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?
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.
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.
He should be fired, and possibly prosecuted if any crimes were committed.
Yeah. Put him in jail with this Assange guy! What do I say. Burn'em!!!
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
Why should he be fired if as you say possibly no crimes were committed, and what did he do that was unethical?
The primary problem seems to be:
"In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name."
If he was a tech journalist reporting some babble about apple or samsung or the mighty GOOG or whoever, he'd have run the story without even bothering to verify and that would be considered "just show business as usual".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
I hope Heartland go completely apeshit and try and sue him. Then they'll get destroyed in discovery.
Oh for.... TGS itself said "he cites his own breach of ethics". Sounds to me like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
I think he did the right thing. It would be even more unethical to let the bastards keep lying.
Free Martian Whores!
As a skeptic, I find your skepticism of our skepticism to be worthy of skepticism. You can anticipate someone searching through your trash and trying to guess your mother's maiden name so we can hack your email and prove that you are a corporate shill.
At least, for variety, the angle of the direction can vary wildly...
http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AO923_scient_G_20120220154702.jpg
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
"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.
You appear to have answered your own question. Misrepresenting yourself as a specific person that you are not is generally not considered good journalistic ethics. It's okay not to tell them who you are, or not to tell them you're a reporter.
Depending on state law, it might even be a crime. I doubt that, though, since I can't imagine Gleick is dumb enough to make a confession without at least checking with a lawyer first.
Exactly, the truth needs to be made public. If these assholes are lying, then using false pretenses to get information out of them is perfectly fine. You think investigative reporters go around telling the targets of their investigation honestly who they are and what their profession is? Of course not, they'd never get any damning information if they did.
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
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.
Look at HP and pretexting psuedo-scandal. Its all a big "eh" who cares, right up there with speeding on the highway or a journalist violating a NDA to leak a story. Journalistic ethics is an oxymoron so thats not even open to discussion.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Oh, they violate their "ethics" all the time, I agree. That doesn't make them not violations of ethics; it just means they don't care.
You realize that voting present in the Illinois Senate is similar to voting no, except it has a different impact on how the bill in question gets handled after the vote gets tallied, right? That it has nothing to do with not having an opinion?
Reposted to attach to right comment.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
Maybe I'm confused -- what substantive difference is there between receiving several documents including the climate strategy one, and only receiving the climate strategy one?
The enemies of Democracy are
...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."
Splunge!
The enemies of Democracy are
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();
California Penal Code Section 528.5
a) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any person who knowingly and without consent credibly impersonates another actual person through or on an Internet Web site or by other electronic means for purposes of harming, intimidating, threatening, or defrauding another person is guilty of a public offense punishable pursuant to subdivision (d).
(b) For purposes of this section, an impersonation is credible if another person would reasonably believe, or did reasonably believe, that the defendant was or is the person who was impersonated.
(c) For purposes of this section, “electronic means” shall include opening an e-mail account or an account or profile on a social networking Internet Web site in another person’s name.
(d) A violation of subdivision (a) is punishable by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or by both that fine and imprisonment.
(e) In addition to any other civil remedy available, a person who suffers damage or loss by reason of a violation of subdivision (a) may bring a civil action against the violator for compensatory damages and injunctive relief or other equitable relief pursuant to paragraphs (1), (2), (4), and (5) of subdivision (e) and subdivision
(g) of Section 502.
(f) This section shall not preclude prosecution under any other law.
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
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.
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
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?
Leak ~= good.
Lying about who you are to steal documents != good.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
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.
Not telling someone who you are or what you do is one thing. As long as that "someone" isn't a cop, it's almost certainly legal.
Pretending to be a real, specific person you're not in order to get private information? Yeah, that's quite likely to be illegal.
Hmmm, given the excerpt of the California code above, it seems rather more likely to be a criminal matter than a civil one. No discovery to be had there.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Yes, right, the only possible ethical action is to forge a document to show just how evil these bastards are, because none of their actual documents look very evil.
Hmmm. Maybe, just maybe, their actual documents don't look very evil because they're not such evil bastards?
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
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
Don't know about that, but the cop bit is interesting, because it's perfectly legal for cops to lie to you to get information they want. If it's OK for them to lie, it should be OK for us to lie to them too.
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"".
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
Been there, done that, and pretty impressed by the references of Watts and his guest posters.
Well, this is almost certainly bullshit. For the sake of anybody reading this, why don't you find one of these Watts talking points with impressive references, and we can lay out the reference chain and then others can make up their mind.
