Slashdot Mirror

Since some of the emails are sent from them, it's worth reading.

Link

For the specifics read the whole article. For a general summary, this excerpt will do:

"Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though."

Actually, I'm pretty sure the reason it drew ire was because in their quest to be contrarian and unintuitive they manage to get everything completely wrong, including such gems as claiming that "The problem with solar cells is that they're black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12% gets turned into electricity and the rest is reradiated as heat - which contributes to global warming." Of course, not only are most solar cells blue, not only do they generally cover surfaces that have no better an albedo than they do, not only would the waste heat from even a large decrease in albedo be no bigger than the waste heat produced by coal plants, but of course the effect of waste heat is completely insignificant compared to the heat trapping effects of the CO2 released by the other power generation methods that solar would supplant, as the most basic sanity check would have shown.

The also manage to consistently cite climate scientists as saying things diametrically opposed to their actual positions, which is the sort of thing that really pisses people off, and all to push a highly flawed geoengineering "solution" which would require climate models much more precise than we have to not go disastrously wrong, would not stop ocean acidification, would not even stop massive climate change, since the earth is not a uniform system and energy would still be shifted around, and would require a feat of engineering and political cooperation beyond anything humanity has ever accomplished that would have to continue to disperse sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere every year for however many centuries humanity intends to survive on this planet, making it considerably more expensive and difficult than the comparatively easy task of just reducing the fucking emissions.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the reason it drew ire was because in their quest to be contrarian and unintuitive they manage to get everything completely wrong, including such gems as claiming that "The problem with solar cells is that they're black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12% gets turned into electricity and the rest is reradiated as heat - which contributes to global warming." Of course, not only are most solar cells blue, not only do they generally cover surfaces that have no better an albedo than they do, not only would the waste heat from even a large decrease in albedo be no bigger than the waste heat produced by coal plants, but of course the effect of waste heat is completely insignificant compared to the heat trapping effects of the CO2 released by the other power generation methods that solar would supplant, as the most basic sanity check would have shown.

The also manage to consistently cite climate scientists as saying things diametrically opposed to their actual positions, which is the sort of thing that really pisses people off, and all to push a highly flawed geoengineering "solution" which would require climate models much more precise than we have to not go disastrously wrong, would not stop ocean acidification, would not even stop massive climate change, since the earth is not a uniform system and energy would still be shifted around, and would require a feat of engineering and political cooperation beyond anything humanity has ever accomplished that would have to continue to disperse sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere every year for however many centuries humanity intends to survive on this planet, making it considerably more expensive and difficult than the comparatively easy task of just reducing the fucking emissions.

Bull. Shit. Note that Levitt is NOT a climate scientist or even an engineer, so he is not the martyred expert you paint him as. On this subject he is just another lazy sensationalist amateur who got his facts very wrong as anyone prepared to think for themselves can easily discover.

There was a critique of the chapter in Super Freakonomics on realclimate.org:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/why-levitt-and-dubner-like-geo-engineering-and-why-they-are-wrong/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/
I think it's worth reading.

Anyway, I don't believe any geo-engineering solution will help combat GW, for a simple reason: conservation of energy. Fossil fuels are so important because we can use energy at faster rate than we could obtain it from the sun (their EROI is higher), because it has been accumulating for millions years. So any solution to CO2 reduction different from plain reduction of fossil fuel usage will have to ultimately convert excess CO2 somehow, and this will cost same amount of energy (or more) as it would just use a renewable resource (which there is ultimately only one, the Sun) for energy. Basically, the problem is that the rate at which we consume energy is not sustainable; we will have to match our rate to that of what we can get from the Sun.

There was a critique of the chapter in Super Freakonomics on realclimate.org:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/why-levitt-and-dubner-like-geo-engineering-and-why-they-are-wrong/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/
I think it's worth reading.

Anyway, I don't believe any geo-engineering solution will help combat GW, for a simple reason: conservation of energy. Fossil fuels are so important because we can use energy at faster rate than we could obtain it from the sun (their EROI is higher), because it has been accumulating for millions years. So any solution to CO2 reduction different from plain reduction of fossil fuel usage will have to ultimately convert excess CO2 somehow, and this will cost same amount of energy (or more) as it would just use a renewable resource (which there is ultimately only one, the Sun) for energy. Basically, the problem is that the rate at which we consume energy is not sustainable; we will have to match our rate to that of what we can get from the Sun.

