [Yahoo].
If Björn truly wants change, perhaps he should ask directly to those for whom $11 billion may be small change.
***
[Stiglitz]: http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105
[Yahoo]: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/much-entire-united-states-america-170634255.html
Charles Murray in “Coming Apart” finds that wealth in the USA can be found primarily in a few SuperZIPS in New York City, Washington, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This can narrow the search for donations.
Willard – this isn’t about quantity, it’s about quality. Money is wasted when spent on nebulous “climate change.” It WOULD be better spent on more pressing issues or, better yet, just cut from the budget.
Defense. It’s a mixed bag, that’s for sure. At least in the US, it is a Constitutional mandate. That being said, there is plenty of room to argue on how it’s been spent in the last 60 years.
A couple of bombs on Japan were much more cost effective and effective at ending hostilities than were the last few wars in the Middle East.
> this isn’t about quantity, it’s about quality
Come on, jim2. Before it was about “public spending” (as if PepsiCo was not a public corporation!) and now you allude to “quality”. I don’t think you can seriously argue that 300 millions lives depend on the “quality” of the money for them to be saved.
Let me recall you how Björn starts:
This claim not about climate change. This claim is about aid priorities. These priorities can certainly lead us to revise how much to spend on climate change. But they certainly allow us to revise how much we spend elsewhere.
Climate change can be interpreted as a public health issue, an energy issue, a security issue, an environmental issue, or a bit of each. Interpret it as you please. I’ll do the same. Choose wisely.
If Björn wishes to argue that what we spend on climate change is not well spent, he’s more than welcome to do so. All he has to do is to put that claim first and argue for it. That means cutting his moralistic crap that leads somewhere I’ll be more than obliged to follow.
Hope this helps,
w
Evil Coke
for willard
http://www.popsci.com/article/science/pure-genius-how-dean-kamens-invention-could-bring-clean-water-millions?dom=PSC&loc=slider&lnk=1&con=IMG
Gosh-golly … good `ol Bjorn plumb fergot to mention that greenhouse-gas emissions funds amount to less than 1/500 of the six trillion dollar cost of the Iraq/Afghanistan war … a horrendous waste of treasure and heroes blood … an impossibly costly war that reflected (in its origins) a corrupt addiction to cheap carbon energy
These guys like what Bjorn writes … no one else is fooled.
Conclusion Bjorn Lomborg’s essays persistently reflect a cherry-picking incapacity — rooted in willfully ignorant denialism — to account the true costs of a global carbon energy economy.
These economic and moral realities are plainly evident to *EVERYONE* who dares to count the *REAL* costs of a carbon energy economy, eh Climate Etc readers?
It’s surprising that Bjorn Lomborg’s accounting tricks and demagogic rhetoric have fooled you so completely, David L. Hagen. It is a pleasure to help open your mind to broader economic and moral realities!
The financial flow to developing countries is already several hundred billion dollars, so is another $11B going to make a difference? It is not as though his suggested programs against disease and for development don’t exist yet. Who is Lomborg trying to fool with this line of argument?
The hubris and hypocrisy of global warming alarmists is palpable and that is what Richard Muller, et al., is shining a spotlight on. “Environmentalists who oppose the development of shale gas and fracking,” Muller said of the greenhouse gas fearmongers, “are making a tragic mistake… [and] concerns are either largely false or can be addressed by appropriate regulation… [S]hale gas is a wonderful gift that has arrived just in time. It can not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also reduce a deadly pollution known as PM2.5 that is currently killing over three million people each year, primarily in the developing world.”
David L. Hagen,
Australia alone spends $20 billion per year on carbon restraint policies. So, this number seems to be an underestimate at least an order of magnitude.
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/08/in-the-next-37-years-labor-will-spend-60000-per-australian-to-change-the-weather/
Lomborgs Case
We take money from individuals and corporations in the form of taxes
and fees.
We spent that money in a crazy way if you are looking at measures like preventable death.
Point: we should look at the priorities of how we spend money we have collected from individuals and business.
Willards argument.
Look a squirrel! there is a a different pile of money that we havent seized yet. Lets go take that and spend it
Steve, this is the risk rate of developing dementia vs age
http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/booth/risk/dementia2.jpg
Life expectancy vs year of birth
http://censuschannel.net/cc/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Life-Expectancy-1900-to-2007-Total-Black-and-White.jpg
Care for US citizen with dementia was $215 billion in 2010.
In 2013 the NIH spent $1.05 billion on general dementia and Alzheimer’s research.
The R&D budget for Climate Research is estimated at $10.7 billion for 2013, but as spending was across many agencies, the exact number isn’t known
DocMartyn,
That’s just for R&D. What is the total annual cost of carbon restraint policies in the USA. See the table (From Alan Moran, IPA) at the end of this post for the figures for the annual costs of carbon restrain policies in Australia: http://joannenova.com.au/2013/08/in-the-next-37-years-labor-will-spend-60000-per-australian-to-change-the-weather/
Read the post to see the cost per person to 2050.
> We take money from individuals and corporations in the form of taxes
and fees. We spent that money in a crazy way [1] if you are looking at measures like preventable death. Point: we should look at the priorities of how we spend money we have collected from individuals and business.
Nothing in these premises allows Björn to focus solely on climate change money. Any money spent in a crazy way is fair ball. Here’s another one:
http://priceofoil.org/fossil-fuel-subsidies/
Checkmate.
Now, get your priorities in order.
[1] Björn does not need to claim that much, only that you could spend it in a wiser way elsewhere. Björn’s argument would still be shown as a PR prank.
‘PHENOMENAL targets: Robust evidence for benefits more than 15 times higher than costs
7.e) by 2030 phase out fossil fuel subsidies’
Copenhagen Consensus analysis of the post 2015 MDG.
BTW – http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/bishop-flags-talks-on-axing-fossil-fuel-subsidies-20140620-zsggt.html
It is little wonder that wee willy usually limits himself to cryptic silliness – as his arguments trip over his profound ignorance.
Huh willard?
Note I exactly what I object to.
If you want to have a discussion about all public money, then fine.
if you want to discuss all money private and public fine.
Lomborg was talking about AID money.
I object to your game of trying to talk about all monies, or all public monies, when the specific topic is aid monies.
You want to switch the topic then do so in a civilzed manner
Willard
In your analysis of what is “given” to the oil and gas industry in the US, do you happen to give consideration to the taxes paid to the US via companies in these industries? No I suppose not.
> Lomborg was talking about AID money.
Huh? No:
But first, he was talking about aid priorities. Björn could have talked about “development priorities,” but of course preferred “aid”. Nevermind.
So Björn talks about aid priorities, and then switches to development money just to cut greenhouse-gas emissions..
Björn sure knows how to audit.
Cue in to wind mills.
There is something fundamentally immoral about the way we set our priorities. In 2010, the combined profits of the six leading companies was $35 billions:
http://www.tobaccoatlas.org/industry/tobacco_companies/profits/
Calculations from the Copenhagen Consensus show that the third of it could save almost three million lives each year if directed toward preventing malaria and tuberculosis, and increasing childhood immunization.
Hey willy, maybe governments should tax tobacco companies and tobacco users. The money could be efficiently spent on helping people, as the gubmints see fit. But my guess is the tobacco companies and customers would refuse to pay the taxes. They are nasty folks. Not at all progressive.
Willard meet capitalism. Capitalism meet Willard. Do you spend every waking hour yearning for a return of that wonderful economic system of the Soviets ? Oh wait, I forgot, they couldn’t feed their citizens 60 years after the revolution. But they certainly did set priorities, as well as all the prices, all 20,000 of them.
Back in the USSR, oh yeah.
Willard, the US spends more money on Climate research than the NIH spends on research into four of the five leading causes of death of its citizens.
Not only Bjorn’s argument is bogus, but it could be used to do lots of things you guys wouldn’t like if Bjorn followed through his moral outrage.
Here’s another example:
With $11 billions, we could save 300 millions lives per year.
PepsiCo Potato Chip brands alone surpass $10 billion in global retail sales.
What do you think we should do?
[1] http://www.pepsico.com/PressRelease/PepsiCo-Potato-Chip-Brands-Surpass-10-Billion-in-Global-Retail-Sales03142012.html
But anything that helps your inactivism is good, I guess.
What Bjorn does is disgusting.
Willard proposes yet another bogus comparison. Pepsi money is private money. The money referred to spent on climate stuff is public money – partly MY money. There’s a big difference. You really need to start thinking.
> [A]nother bogus comparison. […] The money referred to spent on climate stuff is public money […]
So was the 821 billions spent on defense in US alone, in 2014 alone. Perhaps jim2 forgot about that one. Here’s another “public money” number: since 1997, Isreal received &3.1 billions each year from the US.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-strauss/us-aid-israel_b_4251742.html
No hawkish Denizen should wish to play the “public money” reallocation game.
