by Larry Kummer, from the Fabius Maximus website
The public policy debate about climate science shows the dysfunctional nature of the US media. Here’s another example of how propaganda has contaminated the news reporting of this vital subject, looking at stories about a new study of our oceans.
Image courtesy Matthew Long, NCAR. It is freely available for media use.
NCAR’s press research accurately describes the paper: “Widespread loss of ocean oxygen to become noticeable in 2030s” (although it omits a crucial detail, mentioned below). Phil Plait at Slate turns this into agitprop: “Climate Change Is Strangling Our Oceans“. His conclusion: ““messing with {the ocean} habitat is like setting fire to your own house. Which is pretty much what we’re doing.” Maddie Stone at Gizmodo also has a sensational headline “The Oceans Are Running Low on Oxygen” (the paper says nothing like that; for example, “detectable change” does not imply a “low” level).
To see how science becomes sensational propaganda let’s start by looking at the paper — “Finding forced trends in oceanic oxygen” by Matthew C. Long et al, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, February 2016. Ungated copy here. It is interesting and valuable research about climate dynamics. The abstract:
“Anthropogenically forced trends in oceanic dissolved oxygen are evaluated in Earth system models in the context of natural variability. A large ensemble of a single Earth system model is used to clearly identify the forced component of change in interior oxygen distributions and to evaluate the magnitude of this signal relative to noise generated by internal climate variability. The time of emergence of forced trends is quantified on the basis of anomalies in oxygen concentrations and trends.
“We find that the forced signal should already be evident in the southern Indian Ocean and parts of the eastern tropical Pacific and Atlantic basins; widespread detection of forced deoxygenation is possible by 2030–2040.
“In addition to considering spatially discrete metrics of detection, we evaluate the similarity of the spatial structures associated with natural variability and the forced trend. Outside of the subtropics, these patterns are not wholly distinct on the isopycnal surfaces considered, and therefore, this approach does not provide significantly advanced detection. Our results clearly demonstrate the strong impact of natural climate variability on interior oxygen distributions, providing an important context for interpreting observations.”
Note the difference between the paper and Slate’s agitprop. The climate scientists ran models and said “We find that the forced signal should already be evident” (not that it is evident). Their conclusions are similarly modest (i.e., we don’t have sufficiently detailed or long records to validate the model’s output)…
“Our results suggest that ocean deoxygenation might already be detectable on the basis of state anomalies and/or trends in regions within the southern Indian Ocean, as well as parts of the eastern tropical Pacific and Atlantic basins. Observations have insufficient spatiotemporal coverage, however, to adequately characterize the natural [O2] distribution, in the case of evaluating state anomalies. Furthermore, in most regions where early detection is possibly {sic}, relatively long records (>50 years) are required to assess the exceedance of a trend from the O2 variability generated in a stationary climate without external forcing.”
Slate sweeps all this away. Model outputs become definite observations of damage appearing today. Tentative conclusions become certainties. Those are Slate’s smaller misrepresentations of this paper.
The big omission
The paper clearly states that the model was run using a specific scenario: “the CMIP5 Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) for 2006–2100”. The nightmarish predictions of climate change that dominate the news almost all rely on this, the most severe of the four scenarios used by the Fifth Assessment Report (the IPCC’s most recent report). It describes a future in which much has gone wrong (details here), most importantly…
- a slowdown in tech progress (e.g., coal becomes the major fuel of the late 21st century, as it was in the late 19thC), and
- unusually rapid population growth (inexplicably, that fertility in sub-Saharan Africa does not decline or even crash as it has everywhere else).
RCP8.5 is a valuable scenario for planning, reminding us of the consequences if things go wrong. But presenting forecasts based on it without mentioning its unlikely assumptions is agitprop. The current bankruptcies of coal miners already suggests that the late 21st century will not be dominated by burning coal (details here). There is little evidence that fertility in Africa will remain high as their incomes grow.
Some journalists more accurately reported this paper. The WaPo wrote “Global warming could deplete the oceans’ oxygen – with severe consequences” — saying “could deplete”, not “is depleting” or “will deplete”. They also say “High levels of greenhouse gas emissions, the study reports, produce a ‘sharp acceleration of oceanic deoxygenation in the first half of the 21st century’” — a nod to the RCP8.5 scenario.
Conclusions
The steady flow of this kind of propaganda is already slowly shaping US public opinion. A few large extreme weather events — promptly (even if inaccurately) blamed on CO2 — and the course of US public policy might change radically.
Climate skeptics’ lack of strategy or coordination makes this kind of propaganda easy and effective. It’s one of the reasons I believe that skeptics will lose the US public policy debate about climate change (details here).
Other examples of sensationalist reporting of climate change
- Assigning blame for the flooding of Pacific atolls.
- A massive melting problem in Antarctica!
- The New Yorker’s “The Siege of Miami” reveals a serious problem.
- Rising seas alert! Watch how science becomes a sensational news story.
JC note: As with all guest posts, please keep your comments civil and relevant.
‘Climate skeptics’ lack of strategy or coordination makes this kind of propaganda easy and effective.’
This part is easy. Skeptics just need to produce 10-20 billionaire oligarchs that run society and the media.
The rest all falls into place rather easily.
The old political axiom “you can’t beat something with nothing” comes to mind.
You beat them with China, India etc etc.
Even if ‘climate sceptics’ lose every single battle in the US and Europe, the opposition still loses the war. Yet some of them still aspire to rule the world. Their myopic impotence is bizarre.
The warmists have Zuckerberg, Brin, Cook and all the major institutions that people respect. The skeptics have some conservative “think tanks”. Guess who’s going to win?
Alex,
You wrote –
“Guess who’s going to win?”
Nature always wins – LOL.
Cheers.
Really? Honestly I believe that warming is happening, but I do not necessarily believe it is an extinction-level event, nor warranting a gutting of our capitalist system. The USSR is plenty proof that socialism does not create a clean environment.
” that people respect”
Used to respect. Many people now understand how utterly perfidious the techno-oligarchs are and how corrupted the media is.
Mike Flynn: “Nature always wins – LOL.”
She sure does!
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7BTnRqeqVxo/Usw2ugazZ8I/AAAAAAAA2Vw/Up68eQgj6Aw/s320/mother_nature_denies_global_warming.jpg
Pingback: Science into agitprop: “Climate Change is Strangling Our Oceans” – Enjeux énergies et environnement
From the article:
…
The number of climate refugees could increase dramatically in future. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia have calculated that the Middle East and North Africa could become so hot that human habitability is compromised. The goal of limiting global warming to less than two degrees Celsius, agreed at the recent UN climate summit in Paris, will not be sufficient to prevent this scenario. The temperature during summer in the already very hot Middle East and North Africa will increase more than two times faster compared to the average global warming. This means that during hot days temperatures south of the Mediterranean will reach around 46 degrees Celsius (approximately 114 degrees Fahrenheit) by mid-century. Such extremely hot days will occur five times more often than was the case at the turn of the millennium. In combination with increasing air pollution by windblown desert dust, the environmental conditions could become intolerable and may force people to migrate.
…
http://phys.org/news/2016-05-climate-exodus-middle-east-north-africa.html
Jim2,
That’s another forecast of climate doom brought to you by RCP8.5!
The paper is “Strongly increasing heat extremes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the 21st century” by J. Lelieveld et al, Climate Change, in press — The high-end forecasts, which made the headlines, were made using the RCP8.5 scenario. They described it as a “business-as-usual” scenario (it’s not), without mentioning its unlikely assumptions (e.g., a radical slowing of tech progress, high-end assumptions about population growth).
The Phys.org article published today is a bit more sensational. I’ll bet that the general media will go nuts over this paper. It’s effective propaganda. It will believed in the absence of any coordinated thoughtful program to debunk it. That’s why the activists probably will win, eventually.
For more information
(1) About RCP8.5: a useful scenario for planning, but unlikely.
(2) How RCP8.5 became misrepresented as the “business as usual scenario”, and many examples of peer-reviewed papers doing so.
(3) Coal is being phased out around the world, showing the low probability of RCP8.5 happening.
I tend to agree with you that the warmists are winning. They have political tail winds in both funding for “green” energy as well as propaganda. It’s the political clout they are gathering that will prevail, if we can’t somehow turn it around. Once politicians start making laws to “stop climate change,” there is very little the common man can do to stop it. Add to the political momentum the corporations with both feet in the trough, and we are done all over again.
Jim2,
You might find this of interest, giving more details: Why skeptics will lose the US climate policy debate.
It’s a specific forecast given to stimulate discussion. It has no endorsement from Nostradamus, so place no bets on it being accurate.
And when nothing happens as forecast? They will just say they have better forecasting bunk than the old forecasting bunk. (They’re saying that now about the bunk we’re presently choking on.)
Adults please! In a hurry!
Thank you Larry K., a great example of a single case which can be meaningfully extrapolated to give a clear understanding of the shortcomings of the main stream media.
That media is being challenged by the internet in terms of survivability (is that a word?) Bad news is good news and good news is no news.
As Jefferson stated, slightly tongue in cheek. “The only thing you can believed in the newspaper is the advertisements.” That is becoming ever more true..
The UN already got the oceans in a sweetheart deal, doesn’t anyone remember?
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/04/08/exclusive-un-starts-toward-new-control-over-worlds-oceans.html
Get the EPA Superfund going on the worlds oceans and we won’t have to pay a dime to make things right next time. l am sure they will just fine and bill the UN.
Arch,
“The UN already got the oceans in a sweetheart deal”
That’s not exactly what the Fox News story says.
If all were to go according to plan it is a done deal. Unless.
This just goes with the flow…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/04/27/the-european-union-always-was-a-cia-project-as-brexiteers-discov/
I did not know.
it appears to be mostly a report on climate model results. don’t know how good these models are since they also show ocean acidification by fossil fuel emissions for which there is no empirical evidence.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2669930
they did present a correlation between cumulative emissions and cumulative acidification; but correlations betwern cumulative values are spurious.
please see “the spuriousness of correlations between cumulative values” at
http://ssrn.com/author=2220942
RCP 8.5 has been previously discredited on many grounds. Fail 1.
The models used do incorporate a staturating carbon biosink which is nowhere validated. Earth and oceans are greening. Fail 2.
Just change a couple of assumptions, and even the grossly perverted models say there is no CAGW problem. So feed them GI to get GO.
ristvan,
“RCP 8.5 has been previously discredited on many grounds.”
Depends by what constitutes the valid sources of “discrediting” information. I consider the peer-reviewed literature as the only definitive source, followed by reports from the major climate agencies. And, of course, more than one rebuttal needed.
I suspect others have similar standards.
The current CO2 level is basically RCP45. It is over 1 PPM below RCP85 less than 5 years down the road.
RCP85 being wrong is a good reason to discredit it.
The only question is “is it above or below RCP45” which won’t get answered until 2017 (El Nino years 1998 and 2015 hold the records for highest CO2 increase).
Further – much of the oxygen in water is generated by plants from CO2.
Finally, the oceans are warming argument is still being decided.
This is for the North Atlantic:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/ArgoTimeSeriesTemp59N.GIF
This is for the Pacific at the equator top 300 meters (El Nino territory).
https://i.imgur.com/RVbvZRe.gif
(From Climate4you.com)
PA,
Thanks for the info! What’s your source comparing emissions observations vs the four RCPs?
RCP85_MIDYEAR_CONCENTRATIONS.xls
RCP45_MIDYEAR_CONCENTRATIONS.xls
RCP65_MIDYEAR_CONCENTRATIONS.xls
I think I got them from:
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~mmalte/rcps/
Or you can follow the WCRP links from PIK around and end up here:
http://tntcat.iiasa.ac.at/RcpDb/dsd?Action=htmlpage&page=download
PA,
Thanks for the links. Using these to graph emission observations vs. scenarios in the 4 RCPs would require more time than I have. Odd that nobody — at least that I’ve found — has done so.
Has anybody here seen such a graph? Seems important.
I’ll limit myself to remind the audience that:
A) RCP8.5 forecasts oil production will rise above 165 million barrels of oil per day.
B) Today’s production rate is ~80 million barrels of crude oil and condensate, exploration results are dismal and we haven’t found new oil resources to replace what we produce for many yeas.
C) A large fraction. of remaining resources are extra heavy oil and bitumen, which require enormous amounts of energy to produce and turn into marketable products.
D) Abiogenic oil and the other Rube Goldberg ideas one reads as rebuttals are sheer nonsense.
In other words, using RCP8.5 as “business as usual” is scientific and political fraud.
fernandoleanme | May 3, 2016 at 3:58 am |
I’ll limit myself to remind the audience that:
…
In other words, using RCP8.5 as “business as usual” is scientific and political fraud.
The bigger problem is the emissions are close to RCP8.5 and the CO2 level was below RCP4.5 until the El Nino. 1999 (the year after the El Nino) had a CO2 increase 1/3 that of the El Nino year.
fernandoleanme,
“RCP8.5 forecasts oil production will rise above 165 million barrels of oil per day. ”
It’s an amazing number, and I’d like to add it to my articles about RCP8.5. But I don’t recall seeing that specific a forecast in RCP8.5, and can’t find it on Google.
Do you have a source for that?
Editor of Fabius Maximus: here, i loaded the reference to Van Buuren et al 2011 and copied their figure 3, showed you how to scale the values, etc, it’s in my Twitter (I don’t know how to load a figure in here).
https://twitter.com/fernandoleanme/status/727512574426779648
fernandoleanme,
Thank you for pointing that out! I posted that graphic, but didn’t realize its significance.
Much appreciated.
You are welcome. The RCP8.5 volumes imply oil resources way above the USGS median URR. I understand the coal projection is pretty ridiculous, even worse than oil.
Thus far the terrible exploration finding rate, coupled to ongoing field abandonments and price structure tells me the URR should not exceed ~ 3 trillion (crude and condensate).
fernandoleanme,
I’ve dug a little into the cites you provided. The two key papers cited as the basis for the energy use forecasts in the RCPs are:
(1) “International climate policy architectures:overview of the EMF 22 international scenarios” by Leon Clarke el al, Energy Economics, December 2009.
(2) “The Economics of Low Stabilization: Model Comparison of Mitigation Strategies and Costs” by Ottmar Edenhofer et al, The Energy Journal, January 2010.
IMO the second was more interesting. Note this forecast of oil and coal costs. This was run using historical data through 2000. Oil is tracking their forecast. But coal has already diverged quite radically. The text makes extracting specific information quite difficult, since they discuss multiple models — with very different assumptions and forecasts. Which were used in the RCPs?
Another try at posting the graph:
https://fabiusmaximus.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/2010-coal-price-forecast.jpg
fernandoleanme said:
Even ExxonMobil, whose projections I believe you would argue are highly optimistic, doesn’t go where the IPCC does:
http://i.imgur.com/b1Of8K6.png
http://cdn.exxonmobil.com/~/media/global/files/outlook-for-energy/2015-outlook-for-energy_print-resolution.pdf
Fernando,
Neither does OPEC, whose projection I believe you would also argue is unrealistically optimistic, dares go where the IPCC does:
http://i.imgur.com/IV1JvjC.png
http://www.opec.org/opec_web/static_files_project/media/downloads/publications/WOO%202015.pdf
Larry, you are unnecessarily dismissive of an iPad comment while watching the Voice with my significant other last night. (She is addicted, and the show opened with Michelle Obama and Jill Biden greeting veterans who were invited to be most of the audience last night. Big!) To meet your exacting high standards of proof for why RCP8.5 is impossible, here are ONLY peer reviewed papers.
On RCP8.5 assumptions. Van Durren et. al. Climate Change 109:5-31 (2011). Figure 4 Carbon factor in energy high, and energy/GDP high. Figure 6: GtC from 6 now to 27 annually in 2100. That is an increase of ~4.5x. Which means an average increase in fossil fuel consumption of 4.5x, although the mix probably also shifts toward more coal and less oil, since RCP8.5 was developed by Riaha et. al., Climate Change 109: 33-xx (2011) and was explicitly based off of AR4 scenario A2, wherein coal increases ~10x thanks to steel, cement and electricity in the third world modeled off China then and India now.
For fossil fuel production overview to 2100 (nat gas, oil, coal) Maggio and Cacciola Fuels 98: 111-123 (2011)
For gas, Mohr and Evans Energy Policy 39: 5550-5560 (2011)
For oil, Krumhoff and Murr, IMF working paper WP/12/256 (2012). See also AGU 2016 Ocean Science meeting presentation by Hughes, estimating RCP8.5 implies 3.8 trillion bbl additional consumption to 2100. Impossible, as FernadoLeanme points out on this thread. See also the roughly ten books cited in footnote three to essay Oil Isn’t the Next Revolution in ebook Blowing Smoke, previously a guest post here. Look it up if you don’t want to read the rest of the ebook.
For coal, Patzek and Croft, Energy 35:3102-3122 (2010) and Rutledge, Intl J. Coal Geology 85: 23-33 (2011).
