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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."
I'm sure everybody here will be interested in reading Lomborg's response before forming an opinion.
Damn right! There is a huge lack of respect for the amount of money and effort the petroleum industry has put into setting the story straight. Listen people, there is no story here, go back to burning everything you can lay your hands on, and we'll tell you if there is a problem.
However, it has not been shown that humans are the primary cause of this warming.
Incorrect, it has: Empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming
Here we speak of Lomborg, and you immediately begin talking about un-cited "other people" who somehow make Lomborg's mistakes disappear in a puff of equivalency.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
You'd have done much better to link to Lomborg's response, than going off on your speculative aura.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
So now we have a celebrity science pissing-match on our hands. This is simple, IPCC was married with politics, like much of the entire debate. Everyone back to the lab, the field, the research. Stop pandering to politicians and environmentalists, and come up with some science! Until then, no I'm not taking you seriously.
That's absurd. Your sweeping generalization ignores the decades of research poured into the topic by research groups from all over the world. There is ongoing research continually improving upon current models with updated and refined data. You can go take a look at the thousands upon thousands of journal articles written by these scientists, assuming you can even understand the jargon.
You know Lomborg was dishonest? Based on what?
Based on the fact that the numbers he used for deforestation were not applicable to the problem, aggregated over different collection methods, and completely irrelevant to the problem caused by deforestation: loss of habitat for endemic species.
And yes, I read his crap. It was a massive disappointment, and the only conclusion I could come to was that he was either ignorant beyond belief, or dishonest.
So yes, we can ignore him. As for your statement "that global warming "scientists" were dishonest in their research", that's not true either. The closest thing that has been demonstrated is that some researchers are human and petty in their responses to other people's requests and research. That's a long way from demonstrating that EVERY researcher has faked his research.
Feel free to argue otherwise, but to be credible, you're going to have to demonstrate that every single paper arguing for AGW is dishonest. Go ahead.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Does it really matter if we are warming the planet or not?
Even if we are how are we going to fix it? Limit CO2 emissions by something like cap and trade? Great concept but India, China etc are not going to play in
a game that is detrimental to their growing manufacturing industries. Or perhaps we create green energy solutions, problem is none of those solutions are cost
effective to be self sustaining. If we are warming the planet who is to say it is not actually a positive thing?
Got Code?
But still we must debunk and continue to debunk. There are a fair few people who just dont know how accurate the science is, a common question I get is "How can we measure air (CO2) from thousands of years ago", I point them towards the Wikipedia page on Ice Cores and say "because it's been trapped there all this time".
A denialist wont listen, they are just looking to confirm their bias (and tabloids have made an industry out of doing this) but you'll occasionally find a rational person who will listen. We aren't trying to change denialists, it's the genuine sceptics we want to reach. The ignorant never hold any real power.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Out of thousands of independent studies done by thousands of scientists that generally lead to the conclusion that climate change is happening and man is most likely the cause, you would ignore all of that because a few scientists might have been dishonest. Yet you would believe one man who has now been shown that there is some issues with his work. If you are truly skeptical you should throw his work too. That still leads to many, many more scientists who have hard data that climate change is happening.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
One of the things that REALLY bugs me about climate research is seeing LEGITIMATE scientists use the word "SKEPTIC" as a SMEAR.
Scientists are SUPPOSED to be skeptic, and I understand that this is not what the phrase is meant to convey, but the mere idea of labeling a scientists "skeptic" to smear him shows how political scientists in general have become. Remember when they were all about the pursuit of truth and knowledge?
I guess it sounds better than "denier", (which sounds like some McCarthy-era witch-hunt-ism), but why can't scientists keep their professionalism in situations which become politicized?
FanFictionRecs.net
That's not what he says:
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Reading that very lengthy rebuttal, one thing becomes clear. Howard Friel does not deserve our time or thought. If you are going to criticize someone's work, you need to be doubly careful that the things you take issue with are valid. Here it appears that the criticism is far less solid than the material it critisizes. This does not make the original material correct as a result, but truely; there is nothing to see here, move along.
I haven't read his books, but I live in Denmark so Lomborg gets quite a bit of press here, especially under the climate change conference in December. In interviews he's always come across as a pragmatist more than a skeptic.
