by Judith Curry
Some interesting new research on understanding why there is a lack of public support for the climate change ‘consensus’, the nature of the scientific consensus, and agendas in characterizing the consensus.
Cultural cognition
Dan Kahan continues to provide insight, most recently in this post “What exactly is going on in their heads?” (And in mine?) Explaining “knowing disbelief” of climate change. Excerpts:
As I explained in my Monash and RMIT lectures, ordinary members of the public—no matter “whose side” they are on—don’t know very much about the basic mechanisms of climate change. That’s hardly a surprise given the polluted state of the science communication environment they inhabit.
What’s genuinely difficult to sort out, though, is how diverse citizens can actually be on different sides given how uniform their (mis)understandings are.
Regardless of whether they say they “believe in” climate change, most citizens’ responses to the “Ordinary Climate Science Intelligence” (OCSI) assessment suggest they are disposed to blame human activity for all manner of adverse climate impacts, including ones wholly at odds with the mechanisms of global warming.
This result suggests that what’s being measured when one disentangles knowledge from identity is a general affective orientation, one that in fact reflects a widespread apprehension of danger.
The only individuals whose responses don’t display this generic affective orientation are ones who score highest on a general science comprehension assessment—the “Ordinary science intelligence” scale (OSI_2.0). These respondents can successfully distinguish the climate impacts that scientists attribute to human activity from ones they don’t.
This discriminating pattern, moreover, characterizes the responses of the most science-comprehending members of the sample regardless of their cultural or political outlooks.
Yet even those individuals still don’t uniformly agree that human activity is causing global warming.
On the contrary, these citizens—the ones, again, who display the highest degree of science comprehension generally & of the mechanisms of climate change in particular—are also the most politically polarized on whether global warming is occurring at all.
The comments are very interesting. I posted two comments, but can’t find them. The issue is this: the public sees a vociferous debate about climate change in the media and on blogs, and people that are actually paying attention to science see reasons to question the consensus.
Don’t even think about it
Re ‘why’ people think the way they do: A new book by George Marshall has recently been published: Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. I’ve ordered a kindle copy, but haven’t read it yet; the reviews are very strong. The book is discussed here, excerpts:
George Marshall’s search for the answers brings him face to face with Nobel Prize-winning psychologists and the activists of the Texas Tea Party; the world’s leading climate scientists and the people who denounce them; liberal environmentalists and conservative evangelicals.
Along the way his research raised other intriguing questions:
- Why do most people never talk about climate change, even people with personal experience of extreme record breaking weather?
- Why did scientists, normally the most trusted professionals in our society, become distrusted, hated, and the targets for violent abuse?
- Why do the people who say climate change is too uncertain become more agitated about the threats of cell phones, meteorite strikes or alien invasion?
- Why does having children make people less concerned about climate change not more?
- And, why is Shell Oil so much more concerned about the threat posed by its slippery floors than the threats posed by its products?
Don’t Even Think About It argues that the answers to these questions do not lie in the things that make us different and drive us apart, but rather in what we all share: how our human brains are wired, our evolutionary origins, our perceptions of threats, our cognitive blindspots, our love of storytelling, our fear of death, and our deepest instincts to defend our family and tribe.
With witty and engaging stories, drawing on years of his own research, Marshall shows how the scientific facts of climate change can become less important to us than the social facts – the views of the people who surround us. He argues that our values, assumptions, and prejudices can take on lives of their own, gaining authority as they are shared, dividing people in their wake.
New study on consensus among scientists
So, what is going on in the scientists’ heads? There’s an interesting new paper on ‘consensus’ that surveys climate scientists regarding their views on attribution.
Scientists’ views about attribution of climate change
Bart Verheggen, Bart Strengers, John Cook, Rob van Dorland, Kees Vringer, Jeroen Peters, Hans Visser, Leo Meyer
ABSTRACT: Results are presented from a survey held among 1868 scientists studying various aspects of climate change, including physical climate, climate impacts, and mitigation. The survey was unique in its size, broadness and level of detail. Consistent with other research, we found that, as the level of expertise in climate science grew, so too did the level of agreement on anthropogenic causation. 90% of respondents with more than 10 climate-related peer-reviewed publications (about half of all respondents), explicitly agreed with anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) being the dominant driver of recent global warming. The respondents’ quantitative estimate of the GHG contribution appeared to strongly depend on their judgment or knowledge of the cooling effect of aerosols. The phrasing of the IPCC attribution statement in its fourth assessment report (AR4) – providing a lower limit for the isolated GHG contribution – may have led to an underestimation of the GHG influence on recent warming. The phrasing was improved in AR5. We also report on the respondents’ views on other factors contributing to global warming; of these Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) was considered the most important. Respondents who characterized human influence on climate as insignificant, reported having had the most frequent media coverage regarding their views on climate change.
The questions in this survey are far and away the most sophisticated an nuanced that I’ve seen in a survey on this topic. The punchline is 82% of total respondents agree with the IPCC attribution assessment, with 90% agreement from the scientists most qualified to evaluate this. These are certainly more defensible and believable numbers than the infamous 97%. Bart Verheggan also has some blog posts on the paper, see this FAQ
My only minor criticisms of this study was the lack of diversity in the authorship, who they asked, and who responded. Here is who they asked:
Survey Sample. Participation in our survey was sought from scientists having authored or coauthored peer-reviewed articles or assessment reports related to climate change. Approximately 6000 names were assembled from articles with the keywords “global warming” and/or “global climate change”, covering the 1991−2011 period via the Web of Science. Around 2000 names were collected from a public database assembled by Jim Prall, based on scientific literature up to 2009,17 supplemented by an additional ∼500 authors of recent (2009−2011) climate science peer-reviewed literature. Prall’s database also includes signatories of public statements disapproving of mainstream climate science. They were included in our survey to ascertain that the main criticisms of climate science would be captured. This last group amounts to less than 5% of the total number of respondents, about half of whom had only published in the gray literature on climate change.
Filtering scientists by whether they use keywords ‘global warming’ or ‘global climate change’ would miss a lot of relevant people publishing on specific aspects of processes of relevance to climate change, e.g. solar physics, ocean circulations, even clouds. They did make efforts to include ‘skeptics’ by looking at signatories of public statements disapproving of mainstream climate change, but this captures the more ‘activist’ types, not necessarily the most serious scholarship that is skeptical.
The other issue is who actually responded. I think I was invited to participate in this, I vaguely recall a few emails (but this was 2012 and I no longer have the emails). I didn’t respond to the survey (unless my memory is really failing me). I’ve responded previously to AMS and von Storch/Bray surveys on this topic. Bart is regarded by many as a partisan in the climate change; adding John Cook to the author list may have been sufficient for some people not to respond to the survey, figuring that this would be more Lewandowsky/Cook style spin. Adding a skeptical coauthor (see my recent post Institutionalizing Dissent) could have contributed to to a broader invite list, broader response, and possible changes to the questions or portrayal of the results.
But overall Verheggen et al. are to be congratulated for the most insightful analysis to date on this.
Social scientists on the consensus
And finally, what are the social scientists thinking that are analyzing the ‘consensus’? Joe Duarte continues to hit hard on the Cook et al paper with a new post Cooking stove use, housing associations, white males and the 97%. The bottom line is that they included papers on topics like cook stoves, inferring that they supported the ‘consensus’, but didn’t include relevant papers by Lindzen and Spencer. This is really pretty unbelievable. Duarte characterizes all this as ‘Sesame Street consensus counting.’ I was particularly struck by this text towards the end of the lengthy post:
My fellow scientists, let’s huddle up for a minute. What are we doing? What the hell are we doing? I’m mostly speaking to climate scientists, so the “we” is presumptuous – I ask for a couple of minutes of your charity. Is this really what we want? Do we want to coarsen science this much? Do we want to establish a scientific culture where scientists must take polar positions on some issue in the field? Do we want to tout a “consensus” that ignores all those who don’t take a polar position? Do we want to import the fallacy of demanding that people prove a negative, a fallacy that we often point out on issues like evolution, creationism, religion, and so forth? Modern scientific culture has long lionized the sober, cautious scientist, and has had an aversion to polar positions, simplistic truths, and loyalty oaths. Do we mean to change that culture? Have we tired of it? Are we anti-Popper now? No one is required to be Popperian, but if we’re replacing the old man, it should be an improvement, not a step back to the Inquisition. Do we want dumb people who have no idea what they’re doing speaking for us? Are we fraud-friendly now, if it serves our talking points? When did we start having talking points?
In any case, what the hell are we doing? What exactly do we want science to be and represent? Do we want “science” to mean mockery and malice toward those who doubt a fresh and poorly documented consensus? Do we want to be featured in future textbooks, and not in a good way? When did we discover that rationality requires sworn belief in fresh theories and models that the presumed rational knower cannot himself validate? When did we discover that rationality requires belief in the rumor of a consensus of researchers in a young and dynamic field whose estimates are under constant revision, and whose predictions center on the distant future? (A rumor, operationally, since laypeople aren’t expected to engage directly with the journal articles about the consensus.) Who discovered that rationality entails these commitments, or even argued thusly? Give me some cites, please. When did we discover that people who doubt, or only mildly embrace, the rumor of a consensus of researchers in a young and dynamic field whose estimates are under constant revision, and whose predictions center on distant future developments, are “deniers”? When did science become a church? When did we abandon epistemology? Again, what are we doing?]
I think some of you who’ve defended this study got on the wrong train. I don’t think you meant to end up here. I think it was an accident. You thought you were getting on the Science Train. You thought these people — Cook, Nuccitelli, Lewandowsky — were the science crowd, and that the opposition was anti-science, “deniers” and so forth. I hope it’s clear at this point that this was not the Science Train. This is a different train. These people care much less about science than they do about politics. They’re willing to do absolutely stunning, unbelievable things to score political points. What they did still stuns me, that they did this on purpose, that it was published, that we live in a world where people can publish these sorts of obvious scams in normally scientific journals. If you got on this train, you’re now at a place where you have to defend political activists rating scientific abstracts regarding the issue on which their activism is focused, able to generate the results they want. You have to defend people counting psychology studies and surveys of the general public as scientific evidence of endorsement of AGW. You have to defend false statements about the methods used in the study. Their falsity won’t be a matter of opinion — they were clear and simple claims, and they were false. You have to defend the use of raters who wanted to count a bad psychology study of white males as evidence of scientific endorsement of AGW. You have to defend vile behavior, dishonesty, and stunning hatred and malice as a standard way to deal with dissent.
JC reflections
I think we need to declare the idea of a 97% consensus among climate scientists on the issue of climate change attribution to be dead. Verheggen’s 82-90% number is more defensible, but I’ve argued that this analysis needs to be refined.
Climate science needs to be evaluated by people outside the climate community, and this is one reason why I found Kahan’s analysis to be interesting of people who scored high on the science intelligence test. And why the perspectives of scientists and engineers from other fields are important.
As I’ve argued in my paper No consensus on consensus, a manufactured consensus serves no scientific purpose and can in fact torque the science in unfortunate ways.
Understanding scientific disagreement on the topic of climate change would be a welcome addition to the sociology of climate change science, but a meaningful study on this topic would need to include at least one skeptical scientist as a coauthor.
Too many alarmists conflate skepticism of catastrophe with skepticism of the basic science. This is transparently ignorant or disingenuous. Why do they think this is good communication?
==================
+1
After sacrificing our quaint notions of right v. wrong on the altar of political correctness, intellectual convenience and moral indifference, society is increasingly guided by average truths. Common understanding becomes a meaningless average of the everyday humdrum of average scientists, journalists, politicians, personalities and others. Hazy, lazy media-makers force bipolar ideas to grip and claw together in a dance on a tightrope.
Rather than a delicate balance of equal opposites, what journalists report on the scientific debate about global warming becomes an unwitting and valueless smearing of contention and consensus. The common understanding becomes a maceration of pride and prejudice, like pounded cakes of delicate icy fish filets and pungent sun baked fish skins.
Wag – Right, all that is achieved socially by the current level of climate discourse is a polling of ignorance. Good research, particularly when contradicting the PC line du jour, becomes the round peg of new data being forced into the square hole of consensus.
Ignorant on the part of the 2nd order info types…journalists, typical liberal NYT’s readers etc Deeply disingenuous among climate scientists.
It isn’t about “communication” to begin with, it’s about political agenda;
http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2014/09/04/neither-individuals-nor-especially-the-government-should-support-national-politically-correct-radio/
If you accept the debate as anything less than a political meme, if you make pretensions that it is fundamentally a “science” debate, you are no where near the truth. It’s very hard for people in the discussed professional levels to accept it as Dr. Curry is clearly an example. She only ever acknowledges segments while mitigating the impact to the entire field. This of course is actual……denial.
AGW evolved from other similarly politicized “science” and green movements. Acknowledgement is the first step to reforms that matter.
+1 kim
Just when there has been a streak of warmer than usual weather and the constantly reinforced global warming meme is beginning to make sense, along comes a streak of colder than usual weather and people are reminded that it has been that way all their lives. They become suspicious when every heat wave, tornado outbreak, and hurricane is used as a pretext for preaching the same tired sermon. It shows that the public is ahead of those “scientists” who choose to package their message using irrational and unscientific means in a mistaken belief that if they told the story the right way it wouldn’t gain traction. Such is the corner that climate science communication has painted itself into.
Kim – Its purposeful; done with intent and malice. Activists and Alarmist have ZERO appetite for facts or observational science. All they need is propaganda.
Here’s the blueprint via Adolf Hitler:
“All great movements are popular movements. They are the volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotions, stirred into activity by the ruthless Goddess of Distress or by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the people.”
“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”
“All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.”
“As soon as by one’s own propaganda even a glimpse of right on the other side is admitted, the cause for doubting one’s own right is laid.”
“Hate is more lasting than dislike.”
“It is not truth that matters, but victory.”
“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep it, and eventually they will believe it.” – attributed above to Hitler, fomenting the Nazi consensus.
Enjoying exclusive govenment finance, CAGW is now too big to fail. Big Government has so much to gain from making the public believe it, and so much face to lose if it fails to.
Political consensus juggernauts like these are not stopped without major political upheaval.
kim, the basic science says business-as-usual leads to 4 C above pre-industrial temperatures around 2100. If the skeptics agree with this part of basic science, this would be a great starting point, but they don’t. The disagreement is about basic science. Many think 4 C by 2100 is near impossible even with all the emissions we will be adding. If only the skeptics agreed on basic science, we could have the debate about the effects of 4 C or whether we should start looking at alternative and cleaner energy. Or rather, that debate has already started without hem, but the skeptics could finally join it.
No, the basic science does not say 4 degrees, Jim D.
The basic science says there should be some warming influence from GHGs.
Then there is a big gap between what kim calls a difference between basic science and catastrophe. It is not one or the other, unless you skeptics automatically equate 4 C with catastrophe.
“Basic science” to Jim D apparently being something that ignores uncooperative measurements, and bigs-up feeble ones.
If only the consensus could agree that measurements matter, we could have a debate about when/if climate science is good enough to begin to inform policy. Or rather, that debate has already started without them, but the believers could finally join it.
I’ve read the basic science. It does not say 4C. The IPCC fairly captured the range previously–1.1C for CO2 alone, between 1.5C and 4.5C with feedbacks.
I don’t think I’m alone in having read the basic science. Jim D, I must ask–have you?
Jim D,
Where? Reference and link please?
4 C is for 700 ppm which is a conservative BAU scenario that will be hit around 2100. This is more than a doubling, hence 4 C.
Jim D, regarding 4C for 700 ppm, that may be your earnest belief, but it is not what science says. At all.
Tom, even if you don’t like it, 3 C is still a central estimate between 1.5 and 4.5 C, which is where the science is, and they are more to the middle. I think the poll put most climate scientists in the center of this range.
Jim D
Don’t know HOW many times people have to tell you.
1.5 to 3 is NOT part of the “Basic Science”. 1.5 to 4.5 is
a “suspected” feedback considerations to the “Basic
Science” of ~1 per doubling of CO2.
The “suspected” feedback is NOT considered part of
“Basic Science
The IPCC WG1 reports are called The Physical Science Basis because they address the basic science. WG1 includes ranges of uncertainty in sensitivity which is a well defined concept but only accurately estimated for more idealized atmospheres. For example a sharp value is easily obtained by just radiative transfer theory under the assumptions of constant relative humidity and constant clouds, given that CO2 doublings are small 1% perturbations, not a complete atmospheric transformation, and the behavior would be linear. Past climate gives no indication of any strong nonlinearity due to unaccounted for factors even under the rather more dramatic change since the last Ice Age. The skeptics are hoping that clouds will kick in now with a strong negative feedback, when they haven’t prevented the warming from the Ice Ages, and observational signs indicate a positive feedback, if anything.
Back to the topic. So, what is going on in their heads to have this expectation of a negative feedback that hasn’t happened so far? kim agreeing with the basic science may mean being free of such irrational expectations, but perhaps not. Some think the “pause” means that this has finally kicked in, but when they look closer it is natural variation in the ocean and sun, not clouds this time either, so they have to wait some more.
Jim D
I don’t care what the IPCC considers basic science. Yes, feedbacks are a given. And that is basic. But there is nothing “basic” about calculating those feedbacks. If you take IPCC’s feedbacks as given since 2000, they have failed forward fifteen years. If you take IPCC’s feedbacks and hindcast 100-150 years they fail. Explain how any rational person can accept the idea that the understanding of feedbacks is basic.
If feedbacks are so simple and straightforward, Economics would have been a done deal a century ago. What happens when the government spends a dollar, what happens when they tax a dollar. I grew up with Keynesian models, Monetarist models, the ideas of Milton Friedman, Rational Expectations and so on. It’s been many moons since I’ve investigated Macroeconomic Theory, it’s probably all changed. My point is Climate as a Theory can be no simpler than Economic Theory and to believe that our understanding of Climate is in a state equivalent to a “Grand Unified Theory” is preposterous.
Everyone has a thermometer and can check temperatures for themselves.
They can’t check whether or not solar neutrinos oscillate away!
That is the difference!
In March 2001, four (4) of us reported that H-fusion generates only a part of solar energy.
http://www.omatumr.com/lpsc.prn.pdf
Within a few months, about 180 government scientists reported that solar neutrinos from H-fusion just oscillate away before they get here from the Sun.
97% of the solar scientists thus agreed that solar neutrinos oscillate away.
I have my doubts about this theory. The core of the sun would be about 11 times heavier if it were iron. This is the sort of thing people notice.
On the oscillation – I thought that that was due to neutrino mass which causes the neutrinos to alternate between the tau, electron, and muon neutrino states. They don’t oscillate away, they just change flavors.
Iron is the Sun’s most abundant element, but the Sun’s core is a pulsar:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Solar_Energy.pdf
Well… did some checking. The counter views use appeals to simplicity and such…
Your theory is regarded as a fringe theory… but other scientists seem to say nice things about you.
“Iron is the Sun’s most abundant element”
yes, except for Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen…etc.
Iron is about 0.014 % of the sun’s total mass.
@PA, harkin…
Don’t bother. He’s always spamming this (and, I suspect other) blog(s) with his “iron sun” stuff. Probably a nut, certainly O/T.
Back off guys.
Apparently the Earth has an iron core. What theory of Solar System formation excludes Iron from the Sun?
The density of an Iron plasma and photon soup column half a million km high has to be a theoretical value with a large error band.
Cheers, Dr Manuel.
We don’t need to understand climate science to make rational decisions on policy.
The real issue is that scientists, have strong opinions about policy and argue for ‘Actions” which suite their ideological beliefs. But the actions they want have negligible probability of success in the real world.
==> “I posted two comments, but can’t find them.
???
Try using “Judith Curry” in the text box of your browser’s search feature. They’re there. You have to click on “next 50 comments” to see the second one.
Actually, looks like there are 3 on the first page…
Problem solved -‘
Try fixing your linky:
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/8/19/what-exactly-is-going-on-in-their-heads-and-in-mine-explaini.html
Your link takes you directly to the third page of comments.
So people whose livelihoods, careers and next grant funding depend on the AGW gravy train believe strongly in its core message?
Wow!
In other news, 98% of trainee Catholic priests reported to believe in the teachings of Mother Church, 75% of drunk drivers affirm they are fit behind the wheel.
And a truly astonishing 100% of the membership of the Colllege of Homeopaths agree that Homeopathy works.
Nexy week: I review the paper ‘The effect of AGW on Sylvan Defecatory Habits of Ursus Arctos and similar large mammals’.
==> “So people whose livelihoods, careers and next grant funding depend on the AGW gravy train believe strongly in its core message?”
It is interesting that people who self-describe as “skeptics” so often present such classically fallacious arguments that actually reflect a lack of due skeptical diligence.
I’m skeptical of that, Josh.
Unlike “shills for big oil”?
No lack of diligence involved. Just observing that any self-selecting body of people will most likely be happy to agree with the core proposition of the thing they self-select about. That they do so proves nothing.
Example 1, If you were to interview people just as they came through the turnstile marked Home Fans at the next Aldershot Town FC game, you’d probably find that 90% of them described themselves as Shots fans. But this is hardly a surprise.
Example 2: I was at a climate lecture at the Institute of Physics last week. 90% of those attending were either physicists or climatologists. But given the choice of venue and the subject, is this a suprise to anyone? What does it prove?
Example 3: Anybody who has managed to publish half a dozen papers on climatology is going to have chosen to be pretty much steeped in the stuff for at least 5 years..and will just about have dedicated their future careers to its continuance. Its not news that they do.
Come On You Shots!
==> “No lack of diligence involved”
You have no idea what motivates individual scientists.
If there is a causal link between source of income and product of science, you haven’t proven anything about the direction of causality – as a general principle let alone for any particular individuals. Scientists are paid to produce science. This is a societal decision about what best benefits the group. As such, scientists paid to produce science may wind up “overwhelmingly” (using Richard’s language) publish papers with a commonality in their conclusions because that’s where the best evidence points. Could there be a conflict of self-interest involved? Of course. But the potential for that to be true does not = an argument unless you suspend skepticism. Skepticism would, by definition, require you to explore alternative explanations and rule them in or out by virtue of evidence
==> “So people whose livelihoods, careers and next grant funding depend on the AGW gravy train believe strongly in its core message?”
A meaningless statement except that it is a statement of (presumed) fact. Without supporting evidence, it doesn’t support conclusions except in conspiracy-minded folks who don’t apply the principles of skepticism.
Everything about your statement is subjective. By what measure do you determine that their “livelihoods” and “careers” “depend” on a particular “message.” Where is your discussion of counterfactual explanation for what their “livelihoods” and “careers’ might be like if their science produced different results? “AGW gravy train” = confirmation bias/subjective reasoning.
==> “Just observing that any self-selecting body of people will most likely be happy to agree with the core proposition of the thing they self-select about. That they do so proves nothing.”
Yes. Good. That’s better. But notice the absence of “gravy train” reference.
Now you can pretend that there wasn’t anything in the first post that doesn’t conflict with your statement that I just excerpted. You’re entitled. I don’t buy it. But someone else might and there’s no way to prove it one way or the other. I think that you accepted my point and responded accordingly, and appropriately from a skeptical perspective. Kudos.
I will point out that (what is, IMO) your unskeptical thinking (as shown in the original post) is not exclusive to “skeptics.” It also applies, for example, when “realists” assume/assert/imply that Judith’s view on the science is a product of her “gravy train.” It also applies when “realists” argue that “most” “skeptics” hold the views that they do because they are on the “fossil fuel gravy train” or some such nonsense. So I use “realist” in quotes and I use “skeptic” in quotes.
Same as it ever was.
Joshie is the runt who claims that Reagan’s SDI was motivated by a need to funnel money into the Military Industrial Complex. Scientists who work in the MIC are not pure like those working in the climate alarmism field.
“It also applies, for example, when “realists” assume/assert/imply that Judith’s view on the science is a product of her “gravy train.” ”
Maybe we can just ask the kind doctor if she thinks there is a gravy train?
And Joshua, when Obama announces $1 billion to fight climate change, just who do think are in line for this cash, skeptics? Just who do you think approves grant proposals in academia that get to go up the line, specifically climate related? You assume the lopsided grant money for pro CAGW “research” is due to the better science being done? Really?
When the topics touch reality we can count on Joshua in particular to fly off into unreality about “skeptics”.
You’re right about one point Joshua, it isn’t really about “money” (even if it is a factor);
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/fbi-cuban-intelligence-aggressively-recruiting-leftist-american-academics-as-spies-influence-agents/
It’s about social IDs, political culture, belief systems. It isn’t about “science” clearly.
Joshua,
Its been reported that the US alone has spent upwards of $40 BILLION on climate research and since 2012 has spend more than $2.5 billion annually.
How much would be spent if AWG was proven to be a false? How many climate scientists would lose their departments, institutes, etc? Unless you are unaware, many of the University professors are required to bring in soft-money to keep a job.
Its extremely naive to believe that funding is unrelated to objectivity.
Joshua, if you are ever able to relax your obsession with “skeptics” you might find you are more concerned about combatting the mainstream toxic drivel like this (at link), which poisons the public discussions and renders many independent minds less likely to respect what issues forth from the various true believers in dangerous “climate change”:
Speaking of being “seemingly blind to it”:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/02/24/205554/my-response-to-dr-judith-currys-unconstructive-essay/
Joe Romm’s “honesty” (lack of same) may be considered in the light of his deletion of An open letter to graduate students and young scientists in fields related to climate research from Dr. Judith Curry regarding hacked CRU emails
AK I didn’t spot this early, v. interesting
Joshua would also have us believe that those who hire and fire and pay pipers, don’t end up with the piping that most benefits them.
This implies that a man or organisation that orders and pays for an ice-cream, but is given a lettuce, would uncomplainingly reselect the store in question rather than shop elsewhere.
State (in the broad sense) funding of climate science has the same overwhelming, ineradicable, built-in flaw that tobacco funding of smoking studies had – a huge vested interest in a predetermined outcome, regardless of what methods were used to achieve it. And Climategate told all we need to know about the methods state-funded climate science uses.
Joshua and the clapped-out old alarmist “conspiracy” strawman, again:
For the Nth time, Joshua, you don’t need a conspiracy to explain people acting in their own interest. It’s just business-as-usual. Government and its hired scientists both have an obvious substantial vested interest in CAGW theory, so that is what they are pushing. Exactly as you would expect.
Indeed if they were perceived to NOT be doing that – if they were NOT being biased and crooked – now THAT would require some sort of conspiracy to explain, postulating as it did some some secret cabal of govenment climate scientists with integrity. Somewhere.
So actually it is those like Joshua who like to suggest government climate scinece is open and honest, who are indulging in conspiracy theorising. Noone else, certainly not skeptics.