The posited consumption of oil and coal in RCP8.5 is geophysically impossible, by several fold, according to multiple peer reviewed analyses. And newly abundant natural gas doesn’t produce the GtC. It is all IPCC nonsense. And plenty of peer reviewed publications have already shown that if you would bother to connect the dots. All spoon fed with footnotes in the aforementioned essay.
Science, Nature, Nature Climate Change will not publish such refutations of obvious IPCC nonsense. Waste of time trying. You should know that.
Guerrilla warfare is very effective against conventional troops. That is why your call to ‘organize’ makes little sense. Conventional skeptical troops cannot win against a stacked and extremely well funded conventional warmunist defense. Would take 4:1 numerical superiority. Nope.
What will win is guerrilla sniping on failure of Energiewende to reduce emissions, failure of renewables to keep the lights on next winter in the UK, and failure of CAWG predictions like the pause, lack of SLR acceleration, missing tropical troposphere hotspot, lack of increasing weather extremes (although they keep trying to make that one up), ocean acidification killing oysters (scientific misconduct), children soon won’t know snow (modified now to AGW causes more, not less snow, but disappearing the original source comment did not disappear it from the Wayback Machine) and so on.
Voters will increasingly notice that they have been had, that unreasonable and unnecessary demands are being made of them, and they will revolt. Denmark just announced it was cutting wind subsidies. Abengoa and SunEdison are in bankruptcy. MSM no longer exclusively controls the narrative. See R. Betts desperate Twitter effort yesterday to fend off two very reasonable S. McIntyre comments concerning the CO2 fertilization paper. WUWT has the story. The effectiveness of communications guerrilla warfare is why the Dem AG’s are trying to shut down free speech on climate change. I look at that as a sure sign we are having ‘deadly fire’ effect. Carry on.
ristvan,
“RCP 8.5 has been previously discredited on many grounds.”
I don’t have time to locate the cites you give (links would help, but I understand those are not always easy to assemble). So the conclusions of all those papers explicitly attack the plausibility of RCP8.5?
“Guerrilla warfare is very effective against conventional troops. That is why your call to ‘organize’ makes little sense. ”
That is inaccurate in two senses. First, guerrilla organizations are highly organized (those that survive).
Second, history shows otherwise. Guerrilla forces almost always lost before Mao brought 4th generation warfare to maturity during WWII. Even since then insurgents (guerrilla are a specific form of insurgency) almost always lose. There is one exception: once reaching a critical level, local insurgents almost always defeat foreign armies. There is a powerful home court advantage in 4GW. For more about this see…
How often do insurgents win? How much time does successful COIN require? — Analysis by Robert W. Chamberlain (Captain, US Army).
Max Boot: history suggests we will win in Afghanistan, with better than 50-50 odds. Here’s the real story.
A discovery that could change the course of US geopolitical strategy, if we’d only see it. — Andrew Exum (aka Abu Muqawama) points us to the doctoral dissertation of Erin Marie Simpson in Political Science from Harvard. She examines the present and past analysis of counter-insurgency. This could change the course of American foreign policy, if we pay attention.
A look at the history of victories over insurgents. — A study by RAND.
COINistas point to Kenya as a COIN success. In fact it was an expensive bloody failure.
A lesson about counterinsurgency that could change America’s future. — The 2 kinds of insurgencies.
http://i.imgur.com/GvWNSST.jpg
Editor, the ebook provides many hot links. Get it. Google would easily take you to each of the specific papers (granted, some are paywalled and I paid). Your issue may be that you don’t want to/can’t put in the factual scientific sweat equity. I did. And provided you a fast repeatable roadmap. But then don’t complain about a blog comment like you did, before ascertaining the bona-fides. Your hostess wrote a foreword for my ebook after convincing herself there was no professional jeopardy in doing so.
Is there a debate?
‘Climate change’ is the greatest agitprop phrase of all time
All wrongs are literally being ascribed to it.
It is the great Trojan horse of the new authoritarians.
It is the new original sin.
We are witnessing the birth of a new religion and science has allowed itself to be made into a Priesthood.
As a child of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, I shudder.
Well, the claim that the warmest temperatures in the last 120 years, out of a 12,000 year Interglacial that has clearly been warmer, will bring the the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, does seem a little overblown and unsupported by evidence.
The problem is the nature of progressives. Peter Gleick, Dan Rather, and Obama exemplify the issue.
Peter Gleick, after getting on the Heartland mailing lists couldn’t just release their memos, he had to add to them.
Dan Rather couldn’t run with the Bush memos he had – he had to add to them.
Obama couldn’t run with the temperature trend he had, he had to add to it.
The problem progressives have is the truth just isn’t truthy enough to support the story they want to tell. So they have to make it truer. The real world has a lot of grey and they want a black and white story.
Larry Kummer, thank you for the essay and the link to the original.
Thank you. Phil Plaitt needs supervision.
Planning Engineer,
You might find these of interest, debunking other articles by Phil Plait at Slate:
Fierce words about those “wacky professional climate change deniers”.
Secrets about global warming that you must not know, least they ruin the narrative.
A powerful story about global warming in Alaska that has set Twitter aflame.
Just to be fair, I have other posts debunking climate propaganda by the right.
Editor – Thank you very much!
I too am not of the right or left. Over time there have been some areas where I agree with Mr. Plait and his “pitch”. Other times I have basically agreed with him on the issue, but found him to be zealously over the top, shrill and bombastic. On climate he way oversteps his bounds and has gone off the deep end. He’s been ugly, snarky and inappropriate as a “supporter” of critical thinking.
Perhaps Mr. Plait should take his own advice?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/Phil_Plait_the_Universe_is_Cool.jpg/538px-Phil_Plait_the_Universe_is_Cool.jpg
Judith, I can understand your dispair when this kind of crap gets through peer review. But look on the bright side. They made stupidlu specific predictions for 20 years in the future. No different than the 1990s morons that did not think the pause would falsify their climate models. So, it may not be fast, but in 20 years these idiots will be proven same. By then, they will be onto some other scam.
It is not possible to reverse CAGW momentum starting in 1988 and lasting to at least 2009 (Climategate) in just a few years. But braking is more efficient than acceleration. So it will not take another 30 years (I hope).
ristvan: I can understand your dispair when this kind of crap gets through peer review.
I do not share your disparagement of the paper. Ocean O2 is worth consideration, and this is a summary of what is known now and might be expected. If the future is more benign than the hyped warnings, that will be grist for the mills of Marc Marano and company. Betting on RCP8.5 undermines their case that there is much to worry about, but anyone can follow their lead with other scenarios.
There is science behind the effect of climate change on oxygen level in the ocean. I found this:
http://www.oceanscientists.org/index.php/topics/ocean-deoxygenation
Joseph,
You quoted “As the surface waters warm due to climate change, the ocean loses its ability to hold oxygen, leading to an oxygen decline.”
May I point out that warm water decreases the solubility of CO2 as well. The additional CO2 is thus available for use by photosynthetic oxygenesis elsewhere. Just as with land based plants, so too the oceans. The fact that most plants do not thrive in Death Valley, does not mean that plants in other parts of California will not be able to utilise additional food from increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
In regard to O2 levels in the ocean, I presume that the impact would be on oxygen breathing organisms. This is fairly irrelevant, as the oxygen breathers move to areas of greater O2 abundance, which is cooler waters where more CO2 is being absorbed, and more oxygen is produced as a consequence.
Pointless scare tactics achieve nothing.
I have looked at the piece of scary PR you linked to. The usual misinformed Warmist nonsense – assertions, ifs, buts, maybes, triple whammys, and all the rest. Manna to the true believers, not quite so much scientific sustenance for others.
Cheers.
Joseph,
Look at the citations in the Long et al article I cite. The authors do a thorough job establishing the basis for the effect of warming on ocean Oxygen levels.
The page you linked to is pseudo-scientific glop.
I read it, and didn’t find anything contrary to my (somewhat limited) understanding of the subject, but it didn’t list its references. I used their search function for the reference of “Deutsch et al. 2011” and was unable to find anything on their site that specified the paper. I also tried Google.
I would suppose they’re referring to Climate-Forced Variability of Ocean Hypoxia by Curtis Deutsch, Holger Brix Taka Ito Hartmut Frenzel, and LuAnne Thompson Science 333, 336 (2011), but I don’t see how a web page that doesn’t provide proper references could qualify as anything but propaganda.
Joseph:
We (i.e., Keeling) have better records of atmospheric concentrations of O2. Add this to your arsenal of doom:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/oxygen/modern_records.html
The product of the news business is not news. It’s you. They sell your eyeballs to advertisers.
There’s no market for hard news (think city council meetings), except for one-off events, and they won’t pay the daily bills.
There’s one audience that will come every day, news or no news, and that’s soap opera fans. They’ll watch so long as there is soap opera.
So the news business supplies news that’s soap opera. If it isn’t soap opera, they’ll rewrite it so that it is, to keep the interest of their audience.
Politicians free-ride on the narratives.
Nothing can enter public debate that does’t interest soap opera fans.
The solution is ridicule of the audience. Let them think they’re not watching real news but merely an entertainment choice, and one that’s ridiculous.
rhhardin,
“They sell your eyeballs to advertisers. There’s no market for hard news…”
That’s an essential point to remember! As Andrew Lewis said: “If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”
But why do climate scientists participate in this game? Their research is often exaggerated, even misrepresented, by alarmists. Yet they seldom complain.
Editor,
Maybe the grant funding tends to dry up if you stick your head above the parapet.
There used to be a saying “Publish or perish”. Just like minnows in a school, keeping within a group might be a good survival strategy. I might disagree with being one minnow amongst many, (on account of being generally disagreeable, some might say), but there’s nothing wrong with a quiet contented life.
Unless things have changed, a lot of academics are looking forward to retirement. Might as well transition from a state of working contentment to one of non working contentment. Seems perfectly rational to me.
Cheers.
How can you say “often” without quantifying it? What does “often” mean in this context?
Joseph,
“How can you say “often” without quantifying it?”
Wow. Mr. Spock lives. I hope you’re joking.
“What does “often” mean in this context?”
It means “frequently” (see the dictionary), said on the basis of observations; the word is often used when lacking quantitative data — as we usually do in life.
Here are two dozen or so examples of RCP8.5 being misrepresented in studies and articles. Here are 3 examples of Phil Plait doing so at Slate. Here is one at Mother Jones, sounding the alarm about global warming at the north pole. I’ve a few dozen posts with other examples of climate research being misrepresented or exaggerated.
They’re called examples. Look around; you’ll see them too.
Joseph’s shtick is to ask niggly questions that take little effort on his part, but usually takes great effort on the questionee’s part to parry. Lazy, but sometimes effective in sowing doubt.
Joseph,
I really can’t resist.
You wrote –
“How can you say “often” without quantifying it? What does “often” mean in this context?”
Easy. Often, often, often. There. First question answered.
Second question. Precisely what it appears to.
Are you slow, perhaps? What part of often don’t you understand? I’ll try to help, if you’re having difficulty. Warmists often do.
Cheers.
Well in your post you seem to be claiming that this is a major problem. If all you have is anecdotes and can’t quantify it, how can you claim it is a big problem.
Joseph,
“If all you have is anecdotes”
Documented examples are not “anecdotes”.
“and can’t quantify it, ”
The first steps in science are observations and documentation, as done here. Detailed research follows only later; sometimes much later. You prefer to keep your eyes closed until such late stages, which is your right.
Editor: Documented examples are not “anecdotes”.
Yours are cherry-picked from the world of examples, and from this biased sample you want to persuade us that the “skeptics” (a diverse group that includes “lukewarmers”) will necessarily fail. Japan and Germany have increased coal consumption in order to offset the reductions in nuclear power. Neither a carbon tax nor cap and trade has made any headway in the US Congress, in which “skeptics” now outnumber “credents”.
but it might change very fast! Sure it might. With GDP growth at historically low levels for 8 years, Americans might suddenly want tax increases on coal, oil, and natural gas–it might happen!
Meanwhile, the really big things that everyone at the Paris meeting agreed on were (a) to have more meetings (b) each country develops its own goals and plans and (c) no one is held accountable. That, with Rio, Copenhagen, and the expiry of the Tokyo agreements, looks like stasis in the anti-CO2 movement.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
I think this is exactly what you are doing when you claim: “The steady flow of this kind of propaganda is already slowly shaping US public opinion. ” And you are not only claiming that some “steady flow” of propaganda but that it is already having an impact on US public opinion (whatever that means). I just don’t know how you can draw any conclusion based limited that you cherry picked.
matthewrmarler
That’s an awesome reading fail, on multiple levels! It suggests you didn’t read the post, or did so with your eyes closed.
“Yours are cherry-picked from the world of examples, and from this biased sample”
“Cherry picking” is a silly critique. Accusation of a biased selection is a legitimate critique of a study, showing poor sample construction. I make no such claim. I give only a body of observations showing frequent misreporting and exaggeration of climate research. Actual research would be necessary to make definitive claims.
” from this biased sample you want to persuade us that the “skeptics” … will necessarily fail.”
That’s not remotely accurate. That these claims are ineffectively debunked is given as an example of skeptic’s lack of strategy and coordination — serious weaknesses which are contributing factors (i.e., there are others) to the imbalance of forces probably leading to large-scale public policy measures to fight climate change. Hence my concluding sentence:
Joseph,
You “reasoning’ holds this to a standard I don’t claim. You’re conflating reporting with research. That’s bizarre.
Whatever, dude.
Editor: I think there may have been some attempts to quantify fear messaging in climate communication, and certainly studies that assess the impact of fear (and other emotive) messaging. These are generally by consensus folks attempting to figure out why their overall climate communication hasn’t had the desired effect on the public (i.e. more support for policy). The Smith and Leiserowitz 2014 study, part of the Yale Project on Climate Communication, is about the emotional impact of climate messaging forms rather than the amount of such messaging, yet uses the same word as you regarding actual fear appeals, i.e. ‘often’.
“Fear appeals have often been used under the assumption that scaring the public about climate change will engage them in the issue, motivate individual action, and generate public support for broad policy change, but recent research demonstrates that fear appeals are often ineffective or even counterproductive. ‘Dire’ fear-based messaging around extreme weather and other climate phenomena has been found to raise anxieties, but also to distance the public. O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole found that catastrophic and alarmist visual imagery actually decreased public engagement with the issue.”
The study includes a raft of further references, of which some might possibly lead to quantification attempts. I haven’t followed those up.
May be worth a little dig, yet this study and others too suggest that fear messaging backfires anyhow. The conclusion is supported by others in the consensus, yet the consequent advice to climate communicators was not to try and avoid emotive engagement (which is a form of biased communication). Instead the advice emphasized a re-crafting of their messaging for a still more maximized emotive engagement, yet via forms that didn’t produce the undesirable backlash. I doubt the advice will be heeded in any case, largely; the narrative of fear has long since slipped the leash and likely couldn’t be reigned in by anyone.
Oops, forgot link:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/risa.12140/pdf
It’s not gated.
Why are skeptics silent when people make wild claims about fraud?
Answers. .
Both sides feel it’s not their job to correct extremism.
And it’s impossible to stop.
Folks still post Ghcn version 1 charts.
Cant stop them all or correct them all.
Maybe the facts speak for themselves, Steven? Maybe, Vostok? You tell me.
Andy West,
Thanks for the link to “The Role of Emotion in Global Warming Policy Support and Opposition” by Nicholas Smith and Anthony Leiserowitz in Risk Analysis, May 2014. I will read with interest.
There is much research in markering and psychology about the utility of appeals to fear, but few firm conclusions. The widespread use of such appeals in politics and business suggests that practitioners are confident that it works.
One thread that frequently comes up: our susceptibility to fear-based messages probably varies over time (and, of course, by culture — and probably by many other factors).
Mosh
That’s hardly fair. I frequently point out on blogs that the idea that the tens of thousands of scientists involved in climate science are perpetuating a fraud or a hoax is nonsensical.
I have taken the trouble to point this out to journalists and have suggested personally to you and the Met office that as far as the temperature aspect goes, it would be useful to have a simple coherent one page summary on the web refuting point by point the claims made.this would enable those such as me to link to it.
Tonyb
Mosher,
“Why are skeptics silent when people make wild claims about fraud?”
That’s a important question. Steve Goddard has received quite a bit of criticism for his often-wild claims (but not enough, imo). Our host has not hesitated to criticize skeptics.
In-group criticism is imo valuable to keep the group focused on success (rather than a fun community, providing mutual applause) — but that’s a minority opinion. It’s rare, for obvious reasons.
But this is a different phenomenon than what I criticize.
I’m asking why scientists do not criticize those outside their group (i.e., non-climate scientists such as journalists and political activists) who misuse their work — exaggerating or misrepresenting it.
Side note: As a supporter of the IPCC (which has been abandoned by both Left and Right), I’ve written about the climate science fraud conspiracy theory. Doing so doesn’t any friends. See The climate wars get exciting. Government conspiracy! Shattered warming records! Global cooling!, and then this shot at explaining the dynamics at work: Have the climate skeptics jumped the shark, taking the path to irrelevance?
