Slashdot Mirror

:-)

AC wrote: "Paul, referring to Disciplined Minds on Slashdot is like admitting that you are a predator alien. We're going to have to be much more clever than that if we want to convince people to question their ideologies. The subconscious will not cede its control unless you offer it something in return. The best way to deconstruct the subconscious is to study branding and market research. Learn about what happens when people buy stuff, and compare that to what people do when they try to evaluate claims about scientific models with limited information.
See my thread: http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14667 "

First, I probably can't in general disagree with your points on branding, advertising, purchasing, etc. Even if specific cases for specific individuals may differ, as in some people are more analytical than others (sadly sometimes meaning perhaps they are more easily bamboozled by "facts"?), some people may be in a stage of life looking for a new idea to try or an explanation for a past difficulty, etc.. I can wonder if that person to be so good at selling such ideas would be me though? But yes, in general, you are probably right. I liked the personal development diagrams in that thread (having only looked through the first page of 11 in the thread, need to read more later). Reminds me of one I've seen elsewhere with eight stages or so but generally overlapping.And I liked the line in Megamind where he says the difference between a villain and a supervilian (or by extension amateur and professional) is ... "presentation". "-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy2zB8bLSpk

The first ten episodes of the popular "Downton Abbey" provides examples of workers identifying with the system around them and not seeing much hope for change (although a war shows up and some things do start to change, and some do see potential for change). James P. Hogan echoes similar themes in Voyage from Yesteryear, as people cling to the old scarcity-based social hierarchies even when confronted with abundance. Historian Howard Zinn's take on that: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html

BTW, you might also like some other quotes I've collected here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

Also related (there are better links I've posted before, these are just top Google matches):
http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/02/26/peer-review-as-censorship/
http://landshape.org/enm/peer-censorship-and-scientific-fraud/

One thing Einstein got very right was the need to improve our ways of thinking given our new technological powers:
http://anwot.org/

I'd also agree we could use better communications systems to discuss science and reason together about it. My wife and I have taken some steps towards such things in terms of making free and open source software, but no big successes so far. This web page has a video related to a Kickstarter campaign I thought about doing to further those efforts a couple years ago, but I did not proceed with it (taking work doing more conventional stuff instead for sadly short-term reasons): http://twirlip.com/

At least I still have some time now and then to advocate for a Basic Income as at least one way someday to give people more intellectual freedom (among other things). But even that is a tough sell, although I am glad

And the significance of impacts is completely beside the climate science we're discussing, anyway.

Really? So if all the human CO2 emissions ever made only caused, say, an additional 0.01C warming per century, that's perfectly acceptable for you? Either magnitude counts, or it doesn't. I'm perfectly willing to stipulate to AGW as in *any* nonzero positive impact on global average temperature, in the same way I'm willing to stipulate to BYBGW (back yard butterfly global warming).

1. Increased temperature increases the evaporation-precipitation balance of an air-water system, and therefore the water vapor content of the atmosphere.

In the world most simple model, that is correct. In reality, we observe significant differences. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/08/support-for-the-saturated-greenhouse-effect-leaves-the-likelihood-of-agw-tipping-points-in-the-cold/

"If a positive water vapor feedback response existed in the climate system, you’d expect both the specific and relative humidity to increase with time. It didn’t. This ends up putting the kibosh on the idea of tipping points, and a lack of positive water vapor feedback pretty much takes all the scare out of CO2 induced climate change."

(see papers by Soden, Dessler, Santer, etc.)

Some great comments on that: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/16/nasa-says-airs-satellite-data-shows-positive-water-vapor-feedback/

"http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/Dessler2008b.pdf than this is not worth a iota. Mesurements from 5 years is hardly something that would normally qualify as “climate”science. The results in the article are without any error analysis whatsoever and if you do one youre in for a surprise: http://landshape.org/enm/propagation-of-uncertainty-through-dessler/

“The confidence limits of the mean are then 1.96*3.16*0.37 or 2.29, giving a lower limits to the estimated 2.04 W/m2/K value of vapor feedback of -0.25 W/m2/K. Being less than zero, this indicates that zero feedback is within the limits of uncertainty.”

Dressler actually shows that there is room for a negative feedback, still."

Care to hang your hat on some other cherry trees? :)

They're not going to be able to do that unless you give them the historical forcings to at least that accuracy, which we don't know.

So...long story short...they've got no idea what natural climate change looked like in the past, so they can't distinguish it in the present.

They could do some of that if they were initialized with the current climate state, but the data assimilation methods necessary to do that on a global scale are still in their infancy.

So, we've got data networks that are still in their infancy, by the science is settled? :) Nice.

