Check out Deltoid for a set of refutations of common global warming denialist arguments. Then you can whine on that blog. (this thread is at 1146 comments right now—I think the blog is full, time to move on.)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I think the blog is full, time to move on.
Much like your “Hello, Stan Palmer!” post.
Nice link PZ. That’s one of the reasons I come here. That and to get a heads up on when you’re planning on releasing the squids.
uh, Corey? That is what PZ was referring to.
It’s a reasonable effort, but it only covers a small fraction of the idiocy. For a much more comprehensive list of arguments, see:
http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics
(I believe, PZ, that you mentioned this site a while ago.)
I caught this on the BBC news site a few days ago.
I’m personally convinced of the reality of anthropogenic global warming, but I still found the page annoying. It comes off as a little smug when you get to pose the objections and then answer them. I suppose it’s a rhetorical device that’s been used going back to the ancient Greeks, but it doesn’t really work on a news site. (On the plus side, the page did contain some interesting points and the authors didn’t go out of their way to create straw men.)
I also find it a bit cheap to use the ‘denialist’ moniker. In any argument- each side is denying the opposing side’s position. Maybe it works as a short-hand for a group who are ‘in denial’, but I dunno.
And while we’re at it, why is it that people who oppose the position are ‘whiners’ whereas people on our side of the position are fearless crusaders for the truth?
(Disclaimer: I may be wrong, and that’s OK! By all means disagree with me, but I’m not interested in getting into a slagging match over a few hastily thought out points.)
It comes off as a little smug when you get to pose the objections and then answer them.
I know. It almost makes it sound like the answers are right, doesn’t it, when the objection is concisely stated, and then clearly refuted?
I also find it a bit cheap to use the ‘denialist’ moniker. In any argument- each side is denying the opposing side’s position. Maybe it works as a short-hand for a group who are ‘in denial’, but I dunno.
And while we’re at it, why is it that people who oppose the position are ‘whiners’ whereas people on our side of the position are fearless crusaders for the truth?
In all cases where the epithet “denialist” is used commonly (Holocaust, HIV, Evolution, AGW) the deniers are rejecting well-founded, empirically-based consensus. It’s not a matter of being a “fearless crusader,” it’s about a responsible and honest approach to matters that admit of empirical evidence. They’re whiners by choice, not by assignment to an arbitrary designation. Reality is against them, and complaining is not going to change that. Incessant, ineffectual complaining is called whining.
Interesting. Also, I never realized the British spelling of “Skeptic” was different. “Sceptic” kept making me think of septic.
Deepsix wrote:
..which is sort of appropriate because Cockney rhyming slang for an American is ‘septic’ as in septic tank = Yank.
Thanks, Ian. This almost makes sense now: http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/bbc_upgrades_flap_to_row
CJO: If ‘denialist’ is a tactic to paint AGW doubters as akin to Holocaust deniers, then I think it’s in pretty poor taste.
I’d find it just as annoying to label creationists as such. They are both just as wrong about reality- but creationists/GW doubters differ from Holocaust deniers in important ways. I think it’s important that we recognize the Holocaust is too unpleasant to be used as a casual rhetorical device.
Oh- and I think you might have misunderstood my post. I’m emphatically not saying that the BBC page was factually incorrect. AFAIK it represents the scientific consensus quite accurately.
“The hooligans are loose! The hooligans are loose! What if they become ruffians?”
I think it’s important that we recognize the Holocaust is too unpleasant to be used as a casual rhetorical device.
I agree, and yet I don’t follow your logic. One class of denialists have chosen to deny a historical event of horrific magnitude, and so a useful term in the language is now only applicable to that class? I was responding to your contention that “each side is denying the opposing side’s position,” and making it clear that those we call denialists are denying empirical reality.
It’s the denial that’s at issue here, not that there is some moral equivalence between the various sets of deniers. By enumerating the areas in which the epithet is commonly used, I stated a fact, I did not attempt a rhetorical equation.
Christian, maybe this edit will help:
The tactic is not to equate AGW denialism (or any other form of denialism) with Holocaust denialism (or any other form of denialism). This is why every form of denialism is qualified by subject. There is no “tactic”, only a convention – as explained, with or without examples, by CJO.
In other words, don’t let the examples throw you off. They are what they are, discrete examples, with no implied guilt-by-association between any one and any other.
Cross-example: “Neo-Con” is short for “Neo-Conservative”, and is not intended (as some conservatives, even neo-conservatives who don’t know they’re neo-conservatives, may believe) to evoke Neo-Naziism.
One thing that the all the denialists seem to share is that they all deny they are denialists. The Holocaust denialists prefer the term “revisionists.” This drives historians batty since every historian is one kind of revisionist or another.
Hey, I thought John A. Davison was the only one who declared blogs “full”.
Ooops, I see CJO was a few minutes ahead of me.
[* waves “Hi” to Blake *]
Geez, I even saw Carlie and Kristine posting on the same threads earlier. Feels like old times! ;-)
Well- I agree with all that ‘denialist’ is OK as long as the intention is not to create a moral equivalence with Holocaust deniers.
There’s also the subtle distinction between ‘denying a proposition’ and being ‘in denial’ about the truth. We all ‘deny’ certain things- but not all of us are in ‘denial’.
Of course there’s a distinction, but it’s not always very subtle. I deny the proposition that I have three arms, or that the earth is flat. I am not in denial about either. However, if you deny that I have two (and only two) arms and that the earth is round, you are a symmetrical-Kseniya denialist and a round-earth denialist. The lines are neither skinny nor fuzzy. ;-)
Speaking of who it is appropriate to call denialists, I’ve been very naughty and poking a stick at the HIV/AIDS folk crapping all over Tara’s blog at Aetiology under the “Mbeki: still in denial” posting. These people are scary. Go read some of their comments, Christianjb, and then let’s discuss moral equivalence.
Kseniya, I do not deny that you have two arms. In fact, I implicitly accept this as part of my contention that you may have three arms. All I’m saying is that a)the length of time you’ve been on this blog is not long enough to accurately detect your two- vs. three-arminess; b) blog participation isn’t a useful proxie for arminess; c) the ‘Kseniya has two-arms’ camp which dominates mainstream research is biased against three-armed Kseniya researchers,
and c) the disastrous economic effects of switching from three-arm to two-arm policies will be felt for generations to come.
I just don’t see how two-armed alarmism is justified when the data aren’t all in.
