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Gov't Proposes "National Climate Service" For the US
Standing Bear writes "NPR reports that 140 years after the creation of the National Weather Service, the US government is proposing the creation of a similar service that will provide long-term projections of how climate will change. 'We are actually getting millions of requests a year already about: How should coastal cities plan for sea-level rise? How should various other agencies in the federal government or in state governments make plans for everything from roads to managing water supplies?' says NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco. 'And a lot of that is going to be changing as the climate changes.' Under the plan, the new NOAA Climate Service would incorporate some of the agency's existing laboratories and research programs, including the National Climatic Data Center, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and the National Weather Service's Historical Climate Network. Meanwhile, as plans for the new climate service shape up, NOAA launched a new Web site, climate.gov, designed to provide access to a wide range of climate information."
Climate science is in its infancy, as anyone who has been really following the "Global Warming" debate knows. Certainly we know the globe is warming, but the greenhouse gas aspect of it is still very much up in the air.
Setting up a Climate Service today would be akin to setting up an Astrology Service. They would probably both give equally good advice.
I can give one long term prediction. The government will not be able to use "climate change" as an excuse for a orgy of tax rises.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
so, let's see the predictions from the national climate service.
(in a democratic administration)
Plan for warmer temperatures. higher sea levels, some deserts getting a lot of rain, some areas getting a lot less rain.
and we can change the climate to make things better
(in a republican adminstartion)
climate will be about the same, it will be hot during the summer, cold during the winter, floods will occur, droughts will occur.
and no-one can do much about it.
So the hunt for manbearpig continues?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Based on the mercurial history of climate science over the past few decades, we might also need a National Climate Service Service to help us track changes in the climate of climate science research...?
Since climate science really is a science, it's going to have to make predictions. It's good to put consensus predictions on record and then see how good they are. I have enough faith in climate science to think that they will be quite good. Of course they will have big error bars, but that's unavoidable. Also, it's not uninformative. I think it will be important in 5 years to say: We've got a climate model that's made correct predictions for the last five years, so you should trust that model as a good guide to the future. It's not a perfect argument, but I think it will be more persuasive than what we can say now.
It's all about cap-and-trade. First alarmists were preaching global cooling, then global warming, and now that global warming is proving to be a farce and the numbers are skewed, it's "global climate change." Last time I checked, global climate has been changing since before hominids walked upright.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Release the source code of your data models that tell us that "ZOMG!!!! Teh oceans are going to go to e1even!!!!!!" and then we'll talk. Until then, it's all smoke and mirrors.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
I'd say it's all about creating another bureaucracy for democratic party patronage and to act as a mouthpiece for liberal/democrat ideas about climate change. Think of it as kind of like giving Al Gore his own personal branch of government so he can spew his nonsense on the taxpayer's dime.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
now that global warming is proving to be a farce and the numbers are skewed,
Citation needed.
If you're talking about Climategate, sorry, I know it sounds like a cop-out, but that was an isolated incident. Thousands of other studies have confirmed that the climate is changing, and that humans are responsible.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
There are already several organizations measuring climate and environmental conditions. So many, there are open file formats to support data sharing.
Part of the recent US budget includes $433 million to support similar science.
Who are you looking to for validation that Cap & Trade works? How do you measure that and trust the results?
If climate science has progressed far enough to provide results, and so much depends on a safe climate - both for progress and survival, someone needs to keep an eye on things.
What if the National Climate Service predicted earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, as well as space weather events, tidal flow, and provided the data for processing, taking the other open data from organizations studying extra-planetary events, animal vocalizations, and large-scale earth harmonics, and they all pointed to one, big thing?
I can say one thing - it would be fun to work on, and may hint at a return to the large, funded labs of the 1960's.
Science is repeatable, peer reviewable and changes as the truth becomes clearer. Science has never been about consensus, but has always been about pioneers seeking the truth. This leaves us with a quandary; Do we believe scientists who destroy data and refuse peer review, or do we attempt to gather our own data and find the truth. Currently the two barriers that will prevent us from finding the truth are those who believe that consensus is equivalent to scientific truth and the snow piled up so high in Washington D.C. that they are being forced to wait to open the office until after the blizzard of 2010 is cleared.
climate scientists disagree with you and (unlike astrologers) actually want to put their predictions on record because they have confidence in them. I say we let them.
I take it you haven't read the emails from East Anglia? Obfuscation, "hide the decline," discussion of how to destroy the careers of those who disagree with them, and subvert legal FOIA requests. Hardly the behavior of people who want to go on public record.
When scientific research is used as the basis of public policy decisions, that research should automatically be made available for public scrutiny, along with any associated monetary interests of the researchers. Then taxpayers can find out how badly they got screwed.
I'd say it's all about creating another bureaucracy for democratic party patronage and to act as a mouthpiece for liberal/democrat ideas about climate change. Think of it as kind of like giving Al Gore his own personal branch of government so he can spew his nonsense on the taxpayer's dime.
Good point. Say, where has Al Gore been hiding lately, anyway? He's been mighty quiet since Climategate broke. If you have any free money laying around, you might want to buy stock in tar and feathers. Something tells me those are two commodities that are going to be in big demand real soon now.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
The Audi commercial wasn't supposed to be a 'how to' commercial.
Citation: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020126/climategate-goes-serial-now-the-russians-confirm-that-uk-climate-scientists-manipulated-data-to-exaggerate-global-warming/
It wasn't an isolated incident. The Russians are now complaining that their data was misused as well.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
The dendro-proxies are kaput too. We're onto making fun of himalayan glaciers and the Day After Tomorrow warnings now. Next up: satellite thermal measurement calibration to .01 degree C at a range of 2,000 kilometers, and the incredible disappearing Midieval Warm Period.
If the 1800's continue to cool at the current rate, it will not be long before we're thankful of the role of AGW in staving off the impending ice age of 1940.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Thousands of other studies have confirmed that the climate is changing, and that humans are responsible.
Using which datasets? Climategate is regarding the creation of datasets which many thousands of studies are based on. Of course we can't verify whether this is the case because the raw data is now "lost".
Well Phil Jones just threw most of the man made climate warming story under the bus.
AGW/CC has always been a lie and always will be a lie.
Before you reply to me think, "We've always been at war with East Asia."
This is about government control and "socializing" to that end. You're all sheep if you buy this horseshit after all this time and after all that's been revealed.
You're also pretty damn arrogant - and ignorant - if you think your Prius - or my Suburban - makes a whit of difference to this "climate."
Do all reasonable people have Saturday evening plans this weekend?
Interesting revisionism. I'm pretty sure "climate change" was a term invented by denialists, not scientists.
As for global cooling, well, either you have a really good memory or you've been listening to people really intent on spreading the crap. "Global cooling" was an early conjecture by a minority of scientists back in the 70's. Scientists haven't found that theory supportable for a long time. In fact, scientists at the time didn't really back it then, either.
Even if they had, though, why scientists first getting things wrong should be grounds for doubting everything now is beyond me. As I recall, we didn't nail the germ theory of disease right off the bat, too--yet I'll bet you take your antibiotics.
History will not be kind to the memory of folks like you. Of course, you won't be around to care. Your kids will, though.
Kythe
Perhaps they will provide an impartial assessment of the current state of climate science, rather than a pronouncement on global warming.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
is my bank account paying for more useless, pointless, farcical government programs ! For heavens sake, the weatherman can't predict the weather a week in advance, why on earth would I believe they can predict it for a century from now...
Read the article for yourselves. Do not take my or jvillain's word for it.
There is no bus involved, and Phil Jones says that yes, warming since 1950 is probably anthropogenic.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
So the lab facilities, and possibly the employees, would be competed for by two separate bureaucracies? I can't see how that would work smoothly.
Why can't they just throw some more money at the NOAA or NWS, telling them they need to take on some additional responsibilities?
CO2 takes thousands of years to leave the atmosphere, so we can consider it cumulative. Every bit of fossil fuel CO2 we've used since Watt built his steam engine has contributed to the progression of global warming: it's just that the increase in emissions substantially accelerated in the 20th century, and since the 1950s, our cumulative history has begin to catch up with us.
... is government and it's arrogance. No matter how many times they are wrong, they never give up the idea that they are automatically right because they were either elected or appointed by someone who was.
They're almost always wrong and they should never be embraced. Every Federal employee should be looked upon with suspicion. Always.
Government - at least in this country - was never meant to be a trough.
Anyone employed by the state is either ignorant or evil.
Let tom skilling do the job!!
It wasn't an isolated incident. The Russians are now complaining that their data was misused as well.
Is there any particular reason you've decided to suddenly trust a random Russian think tank?
Don't they realize that this is a slippery slope to actually admitting that global warming could be true?
Just look at the snow in Texas.
I'm a liberal and I don't believe in global warming.
Dear Dr. Jane,
Would you please produce a record of the millions of requests you have gotten. As you may know, there is a LOT OF INFLATED CLAIMS in this area and I would like to independently verify your statements without having to hack your servers.
Thank you for your prompt reply,
The Public Taxpayers
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com.
meep
What happened to Obama's Spending freeze? Now they want to create a new bureaucratic government agency with all sorts of high paid administrators?
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
"Every bit of fossil fuel CO2 we've used since Watt built his steam engine has contributed to the progression of global warming" is likely true, but probably only in a pedantic sense (because emissions have gone up so fast, the impact of the decades prior to 1950 is tiny compared to those since).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
scarcity of world butterflies if they plan to do long term weather predictions.
Okay, then how about complaints from the folks up in Canada? http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Scientists+using+selective+temperature+data+skeptics/2468634/story.html
This is not an isolated incident, Climategate just opened the door and started the revelations.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Not to mention that so much of the climate studies are based off each other. Climategate wasn't just one unique thing, it's 'data' was nested and twisted in with so much of the other studies that it makes a house of cards look sturdy.
You better read that again. He admits that warming trends like this have happened in the past, that the earth is not currently warming, that the Medieval Warm Period did happen and so the hockey stick is dead, their data is suspect and the CO2 thing is a guess. He also basically cops to not really being climatologist.
I think that it is just another of Obama's "job creation" programs. After all, the only job increases in the last year were government jobs.
Boy, it sure is fun to act self-righteous. You've got it all figured out!
I've just been having the same discussion with Andy Revkin who seems to be just as confused as you. Here is where the science is at: It is very likely that most of the recent warming is owing to greenhouse gas forcing as a result of our emissions. Look carefully at that statement. It does not mean that we hardly know if some of the warming comes as a result of our emissions. No, if we can say that it is very likely that most of the warming is owing to us, then it is doubtless that some of the warming comes from us. Nothing up in the air about that at all. Non-quantitative people like you or Revkin don't seem to grasp this. There is some small uncertainty about attributing more than half of the warming to us, but that is not the same as not knowing anything at all.
A climate service would be a very good thing since we can finally start to set some policies concerning tidal regions that will be affected by sea level rise. New nuclear power plants, in particular owing to their long planning horizon, need siting guidance that the NRC does not seem able to provide.
Your characterization of what he says won't stand up to people reading the interview, so i would suggest that they go ahead and do that.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Which get rich scheme are you talking about? Is that where McIntyre, McKitrick, Christy, Douglas, Spencer, Miloy, Monckton, Ball, Pimer get paid by Western Fuels Association, Edison Electric Institute, ExxonMobil, Gabriel Resources, Ltd. and host of others to LIE about something they know nothing about. Kinda like Monckton claiming to be a member of the British House of Lords, when he is not or maybe like Ball who claims to have the first PhD in climatology from Canadian University even though his thesis was about migratory birds and there were more than a dozen climatology PhD degree holders before him. Maybe you Christy and Douglas who regularly publish papers in scientific journals confirming that global warming is real and worse than what the IPCC report describes, testify under oath that global warming is real and dangerous yet accept money from ExxonMobil for speaking tours where they deny global warming is occurring. Is that the get rich quick schemes you are talking about? Do you mean Watts and Coleman who get paid tens of thousands of dollars for speaking tours where they talk about climatology and meteorology even though they never have had a single course and meteorology and their only knowledge is from reading a forecast on the television and acting stupid on air for ratings? You surely don't mean the researcher you makes less per year than Watts gets for a 1 hour speech?
I live in Argentina and we've had the "Servicio Meteorológico Nacional" (SMN) or National Meteorological Service since 1872, and if you check the forecast on TV or the radio, it most certainly comes from the SMN. Despite the blatant corruption in our country, the SMN is one of the most (if not the only) unbiased and trusted government source of information.
I get the pattern now: declare a crisis, spend like a drunken sailor, and blame it on Bush. Now I know what he meant by hope and change.
The Weather Service is in its infancy.... according to your reasoning it is already akin to an Astrology Service.
Just about any argument you pose for the weather service I can use for the climate prediction service.
These are both fluid dynamics problems - mankind will NEVER get out of infancy given the level of complexity and chaos involved. If we got the math down 100% we'd not be able to fully compute the problems.
The climate predictions have been largely accurate - much much higher than Astrology. Yes, there is a smaller dataset than weather; we may be no better in a 1000 years of data points than we are today. But we are better than random guessing or Astrology!
There is this thing that is sometimes done in the public sector called LONG TERM planning - and I would rather they asked experts than flipped a coin or asked an astrologist (either of which may be better than asking the politician to "guess.") The expert educated opinion is better than the alternatives - that alone is reason enough! How can such an anti-science position get mod 5 Insightful?? on slashdot?
I've not seen the climate predictions go wrong yet; sure there are some typos and over simplifications but that isn't the field, its just a small sample of a larger field. Easy to say computers suck by looking at e-machines running windows ME... The main temp chart included a RANGE and we've been within range the whole time - the simple stuff for the slow people has been too optimistic or too dire depending on context and source but the science covers a broad range which STILL is specific enough to be quite useful.
I've been following Global Warming not the so-called debate. If you think that silly idiocy going on the last 10 years is debate, then you are a waste of time - go get educated and come back when you have something constructive to say. Don't educate yourself, I don't think you can do that yet... get expert help.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
No one was predicting global cooling. They said that geologically speaking, we're do for another ice age soon. But in geological terms, "soon" means in the next 11,000 years or so. 11k years is barely a moment in geological terms.
What FOOLS ... what folly. Your tax-payer dollars down the drain!
Next, we will have Dir. of Homeland Security, Janet Planet, ridding the Air Force Boing Laser Aircraft to target citizen of Harlem for evaporation.
...by saying the opposite of what you just said.
Did you actually read the article?
No, he does not say those things at all. Read the article again, carefully.