In order to prove that they can forecast warming 100 years to, say, 20% accuracy (about the IPCC range, assuming known forcings, etc.),

If an astrologist had 20% accuracy, would that make astrology science? Show me your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement :)

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/05/picking-cherries-and-hot-fudge.html

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/24/breaking-news-cern-experiment-confirms-cosmic-rays-influence-climate-change/

http://landshape.org/enm/phase-lag-of-global-temperature/

here you go fuck head:

Increases in Longwave forcing inferred from Outward longwave
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
Trends in Forcings
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123222295/PDFSTART
Downward Longwave Radiation
http://landshape.org/enm/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/philipona2004-radiation.pdf
Downward Longwave Radiation
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009JD011800.shtml
29000 data sets, press release:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20080514/
29000 data sets
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Rosenzweig_etal_1.html
Global Energy Imbalance:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2005/Hansen_etal_1.html
Isotopes:
http://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/service/iso_gas_lab/publications/PG_WB_IJMS.pdf

Here they are, but I doubt you will try to understand them:

First you need to understand this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longwave_radiation

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123222295/PDFSTART
http://landshape.org/enm/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/philipona2004-radiation.pdf
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009JD011800.shtml
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20080514/
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Rosenzweig_etal_1.html
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2005/Hansen_etal_1.html
http://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/service/iso_gas_lab/publications/PG_WB_IJMS.pdf

"The claim is that we need to live like hippies and give all our money to Al Gore and friends or THE ENTIRE EARTH WILL BE RUINED FOREVER."
no one claims that. Only people claiming that people claim that.

" But global warming isn't a scientific issue - it's a political issue, "
No, it's a scientific issue, what to do about it is a political issue.

" so you've picked your side (democrat) "
hahaha, now your boiling it down to the side of the Aisle?
democrats like:
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Jon Huntsman
  Olympia Snowe
Susan Collins
  Chris Smith
  Tim Pawlenty
Bob Inglis

oh, wait those are all republicans, my mistake.

In order to support their religious base, The POLITICAL stance of the republicans has been 'no global warming' however if yo look at many of them and there votes, you can see a different picture.
But hey, I actually pay attention to these details, and like researching what different representatives vote for,.
What I don't understand is people like you, who are provably wrong, that keep on spouting your lies. Why?

McIntyre's site is not an opposing site. Pielke's site is an opposing site (and hence is not middle of the road). McIntyre's site is that of someone whose hands are in the till of ExxonMobil.

So if McIntyre's site isn't an opposing site, I suppose that means they're not in opposition. The business about Exxon is, indeed, an ad hominem circumstantial. Look it up, child.

In any case, McIntyre's work is well-supported, is being increasingly published in major peer-reviewed journals, and has been sufficiently strong as to force more careful evaluation of Mann et al. Trying to exclude it entirely is not the scientific approach.

No, there is not. However, you do strongly imply that it is a minor factor by bringing up the warming of Mars (which is actually due, in large part at least, to the precession of its apogee), and trying to claim that CO2 forcing was invented after the fact to explain the heating, when in fact CO2 forcing was addressed during the time when Time magazine was worried about global cooling. (Note: climatologists were NOT worried about global cooling in the 70's.)

If you want to make up arguments, do it on your own. And, er, where did global cooling come in? I haven't mentioned it.

As far as "major" or "minor" factor, my opinion, based on actual examination of the mathematics, is somewhere between 0 and 30 percent of the total. It would be zero if we eventually confirmed the supposition that dendrochronology is under-estimating the temperatures in 1000AD by a degree or so --- which would correspond to the error it would give if you applied the same methodology to current tree ring data. It would be about 30 percent if you look at the difference in slope between the period before 1900 and the period after. Thirty percent corresponds to Pielke's own informal estimates.

But what I really think is that real science demands that we not declare we "know" something when the error bars dominate the data.

I have read McIntyre's criticisms, and understand them fairly well. Basically, he's picking out a few suspect points and claiming that those suspect points invalidate the whole hockey stick. The reality is that the hockey stick survives even in the absence of the points that McIntyre finds suspect.

Then you haven't understood them. You also haven't actually read the NAS report, have you?

There are several very strong reasons to question the "hockey stick", and in fact the NAS report specifically says the extension of temperature predictions back before about 900AD via proxies is very poorly supported. Among them, and one that I find pretty convincing since I've got a background in simulation and modelling as well as information theory, is David Stockwell's observation that purely random numbers of the sort that would correspond to temperature data will generate a "hockey stick".

Now, notice that neither Stockwell, nor (if you look back at my comments) I have said that there is no CO2-based forcing, nor that there is no anomolous warming. That would be a statement that goes beyond the evidence. But Stockwell's work shows that even in the absence of any signal, any information, Mann's techniques lead to a "hockey stick" of similar magnitude to the one in the original paper.

Which means, young paduan, that the technique has no "skill": it doesn't actually identify anything about the data.

So, this is your ad hominem attack. I do have religious convictions at stake here.

Well, no, that's not an ad hominem. "Ad hominem" means "directed to the person." I'm noting that your argument is more like religious conviction than science.

I believe in the scientific process.

As long as it doesn't disagree with what you already believe.

What's more, I believe in the integrity of the majority of the scientific community.

So? Read the NAS report, or any of the scientific criticisms of Gore's movie. It

Separating out the impact of human activity from natural climate variation is extremely difficult. Nonetheless, the IPCC concluded there is a "discernible human influence" on climate. This means the observed global warming is unlikely to be the result of natural variability alone and that human activities are at least partially responsible.

