Slashdot Mirror
Heartland Institute Document Leaker Comes Forward, Maintains Documents Are Real
The Bad Astronomer writes "Last week, an anonymous source leaked several internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a non-profit think tank known for anti-global-warming rhetoric. The leaker has come forward: Peter Gleick, scientist and journalist. In his admission, he cites his own breach of ethics, but also maintains that all the documents are real. This includes the potentially embarrassing '2012 Climate Strategy' document stating that Heartland wants to 'dissuade teachers from teaching science.' Heartland still claims this document is a forgery, but there is no solid evidence either way."
Next news story will involve a suspicious deadly accident involving the leaker.
Who has MORE reason to lie about this?
I'm no climate denier, but what he did was unethical. He should be fired, and possibly prosecuted if any crimes were committed.
Oh yeah, these are the guys that told you cigarettes were healthy, and that there was no reliable evidence that they harmed people. The world is full of shills and whores who will lie to your face if the price is right. Why should this be a surprise. These guys have a track record. The only thing controversial here is that these reprobates are telling a significant amount of the population exactly what they want to hear. I know its hard, double rough for some, when the lies they tell sound so sweet (consistent with your belief systems...), get over it. These people are not your friends and if China should hire them tomorrow, they'll give you 20 good reasons why eating lead is great for you.
Wake up, that smell is your ass on fire, and these clowns are holding the matches.
Have to applaud the whistleblower for having the courage to do this. Heartland is clearly a tool, not just for deniers, but for industry which would profit from a (further) dumbed-down populace. Where is the outrage, probably due to the present level of dumbing-down, there isn't very much. Bread and circuses.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Here is one article written about it (by someone who believes in AGW)
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/leaked-docs-from-heartland-institute-cause-a-stir-but-is-one-a-fake/253165/
This message was sent using 100% recycled electrons.
Those documents could be proven to be true beyond any doubt and the folks who just don't want to accept the facts and what the climatologists' data has shown, will just believe the institute and whatever "facts" Heartland feeds to them.
I'm sure all the talk radio people and the talking heads on Fox will be using the leak as "proof" of the deception and lack of ethics of climate scientists.
This will "prove" that climate scientists are liars and the whole Global Warming Hoax is all part of their Liberal agenda to destroy Capitalism and America.
Gleick is going to regret leaking those documents.
I really really hope I'm wrong and people are smarter than I give them credit for - I really do.
It is very likely faked. It was not gotten through the same channel as the other documents and there are many inconsistencies which make it of doubtful authenticity including metadata: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/15/notes-on-the-fake-heartland-document/ That said, it serves Heartland right after the fuss they made over Climategate.
This article's summary is half true. Lying by omission is almost as bad as by commission though.
What isn't mentioned? Note this: "Peter Gleick, scientist and journalist." Not mentioned are the list of accolades heaped on him (according to his Wikipedia page) for work in Global Warming. In other words he isn't acting as a disinterested scientist or journalist in this affair but as a dedicated partisan to a cause who let winning override ethics. By his own admission.
And "but there is no solid evidence either way" which is true enough on its own. Barring a confession by Gleick we will probably never be 100% certain the memo in question is a forgery. However there is a crapload of circumstantial evidence all pointing that way.
Not saying Heartland doesn't give me heartburn sometimes and I'm firmly in the skeptic camp, with the downmods right here to prove it. But this memo was a setup. It smelt funny from the start and gets riper by the day.
Democrat delenda est
Have you ever noticed how the skeptic's skepticism is biased in one direction? I wonder if they have ever noticed this.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
This was a really stupid thing for Dr. Gleick to do because it diminishes his cause substantially. For example, he was the lead author of the recent Science paper that everyone was making a big stink about having so many National Academy members on. I'm no (anthropogenic or not)-climate change denier, but this is bad. On a similar note, he also wrote this Forbes piece that mysteriously did not mention he was the lead author of the Science paper.
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
Some pretty interesting and pretty detailed analysis of the memo here.
I'm inclined to say the memo is probably fake given all the weirdness surrounding it, and given who the "leaker" is.
At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute's climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute's apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.
It appears the rest are documents that he knows are official that he acquired deceptively in order to verify the anonymous document. My own personal hunch, as I first noted when this broke, is that '2012 Climate Strategy' is a cheap fake thrown in with real documents. There is probably no way to verify this one way or the other but I don't think this summary or Phil Plait's blog posting adequately explain what Gleick did exactly. Here is one thing that is going for the validity of '2012 Climate Strategy' and that is if Gleick did not alter it then some of the sums and investments roughly match up with the budget document -- which caused Gleick to believe it is completely authentic. However, fiscal knowledge of the Heartland Institute might be more public than people think ...
My work here is dung.
Institute chooses names it thinks sounds reassuring but falls into uncanny valley and ends up sounding a bit creepy.
Korma: Good
that enjoys shitting in the face of science and progress under the pretext of that etherial "hand of the market." other notable endeavors theyre renound for include:
creating controversy and doubt over the fact that smoking causes health problems
drafting policies targeted at reducing the services provided by the federal government to nothing more than a "competitive marketplace"
instituting "market reform" into the education system and championing charter schools (here in los angeles, charter schools show up in the news once a week for some major breech of trust, child abuse or embezzlement scandal)
the same reaganite health care privatization and deinstitutionalization mentality that landed an entire generation of schitzophrenics and invalids on the streets of skid row.
check em out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heartland_Institute
Good people go to bed earlier.
And of course, you have evidence for this, right? There are analytics you could run over the text to prove/disprove the connection, but it's easy to just lie on Slashdot.
Evidence, or STFU.
James Gleick, did that cool book on fractals and chaos theory I read in high school.
"I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed." (from Gleick's Huffpost piece.) Haggling over the provenance and ethics of the Heartland documents is a dangerous distraction. People with a financial interest in perpetuating the status quo (and no sense of honesty, scientific ethics or responsibility to future generations) are going to look for every opportunity to debate every debatable point, cast aspersions on all good-faith actors, and sow uncertainty everywhere possible. That's a given, it's human nature.
Heartland institute says the document entitled "Heartland Climate Strategy" is a fake.
Peter Gleick says the document entilteld "2012 fundraising strategy and budget" is real.
They are probably both right. Why is this news?
I guess I can't speak for everyone, but I can't summon much outrage over this at all? Personally, I feel like it's simply a case of another "special interest group" with an agenda getting caught up in a situation of someone showing the world some of their internal content that leaked. I don't even care if people can eventually prove that one of their specific papers was real or fake.... As others posted, we know where they sided on the cigarette issue, and we're pretty clear where they side with respect to the global warming controversy too. Fine ... but ANY issues like this require people doing a lot more of their own reading and interpreting of studies -- not just going along with whatever special interest "think tank" is around, making bold statements.
My own take on things, just using a little bit of common sense, is that sure, things are looking pretty darn likely that our planet is gradually warming up. People bickering back and forth about the accuracy of that claim are wasting their time, if we can't move on to question #2, which is: "What can/should we really do about it?" That's where, IMO, things quickly get out of hand.
I mean, by most counts, the currently estimated world supply of untapped crude oil will be depleted in roughly 40 more years, if current rates of usage are sustained (and more quickly than that if they increase). If we stop burning oil (because it gets too scarce and its price gets prohibitive), some of the most likely alternatives seem to involve much "cleaner" forms of energy (solar and nuclear power, for example, or maybe hydrogen powered vehicles). So effectively, is this whole hullabaloo a "non issue" in the sense it's self-correcting anyway, as we run out of oil?
Oh yeah, these are the guys that told you cigarettes were healthy, and that there was no reliable evidence that they harmed people.
Not really, they worked with Phillip Morris to spread material on the effects of secondhand smoke, which was questionable at the time they did so (they had long since stopped doing this before actual studies confirmed the effects). Every think tank ofcourse helps it's sponsors ...