Did you know slashdot mod points are traded in real time in yahoo groups? It doesn't matter whether or not a comment is any good. It's a scratch my back mentality. And I bet this comment remains without mod points. Meanwhile, a climate change agency would be a fantastic idea, but the majority of americans (the dumb ones) believe global warming to be a liberal lie. So.... good luck getting it going.
http://wwww.zerospeaks.com
Creating a separate service for climate prediction is like saying we need a separate FBI to work on predicting future crimes. Just let the National Weather Service work on climate (hello, weather!) prediction. Come to think of it, why isn't the NWS working on this already??
Troll? Ok, parent is wrong about denialists inventing the term "climate change", but is mostly right on. I'm really surprised that in a site full of supposedly technically savvy people that there are so many here who haven't really looked at the evidence, or looked at it and somehow came to the bizarre conclusion that there's nothing to worry about. I've read about 6 books on climate change in the past few months, both by deniers and by warmists, and spend a lot of time reading blogs like realclimate and climateaudit, and if there's anything that's clear it's that anyone who claims to have all the answers is full of crap. Claiming that the science indicating global warming could be a problem is all fabricated nonsense is really right up there with claiming the moon landings never happened. Yes there is uncertainty in the data we have, but that cuts both ways. There's at least as much uncertainty in the claims made by deniers as warmists. So to latch onto denier arguments and say "see! it's all a hoax!" is just ridiculous. Seriously, you people need to read Hanson's Storms of My Grandchildren. Then Schneiders Science as a Contact Sport. Also read Michael's "Climate of Extremes". Even he (a "denier") says right near the beginning "Global warming is happening. Get over it." His is the only denier book I've read that isn't full of obviously incorrect hooey, so I recommend it. (His position is that it's happening, but we can't do anything about it, and we didn't cause it, and it may even be beneficial). But seriously people. Educate yourselves a little bit before you go spouting off moronic statements like kimvette above. Watching Fox news and reading conservative blogs does not count as educating yourself!
But these people are: http://www.realclimate.net/
All this rhetoric and allegory is laughable.
Planetary Science: Ask the people to say why Mercury is colder than Venus.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I really could care who "feels" there data is correct or not. I have yet to see any real science in a lot of things for a lot of time. Seems like all science is adulterated by politics and groups who want the control anymore. This is why we no longer have much innovation any longer. Let treat this like the ant and the grasshopper. Let me be the grasshopper who could care less, and you can be the ant spending yourself into oblivion regarding knee jerk, "consensus driven" science. Let me be the one who starves to death and goes by the wayside if you are correct. But I want to contribute not one thin dime to this obvious power grab. Think the "oil cartel meanies" are putting out false data? So what - make money by investing in them instead of trying to jam down failed greenie weanie projects that are not money makers (See economics in Spain home of the economically failed greenie weanie industry). Then when the world comes to an end you can claim your spot in style.
I'm sure that with a separate National Climate Service, more funds will be available to maintain and inspect these stations. The dramatic falloffs in station numbers can be probably be traced to budget cuts.
First, your post makes no sense. It's clear you never advanced past high school English. Read back what you wrote, especially the sentence discussing "you Christy and Douglas".
Second, it's time for a fact check from the NY times. Here's just ONE notable figure in the global warming profit model, Al Gore:
"And few have put as much money behind their advocacy as Mr. Gore and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes."
Now before you respond to that quote, READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE THE QUOTE WAS IN!
Gore’s Dual Role: Advocate and Investor
THAT'S the get-rich-quick scheme! There are plenty more examples out there, but I picked this one because it's from an "objective source".
Now why was parent's post modded down?
If you start out by assuming your conclusions, then cherry-pick your data, it's amazing what you can "prove."
Good, inexpensive web hosting
.....you call people who disagreed with you "teabagging yahoos" after using phrases like "I'm pretty sure 'climate change' was invented by denialists, not scientists"...and you wonder why someone marked you a troll!?!?
Lemme give you a small lesson. "I'm pretty sure" isn't scientific...but it was indeed scientists who revised what they had been calling global warming since they realized that 'global warming' wasn't an accurate description of what they were seeing. Regardless of your POV here, that's a fact that nobody in their right mind is going to deny, especially since the scientists now refer to it as 'change' not 'warming'.
Secondly, demeaning your opposition with phrases like "teabagger" isn't cool; it's troll behavior and little more. Yes, I think it's funny BUT I don't dare use it in political discourse as it will only polarize people against you. I had a good friend point this out when I was using in fun and realized that *I* had to make the change before I was going to change someone else's mind.
That said, if the scientific data weren't so miserably absent on BOTH sides of this debate, I might actually be willing to side with one or the other but as it stands I'm definitely on the fence about the whole situation. I'm more than happy to admit that the Russian "controversy" was set up by someone like Sean Hannity, but I'm also wise enough to plot temp vs CO2 from the data on NOAA's site and I discovered the bit about how the CO2 spikes as temperature is about to drop does seem far more plausible since it's a clear trend over the past 400,000 years; the cooling trend that the climatologists are now admitting to would seem to point at that as well; try it, you may well be surprised at what you see; I was.
Regardless, we're only 1 year into a 30 year cooling phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and I'm waiting to see if it only lasts 15 as the climatologists half hinted that it would because the warm phase lasted ONLY 30 years and you'd expect that to be longer if we were really warming; and the past 2 cycles were 30-ish year phases each so why the EXTREME predictions of the demise of its endurance? Makes me think they're full of shit, but so is Sean Hannity.
Extreme predictions require extreme evidence.
This is a truly sweet link. Thanks for it. This was not a friendly interview.
Maxume's comment notwithstanding, he is truly throwing AGW under the bus. "Warming since 1950" includes the periods 1950-1995 (some warming) and 1995-present (he admits no warming at all). Admits doubt about local nature of Midieval Warm Period. Admits measurement challenges and sensitivity of instruments.
His response to the Yamal question was particularly interesting. Rather than respond to the question he referred to the Briffa paper here. Look closely and you'll find that the maximum number of trees is about 77. Even if a tree were equivalent to a NIST calibrated platinum thermocouple, 75 trees is not enough measurement points in that vast area. Demotes interpretation of Yamal data from "proved science" to "I believe it's sound".
And then the killer quote:
N - When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over", what exactly do they mean - and what don't they mean?
It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.
There you go. Phil Jones doesn't think the debate on climate change is over - even for the instrumental measurements and especially for the palaeoclimatic. And then there's the "independent review" mentioned several times:
T - Where do you draw the line on the handling of data? What is at odds with acceptable scientific practice? Do you accept that you crossed the line?
This is a matter for the independent review.
That's shorthand for "I can't talk about that." There are several of these. And then a sweet, sweet close:
W - Finally, a personal question: Do you expect to return as director of the Climatic Research Unit? What is next for you?
This question is not for me to answer.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If you read the article, you'd see that the writer is quoting a Russian press release (pdf). If you speak Russian, you can translate it (or try an online translation). Don't disregard the message because you don't like the messenger.
My company home page
There's a company in Dublin, New Hampshire that's been doing this for over 100 years.
Figure it out for yourself.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I swear, I'll never understand your obsession with Gore. It's the views of ~97% of climate scientists that we care about. Gore's opinions have no more bearing on the science than Christopher Monckton's or Michael Crichton's do.
Kneel Before Christ!
More citations:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7177230/New-errors-in-IPCC-climate-change-report.html
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/international/the-hottest-hoax-in-the-world
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7009081.ece
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html
http://digg.com/environment/Scientist_Admits_IPCC_Used_Faked_Data
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
Bus? He isn't saying anything substantially different from what the climate science community says.
mt
So then your sources are a Russian think tank (who, by the way, tried to publish papers on their claims, but failed to pass peer-review on them), and now a meteorologist (*very* different from a climatologist) and a computer programmer? Really?
Here's why the idiots who push these "omitting stations" claims can't pass peer-review on them: they're *supposed* to omit stations. It's not done manually; it's done algorithmically. The primary reason for this is yet another thing that the deniers fault them for, without realizing that their two attacks are in direct contradiciton with one another: that a lot of the stations are bad. So what they do is first look for regional trends. A heat wave hitting NYC will also tend to hit Philadelphia, but not Los Angeles. So you find the correlation in temperature anomalies between stations. You then have it look for individual stations that buck the trend. You also have it look for individual stations that suddenly experience a persistent discontinuity. Stations with problems are automatically either corrected for or eliminated, so long as each region that shows consistent correlated temperatures has representative stations. The results of this are then validated by a number of subsequent papers. For example, urban heat island effect elimination is demonstrated by comparing trends on windy days with those on calm days (heat island effect is diminished on windy days).
Additionally, there are a few "inconvenient" facts for the people who push these arguments. One, the same trends show up when you just dumb-average all stations, or just rural stations, or just urban stations. Even more inconvenient is that the stations that Watts' team of deniers flags as "bad" show *more* warming than those that he flags as "good". Why? Because the "bad" stations tend to be located near human settlement, and are generally a cheaper type of sensor than the fully-standalone ones that tend to be in "good" locations. The cheaper sensors have a small tendency to report cooler temperatures than the better, standalone ones.
Kneel Before Christ!
Just look to the "Oh Noes, the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035" fiasco... Seriously, has anyone done a FOIA request to see if the guy who made that "typo" also put it on his recent $30 million grant application? I'm dying to see the results of that one.
I'm really surprised that in a site full of supposedly technically savvy people that there are so many here who haven't really looked at the evidence,
It's not really surprising. Slashdot is full of people who think that knowing how to use a computer makes them humanity's elite. For several years now, slashdot has been overrun by arrogant assholes whose only education outside of computing is reading Ayn Rand.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Every time the federal government creates a new agency, it's an opportunity for other agencies to get rid of their dead wood by transferring them. Happened with the department of education, the department of energy, and the department of homeland security.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
A russian press release from an economics think tank that claims some sort of affinity with the Cato Institute, The Frazer Institute, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the Hayek institute. Well, at least it wears its politics on its sleeve.
Even if you believe that global warming is not human caused, it still is a good idea to have someone looking at long term climate change and figuring out which areas will be unsustainable for agriculture/settlement in the future.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Oh, yes, they were. You probably weren't even alive back in the 70s, but I was and I remember it very well. I was in college working on degrees in biology and chemistry.
Most scientists didn't take part in the madness back then the way they're doing this time, but some did. The key word used back then was "imminent". Bah! The public never knew who to believe anyway, just like now. Junk science then; junk science now. Not much real science going on in the climate business.
Alaska convened several working groups to discuss the implications of climate change in their state. Why, because they have been experiencing problems that affect the health, safety, and welfare of the citizens of the state. The Alaska Climate Change Strategy (http://www.climatechange.alaska.gov/) outlines some of the changes they are experiencing. The lack of sea ice has threatened nine villages because of shore erosion. The villages are in the process of being relocated.
They are also reviewing design standards for new roads and bridges in certain areas of the state because of the loss of permafrost.
Lest ye forget, the "Oh noes, the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035" ordeal wasn't even derived from a single fact. It was a game of "telephone" and nothing more. Pro-warming reporter for New Scientist trusts an obscure Indian scientist who gives an off-the-cuff number; World Wildlife Fund trusts New Scientist; IPCC trusts WWF, to which I say "WTF!?!? might as well have been the fake wresting thing". Sure, it may not mean the rest of the data is wrong but why doesn't the IPCC do some damage control and cut-out those who are shown to outright use them as a political tool like Murari Lal? You prop up the IPCC's credibility but then they continue to let that lying fuck have anything to do with their science(I wouldn't let him mop their floors) and you wonder why people don't trust them? The American government had a helluva time with credibility while GWB was in charge and Congress refused to put him in prison so why should we treat a lesser organization shown to allow the promotion of a political agenda? I might note, Murari's assertion about the glaciers is STILL published on the IPCC's site...
NOAA spokesperson on government funded NPR proposes the creation of NCS. NOAA is 7,000 of DOCs 150,000 within the 2,500,000 civil employee Federal Government, almost 2% of the entire US workforce. Average wage of Federal employees climbs past $70k, plus bennies, plus pension, plus union immunities.
I'm not a man to believe in 9/11 government conspiracies, but believing that global warming is a tool used by lying progressives to get large government control is not so far fetched. The great battle right now is between those who love their freedom and those who would enslave the citizens of the United States. President Obama doesn't care for us, he just wants to lull us into foolish submission with government controlled labor.
This smells like another attempt to get politicians or eco-opportunists into "the climate business".Remember, they almost pulled it off. It was really disappointing and scary to me that there are some out there who wold pull any kind of stunt and use any tactic to support using allegedly "settled science" to achieve very questionable political goals. Once again, don't get your science from Politicians, celebrities or lawyers. Examine why you believe what you do. Honest skepticism is healthy. To those who call skeptics "deniers" (like holocaust deniers), please keep your religion to yourself.True scientists are skeptical, as they should be.
Your last source just links to your second-to-last source, in a convoluted way.
They also all seem to be talking about the same event, so I think I can safely drop this down to a single source (Raj Pachauri) you've managed to discredit.
Unless I'm sorely mistaken about the sheer number of other sources, I don't think this helps your case much.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Most scientists didn't take part in the madness back then the way they're doing this time, but some did.
And that certainly doesn't mean the last one was a dumb fad and this one is real, no, it clearly means it's this one that is completely untrue! Clearly the more scientists who agree on something, the less true it is!
liar, you don't know of "thousands of other studies"
the truth is, we're off the "hockey stick" of so many studies that are nothing more or less than extrapolation of an usually warm period of time. Now that the data of the last three years shows us off the hockey stick, and that all the billions of dollars and euros and yen were an utter waste, now we see this foolishness of a department devoted to propagation of useless models and forecasts.
just like the CRU does, spouting nonsense and cherry picking data to please their political benefactors.
Whoooo there nelly... people on /. have kids?!?!?!?! That is scarier than climate change.
My 2 cents:
First penny:When did Homo Sapiens bow out of nature? Are we not a part of the puzzle? Don't we get a say on who eats who and who gets eaten?
Second penny: Last time the Earth went through a warm period there was more species and diversity. I thought that was a good thing, but I am just a guy with an inoperable brain tumor partially living off thd sytem. (I collect both SSDI and disability insurance, As I feel it should be.)
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."
liar, you don't know of "thousands of other studies"
I never claimed to, so how does that make me a liar? I only asserted that they exist.
the truth is...
Liar, you're simply making assertions with no citations to back them up.
It may seem hypocritical, but you know what? You guys started it. The original post I was replying to asserted it was a "farce", yet provided absolutely no evidence to support that claim. I'm simply responding in kind -- if you can assert something without evidence, so can I, and we can have a shouting match.