Ah, but since three arms are obviously more useful than two, then obviously evolution says that you should evolve three arms, therefore, since you have not, evolution must be false…
</denialist style=”TheirRealityhasLappedOurSatire”>
</denialist style=”ClassicPaleocreo“>
Sigh-
this is turning into an ‘arms race’.
Christianjb,
Speaking as an AGW sceptic, thanks for the comment. I have to say, while I obviously still have problems with the format, I much prefer for them to present the actual arguments sceptical scientists put forward than to either put up simplistic strawmen or not mention them at all. I would not expect them to put them up without an opportunity to counter, and nor would I expect them to allow for an extended to-and-fro as the sceptic countered all the AGW points. As a resource to improve understanding of the issues, I approve.
On the denial/sceptic issue, the original term was “global warming denier” or “climate change denier”, which was designed to paint AGW sceptics as denying that the climate was changing, a position much easier to counter than their actual one. We generally don’t deny that the world is warming, or that some component of the warming will be from man-made CO2. The holocaust denier connection is a bit strained, I think.
It’s impossible for me to argue with all the points Gavin puts up compactly. I’ll just point to one example, in Q1 where they say NASA has derived trends from “rural” stations, I’ll point you to the results of a photographic survey of the sites in the US that NASA actually used.
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/UCAR-slides/index.html
Make your own mind up whether the responses the BBC provides are all good ones.
Well “YOU” ARE almost there. YOU NEED “to” put more random “words” in “QUOTES”. QUESTION marks and exclamation “points” always COME IN “at” least threes.!!! But more is “OK”!!!!!!!
GWAD- I’m in the minority here, because it doesn’t upset me at all when someone disagrees with aspects of AGW.
What annoys me and most everyone are the cases when it turns out that the criticisms originate from right-wing think tanks / people receiving money from industry, with the express intent to sew just about enough controversy to make it look like the scientists are muddled and undecided, when in fact there appears to be a very strong scientific consensus.
As for the surface-station data: I think it’s possible to usefully criticize aspects of the data collection process. It’s by no means a trivial task to collect accurate data on surface temperatures across the world. However- remember that scientists are genuinely concerned with obtaining the most accurate data and are always striving to improve their imperfect methods. I’d reject any implication that said scientists are ‘covering up’ or deliberately fudging the data to make GW look worse than it is.
I also think it’s to a certain extent true that pages like the one you link to constitute ‘nit-picking’. If you can think of a better way to collect the data, or if you have found a serious methodological flaw- then by all means try to publish your results instead of sitting on the sidelines throwing pebbles.
But that’s the central problem with AGW opponents- at the moment they seem much more adept at criticizing others than in publishing their own papers.
Myers,
Why don’t you explain why the real arguments being made are wrong instead of a bunch of straw man ones. Tell me why Wegman is wrong. Tell me why C02 fertilization, rain, and other factors doesn’t make tree ring analysis unusable. In fact, give a proxy that can accurately track temperature.
As far as I can tell all the methodologies these “climatologists” use are bogus. These proxies don’t agree in the way a statistician would expect, but more in the way a astrologist would.
As far as I can tell this is very weak science. I have as much respect for it as when physicists claim they know precisely what went on a few nanoseconds after the big bang. I know enough about science to understand that it’s most likely that they are wrong. It’s called overreaching.
Everyone point and laugh and Galileo Gambit for denying that he denies there is global warming, then turning around and implying that (a small amount of) the data showing that is unreliable.
“On the denial/sceptic issue, the original term was “global warming denier” or “climate change denier”, which was designed to paint AGW sceptics as denying that the climate was changing, a position much easier to counter than their actual one. ”
Exactly and that’s why Myers along with his AGW commenters don’t get my respect on this issue. They are acting more like religious dogmatists punishing the heretics than people with a scientific attitude.
“Denialists are denying empirical reality”
Really, I’ve been called a denialist. What empirical reality am I denying?
Just a suggestion:
If you don’t want this page to descend into fruitless name-calling then hold off on insulting either PZ or his readers.
If you want to discuss GW like an adult then do it, but don’t come here to insult us and then complain if you get mercilessly torn to shreds.
Or perhaps yet even more like people who frequent a blog that is being repetitively trolled by idiots who act like their respect is a valuable commodity and pretend that false, agenda-driven “skepticism” is a prerequisite for “a scientific attitude.”
Fuck off.
“On the denial/sceptic issue, the original term was “global warming denier” or “climate change denier”, which was designed to paint AGW sceptics as denying that the climate was changing
The AGW denialist camp went from denying the “W” to denying the “A”, but they are still denying AGW. No need to chagne the terminology with the shift in goalposts.
unsurprisingly CA is using the weblog-award-tie to further cry out that they are being repressed.
Christianjb,
First, I can assure you that I receive absolutely no money from right wing think tanks or industry, and ClimateAudit say neither do they. If you are prepared to consider such ad hominem arguments, what would your views be on James Hansen, architect of the NASA studies the BBC mentions, receiving $720,000 from George Soros’s group, or $250,000 from Theresa Heinz-Kerry’s foundation? Personally I’m not interested, and only want to talk about his science, but it’s not as if I couldn’t.
I don’t know about this strong scientific consensus. The only actual survey I know of was conducted by the pro-AGW climatologist Hans Von Storch.
http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2007/08/climate_scientists_views_on_cl_1.html
Certainly it has been argued with, but not with any better data that I know of. The IPCC are known to be more pro-AGW than that, although not exclusively (Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit was an invited expert reviewer on the latest report, for example, and Richard Lindzen was a principle author on another), but they’re a selected subset of climate science. As I don’t regard consensus superior to evidence, I don’t really care about the question, but it seems a bit weak. Mostly, people simply assert that there is a consensus and that seems to be sufficient.
I would absolutely agree that climate scientists should be and are concerned with problems with the network. In fact, work is underway to roll out a new network of class 1 stations in the US, and I applaud that. The first sceptic point in the BBC article is not claiming that scientists are uncaring or careless or covering things up, but simply that the errors are large and the network has problems with urbanisation. Is that a true statement? Yes or no?
There is a case for calling it “nit-picking”. I’ve heard people say the same sort of thing about insisting on randomised double-blind trials. You’re trying to measure an effect that is only a fraction of a degree, and 85% of your sensors have estimated errors of more than a degree, that they have probably picked up sometime during the last century. How sure are you that this is just nit-picking?