McIntyre shills for Big Oil? The link you provide leads to another leak that alleges that McKittrick, not McIntyre, once had expenses paid to speak at an event hosted by an organization that occasionally received donations from energy companies.
Lying through your teeth much?
@ willard (@nevaudit) | September 5, 2014 at 11:45 pm |
Speaking of being “seemingly blind to it”:
*****
It is only right that Steve M. audit whatever he likes. If you believe something else needs an audit, feel free to do it yourself instead of posting disingenuous BS.
Tom
If you read Skiphills comment it seems he was calling the link nonsense, not endorsing it.
tonyb
> It is only right that Steve M audit whatever he likes.
What’s good for the Auditor is good for Dan Kahan:
http://judithcurry.com/2014/09/05/what-exactly-is-going-on-in-their-heads/#comment-625117
Don’t be seemingly blind to the overburdening tactic, jim2. It’s a common one at Steve’s.
Williard. Steve M., like all of us, has limited time. He audits what interests him.
You and Joshua spend hours looking for alleged inconsistencies in what Dr. Curry writes. Same but to a lesser extent with Steve.
Just about all these sorts of activities result in poppycock for various reasons.
1. No human is consistent in beliefs. If you find one that is, then the IQ is probably very sub par. Because humans learn as time progresses and as we learn, our beliefs change.
2. Context. Cherry picking this or that writing and comparing it to another out of context is fraudulent. Maybe not in a legal sense, but certainly in an “honesty” sense.
Of course, you and Joshua know all this, you just do these sorts of things for political effect or in an attempt to paint your target in a less than flattering light.
Your feeble attempts at sliming Steve and Dr. Curry make no one look bad except yourselves.
jim2 | September 6, 2014 at 9:33 am |
“Cherry picking… do these sorts of things for political effect or in an attempt to paint your target in a less than flattering light”
Who would do such a thing?
Awful.
Here’s what the Auditor just said, jim2:
<blockquote
But isnt the Lennard Bengtsson incident an example of someone taking a position that “conflicts with their cultural group”. But although this incident was very widely covered and very controversial and even though it seems to exemplify one of Kahan’s core hypotheses, Kahan did not write about the incident and was seemingly blind to it, because he is much quicker to recognize ideology among his opponents than in himself and people with whom he sympathizes. An easy enough failing, but one hopes that social scientists would be more objective.
So Dan has not covered the B affair because of his ideology.
So Dan is not as objective as the Auditor expects from social scientists.
So Dan’s not free to study the objects he fancies.
Only the Auditor is.
Now, go in your room and reflect on your ideology, jim2, pretty please with sugar on it.
AK, curryja, Romm didn’t delete it, it moved.
Why thank you JamesNV, for an interesting tidbit. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?
First, the page you referenced cannot be found with a search, at least as of this time. (Hopefully interested readers will follow links and take screen prints.) What that search still does find (note that I originally posted the comment with links on August 27) is two pages, “The most popular posts of 2009”, and “The most-discussed Climate Progress posts of 2009”. Both of those, as of this moment, link to the old location. Where they get 404’s. Thus, there is no way by searching that Prof. Curry’s letter can be found. At ThinkProgress. Maybe it wasn’t deleted, but it was hidden!
Now, the first reference the Wayback machine has to this new location is April 25, 2012.
As for the old location, the latest instance of the actual page I could find was May 19, 2011. After that, the Wayback Machine crawler was redirected to the 404 page. (AFAIK.)
It would appear (noting that appearances can be deceiving) that the letter was removed from its spot shortly after May 19, 2011, and showed up in its new spot, immune from the search engine, some time before April 25, 2012. All very interesting.
BTW, it just occurred to me that maybe all those links got 404’s. So I spot-checked a few on each of the “most” pages. Nope, all the rest I tried were there at as of a few minutes before posting this comment.
“overburdening”
This is a term used by alarmists to decribe what genuine scientists call proving your case, supporting you argument in a proper way, examining other avenues, dealing with criticisms, providing your data and algorithims.
All a tedious waste of time for the busy scientivist with some more important political or funding agenda to attend to.
Kahan ignores a recent, much publicised example of something that fits his hypothesis, but flatly contradicts the ideology trying to palm off as fact.
Yeah, I guess he was just too ‘overburdened’ to include it.
@joshie
Whether I do or don’t fit into your own mental model of an ideal ‘sceptic’ may be of huge interest to you, but is of very limited relevance to the rest of us.
And the cynic might wonder if your endless discussion of this rather peripheral point is a distraction technique to avoid discussion of the real problems with climatology, climatologists and their cheerleaders/hangers on.
AK, most sites have a terrible internal search engine. Searching for “Judith Curry cru” and “Judity Curry hacked” both return the article in question. It’s listed last, but it seems they sort results chronologically rather than by relevance. Which reminds me of a quote:
“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
PS For those who may not know, if you want to Google search just a particular site you can add “site:thedomain.com” (no quotes) to your search terms and it will limit the results to those from the site in question.
@John M…
Thanks, but my point had to do with the fact that they hid the letter, not how well they hid it. After all, I suppose anybody competent would have realized somebody who really wanted to see it would try the Wayback Machine. (Note that the last few entries there also point to the 404 page.)
That they did single it out for special attention, IMO tantamount to hiding it, is demonstrated (at this moment) by the fact that clicking on any other link on the most popular posts of 2009 gets redirected to the new locations, while clicking on the link for the letter still gets a 404.
Willard – I’m a little late seeing your Goose-Gander comment. But as others pointed out, Kahan was ignoring a highly publicized incident in his own camp. I think that is the difference between him and SM.
Here was Dan’s response, jim2:
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/8/25/lewandowsky-on-knowing-disbelief.html?currentPage=2#comment21039002
Compare your defense of the Auditor’s freedom of audit with Dan’s own commitments.
Well, Willard, considering that at this point I’m bored to tears, I appreciate the input. I’m moving on.
Once upon a time, many moons ago, an engineer who thinks very clearly, has stacks of real world experience and explains it well said:
Latimer Alder | May 19, 2013 at 12:51 am
Wise words indeed, Peter :-)
+Lots
Peter, there are “economists” if wish to sink this low in the food chain.
97%, the transmogrification of uncertainty into something else.
@joshua
Thanks for the peer-review.
But among your many critcisms I didn’t spot anything to suggest that its main point – that a self-selecting group has that as their point of commonality is neither news nor proof of anything – is wrong.
As to your critcisms of my thinking skills, or whatever it was you took such objection to, rest assured that I will treat your remarks with the seriousness I feel they deserve.
Come On You Shots
Are you suggesting the science is fraudulent? That the results that either support AGW or the negative consequences are just made up?
Joesph- What negative consequences are you referencing? What will occur and when? What makes you confident that these things will happen when you think they will? Are you sure the negative consequences are greater than the negative?
I haven’t seen very many examples of potential benefits of climate other CO2 fertilization effects which will be more than offset by temperature increases.
Joseph-
What specific harms do you fear from a temperature increase? How much will the temperature rise over what time period? The point is you do not know that any net harms will occur or when…there is only the risk that something bad will happen.
There’s none so blind as those who will not see.
AFAIK, according to most models, as well as observations, most of the “warming” is concentrated in high-latitude mid-continental winters. That means more crops in places like Canada, Siberia, etc.
Benefits?
There are substantial risks according to the IPCC. I don’t see your point.
What science backs this up? What is the net effect of climate change on changes in crop productivity. I saw one conversation that indicated the losses in the US would dwarf any gains in Canada.
So what? You asked for benefits, northern areas get benefits.
Anyway, estimates of “losses” (or “benefits” for that matter) are highly speculative, based on a number of unwarranted assumptions. (Such as that crops adapted to the new conditions won’t be available.)
Well, cotton at 2x CO2 produces 80% more mass and 200% more yield.
Any crop like peaches that is grown from Florida to Michigan isn’t going to be stressed by a degree or two change in high temperatures (most of the CO2 effect is an increase in low temperatures that lengthens the growing season). And many crops are grown over a similar range.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/study-finds-plant-growth-surges-as-co2-levels-rise-16094
An Australian study found an 11% increase in foliage since 1982 (they were expecting a 5-10% change).
@ Joseph
“There are substantial risks according to the IPCC. I don’t see your point.”
The IPCC.
That would be the organization that was created for the specific purpose of providing scientific confirmation–NOT investigation–of the axiomatic dangers posed by ACO2 and to provide a laundry list of the CATASTROPHES that would ensue if governments around the world did not engage in a coordinated effort to control or eliminate the usage of fossil fuels through a combination of regulating and/or taxing every human activity that either produced or consumed energy?
And whose funding and continued existence are absolutely dependent on its continuing production of ‘studies’ and overwhelming ‘scientific consensus’ confirming the frightening consequences (increased danger of kidney stones???) of our continued production of ACO2?
THAT IPCC is the organization on which we should rely for our information re the hazards of ACO2?
Amazing they don’t see their own selection bias!
Josuha seems to think blatant vested interest is a “fallacy”.
This idiocy is typical of people who exhibit truebeliever symptoms about CAGW.
Q & A with Kevin Trenberth
For what it’s worth I had the same experience.
Hansen on scientific reticence:
“may or may not”
Climate Science, Nutshell Version.
Andrew
Grants are handed out by the administrative branch of government in the US; a head-down non-committed approach is the best way to avoid disrupting a steady stream of funding. Any scientist speaking out more than the norm is acting against their personal interest in what they perceive to be the public interest. This tends to make the norm of public posture lag far behind the actual behind-the-scences consensus.
I expect the pressures are similar elsewhere.
That is to say, to the extent that the corrupting influence being mentioned here exists, it operates in the opposite sense than the one Mr Adler proposes.
It is not as if climatology would cease to exist if CO2 were not a greenhouse gas. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine that climatology would be better funded (since it serves the interests of the aerospace industry and of agriculture) if it were not forced by reality to deliver bad news.
There is no funding motivation for government-funded scientists to scare people, at least in the US. Indeed, the motivation quite palpably goes the other way.
What you are saying is the same as saying military weapons research would get more funding absent any enemies presenting a credible threat.
Seriously?
“Indeed, it’s easy to imagine that climatology would be better funded if it were not forced by reality to deliver bad news.”
Interesting perspective counter to what we often hear. However your one line is not something I hear a lot. Good news, Mother Nature has given us 15 years to get our act together. For technology to advance and to try out new things. As some of the new ocean involving studies are saying, maybe the oceans did cause some of the earlier (late 70s to late 90s) warming. Aren’t we lucky it wasn’t as bad as we thought. More good news, extreme weather doesn’t seem to be as bad as we thought. And yet more good news, it may take thousands of year to melt those ice sheets. I think you may have a point when you say scientists are pre-disposed to not be alarmists. However might there be another factor that explains alarmism?
mtobis: “Grants are handed out by the administrative branch of government in the US; a head-down non-committed approach is the best way to avoid disrupting a steady stream of funding.”. Doesn’t sound like the government I know.
Only in it for the gold.
================
mtobis,
1. Government funds (virtually all) climate science
2.. Governmant has an enormous vested interest in alarmism, since that would give it the justification for ramping up taxes and bureaucracies.
This means climate acientists who preach alarm will be viewed more favorably than those that don’t. The more alarm, the more favor.
This is plain for all too see.
“On the contrary, these citizens—the ones, again, who display the highest degree of science comprehension generally & of the mechanisms of climate change in particular—are also the most politically polarized on whether global warming is occurring at all.”
Maybe that is because there are epistemological problems with the arguments of the Alarmists that are extremely difficult for them to overcome and that are hard for people who have any background in hard sciences or technologies that require on to above all, not fool oneself or pay the consequences, to ignore.
Kahan’s evidence is that the tendency described in the quote you provided applies to other issues as well, and not just to disagreements about climate change – hence if you accept his broader argument then you’d have to explain why views on climate change are an outlier.
Other fields of science are not trying to force new behaviors and restrictions of freedom on us. So in that case, we are perfectly willing to wait and see, for example, if string theory will eventually overthrow Quantum Mechanical formulations like “Schrodinger’s Cat,” or that the universe is truly that odd. QM is spectacularly successful at making predictions, as was Newton until our measurements got better, or General Relativity. People are genuinely trying to overturn GR all the time, and String Theory is a termite colony in QM, as they should be.
Anybody who attempts to examine the premises of AGW is denounced as an outcast stooge of Koch or Big Oil
Let’s use GMO as an example:
If you know anything about GMO and agriculture, you disagree with the anti-GMO crowd but you’re not really bothered by it because you assume they are harmless and real research is continuing.
If your government is about to do something truly stupid based on the activism of the anti-GMO crowd (let’s say ban life-saving work on half-baked fears leading to a precautionary principle), suddenly you are one of “the most politically polarized” on the issue.
Shorter Kahan- “the moment governments decided to make energy significantly more expensive using policies that would have little impact whether AGW was real or not, people who knew the most about AGW became the most vocal critics of the plan.”
Perhaps we have not all read and understand, the same textbook.
“Don’t Even Think About It argues that the answers to these questions do not lie in the things that make us different and drive us apart, but rather in what we all share: how our human brains are wired, our evolutionary origins, our perceptions of threats, our cognitive blindspots, our love of storytelling, our fear of death, and our deepest instincts to defend our family and tribe.”
If we had, the 1,868 scientists alone, might not fear death as much? People need to think about it today, just like yesterday. You and I are in the human tribe anyway, we all are a like.
” hence if you accept his broader argument then you’d have to explain why views on climate change are an outlier”
Because the questions he asks are a product of his own biases. He does not for instance ask about the use of genetically modified food, organically grown food, nuclear power, the use of human embryos in research and the use of animals in research.
Even something as simple as who killed JFK as an internal control sail’s beneath his radar.
By that I mean that if it is possible to cook up an explanation for any new set of facts, or measurements, for example, that blames Global Warming. The latest egregious example in my mind is that there was a group who instagramed a Fourth of July picnic they had on an ice floe in Lake Superior this summer and it was blamed on Global Warming. It could be true, but it is also true that if you are determined to get the answer ‘3’, there are an infinite number of formulations which can arrive at it, as long as you can keep adding factors to account for times when your formula does not reach three based on existing terms.
It is a case where “If I hadn’t of believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it.”
The fact that so many proponents of the “Consensus” refuse to acknowledge this fundamental problem just says they are either not seriously thinking about the issue, or they are hiding something.
The main item that falls under this is the dread Hockey Stick. If you believe in AGW, then the stick makes perfect sense, but if you are unconvinced, then you see the Hockey Stick as a way to bootstrap a whole edifice of circular thinking.
@joshua
If some kind person comes and tells me that the Higgs Boson has been found (or not), then I might be pleased for them. But it is of little consequence to me or mine, so I file it away as an interesting piece of science.
But if the same person tells me the same and also asserts that as a direct consequence something nasty and drastic is going to happen to me and mine unless I do what they tell me to do, then I’m going to want a lot more persuading…and will examine the evidence for myself with a great deal more interest and take a lot more critcial approach.
And as TJA wisely points out above, by the evidential standards of hard science or engineering much of ‘climatology’ is pretty poor stuff. And by the ethical standards of normal citizenship, many climatologists and their cheerleaders score pretty poorly too. It’s not a convincing combination.
So – for many sceptical folks, the more you look, the less convincing it gets.
I started out with a mild interest and a day to spare to understand just what great science had been done for people to be able to say ‘The Science Is Settled’. I’m still looking 6 years on and I ain’t found it yet.
Well, the problem is that the alarmists blame everything from earthquakes to sea animal deaths on the north pacific coast on global warming. Since about 95-99% of their claims are outright lies they suffer from the “cry wolf” syndrome.
The problem is the alarmists consistently lie and it doesn’t seem to bother them. To me – once someone has lost credibility I just quit listening to them. When an “alarmist” is cornered on a global warming lie they come back with “but it gave us electric cars” or other nonsense.
The scientists involved in climate studies are frequently members of environmental organizations and many of them appear hopelessly biased. What is needed is someone objective (engineers and statisticians from the private sector with no environmental group ties) to referee the science used by the government for policy decisions.
The government should spend zero on global warming model studies and plow a climate study money into the basic science. The models have too little skill to be of any value. If we don’t have a better understanding of climate forces the models will never be right. We also have a data problem with good data only from recent decades (we really only have good ocean data for the top 2000 m since 2003).
The fact that the main stream scientists didn’t predict the pause (the near future) shows they are too ignorant to predict the far future.
Errr… to return to the thread topic.
1. There is too much “churnalism” with inaccurate alarmist stories being planted and replanted as news articles on a daily basis in a transparent attempt to herd the opinion of ignorant like sheep. It is propaganda pure and simple.
2. Many of the intelligent believers in global warming seem hopelessly biased. The fact that reputable scientists call people who aren’t fully in the global warming camp “deniers” is disturbing and indicates a bias that should preclude them from future government funding for climate studies. People who aren’t objective or open to new information shouldn’t be doing government climate studies.
@ PA
“When an “alarmist” is cornered on a global warming lie they come back with “but it gave us electric cars” or other nonsense.”
But, fortunately for us and our beloved power grid, it has given us a negligible number of them.
Lets see how they like the results after they have achieved their proclaimed objectives of eliminating the internal combustion engine, destruction of coal fired utilities, AND blocking the construction of additional nuclear power plants.
OMG, the consensus isn’t 97%, it’s 90%, so that’s OK!!??
Wasn’ Judith telling us that the consensus was ‘manufactured’ it was bad science, there was no such thing, etc etc etc
Now that it’s 90%, it’s ‘believable’.
WTF?
Read more closely- you misunderstood
One of the more interesting aspects of the climate wars is that some “skeptics” tell us over and over how the very notion of consensus is irrelevant and more importantly antithetical to pure science, the scientific method, etc. And they post over and over examples of when the scientific “consensus” as if that proves that in a particular situation the “consensus” (in other words, notice how they leave of their lists all the times that the “consensus” has been right).
And yet they spend gobs of time in post after post and comment after comment arguing about the precise quantification of the “consensus.”
It’s almost as if they don’t subject their views to basic skeptical due diligence – which of course is impossible because they self-describe as “skeptics.”
reminder to self: never post before coffee:
“…examples of when the scientific “consensus” was wrong as if that proves that in a particular situation the “consensus” is wrong (in other words…..”
Of course, that doesn’t explain the errors when fully caffeinated….
The very 1984 idea that septic’s can only a choice between good and very good , their simply being no bad option , shows much this area depends on a outlook that has nothing to do with science and much to do with religion.
When to comes to unquestioning acceptance of idea , not because you know its good but because you want it to be , no body bets AGW promoters . Who can even set aside reality and common sense in support of ‘the cause ‘
Reminder to Josh: Never post. Just read.
If the “consensus” people believe so strongly in the consensus – why don’t they ask what they say the consensus means?
Survey scientists and ask them, “Do you agree that 100% of the 20th century warming is due to the increase in CO2?”
Please report back on that – random sample please – and include all climate scientists not just the public sector.
Joshua, I tend to worry about climate sensitivity. This subject tends to be skipped over by the consensus propaganda. I´m also very worried about the rather silly solutions I see being carried out. As far as I can see, I´m far superior to a climatologist when it comes to figuring out sensible solutions. The solutions do depend on the climate sensitivity. And this is where the range Michael Mann —˃ Barack Obama and I part company.
Yes, Joshua, skeptics exist in a vacuum and never read what the alarmists say. Hence all their comments about consensus just exist all by themselves, with nary a trigger or impulse to bring them forth.
the manufactured consensus is 90% not 97%
personally I dont think it would be much different if there wasnt so much
social pressure to conform.
You can understand this issue this way.
Cook says the consensus is 97%
Judith says two things.
1. The consensus is manufactured
2. The real number is closer to 90%
What that means is this.
Judith believes the real number is more like 90% and because she thinks
this number is partly the result of social pressure, she would hypothesize that the number would be lower than 90% BUT FOR the social pressure
How much lower she doesnt say.
Finally a skeptic would say the following
1. Consensus is not scientifically relevant.
2. IF you choose to measure it, then do it correctly. Show your data
and your code.
3. Cooks number is bogus for a variety of reasons, its probably lower than
97%
4. The number, regardless of how you compute it, is Higher than it
would be otherwise because of pressure: social pressure, funding pressure.
Someone like you would argue.
1. Consensus is scientifically relevant, if you are in the minority you
are wrong, or crazy, or taking bribes.
2. Cook’s number is accurate.
3. If you took away all social pressure, and all funding pressure, the number would not change because scientists are super human and dont let personal subjective issues influence their beliefs.
There is no number. The vast range of opinion about the vast number of concepts subsumed in ‘climate change’ preclude it.
It’s a fool’s errand to quantify it. Fools fantasizing to fool other fools.
================
Heh, compare with ‘attribution’ of the various anthropogenic effects.
============
What social pressure? Are you saying that skeptics can’t get funding? Why would they not get funding?
What would 90% or 98% agree to? That man is responsible for 90% or 60% or 30% of the warming? All amounts would generate a different response. Then lets give the public the best information we have on the MWP and Little Ice age. Then show them how there are similarities between the sea level rise rate of 80 years ago and now. Then show them the best information of historical incidence of hurricanes and tornadoes and droughts. Then show them the best information about the variability of Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice for the last 1000 years. Then give them some of Tony/s information for CET. Give them all the information that any skeptic worth his salt knows about. After all that, watch the number that previously believed man accounted for 90% of warming or any number of your choosing, go down. It only takes a little investigation of all the data to realize that there is more unknown than known.
I was downstairs playing dominoes and discussed the optimum design for such a survey of climatologists and others we could consider qualified to serve as experts on the transient climate sensitivity issue.
The best solution seems to be to do a Gallup Poll…just call 100 thousand people at random and ask them to make an estimate of the most likely value for the TCR (use the acronym TCR or its equivalent in other languages to screen out the regular folk) Then plot the answers and let the guys at Climate Audit and SKS debate the figures in PBS series for three years.
Another cogent SM comment.
SM’s analysis seems to be spot on.
Actual science would have classical empirical evidence, tests and arguments. Climate studies are dominated by post normal consensus, political arguments, belief systems (being green).
That’s why climate scientists should be inventoried, their voting records and political contributions, their connections to government grants and other agenda incentives. Instead they behave like a religious order above social suspicion, at least internally in their enclaves. It’s nonsense.
“What social pressure? Are you saying that skeptics can’t get funding? Why would they not get funding?”
Social pressure exerted by the tribe on its own.
For example, you see this in the climategate mails where Briffa
begs Overpeck not to give in to pressure from Solomon and Mann
to overegg the pudding.
Social pressure exerted by journals to include ceremonial curtseys to global warming in papers that are only tangentialy related
Social pressure exerted by colleagues when you invite Steve mcIntyre
to speak to your class.
In other words, there is ( judith would argue ) a pressure to conform.
The very ACT of asking people what they agree to can be seen
as a form of social pressure.
I don’t see how any of the (very few) examples you gave forces anyone to accept AGW (or the IPCC conclusions). Nor do I see how any such pressure would have any influence on one’s response to an anonymous survey.
Fernando, I know you were being facetious, but Galton got the weight of an ox that way
81% is consistent with von Storch et al. Somewhere between that and 90% is probably correct regarding opinions.
However, they confess to sample bias, as Judith notes, so it’s hard to take seriously.
Bart asked me about surveys two years ago and I told him that 90% of the problems with surveys lie in getting the right people to respond to it.
I don’t know if he didn’t listen or if he listened too well.
Joseph > What social pressure? Are you saying that skeptics can’t get funding? Why would they not get funding?
Because the monoply funder – government – has a vested interest in alarmism.
Michael: You don’t believe a factor of between 3 and 7 is significant? Wow. Just wow.
I suppose even if you had basic math skills you would still disagree anyway.
fizzymagic | September 5, 2014 at 8:16 pm | Reply
“Michael: You don’t believe a factor of between 3 and 7 is significant? Wow. Just wow.”
Huh??
I’m not surprised you are confused.
However, to those who analyze data for a living, the relevant number is the difference between the consensus figure and unity; that is, what percentage of scientists are NOT part of the consensus?
The difference there is between 3% (from the 97% number) and 10-20% (from what Dr. Curry says is plausible. That’s a factor of between 3 and 7.
No self-respecting scientist would ever claim that the difference between 97% and 100% was insignificant; there is an enormous difference.
See? Math is not actually that hard!
Fizzy, go back and read my original comment.
You’re talking to yourself (and getting it wrong anyway).
So, huh?
Well, I actually read the study:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/ipdf/10.1021/es501998e
This study is interesting in view of the following:
http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2014/07/1-scientific-publishing
1% of scientists publishes 41% of papers and is a co-author on 87%.
6550 people were contacted. 1868 responded with 379 (almost 1/4) in the the 30-300 group publication group. This is a fringe of about 1% of the science population. There should have been only 65 in their study – total. If the 1868 were a random sample there would only be 18.7 (it is hard to cut up people into sections smaller than 10ths accurately).
Of the vast majority of the scientists (0-3 is perhaps 90% of scientists) only 55% believe in IPCC strong warming. About 28% believe in moderate warming (skeptics) and the rest are some form of “denier” (it’s slight, it’s cooling, I don’t know and/or don’t care).
Why not include “global cooling”?
Verheggen et al. used keywords “global warming” and/or “global climate change”
Why did they not include the term “global cooling”?
e.g., Google Scholar notes 15,000 hits papers from 1950 to 2015 addressing “global cooling”.
Argue about whether it is 97% or 90% of qualified scientists that agree that it is AGW — there is no question over the fact that 100% of the last century’s global warming trend is driven by aCO2.
Another new paper substantiating that here:
[1]P. Kokic, S. Crimp, and M. Howden, “A probabilistic analysis of human influence on recent record global mean temperature changes,” Climate Risk Management, 2014.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212096314000163
The key method of the article is quoted below:
This looks like a common approach that others such as Tamino, Lean, Cowtan, Lovejoy, etc also use. I call my own model CSALT, with the letters standing for CO2, SOI, Aerosols (volcanic), LOD (for the long term natural variability), and TSI (for solar).
The twist on this approach is that I believe the missing ingredient that other like-minded modelers need to consider is the LOD or “Stadium Wave” part. Add this to the model and it improves the fit immensely — helping to explain various pauses during the 20th century.
thanks go out to Judith Curry for the “own goal” stadium wave assist.
http://imageshack.com/a/img674/3518/rdsvA5.gif
Have you ever elevated your CSALT model out of your own blog and the comment threads around the web?
All I do is substantiate what other scientists are finding. How is that worthy of publication?
Shorter WHT: “Harrumph”
What percentage of the consensus agree that 100% of warming is aCO2 driven and that all fossil fuel use should be eliminated by 2030? or 2040? or pick a date.
What percentage of the consensus agree that your overfitting model is THE obvious proof climate is 100% aCO2 driven?