Or maybe, just maybe, someone will start bringing some facts into the discussion. Scroll up a bit, you'll find some actual intelligence (not mine) involved.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
over the past ten years, the "climatologists" (not real scientists) have wasted billions of dollars saying "climate change will cause drought", then "climate change will cause stronger storms, then "climate change will cause flooding"...depending on what the global weather at the time seemed to be doing. Thus exposing their basic methodology of cooking the books to conform to what answers they wanted, including taking a 25 year period and extrapolating into the future to get the "hockey stick". They when planet earth went off the hockey stick, "where is the heat going?" the "climatologists" were wailing, and now the public is awakened to their scam.
We don't need a government organ devoted to spewing unscientific nonsense to support the agenda of Al Gore and his ilk. We don't need to continue the funding of utterly useless and bogus "climate models" that have nothing to do with what the sun-driven climate of this planet (and all the other planets, as real scientists have noted).
The real purpose of climatology as practised has to do with channeling of trillions of dollars of wealth through the World Bank in "cap and trade" fraud, and the pumping up of carbon emission derivatives for the money cartels such as Goldman Sachs.
I award you a comprehension fail.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
And those 'arrogant assholes' are finding a remarkable resemblence of the liberal march to a fictional story written more than 50 years ago. Strange but true. What's going to happen when the computer professionals shrug?
and now a meteorologist (*very* different from a climatologist) and a computer programmer? Really?
Don't knock them because of their group. A meteorologist knows and uses the same differential equation climate models as climatologists. In fact, meteorologists use more detailed models of local climate in their weather forecasts than climatologists use in their global predictions. The physics are the same. The purpose and statistics are slightly different.
Thousands of studies have confirmed it? Really?
I think you mean that thousands of studies have stated it as though it were a fact. The number of studies that actually confirm, from first principles, that (a) the earth is warming and (b) man's actions are unequivocally responsible for this are somewhat smaller than "thousands". Like by several orders of magnitude.
That said, if the scientific data weren't so miserably absent on BOTH sides of this debate, I might actually be willing to side with one or the other but as it stands I'm definitely on the fence about the whole situation.
Congratulations, you're a skeptic. Which, these days, means you're tarred as a denier, and thus are no better than a baby-killer according to some folks. Personally, I view healthy skepticism as a good thing, but apparently we're not allowed to do that any more. Must have missed that memo.
Modding "-1, Troll" is not a proper response if you disagree with me. Try reason.
And those arrogant assholes are stupid. That's the point. Being a "computer professional" does not necessarily mean that one is intelligent.
... and then they built the supercollider.
There's a source that supports the position that "denialists" came up with the term "climate change:"
"Luntz advises that, “’Climate change’ is less frightening than ’global warming.’ ... While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge” (p. 142)."
source: http://www.ewg.org/node/8684
Frank Luntz is the Republican pollster and go-to person to craft Republican messaging.
It constantly amazes me that the people who complain about politicizing science, are the ones who are doing it the most.
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
youd buy stock in what were gonna do to you? good for you, maybe you climate deniers will come out of the feathering ahead
Political benefactors?
Climate research is a political black hole. It's nice to talk about and support change in theory, but when it comes to action, the fiscal ramifications relegate serious change to a 25 or 50 year plan.
We can improve auto efficiency all we want, we can try to change household energy consumption habits all we want, but until a real technological replacement for coal plants is solved we will never turn things around. Over a billion people around the planet live in destitution and burn wood fires for cooking daily. Many billions more are getting their power from dirty coal plants.
There isn't much in climate change that is politically beneficial, except to admit that the problem exists and we're pretending to work hard on solving it.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Is it so rational to ignore the views of the vast majority of climatologists on climate change?
Perhaps not, but it might might be a good idea to consider the views of climatologists with some skepticism, for the same reasons you would the views of petroleum geologists. There are those on both sides of the issue that have a vested interest in convincing policymakers of a certain conclusion.
Makers of AntiVirus software have NEVER overstated the impact of a given computer virus right? Climatologists ought to be almost as trustworthy right?
Were we reading the same article? Did you open the posted URLs (hatefully not linked)?
I know you don't want to believe it. It goes against a lot of your established, posted and quoted opinions. But here Phil Jones is admitting Doubt - not just about small things, but about the very premises on which Climate Change Alarmism is based. When asked about dendro-proxy data he defers to the Briffa paper that cites at most 77 trees and chooses trees based on how well they match the desired conclusion. He doesn't disparage it but the implication to read the data is clear, and he's distancing himself from the conclusion in that way. A year ago his response might have been much different.
He confirms warming, and denies that the science is settled on the cause. He may has well said "we live in an interglacial age" and the jury is out on what humans are doing to impact climate. This is so far at odds with his published opinion that "throwing AGW under the bus" is an appropriate description.
I know moderation is going to be harsh in this thread, and one particular admin is going to run rampant with her unlimited mod points. I don't care. I'm not going to let her stifle discussion.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Professor Richard Alley recently gave a presentation called "The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Climate History," in which he makes the case that climate models simply don't work right unless you incorporate CO2.
The key point he makes is that there is a record dating back over 400 million years that provides proof that climate is sensitive to CO2. Doubling CO2 adds 3 degrees C to global temperature.
There are multiple lines of evidence to support climate sensitivity, and additional research is filling in what gaps might have been missing, and further strengthening the argument.
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
We've always been at war with Eastasia
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I am of the opinion that this whole argument is a red herring and really only a small part of the big picture. There is no point in arguing about Climate Change because the real issue should be referred to as "TOXIC GAS BUILDUP" We live in a closed system. Any waste we produce doesn't go away. Carbon Dioxide is only one of many chemicals which are toxic to humans which we human are producing in ever increasing amounts. Just looking at Carbon takes our eye off the ball for the bigger problem. And gives the Climate deniers something to pretend isn't true. Go up into the hills above most major cities and look down on the brown sludge floating in the air and water and tell me we don't need to change the way we do business in a big way and soon. Anything else is a distraction. Wake up. Come out of your Mothers basement and look at the state of the world around you. Humans can't live on Sludge the way Cockroaches can and no amount of pretending will allow them to.
Relevant quote:
My own interference with this great question, while sanctioned by many eminent names, has been also an object of varied and ingenious attack. On this point I will only say that when angry feeling escapes from behind the intellect, where it may be useful as an urging force, and places itself athwart the intellect, it is liable to produce all manner of delusions. Thus my censors, for the most part, have levelled their remarks against positions which were never assumed, and against claims which were never made.
- John Tyndall, 1881
http://transcribingtyndall.wordpress.com/2008/08/
Phil is talking like climate scientists talk. There is nothing remotely unusual in any of it. Your problem is you don't know how to spin it when you have actual scientist talk in front of you. Sorry to confuse you so badly.
mt
That's pretty ironic.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Making energy more expensive will slow down the world economy. For us in the West, that's a recession at worst - annoying, but our governments and way of life will survive.
For India, that's hundreds of millions of people getting out of subsistence farming more slowly. Given the choice, they'll choose to improve their lives this generation rather than next, and they DO get a vote.
Same for China, with the added risk of a revolt if their economy stops growing. The only reason the average Chinese peasant puts up with their abusive government is the possibility that industrialization will improve their lives - if their economy stalls, someone will pick up one of those Little Red Books they have lying around, and think "say... this might just work again, you know?"
India and China will industrialize as efficiently as they can, because their people will demand it.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
You've also just proven what i've always said about the peer review argument - it's a circular reference, you don't take anything not in a peer reviewed mag as valid, but the people publishing the peer reviewed articles won't publish anything anti global warming. with climate gate you've got evidence that "peers" are in fact pushing an agenda of their own and actively seeking to derail any descenting views.
if the global warming crowd could stop foaming at the mouth for long enough to make a non emotive arguement you might actually sway some of us skeptics over to your side.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
and we can change the climate to make things better
That is what makes me suspicious of what some might call "gorebots"--those that assume not only the problem exists the way they see it, but that the solution is to try and "undo" it.
I think there is enough scientific evidence to suggest the climare is changing, that the world is slowly warming up, and even that human actvity involving the release of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases has affected climate.
What I am VERY concerned about is that there is so much certainty that the problem is acutually reversible simply by doing less of what they think caused the problem, and so little attention is being given to actually adapting to what might actually be too late to change.
Perhaps we could spend less time and money setting up elabourate carbon counting and trading schemes and start looking at REAL efficiency and conservation efforts (not just those that directly involve carbon emissions), investing in infrastructure to protect costal communities that we are fairly certain are vulnerable to rising sea levels, and so on.
It sounds like this national climate service specifically includes this as part of its proposed mandate, so that somewhat promising.
There's plenty of real science being done, but it's being done by a bunch of rubes who assumed that all their initial data could be trusted since it came from government sponsored agencies.
I remember that too. Also, we were going to be out of oil by the mid-eighties.
Shouldn't California be underwater by now as well?
I swear, I'll never understand your obsession with Gore. It's the views of ~97% of climate scientists that we care about. Gore's opinions have no more bearing on the science than Christopher Monckton's or Michael Crichton's do.
It is hard to say that his views do not have bearing when he won the Nobel prize for that sham of a movie he made.
I'm sure that with a separate National Climate Service, more funds will be available to maintain and inspect these stations. The dramatic falloffs in station numbers can be probably be traced to budget cuts.
Actually, I think the argument is that the misinformation was used to get more funds. It's funny that you think that throwing more money at this will change things.
Conspiracy theory A requires you to believe the government has the ability to magically disguise the major construction work and control runs needed to set up the supposedly controlled demo of the WTC from the people working in the building, supposedly done within the period of less than one year. Conspiracy theory B merely requires you to believe a wing of the government is trying to behave as it's first principles dictate, with any actual conspiracy merely being vocal or in paper form. No need to actually do anything physical.
1) How did the IPCC come into this? We were discussing how the different peer-reviewed temperature datasets are built up. Oh, that's right, you wanted to change the subject to whatever talking points you had handy.
2) "wasn't even derived from a single fact" -- Yes, it was. The New Scientist got the digits reversed. It was a typo that got spread. Saying that it "wasn't even derived from a single fact" is false; it was derived from the date of 2350.
3) It wasn't an "off-the-cuff number". It was a number from an upcoming paper.
4) "IPCC trusts WWF" -- first off, the IPCC explicitly *is* allowed to use industry, NGO, and governmental sources, not just peer-reviewed sources. This is typically only done in WG2 and WG3, which, contrary to how this is being played, are *not* about the science of global warming. WG1 is about the science of global warming, and is much more heavily reviewed. WG2 is basically a news report, and WG3 is how to avert AGW. Over, even in WG2 and WG3, the overwhelming percent of cites are peer-reviewed papers. If you want to attack the science of AGW, you need to attack WG1. And furthermore...
5) the complaints are about a handful of places in a *three thousand page report*. And we're not talking about a handful of *pages* in a 3,000 page report; just a handful of *claims* (there are generally a couple dozen claims per page). So, it's your turn: write a 3,000 page report with dozens of claims per page without a single error, *then* complain to me about a lack of perfection. If you want to show that the IPCC report (let alone WG1, if you want to attack the science rather than the news) is unreliable, you're going to need a *much* greater error rate than ~0.003%.
Kneel Before Christ!
@Kythe
"As I recall, we didn't nail the germ theory of disease right off the bat, too--yet I'll bet you take your antibiotics."
Yeah,now
"MRSA is a type of Staph bacteria that can cause very serious bacterial infections. MRSA stands for methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). MRSA is caused by Staphylococcus aureus or "Staph," that has acquired an immunity or resistance to the penicillin type of antibiotics..."
Let's try not to fix something we don't really understand and make it worse. Doing nothing till an answer is derived is a viable action. What we can all agree upon is Maurice Strong is a shadowy figure and has way to much power and money.
So you assert that things exist of which you don't know?
How is that not an ungrounded assertion then or some really bizarre behaviour.
Letter sender: "Did you get that letter I sent you?"
You: "I don't know of any letters from you which I have received."
Letter sender: "Hmm, but I put it right in your in-box. You actually didn't receive the letter from me?"
You: "I didn't say that! In fact, I did receive it, I just don't know of it."
Letter sender (+ everyone else): "What?"
Conspiracy theory B merely requires you to believe a wing of the government is trying to behave as it's first principles dictate, with any actual conspiracy merely being vocal or in paper form. No need to actually do anything physical.
But it also requires you to believe that government is controlled by "lying progressives" - when in reality, progressives are almost non-existent in government. It also seems to require belief in some powerful group wanting to "enslave the citizens" and who hates freedom. This group isn't defined, but it is implied by proximity that this is liberals and the Obama administration.
In other words, a crackpot theory that is just as insane as the 9/11 conspiracy theories.
... and then they built the supercollider.
An organization cannot "agree", "disagree" or hold any other opinion. What you mean is that some people claim to speak on behalf of some other people, who most likely have not been unanimous or even individually asked.
These fine organizations you mention are either government organizations or are there to lobby the government. What a surprise that they should "agree" with the government, with the likely effect of some taxpayer money sent their way!
You see, "science" in the name does not make a political representation organization any less political. People who head these organizations are usually third-rate as scientists, and real scientists hardly ever bother to attend meetings, vote, or even join "scientific" organizations that claim to represent them -- they have real work to do.
I believe the climate is changing, as it always has and thank goodness we're on the upstroke of an interglacial age - the crop growing region is moving toward the arable land, which is good for feeding our teeming billions. Another 5C and most of Russia and Canada become farmland instead of permafrost. I would say that this would make much of southern California uninhabitable, but that would be redundant. The first three settlements there were never heard from again - it's a desert made habitable with water resources that are desertifying millions of square miles of external lands.
On whether humans are impacting this process I might admit that we have had some barely measureable impact, though I wouldn't claim to know it for sure. Most especially I would not claim that were a bad thing
But on whether anything ill will come of that, I have much doubt. Most especially whether the ill will outweigh the good is a serious question. Whether we need to do anything about seas that rise mere millimeters a year I would seriously debate. We have much more important issues to discuss from colonization of Mars and the Asteroid belt, beginning the work on interstellar travel, to observing and preparing to defend against the inevitable world-crushing asteroid - to preserve Man against real known threats. To worry about how much it will cost the remote descendants of some residents of the Phillipines to move their huts further from an encroaching sea is absurd. If they don't want to get wet they should move inland at a stately 4 meters per year and they will without intervention as the water comes up. To crush the world economy on the speculation that Global Climate Change might escape to infinity based on the available evidence? That's madness.
And about the "Science" of "Scientists" who won't show their work, I have outright disbelief. We might as well subscribe to the opinions of Kevin Trudeau. What have they got that he hasn't got, and more importantly, what do they not want you to know?
But call me a denier if you want. Labelling and ad-hominem seems to be the message of your political party.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Sorry to confuse you so badly.