Note that this is a very bold statement on my part. I am not trying to point out what Watts gets wrong -- I am giving you a chance to point out ANYTHING substantial that Watts gets right.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Generally if someone is a "scientist" you can assume a few things:
1. They are as sure as can be that the diversity of life on Earth is the result of evolution driven by natural selection.
2. They are not quite are sure as that but pretty damn confident that General Relative gets it mostly right.
3. Less confident still but still more confident than they are that Obama won't do a naked dance in front of Congress tomorrow that carbon dioxide production by people is a significant factor in causing global warming.
Of course there are exceptions, but you would assume the above unless otherwise was stated.
Okay, I'll bite. Why not the current topic of Gleick's confession?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/20/breaking-gleick-confesses/
Or, if you want to skip to something a little more sciency:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/20/new-paper-a-high-resolution-surface-mass-balance-map-of-antarctica-shows-no-significant-trend-in-the-1979-2010-ice-sheet/
Do you disagree with his emphasis on the money quote?
"We found no significant trend in the 1979–2010 ice sheet integrated SMB components, which confirms the results from Monaghan et al. [2006]."
As per his cite, full paper here: http://www.leif.org/EOS/2011GL050713.pdf
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 :)
Well, the results of Lenaerts et al. (2012) really aren't that surprising. Plenty of ice melting in other places of the world. Antarctica is huge and benefits from increased precipitation (from warmer oceans) enlarging the entire ice sheet.
/breaks/ the science, not some minor detail that really makes not difference to the overall picture.
You gotta find something on Watts' site that actually
As for the stuff on Gleick. Whatever. Got nothing to do with the evdience on AGW.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
There really is a big difference between documents required to be released under FOIA requests which is stonewalled and subsequently placed in a publicly searchable FTP server without password protection in a directory labeled FOIA after being produced by persons on the public payroll, to documents being acquired under false pretenses from a private organization.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
... 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.
I'm not sure why anybody really wants to talk about what Al Gore believes about Climate Change. I'd rather talk about what Carl Sagan, one of the most brilliant minds of his time, thought about the topic:
"For our own world the peril is more subtle. Since this series [Cosmos] was first broadcast the dangers of the increasing greenhouse effect have become much more clear. We burn fossil fuels like coal, and gas, and petroleum putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and thereby heating the earth. The hellish conditions on Venus are a reminder that this is serious business. Computer models that successfully explain the climates of other planets predict the deaths of forests, parched crop lands, the flooding of coastal cities, environmental refugees; wide spread disasters in the next century, unless we change our ways. What do we have to do? Four things:
(1) Much more efficient use of fossil fuels. Why not cars that get 70 miles-per-gallon instead of 25?
(2) Research and development on safe alternative energy sources, especially solar power.
(3) Reforestation on a grand scale.
and (4) Helping to bring the billion poorest people on the planet to self-sufficiency, which is the key step in curbing world population growth.
Every one of these steps makes sense apart from greenhouse warming! Now, no one has proposed that the trouble with Venus is that there once was Venusians who drove fuel inefficient cars, but our nearest neighbour nevertheless is a stark warning on the possible fate of an earth-like world."
Carl Sagan, Cosmos (episode 4: Heaven and Hell (update - 10 years later))
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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
Most of the best investigative journalism has been thru some form of misrepresentation. Like the journalist pretending to be mad to expose the horrors of early twentieth century asylums...
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?
Are you dense? I already said "It's okay not to tell them who you are, or not to tell them you're a reporter." But when you start impersonating a specific, real someone else, that's wrong, and depending on circumstances may actually be a crime.
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.
They are a PR company, one long infamous for pushing very obvious lies hard. Lying is what they do for a living so unless a disinterested third party backs them they have zero credibility. It's the "crying wolf" problem.
Unfortunately, I disagree about your claim of "zero credibility". Most people think they're a "think tank": Wikipedia's page on them says: "The Heartland Institute is a conservative and libertarian public policy think tank based in Chicago, Illinois which advocates free market policies." The general public doesn't think that equates to "paid liars", they think it means they sit around and think about policy matters (with an obvious bias, granted) and support these policies in government.
Think tanks are supposed to (in an ideal world) be places where people come up with ideas on how things should be, how society/government should run for best effect, etc. I don't think they're generally thought of as glorified marketing firms, which really are paid liars.
I've just put a key logger on your system. Don't worry, its just to check if you are an asshole or are lying about anything.
"I didn't spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called 'Mr.Evil,' thank you very much!"