I don't know that going along with your pseudo science ( and that all it is, given 80% of the temperature monitoring stations have been found to be to close to man made radiators to produce ANY useful information )

Really?. Have you also considered that there are satellite and sea measurements, those scientists are crafty. So what we do now won't affect the future?.

I'd rather spend the resources on something with a better chance at real pay back, and yes that includes laughing at, and campaigning/voting against people like YOU.

Oh OK, as long as you are having a good time I suppose future generations won't matter!

Your source is not evidence at all. McIntyre and McKitrick published their article, it had statistical mistakes in it, and the mistakes were never corrected.

I applaud McIntyre and McKitrick for making pretty much the only skeptic argument within the scientific discourse. You see, skeptics don't actually practice science, but rather, they write articles like the one above. They sound impressive, but if you dig beneath the surface, you'll find nothing but echoes of already discredited arguments. I highly recommend that you do that for yourself

As a hint: you can find information about the McIntyre & McKitrick paper here.

Read the paper. Look at the references, so that you can see that they really are what they say they are. Look at the dates of the refutation. Note the date of your linked article is 3 years after McIntyre & McKitrick were shown to be wrong.

Here is an excellent page by David Suzuki, which might help you make sense of what's going on with this debate.

Greg Craven has taken much the same stance with his book about the climate change debate. He doesn't expect he'll ever make anything over his advance, and he'd like more people to read it. This is the guy who got started by putting up a series of videos on YouTube on the subject.

"couldn't the same mechanism that made the Earth warmer back then, also be responsible now?"

Yes but then you would have to explain why a 30% increase in CO2 over the last couple of centuries has not produced a warming signal.

"I'll buy the whole "man is making the globe warmer" argument AFTER the scientists can explain the previous global warming events from 100 to 1200 A.D. and circa 3000-2000 B.C."

Sigh

Yawn!

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/

Yawn:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/11/english-vineyards-again/

For the last decade there has been no global warming, at all, while producing more CO2 than ever.

1. 10 years of noisy data is not significant enough to reverse the significance of the warming trend over the entire instrumental record. 2. The last decade as shown a warming trend of 0.11C/decade.

Scientifically, this _necessarily_ throws global warming into serious doubt.

So long as science relies on whacky stuff like statistics, no it doesn't.

answers here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/07/no-man-is-an-urban-heat-island/

See Taking Cosmic Rays for a Spin (2006). Also a very informative section in Spencer Weart's Discovery of Global Warming.

Even trolls need feeding from time to time...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/taking-cosmic-rays-for-a-spin/

Let's start with Iran facts: Iran has been building nuclear power facilities for years and has a long history of allowing independent inspections of any requested facility. None of the inspections have shown weapons development. Iran supports a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East.

Israeli government and military facts: Israeli military has nuclear weapons (there's enough evidence to convince, among others, the US assistant secretary of defense). The Israeli government refuses to agree to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses inspections. The Israeli military bombed a Syrian nuclear energy plant in 2007. The Israeli government and military have plans to use nuclear weapons on Iran.

And just to show that no one is pure: Iranian and Israeli military jets bombed a nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1980 and 1981. When it comes UN inspections of nuclear energy and weapons production facilities, is the US as open as Iran? The US demands some other countries account for all fissionable material but can it account for its own? Does the US support nuclear free zones on its own continent, or is that just for others? In your opinion is the US government being fair or hypocritical?

Let's move on to FUD: The Israeli government and military have fears that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. If, and this is a civilization threatening "if," bombing nuclear facilities that produce energy but could be used to develop weapons is allowed, then every nuclear facility in every country is a risk and could (should?) be bombed by any country. This is a policy so stupid it could only be inspired by private greed for power and supported through public fear; with no apparent concern for consequences.

Iran currently has oil and gas energy available, and could cheaply use those instead of nuclear power. Perhaps, though, the people of Iran are aware of the limited availability and the climate warming effects from burning oil and gas as established by climate scientists. So Iran has chosen a climatically safer energy source (which has its own serious issues). Like every government Iran's is not perfect, but on this issue its respect for inspections, nuclear weapons-free zone, and rational energy plans makes it a better example than a target.

Yeah, I like to get all my climate science from medical doctors and science fiction authors, too. Crichton never was very good at getting climate science right.