Unless you're Maxume's alt, why the apology?
About your derision: it's beneath my contempt. If this is all you have you've wasted your time.
Apparently the way "climate scientists talk" is so divorced from reality that it's a language unto itself. A thing is what it is. Words mean things. Did you think I chose "symbolset" accidentally? That would be a bad guess.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Citations? One can argue if you want to believe them or not, but: US data., Austrailian data., and African data.. And there's plenty more of non-data related repudiations (wrongly quoted, science does not support the conclusion....) if you bother looking.
Has there been a time in recent memory when the given reasons for tax rises matched the way the money was spent? I thought that trend died in the 1950's.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
He won the Peace Prize, not a Nobel Prize in a science. Once again, it's the science and the views of scientists in the field that we care about. What is hard for you to understand about this?
Kneel Before Christ!
So you assert that things exist of which you don't know?
I assert that there are currently thousands of people living in this building. I don't know all of them by name. Does that help?
I am not making a claim to absolute knowledge. It could turn out that only the people on my floor and a few nearby floors actually live here, and the rest of the building is abandoned. However, it seems like a reasonable assumption that it's mostly occupied, based on other observations. Even if I were to come across an abandoned room, I wouldn't immediately assume the rest of the building is abandoned -- it takes more than one to establish a trend.
You may also be conflating this with my "responding in kind" comment -- I was responding to someone who provided absolutely no evidence, so I didn't feel the need to provide any evidence. That doesn't mean I have none, only that I didn't provide it -- mostly because I'm lazy, but also because the burden is on the original poster.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This is some quality work. It's nicely done. I would say what kind of work but I don't want to take away from the beauty of it.
But somebody here appreciates the fine line you're cutting. Well done!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If you have actually read both sides, I don't think you have read the other side very well. All the serious ones (if you can filter out the noise) say not that there is no global warming - they say that it is not significant. Given that the Little Ice Age ended ~1850, it should surprise no one that 160 years later, the planet is warmer than what it was back then. A very good read about the matter can be seen here.. It (as all other things) is incomplete, for sure, but is the best even-handed summary that I've come across.
And that post is the first time i've mentioned Al Gore, you twit.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I don't think that any reasonable person, or even most of slashdot, considers a skeptic a bad person. It's people who post crap without any evidence to back their claim that are a problem.
If you say you believe in global warming... sorry, climate change... because random news caster told you to believe it, you're no better than the one that doesn't believe it because random news caster told you it's fake.
Climatology has about as much overlap with biology and geology as it does with meteorology. Meteorologists start at current and look into the future until the locations, intensities, etc of various systems ceases to reliably match up. Climatologists start at any point in time (past or present) and extend the trends past the chaos to compile averages of events, not when said specific events will occur. Meteorologists don't care about the "why". They don't care why the level of insolation is what it is, why the current average level of water vapor is 5% higher than it was in the 1970s, etc; a meteorologist would never even dream of looking at sunspot levels in their forecast, or how the current level of galactic cosmic radiation is affecting our climate. These sorts of things are critical to climatology. The fact that decreased rainfall in China would mean increased dust levels over the Pacific which would seed greater algal growth which would lower CO2 levels which would alter temperatures in the US doesn't even begin to factor into the equation to a meteorologist. But that sort of thing is very important to climatologists. Meteorological models are greatly simplified because of this; climatologists don't use anything like the GFS. Meteorologists wouldn't dream of looking at tree rings, or ice cores, or boreholes. I could keep on going.
Kneel Before Christ!
I am noticing in many of the posts here a distinct lack of intellectual rigour. A friend of mine is an engineering professor, and he notices this amongst his students too. Specifically, many of his students have an attitude where they feel they can question any scientific theory. Fine you might say. After all, isn't it good to be skeptical? Well yes, perhaps. But when he asks these students specifically why they doubt a particular theory, they can't make a logical argument to support their position. They just say it doesn't intuitively seem right. It is almost as if they don't really comprehend the reasons for their opinions. And this is amongst elite engineering students.
If I could venture my own opinion on this, I think that relativistic values (and I don't mean Einstein) have seeped into much of our educational system, and by extension to society at large. This relativistic world is a place where there is no real truth, where all opinions are relative to the self and are essentially given equal value. In such a world, taken to its extreme, there are no facts, only opinions. Everything is relative.
On the left, we see university professors pontificating from institutions founded on Greek principles of Truth and Freedom of Inquiry that these Greek principles are merely just another cultural view in their relativistic universe. And from the right, we see religious leaders cavalierly rejecting the search for Truth through rational inquiry and observation, preferring to create their own "Truth" as revealed in the bible. What both of these extremes are forgetting is that this country was founded on Greek principles of Truth and Freedom of Inquiry, that in the founders' minds, the Greeks were a primary inspiration. Separation of Church and State; Science; Universities where Truth is the primary virtue; the ideals of Justice; a three class society, in which the Middle Class (the Polis) forms the backbone of society; Democracy. These were ALL Greek values and ideals. And has been these Greek ideals that have made our country great.
If you don't believe this, I suggest you read some Greek literature. Plato. Aristotle. Aristophanes. Sophocles. In Greek literature you will find commentary on many of the most important issues our society faces. The Greeks even wrote about cultural relativism. I believe we are sorely in need of a rediscovery of Greek wisdom.
And here is my main point. I believe that many in our society are abandoning the Greek values that have made our civilization great. Values such as searching for Truth for Truth's sake through rational inquiry and logic. Skills such as rigorous logic applied in rational debate. In our modern technological society it often seems that Truth should only be pursued for material gain, for profit and not simply because it is noble to pursue the truth. Thus it is easy for business executives to ignore inconvenient facts if those facts might interfere with profit margins. And it is easy for religious followers to adopt truths that make them feel more comfortable with their chosen worldview. After all, if all Truth is relative, then why not pick an easy and comfortable Truth.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
who, by the way, tried to publish papers on their claims, but failed to pass peer-review on them
This is especially rich given the revealed suppression of publications and heretical papers in the climategate emails. Are there no depths you will not plumb to fit your theory? This is not science.
I can't even believe you still dare to bang this drum. Have you no pride?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
We're going to take tax payer money to create a body that creates "long term projections".
Okay, we've had assorted loonies out on the corner for centuries preaching the end of the world.
Now we want to nationalize them?
Don't we have BETTER things to be spending our money on?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
He won the Peace Prize, not a Nobel Prize in a science. Once again, it's the science and the views of scientists in the field that we care about. What is hard for you to understand about this?
You mean, you might care about the views of scientists in the field. My observation has been that the scientists in that field are only slightly less trust-worthy that priests and snake-handlers. Sorry, but I don't accept "cuz the scientists say so" as the alpha and omega of veracity.
If I had a nickel for every stupid idea I've seen promoted by scientists in my lifetime, I'd be able to retire to a nice warm climate myself. Lobotomies and eugenics, anyone?
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Don't try hide behind the dictionary, the intention of calling people "deniers" is to try tar them with the same brush as holocost deniers. I'm well aware of what your trying to do with that turn of phrase. "denier" isn't a term you use when someone disagree's with you in the scientific community, it's a term religous zealots use.
Well, what did you expect from a Jew?
We in the U.S. have decided that separation of church and state is a good idea.
I wonder how long until we decide that separation of science and state is also a good idea.
This sounds like it will be an office of propaganda, not a scientific establishment.
--
Toro
The publications were published, the "heretical papers" were published. So your claim fails at the first hurdle.
Since real,
Since real scientists don't use pejoratives like "denialist" in referring to those with whom they disagree, one is forced to conclude that you have not actually educated yourself at all, and that you are not interested in the science at all.
You might want to educate yourself a little more about science before posting nonsense like this.
Look, I get that you're playing to the audience rather than replying to the idiot who prompted you. That's fine.
The thing is, all of your weathergaarble is deprecated. We don't believe it any more. We once did, but it turns out those stories about thermal apocolypse 2004 didn't happen. You can Gaarble all you want about 2035, but we bought it once and we won't be fooled again.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
No it isn't. The word is regularly applied to a variety of groups with no such connotations, and the only people who claim it to be used like that are hyperbolic asshats like you who are trying to dig up every little possible niggling detail to demonize their opponents. If you have nothing more substantial than "OMG YOU SAID DENIER", then you might as well bring out the white flag already.
First alarmists were preaching global cooling, then global warming.
Keep in mind that journalists don't always convey what the scientific community is trying to say very accurately. I'll try to explain it to you. In the last 20.000 the climate has been really stable, ridiculously stable compared to the climate before that. Before the temperature would go up and down like a roller coaster ride, I'm not talking about centuries here, I'm talking about periods of decades to years The thing that keeps climatologists up all night is that the numbers strongly suggest that human activity seems to bringing us back to this unstable climate. Why is that bad? Well it would, for example, make modern agriculture extremely challenging, and feeding the world would become more and more difficult over time.
and now that global warming is proving to be a farce
And it looks like the propagandists are getting better and better at their game. And you fell for it.
Working this "first Hurdle" meme pretty hard, are you? Hurdling is for people who can't run.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What happened to Obama's Spending freeze? Now they want to create a new bureaucratic government agency with all sorts of high paid administrators?
You know, when it gets warmer, you get less freeze.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
> Oh, yes, they were.
no really, they weren't.
they figured out in that time that there were glacial cycles and how to use fast Fourier transforms, and that if these cycles continued we are overdue for another ice age. the same way that many places get hit by earthquakes or meteors which a frequency you can average.
and these years later we still sit at the presumed end of a remarkably stable and temperate period of earth's history. well except for the last 100 years of course.
Clearly the more scientists who agree on something, the less true it is!
You mean like the consensus that plate tectonics and continental drift was "Utter, damned rot!" etc?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/12/are-scientists-always-smart/
it's in my head
Thousands of other studies have confirmed that the climate is changing, and that humans are responsible.
No. The question is, why do you believe that there are?
it's in my head
the numbers strongly suggest
Numbers from models. Models without predictive power.
Do science.
it's in my head
CO2 takes thousands of years to leave the atmosphere
You're off by orders of magnitude. Estimates from 7 up to about 50 years would be more in line with current state of science.
it's in my head
Just because the climate is changing doesn't mean it is caused by carbon.
Even if it is caused by carbon that doesn't mean we are producing an amount of carbon significant enough to be behind the climate change.
Even if carbon causes climate change and we are producing significant amounts of carbon doesn't mean that mandating lower carbon emissions will have any impact on the carbon output of the world, in fact I can almost guarantee that if we mandate lower carbon emissions all we will do is provide opportunity for other countries to slowly extract all of our capital goods and set up shop there.
What you are pushing for when you say we should lower carbon emissions is a lower quality of life for everyone on the planet (including the poorest). You are claiming that it is a good thing to reduce production and use less energy. The standard of proof should be exceptionally high for a claim like this.
Back in the stone age people drank clean water, breathed clean air, ate organic, free range food and they even got plenty of exercise - yet virtually no one lived past thirty. Yeah, some of that is due to advancements in culture and science, but the vast majority of it is production and energy.
Telling me that 97% of scientists agree that something is true is not the same thing as providing the evidence. Especially when the conclusion is so important to many political organizations.
A lot of you out here seem to think that government funded science is automatically conflict-of-interest-free yet private studies are always to be doubted. What you fail to realize is that politicians choose which fields of government science get funding. Some of these politicians want more power, and any piece of science that justifies expanding their power will probably get funding.
Words from ideas. Ideas without confusing structure.
Do sentences.
the numbers strongly suggest
Numbers from models. Models without predictive power.
That these models have no predictive power is your opinion. These models where designed to make an attempt at predicting the future of climate with the current day knowledge, so these are actually a best guess at what's to come. Can we ask for anything more? And don't confuse with predicting global temperature change with predicting the weather. Local changes are harder to predict than global changes, since the world as a whole is, sort of, a closed system.
Do science.
Good advice, maybe you should take your own.
I do. Science is based on observation, refutation of hypothesis etc. Creating a model and claiming that it's science even though it hasn't been validated in any way (anyone can fit an algorithm to historical data - that's easy) is a sham, however.
Btw, the last part of your post is in error. It's not easier to predict global changes and the world (of which I assume you mean the Earth) is absolutely not a closed system.
it's in my head
I do. Science is based on observation, refutation of hypothesis etc. Creating a model and claiming that it's science even though it hasn't been validated in any way (anyone can fit an algorithm to historical data - that's easy) is a sham, however.
So you're assuming that climatologists don't make observations, don't form hypothesis which they then peer review? Are you for real? There's more to climatology than just "a model" As for validation, the models that climatologists have been using have not been correct over time, that's true. Reality, so far, has turned out to be worse than predicted. (and no one cold winter doesn't mean anything about -global- temperature) Besides all that, what you expect? Double blind tests? We only have one world! Science is always about best guesses, and this is our best guess. To ignore and belittle it is unwise to say the least.
Btw, the last part of your post is in error. It's not easier to predict global changes and the world (of which I assume you mean the Earth) is absolutely not a closed system.
In a sense, when comparing climatology to meteorology, it is. Because at a global level you can determine, roughly, what the heat input and output is. And when you take that into account, anything you do from then on is essentially a closed system. At a local level -nothing- is isolated. That's why climatologists are way more certain about global trends compared to local trends. I may not have been correct to the letter when I said that, but I'm certainly correct in what I was trying to convey.
Just look to the "Oh Noes, the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035" fiasco...
I don't see how anyone could ever have taken that figure seriously. Himalayan glaciers just don't melt that fast. Has they said the Kilimanjaro, or those famously fast-melting glaciers in the Andes, I wouldn't have had a problem with it, but the Himalaya is going to be among the last glaciers to melt. Probably only just before east-Antarctica.
The 2035 fiasco doesn't in any way disprove global warming, but it does prove that that one report was sloppily written and badly read.
It's actually the exact opposite from your scenario. GP claims that there exist letters in other people's mailboxes despite the fact that he doesn't know any of them. You seem to claim that nothing can exist unless you've personally experienced it.
Ah yes true. In trying to be somewhat brief I was instead unclear. My point is that the harm being done to the planet by CO2 as discussed by "Climate Change" is only a small part of the problem. We need to stop getting bogged down in whether Humans are causing Climate change and start seriously looking at how Humans are making a mess of the only planet which we have available to us. Anything else is just short term thinking.
You can disagree with Gore and his lack of charisma, but the grandparent post is right that most people believe in Global Warming due to when most scientist agreeing on something it usual means that they are correct judging by past records. Flat earthers like yourself only need Gore to have someone to make fun off and to push your story it is a political ploy, since you don't have any real arguments against the careful work of thousands of scientists.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
now that global warming is proving to be a farce
How the hell has it been proven to be a farce? Some faulty numbers in a huge WG2 report that was never meant to be scientific?