People prefer to believe things that fit with what they already believe. It’s a natural human bias the scientist must be aware of and on their guard against. Yes, the problems with the network might make no difference, and almost certainly don’t challenge the conclusion that warming is taking place (which was not disputed). But following proper scientific method matters. There are large errors, which for past data at least are probably impossible to remove now. They should be quantified and reported and the data assessed accordingly.
Publishing papers, and indeed setting up climate monitoring networks, takes funding. And contrary to rumour, most sceptics are not paid off by the oil industry and pro-AGW funding is reported to be about a thousand times more plentiful than anti-. But there are in fact quite a few peer-reviewed papers by sceptics. The site CO2Science has a collection of a few of them, if you’re interested. See their subject index.
I’d like to say again, I appreciate your earlier politeness, and have no objection to you or anyone else believing in AGW and saying so. I’m only putting the case that it’s not all on the same level as Creationism as some people have claimed, not that it’s necessarily right.
s/laugh and/laugh at
That’ll teach me not to use the preview button.
And Brian, your argument, such as it is (more a string of phrases you don’t understand), is amazingly similar to young-earth creationists who deny the validity of radioisotope dating. They, and you, have been told that there are confounding factors that make the relationships not entirely straightforward, and then you crow about how that means it’s impossible to get any information from it. This is why you take multiple proxies that are affected by different confounding factors in different ways and see how they mesh. By your standards, we can’t know anything about elemental abundances in the Sun because the spectroscopy is confounded by overlapping lines, temperature and pressure gradients, and magnetic fields (among other factors). But why am I wasting my time? You’ve made it clear that you aren’t involved in good-faith discussion or inquiry.
Apologies for feeding the trolls.
GWAD: I have no problem with the surface-station monitoring project (from what I’ve seen) and hope the results are eventually submitted for publication.
My opinion probably differs from many others here. I think that honest criticism of AGW cannot usefully be compared to creationism or Holocaust denial, which are almost always done from fundamentally dishonest positions. (By the same token, I suspect that a lot of race-IQ studies are done with a racist agenda in mind- but I don’t know enough to be sure.)
There is a lot of dishonest criticism of AGW done by those with a vested interest in creating FUD in the scientific consensus- but I doubt that all criticism can be categorized as such. (That doesn’t mean the critics are right.)
It’s certainly true that left-wing bias can also lead to problematic science. However, the current state of affairs in this country shows beyond doubt that Republicans are far more willing to ignore and manipulate the science to suit their own agenda.
(As a disclaimer- I don’t know enough about these subjects to be sure that my perspective is correct.)
Now you are simply a liar. In fact, that almost looks like libel. Classy.
Christian —
You seem to have a shockingly sane perspective. What do you think you’re doing, recognizing the limitations of your knowledge? Where’s the fun in that? And yes, you’re entirely right that there is honest disagreement within the climatology community and specifically with the AR4. Anyone who argues otherwise is as blind or dishonest as the denialists like G-WAD who take this sign of healthy scientific discourse and twist it into failure of the entire field, or who pretend the existence of any uncertainties falsifies the results. The problem is, there really isn’t much room for honest criticism of AGW qua AGW left, only for criticism of the extent, relative contributions, effects, and the like.
if Hat(Current).Material == TinFoil {
Soros.Funding.Mention;
Theresa_Heinz_Kerry.Funding.Mention;
}
I haven’t seen a textbook example like this since the Summer of ’04. Maybe because I’ve been avoiding Wingnut websites?
Yes, that’s Bjorn Lomborg in Cool It, or so I understand – I confess I haven’t read it yet. (I did read his first book, though, and whether he’s right or wrong, I don’t buy the hype that he’s a denier in disguise.) Even so, BBC’s point on the right-hand side doesn’t seem more persuasive to me than its strawman on the left-hand side.
I shouldn’t have to say, “Discuss.”
@Christianjb (#22):
Geez, next time warn me that you are going to put up something like that. I didn’t have a fizzy drink ready to tickle my nose and ruin a good keyboard :D
@GWAD:
You might want to read up on the definition of rural before commenting on the fact that the stations are near populated areas. Note that rural does not mean unsettled.
Also it is almost too funny that you cite a report in your defense of which the author(s) say you should not read it as you do. I cannot give further comments without knowing the questionnaire.
For your nitpick about accuracy. That is why error bars exists, confidentiality intervals, testing of behavior (of the measuring devices), etc. Things which (if the papers written on them are to have any value) are explained in the papers based on this data.
Did look at the CO2science site. Just the front page made it clear by looking at the temperature record of the week. Selective selection (of a timeperiod) of a regional temperature graph from a time before that addition of a human component is needed to explain why temperatures are what they are today. Or that they are lying about papers they contend that support the denier position (just reading the abstracts available shows that).
You know, it occurred to me the other day that there’s a fundamental disconnect between two groups in the CO2/climate change issue; those who’ve grasped some basic physics and those who haven’t.
There’s a reason why CO2 is called a “greenhouse gas” in the first place. The earth is absorbing energy at visible wavelengths- daylight. It’s radiating it at infra-red wavelengths. Gases that are transparent to visible light, but scatter or absorb infra-red (like, say, CO2 or methane) will slow the loss of heat but not its absorption. Therefore, more CO2 in the atmosphere is going to warm the planet. The details of how that affects climate can be debated. But claiming that global warming isn’t going to happen, despite what we’ve done to CO2 levels since the industrial revolution, is akin to claiming that I can keep putting on extra sweaters and never get any warmer.
People who haven’t understood this, or don’t want to understand it, can point to this or that uncertainty in climate data or modelling, and claim that there’s no evidence of warming. Some of them are honest. Some of them are shills. But none of them actually have a point, unless they can explain how putting on more sweaters won’t make you warmer. Well?
As Jesus in his love judged the voodists in Louisiana by hurricane and the sodomites in California by fire, so he is now judging the evolutionists worldwide by global warming. Jesus will raise the sea levels until that most sodomy-and marijuana-infested, lowland nation of the Netherlands and with it Satan’s capital–The Hague–are wiped off the face of the earth!
Stephen, in July, Gerlich and Tscheuschner published a paper claiming that the IPCC conception of greenhouse warming is unphysical. I’ve not the maths to criticize it, but basically they are saying that the IPCC’s model requires a hot upper stratosphere to transmit heat through a cooler lower stratosphere to a warm troposphere. This violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Who Cares, divergence is damning. Watch at climateaudit.org as Steve dissects Mann over the Ababneh data.
============================================
Hat tip to Mac Lorry, who explained the G&T paper to me.