Steven Mosher said:
Nah. False equivalence.
https://scienceornot.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/science-and-nonsense2.jpg?w=500&h=400
http://i.imgur.com/3tPLh1O.png
Editor: “It’s one of the reasons I believe that skeptics will lose the US public policy debate about climate change (details here).”
How is that different from what I wrote? Namely, You are trying to persuade us that skeptics will “fail”.
Biased selection of cases characterizes your warning, though that is not the entire “warning”. I cited cases that rather balance the argument.
I would claim that the best “strategy” for opposing policy based on exaggerations and biased reportage of limited research would be to constantly recite the research results accurately and completely. It’s a long-term strategy. As partial support to that claim, I mention the nearly complete absence of major Congressional funding to restrict CO2, the majority opposition to the EPA attempts to control CO2, the absence of both cap-and-trade and a carbon tax, and the continued majoritarian opposition to new restrictions on fracking (which has had the unintended consequence of reducing CO2 produced per GDP.). When even the BBC takes note that the changes to vegetation over the past 135 years are beneficial on the whole, it seems to support my claim that the best long-term “skeptical” strategy is to focus heavily on the science.
Matthew,
“How is that different from what I wrote?”
You wrote ” from this biased sample you want to persuade us that the “skeptics” … will necessarily fail.”
That is incorrect. I do not say that this sample provides a basis to conclude that the skeptics will necessarily fail. Since you’re not reading my replies, I’ll repeat what I said.
Also, when someone says “I believe that ‘x” will happen” it is not accurate to paraphrase by saying “it necessarily will happen.” That’s an emphasis of certainty that exists in your mind, not in my words.
As for my prediction, that is beyond the scope of this post (I mention it at the end to put this post in a larger context). You can post a comment there about it. Hopefully after reading it first (that you give rebuttals to it without reading it is … odd).
False moral equivalency:
http://goodmenproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/1double.jpg
Editor: You points are well taken. But I think there is more going on that *may* mean the confidence of the practitioners is misplaced. Inside a consensus, fear messaging (and other highly emotive messaging, for instance ‘salvation’) may rise because of the influence on the adherents and (over decades, many different) practitioners themselves, not the targets, and such messaging will work net to help bind an existing social consensus stronger still. So in this scenario emotive messaging is unconsciously selected and amplified in a positive feedback loop. Outside a social consensus, such potent messaging is likely to be polarizing, yet while there are always fresh folks to address, those who do buy into the message will provide (a steady stream of) extremely committed adherents, even while potentially building up resistance from those who detect the true nature of the narrative (which resistance is presumably what S&L are seeing). This also means that how well it is working at any time, will depend on the development trajectory of the consensus and the evolving social reaction to its growth. What ‘working’ means also comes under question regarding a net effect; for instance does ‘recruits at any cost’ = working. The surface motivation, ‘more support for climate policy’, may not be the only agenda in action, even if other agendas are not consciously recognized. This is an interesting area and I think one that your post brings much needed attention to.
Editor: “It’s one of the reasons I believe that skeptics will lose the US public policy debate about climate change (details here).”
Then you are not trying to persuade us? Since you are not trying to persuade us, and only believe that skeptics will lose (not fail) the public policy debate, you rule counter arguments inadmissable?,
Your belief that skeptics will lose the public policy debate should be subjected to skeptical examination same as any other belief.
Worth mentioning that it is a 50% reduction in oxygen levels in large areas from a model that can simulate current oxygen levels and its natural variability well enough.
Jim D,
There are also large reductions in H2O over arid deserts, Antarctica, and other places. Nature at work. No doubt a Warmist has modelled this and called it useful science.
Models are models. If they’re based on sound physics, they may be useful. If they’re based on wishful thinking, they’re not likely to be of much use, eh?
Cheers.
Mike,
“There are also large reductions in H2O over arid deserts, ”
Touché. That’s got to be the “Best of Thread” winner!
Jim D,
“from a model that can simulate current oxygen levels and its natural variability well enough.”
The excerpt I gave said the opposite. What paragraph are you looking at?
I am looking at the paper.
Jim D.,
“I am looking at the paper.”
Yes, you said that. This post gave an excerpt from the paper that said the opposite of what you asserted, so I asked what in the paper you were looking at. Still wondering…
Section 2.3 shows the validation against current data.
Jim D.,
I don’t see any claims in section 2.3 that match yours. The last paragraph of 2.3 says…
Second 2.3 ends with this narrow claim: “However, a comparison of the agnitude of interannual variability from the Hawaii Ocean Time-Series (HOT) station and the same location in CESM demonstrates that CESM does indeed have weaker variability. “
Point observations versus 100 km average from a model are a big part of the difference, and Figure 5 shows a lot of variability. The model captures how the mean values change with region, so it has the basic mechanisms needed. That is what the validation tells you. There are mechanisms that cause deogygenation represented in the model, but first it has to capture current oxygenation reasonably, which it graphically does.
Jim D,
“but first it has to capture current oxygenation reasonably, which it graphically does.”
You, of course, are entitled to your opinion. However, the authors make no such claim. I’ll go with their opinion.
What do you mean? They show the maps.
http://www2.mbari.org/~coletti/dropbox/Optode/Argo_Optode_Sensor_article.pdf
Trends in marine dissolved oxygen: implications for ocean
circulation changes and the carbon budget
The observationally-based analyses identify ocean circulation changes as the main cause of the observed decrease in dissolved O2 (Emerson et al., 2001; Keller et al., 2002; Kim et al., 2000; Watanabe et al., 2001; Ono et al., 2001; Shaffer et al., 2000; Bindoff and Mc Dougall, 2000). Changes in O2 solubility and changes in biological export production and, hence, O2
consumption at depth may have also contributed.
So prior study says mostly circulation issue.
http://www.euro-argo.eu/Activities/Floats-Developments-Deployments/Sensors
To date 291 floats carrying dissolved oxygen sensors have been deployed of which 191 remain active…
The absolute sensor accuracy is today it is ±5 % or ±8 µM (whichever is greater). Factory settings and calibration is sometimes erroneous.
Argo status as of 2012. The target accuracy for usable oxygen data was 1%. 191 prototype floats still working.
Where did they get the data to claim the oxygen trends and cause in this study? Or is this another keyboard exercise by a computer jockey?
I know of no Western country where the Government or corporate media isn’t yellow hued to a greater or less intensity. I would be interested to know if there is such a country.
“Climate skeptics’ lack of strategy or coordination makes this kind of propaganda easy and effective. It’s one of the reasons I believe that skeptics will lose the US public policy debate about climate change ”
I suppose one imagine how different the battle would look if skeptics followed nic lewis lines of argument as opposed to Lamar Smith lines.
There are skeptics who do. And there are credulous alarmists whose ridiculous predictions could be used to discredit the whole “global warming” issue. And sometimes are.
And there are scientists, many of them funded by government grants, who are digging up the roots of the IPCC paradigm. Quietly in the main.
Mostly, IMO, the issue for the MSM is that “the sky isn’t falling” isn’t news. For many socialists and other lefties, the alarmism makes a useful stalking horse for their political agenda.
As for the skeptics, many of them are really creationists, who like the alarmists don’t grok science, to them it’s just words (symbols) to use in their rhetorical flourishes.
“lack of strategy or coordination ”
Read harder.
“Some do “as you argue.
Proves my point.
Thanks
Steven Mosher,
I am glad your point was proved to your satisfaction. You quoted yourself, and presumably told yourself to read harder.
Setting that aside, what point were you making about the effects of changing climates on GHE ocean?
What is the battle to which you refer? Facts are facts, no battle necessary. Maybe you have confused yourself.
Cheers.
This is a very good point. But…
Marc Morano chose Sarah Palin to be on the panel for his movie. Why? I presume because Morano wants to appeal to the angry white audience. There are a lot of these people, something we’ve learned in the last 6 months. The climate wars are a political and a science struggle.
I don’t much like Sarah Palin but maybe Mark Morano knows more about the reality of the climate wars than I do. Palin’s presence irritates intelligent skeptics, but what is more important to skepticism success?
I don’t like Donald Trump much either but it’s possible that the political fortunes of climate change skepticism will suffer a terrible defeat along with his. I like Hillary OK but a continuation of Democratic control of the White House is not good for skepticism.
Maybe Mark Morano is better for skepticism than Nic Lewis, at least in the short term?
To win in the political arena it takes all types.
I would argue, for instance, that Malcolm X was just as important to the success of the Civil Rights movement as was the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Without the efforts of both these men, Barak Obama’s presidency would have been an impossiblity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4PqLKWuwyU
The net effect, whether they planned it that way or not, was a good cop bad cop effect.
In his interview, Morano said that the “tabloid astrology” of the climatariat has become a “politically toxic.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_crkSnRa4o&app=desktop
Mosher is just trying to confuse and misinform people.
Sydney Smith, one of the seminal figures in the battle for civil and human rights, put it this way:
SP was quite reasonable as a governor. Probably would have made a better president than McCain or Obama (she at least had executive experience). After the failed VP run, there was little left for her to do but become populist media personality and party advocate. Made the best of a bad situation, turned it into a profitable career.
Steven Mosher said:
Mosher, I don’t know that I’d be taking that victory lap just yet.
I once thought that global warming was a hoax and a scare tactic — more political than science — but, it’s become something else… good theatre!
Climate skeptics’ lack of strategy or coordination makes this kind of propaganda easy and effective. It’s one of the reasons I believe that skeptics will lose the US public policy debate about climate change
I think that will depend a lot on how the climate changes during the next few decades. Meanwhile, the US House and Senate have CO2 skeptics in the majority. What exactly are you recommending by way of “strategy or coordination” for the CO2 skeptics and lukewarmers? How do you know it would have the effects that you desire?
Matthew M.,
“I think that will depend a lot on how the climate changes during the next few decades.”
My guess is that it might not take that long. One or two extreme weather events — of course blamed on CO2, accurately or not — and alarmists will use their vastly superior infrastructure and dominance in media, academia, and ngos to panic the public into agreement with large-scale public policy actons.
“Meanwhile, the US House and Senate have CO2 skeptics in the majority.”
They’ll probably change like weathervanes if the public shifts.
“What exactly are you recommending by way of “strategy or coordination” for the CO2 skeptics and lukewarmers?”
No specifics needed. The major successful political movements in history worked hard on strategy and coordination.
“How do you know it would have the effects that you desire?”
I said nothing like that. I said “It’s one of the reasons I believe that skeptics will lose the US public policy debate about climate change ” That is, without strategy and coordination their odds of winning are low.
You are welcome to disagree about the value of strategy and coordination. Of course, that would be an unusual opinion. Best wishes for success in your next political project…
Editor: The major successful political movements in history worked hard on strategy and coordination.
Given Marc Morano and ClimateDepot, the widely read WUWT and other “skeptical”/”lukewarmer” blogs (and a bunch of “skeptical”/”lukewarmer” lawyerly blogs), Inhofe and Smith in the Senate and House, NIPCC, GWPF, the Heartland Institute and numberless “skeptics”/”lukewarmers” in the polity writing to their CongressFolk every month, with the Koch Bros and others in on finance, and with the Republican front-runner(s) opposing dramatic CO2-reducing restructuring of the US economy — what exactly is the great lack of which you are complaining?
Matthew,
I have talked with many of the folks you list. Most agree that there is little coordination, and even less on strategy.
Some of the key ones explicitly mock the need for strategy. It’s a common belief, in my experience, among leaders of organizations that fail.
Happily, social media are not about coordination. Democracy is not about coordination. You are missing the ,point.
David,
“Democracy is not about coordination.”
That’s an unusual perspective. Most large successful movements for public policy change in the US and UK were done with coordination — people working as groups, with these groups working together. Here are a few examples.
Samuel Adams and his fellow activists in 1764 Boston reacted to local problems by taking collective action: organizing the first of the Committees of Correspondence. Later these reached out to like-minded people in other colonies. Eleven colonies had Committees by February 1774. These groups steadily gained experience acting on a local and then national scale. They formed the nucleus of shadow governments, which later formed the basis of revolutionary governments.
In 1787 anti-slavery leaders recruited William Wilberforce to help lead their crusade in Parliament against slavery in the UK. They drew upon groups such as the Quakers’ antislavery societies and the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, plus informal groups like the Testonites. They worked together; full victory came in 1833.
Benjamin Franklin helped organize America’s first Abolitionist Society at Pennsylvania in 1785. These spread across the nation, working together. Victory came in 1865 (the hard way).
Flash forward to our civil rights movement. Rosa Parks’ act of civil disobedience in 1955 was a staged event, brilliantly developed into the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Greensboro sit-in in 1960 was unorganized, but used a technique developed during the previous 20 years by civil rights groups. The movement was an alliance of groups such as the NAACP, Congress of Racial Equality, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference — plus others formed from the energy released by these early protests, such as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
We used to read the funny papers in the newspapers to get a good laugh. Now we just read the headlines and editorials. Once a week we get extra special laughs in Earthweek. The alarmists have already printed a lot of material for Climate Hustle 2.
We had a really good turnout at the Climate Hustle movie earlier tonight. We knew a lot of the people in the movie. We have met and talked to many of them at several Climate Conferences. We just had two days of Climate Study meetings that ended with the movie.
“Climate skeptics’ lack of strategy or coordination makes this kind of propaganda easy and effective. It’s one of the reasons I believe that skeptics will lose the US public policy debate about climate change”
This is a subject that drives me crazy – not only the media propaganda, but the failure to respond effectively, outside of forums and blogs. We need much more than a movie every now and then,
I see it mostly as timidity, worrying about how assertive public comments might be perceived by the media, instead of worrying about getting the message out. Of course, alarmists pretty much have the media perception problem under control(they ARE the media, outside of Fox )but one of the presidential candidates has been doing quite well with his “I don’t care” strategy, I have observed( not an endorsement) and I don’t mean Cruz.
Go on the offensive, backed by the sound science we know exists, but prepared to use strong language. Appeal to the need to deal with the very real problems in the world, unlike the virtual crises generated by flawed computer simulations. Question the psychology of fear and pessimism, while acknowledging the need for preparedness to deal with whatever Nature has in store.
Huh?
It is a culture war by a small elite who are dishonest.
Demanding political diversity in academia is probably the best solution.
Academia has shifted to the left because of the unethical discrimination against conservatives by a small minority. This behavior violates the conduct policies at most universities and hasn’t been punished.
Start with punishing unethical conduct by the liberal elite.
Ken Loffer,
I agree.
When people start losing their jobs and can’t make their car and mortgage payments, all because of the climatariat’s boneheaded idiocy, what little moral high ground it has achieved will crack and crumble under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
Then we’ll see what making sausage really looks like.
http://www.jarofquotes.com/img/quotes/83e5be95acea842c2c1bf92fe9951fe7.jpg
I think you are wrong Ken. Not only do skeptics dominate print Mainstream media comments, plus the blogs, we own radio. We are everywhere you look.
Reblogged this on TheFlippinTruth.
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Ironically the conclusion to this post is as big an unwarranted jump as in the media hype complained of. There is nothing new in these press exaggerations. This is BAU for them and it is not having an increasing effect, quite possibly the opposite. Nor is public policy that simple. Skepticism is doing pretty well and the weather will not change that.
David,
I agree.
We’ve now been subjected to 40 years of this sort of agitprop, and what has been the effect?
Not what the climatariat had hoped for, I would say.
That’s why the climatariat is now clamoring to ban free speech, argument and debate.
David,
“There is nothing new in these press exaggerations.”
I didn’t say there was, and that’s not relevant to my conclusions.
“This is BAU for them and it is not having an increasing effect, quite possibly the opposite.”
Gallup’s polls show that the fraction of Americans who believe global warming poses a serious threat has risen from 32% in 2010 to 41% while the number who worry about global warming has risen from 52% to 64%.
Slow and steady wins the race.
Other polls show otherwise. More importantly, the polarization is well established, probably permanent.
David,
Even more important than opinion is salience.
And when it comes to salience, what opinion and WTP (willingness to pay) surveys show is that climate change hardly appears on the radar.
http://i.imgur.com/fRGzLin.png
Glenn,
Yes, the public’s ranking of climate change as an issue is at rock bottom. But those rankings reflect the current news, and historically have changed rapidly based on events. A few large weather events could change people’s priorities fast — again.
The belief trends I cited tend to change more slowly, and reflect changes in the nations’ belief structure.
Editor,
I think you’re citing the polls, and seeing in the polls, what you want to see.
What you are doing is the way mainstream science is practiced these days. It is the 180° opposite of the way Popper advocated science should be practiced.
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says of Popper in The Black Swan:
A majority of Americans believe climate change is happening, but doubt the claims about the dire negative consequences. And when it comes to these opinions, the needle has hardly moved since the beginning of the century:
http://i.imgur.com/JWHAA7b.png
And if we look at the percentage of respondents who believe “the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated in the news,” it has grown considerably since the beginning of the century.