Okay, so I don't want to caricature your particular belief in AGW (lesser or greater), but you've got to admit, that the public face of global warming has been talking about "ZOMG, sea levels are gonna get crazy high because ice in Antarctica is all gonna melt!" Nobody said in 1990 "hey, the antarctic is going to melt along the edges, but it's gonna gain just as much ice mass as it loses because of increased precipitation inside". The worry was always that the ice would melt, into the sea, and raise sea levels:
"But according to evidence developed in the 1990s, during a dramatic episode at the end of the last ice age, something had once raised the sea level 16 meters within three centuries. The rate of rise might have reached two feet per decade. Antarctica was the most likely source of all that water."
The caveat that "oh, all that melting ice will be replaced by fresh snow" is nowhere to be found.
"Breaks"? Without a clearly falsifiable hypothesis statement, no matter what I find, you'll claim some other ad hoc special pleading (ice melting in other parts of the world, for example). Watts talks a lot about science, and for the most part, he and his compatriots do a good job of being scientific about it (although certainly some of the comments are just as shrill as realclimate.org or desmog).
Here, try another one, which finds a significantly overlooked negative feedback:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/09/declining-global-average-cloud-height-a-significant-measure-of-negative-feedback-to-global-warming/
"Breaks"? Without a clearly falsifiable hypothesis statement, no matter what I find, you'll claim some other ad hoc special pleading (ice melting in other parts of the world, for example).
Well that's not true. Monckton thinks he's "broken" the science. If his claims were supported by the evidence (or indeed his references), then he would be correct. He /would/ have falsified the AGW argument. Fact is, that his claims do not stand up to even modest scrutiny. It's all pretty laughable actually.
But onto the paper you link. Again, no big deal. We're looking at a hypothetical forcing that might occur, and that warrantees further investigation.
And just think about this for a moment. A negative forcing means that the lowering clouds make the earth cooler. And what goes down must come up. (Presumably the clouds will not eventually settle on our heads.) So at some stage we could predict that clouds will raise again, and this will warm the earth. So the lowering clouds is "storing" heat in some way. (If the clouds don't raise again, then we'll have incurred a one-time cooling effect from cloud lowering.)
Pretty cool, but there is nothing there which would challenge the consensus on climate change.
"ZOMG, sea levels are gonna get crazy high because ice in Antarctica is all gonna melt!"
I know people who speak like this. It is really annoying. But I don't hear many scientists talking like this -- not climate scientists anyway. Yet they all (97%) agree that AGW is happening. Not CAGW. Just AGW.
/solutions/. Practical.
/and/ the Republican primaries -- we get a blanket denial that there is any problem at all! 100% certainty that there is no problem. (Belief in climate change is correlated with degree of partisanship.) Not one Republican primary contendor can even admit that AGW is even happening! (Gingrich and Huntsman both back-peddled.) The fact that it has become such a black-and-white partisan issue with the Republican base should tip you off that the AGW debate is actually characterised by shrill-paranoid-anti-environmentalism. Not environmental alarmism, but a blanket denial that anything needs to be done at all.
My guess (and it is a well-informed layman's guess) is that we have a 10% chance of CAGW, 30% of nothing problematic, and 60% somewhere in-between. In my book, that warrants talking about solutions. Not marxism. Not world government. Not crippling regulations and taxes. That doesn't solve any problems. I'm talking
But when you look at Fox News,
I am *sure* that there are some great solutions that conservatives can come up with, and am ready to have that conversation.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
You know, and I know, Monckton is fighting a straw man. He's built it because nobody on the warmist side has bothered to specify a falsifiable hypothesis statement that contains all necessary and sufficient factors to show AGW or CAGW, but what he's done is broken straw men he's inferred from the various alarmist exclamations made without much thought. He's fighting a PR war, not a science war.
It is a big deal if you insist (as some alarmists do), that "the science is settled". A potential negative feedback of this magnitude has immense consequences on what the actual climate sensitivity to CO2 is, and can easily bring temp increases down from "OMG" to "meh". The fact that the models don't even consider this factor is an indictment of their possible accuracy (even if they've overestimated the magnitude of negative feedback, it's still got real world implications that should be part of GCMs).
97%?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/21/gmu-on-climate-scientists-we-are-the-97/
Okay, but forget that nitpick for a moment. AGW is happening. If defined as a nonzero and positive amount, I'll stipulate that to be true, in the same way that BYBGW (back yard butterfly global warming) is happening, and is nonzero and positive. Assert that it's happening at a rate of 1.5C per doubling of CO2, and I'll doubt you. Assert that it's happening at a rate of .8C per doubling of CO2 and I might believe you. Assert that it's happening at a rate of .000001C per doubling of CO2, and I might believe you.