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I never saw your answer Kim. Are you and IDist?
Pole that was hysterical!!!!
You have the nutjob righwinger down pat.
Look at #1199 on the Stan Palmer thread. Moron.
=============================
This violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
I guess it violates the Second Law the same way that evolution violates the Second Law.
And you, my dear young slug, are the one Who Cares corrected. The remedy apparently didn’t take. How is your dishonesty tolerated here?
====================================
Graculus, no.
========
Kim, ya dumb shit. I don’t have time to read every troll comment.
It’s not hard to answer a question more than once. I do it all the time.
So you support evolution?
Steve believes I’m a creationist because I claim creationism can’t be falsified. Isn’t it just about enough to make you cry?
====================
I believe you’re a creationist because you won’t answer the question.
Do you support evolution?
The Tooth Fairy can’t be falsified either.
Of course I believe in evolution. I’m certain the IDers underestimate the survival value of things like clottling mechanisms and flagellae which allow maintenance of the internal milieu and mobility.
It is annoying to have to say this again. It is dishonest to continue making your claims. You are a deliberate and ingenuous liar, and that is not an easy thing to be.
=======================================
Graculus: Heh.
It sounds like G&T’s argument rests on the concept that conduction is the sole means of heat transfer through the atmosphere.
Kseniya, no. I simplified G&T’s point. Where do you get ‘sole’. Surely not from examination of the paper.
So why say it? Think, man, think.
====================
Graculus, no.
Actually yes, because the answer is “not applicable”.
Being as my physics formally stops at high school, forgive the lack of big words in the explaination.
the IPCC’s model requires a hot upper stratosphere to transmit heat through a cooler lower stratosphere to a warm troposphere.
This posits that the only energy that passes through the stratosphere does so by conductance. In other words, it claims that the upper stratosphere is an energy opaque shell around the Earth.
In orther words, it claims the surface of the Earth is a closed system, which is exactly the same as the Creationist Second Law claims.
I hope you see the obvious stupidity, now.
In the troposphere, where the GHG effect could work, absoption of re-emitted energy in the form of IR is blocked by the absorption bands of water vapor. In the Upper Stratosphere, CO2 is absorbing energy, but can’t bring it back to the surface in the magnitude required to validate the IPCC’s model.
==============
Graculus, who or what is this ‘it’ that you say claims the surface of the Earth is a closed system? I don’t think any physicist claims the earth is a closed system.
===============================
Kim.
We get creationists and IDers in here ALL the time. And until you nail someone down with an unequivocal, “yes, I support evolution”, it can be a game of cat and mouse.
You’re still a CA troll however.
So much for the brilliant Tim Lambert.
1. Temperature studies are controversial, but I’ll grant a late 20th Century rise in temperature.
2. For the last 10 years, global temperature appears static, or at worst, the rise in temp is slowing. Some temperature metrics now suggest a drop, just recently.
3. There are dead forests under Alpine Glaciers. The MWP lives, and not just locally.
4. We don’t have the computer power to model the chaos that is climate regulation.
5. Ah, yes. Satellite data isn’t confirming the expectations of temperature rise. And complaining about the satellite methodology is mote sightng in the extreme.
6. Global temperature is most regulated by clouds, determined by cosmic rays, determined by the earth’s magnetic field, determined by the sun’s magnetic field, determined by the wiggle of the sun around the gravitational center of the solar system. Google CERN and Svensmark.
7. Outgassing.
8. I’ll let Bill Gray talk about hurricanes. Ice is random froth on chaos. There are places on earth where ice melting and places on earth where ice is accumulating.
9. Clouds contribute 25% to the work of warming? Was that little bit from Singer or Schmidt.
10. Kyoto is hung on the circularity that Bristlecone Pines, the strip bark variety, widen their rings from CO2 fertilization, not temperature. The Piltdown Mann’s Crook’d Hockey Stick depends on cherry-picking data. Send him back to Tulsa, he’s too crooked to marry.
=========================================
Roger of Ockham would say that the simplest explanation is that the recent rise in temperature and carbon dioxide are coincidental, and the AWG hypothesis represents the most recent and most flagrant example of the Post Hoc, ergo Propter Hoc, fallacy.
It’s simple, folks. We’re cooling and this will all make sense for you some day. In the meantime, get busy with Pebble Bed nuclear technology. Hydrocarbons bonds were much too labouriously formed to just throw them away for energy released from breaking them.
=================================
@Kim:
I’m going to read up on tree ring divergence but I’m not going to restrict myself to CA on this subject. That said it will take at least a few days to get more then just abstracts and then do some serious reading
Thank You, Who Cares. That is all I ask.
Be very careful poking some denizens of the wild, PZ. It’s not nice down under or up over.
======================================================
This Kim guy is indefatigable, no? So many, many posts to convey the message “Nuh-uh.”
Christianjb,
I have no problem with that.
Stinky,
I didn’t know about that. My thanks. I withdraw the $720,000 bit, but leave the $250,000 in place.
If that looks like a libel and unclassy, what would your opinion be of people making the same ad hominems about Exxon? That’s my point – you think people can insinuate funding from right wing think tanks (which in this case was false) and that’s no problem, but those on the other side of the debate cannot. Double standards.
I would prefer it if nobody did. Ad hominem is a fallacy. I was simply asking if it was just an excuse to come to a pre-determined conclusion, or if the fallacy would run both ways.
Who Cares,
In the BBC article Fred says the record relies on surface stations that are affected by heat island effects and that the errors are therefore large. Possibly it simplifies the terminology a bit too much, but the essential point seems to be born out by the evidence. Gavin supposedly counters that by saying trends have been calculated on “rural” stations. I know perfectly well that “rural” does not mean unsettled, but if that’s the case, why does anyone think the sceptic point has been countered by it?
Regarding relying on Von Storch’s paper, I make none of the claims nor draw any of the conclusions that he tells me not to. I agree that they cannot be drawn. The opinion reported was 56:30 in favour of AGW, with the rest “Don’t Know”s. AGW is quite clearly a majority opinion, no argument. If that’s what you guys mean by “consensus” then fine, but then why find it so outrageous that someone could honestly be one of the 30%?