So, they say it's hard to tell if there's a lot of influence. It then cites the IPCC study --- which happens to be the same group of people as run RealClimte, and whose work is criticized in the NAS report.

Because human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases continue to climb, and because they remain in the atmosphere for decades to centuries (depending on which gas), we're committing ourselves to a warmer climate in the future. The IPCC projects an average global temperature increase of 1-4.5F (0.6-2.5C) in the next fifty years, and 2.5-10.4F (1.4-5.8C) in the next century. Temperatures in some parts of the globe (e.g., the polar regions) are expected to rise even faster. Even the low end of the IPCC's projected range represents a rate of climate change unprecedented in the past 10,000 years.[Emphasis mine.]

Look, it's really worth reading around a bit in the literature, and not just on RealClimate. For example, read Pielke's site --- he's respectable, he's not associated with either end of the spectrum (more or less represented by Al Gore and Real Climate on one end, and Climate Audit on the other.)

Read about the anomalies in the behavior of the proxies in the 20th century --- tree rings don't seem to show the same reaction to temperature in warm periods like the last 100 years, versus cold periods like 1500-1600. Some of these studies suggest that the proxy data used by IPCC and MBH may have a systematic error of about -1 degree in warmer periods --- which, if true, would completely eliminate the "unusual warming" signal in itself, and turn "global warming" into normally cyclic climate changes.

Or have a look at Dave Stockwells work (eg here and here) which shows pretty clearly that the same statistical process used by the MGH and IPCC methods, applied to random "pink noise" --- random data in which small variations are more probable than large variations --- will show a dramatic "hockey stick".

Check out some of the (not very widely publicized) dissenters like hits:

Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

Or this:

While the gods must consider An Inconvenient Truth the ultimate comedy, real climate scientists are crying over Al Gore's new film. This is not just because the ex-vice-president commits numerous basic science mistakes. They are also concerned that many in the media and public will fail to realize that this film amounts to little more than science fiction. .... In fact, the correlation between CO2 and temperature that Gore speaks about so confidently is simply non-existent over all meaningful time scales. U of O climate researcher Professor Jan Veizer demonstrated that, over geologic time, the two are not linked at all. Over the intermediate time scales Gore focuses on, the ice cores show that CO2 increases don't precede, and therefore don't cause, warming. Rather, they follow temperature rise -- by as much as 800 years. Even in the past century, the co

Separating out the impact of human activity from natural climate variation is extremely difficult. Nonetheless, the IPCC concluded there is a "discernible human influence" on climate. This means the observed global warming is unlikely to be the result of natural variability alone and that human activities are at least partially responsible.

So, they say it's hard to tell if there's a lot of influence. It then cites the IPCC study --- which happens to be the same group of people as run RealClimte, and whose work is criticized in the NAS report.

Because human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases continue to climb, and because they remain in the atmosphere for decades to centuries (depending on which gas), we're committing ourselves to a warmer climate in the future. The IPCC projects an average global temperature increase of 1-4.5F (0.6-2.5C) in the next fifty years, and 2.5-10.4F (1.4-5.8C) in the next century. Temperatures in some parts of the globe (e.g., the polar regions) are expected to rise even faster. Even the low end of the IPCC's projected range represents a rate of climate change unprecedented in the past 10,000 years.[Emphasis mine.]

Look, it's really worth reading around a bit in the literature, and not just on RealClimate. For example, read Pielke's site --- he's respectable, he's not associated with either end of the spectrum (more or less represented by Al Gore and Real Climate on one end, and Climate Audit on the other.)

Read about the anomalies in the behavior of the proxies in the 20th century --- tree rings don't seem to show the same reaction to temperature in warm periods like the last 100 years, versus cold periods like 1500-1600. Some of these studies suggest that the proxy data used by IPCC and MBH may have a systematic error of about -1 degree in warmer periods --- which, if true, would completely eliminate the "unusual warming" signal in itself, and turn "global warming" into normally cyclic climate changes.

Or have a look at Dave Stockwells work (eg here and here) which shows pretty clearly that the same statistical process used by the MGH and IPCC methods, applied to random "pink noise" --- random data in which small variations are more probable than large variations --- will show a dramatic "hockey stick".

Check out some of the (not very widely publicized) dissenters like hits:

Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

Or this:

While the gods must consider An Inconvenient Truth the ultimate comedy, real climate scientists are crying over Al Gore's new film. This is not just because the ex-vice-president commits numerous basic science mistakes. They are also concerned that many in the media and public will fail to realize that this film amounts to little more than science fiction. .... In fact, the correlation between CO2 and temperature that Gore speaks about so confidently is simply non-existent over all meaningful time scales. U of O climate researcher Professor Jan Veizer demonstrated that, over geologic time, the two are not linked at all. Over the intermediate time scales Gore focuses on, the ice cores show that CO2 increases don't precede, and therefore don't cause, warming. Rather, they follow temperature rise -- by as much as 800 years. Even in the past century, the co