***
It easy to demonstrate that Bjorn is exploiting a lack of proportion. By showing some numbers, Bjorn’s trick can easily be seen. His argument is morally inept.
The idea that any and only public money can be compared with public money is ridiculous. Worse, it’s falters on the fact that Bjorn’s charity also targets private aid:
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/guide-giving
We can be certain that private money will be used more effectively and efficiently than public money.
=============
Willard
I gather you prefer philanthropists shorten global warming by 7 hours rather than save hundreds of millions of poor from starvation; for the same expenditures. It is very obvious what they recommend.
I recommend you actually read what the Copenhagen Consensus actually finds and recommends rather than chasing red herrings.
They make it very clear where they recommend spending funds.
Bjorn Lomborg How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place
Bjorn Lomborg ed, Global Crises, Global Solutions: Costs and Benefits 2009 2nd Edition| ISBN-10: 052174122X
Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits
PS Fan see One 9/11 Tally $3.3 trillion.
The US has already spent $10.3 trillion on importing fuel when oil was “cheap”. The cheap oil is now gone. Better to ask the economists who have actually studied the issues than illogical complaints on false global warming costs while ignoring the much higher mitigation expenses.
Better to ask What did the US do to earn such a penalty?
> I gather you prefer philanthropists shorten global warming by 7 hours […]
Another brilliant pair of arguments. Another time. This quote opens the flood gate and shows where Björn is heading:
This clearly indicates that Björn does not restrict himself to what’s already available. As if his argument only applied to development money anyway.
OPTIMIZE ALL THE EXPENDITURES!
http://memegenerator.net/instance/51483399
Have any of the IPCC climate models been applied to the temperatures of the last 1000 years to check for the alleged strong correlation between global temperatures and CO2 concentration?
@Ali Bertarian An internet search for “paleoclimate models” brought me to this page: Paleoclimatolgy-modeling. An interesting website.
Ali Bertarian, the free-as-in-freedom survey “Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change“ provides the concisely stated, well-reasoned, verifiably referenced, paleoclimate analysis that dispassionate knowledge-seekers of all political persuasions seek and respect.
Conclusion Immoderation in the quest for knowledge is no vice; denialism in defense of ideology is no virtue.
Good on `yah Ali Bertarian!
AliBertarian
We are fortunate in having an instrumental record (CET) for a third of the last 1000 years and I have reconstructed back a further 100 years and am currently researching ,material to take it back to around 1086.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-curious-case-of-rising-co2-and-falling-temperatures/
Preliminary research shows considerable warmth at times prior to 1538. with the warmest in the 11th and 12th centuries. There appears to be little correlation with co2 levels although it is a greenhouse gas and must have some impact. However on the instrumental and observational evidence to date-as opposed to computer models- the impact is far less than from natural variability
tonyb
Climate study vs. Economic study: What are the similarities and differences? Both are based on one experiment : the earth. Neither can repeat the experiment to study variations. Both use complex models to make predictions. Opinions?
‘In a world of limited resources, we can’t do everything, so which goals should we prioritize? The Copenhagen Consensus Center provides information on which targets will do the most social good (measured in dollars, but also incorporating e.g. welfare, health and environmental protection), relative to their costs. Some of the world’s top economists have assessed the targets from the 12th session Open Working Group document into one of five categories, based on economic evidence: Phenomenal, Good, Fair, Poor and not enough knowledge
The final decision on choosing goals will definitely rest on a number of factors, not just economics – but knowing the costs and benefits provides an important piece of information. Given the short turnaround, the results should be considered informative, but preliminary. The Copenhagen Consensus will present full, peer-reviewed economic evidence over the coming half year.
Just think: if we could prioritize a goal that saves 10 lives for every $250,000 spent, over another goal that saves 1 life for the same amount, we could do billions of dollars more good over the next 15 years!’ http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/owg12.cost-benefit-assessment_0.pdf
‘Each year, ten million people die from infectious diseases like malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis, along with pneumonia and diarrhea. Lack of water and sanitation is estimated to cause at least 300,000 deaths each year. Malnourishment claims at least 1.4 million children’s lives.
Poverty is one of the main killers. It is why children do not receive proper nutrition and live in neighborhoods with unclean water and inadequate sanitation. And it is why an entirely preventable disease like malaria kills 600,000 people each year; many are too poor to buy drugs and bed nets, while governments are often too poor to eradicate the mosquitos that carry the disease or contain and treat outbreaks when they occurs.
But some of the most lethal problems are environmental. According to the World Health Organization, about seven million deaths each year are caused by air pollution, with the majority a result of burning twigs and dung inside. Previous generations’ use of lead in paints and gasoline is estimated to cause almost 700,000 deaths annually. Ground-level ozone pollution kills more than 150,000 people per year, while global warming causes another 141,000 deaths. Naturally occurring radioactive radon that builds up inside homes kills about 100,000 people every year.
Here, too, poverty plays a disproportionate role. No one lights a fire every night inside their house for fun; they do so because they lack the electricity needed to stay warm and to cook. While outdoor air pollution is partly caused by incipient industrialization, this represents a temporary tradeoff for the poor – escaping hunger, infectious disease, and indoor air pollution to be better able to afford food, health care, and education. When countries become sufficiently rich, they can afford cleaner technology and begin to enact environmental legislation to reduce outdoor air pollution, as we now see in Mexico City and Santiago, Chile.
One of the best anti-poverty tools is trade. China has lifted 680 million people out of poverty over the past three decades through a strategy of rapid integration into the global economy. Extending free trade, especially for agriculture, throughout the developing world is likely the single most important anti-poverty measure that policymakers could implement this decade.’
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-deplores-the-ineffectiveness-of-environmental-aid-to-developing-countries#M2pb2QjrEJyaqXTc.99
The AID dollar is in short supply – far shorter than has been committed to – but not delivered on – by western governments. The objective is to do the most good through the most focused expenditure. That we can also decrease black carbon, tropospheric ozone, nitrous oxide and methane – as well as manage population, environments and agricultural land – is a bonus. This is the most effective approach to mitigation in the short to medium term.
Yet we get what as a response from progressive nutters? Iraq? Tobacco? The 1%? All very relevant and helpful I’m sure – if utterly insane.
Hi ClimateEtc people (and those guys down at WordPress)
Love this blog but:
Why is it that we people down in the sticks (i.e. the Greenwich plus 10 time zone) never get a fresh go at US blogs such as this one. It doesn’t matter what time of day or night a new post is posted there are always 100 plus comments already posted when we get the reminder email. What do I need to do to get to the top of the list? (other than commenting on high order comments.)
Also (you guys down at WordPress please note) the “Notify me of follow up comments” box doesn’t work properly. The commenter gets EVERY later post, even those on different threads and this flood of irrelevant emails can be difficult to switch off. (I am using Firefox under Mint 16)
Change your email delivery to instant in your WordPress Settings – Notifications. This has nothing to do with your browse or operating system.
John Reid,
Good to have some more contributors from the front end of the world. We just get used to the rest of them being behind the times. :)
I linked climate etc and other radical blogs I like to read to my own blog. I coded it so it shows me when a new post is written. If a new post is about a subject I like then I read it. I don’t sign up to get emails to avoid clutter ever since I stopped having a secretary who kept the mail in the right order in my outlook folders. I’m also in a different time zone from everybody else who writes in English.
The Pillars of Climate-Change Discourse
• The First Pillar: Reason and Science When reason and science are on your side, pound reason and science.
• The Second Pillar: History, Law and Morality When history, law and morality are on your side, pound history, law and morality.
• The Third Pillar: Demagoguery and Denialism When neither reason nor science nor history nor law nor morality are on your side … pound gratuitous personal abuse, third-rate science, and bizarre conspiracy theories.
Question Is it any wonder that young researchers (in particular) adamantly reject the innumerate demagoguery of climate-change denialism?
“Unstoppable,” Climate Etc readers appreciate your post’s vivid demonstration of denialism’s Third Pillar!
Unstoppable, please reflect that science is an activity that people do and a community that people share … and definitely not a certificate that some folks possess (and not others).
Notorious Example Freeman Dyson ain’t got one of them PhDs!
Recommendation Don’t Become a Scientist … unless you appreciate that nbsp;… and are sufficiently strong-minded to chart your own path.
Judith Curry’s students appreciate the pragmatic realism of this advice, we can be sure!
Erratum the final link should have read
Recommended readings for young researchers and voting citizens alike!
Well heck! The link to Peter J. Feibelman’s well-respected guide “A PhD Is Not Enough” ain’t rendering in WordPress … none-the-less, this book is *HIGHLY* recommended to *ALL* aspiring researchers.