Stephen Wells,
At CA they do understand this and they agree with everything you say. Doubling CO2 would, all other things being equal, increase temperature by about 1C. (And we would be about half way to that, with the rise over the last century.) Your idea that “deniers” do not is based on misinformation. Where the disagreement arises is that there are many additional feedbacks involved, including convection, clouds and water vapour. The modellers claim these will multiply the effects of CO2 by 3 or more. Sceptical meteorologists say the combined feedbacks tend to cancel out and that the sensitivity to doubling is between 1C and 1.5C. There’s a certain amount of empirical evidence to support (but not prove) that, too. We can’t get into that argument here, but please, be assured that we are not so silly as to claim it has no effect, or to have not taken the time to understand the physics.
Ann,
The Gerlich and Tscheuschner paper makes some interesting valid points along the way, but is fundamentally incorrect in many of its conclusions. The usual popular greenhouse physics explanations are not very good, and they’ve misinterpreted what was being claimed. Certain complex heat flows are normally broken down into fictitious components for calculational convenience, and G&T are assuming these are being claimed to be real and that thermodynamics applies to each separately. It doesn’t help that some of the AGW scientists have apparently said the same. The “greenhouse effect” is misnamed and often incorrectly explained (it’s not much like a jumper, for example), but it does not violate thermodynamics.
But I’ve based that view on looking at the paper and thinking about the physics, not on whether I like the conclusions. I don’t think the paper is dishonest, but even sceptics make mistakes.
I’ve convinced the owner of the most scientific mind(among the AGW proponents) that I’ve found here to examine the evidence. It wasn’t easy, even though he is honest.
======================================
Thank you GWAD, for the insight into G&T. It is difficult to understand.
=================================
PZ…
Grow up and GET OVER IT!
Gawd!
A denialist is someone who takes denial up to the level of a political ideology. Taste has nothing to do with that.
Your ignorance :-)
Search deltoid and realclimate.org for it.
Show me that “difficult” reaches the level of “unusable”…
What about ice cores?
That’s an argument from personal incredulity combined with an argument from ignorance. Wow. If you understood the math, you would come to the same conclusions about what went on a few nanoseconds after the big bang.
Understands nothing of the matter, but believes he can tell anyway that it must be infinitely difficult to figure out! The arrogance! The ignorance! It burns.
Looks more like a case of ignorance and credulity to me.
How does it follow that we should drop everything else?
Also, poverty… imagine Bangladesh going under. Sure, that’s going to be a gradual process that will take decades, if not centuries, but the present population of Bangladesh is 150 million…
Hmmm.
Firstly, if it were true, do you really think that the entire IPCC, thousands of climatologists, is too fucking stupid to notice their assumptions violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?!?
Secondly, I don’t see where that assumption might lie. The heat is generated by the CO2, in place, by absorption of infrared radiation of certain wavelengths.
Untrue. Look it up.
And your only evidence for this is evidence for the MWP in precisely the region where the MWP is universally agreed to have 1) happened and 2) manifested as a rise in temperature (as opposed to changes in precipitation or whatnot)?
Translation: You are too ignorant to write a computer program that can model the climate.
That might mean everyone else is too ignorant, too — but it doesn’t necessarily mean that.
Really? Are you perchance 5 or more years behind with your reading?
That was a very neat hypothesis. Too bad it’s wrong. Witness the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
(And that’s just the first one. Search that site for “cosmic rays” to find more.)
Yes. Outgassing of CO2 not quite 66 million years ago produced a rise in temperature, rather than the other way around. Outgassing of methane from clathrates 55 million years ago produced a spike in temperature, not the other way around. And so on.
Changes in CO2 levels that were not due to temperature haven’t happened in the last few million years, but they have happened repeatedly.
So what? On average, it melts. And that even though due to the warming there’s more evaporation and therefore more precipitation, which still falls as snow in some places.
Kyoto does not rely on a single data point. Please.
Oh yes — except that, at the present level of consumption, there’s uranium left only for the next 60 years. You are proposing to multiply the present level of consumption.
BTW, Occam/Ockham was William, not Roger.
A denialist is someone who takes denial up to the level of a political ideology. Taste has nothing to do with that.
Your ignorance :-)
Search deltoid and realclimate.org for it.
Show me that “difficult” reaches the level of “unusable”…
What about ice cores?
That’s an argument from personal incredulity combined with an argument from ignorance. Wow. If you understood the math, you would come to the same conclusions about what went on a few nanoseconds after the big bang.
Understands nothing of the matter, but believes he can tell anyway that it must be infinitely difficult to figure out! The arrogance! The ignorance! It burns.
Looks more like a case of ignorance and credulity to me.
How does it follow that we should drop everything else?
Also, poverty… imagine Bangladesh going under. Sure, that’s going to be a gradual process that will take decades, if not centuries, but the present population of Bangladesh is 150 million…
Hmmm.
Firstly, if it were true, do you really think that the entire IPCC, thousands of climatologists, is too fucking stupid to notice their assumptions violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?!?
Secondly, I don’t see where that assumption might lie. The heat is generated by the CO2, in place, by absorption of infrared radiation of certain wavelengths.
Untrue. Look it up.
And your only evidence for this is evidence for the MWP in precisely the region where the MWP is universally agreed to have 1) happened and 2) manifested as a rise in temperature (as opposed to changes in precipitation or whatnot)?
Translation: You are too ignorant to write a computer program that can model the climate.
That might mean everyone else is too ignorant, too — but it doesn’t necessarily mean that.
Really? Are you perchance 5 or more years behind with your reading?
That was a very neat hypothesis. Too bad it’s wrong. Witness the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
(And that’s just the first one. Search that site for “cosmic rays” to find more.)
Yes. Outgassing of CO2 not quite 66 million years ago produced a rise in temperature, rather than the other way around. Outgassing of methane from clathrates 55 million years ago produced a spike in temperature, not the other way around. And so on.
Changes in CO2 levels that were not due to temperature haven’t happened in the last few million years, but they have happened repeatedly.
So what? On average, it melts. And that even though due to the warming there’s more evaporation and therefore more precipitation, which still falls as snow in some places.
Kyoto does not rely on a single data point. Please.
Oh yes — except that, at the present level of consumption, there’s uranium left only for the next 60 years. You are proposing to multiply the present level of consumption.
BTW, Occam/Ockham was William, not Roger.
I’m not the most scientific around here. Literal translation of my graduation title is engineer (the English form gives it as bachelor).
I do this out of curiosity (and filling some spare time) more then anything else.
DM, yes, bad error about the Occams. I’m embarrassed. But you should be embarrassed that cosmic rays only come in one flavor and energy level at Real Climate.
=====================================
@David Marjanović:
Just one clarification. The uranium ore currently profitable to mine is worth about 60 years of U235.