My guess (also well-informed layman's guess), is that we've got a 0% chance of CAGW, a 60% chance of hitting something akin to a Maunder minimum between now and 2050, and a 40% chance of business as usual.
My further guess is that even if there was a 10% chance of CAGW, nothing we could do now could stop it from occurring - the only option would be adaptation, not mitigation.
Throw away your mitigation solutions for a moment. What practical adaptation solutions do you have?
Would it be less offensive to you if they simply said, "Look, we don't think human CO2 has any measurable effect on natural climate change, but even if it did, nothing we can possibly do will stop it now. If people want to start focusing on adaptation (designing hurricane proof shelters, planning dikes, raising people out of poverty to they can survive natural weather disasters), great. Mitigation is a non-starter."
Well then, as your token conservative (well, really a libertarian, but I get lumped in as conservative even though I support abortion rights, gay marriage, and the separation of church and state), here's my great solution:
Drill, baby, drill. Get the cheapest energy out of the ground as
You know, and I know, Monckton is fighting a straw man.
Monckton has a huge following of rabid denialists. He isn't fighting a straw man, he /is/ the straw man. It is absolutely laughable. Monckton also believes he has a cure for cancer, aids, graves disease and multiple-sclerosis. He is constantly contradicting himself (as the need arises). There is a hilarious conversation between Monckton and Peter Hadfield on WUWT. Search for all the references for Thatcher for a truly mind-numbing example of fantasy land.
As for your solutions -- I'm not sure drilling for oil is going to solve the coming energy crisis. We have been using exponentially more energy for a long time. If we double every 20 years, then that means we will use more energy in the next 20 years then we have used since the beginning of civilisation. Obviously something is going to break there eventually.
The price of energy should reflect its future availability. Markets get this wrong. E.g.: scientists warned that we should not be using trawlers back in the 70s, because it is not sustainable. Only took 20 years for the North Atlantic fish populations to tank, and we needed a moratorium on fishing. The investors in the 70s walked away with the cash, and the fishermen lost their livelihood and their towns.
Same thing will happen with a "drill-baby-drill" mentality. We will hit a brick wall due to exponential growth, the investors will walk away, and the government will be forced to do something. (And then Republicans will complain about the big arm of government.)
"Look, we don't think human CO2 has any measurable effect on natural climate change, but even if it did, nothing we can possibly do will stop it now. If people want to start focusing on adaptation (designing hurricane proof shelters, planning dikes, raising people out of poverty to they can survive natural weather disasters), great. Mitigation is a non-starter."
This is perfect example of how stupid the debate is. You complain that AGW isn't happening or it isn't a problem. But what you really mean is that you don't want to do anything about it. Hence the attack on the science. This is an obvious misdirection, and it is very dishonest and frustrating, and scientists are well aware that this is the score. Their work is attacked because lassez-faire fundamentalists don't want to deal with the reality of what their work might say. The evidence just doesn't matter. This is perhaps the most well studied phenomenon in all of human history.
So just be honest and say: "Yeah AGW and perhaps CAGW could happen, but I don't think that there is anything that can be done about it except adapting to whatever happens." That is a perfectly valid opinion to have. Denying the science is just counter-productive.
Personally I don't think anything will ever happen because it is hard enough to get people to save up for their retirement. Just remember what you said and where you stood today, and tell it to your grand-children, when you give them sage advice about politics. (I imagine you will say that the science just wasn't settled, when this is just a lie that you tell yourself.)
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Not sure about aids, graves disease and multiple sclerosis, but I know the cure for cancer - stop eating carbohydrates. Lustig and Gary Taubes do pretty good exposes on the chronic toxicity of carbohydrates. But again, the point is, Monckton is simply a caricature, much like Al Gore, James Hansen or Michael Mann.
Fair enough, we certainly going to plateau, and if one is really desirous of being pessimistic, you can read this: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
That all being said, I suppose one could make the statement that we need to grow our energy faster than our population - which means population controls (anathema to ideas of freedom - see David Wingrove's "Chung Kuo" for an interesting scifi novel based on the premise of unlimited birth rate), or more aggressive exploitation, or a combination of both. We're lucky, of course, that it seems that wealth tends to slow growth rates down, so aggressive exploitation might actually drive natural population control.
NOOOOOO!!!!! That's what Big Oil *wants* you to think! Artificial scarcity is anathema to free markets, and the psychological trick of publishing stats on "proven reserves" in scary ways only distorts the market. The price of energy should reflect supply and demand. Increasing supply will lower prices.