The green house effect is an old and proven theory. The prediction that our CO2 emissions will eventually lead to global warming is an old one, and so far the observed evidence supports the theory.
Saying some faulty numbers in a non-scientific report disproves all of this is like saying a single gap in the fossil record disproves the Theory of Evolution. Or lack of stars in a photo prove the moon landings are fake. It shows a complete lack of understanding of what the hell you're talking about. It's abusing and mutilating science to support your own preferred world view, rather than looking at science for what the real facts are. Don't rejoice because someone you disagree with made an error, try to figure out what the real facts are, no matter how inconvenient they might be for your world view.
The mouse-over text of the latest XKCD Comic is very relevant here: you don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
I don't post here under any other accounts.
(I did at one point create an Abe Simpson (or something similar) account so that I could post stuff like Maaatloooocck and seeeeeeeeeeex, but I never used it before I lost track of the password)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Naturally present day events resemble the things in that book, and others like it.
That's because the statists and the collectivists always operate in the same way: (1) There is a crisis! (2) Only the Government can resolve it, and then only if we are all willing to put aside politics and work together! (3) For the common good, the people must be compelled to work together by any means necessary.
Over time, they have changed the nature of the crisis, but the tactics have not changed. What is really sad is how easily some Slashdotters are fooled by Government propaganda. The same people who railed against the Patriot Act and the War on Drugs are falling over themselves to tell everyone who is even slightly cynical about this blatant Government job-creation scheme that they're a Nazi Fox News viewer.
"dangitman" and those who modded him up are a case in point. According to them, if you don't buy into the Government bullshit, then you must be an "arrogant asshole" and "stupid". Unlike them. According to the Government, being an AGW believer is definitive proof that you are (1) right about everything, and (2) really smart.
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
Great, yet another federal bureaucracy. Guess what, there are plenty of professional consultants who will help with city planning, etc. Using private industry will be a lot cheaper than building another monstrous federal bureaucracy. The services will be paid for by those who use them, rather than by everyone, whether or not they are needed.
AGW had made no, none, zero long-term predictions that have been correct. Increased hurricanes? Wrong, at historical lows. Continued decrease in arctic ice? Wrong, increasing for 2-1/2 years now. Continued increase in global temperature? Wrong, decreasing trend since 1998. Rapid sea level rise? Wrong - increasing at the same rate it has done for hundreds of years. And on and on...
At the moment, AGW fanboys are saying that anything and everything is proof that they are right - hot weather, cold weather, heavy snow, you name it. The problem is, they have predicted none of these - it's all after the fact, and hence worthless. Given false assumptions, you can prove anything at all.
But, sure, have them make public predictions - put them on record. Also generate control sets (randomly generated predictions). If the AGW predictions exceed the random predictions by a substantial margin, over the course of several years, then and only then should anyone pay any attention to them.
None of this, however, is any justification for the government to establish yet another public agency.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Mismoderated - posting to undo
Yeah, only since 1865...
Moron.
Extra snow is pretty consistent with warming: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1427 The atmosphere holds more moisture at the same relative humidity in a warmer world so precipitation events can end up stronger than usual. Snow is just one form of precipitation.
Need a citation here.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
30,000 scientists? Really? http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610#p/a/u/2/Py2XVILHUjQ
No, not really.
Oh dear.
The only reason you believe the moon landings happened is that the alternative makes you feel nervous. There is nothing in the Apollo program that couldn't be faked in one way or another. It is a matter of faith, just like the global warming or 9-11.
Agreed. However, mitigating pollution is something completely different from minimizing carbon output. If we really care about the environment, we need to stop talking about our carbon use immediately. There's nothing stopping a modern carbon based power plant from outputting clean CO2 - the same as us humans - while we take care of the real pollutants that today might be let out in the environment (heavy metals etc).
it's in my head
Already released. http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/ and released YEARS ago. Yet still people say "release the source code oenonee!!!". So given they already have, and you still haven't noticed, what benefit has been gained by releasing the code?
Clean burning wood heating is a mature technology. Over on the east coast of the Atlantic, at 60 deg North latitude, local governments subsidise by a small amount the changeover from old-fashioned stoves to new, clean burning ones. The "clean" comes from either an afterburning chamber or a catalyst chamber. The result is more heat and less polluting gases. I still have my old fireplace, but installed an air-to-air heat pump which works fine. If and when I replace the wood heating system it will be by a small automatic pellets burner, also using clean burning technology. Oh, and logging in this country takes out less biomass from the forests than the annual regrowth.
Was he wrong about that? No. Fank Luntz: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz#Global_warming
Quote:
Although Luntz later tried to distance himself from the Bush administration policy, it was his idea that administration communications reframe "global warming" as "climate change" since "climate change" was thought to sound less severe.
No to see here. Move along.
Everytime the summer is hot or a storm hits the coast it is blamed on anthropogenic global warming (AGW). But when it gets cold, suddenly "wheather is not climate". When the satellites are showing no warming for the last 10 years we are told that "there is inter-decadal variability".
If we ignore the science (greenhouse fingerprint, solar forcing, ...) and just have a look at popular beliefs: Just 40 years ago the "discussion" was tilted the other way and we were anticipating the beginning of the next ice age.
So, it's your turn: write a 3,000 page report with dozens of claims per page without a single error ...
Disproving a theory doesn't require coming up with an alternate one. You just need to show that the theory fails to explain reality. Furthermore there is in fact an independent scientific report and it is called the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change Report.
Per Dr. Phil Jones:
* Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html##ixzz0fWNe9VeK
Spin it!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Per Dr. Phil Jones:
* Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html##ixzz0fWNe9VeK
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get." — Robert A. Heinlein
Very interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. I just figured it must be the contrarians since some of them have been using it to argue that even warmists don't believe in warming anymore. If it really was Frank Luntz who came up with the term, it's quite ironic.
Per Dr. Phil Jones:
* Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html##ixzz0fWNe9VeK
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Given how accurate the 5 day *weather* forecasts have been, I fear that the climate service will be about as accurate
as Dick Cheney shooting lawye... er, quail with a shotgun.
Here's a question on climate that anyone with a *good* clock can independently verify- why has the earth not slowed down in rotation? More specifically, the loss of glaciation over land (that is, non-floating) is supposed to be "tremendous". Using the figures published by the IPCC, if you do the calculation of the change in Izz (the moment of angular momentum of the Earth as it turns on it's axis, as a whole, as those glaciers melt down into equilibrium ocean), you see that it's on the order of a fraction of a part per million. That sounds tiny, but it's not- it's 2.6 seconds per month per PPM _every month_, so it's 2.6 seconds the first month, 5.2 seconds the second month, 7.8 seconds the third month, etc.
So, why is it that the earth spin rate / tidal drag equations from 30 years ago continue to predict the actual spin rate of the planet to parts-per-trillion accuracy? Something is clearly wrong when a simple measurement with a quality clock no better than Harrison could have built in 1761 can show that the Earth spin rate is simply not following what it must given the claimed rates of melting.
I mentioned Pat Michaels and even mentioned his position that global warming will not be dangerous. Yes the earth is coming out of an ice age so we would expect to be at a plateau about now. The problem is we're at the plateau but CO2 is now FAR higher than it was during any of the previous plateaus over the last few hundred thousand years. You may not believe CO2 makes much difference, but at this point you would have to call that a faith position, because there's significant evidence that indicates doubling CO2 will increase global temps by like 2-5 degrees C. Further investigations like the recent work by Lindzen and Choi may revise our understanding of the role of CO2, but so far alternate explanations are far from being totally convincing.
Why not take a cue from one of the most clever Anonymous Cowards of the world? Challenge yourself to read and enjoy this interview with Professor Jones from East Anglia University! Phil Jones is without any doubt one of the most preeminent figures of the climate debate. The words of Phil Jones are an implied centerpiece of the GW discussion above. His latest words may also prove to be equally influential. However, I will leave it to you to decide how they affect the debate.
1. Professor Jones conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.
2. And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html?ITO=1490#ixzz0fWMcbgPU
Enjoy!
Yes , because if you are not with it , you are against it , right ?
The only thing getting feathered here is the truth : with all this nonsense, it's almost impossible to know the facts, as everyone seems to have an agenda.
Slipping shoelaces ?
This is only half right. Climate is changing, but humans are not responsible for it happening. We may be responsible for it accelerating, but the climate of the Earth has been changing for millions of years.
This is what irritates me about the whole argument from both the left and the right. What we need to be arguing is the human influence of climate change, not the fact of climate change.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
First we have the NWS, a service that predicts ten days ahead, but often (usually, where I live) can't get the prediction correct within a reasonable margin eight hours into the future, because what they do is astonishingly difficult; many things are not yet understood, and some things that are understood are so complex, so under-sampled, so skeletally simulated, that it's often not much more than hand-waving.
To this, we (apparently) want to add a service that deals with climate predictions... a domain where the global warming alarmists have amply demonstrated that forming even one hypothesis that gives rise to working laws (meaning, predictions that don't turn out to be falsifiable) is so difficult as to be beyond our present abilities.
Well, on the plus side, because the problem (predicting climate) appears to be impenetrably difficult, the agency should be able to continually increase its budget for computers and programmers. Maybe it'll grow so large we can no longer afford to mire our military in a war in the Middle East and bankrupt ourselves for the next half-century to secure access to the last big reservoir of the polluting, nonrenewable energy source of the 20th century. (that last bit was quoted almost verbatim from Tim Kreider, a very funny and cynical fellow.) Consequently we will have to actually focus on other sources of energy.
Oh, wait. We couldn't afford to engage in those wars anyway -- we borrowed that money from China. Your kids will be paying it back. Or perhaps learning to speak Chinese.
Yeah, hey. A climate agency. After all, what could it hurt? It's not like decisions taken on wrong, incomplete, or outright fabricated information might cause problems, is it?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Oh please. I don't claim to be a real scientist, just a guy on slashdot who has done his reading. I'm happy to call folks who don't believe in AGW whatever you'd like me to. Denier may not be the most accurate label to use, given the spectrum of beliefs out there, but the fact is there are most definitely global warming deniers out there. It does accurately describe the people who are crowing now about how global warming being "disproved" because of blizzards in Europe and North America this year. But sorry if I offended you. I think the label Hansen uses, "contrarian", is a good one, but it doesn't seem to have caught on.
Out of curiosity, do you not believe of the ice ages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age), which is a scientific theory that has been accepted since 1870s? Doesn't it stand to reason that the opposite occurs - periods where the temperature of the world is much higher on average? And so, there are periods of global cooling and warming.
The climate changes. It has long before we showed up, and it will continue long after we are gone. You may not agree that our industrial nature is impacting how the climate is changing, but you cannot dispute that the climate of the Earth changes regardless.
To do so, you put yourself in the same class of individuals who thought that the idea of the world revolving around the sun was "junk science."
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
Pick any issue out there, if there is money to be made, some people will be trying to exploit it to make a profit for themselves. Global warming is no different. Profiteers emerge anytime there is a big change in how things are done. It doesn't mean the need for change isn't there or that the change should not be made.
So then your sources are a Russian think tank (who, by the way, tried to publish papers on their claims, but failed to pass peer-review on them), and now a meteorologist (*very* different from a climatologist) and a computer programmer? Really?
What is your point? That a meteorologist or a computer programmer cannot in any circumstances prove a climatologist wrong? They can't say the the use of statistics in the model is flawed, or there is a coding error in the model? I didn't realize that climatologists were born perfect.
Here's why the idiots who push these "omitting stations" claims can't pass peer-review on them: they're *supposed* to omit stations. It's not done manually; it's done algorithmically.
This is one of the dumber statements I've seen in this discussion. Suppose you have 4 stations in a geographic area. 2 are out in the middle of fields way away from any development (and been this way for the last 80+ years) and 2 right next to human development. Do you not see a) which two (all other things being equal) of the 4 stations are going to give you better temperature data b) what the net effect of deleting/algorithmically adjusting the data from the data from the fields is going to be? (hint: these are NOT going to show any significant urban heat island effects). Yes, a lot of the measuring units don't give accurate data. They can be poorly maintained, break down, degrade... nothing new to remote sensing. All this means is that you have to assess each station individually to figure out what errors (if any) the station has. To omit data just because it doesn't match it's neighboring stations is a stupid algorithm if all its neighboring stations are affected by the urban heat island effect and the one you are omitting isn't - omitting the data is just going to produce a heating bias.
The results of this are then validated by a number of subsequent papers
For something that is supposedly "validated", we are seeing an awful lot of instances of incorrect usage.
One, the same trends show up when you just dumb-average all stations, or just rural stations, or just urban stations.
What "trends" are you talking about? Like the trend line of 1995-2009 (-0.12C per decade - yes, that's a minus - from Phil Jones no less)? Or are you talking about the one since 1850?
Even more inconvenient is that the stations that Watts' team of deniers flags as "bad" show *more* warming than those that he flags as "good". Why? Because the "bad" stations tend to be located near human settlement, and are generally a cheaper type of sensor than the fully-standalone ones that tend to be in "good" locations. The cheaper sensors have a small tendency to report cooler temperatures than the better, standalone ones.
Are you saying a station next to a heat pump discharge is going to give you accurate readings? Or you do not think the urban heat island effect is real? Or do you not think a survey of t he sensing sites is useful? Don't see what you are trying to get at.
Thanks for pointing that out. I had assumed it came from pro-GW camp since anti-GW folks constantly use it as a bludgeon against them.
"Clearly the more scientists who agree on something, the less true it is"
Yes, that's actually the way it works :
If every scientist immediately agrees on something, then no one is really investigating it.
On the other hand, when scientists disagree with each other, they will need to prove their points with facts, and anyone who bases their findings on subjective information , will quickly be discredited by their opponents.
A simple example : hunderds of years ago , almost every 'scientist' agreed that the sun turned around the earth . If no one had ever disagreed with that ( or other dogmas , for that matter ) , we would still be in the dark ages today.
Slipping shoelaces ?
So you're assuming that climatologists don't make observations, don't form hypothesis which they then peer review?
No, you're correct that there's lot of real science being done on climate.
There's more to climatology than just "a model"
Again, true. However, when it comes to AGW and the scenarios being reported - and acted upon by politicians - the ONLY data behind those scenarios is the output from models.
As for validation, the models that climatologists have been using have not been correct over time, that's true. Reality, so far, has turned out to be worse than predicted.
Wrong. You're either ignorant or lying deliberately. Why?
Because at a global level you can determine, roughly, what the heat input and output is. And when you take that into account, anything you do from then on is essentially a closed system.