You need to keep history of something in mind. There's a history to every idea, as hard as that is to see. Until 1954, the official medical opinion on smoking itself was that it was healthy as well (there were suspicions from 1912 onwards). Even today I heard someone claim that smoking pot does not have worse health effects than tobacco smoke (think about it : no filters on the sigarettes -> you're actually inhaling burning leaves directly into your lungs which will never again come out. Healthy ? Of course not)
This is still happening to other products too. E.g. soda is supposedly healthy (esp. soda with "added vitamin C" or some such. It's not healthy at all). And sugar-free soda is worse, again something often denied. Or another popular one, that TL lights are healthy and generally good, especially CFL bulbs. We all know you get headaches from them, they can induce epileptic seizures, and research confirms long-term health effects. But they're "better for the environment". I guess environment doesn't include people.
So just to help me clarify here, we are not free men and we must exist and act within little narrowly defined jobs, all with conflicting standards and goals. Unfortunately this dude doesn't seem to have a clearly defined job so it's hard to evaluate him:
1) If he's a scientist he's supposed to at least appear objective and honest (reality, especially in private, is permitted some divergence). Both sides of this issue flake out from facts into intense social engineering so all players on both sides fail. There might exist a scientist on one side or the other who is just researching facts and is not carefully positioning activities and results to grind an axe... but I highly doubt it. So he fails, but not worse than anyone else in the game.
2) As a journalist he's supposed to just run any old garbage that gets for page hits and high ratings. He's failed at this because he wasted time and considerable ethical danger trying to verify if its true or not. He should have just scanned those docs and tossed them up on as many separate web pages as possible to maximize ad impressions. Poorly played, but at an ethical standard far about almost all contemporary journalists.
3) As a politician he's expected to tell whatever lie he was paid to tell as convincingly as possible. The ethical standard is so infinitely low that its impossible for him to fail. I can see some controversy if he's biting the hand that feeds him. He should expect the guys on the "other side" to spin the issue into turning him into a criminal mastermind, regardless of the facts, which seems to be what they're doing. He seems to waffle a bit about how sure he is, thats not good politician behavior. Again, poorly played, but at a high ethical standard.
4) Some flakes are trying to position the guy as being evil because he's a complete failure at NCIS / forensics by not operating in a manner fit for a FBI officer gathering evidence at a crime scene. I'm unimpressed, as far as I know the guy is not a lawyer nor does he play one on TV nor was he operating as a paid expert witness at the time.
Overall he didn't play it perfect, but he's not a crook. I'm moderately impressed with how he's playing it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
20 years of geologic data means NOTHING.
Heck, even 100 years might not be enough to determine whether anything is happening. Sorry Mr. Gore, a pretty presentation doesn't make a theory into a fact.
Anyone else remember the mid-1970s when another ice age was feared?
Come back in 2100 with facts. Until then, STFU.
The fossil fuel industry and many of the issues that the Right in this country are harping on have an interesting pattern.
They take an issue that could be potentially dangerous to their profits and turn it into an emotional issue - in this case Global Warming - and when it becomes an emotional issue, all reason is thrown out the door and rational discourse becomes impossible.
Global Warming was discovered decades ago. The fossil fuel companies started to become threatened by it. So we go from scientists have data about global warming and what we could possibly do about it to scientists have a Liberal Agenda to destroy capitalism and our Way of Life.
I have a neighbor and in-laws who live on a steady diet of Fox News and Talk Radio; such as Hannity, and if Global Warming comes up, they say words like "hoax", "socialist", "cause higher taxes", "destroying America", "predictions based upon inaccurate computer models", etc .... in very angry tones.
They're thinking emotionally. The anti-global warming crowd did a very good in turning this into a personal emotional issue.
They do this with other issues. Turn an issue from a purely academic one into dumbed down emotional rhetoric, and you got the other guys by the balls.
That's where the climate scientists got screwed. The fossil fuel industry got their PR people on it and then the right wing talking heads grabbed onto it, and now we have this mess of an issue that I for one have given up complete hope that anything can be done now.
tl;dr: industry is great at turning a scientific issue into an emotional one - an "us" vs. "them" issue and neutering the opposition.
Gleick has confessed to lying to obtain the documents; they were not leaked. You have to work inside an organization to leak documents, like the original ClimateGate emails. Megan McCardle of the Atlantic makes a strong case that the main document is forged.
The blog post in particular points out that he received many of these documents anonymously at first, and then sought to verify them using the deceptive practice that is mentioned in the summary.
Then that's wrong, he did not receive many of them anonymously, read the quoted section. He received one of them anonymously -- and it's important to point out -- it's the inflammatory one on climate strategy! This same error is in Phil Plait's blog!
I can't really comment about whether all the docs are real, but, just on the issue of the propriety of leaking documents:
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
It was great to be able to read the documents in Climategate I and II. And it's great to be able to read these, too.
Although Climategate has shown climate "scientists" to be more concerned about propaganda than science, and has thrown the whole theory of global warming (oops, I mean the theory that climate changes over time) into question, no one should be under any illusion that the think tanks that propagandize against AGW aren't oil company shills.
They may be right (by coincidence), but they're still shills.
Expecting a mod-down since I've hit both sides in this post.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Looking through the Google histories it seems that first he came out and then, after the fact, people started saying that he must have forged it. That is pretty difficult to check, (remember you can set a date range in Google news search; go from distant past to two days ago and you see just a few articles which seem to be the very first ones) and I'm not at all sure I did it right, but if it is true then it's pretty damning evidence that someone is desperate to tell any lie to make it seem that this is a forgery.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
As long as the document is accurate in portraying the story, it doesn't matter if the document is a fake or not. The real story is important.
Been there, done this.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
*kneads his forehead with his knuckles slowly and deliberately*
Argh... Now when I say "Hello Mr. Thompson" and press down on your foot, you smile and nod.
Hello, Mr. Thompson.
...he never says "they are real", he only says "he got them anonymously".
Gleick has lawyered up, and I'm getting some popcorn.
1. The group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment.
Hansen, Jones, et. al.
2. The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
Read the latest textbooks? AGW is taught as a FACT, pages and pages. Have to indoctrinate early ya know.
3. The group is preoccupied with making money.
Government Grants. Although I have to say that these guys are more narcissists that money grubbers.
4. Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
Editors losing jobs, those expressing legitimate doubts ostracized, etc.
5. Mind-numbing techniques (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, debilitating work routines) are used to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).
Nothing here.
6. The leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act, and feel (for example: members must get permission from leaders to date, change jobs, get married; leaders may prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, how to discipline children, and so forth).
Related to #4. JOnes and friends want to be the only peer reviewers. So no dissent every really sees the light of day in the journals.
7. The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and members (for example: the leader is considered the Messiah or an avatar; the group and/or the leader has a special mission to save humanity).
YOOOU aren't a Climate Scientist so nothing you say matters...Nobel Prize Winner in Physics? No matter because Yooou aren't a Climate Scientist
8. The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which causes conflict with the wider society.
Juden, Denier, etc. What will I have to sew onto my shirt?
9. The group's leader is not accountable to any authorities (as are, for example, military commanders and ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream denominations).
Hiding data, ignoring legal requests for data, etc. No Problem as long as you are on the "Right" side of the debate.
10. The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify means that members would have considered unethical before joining the group (for example: collecting money for bogus charities)
And here was have Peter Gleick. "I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts -- often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated -- to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved."
11. The leadership induces guilt feelings in members in order to control them.
Starving Polar Bears anyone? What natural disaster hasn't been blamed on Global Warming?
12. Members' subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group.
OK, pretty much applies to Slashdot guys.
13. Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group.
MDSolar? Is that you?
14. Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.
I'm sure Jones and Hansen hang out with non-believers all the time.
See, here's another moron sticking up for this shitty president.
There are people who just hate one side or another. And they predictably come up with the most shockingly shallow bullshit. And when someone points out /anything/ that might question deeply held prejudices, the ideologues call them stupid.
/greatly/ if people like you suddenly moved to pluto, where you could scream at each other all day, and the rest of society could actually get on with addressing the ISSUES.
The truth is not always on one side or the other, and it is not always neatly in between -- and society as a whole would benefit
I say this, already expecting a big woooossshhh before I even hit the Submit button. Part of me thinks you are a charity case.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
"Look, guys, I have to tell you the truth. To you I may be a big noise in the cocaine business, but I feel bad about not telling you I'm really an investigative journalist. Hey, I bet you're all feeling glad I got that off my chest".