I see very little reason to suspect that the Steig et al 2009 study was wrong to say: "... significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported. West Antarctic warming exceeds 0.1 C per decade over the past 50 years, and is strongest in winter and spring. Although this is partly offset by autumn cooling in East Antarctica, the continent-wide average near-surface temperature trend is positive."

It's a better idea to get your science from scientists rather than politicians. The CO2 emissions by living organisms are part of a closed cycle, and those isotopes don't match the composition of the atmospheric CO2 that's currently ~26% higher than it's been in the last 650,000 years. Other sources such as volcanoes emit 100x less than humans do. Also, water vapor isn't relevant because it has a short lifetime in the atmosphere and isn't well-mixed to the top of the atmosphere. I've discussed all these issues at length.

As far as I understand it, Antarctica as a whole is warming more quickly than climatologists expected. Antarctica should be warming more slowly mainly because currently most of the land mass is in the northern hemisphere. The fact that Antarctica is warming at all is a little troubling.

I wish someone would tell me how you compute the mean temperature of a composite substance like the atmosphere. Global atmospheric heat content is meaningful. Global mean temperature is not. Unless someone would care to explain how you actually compute it in a physically meaningful way?

This sounds similar to the arguments presented in a 2007 paper that's widely considered to be some kind of joke.

Perhaps you mean that different substances have different heat capacities. That's only a problem if you want to determine the equilibrium temperature, and even that's just a weighted average. But even an unweighted average improves the signal-to-noise ratio of temperature measurements, which is why climatologists routinely speak of global mean temperatures.

And to be really pedantic, "heat content" isn't physically meaningful either. Heat is a type of energy transfer across a thermodynamic system boundary. Systems don't store heat, they store internal energy, which is also measured in Joules but can be transferred as heat or work. (Yes, this distinction is irrelevant. That's my point.)

Incidentally, whenever I get some free time I plan to copy one of your older comments to the climate change article on my homepage and answer it. That's because compared to most other people arguing against abrupt climate change, you seem significantly more scientifically literate. I'd email you when this happens, but I don't know how to get in touch with you other than comments like this one.

I'm referring to this quote: "I've now done some stuff with random series rather than the MBH proxy series. This has the advantage of allowing you to create as many proxies as you like. I'll hive that off to a separate page: here. What that appears to demonstrate is that M&M are right about one thing: it often does lead to a 'hockey stick' shape in random data. But the problem is that the variance-explained of the PC1 done this way is tiny: the first eigenvalue is about 0.03. Whereas when you run it on real data the first eigenvalue is about 0.55 (back to 1000) or 0.38 (back to 1400). Which means the two problems are very different."

In the other link, the eigenvalues are supposed to be accessible via a link, but I can't get figure 1 to display. Again, don't know if this is just me. Regardless, they're saying much the same thing. The eigenvalues of the MM fit to red noise aren't statistically significant.

But the real point is that the same answer emerges from more straight-forward analyses that don't rely on PCA at all (which avoids all these issues). In fact, as I've mentioned in my article, multiple independent analyses have been performed, all of which agree that the hockeystick shape is accurate.

It is asserted that if you use random, trendless data, you also get the same answer. See the graph near mid-page at http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.archive.html.

I can't get that graph to load (but my net connection has been flaky lately so it could be my fault.) At any rate, it sounds like a claim that MM have made: that sending "red noise" into the MBH98 program results in a hockeystick. The main problem is that the extracted trend explains very little variance relative to the trend extracted from real data. Here's a 4-part primer on PCA to help people understand the basics.

Do you have any comment on the link I gave regarding the Nature correction?

I read some of it, and their complaints sound very similar to what other scientists go through when trying to get their research published. Peer-review is often an unpleasant process because it's based on confrontation, but this is true for everyone. In this particular case, I think Nature was right to reject their article based on the mountain of evidence against their claims.

It doesn't show a weakness in the process, it shows that computation power isn't infinite. Redoing all the calculations without the benefit of PCA requires use of a large cluster for a long time. This was done (in point 5) and shows that any PCA errors were negligible. Scientists aren't evil monsters engaged in a massive conspiracy. Really. We're ordinary people, just like you.

Yep.

I find it unnerving that you would dismiss creditable dissension to a closely held theory as something to do with democracy. Folks like Monsieur Allegre raise valid points that should be addressed and not swept under the carpet.