At the same time, if we look at the percentage of those who believe the news “generally underestimates the seriousness of global warming”, this number has declined considerably, by almost 40% since the turn of the century:
http://i.imgur.com/peYGgVn.png
The percentage of people interested in Gun Control and Climate Change is just slightly higher than the percentage of liberals.
If only liberals are interested in an issue the issue gets pushed during Democrat Administrations and pushed back during Republican administrations.
If Trump wins and the Republicans get their turn Climate Change should be pushed back to the Stone Age.
Glenn,
Only time will tell which of us is correct. However there is a long history of people believing that political movements will fail — on the eve of their success.
Editor: Gallup’s polls show that the fraction of Americans who believe global warming poses a serious threat has risen from 32% in 2010 to 41% while the number who worry about global warming has risen from 52% to 64%.
The US economy is approximately stagnant — Obama is the first president not to have a single full year of 3% gdp growth.
Illegal immigration is a growing threat;
The US military is engaged in combat in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan (first casualty among the US boots on the ground in Iraq has just been reported)
Violent crime has recently increased nationwide (well, mostly in some cities) after years of decline
Obamacare is more expensive and less valuable that what its supporters promised.
And more.
Americans consistently rank global warming as not in the top 15 problems to be addressed seriously.
“Slow and steady wins the race.”
This is a good and important point. It leans in the favor of the warm, but will ultimately be “catastrophic” for their political allies IMO.
For the general public there really isn’t a science debate, there’s only the question of solutions and since there is no alternative to fossil fuels the warm are “losing”- i.e. nothing is happening. Once consensus forms around alternatives, however, action takes place. The reason people are fighting so hard is that the politicized environmentalists don’t like the solutions.
Fracking for natural gas and nuclear power are taking off because they are naturally successful alternatives that reduce emissions. Wind and solar are in retreat because they aren’t.
For sustainability fetishists in the warm movement this is terrible news. Quite frankly it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if 10 years from now Slate magazine is pooh-poohing global warming as the conspiracy of “big atom” and “big gas” to “scare people” into switching to their product. It wouldn’t be their first flip-flop on climate.
Did H. Clinton change her mind about coal?
http://www.weeklystandard.com/clinton-flip-flops-on-coal-now-wants-coal-to-prosper/article/2002208
Maybe she has different policies for different primaries. When she gets to California, maybe she’ll be back to putting the coal industry out of business.
Editor of the Fabius Maximus website said:
Yep.
As Hannah Arendt noted in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
jeffnsails850 said:
Well fracking certainly took a wrecking ball to natural gas prices in the regional North American — US Henry Hub — market (natural gas is not a fungible commodity like crude oil is):
http://i.imgur.com/sGkZww5.png
And to the price of crude oil in the global market:
http://i.imgur.com/jodLVhK.png
matthewrmarler said:
The Democatic Party threw folks who have to work for a living under the bus a long time ago.
For the Clinton Democrats, it’s all about pandering to certain group interests (e.g., blacks, Hispanics, LGBTs, bankers, environmentalists.)
There’s one group — the white working class — that sure to hell ain’t on the list.
Glenn,
The US is lowering CO2 emissions faster than Europe because it’s switching to gas from coal. Then it will switch to nuclear. The warm oppose both steps.
IMO, the public would be happy to make the switch to gas and then nuclear regardless of how dangerous or not global warming is. They won’t make the switch to wind and solar even if Gaia herself held a press conference and pronounced the imminent extinction of man. Wind and solar aren’t viable alternatives. The warm hop up and down trying to convince everyone that ECS is 3 instead of 1because they think it will get them solar and wind. What Joe Sixpack sees is a political movement that has declared global warming an “existential threat” that is somehow not serious enough to justify the viable alternatives available.
jeffnsails850 | May 3, 2016 at 2:07 pm |
…
The warm hop up and down trying to convince everyone that ECS is 3 instead of 1because they think it will get them solar and wind.
https://i.imgur.com/glh2pii.png
The most precise measurement (precision close to 8) isn’t shown but is less than 1, significantly less than 1.
It does look like the ECS is 1 or less. I’m not sure all the hopping in the world is going to change that, and was not aware warmers believed hopping up and down altered climate sensitivity.
Let’s have another look at what stories we might tell based on this plot, Glenn Stehle.
1) Just eyeballing the “generally underestimates” curve, its linear trend is flat as lower troposphere temperatures estimated from orbiting microwave sounding units over the same interval.
2) Not that anyone would ever cherry-pick endpoints, the 1998 value of the same curve is 31% vs. 35% in 2015, or a 4% increase. [1]
3) The “generally exaggerated” curve was fairly flat from 1998 to 2008 with a mean value of, oh, call it 35%. It spike up to 41% in 2009, almost certainly due to Climategate breaking that November.
4) After topping out at 48%in 2010, the same bucket settled down to a flat trend wiggling between 41-42%.
5) Since 2010, “generally underestimated” rose ten points from its low of 25% to 35% in 2015, statistically tied for its peak of 38% in 2006.
6) Half of that rise was at the expense of “generally overestimated” (five percentage points from 2010-2011), the balance since 2011 has been gained from “generally correct”, which dropped from 26% in 2011 to its low of 21% in 2015.
7) The *only* curve showing a clear trend over the 1998-2015 interval is “generally correct”, 13 percentage points over the full period.
8) Combined, the “generally correct” and “generally underestimated” categories add up to 56% of those polled who answered the question, against 42% in the “generally exaggerated” bucket, a statistically significant eight percentage point difference.
Conclusion; you’re not looking hard enough at the messages in this plot. It suggests that the largest single influence on the “generally exaggerated” respondents was a scandal, a “gateway” if you will into a belief that all or most climate science is tainted, corrupt or otherwise somehow corrupt. To the extent that the MSM sensationalizes climate stories, we might also argue that it has contributed to the rising “generally underestimates” trend since 2010, but only if we use some “reverse psychology” to get there.
However and wherever Americans are getting their information and forming opinions about AGW, your position is still a minority and apparently losing ground to folks who seem to think there isn’t enough “alarmism” in the press.
Did I mention that you might not be reading this plot correctly? Yes, I believe I did. I’d say your best hope is a massive La Nina next year, plus Trump winning in November.
———————
[1] Annoyingly, I can’t find the original article for this particular plot, but the typical Gallup poll has an MOE of +/- 4%, so the 1998 and 2015 values are arguably statistically equal.
jeffnsails850,
If that’s true, I believe it will likely be due to NIMBYism rather than wholesale opposition: http://www.gallup.com/poll/182180/support-nuclear-energy.aspx
http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/tihye16fieok4cpjoekfwa.png
The highpoint of 62% in favor in 2010 coincided with Obama’s announcement that the first two nuclear plants in several decades would be supported by Federal loan guarantees. Fukushima in 2011 is the obvious driver of the decline since then to 51%. The trend appears to be stabilizing there.
From an older 2010 poll, we see the partisan breakdown:
http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/qk4h7kf4meggeqrsglnpuw.gif
Not for 100% replacement in the near- to mid-term, but both wind and solar PV are growing rapidly in the US (figures only to 2011):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/GlobalREPowerCapacity-exHydro-Eng.png
Deployment has stalled somewhat since then. But LCOE has plummeted since the 1980s, and seems to have leveled out:
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/wv_fig_2_5.jpg
That’s quite competitive with coal, does not do so well against natural gas economically or due to intermittency of wind power. However, not a viable alternative reads to me as hyperbole.
For the record, this warmist thinks natural gas is a fair enough trade for coal in the very near term while we are hopefully getting our act together on rolling out fission power.
Gates is in denial. The left side of that plot in 1998 has the three trend lines clustered together around 33% each. At the far end the plot in 2015 the AGW exaggerated line is over 40% and the AGW correct line is near 20%. The AGW underestimated line is still near 33%.
Anyone but an imbecile or someone in denial can see the AGW message has suffered a loss in credibility. A big loss. The AGW is exaggerated opinion is held at twice the rate of AGW is correct opinion whereas 20 years they were equal.
Which are you Gates; and imbecile, a denier, or both?
Come on, lighten up Springer. Gates is by far the best troll I’ve encountered, I really only consider him a troll because of how he clutters up threads with responses to Mike Flynn.
He should really feel welcomed here.
David Springer,
I did rather bodge up one line in my response to Glenn: It suggests that the largest single influence on the “generally exaggerated” respondents was a scandal, a “gateway” if you will into a belief that all or most climate science is tainted, corrupt or otherwise somehow corrupt.
The final word was supposed to have been “unreliable” which also tends to create a loss of credibility even in absence of intentional corruption or other form of wilful malfeasance.
I can read the plot, Springer. I even commented on that in the post to which you are replying. I chalked it up to Climategate in Nov. 2009. A few years later, the “exaggerated” position relaxed a few points and has held steady, albeit at a higher rate than the pre-leak opinion. What interests me in addition is that “generally underestimated” position has climbed at the expense of the “generally correct” view. What that tells me is that it’s at least plausible that the message is “getting out” despite the increasing perception that the MSM is not being … strident … enough about the potential hazards of continuing our present course into the future.
Oh I don’t know, I tend to think the guy giving false choices is more the nitwit. Further, the public opinion — which again, remains in the AGW is real and of concern category by an eight point margin in that particular poll question — is not the first place I’d look to gauge reality myself. For that I go with the much larger majority of domain experts both in primary literature and popular press saying something’s going on, it’s us that’s doing it, and it’s in our collective best interests to knock it off to the best of our ability to do so.
I’d ask you the same question you asked of me, but then I’d be the nitwit by my own definition. How about a more open-ended one: how do you form rational beliefs about scientific findings? Man on the street, or men and women in laboratories? Something else?
aaron,
Nah, it’s no problem; his boorishness makes for a good foil.
That’s quite the honor, albeit bittersweet. Number one rule of “trolling” is to not be boring, or create too much clutter. If it helps any, I’ve likely had my fill of Flynn for at least a year.
Snarky, opinionated, prone to rhetorical flourishes, baiting and trapping, trying to trip up opponents with their own words … I agree; yes, I really should fight right in.
DW:
It is well known in politics that if you want X you demand 3X or 10X. Compromise then leads to 100% of your original goal. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Climate politics isn’t any different. Demand total control of the global energy economy and “settle for” tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars in money for new toys and adventures.
This morning’s example from the NYTimes: “Resettling the First American ‘Climate Refugees'” http://nyti.ms/23kzyiz
Bottom line of the story is that $48 million in federal funding will be spent to relocate the ~85 people still living on a shrinking marsh island in Louisiana. Over $500,000 per man, woman and child.
Blaming it on “climate change” (even while nodding at natural subsidence, devastating Corps of Engineers projects, poorly designed road access and decades of building oil and gas canals around the community) is the secret to getting major moola.
Climate ka-ching!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9Obgf_FJIs&w=420&h=315%5D
Actors don’t call them lines anymore, instead they have become todays talking points. ‘The world is a stage’, we were told,… Now, may we see your ticket please?
Larry Kummer,
I very much appreciate your calling attention to the distortions, exaggerations and outright lies which have become the stock and trade of the climatariat.
I also recognize that this is a call to arms, and a credible threat is needed to react to.
Nevertheless, I question how realistic your conclusion is when you say:
I’m thinking of all the interests the climatariat has declared war on, and therefore has allied against it. Can these be overcome so easily, with nothing more than a great deal of sound and fury that signifies nothing?
The interests allied against the climatariat include:
• The economic interest of society as a whole
If we look at the facts, and not the hype, the “new energy economy” is in reality the “new energy no-economy.
Other than the risks that the climatariat poses to investors, if it should indeed ever gain political power, investors have for the most part tuned the climatariat out:
• The political interest of society as a whole: civil rights
The cliatariat is clamoring to do away with the first amendment and to criminalize free speech, debate and argument.
• The political interest of society as a whole: human rights
The human right to a minimal material standard of living, which only an abundant supply of inexpensive energy can provide, is not even on the climatariat’s agenda.
• The political interest of society as a whole: property rights
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’ call to ban fracking would make millions of people’s royalty and mineral interest worthless.
• The economic interest (jobs) of those who work in the fossil fuel industry
Larry,
And even if the climatariat were advocating for the preservation of the commons, which it obviously is not, it would be a herculean chore.
We are, after all, talking about cooperation on a global scale, something which has never been achieved before in the recorded history of humankind. When the economies of various nations begin to suffer the consequences of the environmentalists’ mandates, just how long do you believe it will be before they start cheating?
Here’s a theorietical discussion of the task at hand. It begins with the tragedy of the commons:
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=lepp_papers
Glenn,
“We are, after all, talking about cooperation on a global scale, ”
When you look at goals in that cosmic sense, of course they seem unlikely. Look instead at the proposed next steps: shifting taxes to carbon taxes, regulation of carbon-based fuels, cap & trade. None are radical; the first two are extensions of current policies.
Larry,
Given the existing political realities, I’d say the chances for a carbon tax are slim and none:
But even if the climatariat were to be successful in getting some of its mandates through, these can easily be reversed.
Remember the Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax Act (P.L. 96-223)? Carter got it through Congress, only to later be repealed during the Reagan administration.
The same goes for many of the subsidies that were lavished on “green” energy in the UK, Australia, Spain, and Germany. Recently they’ve been rolled back.
Colorado Supreme Court voids two city voter-approved fracking bans
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fracking-colorado-idUSKCN0XT1VA
The separation of powers between the different branches of government and between the federal and state governments is one of the mechanisms that Madison wrote into the constitution to keep a group of fanatics like the climatariat from riding roughshod over other people.
A major shortcoming is the wholly arbitrary isentropicty assumption that necessarily underlies the oceanic oxygen study. For example, could hypothesize that warmer oceans would lose oxygen content and then — predicting an increase in the average ocean temperatures due to global warming — try to detect an oxygen concentration trend that supports our hypotheses, some 30 years into the future.
However, if we assume the increase in global warming really is the result of increased levels of atmospheric CO2, we have a big problem. Natural forces having nothing to do with increases in atmospheric CO2 were the ’cause’ of previous global warming events. We see this throughout the geophysical record –e.g., global warming has followed not led global warming.
Accordingly, if we assume AGW, we might as easily hypothesize that increased global warming due to AGW — unlike previous global warming events throughout history that had nothing to do with AGW — will tend to increase oceanic oxygen content.
Larry,
Don’t get discouraged. Please keep articulating rational responses to the media over hype of misleading reports or absolute modifications to conclusions. With ARGO and more observations eventually science will recognize the limits of the model projections.
It is depressing but one must continue to objectively assess the state of the science. Thanks for your article.
Scott
Between the science and the press lies (lies?) the press release. Here is the UCAR/NCAR PR, which I posted earlier:
https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/20721/widespread-loss-of-ocean-oxygen-become-noticeable-in-2030s.
“…marine life struggling to breathe..” is in the second short paragraph, an obvious hook for the press.
So I would put more blame on the NSF funded UCAR/NCAR than the press in this instance. The government is clearly buying scares, perhaps even getting their money’s worth.
I would also argue that the problem here is not with the emission scenario. It is with the junky climate model used to make this scarey forecast.
David,
I see your point, but believe that’s too harsh on the NCAR press people. They were keying off a direct quote from an author, and their statement was lurid but consistent with the paper. Their job is to get attention for research (funding does not grow on trees), and the temptation is great…
But imo Plait took this several steps too far in terms of describing the ill effects as happening now (not just perhaps detectable now), etc.
I noted that the WaPo article was, imo, excellent. That’s why I try to refer to activists as the key problem here, who can be scientists, journalists, or others.
Fortune headline a good example of agitprop?
Wagathon,
Just business as usual in US politics, going back to the Founders (e.g, Jefferson played especially dirty).
Kumar I’m not sure you understand. The headline is false. Trump didn’t suggest anything. He pointed out that Cruz’ father Raphael was in a group photo that included Oswald taken after Oswald’s arrest. Obviously Raphael was somehow involved with that group otherwise he wouldn’t be in it. Oswald and Raphael are both Cubans. As far as I know Raphael might have been an informant working against Oswald. The bottom line is Trump didn’t suggest what Fortune said he suggested. Fortune lied.
If you are talking about Oswald’s arrest for the assassination, the photograph was taken before Oswald’s arrest. Oswald was not a Cuban.
You are correct. Mibad. Oswald only wished he was Cuban and wanted to go there. The photo was taken several months before the shooting. I don’t believe that changes my point however. Oswald was a known dissident at the time and Rafael could have been working for either side. Or maybe that wasn’t even him. Trump’s point still stands which was mostly “why isn’t anyone talking about it or looking into it”?
Lee Harvey Oswald was from Louisiana. If he had been Cuban his name would have been something like “Leonardo Jarvi Osvaldez”.
Simply being together in the photograph suggests nothing. My Aunt was a neighbor and friend of Ruth Paine, and she met Marina and the Oswald children when they lived at the Paine’s house, which was where Oswald rifle was kept. I used to tease her that she was within feet of the magic bullet. Anyway, I think Cruz’s father has said he was a supporter of Castro, as was Oswald. Sounds completely innocent.