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Actually, it was claimed by some that it was him who forged it before he came out, based mostly on similarities in his own writings and the memo. There was speculation on a number of blogs and Roger Pielke Jr. even sent him a tweet asking him if he could confirm or deny his involvement in a forgery. That was before his confession blog entry.
Clicky please.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Honestly I thought it was some shit-for-brains script-kiddie that made the forged Strategy Document considering the horrendous grammar used. I'd also hoped that someone with three letters after their name would have had enough sense to edit the document's meta-data enough so that it was at least plausible the forgery was authentic!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water [Paperback] Peter H. Gleick (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/Bottled-Sold-Story-Behind-Obsession/dp/1610911628
Maybe you should go live on Pluto, you idiot. I don't have any "deeply held prejudices"
This is a typical response of the political mind. Instead of cognizing incoming information, it is just turned around into ATTACK. So people who disagree with you are stupid, evil, uneducated... and you are a beacon of sanity. This is typically how crazy ideologues think of themselves.
/erases/ the memory of uncomfortable pieces of information, so that it never needs to connect with "painful" information.
The key problem is that powerful negative emotions prevent the ideologue from cognitively representing disconfirming information. And so they merely see the world as they want to, and become overly negative and aggressive whenever their perceptions are challenged. The mind even
The result is aggressive partisanship. Talk, talk, talk. Never listen. Never second-guess yourself. Never learn.
Call me an idiot again, and prove my point.
Gleick's announcment Feb 20: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/peter-gleick-admits-to-deception-in-obtaining-heartland-climate-files/
McArdle's Article: Feb 19: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/heartland-memo-looking-faker-by-the-minute/253276/
Pielke's tweet Feb 18: http://twitter.com/#!/RogerPielkeJr/status/170542669007818752
Sorry, wrong link for Gleick's announcement. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-h-gleick/-the-origin-of-the-heartl_b_1289669.html
and I'm here to generate more heat than light.
But seriously, did you have something to say about the Heartland Institute and its history and acts reflecting some of the worst of human nature?
Or were you just trying to muddy the issue?
But wait a minute.. why on earth would you defend the Heartland institute no matter who on earth else was doing anything? What does anyone else have to do with how what they do is wrong?
Ah... what exactly were they lying about?
People have pointed to some rather stupid statements in their internal documents, but where are these lies?
People also seem to forget that these are basically paid Lobbyists, albeit in a more public and less political directed roll.
These are NOT scientists, and they do NOT have particularly large budgets (actually quite laughably small).
Their aim seems to be to funnel a bit of money towards publication of articles that support their lobbying directions.
Why people seem to think this is any form of scientific smoking gun is beyond me, isnt this just how just about anything
political in the good old USA works these days?
There are an amply number of morons on both sides who treat this as a 'hearts and minds' exercise rather than a factual
situation, but thats hardly new.
Actually, he does not maintain that the documents are real. His statements was obviously written by his lawyers and only state that "many of the facts" (note: not "all of the facts") and especially of their budget and fundraising documents. Nothing about the policy document, and he doesn't even say that the original document was the policy document. It's sort of like a linear regression with huge confidence intervals: you can run about any set of facts through it and they fit.
Heartland claims Earlier this evening, Peter Gleick, a prominent figure in the global warming movement, confessed to stealing electronic documents from The Heartland Institute in an attempt to discredit and embarrass a group that disagrees with his views.
In fact, he made no such confession. What he said is: At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute's climate program strategy.
Then, he went to the effort of attempting to verify the authenticity and accuracy of the documents by pretending to be someone else and asking for information directly from Heartland: The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget.
So, he did pretend to be someone else, but he stole nothing. If the original documents were stolen (which is pure speculation), it was by someone other than Gleick. Impersonating someone else is certainly nothing to be taken lightly, but it's a well established technique used by reporter and investigators when using your real name may impede or alter your access to the information. Whether a crime was committed requires more details than given. But there is no evidence that he stole anything, and as such, he may have a slander or libel claim against Heartland for their statement. IANAL.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
There is no idealism here at all.
The is idealism. They believe that environmentalist-anything is a threat to free society. They are laissez-faire extremists. They always ask for more evidence whenever there is some threat from science.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Deniers always talk about popper, and science, and how they are the rigorous ones. They want falsifiable hypotheses, and when they get one -- they will argue black is white over whether or not it is falsifiable. They think they know more then the 1000s of /actual/ scientists who study the issue.
It is denial, because it is a black and white issue, they are right, and there is an inability to cognitively represent any disconfirming evidence. They always see themselves as sane, and therefore people who disagree with them are: stupid, evil, or uneducated.
Lord Monckton is at the zenith of climate change denialism. I honestly believe that he doesn't know he is just making stuff up. Vetren anti-science debunker potholer54 puts out a challenge to denialists: come up with ONE thing that Monckton gets right, that calls into question the IPCC's conclusions. To complete the challenge, you actually have to find Monckton's references, and assess that they really support what Monckton say.
And this is the key sticking point. Denialists just believe anything they hear, so long as it confirms their biases. It is obvious that denialists doen't follow references, because of the absurdly high number of mistakes that are made.
There is actually a slew of falsifiable hypotheses in AGW. All of them are very precisely defined and tested. An argument is built from 1000s of studies of more then 100 years of scientific research.
Don't believe me? Crack open an IPCC report and actually read it.
PS: Popper is not without critics in the philosophy of science, but that is another story.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
You should source some of the claims that Anthony Watts makes. Then compare them to what Watts says about them. It is pretty easy to work out that he doesn't know what he is talking about. But this doesn't matter since he is talking to people like you -- presumably Republican ideologues terrified of any government intervention is the free market.
All ya gotta do is follow the references. It is shockingly easy to do.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
You should also read what Gleick has to say about the leaked memos.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
A catastrophic, man made, global warming "scientist" lied.
Color me shocked. Or, to quote the baby from the E-trade commercials, "Let me show you my shocked face"!
I've never met anyone who thought investigators should be 100% honest that wasn't busy trying to hide their unethical actions from the world.
I don't let my children get away trying the "all the other kids do it" defense, why should I let a supposed adult do so?
and spewing half-truths, so perhaps you shouldn't try blaming the other side for acting how you do, even if it's simply made up slander to make yourself look better in your own eyes.
It takes in excess of $100 million to drill a deepwater offshore well these days, and it takes ~10 years after the exploration phase before the production starts (assuming success). Given those costs and a 10:1 success ratio in less-explored areas, an obscene profit margin can disappear pretty quick,
Yeah! Why, with a profit margin of only 38 billion dollars a year, at a hundred million to drill a deepwater offshore well, they'll be losing money if they drill a mere three hundred and eighty deepwater offshore wells every year, and not one actually produces oil.
Oh, wait-- the cost of drilling the well doesn't come out of their profit, it's already incorporated in their expenses. So, that forty billion dollars of profit already accounts for the costs of drilling wells. Never mind.
After Mosher received a posting from the hacker complaining that nothing was happening, he replied: "A lot is happening behind the scenes. It is not being ignored. Much is being coordinated among major players and the media. Thank you very much. You will notice the beginnings of activity on other sites now. Here soon to follow."
He doesn't sound too concerned that the data was obtained illegally. Bit different when the shoe is on the other foot eh?
Current at '-1'. You deserved that, sorry.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Your link directly contradicts your claim about RealClimate and UEA. RealClimate claims that someone attempted to hack into their server to upload the files taken from UEA. That would mean that the leaker definitely didn't work for RealClimate and could still have been a UEA insider.
The "study" she did on "scientific consensus" was shown to have used search terms that self-selected for papers that supported her premise.
Oh yeah, suppose we should just take your word on that. Which "study" are you talking about (provide a reference), and where is the refutation (also a reference).
99% of people can usually see through the bullshit when you actually go back to the original sources. (A true ideologue will say black is white and mis-read what is in front of them.)
I'm going to make a punt and say that your references will not support your assertion, and that you will not be able to admit it. But at least other people reading this post will have a chance to verify your claim.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I think the problem is that they want legitimately falsifiable hypotheses, not just silly statements like the CO2 absorption spectrum means that AGW is true. Yes, if any of the physical constants of the universe weren't what they are, then all of our science would be falsified. But it takes more to come up with a more than trivial hypothesis of AGW (trivial, meaning that human CO2 emissions have some nonzero and positive effect on global average temperature, in the same way that the butterfly in my backyard has some nonzero and positive effect on global average temperature). Especially when you're looking at asserting "catastrophic" consequences (or heck, even just some arbitrary definition of "bad"), everything falls apart, and Popper becomes particularly relevant.