@Kim:
What Ockham said was that you should not multiply entities beyond the needed ones. Einstein paraphrased it as “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. This is why you cannot just the razor to state that greenhouse gases are not a cause for global warming without doing research that clearly points out that there is no causal relationship.
3. The evidence that we are as hot now as ever in the recent past is poor.
4. No, I can’t model chaos. And present computers are inadequate to the task. There are forces at work in climate regulation that aren’t even imagined yet. How do those go in your programs?
5. Perchance. Perchance not.
6. See #72. And the same response to you several days ago.
7. There is little corrrelation in the past between CO2 level and global temperature, and the simplest explanation for the few episodes of correlation is outgassing after ocean warming from other causes.
8. So why is it necessary to focus on where ice is melting, and claim that it has meaning. What is the total worldwide ice burden, and why wouldn’t some of it melt off with the late 20th Century rise. The questions is whether the melting is unusual and from man made causes, and that isn’t answered.
9. Well, what about it?
10. The hysteria around the urge to accept Kyoto has more to do with the shape of Mann’s fraudulent hockey stick than anything else. Furthermore, if there is data that better supports the idea that man is warming the climate through burning of hydrocarbons, why is an inadequate temperature proxy, and the inadequate statistics around it, still a major plank in the platform of AGW proponents?
WC, you’ve been the only one here willing to examine the evidence. I found science on Pharyngula.
===================
Graculus, who or what is this ‘it’ that you say claims the surface of the Earth is a closed system? I don’t think any physicist claims the earth is a closed system.
*You* claimed that it was.
If “all other things being equal” means “no water vapor feedback” and “no methane feedback”, among other things. That’s not the real world.
And indeed, last time we had 560 ppm CO2… that was apparently in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when just about the whole world was a tropical paradise. Bangladesh? Forget Bangladesh. Imagine the sea all the way to Delhi.
Sure, the PETM levels went much higher still, and there are other factors than CO2 like the break of the landbridge between South America and Antarctica in the late Eocene, but still, you are hiding a lot of feedback in “all else being equal”.
We already have CO2 levels like those of the middle Miocene, when there were no deserts except the Atacama, and North America had a savanna instead of a prairie.
Dana L. Royer, Scott L. Wing, David J. Beerling, David W. Jolley, Paul L. Koch, Leo J. Hickey & Robert A. Berner: Paleobotanical Evidence for Near Present-Day Levels of Atmospheric CO2 During Part of the Tertiary, Science 292, 2310 — 2313 (22 June 2001)
If “all other things being equal” means “no water vapor feedback” and “no methane feedback”, among other things. That’s not the real world.
And indeed, last time we had 560 ppm CO2… that was apparently in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when just about the whole world was a tropical paradise. Bangladesh? Forget Bangladesh. Imagine the sea all the way to Delhi.
Sure, the PETM levels went much higher still, and there are other factors than CO2 like the break of the landbridge between South America and Antarctica in the late Eocene, but still, you are hiding a lot of feedback in “all else being equal”.
We already have CO2 levels like those of the middle Miocene, when there were no deserts except the Atacama, and North America had a savanna instead of a prairie.
Dana L. Royer, Scott L. Wing, David J. Beerling, David W. Jolley, Paul L. Koch, Leo J. Hickey & Robert A. Berner: Paleobotanical Evidence for Near Present-Day Levels of Atmospheric CO2 During Part of the Tertiary, Science 292, 2310 — 2313 (22 June 2001)
And I maintain that GHG from CO2 is too simple. The carbon cycle on earth is not just gas in a box.
=======
Naw, Graculus, you put words in my mouth that made it seem as if I had claimed that. It seems to be cultural around here. Truth is a needle in a haystack here. Uh, strawstack.
===========================
Kim,
If you were more willing to state what you thought, rather than just imply it, I daresay you wouldn’t have so many “misunderstandings.” Otherwise, you’re just complaining about what your own actions have brought forth.
As I said: I only linked to the oldest post. Search for “cosmic rays” to get the more recent ones, at least some of which reply to more recent papers on the subject.
If by “recent past” you mean 8000 years ago, it’s pretty good…
Climate is not weather. If climate were chaos, why is it as orderly as it is? Why don’t we get ice ages at random intervals and for random spans of time the way we get reversals of the magnetic field?
How do you know? :-)
Fortunately, climate models can be tested: if given the parameters of today’s real world as input, they must have today’s real climate as the output. Otherwise we know something is wrong with them and discard them.
Untrue.
Dana L. Royer, Robert A. Berner, Isabel P. Montañez, Neil J. Tabor & David J. Beerling: CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate, GSA Today 14(3), 4 — 10 (March 2004)
True in most cases, because there are few other possible causes other than temperature for changes in CO2 levels. Yet, there are some, and when they happen, temperature follows suit. Read for example
Yannick Donnadieu, Yves Goddéris, Gilles Ramstein, Anne Nédélec & Joseph Meert: A ‘snowball Earth’ climate triggered by continental break-up through changes in runoff [and thus weathering of silicates, which takes up CO2], Nature 428, 303 — 306 (18 March 2004)
G. Ravizza & B. Peucker-Ehrenbrink: Chemostratigraphic Evidence of Deccan Volcanism from the Marine Osmium Isotope Record, Science 302, 1392 — 1395 (21 November 2003)
Peter Wilf, Kirk R. Johnson & Brian T. Huber: Correlated terrestrial and marine evidence for global climate changes before mass extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, PNAS 100(2), 599 — 604 (21 January 2003)
And these are just the pdfs I happen to have on my harddrive.
Well, it is melting off from “the late 20th century rise”, which in turn is manmade. Unusual but expected. What do you mean by “ice burden”?
Water vapor is very important, but it’s a feedback. It can’t get anything started. Unless of course it gets so hot that it doesn’t rain anymore, but that is very hot indeed; we won’t reach that temperature range, and we haven’t for billions of years.
10. Start here.
As I said: I only linked to the oldest post. Search for “cosmic rays” to get the more recent ones, at least some of which reply to more recent papers on the subject.
If by “recent past” you mean 8000 years ago, it’s pretty good…
Climate is not weather. If climate were chaos, why is it as orderly as it is? Why don’t we get ice ages at random intervals and for random spans of time the way we get reversals of the magnetic field?
How do you know? :-)
Fortunately, climate models can be tested: if given the parameters of today’s real world as input, they must have today’s real climate as the output. Otherwise we know something is wrong with them and discard them.