You're implying that science is democratic-- that it depends on the number of people who support a theory-- by continually emphasizing that there are "too many creditable people who argue against your point of view." But as I've argued over and over again, science is about evidence, preferably in peer-reviewed journal articles. I humored you by opening that non-peer-reviewed article, and didn't see any compelling evidence. All he mentions is Kilimanjaro's glacier, which I've already discussed in the article, and Antarctic ice mass, which is well known in the climatology community to be losing mass in the west and gaining it in the east.

It's wrong to consider science democratic, but if you really want to play that silly numbers game, consider that ~84% of scientists agree that abrupt climate change is happening, and that it's being caused by humans. Again, science isn't democratic! It's about evidence!

When it comes to the general public, this subject is quite similar to evolution or the reality of the moon landings.

The questioning of the moon landings comes from NO ONE with any credible scientific background, yet LOTS of credible (and credentialed) folks are questioning the work being done on global warming. Yet those good folks are being put in the same category as the loons who question the moon landings...incredible.

Notice that I said "when it comes to the general public." All you have to do is click on the article and notice how juvenile and repetitive all these arguments are. Then consider that I've tried to edit their responses so they look less crazy. For instance, compare my version of Stormcrow309's objections to the Slashdot original. I've seen exactly the same bizarre attitude in my conversations with creationists.

And again, your repeated emphasis on "LOTS" continues to imply that you think science is democratic. I've tried to convince you that science is actually about evidence. If you can find convincing evidence that these people have published in reputable peer-reviewed journals, then I'll read it. But please make sure that I haven't already addressed these issues in the article. So many people on this thread are rehashing issues that I've repeatedly debunked that I'm starting to wonder how Carl Sagan managed to talk to nonscientists without pulling all his hair out. Maybe that's why he died so early?

Yes, it's common for people to claim there's a giant conspiracy among scientists. I've faced this repeatedly in the article from people like Jane Q. Public. No, data aren't being manipulated to serve some political agenda. Scientists aren't evil monsters. We're people just like you, and our primary interest is in understanding the universe, not pushing an agenda. For instance, my interest in this subject began when I was trying to solve an unrelated problem and the mass loss in Greenland's glaciers jumped out at me.

That website is confused on many levels, most of which I've already covered in the article. They confuse weather with climate regarding ENSO events, mistake Newsweek and other mainstream media for "science" and assume nefarious motives for what is simply an ongoing process of assimilating data from various sources properly.

Here's a very simple explanation of AGW for you. No computer models, nothing about weather, very basic.

Imagine a sphere the size of the earth at the earth's distance from the sun with the earth's albedo (average reflectance). What will the surface temperature be due to solar radiation? Do the maths and you get a temperature about 33C lower than that we observe on the earth's surface today. In other words, the earth's atmosphere acts as a blanket trapping heat and raising the temperature by about 33C: the greenhouse effect.

What parts of the atmosphere are responsible for this 33C increase? By far the most important is water. As a gas and in clouds, it is responsible for up to about 90% of the effect. The remaining warming is caused by the so-called greenhouse gasses: CO2, Methane, O3, NO, etc.

If you examine the absorption spectra of these gasses and weight by atmospheric concentration, you'll find about 40% is due to CO2. So 40% of 10% of 33C is around 1.3C of warming due to atmospheric CO2.

Atmospheric CO2 has gone up by 50% since pre-industrial times, the increase is almost all due to fossil-fuel burning (you can tell from radioisotope ratios), so we would expect about a 0.5C rise in global temperatures due to human CO2 output.

Of course that's a very, very crude back-of-the-napkin calculation, but the result is approximately in line with the IPCC reports. Here's another version of the same calculation (but a bit more complex), with full references and some spreadsheets you can download and try out yourself:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing

For a serious discussion about "An Inconvenient Truth" and judges ruling see this article att realclimate.org. Here is an excerpt from the article by Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann

:

There are a number of points to be brought out here. First of all, "An Inconvenient Truth" was a movie and people expecting the same depth from a movie as from a scientific paper are setting an impossible standard. Secondly, the judge's characterisation of the 9 points is substantially flawed. He appears to have put words in Gore's mouth that would indeed have been wrong had they been said (but they weren't).

....

Overall, our verdict is that the 9 points are not âoeerrorsâ at all (with possibly one unwise choice of tense on the island evacuation point).