The problem is that you need a falsifiable hypothesis to string all of those mini-hypotheses together - their mere *existence* doesn't let you conclude anything, there must be a rationale (and a falsifiable one at that) to get them to mean something. Yes, if you could show humans exhaled and emitted NO2 instead of CO2, AGW would be falsified. And if you could show that humans didn't exist, AGW would be falsified. But the individual facts that humans exist, and humans emit CO2, does *not* necessarily lead one to the conclusion that "human emissions of CO2 are increasing global average temperatures in measurable ways that will be "bad"".
Woooossshhhh
Been there, done that, and pretty impressed by the references of Watts and his guest posters. When the data is open, and the science isn't settled, they argue back and forth over what some bit of data really means, or if some particular sub-theory actually makes sense. Quite refreshing, actually.
The problem is that if any citation that leads through WUWT is reflexively rejected, you're simply closing your ears to uncomfortable truths. If your argument is strong enough, it shouldn't matter where the cites come from.
WUWT was on top of FakeGate from the beginning, and it's arguable that because of the sleuthing done there, Gleick was forced to come clean. For all the desmog flurry and wind blowing, WUWT was reasoned, rational, and right.
The other thing to think about for a moment (if you had paid attention when it happened) - during Climategate I, WUWT was *incredibly* careful in their handling of the damaging files given to them. Long before publishing them, they did their due diligence, and treated the data with skepticism. Desmog's post one hour after getting Gleicked, without even trying to contact HI, was sloppy, and typical of warmists unfortunately.
If there was a 10% risk of catastrophic results from AGW, 30% chance of nothing unusual, and 60% in between, would that be enough risk to think about making a policy response? This is the type of question which is never talked about by those who want a grand falsifiable hypothesis.
The AGW argument is supported by hundreds of hypothesis. There are several key hypotheses which can be disproven which effectively disprove the entire argument.
If I gave you a hypothesis, you would just squint, and say that you want more. This video summerises the argument concisely. The IPCC reports give the details. If there was a problem with the argument, then somebody would point it out.
This simply hasn't happened. There is just a vast echo chamber of baseless claims (follow the references).
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
What if there was a 1% risk of catastrophic results from AGW, 30% chance of nothing unusual, and 69% chance of something good? Would that be enough reason to second guess policy responses that require creating energy poverty around the world?
Ah, so it's just an *argument*, not really a hypothesis. Astrology is supported by hundreds of hypotheses, too.
Well, of course I'm going to ask for more if what you propose is only *necessary* but not *sufficient*. A few things that are *necessary* but not entirely sufficient:
* rising CO2 levels (of course you could argue some ad hoc special pleading for why they fall)
* rising global average temperatures (again, you can also argue some ad hoc special pleading for why they fall)
* CO2's absorption spectrum
* quantifiable catastrophe during previous global warming episodes for humanity (holocene optimum, medieval warm period)
* increasing global cyclonic activity (and not just because our instruments are more sensitive, we're talking *real* increases)
In order to get to "sufficient", you'll need essentially to exclude natural variation from our observations (which we can't), and show that a warmer world is a worse world (which it isn't). But, if you think you can actually come up with a falsifiable hypothesis that is sufficient to show that, please, be my guest :)
... and bringing up Exxon and Phillip Morris (further below). Let's go back a little further.
Remember how much crap Galileo had to take, 'way back when? Remember thinking, in elementary school, how could people have been so stupid back then. Thank goodness we live in an age of reason now, right? Remember thinking that?
I just flashed on the thought that maybe those attitudes were just our grade school naivety, brought about by not realizing (back then, so young) that scientists have always had to fight against sophomoric orthodoxy from the inside and arrogant stupidity from the outside. Hoc opus hic labor est. No sense in complaining about it.
(Yeah, I know. That Latin quote is a descent-into-hell reference. But if you realize, that's what your job is, to push back the boundaries of stupidity, and it ain't ever going to be easy, maybe it won't seem so bad to have chosen that path.)
That would mean that the leaker definitely didn't work for RealClimate and could still have been a UEA insider.
That hypothesis would still require the "leaker" to have hacked RealClimate which indicates some hacking skills (and incidentally would also be an illegal act). There is also the matter of the data uploads to a server at a university in Russia which the "leaker" also had access to. And, this is not the first time that a fictional "mole" has been blamed to obscure the true source, McIntyre has admitted previously lying about a "mole insider" at CRU:
On 24 July, McIntyre says he received a freedom of information (FOI) refusal from CRU. He announced it on his website. The next day McIntyre announced that he had got hold of a mass of data.
He was initially coy about it. He said: "Folks, guess what. I'm now in possession of a CRU version giving data for every station in their station list."
The next day he said: "I learned that the Met Office/CRU had identified the mole. They are now aware that there has in fact been a breach of security My guess is that they will not make the slightest effort to discipline the mole."
This was a tease. There was no human "mole", just a security breach. Rotter in San Francisco later blogged that "In late July I discovered they had left station data versions from 2003 and 1996 on their server without web page links but accessible all the same. They were stale versions of the requested data ... just sitting in cyberspace waiting for someone to download."
McIntyre later admitted that "I downloaded from the public CRU ftp site ... No hacking was involved". Climate emails: were they really hacked or just sitting in cyberspace?
So in conclusion, yes, it is possible that there was a rogue sysadmin at CRU who suddenly decided to release a huge dump of emails from a backup server, and who was also a hacker who could break in to RealClimate, and who had some link to Russia. But the alternative hypothesis - that they just got hacked from outside - seems more likely, particularly as they have had external facing security issues in the past.
Somewhat agree with this.
Bullshit. But you know what is a fact: All the global warming deniers are people who cannot reason, give bogus arguments and are usually paid for by groups who have an interest in keeping going on polluting.
We have a group here in the Netherlands called 'Groene rekenkamer' for example who provide a bunch of bullshit material so moronic, that the inhabitants of a mental asylum could not compete against them!
Slashdot is getting more and more such that the postings resemble those of a bunch of demented 5 year olds...
With the deniers here like Jane Q Public repeating their moronic crap over an over again, and learning nothing, it seems it's time for meta meta moderation: Keep repeating the same crap argument and your initial posts are valued at -1 lower each time. No lower limit! One of 'Jane Q Public's latest pieces of 'insight':
His so called skeptics aren't skeptics but deniers. They aren't interested in science and never give real arguments. They are the ones not interested in debate, or if they do debate give moronic arguments that no scientist is interested in. Debating with a moron isn't helping science therefore scientists are not interested in most of these 'skeptics'. The fact that the real scientists have a concensus doesn't mean there is no interest in discussions or new ideas or new viewpoints or new interpretations, not at all, it just means there is a concensus, and you better have damn good arguments if you are to convince them. Not the garbage quality arguments of 'skeptics'/deniers.
There's evidence either way, and it points to forgery. The most incisive and in-depth analysis I've seen comes from Megan McArdle of The Atlantic, herself a supporter of AGW. 16 Feb 2012, Leaked Docs From Heartland Institute Cause a Stir—but Is One a Fake?. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/leaked-docs-from-heartland-institute-cause-a-stir-but-is-one-a-fake/253165/. 17 Feb 2012, Heartland Memo Looking Faker by the Minute. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/heartland-memo-looking-faker-by-the-minute/253276/. 21 Feb 2012, Peter Gleick Confesses to Obtaining Heartland Documents Under False Pretenses. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/peter-gleick-confesses-to-obtaining-heartland-documents-under-false-pretenses/253395/.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
That hypothesis would still require the "leaker" to have hacked RealClimate which indicates some hacking skills
And failed, which doesn't indicate great skill.
So in conclusion, yes, it is possible that there was a rogue sysadmin at CRU who suddenly decided to release a huge dump of emails from a backup server, and who was also a hacker who could break in to RealClimate, and who had some link to Russia.
Doesn't seem all that far fetched. How may sysadmins do you know?