He has two main arguments:
1) Think about the return on investment.
Let's say we can cool the earth one degree by spending a trillion dollars. Is it worth the investment? What do we really get out of it? How many other problems could have been fixed with that money?
2) The current approach to fighting climate change is wrong.
UN treaties and money aren't going to stop the developing world from using fossil fuels. The only surefire way to get off of coal is to develop something that is cheaper. Instead of giving money to developing countries to bribe them not to pollute, we should invest the money in new technology, so that in 10, 20, 30 years we can say "here, this is cheaper than coal and doesn't pollute".
I think both of his points are important to consider, though I don't agree with him completely. There are risks to his solution - what if our investments don't bear fruit, and coal is still the cheapest energy source in 30 years? What if climate change causes political destabilization so we don't have enough time to get finished?
I don't think anybody has a perfect solution, but I do think that Lomborg contributes positively to the debate.
One of the new postdocs in my lab is from the Czech Republic. He says that everything's more advanced in America, including the idiots.
The problem is not, nor has it ever been that lunatics with their hand out the window yelling, "it feels fine!" are shouted down or ignored. The problem is that over the past 20 years the understanding has evolved that there is a "correct" result, and anyone working to disprove that result is an enemy to be scrutinized, tied to suspicious parties and ostracized.
By contrast, there are respected scientists in every other field attempting to disprove established theories, and should their work pan out, they would publish without fear of immediate rejection by their peers.
It is the nature of scientific theory that it is tested and attacked. That is why we value a theory limke evolution, which has survived these constat attempts to disprove or reduce its scope for a very long time.
Of what value is a body of theory that can only be confirmed, but which brooks no attempt to disprove?
"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.
Medieval warm period wasnt necessarily a period of global warmth. It may have been a period of north-atlantic warmth. Other areas were cooler. This is one of the many areas where the situation is just flat out more complicated than any popular treatment would lead one to believe. Very often one area will be cooler and another hotter and it's bugger-all difficult to properly sort it out and demonstrate a *global* trend without going to a very long time-scale.
And it wasnt named that because it was actually green - it wasnt. It was named that because Ericsson had previously found it very difficult to attract settlers for his previous development, Iceland, because even though it was in fact quite green at the time, it just sounded cold and barren. So he chose a more attractive name for his second development in the interest of marketing.
Certainly true.
Whether or not this is true is far from a settled question. Mans actions influence the environment and vice versa and always have. How much is "significant?" There is some very interesting research that indicates even the tens of thousands of years of farming prior to the industrial revolution may have altered global climate significantly enough to be detected. However in the broader picture, of course, the natural forces that have driven climate change since long before humans evolved are still at work and dwarf anything we can do or likely will be able to do anytime soon.
I think there is a grain of truth in that, but you drastically oversimplify.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
There you go again. Conflating "climate change" with whether man is the most likely cause. Its really rather rich. The prime highlight of the IPCCs AR3 was to "forget" the existence of climate change prior to the 19th century. Natural variation over the past thousand years was reduced to quiet gradual downtrend with an abrupt surge upward in the 1800s. In so doing they discarded thousands of studies and work of thousands who previously carefully documented periods of great warming and cooling throughout the history of man.
This can be seen clearly by comparing the IPCC-1990 report, which concisely shows the consensus of an old guard (now largely dead). A very warm, much warmer period during the middle ages (shown in read). The IPCC AR3 and AR4 replaced this with the blue curve. Shown a flat-changeless temperature history with a slight downtrend, suddenly accelerating upward.
But their claim was bespectacled from the start by way of special pleading they had explained away each interruption in warming that occurred during the 20th century, but then after the report was published, yet another unexpected cooling period emerged.
Suddenly the meme switched from being about "Global Warming" to being "Climate Change". The focus shifted from temperatures to sea-levels and hurricanes. Yet this turned out to be an even more tenuous footing. Its already no longer considered reputable among intellectual circles to discuss such extravagances. Eventually the talking point was settled upon: weather is not climate. The recent cooling is just weather.
Indeed, weather is not climate. Climate is the expectation of weather--and so yes, it surely does matter when year after year goes by somewhat cooler than had been predicted by the IPCCs latest report.