Untrue.
Dana L. Royer, Robert A. Berner, Isabel P. Montañez, Neil J. Tabor & David J. Beerling: CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate, GSA Today 14(3), 4 — 10 (March 2004)
True in most cases, because there are few other possible causes other than temperature for changes in CO2 levels. Yet, there are some, and when they happen, temperature follows suit. Read for example
Yannick Donnadieu, Yves Goddéris, Gilles Ramstein, Anne Nédélec & Joseph Meert: A ‘snowball Earth’ climate triggered by continental break-up through changes in runoff [and thus weathering of silicates, which takes up CO2], Nature 428, 303 — 306 (18 March 2004)
G. Ravizza & B. Peucker-Ehrenbrink: Chemostratigraphic Evidence of Deccan Volcanism from the Marine Osmium Isotope Record, Science 302, 1392 — 1395 (21 November 2003)
Peter Wilf, Kirk R. Johnson & Brian T. Huber: Correlated terrestrial and marine evidence for global climate changes before mass extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, PNAS 100(2), 599 — 604 (21 January 2003)
And these are just the pdfs I happen to have on my harddrive.
Well, it is melting off from “the late 20th century rise”, which in turn is manmade. Unusual but expected. What do you mean by “ice burden”?
Water vapor is very important, but it’s a feedback. It can’t get anything started. Unless of course it gets so hot that it doesn’t rain anymore, but that is very hot indeed; we won’t reach that temperature range, and we haven’t for billions of years.
10. Start here.
Naw, Graculus, you put words in my mouth that made it seem as if I had claimed that.
From your post:
“This violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
Nice try.
Besides, water vapor is of course included in the climate models. And so are clouds.
Guess what! You are not the first human being to notice this astonishing fact! The entire carbon cycle is included in the climate models. Did you really think it wasn’t? How naïve can one be?
Besides, water vapor is of course included in the climate models. And so are clouds.
Guess what! You are not the first human being to notice this astonishing fact! The entire carbon cycle is included in the climate models. Did you really think it wasn’t? How naïve can one be?
GWAD,
There are ad hominems and then there are explanations of motive for spreading lies. If I were to point out, for example, that ShillCentralStation was created by a PR firm whose clients include Exxon, Philip Morris, and Microsoft, and that their articles just happen to make excuses for their clients, it is true that it doesn’t logically follow that the articles are wrong. They’re wrong (if even that) because they are at odds with reality, and the paycheck just goes to motive. But it’s generally not a productive line of discussion, and I reserve it for those who have a well-documented history of opinions for sale combined with failure to disclose potential conflicts of interest (e.g., Singer, Milloy).
Regarding your retraction, thank you for changing your position when the facts disagree. Sorry for accusing you of mendacity when misinformation was a more parsimonious explanation. However, why did you bring it up in the first place? I didn’t make such arguments, and by your own standards your mention of the money was unfair and irrelevant. The only double standards I see are yours. And you’re wrong about the Exxon funding, BTW. It’s right there in ExxonMobil corporate giving reports.
Unreserved compliments on your completely correct and sensible explanation of part of why G&T are wrong, however. I don’t know where they could have gotten the idea heat flow components work like that other than sloppy popularizations. They certainly should know better within two years of undergraduate physics, but maybe thermo isn’t their thing. Their other claims, however, and their flagrant misapplication of equations in often unphysical ways (air is an isochoric perfect blackbody? really?!), call into serious question their qualifications as physicists. After getting you wrong on the Hansen/Soros allegations I’ll apply Hanlon’s Razor here and say they’re utterly incompetent rather than mendacious.
Kim:
that’s funny. You can watch chaos being modeled and simulated in your web browser: http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~worfolk/apps/Lorenz/
That site must violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Funny how Kim argues by assertion and ignores actual evidence.
AS for the last 10 years of temperature being static, obviously they know nothing about stats or anything else. Take a look at the Hadley centre graph, for example:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/obsdata/
In no way can it be thought that global temperatures are static. Maybe you can suggest the rise in temps is slowing, but seeing as that is based only upon the last 5 years or so, its hardly settled yet. As usual, a denier doesn’t know what story they want to tell.
ASs for the medieval warm period, where is the evidence of it being global?
CHaos that is climate regulation? I’m afraid I don’t understand.
AS for satellite data, it was found to be wrongly calibrated and actually the data does confirm the warming.
Good luck on finding good evidence for clouds being modulated by cosmic rays. Nobody else can.
Shiritai, touche.
DM, thanks for the responses. CERN’s cosmic ray work continues apace. We shall see.
3. No, I meant more recently. I don’t believe the shaft of the hockey stick.
4. I don’t like my word ‘chaos’, anymore. I mean the system is more complicated than we have divined. How do I know? We keep finding new, previously unimagined, factors in climate regulation.
7. Thank you for the lesson.
8. Where’s the proof that late 20th Century warming and rising CO2 is other than co-incidental?
9. I objected to the assertion that clouds increased global warming.
10. I no longer trust Michael Mann’s bona fides. Explain divergence.
Guthrie, AGW is an assertion without proof. The evidence is indeterminate, as yet.
====================================
Reading G&T more, are we sure this isn’t another joke? A few things that make me suspect this are the subtle reference to the dihydrogen monoxide gag, the consistent use of explicitly inapplicable equations in spite of showing knowledge of at least the existence of appropriate equations, the frequent pointless over-complication of simple equations (e.g., using sidereal day and year instead of just solar day), and the odd notation conventions that almost look like inside jokes ( S(T) is never used in Stefan’s Law but is used for the source function which is in the correct equation, and I don’t think it’s a German thing because my stellar astrophysics textbook, written by a German astrophysicist using a lot of strange-to-Americans notation, uses exactly the notation I describe). The fact that both authors’ publication histories (quick ADSAbs search) are all quantum all the time (though Gerlich apparently hasn’t published anything in over a decade), the argument that something is meaningless because it can’t be solved analytically goes from silly to laugh-out-loud funny.
Of course, if it isn’t a joke and they are sincere, Gerlich and Tscheuschner would flunk any undergraduate thermodynamics exam, and their casual accusations of widespread academic fraud don’t speak well of them. With their repeated citation of identical sources (with separate endnotes, natch) combined with citation of sources that aren’t even relevant to the claims mean that if this isn’t a joke, it’s becoming harder and harder for me to give them the benefit of the doubt on honesty.
That would explain why it is so hard to understand, no?