Anyone who's worked for a big organization for any amount of time can tell you they don't have a file sitting around called evil_strategies.docx that is a clear, concise list of things they do that they wouldn't want others to find out about. Hell they usually can't even put together a document of good things. Rather strategy documents are massive wodges of rambling text. I've never seen a strategy memo that wasn't huge. Executives love to carry on about that shit. I should copy-paste the memo from our new university president. It goes on for 3 pages and basically just says "Hi, I'm the new head, I hope we can get more funding."
I'm not saying it is impossible that there was something like this, but it is really, really strange. Metadata aside, I question the likelihood of a single, concise, "smoking gun" document that says everything the company doesn't want people to hear.
Gleick has no where to stand as his reasoning is flawed, his actions are without value.
Gleick gives good reason to be sceptical regarding 'Climate Science' because such is most definitely NOT science. 'Climate Science' is merely a psychological state of a deranged human mind. Gleick now presents himself, standing erect clutching his ID, as the poster child of that deranged human mind.
But the individual facts that humans exist, and humans emit CO2, does *not* necessarily lead one to the conclusion that "human emissions of CO2 are increasing global average temperatures in measurable ways that will be "bad"".
That is true. You have to take into account how much CO2 we emit, and it is in fact a shitload. It's probably over 150 times as much as volcanism. Decomposition of flora is generally carbon-negative; virtually all the carbon in a plant came from the atmosphere, and yet not all that came from the atmosphere will return to it when the plant decomposes. Rainforests are right about carbon-neutral in this regard, and only because of the rapidity at which plants grow up and die in this environment, usually due to competition by other species. CO2 in seawater becomes acidity and is fixed in subaquatic limestone, though some does escape via gas exchange; however, the oceans also harbor algae, which produces most of the world's available oxygen, and fixing carbon in the process. Before we appeared and industrialized, CO2 levels followed a very regular pattern, and now they are much higher. It should not take a genius nor a debate to realize that we are the cause. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and we know that we produce a great deal of it, what more do you need to know? Just precisely how you can continue to live your selfish, self-centered existence at the cost of all others? Yeah, thought so.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Still, not impressed. You've essentially got an ocean that can buffer more CO2 than you can possibly imagine, as well as hold orders of magnitude more heat than the entirety of the atmosphere.
1) where is the missing CO2 - http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/06/the-ipccs-missing-co2-remains-a-major-embarassment-of-its-consensus-science-its-still-awol-maybe.html
2) will an increase in the average global temperature statistic be a bad or a good thing
3) what other negative feedbacks are in play - http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/09/declining-global-average-cloud-height-a-significant-measure-of-negative-feedback-to-global-warming/
I know that cities create local weather effects through UHI, and we've built a lot of cities - what more do you need to know before we decide that we've got catastrophic anthropogenic global warming due to city building? :)
Again, simply stringing together two things we might agree on, in order to claim a third thing we don't agree on, isn't the way the science game is played. Start off with your falsifiable hypothesis statement (and "AGW could be falsified by showing that humans don't exist" is just as silly as "AGW could be falsified by showing that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas" - the existence of physical constants or emitters of CO2 isn't sufficient to lead to catastrophe or causality.)
The same way you do :) I'm breathing out CO2, enjoying the trappings of 1st world living with my huge ass carbon footprint, only I'm not being a snoot about it :)
Look, how has the past 0.8C of temperature rise over the past 100 years negatively effected you? Why should we assume that another 0.8C of temperature over the next 100 years will be bad if the last 0.8C wasn't bad?
Hope you're ready to apologize to your grand children when they're living through a Maunder minimum that lasts until 2050 :)
Still, not impressed. You've essentially got an ocean that can buffer more CO2 than you can possibly imagine, as well as hold orders of magnitude more heat than the entirety of the atmosphere.
No, it cannot. Oceanic acidity is increasing year by year and that is unsustainable unless you want to live in a world where the only marine life is brittle stars. Where is the missing CO2? It made the ocean more acidic. Will an increase in the average temperature be a good thing or a bad thing? It will be a chaotic thing, and that makes it a bad thing. What can be predicted can be dealt with. What other negative feedbacks are in play, that is not the issue, what is the issue is that adding more energy to the system will cause more outputs, that's how it works. And the outputs are going to be weather, because we're talking about weather. And they're going to be more vigorous and more numerous, because that's what happens where there's more and more sizable inputs. And we know that our CO2 input is actually quite massive, and larger than volcanism, even when volcanism produces amounts of CO2 that the planet takes a long time to deal with. Again, when you put all the things that we know together, AGW is a logical conclusion, and the burden of proof is on the other side.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Quantify that. How quickly can the oceans absorb CO2, and how much CO2 is necessary to make it so that the only marine life is brittle stars. Oh, and also explain how marine life survived atmospheric CO2 levels ridiculously higher than today. Show your work! :)
Or perhaps it also made more plants grow?
That doesn't follow. Has weather gotten more chaotic in the past 150+ years since the little ice age? Do you have any evidence that weather is more orderly and predictable during an ice age?
Um, no, we're not a closed system. If we add more energy to the system, and the system radiates more energy (or changes albedo in such a way that it absorbs less energy), none of the proposed outputs you claim will have any terrestrial effect.
Um, no. You don't get to dismiss natural climate change as the null hypothesis that easily :)
Tell you what, here are a few claims you've made:
1) a hotter world has more chaotic weather (corollary, a colder world has less chaotic weather)
2) negative feedbacks can't possibly deal with adding more energy to the system
Let's take them apart for a second. I'm assuming you'd accept #1 as falsified if we could show a colder period with more chaotic weather. Case in point, I'll cite the fact that colder global average temperatures generally mean an increase in temperature differential between the poles and the equator, leading to more cyclonic activity. By the very theories of global warming, we should expect a less chaotic weather world with the temperature differential between the poles and the equator (such as say, during the late eocene). Following the dots is left as an exercise for the reader.
As for #2, I'll assert that given the large changes in solar activity (not just TSI, but magnetic changes, etc), during which there have been some periods of time when activity has greatly increased, and some periods of time when activity has greatly decreased, we've actually got a robust system of negative feedbacks that stops any sort of runaway heating effect.
Now answer my questions, if you will:
How has the past 0.8C of temperature rise over the past 100 years negatively effected you? Why should we assume that another 0.8C of temperature over the next 100 years will be bad if the last 0.8C wasn't bad?
So the fellow who is going to be facing identity theft, online fraud and other charges is saying "the docs are real". Two simple words to Dr G
PROVE IT.
If you are saying they are fake you now must prove it. Heartland does not have to prove they are fakes. You have to prove they are real. Have fun with that one.
What a joke. All the excuses for his actions are just pathetic. He will have a huge legal bill and will get his day in court. All that to spread a fake document along with a bunch of real but meaningless ones? How can someone bright enough to get a PhD be so stupid?
I'm breathing out CO2,
The fact that you think the CO2 you exhale matters at all just shows how little you know. The carbon in the the CO2 you exhale comes from the food you eat which came from carbon that was already in the active carbon cycle, absorbed from the atmosphere by the plants in your food chain. The carbon that matters is the carbon that we're digging up and adding to the active carbon cycle after having been buried for millions of years.
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/02/is-stealing-ok-alarmist-climate-scientists-not-sure-in-tumult/
That doesn't follow. Has weather gotten more chaotic in the past 150+ years since the little ice age?
Yes. We have seen record highs and lows and winds and rains (and lacks of all these things) this year.
Do you have any evidence that weather is more orderly and predictable during an ice age?
Not relevant, because we also don't have any evidence that the weather is going to be more orderly and predictable as a result of what we're doing.
we're not a closed system. If we add more energy to the system, and the system radiates more energy
NO. If we add more energy to the system, even if the system radiates the increase it will still do work while it is within the system. It doesn't just magically leave, it has to get where it's going. The radiated energy, added at ground level, is reabsorbed and reradiated countless times (well, I'm sure you could calculate it) before it escapes the system. But you said "if we add more energy" and "if more energy is radiated" and yes, if you add more energy then more will be radiated, but only if the total increase is radiated instantly will there be no effect.
How has the past 0.8C of temperature rise over the past 100 years negatively effected you?