Good on `yah, Peter J. Feibelman!
a fan of *MORE* discourse: • The Third Pillar: Demagoguery and Denialism
How did you overlook “Alarmism”? It clearly belongs there, complete with gratuitous personal abuse, third rate science, and bizarre conspiracy theories.
A good example on: How to pollute a blog?
You cannot pollute a blog by posting facts.
Reykjavik atmospheric pressure (or part of the north’s component of the NAO, 150 year long instrumental record from a single location) is a good guide to the near future N. Atlantic’s SST, which in turn drives N. Hemisphere temperatures, it suggests about 0.25C cooling during forthcoming decade.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/RAP-AMO.htm
Motivation:
THE GREAT CLIMATE ETC DEBATE:
Cherry-Picking and Backtest Overfitting versus
Reason, Science, History, Law ,and Morality
Resolved Climate-change skepticism that is grounded in innumerate cherry-picking and ideology-driven back-test overfitting is like a music video without the music.
Opinions? Peter Lang? Libertarians? Anyone?
Yep, if the old Isaac was sitting under a cherry tree, young Albert would have been aimlessly looking at the clock tower across the road from his office. Pitfalls of what counts for science are endless.
Fan, have fun.
Fan my man,
If only you could be half as astute as Vukcevic with data (or produce any at all). We could probably clean up our derrieres with the results:
If only he were as good as Eli the Ape:
http://givemesport.com/425823-eli-the-ape-predicts-the-super-bowl-outcome?tg=% 2Fhome-us
Being that your from Seattle, I’m sure you can appreciate that.
GO SEAHAWKS!
Instead Fan routinely depends on Hansen for data:
Hansen good at temperature predictions (not):
http://granitegrok.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/HansenProjections.gif
A: Increase in CO2 by 1.5% per year
B: Constant increase in CO2 after 2000
C: No increase in CO2 after 2000
hmmm … he seem to running hotter than ‘no increase in CO2’ perhaps he should get in the shade and drink some water.
Your blunderboy Hansen seems to have been wrong about a lot of things, fortunately:
http://www.usmessageboard.com/3838435-post30.html
Conclusion: Fans constant use of Hansen as a data source lacks credibility. Perhaps he should consult Eli the Ape next time.
The mystery to me is why you think an appeal to authority would work here in the first place.
Yes, I understand your argument. I don’t understand what difference it should make to me. I don’t disbelieve your work because you aren’t a private detective or are you? If I wanted to dispute what you say I would put effort into finding out if/where it is wrong.
So you are arguing that he is making an appeal to authority and that it matters. I haven’t noticed any reluctance for people at this site to argue with anyone regardless of credentials but I’m not going to put any effort into this argument either. We can just keep our respective opinions unless you have a way to support yours?
So now we have Henry Paulson, staunch Republican and Secretary of the Treasury from 2006-2009 weighing in with this foolishness in today’s NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/opinion/sunday/lessons-for-climate-change-in-the-2008-recession.html?hp&rref=opinion
I wonder where he gets his coolaid.
Paulson is an ardent birder and major Sierra Club contributor. You should not have been surprised.
Thanks Rud. How do you know this stuff?
Of course there is nothing in the attribution at the end of the OpEd that provides this disclaimer.
Part of left-wing disinformation as a culture is to call the most centrist of GOP members; Hoover, GWB or in this case Henry Paulson “staunch” or “right-wing” which usually lead to a fair understanding of why pandering to leftist demands is almost always a mistake. Paulson owes his fortune and existence to the government operated money system that has all the predicable failures and abuses found in any socialist system. Punctuated by the travesty of “TARP” that as a matter of record triggered the “Tea Party” movement.
There are all manner of RINO and fifth columnists found inside the GOP. Paulson is an appalling character.
I was against, and still question, TARP. But at least it wasn’t wasteful spending. It bought assets, and sold them at a profit. Some of the recent deficit reduction was due to TARP payback.
(I’m not a fan of Paulson)
Maybe not so much deficit reduction as preventing deficits from being much bigger when they were growing.
Oh d*mn those citizen-scientists who refuse to bow down to Big Carbon!
When-oh-when will the world’s citizen-scientists and citizen-naturalists finally submit to demented far-rightie neo-economics?
The world wonders!
The Washington Post article on The Pause is nearly three years after Pielke Sr’s discussion of a Greenwire article on the same topic. Better late than never.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/candid-comments-from-global-warming-climate-scientists/
I suppose Judith is waiting for David Evans to finish his series of blog articles on his solar-climate model before she has a post on the subject…
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/06/big-news-part-vi-building-a-new-solar-climate-model-with-the-notch-filter/
Since this model is observation based, I think Dr. Evans has something. That being said, since it is observation based and the observations are limited in time, it will nevertheless be a snapshot of climate configuration covered by the time period of the data. If there is a catastrophic change, the model would change.
That being said, it could be the best high-level model around. :)
Falsifiable in the short term, too.
===================
http://insideclimatenews.org/carbon-copy/20140620/why-epa-expects-its-new-carbon-rule-shrink-your-electric-bill
The price of juice will go up but bills will go down! EPA smoke and mirrors.
EPA’s claim of $30 billion in climate benefits for restricting US coal burning is based on avoided damages of over $100/ton of coal burned (when discounted to 2030, the actual damages are far greater). This means that present emissions, per year, will cause many trillions of dollars in future damages. Surely this is not credible scientifically.
“There is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of reality in complex systems and our predominant ways of thinking about that reality. The first step in correcting that mismatch is to let go of the notion that cause and effect are close in time and space” – The fifth discipline by Peter M Senge
Climate is a complex system, I doubt that all the causes for change are known, nor what the effects are. But the proposition that Senge poses also adds the dimensions of time (when) and space (where). Which leaves me to the sad conclusion that climatology is not about science but more to do with faith and belief.
The dominance of faith and belief over rational thinking appears, from casual observance, to be prevalent. Further, faith and belief appears related to social grouping; micro-cultures.
NYT:
‘ “The Great Flood,” released on DVD by Icarus Films, is composed almost entirely of archival footage documenting the Mississippi River flood of 1927. The result of the severe storms that struck the South beginning in 1926, this cataclysmic event affected over 16 million acres of land in seven states, inundating the lower Mississippi Delta and displacing as many as a million people, an estimated 90 percent of whom were black.’
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/movies/homevideo/nonnarrative-cinema-great-flood-and-visitors-on-dvd.html?_r=0
Apparently not all extreme weather events are caused by carbon dioxide. :)
The EIA forecast for US crude production is that we will exceed the 1971 peak in 2015. So much for peak oil guesses.
From the article:
Energy facts: Shale revolution will bring US oil output to new high in 2015 and petroleum exports have doubled in 5 years
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/02/energy-facts-shale-revolution-will-bring-us-oil-output-to-new-high-in-2015-and-petroleum-exports-have-doubled-in-5-years/
TonyB
You may be interested in this blog post.
.
Vuk
Thanks for that. Its pretty old news. Ladurie and Lamb chronicled the glaciers 50 years ago. It is well known (except to warmists) that they have retreated and advanced many times over the past few thousand years.
Climate Audit ran this in 2006
http://climateaudit.org/2006/08/07/green-alps-1/
I documented glacier movements over the last 3000 years in figure 5 here.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/16/historic-variations-in-temperature-number-four-the-hockey-stick/
Prof Manley (of CET fame) chronicled the start of modern glacial retreat as 1750.
tonyb
Perhaps most the most interesting part of that article is the treatment of scientific skepticism. No wonder John Liar Cook was able to divine a 97% consensus.
From the article:
…
Predictions that solar energy will disrupt and replace the current electricity grid system may be premature, with analysts noting urban settings are likely to remain dependent on traditional delivery methods for a while yet.
“The problem is solar or wind or some of the other main intermittent renewables only work when the sun is shining or when the wind is blowing or when the tide is moving,” said Lord Ronald Oxburgh, chairman of the Science & Technology committee in the U.K.’s House of Lords as well as a former non-executive chairman of the U.K. arm of Royal Dutch Shell.
…
“None of these things will work unless you have some means of storing energy,” he said on the sidelines of CNBC’s EnergyFuture brainstorming event Tuesday. “You’ve got to have some backup and your backup at the moment looks like fossil fuels.”
That’s been the experience of import-dependent Singapore, which is keenly interested in cutting energy use.
“By using solar energy, we are not going to be able to be self-sufficient,” said Dr. Liu Thai-Ker, chairman for the Centre for Liveable Cities and a former head of Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority and its Housing Development Board. “But we’ll try to use solar energy to supplement the energy supply as much as possible,” Lui said on the sidelines of the EnergyFuture event.