Meanwhile, the very people who had steadfastly refused to deny climate-change are now labeled the climate change deniers. This stemmed from an Orwellian campaign to redefine terminology. Suddenly believing in climate-change meant believing in anthropogenic climate change. The language literally twisted to be an embodiment of the "one true belief"--no need for that pesky modifier anthropogenic, and all the better to co-opt what everyone knows: climate changes.
Several very cogent critiques of the AR3 temperature series have been published which eviscerated that graph as a product of flawed statistical methods and bad data. Yet a loud cadre continues to deny any problem exists, and banks on the lack of specialized knowledge among the public and other scientists to trade on their word alone.
And, no, we're saying that there is no contribution from Man. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but its effect on temperature depends on poorly understood feedback effects. These effects are in part also responsible for the long history of natural temperature variation that the IPCC otherwise ignores. Ultimately, what it comes down to is this: The IPCC claims a temperature rise of 2C/century. To arrive at this number they assume almost all strong feedbacks are amplifying rather moderating the C02 driven warming. Why does this matter? Much of the impetus for "ACTION NOW!" stems from the notion of a climate tipping point, but if the feedback effects are more moderating than the IPCC claims, this is highly unlikely.
But if the cause isn't man made, then we can say "don't blame me!" when disaster strikes.
Imagine if this thinking was applied to other areas. Hurricanes aren't man made, so we don't need to get out of the way. Floods aren't man made so I can build my house on the river bank. Lightning is a natural phenomena so I can keep golfing in the rain.
If you replace 'suffer' with 'LIVE IN HOUSEBOATS' then global warming becomes AWESOME! :D
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Greenland was colonized during a period of global warmth. That it is why it was named that way.
According to the Reverend J. Sephton in his book Eirik the Red's Saga, Greenland was named as a marketing ploy by Eirik: "Because," said he, "men will desire much the more to go there if the land has a good name."
Yes, it would have been warmer and greener than it was now, but if there was subterfuge in the naming of the country then I don't imagine that it was a tropical paradise. It also doesn't mean that it was as consistantly warmer across the globe as it is now.
But it is also a distraction. Do you deny that being shot by a gun could kill you, merely because other people have died without being shot. Just because it got warmer then doesn't mean that we are not causing it to get warmer now. It is getting hotter, faster and more globally than it did back then.
Man is not powerful enough to change the earth's climate to any "significant" degree. But that big thermonuclear ball in the sky is. A billion petrochemical fueled cars will not influence the sun.
Nobody has every claimed that we are making the sun hotter. This demonstrates that you really don't understand the problem. The problem is that the heat from the sun is being trapped here. As an analogy, my house stays pretty cool even on hot days without the need for air conditioning. As long as it gets cooler at night, it stays pleasant during the day. But if it stays hot at night, it doesn't get a chance to lose the build-up of heat from the previous day and it gets more unpleasant as after day. The days are not necessarily hotter, but the accumulated heat energy means that each successive day has a larger affect.
Scientists are men that can be influenced by propaganda just like any man can be. I think the climate change scare is just another way for politicians to steal our hard earned money.
The climate change "scare" as you call it was instigated by the scientists, not the politicions. They don't just watch the news and think "yeah, I had better parrot that line too". They just follow their data, and all get to the same place. It is either a giant conspiracy or the truth. Which seems the most likely.
However, if you can come up with ANY evidence to back up the claim that it is the politicians that are leading our scientists around then please present it. Oh, have a look at all those CRU emails that were released. They should be able to tell you the names of the politicians who are giving the orders (if there are any). Come back and let us know.
The above poster illustrates something very important:
Part of the reason one should be very skeptical of AGW alarmists is their rabies-like demeanor and aggression against all that they perceive as even the slightest heresy against their little modern day apocalypse cult.
Wider implication: Never trust the results in any discipline that is subject to a reputation cascade. (I.e, disciplines where even mild dissenters are ostracized)
You do not "debunk", you ostracize. The main modus of debate of AGW proponents from day one has been moralistic, not empirical.
Hence the conversion of "skeptic" from badge of honor to a mark of shame, and the introduction of the "denier" label to further amp up the hysteric persecution of those who dont go with the program.
This also explains the skepticism of the general public. Joe Blow doesnt know his tree rings from his ice cores, but he sure knows what fanaticism looks like.