I call bs on that -- people have called it climate change right since the end of the 1990s when the AGW groups were even more vocal and mainstream than they are now. You are also confusing global warming/climate change process with the result (cooling). Changes to the climate can result in different conditions; some places can experience more cooling than normal, others more heat, more extremities and so on. Also a few years of cooling trend doesn't disprove global warming. (It's quite common in AGW circles to show a graph of the last 10 years or so to show cooling, but when the same data is plotted over a much longer time frame, it is clear that there is warming...) You might benefit from starting at realclimate.org

No it does not, though I made the same mistake when I first read it. It may below the mean at the present time, it is show a recovery.

Answered in another comment to you here. Again, I'm saying your conclusions don't flow from these cherry-picked examples, I'm NOT disputing the AMSR-E ice minima record.

I do not know at this point who's website dumbscientist.com is, but it excludes, very typically, Maurder Solar minimum / Little Ice age data. I am still going through it.

It's mine, and this point was also answered in another comment to you here.

And are you refuting the fact that water vapor makes up %95 of the greenhouse effect on earth? If so, what percentage does it make up?

I've been strenuously trying to say that it's the conclusions you're reaching that are wrong, not necessarily these details. As a matter of fact, CO2 makes up 66% to 85% of the greenhouse effect in our current atmosphere. But that's not the point. As I've repeatedly explained to you, water vapor reaches equilibrium with the oceans in a matter of weeks, so we can't really change its concentration except by changing Earth's average temperature. Water vapor is also not present in the top level of the atmosphere where the greenhouse effect is most important. CO2, on the other hand, is well-mixed even to the highest level of the atmosphere, and it stays in the atmosphere for many decades which is why it's so dangerous.

I'm sorry, but I don't see any point to having a conversation where all my words hit a brick wall, requiring me to immediately repeat them. Have a nice day.

... no model takes clouds into account.

Actually, all models take clouds into account. Which journal article led you to this conclusion? I've discussed this issue in the comments and linked to a new paper describing recent improvements to models of clouds.

I do not have seen any attempt of applying models to past conditions where CO2 concentration was higher than today ... I have read your article, and it is not convincing. Especially, the way you insist that the model should be applyied to recent time only is not sound: a numerical model should be tested in as much conditions as possible, especially for other input that the ones that have been used to calibrate it!!!

Because, as I state in a popup on the words "very slightly" in the third paragraph of the article, there are so many changes to the Earth over such long periods of geological time (you have to go back tens of millions of years to see higher CO2 concentrations) that the dynamical models wouldn't be expected to apply. Plus, proxy data are unreliable at such timescales, so we're stuck with "recent" data like the last 650,000 years from EPICA.

models predictions seems much better in the 1990-2000 region than in 2000-2010, but adjustable parameters were tuned to fit 1990-2000 data...not a good sign for a numerical model...

Huh? You're not under the impression that climate models are empirical models, are you?

... cyclic variation of solar power is taken into account, but other effects on cloud formations are not (not surprising, as cloud are not taken into account anyway). But recent studies suggest that the main effect of solar cycles is linked to magnetic effects, not incoming solar radiation.

That's because those other effects have been shown to be very small. See 7 (b) in the index: "Cosmic rays are responsible for global warming." If you've found evidence contradicting these papers, please let us know.

much more emphasis (as in your article) to positive feedback effects than negative one. In fact, positive feedback is set at the stability limit: a little bit more and the system would be instable and the climate we had before industrialisation would simply not have been possible, you would have had a runaway warming or cooling.

I've explicitly addressed this point. The point is that feedback effects act on different time scales, and our forcing is geologically very rapid.

And man produced CO2 is just the same as natural CO2, any attempt to spearate the two (one have a greater effect that the other???) is highly suspect.

I didn't mean that man-made CO2 has a greater effect, just that feedback CO2 appears after the temperature rises, not before. Therefore the recent CO2 rise is anthropogenic, and we should expect the natural feedback CO2 (observed in Vostok) to add to it.

In fact, I think many reader objections in your article are valid, and you seem to agree as you do not really debunk the well formulated ones...

For instance? (I've got my own research distracting me, so I don't always have time to answer each and every question, but I've tried really hard to answer all the scientific questions that people have posed. I'd l

Now, drag out all the charts, graphs, and politically-motivated reports you want, for and against; the only actual modern large-scale experiment that gives us any proof regarding human impact on temperature was the week after 9/11.

It was three days. Citation with reference here.

The complete lack of aircraft over the US had a SIGNIFICANT effect on high and low temperatures immediately.