Overfitting? Have you ever considered it is undereducation on your part?
Cappy, you should review the basics of how CO2 provides the control knob to raise the atmosphere’s temperature above its quiescent value.
Webster, “Cappy, you should review the basics of how CO2 provides the control knob to raise the atmosphere’s temperature above its quiescent value.”
I have. I have stated a number of times I see zero reason to assume CO2 has any impact greater than the no feedback sensitivity.
Now I am not a genius expert on nucleation and condensation, but I have a fair amount of experience with heat transfer which leads me to believe that dLOD, TSI, SOI and Volcanic influences can all be related to orbital and mechanical forces meaning your model would be over fitting. You can do a guest post here and let all the scientific world beat a path to your door though.
Webby, did I just see you out yourself as a “CO2 Control Knob Freak”? Dessler and Webby – two peas of a pod.
Ok, start by explaining how the earth’s surface temperature is about 33C above its nominal value. See if you can do this without invoking CO2 as a mechanism. Good luck.. LOL
The earth’s temperature gets progressively warmer the closer you get to the core. Is is the greenhouse effect that makes it hot enough to melt iron?
The average temperature of the global ocean is 4C. That equates to a blackbody emitting very near 341W/m2 which is the average insolation received at TOA. Given that surface air temperature averaged across the globe is 14C not 4C then the greenhouse effect is raising it 10C above blackbody temperature not 33C. Most of the 10C is accomplished by water vapor not CO2.
Thanks for asking.
If you believe that the papers you cite show that there is “no question over the fact that 100% of the last century’s global warming trend is driven by aCO2,” then you have no business being a scientist. One of the authors you cite, Lovejoy, is very careful not to make such claims, and the current paper you cite is simply a time series regression between temperature and the four covariates you mention. Only a neophyte would believe that a simple regression analysis is conclusive in terms of causal attribution. Perhap you want to walk back the “no question” statement.
> If you believe that the papers you cite […]
I thought Web cited a paper by Kokic, Crimp, and Howden:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212096314000163
Then the As go on to describe their own approach.
The emphasized sentence seems to indicate a moment for pause.
MachineLearner,
You are invited to join our group at the Azimuth Project where we are applying machine learning concepts to try to explain and predict the occurrence of El Minis.
Your credentials as a non-neophyte won’t be used against you — LOL.
WHT, I believe that paper you quote has already been deposited in the dust bin of climate science history.
Why?
Why not, run your own experiment…
Ephesians 1:9-14 King James Version
9 Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself:
10 That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him:
11 In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will:
12 That we should be to the praise of his glory, who first trusted in Christ.
13 In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise,
14 Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory.
Receive the earnest… it is something observable, by anyone.
There is no way that Salt, Climate Scientists, or anyone else can attribute 100% of late 20th century warming to CO2. The reason is that not enough is known about how solar works in the atmosphere. Your solar data is just prescribed pablum. UV B in the stratsophere is almost entirely unknown. The effect of solar flares, sunspots, and cosmic rays on cloud formation is still in its infancy. The effect of solar radiation on the oceans is uncertain. The effect of solar with CO2 cannot be fully known until the data comes in from the new stallite and the amount of redirected radiant that feedbacks to earths atmosphere is entirely understood. The satallite is also collecting sink data. The effect of CO2 is still a % redirect problem that you could probably solve but the interaction with clouds, aresols, methane and ozone is still unknown. If you solve the solar problem, let us know. The science is not settled.
The missing ingredient is clouds. This data is consistent with ERBS, with Project Earthshine and with later CERES data. It is simple enough to scale parameters to temperature in a multiple linear regression – but without the right parameters it is a pointless exercise.
http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/zFD/an9090_LWup_toa.gif
http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/zFD/an9090_SWup_toa.gif
http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/zFD/an9090_TOTnet_toa.gif
‘The overall slight rise (relative heating) of global total net flux at TOA between the 1980’s and 1990’s is confirmed in the tropics by the ERBS measurements and exceeds the estimated climate forcing changes (greenhouse gases and aerosols) for this period. The most obvious explanation is the associated changes in cloudiness during this period.’
The LOD change is a response to changes in atmospheric angular momentum – which has step changes at the appropriate places. The mid 1970’s and ate 1990’s.
The essential points remains. The rate of residual warming is 0.07 degrees C/decade – and the evidence suggests that the recent warming – and current cooling – is strongly cloud mediated rather than caused by CO2. The step changes suggest cooling for decades yet.
Odd bits of eccentricity such as claiming everything is an own goal notwithstanding. It takes quite a skill to ignore both your own trend and all the cognitively dissonant evidence. All done with gratuitous prattling and preening on a foundation of profound ignorance.
He was at realclimate again recently prattling about uncertainty. How incongruous it was for Judy to say anything because some things are profoundly uncertain.
‘Prediction of weather and climate are necessarily uncertain: our observations of weather and climate are uncertain, the models into which we assimilate this data and predict the future are uncertain, and external effects such as volcanoes and anthropogenic greenhouse emissions are also uncertain. Fundamentally, therefore, therefore we should think of weather and climate predictions in terms of equations whose basic prognostic variables are probability densities ρ(X,t) where X denotes some climatic variable and t denoted time. In this way, ρ(X,t)dV represents the probability that, at time t, the true value of X lies in some small volume dV of state space.’ (Predicting Weather and Climate – Palmer and Hagedorn eds – 2006)
Uncertainty remains from many sources – and the future is ultimately unpredictable except – perhaps – as probability densities. Thus these people seem always horribly off course technically – cognitively dissonant – but it is really the ‘vile behavior, dishonesty, and stunning hatred and malice as a standard way to deal with dissent’ that is the defining behavior.
Good entertainment when Ellison comments at http://RealClimate.org.
Gavin has exposed the Aussie’s failings over and over.
Webhubtelescope
What about temperature driving CO2?
e.g. what if you changed from “CO2” to fossil CO2 from anthropogenic sources, and average ocean temperature rather than atmospheric CO2.
On LOD, few models include it.
Try publishing it with a prediction based on training from data before 1950, and post an ongoing monthly comparison like Scafetta.
Web > there is no question over the fact that 100% of the last century’s global warming trend is driven by aCO2.
Sure – aCO2 went up and so did temps. Case closed, let the taxes and bureaucracies rip.
You say there is no question. I question it.
“On the contrary, these citizens—the ones, again, who display the highest degree of science comprehension generally & of the mechanisms of climate change in particular—are also the most politically polarized on whether global warming is occurring at all.”
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
‘we found that, as the level of expertise in climate science grew, so too did the level of agreement on anthropogenic causation’
Or as the level at which their income depends on anthropogenic causation being true increases so does their view that it is true
Oddly the Pope , the ultimate ‘expert’ on the subject , also has stronger belief in the idea god exist than the average follower of the catholic faith does.
Indeed it quite common to find those who work in area or who have strong beliefs on a subject are also strongly in favour of that subjects importance.
But none of that matters a bit , what matters is what you prove not how strong your belief in it is. So now lets talk about ‘proof’ not the strenght of your faith .
Phil’s TL;DR wasn’t bad at all:
http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/cooking-stove-use-housing-associations-white-males-and-the-97
It might take more than Joe’s rants to declare an idea “dead”.
“You have not provided a single example of a paper being incorrectly rated or any evidence whatsoever of systematic bias actually being introduced, just a lot of assertions and opinions.”
and when the authors were asked for the data required to substantiate these types of claims it was not released.
1. To prove the case you need the data.
2. They wont release the data.
3. Therefore I can form a rational, justifiable belief that my case has
merit and I am rational when I conclude that the withheld data
should be viewed in a light most favorable to me
The analog would be a legal proceeding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence
> the data required to substantiate these types of claims
http://www.skepticalscience.com/tcp.php?t=rate_papers
wrong again willard, to show a SYSTEMATIC bias due to rater fatigue you need time stamps.
as for their own little test I participated. errors and problems were obvious.
hence the request for data.
data with held
spoiliation.
Its rational to conclude that the withheld data would uphold a charge of bias.
Does that mean its biased? Nope
Just means that one is on good grounds to hold that view.
and in the end all we have are good grounds to hold any view
When will willard wonder well?
======================
> to show a SYSTEMATIC bias due to rater fatigue
See how it goes from “these types of claims” to “a systematic bias due to rater fatigue”, which is pure armwaving for the peanut gallery unless one provides a systematic way to rate the objects. Every abstracts were rated twice, and conflicting results were arbitrated. To find an abstract that was misclassified, all one needs is to find one.
Speaking of releasing data, we are still waiting for Richard’s 300 papers.
#freetheTol300
I’m not sure how one can insist Richard Tol provide his list of 300 papers when hundreds of papers rated by Cook et al were never even disclosed.
Free the Cook et al 521?
> hundreds of papers rated by Cook et al were never even disclosed.
Not papers, ABSTRACTS.
And then people wonder why I use caps lock for more than a year, now.
Besides, here’s how C13 did not “disclose” what they did:
http://hiizuru.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/cook-et-als-hidden-data/
ISI is where to look to scratch one’s itch.
Richard’s 300 items are more abstract than ABSTRACTS.
Have you tried Google Scholar. That seems to list about 300 papers with Richard Tol as one author. There are probably some duplicates, but even so.
I don’t think Richard was alluding to papers he wrote, Pekka.
I didn’t see his original his original statement, only discussion that made me think that the issue was the number of his publications.
Perhaps I’m not the only one who misunderstands what people are referring to, when that’s not repeated often enough.
willard is playing dumb
“Every abstracts were rated twice, and conflicting results were arbitrated. ”
CONFLICT is not the only result of fatigue. If I am a harder grader than
rater A or rater B, then If I get easier as time goes on, the fatigue will result in AGREEMENT not conflict.
You need the times.
spoiliation, since they have the times and refuse to release.
> You need the times.
You also need objective answers, and even if you have these, it provides no reason to coerce anyone for anything.
willard offers a stupid response to me saying:
By responding:
> Given I was talking about the titles of papers Cook et al never disclosed, it makes sense I would refer to “papers.”
And now Brandon paraphrases instead of quoting. Here was the sentence:
Cook & al did not rate papers, but ABSTRACTS.
The authors themselves rated their PAPERS.
Simple.
Brandon uses that trick all the time.
==> “And now Brandon paraphrases instead of quoting.”
Now?
Check this out:
==> “Instead, their “intelligence” is measured by their ability to give answers Kahan expects “intelligent” people to give.”
This one’s even better.
==> “Did you know the universe began with a huge explosion? If not, you’re an idiot. So says Dan M. Kahan. ”
Ya’ just gotta love Brandon.
==> “And now Brandon paraphrases instead of quoting.”
Now?
Check this out:
==> “Instead, their “intelligence” is measured by their ability to give answers Kahan expects “intelligent” people to give.”
This one’s even better.
==> “Did you know the universe began with a huge explosion? If not, you’re an id*ot. So says Dan M. Kahan. ”
Ya’ just gotta love Brandon.
A thing I find interesting is I did provide evidence of systematic biases. Even if Joe Duarte didn’t, anyone following this should know about it.
What I find more interesting is Cook et al didn’t release their ratings for all the papers. They’ve repeatedly claimed to have, but anyone who looks at their data files can see data for 521 papers was not included. As far as the evidence we’ve been given shows, Cook et al could have thrown out hundreds of anti-consensus papers then hid that fact.
Even worse, Cook et al didn’t even publish a full list of the papers they rated, meaning nobody could hope to replicate their work. We can’t even rely on the search engine they used as its database changes over time so we won’t get the same results from it.
And that’s not even touching on the fact there is absolutely no published data available about which people they contacted to do self-ratings. The list of e-mail addresses used was collected by Cook et al in a non-structured, unverifiable way, and we can’t even see the list they came up with. We have no way to check their work.
How, exactly, are we supposed to verify Cook et al’s results?
> They’ve repeatedly claimed to have, but anyone who looks at their data files can see data for 521 papers was not included.
They did not have to rate the papers they excluded.
That. Is. So. Tough. To. Understand.
willard’s comment amuses me. People who’ve followed my discussion of Cook et al know we have ratings for some of the the 521 papers excluded from Cook et al’s data file. willard defends the decision not to disclose ratings for 521 papers on the basis they didn’t need to be rated even though we know for a fact some of those papers were rated.
The worst part is one wouldn’t even need to follow my discussion of the paper to know willard’s defense is wrong. Anyone who has used the searchable database hosted at the Skeptical Science website or the user-version of the rating system would know it. Those both allow users to select any of the three rating categories which got excluded from the Cook et al analysis.
willard would have to either be quite unaware or willfully obtuse to offer the defense he offers.
> How, exactly, are we supposed to verify Cook et al’s results?
webofknowledge.com
Brandon don’t expect honest engagement from Willard on this. Too much at stake
I’m not sure I’d be able to tell when willard is engaging honestly.
> willard defends the decision not to disclose ratings for 521 papers on the basis they didn’t need to be rated
Brandon puts words into my mouth to connect with the second part of his sentence, which is a red herring:
> even though we know for a fact some of those papers were rated.
Sometimes, work evolves.
Brandon inflates his discovery by saying “some” instead of the number of ratings he found.
Brandon does he tell their ratings, nor how they would change C13’s results.
“Evidence” Brandon? As every good “sceptic” knows, the uncertainty monster demands absolute proof before any action can be contemplated. Evidence is meaningless. The only thing that matters is proof. Bring in absolute proof or you got nothing.
Judith –
==> “I think we need to declare the idea of a 97% consensus among climate scientists on the issue of climate change attribution to be dead. ”
I’ll just go with Richard Tol:
Good enough for Richard, good enough for me.
small question how many actual climate scientists are there and where do this figuer comes from . You see rather basic maths suggest that to know what percentage any sub group is of a whole group you must, no matterthe size of that sub group , know the size of the whole group.
So how many climate scientists are there ?
Does your “small question” contain an appeal to authority, by any chance, KNR?
KNR –
Richard speaks of published papers, you speak of climate scientists. Please explain.
You say you want small…
http://news.yahoo.com/stephen-hawking-god-particle-could-163109712.html
you might not be able to handle the small.
KNR,
There are no climate scientists. There are people who claim to be climate scientists, and of course these numbers will change depending on the pecuniary advantage to be found by claiming to be a climate scientist, rather than a second or third rate mathematician, physicist, mammalogist or such.
Some of them even give the impression that they have received a Nobel Prize for their Climate Science work, but this is, of course, nonsense.
The climate is merely the average of weather over an arbitrary period, and any reasonably intelligent twelve year old can calculate averages, using nothing more than basic arithmetical skills.
So called climate scientists can predict the future no better than you or I, which probably gets up their collective nose no end!
The wonder is that anybody was gullible enough to believe the Warmists, but if politicians were involved, I suppose it was inevitable.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Joshua
I find it interesting how much energy you spend discussing the “if there is a consensus” and who supports the “consensus” and people’s views on “the consensus” vs. actual discussions of the merits of the positions taken.
A. You believe that taking aggressive actions today to reduce CO2 emissions will result in less harmful conditions in the future. You believe that the resulting reduction in future harms merit incurring the expense today.
B. Others do not think that CO2 mitigation actions have been reasonably justified as being cost effective, especially for those paying for the actions. They think this for a variety of reasons.
It really boils down to being that simple. I wish people believing in “A” would focus on the merits of their proposed actions, but since that is not possible…oh well.
Rob. –
There’s a problem (a problem that reflects a lack of skepticism) with discussing my views if you make assumptions about them without gathering evidence.
==> “You believe that taking aggressive actions today to reduce CO2 emissions will result in less harmful conditions in the future.”
No. I don’t have such a “belief.”
==> “You believe that the resulting reduction in future harms merit incurring the expense today.”
No. I don’t have such a belief.
==> “Others do not think that CO2 mitigation actions have been reasonably justified as being cost effective, especially for those paying for the actions. ”
The problem there, IMO, is with “reasonably.” I don’t know if they have “reasonably” been justified – because that is an inherently subjective determination. Expecting a determination of “reasonably” is tricky for risk assessment in the face of uncertainty. I believe that there are too many unknowns to really justify such conclusions – for example, the health outcomes and geo-political negative externalities associated with using fossil fuels for energy (as well as the associated positive externalities) .
What I think is that there needs to be discussion among stakeholders with the goal of establishing ownership over policy outcomes that look for synergies and shared interests. Instead, what I see is people locked in to zero sum games based on tribal and identity-aggressive/protective behaviors that necessarily require that the combatants ignore uncertainties.
==> “:They think this for a variety of reasons.”
Indeed. This is what I have been saying all along. There are certainly a variety of reasons why people believe as they do w/r/t climate change. And the evidence shows that the “reasons” for most are operational more or less independently of the science.
==> “I wish people believing in “A” would focus on the merits of their proposed actions, but since that is not possible…oh well.”
I wish they would also. I don’t think it’s impossible. But to get there, there has to be an elevation of the framework for the discussion. The identity-aggressive and identity-defensive behaviors that are so ubiquitous in the climate wars, and so enthusiastically embraced by Judith and her “denizens” will, IMO, not likely move things in that direction.
Joshua
I apologize for having misunderstood and misrepresenting your views on CO2 mitigation actions. It appears we may agree that most proposed CO2 mitigation actions have not been shown to make sense.
I use the term “reasonably justified” because that is all that is unusually possible. There is certainly potential for debate or disagreement. Imo, the key is to examine the details of the cause of the disagreement and then to establish a path to gain more data to reduce uncertainty.
You write- “Expecting a determination of “reasonably” is tricky for risk assessment in the face of uncertainty.” Imo, these types of discussions/determinations happen routinely when infrastructure is being designed as an example. How high should the dam be? What size of water treatment facility is appropriate? etc.
I agree fully that there are potential negative and positive impacts that are not accurately quantifiable today. Imo, there has been extensive discussions among stakeholders but there is still tremendous uncertainty over potential outcomes.
What has happened is that those who support “path A” have made a determination of what actions should be taken prematurely at best.
Rob –
I gotta take a break. More important things to get done. Plus, I’m probably approaching Judith’s cut-off point w/r/t % of comments in a thread, and I”m terribly concerned that jim2 might break down emotionally out of his concern about what I do with my time….
So I’ll just say this:
==> ” It appears we may agree that most proposed CO2 mitigation actions have not been shown to make sense.”
That is a bit tricky. I don’t know whether it has been shown to make sense or whether it has been shown to not make sense. I view it as decision-making about risk in the race of uncertainty. IMO, that means that a determination of “makes sense” is too simplistic to be of much use. When the projected scenarios involve wide ranges of uncertainty, then what “makes sense” must necessarily be correlated with a variety of scenarios and then decisions should be made (IMO) on the basis of synergies and common interests. And while I see uncertainty in the sense of measuring positive impacts of ACO2 mitigation (economic or otherwise) I also see uncertainty w/r/t measuring the negative impacts (economic or otherwise) of ACO2 mitigation. Further, I see many people on the two sides, respectively, who quite willingly paper over those uncertainties to fight tribal battles.
Same as it ever was.
Have a good day.
Joshua
At the end of the day actual decisions are made. If you decide to “do something”, you thought it made sense; if you didn’t decide to do something it ONLY means there was insufficient information to justify the decision and not that it was determined that it did not make sense.
I challenge someone to justify how most proposed CO2 mitigation actions make sense when the proposed action has significant cost and it can’t be shown reliably what will occur as a result.
Joshua recapitulates comedian David Steinberg’s old routine about taking an exam when you are clueless:
(As if reading the test question:) “Refute the allegation that the literature of the middle ages was moribund.”
(As if writing:) “Some believe that the literature of the middle ages was moribund. Some believe that the literature of the middle ages was not moribund. I believe that the literature of the middle ages was not moribund. In order to refute the allegation that the literature of the middle ages was moribund, one would need to have a detailed knowledge of the literature and history of that period.”
(Whispering to self) “which I wish to God I had.”
“Joe Duarte continues to hit hard…..” – JC
R@nt like a loon, is a bit more like it.
I see Judith has latched on to the “cooking stoves”, to her discredit;
“The bottom line is that they included papers on topics like cook stoves, inferring that they supported the ‘consensus’, … This is really pretty unbelievable” – JC
Except that despite Jose’s r@nting, that paper does meet the search criteria that the authors used.
Jose peppers his missive wih repeated claims of…the ‘f’ word….that would land this comment in moderation here – 40 times. 40.
Sadly, his own reading comprehension incompetence makes Cook et al look like geniuses.
Judith should have paid more attention when she wrote “This is really pretty unbelievable” – that was probably the drowning cry of her inner sceptic as it was engulfed in a tsunami of confirmation bias.
@michael
‘Except that despite Jose’s r@nting, that paper does meet the search criteria that the authors used’
Exactly. What better illustration could there be of the futility of this paper? And the sheer boneheadedness of its few remaining supporters.
Latimer –
==> “And the sheer boneheadedness of its few remaining supporters.”
Do you describe yourself as a skeptic?
Latimer Alder (@latimeralder) | September 5, 2014 at 11:45 am |
“Exactly. What better illustration could there be of the futility of this paper? And the sheer boneheadedness of its few remaining supporters.”
Lati,
Except that Jose’s point was that the paper should not have been included because it didn’ meet the search criteria.
Poor Jose seems a little over-wrought.
Sceptics would beware.
Others will jump on the band-wagon, high-five and be ditto-heads.
@michael
I wonder what sort of boneheads there are around here who think that the opinion of authors of a paper about cooking stoves is relevant to the construction (or not) of a ‘consensus’ about something to do with warming?
Whether it is formally included in the ‘search criteria’ or not is a sideshow compared with the amazing (but sadly not surprising) stupidity of those who think it should be included at all.
Lati,
Jose got it wrong.
You were insufficiently sceptical.
That’s all.
@joshua
I describe myself as ‘Latimer’. My girlfriend uses other terms – sometimes less polite.
But I’m sure you’re about to give us all a lecture designed to show off your abilities to argue conclusively about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Or some other eqully fatuous semantic point
Please go ahead. Don’t let my answer to your question affect your moment of fame in anyway.
PS – I cannot read long words very fast, so please type slowly.
Don’t mean to be insulting, but anyone who is defending Cook’s study after Duarte’s articles just doesn’t care about anything but winning. There are so many flaws, and they are so completely obvious.
I guess I should add, “just doesn’t care about anything but winning”, but isn’t using good sense in that either. It is just so easy to mistrust climate science: there are so many political operatives pretending to do it. Anyone who really cares about global warming should be tarring and feathering Mann and Cook; they are destroying your cause.
> Anyone who really cares about global warming should be tarring and feathering Mann and Cook; they are destroying your cause.
Thank you for your concerns, miker613.
I have the Joe’s
> Don’t mean to be insulting, but anyone who is defending Cook’s study after Duarte’s articles just doesn’t care about anything but winning.
The same argument applies to Joe’s rants, miker613.
What a joke.
Jesus.
“Thank you for your concerns, miker613.” I have no concerns, I am happy about it. But you are not showing good sense.
“The same argument applies to Joe’s rants, miker613.” Your choice. A bad choice. The rest of us can draw conclusions.
Who’s “us”, miker613? I’ve seen so many people say so many stupid things about C13 from every side I lost count. Including those who defend C13, whoever they are. Not me, actually, as I’m seldom in defensive mode.
Having a sell recommendation does not imply you have a buy in mind.
Could it be that on all measurement parameters, the atmosphere has not warmed for over 17 years and in response, but not in initial scientific presentations, there have been nearly 40 reasons why.
However, among the reasons the most logical is not given much attention because many are so dogmatic in what they believe to be true. The most logical is that there are so many uncertainties that it appears we overstated anthropogenic forcings.
It has been a hallmark of science to be skeptical, especially of ones own work. Now skepticism is rewarded with vitriol. As Ike predicted that hallmark has become eroded, and for some of us older guys, it really does not feel very good.
Also, the intentional over exaggeration (Schneider sp?, Hansen) does not sit well, we might consider a purveyor to simply be a lying stack of manure.
– Bob Heinlein
Other
possiblyIMO relevant quotes:Hi Judy
Thanks for another interesting post.
I spent a whole day with Bart Strengers and Bart Verheggen in an early stage to work on the survey questions. I remember that they also asked Roger Pielke sr. to give feedback. So at least the input of “sceptics” was taken into account somewhat.
I am not sure that they mentioned John Cook’s name when they sent the survey. Bart Verheggen surely is able to tell that. As a journalist I wasn’t invited to participate, which is fine.
Note that this project was the result of the Motion Nepperus in the Dutch parliament (in 2010) which – after climategate and IPCC-gate – said that “sceptics should be involved in future reports”. This motion was backed up by most of the political parties. The discussion site climatedialogue.org also resulted from this motion. Verheggen, Strengers and I are all involved in Climate Dialogue.
Also note that they started this long before the (in)famous 97% Cook paper but Cook managed to get it published much quicker (somewhat to the frustration of Bart Verheggen I remember).
Verheggen surely can provide more details about the whole process.
Marcel
Hi Marcel,
I just want to congratulate you on the excellent interview you did with wegmetmvo!!
Great stuff! Your view almost exactly fits my own, so your 20 min interview is a great way of sending people “my view”, since you so very eloquently summarized it!
For Dutch speakers, here is the link:
http://youtu.be/A2U7dHF0PdI
Thanks again!
Kind Regards,
Wijnand
thanks for your kind words Wijnand
I hope people don’t dismiss the Verheggen study just because Cook is a coauthor or because “90%” is mentioned in the abstract. The actual content of the study shows a fairly wide range of views among scientists.
The 90% number is based on an answer to a qualitative question about “strong” warming from CO2, and uses only a subset of their sample. But the authors discuss a wide variety of other measures of a consensus, including a 66% agreement with a statement about 50% or greater CO2 attribution to warming.
The results of the survey regarding climate sensitivity also deserve a lot of discussion and are quite interesting. There is a surprisingly large number of scientists who think ECS3.5.
This is not the say the study is without flaws, but it should not be dismissed either and certainly worth a close look.
Hi Judy –
On the survey paper by Bart Verheggen and others
“Scientists’ Views about Attribution of Global Warming”
I have reproduced below several of the e-mail interactions with Bart and one with Marcel Crok. I am pleased to have been asked but feel a more objective, focused survey is still needed.
Selected e-mails follow:
“Hi Bart 2/10/12 [on first form of the survey]
I have looked at and feel you have way too much information/questions in the survey. Most are on very specific science issues, as they are posed. This detail is going to obscure the value of the survey, as well as discourage people to answer. Indeed, some of the questions should really only be answered by specialists in those areas. Otherwise, how do you weight an answer?
My recommendation is to just ask the following:
1. Is global warming (and cooling) a subset of climate change or does it dominate climate change? If there are other first-order climate forcings, what are they?