…
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101729358
The argument fails from the beginning. One does not have to earn a degree in the sciences to engage in science, i.e. Be a scientist. Scientist is a general term like musician, artist, athlete, etc…. If one engages in scientific endeavors, works with others scientists in like pursuit of knowledge, is recognized by other scientists as capable and is for all practical purposes achieving an expertise in a scientific field as a scientist, then one can call him/herself a scientist. That is what is called a citizen scientist. Heck, one can be a nuclear physicist without ever earning a formal degree in the field… see Freeman Dyson.
For what reason is this really important to you? My hypothesis would be you feel threatened by Moshers ability to put together cogent scientific arguments. You fear his arguments gain traction? You fear his ideas are found to be worthy by other scientists? For what other reason would it be important to try to discredit him. One who resorts to discrediting someone usually does so for personal reasons of being inadequate themselves. How much integrity do we assign to an anonymous blogger vs someone who uses his real name and has nothing to hide. The situation speaks of itself.
Go back to the hole you live in.
Mosher’s doesn’t argue very well. He “frames” and disappears when an argument goes against him.
Andrew
I have a proposal. For the past several days I’ve looked at taking a vertical plug of the Earth’s atmosphere (about 10,300 kg/square meter) and putting it in a centrifuge to squeeze it down so it’ll fit in a lab, yet retain an open-topped form with natural pressure and temperature lapse rates. Then, from the axis of the centrifuge, you could hit it with simulated top-of-atmosphere sunlight and accurately measure the results on the atmosphere’s full optical thickness (with some pressure broadening of the spectral lines), and perhaps cool the axis to cryogenic temperatures so it will act as a cold sink for returning IR. You could also of course add water, rock, lichens, water vapor, pollen, and any volcanic gases you want.
To squeeze 60 km of atmosphere down to lab sizes, the product of height and acceleration stays approximately constant, so you need 60,000 G.meters, and the hoop stress in a thin spinning cylinder is material density times centripetal acceleration times radius, and that indicates that with carbon-fiber/epoxy composite or better, such a centrifuge could be built.
So I wrote some code to step vertically through the spinning atmosphere to compute pressure, temperature, and density, and that all looks workable, as does running the rim at 1 atmosphere of pressure and using a much thinner plug. It would be much cheaper than a new supercomputer center, and give results based on real live atoms and dynamic gas behavior.
So that’s my thought for the weekend.
This appears to be a smilar project:
http://www.gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/simulated-atmosphere-jupiter/
I think the big difference between my proposal and the Georgia Tech experiment is that the centrifuge would reflect the way a real atmosphere changes pressure, density, and temperature with altitude. There would be almost no air pressure near the axis (making it like the top of the atmosphere), and large pressure down at the surface. When sunlight is applied, water would evaporate from the rim, travel upwards through the full thickness of the Earth’s atmosphere, travel into cooler, lower pressure layers above, condense, and probably fall as rain.
I think it should work pretty well with a cylinder anywhere from about 2 to 20 meters in radius, depending on what conditions you want to replicate.
Yes indeed, it would be neat to see such an experiment. I only wounder if it could get aresols, vocanic, and ozone along with all altitude air chemistry right? Even still it may be a more useful pursuit than models as you point out.
This is a really good idea! However, we need to broaden the scope to make it a lot bigger. For example we could propose housing it in a 600 meter diameter enclosure carved out of the rock on the Texas-Oklahoma border (that’s four senators and a bunch of congressmen)..anyhow…. You write the science I’ll write the politics and we can get it funded for at least 1.3 billion US dollars. By the time we have the first cost overrun we will be famous and may have a Nobel peace prize. We will call it the Super Atmospheric Global Warming Ultra Super Simulator or SAGWUSS).
More from you friendly, local police state …
From the article:
…
Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails.
At the request of the Marshals Service, the officers using so-called stingrays have been routinely telling judges, in applications for warrants, that they obtained knowledge of a suspect’s location from a “confidential source” rather than disclosing that the information was gleaned using a stingray.
A series of five emails (.pdf) written in April, 2009, were obtained today by the American Civil Liberties Union showing police officials discussing the deception. The organization has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with police departments throughout Florida seeking information about their use of stingrays.
“Concealing the use of stingrays deprives defendants of their right to challenge unconstitutional surveillance and keeps the public in the dark about invasive monitoring by local police,” the ACLU writes in a blog post about the emails. “And local and federal law enforcement should certainly not be colluding to hide basic and accurate information about their practices from the public and the courts.”
The U.S. Marshals Service did not respond to a call for comment.
…
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/feds-told-cops-to-deceive-courts-about-stingray/
Judy, I think it is important for comments such as those posted by ‘unstoppable’ to remain with links intact. This is an ‘open thread’ and the argument that people who engage in science cannot be referred to as or refer themselves as ‘scientists’ is an important topic with respect to the climate wars. Citizen scientists should and are recognized as important contributors to scientific knowledge in other fields (such as astronomy). Those who are pursuing ways to discredit citizen scientists (poptech/unstoppable) reveal themselves as people afraid of the ideas citizen scientists offer and how they are able to contribute to the scientific knowledge base. They need to be equally scrutinized for their integrity in full light for all to see. Censoring their comments only gives them reason to believe they are righteous in what they do. People who are familiar with the regular commenters here can make their own judgement about the ideas and knowledge they contribute. Though I am one who is interested in the credentials one brings to the table, I am not so narrow minded to ignore or consider the abilities non-credentialed people can offer in discussions as well as advancement of understanding in technical fields. The efforts to silence Mosher by discrediting him in a very public way by the likes of poptech/unstoppable should be met with equal exposure and light to the motivations of these anonymous people. Censoring them is not, IMO, the way to expose them for what they are. Let them try to defend their weak position. Let them be seen as the scientific cowards they are.
Good point. The problem i have had with unstoppable is that he spams with 100 comments about Mosher. I will let the next one through. My next thread is on expertise, so that would be appropriate place
100 comments from one person are just too many from one person, especially if the subject of each comment is the same. Too much noise.
What unstoppable needs is a nice latex signature like Fan :)
Why are you exaggerating? You asked me to stop and I stopped but the open threads are open for a reason.
> Censoring their comments only gives them reason to believe they are righteous in what they do.
Letting them stand could have the same effect. I’d only remove “unstoppoable”‘s comment because of his name. Such sock puppetry should not be tolerated, and “unstoppable” should be teached that he’s stoppable.
The problem with deleting spamming comments is that spamming is a well-entrenched practice among Denizens.
Judith
Poptech has been a bit of nuisance recently. He obviously has a bee in his bonnet about both Willis and Mosh.
Both can claim to be citizen scientists who do useful work in their own fields. I have ever seen either claim to have a science phd nor call themselves a scientist, although others may have referred to them as such.
Personally, I am sorry to say that my respect for poptech has diminished considerably in recent months. He did some very useful work in drawing together sceptical papers, but due to his activities I will not directly reference them, It is a shame as Poptech has much to give, it is just that for some reason he has taken against Willis and Mosh.
Perhaps he can explain exactly what his problem in his own name is as I have ceased to read his comments by his sock puppets.
tonyb
Here is a good definition of science from the Royal Society
‘The Royal Society is concerned with excellent science wherever and by whomever it is done. We are committed to promoting diversity in UK science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine by seeking to increase participation from underrepresented groups’
https://royalsociety.org/about-us/diversity/oncerned with excellent science-
Whether you agree with them or not, by the Royal Society’s definition, Willis and Mosh can surely be considered as scientists?
tonyb
Sockpuppetry is when someone uses as pseudonym to support themselves.
Willard, I have to disagree with your point. Though it would be satisfying to censor the idea away, I would rather see unstoppable stopped by failing to defend a poor argument. In that way it is a very observable failure for all to see by reading for themselves the ludicrous idea put forth and owned by unstoppable. That does not mean unstoppable should be permitted to continuously post the same idea repeatedly as an annoyance to everyone. In the case where his/her idea has been given ample opportunity to be aired and then just becomes a mere annoyance… I would have no problem with censoring it at that time.
Tonyb
“A scientist, in a broad sense, is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge.” – wiki
Science is a human behavior. It is a way of approaching a problem. It is a way of validating explanations of how things work. It is “a systematic activity to acquire knowledge”. A person engaging in these activities is a scientist. The Royal Society understands this. Willis and Mosher are scientists. They engage in these types of activities. They should be evaluated by the strength of their ideas and not by their credentials (or lack of them for those trying to make that point). Thanks for providing the link.
You know the saying by Eleanor Roosevelt…
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people”
It fits this situation rather well.
John Carpenter,
Let me clarify what I tried to say.
1. Sock puppetry should not be allowed.
2. There are means to prevent sock puppetry.
3. Spamming could be prevented.
4. Policies against intensive spamming are tough to implement.
5. Spamming is already a well-entrenched practice at Judy’s.
These points are irrelevant to the question of whether or not Pop should have the right to say what he says. I think he should. But in the right place, and abiding by proper etiquette.