You're assuming we know of all the inputs and outputs to Earth, which we don't. Your position is however the same as the one behind AGW - "something happened and we don't know the cause - it must be due to us!" which is, of course, laughable.
Just last year two previously unknown possible energy transfer methods to Earth were "discovered". If climatology wasn't so extremely infected by a "holier than thou" attitude and if some of its proponents stepped down from their ivory towers (which Phil Jones finally seems to do btw) we might even be able to perform some proper science.
[with regards to the debate about climate change being "over"]
It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. - Phil Jones, CRU
it's in my head
A National Climate Service for the rest of US.
I like toast!
Tell that to Phil Jones.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Because the numbers do seem to back me up.
However, both you and kimvette are asserting things without evidence, so I think I can, too. If you don't want this to be a shouting match, bring evidence.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If you start out by assuming your conclusions, then cherry-pick your data, it's amazing what you can "prove."
So you admit that's what you "sceptics" do.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml
Climate researchers need long stretches of uninterrupted high quality data. Weather researchers don't.
It's simple, Gore took an issue and propagandized it into the biggest "save the earth" crusade he could. The point of this was political: to draw as many people into the democratic party as possible. Gore is a politician, not a scientist. Why is this so hard to understand? The science was never the point, he successfully personalized AGW for anyone fool enough to believe him. Everyone with a ration of sense knows there isn't a damn thing you can do about CO2 emissions. The US could cut emissions to zero only for china and india to pick up the slack and china in particular has absolutely no intention of doing anything about it. China is putting up coal fired power plants as fast as they can and people over there are buying cars as fast as they can make them. Besides, it's not the CO2, it's the CFC's and we already banned them. Go play outside.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
No. You are incorrect. Faith is believe without evidence to back it up. There is far less evidence to support faked moon landings than there is to support real moon landings. Ditto for 9-11. Evidence for global warming is also fairly certain. Evidence that it is human caused a little less so. Evidence that it will be dangerous even less. But still these dangers are significant enough that we ought to take them seriously.
So Gore is a hypocrite for putting his money where his heart was years ago? For investing money? Evil Communist!
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Any pilot can tell you that when dew-point meets temperature, clouds form... theres nothing mysterious about it.
Don't put words in my mouth. AGW skeptics don't ignore long-term trends like the Early Medieval Warm or the Little Ice Age in setting up models. Skeptics don't select a small number of tree-ring samples that Just Happen to fit their ideas while discarding the majority that don't. Skeptics don't add arbitrary, ad hoc adjustments to their data to hide the fact that the data doesn't fit their theory. That's what the alarmists do, and have been caught doing, repeatedly.
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Yes the earth is coming out of an ice age so we would expect to be at a plateau about now.
and what leads you to this conclusion? which dataset are we using here?
The problem is we're at the plateau but CO2 is now FAR higher than it was during any of the previous plateaus over the last few hundred thousand years.
So are the number of humans (and human artifacts (cities, roads)), cows and corn farms on this world. All contribute to warming. The point being you have to show it is significant.
You may not believe CO2 makes much difference, but at this point you would have to call that a faith position
er, why? Did you read the link?
If nothing else in the system changes, a doubling of CO2 from the preindustrial levels is estimated to produce a temperature rise of 1.2 to 1.3C (2.2 to 2.3F). Again, the calculation is straightforward and there is little controversy about the figure among scientists. Now recall that over the last century and a half CO2 levels have risen from a preindustrial 280 ppm to around 380 ppm. At the same time global average mean temperature has risen (depending on who you believe) 0.8 to 1.0C.
I don't think I am unreasonable in thinking 1degC isn't that significant. Mind you, I didn't check his math, but the logic is sound.
because there's significant evidence that indicates doubling CO2 will increase global temps by like 2-5 degrees C.
SHOW ME REFERENCES. Tell me exactly how the calculated ~1degC inflates to 2-5degC. From what I have gathered, the 2-5degC is the faith position here.
Further investigations like the recent work by Lindzen and Choi may revise our understanding of the role of CO2, but so far alternate explanations are far from being totally convincing.
Explanations of what? That the climate is WAY more complicated than "CO2 = lots of warming"? Just google "Susan Solomon" 2010 (choose from a source you are willing to believe). Or try "soot glaciers". It seems something comes out every other week now that hints that CO2 is far less significant than what the alarmists say.
AGW skeptics don't ignore long-term trends like the Early Medieval Warm or the Little Ice Age in setting up models. Skeptics don't select a small number of tree-ring samples that Just Happen to fit their ideas while discarding the majority that don't. Skeptics don't add arbitrary, ad hoc adjustments to their data to hide the fact that the data doesn't fit their theory. That's what the alarmists do, and have been caught doing, repeatedly.
Yeah, instead skeptics pretend the MWP and LIA are more than local events. And the bit about "Skeptics don't add arbitrary, ad hoc adjustments to their data to hide the fact that the data doesn't fit their theory"? Are you fucking serious? Even if we ignore non-scientists like Monckton aka Sir Münchhausen with his host of completely made-up graphs - how about the papers from Friis-Christensen and Lassen? Here's one paper that not only rips them apart, mostly by showing where they manipulated and ignored data that didn't fit their theory: http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Laut2003.pdf The funny-sad part is, even after they have exposed a hoax, they are still widely touted as the truth (TM) by all skeptics.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Again, true. However, when it comes to AGW and the scenarios being reported - and acted upon by politicians.
Acted upon by politicians? That's almost a Contradiction in terminis! :)
the ONLY data behind those scenarios is the output from models
Yes, that's why there are thousands of pages in IPCC reports..
Wrong. You're either ignorant or lying deliberately. Why?
You know we can start insulting and name calling here, but that won't do any good in any way.
From my point of view I could use the exact same sentence back at you.
As for my "reality has turned out worse than predicted" comment, just look at all the IPCC reports. Every time they release a new report, roughly their worst cases turned out to be the best case in the next report.
You're assuming we know of all the inputs and outputs to Earth, which we don't.
Like I said before, science is always a best guess.
If you want a 100% accuracy you'll have to wait until it's too late to do anything, does that sound rational to you?
Your position is however the same as the one behind AGW - "something happened and we don't know the cause - it must be due to us!" which is, of course, laughable.
No, my position is: when you look at the correlation between CO2 and temperature, which records, theories and models suggest to be tied together, and then look at the -huge- increase of CO2 released since the industrial revolution, then you should be worried.
If climatology wasn't so extremely infected by a "holier than thou" attitude
Pot.. kettle?
and if some of its proponents stepped down from their ivory towers
I'm sure a lot of people who didn't believe in it before believe it now. What's your point?
[with regards to the debate about climate change being "over"]
Well I think this is mainly because we seem to have a short time frame to take any meaningful action. People get emotional when they think time is running out and people aren't listening or simply don't want to listen.
It's gotten to the point where talking about climate change is almost a religious discussion.
I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. - Phil Jones, CRU
Most seem to disagree with him: http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
For anyone that doesn't speak Russian, the allegation in the press release is that the UK scientists cherry-picked 1500 out of the 5000 stations available in order to get the conclusions they wanted.
I haven't read all the way to the end, so I don't know what results they give instead.
Just out of curiosity, do you have any evidence that the weren't, or are you just arguing by assertion? I ask because there's lots of evidence that the LIA affected North America as well as Europe. (In 1776, Major Hamilton was able to drag the guns of Fort Ticonderoga across the frozen Hudson River to New York; by 1830, that would have been impossible.)
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and how exactly are we going to look at future climate change? Our models have already been proven the most useless rubbish in the last three years, and they might be based on tainted data: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026317.ece
And that red herring about sea level rise, here's a news flash for "climatologists", the sea has been rising for millenia, for most of the time much fast than it has been rising today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
Under the newly enacted PayGo, Congress must raise taxes or cut something else. Or is this merely an Executive Branch decision not subject to PayGo? I understand they're combining some existing stuff but "NOAA also plans to create new positions for six regional climate service directors." Who will pay for the six new directors? Jus' asking.
Yes the earth is coming out of an ice age so we would expect to be at a plateau about now.
and what leads you to this conclusion? which dataset are we using here?
Temps reconstructed from ice cores. See Hansen's book or just about any serious book or site on global warming.
The problem is we're at the plateau but CO2 is now FAR higher than it was during any of the previous plateaus over the last few hundred thousand years.
So are the number of humans (and human artifacts (cities, roads)), cows and corn farms on this world. All contribute to warming. The point being you have to show it is significant.
You have a gun pointed at your head. Person A shows you evidence it is loaded. Person B shows you evidence it is not. If you value your life, you better be absolutely sure Person B is correct before you let someone pull the trigger. If you aren't absolutely sure, then you best not pull that trigger until you are. The point being that the evidence that GW is insignificant really needs to completely overwhelm the evidence that it is, and it's just not doing that yet. I for one am glad that folks like Michaels and Lindzen are doing their darndest to prove that the climate is A-OK. It keeps the other guys on their toes, and gives us greater confidence in what comes out the other end of the process unscathed. Given the uncertainties involved in climate science, it would be scary if there were no contrarian voices out there.
You may not believe CO2 makes much difference, but at this point you would have to call that a faith position
er, why? Did you read the link?
If nothing else in the system changes, a doubling of CO2 from the preindustrial levels is estimated to produce a temperature rise of 1.2 to 1.3C (2.2 to 2.3F). Again, the calculation is straightforward and there is little controversy about the figure among scientists. Now recall that over the last century and a half CO2 levels have risen from a preindustrial 280 ppm to around 380 ppm. At the same time global average mean temperature has risen (depending on who you believe) 0.8 to 1.0C.
I don't think I am unreasonable in thinking 1degC isn't that significant. Mind you, I didn't check his math, but the logic is sound.
I put the link on my reading queue, and skimmed it. Does look interesting, thanks. Unfortunately I don't have time to really pore over it in detail at the moment. But initial reaction is this. If the climate is so complex, how could a "straightforward calculation" be expected to give you anything other than a very gross ballpark figure? About 1-2 degrees not being significant, I have two points. 1) Temps in the Eemian were about that much higher than now, yet sea levels were several meters higher (source: Hansen, Storms of my Grandchildren, and his paper http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126). We don't know the cause for sure, but a good guess would seem to be that the higher temps caused ice caps and glaciers to melt. 2) 1 degree is on the low end of current predictions.
because there's significant evidence that indicates doubling CO2 will increase global temps by like 2-5 degrees C.
SHOW ME REFERENCES. Tell me exactly how the calculated ~1degC inflates to 2-5degC. From what I have gathered, the 2-5degC is the faith position here.
That's the IPCC AR4 conclusion. If you know anything about climate science, I would assume you'd have heard of it and be aware of its major conclusions.
Further investigations like the recent work by Lindzen and Choi may revise our understanding of the role of CO2, but so far alternate explanations are far from being
Neither of your points invalidate mine. Sure, our current models are crap. That's not a reason to throw up our hands, that's a reason to work to improve those models. A climate service would help do that by serving as a centralized data repository, allowing scientists to validate their models against a number of historical data series, not just the ones that scientists were able to discover on their own.
In addition, I note that you don't deny that sea levels are rising. Given that the majority of human cities are on or near coastlines, isn't it a good idea to at least start planning our defenses? How many more Katrina-like situations are you willing to pay for before realizing that its good to have projections that outline the costs of defending an area against rising sea levels.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I ask because there's lots of evidence that the LIA affected North America as well as Europe. (In 1776, Major Hamilton was able to drag the guns of Fort Ticonderoga across the frozen Hudson River to New York; by 1830, that would have been impossible.)
Well, that's odd, because the LIA supposedly lasted until 1850. So your argument for the LIA not being a local event is that "it" ended in North America long before it ended in Europe?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
The other phrase that's often bandied about also seems to have originated from the opposing side: "settled science."
It makes a great strawman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sbandrews/the_science_is_settled
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
Since most cities weren't built by idiots who put them below sea level, I'd say Katrina like situations should be quite rare
And this is good time to point out IPCC fear mongering saying 55% of Holland is below sea level, more like 21%.
But having a government in charge of such a thing is proving to be a horrible thing, for fraud such as "cap and trade" nonsense which will cost trillions of dollars over the coming decade, funnelled through World Bank to get a piece of the action, and also pushed by institutions such as Goldman-Sachs who already have funds set up to profit. It's expensive, it's evil, it's fraud.
No, because the LIA didn't suddenly end, it gradually tapered off. By 1830, it would have been impossible to drag cannon across the Hudson in the winter; by 1850, it didn't freeze over at all.
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astrology.govbr/> creationism.govbr/>
All the nuts need somewhere to go.
So many examples of fail here.
1) I thought you were saying that lots of scientists were disagreeing with AGW. Therefore isn't this your proof that this is science?
2) Where are the facts for your position?
3) Simple example, Aristotle measured the diameter of the SPHERICAL earth in 390BC. He wasn't the first and he wasn't the last
Please point me to 10 of these "thousands of studies" that have confirmed that the client is changing AND that humans are responsible as I am unaware of any. If there are thousands of them then it should be trivial for you to link me to a mere ten.
I have a serious question. If the stations are "bad" as is claimed then WHY are you collecting data from them AT ALL?
For example if the temperature gauge in my car were "bad" and continuously giving me erroneous readings I wouldn't ignore it. I'd do what any right thinking person would do and FIX it, probably by replacing the sensor.
Don't throw away data, replace the faulty sensors! Replace failed equipment. If the location is bad then move it to somewhere more suitable.
Whatever you do don't automatically throw away data claiming that it's junk and should be ignored. This just _reeks_ of data manipulation, specifically it suggests that they are throwing away data that doesn't fit their hypothesis.
Right. Because when I want to find out the current state of science, I turn to the Heartland Institute and the "usual suspects" among the 3% of climate scientists that disagree with AGW who they paid to write it.
Kneel Before Christ!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026317.ece
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
What is your point? That a meteorologist or a computer programmer cannot in any circumstances prove a climatologist wrong? They can't say the the use of statistics in the model is flawed, or there is a coding error in the model? I didn't realize that climatologists were born perfect.
Obligatory xkcd ref.
This is one of the dumber statements I've seen in this discussion. Suppose you have 4 stations in a geographic area. 2 are out in the middle of fields way away from any development (and been this way for the last 80+ years) and 2 right next to human development. Do you not see a) which two (all other things being equal) of the 4 stations are going to give you better temperature data b) what the net effect of deleting/algorithmically adjusting the data from the data from the fields is going to be?
1) Here's where naive approaches like yours fail. The stations out in the middle of fields tend to be different, more expensive kinds of sensors than the ones close to human settlement. The cheaper ones tend to report *cooler* temperatures than the more expensive, standalone sensors. So the "urban" stations actually show *less* global warming if averaged in a naive approach.
