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Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic
DJRumpy writes "The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."
When you have an algorithm, for instance, that produces the 'hockey stick' even when fed random numbers, that is positive proof that the numbers have been cooked - manipulated in order to produce the predetermined outcome.
Yes but we don't have such algorithms do we? Instead we have models such as GISS-E which you can download and run on your *nix box at home.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
"It's like dealing with a bunch of raving Creationist lunatics."
Creationists, pro-tabacoo and anti-AGW groups fund and work for the same think tanks that produce the red-herring theories. It may be obvious propoganda but their marketing efforts are nothing short of outstanding. I started debunking denialist on slashdot almost a decade ago, back then almost every one of my posts was modded down, nowadays I get much better treatment from the mods.
It's not the hard core nutjobs that need to be convinced, an impossible task. It's the moderate but disinterested observer who has been befudled by clever marketing. As with educating people about tabacoo and evolution, it's a slow process but a necassary one.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You should go and visit "uncommon descent" the blog HQ of intelligent design. They're always bringing up AGW skepticism, since the notion of a far-reaching conspiracy of scientific propaganda and elitist repression is the same excuse they use to wave away the fact that the overwhelming majority of scientific opinion is in favour of evolution. Throwing their lot in with other denialists "makes their worldview make sense".
Also institute for creation research states:
Global warming may affect some parts of our society negatively but would likely benefit others. In fact, the current warming trend may be returning our global climate closer to that prevalent in the Garden of Eden. Compared to climate changes which have occurred in earth history, a temperature rise of a few degrees is a small fluctuation which will not lead to a complete melting of the polar caps or another ice age. Earth has a stable environmental system with many built-in feedback systems to maintain a uniform climate. It was designed by God and has only been dramatically upset by catastrophic events like the Genesis Flood. Catastrophic climate change will occur again in the future, but only by God's intervention in a sudden, violent conflagration of planet Earth in the end times
Answers in genesis cry conspiracy and even cite "The Day After Tomorrow"!
The tactic used by Lomborg (quote mining) is the definitive modus operandi of a denialist. It is the bread and butter of Creationists, and for the person employing it, it is a strong indicator of either severe cognitive dissonance or outright lying.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
A: Correct. It is about manipulating the IPCC, not the peer review literature itself. I dont really know if that strengthens your case, however. For more extensive discussion, head over to the CRU nemesis himself: http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/17/climategatekeeping-2/
B: But here you go for some cut n paste - how to deep six a "dangerous" paper or journal editor in some easy steps (as far as I know it has not been published so far):
From: Phil Jones
To: rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,mhughes@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,srutherford@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, "Michael E. Mann" ,tcrowley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Fwd: Soon & Baliunas
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 08:49:22 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,jto@u.arizona.edu,drdendro@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, keith.alverson@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more
to do with it until they
rid themselves of this troublesome editor. A CRU person is on the
editorial board, but papers
get dealt with by the editor assigned by Hans von Storch.
Cheers
Phil
Dear all,
Tim Osborn has just come across this. Best to ignore probably, so
don't let it spoil your
day. I've not looked at it yet. It results from this journal having a
number of editors. The
responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few
papers through by
Michaels and Gray in the past. I've had words with Hans von Storch about
this, but got nowhere.
Another thing to discuss in Nice !
Cheers
Phil
"From: Keith Briffa
To: Edward Cook
Subject: Re: Review- confidential REALLY URGENT
Date: Wed Jun 4 13:42:54 2003
I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review – Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting - to support Dave Stahle’s and really as soon as you can. Please
Keith"
Hi Keith,
Okay, today. Promise! Now something to ask from you. Actually somewhat important too. I
got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and
Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims
that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression)
is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. They use your Tornetrask recon as the main
whipping boy. I have a file that you gave me in 1993 that comes from your 1992 paper.
Below is part of that file. Is this the right one? Also, is it possible to resurrect the
column headings? I would like to play with it in an effort to refute their claims.
If published as is, this paper could really do some damage. It is also an ugly paper to
review because it is rather mathematical, with a lot of Box-Jenkins stuff in it. It
won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically,
but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies,
without showing that their improved inverse regression method is actually better in a
practical sense. So they do lots of monte carlo stuff that shows the superiority of
their method and the deficiencies of our way of doing things, but NEVER actually show
how their method would change the Tornetrask reconstruction from what you produced.
Your assistance here is greatly appreciated. Otherwise, I will let Tornetrask sink into
the melting permafrost of northern Sweden (just kidding of course).
Cheers,
Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it
wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either
appears
I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.
Cheers
Phil
And another one:
Thanks a bunch Phil,
Along lines as my other email, would it be (?) for me to forward this to the chair of our commitee confidentially, and for his internal purposes only, to help bolster the case against MM?? let me know
t
Normally, temperature starts to rise due to e.g. distance to the sun decreasing slightly, which leads to increased CO2 which enhances the effect of the warming, causing further CO2 to be released until a new balance is achieved (essentially that the energy absorbed from the sun equals the earths black-body radiation). CO2 increase with temperature because CO2 is less soluble in warm (sea)-water, and a number of other effects (Tundra melting is often mentioned as a big one, though I don't personally know.). Now, into this system we (the humans) release enough CO2 to increase the concentration by what, 30%? What do *you* think will happen?
You have such a simple-minded view of the planetary climate...that is...unfortunately...wrong. Planetary temperatures are not correlated with (in the order you mention them) 1)short-term earth-solar distance, 2)CO2 increases, 3)solar absorbtion-black body radiation 'balance', 4)warming sea water CO2 solubility decrease (also bad chemistry as carbonate chemistry is far more complex than just 'CO2 solubility') or 5) tundra melting.
That CO2 must warm the earth can also be concluded directly by looking at the absorbtion bands of CO2. You could even calculate the approximate effect (though not the feedback loops) from this, the atmospheric and distribution of CO2 and from the distribution of the electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere.
Apparently you have never actually looked at the absorption bands for CO2. There is already more than sufficient CO2 in the atmosphere to absorb all of the IR radiation that is capable of being absorbed by CO2, within the first few hundred meters of the atmosphere above the surface. Once absorbed, the energy is not trapped but is immediately re-emitted. The wavelength of the reemitted thermal radiation is a probability distribution depending ONLY on temperature that can be predicted with Planck's law and it is NOT concentrated within the narrow CO2 absorption band so almost all of that re-emitted raditation is free to radiate out into space untouched any further by your nemesis CO2.
But of course, you knew all this. What pisses me off about all this that while the above is well-known science and has been for a long time, the economic aspects are far from clear to me.
It's precisely all of that 'well-known science' that is giving you so much difficulty.