2. What evidence exists that the multi-decadal global climate models
can skillfully predict i) the real-world observed behaviour of
large-scale atmospheric-ocean circulation features such as ENSO, the
NAO, the PDO, ect, and ii) CHANGES in the statistics (patterning and
in time) of these circulation features?
4. Which of the following hypotheses have not been refuted?
■Hypothesis 1: Human influence on climate variability and change is of
minimal importance, and natural causes dominate climate variations and
changes on all time scales. In coming decades, the human influence
will continue to be minimal.
■Hypothesis 2a: Although the natural causes of climate variations and
changes are undoubtedly important, the human influences are
significant and involve a diverse range of first-order climate
forcings, including, but not limited to, the human input of carbon
dioxide (CO2). Most, if not all, of these human influences on regional
and global climate will continue to be of concern during the coming
decades.
■Hypothesis 2b: Although the natural causes of climate variations and
changes are undoubtedly important, the human influences are
significant and are dominated by the emissions into the atmosphere of
greenhouse gases, the most important of which is CO2. The adverse
impact of these gases on regional and global climate constitutes the
primary climate issue for the coming decades.
I hope these comments are useful to you in preparing a survey. If you
choose to include the survey questions that you sent, I hope you can
add these broad-based ones.
Thank you for the opportunity to comment!
With my Best Regards
Roger”
Another E-mail on the survey
“Hi Bart 4/2/12
I started the questionnaire but there is still too much ambiguity in
some of the questions, and often options to not even provide an answer
that I see should fit. This occurs, for example, in
“Climate science is too uncertain to be useful for policymaking on
climate change.
We do a lot with climate science that we know about. The statement should be
“Climate predictions decades from now are too uncertain to be useful
for policymaking on climate change.”
Questions on glacial length depend on locations. There is a mix of
global and regional issues but they are handled as if they were the
same.
The statement
“Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are smaller than natural CO2 emissions to
the atmosphere”
is literally clear (CO2 emssions are less as can be seen in a monthly
plot), but it is the removal of the balance in fluxes in and out of
the atmosphere that matters.
The survey is an improvement over the first draft you sent, but it
really is still needs work in my view. A shorter survey (perhaps do
multiple ones) might solicit more participation. Watts Up With That,
Real Climate, Climate Etc would be ideal venues to announce it.
Let me know if you still would like to talk by phone. I will be in and
out today, so let me know a time if you do want to call.
Best Regards
Roger
Another E-mail
“Hi Roger, 4/2/12
Our climate science survey has been out for a week now and so far we obtained a response rate of around 15%. We intend to send out a reminder early this week (possibly tomorrow) to those who have not responded (either by clicking the link to participate or the link to opt-out), so as to maximize the response.
In order to increase the response rate, we were hoping to have a couple of well known and respected scientists support the survey, as being helpful in describing the range of professional opinion on climate science. We would like to ask if you would be willing to do so in our reminder message (either by a one-sentence quote or by subscribing to a mutually agreed upon description).
This is perhaps somewhat complicated by the fact that you have not yet filled out the final survey (the survey software keeps track of who has responded and who has not).
Would you be available for a quick phone call today to discuss this further?”
“Hi Roger, 4/2/12
Thanks for lending your support to our survey this way. The wording I suggested over the phone is the following:
“Both Dr Roger Pielke Sr (University of Colorado) and Dr Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard) support this survey as being helpful in describing the range of professional opinion on climate science. They were both included in a preview panel of (a beta version of) this survey and call on you to participate by filling it out at your earliest convenience.”
Would you agree to this text being included in the survey reminder, to be sent out to [all] those who didn’t reply (a few thousand people)?
If this text changes, I’ll let you know and await your approval before it goes out.
As to your comments on survey questions: Thanks for your feedback; that is highly welcome. You will understand however that at this stage we cannot change anything in the questions. To respond to some issues you mentioned:
– Climate science vs climate predictions decades from now: I see your point in specifying it, but narrowing it down like that also changes the meaning. There’s something to say for both approaches I think: attribution of extreme events could also be regarded as policy relevant, or paleo-climate as a lesson for the future, or evidence from observations about climate sensitivity, just to name some examples that would be excluded in the narrowed down question. For these question, we thought it best to phrase the answers in rather broad terms, so that they encapsulate a stance, a viewpoint, more so than a very specific issue. But indeed: other choices could have been made, also with good reason.
– glacial length refers to the global average. That could have been made clearer.
– anthro vs natural emissions: You’re entirely correct, which is why these questions are followed up with a question, that if true, can it be reconciled with AGW? But indeed, before you know that such a follow-up question will be asked, you may wonder how your answers might be interpreted.
Thanks a lot,
Bart”
E-mail when queried by Marcel Crok later on what I thought of the survey
Hi Marcel 9/26/12
Thank you for sharing!
The questions are not ideal and the questionnaire is much too long. Bart did not, for example, adopt the very straightforward set of three hypotheses that I recommend to him. That would have been easy for him to do.
However, the real crux of the issue is who responded. Unless they post the list (without attribution to who answered what) it is not likely to add much to resolving the diversity of viewpoints; but I will wait to see what is found.
The choice of Cook though was a poor one as Skeptical Science is clearly not a balanced source of information. Hans von Storch and/or Judy Curry would have been much better, in my view.
Best Regards
Roger”
My bottom line conclusion (September 2014) is that such surveys need to be more focused and balanced. We attempted such a survey several years ago
Brown, F., J. Annan, and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2008: Is there agreement amongst climate scientists on the IPCC AR4 WG1? http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/brown.pdf
We were never able to get published (EOS would not let us, for example).
Our conclusions read
“An online poll of scientists’ opinions shows that, while there is strong agreement on the important role of anthropogenically-caused radiative forcing of CO2 in climate change and with the largest group supporting the IPCC report, there is not a universal agreement among climate
scientists about climate science as represented in the IPCC’s WG1. The claim that the human input of CO2 is not an important climate forcing is found to be false in our survey. However, there remains substantial disagreement about the magnitude of its impacts. The IPCC WG1 perspective is the mean response, though there are interesting differences between mean responses in the USA and in the EU. There are, also, a significant number of climate scientists who disagree with the IPCC WG1 perspective.”
George Marshall (along with Mark Lynas) was one of the first activists (he is senior ex Greenpeace and Rainforest Foundation – and founder of Rising Tide) to put Prof Lindzen, Lomborg and other into a who’s who of deniers..
in 2003:
Who’s who among the climate-change deniers
(towards the bottom of the article)
http://www.newstatesman.com/node/146820
Marshall created a Deniers Hall of Shame – at Rising Tide
an organisation he founded:
http://risingtide.org.uk/content/hall-shame
Marshall is on the board of the Campaign Against Climate Change – which has a Deniers Hall of Shame. Mark Lynas was also on board of the same group, but at Climate Etc (An Opening Mind, about Mark Lynas) he conformed in the comments – that Halls of Shame are shameful, and has now stepped down.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/06/15/an-opening-mind/
Mark’s comment:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/06/15/an-opening-mind/#comment-76091
George still links to the Rising tIde – HAll of Shame on his blog http://www.Climatedenial.org (and comments form sceptics are not welcome)
and his little video – How to Talk to a Climate Change Denier is beyond parody, not least when he says the word denier is problematic (he should know he was one of those that started using it!!)
http://talkingclimate.org/george-marshall-how-to-talk-to-a-climate-change-denier/
George has no psychology qualifications that I am aware of, and seems to have just jumped off the rainforest activist career path when he became scared about climate change. comparing the public denial of a coming climate catastrophe (holocaust) with Jews who were unaware and in denial of the holocaust that was to fall on them..
see his article in the Ecologist here:
The Psychology of Denial:
our failure to act against climate change
Author: George Marshall
Date Published: 22/09/2001 – Source: The ecologist
http://www.ecoglobe.ch/motivation/e/clim2922.htm
A theme he continued at the various activist Climate Camps in the UK, where he talks of cattle trucks, and people being taken away screaming in the night..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wGNDnkahVw
At the same Climate Camp, a young activist describes what he has learnt about climate sceptics (exxon funded evil people)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wGNDnkahVw
George Marshal is part of the climate science communications problem, not the solution.. Interestingly, when Michael Mann wanted to get hold of activist journalist George Monbiot’s email address to get a response to the Channel Four program the Great Global Warming Swindle – it was George Marshall that passed on the contact details. (see climategate emails) Marshall’s blog (Climate Denial) was an early entry on Realclimate blog role.
.
why is a climate activist talking about the psychology of sceptics? why does psychology take him seriously.
Ben Pile – Climate Resistance was blunter than I in his criticism of the – How to Talk to A Climate Denier – George Marshal video
http://www.climate-resistance.org/2012/04/how-to-talk-like-an-oily-dishonest-creep.html
Perhaps the question at Climate Etc should be is what exactly is going on in the heads of activists like George Marshall, Dr Adam Corner, John Cook, Prof Lewandowsky, Dana Nuccitelli, Chris Mooney, etc
The young gentleman in the video is a lot like Exxon. He talks Big Green and depends on Big Oil. (Admittedly he and Big Oil depend heavily on Big Coal to make things like solar panels.)
“On the contrary, these citizens—the ones, again, who display the highest degree of science comprehension generally & of the mechanisms of climate change in particular—are also the most politically polarized on whether global warming is occurring at all.”
The citizens who display the basic degree of science/logic comprehension know that global warming (and cooling) is occuring, depending on the time-scale and significance. The ones who don’t comprehend this and conflate AGW with global warming are either indoctrinated/brainwashed or who knows what else (daft, insincere?).
The ‘hypothesis’ is that the late 20th century warming is caused partly by humans (CO2 emissions mostly) – NOT whether global warming is occuring.
Judith, sorry for the off topic post. Is there a way to turn off the wordpress banner? It obscures text when I ‘page-down’.
wrong link, sorry, in a long comment in moderation (lots of links) George Marshall at Climate Camp 2007, talking about denial, cattle trucks and people being taken away screaming in the night.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SqFZgoE_Us#t=116
George apparently has no qualifications in psychology and is a career activist/campaigner (BA degree unknown subject in 1984), then it was Greenpeace, Rainforest Foundation, Rising Tide, Climate Outreach and Information Network)
Shorter George: ‘F*ck the science, we need to scare the proles sh*tless’
Sanity coming?
At the Crossroads: Energy and Climate Policy Summit
Some sanity may emerge from this conference considering the speakers as Roy Spencer posts:
By “on whether global warming is occurring at all” Dan Kahan equivocates and immediately loses my attention.
When he does not distinguish the length of warming nor whether major/minor anthroprogenic, he is not being scientific.
David L. Hagan: Marc Morano (Climate Depot)
That should be fun.
Regarding the Verheggen abstract: “…we found that, as the level of expertise in climate science grew, so too did the level of agreement on anthropogenic causation. 90% of respondents with more than 10 climate-related peer-reviewed publications (about half of all respondents), explicitly agreed with anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) being the dominant driver of recent global warming. ”
This interesting article ‘Is There a Creativity Deficit in Science?’ provides some good context with which to process that conclusion (h/t @SCStreet):
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/09/is-there-a-creativity-deficit-in-science/
When John Cook appears as a contributing author, then we get a warning that this study cannot be taken seriously. Verheggen could have picked someone not previously associated with a fraudulent 97% konsensus survey.
These researchers seem to live in a world of their own. I’m content to believe in global warming for the past 300 years because the British Isles where I live has definitely warmed. The sea around our coasts are warmer with differing fish and hence some sea-birds are struggling to find their favourite food. However, it’s not unprecedented because we stall can’t grow wine grapes on Hadrian’s Wall like the Romans did, and the North-West Passage is not as open as it must have been in the Vikings time. I most certainly do not take the surface temperature time-series as evidence because the fractions of a degree that it shows are probably less than the error margins in calculating such a complex measure as global mean temperature.
This does say who I am – a numerate person who doesn’t just believe something because they tell me they’re the experts. In fact, I’d be ashamed if I did! It’d be like buying from a snake-oil salesman. Believing warmists that there’s definitely going to be a catastrophe is really hard when they can’t tell me why 400 years of cooling changed into warming 300 years ago. Couldn’t the same thing have happened end last century? They don’t have any data that says it couldn’t.
But these social scientists talk about the “sides people are on”! Most people can’t be bothered to look into the mechanisms – it won’t make any difference – India and China will continue emitting carbon-dioxide whatever we do. The big moan is that we’re expensively ‘giving a good example’! But social scientists and commentators make up motives and opinions completely unrelated to people’s ordinary lives.
They need to get out more.
@anng
You are not allowed to use draw any inferences about the historical past unless it comes from tree rings and has been through an incredibly complex unexplained and ill-implemented algorithm.
Doing simple stuff like wondering about the climatic implications of vineyards on Hadrians Wall or buried farmsteads in Greenland is completely forbidden.
You have probably qualified as a Denier by even thinking of it.
Welcome!
Indeed.
Loving nature as I do, I know perfectly well that trees grow larger rings when they have the precise mix of rain, heat/coolness, nutrients, and lack of disease which suits them. Tree ring analysis is just a small part of the possible errors in the temperature data. Not to mention that I learnt to distrust statistics when studying it at university and everything I’ve come across since confirms that approach.
You’ll be telling me next that I’m an unscientific ignoramus …
Borehole data are direct measurements of temperature from boreholes drilled into the Earth’s crust. Departures from the expected increase in temperature with depth (the geothermal gradient) can be interpreted in terms of changes in temperature at the surface in the past, which have slowly diffused downward, warming or cooling layers meters below the surface.
Docmartyn
Twaddle!
Peter, the paragraph was directly from the NOAA.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data/datasets/borehole
DocMartyn,
My misunderstanding of what you said. My mistake. My apology. I read your comment after I’d read David Springer’s comment down-thread and mistakenly thought you were referring to interpretation of ice cores from boreholes in ice sheets. This is the comment I mistakenly thought you were responding to:
Peter Lang,
You still weren’t far off. The bore hole temperatures taken are “direct measurements.” But the use to which those measurements are put is as a proxy for past surface temps.
“Departures from the expected increase in temperature with depth (the geothermal gradient) can be interpreted in terms of changes in temperature at the surface in the past, which have slowly diffused downward, warming or cooling layers meters below the surface.”
Current temps at depth as proxies for past temps at the surface? Forget the issue of the impact of drilling the bore holes on the temps at depth Forget also how you attribute temperature at depth to heat from above as opposed to heat radiated from below I am sure these are all calculated to within hundredths of degrees by the modelers. And I am sure they have the diffusion rate calculated with sufficient precision to allow the to determine surface temps at least on annual, if not monthly (daily?) time scales. But I wonder what type of Mannian statistics they use to determine past surface temps this way? What are the assumptions? What are the error bars? How do they test their results?
Yeah, this is a much better idea than tree rings and ice cores. (Aren’t the measurements of the widths of the rings, and the isotopes in the ice cores, also “direct measurements?”)
What was the word you used?
Oh yeah.
Twaddle.
GaryM
Whole branches of science have developed to support unlikely measurements. Tree rings, sediments, boreholes are all ones that should have been laughed out of court before they had developed into the apparently irrefutable highly accurate forms we see today.
Why do climate scientists blithely accept this sort of stuff as being meaningful to fractions of a degree?
tonyb
@Tonyb
You are committing sacrilege!! ::)) by deigning to question the holy authority of the Scientism Priesthood!!
cheers
brent (the denier!)
Julian Huxley First director general of UNESCO
The general philosophy of UNESCO should be a scientific world humanism, global in extent… It can stress… the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world political organization… Political unification in some sort of world government will be required…to help the emergence of a single world culture
http://ronpaulquotes.com/Texas_Straight_Talk/tst093002.html
Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975) FRS
And in his book Religion Without Revelation, he wrote:
“What the sciences discover about the natural world and about the origins, nature and destiny of man is the truth for religion. There is no other kind of valid knowledge. This natural knowledge, organized and applied to human fulfilment, is the basis of the new and permanent religion.”
http://judithcurry.com/2013/08/31/open-thread-weekend-30/#comment-373005
E.O Wilson Quotes
Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds… is not productive.
People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/17/climate-change-is-sucking-funding-away-from-biodiversity/#comment-1664385
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn’t Hadrian’s wall separate Scotland from England?
Go visit some vineyards in Scotland and report on the quality of the wine and how it compares to Roman vintages.
http://www.wine-searcher.com/merchants/ukx-scotland,winery,134
Bob
Are you suggesting they have vineyards in The Orkneys and Argyll? I think you have misread the nature of the list you posted.
tonyb
Apples, berries, roots, leaves…you can make wine from anything. Ask a canny Scot.
Hey, someone just this year actually managed to make a tiny amount of GRAPE wine in Scotland using white grapes developed in a German lab. Planet’s in trouble now.
mosomoso
yeah, the Romans were able to do that as well of course, which is why its such a fair comparison to match todays grapes with those of 2000 years ago.
tonyb
Is it possible to take the Ordinary Science Intelligence test mentioned here?
Yeah, I was curious about that.
I should add that internet searches just take to to articles discussing the test.
It is a Saganesque question –e.g., how does someone go from being really, really amazed about how really, really small we are to hallucinations about it being America that was tempting megalomaniac Saddam Hussein to retaliate against modernity by torching his oil wells in an attempt to destroy civilization? Turns out all you have to do is turn on the spotlight and start the cameras rolling.
I’ve said it before:
Cook et al’s 97% paper is a line in the sand. Anyone who has looked into the detail and still supports it is an Alarmist, plain and simple. They don’t give a damn about facts or ethics, they only care about The Cause.
Any other paper that Cook is involved with requires pulling apart to the most basic level possible before it can be taken seriously by anyone. I’m sure that is happening right now, and await the results with interest.
The Origin of Mind
Only read half of it, but very good.
Aaron – The Origin of Mind
Interesting…for a darker view, read “Straw Dogs” …
http://www.amazon.com/Straw-Dogs-Thoughts-Humans-Animals/dp/0374270937/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1409980092&sr=1-1&keywords=straw+dogs
“…they are disposed to blame human activity for all manner of adverse climate impacts, including ones wholly at odds with the mechanisms of global warming.”
Mechanisms of what now?
When using the expressions “climate change” or “global warming” it would be a good idea to qualify those expressions so they are not confused with common English usage of the words; an even better idea would be to come up with expressions specific to the events or conditions. I don’t care if it results in a mouthful Like “human-caused climate disruption”. Better that than the hijacking of ordinary language so that people can be quizzed on whether they believe in something as natural as motherhood or oxygen.
The fact that so many claiming expertise in the field are extremely unwilling to lose the wriggle room and opportunities for manipulation offered by the vagueness and open-endedness of the terms “climate change” and “global warming” tells you much of what you need to know about their expertise. When challenged on specifics of attribution and causation, they have that great big back door. Sometimes they talking anthro, sometimes not, sometimes they’ll tell you, but sometimes…you have to guess!
+1
Seems to me that despite thousands? of posts about the “consensus” in the climate wars blogosphere, and hundreds of thousands? of comments on those posts, a reasonable conversation between non-tribalists about the “consensus” would be relatively uncomplicated. It would go something like the following:
“Realist” (meaning someone who is relatively concerned about the potential for ACO2 to affect the climate negatively)..
“Skeptic” (meaning someone who is relatively unconcerned about the potential for ACO2 to affect the climate negatively).
Realist”:
“Skeptic”
“Realist”
er…”….dispositive vis-à-vis….”
Seems to me despite hundreds of posts that you have burned hours of your life writing, they accomplish nothing and in too many cases are simply you nitpicking and ankle-biting Dr. Curry. In other cases, they are information-less and just burn internet bandwidth and WordPress space that could be better utilized. Why don’t you take a break. You might discover that there is life waiting out there for you.
jim2 –
==> “Seems to me despite hundreds of posts that you have burned hours of your life writing, they accomplish nothing ”
Is this in contrast to the deep meaning and impact of hundreds of posts that you have burned hours of your life writing? Perhaps in contrast to the hundreds of posts other “skeptics” here have burned hours of their lives writing?
Do you think that the selectivity of your aggressiveness towards people, on the basis of what seems to be their political or other views on highly polarized issues, is consistent with skepticism?
But please, provide some more deep meaning and impact with your “dimocrats” comments or comments about “Obummer” or some other such nonsense. Such a useful expenditure of your hours of time, you know.
Joshua – each skeptic is a unique entity. Obviously, I diss some, encourage others, and point out the pointlessness of your posts. I see no conflict there.
And the differnece between your ‘realists’ view and a simple appeal to ‘climate experts authority’ is what exactly?
It’s more likely that the sceptic would reply.
‘I don’t really care about what people say or think or believe. Science is about evidence, not opinion. Show the evidence and the experiments and the observations, not the opinion’
And I would say that most skeptics are not qualified to thoroughly assess the evidence. That’s experts get PhD’s in their field.
@joseph
Crap. You are vastly over-estimating the difficulty of understanding a subject that is relatively simple. It is not, to coin a phrase’ rocket science. Any real ‘hard’ science is much much harder both conceptually and practically.
You need only see this graph of predicted vs observation to see that there is something seriously wrong with the field
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT-5-yr-means1.png
You don’t even have to know that its about climate. It could be any subject under the sun. You do not need a PhD in climatology to understand it. You need to see only that some predictions are not confirmed by actual observations. My chum who hated science and finished his studies at age 13 drew exactly that conclusion.
And for other stuff, I think I’m confident enough in my own abilities and experience (see denizens thread for bio) to make an assessment without a climo telling me what they think I should be seeing.
I see you used Spencer’s cherry picked graph, which has been heavily criticized for his choice of baseline. But I don’t think climate science is as simple as looking at a graph. If it were that simple, then either climate scientists are either dumb or intentionally committing fraud.
@joseph
You say that Spencer’s work has been ‘heavily criticised’. I’m sure you’re right. And I’m equally sure that many people’s work has been criticised for many things. Einstein was criticised for being ‘Jewish Science’. Darwin for not agreeing with the Bible. Simply ‘being criticised’ does not mean that it is wrong.
But for a climatological ‘science’ that only rises above the significance of stamp collecting if it has some real predictive power, then Spencer’s graph is very bad news. For it shows – even to the least scientifically trained – that reality is not matching the predictions. That would still be true whatever the choice of baseline for presentation.
Nonetheless, if you don’t like the graph, try the written word from the IPCC itself.
‘“For the next two decades a warming of about 0.2C per decade is expected for a range of emission scenarios’
That is the climos’ own prediction in AR4 -which they claimed to be the ‘most reviewed piece of scientific work in history’. And it hasn’t happened. Temperatures haven’t changed in the last 17 year.
I do not need a PhD to conclude that the predcitions are wrong and climatology is in error. Maybe one needs a PhD to diagnose the fault(s) and fix it. But not to point out the basic failing.
Seems to me that you may have been bamboozled by the mystique that climate scientists have tried to construct for themselves. Somebody with a soft degree in ‘Environmental Science’ a PhD in Hydrology and their entire careeer spent in academic institutions really is not an intellectual giant, no matter how much they’d like you to believe it.
Joseph,
You said –
” But I don’t think climate science is as simple as looking at a graph. If it were that simple, then either climate scientists are either dumb or intentionally committing fraud.”
Of course, it is just that simple.
Anybody who claims that the calculation of the numerical averages of historical weather events – commonly referred to as climate – is a science, may be merely suffering from a form of delusional psychosis, not necessarily just dumb or intentionally committing fraud.
Even first rate minds of the calibre of Sir Isaac Newton or Lord Kelvin were not immune to sincere belief in things we would consider laughable today. Given that most self proclaimed climate scientists clearly have difficulty in achieving even second rate status, determine whether they are generally fools, frauds, or mentally deranged is difficult.
Never has so much been wasted by so many, to achieve so little.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
““Well, yes that is true, but the existence of that overwhelming prevalence of view among published experts does help to inform us non-experts about probabilities involved.”
laughing.
it tells you nothing about the probabilities of the science. it tells you
about the probabilities of the scientists beliefs.
So, factor in the probability that experts are right.
how many times are experts right versus wrong?
tough question because how do you “count” times.
Steven Mosher, “So, factor in the probability that experts are right.
How many times are experts right versus wrong?”
It is more like how many times do experts over emphasize the importance of their findings?
“Published papers that seek to test what caused the climate change over the last century and half, almost unanimously find that humans played a dominant role.”
I can agree with that. Huge changes in the landscape, altering water movements, pumping of water from aquifers and changing the levels of atmospheric CO2 have increased the temperature in the last 150 years by 0.8 of a degree.
Doubling CO2 from 280 to 560 ppm will probably add something between 0.6 and 0.9 degrees.
Forget bacon, wheres the beef?
So despite thousands of posts on the topic, Joshua still has (or feigns to have) absolutely no idea what a skeptic is (hence his posing the two sides as being between Realist and Skeptic, rather than Truebeliever/Alarmist and Realist).
A skeptic is a one who is skeptical of a position. It really isn’t rocket science, that. But following time-honoured truebeliever dishonesty, he persists with trying to conflate skeptic and denier.
A true sceptic questions everything – a true believer questions nothing.
Backing up what Roger Pielke, Sr. said, I also want to see a more relevant survey, where respondents are asked to agree with one of the following questions:
1. Virtually all warming since 1950 is due to increased human emissions of CO2, black carbon, methane, etc.
2. At least half of warming since 1950 is due to increased human emissions of these substances.
3. Less than half of warming (etc.)
4. Virtually no warming since 1950 (etc).
If this survey was submitted to people who have published either about global warming explicitly, or who have published in highly relevant fields, such as cloud microphysics, and if educated skeptics were included, it wouldn’t surprise me if less than 15% of responders — today, now that we have a 16 year pause — picked box #1. I would imagine that another 65% would take box #2, 15% box #3, and the remaining 5% box #4. Box #4 would be real deniers, boxes #2 and #3 would contain all skeptics (although many would not think of themselves as skeptics, and many would not be actual skeptics).
As Joshua says, such a survey would reveal that a large majority of respondents would believe that human emissions are the “dominant” cause of increasing temperatures in the last 60 years or so. But that WOULDN’T mean that they agree with the IPCC’s midpoint temperature estimates. The difference between thinking that over half of warming since 1950 or so is due to human influence (that would translate about about 0.3 to 0.4 degrees over that time frame), and thinking that temps will rise by 3 degrees C for a doubling of CO2 and its equivalents, is a big difference for both warming and, perhaps, policy.
Verhaggen et al say that 90% of the most qualified respondents to his survey agree that human emissions are “the dominant” influence on warming, and 82% of the total respondends agree. But Verhaggen apparently doesn’t allow the breakdown between questions #1 and #2. What would people think if it turned out that a large majority of these scientists (the 82% or the 90%, depending on who is included) agreed only with the > 50% attribution, but not with the virtually all attribution (if that were to be the case)?