Record highs and lows in temperature and rainfall causing crop failures worldwide. Record rainfall causing landslides. Record lack of rainfall causing drought.
Why should we assume that another 0.8C of temperature over the next 100 years will be bad if the last 0.8C wasn't bad?
It was bad, and you can keep your logical fallacies to yourself.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We will always see record highs and lows every year, given the size of the planet.
Can you name a year when we *didn't* have record highs and lows? If we *did* have just one year without record highs and lows, would that falsify your belief?
So...we don't have any evidence that weather is going to more orderly and predictable in a warmer world, and we don't have any evidence that weather is going to be more orderly and predictable in a colder world...yet we've got to undertake dramatic steps to try and cool the world down *right now* ZOMG!?
Yeah, that doesn't seem to fit.
So energy that is reflected via albedo happens to do work to the system? Yeah, that doesn't make sense either.
Are you trying to say that any increase in radiation must have driven all the way to the surface before traveling back out to outer space?
And before the 20th century, we never had record highs or lows in temperature, or rainfall? We never had crop failures in the 1800s? Landslides? Drought?
I'm sorry, if you want to assert that the past 0.8C of temp increase over 100 years did something *bad*, you're going to have to do more than just say "something bad happened in the last 100 years". Of *course* something bad happened in the last 100 years. Something bad happens *every day*. What evidence do you have that there is any causality between the 0.8C in the past 100 years?
Oh, and did any of your crops fail, or did you experience drought and landslide *personally* in the past 100 years?
Carbon dioxide doesn't care where it comes from.
A plant is just as happy to absorb a CO2 molecule from your breath, as it is from the burning of petroleum (biogenic, or abiogenic).
An ocean is just as happy to absorb a CO2 molecule from a butterfly's breath, as it is from the burning of petroleum.
A light ray is just as happy to be absorbed by a CO2 molecule from a burnt tree, as it is from the burning of petroleum.
CO2 has no memory.
The pertinent question is this - are there negative feedbacks within our biosphere that deal with both pulses of additional CO2 (as compared to say, the year before), as well as a dearth of CO2 (as compared to say, the year before). The answer is, yes. We don't have a system that runs away in either direction.
I know that carbon dioxide doesn't care where it came from. The point it the CO2 you exhale is not adding to the total carbon in the carbon cycle because it was already in the carbon cycle then the food you ate acquired it and an equivalent amount of CO2 to the amount you exhale will be absorbed by your future food before it gets to you. So it's a carbon neutral cycle. The carbon from burning fossil fuels has been out of the active carbon cycle for millions of years and so is adding to the total carbon in the carbon cycle thus increasing the total CO2 in the atmosphere, the oceans (ocean acidification) and the other short term sinks.
That's a false assumption. Thinking that without humans CO2 levels are somehow in perfect equilibrium is untenable.
The fact of the matter is that the CO2 cycle in the atmosphere is dynamic, going in and out of equilibrium on both local, regional and global levels. The system responds to these disruptions of equilibrium with various negative feedbacks, at various time intervals. There's the time it takes for CO2 to be absorbed by oceans, the time it takes for CO2 to be absorbed by plants, the time it takes for plants to be eaten by animals, and for them to release CO2 - it's a dynamic, not static situation.
And when it comes right down to it, CO2, while its theoretical impact for doubling is 1C, is mostly outweighed by negative feedbacks. Lindzen had another wonderful presentation on it recently: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf
CO2 does not care if it has spent millions of years in calcium carbonate from before being dissolved in water, and outgassed as temperatures rise. CO2 does not care if it has just come out of a human exhaling, or a tree burning. The idea of a "carbon cycle" with any sort of equilibrium (much less without negative feedbacks to dampen changes in either direction) is...wanting.
1. IRS investigation of Peter H. Gleick for tax evasion.
2. IRS investigation of Pacific Institute for tax evasion.
3. DoJ investigation of Peter H. Gleick for criminal activities.
4. DoJ investigation of Pacitic Institute for illegal employment activities.
5. Macarthur Foundation expels Peter H. Gleick and rules his award revoked. Then takes legal actions to recover all spent and unspent moneys.
6. National Academy of Science expels Peter H. Gleick.
7. All academic degrees award to Peter H. Gleick are revoked.
8. Journals having published paper by Peter H. Gleick rescind all papers as being fraudulent.
I never said that without humans that CO2 levels are in perfect equilibrium. Each year it cycles up and down by about 10 ppm following the northern hemisphere seasons But the fact remains that for about 10,000 years, since the end of the last glaciation the level of CO2 remained at about 280 ppm. Only since the increase in human burning of fossil fuels has it risen to 390 ppm now, a level that hasn't been seen for over 15 million years.
It's true that a doubling of CO2 would cause about 1C of warming from the CO2 alone but that ignores the feedbacks it produces. In particular that warming causes an increase in water vapor in the atmosphere which causes its own warming. The total warming, including feedbacks, from a doubling of CO2 appears to be around 3C.
We will always see record highs and lows every year, given the size of the planet.
Disingenous argument is disingenuous; there have been far more records set per year, per year.
So energy that is reflected via albedo happens to do work to the system? Yeah, that doesn't make sense either.
Albedo is falling because of ice melting, so your argument is stupid anyway. But the simple truth is that energy is absorbed and reradiated, especially UV, and especially by water vapor. On the way, it does work, notably in the form of convection.
Oh, and did any of your crops fail, or did you experience drought and landslide *personally* in the past 100 years?
The crops in the country where I live that I consume failed. See, in a system with more than one person, I don't have to personally have crops fail.
I have decided you are just a troll, because nobody interested in this subject could be so stupid, and therefore I'm out. Call this Ad Hominem if you like, if you even understand what that means.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Cite.
And there, perhaps, we agree. Water vapor is the key here, and our understanding of it is infantile. The models suggest a positive feedback, while observation suggests a negative one (see Lindzen's latest).
Okay, good start, crops in the country where you live that you consume failed in the past hundred years. Can you cite any earlier 100 year period where no crops failed? Do you have *any* data at all on agricultural output over say, the past 500 years you'd like to compare? (Hint: agriculture *loves* high CO2)
That's not a fact, that's a supposition based on the accuracy of a proxy. CO2 levels vary *wildly* on the local scale, so much so that the official CO2 measurements at Mauna Kea have to throw out outlying data to avoid measuring local disturbances:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
" The upslope air may have CO2 that has been lowered by plants removing CO2 through photosynthesis at lower elevations on the island, although the CO2 decrease arrives later than the change in wind direction, because the observatory is surrounded by miles of bare lava."
Actually you're right - it obviously doesn't create 1C of warming because negative feedbacks have kept it to about 0.8C. If these negative feedbacks didn't exist, we should have seen much more warming over the past 100 years...and we haven't.
Again, Lindzen: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf
That's not a fact, that's a supposition based on the accuracy of a proxy. CO2 levels vary *wildly* on the local scale, so much so that the official CO2 measurements at Mauna Kea have to throw out outlying data to avoid measuring local disturbances:
No, it's based on direct measurements of CO2 levels from ice cores.
Actually you're right - it obviously doesn't create 1C of warming because negative feedbacks have kept it to about 0.8C
But we haven't doubled CO2 levels yet so your argument is incorrect. CO2 has increased about 40% from 280 ppm to 390 ppm. Doubling would take it to 560 ppm. So we've had about 0.8C of warming with a 40% increase in CO2.
Giving him credit for actually working in the field I've read most of what Lindzen has to say but he doesn't have much credibility with me. Do you accept what he says as uncritically as you think I accept what what other climate scientists say because he agrees with your point of view?
With the assumption that the CO2 level in a single ice core represents the global average accurately. Given the regional and temporal variation of CO2 in the atmosphere, I'd argue this is unlikely to be very accurate.
Do so get to a doubling, we'll have say, another 50% increase from 390 to 590. Say, maybe that might even be another 1C...so on the outside (discounting any sort of non-CO2 effect of the 0.8C...AFAIK, human CO2 emissions have only been asserted to by > 50% by even the most alarmist people), we've got what, 1.8C of warming by the time we get to 590, which is anticipated...when?
No, I accept what he says because he's well sourced, and offers real analysis rather than hyperbole. Is there anything in specific you fault him for?