Since you appreciate irony, please know that Pop has refused to publish most of my comments at Pop’s.
“Unstoppable” is indeed stoppable. Ask Lucia.
You had a choice. It’s called personal honor, and you obviously have none. If somebody asks you not to comment, then shut up. Go talk at your place.
I have added a Rebuttal:
Criticism: Anyone who follows the scientific method is a scientist.
Rebuttal: Claiming anyone can be a “scientist” makes the title meaningless. There is a big distinction between an amateur scientist and a professional scientist. A professional scientist is “a person who is trained in a science and whose job involves doing scientific research or solving scientific problems.” Since Mr. M has no educational background or any professional experience as a scientist, the only thing he can be considered is an amateur scientist.
* scientist (defined) “a person who is trained in a science and whose job involves doing scientific research or solving scientific problems” – Merriam-Webster
* scientist (defined) “someone who is trained in science, especially someone whose job is to do scientific research” – Macmillan
Amateur or professional scientists are all welcome here. Please note that many so called amateur scientists are publishing papers in peer reviewed journals, or publishing books.
Well we are a little bit more sophisticated here in what we do, we rarely run to the dictionary. See my previous posts on the sociology of science http://judithcurry.com/category/sociology-of-science/ and scientific method http://judithcurry.com/category/scientific-method/
Yep, when I have a question about science, I always turn to the dictionary. Don’t all scientists turn to the dictionary if they have a science question?
curryja, I never claimed that they were not. None of which changes my argument.
Ok, but we find your argument irrelevant and uninteresting. You can move on now.
Climatereason, this is incorrect:
Willis explicitly claims to be a scientist:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/07/noaa-shows-the-pause-in-the-u-s-surface-temperature-record-over-nearly-a-decade/#comment-1659273
“Which is why Anthony and Mosh and Zeke and Steve McIntyre and I and many others are scientists” – Willis
And Mr. M claims on his LinkedIn profile to be a scientist.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/steven-mosher/1/b07/27b
“Scientist at BerkeleyEarth.org”
Berkeley Earth web page http://berkeleyearth.org/team lists Mosher as a scientist. And apparently they even pay him. If a scientific organization (one that does research and publishes papers) employs someone as a scientist, then that person is entitled to state that they are a scientist employed by that organization.
If my argument was irrelevant and uninteresting no one would be responding to it.
Judith, I thought you said you read my article?
“Sometimes the answer is rather simple. Since the founder of Berkeley Earth, Richard A. Muller, is a Professor of Physics at the University of California Berkeley, it is incorrectly believed that Berkeley Earth is affiliated with the University but further research reveals that it is an independent 501C(3) Non-Profit Organization registered to a house in Berkeley California and completely unaffiliated with UC Berkeley. This gives the organization the facade of a scientific authority when in reality they can fabricate whatever titles they feel like. If Berkeley Earth wants to be taken seriously they should begin by not manufacturing credentials for people who have clearly not earned them, as this does a disservice to professional scientists who have put in the years earning advanced degrees and doing scientific research at research institutions and universities.”
So I can make up an organization, pay myself and become a scientist?
Either the title has meaning or it is meaningless. If it is meaninggless than why is he using it?
Yes, and I thought that paragraph was the most ridiculous thing in it. Berkeley Earth also includes a Nobel Laureate on its staff (Saul Perlmutter). Are you familiar with the scientific credentials of Muller?
I apologize for using dictionaries to define words, what a crazy idea.
Judith, is Berkeley Earth affiliated with UC Berkeley?
I thought we were not discussing appeals to authority?
Berkeley is a city in California. Berkeley Earth is a company, who has on its scientific staff several Berkeley professors. You can’t justify saying that Berkeley Earth is not an organization that does scientific research.
Strawman argument.
Judith, is Berkeley Earth affiliated with UC Berkeley?
Willard, thanks for the clarification, I agree.
Unstoppable,
Well you at least agree he is an armature scientist, which is a scientist no less, thanks for coming to that realization. Oh, by the way, ‘scientist’ is not a title.
I have never disagreed he was an amateur scientist but failing to add the qualifier “amateur” gives him credibility he has not earned. Scientist is clearly a title as he is using it on his LinkedIn profile.
John, you are very confused, I am not afraid of any amateur scientist let alone Mr. Mosher. My concern is rather simple, he has been misrepresenting and embellishing his credentials in this debate as I have demonstrated in my post and people falsely believe he is a professional scientist.
When making decisions on scientific matters you cannot entertain every comment on the Internet and it helps to be able to filter these for their appropriate weight. Can amateur scientists be right? Certainly but I have seen far too much (with a few specific exceptions) that they are not.
I have never called for Mr. Mosher to be silenced, though I do believe his comments should not be entertained if he refuses to defend them. If my position was so weak it would not have to be censored in the first place.
Most of us have been interacting with Mosher for a long time. We don’t really need any lectures from anonymous clowns on his character and credentials.
Unstoppable. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just another internet twit. Submit proof. Or shut up.
I think we’d all be more impressed if you criticized his work, rather than the ad hominin:
http://stevenmosher.wordpress.com/
You seem to be a hater, is it some kind of jealousy or personal inadequacy? Resting on ones laurels doesn’t play well here for you or him. Generally everyone gets picked apart by both sides no matter the subject or pedigree.
The personal attacks come out when you can no longer debate. I made no ad hominems in my article, try reading it.
You have made your charges against Mosher and you have seen the reaction. What makes you think this is a debate? We don’t like your style. We don’t like you. Why are you still here?
Don, I had no idea I was supposed to friend you before I was allowed to speak.
Un-self-aware? Unhinged? You can’t take a hint.
Unstoppable,
I made no personal attacks on you, heck I don’t even know who you are. I simply asked you a question ‘Why the hate.’ I reread that popular technology article again just to make sure. I also reread what ad hominem means. That Mosher claims in his bio seems to be based on his work experience is an embellishment is a fairly common practice. Putting him down for his claiming to be a scientist is an attach on his claim (ie ad hominem). He seems to fit into most of the definition of scientist that you supplied. Where’s the beef?
I am well aware certain people here are very upset with learning the truth but they are in the minority.
Climatereason, this is incorrect:
Willis explicitly claims to be a scientist:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/07/noaa-shows-the-pause-in-the-u-s-surface-temperature-record-over-nearly-a-decade/#comment-1659273
“Which is why Anthony and M o s h e r and Zeke and Steve McIntyre and I and many others are scientists” – Willis
And Mr. M o s h e r claims on his LinkedIn profile to be a scientist.
“Scientist at BerkeleyEarth.org”
Predictions of september Ice
http://www.arcus.org/sipn/sea-ice-outlook/2014/june
Note a few things.
1. A variety of approaches when predicting complex phenomena
A) statistical ( see hamilton for my favorite )
B) Modelling
C) heuristic
D) Mixed
2. Two estimates over last years value.
This is an open thread this discussion should be allowed. It is clear that you are trying to protect Mr. Mosher:
Who is Steven Mosher?
http://www.populartechnology.net/2014/06/who-is-steven-mosher.html
Steven Mosher is an English major with a long career in marketing and technology who is known for wasting everyone’s time by making indecipherable drive-by comments on skeptic websites. He is not an “aerospace engineer”, he is not an “open-source software developer” and he is certainly not a “scientist” (despite all ridiculous claims to the contrary).
I’m allowing this one through. If people want to talk about this, then fine. but I’m not letting any more through
I am glad you let this through. The more data the better………..on everything.
My scientific understanding of climate has matured a great deal more from the input of Steven Mosher than from Poptech. So who is a better teacher?
==============
I have learned a ton from scientists like Dr. Lindzen, Dr. Spencer and Dr. Christy but nothing from the English major.
Unstoppable it’s good that you are still learning, even if you concieve of it as nothing. It’s even better that you admit learning that something from Mosher. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. You will learn more from a person with opposing views than you will ever learn from someone you agree with all the time. The person you disagree with is opening your mind to new ideas. Theses may hurt at times but if you persist you may see things that you previously were unable to. The insight can work both ways.
Steven Mosher has viewpoints that are often opposed to mine but he argues rationally, he presents new, interesting and intelligent ideas, and he is still a “skeptic”.
Judith, I feel this one ad hom let through was good enough to give a thorough understanding of the situation.
WTF? Did you even read what I wrote?
Why do you keep falsely claiming that it is an ad hominem?
you are attacking someone’s credentials as a means of diminishing their arguments (or blog comments or whatever). Look up ad hominem attack in your dictionary.
Why would someone’s actual credentials diminish their arguments? You have been arguing that it should have no bearing on it.
Now I am confused.
Actually, Uninteresting is attacking Mosher’s character. Unseemly is making the dubious case that Mosher has misrepresented his credentials. It is ad hominem. And it is senseless, tedious BS.