After all, how can one trust a science where "skepticism" is career death? The answer is simple: One cant. And as the tip of the iceberg is now visible for all to see - the remaining question is how much is hidden by the sea...
After reading about half of Lomborgs rebuttal, I think the more pertinent issue is "can Friel read"? Perhaps we can set up a literacy fund to help the good man get some remedial ed?
As for your assertion that "Lomborg paints himself a persecuted DaVinci":
1. As far as I know, he has never compared himself to DaVinci. I.e, you are making shit up.
and
2. He has had the pleasure of being convicted (and then aquitted) of the novel thought-crime of "unintentional dishonesty". Gotta love those cultists - they are at least an inventive bunch.
http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20reply%20to%20Howard%20Friel.pdf
"Without reading both books, I can't take sides on the merits. But I will say some of the stuff in TFA sets off my alarms--like spending a footnote on a WHO report just to cite the population of Europe."
When doing math, statistical sources matter. But here we have something substantial to discuss. Is Lomborg dishonest in this case? Read along for the answer!
Friel: "But Lomborg's only source for these figures—a chart in the statistical annex of a 2004 World Health Organization report—contains
no data on human mortality due to excess heat or cold. In fact, the words "excess heat" and "excess cold" make no appearance in the WHO document; neither does the word "heat," and the word "cold" appears only once in a reference unrelated to death due to excess cold.
Lomborg's reference to the WHO document, which allegedly supports his claim that two hundred thousand people die each year in Europe from excess heat, reads in its entirety: "207,000, based on a simple average of the available cold and heat deaths per million, cautiously excluding London and using WHO’s estimate for Europe’s population of 878 million (WHO, 2004a:121).”
However, page 121 of the 2004 WHO report—The World Health Report 2004: Changing History— which is what this source references, lists no data on cold- and heatrelated deaths per million, or for cold- and heat-related deaths in any context.
Likewise, Lomborg's very next reference-to support his claim that 1.5 million Europeans die annually from excess cold - reads in its entirety: "1.48 million, estimated in the same way as total heat deaths."
Thus, Lomborg's references indicate that page 121 of the 2004 WHO report is the source of his estimates of annual heat- and cold-related deaths in Europe; however, this page in the WHO report lists no statistics for either cold- or heat-related deaths. Consequently, there is no apparent basis here or elsewhere in Cool It for Lomborg's claim that 1.5 million Europeans die annually from excess cold. [LD, p. 86, emphasis added]
Lomborg: "In fact, the text and first endnote in this section make it very clear where the figures are sourced from: “Based on the summary of the biggest European heat and cold study (Keatinge, et al., 2000, p. 672).” (p. 170).
In the UK edition of the book, there is even a figure with the numbers, with the further explanation: “estimated in the text, using Keatinge et al., 2000:672.” (p. 233, CIUK) Friel’s claim that I relied on a WHO document that does not support my case is astonishing and profoundly disingenuous.
I clearly used the WHO report solely to provide an estimate of Europe’s population (because WHO uses the standard geographical definition of Europe to the Ural Mountains).This is evident in the text that Friel himself quoted: “and using WHO’s estimate for Europe’s population of 878 million (WHO, 2004a:121).”
Finding this study on Google Scholar took me all of two seconds using the reference provided by Lomborg (in his book).
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/321/7262/670
The quote is confirmed by Google Books:
http://books.google.se/books?q=estimated+in+the+text,+using+Keatinge+et+al.,+2000:672&btnG=S%C3%B6k+i+b%C3%B6cker
In short, from this example, picked by you - not me, it plainly evident that is Friels honesty or literacy that should be in question, not Lomborgs. This is likely to be representative of the "debunking" in its entirety, going from what I have read of the rebuttal so far.
Friel, denouncing Lomborg on glaciers:
"Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is Page 18 of 27 very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005). [IPCC, 2007c, p. 493]"
How is that "settled science" working out for you Frielyboy?
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
He's not just saying "Nope, this isn't a problem, ignore it, don't worry, etc, etc." A person like that is much easier to dismiss. What he's saying is "Yes, this is a problem, but not a big one, and certainly not one worth all the money and effort being proposed to fix it. Instead, we should spend that on other things that would have a much bigger impact on quality of life." More or less he's not disagreeing with the fundamental premise or conclusion, he's disagreeing with the policies being proposed because of that.