Famous Cubans
Steven Bauer, Willam Levy, Ray Noble, Joel Armas, Nessier Bent, Oscar Biscet, Ana Betencourt, Meyer Rosenbaum, Celia Hart, Mike Lowell …
Your point is taken but not every person of Cuban descent has a name like Ricky Ricardo.
Guys, get a grip. Trump quoted National Enquirer, a renowned reliable source–NOT. And there are a few problems with the NE assertion that were investigated by the Warren Commission. Like the supposed height of Cruz’ father in that picture. Pure scurrilous garbage. Not fit to reproduce here, and I hope Judith disappears the whole disgraceful discussion. Lose the innuendos, cling to facts and their uncertainties.
See my http://www.cato.org/publications/working-paper/government-buying-science-or-support-framework-analysis-federal-funding. It is a simple cascade.
Could they have said reoxygenation with the same data?
“Our results suggest that ocean deoxygenation might already be detectable on the basis of state anomalies and/or trends in regions within the southern Indian Ocean, as well as parts of the eastern tropical Pacific and Atlantic basins”
With that “might” they could have claimed anything, but deoxygenation catches more headlines and maybe also more money.
It is fine to measure, but why must the result allways in some obscure way be connected to “climate change” with some might, could and maybe.
O/T, but might be of interest.
“Ecologists have retracted a paper published only months ago in Science Advances, after realizing that they had misinterpreted a climate model.
The October paper examined the effects of climate change on populations of 155 species of British moths and butterflies. According to a press release from the authors’ institution, the University of York:
“Using data collected by thousands of volunteers through ‘citizen science’ schemes, responses to recent climate change were seen to vary greatly from species to species.”
But the authors quickly realized that the variation they had measured was not due to climate change alone, according to the retraction notice they issued for the paper last week: . . . “
Good for them. They realised they were probably wrong, and retracted. It’s a pity that they didn’t realise their mistake before publication. Citations for retracted papers often increase after retraction. God knows why!
This might serve as a warning. Published in a prestigious Science journal, peer reviewed, but withdrawn by the authors, who are to be commended.
Cheers.
This is so incredibly common. I found a perfect example last fall that started with the same UN report I provided to Dr. Curry as she prepared for a presentation about extreme events. The UN report executive summary was quite clear about extreme events, but the report also included bread crumbs for journalists to use to build alarmist articles. Which they of course did. The article originated at Reuters and spread to the CBC and the Guardian as well.
I was able to break it all down quite quickly as the article linked to the UN report and the report to the database on which the report was built.
This is the kind of material that should be spread around as it opens up, for the world to see, the real manipulators of the media.
Anybody coming from a neutral background and a bit of intelligence and wisdom will see what is going on. The problem is that ultimately most people are willing to ignore the issue…… until they see it hurt their bottom line.
I have a relative that was just assigned to a Climate Change related position and was quite thrilled to get involved. Naturally they had no idea what ECS was or who Dr. Hansen was. They were simply excited to start a new job where saving the environment was the goal. I hope my few words of wisdom will help them look critically at their work.
CNBC has an entire section dedicated to the dregs of science. It would make for several posts.
http://www.cnbc.com/sustainable-energy/
In Mosher’s imaginary world, skeptics would become “citizen scientists” and analyze data for themselves, come up with climate models, etc.
In the real world, many climate skeptics have jobs and families; not a lot of spare time. If one doesn’t already know higher math, physics, and how to program; it’s a pretty tall order to get up to speed.
Since the real battle is on the political front, a wiser use of time would be to get familiar with your local, state, and federal representatives; then contact them often with pieces like this at CE, Climate Audit, Nic Lewis, etc. It does not matter if you understand all the science or not; if you simply want to see what develops before tragic government programs are instituted, then you have every right to tell you representatives what you want.
You can start here:
http://hq-salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/5950/getLocal.jsp
“In Mosher’s imaginary world, skeptics would become “citizen scientists” and analyze data for themselves, come up with climate models, etc.”
err no. My advice to skeptics ( and most other people is the same)
1. Pick some aspect of climate science to focus on.
2. Work INSIDE the system
3. Avoid commenting if you don;t know your stuff
4. Volunteer to help where you can.
Lets take some well known examples: Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, JeffID, and Nic Lewis.
and for constrast Brandon S.
Steve Mc. He started off with two focal points: Paleo and temps. Over time he has tended to focus on one. Paleo. He reads papers. he gets the data. he tears them apart. he knows the proxies inside and out. he also knows what he doesnt know.
Anthony: do I need to say anything? Surface stations. Note also
that Evan has helped anthony and learned a lot. I would bet that you
also could volunteer and help. heck I have tons of projects that ordinary people could help on. There are pages devoted to citizen science on old temperature records.
JeffID: worked on temperatures and eventually focused on antartica with Ryan O Donnel
Nic Lewis: sensitivity.. as long as he sticks to that he does great work
For constrast I will use brandon S.
His first work on Mann was as good as Mcintrye. I advised him to stick with it and think he could be a great addition. he has an attention to
detail that is admirable. But over time he has wandered into other areas
Cook, Surface temp, legal arguments, etc etc. he shows the same
good skills here, but he really needs to focus ( if he wants to make an impact ). he may not want to. I get that. But I do get to note that I think he
is wasting a great talent by not diving deep into one area and working on it for a few years.
“In the real world, many climate skeptics have jobs and families; not a lot of spare time. If one doesn’t already know higher math, physics, and how to program; it’s a pretty tall order to get up to speed.”
Then pick something you can do. devote the time you can and stay
focused. You can just read papers to start. make a bibliography.
you tell me what you like to do and I will give you a project to make
you a better skeptic
Since the real battle is on the political front, a wiser use of time would be to get familiar with your local, state, and federal representatives; then contact them often with pieces like this at CE, Climate Audit, Nic Lewis, etc. It does not matter if you understand all the science or not; if you simply want to see what develops before tragic government programs are instituted, then you have every right to tell you representatives what you want.
That is also a good idea. But give them the best weapons.. not junk
you find on goddard.
You can also spend you time keeping other skeptics in line.
Pick the strongest argument against AGW you know. Spend time with it.
When you see other skeptics using horrible arguments.. remind them of the best argument. ride herd on the cats
Speaking of Paleo, Steven.
Boo!
Vostok, No argument is the worst argument of all, you know what I mean?
Arch.
1. Pointing at Vostok ISNT an argument.
2. You ask my opinion.. simple.
A) Look at EPICA ( more data is always good)
B) Make an argument
There really isnt any other way to answer your “pointing” at Vostok.
Except to say. Yes Vostok supports AGW theory.. And Yes we cannot explain what we find at Vostok without AGW theory.
So you point at evidence that supports my view.. what can I say?
You still have not said anything Steven, about why the deposited Vostok, McMurdo and other ice cores have been a waste of tax dollars because they all lack the consistency needed for a representative series of sample data that is Earth’s recent weather history? Yet it now supports AGW… how so? Not from the graphs that I have seen.
“You still have not said anything Steven, about why the deposited Vostok, McMurdo and other ice cores have been a waste of tax dollars because they all lack the consistency needed for a representative series of sample data that is Earth’s recent weather history?
HUH?
1. the ice cores ( of varying quality) give you a picture of deep history
Vostok to 400K, EPICA to 800K.
2. They are not global, So the best we can do is INFER global
values from them. That comes with uncertainty. More uncertainty
than a thermometer.
3. If you want Recent weather in antarctica use thermometers.
Yet it now supports AGW… how so? Not from the graphs that I have seen.
A) The cores show a peak to peak c02 amount of 180ppm to 300ppm
You can think of this as the regulated earth system with no
human influence.
B) we have driven the c02 to a regime not seen in the last 400-800K
years
C) The best science tells us that this will WARM the planet.. outside
of the boundaries seen in the last 400-800K years
D) Lastly, the ice cores depict the “delay” in the rise of c02 predicted
by hansen. Orbital mechanics drives the onset of higher temps
and co2 goes up as a “feedback”. All predicted. all consistent
with AGW.
The CO2 in collected in the ice of Antarctica, should have been a very well mixed gas with hundred mile an hour winds common. How did we ‘drive CO2’? Who drove them up 400K years ago? Explain the reason for the lag soon please, I feel it is getting colder outside.
All of AGW, GMT… the adjustments, homogenization, calibration, infilling, precision… it’s all inferred isn’t it, Steven?
“Pick some aspect of climate science to focus on.”
The most important aspect is whether the human released CO2 is beneficial or harmful for the climate.
Steve- what is the best science that makes you/anyone believe that AGW will result in a worse climate for the world/USA? When will it get worse and where?
Isn’t it more likely the climate in the USA will be better as a result of AGW?
If we have limited financial resources, shouldn’t theose be spent on building and maintaining robust infrastructure?
I see five tops, Steven.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Vostok_Petit_data.svg
Maybe we should all by a nice warm coat?
Yes. Inference comes with error.
Always.
Both vista and thermometers confirm the theory.
I’ll fcousin on the data with the lowest error.
But thanks for pointing at vostok which also supports the theory
Are you going to explain why the points I have been making with you are laughable? Let’s just get to the point. Five tops, 420K years, 1/10,000 the age of the earth. Science is not worth much from what you are showin.
Imagine what the costs for sustainability and mitigation against glaciers will have to be…for the next 3,000 years.
Steven Mosher,
You wrote –
“‘err no. My advice to skeptics ( and most other people is the same)
1. Pick some aspect of climate science to focus on.
2. Work INSIDE the system
3. Avoid commenting if you don;t know your stuff
4. Volunteer to help where you can.”
Well, if someone did take your free advice, they might concentrate on some aspect of science that appears to relate to climate science, however defined.
They would strike an immediate problem. They might try to confirm the heating effect of CO2 by finding a repeatable scientific experiment which demonstrates this effect.
It has to be a heating effect, rather than an effect which results in something being warmer than it otherwise would be, because the claim is that the world is actually heating up. Not cooling more slowly, it’s temperature is actually increasing.
Here’s the first problem. Such an effect does not exist in reality. It only exists in Warmist speculation or fantasy. Wishful thinking.
This being the case, the rest of your advice is completely pointless. Maybe you should apply yourself to real science. Write down your theory. Devise and perform a rigorous repeatable experiment. Record your results. Try to think of everything that could give you those results, without the necessity for your theory.
Fiddling around with historical data does not alter today’s reality, nor does it help to explain today’s reality. Trying to understand the climate requires understanding of weather, from which climate is derived.
Unfortunately, your data manipulating efforts do not even qualify you for the PSB Awards for rigorous secondary data analysis (The “Parasites”). You don’t satisfy the selection criteria, as far as I can see.
Wishful thinking does not create fact.
Cheers.
“what is the best science that makes you/anyone believe that AGW will result in a worse climate for the world/USA? When will it get worse and where?
Isn’t it more likely the climate in the USA will be better as a result of AGW?”
Rob, If you accept the prevailing science that increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere should result in a warmer planet, then you should understand there is some risk related to continuing to add more and more CO2. So the questions become 1) what is the size of the risk? And 2) how much warming is likely (sensitivity)? The answer to the first is more obvious than the second. Since the affected area is the entire planet… the risk is pretty high IF sensitivity is high. If sensitivity is low, then less risk. The science is uncertain on sensitivity, uncertainty should drive more awareness about what kind of experiment is being run on the planet. I suggest a more skeptical view should be taken on looking at the notion that results will be only a better climate. Uncertainty exists here as well. It is more likely there will be winners and losers. The key is what risk are we willing to take to find out? BAU? We want to just keep going full steam ahead? Or proceed with caution and make some course corrections.
“They might try to confirm the heating effect of CO2 by finding a repeatable scientific experiment which demonstrates this effect.
It has to be a heating effect, rather than an effect which results in something being warmer than it otherwise would be, because the claim is that the world is actually heating up. Not cooling more slowly, it’s temperature is actually increasing.
Here’s the first problem. Such an effect does not exist in reality. ” – MIke Flynn
So Mike Flynn, here is your golden opportunity. Instead making assertions that there is no GHE because there is no experiment to prove it (you say this regularly), you should focus on creating an experiment that either provides evidence for or against the GHE. For you to show there is no GHE, then you must do as you say. Use the scientific method. State your hypothesis. Design an experiment or a series of experiments to validate or disprove your hypothesis. Run the experiments and carefully document how you did it and record all the results/observations that were obtained. Analyze the data carefully, and be sure to show all your work, and then show how the data does or does not confirm your hypothesis. Write it up and submit it to a scientific journal of your choosing and see what happens. According to your assertion this should be a relatively simple task. If you are able to do this, I would predict that the name Mike Flynn would become synonymous with the greatest scientific minds known. You would be famous beyond famous for correcting an apparently HUGE scientific debacle in the making.
But you won’t do any of what you preach because 1) you are not a scientist , 2) reality of how science works will come crashing down on you, 3) if it were so simple, someone would have shown this long ago.
John Carpenter,
You wrote –
“So Mike Flynn, here is your golden opportunity. Instead making assertions that there is no GHE because there is no experiment to prove it (you say this regularly), you should focus on creating an experiment that either provides evidence for or against the GHE.”
Thank you for your suggestion. You will no doubt understand why I don’t believe I have to focus on creating an experiment that either provides evidence for or against the GHE.
Warmists claim that the GHE exists. Unfortunately, this claim is unsupported by any repeatable scientific experiment. I can do no better than quote Richard Feynman – “And now you find a man saying that it is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science?”
You would appear to be that man. You claim there is a greenhouse effect. You provide precisely no experimental verification, just ever more strident demands that I disprove something that has never been shown to exist.
No GHE, no spoons bent by Uri Geller’s mental power, no unicorns.
If you can demonstrate by repeatable experiment the existence of any, or all, of these, I will no doubt reconsider my position. How hard can it be?
Cheers.
SM: I think you are right in what can make an impact. In addition the abuse of science has to be met by pointing out that propaganda is the communication of some kind of extremism. So Larry kummer is making a good job on that. And the socalled “sceptical” ignorance of GHE is also a problem. This is not at all sceptical, but a belief system.
Mosher is deep in denial. Vostok doesn’t support the theory. Vostok shows temperature rising centuries before CO2 rising. It shows CO2 to NOT be a cause but rather an effect.
Steven Mosher,
You wrote –
“‘err no. My advice to skeptics ( and most other people is the same)
1. Pick some aspect of climate science to focus on.
2. Work INSIDE the system
3. Avoid commenting if you don;t know your stuff
4. Volunteer to help where you can.”
——————————————————————
Mosher violates #3 himself constantly. But that’s beside the point.
#2 is imbecilic on the face of it. You don’t need to join an organization to change it. Change can be accomplished from within or without. In fact if your intent to change a system is known the system will resist letting you work from within. Duh.
Just sour grapes from Mosher the wannabe scientist. He’s on the “inside” alright. The real insiders like Muller pat him on the head like a dog, throw him a bone by giving him a title and unpaid work to do, and he wags his tail in response. Funny stuff. Here boy, fetch that R code! ROFL
Mike Flynn, appeals to Feynmann are not scientific arguments. The evidence of a GHE is the fact the earth is warmer with CO2 in the atmosphere than without it. It can be shown, it has been shown and you have been led to sources that show you this from first principles of physics. Hiding from this fact does not make it go away. All observational evidence available points to agreement with the GHE theory. There is no evidence supporting the non existence of the GHE. There is no other theory from first principles to support observations made. If there was, it would have altered or replaced the GHE theory by now. Just saying it doesn’t exist does not make it so. You have to come to the table with an alternative explanation. But you can’t because you have no idea how atmospheric physics works. Since you are so enamored with laboratory experiments, I challenge you to come up with the simple experiment that supports your position. If it so obvious to you, why can’t you provide a rigorous alternative explanation to the GHE? You can’t do it because no other explanation has been found. You can’t do it because you are not capable.
John Carpenter –
==> appeals to Feynmann are not scientific arguments. /i>
It would be interesting to see what would happen if you ran all “climate-o-sphere” comments through a filter that extracted all appeals to Feynmann (and Popper)…
Why do CO2 levels consistently lag Vostok temperatures over the last five peaks? We just don’t know now, do we? These numbers for the area are not inferred either.
I just read this again, Steven.
D) Lastly, the ice cores depict the “delay” in the rise of c02 predicted
by hansen. Orbital mechanics drives the onset of higher temps
and co2 goes up as a “feedback”. All predicted. all consistent
with AGW.
If ‘It’s the Sun’ after all. Why didn’t Hansen, just say so, Steven? How do you explain the 600-800 year lag when you factor in speed of light and stuff like that?
A) The cores show a peak to peak c02 amount of 180ppm to 300ppm
You can think of this as the regulated earth system with no
human influence.
B) we have driven the c02 to a regime not seen in the last 400-800K
years
C) The best science tells us that this will WARM the planet.. outside
of the boundaries seen in the last 400-800K years
D) Lastly, the ice cores depict the “delay” in the rise of c02 predicted
by hansen. Orbital mechanics drives the onset of higher temps
and co2 goes up as a “feedback”. All predicted. all consistent
with AGW.