Unstoppable
We judge mosh and others by the quality of their posts. Sometimes Mosh is infuriating, cryptic, contradicts himself and irritating? ( did I mention how infuriating he can be especially when he is cryptic)
At other times he provides brilliant insights And solid information which provoke discussion. He does not claim to be a scientist, although others may call him that. Indeed, as I posted above, the Royal Society itself would see him as a scientist.
I wish you would stop your vendetta as it is detracting From the excellent work you have previously done on assembling sceptical papers.
Thank you.
Tonyb
+1
Fair points TonyB,
All valid.
I agree
+1
What I find remarkable is the similarity between the attitude displayed on that web-site (poplartechnlogy.nt) and Mosher’s attitude towards climate models. Both show an undue “respect” for established “authority” of one sort or another.
I wonder what they would have said about Einstein if he’d promulgated his theories on the innertubes instead of how he did? Not that Mosher’s any Einstein…
I respect credentials as having validity and that someone who possesses them are more likely to know what they are talking about (if not ideologically biased or dishonest). In my experiences in the climate debate this has largely been shown to be true.
“Mr. M has no formal training in computer science let alone programming and knows very little on the subject.”
Good thing Bill Gates and Steven Jobs completed their “formal” education before playing innovator.
Jobs was a master marketer, he was not a computer engineer or a programmer. If it was not for people like Woz, he would have gotten no where. Gates was a legitimate proven programmer who became an elite businessman. Mr. M o s h e r is no Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
“Mr. M o s h e r is no Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.”
You seem to have issues with marketing.
I have a problem with people who take credit for other people’s work or pretend to be people they are not. If you knew anything about Steve Jobs, you would of never made the ridiculous comment that you just did.
“If you knew anything about Steve Jobs, you would of never made the ridiculous comment that you just did.”
So Woz the college dropout that worked for HP was the brains of every Apple innovation not Jobs the dropout that worked for Atari?
Nice strawman argument.
“Nice strawman argument.”
right. Your entire argument is straw. No one really gives a rats arse about Mosher’s educational pedigree, nor Gates, Woz, Jobs or anyone else that has made a difference in anything they have pursued.
Incorrect, my argument is fully cited and sourced. If no one cared about his credentials then I would have no one responding to my post but this is not the case. Continuing to even imply comparing Mr. M o s h e r to Gates and Jobs is beyond laughable.
Ok everybody, time to stop replying to Unstoppable (or whoever he shows up as next). We are feeding the troll, not a good idea.
Why the personal attack because you are unable to debate?
“You seem to have issues with marketing.”
He should hire Mosher.
Do you have a human name and a resume, poptech/unfloppable/whatever? We know Mosher. He can be a pain in the buttocks, but he makes many useful contributions. And it was really cruel of you to post that unflattering photo. That was before Mosher started working out and taking care of his hair. He has a girlfriend now.
Just in case you decide to investigate me I don’t have a pH d and this isn’t my real name.
What is a scientist:
http://www.kindergartenkindergarten.com/2010/07/we-are-all-scientists.html
I didn’t see professional anywhere.
Only tangentially related to climate, I was very impressed with Russ Robert’s interview with William Easterly, author of The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/06/william_easterl.html
Easterly expressed extreme criticism of technocratic solutions to development of poor nations by proponents such as Bill Gates and jeffery Sachs. CAGW proponents would most likely share this technocratic philosophy.
Russ Roberts recent podcasts include an interview with Dr. Curry and a debate between John Christy and Kerry Emanuel.
Hmmm
Poptech, I read your post on Mosher, I found it to be a yawner, nothing there that I didn’t already know. You wont get much traction here with your ‘expose’. Appeals to authority get nowhere here, so trying to tell us someone isn’t an authority as defined in some arbitrary way by yourself isn’t very interesting. We play the argument, not the person. Stay tuned for a post on expertise in a few days.
I have tried to make this a safe place for debate by a broad spectrum of people, hence I do not tolerate personal attacks on people that comment here.
It is very strange that you now consider it a “yawner” when so much effort was made to keep people from reading it.
You were aware that Mr. M falsely claimed to have a Ph.D. in English on his resume?
Again, you seem very confused as I made no appeal to authority in relation to Mr. M. I am simply making people aware of his background.
I had no idea that fact based arguments were considered personal attacks? Please quote the so-called “personal attack” in my article. I find it rather hypocritical coming from you about this issue since you had no remorse about previously using the word “denier” to personally attack skeptics for years.
Show the resume. As in why the hell should anyone believe anything you say?
I objected to your submitting many many posts on the credentials of one of the regular commenters here. No one here seems to care, you can move on now.
Unfortunately you have deleted many of my responses. If my arguments were so weak you would not need to. Why are you so afraid of allowing me to debate?
Returning to the original idea….did you guys notice how hard it is to blow bubbles when diving in the ocean below 100 meters?
Fernando Leanme,
Regarding ‘revenue neutral taxation’, revenue neutral is not the same as no economic cost. Virtually all economic analyses of carbon pricing demonstrate a high economic cost of carbon pricing. These costs can only be justified by assuming avoidance of climate damages over a period of hundreds of years. But this is academic. Policies must deliver net benefits and exceed the opportunity costs over short periods – e.g. the length of one or two elections cycles or up to a decade or so at most. Policies that damage the economy, like carbon pricing have near zero chance of remaining in place for decades, let alone centuries. The reasons are explained here (see submission2: http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Environment_and_Communications/Clean_Energy_Legislation/Submissions )
To understand the impact of the policies for the individual, see the cost per person of Australia’s carbon pricing legislation and other carbon restraint policies: http://joannenova.com.au/2013/08/in-the-next-37-years-labor-will-spend-60000-per-australian-to-change-the-weather/
China: Nuclear vs Transparency?
Some climate control advocates are pushing nuclear. Be careful what you ask for!
Nuclear Regulators ‘Overwhelmed’ as China Races to Launch World’s Most Powerful Reactor
David L. Hagen,
Let’s maintain perspective. The first point to recognise is that nuclear power is the safest way to generate electricity. So even with the occasional major accident nuclear is still safer than the alternatives.
Second, similar to the above quote could have been written over a century ago as cars first appeared on our roads and then airplanes. We didn’t stop driving cars or flying in planes because they have accidents. We accept the risks because of the huge benefits.
climate sensitivity or no climate sensitivity
The Antarctic is about to set a record for measured sea ice extent in the modern Satellite era. which means there is more ice at the South Pole in the last 34 years then ever before measured.
This is at the same time that CO2 levels have risen from 328 to 401 ppm, a rise of 2 ppm/year which has been put down to increased burning of fossil fuel.
CO2 is known to cause a warming effect in the atmosphere due to its absorption of Infra red radiation, as do all the other gases and water both as a gas and a vapor. The effect of an increase in CO2 levels is postulated to cause a 1 degree rise in temperature for a doubling of the CO level from 35 years ago.
This rise in temperature of the earth at sea surface level for a doubling of CO2 is referred to as the Climate Sensitivity [CS]. The Climate Sensitivity which is easy to define is in practice impossible to estimate or measure.
The reasons involve Natural Variation, which can also be looked at as not being able to measure the multiple effects of winds , waves, currents, forests, deserts, cloud and albedo to mention just some with precision hence the weather daily, weekly and seasonally cannot be fully predicted. Another is the presence of positive and negative feedbacks in the climate system which are even harder to work out.
Some people have stated that Climate Sensitivity cannot be negative, that there must be some positive increment to a forcing and any feedbacks must of necessity be less than the original input.
A measure of the degree of warming is logically that cold areas should warm up and areas of ice should melt.
Here is the conundrum. The Antarctic sea ice should be melting. At a Climate Sensitivity of 1 the world temperature should be 0.7 degrees warmer over the last 35 years and this should show in retreating Antarctic Sea Ice extent.
The fact that the area of Sea Ice is now 1.8 square million kilometers greater than the average over the last 35 years on its own would imply a negative Climate Sensitivity to CO2 increase.
There are arguments why this might not be correct.
We might be having a very, very long lasting natural variation in temperature which is overriding CS.
Temperature changes are different in the 2 hemispheres due to different land mass sizes.
Numerous other explanations have been attempted which fall over for 2 reasons.
The first is that all of them involve measures which are inherently counter intuitive. An example would be hot seas cause more clouds which cause more snow which cause more ice buildup. This logic loop is ultimately self defeating, two plausible ideas are put together but the outcome fails due to the argument on climate sensitivity above. An input should not usually cause a bigger feedback than the input itself.
Other arguments include trade winds blowing faster put forward ten tears ago and trade winds blowing slower put forward last year. Ozone holes are another argument which fails the logic test. Melting causing fresh water which is lighter and sinks allowing colder water to form more ice. Melting glaciers is another.