2) There's a *lot* more than 4 stations in most regions which have correlated temperature anomalies. In the US, generally dozens.
3) The heat island effect *is* cancelled algorithmically, and this is verified by, among other things, comparing calm and windy days.
For something that is supposedly "validated", we are seeing an awful lot of instances of incorrect usage.
Yes, by people like Watts.
What "trends" are you talking about? Like the trend line of 1995-2009 (-0.12C per decade - yes, that's a minus - from Phil Jones no less)? Or are you talking about the one since 1850?
1) This, this, and this.
2) Since when do you trust Phil Jones?
3) Phil Jones is one climate scientist among several thousand. He is not the god of climate science.
4) Wrong. Jones says that there is a +0.12C warming trend for that time, but it's not long enough to be statistically significant. And he's right. It's idiotic how so many people keep trying to read trends into a couple years of extremely noisy data. El Nino in particular adds a *lot* of short-term noise. The "-0.12 trend" is for 2002 to present, which is an even shorter time period and even less statistically significant -- as Jones points out.
Are you saying a station next to a heat pump discharge is going to give you accurate readings?
1) Which is why you *algorithmically eliminiate bad stations*. The problem is that you criticize them when you think that they're using said stations, but also criticize them when they mathematically eliminate them. It's a no-win situation that you're trying to put them in.
2) The "bad" stations tend to show *less* warming than the good stations. So "whoops" on your part.
you do not think the urban heat island effect is real?
1) The urban heat island effect is algorithmically cancelled, and the cancellation verified by, among other things, comparing windy days to calm days.
2) There exists a closely monitored "reference network" for a reason, you know.
Kneel Before Christ!
Yes the earth is coming out of an ice age so we would expect to be at a plateau about now.
and what leads you to this conclusion? which dataset are we using here?
Temps reconstructed from ice cores. See Hansen's book or just about any serious book or site on global warming.
Ok. So we are looking at this. Only plateaus I see are at the bottom end of the cycle. The temperature spikes, then decays. We are currently at a spike. Please show me on the graph why we should be in a plateau.
You have a gun pointed at your head. Person A shows you evidence it is loaded. Person B shows you evidence it is not. If you value your life, you better be absolutely sure Person B is correct before you let someone pull the trigger. If you aren't absolutely sure, then you best not pull that trigger until you are.
That analogy has so many biases it isn't even funny. First, you assume that it is a fact that it is dangerous (a gun). Second, you assume that the bullet has enough propellant to kill you. Third, you assume there is no consequence for not allowing the trigger to be pulled (and if don't think that carbon limits won't hurt the poor of the world, you should go count the # of Indians and Chinese that were lifted from poverty in the last 20 years). Fourth and finally, you assume that it's that gun and not some other thing behind your head that you aren't looking at because you are so fixated on the gun that might to kill you.
The point being that the evidence that GW is insignificant really needs to completely overwhelm the evidence that it is, and it's just not doing that yet.
But we don't live in a perfect world. If you drive, you risk getting into a fatal accident. If you walk, you risk tripping and breaking your neck. An asteroid can crash into the planet and wipe out all of humanity. That view is perfectly fine if there is no cost in making the decision. Once there is a cost, then cost/benefit comes into play. You can hold that the danger merits keeping billions of people in poverty. My opinion is that that is immoral, but it is just that, an opinion.
If the climate is so complex, how could a "straightforward calculation" be expected to give you anything other than a very gross ballpark figure?
That's the whole point of the article. In short, CO2's GHG component can at most account for ~1degC because that's how much heat GHG can trap as a GHG. This is solid science. To get more than that, you have to add some other process other than simple GHG warming. That's not to say such a process doesn't exist, just as there might be a process that lessens the net CO2 warming. I don't think anyone will say we know all or even most of the processes that make up our climate.
1) Temps in the Eemian were about that much higher than now, yet sea levels were several meters higher. We don't know the cause for sure,
well, given that CO2 was lower then (if you go by the ice cores), it culprit wasn't CO2....
but a good guess would seem to be that the higher temps caused ice caps and glaciers to melt.
er, so the Earth was warmer in the past. No argument there. Though if you are trying to say it's the atmospheric temperature that caused this melting (as opposed to warmer the sea temperatures), I think there's lots of room for dispute.
2) 1 degree is on the low end of current predictions.
Not from just GHG warming. The IPCC adds a positive feedback to get >=2degC.
That's the IPCC AR4 conclusion. If you know anything about climate science, I would assume you'd have heard of it and be awa
He won the Peace Prize, not a Nobel Prize in a science. Once again, it's the science and the views of scientists in the field that we care about. What is hard for you to understand about this?
That he won the peace prize? Not that I'd want to put words in GP's mouth.
Frankly, while I'm not unsympathetic toward the obvious effort you put into constructing such a wordy, yet nonsensical rebuttal, I'm afraid it doesn't really make the grade. Case in point: my post above wasn't intended to be a scientific treatise. It doesn't necessarily follow that it was worthy of a troll rating. And it was in response to the obvious hypocrisy of the troll ratings that I called a spade a spade, not the other way around.
As for political discourse...my friend, I've been arguing politics online for a very long time--since the days when Usenet was the primary medium. I do not fear referring to the various variety of wingnuts by their proper names.
But if you really want to be scientific about it, perhaps you'd care to prove your assertion that
"Climate Change" is a general term, and my recollection is that skeptics have been using it for years instead of "global warming" to make it seem as though humans aren't involved. Since you seem to know climate scientists started using the term because they saw data contrary to the notion of global warming--and your knowledge is supposedly plain for all to see--it should be simple to prove-- with citations.
Kythe
Ever looked at a precipitation map of Antarctica? Most of the continent is a desert.
Good point, it doesn't usually snow in a desert. Think it has something to do with moisture. In Tibet, where it gets really cold and there's moisture during the winter, it can snow a lot.
I don't know the details but I think the parent said the better ones are more expensive. I may just be a cost issue. Also totally guessing here but perhaps the higher amounts of pollution in a urban area would have an effect on the sensors?
You're complaining about 'spin' while linking to the Daily Mail? Really? How about you get it from the original source, then you might have some idea of what he actually said.
Daily Fail says:
BBC says:
Daily Fail says:
Phil Jones says:
And also (text in bold here and further on is the questions by the BBC):
Daily Fail says:
Phil Jones says:
Daily Fail says:
Phil Jones says:
Slight mistake in my post. I said:
But the BBC article says:
Since that's not a direct quote, I'm not sure whether it's something he said that wasn't included in the Q&A, or is a poor summary of parts of his answer to that question. Nevertheless, I'll retract that particular point.
"We" are hard working people who are not about to turn over our hard earned cash to a cabal of governments selling a load of snake oil and pushing for wild ass tax schemes to "save the earth".
Day be day your arguments fall apart. The IPPC (or whatever they call this waste of ink and paper) report was "God" at first. Everyone pointed to it. Now we know it's mostly made up garbage.
So you fall back on this and that. "Pay no attention to our first lame ass arguments and evidence...take a look at THIS!"
If you people were at all serious about AGW, you would be pushing unrelentingly for nuclear power as it is the only plausible way out of the mess you claim we are in.
Since you don't, then I am unlikely to believe your chicken little fantasies and am even less likely to agree to your totalitarian solutions.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Cost to maintain a station: zero or near-zero dollars.
Cost to tear down a station: nonzero
Answer above. It costs virtually nothing to keep it, but sending out a team to tear it down does cost money. And the data from it isn't automatically worthless; it's just not generally used or is corrected for. In general, the economic course of action is to simply add new stations rather than replace old ones. Eventually the worst ones do come down, but it's not something that gets rushed.
Whatever you do don't automatically throw away data claiming that it's junk and should be ignored.
So bad data should be included? Or should humans manually pick what's good or bad? No, what is used is peer-reviewed algorithms that are validated six ways from Sunday by comparing how the stations perform under all kinds of different conditions vs. when those conditions don't occur, comparing data between stations with different hardware, different enclosure types, etc to see if there are any systematic biases. Whenever a new bias is encountered, it is compensated for. This is how the peer-review process is supposed to work. But so many people insist on politicizing this damned issue. Quantum physicists don't have to deal with this crap. But everyone and their brother fancies themselves an amateur climatologist.
Kneel Before Christ!
When I read shit like this I feel like eugenics might have been the way to go...
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Obligatory xkcd ref.
Well, if you want to disregard what the Wegman Report says, that's up to you.
The cheaper ones tend to report *cooler* temperatures than the more expensive, standalone sensors. So the "urban" stations actually show *less* global warming if averaged in a naive approach.
This is only true if there are no adjustments made to the temperature reading AND the "cooler" temperature is greater than the heating effect. If these aren't true, then obviously it would depend on the amount of the adjustment and amount of error in the reading.
2) There's a *lot* more than 4 stations in most regions which have correlated temperature anomalies. In the US, generally dozens.
You know very well that the # wasn't significant in the argument. It's fine to eliminate grossly incorrect readings this way. It's another thing entirely to adjust a good reading because the surrounding stations have more error.
3) The heat island effect *is* cancelled algorithmically, and this is verified by, among other things, comparing calm and windy days.
You have a remarkable confidence that this algorithm is very accurate. You can read the conclusion of here and see there are reasons to believe there are deficiencies in the algorithm. Even comparing calm/windy days will be influenced by the location of the unit (walls close by) and topological influences.
For something that is supposedly "validated", we are seeing an awful lot of instances of incorrect usage.
Yes, by people like Watts.
Proof by Innuendo. There's science for you. Are you actually trying to argue that algorithms are better than calibration?
1) This, this, and this.
er, ok. These graphs tell me the world is warmer than it was than the Little Ice Age. If you assume all this is due to CO2 (ie there is no solar forcing), one would expect and .2-.5degC if the CO2 level reached 2x pre-industrial levels (560ppm) assuming this guy did his math right.
2) Since when do you trust Phil Jones?
I don't trust EITHER side in this debate. I note that it is more significant if a proponent of AGW says there's no warming just as if a detractor of AGW says that there is warming.
3) Phil Jones is one climate scientist among several thousand. He is not the god of climate science.
Please. Saying he's just one climate scientist is like saying Joe Biden is just another government employee. It's being disingenuous. It would be much more difficult to make the AGW case if you took his work out of the picture.
4) Wrong. Jones says that there is a +0.12C warming trend for that time, but it's not long enough to be statistically significant. And he's right.
Sorry. I stand corrected. It was for the period Jan 2002-present with the -.12C.
It's idiotic how so many people keep trying to read trends into a couple years of extremely noisy data.
I have NO idea what YOU consider a trend when I wrote the question which is why I asked. Forgive me for not being psychic. Jones uses the word "trend" to talk about Jan 2002- (see question C)
What's going to happen when the computer professionals shrug?
The Internet will be choked with spam and Windows will be full of computer viruses?
Oh... hmmm..
Who *is* Bill Galts?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
The same people who railed against the Patriot Act and the War on Drugs are falling over themselves to tell everyone who is even slightly cynical about this blatant Government job-creation scheme that they're a Nazi Fox News viewer
Well yes. If you were paying attention during the '00s you'd have noticed that those same people were also criticising the Dubya regime for not creating jobs, and his supporters for being Nazi Fox News viewers. So they didn't change their position at all.
Jobs are good, wars are bad. That's the liberal stance (*) (**) and it hasn't changed.
* with the exception of the centre-right so-called 'liberals' (the Clintonites) who fell all over themselves to support W's illegal war in 2003 because they were terrified of being seen as unpatriotic
** those same centre-right 'liberals' were also behind Clinton invading Yugoslavia in 1999, which was also unsanctioned by the UN but somehow he got away with it because NATO was behind him. But that one was also a shonky war for exactly the same reasons as Iraq and the left wing of the left wing (like Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader) *were* criticising it. IIRC.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
*** and let's not talk too much about WW2 and how come that one was a 'good' war for conservatives and liberals alike despite it involving cosying up to Stalin. Or the Cold War, which immediately involved demonising Uncle Joe in almost the same breath as he was being lauded in WW2, and by the same people, because that war was also good and noble despite flirting with the destruction of all civilisation and propping up dictatorships in 'free' countries.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
First of all, completely ignoring my response and going into a pathetic rant against a strawman on an unrelated topic just makes you look like an ass. But I'll respond anyway, because your claims are just so easy to strike down.
As opposed to those damn AGW hippies, who just live on peace and love right? You don't have a monopoly on 'hard working people'.
The thing that makes snake oil snake oil is the wild, unbacked, unverifiable claims. When the thing in question is a theory that has a mountain of solid evidence from decades of hard work and wide support amongst the relevant experts in the field, it is no longer snake oil. The only evidence of any sort you have presented against this is a single, highly flawed article from a highly biased tabloid with a reputation for not caring much for that 'truth' stuff, which I have quite thoroughly demolished. All you have left on this matter is hot hair.
If you're talking about merely using tax money for developing things to reduce global warming, well, tax money is used to defend against a lot of other threats. It's used for an army to protect your country against others who might wish to do it harm; it's used for a police force, to protect its citizens against others who might wish to do them harm; it's used for fire-fighting, disaster response, and handling disease outbreaks; in many countries, it's used to provide cheap, efficient universal healthcare. Given the projected negative effects of continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in current quantities, it's quite reasonable to spend tax money to help protect against that.
If you're talking about more direct taxation, such as on businesses for producing greenhouse gases, then I'm glad to inform you that there is an alternative, and I'm sure you'll love it: heavy-handed government regulation setting strict limits on output and beating any company who breaks these limits into the ground. The taxation-based schemes instead work on the magic of free markets people like you tout so much. They are a mechanism for internalizing the externalities and thus providing an economic incentive to businesses to be more 'green'. One can think of the market, at least in an idealized form, as a sort of optimization algorithm. Then, these laws are modifications to the function it is optimizing. I personally don't have any particular preference either way, as long as it gets good results.
My arguments are in the post you replied to. They are fairly solid, and as your post has completely ignored them, they still stand, and are certainly far from falling apart.
Nobody has called it "God", except you, people still point to it because it's still fine, and no, "we" don't know it's "mostly made up garbage". You may "know" it, but then, there are people who people who "know" there are aliens who have communicated with humans and regularly abduct us and ram stuff up our asses for no particular reason, people who "know" that they saw Jesus in their food and that it's a sign from the heavens, people who "know" that they are allergic to electromagnetic radiation, and so on. "Knowing" something counts for nothing. Having evidence is what matters.
The one here acting in such a manner is certainly not me. You are the one who has ignored the re
You probably weren't even alive back in the 70s,
Don't go making a bet on that with me.
but I was
As was I.
and I remember it very well.