I don’t know if Judith would pick box #2 or #3 — she is on record as thinking that the range of human-caused warming has a very wide variation and that the variation is approximately around the 50% mark. If she had to chose one box or the other, I would guess she would chose #2, but that #3 would be almost as likely. I can’t speak for her, of course.
The point is that today, if we had these questions, including a question that allows you to chose a box that says “At least 50%, but not virtually all,” my sense is that nearly 2/3rds of relevant scientists would chose that statement.
So let’s have someone do such a survey. Don’t hide behind the IPCC statement, give your survey some meaningful nuance.
Dear John, My human emission is 100 times worse than they think. Everyone is in the same boat. What do we have to do next to save the world?
They do break it down and 20% are in the 51-75% range. The majority, more than 30%, are in the 76-100% range, and about 20% are over 100% with aerosols counteracting, including more of the experts judged by relevant publication numbers. This total includes don’t knows and unknowns so these don’t add up to 80%. Fig. S3 in the following.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/es501998e/suppl_file/es501998e_si_001.pdf
To Jim D: Thanks, not what I expected (obviously). Don’t know how they factor in a 16 year pause and still got what they got. Perhaps they are wed more to the models than to observations?
You don’t need models. Most would equate long-term warming over 60 years to forcing changes, and the biggest player in the forcing change has been CO2.
OK – So instead of how it might go between non-combatants, let’s look at how it often actually goes with “skeptics.”
“Realist” (meaning someone who is relatively concerned about the potential for ACO2 to affect the climate negatively)..
“Skeptic” (meaning someone who is relatively unconcerned about the potential for ACO2 to affect the climate negatively).
“Realist”:
“Skeptic”
“Realist”
“Skeptic”
“Realist”
“Skeptic”
“Realist”:
“Skeptic”
“Realist”
“Skeptic”
“Realist”
“Skeptic”
Of course, just because there are quite a few folks who like to present logically-challenged arguments here, there are a variety of ways that the discussion of the “consensus” plays out that are not so flattering for “realists,” e.g., ones that devolve into a similar labeling of “deniers”).
I think there was an animated discussion between an alarmist and a skeptic a while back… I think it was better than your version. Instead of looking for motivated reasoning, I think you should be motivated to reason. Straw men get straw dogs.
It would be too easy to do as you did and create a caricature of a discussion that pointed the other direction. Why don’t you do it yourself?
Tom –
==> “Of course, just because there are quite a few folks who like to present logically-challenged arguments here,…”
Right on cue, eh?
But notice which one you picked as an example. One that makes your tribe look good. Sort of undercuts any claims you might make to impartiality.
Still, it’s clearly not a matter of opposed “equal” sides. The “Realist” “side” is in tune with the dominant paradigm, the “Skeptic” “side” is opposed to it. Different scientific motivations, along with, of course, the political/economic motivations.
Does it? Really? Just because the number of times the dominant paradigm has been wrong is very small compared to the number of fringe types hanging around questioning every paradigm, doesn’t mean the probability of the paradigm being correct is high.
In fact, if we go a little beyond Kuhn’s dichotomy (“normal” vs. “revolutionary” science), we can see that in almost every scientific field the “consensus” understanding has ended up in the dustbin, as new research opened new understanding of complexities that were previously ignored.
The key question here is how changes to “climate science” now underway, or possible in the future, would impact the political/economic policy implications. Your “Realists” will typically want to assume that advances in the next decade or so won’t completely invalidate their preferred policy demands. Your “Skeptic” typically opposes those demands, and looks for reasons to doubt their continued scientific support.
So where does the “consensus” fit in? Well, in any scientific field you will usually find it supporting the dominant paradigm. Note that (AFAIK) every attempt to measure that “consensus” via polling has left out proper questions about individual certainty, as well as opportunities to include normal scientific caveats about more “revolutionary” (sensu Kuhn) changes.
==> “Sort of undercuts any claims you might make to impartiality.
Yet another rather strange argument when seen coming from a “skeptic.”
Where have you seen me make any claims to impartiality? Please, provide one.
My basic argument is that no one, including myself can make such a claim validly,. There are well-known biasing influences that affect us all – the product of underlying characteristics of human psychology and human cognition.
I state that over and over, yet over and over “skeptics” still make the same non-sequitur-type argument in response.
Not only is it a fundamental mischaracterization of what I say, it also alludes to an irrelevant argument. Whether or not I am impartial says nothing of meaning w/r/t a critique offered of arguments made by “skeptics.” Your argument is an ad hom from bottom to top. Please stop staining the value of skepticism. If you have a critique to make of my characterization of the types of arguments often seen from “skeptics” have at it. I would enjoy a good exchange along those lines.
I did. You didn’t notice:
Of course, with the current policy implications, there’s certainly an economic/political angle as well.
==> “I did. You didn’t notice:”
Try re-posting it w/o first laying out a fallacious (and ad hom) preamble. Why bother with the rest of a comment when it begins with an illogical premise. You can basically prove anything when you start with an illogical premise.. I often don’t bother with the rest of the comment when it starts out that way.
“My basic argument is that no one, including myself can make such a claim validly,. There are well-known biasing influences that affect us all – the product of underlying characteristics of human psychology and human cognition”
My claim is that you cant make this claim validly.
youve never answered that.
> My claim is that you cant make this claim validly.
And mine is that the claim above can’t be validly made.
A validator’s paradox may not help the auditing brand.
steven –
==> “My claim is that you cant make this claim validly.
youve never answered that.”
Thanks for pointing that out. I was imprecise in my language. Precision is good.
I’ll revise:
My basic argument is that no one, including myself, can make such a claim validly. I make that argument because there is well known, empirically-researched and gathered evidence of biasing influences that affect us all – the product of underlying characteristics of human psychology and human cognition. Of course, as always, skepticism about the validity of that evidence – that is likewise the product of a scientific method is called for and quite welcome. After all, that’s what science is about.
You see, steven – when you can make a comment without resorting to name-calling and fallacious argumentation, I will pay attention to you.
At least you’re temporarily avoiding your Cary Grant impersonation. Judy, Judy, Judy…
Climate change insiders don’t consider that it’s not a science at all. Instead it’s a communication problem.
The scientific public that might know something about this or that piece of the climate change conglomeration know that the climate scientists are lying about that this or that, and decide that the whole thing is simiarly contaminated or worse.
The best analysis seems to be that it’s cargo cult science. Take on the trappings and science will follow.
What? The consensus has FALLEN to 82%? If we extend that trend with modeling, it will only be a couple decades before nobody believes in AGW! Ha ha.
If this continues, in just a few years our children will never know Leftist-inspired alarmism again!
All the laboriously worked out science from the ages is put in service of the dogmatic idea of AGW, as bits and pieces are cobbled together into models.
The dogmatic idea always survives. The bits and pieces will change as necessary. In the meantime, it’s a communication problem only, to insiders.
The public though has seen this before. They have their own science of noticing stuff.
I’m not a climate expert, just a high school level physics intuition guy.
A while ago it occured to me why low pressure areas have bad weather and high pressure areas have nice weather, something that was never explained.
I offer it as a perhaps wrong beginning of a bit of science. Somebody is likely to know, in fact.
As a pilot, one hand rule of thumb is that wind aloft comes from 45 degrees further to the right than the wind on the ground. (Nothern hemisphere)
What does this mean? It means that the slower wind on the ground runs down the pressure gradient a little, where the faster winds aloft run at constant pressure, held by centrifugal force balanced with coreolis and pressure gradient.
Well, if the wind on the ground runs down the pressure gradient, it fills in the bottoms of low pressure areas. Air in low pressure areas then rises, and this causes water to condense into clouds, and you get bad weather.
If the wind runs on the ground runs down the pressure gradient, it runs out of the bottoms of high pressure areas. Air in high pressure areas then falls, and this uncondenses water in the air into clearness, and you get nice weather.
Is this right? It would be nice if so. But there’s no anger over it, no consensus survey, no communication problem.
It doesn’t start with a hockey stick or alarm.
There’s no big 45 degree lobby.
A failing is enough to bring it down. As is a better explanation.
You need a fancier name –e.g., instead of the ’45’ I’m thinking perhaps something like, the ‘suicide jet.’ Then you need to spice it up with some key words like, hurricane or cyclone, flanks, hooks, mesoscale flows, accelerations, explosive depressions, drying out, evaporating, stronger and denser, warm conveyor belts and fractured cold fronts and complex, high-resolution models capable of resolving conditional symmetric instabilities.
We’re not far from academia saying –e.g., Ooops, we are mostly right: human-caused global warming (AGW) really, really is the key concern of our age! AGW isn’t, however, caused by American CO2 after all: it’s caused by Brazilian, Russian, Indian and Chinese aerosols. Someone needs to tell them that modernity ain’t all it’s cracked up to be and that we all really, really should start wearing hairshirts and going around barefoot.
“Climate science needs to be evaluated by people outside the climate community…”
Some people have done that, and decided that it needs to be quarantined.
Trying to shelter their own disciplines from the fallout may often be the first concern, but some of the ‘learned societies’ have scored some serious own-goals.
By which I mean, for example, that an oceanographer might want to distance themselves and their perfectly respectable discipline from a self described “climate scientist” who gives the impression they have a working model of everything in the world on their computer.
I think Dan Kahan’s commentary regarding his OCSI scale is misguided. The first thing to note is (as he acknowledges) he didn’t seek to measure people’s ability to correctly recognize facts. People’s “intelligence” in this scale isn’t measured by their ability to give right answers. Instead, their “intelligence” is measured by their ability to give answers Kahan expects “intelligent” people to give. For instance, when asked to agree or disagree:
Kahan says “intelligent” people will answer False. That answer is not factual. Some climate scientists believe the answer is true. Some climate scientists believe we don’t know whether the answer is true or false. A person who wished to accurately answer that question would not be considered “intelligent” on this scale.
A stranger example is found in the questions asked for the OSI scale (of which the OSCI scale is a subset):
Kahan’s published documentation for the OSI scale says the “correct answer” to this question is True even though anyone with the slightest understanding of the Big Bang theory should know the description is completely wrong. This description is nothing but a popsci explanation popularized by and for people with no idea what the Big Bang theory is. And that’s the sort of “intelligence” Kahan measured. He didn’t measure knowledge of science or actual intelligence.
Additionally, Kahan states as fact interpretations of his data he can’t know to be true. Kahan justifies excluding the item above by saying:
But he has know way to know this is true. Religious people were less likely to give Kahan’s “correct” answer, but that means they were more likely to give the actual correct answer. One could posit religious people are less likely to believe the popsci version of the Big Bang theory than non-religious people because religious people are more interested in the subject. Kahan simply ignores this possibility by falsely claiming the popsci interpretation of the Big Bang theory is correct.
In other words, Kahan threw out an item in his survey because religious people were more likely to give the actual correct answer than non-religious people. Kahan justified this by saying religious people were biased to give the wrong answer… because they gave the right answer.
I don’t think it’s appropriate to call Kahan’s scale a measure of any sort of intelligence. I imagine the latent variable he found is a real thing. I just don’t see how one can claim giving wrong answers indicates higher levels of “science intelligence.” If anything, his scale seems more like a measure of people’s ability to recite popsci catch phrases.
Oh, and Kahan misapplies correlation calculations in the same way Stephan Lewandowsky does, showing he apparently doesn’t understand basic and fundamental aspects of analyzing survey data.
dont expect Joshua to attack your sound analysis here.
Why not? Joshua is adept at attacking anything. How sound it is merely determines how much he must misunderstand it.
Why not is simple.
he doesn’t have the skill
Do you mean Kahan used degrees of disagreement to measure agreement correlations? That was my favorite thing last time.
stevepostrel, it’s impossible to say. Stephan Lewandowsy managed to do what you describe by applying tests inappropriate for his data. The tests he used require the data have a normal distribution. If that’s not true, the tests produce incorrect results. In Lewandowsky’s case, it produced the spurious correlations you refer to.
For part of his work, Dan Kahan applied simple correlation tests which also assume the data is normally distributed. His data does not have a normal distribution. That means those test were inappropriate in the same way Lewandowsky’s tests were.
That doesn’t mean the result of using an inappropriate test is the same though. Using data with a non-normal distribution can produce all sorts of strange results. Without being able to see the data itself, I don’t know how the inappropriateness affected the results. It could have had any number of impacts. I know what Kahan did, and it is the same thing Lewandowsky did, but until Kahan publishes his data (something he refuses to do), I can’t say how it affected his results.
What I can say is Kahan is incredibly obtuse about this issue. I pointed out the issue, saying:
Kahan asked if the simple correlation scores he reported were what I was referring to. I responded by saying (in part):
Clearly acknowledging I was referring to what he asked if I was referring to. His response was baffling:
I don’t understand this response. How can someone be snarky based on the idea I refused to answer a question when I specifically acknowledged the answer was what he thought it was. I even gave a search string so one could find what I was referring to without having to look through the whole document being discussed.
That wasn’t the only time he flat-out made things up about what I said. And like the other times, he simply ignored the issue when I pointed out his error. If that’s not him being willfully obtuse, I don’t know what it is.
Pingback: The “97%” Nonsensus | Transterrestrial Musings
Q: What exactly is going on in their heads?
A: Telepathy.
Team of US-led researchers successfully achieves brain-to-brain communication between humans from India to France. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/
I hope everyone takes the time to read this. It goes along with the work outlined in the book “Future of the Mind” Truly amazing. Thanks
I’ve had telepathic communication, over distances up to about 150 miles. No artifacts involved, only with one person (although I could pick up some things from other people). This was in 1974-75, not since. Our brains are more powerful than we think, we just don’t develop all of their capacity. But with modern tele-communications, why worry about telepathy.
Correction, 1973-74.
I was sitting around one day dreaming when a young friend said something to me. I was a bit distracted – and an elaborate explanation of adults and sexuality flashed instantly through my mind. Not a single word was uttered. I swear she laughed and said – that’s silly.
George Marshall ponders without so much as a hint of self-awareness:
Uh, because they understand that weather is not climate?
Because they have personal experience with extreme record breaking weather that flies in the face of “global warming” prophesies?
Because they have personal experience with a decided lack of extreme weather – such as the dearth of tornados and the apparent extinction of landfalling hurricanes – during a time when you clowns were claiming we would be overrun with them?
Among other reasons – because climate ‘scientists’ do decidedly anti-scientific things such as encouraging the public to conflate weather with climate.
Another reason – because climate ‘scientists’ do decidedly anti-scientific things like claiming that everything that happens – hot, cold, wet, dry, snowy, not snowy, whatever, not whatever – is proof of global warming.
Another reason – false claims of being the “targets of violent abuse” and other examples of the climate science persecution complex acting out. All the while climate ‘scientists’ like Ben Santer are threatening to punch people, Jan Perlwitz is threatening to shoot people, the 350.org twits are making bloody videos of their “blow up the deniers” fantasies, John Cook and friends are dressing up like Nazis, and German speaking global warming advocates like Richard Parncutt are advocating for the Final Solution for “climate deniers”.
Summing up, its mostly because a certain subset of scientists have decided to stop acting like scientists and start acting like politically active religious zealots.
They don’t. You made that up. Their propensity for making up stuff to score a propaganda point being another reason why climate ‘scientists’ are distrusted, hated, etc.
Because when you accept responsibility for the proper care of another human life, you find yourself motivated to address real threats, not fake threats ginned up by a bunch of political actors in support of policies that are themselves real threats to the well being of your offspring.
Because Shell’s products are the lifeblood of humanity, and literally the fuel by which all the benefits of civilization are produced.
And that is why you hate them. And that is why other people don’t much care for you.
1+
It’s another day, another thread where the anything will be discussed by the usual suspects other than the binding political agenda at the center of “climate science”. Self awareness just isn’t what it is cracked up to be in this debate.
If Dr. Curry were 100% forthcoming all of the nonsense actors here would be washed away. She still distributed fig leafs daily.
George Marshall spent years fighting chevron in the rainforests. So climate change and big oil, ticks all his activist boxes and preconceptions. He was even involved in Earth First UK, getting Ecologist (goldsmith) money on board. A Lifelong activist
@jj
Marshall asks
‘When did scientists, normally the most trusted professionals in our society, become distrusted…..’
The moment they started acting like shysters not scientists. And when they started calling critics ‘deniers’.
Climategate just confirmed what many had suspected – that then famous ‘leading lights’ were doing their best to rig the game in their favour. And since few other climos have had the integrity or cojones to call them out for their anti-scientific and misleading behaviour, my default position is to assume that they are acting in the same way.
So sometimes I am pleasantly surprised when I discover one who isn’t. But it’s still wise to check and to count your fingers after the handshake.
Marshall is also wrong to generalise to all ‘scientists’. So far, the misbehaviour of climos hasn’t widely affected the reputation of science as a whole. But the longer it goes sanction-free the greater that risk.
Judith
Thanks for this very much. To me my skepticism falls into two categories. I am an engineering physicist and I have delved into the numbers, and they are unconvincing. I have researched the entire history of the papers on the subject, going back to Plass and Kaplan for the best ones, and see where Plass, which is Gavin Schmidt’s old testament of climate science was refuted by Kaplan in Plass’s over estimation of the sensitivity of the atmosphere to CO2.
I also see very little discussion of the fundamental physics involved, which were only quantified in the 1940’s and 1950’s based upon the work of spectroscopists, and quantum physicists. I see no discussion whatsoever of the fundamental atmospheric processes and how they are applied to the study of CO2 absorption and emission at different altitudes and temperatures, which is fundamental to the study of CO2 and climate. I also see a complete ignoring of the work of the physical chemists, which measured far higher ground level CO2 levels in their work, prior to the age of spectroscopy. These methods are just as accurate as the spectroscopy but have been completely discounted.
The other side of the equation, which is my second category, is to simply say that the AGW community is completely and absolutely right as a thought experiment and to examine the policies that could actually address the problem while we maintain a global human civilization of 9 billion people, which we will have in 36 years. The solutions offered are no more than restated version of the work first put out by the Club of Rome in the book Limits to Growth in the early 1970’s, a book that has been completely debunked by the passage of time.
If we seriously want a carbon free civilization there is only one solution, and that is the development of nuclear power, fission first, then fusion. There should be a sustained global effort. Some might retort that this indeed is the case but they would be wrong, by at least an order of magnitude in terms of funding and effort put forth. If what the AGW community says is right, and that we have to do it as soon as possible, then we should be advocating a “Manhattan Project” level of effort in developing and deploying nuclear power across the world, and dealing with its side effects, which are actually not that hard to deal with.
Thus when I hear that we can run a civilization of 9 billion people on solar panels and wind turbines I am immediately skeptical because as and engineering physicist it is easy to do the calculations on the energy gain from both forms of power generation and then remove oil from the energy equation and find that if we did not have oil, we could not replace the solar panels and wind turbines that we have, much less build successive generations of them.
I challenged Gavin Schmidt on this point and his only defense was to point me to two completely unknown scientists who seem to be more advocates than scientist when it comes to the incredibly complex systems of systems engineering problem that providing tens of terawatts of electrical energy (which is what is required if you get rid of oil) that we need to maintain and extend the blessings of civilization to the rest of our brothers and sisters around the world.
Dennis,
Makes a lot of sense to me as an observor. Fusion breakeven may be just around the corner and Fukushima tidal wave killed 16,000 outright and swept 12,000 out to sea two years ago. Three people got 25 rem’s dose which rasise chances of cancer from 22 % to 22.1% over a 70 year lifetime. So future risks in global warming in 2100 is not even that certain. If we were serious we could push for 3rd and 4th generation nuclear plants now and fusion in 50 years. Club of Rome distaste for humans evolved into big green machine that is chewing up the future of energy. Solar in sunny places and wind except where it kills birds are niche supplies that should be encoraged but big baseline energy plants will be coal, natural gas or nuclear. When GB gets really cold and people start to suffer the response will be to move back to baseline power plants. From one of three sources.
Scott
It is a view strongly held by Hansen and Emanuel as in this letter they wrote to the anti-nuclear people last year.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/to-those-influencing-environmental-policy-but-opposed-to-nuclear-power/
What’s new about nowadays is that in the past, schoolteachers didn’t stab the country in the back while academia just looked on, silently.
I want to see a more relevant survey, where respondents are asked to agree with one of the following questions:
1. Virtually all warming since 1950 is due to increased human emissions of CO2, black carbon, methane, etc.
2. At least half of warming since 1950 is due to increased human emissions of these substances.
3. Less than half of warming (etc.)
4. Virtually no warming since 1950 (etc).
If this survey was submitted to people who have published either about global warming explicitly, or who have published in highly relevant fields, such as cloud microphysics, and if educated skeptics were included, it wouldn’t surprise me if less than 15% of responders — today, now that we have a 16 year pause — picked box #1. I would imagine that another 65% would take box #2, 15% box #3, and the remaining 5% box #4. Box #4 would be real deniers, boxes #2 and #3 would contain all skeptics (although many would not think of themselves as skeptics, and many would not be actual skeptics).
Verhaggen et al say that 90% of the most qualified respondents to his survey agree that human emissions are “the dominant” influence on warming, and 82% of the total respondends agree. But Verhaggen apparently doesn’t allow the breakdown between questions #1 and #2. What would people think if it turned out that a large majority of these scientists (the 82% or the 90%, depending on who is included) agreed only with the > 50% attribution, but not with the virtually all attribution (if that were to be the case)?
I don’t know if Judith would pick box #2 or #3 — she is on record as thinking that the range of human-caused warming has a very wide variation and that the variation is approximately around the 50% mark. If she had to chose one box or the other, I would guess she would chose #2, but that #3 would be almost as likely. I can’t speak for her, of course.
The point is that today, if we had these questions, including a question that allows you to chose a box that says “At least 50%, but not virtually all,” my sense is that nearly 2/3rds of relevant scientists would chose that statement.
So let’s have someone do such a survey. Don’t hide behind the IPCC statement, give your survey some meaningful nuance.
I liked this survey, even though (as Dr. Pielke Sr. points out), it could have been improved. Every survey could have been improved; wording surveys is really difficult. But they got a lot of useful information. Well done.
I really, really, wish that they had asked people for a range (quartiles?) for ECS, instead of just the most likely value. It was very interested that something like 30% of respondents put the likely ECS on the low side of the IPCC estimates, and almost no one put it high. To me that’s important news, and news that will surely not be allowed on Wikipedia any time soon.
To me, it detracted from the survey that they spent so much time in cross-tabbing things like “amount of media attention”. That gives me the impression that they have a goal of undermining skeptics in the news. I’d rather that a survey just gathers information, rather than trying to score points.
Dr. Curry and all the brilliant lights on CE –
keep trying to be a passive observer, but since I am one of the lab rats this post is about, I can’t help but respond –
since the only reason I could possibly have become a “denier” is that I’m stupid or the unwitting victim of sinister “denial organization” propaganda – I shall attempt to explain why the great scions of science like Mann and Gavin (first or last name … is it Schmidt?) have failed in their attempts to save me
science –
(which I couldn’t possibly understand)
from the abstract above … “90% of respondents agreed recent warming is anthropogenic”
“recent warming”? … is there a “pause” or no? … there was post on the 39 (and counting) attempts to explain it away on this very site a few days ago … 16-18 years? … please define “recent”
reconstructions of average surface temps from 800 years ago seem dubious and unproven to me, but never mind
“missing heat”… please … my new Ferrari is “missing,” oh wait, I never had one in the first place
culture and politics –
“denier”…
all I can think of is the bony finger of the inquisitor pointing at me
so there … I shall return to edge of the lab cage … (thigmotax) … ain’t that one of them science words
I really appreciate this site and admire everyone who writes here … and only hesitantly and humbly participate
John
Good to see you are asking questions as well as lurking, the sceptics and alarmists here are mostly pretty nice and there is often a good debate and lots of links to interesting references. You can’t follow and read them all but you will come to realise whose are worth following.
The food fights seem to have calmed down a bit in the last week or so which is very welcome.
Tonyb
thanks tony
the tone of some of the stuff in post annoyed me a bit. not JC, but the folk doing the “studies” … modern psychobabble
I’m a bit of history geek, I think like you, and got really curious about climate science because of historical stuff I ran into –
like the the curious fact that the Norman coast was 4.3 miles farther away from Mont St. Michel in the High Middle Ages (sea levels?) –
Or why did Hannibal cross the Alps? … cause he could :)
also tony
I like very much that climate history thing you do. So anytime you have a chance to put stuff up, that’s good fun for me
also relevant and important IMO
John
I’ve always fancied going on one of Dr Hunts annual expeditions to try to definitively determine the pass that Hannibal went over
http://www.patrickhunt.net/events/events.html
No, I’m not keen on modern physcho babble either, for which climate science seems to be a world leader.
Tonyb
JohnS
linked below is an interesting web page on basics of climate controversy and science in a number of smaller doses.
http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/02/16/ghosts-of-climates-past/
Actual best to go to the roadmap there to see what he proposes.
Scott
wow – looks interesting, surprised I hadn’t run across it before – thanks
By the way, I think it’s worth pointing out that everything I’ve seen in climate science makes me think that something like 80% for the “consensus” is probably pretty much right. That is quite a solid consensus! However, it is different from 97% in a very important way. We have a name for a scientific question where only 10 or 20% of scientists disagree. We call it an _open question_. Not settled, not at all like Special Relativity or the Germ Theory of Disease.
97% is entirely different. 97% means: no one disagrees except a few crackpots, and some political operatives paid for by Big Oil. 97% really means 100%.
That number is important to them – go to the Wikipedia page on Scientific Consensus on Global Warming and search for 97.
Summary of Verheggen et al. (2014): Another paper that finds that anthropogenic global warming wins over natural warming in a “popularity contest”. Wow!
I began having problems with the CAGW group when they talked about tipping points. In a system where feedback is used, a tipping point is a place where once you have reached it, unless something changes, like moving the mike away from the amplifier or your mouth from the mike, you will NEVER get back to stability. Since CO2 has been MUCH higher in the past, with no tipping, the CAGW tipping point is all arm waving. I have even had folks on this site say there were “different kinds of tipping points”?????
Really?
They don’t talk about tipping points that much anymore. Back when the incoming was 363 Watts/m^2 the outgoing was 103 watts/m^2, that was at 370 -380 ppm of co2. Interestingly they’ve never said where the balance should be. If it’s at 270 ppm when according to their graphs then it should have balanced. However, they explained away climate changes in the past as saying they were only local (MWP & LIA). They aren’t saying whether the incoming radiation has increased or decreased. Nor are they saying what the what the outgoing is now. I think we can draw a line here on a graph to determine what the tipping point is. If that were true don’t you think they’d be screaming their heads off about it? The lack of information indicates something is wrong with their analysis. Otherwise, we’d know, it’s be right in our faces. I’m sure the AGW people watch this closely.