The second reason is that there are so many of these counter intuitive arguments still around with few in the close knit Antarctic community having the gumption to say no, this is wrong. Hence we have nearly 10 reasons for why there is more ice in the Antarctic. If even half of them were right this would mean that there should be 5 times as much ice in the Antarctic as there currently is.
This leads to the question then of is it possible that there are feedback loops that prevent our climate from changing too drastically whatever the local input. With the input of palaeontology it is obvious that the earth has had massive eons of life producing the fossil fuels in the first place, possibly for over a billion years. The earth’s atmosphere may originally have been devoid of Oxygen and CO2 [see stromatolites]. The upheavals of the earth’s crust have had super volcanoes and eras where burning coal would have produced more CO2 than mankind could ever produce. Yet we are here.
CO2 does warm the air, rising levels with no negative feedbacks should cause a rise in the earth’s temperature, yet one of the biggest, easiest to measure objective measurements says very plainly this is not happening. There may be a bit of transfer of heat to the Northern Hemisphere for the North South divide to exist that is not yet understood. The most likely answer is that Climate sensitivity is a lot lower than most climate scientists are prepared to admit.
Unstoppable has zero credibility. If (s)he had even a couple of IQ points above 100, (s)he would realize (s)he is making Mosher look good by comparison. In fact, based on Unstoppable’s ravings here, I would hazard a guess that (s)he is mentally unstable. Do us all a favor and take your meds. Oh, and watch out for the guy with the big, butterfly net-looking thingie – I’m sure he would like to catch you.
This makes no sense, if I was making Mr. M o s h e r look good my comments would not be so heavily moderated.
Interesting at how the personal attacks are escalating.
Oh, but it does make sense. You are a pain in the a$$. That’s why your comments are so heavily moderated and why you are making Moser look good.
Got it?
I am well aware you are annoyed with fact based arguments.
So you claim you are making fact-based arguments? I haven’t seen one fact out of your ramblings. No proof. Do you understand what proof is? Look it up in the dictionary.
What “Unstoppable” is doing is making all sensible skeptics look foolish by association. Perhaps really a socialist trying to discredit skepticism? Or, given the foolishness displayed, perhaps somebody who even believes in AGW catastrophe trying to discredit skepticism?
Uh no. No one here cares about Mosher, other than his arguments. I may be one of the only commenters here that has actually met Mosher (maybe 3 times). As blog owner, I care about preserving this as an ad hom free venue for participants.
You are spamming my blog, I’ve asked you to go away unless you have something to talk about other than the credentials of people that comment here.
Huh… so hi Steven Mosher. What’s new? Causing any trouble in the sandbox lately?
DOE released The Water-Energy Nexus: Challenges and Opportunities
Full Report 258 pp
WM Briggs Final Proof Global Warming Purely Political
There are very few people left who still need proof about global warming. The world has moved past that.
You equivocate on “anthropogenic global warming” implying majority anthropogenic warming when climate has been warming since the Little Ice Age.
In science, the proponents of the hypothesis bear the burden of proving it with models validated against the evidence.
When ALL the models do not match the evidence, you have no case.
Unproven.
The scandal of fiddled global warming data
The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html
Two weeks ago I would not have believed such stuff. After reading Obama’s shout down rhetoric, I feel that such fudging is plausible. Hard to ignore that many warmists behave like cultists
Global warming (and global cooling) at all time scales is basic education. However, if you think the Orwellian Global Warming (the late 20th century rise in global warming indices, known as AGW, attributed mostly to human CO2 emissions, which seems to be shifting to cooling with the 21st century), then yes – we want to see some proper evidence. Cargo cult science is not enough.
Jim D
It all depends on time frame.
Cooling since 1998.
Warming since Little Ice Age
Cooling since the Holocene Optimum,
etc. etc.
Just for everyone following this, I can reply to every argument made towards me but unfortunately my comments are being heavily moderated and so it appears I cannot.
Uncannotable. Er, maybe it’s Uncannonball, or maybe Uncannibal.
==============
From the article:
When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html
It’s about the IRS but it could just as easily be written about climate policy and those motivated by it;
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/06/22/the_naked_self-interest_of_the_government-worker_class__123069.html
Good article cwon14.
Sun & SAM
Sunspot Integral & Southern Annular Mode (SAM)
Steven Mosher is outraged at his perception of the misuse of science. Poptech is outraged at his perception of the misuse of a term.
==============
So, that makes moshe a scientist and Poptech a Terminator.
====================
Vehicle Miles Traveled tax proposed
http://www.wbaltv.com/politics/vehicle-miles-traveled-tax-proposed/26446130
I missed this. It’s pretty cool.
From the article:
A team of skeptical scientists, citizens, and an Australian Senator have lodged a formal request with the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) to have the BOM and CSIRO audited.
The BOM claim their adjustments are “neutral” yet Ken Stewart showed that the trend in the raw figures for our whole continent has been adjusted up by 40%. The stakes are high. Australians could have to pay something in the order of $870 million dollars thanks to the Kyoto protocol, and the first four years of the Emissions Trading Scheme was expected to cost Australian industry (and hence Australian shareholders and consumers) nearly $50 billion dollars.
Given the stakes, the Australian people deserve to know they are getting transparent, high quality data from the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The small cost of the audit is nothing in comparison with the money at stake for all Australians. We need the full explanations of why individual stations have been adjusted repeatedly and non-randomly, and why adjustments were made decades after the measurements were taken. We need an audit of surface stations. (Are Australian stations as badly manipulated and poorly sited as the US stations? Who knows?)
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/02/announcing-a-formal-request-for-the-auditor-general-to-audit-the-australian-bom/
Now they have some results. Some comments concern BEST.
From the article:
Modelling Global Temperatures – What’s Wrong. Bourke & Amberley – as Case Studies
From Jennifer’s site: “The most extreme example that Ken found of data corruption was at Amberley, near Brisbane, Queensland, where a cooling minima trend was effectively reversed, Figure 1.” Jennifer has also raised her concerns (repeatedly) with Minister Greg Hunt.
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/06/dont-miss-jennifer-marohasy-speaking-in-sydney-wednesday/
Re raised concerns. Likewise and will again.
It’s a conspiracy led by Al Gore.
It’s too complicated for Gore. I bet Tipper is behind him, even now.
From the article:
Perhaps no issue better illustrates the current divide between everyday citizens and our political and business elites than the issue of immigration. The latter group draws the financial gains from a generous labor supply without considering the perspective of those on the other side of the ledger: the working people who have to worry about being laid off and replaced with lower-wage workers, about the strain placed on their local hospitals and neighborhood resources, or about cartel violence spilling across the border into their own communities.
For instance, Sheldon Adelson recently wrote that: “The immigrants here illegally need jobs, want to work and are willing to take on jobs that are not appealing to many Americans.” What about Americans who need jobs? Human beings are not commodities. We need to get our own workers off of unemployment and into good-paying jobs that can support their families. That means if a job is hard or strenuous, employers should raise wages and improve working conditions – why shouldn’t Americans who do tough work get paid more for their efforts?
(end quote)
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/06/22/Exclusive-Sen-Jeff-Session-Pro-Amnesty-Elites-Treat-People-as-Commodities
From the article:
Rep. Darrell Issa said Monday that ex-IRS official Lois Lerner acted on President Obama’s opposition to Citizens United in her targeting of conservative groups.
“I believe Lois Lerner is hiding something. I believe the Justice Department, the IRS, and the White House are interested in her succeeding in hiding what she’s hiding, which is targeting of conservative groups based on their ideology in support of the president’s war on Citizens United, a Supreme Court decision that he didn’t like,” Issa said on Fox News Monday morning.
“This is something he vehemently opposes, and Lois Lerner acted on his opposition,” the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman said.
http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/23/issa-lois-lerner-attacked-conservatives-on-obamas-behalf-video/
What’s needed of course is the “smoking gun” likely in the deleted and purged emails. It would take great technical skill to complete such a targeted and absolute server deletion. Email is mirrored in so many ways, the key is getting forensic experts in the servers ASAP.
As with the clowns at the EPA there has been a tendency to use private mail servers to cover-up standard Federal policy and documentation, that might be the critical link. Effectively you can’t delete those emails without massive private sector assistance from say Hotmail, Google or Yahoo. Of course all left-wing cronies but I don’t think the records would be easy to wipe out on a targeted basis. That would take a massive conspiracy.
We could be one “Climategate” type email drop from an impeachment and conviction.
@ cwon14
“We could be one “Climategate” type email drop from an impeachment and conviction.”
Seriously?? Can you think of ANYTHING that Obama could do that would result in his impeachment AND conviction??
One “Climategate” type email dump, impeachment and conviction.