=================================
What’s so hard to understand, Kim? My poor editing skills? (I’ll give you that one.) Or do you mean that there are so many things wrong with the paper that it’s difficult to know where to start? (The Dembski number seems to be approaching unity in places.)
Read the Sheep Mountain Update at CA, Who Cares.
==============================
That would explain why it is so hard to understand, no?
kim, you don’t understand introductory physics or what chaos is.
I really don’t expect you to understnad much beyond, “Trollie want a lollie?”
What factors have we discovered that are not yet included in the climate models?
This is science. We are not looking for proof, because we can’t. We are looking for the simplest falsifiable explanation for our observations.
Now, please explain the lack of possible reasons for the late-20th-century warming other than the rise of CO2. It’s not the sun; the sun stopped getting brighter in 1940 or thereabouts, but the temperature keeps rising.
Clouds have very complex effects, but in sum it does seem that they increase global warming.
What do you mean?
Maybe it’s a Swiss thing. Though that would surprise me.
What factors have we discovered that are not yet included in the climate models?
This is science. We are not looking for proof, because we can’t. We are looking for the simplest falsifiable explanation for our observations.
Now, please explain the lack of possible reasons for the late-20th-century warming other than the rise of CO2. It’s not the sun; the sun stopped getting brighter in 1940 or thereabouts, but the temperature keeps rising.
Clouds have very complex effects, but in sum it does seem that they increase global warming.
What do you mean?
Maybe it’s a Swiss thing. Though that would surprise me.
8. I believe the cosmic ray theory being tested at CERN.
9. Clouds reflect more energy than they trap.
10. Read the Sheep Mountain Update at climateaudit.org
==============================
@David Marjanović, OM (#92)
It’s not the sun; the sun stopped getting brighter in 1940 or thereabouts, but the temperature keeps rising.
Wrong, as even the bastion of alarmist media, the BBC reported:
A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years.
source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3869753.stm
There are varieties of activity, too. Brightness isn’t the same as magnetic effect, for instance.
=============================
JePe, did you even bother to read your link?
Yeah, sorry. It’s not brightness that’s important for the cosmic ray hypothesis, it’s the number of sunspots. See comment 96.
Yeah, sorry. It’s not brightness that’s important for the cosmic ray hypothesis, it’s the number of sunspots. See comment 96.
Linzen Says Chill Out
I could not agree more with MIT Professor Richard Linzen:
“He then went into a very scientific debunking of the sensitivity of climate to greenhouse gases, concluding that, “from a religious point-of-view, the Earth is well-designed.” He compared the attribution of global warming to greenhouse gases to the intelligent design theory.”
Source:http://media.www.maroon-news.com/media/storage/paper742/news/2007/11/15/News/Linzen.Says.Chill.Out-3102692.shtml
But never mind that debunking, here’s another article!
Linzen? Yawn.
Rey Fox, you didn’t make a link.
Linzen? Yawn.
Rey Fox, you didn’t make a link.
Sorry, I was doing my JePe impression.
@Red Fox #99
You debunked nothing. The oceans warm and cool very slowly, so there is a time lag (minimally 10 years) involved. Given the fact that the sun was unusually active for a prolonged period of time, this can explain why the temp kept rising while the sunspot-number stayed relativily constant.
So there is no one on one correspondence between solar activity and temperature.
The fact that the oceans started cooling since 2003 is in line with this explanation.
JePe:
Gotta cite?
@Robin Levett #103
I have to correct my statement (the fact that….), because the authors seem to have detected two biases in their research.
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/lyman/Pdf/heat_2006.pdf
Nevertheless, as Roger Pielke SR notes about the corrected version:
“The cooling will be shown to have been removed; however, the warming of the 1990s and up to 2002 will be shown not to have persisted. This will still be a challenge for the global climate modelers to explain, since the IPCC perspective of global warming requires a more-or-less monotonic increase in Joules within the climate system, in the absence of a major volcanic eruption”
source: http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/04/11/correction-to-paper-on-recent-ocean-cooling-to-be-available-soon/
Well, at least I got you to address your criticisms before throwing up an article, right?
@Rey Fox #105
I would have adressed the issue anyway, but I found the recent Linzen quote so applicable, especially here on Pharyngula, that I could not resist the temptation to link to it.
To elaborate on the religious nature of “skeptics bashing” as seen here on Pharyngula:
Professor Stanley Trimble:
” An even greater concern is the almost cult-like religiosity within some parts of the environmental movement that is quick to identify and viciously attack heretics and infidels but averseto self-examination and self-criticism. This group, which rightly condemns the pressure on science from fundamentalist religious groups, is now acting in the same manner as those groups. Any other field of science with a history of as many extreme statements, personal attacks, and repeatedly wrong predictions, with so little self correction, would be given short shrift by the scientific community. But extreme environmentalism sails on, brazenly flying the colors of science and turning environmentalism into a morality play.”
Source:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv30n2/v30n2-1.pdf
Yeah yeah we’re a bunch of extremeists… blah blah blah.
Can’t wait until the green getsapo come and takes your lawnmower away,
and forcibly installs compact flourescent bulbs in every fixture.
Ohhh the humanity!
JePe:
So the cite you have for recent cooling can’t be relied upon; instead, you say that the ocean isn’t warming any more, and this is a problem for AGW from CO2 because RPSr says that oceanic heat content should be “monotonically increasing”.
Two difficulties with this. First, if the ocean isn’t warming, why is sea-level still rising?
Second, you also said (#102):
Care to show me where in the atmospheric temperature record in the early 1990s there was a downturn that would provoke a downturn in SSTs this century?
More generally on “solar causes late 20th century GW”; your own source for the claim:
makes clear that the activity levelled off in the 1940s – 60 years ago. If you are right that late 20th century warming is a result of solar, then it should have continued rising and then levelled off in the 1950s or so; whereas in fact (because of aerosol forcing) global temperatures fell until the 1960s and then resumed their increase.
I know that Svensmark has manipulated the figures (less charitable commentators have suggested that the word “falsification” is more appropriate) in an attempt to show that global temperatures track solar – but every attempt so far has been shown to be just that – manipulation.
One interesting point BTW is that McIntyre has decided he’s not going to audit Svensmark’s figures – because the mainstream is doing so and he only has so much time on is hands – but nor has he commented upon the mainstream criticisms of his papers. This leaves the commentators on Climate Audit to rely upon Svensmark’s papers and reject those criticisms. I don’t find that honest.