The 'Going Down' elevator is accelerating for a one Mr. Peter H. Gleick (very soon to be former Ph.D.).
IRS and DoJ could be taking a very close (as in subpoenas and search warrents and lots of boxes) look at the Macarthur Foundation, Pacific Institute and their contributors in the wee hours.
Also for Gleick, FBI could have him on the do-no-fly list very soon and with Treasury have his bank accounts and credit cards frozen.
LoL
With the assumption that the CO2 level in a single ice core represents the global average accurately. Given the regional and temporal variation of CO2 in the atmosphere, I'd argue this is unlikely to be very accurate.
I have to take that as a supposition on your part with little science to actually back it up. While there may be some local variations in CO2 because of local sources/sinks CO2 in general is well mixed in the atmosphere once you get away from those. The locations that ice cores are taken are all well away from any local sources and sinks. I trust that scientists know what they're talking about in this case.
At the rate we are currently going we'll hit 590 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere well before 2100. The warming from doubling of CO2 is more likely to be around 3C when you take feedbacks into account. I don't get what you mean by "AFAIK, human CO2 emissions have only been asserted to by > 50% by even the most alarmist people".
Lindzen is well known for cherry picking and has been debunked over and over again by others in the field. I just can't give him much credibility although I do pay attention to what he says since he has some knowledge.
Subtitle: The Curious Case of a one Mr. Peter H. Glieck
Wire Fraud is a felony crime in the USA punshible to 20 and up to 30 years of federal imprisonment. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud and http://www.federalcriminallawyer.us/2011/02/09/a-summary-of-federal-wire-fraud/ for details.
The question now surfaces: was this an isolated event, like a climate extreme, or was his actions part and parcel of his everyday affairs throughout his life, a 'normal' climate as such?
I'm not sure if that's particularly true, but I'd be open to the idea.
My layman's understanding is that we observe gases trapped in ice cores to run through some formula or function to get what we believe is the atmospheric CO2 level that applies to when that gas was trapped (i.e., we don't measure ppm of CO2 in trapped ice core gas - I could be mistaken, but can't find relevant cites - interesting notes here: http://www.john-daly.com/zjiceco2.htm).
In order to assert that ice cores represent areas that have no local sources or sinks, I'd expect that the *exact* same trapped gas data (direct measurement, not calculated), would have to exist in *every* ice core we find. So, if you took, say, two ice cores, 50 ft apart, they should be identical, and if we took, say two ice cores, from opposite poles, they should be identical.
Vostok is generally taken as the gold standard (much as Mauna Kea is today), and it may very well be that it's not just a single ice core, but a cluster of them in Vostok they're talking about - but I'd love to see a graph of them compared to ice cores elsewhere.
Of course, the real problem, apparently, is that ice cores can't be directly compared to modern instrumental records from Mauna Kea, and have been subject to unfounded data manipulation:
"An ad hoc assumption, not supported by any factual evidence[3, 9], solved the problem: the average age of air was arbitrary decreed to be exactly 83 years younger than the ice in which it was trapped. The "corrected" ice data were then smoothly aligned with the Mauna Loa record (Figure 1 B) , and reproduced in countless publications as a famous "Siple curve". Only thirteen years later, in 1993, glaciologists attempted to prove experimentally the "age assumption"[10], but they failed[9]."
Well, let's take a look at the data: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
For the 50 year record, we've probably added 70ppm (1960 - 2010). The trend looks linear, not exponential, so straight line it from there. Take today, 390, and add 100 years worth of CO2...say, 140 (round up to 150 if you want).
Now we're at 2112, and we've got a CO2 ppm of 540, tops.
Your jump from 280 - 390 (+40%, over a hundred or so years), caused a change in temp of about 0.8C. Going from 390 to 540ppm is about another 40% bump, so we can expect, probably another 0.8C. Asserting 3C has no basis in reality.
I believe the IPCC stands by the thought that *most* of the temperature change is due to human CO2, but nobody has ever said *all* the temperature change is due to human CO2. I'll roughly define "most" as >50%. By that definition, if we've had 0.8C of temperature rise, and we're going to assume human responsibility for say, 50%+1 of it, that's only 0.4C of temperature rise that is "unnatural" and the other 0.4C of temperature rise that is "natural" (i.e., non CO2 based).
So, what this means is that the 0.8C observed increase during the 150 year period when we went from 280 - 390ppm has to be subdivided further - up to 0.4C of that was completely unrelated to CO2, and just part of natural cycles.
However, even if you assume that 100% of the temperature change was due to CO2, you can see by the math that it simply isn't alarming. +0.8C in 2112 isn't anything to worry about.
Watch this video by a high school student. It's great! http://forms.climaterealityproject.org/page/s/heartland
What sources and sinks would you find near an ice core drilled into 2 miles of ice in the middle of Antarctica or a mile of ice in the middle of Greenland? Possibly volcanoes but they don't run steady for thousands of years and I would think the anomaly caused by such a thing would be obvious in the data.
Jaworski doesn't have much credibility in the ice core community. A letter to ESPR from Hans Oeschger in 1995 addresses Jaworski's points. A quote from it:
The project to reconstruct the history of the greenhouse gases was conducted; it was, and is, very successful – much above expectation. The CO2 concentrations measured on the SIPLE core, Antarctica, serve as a measure of that success. They illustrate (JAWOROWSKI, Fig. 5 a, p. 168) the history of atmospheric CO2 increase since the middle of the 18th century. Another important result was the observation of low CO2 concentrations of the gases extracted from ice-age ice. The low glacial CO2 concentrations have been confirmed in ice cores with different physical and chemical properties both from Greenland and Antarctica and independently from (carbon 13) measurements on carbonate of foraminifera shells in ocean cores and, yet again, more recently in moss samples.
The scientists studying this are well aware of the points Jaworski raises and don't ignore the difficulties involved in their measurements.
The trend in CO2 levels is not linear. If you look at the full Mauna Loa CO2 record there is an upward curve to to it. Current estimates for the BAU scenario show a CO2 level of 560 ppm in about 2070.
The estimates I've seen lately mostly say that human contributions are responsible for more than 100% of the warming in the past several decades. The 0.8C of warming you keep mentioning is not the full warming that will be caused by the increase in CO2. The thermal inertia of the oceans causes a 20-40 year lag in temperature increases so even if we instantly stopped increasing CO2 it would be that long before warming slowed down.
I'd assume that regional variations in CO2 levels would abide by air circulation patterns. Up in the stratosphere, CO2 may be fairly evenly distributed, but I'd bet that CO2 variability can be carried by the wind (as is noted happens on Mauna Kea).
Well, actually, they do ignore it:
"why should there be such a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 (Fig. 5 a) in the middle of the 19th century?"
They adjust their timeline because it doesn't fit their preconceived notion - their argument is from ignorance (we can't posit a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 in the middle of the 19th century, so we simply adjust the data until it fits with what we *think* should be happening).
If some other line of reasoning had come to the 83 year lag, other than curve fitting, I might be more apt to believe it...some laboratory experiment that showed it took 83 years for atmospheric gases to penetrate solid ice and then get trapped there....hmm...
The upward curve is barely detectable - and even a 560ppm by 2070 instead of 2112 isn't all the big of a deal either.
That's not remotely possible, but furthermore, like Obama's "jobs saved or created", it's not falsifiable :)
CO2 may not be as well mixed as I assumed. Here is some more information about that. But climate scientists are no doubt aware of this and take it into account as best they can. You'll have to provide a lot more solid evidence to convince me it significantly affects what they are saying.
Well, actually, they do ignore it:
Have you done a comprehensive review of the literature and confirmed that or is that just your supposition? (And no I haven't either but if Jaworski had something other scientists would pay more attention to him.)
The estimates I've seen lately mostly say that human contributions are responsible for more than 100% of the warming in the past several decades.
That's not remotely possible, but furthermore, like Obama's "jobs saved or created", it's not falsifiable :)
Why isn't it possible? If natural forcings would lead to cooling but it's still warming then you can say human contributions are responsible for more than 100% of the warming. Here is an article on a paper that indicates natural forcings may actually be negative. The actual paper is here.