Three days is far too short a time period to say anything conclusive about climate. You might as well argue that the sustained low temperatures last winter are a sign that the world is cooling...

Couple that with this current evidence that a single shuttle launch can apparently impact cloud formation over the Antarctic, and I'd say that's a far-more-tangible red flag than the supposed connections made over CO2 or other 'global warming' gases.

So why isn't there a significant, sustained effort to minimize air travel?

You mean like this? Judging from this and the rest of your comments, you really need to get out more...

Two other sources that I would recommend on climate are Nature's Bolg and RealClimate. These are both very informative and more accessible that journal papers.

But that doesn't mean there aren't sources. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing/

"it's happening much faster than ever before thanks to human behaviour"

that's the leap that you aren't being very convincing about. there seems to be this movement of "omgz everything humanz do is wrong!" which isn't science.

Perhaps if you stopped attacking straw men, you might realize that there is ample science to back up this point.

What's the big deal about the infamous hockey stick?

7) Basically then the MM05 criticism is simply about whether selected N. American tree rings should have been included, not that there was a mathematical flaw?
Yes. Their argument since the beginning has essentially not been about methodological issues at all, but about 'source data' issues. Particular concerns with the "bristlecone pine" data were addressed in the followup paper MBH99 but the fact remains that including these data improves the statistical validation over the 19th Century period and they therefore should be included.

8) So does this all matter?
No.

• Clouds - yes, difficult to simulate, they may speed up or slow down global warming, but this does not mean global warming is not happening.
• Measurement uncertainty - some photos from a web site should scare me? Hmm. Let's ask some other people:

  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report: Q: "Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?" A: "None at all... Clearly there is no indication from this analysis that poor station exposure has imparted a bias in the U.S. temperature trends."

  Gavin Schmidt: "They have not shown that those violations are i) giving measurable differences to temperatures, or ii) they are imparting a bias (and not just random errors) into the overall dataset" Realclimate

• The oceans are driving climate change? Hmmm, sounds like a newer version of Climate myths: The oceans are cooling. Of course there's a correlation between global warming and ocean temperature, it would be absurd if there weren't. This doesn't mean that the ocean is the driver of current global warming, and of course the ocean is a massive heat and carbon sink so it does play a part.
• Gore? Surely invoking the name of a political figure in a scientific argument is just some kind of inverse appeal to authority? :-) If anyone else had mentioned "George W. Bush's ideas on global warming" I'm sure you'd be the first to point out their logical failure.

Get a clue.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/

I'm aware. My point is that I'm tired of "but how much CO2 does it generate?" being tacked on to everything because it's the current fad question.

Fair enough, the answer has such a large range of possible answers that it is meaningless.

The coming ice-age was a science disaster fad.

Well there were a few papers on the subject. But it was more speculation than accepted scientific consensus. Would you rather all scientist in a field focus on one thing, or explore every conceivable angle?

So was the coming overpopulation and world famine.

Well I can't easily believe the Earth can harbour 6.7 billion people with the level of affluence that the west have. Something has to give, either quality of life or population. Also there are 1 billion who are hungry in the world. Don't you remember the food riots last year?

And the ozone holes that would cause everyone to get skin cancer. And....

What everyone? Don't make up straw man arguments. What you have done is taken the sensationalism of the press and applied their echo chamber to what the experts think. What the papers say is not what the experts think! Or to put it another way what the news says is mostly bullshit, with an element of truth. If it tires you then ignore it.

The blog of the science journal Nature recommends this rebuttal, which points out that the economist censored that claims that solar cycles could have anything to do with global warming cites an astrologer who believes they had something to do with Hitler and Stalin's rise to power. Perhaps the report was so bad the bureaucrats at the EPA were motivated by fear of embarrassment, and though this still does not excuse withholding it, I feel it is grasping at straws to find some way to equate Obama with Bush with regards to science. Thank you for bringing it to my attention, though.

First of all, we're calling Global Climate Change now, since, you know, the planet has been COOLING for the last decade, despite all the CO2.

Well you can say that, but the data says different. Secondly global atmospheric temperature is not the same as the amount of heat energy. The heat capacity of the oceans are far greater than the atmosphere, but it is rather hard to measure the temperature of the entire ocean. If you really think that we will experince cooling in the next 10 years then take a bet with this guy.

No, the fact is, I haven't heard a scientific THEORY about CO2, at all.