This drives the global warming proponents totally mad. Most of them seem to be of the opinion that what they have to do is convince people that global warming is real, and caused by humans. Once that is done, people should be willing to accept whatever policies they say are necessary. No questioning of the costs or the utility, they've proven the problem and now whatever they say needs to happen should happen without further question.
So Lomborg has become one of their top enemies because he doesn't fundamentally disagree on the idea that the world is warming, just that it is worth while to try and solve when there are so many other problems to human life. For that, they hate him.
That is one of the things that makes me question motives in this whole thing. I can understand exasperation with people who believe your research is incorrect/false/made up if your truly believe it is right. You think you've got it correct, done a lot of work in that regard, you get mad when people say "Nuh uh!". However, when someone is disagreeing not with that, but with the policies you demand and you get even more angry at them, well that makes me wonder: Is the research really what's important to you, or are you using it just to try and drive policies that you want, regardless of their use? It would seem to me that how to deal with the problem would be open for discussion, yet discussion of that generates the most backlash. Makes you wonder.
Who knows why this got modded interesting, it's fuckin' dumb.
Let's try a little thought experiment, shall we? Two scenarios:
1) Let's imagine that you are working on the bleeding edge of science and you're investigating a question that no-one knows the answer to, like "why does Nt-acetylation of bulk proteins happen?". You do some clever research, and whaddya know, you come up with an interesting answer: "it's because acetylation can function as a degradation signal". That forces a need to revisit thinking on protein turnover, a larger topic, and may even mean that we need to think again about exactly how homeostasis works. So you write it all up and if you can get the paper past your clever colleagues who do peer review, you might get published in Science and you can be very proud of yourself. Look, it's happened here!
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/327/5968/966
2) Now, let's imagine that you investigate something a bit more fundamental to modern biological science. Say, the idea that DNA encodes genetic information about the shape of proteins. Let's say you invent a clever experiment and the findings are very striking -- they appear to show that DNA doesn't encode that information after all! Now for the thought experiment bit: do you think that the standards and scrutiny that will be applied to your claim will be higher or lower than in scenario 1, given that your results will require the setting aside / reinterpretation of an enormous mass of prior experimental results and accepted scientific theory. Why, that's right! Your results will be subjected to more careful scrutiny. They will have to be replicated, validated, tested etc etc every which way from Sunday, because the inherent balance of probabilities is that your results are wrong or artefactual or explicable within the current framework, and that the prior thinking was right. It's not *impossible* that the opposite holds true, but it *is* extremely unlikely.
People who seek to demonstrate that anthropogenic climate change is not happening are much closer to scenario 2 than scenario 1. Scientists will quite reasonably say, "just before we chuck out all the accumulated evidence and thinking about how the world works and accept your argument that you've shown it that is, in fact, possible for humans to add net tens of billions of tons of gases such as CO2 and CH4 to the atmosphere in the space of decades without it having an impact on climate, do you mind terribly if we take a very long hard look at your evidence and reasoning?"
The best part is that even on that very page, if you match up the time-lines you can see that the temperature and CO2 graphs don't line up, and that the temperature starts to spike before CO2 amount does.
Unfortunately, there's no -1 misinformative mod.
That is to be expected. 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?
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.
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. Is it worth it to curtail the warming? How much will it cost to adapt vs. prevention? Those are the interesting questions, but few discusses this :/
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
You deserve upmods. It seemingly cannot be stated enough, because the "skeptics" don't get it: of COURSE temperature leads CO2 levels. What would a sudden, pre-temperature rise of CO2 levels come from? There wasn't much coal burned in the ice ages.
When no CO2 is added to the system, it merely works as a feedback for temperature changes, magnifying them. Oceans get warmer, reducing their capacity to dissolve gases, releasing more CO2. Rotting vegetation trapped in ice melts, releases methane and CO2. Fortunately, the additional CO2 released from warming is not enough to cause more warming than what released it, so it doesn't run away, it stabilizes at a new, higher temperature.
But when CO2 is added to the system from outside (fossil fuels trapped in the earth for ages), it's not just a feedback. It's a forcing, something that drives temperature change.