Well, I think the take away is this - ice core CO2 records which have been arbitrarily adjusted to match Mauna Kea CO2 readings may not be as representative of global CO2 averages. Just as with global average temperature, we don't really have a thermometer you can stick up in the air, with global average CO2, we don't really have a CO2-omometer we can stick up in the air and measure with.
While our proxies may be approximate, there are some pretty large error bars around them :)
It's Hans Oeschger's statement, not mine - but as for the 83 year adjustment, I believe it's only asserted in a few papers (Friedli et al. 1986, Neftel et al. 1985), and others simply assume it as valid. Other than curve fitting, there simply is zero defense for it.
Well, it isn't possible because human activity cannot possibly be construed as overwhelming natural variation - the physics simply don't fit. And the idea that the world should have been *cooling* while coming out of a little ice age is well, an odd supposition at best.
But really, possible or not, it's not falsifiable. Asserting that the rise in temperature pre-1950 had a non-human cause, but magically, after 1950, we can blame humans not only for the rise, but for *more* than the rise is crazy. I mean, why not double down and assert that humans are now responsible for keeping the earth from becoming a snowball next year?
The paper you cite is models all the way down, so it's hard to keep a straight face while reading it, but I think it contradicts your point of view:
"Our estimate of greenhouse-gas-attributable warming is lower than that derived using only 1900–1999 observations. Our analysis also leads to a relatively low and tightly-constrained estimate of Transient Climate Response of 1.3–1.8C, and relatively low projections of 21st-century warming under the Representative Concentration Pathways."
also
"We therefore recommend caution in interpreting the scaled projections derived from this single model, since our uncertainty estimates account only for possible errors in the magnitude of the simulated responses to the forcings, and not for possible errors in the observations, in the forcings, or in the spatio-temporal pat- terns of response to those forcings."
The statement you quoted was mine, not Oeschger's.
Well, it isn't possible because human activity cannot possibly be construed as overwhelming natural variation - the physics simply don't fit. And the idea that the world should have been *cooling* while coming out of a little ice age is well, an odd supposition at best.
Why not? I don't see that the physics don't fit. Of course there are the natural effects like insolation and the Earth's orbit and physical nature (atmosphere, oceans, etc.) that set a baseline. CO2 is one of the more significant factors in that and the fact that we have increased it by 40% is bound to have an effect even if you don't believe it. The natural cooling trend I was talking about is just from around the 1970's. insolation has been slightly dropping since then.
You know, all of science is models of one sort or another.
Sorry, the quote I was referring to:
"why should there be such a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 (Fig. 5 a) in the middle of the 19th century?"
- Hans Oeschger in Environ Sci. & Pollut. Res. 2 (1) 1995, pp. 60-61.
Well, back of the napkin, if you take all the UHI, and all the CO2 humans have ever emitted, and compare it to all the CO2 that is naturally emitted, and any sort of baseline temperature from when humans didn't exist, we're a speck - a fraction of a fraction. Models which take that fraction of a fraction, and amplify it with speculative feedback effects fail to address the problem of "why didn't this amplification happen before during natural variation?"
We simply don't have enough human based joules to push the globe into a tipping point, *assuming* that these tipping points exist.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
"Only 70% of the incident sunlight enters the Earth’s energy budget—the rest immediately bounces off of clouds and atmosphere and land without being absorbed. Also, being land creatures, we might consider confining our solar panels to land, occupying 28% of the total globe. Finally, we note that solar photovoltaics and solar thermal plants tend to operate around 15% efficiency. Let’s assume 20% for this calculation. The net effect is about 7,000 TW, about 600 times our current use. Lots of headroom, yes?"
Solar energy levels are *so* much greater than our energy use it's difficult to compare them.
Anyway, that's the back of the napkin physics :)
Oeschger was just doing what a good scientist does, asking questions. We may not have the answer to that question yet but what in that makes you think anything is being ignored?
The urban heat island effect has no effect on global warming. Some speculated that it was causing the temperature records to read high but that's been discredited. The CO2 that is naturally emitted has been emitted yearly for the past 10,000 years and then naturally absorbed each year. There is a natural cycle of around +/- 10 ppm every year. That's why CO2 levels remained around 280 ppm during that period. Human emissions add carbon to the carbon cycle that hasn't been there for many millions of years.
The heat/energy that drives global warming is not produced by humans but by the Sun. If there were no Sun the Earth temperature would be near absolute zero. If there were the Sun but no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere the surface temperature would be near -18 degrees C. The heat produced by human use of energy is trivial compared to the Sun. Nearly all of the Sun's energy comes to us in the visible light range. What isn't reflected (70% according to you) is absorbed by the surface (mostly) and later gets re-radiated in the infrared range. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere slows down the re-radiated infrared energy on it's way back out causing the Earth to get hotter. That's simple physics.
You misunderstand his question - it was *rhetorical* not scientific. He *presumes* the answer, he doesn't look for it.
A good scientist does not ask rhetorical questions (although a good teacher might).
I'm sure you can't possibly mean that. Human activity generates heat, and that heat will, all other things kept equal, warm the planet. It may be that those things that tend to increase average global temperature are minuscule, and possibly undetectable against the background of natural variation, but they *must* have some nonzero, positive effect.
That's proxy data, not real data. And further, it simply cannot be taken as a proxy with a high sample rate - http://robertkernodle.hubpages.com/hub/ICE-Core-CO2-Records-Ancient-Atmospheres-Or-Geophysical-Artifacts
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/01/antarctic-ice-cores-the-sample-rate-problem/
Here's another simple physics problem - you can place the end of an object in a pot of hot water, and measure the amount of time it takes for that heat to go from one end of the object, to the end that is not in the water.
Given a human is mostly just water, how long will it take for the left hand to warm up if you put the right hand in a pot of hot water? Now what happens when you test that simple physics guess :)
You misunderstand his question - it was *rhetorical* not scientific. He *presumes* the answer, he doesn't look for it.
That's your interpretation, not mine. I think you're making a pretty big assumption that he presumes the answer.
I'm sure you can't possibly mean that. Human activity generates heat, and that heat will, all other things kept equal, warm the planet. It may be that those things that tend to increase average global temperature are minuscule, and possibly undetectable against the background of natural variation, but they *must* have some nonzero, positive effect.
Human generated waste heat contributes about 0.028 W/m^2 to heating the climate. The additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contribute about 2.9 W/m^2, over 100 times as much. More details here. So my saying the UHI effect has no effect on global warming overstated it a bit by not much. If waste heat was the only thing causing global warming it wouldn't be enough to cause enough warming to worry about.
I realize that ice cores can not show the details of CO2 fluctuations on scales of less than about a century. Where is you evidence that there have been drastic fluctuations in CO2 levels that just happen to average 280 ppm on those time scales?
Under normal conditions the left hand will warm up zero or hardly at all because of the human body's heat regulation mechanisms. I don't understand the point you are trying to make. Conduction of heat plays little role in the heat energy dynamics of the Earth. It's mostly radiation and convection.
It's fairly straightforward.
1) The raw data didn't fit the curve they had.
2) Adjusting by 83 years made the curve fit.
3) In order to argue that the raw data was somehow improperly dated, he rhetorically asked, "why should there be such a drastic increase of CO2 and of CH4 (Fig. 5 a) in the middle of the 19th century?"
The answer he presumes is "there is no reason for such a drastic increase", thus justifying the arbitrary adjustment to fit the curve.
My evidence is the Mauna Loa data that is rejected in the data rejection step: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
" However, that air is sometimes contaminated by CO2 emissions from the crater of Mauna Loa. "
Local CO2 levels can be drastically changed by wind patterns and other dynamic atmospheric conditions. Given that ice cores can't show details of CO2 fluctuations on scales of less than about a century, how is it *possibly* rational to adjust something by 83 years in order to calibrate it?
The point I'm trying to make is that just like the human body has complex heat regulation mechanisms that belie its mostly water content, the global atmosphere has complex heat regulation mechanisms that belie it's simple chemical composition. Further, I'd argue that conduction of heat (if that's the proper terminology for the mixing of temperatures in the oceans), drives large natural variations such as ENSO/PDO/ADO.
Convection is what drives the mixing of temperatures in the oceans. Conduction is a very minor component of it.