This is off the mark.
The glacial cycles did not occur because of global average temperature and perhaps not because of global average radiative forcing.
The glacial cycles occurred because of regional radiative forcing at high northern latitudes, during melt season only.
While it’s true that the changes of forcing from CO2 were in phases with the glacials, the extent of those changes were quite small in comparison to the changes of high northern summertime maximal radiance.
The glacials and interglacials would have occurred without any help and even with some hinderance by CO2.
Dust precedes moves in CO2. Why this pattern when we aren’t even there yet in theroy?
Lags, sorry for any confusion.
John Carpenter,
You wrote –
“The evidence of a GHE is the fact the earth is warmer with CO2 in the atmosphere than without it. It can be shown, it has been shown . . . “
You live in a Warmist fantasy world, quite obviously.
Nobody has ever shown, via repeatable scientific experiment, that which you claim. Not using the Earth, nor anything else.
Here’s a short version of my initial non GHE reasoning,with relevant assumptions –
1. The Earth is about four and a half billion years old.
2. The Sun’s output has not markedly increased since the start of the European Industrial Revolution.
3. The Earth’s surface was originally molten.
When the surface was say, 1100K, it cooled.
When the surface was 500K, it cooled.
When the surface was 300K, it cooled.
It is now say 288K or thereabouts. It had to cool to reach that temperature.
My conclusion is that after four and a half billion years, CO2 in the atmosphere at any concentration, and four and a half billion years of continuous sunlight have not prevented the planet from cooling.
Before I give you several reasons to explain why surface temperatures might, in fact, show rises, I will ask you if you agree with my initial propositions and assumptions. If cannot proceed on the basis of agreed facts, there is no point in proceeding.
Warmists seem to believe the Earth was created cold, is a flat featureless disc of constant albedo, continuously illuminated by an unchanging radiation source of fixed and known qualities. At least, according to many US bodies, such as NASA.
For all I know, you subscribe to this sort of unrealistic nonsense. Please let me know.
Cheers.
Mike Flynn- so your really going with the earth is cooler now than when it formed billions of years ago as an alternative to the GHE. Honestly I don’t think that will make it into a technical journal if you try. I don’t think the idea the earth has cooled since initial formation is in dispute, however it bears no relevance to the GHE and present day earth atmospheric conditions. The state of the planet at that time and now is nowhere near an apples to apples comparison. It appears to me you are also in denial that there is this phenomenon called natural variability of our climate where the planet has warmed and cooled over the last several hundred million years, long long long after it cooled to a life sustainable temperature. You surely also know the atmosphere has undergone many compositional changes over this time which has impacted surface temperatures and changed the climate. Paleogeology clearly shows when and how some of these changes took place, some from catacalismic events and many others less well understood. Nevertheless it is well accepted that historic changes in atmospheric compositions have impacted or helped drive climate shifts of the past. Again, from first principles of physics, the present day temperature of the planet can be estimated based on atmospheric composition. Without CO2 in the atmosphere we would expect the planet to be about 33K cooler. There is no dispute that CO2 is one of the gases in our atmosphere that when changed it impacts temperature. There is no dispute that CO2 concentrations have increased since industrialization and that the burning of fossil fuels largely explains that change. There is little dispute that since the mid 1800’s, SAT has increased about 1.5 degree C. There is little dispute that increased CO2 should lead to warming based on first principle physics. There is less agreement on how much of the warming observed is due to natural variability and how much is due to increased CO2 from burning fossil fuels. There is less agreement on how sensitive temperature is to increased CO2 in the atmosphere. There is less agreement on how dangerous that might be in the future. There is less agreement on what actions should be taken. If you want to engage in good faith discussions, then I suggest you focus on the areas where there is less agreement since that is where the relevant discussion are taking place. Your obsession with the idea there is no such thing as the GHE because it can’t be measured with a laboratory experiment is remarkably inane. You can’t reproduce earth atmospheric systems and dynamics in the laboratory. Just not big enough. Not controllable. So will never happen. Studying the climate is an observational science. Mathematical physics models from simple to complex have to be used to try to understand the dynamics. They are far from perfect but they all show more CO2 should result in warmer temps. None show cooling.
John Carpenter,
If I understand you correctly, you’re falling back on the well worn Warmist ploy that the CO2 heating effect can not be disproved because the Earth is too large, therefore it must exist because Warmists say so. So there!
Not science, I fear. Cargo Cult science, maybe. Voodoo science, as the IPCC might characterise. Proselytising by the disciples of the Warmist Church of Latter Day Scientism most likely.
Correlation is not causation – and even that’s looking a bit dodgy at the moment. Even the amazing Michael “Gee, I nearly had a Nobel Prize” Mann co authored a paper recently wherein he admitted that temperatures weren’t rising in line with Warmist assumptions.
He probably blamed the facts for upsetting the fantasy.
CO2 heats nothing. Generating useable energy does, whether you burn stuff, use nuclear decay, hydro or wind, horses, or your own body to do work. Heat. Measurable. Raises temperatures if there’s enough of it at the appropriate energy level.
Keep at it. I hope it keeps you content.
Cheers.
Flynn is 100% gimmick. He’s a whack-a-mole machine. Feynman is dead. It is against my ethics to harness the dead to pull my wagon, go I’ll go on my own. Cargo Cult is for mildly entertaining paranormal, thrilla fiction. Not even wrong is Flynn’s category.
“If I understand you correctly, you’re falling back on the well worn Warmist ploy that the CO2 heating effect can not be disproved because the Earth is too large, therefore it must exist because Warmists say so. So there!”
Mike Flynn, you do not understand me correctly. What I said is you cannot reproduce atmospheric systems and dynamics in a laboratory. You can’t run that experiment. I did not say the GHE therefore exists because of that reason. Read harder. I said you can calculate from first principles physics an estimate of what the earths temperature should be. When you do that it closely matches observations.
It’s funny that you use an example of a molten earth surface as your starting point for when the planet started cooling when you have no evidence the planet surface was in fact molten. You can’t produce any, not one single experiment that confirms your assertion that the surface was molten. You just say it was so and so there. Your own argument against the GHE works against your own molten earth surface theory. That’s pretty funny.
“CO2 heats nothing”
I agree with you there. If you understood how the GHE works you would realize no one claims CO2 creates energy. No one claims it creates heat. What it creates is an energy imbalance as IR energy cannot escape to space as quickly when there is more CO2 blocking the path out. Because it can’t escape as fast, the ERL (effective radiation limit) moves higher at the TOA (top of atmosphere). Because ERL is higher, the radiation efficiency is lower due to lower temperature. In order to gain energy balance, the atmosphere below the ERL at TOA must warm to raise the efficiency and restore energy balance. It takes a long time to restore the balance because the atmosphere has a large thermal mass. It takes awhile for that thermal energy to build and cause warming. It is an inertia problem. But nature will prevail in order to reach a new energy equilibrium. All the energy is coming from the sun, not from CO2. CO2 just retards the escape of IR. That’s what causes the warming.
JCH,
“Feynman is dead. It is against my ethics to harness the dead to pull my wagon, go I’ll go on my own. Cargo Cult is for mildly entertaining paranormal, thrilla . . . “
And yet, Warmists refer to Fourier, Arrhenius, Tyndall, Callender, and many others to support their unverifiable and unprovable assertion that CO2 possesses magical heating properties. I agree with you. Produce a single repeatable experiment demonstrating the heating abilities of CO2, and the matter is settled.
CO2 heating ability? Complete nonsense. It doesn’t exist, any more than unicorns or pixie dust.
Cheers.
Diffusion Is the key boys.. CO2 diffuses in ice up until it becomes calthrate. How robust is the ice paleo record. Well I’ll leave you to judge. Also chronology is a tad hit and miss. Bit of research and you’ll find all sorts of interesting things. Some of it even from the Team :-)
Battle of Agitprop – slings and arrows of outrageous
mis-fortune.
Arrows ‘n slings off-target include:
-> By 1995, horrific drought widespread due to
Greenhouse. Eurasia ‘n North America, leading
to food riots. Michael Oppenheimer, 1900.
-> Seas rising by up to 6metres in 30 years.
Tim Flannery
in 2000.
-> Coral atolls sinking PM of Tuvulu… send more
money.
-> Arctic ocean may be ice free by 2000.
Bernt Balchan.
-> Snow a thing of the past. Children wouldn’t know it
if they saw it.
-> Polar Bears becoming extinct. Disregard counts of
increasing numbers. Kassie Siegels.
2nd last arrow by David Viner. -> o//-<
I once supported the Tea Party and Ted Cruz, but both seemed unaware of the deep and well-justified public anger at both political parties and the dishonest scientists that accept public funds from them to deceive the public.
If Trump has the courage to take control of public policy away from the US National Academy of Sciences, the climate change scare will end overnight.
E. M. Smith explains how Trump energized this public anger.
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/05/03/dear-lame-stream-media-msnbc-in-particular-and-tptb-per-trump/
If Trump is anti-globalism, as some suggest https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2016/05/04/globalist-peril-vs-the-individual/
that may be quickest way to end “consensus science.”
I took some time and took Maddie Stone, of Gizmodo, to task for her reporting. It’s not the first time I’ve done this with her, and I’m pretty sure it won’t be the last.
A model is like a ball bearing mischievously rolled from the back of a wooden cinema. It can only go in one direction while making pointless rattly noises to edify hoons.
Adults please!
Strategy, coordination and organization are wihthout a doubt important in any confrontation.
However, there’s more to winning an engagement than that.
Tolstoy called this something else “some unknown x.”
This x does not consist of the size of the army, a geometric formation of troops, armaments, or the genius of the commanders, “This x is the spirit of an army,” Tolstoy concludes.
The Rev. Martin Luther King struck a similar note when he said:
In a world of false moral equivalence and relativism, of Plato’s “noble lie” or communism’s “greatest tragedy” as MLK called it, morality counts for nothing. King described it as “the philosophy that the end justifies the means that are used in the process,” so that “we can read or we can hear the Lenins say that lying, deceit, or violence, that many of these things justify the ends of the classless society.”
Most flesh and blood human beings, however, do not live in this world. Quite the contrary, they live in is a world in which morality counts a great deal.
So okay ye band of brothers
ye happy few, once more unto
the breach – that missing heat,
missing trees, hide the decline
‘n such…
https://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/briffa99-science_notrick2.png
From the abstract: “We find that the forced signal should already be evident in the southern Indian Ocean and parts of the eastern tropicalPacific and Atlantic basins; widespread detection of forced deoxygenation is possible by 2030–2040.”
So according to model the signal “should be” evident, but it is not claimed that it is evident. And 20 years in the future it is “possible” to detect.
nobodysknowledge,
These are obviously Wayward Wobbly Warmist “future facts”. They are much better than past or present facts, as they are infinitely flexible.
And model facts are better than anything at all.
Cheers.
Hillary has thrown the working class under the bus for her rich environmentalist friends.
We’ll see how that plays in Peoria.
A former Clinton stronghold is now firmly in Donald Trump’s grasp
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-former-clinton-stronghold-is-now-firmly-in-donald-trumps-grasp-2016-5?
One question not considered enough is what is the cause of the atmospheric CO2 response to increased temperatures? Is there less carbon in the ocean, or is carbon sequestered in the deep ocean freed up to cycle through surface biosphere?
“Cause and effect” is a myth.
That said, it’s well demonstrated that warmer water will support a lower concentration of dissolved CO2 relative to any atmospheric concentration (than colder water will). That doesn’t say anything about the relationship with carbonic acid (H2CO3), carbonate (CO3–), and bicarbonate (HCO3-). (Most of the oxidized carbon in the ocean is currently in the form of bicarbonate.)
Those relationships are primarily driven by concentrations of other ions (usually mostly the sum we call pH). Since changes in temperature will typically drive ecological changes which in turn can affect ion concentrations, as well as erosion which also affects ion concentrations, trying to pin down a “cause” is very difficult. Prediction even more so.
WRT paleo, we should also remember that those long-term relationships involved not only temperature but glacial activity. Glaciers grind the rock they travel over into rock flower, much or which can spread to the oceans via wind (aeolian) and river (riparian) transport.
Yes, but I’m wondering if the biological pump and ocean circulation are bigger factors than out gassing.
Good point about glacial and other geological factors.
I’d say probably so. Although given that the production of MgCO3/CaCO3 coccoliths by coccolithophores actually works to increase atmospheric CO2, I very much doubt anybody can plausibly predict the effects.
Temperature sensitive carbon reservoirs are at least several. Permafrost, methane ice, frozen organic materials that decompose when they thaw, gas dissolved in the ocean…
“It’s one of the reasons I believe that skeptics will lose the US public policy debate about climate change”.
No. Skeptics are losing the debate because they do not have scientific facts on their side.
Today the Left, is losing the vote because people are sick of being treated like little children. That is not scientific but a good guess from the looks of things. Trump, is just going to fire everybody is the hope today. We win.
Harry,
It doesn’t matter who wins or loses a debate. Nature doesn’t care. I assume that’s why the scientific method includes testing theory by physical experiment.
If the experiment doesn’t support your elegant theory, your theory is wrong.
I’m just surprised that so much has been spent by so many for so little result.
What has the expenditure on climate change achieved? As far as I can tell, precisely nothing at all. Would similar expenditure in the fields of medicine, education, and so on, have produced greater measurable benefits?
I have no objection to people indulging in their personal fantasies, but I don’t think I should have to contribute to their support. I’d like to see some results, first.
Don’t you agree?
Cheers.
“Today the Left, is losing the vote because people are sick of being treated like little children.”
What on earth has that sentence got to do with a comment about scientific facts?
You still don’t get it, right now folks don’t need more scientific facts, we all have enough real problems as it is. Did you have a chance to review the Vostok graphs I linked to up thread? What do you see now? Facts.
Arch Stanton.
You did not answer my question, you just attempted to change the subject.
I always have a laugh when people point to Vostok as “evidence” for AGW being incorrect. Vostok is actually good evidence AGW is correct.
Us old time AGW proponents are not distracted by dishonest red herrings.
Gotta love focusing on Vostok. One location one data set. What does it have to say about the rest of the world? Are scientists saying the Ice Age cooling and warming effect was only happening in Vostok – nope.
Harry,
You wrote –
“What on earth has that sentence got to do with a comment about scientific facts?”
Probably about as much as sentences about winning or losing a debate .
Neither affects scientific facts one jot. Maybe the point is that if people become annoyed with being dictated to by Warmists, the people may elect representaives who cut off the money supply to the Warmists.
Sounds like the will of the people, if it happens. Wouldn’t you agree?
Cheers.
Mike Fynn.
“It doesn’t matter who wins or loses a debate”
Well you better take that up with the author of the article I comment on. I quoted directly from it.
“Don’t you agree?”
I cannot answer that unless I know what I am supposed to be agreeing or disagreeing with. Your series of sentences together do not make any sense so I cannot figure out what you are talking about.
“If the experiment doesn’t support your elegant theory, your theory is wrong.”
I suspect you are referring to Richard Feynman’s description of the scientific method. If you are referring to the scientific theory of AGW, then yes the experiments do support the theory.
Harry,
You are right about my query. Extra white space clouded the meaning. I apologise. It should have read as follows –
“I have no objection to people indulging in their personal fantasies, but I don’t think I should have to contribute to their support. I’d like to see some results, first. Don’t you agree?”
Is that clearer? Fantasies, support, results first?
Unfortunately AGW theory is a misnomer. If you can state the AGW theory, I would be most surprised. Not a link to some tedious publication, but a statement of the wondrous AGW theory. I presume it can be shown in public. Just cut and paste if you fell like it – this will avoid the usual Warmist response of providing a link to something like an IPCC report.
Maybe you were really referring to an even more nebulous theory, that of the proposition that CO2 can provide heat energy resulting in an increase in temperature of that which it surrounds. This is easily shown to be complete nonsense of course. Place a thermometer in a container full of air. Let the temperature stabilise. Replace the air with CO2. Let the temperature stabilise. The temperature is unchanged. There is plenty of radiation reaching the thermometer (otherwise it would show no temperature at all – absolute zero). No heating effect due to CO2. None.
Anyway, trot out your mad theory that states in some disprovable fashion that AGW is due to atmospheric CO2. I don’t believe you will find it so easy.
Your call.
Cheers.
Unfortunately AGW theory is a misnomer.
I find AGW to be apt, it’s climate change that I doubt.
If you can state the AGW theory…
Earth receives energy from the sun.
The only significant means of balancing this gain is emission to space.
As CO2 increases, the average height of emission increases.
Emissions from greater heights are from colder molecules.
This reduces the emissions to space creating a surplus of energy.
This surplus could be balanced by other means.
But increasing temperature to balance is the most direct response.
TE,
With respect, this seems to be an explanation of what Warmists think happens. It is not a testable theory.
In any case you wrote –
“Earth receives energy from the sun.”