Kent you’ve hit on an important fact, co2 levels were much higher in the past and no tipping point.
“…agreed with anthropogenic greenhouse gases being the dominant driver of recent global warming.”
Dominant – most important, powerful, or influential.
Dominant could be less than 50%, say 40% against two 30%s. A broad range was used again. I think that’s lowering the bar that resulted in a bigger percentage number.
It appears that the criticisms of the 97% Cook study resulted in a better study.
–I think we need to declare the idea of a 97% consensus among climate scientists on the issue of climate change attribution to be dead. Verheggen’s 82-90% number is more defensible, but I’ve argued that this analysis needs to be refined.–
He is dead, Jim.
I think what is far more important than a number of 97% as compared to a number of 82% is the process of arriving at the number.
Or one can safely conclude that Cook is not a scientist nor should be person one wants appointed to position related to ethics.
And it seems that higher or lower percentage to any question doesn’t mean much. Or usefulness of it, may be more important in terms of indicating how stupid or brainwashed climate scientists are.
Though another aspect could be related to the question rather than the answer to it. Such as, how a group of people are responding to a dumb question? And why do people who imagine they rational, ask such poor questions.
For instance one could ask, “Are humans having a profound effect upon the world?
Or perhaps, “Are humans causing causing the extinction of animal species.”
If one were to ask either these questions, it seems it’s usefulness would be little, but any value to it, would related to assessing the people who asked such questions as compared the idiocy of imagining it has anything to do arriving at an answer to the questions.
And as I say, the higher percentage would tend to indicated the mindlessness of the group of people polled- and willing to answer such an useless question. And as I said, it tells one about the idiot asking such questions. Or when news reporter, asks any question, it also tells one about the news reporter.
And as in news reporting, the follow up question is probably more important than first question.
So, “Are humans having a profound effect upon the world?”
And, “What is most significant effect”
Or “Are humans causing causing the extinction of animal species.”
And, “What should be done about this?”
Now the follow up, does not really give better answers, but rather it tells one more about the person which asked the questions, and the person asking the questions- but this is all that polling can ever do.
Maybe some people’s brain are wired to expect the worst and find it. I am well ground in what expectations can be. I’ve seen them waiting in the fields for Jesus to return. People willingly drink acid laced cool aid while their children are screaming that they aren’t quite ready to go. ( the poison they took is a horrible death) . It’s a double edged sword when they produce this kind of report. I’m not deluded at all about the hoax of climate change, the people pushing it are. They’ve linked changes with changes riding solely on co2 . Has that changed? The AGW people now have a wide variety of explanations as to the pause, but none refute the basic premise that man made release of co2 is the cause of every weather event. It seems they have the right to agree that it did get warmer for awhile. However, they can’t seem to believe that the climate can get colder. A few years ago, after every snowstorm the headlines read ” Winter’s last Hurrah” ( in January no less) only to be followed by another snowstorm. How quickly AGW forgets.
By the way, I’m not a paid by big oil or anybody else. As to whether you can call anybody a crackpot is a matter of opinion. I disagree and I base that on the science. N’est pas? What exactly is the heat retention now anyway, since the amount of co2 has increased by 13%, in watts /m^2 since it was measured at 240w/m^2 when the ppm was 370? Or did the incoming radiation decrease? Did the outgoing increase? You do remember the tipping point right miker613?
Speaking of other contrived consensus “sciences”, school nutrition;
http://eagnews.org/illinois-2nd-largest-district-drops-michelle-os-menu-after-hummus-is-deemed-too-fatty/
The synergy between animal rights activists, greens and the emerging food authoritarians is evident but curious in thin polls how these culture groups self-segregate;
http://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/new-gallup-poll-reveals-5-percent-american-are-vegetarians/
5% of “conservatives” are vegetarians as well? 7% liberal. You wouldn’t think the public image could be so pronounced. Regardless, this is who is taking over “what’s best” in food choices in public education, another “consensus” with little hard science to support it. More central planning, political hand waving, cronyism and secular moral-ism. It’s very concurrent to climate change advocacy culture.
Why do the people who say climate change is too uncertain become more agitated about the threats of cell phones, meteorite strikes or alien invasion?
Is the supposition of the sentence even true?
No.
Tonyb
not only baseless, to me it’s an arrogant insult – prompting my previous comment
John S and tonyb
Actually the world should worry more about a meteroite strike than 1 degree C in 2100. B612 foundation is trying to build a satellite to find near strike items before it is too late. For a price of $430,000,000. That is a lot but consider US gov spends $8,000,000,000 (Billion) annually of climate it could save us from the fate of the dinosaurs 60 M years ago or losing a major city today.
http://sentinelmission.org/news/asteroid-2014-rc-flyby/
Here is the link to the latest flyby. It is a low probability in any one year but certain to happen and has happened in the past issue.
Risk is a funny thing. Pretend enemies are easier to fight than real things.
Scott
scott
you are absolutely right …
isn’t there a big NEO passing close this weekend ? …
so many galaxies, the math can not be disputed, aliens are out there
cell phone radiation (what the consensus % on that?) … uh-oh, maybe they’re right!
where’s my tin foil hat?
I knew that Voyager thing with the map on how to get here was a bad idea …
no telling who, are what, is going to find it :)
They don’t need a map – it’s on the bus route.
Climatists promised warming and it didn’t happen. Al Gore was given a Nobel for yelling GLOBAL WARMING in crowded theaters but the Left’s propaganda is beginning to petering out: there are only so many ways to describe a non-problem in ways that frighten people. We’ve heard it all before— that Marxism is the only hope and that Americanism can only lead to, Catastrophic, Calamitous Runaway Global Warming and Extreme Climate Change and Weather Disasters and will Kill All Life.
The survey has more to offer than others in this field. Final data will be worth waiting for. The minorities in the data (eg the numbers seeing climate sensitivity on the low side) and, if number of papers published is related to age/seniority in the field, the higher level of skeptics among the less published scientists suggests more dissenting views than anticipated. As replies were later checked for accuracy (eg against number of papers published), there’s a mild concern about anonymity, as dissenters would be known to the researchers – I guess this has been ethically handled so the data can’t be misused.
JC, many thanks for pursuing this line of thought and sharing them with us. It really doesn’t take very long to come to the realization that the debate is often about belief structures versus knowledge structures.
In my discussions with fellow scientists from many fields, blogs, as well as casual discussions with friends and acquaintances that veer off into the AGW discussion, I soon came to a different notion regarding regarding the reactions of parents. I began to notice that there were two definable groups of “believers” in the AGW hypothesis, “parents” (those with offspring in the offing) and “parrots” (those that can repeat a thing without understanding it). There is a strong primal motivator to protect ones young from future calamities, more or less regardless of the perceived risk. We monetize it as insurance.
“Parrots” are another can of worms altogether. In undergrad. I took Psych 101 towards satisfying general college credits. I was so fascinated that I asked for and received permission to take a graduate level Psych course (Theories of Personality) and get general college credit. It was in this course (now 40 years ago) that I coined the term “parrot” to describe a stunning study we discussed for a week in that class. Unfortunately, being a globe-trotting geologist, somewhere along the way the box containing that coursework evaporated, so I cannot provide much to relocate it, and I have tried long and hard to find it again on the net. Best I remember, it was done at a Chicago university, but then there’s the persistence of memory problem. The result that remains burned into my psyche was that the researchers claimed to have proven, with a massive study, that the human being is nine times more susceptible to rumor than it is to fact. I have since referred to it as the “9 Times Rule.”
My simple proof of the “9 Times Rule” is this: of all of mankind’s religions, which is the correct one? And would not the “correct” one make all the rest rumors?
Then, in 2011, a paper by Xie et al (“Social Consensus Through The Influence Of Committed Minorities” http://arxiv.org/pdf/1102.3931.pdf ) may have taken this concept further:
“We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction p of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence. Specifically, we show that when the committed fraction grows beyond a critical value pc ≈ 10%, there is a dramatic decrease in the time Tc taken for the entire population to adopt the committed opinion….
“Human behavior is profoundly affected by the influenceability of individuals and the social networks that link them together. Well before the proliferation of online social networking, offline or interpersonal social networks have been acknowledged as a major factor in determining how societies move toward consensus in the adoption of ideologies, traditions, and attitudes [1,2]. As a result, the dynamics of social influence has been heavily studied in sociological, physics, and computer science literature [3–7]. In the sociological context, work on diffusion of innovations has emphasized how individuals adopt new states in behavior, opinion, or consumption through the influence of their neighbors. Commonly used models for this process include the thresholdmodel [8] and the Bass model [9]. A key feature in both thesemodels is that once an individual adopts the newstate, his state remains unchanged at all subsequent times.”
From their Summary:
“In closing, we have demonstrated here the existence of a tipping point at which the initial majority opinion of a network switches quickly to that of a consistent and inflexible minority. There are several historical precedents for such events, for example, the suffragette movement in the early 20th century, and the rise of the American civil-rights movement that started shortly after the size of the African-American population crossed the 10% mark. Such processes have received some attention in sociological literature under the term minority influence.”
That tends to provide some explanation for the “Parrot” phenomena as well as the “9 Times Rule”. We monetize it as the advertising industry.
But there is another absolutely incredible psychological phenomena in play here, and it is, in fact, denial, but from a very different perspective.
I have yet to bestow a catchy name to it, but the term cognitive dissonance seems the most appropriate accolade. In whatever form of discussion, including here, that gets around to AGW, I try to pose what I hope are questions that attempt to lend perspective, such as “What if the proponents of the AGW hypothesis are right?” and “So AGW could produce a big rise in sea level, how big?” or “When do we live?” It takes little time for cognitive dissonance (CD) to make its entrance.
On “What if the proponents of the AGW hypothesis are right?” this obviates discussion of attribution advancing immediately to what to do about it. I like to let that run a while. I make sure to ask about sea level rise, to see if anyone has read AR4 or AR5, and to acquaint those that have not with the upper error bar of SRES marker A1F1 estimate of about +0.6 meters by 2099 in AR4 and the upper error bar of RCP8.5 on table 13.8 in AR5 of about +0.8 meter rise by 2100.
It is here I explain that the estimates of sea level from the second and last thermal excursion at the very end of the Eemian, the previous interglacial, produced that interglacials sea level highstand somewhere between about +6.0 meters to +52.0 meters ( http://www.uow.edu.au/content/groups/public/@web/@sci/@eesc/documents/doc/uow045009.pdf http://lin.irk.ru/pdf/6696.pdf ). And that we were indeed there as our stone age selves.
CD then arrives. It doesn’t matter that the prognosticated worst case “business as usual”, as the IPCC puts it, anthropogenic late Holocene sea level highstand scores in the 10-15% range against the late Eemian natural highstand. Even describing this in terms of anthropogenic signal to natural noise, it seems one of the most basic principles of engineering, signal to noise ratio (SNR), becomes entirely meaningless.
Score 1 for CD.
Invariably, an argument is eventually made that the AGW highstand will happen faster and be unprecedented because there is no reason to suspect a natural change of that magnitude is remotely imminent. It is here that I go into the present 11,717 year age of the Holocene (based on distinctive varve counts at the end of the Younger Dryas), and that 7 of the last 8 interglacials have each lasted about half a precession cycle. Which varies between 19,000 and 23,000 years and we are at the 23kyr point now, making 11,500 half and 11,717 “about half”. Generally speaking, these are things which only a handful of scientists even know, or had ever even considered. “When we live?” doesn’t seem to be a variable much of anyone ponders. It is also fair to say that being hit with so much “new” information, with most listeners/readers being introduced for the first time to the other parallel climate debate raging in the circle of Quaternary scientists regarding just how long the Holocene will last, is probably too much to take all at once. Most just don’t know what to do with this dramatically expanded discussion.
Score another point for CD.
The problem with information these days might be that there is simply too much of it. We can go to almost infinite depths on whether or not a pause exists, what is causing it, etc. etc. But we do not seem to be able to get our minds wrapped around a totally different way to approach climate. Climate at the possible/probable end-Holocene.
This is when I will generally move the discussion back to “”What if the proponents of the AGW hypothesis are right?”, making sure that everyone is OK with adopting, for the purposes of discussion, that we accept the upper error bars of whatever prognostication one favors for the effects of AGW. The issue of attribution having been agreed, we now move on to what to do about it.
Or more precisely, what to do about it at the now 11,717 year old Holocene interglacial. Which, as it turns out, is a much more difficult proposition. There is a 1 in 8 chance (12.5%) that the Holocene will “go long”, like MIS-11 (the Holsteinian interglacial) did, all on its own. In considering this 12.5% possibility, we need also consider that MIS-11, while running something like 1.5 to 2 full precession cycles, also experienced many orbital induced warm and cold spells, paced by precession and obliquity. And MIS-11 had 3 thermal excursions, right at its bitter end, with the last one being the strongest with an estimated sea level highstand of +21.3 meters.
This is an awful lot of dissonant information if filtered through a belief structure. But there is a lot more to go. That is why CD begins to rise steeply from this point on to “the Choice.”
Adopt AGW and then realize we are having this discussion at the half precession old Holocene and introduce another possibly independent climate variable, when we live, and it starts to get complicated. Realize that there is an 87.5% chance that the Holocene will not “go long” and run head-on into Ruddiman’s Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis, best described by Muller and Pross (2007) (http://folk.uib.no/abo007/share/papers/eemian_and_lgi/mueller_pross07.qsr.pdf):
“The possible explanation as to why we are still in an interglacial relates to the early anthropogenic hypothesis of Ruddiman (2003, 2005). According to that hypothesis, the anomalous increase of CO2 and CH4 concentrations in the atmosphere as observed in mid- to late Holocene ice-cores results from anthropogenic deforestation and rice irrigation, which started in the early Neolithic at 8000 and 5000 yr BP, respectively. Ruddiman proposes that these early human greenhouse gas emissions prevented the inception of an overdue glacial that otherwise would have already started.”
We are now faced with our agreed-to proposition that AGW is real, in fact so real that “early human greenhouse gas emissions prevented the inception of an overdue glacial that otherwise would have already started”. Test your CD on what that means. It means that the reason we are still enjoying interglacial conditions is BECAUSE of GHGs. And that means that reducing their late Holocene atmospheric concentrations might might run afoul of the Law of Unintended Consequences and tip us into the next glacial. And that might actually be what “The Choice” really is as regards AGW. Amazing, isn’t it? If we are right about AGW/GHGs, wouldn’t stripping them from the late Holocene atmosphere be the wrong thing to do? Unless you are not worried about glacial inception, or its successor, the next glacial, or…
The next CD calculation, which involves the climatic “madhouse” known as glacial inception. In MIS-1, the Holocene, we are at an eccentricity minimum yet again. Eccentricity minima occur about every 400kyrs. The last time we were at an eccentricity minima was MIS-11, the Holsteinian interglacial, and 800kyrs ago it occurred during MIS-19 within the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT). MIS-11 went long. MIS-19 didn’t. From memory the most credible analysis of this I remember is something on the order of 10kyrs below 3.6 parts per mil O18/16, or about half a precession cycle. MIS-19 experienced 3 thermal excursions during the MIS-18 glacial inception, the last one being the stronger. MIS-11 experienced 3 thermal excursions during the MIS-10 glacial inception, the last one being the strongest yielding a highstand of +21.3 meters. MIS-5e had 2 thermal excursions during glacial inception, the last one once again being the stronger, yielding somewhere between +6.0 to +52.0 meter highstand, the highest for that interglacial. These were very abrupt climate changes.
“The lesson from the last interglacial “greenhouse” in the Bahamas is that the closing of that interval brought sea-level changes that were rapid and extreme. This has prompted the remark that between the greenhouse and the icehouse lies a climatic “madhouse”!
conclude Neuman and Hearty (1996) http://www.researchgate.net/publication/249518169_Rapid_sea-level_changes_at_the_close_of_the_last_interglacial_(substage_5e)_recorded_in_Bahamian_island_geology/file/9c96051c6e66749912.pdf
and:
“The pronounced climate and environment instability during the interglacial/glacial transition could be consistent with the assumption that it is about a natural phenomenon, characteristic for transitional stages. Taking into consideration that currently observed ‘‘human-induced’’ global warming coincides with the natural trend to cooling, the study of such transitional stages is important for understanding the underlying processes of the climate changes.”
state Boettger et al (Quaternary International 207 [2009] 137–144) in their abstract ( http://eg.igras.ru/files/f.2010.04.14.12.53.54..5.pdf ).
Revisiting our assumption once again, we can be right about AGW/CO2/GHGs and because we are right, removing them, right now, might actually be the wrong thing to do. Doing that might be all that is needed to tip us into the next glacial. Sirocko et al (“A late Eemian aridity pulse in central Europe during the last glacial inception”, nature, vol. 436, 11 August 2005, doi:10.1038/nature 03905, pp 833-836) inform us:
“Investigating the processes that led to the end of the last interglacial period is relevant for understanding how our ongoing interglacial will end, which has been a matter of much debate…..”
“The onset of the LEAP occurred within less than two decades, demonstrating the existence of a sharp threshold, which must be near 416 Wm2, which is the 65oN July insolation for 118 kyr BP (ref. 9). This value is only slightly below today’s value of 428 Wm2. Insolation will remain at this level slightly above the inception for the next 4,000 years before it then increases again.” ( http://www.particle-analysis.info/LEAP_Nature__Sirocko+Seelos.pdf )
Might it not be a tad more prudent, that if we really, really want to strip said “climate security blanket” from the late Holocene atmosphere, that we at least consider waiting maybe say ~4,000 years or so before plunking down?
Or should we just go for it, and take our chances with the climatic “madhouse” known as glacial inception?
This brings an entirely different perspective to the term “denier”. Here, we have adopted the AGW hypothesis in total. No denial. And precisely because we do not deny AGW we either have to face the prospect that a consequence of being right about AGW pretty much vindicates Ruddiman’s Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis, meaning that the reason we are still experiencing interglacial warmth is because of AGW, or we must deny the possibility that the Holocene would otherwise already be in the climatic “madhouse” of glacial inception.
The denial shoe is therefore neatly transferred to the other foot. We must now deny that there is an 87.5% chance of the Holocene being kaput and embrace the 12.5% chance that the Holocene would just have run along, for however long, perturbed only by AGW.
The larger problem here, which should be painfully obvious by now, is what if we are right about AGW/CO2/GHGs? Because then we are faced with “The Choice.” How many of us can parallel process “Insolation will remain at this level slightly above the inception for the next 4,000 years before it then increases again” with being right about CO2 and reach the conclusion to remove the objectionable mass of it quicksmart?
Why would this not be considered retarded?
“What are we doing? What the hell are we doing? – Joe Duarte
“Knowledge begins with skepticism and ends with conceit” – Socrates
“For Holocene’s sake, why can’t we consider waiting say ~4,000 years, just in case we are right about AGW?” – me
The Marshall excerpts raise a few flags, e.g. I’m not “agitated about the threats of cell phones, meteorite strikes or alien invasion,” I don’t fear death, my views on climate change don’t reflect the views of people who surround me.
“It appears then that English law does not easily accept the results of scientific analysis… The analyses are frequently flawed and there can be little confidence in the methods adopted. The experts usually admit that the different methods will give different results. In some cases, the experts adopt incorrect logic and ignore evidence…
Causation was as understood by the man in the street, and not as understood by the scientist or the metaphysician…
The term “dominant cause” is intended to classify the event as ruling or prevailing over other events…
When the classification is used, there is no guidance on how the “dominant cause” is to be ascertained.”
http://www.atkinson-law.com/library/Chapter_1_Extract.pdf
Greenhouse gases as the dominant cause of recent global warming. What does it mean? What is the coherent message they are trying to send?
Hi Judith – From your quote of the Verheggen, et al paper, it appears they used the **exact same search in WoS** that Cook et al used. Oh snap. I only skimmed that paper when a commenter on my blog mentioned it, and never noticed the search they used. That search results in a ton of non-climate papers, including all the psychology papers, surveys of the general public, papers analyzing TV coverage, etc. that I found in the Cook scam.
If Verheggen et al did not screen out social science papers, or all the other non-climate papers, like all the irrelevant engineering papers, and it appears they did not, then their results are voided — their poll consists of the authors of those papers. We can’t do anything with their study or their numbers if they’re polling authors of those papers. I wish I’d caught this earlier…
(The engineering paper phenomenon I discovered was many, many iterations of: Hey guys, you all know about global warming… let me tell you about this new membrane I’ve developed, or this new diesel engine design, or this new atomic layer deposition technqiue.)
All those papers would go into their “mitigation” category if they used they same scheme as Cook et al. The quality of their questionnaire will become moot if this is the case. Now we would think that engineers, psychologists, pollsters, sociologists, and what have you who are polled as part of a study of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change would be confused and tell the researchers “Yo, I’m not a climate scientist, or even in a related field. I don’t even study the natural world. You don’t want me.” But after Cook I’ve lost my power to be surprised by consensus studies.
The mitigation and impacts categories also create a structural bias that invalidates such studies. There is no disconfirming counterpart to mitigation or impacts papers/authors. There is no opposite of a mitigation paper, which will almost always be counted as endorsement. Same with impacts (unless there is an explicit category of Minimized Impacts or DIsputed Impacts, or like your hurricanes paper, disputing the evidence of causation) Cook’s Impacts category description (Table 1) does not contemplate minimization, no do the available guidelines in the rater forums (forums which violated their stated method.)
To illustrate, if talking about climate gets an engineering paper counted as endorsement, how does an engineering paper get counted as rejection? Most won’t talk about climate. Will they count as rejection? Could an engineering paper say “Yeah, we’re not talking about climate” and count as rejection? There’s no way. It becomes even worse with social science papers. If a paper that analyzes TV coverage of AGW counts as scientific endorsement of AGW, does a paper that analyzes Taco Bell commercials count as rejection?
The use of “mitigation” papers invalidates the method completely. (The TV paper was counted as mitigation by Cook.) It’s trickier because they’re polling the authors of such papers, but from the Methods section they didn’t exclude non-climate scientists, or even psychologists. The said this: “By also soliciting responses from signatories of public statements who are not necessarily publishing scientists, it is likely that viewpoints that run counter to the prevailing consensus are somewhat magnified in our results.”
This will turn out to be false if they included a bunch of the unrelated papers’ authors. The results will need to be recomputed excluding all the non-climate science respondents.
I must say that I like what you have been doing on your quest.
> The mitigation and impacts categories also create a structural bias that invalidates such studies. There is no disconfirming counterpart to mitigation or impacts papers/authors. There is no opposite of a mitigation paper, which will almost always be counted as endorsement.
Category “mitigation”, search term “climate”, classified as a 6:
http://skepticalscience.com/tcp.php?t=search&s=climate&a=&c=3&e=6&yf=&yt=
Category “impacts”, search term “climate”, classified as a 6:
http://skepticalscience.com/tcp.php?t=search&s=climate&a=&c=2&e=6&yf=&yt=
Jesus.
> If Verheggen et al did not screen out social science papers, or all the other non-climate papers, like all the irrelevant engineering papers, and it appears they did not , then their results are voided — their poll consists of the authors of those papers.
Oh snap:
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2014/08/11/faq-for-the-article-scientists-views-about-attribution-of-global-warming/
They don’t even claim representativity.
Jesus.
Dan Kahan’s work is infused with the conceit that his opponents have ideology, but he doesn’t. For example, consider Kahan’s silence on the Lennard Bengtsson incident in light of his following analysis: http://www.nature.com/news/why-we-are-poles-apart-on-climate-change-1.11166
Kahan considered the potential social crisis for someone taking a position that “conflicts with their cultural group”. His example is tellingly a “barber in a rural town in South Carolina” who want to take action on climate change:
But isnt the Lennard Bengtsson incident an example of someone taking a position that “conflicts with their cultural group”. But although this incident was very widely covered and very controversial and even though it seems to exemplify one of Kahan’s core hypotheses, Kahan did not write about the incident and was seemingly blind to it, because he is much quicker to recognize ideology among his opponents than in himself and people with whom he sympathizes. An easy enough failing, but one hopes that social scientists would be more objective.
In The German Ideology, Marx condemned “the sanctimonious and hypocritical ideology of the bourgeoisie [which] voices their particular interests as universal interests.” Something that Kahan might reflect on/
The same people who want to hear a barber “explain” **climate change**, are same people who pay thousands of dollars to listen to Al Gore.
And Barber don’t get fired for talking about anything, they get fired for driving away customers. As in who in there right mind wants to be stuck in chair and forced to listen to someone like Al Gore?
==> “Kahan did not write about the incident and was seemingly blind to it, because he is much quicker to recognize ideology among his opponents than in himself and people with whom he sympathizes
Wow! I’ve read “skeptics” talking about how smart Steve is, but even so I didn’t realize just how brilliant he is.
He knows why Dan didn’t write about Bengtsson even without asking. He knows that any of myriad other reasons why Dan didn’t write about Bengtsson can so easily be dismissed. Yes, indeed. Steve is one smart fellow.
Steve’s one hell of a lot smarter than you. Again, you would be helping your image if you read more and posted less. It’s better for people to think you are an i-d*ot than to open your mouth and prove you are.
==> “Steve’s one hell of a lot smarter than you.”
Agreed, jim2.
But pointing out my lack of intelligence does nothing to answer the question of why such a smart fellow makes such obviously fallacious arguments.
Just Steve playing his usual tricks.
Josh, do you understand that the possibility that Kahan may have his own biases, and that these biases creep into his survey questions, may undermine his analysis and conclusions?
Josh, you can also tell me why support for Palestinian Arabs over Israeli Jews tightly correlates with support for an aggressive response to climate change?
http://www.people-press.org/2014/07/15/as-mideast-violence-continues-a-wide-partisan-gap-in-israel-palestinian-sympathies/
http://www.gallup.com/poll/161714/republican-skepticism-global-warming-eases.aspx
Doc –
==> “Josh, do you understand that the possibility that Kahan may have his own biases, and that these biases creep into his survey questions, may undermine his analysis and conclusions?”
Of course I think it is a possibility, and more generally I think that it is a certainty that Dan’s work reflects his own motivated reasoning, cultural cognition, etc. His theoretical work predicts exactly that.
And it’s not like I agree with Dan on everything.
But that doesn’t mean that I agree with the bogus reasoning that has been presented here.
Dan criticizes the “scientific literacy” assessments as being quite inadequate. The notion that he assumes that they validly measure intelligence, as has been asserted, is not consistent with his work. He has done quite a bit of work discussing the inherent biases in those assessments.