Pfffft. Apparently not.
I was in college working on degrees in biology and chemistry
Apparently, getting your "science" from TeeVee.
"Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No.
If you can find me a reference saying otherwise, I'll put it here."
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/
gewg_
I'm not an authority on this. Please scroll up and see some of the people who have replied to me -- in particular, this guy.
Keep in mind, I was replying to someone who claimed, without evidence, that Global Warming was a farce. If they can assert something without evidence, so can I.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well, if you want to disregard what the Wegman Report says, that's up to you.
Oh, god, don't get me started on the Wegman Report. Let's start by pointing out that the NRC and the NAS analyzed the Mann paper and confirmed it, and that there have been numerous reconstructions since Mann et al, all of which show the same general shape -- but using different data (including, now, boreholes, which are a much less opaque science than dendrochronology). No fewer than four papers rebutted McIntyre and McKitrick, and when they tried to publish a counter to some of their criticism, they failed to pass peer-review.
Republican representatives Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield, two prominent global warming deniers, arranged the Wegman report. They picked Peter Spencer, another political denier, to arrange the process. The National Academies of Sciences itself offered to conduct an independent investigation, but they rejected this because they wouldn't have enough control over the process. Actual climate scientists were banned from the process. McIntyre remained in contact with Wegman throughout the entire process of drafting conclusions, while Mann was not, automatically biasing the outcome -- something that McIntyre tried to keep secret for years, but was only recently exposed. The committee *picked its own peer reviewers*. I could go on and on. When the National Academies of Science saw how it was being conducted, they sent a letter expressing their concerns. It was promptly ignored. They ultimately launched their own investigation.
But it's all a moot point, since McIntyre has widely been rebutted in the peer-reviewed literature since, and hasn't been able to pass peer-review in response, as well as different lines for historical climate reconstruction coming up with the same curve.
This is only true if there are no adjustments made to the temperature reading AND the "cooler" temperature is greater than the heating effect. If these aren't true, then obviously it would depend on the amount of the adjustment and amount of error in the reading.
Wait, so what's your argument then? Adjusted, the warming is shown. Unadjusted, the warming is shown. Are you arguing that there should be adjustment, but just not the ones currently used?
You know very well that the # wasn't significant in the argument. It's fine to eliminate grossly incorrect readings this way. It's another thing entirely to adjust a good reading because the surrounding stations have more error.
Since when is that happening?
You have a remarkable confidence that this algorithm is very accurate. You can read the conclusion of here
Pass peer review on that or it's worthless. Everyone *else* has to pass peer-review. No exception for critics.
Even comparing calm/windy days will be influenced by the location of the unit (walls close by) and topological influences.
The heat island effect extends to the upper troposphere. Those are some giant walls. And, FYI, there has been more lower tropospheric warming than there has been surface warming, which doesn't fit the heat island explanation at all.
Proof by Innuendo. There's science for you. Are you actually trying to argue that algorithms are better than calibration?
Red herring. Of course perfect, flawless calibration is ideal. But we live in the real world where budgets and practicality mean that's not an option. So you do the best that you can with the data that you have.
If you assume all this is due to CO2 (ie there is no solar forcing)
Both of those are untrue. First off, there's *always* solar forcing. Did you mean *changes* in solar forcing? They're intensely studied, too. Secondly, CO2 is just one of a number of GHGs, and there are a lot of non-GHG factors considered as well, everything from carbon-black to contrails. Third, assume nothing; CO2 forcing is calculated mathematically, experimentally, and historic planetary CO2 responses are studied as well.
, one
Kneel Before Christ!
Yes the earth is coming out of an ice age so we would expect to be at a plateau about now.
and what leads you to this conclusion? which dataset are we using here?
Temps reconstructed from ice cores. See Hansen's book or just about any serious book or site on global warming.
Ok. So we are looking at this. Only plateaus I see are at the bottom end of the cycle. The temperature spikes, then decays. We are currently at a spike. Please show me on the graph why we should be in a plateau.
Ok, I see what your gripe is. Yeh, by "plateau" I didn't mean tens of thousands of years of relatively flat temperatures. Just that we should be maxed out about now.
You have a gun pointed at your head. Person A shows you evidence it is loaded. Person B shows you evidence it is not. If you value your life, you better be absolutely sure Person B is correct before you let someone pull the trigger. If you aren't absolutely sure, then you best not pull that trigger until you are.
That analogy has so many biases it isn't even funny. First, you assume that it is a fact that it is dangerous (a gun).
It is not an assumption, rather what a truckload of research has been pointing to. But if you prefer let's say it's dark and it looks like it might be a gun, but you're not sure. The analogy is still fine.
Second, you assume that the bullet has enough propellant to kill you.
That's pretty much the same thing as saying the gun isn't loaded. Or that it might actually be pointed at your foot and not your head. Put that in if you like. The analogy still works.
Third, you assume there is no consequence for not allowing the trigger to be pulled (and if don't think that carbon limits won't hurt the poor of the world, you should go count the # of Indians and Chinese that were lifted from poverty in the last 20 years).
This I'll grant you. The analogy does not include possible side effects of action. However you are making a false dichotomy: solve the climate problem or help the poor. Any action we are able to take now on climate will help improve our options in the future should the dangerous effects of AGW prove to be true. And furthermore, significantly rising sea levels and changing weather will probably have a much greater adverse effect on the poor and disadvantaged than anyone else. So not doing anything to stop GW may also end up being equivalent to hurting the poor.
Fourth and finally, you assume that it's that gun and not some other thing behind your head that you aren't looking at because you are so fixated on the gun that might to kill you.
So you're advocating ignoring a known threat just because there might be other unknown threats? That just seems silly.
The point being that the evidence that GW is insignificant really needs to completely overwhelm the evidence that it is, and it's just not doing that yet.
But we don't live in a perfect world. If you drive, you risk getting into a fatal accident. If you walk, you risk tripping and breaking your neck. An asteroid can crash into the planet and wipe out all of humanity. That view is perfectly fine if there is no cost in making the decision. Once there is a cost, then cost/benefit comes into play.
I totally agree with you there. You'll note that I made no suggestions about what policy actions to take. I merely said we need to take the threat seriously. But I believe there is much we can do without sending global economies to the brink of disaster. As the science evolves we must be prepared to react. But doing nothing now is a poor choice. We at least need to invest heavily in green
As for the so-called manipulation of data. I can give one relevant example. I worked for 15 years in climatology. One of the first software I wrote was reception of data packets from automatic weather stations. There were so many errors in the packet transmissions that according to the built-in CRC (cyclic redundancy check) we would have had to toss 9 out of 10 packets. With one packet every 10 minutes, that was unacceptable, so I would extract the data (pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction) from the packet and then just remove the 'wrong' data points, both automatically, but also manually. So you have -10.1C, -10.2C, 5.2C, -10.4C, guess which point needs to be removed? When half the data points on a given measurement are bad, it can be a little trickier. I'm sure some denialists would love this example as an evidence of data tampering. Well, fuck them.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I want the anti-GW argument to be ROCK solid before I'm willing to just dismiss offhand the evidence that we are going to irreversibly make earth inhospitable to humans.
So, why isn't the converse just as valid?
I forgot to address this adequately. The converse is not logically valid from a risk management perspective. Say an automobile manufacturer discovers that 5% of its accelerator pedals are affected by some potentially fatal defect, and you own one of their cars. That implies that the overwhelming odds (95%) are that your car is not among those affected. Do you think most people would say "That's ok, Manufacturer, you don't need to do a recall, we know that each of us is not very likely to have this problem"?
Think of it this way, if we had 100% confidence in the pro-GW research and 0% confidence in the anti-GW research, then it would be clear that we should invest at least as much to prevent disaster as those disasters would cost us (lets assume we're also 100% confident in the efficacy of our investments). Likewise, if the percentages were reversed we'd not invest a dime. But the situation we're in is more like, let's say, %50 confidence in GW research, 50% confidence in anti-GW. So let's say that means dire consequences are 50% likely. If that's the case we still should invest in hedges against the bad outcome at a level commensurate with the risk involved. The potential downside here is pretty huge -- meters of sea-level rise and mass species extinctions significantly impairing our lifestyle. To me it's clear that even at the 50/50 level (GW/AntiGW) we need to take preventative action. At the 25/75 level I still think action is warranted. Even at the 10/90 level, I'd still want to begin to take some action like aggressive investments in alternative energy. So the numbers just aren't symmetrical. 90/10 pretty clearly means "take action", but 10/90 doesn't means equally unequivocally "take no action".
The other peculiar thing here is that regardless of whether you believe in GW, getting ourselves weaned off oil is a good thing that would have benefits of its own.
Keep pumping out the hot air nature boy - I'm still freezing my ass off!
Eh, no. If you claim there are thousands, and that they support your claim, feel free to source it :)
You seem to believe that the thousands of papers written on climate are all in the area of "is climate change due to humans?" which is laughable. They're not. That's conjecture you'll find in IPCC reports though.
As for my "reality has turned out worse than predicted" comment, just look at all the IPCC reports.
Sorry, I'd rather have a look at real science as compared to the latest IPCC reports which are not based on hard science but on opinion reports by environmental groups ;)
No, my position is: when you look at the correlation between CO2 and temperature, which records, theories and models suggest to be tied together, and then look at the -huge- increase of CO2 released since the industrial revolution, then you should be worried.
Why? No where before in earth's history has CO2 been a driver of temperature. The whole AGW argument (feel free to read up upon it) is that we currently cannot explain why the temperature has risen over the last 35-or-so years, and thus it must be our fault - and that CO2 for the first time in history is the driver, not the result, of increasing temperatures.
There are, of course, competing hypothesises.
PS: "huge"? Where? The CO2 levels in our atmosphere have been more than an order of magnitude higher before without ill effects ("runaway" scenarios)
it's in my head
I know right? I clicked on the comments section for this Slashdot article and the first thing I see is a +4 informative post about how global warming has been occurring long before humans have ever existed on the planet.
I'm starting to suspect Slashdot is populated by a mob of rednecks. The sheer stupidity is mind-boggling. It makes me sick that the US, with an economy an order of magnitude larger than any other in the world, has fallen behind in new technology and research and development while spending trillions on wars and worthless bailouts.
It's not even the fate of the US that bothers me. It's the fate of the world. Technological breakthroughs and developments the US could produce can be horizontally transferred all over the world, decreasing energy consumption, greening our power supplies, aiding in the suffering of billions. Our entire world suffers because the US is run by a bunch of paranoid, red-tinted retards.
As for my "reality has turned out worse than predicted" comment, just look at all the IPCC reports.
Sorry, I'd rather have a look at real science as compared to the latest IPCC reports which are not based on hard science but on opinion reports by environmental groups ;)
Well that's definitely convenient for you that if a report doesn't fit into your world view, then it surely must be unscientific!
Just because they made one or two mistakes in a report of more than 3000 pages, doesn't mean anything. That's actually pretty good!
If anything, Climatologists have been complaining that the IPCC reports have been watered down by politicians.
Why? No where before in earth's history has CO2 been a driver of temperature .... and that CO2 for the first time in history is the driver, not the result, of increasing temperatures.
Err.. I'm not sure where you're getting that, but that's bullocks.
That goes completely against everything I've read and heard from experts in the field.
PS: "huge"? Where? The CO2 levels in our atmosphere have been more than an order of magnitude higher before without ill effects ("runaway" scenarios)
The last time CO2 levels where as high as now was about 15 million years ago,
and sea levels where also about 22 to 36 meters higher.
Global temperature was 5 to 10 degrees Celsius warmer.
I never said anything about "runaway" scenarios.
I did mention that there is a danger that we tip the balance that gave us this ridiculously stable climate for the last 20.000 years, compared to how the climate was before.
I call fake! Thats not a Daily Mail article. Where is the part detailing how this is all the asylum seekers' fault?
Ok, I see what your gripe is. Yeh, by "plateau" I didn't mean tens of thousands of years of relatively flat temperatures. Just that we should be maxed out about now.
And what makes you it's "maxed out"? Just visually looking (you have to look at the raw numbers to get an exact amount), the trough to peak time for the previous cycles exceeds the current trough to current time. My TARDIS is broken. Is yours working?
It is not an assumption, rather what a truckload of research has been pointing to. But if you prefer let's say it's dark and it looks like it might be a gun, but you're not sure. The analogy is still fine.
I'm tired of people saying there's "a truckload of research". Cite references. You can't have an intelligent discussion without knowing what the basis of the opinion is. Back to your anaogy, I presume you are saying that CO2 is a gun. I know guns can easily kill. Show me a reference where it says were are going to release enough CO2 to be toxic. The dark example I agree is much better.
That's pretty much the same thing as saying the gun isn't loaded. Or that it might actually be pointed at your foot and not your head. Put that in if you like. The analogy still works.
If only works if you are trying to get me to react without thinking. Let's change your analogy to this: You are in a dark room and you have the gun, and you see something coming towards you. Do you shoot? Much harder to answer, isn't it?
However you are making a false dichotomy: solve the climate problem or help the poor. Any action we are able to take now on climate will help improve our options in the future should the dangerous effects of AGW prove to be true. And furthermore, significantly rising sea levels and changing weather will probably have a much greater adverse effect on the poor and disadvantaged than anyone else. So not doing anything to stop GW may also end up being equivalent to hurting the poor.
You have not examined the effect of the politics from the issue much, have you? We've already seen limiting of cheaper, combustion generators to push more limited solar ones (yes, it's renewable, the it doesn't work at night and is far more costly). If you want an egregious ( unrelated to AGW ) example (but same 'logic'), the EU obstructed US GM (genetically modified) corn to Somalia under famine conditions. If the EU cared that much, they should have just offered to grind it up into cornmeal. Another one would be the effect of banning DDT and malaria. Millions of lives were needlessly lost. The poor will be the ones who will mostly suffer.
So you're advocating ignoring a known threat just because there might be other unknown threats? That just seems silly.
No. I'm saying (for example) if soot is what is causing a bulk of the glacial melting you are worried about, you should concentrate on soot.
I totally agree with you there. You'll note that I made no suggestions about what policy actions to take. I merely said we need to take the threat seriously. But I believe there is much we can do without sending global economies to the brink of disaster. As the science evolves we must be prepared to react. But doing nothing now is a poor choice. We at least need to invest heavily in green energy, so that we'll have something reliable we can switch to.
The sane non-AGW sites say exactly that. You don't need AGW to argue that it's a bad thing to send B$s to unstable parts of the world. You don't need cap-and-trade to push economical light technology or better insulation. AGW is just a distraction.
Oh, ok, you mean ignoring feedbacks. Yeh, 1 deg C