So, that CO2 followed temperature rises during the end of the ice ages is not evidence against global warming. It's what you would expect to happen when there are no humans around to burn gigatons of coal, if current theories of carbon feedback are correct.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
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
I think the whole thing has become so politicized that an honest viewpoint from either side is rare. The global warming believers think it's such a big impact if it's true that they feel they can't honestly present counter-evidence, and the unbelievers think the cost is so high that it can't be paid without incontrovertible evidence.
Unfortunately, climate science doesn't have a great record (the planetary ecosystem and climate are pretty goddam complicated). At the same time, we will never have evidence that the average idiot will understand and accept for anything as complex as a checking account.
Most people, myself included, have no real basis on which to make a decision, so we pick the side with the people we trust.
Personally, I trust scientists much more than businessmen. Good scientists are trained to be brutally honest with themselves, and to use methods that expose rather than hide flaws in their own reasoning.
Businessmen are trained to be confident in their abilities and conclusions regardless of reality.
This means that when businessmen look at the objective opinions of good scientists, with their "given this" and "see chart X for exceptions", they blow them off. Then they spend millions pointing out how the scientists can't even make up their mind.
For me, it's an easy choice. That doesn't mean that I am immune to arguments either way, just that I tend to listen with my own slant, and I recognize it.
I personally wish we would just give respected climate scientists some money and some peace for a couple of years to fight it out among themselves without worrying about the viewpoint of uninformed idiots, but I know it's not going to happen.
As someone who believes in man-made climate change I can assure both you and the GP that you are completely wrong about my beliefs.
I don't think we need to give up our modern lives and return to some kind of hippy-farming-commune existence. We just need to develop technology that doesn't pump CO2 into the atmosphere. Sure, that does cost money to develop, but so did drilling for oil or burning coal to generate electricity.
Even if you don't believe in climate change the benefits of not burning coal and oil should be pretty obvious. You can see pollution all around us in the form of the dust and dirt that accumulates on buildings and in my house (which is next to a main road).
Don't think I'm attacking you personally either. We need to change things at government and industrial levels. In the end though there comes a point where we are going to have to force the Chelsea Tractor / Hummer drivers into less polluting cars. I don't see a problem with that - we don't allow people to piss in swimming pools because the majority of people don't want to swim in that. You can't expect to go around spewing crap into the air when there are just as good alternatives that don't do that.
We are not there yet by a long way, but one day we will be and that's all I'm saying:
- We need to develop less polluting technology, if not because of climate change then because of pollution and the finite nature of the oil and coal supplies.
- Eventually technology will get there, but in the mean time I'm still flying long haul and you can still drive your tractor around town. I own a Colt with super-efficient engine, mainly because it's cheaper for me to run. If electric was cheaper I would buy one of these too. Totally selfish and nothing to do with the green lobby.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
1. Oops! You used the wrong word there -- you said there are *rates* of increase / decrease that overwhelm anything we've seen in modern times. I'm aware that the *total change* was much larger, but not that the *change per unit of time* was much larger. Rate is important, as faster rates reduce the time for species to adapt.
2. What is this rubbish about little old us? There are more than 6 billion of us on the planet. Why wouldn't a very large number of resource-using large mammals be able to affect the planet? We can and do change physical geography on an ongoing basis -- there's virtually no square inch of England that isn't different from its "natural" state due to active management by humans. We can and do deplete resources or poison environments so that they are uninhabitable.
3. What is this rubbish about "trace gas" and "parts per million"? What is inherently implausible about changes in the quantum of trace gases (it's not just CO2, y'know) having real effects on physical systems?
4. Overall, you've missed the point: there's a ton of physical evidence that climate change is happening (and quite a bit for it having an impact on ecosystems too), plus well-worked through theory with good evidence for how ("the greenhouse effect"). *That's* what will need reconciliation with an assertion that there is no climate change.
In the end, there are two arguments to be discussed:
1) Is it happening?
2) What do we do? -- ranging from nothing to something.
I assure you that I'm quite as attached to home comforts as you -- I just happen to believe that the answers are pretty clear:
1) Yes, it is
2) Doing something is more likely to preserve more of my comforts (and fellow human beings) than doing nothing. You clearly take the opposite view.