I think there are some legitimate questions about the possibility of what might be considered a “partisan” implication vis-à-vis the climate wars to some of Dan’s work (specifically, whether scientists are less likely than Joe lunch pail to engage in cultural cognition when working in their field of expertise) – but the notion that his work targets “opponents” is not, IMO, consistent with his work and someone making such a claim, if they’re serious about due diligence and “engineering quality” work should necessarily offer something more than just a shallow argument.
Dan is open to discussing where his work might be biased when people approach him in good faith. Sometimes he presents evidence in response to show that the assignment of bias is not consistent with data. Sometimes he admits to biasing influences and changes course accordingly. Like anyone, he’s going to be resistant to arguments that he is biased – but there’s no meaningful way to respond to fallacious arguments such as we’ve seen here.
IMO, Dan’s work is a rare form of antidote to the tribal identity-aggressive and identity-defensive behaviors so widely associated with the climate wars. One aspect of his basic thesis is that there is a symmetry to the forces that influence public opinion w/r/t climate change. Accordingly, it is easily predicable that partisans on both sides, respectively, will attack his work.(indeed, his evidence predicts just that).
That’s why I put “skeptics” and “realists” in quotes.
Sane as it ever was.
> [T]he possibility that Kahan may have his own biases, and that these biases creep into his survey questions, may undermine his analysis and conclusions?
Yes, there is that possibility. There is always that possibility. Science is supposed to help us guard against such bias, which are not always bad, incidentally.
But why is that possibility raised in some cases, but not in others?
Ideology is what the Otter entertains.
==> “But why is that possibility raised in some cases, but not in others?”
What about the possibility that the charge is made based on bogus arguments? What about the possibility is raised with no presentation of supporting evidence, no “engineering quality” work?
What about the possibility that Doc is seemingly blind to the Dante Stallworth situation?
Joshua : But pointing out my lack of intelligence does nothing to answer the question of why such a smart fellow makes such obviously fallacious arguments.
He didn’t. You just dishonestly attributed obviously fallacious arguments to him.
No accident then that he didn’t write Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore ClimateGATE
Steve notes merely that Kahan ignores the Bengtsson case – thereby showing himself to be quicker to recognize ideology among his opponents than in himself.
Your claim – that Steve claims to knows what is in Kahan’s mind – is just another one of your little lies. Another one of those strawmen you so rely on.
Kahan also seems to be going to the Wegman affair, jim2. He’s not alone in that seeming blindness.
Please reflect on your ideology.
> seems to be going
Seems to be blind, that is.
More topics that Dan is “seemingly blind” to:
The heartbreak of halitosis
Kim Kardashian
BHENGAAAZZZIII!!!!!111!!
The Wegman affair:
A prof misses that some uncontroversial paragraph was plagiarised.
Every bit as serious as systemic hiding of data for 10 years, deleting evidence of having done so, and corrupt ‘investigations’ briebed with tax money that attempted to cover all this up.
Oh yes, Wegman has much to answer for.
Steve –
==> “Dan Kahan’s work is infused with the conceit that his opponents have ideology, but he doesn’t. ”
If you bothered to perform due diligence (i.e., actually read what Dan writes before drawing conclusions), you’d avoid making such errors (eg.., concluding that he’s identifying “opponents,” that he doesn’t acknowledge ideology, etc.).
Can we get someone around here to do some “engineering quality” work?
Is that really too much to ask?
“If you bothered to perform due diligence (i.e., actually read what Dan writes before drawing conclusions), you’d avoid making such errors”
Many BTL commentators on his site point out potential biases in his methodologies and Dan seems to ignore them in his follow up work.
Why do you think that is josh?
==> “Many BTL commentators on his site point out potential biases in his methodologies and Dan seems to ignore them in his follow up work.
There we go again. ‘Seems to ignore…” Just like he “seems to be blind” to the Bengtsson situation. Reminds me of when mosher or Brandon talk about what someome is “basically” saying by twisting what they said to conform to their distortion.
Make an actual argument. Perform due diligence. Present evidence.
Do some “engineering quality work”. Is that really too much to ask?
Doc –
Did you know that you’re “seemingly blind” to Dante Stallworth’s views on vaccines?
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/43813_Donte_Stallworth_on_Climate_Change_and_Vaccines
For God’s sake, is there an engineer in the house?
Joshua,
Overwrought, dude.
Andrew
How odd for Joshua, known largely for completely lacking diligence, to be asking for dilgence from the super-diligent McIntyre. I guess he thinks h’s being clever.
The evidence is clear. Kahan ducks a well known fact that undermines his real point. And young Joshua, because he subscribes to Kahan’s chicanery, tries ever so hard to miss that.
I had never heard of Dante Stallworth and am not his acolyte.
Up your meds dude.
==> “I had never heard of Dante Stallworth and am not his acolyte.”
Oh. Gee. So you mean just because you didn’t comment on Dante Stallworth, we can’t assume that you’re ignoring him because of your biases?
Geez. Whodathunkit?
Still waiting for you to make an actual argument, Doc.
Give it a shot. Act like an engineer.
Kahan’s study of answers to questions was interesting. While there is a trend towards correct answers with more scientific knowledge, even knowledgeable Democrats were more likely to get wrong that Arctic sea-ice melting doesn’t create a sea-level rise, while even knowledgeable Republicans were more likely to get wrong that the 2000’s decade was warmer than the 1990’s decade or that more coastal flooding will result from global warming.
“Climate science needs to be evaluated by people outside the climate community….”
It already is, on a daily basis. The collapse of Copenhagen was the first real example of the “evaluation” of climate science by the real policy makers – the voters. Western politicians were salivating at the prospect of the power and taxes that were at their very finger tips leading up to Copenhagen. It was their very real fear of the voters that caused them to blink.
That evaluation by the voters continues. The results are becoming more obvious in Australia, Canada, while the 2014 and 2016 elections might well put a stop to the decarbonization agenda of the Obama administration in the US.
The “system” is working just fine. There is no lack of communication. The “consensus” on whether man is responsible for more than half of warming since 1950 (or whenever) is irrelevant to the voters. Who cares about Cook and his magical, mystical, statistical tour de farce?
What matters is whether the public believes that BOTH:
1) warming in the near future is likely to be catastrophic; and
2) the costs of decarbonizing the western economy (the Russians, Chinese and Indians will never go along) is justified by that risk.
So far, they don’t. And nothing the Keystone Klimate Kops at Skeptical Science say has had any effect on that to date. Unless someone comes up with some actual science to cause voters to believe 1) is true, along with some actual, rational cost benefit analysis to convince them of 2), that is unlikely to change.
All bets are off if it gets really hot in the northern hemisphere for three or four years in a row. Then the warmists might be able to scare the voters into anything. So you CAGWers all keep praying for a super El Nino and some really devastating, catastrophic weather events with large death tolls.
Help us Obi Wan El Nino. You’re our only hope!
Chances of it getting warmer are nil. Eddy, deVries, Gleissberg all bottoming in the next few years. Throw in a few volcanoes… Brr… Obama will be on his own in New York. Warmistas are going down for the count. November will tell the tale. Watch as Democrats are decimated and Republicans seize control of the Senate. Then the fun really starts.
from the start of the post
This result suggests that what’s being measured when one disentangles knowledge from identity is a general affective orientation, one that in fact reflects a widespread apprehension of danger.
prefer “reflects a widespread feeling of anger”
Anger at statements like
Re ‘why’ people think the way they do: A new book by George Marshall has recently been published: Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.
Along the way his research raised other intriguing questions:
Why do most people never talk about climate change, even people with personal experience of extreme record breaking weather?
Extreme record breaking weather is just that, weather, not climate change. Anyone who tries to tie normal weather extremes to climate change has missed the boat big time and needs polite ridicule.
In our lives, in our personal experiences, we will all experience extreme weather events relative to where we live. [In fact the most extreme would be to never experience an extreme weather event but that is another matter].
I have lived through a prolonged drought in Victoria, Australia recently and also experienced floods on 2 occasions. My family home was destroyed in a massive cyclone. Records continue to change and be broken the longer I/we live.
Extreme events go into the past just as much as they do into the future.
We live on an earth that is in a settling down phase. On a millennial scale we will have less extreme weather and events than people in the past, but in a human lifetime we will all experience the occasional normal extreme event.
Is there any evidence that some balance of the EMR flux from Sol and the EMR exitance from Earth, play any significant role in the surface temperature of Earth? What really is the “extent” of this scam? Are the Solar bright points and dark spots but indicators of other kind of energy transfer (work) at planetary distances?
I think the simple truth is that the public has realised what a politically-driven farce politically funded climate science is – the ongoing lack of repentance over Climategate being particularly telling.
This is true even of those who *support* public science being made to serve the ‘greater’ political cause of whatever argues for more taxes, more controls. They may still vote for it, but they they’re not dumb enough to actually believe it. They know public climate science has close to zero integrity.
And speaking of correlations, did Vergheggen et al notice the link between
– who funds the consensus, and
– who stands to benefit from it?
Or did they in effect plead the fifth?
A member of the family of gorillas in the drawing room is the peer-filtering of who gets to publish (and her hubby the peer-funding enforcer). If perchance all the approved ‘peers’ are alarmist, then the acceptable survey population is guaranteed to be biased to the point of guaranteed outcome.
Dr Curry is right to identify the present scientific consensus as manufactured and it is interesting to reflect on the historical process which manufactured this consensus.
At the turn of the last century, the 1900s, the consensus was that while there was a theoretical possibility that CO2 levels would affect the global temperature, the actual effect would be small.
this conclusion was based on a number of errors which were slowly corrected over the next few decades. these errors were;
the miss-measurement of the energy absorption of CO2,
the absence of computational methods that could calculate the effect of that absorption over the full thickness of the atmosphere as opposed to treating the CO2 as a single thin layer.
the assumption that the oceans would absorb any extra CO2 that human activity could produce.
the assumption that human industry could never generate CO2 in quantities sufficient to be a significant influence.
Over succeeding decades all of these errors were corrected.
When Callender in the 30s suggested that measurements showed that anthropogenic CO2 could be appearing in the atmosphere and this could be the case of observed recent warming using improved methods of calculating the effect and improved measures of CO2 absorption it was still a non-consensus position, the ocean buffering and difficulty in calculating the ‘greenhouse’ effect meant that the consensus was still that CO2 from human sources would never be a significant climate factor.
By the late 50s Revelle’s work on ocean chemistry and the application of astronomical computational methods to the radiative transfer of energy by the military to develop heating sensors for missile detection enabled a much more accurate calculation of the extra energy that accumulates from extra CO2.
As a result by the mid 60s the present scientific consensus was firmly established. Direct measurement showed the rate of increase of anthropogenic CO2, calculation showed that a doubling of CO2 would cause a global warming of between 1.5 – 3.5 degC
Since the 60s there has been very little change in this consensus manufactured by the scientific progress of the last century. Certainly there is a lot more known about the detail, but nothing has emerged that undermines that consensus of fifty years ago.
Direct measurement of surface temperatures, stratospheric temperatures, sea level rise, sea surface and bulk temperature and energy content along with many other real physical properties of the climate system have all supported and confirmed that original scientific consensus. Despite the small minority of contrarian views from a shrinking cadre of the emeritus there has been nothing of scientific significance that changes that strong consensus of the role of anthropogenic CO2 in causing the measured AGW and the projected further rise in temperatures and sea level.
Arguing about a few percentage points in the results of different techniques for measuring this consensus seems to miss the point. This is a mature and well established scientific field of knowledge at least equal in authority to the development of evolutionary genetics and big bang cosmology.
Which has not inhibited the YEC crowd from continuing to argue that those scientific conclusions are false.
Do you think it might just be simpler to just reset the biomass of the sea back to 1754 levels first? It might even help TOA or the lost heat in the deep. Do the simple thing first.
Food for thought.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CDwQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nps.gov%2Folym%2Fforteachers%2Fupload%2FThe-Grand-Banks-Collapse.pdf&ei=KQoLVPr0A-WwjAK394GgCQ&usg=AFQjCNGbk4wWNF9hCddsQ9bxbVIsMSjPbg&bvm=bv.74649129,d.cGE
izen,
Some important points you didn’t mention:
1. the climate changes abruptly. Always has, always will. But the GCMs and more importantly the IAM’s are not yet capable of handling this.
2. Scientist argue for urgent ‘Action’ to prevent catastrophic climate change. But the ‘catastrophic’ assumption is far from demonstrated and not supported.
3. Warmer is better than colder so we are reducing the risk and consequences of catastrophic climate change by increasing GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. Because of the pervasive group-think amongst climate scientists and their desire to advocate doom and gloom, no proper, objective, unbiased analysis has been done of the overall risks.
4. The climate is less volatile when warmer: see Figure 15:21, p391 here: http://eprints.nuim.ie/1983/1/McCarron.pdf:
@- Peter Lang
“Some important points you didn’t mention:
@-1. the climate changes abruptly. Always has, always will. But the GCMs and more importantly the IAM’s are not yet capable of handling this.”
In the geological past climate change only shows abrupt change as a result of a major asteroid impact. Tectonic and orbital forcings take several thousand years to effect change. Abrupt only in geological terms.
@- 2. Scientist argue for urgent ‘Action’ to prevent catastrophic climate change. But the ‘catastrophic’ assumption is far from demonstrated and not supported.
very few scientists argue for specific policy choices or urgent action, those that do vary in what they advocate. The ‘catastrophic’ assumption is much more commonly invoked by those wishing to oppose any actions to deal with the alterations to the atmosphere and subsequently the climate.
What is catastrophic is very much a matter of subjective judgement. those washed out by extra-tropical storm Sandy who now find it impossible to rebuild because there is no way of preventing or insuring against a repeat face a personal catastrophe.
@-3. Warmer is better than colder so we are reducing the risk and consequences of catastrophic climate change by increasing GHG concentrations in the atmosphere.
That assessment indicate you live in a temperate zone. Most of our major food crops are being grown at the upper limit of their temperature tolerance. Without a major reorganisation of agriculture warming will significantly decrease basic cereal production. Only in a small, but affluent, region of the Northern Hemisphere is warming likely to have much positive benefit. Your assertion reveals a very parochial viewpoint.
@- 4. The climate is less volatile when warmer: see Figure 15:21, p391 here: http://eprints.nuim.ie/1983/1/McCarron.pdf:
Your link actually argues for a much less general finding. That the climate in glacial periods before terminations are much more variable than the interstadial period.
Comparison with past periods when CO2 and the climate were in similar states indicates largely ice free poles, sea levels twenty feet higher and the interior of most continents as drought affected dust-bowls.
I didn’t mention these points because they are not important and wrong.
Izen’s answers are so filled with false assumptions it’s not worth pursuing each. For instance another is stating that continental interiors were dust bowls when there were no polar ice caps.
That’s possibly true but not provably. Even if we assume it’s true no one I care to engage with on climate science would equate the effect of manmade global warming to predominant state of the earth’s climate taken over geological ages. It would takes thousands of years to melt the polar ice caps. No one who isn’t either ignorant or dishonest would point to that as a remotely possible outcome from the combustion of economically recoverable fossil fuels. It’s irrelevant. Too far removed into the future. What’s not irrelevant is the interior of North America was dustbowl in the 1930’s and despite pCO2 rising 33% in the intervening 80 years there has not been a repeat of the dust bowl. On the face of it increasing CO2 decreases the frequency of dust bowl conditions in continental interiors. Only the ignorant or dishonest would state otherwise based upon the evidence available during an interglacial climate configuration.
And again IPCC the fifth says there is no reliable evidence to show that increasing global average temperature results in increasing frequency of either drought or flood.
Izen,
Your answers display almost total ignorance about the subjects you are twaddling about. And clearly you haven’t even read the link I provided. Amazing. Anot6her example of how the climate cultists try propagate their beliefs.
In reply to your responses to my four points.
1. Twaddle. Read PNAS, Wallace Broecker
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=1
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=14
http://www.slc.ca.gov/division_pages/DEPM/Reports/BHP_Port/ERRATA_CSLC/Vol%20II/EDC%20Attachments%20Vol%20II-02.pdf
And read see the link in the previous comment to Coxon and McCarron, ‘Geology of Ireland’, Chapter 15. See Figure 15:21, p391. Note the many abrupt changes and the fact that the amplitude of changes is much greater when the planet is colder than when it is less cold (as it is now). Note when the minimums occurred, the may implied overlapping periodicities and the relevance for Watt and Curry’s Stadium Wave hypothesis.
Especially note points A and C demonstrating that the climate warmed from glacial to near current temperatures in 9 years and 7 years (less than a decade). Also note that this was regional not local; the evidence comes from Ireland, Iceland and Greenland.
2. Twaddle. Look at virtually Australia’s top climate scientists spreading their doomsday message on this collection of 13 articles assembled by Lewandowski, See the 13 articles and 87 signatories listed at the end of the first article in the series:
http://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-real-an-open-letter-from-the-scientific-community-1808
And here is Lewandowski sharing and spreadin his bile:
https://theconversation.com/the-false-the-confused-and-the-mendacious-how-the-media-gets-it-wrong-on-climate-change-1558
Similar applies to the top climate scientists in USA, UK, Canada.
3. Twaddle
4. Twaddle.
I can’t post any more links to support 3 and 4 because my comment will go to moderation. But since you didn’t even read the one I provided for my first comment, and you provided no support for your responses, I’d be wasting my time anyway.
@-David Springer
“And again IPCC the fifth says there is no reliable evidence to show that increasing global average temperature results in increasing frequency of either drought or flood.”
Globally the statistics are ambiguous.
But the local or regional picture is different. The IPCC AR5 says this-
The AR5 concludes that increased intensity and/or duration of drought has “likely” occurred in many regions since 1970 (SPM p.5), and a further increase in these intense droughts is projected in regions including the American Southwest (WGII Chpt 26, p. 11; p. 17). There is low confidence in global-scale changes in drought, but for the affected regions drought represents a major climate impact, one that “more likely than not” is already showing the fingerprints of human influence (SPM p.5).
You mention evolution and genetics like you know something about it. Ancestral trees created by genotype upset a lot of applecarts with regard to tree of life organized by traditional phenotype. You’re not half as well informed as you pretend to be.
“By the late 50s Revelle’s work on ocean chemistry and the application of astronomical computational methods to the radiative transfer of energy by the military to develop heating sensors for missile detection enabled a much more accurate calculation of the extra energy that accumulates from extra CO2.”
This is your bold faced lie. The measurements of the attenuation of atmosphere was done only for the amplitude modulation, never for any flux. If the atmosphere is in radiative equilibrium no radiative flux is absorbed at all, Kirchhoff’s laws of thermal radiation forbid such. The whole concept of “back radiation” flux in opposing directions at any frequency, is a direct contradiction of Maxwell’s equations, and has never been observed in this physical. Fantasy only.
“As a result by the mid 60s the present scientific consensus was firmly established. Direct measurement showed the rate of increase of anthropogenic CO2, calculation showed that a doubling of CO2 would cause a global warming of between 1.5 – 3.5 degC”
There may have been some consensus by a few academics that could never understand what was measured. No engineer involved in atmospheric seeing at that time would believe even one bit of that nonsense. Easy to disprove. The whole atmosphere and its water vapor do a better job of radiating excess and waste heat to space than the planetary surface possibly can do. There have never been direct measurements of what you claim. Fantasy only.
“Since the 60s there has been very little change in this consensus manufactured by the scientific progress of the last century. Certainly there is a lot more known about the detail, but nothing has emerged that undermines that consensus of fifty years ago.”
Since the 60s there has been very little done to change this fantasy manufactured by certain academics of the last century. Certainly there is a lot more known about the detail, but nothing has distracted the Climastrogolists from their willful malfeasance of fifty years ago.
I have not thought of Maurice Ravel, in years. Thank you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KgpEru9lhw
It was a easy time, to be alive.
izen : This is a mature and well established scientific field of knowledge at least equal in authority to the development of evolutionary genetics and big bang cosmology.
Yes I’d forgotten about DNAgate and BigBangGate. Fraud and political aganda is normal in science, folks, so just get over it already .
Translation: a paradigm (sensu Kuhn) had been established and most scientists weren’t going to waste time questioning it.
Translation: most of the published evidence was not clearly contrary to the paradigm. As is typical for solid paradigms (see Kuhn), evidence bringing the paradigm under question tended not to be published, or when published to be ignored.
Translation: we’re still ignoring evidence that tends to bring the paradigm under question.
Translation: I [he] doesn’t want the paradigm questioned.
As others here have pointed out, both the evolutionary and “big bang” paradigms remain in a state of flux.
False equivalence. It’s typical of people who don’t understand science to (try to) equate people who question the “global warming” paradigm to people who question evolution. But that’s wrong:
The proper equivalence is between people who question the linear assumptions behind the current paradigm in climate science, and those who question the continued applicability of the “Modern Synthesis” in evolution.
NB: The “Modern Synthesis” appears to have grown out of an attempt to apply the Hegelian trio (thesis: anti-thesis: synthesis) to the progression of early Darwinism, Mutationism (based on Mendel, etc.), and the supposed “reconciliation” called the “Modern Synthesis”. This brings up the role (if any) of Marxist ideology in attempting to bury the importance of discrete differences (implied by Mutationism) in the supposed continuity of “gene pools” fundamental to population genetics. We can easily see how both Darwin and Marx applied, by analogy, the successful (in thermodynamics) principles of predictable mass behavior based on pure statistical analysis of individual components. Given how Marx etc. rationalized their socialist agenda via Hegel, we must wonder how much the “Modern Synthesis” owed to the need to avoid contrary analogies, for the sake of protecting Marxists ideology.
If true, we should expect considerable resistance to Evo-Devo from those with socialist world-views.
I call BS.
97% state that CO2 emissions will cause catastrophic climate change (nee global warming)
3% of people state that there has been no global warming for almost 18 years.
It does not matter one jot whether the books were Cooked or not regarding the opinions or studies by others. What matters are observations and facts.
@-Stacey
“3% of people state that there has been no global warming for almost 18 years.”
This is incompatible with the directly measure rise in sea levels over that time.
It takes enormous amounts of energy to melt that much ice and expand that much water to cause the observed rise in sea level. If that doesn’t connote global warming I don’t know what does.
@izen
“This is incompatible with the directly measure rise in sea levels over that time.”
Your statement is only true if you assume that sea levels were recently stable. But sea levels appear to have been rising since the start of the Holocene.
I am inclined to think your claim of incompatibility is not compatible with either the measurements or the proxy records of past sea levels.
Sea level rise and global warming are not synonymous. For decades global warming has been measured by surface air temperature. Surface air temperature has not significantly increased over the past 15 or more years.
You can’t change the definition of global warming so that the metric by which we measure it is mean global sea level. Nice try but no cigar.
The statement “This is incompatible with the directly measure rise in sea levels over that time” is just wrong:
If you change the surface air temperature by a fixed amount ( a step function) through an increase in forcing, the change in height of ocean levels will be decades long for the fast response, and millennia until equilibrium.
izen,
You said –
“If that doesn’t connote global warming I don’t know what does.”
Given that tectonic movements are three dimensional, and that there are other mechanisms involved in determining both the volume and location of liquid water above the mantle, you are indeed correct.
You don’t know what connotes global warming.
The reason is extremely simple – there isn’t any – at least due to CO2 in the atmosphere. While local temperatures vary from the white heat of recently ejected magma to the -90C of high Summer in the Antarctic (surprising, that), the Earth continues its four and a half billion year history of cooling.
If you are really worried about an increase in air temperature of a degree or so, might I suggest you stand in the shade, or wait for nightfall. Your desired temperature reduction might also be achieved by moving to a place with colder temperatures.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
@-willb
“Your statement is only true if you assume that sea levels were recently stable. But sea levels appear to have been rising since the start of the Holocene.”
I do not assume that sea levels were stable over the Holocene, it is direct evidence from archaeology and historical records that confirm that the recent sea level rise is unprecedented in the last few thousand years. Try searching for Roman fish ponds and lunar eclipse records.
@-Mike Flynn
“Given that tectonic movements are three dimensional, and that there are other mechanisms involved in determining both the volume and location of liquid water above the mantle, you are indeed correct.”
tectonics can alter the location of the land, but it cannot alter the volume of the oceans. the suggestion it could reveals a myopia about three dimensional topology. Altering the volume of the oceans is only possible by thermal expansion, the addition of melted land ice, the burning of hydrocarbons with oxygen to form H2O or the addition water from space by meteorite impact.
the last two options are several orders of magnitude too small to be the cause of the observed sea level rise.
The biblical ‘Waters from the Deep’ is not a credible source either.
“not a credible source”
But anonymous internet commenters are.
Andrew
izen—I noticed you haven’t addressed the fact that sea surface height is a lagging indicator of global mean temperature. It could have stopped warming 18 years ago, and ocean levels *would* still be rising.
I’d say the rate of the rise is not unprecedented:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7426/images_article/nature11593-f2.2.jpg
At the link we see the familiar hockey stick shape that nature seems to like. Fast warming, slow cooling.
@izen
“Try searching for Roman fish ponds …”
I highly doubt that sea level data points based on Roman fish pond levels have either the accuracy or the necessary spatial and temporal coverage to ‘confirm’ anything.
izen,
With respect, I suggest you may have misread what I wrote.
Marine fossils have been found at 6000 m altitude. Likewise, fossilised marine creatures are found in remote opal fields in Australia, quite remote from present oceans. Sea levels appear to be dictated by more than just water volume. And, of course, free liquid water volume depends on surface temperature in the area being below boiling and above freezing.
You may be able to quickly calculate the effects of the land mass surrounding Mt Everest rocketing skywards at around 1 cm per annum, and combine it with the unknown vertical displacement of the ocean basins, the unknown amount of heat from deep sea vents, heat from geothermal activities melting ice caps, deposition from land solids into the oceans, fresh water flows both from the land and sub surface aquifers, and a raft of other things which affect the relative level of the the sea to the land.
Alas, I cannot. Nor, I fear, can you or anybody else.
For example, the Aral Sea, (not an ocean, I grant you), has lost an unknown amount of water shrinking to some 10% of its previous 68,000 sq kms. The water no doubt went somewhere. Neither you nor I can state with certainty it did not wind up in the nearest ocean. Nobody really knows how much liquid water is contained within the Earth’s system, let alone how much is readily available.
Your assertions remain just that – unproved assertions based on the fiction that a body can have its temperature raised by the simple expedient of surrounding it with CO2. Again, alas – nonsense pure and simple.
So, which do you prefer? Are so called climate scientists fools, charlatans, mentally deranged, or merely gullible and too easily influenced?
Unfortunately, amongst the motley crew of second raters, there are no doubt some who could have used their undoubted talents to provide something of value, however meagre, to humanity. It is a pity they wasted their efforts, producing no benefit to anyone except themselves.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
@-willb
“I highly doubt that sea level data points based on Roman fish pond levels have either the accuracy or the necessary spatial and temporal coverage to ‘confirm’ anything.”