I didn’t think it would happen again in living memory of Richard Nixon but this administration has exceeded any modern administration in using government facilities in a partisan fashion. EPA, Justice, IRS all used to target dissenting Americans and groups. We’ve seen segments of the military polarized for climate change spamming and corruption.
With ideological monopolies in media, academia in general and local unionized public education we are a hair away from the end of the Republic as we knew it.
From the article:
EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton may have turned down Dinesh D’Souza and the producers of the upcoming docu America but fellow potential 2016 Presidential hopeful Sen. Rand Paul answered the call. Unlike the former Secretary of State, the Kentucky Republican appears in the follow-up to 2012’s 2016: Obama’s America, the second-highest-grossing political documentary of all time. “We wanted to have several of the leading contenders for 2016 be a part of the conversation,” producer Gerald Molen told me. “So we invited several leaders including Hillary Clinton and Rand Paul.”
In this clip from the John Sullivan co-directed pic, which comes out later this week in Atlanta and Houston and then goes wide on July 2, Rand joins D’Souza slamming the government’s relentless legal battle against Aaron Swartz:
http://www.deadline.com/2014/06/dinesh-dsouza-america-movie-clip-aaron-swartz-hillary-clinton-rand-paul/
From the article:
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Prime Minister Tony Abbott reintroduced legislation to the Australian Parliament on Monday that would repeal a carbon tax that the nation’s worst greenhouse gas polluters have to pay.
The opposition center-left Labor Party and minor Greens party used their Senate majority in March to block the bills that would remove the 24.15 Australian dollar ($22.79) tax per metric ton of carbon dioxide that was introduced by a Labor government in July 2012. The bills were defeated 33 votes to 29.
But with new senators to take their seats on July 7 for the first time since Abbott’s conservative coalition government took power in an election in September, the bills are expected to be passed by a narrow margin. Coal mining magnate and carbon tax critic Clive Palmer leads four new senators who have promised their allegiance to his influential Palmer United Party.
…
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_AUSTRALIA_CLIMATE_CHANGE?SITE=MYPSP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-06-23-01-12-16
Is asking WebHubbleTelescope how he avoids backtest overfitting in his CSALT model grounds for having your post deleted? Me makes a lot of claims to authority as a “scientist” and he should be able to answer such a question simply and in a small paragraph, yet he doesn’t, he doesn’t even seem to understand the question, and you allow him to posture here. He had a post on his blog linking to this blog as a denier blog, but has deleted it. Unfortunately, the wayback machine only snapshots his blog every couple of months. He calls anybody who questions CSALT a “denier.” I thought that this blog was about discussion.
Or was it asking FOMD how his much ballyhooed pause ending el Nino is looking these days?
I am a skeptic. I also asked AlecM to explain his point of view about “back radiation can do no thermodynamic work” and why his interpretation invalidates the “greenhouse effect.’ Was this also out of bounds? I notice that he doesn’t seem to be able to answer it.
I just think that people ought to be able to defend the points of view that they promulgate with such presumption of authority.
Also please note, Judith, that I do not attack people themselves, just debate their ideas. At least that is how I feel, maybe I am wrong.
+1
Thank you for your question TJA!
• ‘The Pause’ will end eventually says energy-balance climate-science.
• ‘Eventually’ is *NOW* suggests recent observational data.
• The Verdict The energy-balance climate-change worldview is affirmed.
Thank you for your question TJA!
Time will tell FOMD!
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/animation-11.gif
Why should I respond to a challenge that is meant for financial forecasting situations when we are dealing with climate science?
That is a classic strawman fallacious argument tactic.
What CSALT does is simplify the model of global warming. I will put it up against the best that the deniers can supply, which from the looks of it is the notch filter model of the “rocket scientist” from down under David Evans.
No contest.
No doubt about it, a piece of work.
In other words, you can’t explain how you guard against overfitting.
Oh look: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/10920198/Greenpeace-executive-flies-250-miles-to-work.html
I am sure it is a crisis though, just not a big enough crisis to stop commuting to work by air.
From today’s WSJ. http://online.wsj.com/articles/lamar-smith-what-is-the-epa-hiding-from-the-public-1403563536
Thank you Lamar Smith!
http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.com/2014/06/misrepresentation-of-bray-and-von.html?showComment=1403506008877#c3987302369502607948
“@ Mike R
I would be happy to send the raw data and the code book to anyone that makes a request. Simply send the request by email: dennis.bray@hzg.de. I don’t have time, however, to calculate crosstabs for the entire data set, not at this time, anyway.”
As I mentioned over there, I’m not competent to do it, but I would like to know if the same scientists who are skeptical on one point are skeptical on all, or if a much larger group of scientists are skeptical on at least one critical component of CAGW. Would anyone here like to look at the raw data?
Update from Dennis Bray over there:
“The full raw data set in Excel format with code book is now available at https://www.academia.edu/7454421/CliSci_2013_Data_Set_Excel_Format_with_code_book. The report of descriptive statistics can be found at
https://www.academia.edu/5211187/A_survey_of_the_perceptions_of_climate_scientists_2013
It would be appreciated if any user would share their findings on this blog.”
Hi, this is my first post here (i’ll introduce myself on the denizens page at some point….).
I’m looking for analysis of Sagan’s venusian doomsday scenario — the idea that the earth could experience runaway greenhouse warming until the oceans boil away.
From my cursory look into it, there seem to be many more differences than similarities between earth and venus (atmospheric composition, atmospheric pressure/density, gravitational constant, length of day, insolation, lack/presence of feedbacks originating from a biome, etc); Additionally, one would need to show evidence that the water in venus’ atmosphere was definitely planet-bound at some point (and not always atmospheric), and that earth’s hydrological cycle nets a positive warming feedback (which as I understand it, is certainly not settled yet).
My web searches so far have resulted in very superficial (and wholly unconvincing) explanations of how this applies to earth — explanations that do not seem to consider the vast differences between the two planets.
Does anyone know of more exhaustive explanations, either pro or con? This seems to be one of the sticking points among some alarmists I know, and I’d like to be able to discuss it on an intelligent level.
thanks
bb
Read this article about an ancient forest unearthed by storms and waves on a beach in Britain. Talks about how they were first submerged 5000 years ago, then again 3000 years ago. Then goes on to talk about how they are now being revealed again, because of man-caused climate change. Here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/24/science/a-sunken-kingdom-re-emerges.html?ref=earth&_r=1
It’s the New York Times, so it is a newspaper with influence.
But I fail to see the logic…
5000 years ago, a condition existed. Without our help.
3000 years ago the same condition existed. Without our help.
0 years, the same condition exists, to a much smaller degree, and we are the cause??
I just don’t get it. How do people make that leap, within the context of a single article, and not realize the idiocy of their statements?
Help me out??
Naychur it seems is life on the littoral writ large,
golloping glaciers advancing then retreating, (see
Tony Brown’s historic record on this,) coastal sea
levels low then rising (see Tasmania fer this.) North
West Passage, nevah jest an open and shut case,
the long view can be oh so inconvenient ter claims
of unprecedented this or that.
b-t-s.
“Giant of Geology/Glaciology Christian Schluchter Refutes CO2 Theory… Feature Interview Throws Climate Science Into Disarry” (yet again)
http://notrickszone.com/2014/06/09/giant-of-geologyglaciology-christian-schluechter-refutes-co2-feature-interview-throws-climate-science-into-disarray/
“The scandal of fiddled global warming data
The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/noaanasa-dramatically-altered-us-temperatures-after-the-year-2000/
Antarctic sea ice record highest anomaly:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
How did the IPCC (or any climate scientist) come to the conclusion that a doubling of CO2 levels would lead to a 2C-5C?
And how is that reconciled with paleoclimate data of CO2 levels and avg temperatures of past geological epochs? Such as the Jurassic with CO2 levels of 1950ppm and temps only 3C higher than today’s.
“Another Reasonable Question Why is Climate Etc’s skeptical cohort (including Judith Curry herself) proving to be utterly incapable of generating probabilistic Fermi Estimates? Instead, skeptics post feeble excuses and vague ideological baffle”
Because others guess future based based on doggy models, we don’t have to do the same. The heat absorbing powers of CO2 depend upon how many neutrons are in the molecule and that depends in turn from where the parent fuel came from. This can explain the temperature singularity of 1940. In 1940 the CO2 molecule as it was then reached heat saturation and so the temperature fell very fast.
Im 1940 the lapse rate of tropospheric temperature equalled the maximum temperature that the CO2 molecule could sustain its heat absorbing powers.
There is no evidence that future CO2 can absorb any more heat, since it is still unlikely ro exceed 1.0% of the atmosphere.
Thanks a bunch for sharing this with all people you really know what you’re talking about!
Bookmarked. Please also consult with my web site =).
We can have a link change agreement among us