Well that shows your ignorance. In fact the reasoning is simple for CO2 influence on global temperature, which is why I "believe" it. In fact this is not hypothesis, nor is it theory. It is FACT that increased concentrations of CO2 will block infra-red radiation radiating into space. The only possible way that increased CO2 does not create a warmer climate is if there is a feedback loop that increased CO2 levels produces which more than cancels their known warming effect. Don't even think plant growth because if that were the case than the CO2 levels over the last 200 years would never have risen.

• M&M used the wrong version of Mann et al. (1998). (that should be enough right there.)
• M&M eliminated 70% of Mann's data due to some methodological misunderstanding. (I will not summerize, you must read. It's on page 13-14.)
• Mann et al.s reconstruction is reproducible, and within close approximation (2 standard deviations) of other methods. M&M's is not.
• Interestingly, the hockey stick does appear in a reconstruction using M&M's method and subset of data. This fact is left out of their report.

Good enough? If not, I don't care - honestly. There's a whole page on McIntyre and McKitrick myths. I think James Annan said it best on google-groups: Steve McIntyre has found a molehill and is doing his best to make a mountain out of it.


"I want to know what the observed experimental data is, from a ~10 meter tube, or the observed atmosphere, or such, not computer models" - the absorption spectrum of CO2 is measured by a spectrometer over ~1cm, I think it's important to have done the (simple) experiment that would verify we know how CO2 behaves over longer distances, if it's a fundamental part of our models.

Here is a derivation. Here is an article on observations of CO2 absorption. Also, the linked diagram was observational data.

I did some googling, and I think I found the argument your putting forward - that CO2 absorption saturates after 10m. See here

My specific claim about standard deviation is that no one has taken the observed temperature readings, and calculated the standard deviation from that, for 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, and 1 year. If you've read a paper which has this value, please provide a quote, and link.

Is this some oblique way to assert that prediction models don't have standard deviations built into them? Here is a model from 2002, that includes variance of estimates

Anyway, you wanted to know what's wrong with the equation you specified, *I don't care about the rest*. Please upload a well-formated copy somewhere, with the numbers and working for Earth and Venus. I'll figure it out and get back to you.

It's rather disingenuous to expect me to provide a simpler derivation

If you say so, however, I'm not after a simpler derivation. I'd like to see your working with your numbers, and formatted so I can read it without having to write is out from scratch. I don't want to do the leg work only to have you tell me I didn't do it right. I want to see you do it, and be happy with the equation, and then I'll do the leg work.

>>>> You're so insistent on taking me out of context, I'm not sure it's even worth responding.

>> Ad Hominem.

Congratulations on your first foray into Latin. But ad hominem is only a sure-fire response if the argument is a syllogistic one (as in, "because X is a bad bad man, his argument Y must be wrong.") My ad hominem argument -- such as it was -- was just a response to your own bad behavior.

The fact remains that you were twisting my words around, you continue to do so, and I urge you to stop.

>>>> Even among climate skeptics (at least, the subset of skeptics with scientific credentials in relevant fields), only a handful will go so far as to claim that the warming is imaginary.

>> Maybe you just don't hear them because they're being suppressed. example A example B And have you seen this?

That's not what I'm talking about. Even if climate skeptics are shut out of the relevant peer-reviewed journals, they still have other ways to get their ideas out. What I'm saying (and please pay close attention here) is that, even among outspoken critics of global warming with scientific backgrounds large majorities believe that global warming is happening. Far more dispute the mechanisms of warming, the accuracy of future predictions, and appropriate responses. Virtually nobody with decent scientific credentials is coming out in favor of the idea that the globe isn't warming.

As a side note, the WSJ's report of the "collapsing consensus" is overblown, bordering on fraudulent. Inhofe compiled a list of 700 naysayers, out of hundreds of thousands of working scientists. I stand unimpressed. Skeptics may be shut out of the peer review circuit -- arguably due to their own scientific incompetence -- but Exxon and other energy interests makes sure their concerns are widely circulated in the media, and the media frequently reports "both sides."

I read the Newsweek article. The plan to cover the poles in ash is mentioned, but it's pretty clear that it never made it beyond the "drunk scientists at the pub" phase of planning. Yes, let's not repeat the horrible, horrible mistakes of the 1970s, where scientists around the globe noticed an interesting trend, argued about what might happen, and came up with some rough, impractical ideas about how to stop it.