Your personal high doubt has little effect on the known and established science in this field.
@-Mike Flynn
“You may be able to quickly calculate the effects of the land mass surrounding Mt Everest rocketing skywards at around 1 cm per annum, and combine it with the unknown vertical displacement of the ocean basins,… Alas, I cannot. Nor, I fear, can you or anybody else.
No calculation is required. It is simple topology and conservation of matter that tectonic movement of the land and ocean floor has zero effect on he volume of the oceans. It can only change the local position of the sea shore. The volume of the oceans can only be changed by thermal expansion and the addition of water from land ice.
@-“For example, the Aral Sea, (not an ocean, I grant you), has lost an unknown amount of water shrinking to some 10% of its previous 68,000 sq kms.”
The cause is known and the effect was predicted when the main inflow rivers to the Aral were diverted into irrigation projects in the 60s.
izen,
As you eloquently point out “It is simple topology and conservation of matter that tectonic movement of the land and ocean floor has zero effect on he volume of the oceans. It can only change the local position of the sea shore. ”
I believe that a change in the local position of the sea shore is also known as a change in sea level – you may not. The nonsense about the conservation of matter is just silly – the language of the pseudo scientific poseur – devoid of of real meaning.
As to your assertion that the volume of the oceans can only be changed by thermal expansion and the addition of water from land ice is firstly, nonsense, and second, irrelevant, as you have already stated.
You may well believe that rivers do not flow into the sea, that precipitation does not occur, and that water resulting from the oxidation of hydrocarbons refuses to eventually increase oceanic volume. Possibly the water from the Aral Sea and similar bodies remains hidden away in some arcane Warmist repository, along with the non existent Hidden Heat.
Obviously, to you, my local variation in sea level as tides rise and fall, varying as it does between around zero and seven metres, does not count – after all, the ocean’s volume didn’t change did it?
Enjoy the febrile figments of your imaginarium, along with your fellow Warmists. I prefer to live in the real world of continuous change and uncertainty.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
“…study finds groundwater pumping for irrigation contributes to one-quarter of the sea-level rise observed in today’s oceans.”
http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2010/09/irrigation
It seems a material part of the energy required to irrigate large farm fields is diesel fuel. Electrical power is also used. There seems to be more focused approaches to sea level rise.
@izen
“Your personal high doubt has little effect on the known and established science in this field.”
According to the science, there are many factors affecting sea level: Earth’s orbit, moon’s orbit, post-glacial rebound, land subsidence at river deltas, changes in ocean circulation, ocean thermal expansion, plate tectonics, sea floor spreading, melting of land-based ice, urban development, removal of ground water, to name some. All of these factors would have affected Roman fish pond levels. Your argument, that only melting ice and thermal expansion of water have changed the sea level at the Roman fish pond locations, is pure speculation on your part.
Kahan drank the kool aid. He presumes that people who can answer cli-sci questions with the same answers that a majority of experts in the field would give must also “believe in global warming” otherwise they have some sort of mental blockage that despite knowing better voice their politics instead of their science.
That’s utter bullshit. One of the few things Mosher gets right is “your first job is to understand your opponent’s argument”. Just because I understand my opponent’s argument and can answer questions like a bandwagon climate scientist would answer doesn’t mean I agree with those answers. Kahan’s study is thus flawed because of his belief that anyone who understands the consensus position must profess belief in it. He drank the kool-aid he believes that 90% (or whatever) of climate scientists can’t be wrong.
Many of the questions in his assessment categories are ignorant. Just one for example “do you believe that recent global warming is more natural or more manmade”. A false dichotomy. I don’t really know. What specific global temperature metric are we presuming is trustworthy? We’re only talking about a few tenths of a degree of warming and aside from disagreement between disparate GAT estimates due to instrumentation issues or proxy calibration issues, unknown level of subtle interference by the sun’s changing power-spectrum and magnetic field strength, insufficient knowledge of hydrologic changes… it’s my opinion that anyone who can state affirmatively that most recent warming either is or is not anthropogenic is talking out of their ass. The correct answer is “I don’t know” because no one does. What am I to make of “science” tests that don’t have the correct answer as a choice?
Kahan drank the kool aid. He presumes that people who can answer cli-sci questions with the same answers that a majority of experts in the field would give must also “believe in global warming” otherwise they have some sort of mental blockage that despite knowing better voice their politics instead of their science.
That’s utter bullschist. One of the few things Mosher gets right is “your first job is to understand your opponent’s argument”. Just because I understand my opponent’s argument and can answer questions like a bandwagon climate scientist would answer doesn’t mean I agree with those answers. Kahan’s study is thus flawed because of his belief that anyone who understands the consensus position must profess belief in it. He drank the kool-aid he believes that 90% (or whatever) of climate scientists can’t be wrong.
Many of the questions in his assessment categories are ignorant. Just one for example “do you believe that recent global warming is more natural or more manmade”. A false dichotomy. I don’t really know. What specific global temperature metric are we presuming is trustworthy? We’re only talking about a few tenths of a degree of warming and aside from disagreement between disparate GAT estimates due to instrumentation issues or proxy calibration issues, unknown level of subtle interference by the sun’s changing power-spectrum and magnetic field strength, insufficient knowledge of hydrologic changes… it’s my opinion that anyone who can state affirmatively that most recent warming either is or is not anthropogenic is talking out of their ass. The correct answer is “I don’t know” because no one does. What am I to make of “science” tests that don’t have the correct answer as a choice?
Just a single point of reference for the natural/manmade majority warming question. Borehole temperature series vs. depth in ice which isn’t subject to surface melting (i.e. dry year-round) are the most accurate metrics we have for the comparatively small portions of the earth where they can be taken. made. Boreholes in the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) reliably show that surface temperature in the year 1000AD were 1C warmer at that location than in the late 20th century. So here I have a very solid reference that says in that one location natural causes drove temperature substantially higher than what’s happened there in the 20th century. Does that mean the whole globe was warmer too? I don’t know. Did the warming circa 1000AD happen faster than twentieth century warming? I don’t know that either because the temporal resolution in an ice core at that depth is not sufficient to discriminate periods briefer than one century. It could have happened fast and lasted a brief time or happened slow and lasted a long time. The ice core temperature series would look the same in either case.
borehole reconstructions of temperature are extremely inaccurate beyond about 500 years.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!!!! Wrong again.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11676&page=81
Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years
2006 The National Academies Press
Note how arguments in science are backed up by quotes and citations to the literature. Note how arguments presented by Izen lack both. Just one false claim after another. A complete waste of time.
izen,
Here you say: “borehole reconstructions of temperature are extremely inaccurate beyond about 500 years.”
In a reply to one of my comments on the previous thread http://judithcurry.com/2014/09/05/what-exactly-is-going-on-in-their-heads/#comment-625213 you said:
Since you dismiss borehole measurements, can you please explain, for my benefit, how you know that “In the geological past climate change only shows abrupt change as a result of a major asteroid impact.”? Do you have access to daily max. and min. temperature readings over the past 50 million years (i.e. the period the planet’s climate has been cooling)? Are your daily max min temperature readings collected at appropriately located temperature measurements stations over the surface of the world. What types of data loggers were used? What format is the data in?
Oh yes, and another question? Have any adjustments been made to the original temperature readings? Has any homogenisation been performed to make the trends more “correct” so they better fit the climate cultists’ agenda?
@-Peter Lang
“Since you dismiss borehole measurements, can you please explain, for my benefit, how you know that “In the geological past climate change only shows abrupt change as a result of a major asteroid impact.”?”
Geology.
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20100907-105245009
izen,
Your one word response does not address the question and is wrong. It is a clear sign of intellectual dishonesty (e.g. see 10 signs of intellectual dishonesty, No 4 (and others) here:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/04/20/10-signs-of-intellectual-honesty/
The paper you referred to shows all times scales in kyr, and at a single location. What does that have to do with telling us anything about rates of global temperature change over time scale measured in years decades, let alone answer the questions I asked you about your temperature monitoring instrumentation you had in place recording daily max and min temps all over the planet millions of years ago..
What is going on in our heads? A lot of politically-inspired misinformation. It started with AL Gore’s science fiction film which was played over and over by the media that loved it because it scared people. Even the Australian Prime Minister (Kevin Rudd) described climate change as the greatest moral challenge of our time. I thought moral announcements were left to the churches, but no. Yes, we have had two periods of rising global average temperature, 1910 to 1940 and 1980 to 1997 and these could properly described as anthropogenic, although the second could be described as the inevitable outcome of the first, so not independent events. At any rate, the conclusion could be drawn that climate change was an on/off phenomena – a conclusion that modellers did not like. because they were used to continuous models. So what chance did science have to clear its heads for the facts?
Fortunately there were a few scientists who were used to working in in poor signal-to-noise ratio environments, like radar and HF communications, who were used to disentangling the true signals from the noise.
It’s relatively easy to disentangle signals from noise if you know what the signal looks like. If you don’t then you can never be sure what’s signal and what’s noise.
A point conveniently overlooked by so many electrical engineer climate scientists. And many climate scientist in general, not to mention dilettantes who often appear in the comments here.
On Kahan’s blog page, in addition to Judith’s (and Gavin’s!) comments, the comments by Ronan Connolly are worth a look.
I think there is way to much psycho-analysis going on here. You need look no further than the famous reply made by Mandy Rice-Davies to the prosecutor when it was pointed out that Lord Astor, with whom she had allegedly had an affair, had denied ever having met her. Her reply “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he ?” is arguably one of the greatest witness-box statements of all time. In a single 7 word put down she utterly destroyed the notion that authority has any more claim on the truth than anyone else.
I believe the reason people are not interested in climate change is due to the fact that they can clearly see (what apparently no alarmist can see) that the world around them is pretty much the same as it always has been and if there are any changes happening, they are too slow and too uncertain too be worth worrying about. And the more the green lobby try and convince them otherwise, the more they are likely to ignore it.
I think the common man already knows the truth, as did the general public back in the early 60’s, about the decadent state of British politics. Which is why the beautiful elegance of Ms. Rice-Davies reply was so appealing and so memorable. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know the truth.
With sincere apologies in advance for the awfulness of the pun, might I submit that Gobal Warming is the result of the incorrect use of Warmist procedures on observed historical temperatures.
I refer, of course, to the use of the Warmist AlGoreRithm.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Well, I can tell you what’s been going on in my head: I’m intrinsically suspicious of monocausal theories (denoting such factors as carbon or labor or race as the sole independent variables) that purportedly explain the behavior of complex non-linear systems (climate, the economy, or social reality), whether those systems are the global climate complex or Marx’s iron laws of capitalist development or Michaels’ iron law of oligarchy. Those “scientific” theories have invariably failed to produce the goods while instead producing a rich crackpot version of reality. It is curious how a Swiss patent clerk can create/discover the General Theory of Relativity while the current state based chartered oligarchy of authoritative climate science produces fantasy.
George Marshall does not understand why his propaganda about climate change refuses to impress the masses. With his Greenpeace U.S & Rainforest Foundation career he is an activist, fully committed to the belief that climate change is real and dangerous. A mind is a terrible thing to waste on such propaganda trash. I am doubtful that I can open his mind to reality but it is worth a try. First, greenhouse warming. Global warming science says that carbon dioxide in the air absorbs outgoing infrared radiation, the absorbed energy makes it warm, and the atmosphere warms as a result. Infrared radiation is known as heat radiation and this is how the earth gets rid of the heat absorbed from sun shining on the earth. When everything is in balance or equilibrium the absorbed heat will eventually get transferred to the upper layers of the atmosphere and leave the earth as it intended to do in the first place before caught by the carbon dioxide in its path. Where greenhouse theory comes in is a situation where the amount of carbon dioxide is not constant but is increasing. If you increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, say by burning coal in a factory or power station, this extra carbon dioxide will also absorb infrared radiation and this will increase the warming of the atmosphere. This increase of warming due to the extra carbon dioxide is called the greenhouse effect. It is said that it manifests itself as an an increase of global temperature that makes our climate warmer. And the more carbon dioxide you add the warmer climate gets. Here is a question: is there a limit to this greenhouse warming? One answer comes from James Hansen, former head of NASA GISS laboratory. According to Hansen, if we keep burning fossil fuels and adding more carbon dioxide to air things will get so hot that the oceans will boil and the atmosphere will become a hot gas like that of Venus. This runaway greenhouse effect is of course a frightening prospect, to be avoided at all costs. Hansen had a play of it for a while but unfortunately he had his science wrong. The atmosphere of Venus was not produced by runaway greenhouse effect but was exuded from its hot interior. On earth radioactive heat from the interior is constantly vented by plate boundary volcanism. Venus does not have plate tectonics and the heat just builds up under the crust. Eventually it so weakens the crust that it breaks up into giant slabs. These sink into the interior and a complete new crust is built every 300 to 600 million years. The atmosphere of Venus is produced by these giant eructations, not by boiling oceans as Hansen would have us believe. That takes care of the worst case possibility from greenhouse warming. Hansen himself was responsible for starting the fear of greenhouse warming when he testified to the Senate in 1988 that he himself had detected the greenhouse effect. What he said is that he had observed a hundred year long period of greenhouse warming that could not be explained by chance alone. And this meant that the greenhouse effect (the one I mentioned) has been detected. But I checked out his 100 year warming he spoke of and found that over 30 of these years could not possibly be greenhouse years. You cannot use non-greenhouse warming to prove the existence of the greenhouse effect, and this invalidates his claim of having found it. Not having found it does not mean that it does not exist. There is the greenhouse theory based on the work of Svante Arrhenius at the turn of the twentieth century that is still used by the IPCC to calculate the greenhouse effect to be expected. Arrhenius measured the absorption of infrared radiation in his laboratory and came to the conclusion that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the air would raise the global temperature by 4 or 5 degrees Celsius. With better methods of measurement today this Arrhenius warming comes out as 1.1 degrees Celsius. This of course is still below the predictions of 3 or 4 degrees Celsius coming from the IPCC. How do they do it? Very simply. They say that water vapor in the air is responsible. How so? According to them, the original greenhouse warming from carbon dioxide warms the air, and warm air can hold more water vapor than cool air. This extra water vapor also absorbs in the infrared, and the warming from it must be added to the original warming from carbon dioxide. This machination is necessary to raise the original warming of 1.1 degrees, which is not dangerous, into the danger zone of 3 to 4 degrees Celsius. But all this is a complete farce because nobody expected that nature itself would step in to set the record straight. It so happens that global warming has stopped, something you surely must have heard somewhere. There has been no warming of any kind for the last 17 years (or 15, or 19 according to source). Not only that but more surprisingly, atmospheric carbon dioxide has been increasing without a pause. Recall that the Arrhenius greenhouse theory predicts warming when carbon dioxide increases. And so it has predicted for the last 17 years. If you are a scientist and your theory predicts warming but nothing happens for 17 years you know that this theory belongs in the waste basket of history.There is a spot for it right next to phlogiston, another failed theory. This takes care of the Arrhenius greenhouse theory. But what is left? What is left is the Miskolczi greenhouse theory (MGT), the one that came out in 2007 and was immediately blacklisted by the IPCC. It predicts exactly what we see: addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere does not warm the air. That makes runaway greenhouse warming impossible and nullifies the greenhouse theory of warming as well. That is the one that Hansen and IPCC hold responsible for anthropogenic global warming (AGW) that you, George, think you are fighting with Greenpeace and all your other efforts. Sit down, hold on to the grass, digest what I said, and start thinking of who you are and what you are doing.
Thank you Arno for putting some sense into this debate. My own theory is that the absorption of gases from IR is not just kibnetic enegy as Arrhenius predicted over a century ago. but also more or less due to vibration energy within the CO2 molecule, due in in turn to the the absence or presence of neutrons. first discovered by James Chadwick in the 1930’s. Neutrons are heavy particles so it is not surprising that they can absorb considerable energy. Indeed they are the probable reason for the on/off character of climate change. Nobody has taken the trouble to measure the neutron content of CO2 or the atmosphere regularly. particularly at the cassation of global warming in 1940.
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The overwhelming majority of science studies are wrong. Science has no quality control. Why would any intelligent person believe anything scientists say when no one checks anyone else’s work?
What kind of idiot spends hundreds of billions of dollars without checking people’s work? The hubris of alarmists is so bad we probably need another, more extreme, term to describe it adequately.
I think that climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our time. If we don’t get a handle on the politicization of science, the whole enlightenment is at stake.
Have you seen the Andrew Montford paper just posted on GWPF titled:
“FRAUD, BIAS AND PUBLIC RELATIONS
The 97% ‘consensus’ and its critics”
http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2014/09/Warming-consensus-and-it-critics.pdf
Have you seen Penn and Teller’s survey?
Hi Beth,
Yes I saw that long ago, but great to be reminded.
I am looking forward to the climate cultists response to Andrew Montford’s paper.
By the way, congratulations to Richard Tol, Mike Hulme and Brandon Schoelenberger for their hard work to expose Cook’s fraud and SkepticalScience’s bias so well.
I’ve just circulated the following:
“FRAUD, BIAS AND PUBLIC RELATIONS: The 97% ‘consensus’ and its critics”
http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2014/09/Warming-consensus-and-it-critics.pdf
If what this paper says is basically correct, it demonstrates the sort of cr@p the climate cultists have been swallowing for over two decades – including President Obama, his chief adviser John Holdren, and Labor and Green cultists like Bob Brown, Christine Milne, Rudd, Gillard, Wong, Combet and the rest of the loony left.
I reckon it’s all over bar the shouting, the moaning and winging about “Deniers and Skeptics” and then moving on to whatever is to become the next loony Leftist’s cult.
Thanks Judith for your kind words about our survey. We vetted the survey questions very thoroughly, consulting input from a variety of people, and I think that paid off. Regarding some other issue you brought up:
– The level of agreement with the IPCC position among all respondents is ~85%, not 82%, see e.g. table S3, average of responses to Q1 and Q3, or the FAQ Q4 (http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2014/08/11/faq-for-the-article-scientists-views-about-attribution-of-global-warming/ ). As we explain in both the paper and FAQ Q4 our results relate to the views of the wider scientific field (see also the next point). The level of consensus amidst the most qualified experts and in the scientific literature is probably higher, as was found by a range of other studies.
– Who we asked: We cast a wide net in our list of invitees to the survey, such that it comprises a very broad group of scholars indeed, only some of whom have expertise in the subject matter of any specific question. As such we mainly looked at how the wider scientific field perceives these issues. At least for the questions we investigated in detail, those with more relevant expertise generally agreed to a larger extent with the IPCC position. However, this level of agreement was not strongly dependent on whether the self-reported fields of expertise were in WG1, WG2 or WG3 fields, as characterized by us. Inasmuch as solar physicists or ocean scientists published about climate change, there is a very high chance that they were included in our list of survey invitees. In other words, you could rightly argue that we cast a very wide net ,which some will perceive as too wide, but I don’t think we missed a lot of relevant climate scientists.
– Who responded: As is explained in the article, ‘skeptical’ invitees responded to a greater extent than other invitees. This is opposite of what one would expect if the list of authors would have dissuaded them from participating.
– Who authored the article: My views on climate change are imho evidence-based and mainstream, and not based on group allegiance or other aspects of partisanship. Depending on their perspective, others may equate mainstream with partisan, but in that case it says at least as much about them than about me. The name John Cook appears to be a lightning rod for people skeptical of anthropogenic climate change even more so than the word “consensus”, as I observed tongue in cheek on twitter. Perhaps that’s because he’s an effective communicator of the argument, whether one or agrees or not, that many skeptical viewpoints aren’t worth their salt. Public criticisms of John Cook are more often than not way over the top and bear no resemblance to how I have come to know him.
Actually, Cook is a lightning rod because he is a thoroughly discredited disingenuous clown. It’s lamentable for your own reputation that you don’t have the sense and integrity to avoid associating with the fool. How come you didn’t get 97%, the right answer?
Has Obama tweeted about your survey, Bart? What’s he gonna say:Latest climate alarmism survey shows drop of 12% in consensus! Tweet! Tweet!
“… a general affective orientation …” – Well, what does anyone expect? People tend to vte for the same party, repeat the same mistakes, ignore facts that don’t fit their world view etc. All this has been studied for decades. In the pro- and anti-nuclear movements it was quite the same: when I asked pro-nuclear activists about what came out of these chimneys that each power station has (for the gaseous radionuclides which cannot be retained and some aerosols) I got the same blank stare as when I asked the staunchest opponents of nuclear power!
Reblogged this on I Didn't Ask To Be a Blog and commented:
“No one is required to be Popperian, but if we’re replacing the old man, it should be an improvement, not a step back to the Inquisition.”
“No one is required to be Popperian, but if we’re replacing the old man, it should be an improvement, not a step back to the Inquisition.”
Absolutely bloody right. Mr. Duarte’s argument is among the strongest I’ve ever read. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice your career in order to defend the most basic of scientific tenets. Yet it’s happening all the time.
Here are some excerpts I noticed from JC’s remarks that are important:
“I think we need to declare the idea of a 97% consensus among climate scientists on the issue of climate change attribution to be dead. Verheggen’s 82-90% number is more defensible, but I’ve argued that this analysis needs to be refined.”
I agree.
“Climate science needs to be evaluated by people outside the climate community,…”
I disagree. They do not understand and are easily duped. Agreeing would mean that you think ignoramuses are still better than climate scientists who are too corrupted to tell the truth. There are plenty of climate scientists who could expose this farce but they are held back by the administrators and self-interested and dishonest scientists who impose their pseudo-science upon others. You will need a revolution of course, what with the royalty of organized science all mindlessly marching for the warmist cause.
“…a meaningful study on this topic would need to include at least one skeptical scientist as a coauthor…”
Bravo. Not just one but an equal number, and with a guarantee of no reprisals. They do exist, you know. The last condition is essential and should be self-evident in a well-run science establishment.
Of the commentators, Jay | September 5, 2014 at 6:11 pm | says: “Its been reported that the US alone has spent upwards of $40 BILLION on climate research and since 2012 has spend more than $2.5 billion annually. How much would be spent if AWG was proven to be a false?…”
Now that really is a good question to ask because AWG actually has proven to be false. Having done that myself, I naturally expect to be rewarded by some of the savings that come from cutting out unnecessary expenditures that this will lead to. Actually, it is all very simple, and starts with the hiatus/pause/cessation of warming we experience today.
The facts are well known: there is no warming now and there has been none for the last 17 (or 15 or 19, according to source) years. At the same time, atmospheric carbon dioxiode, that pollution we exhale, has been raising through all these years. Now there happens to be this greenhouse theory of Arrhenius according to which addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will warm it because of the greenhouse effect. What happens is that atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbs some of the infrared radiation leaving earth for outer space, converts that radiant energy to heat, and this is what warms the atmosphere. This warming of the atmosphere is called greenhouse warming and it follows the laws of physics as far as anyone can tell. And since the atmospheric carbon dioxide has been rising through all these years it follows from the Arrhenius greenhouse theory that the atmosphere surely must be warming.
The only problem with that is that despite this unprecedented increase of carbon dioxide there is no greenhouse warming to be seen anywhere on earth for the last 17 years. This also applies to Arctic warming which is actually the only warming in the whole world that is still active. That is because Arctic warming is not greenhouse warming, contrary to some ignorant “climate” scientists who do not read scientific literature in their own field. Three years ago I proved that Arctic warming is caused by ocean currents carrying warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic Ocean [E&E 22(8):1069-1083 (2011)]. It started suddenly at the turn of the twentieth century, prior to which there was nothing but slow, linear cooling for two thousand years. Greenhouse warming as a cause was ruled out because there was no increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide when the warming began. It is likely that the warming started because of a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the twentieth century that started to carry warm water into the Arctic Ocean. Cool conditions returned for thirty years in mid-century which can be understood as a temporary return of former flow conditions, but quite impossible for greenhouse warming to do so. Now back to hiatus. Their greenhouse theory has been predicting a non-existent warming for 17 years now. If you are a scientist and your theory predicts warming but nothing happens for 17 years this theory belongs in the waste basket of history. There is a spot for it there, right next to phlogiston, another failed theory.
This apparently leaves the IPCC without any greenhouse theory that could explain what global temperature does. Fortunately this is not true because we still have the Miskolczi greenhouse theory, MGT. It came out in 2007 and was promptly blacklisted by IPCC. They did not like its predictions but it turns out that the Miskolczy theory is the only one that can explain what the climate is doing today. It predicts exactly what we see: addition of carbon dioxide to the air does not warm the air. The difference between MGT and Arrhenius theory is that MGT can handle several GHGs absorbing IR simultaneously while Arrhenius can handle only one, carbon dioxide, and is incomplete. According to MGT carbon dioxide and water vapor, the most important GHGs in the atmosphere, form a joint optimum absorption window in the IR which they control. The optical thickness of this absorption window in the IR is fixed at 1.89 according to Miskolczi. If you now add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere it will start to absorb , just as Arrhenius says. But this will increase the optical thickness. And as soon as this happens water vapor will start to decrease, rain out, and the original optical thickness is restored. The introduced carbon dioxide will of course continue to absorb IR but thanks to the reduction of water vapor the total absorption stays constant and no greenhouse warming is possible. That is why there is no warming today despite a constantly rising carbon dioxide amount in the air. Misskolczi discovered also that it had happened before by studying the IR absorption by the atmosphere in radiosonde records going back to 1948.
This limitation of the greenhouse effect has tremendous importance for climate science. For one thing, it makes the runaway greenhouse effect impossinle. That is why there was no runaway warming despite extremely high carbon dioxide amounts in the geologic record. It also makes the enhanced greenhouse effect impossible. It so happens that the enhanced greenhouse effect is invoked by the IPCC as the cause of anthropogenic greenhouse warming or AGW. Take away that enhanced greenhouse warming and that AGW becomes nothing more than a pseudo-scientific fantasy, cooked up by over-eager climate scientists to prove that the greenhouse effect is real. It is not real and AGW simply does not exist.
Arno Arrak,
I agree with Judith and disagree with you on this point. But I am probably considering a broader interpretation of what Judith and you may be meaning by “climate science”.
I am including the effects of the flow on consequences of the climate scientist predictions and projections. Because the predict dire consequences and even catastrophe (as James Hansen has done), it is important that other disciplines bring their expertise to the debate rather than just leave it until policies are imposed that do enormous damage for no measureable benefit. Experienced engineers, economists, medical professionals diplomats to name just a few bring a great deal of relevant expertise to the debate. They also bring what engineers call “engineering judgement”. Others may call it wisdom gained from decades of experience.
Since the climate scientists are calling for “action”, which actual means huge expenditures and, consequently, damaging human well-being, it is disciplines the other disciplines contribute.
+ 10