Perfectly true. At any given time, half the Earth is exposed to energy from the Sun. About 70 % of it reaches the surface. The other half of the Earth is emitting energy in line with fairly well understood physical laws.
Some people get upset if I mention dead people, so I’ll just say that at night, anything that heated up during the day cools down at night. Winter is generally colder than Summer, and in spite of the Earth being exposed to four and a half billion years of sunlight, it has cooled.
No overall heating at all. The Earth does not spontaneously heat up and cool down. It sits in a void with a nominal temperature of about 4K. The core is probably around 5000 K, or hotter. Heat moves from warmer to cooler, not the other way round. The Earth must continue to cool until is achieves isothermality at depths beyond the Sun’s influence – 20 m or so.
Nobody has yet stated a testable theory of CO2 heating, which appears to be the unstated basis of Warmism. Probably because it’s nonsensical.
Pardon me if I’m trying to be precise.
Cheers.
Why can’t he be both?
With respect, this seems to be an explanation of what Warmists think happens. It is not a testable theory.
You haven’t tested these ideas for yourself?
I’m guessing that you’d agree that the radiative properties of CO2 ( and other greenhouse gasses ) are testable ( and tested ) in laboratories.
It’s true that no one can control earth’s atmosphere for CO2 only and sample the result a century later. However using the knowledge of the testable physical properties of CO2, one can certainly calculate the effect of additional CO2 with all other aspects fixed. Doing so is the basis of the IPCC simplified expressions. These expressions bothered me ( because they weren’t particularly well described even by the papers ). But I ran the radiative model that encapsulates the testable physics on various atmospheres and do have a better appreciation of the generalized forcing as a result.
There are ways other than surface warming in which radiative imbalance might be restored ( water vapor, clouds, warming aloft only, et. al. ). But warming is the most direct response ( surplus energy raises temperature ) and the other aspects don’t have a physical cause resulting from radiative imbalance.
TE
Appreciate your comments but the alternates to CO2 causing the heating of the earth are great in number, unknown in magnitude and understood sketchily. What about increased clouds and brightness reflecting sunlight, or increases in wind hadley cells dissipating energy. Heating the deep ocean not currently measured below 2,000 m and likely to stay sequestered for a 1,000 years in the ocean conveyor. Changes in the AMO or PDO. The unknowns in sign and magnitude are so great.
“What we know is not much, What we do not know is immense.”
Pierre Laplace, Astronomer.
That said, I enjoy your science based posts and thank you for joining the conversation. As you mentioned lots of ways to dissipate heat.
Scott
There are measurements of earth spectrum. Placing various multi-spectral satellite sensed imagery over this spectrum yields the following. Where greenhouse gas bands are prominent, satellite measurements indicate colder, and thus less energetic emissions to space. Increasing these greenhouse gasses broadens these bands, thus reducing energy lost to space:
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/Spectrum.png
Hello Scott.
True dat – no one has a crystal ball.
There are things that will happen independent of +CO2.
There are things that will happen because of warming which may happen because of +CO2.
But these are different than Flynn’s denial of radiative forcing.
Evidently the RICO dragnet is after the Libertarians.
This is getting Orwellian.
Amazing. Poor old Reason are a bunch of classical warmies whose links to the fossil fuel industry are dwarfed by those of eg the Clinton Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And, last time I looked, that old greenie hero Buffett was still favouring the most oily way to cart Canadian oil – on his sooty choot-choots! No pipelines for Puffing Warren.
But some Virgin Islands climate mullah wants to pick on a few egghead libertarians who don’t even disagree with him?
I suppose the strategy of these RICO-wielding thugs is to find someone just small enough to fail but big enough to pay.
Bugger the climatariat. Fight Green Blob!
Mike Flynn, insulators don’t work by heating. They work by keeping things warm. They may appear magical to you, but add insulators the list in your world of wonders. Greenhouse gases work by insulation. I don’t expect you to understand insulators either, but there it is.
Jim D,
You wrote –
“Mike Flynn, insulators don’t work by heating. They work by keeping things warm. They may appear magical to you, but add insulators the list in your world of wonders. Greenhouse gases work by insulation. I don’t expect you to understand insulators either, but there it is”
You have overlooked that insulators work both ways. Your refrigerator, or even a Thermos, keeps things cooler than they otherwise would be. Of course, that’s the same misleading example that Warmists employ.
In spite of the fact that many Warmists claim that CO2 is not just an insulator, I agree that the atmosphere acts as an insulator. In fact, a Warmist named Raymond Pierrehumbert calculated the insulating effect in his textbook. One seventh of an inch of polystyrene, as I recollect.
The insulating effect of the atmosphere prevents some 30% of the Sun’s nominal radiation from reaching the Earth’s surface. It allows 100% of the ongoing radiation to exit the Earth’s system. 100%. If it was not so, the Earth could not have cooled over the last four and a half billion years.
Insulators do not heat objects, Warmists claim CO2 provides a heating effect. You may have heard claims of “Hottest year EVAH!” as a result of global heating of some sort.
Place as much insulation as you like around a corpse, or an abandoned house. It stubbornly refuses to increase its temperature. No magic, just physics.
I note you obviously haven’t found Steven Mosher’s missing clue, or Tremberth’s missing heat. It’s a travesty. If you find either, do let me know.
Until then, no heating effect from CO2. No increase in the Earth’s temperature due to CO2.
Cheers.
People who misunderstand both warmists and insulation claim it has a heating effect, but actually it doesn’t, and neither do insulators, but they keep things warm. Understand?
Moreover, adding insulation keeps things even warmer. Not going too fast for you, am I?
“Warmists claim CO2 provides a heating effect. ”
too funny.
Its simple Flynn.
A thermos does warm the coffee
A space blanket doesnt warm the camper.
C02 doesnt warm the planet
A thermos keeps the coffee warmer than it would be otherwise by slowing the loss of energy via radiation.
A space blanket keeps the camper warmer than he would be otherwise
The hat on your head.. same thing
C02 does not warm the planet. If keeps the planet warmer than it would
be otherwise. Water vapor does the same thing.
nature gives us a great natural experiment.
Two bodies receive the same energy from the sun.
One has GHGs
One does not
Here is what temperature looks like without GHGs
http://diviner.ucla.edu/gallery/AbFab_Plot.png
http://diviner.ucla.edu/science.shtml
Steve Mosher.
““Warmists claim CO2 provides a heating effect. ”
It is amazing what straw men the deniers come up with, isn’t it?
I am sad the climate trolls waste their time trying to trick unsophisticated readers with this rhetoric. They have a very low opinion of the readers. They could be spending their time on more useful pursuits.
Also conduction.
AK,
And of course, doesn’t heat at all. No “Hottest EVAH!”
Cheers.
Don’t forget, if the camper is kept sufficiently warm he pisses himself.
Mosher, that’s what temperature looks like without an ocean.
You’re physically illiterate. Lunar soil does not capture and sequester solar energy to a depth of 100 meters at the speed of light. An ocean does exactly that. Morever, the shortwave solar radiation that thermalizes ocean water many meters below the surface must exit by slow mechanical means because the ocean is quite opaque to thermal radiation.
Liquid water’s transparency to shortwave radiation and opacity to thermal radiation should sound familiar to you. It’s *exactly* the characteristic that distinuguishes greenhouse gases from non-greenhouse gases. The ocean is the great greenhouse heater for this planet not the wispy little atmosphere above it.
Write that down. And buy clue you physics-challenged dork.
Radiative insulation of a thermos bottle is only a small portion of the overall insulation. If the thermos was black inside instead of silver it makes little difference. The big effect is accomplished by the vacuum between the inner and outer flasks. Indeed “Thermos” is a brand name that was generalized like Xerox was for copiers. The original name for it is a vacuum flask. It works by blocking conduction and convection not radiation.
Buy hey, that mistake about how a thermos bottle works is typical of the kind of empty-headed malarky you get when someone with an undergraduate degree in English pretends to be a scientist. Just stop it, Mosher. You are ridiculous.
David Springer.
“Write that down. And buy clue you physics-challenged dork.”
You are a nasty piece of work. And you have wayyyy too much spare time on your hands.
Is the earth’s surface liquid nitrogen? No. It is actually warmed by the sun. Liquid nitrogen would not last long. Perhaps you are confused with some other planet. In summary, surface warming by the sun, insulation by GHGs keeping warmth in. Easy to follow, right?
Jim D,
You wrote –
“In summary, surface warming by the sun, insulation by GHGs keeping warmth in. Easy to follow, right?”
Not really. The atmosphere stops about 30% of the Suns radiation hitting the surface during the day. The surface doesn’t get hotter with less heating. At night, there’s no sunlight at all. The radiation escapes to space.
After four and a half billion years, the surface has cooled, not heated.
Insulation works both ways – unless it’s magical Warmist insulation, which heats things all by itself. Maybe it’s made of unobtainium – who knows?
Cheers.
There is an external heat source. Each day a packet of heat is delivered. Each day a packet of heat exits. If the two are equal, the heat content remains the same. If the two are for any reason unequal, the heat content will adjust accordingly. In the case of a thermos… if it is perfectly insulated, the daily additions will lead eventually to the melting/destruction of thermos. In the case of a human body under a perfect space blanket, it would lead to death from heat prostration, and, if the blanket is indestructible, eventually to cremation and beyond. So say the insulators are imperfect. Say one is perfectly imperfect. Each day the packet of heat would be delivered, and then it would immediately exit. It would take a pretty fast thermometer to even notice it had happened. The heat content of the thermos would be zero.
A thermos is insulated by a vacuum. We could make one insulated by an atmosphere. It would surround the coffee. Some might think 300 miles of atmosphere inside the thermos would be enough, but to satisfy children Flynn and Stanton, the insulating area for the cup of coffee would also require enough room for galaxies and a good sun like ours and a bunch of planets. Sounds like a honker thermos, but a bench experiment is required.
JCH,
Unfortunately, Nature has decreed that the Earth has cooled, your arguments notwithstanding.
You wrote –
“A thermos is insulated by a vacuum.” Complete nonsense, of course. The Earth is surrounded by a fairly good vacuum, but still manages to heat during the day, and cool during the night. Some insulation – not. It has demonstrably cooled over the last four and a half billion years as I understand.
You wander off into the realms of fantasy – perfect insulation, indestructible blankets, and the like. I’m happy enough with reality. Your fantasy may suit you, and I have no objection to your desires, provided you pay for them yourself.
Cheers.
Of course it has. What the F difference does that make? Lol. The earth has insulation that is not perfectly perfect and that is not perfectly imperfect. It’s between those parameters and variable. Same for its heat source.
JCH it’s not quite like that. CO2 isn’t an insulator per se. It’s more like a diode. It lets energy in with little restriction but offers significant resistance to energy flowing out. Transparent to shortwave radiation incoming from the sun and opaque to thermal radiation trying to leave the solar heated surface.
That’s an adequate explanation for land and greenhouse gases work to a limited extent over dry land but not over water. That’s because water has an alternative, non-radiative means of cooling that is not radiative. It’s evaporative. Water vapor convects upward from the surface carrying huge amounts of solar energy with it. It goes through CO2 as easily as any other gas like an express energy elevator to the stars.
The ocean is the big kahuna when it comes to greenhouse heating. Transparent to solar radiation the sun instantly penetrates and warms ocean water to a depth of many meters. Quite opaque to ALL bands of thermal radiation, unlike CO2 which is opaque only in small narrow bands, the solar heated water below the surface must be mechanically transported to the surface where it primarily cools via evaporation with some radiation thrown in on the side plus a very small amount of conductive cooling.
Transparency to shortwave and opacity to longwave is what distinguishes non-greenhouse gases from greenhouse gases. Ocean water has exactly those characteristics only unlike the wispy air above it the ocean has tremendously larger (2000x) more heat capacity than the atmosphere. The global ocean and it alone is responsible for most of the earth’s greenhouse heating.
Write that down.
And land and plants inhibit evaporation, meaning net increase in transfer of water from ocean to land. Reducing water stress.
Come on gang! “Mike Flynn, insulators don’t work by heating. They work by keeping things warm. They may appear magical to you, but add insulators the list in your world of wonders. Greenhouse gases work by insulation. I don’t expect you to understand insulators either, but there it is.”
You have a body covered by 99 thin blankets losing heat at a rate of 1 whatever and add one more thin blanket, what happens to the rate of heat loss?
Now you have a hot cup of coffee under 99 blankets and a baked potato of the same mass and at the same temperature under another 99 identical blankets, how does the rates of heat loss compare?
Now that Mosher the liberal arts major’s planet without GHGs. Make one rock planet and one water planet, do they lose heat at the same rates?
Now imagine EMTs just pulled you out of a friged lake and offer you a space blanket or one of the heated blankets they have in the bus, which one you want?
Yes they are all questions just to tweak the philosophers in the house :)
John Carpenter | May 5, 2016 at 9:47 pm | “no one claims CO2 creates energy. No one claims it creates heat. What it creates is an energy imbalance as IR energy cannot escape to space as quickly when there is more CO2 blocking the path out. ”
John, if the air warms below this CO2 blanket, it must become cooler that it would have been above it.
Same with an ordinary blanket over you as you sleep. The warmer it becomes inside the blanket (thanks to reducing air circulation of your body heat) the cooler it becomes above the blanket, so that net, there is no change.
Geoff.
The stratosphere gets cooler, not quite for that reason, but for a similar reason.
Jim D,
You wrote –
“The stratosphere gets cooler, not quite for that reason, but for a similar reason.”
Words, containing precisely no useful information.
Is this the best example of the use of Witless Woeful Warmist Weaselwords you can find? What were you really trying to say?
Cheers.
Let’s try it again more slowly. The stratosphere gets cooler because of increasing CO2. Comprende?
Jim D,
You wrote –
“Let’s try it again more slowly. The stratosphere gets cooler because of increasing CO2. Comprende?”
Are you really saying that the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the colder the stratosphere gets? Is that it? Did the stratosphere increas in temperature as CO2 levels dropped in the past? How cold was the stratosphere when the CO2 was 7000 ppm? And what’s the temperature of the stratosphere now?
Do you have any idea of how desperate your assertions are sounding?
Keep at it.
Cheers.
OK nearly right for once. Yes, more CO2 in the stratosphere makes it cooler. Is this completely new to you? I made progress. Absorb that fact. Hold on to it.
Well, give us the reasons, then.
While the stratosphere may receive some warming from the IR coming from below, mostly it warms because of ozone absorbing UV from the sun. The cooling that balances this is from GHGs, ozone itself being one and CO2 being another, with very little H2O and some other trace GHGs. More GHGs mean more cooling, which is where increasing CO2 comes in.
Flynn stupidly writes:
“Are you really saying that the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the colder the stratosphere gets?”
Yes.
“Is that it?”
Yes.
“Did the stratosphere increas in temperature as CO2 levels dropped in the past?”
Yes.
“How cold was the stratosphere when the CO2 was 7000 ppm?”
An expert in atmospheric physics can figure it out for you.
“And what’s the temperature of the stratosphere now?”
Warmer than it was when CO2 was higher.
CO2 warms the dense troposphere and cools the thin stratosphere. The difference is due to the increasing distance between molecules with increasing altitude. It works like a sieve. In the troposphere the molecules are space so closely that the sieve catches 15um radiation and transmits a portion of it back towards the surface from which it came. In the stratosphere the gaps in the sieve become too large to block the 15um radiation. In the stratosphere other non-radiative warming mechanisms don’t stop working. It’s still conductively heated from below and convection reaches far enough up to also heat the stratosphere. Nitrogen and oxygen are poor absorbers and by Kirchoff’s Law poor emitters too. Thus when mechanically heated are slow to cool radiatively. CO2 on the other hand is a good absorber and good emitter thus when mechanically warmed those molecules readily cool by radiation.\
I’m certain these physical realities are, like the stratosphere, way over your head. I describe them for the benefit of others who aren’t so mind-numbingly willfully ignorant as you are.
Flyynn stupidly writes:
“Are you really saying that the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the colder the stratosphere gets?”
Yes.
“Is that it?”
Yes.
“Did the stratosphere increas in temperature as CO2 levels dropped in the past?”
Yes.
“How cold was the stratosphere when the CO2 was 7000 ppm?”
An expert in atmospheric physics can figure it out for you.
“And what’s the temperature of the stratosphere now?”
Warmer than it was when CO2 was higher.
CO2 warms the dense troposphere and cools the thin stratosphere. The difference is due to the increasing distance between molecules with increasing altitude. It works like a sieve. In the troposphere the molecules are space so closely that the sieve catches 15um radiation and transmits a portion of it back towards the surface from which it came. In the stratosphere the gaps in the sieve become too large to block the 15um radiation. In the stratosphere other non-radiative warming mechanisms don’t stop working. It’s still conductively heated from below and convection reaches far enough up to also heat the stratosphere. Nitrogen and oxygen are poor absorbers and by Kirchoff’s Law poor emitters too. Thus when mechanically heated are slow to cool radiatively. CO2 on the other hand is a good absorber and good emitter thus when mechanically warmed those molecules readily cool by radiation.\
I’m certain these physical realities are, like the stratosphere, way over your head. I describe them for the benefit of others who aren’t so mind-numbingly willfully ignorant as you are.