What the scientists -- that is to say, the few scientists who felt certain enough to actually make policy proposals -- were suggesting were pretty non-controversial actions. Creating some food reserves, for example. That wasn't a bad idea even if cooling wasn't happening.

>>>> the number of peer reviewed papers predicting warming outnumbered the number that predicted cooling by about 6 to 1.

>> Your link does not support this, but suppose I take that as fact. I for one do not care how many people say something is true. In 1300 everyone knew the Earth was flat and everything revolved around it. Just because there is some kind of "consensus" either then or now, doesn't mean it's true.

The 6 to 1 statistic comes from elsewhere. But that's tangential. The real point is, skeptics argue that "global cooling" was once a consensus, which was then overturned, and that we should therefore be skeptical of this consensus as well. No such broad agreement ever existed, and global warming is a completely different animal.

Sure, consensuses can be wrong. But when basically all the peer-reviewed research favors the idea of anthropogenic global warming, it's hubris for laypeople to dismiss it all as a vast academic conspiracy to get grant money.

>>>> It seems that, in your mind, no disaster is truly epic so long as there are survivors, and that it wouldn't be worthwhile to you to take a $1500 pay cut to avert any di

Gavin Schmidt, notable NASA climate scientist, provides a nice reality check on this story, concluding with this:

"So in summary, what we have is a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at. Seriously, if that's the best they can do, the EPA's ruling is on pretty safe ground."

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/06/bubkes/

Fine. I'll start. I'm reading the page six of the report, where this oh-so-vital, must-not-be-suppressed, dare-we-proceed-before-we've-fully-worked-out-the-implications-of-this study. He's leading off with the claim that we've had an eleven year cooling trend. This is such a dishonest, basic fallacy, that there hardly seems to be any point in going further.
    I mean, for a regular Internet nobody, it would be worth correcting. But coming from this guy, who seems to think that the entire national debate should stop and pay attention to his report, it's a slap in the face to anyone who wants an honest discussion.

Next he claims that the "consensus" on hurricanes has changed, and that now scientists are predicting no change in hurricane behavior due to warming. He's wrong to say that any consensus exists on hurricanes, and he's doubly wrong because the current expectation is that hurricanes will increase in intensity, migrate further north (to areas that are generally unprepared for them) and remain about the same in frequency.

I'd continue, but the guys over at RealClimate have already written the substantiative critique you're demanding.

Fine. I'll start. I'm reading the page six of the report, where this oh-so-vital, must-not-be-suppressed, dare-we-proceed-before-we've-fully-worked-out-the-implications-of-this study. He's leading off with the claim that we've had an eleven year cooling trend. This is such a dishonest, basic fallacy, that there hardly seems to be any point in going further.
    I mean, for a regular Internet nobody, it would be worth correcting. But coming from this guy, who seems to think that the entire national debate should stop and pay attention to his report, it's a slap in the face to anyone who wants an honest discussion.

Next he claims that the "consensus" on hurricanes has changed, and that now scientists are predicting no change in hurricane behavior due to warming. He's wrong to say that any consensus exists on hurricanes, and he's doubly wrong because the current expectation is that hurricanes will increase in intensity, migrate further north (to areas that are generally unprepared for them) and remain about the same in frequency.

I'd continue, but the guys over at RealClimate have already written the substantiative critique you're demanding.

"And the question is, is that information correct or incorrect."

Astroturfers aren't worth the time even answering, because they don't argue in good faith. They want to spread FUD. It's what they're paid to. As soon as they manage to grab hold of someone to "debate", they score a point with their funders, because by then lots of the audience will just zone out and just assume "well, both sides probably have some merit".

"In fact, when you look at how politics dominate this topic, you have to wonder if science is actually driving it at all."

Hah, the old politician's trick of making lots of noise, and then using that noise to say "listen to the noise! this is way too controversial!".

Get this: It's all about good faith. If I think you don't have it, I'm not going to bother much. As it is, I think you are merely a bit brainwashed. Some people are willing to waste more time on it (or maybe just a bit more willing to give the benefit of doubt when it comes to whether arguments are made in good faith or not).

Gavin A. Schmidt at realclimate.org has in fact had slightly more patience with Carlin's report. If you're so interested in the science as you claim, you might want to read it?

"Doesn't anybody screen these calls?" -- Click and Clack

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/06/bubkes/