It is a pity. Comments on this blog could be so much better. If only people would stick to the subject of the article, and stick to scientific facts.
I despair.
Harry Twinotter,
To paraphrase Steven. We’ve had the debates, your side was not there so your side loses this time. Try to read more and write less stuff about the stuff you can’t even see from the looks of it? Did you see Building Seven, collapse on 9/11/2001? If so, what is the big question that jumps out at you as a scientist? This is the part where you need to get out your stopwatch. Time the collapse and tell us Your, thought. Thank you for your scientific observations and please tell us of other similar collapses of similar sized buildings. Prove me wrong. Buildings that catch fire and fall into their own footprint must happen all the time? Know the answer now?
Arch Stanton.
“Did you see Building Seven, collapse on 9/11/2001”
Leaping in and demonstrating my point with a good example of what I am talking about?
Gadzooks Harry, I believe you’ve caught a live one!
Any opinions to share on moon landings, Arch?
THE huge story and it only takes the one fact to knock it all down. Gravity is measurable and constant on Earth. Unless you play games. More invisible science from Harry. He is too good a scientist to explain a good question to just anybody.
How much did it cost to put a pound of weight on the moon in those days? Degauss most of the NASA tapes? You don’t have any questions and you call yourselves scientists? What do you think of Agenda 21, you are a smart cookie. I don’t like it. What about you?
verytallguy.
You understand my angst – people don’t want to respond to my points (or even talk about the article), they want to change the subject back onto their own favourite hobbyhorse.
I do consider myself a true skeptic. While I consider the multiple lines of evidence for the scientific theory of AGW compelling, I want to hear well-reasoned discussion to the contrary. But after several years I have come up with almost nothing.
Not much has changed for you then has it?
For being a professional class of questioners, from the examples you have given us today, we should just outsource the science part to ten-year olds.
Harry,
written a year ago, on the climate “debate”, still holds true:
https://judithcurry.com/2015/02/15/denizens-ii/#comment-676044
Arch is a great catch for you. There’s enough material there for an entire conference, to coin a phrase
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Psychiatrist_(Fawlty_Towers)
Trump… what does he suggest to you?
Harry twin , “While I consider the multiple lines of evidence for the scientific theory of AGW compelling, I want to hear well-reasoned discussion to the contrary. But after several years I have come up with almost nothing.”
You won’t find anything if you are looking for a purely “scientific” discussion because it is a blend of science and politics aka half truths. CO2 equivalent gases produce roughly 15% to 30% of the total atmospheric effect. The 30% if you look for the absolute ideal circumstances for CO2 to have a maximum impact. That maximum provides an unrealistic upper boundary. “Skeptics” look for the absolute minimum impact or zero, which is an unrealistic lower boundary. The Charney compromise ignored the lower boundary, zero, and created a false lower limit of 1.5C based on the always interesting “science” of averaging guesses of people looking for some impact not the possibility of no impact. So the IPCC range is based on politics not science.
verytallguy you’re an argumentative foreign bonehead who usually doesn’t crawl out of the protective warren of some climatastrophist censorium or another – you feel like another intellectual denouement of your vacuous global warming science before crawling back?
Hi Dave, thanks for the lovely welcome.
Whilst Arch is enlightening us on 9/11 and the moon landings, how about you bring us bang up to speed on the origin of species through natural selection?
Denizens. Dontcha just love ’em.
VTG ESAD MF
VTG either all the order we observe in the universe; life, computers, the library of congress, our thoughts and dreams are the result of a random dance of atoms in a huge cosmic accident or they are not. If you want to cling to the silly idea that it’s all just a big accident that’s your prerogative of course but it, among other things, makes you appear to be an uninformed hopelessly biased m0r0n. It’s no accident that I write this.
Thanks again Dave. It’s appreciated.
I think it’s best we leave it at that, but do feel free to add further assertions. Even with contributions so far from Arch and your good self, we could do with another “c”
Denizens. Conspiracist, creationist…
I don’t have the answer, I just ask the question.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-07-16-moon-footage_N.htm
What do you say?
Harry Twinotter,
Wait … there was an article? Oh yeah, I kind of stopped reading here: THE BIG OMISSION
It’s sort of the equivalent of how some folk skid to a halt the first time their eyes catch the word “model” in a page of text.
Mosher, evolution requires extremely complex molecular machinery to reproduce so that successive, slightly altered generations may be selected for fitness to a sometimes changing and sometimes not changing environment.
How did that machinery originate? I don’t waste time with evolution of species I ask how the machinery that enables mutation and selection in the first place came to be.
Beyond that when we look into the laws of physics that allow this universe to exist at all we find there are interdependencies in those laws and constants that, subject to the most minute deviation from observed values, would render the universe incapable of producing stars and planets and life. There is no theory in physics which demands that any laws or constants be what they are. They could have assumed any values.
Beyond even that, the most compelling evidence against random creation of the universe and governing physical laws, is the law of entropy.
If the universe is a closed system which began with a quantum singularity 14 billion years ago, then according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics (2LoT) the universe was at it’s most ordered (lowest entropy) point in the very beginning and it may only have become more disordered at time marched on.
Therefore all the order that exists in the universe today including life, space shuttles, the library of congress, the human mind also existed at the moment of the Big Bang and it simply unfolded like an origami over the subsequent 14 billion years.
My question is: where did the order present at the birth of the universe come from?
You are, unfortunately, incapable of thought at this level. You weren’t as intellectually gifted as I by the unfolding origami that produced the both of us. I feel like I’m trying to teach arithmetic to a dog.
Not always just slightly
Well, similar sequences in the key ribozymes involved in protein synthesis pretty much demonstrate a common ancestor that used DNA and RNA much the way modern life does.
Although the subject is highly confused by massive lateral gene transport (LGT), the general evolutionary trees of many key proteins seem to demonstrate that the common ancestor already had much of the protein suite used by modern life.
A key point, often ignored by evolutionary biologists, is that the Eukaryote system of introns and exons in protein-coding DNA has a clear analog in ribozyme-coding DNA, including all three kingdoms. This suggests that the intron-exon structure was present in the common ancestor.
One primary advantage of that structure is the way it aids in gene-level recombination during meiosis. This in turn suggests that the common ancestor already had sexual reproduction. (Probably mostly with a haploid/diploid life cycle, with eubacteria and archea being descended from haploid phases that lost their abilities for sexual reproduction.)
It probably evolved in the normal way, prior to the invention of proteins. (No survivors exist today aside from descendants of the common ancestor discussed above.)
Check out the “anthropic principle”
Nope. According to the second law, loosely interpreted, the total amount of “order” must decrease in a closed system. But the kinds, and especially the details, have the ability to evolve with changing circumstances.
Science doesn’t have a good answer. Yet.
I’ve been pretty busy, not much time for moderation. I’m cleaning up the comments now, will be able to stay on top of the comments better for the next week.
verytallguy…
http://www.climateaccess.org/sites/default/files/Futerra_NewRules_NewGame.pdf
Your team has Egg-head scientists, so there.
Pg. 7/ See number 8. at bottom right
Harry,
You wrote –
“I despair.”
I don’t blame you at all. In your situation, so would I.
Cheers.
Remember Tralfamadore!
OK all you theoretical CO2 warmers,
If the air below the CO2 blanket does get warmer (convection is restricted) it is just as easy to show that the air above it gets cooler, for a net no change.
If your argument is that the stratosphere gets cooler – and if you argue that to be total compensation – go back and do your engineering. The stratosphere is so low in density that it lacks the capacity to change heat balance by much when cooling a lot.
You might be arguing different processes that have been written up, but just to show your bona fides, do describe the mechanism by which the lack of heat above the CO2 blanket is spread to the stratosphere and then to space.
Some other matters bother me, but there might be good physical answers. The first. The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is much the same, +/- 5 ppm or so, at Mauna Loa, elevation 3,400 metres, South Pole 3,800 m asl and Cape Grim, 30 m asl. The air thus has rather different densities at these heights and temperatures and pressures and humidities, PV = nRT. Has anyone studied how the CO2 concentration should vary with these factors? And how it does? References would help.
Second. The concentrations are expressed as parts per million of dry air. If the ppm stays constant for the first 4,00 m asl, does it stay constant all the way to the stratosphere and beyond?
For if it changes, it can upset some assumptions in the theory of radiation at low temperatures to space. There must be very few CO2 molecules per cubic metre at 50,000 metres asl, in an absolute sense, ready to do physical things to stray light.
There are many more, but this will do for now. My reading is quite intense, but the field is broad and it is easy to miss key papers.
They often come to light through blogs like CE, thank you Judith.
Geoff Sherrington,
There’s a song which might help –
“Don’t you know, it’s magic” – John Farnham.
Cheers.
@Sherrington
CO2 increases cooling efficiency of the stratosphere. It’s a confirmed, measured effect. Not sure what your point is. CO2 warms the troposphere by decreasing its cooling efficiency. This is as grounded in theory as stratospheric cooling but measurement is made impossible by confounding factors; mostly by water vapor, clouds, precipitation, convection, ocean circulation, and seasonal albedo changes to the surface.
Where the climatastrophist crowd goes wrong is not the 1C per doubling no-feedback warming it’s the addtional 2C of warming from “water vapor amplification”. The fingerprint of that should be found in a mid-troposphere hotspot where clouds form that warms more than the air below it. This hotspot is mostly missing and lost with it is most of the 2C of water vapor amplification. The vaunted climate models evidently don’t parameterize clouds very well.
David Springer.
“Where the climatastrophist crowd goes wrong is not the 1C per doubling no-feedback warming it’s the addtional 2C of warming from “water vapor amplification”
Well the hot spot measurements so far are ambiguous, it remains to be seen if it is just a measurement problem or something missing from the theoretical models.
Climate sensitivity is a complicated issue, and the result is deduced from several different lines of evidence. As it should be.
Measurements of mid-troposphere temperature are as good any others. If you question those then you question them at all levels. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Either the global average surface temperature has gone up in the past 60 years or it hasn’t. Either the mid-troposphere temperature has gone up more than that or it hasn’t. Despite the best efforts of all involved to find that hot spot it is still not there at the expected magnitude and the expected magnitude of surface temperature increase is lower than expected as well. Deal with the facts or take your cherry picked narrative somewhere else.
David Springer.
” Either the global average surface temperature has gone up in the past 60 years or it hasn’t.”
The global average surface has gone up. Surely you are not disputing this scientific fact considering the preponderance of evidence supporting it? I will rattle off a few: increase in global average surface temperatures, rising global average sea levels, retreating glaciers, radiative physics of greenhouse gases. Downward trend in Arctic sea ice extent. Even the satellite temperature proxy shows an increase, noisy and uncertain as it is.
An anomaly in a hypothesis does not undo a theory if there are other supporting lines of evidence. Beware black and white thinking, it will be your undoing.
Look, I know where you are coming from: confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, unknown motivations. I see it often on pseudoscience blogs. You are entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts, as they say.
Harry Twinotter, the ocean covers over 70% of the planet’s surface and very little of it has any historical measurments of surface temperature. I don’t really dispute the recent warming of north America and Europe where all the historical observations were made but I don’t believe that can be extrapolated to the entire world. It can’t even be extrapolated to southern hemisphere continents to say nothing of southern hemisphere oceans.
Harry, the bottom line is the best science so far cannot tell us if climate sensitivity is closer to a little feedback 1.5C or an extreme feedback 4.5C.
Wake me when you boys can demonstrate that sensitivity is a beneficial 1.5C or a catastrophic 4.5C. Empirical studies so far point to 1.5C.
I know where you’re coming from. Pure unadulterated ideology in abject denial of the inadequate numerical modeling of the earth’s water cycle and ocean circulation. A bunch of Chicken Littles running around saying the sky is falling when actual observation say it isn’t doing any such thing. You are a catastrophist addicted to the notion that your ideology is the salvation of the earth. Spare me.
David Springer,
You wrote –
“CO2 increases cooling efficiency of the stratosphere. It’s a confirmed, measured effect. Not sure what your point is. CO2 warms the troposphere by decreasing its cooling efficiency. This is as grounded in theory as stratospheric cooling but measurement is made impossible by confounding factors; mostly by water vapor, clouds, precipitation, convection, ocean circulation, and seasonal albedo changes to the surface.”
A clearer exposition of a scientific theory would be easier (as opposed to harder) to find. Pardon the play on words. Warmists tend to be slow, and occasionally humour impaired.
You seem to be saying you haven’t got the faintest idea what you are talking about, but hopefully no one will notice.
Cheers.
Hasta la vista, baby. You broke the over posting rule again. This time hopefully Curry will keep you in moderation permanently.
David Springer,
You wrote –
“Hasta la vista, baby. You broke the over posting rule again.”
I am aware of the written blog rules. I am not quite as aware of the unwritten David Springer blog rules.
However, if the blog operator’s decision is to censor my posts as a result of responding to the attacks of acolytes of the Warmist Church of Latter Day Scientism, then so be it. (A bit of the scientific freedom to dissent guilt appeal there, I admit).
I accept the absolute power of the blog moderator in this regard. I might suggest that the blog rules be explicitly expresed in written form, if necessary. I accept that normal US societal requirements preclude the use of certain words (that are considered acceptable in civilised parts of the world). I try not to use them, nor phonetic variants which attempt to circumvent the intent of the blog operator. I’m not always successful, admittedly.
I leave it to Professor Curry. Her blog, her rules.
Cheers.
Mike, you have made 93 of the last 1000 comments. I am putting you in moderation to slow down the rate of your commenting. Thx.
Mike Flynn you’ve been told that going over 5% of all comments is over posting. You were put in moderation once already this year for breaking the rule. Your given reason of self-defense for doing it doesn’t matter. The reason you get hounded in the first place is you keep stupidly denying basics of classical physics established in the 19th century by giants like Maxwell and Boltzman then post yet more imbecilic responses when corrected. Because the corrections come from many different people none of them are over posting in response.
I’d tell you to find another blog but I’m sure no others would tolerate you like Curry does. I hope you stay in moderation forever so I don’t have to step around the huge number of your stanky droppings in the future or risk breaking the limit myself coming along cleaning up after you.
Science into agitprop: “Climate Change is Strangling Our Brains”
Some years ago an article at WUWT predicted that, when the CAGW hypothesis ran out of “measurement problems” and other places to hide the fact of its total falsehood, and the scare began to collapse, its proponents would sashay smoothly into the next scare, O2 depletion of the atmosphere.
This was meant as a joke, but it now seems to be happening.
I guess they can’t recycle the global cooling scare again.
The population bomb fizzled out.
Nuclear armageddon isn’t making anyone shake in their boots anymore.
No one is building an Ark anticipating sea level rising.
O2 depletion? Seriously? Sounds pretty lame.
My favorite, with good reason because it happened just 110 years ago and will happen again, is a coronal mass ejection (CME) that takes out an entire continent’s electrical grid without hope of repair for many months. The more industrialized the country the worse the problem. Water and sewer will stop working for most people. Refrigerated food will quickly perish. Gas stations won’t be able to pump from underground tanks. Deliveries of all kinds, including food and fuel, will cease.
A CME that lit telegraph lines afire in the 1859 “Carington Event”, wherein the northern aurora borealis could be viewed in Florida, would wipe out the US electrical grid today. It would fry a giant number of large high voltage transformers which are not kept in stock except in small numbers. These transformers, which normally never wear out or need replacement, have months long lead times on manufacture. Epic disaster waiting to happen. It’s preventable by hardening the grid, staging routine shutdowns, beefing up the early warning system, and stockpiling strategic components that might be be needed to bring a skeleton-level of the grid back online in a matter of days before lack of food, water, and sanitation becomes life threatening for hundreds of millions of people.
As it was, in the days of Noah…
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2016/04/26/massive-life-size-replica-noah-ark-set-sail-brazil-johan-ark/83533226/
Not that this means anything.
New AGW propaganda video from TV personality Jimmy Kimmel, calling it a “public service announcement” —
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/05/06/science-credibility-a-public-service-announcement/.
It was as predictable as day follows night that an article blaming the fires in Canada on climate change would appear:
The wildfires ravaging Canada might have a lot to do with climate change
http://www.businessinsider.com/alberta-wildfires-might-have-a-lot-to-do-with-climate-change-2016-5
Yes, a great case study in confirmation bias.
Dry winter implicated, even though AGW modeled to bring wet winters:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/graphics/images/Assessment%20Reports/AR5%20-%20WG1/Chapter%2012/Fig12-22.jpg
Considering what happened around the Great Lakes in mid-autumn of 1871, I dare say climate is a changeable brute.
But by the use of slob terminology like “climate change” any fresh disaster can be fitted to the dogma of these shrieking mullahs. How they love their slob terms!
Slobs.
Phil Plait at Slate is an embarrassment to science reporting.
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