Actually, we didn't need a moratorium - the natural economics work themselves out naturally. Once it becomes uneconomical to fish an area, people stop fishing it. Yes, this can be devastating to people who have bet their lives on the idea that they will always be able to economically fish an area, but making those kinds of plans isn't very prudent.
No, I really do mean that AGW isn't happening, or it isn't a problem, or there is nothing we can do about it in terms of *mitigation*. I'm open to adaptation if necessary. My attack on the premise of significant or catastrophic AGW is based on my popperian view of science as falsifiable hypotheses, and comes from an honest conviction. My dislike for big government comes from a completely separate honest conviction regarding the proper place for government based on the works of classic liberals like Bastiat. I'm simply lucky that the two convictions aren't in conflict with each other :)
Absolutely. And I hope if our grand-children are living in a Maunder minimum event with historically low temperatures for decades, you'll have the integrity to admit to them you had it figured wrong :)
In the end, I think it's just as rare to find a gun-toting gay republican as it is to find a libertarian AGW believer, or big-government AGW skeptic. One can assert that the big/small government views is what drives the AGW views, but I think that sells people short, and is mostly an artifact of how it has been politicized. I think the problem that you rightfully point out is that often the argument over the science (be it of a
I'm no climate denier, but what he did was unethical. He should be fired, and possibly prosecuted if any crimes were committed.
It really seems strange to me that he would out himself, since that seems to be the likely outcome.
Pangs of guilt, wanted to confess? Martyr complex? Thinks outing the Institute is more important than his own well being? Knows he's dying in a few weeks? Talked to a lawyer and figures nothing will stick?
Who knows.
I think there's room for debate on the topic of whether it's right to violate first-order ethics in support of higher-order ethics, but this hardly seems like the occasion for that sort of thing even if you think it's OK. It's not like we didn't already know that there's big money and back-room arrangements behind climate denial (like every other PR effort). Why would he feel a need to stick his neck out just to prove that one organization is involved in it?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
He should be fired, and possibly prosecuted if any crimes were committed.
Yeah. Put him in jail with this Assange guy! What do I say. Burn'em!!!
Or put him in solitary confinement with waz-zis-name.
But then, it wouldn't be solitary confinement anymore, would it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.'"
No, I really do mean that AGW isn't happening, or it isn't a problem, or there is nothing we can do about it in terms of *mitigation*.
Be honest with yourself. All (97%) of the scientists believe AGW is happening. But you're just smarter then that, right? No.... you just don't think there is anything that can be done. Don't WANT to think. That is what I see.
if one is really desirous of being pessimistic
I don't desire to be pessimistic, and I am not. Republicans are being obstructionist scumbags on the issue, but we will find some solutions regardless. We'd all be better off is there was a mature discussion on the topic. But that will never happen.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Here is a recap of what just took place here:
hsthompson69: I'm "pretty impressed by the references of Watts and his guest posters" ...
microbox: "point out ANYTHING substantial that Watts gets right."
hsthompson69: here's something [provides a specific link]
microbox: yeah but I said "substantial" so I reject your factual evidence
hsthompson69: Here's another example [provides another link]
microbox: yeah but I still reject your factual evidence because I don't think it's a big deal
Basically hsthompson69 could provide a plethora of smaller issues that all counter the general CAGW stance on things and you would just keep rejecting them because you are looking for a single catch all "smoking gun". What if, just maybe, all the smaller aspects sum up to "break the science" as you seem to think they should.
Your original argument was essentially that Watts is a crackpot, and when shown he isn't, you make excuses.
The best thing about WUWT that is that they don't censor. They allow for open debate, on every article. Their policies are clear, such as stay on topic, and don't be a name calling dick. Follow those simple rules and you are free to openly debate each topic. The same can not be said for sites like realclimate where nearly all dissenting comments are removed from existence.
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 :)
Oh, don't forget your caveat! That only applies to people we define as "those who have studied climate"! I'll remind you the same holds true of Back Yard Butterfly Global Warming as well, yet you surely deny that!
But really, the argument from unnamed authorities isn't your strongest argument.
Well, remember, we've been *told* there's nothing we can do (since CO2 hangs out in the atmosphere for so long). And you keep telling me not to think (since 97% of those who have studied climate apparently believe something already, and that should be good enough).
Look, yes, we can adapt. Mitigation is a losing battle, even if I were to stipulate to all of your worst fears. Why isn't that good enough for you?
You've been doing pretty well so far in this thread, so don't give up hope! Get past the knee-jerk name calling, the automatic assumption of bad faith, and maybe we've got a chance of finding out what we do agree on.
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?
No, the best person to talk about cancer treatment is the guy who has the highest treatment success rate. If that's my dentist, I go to him. I don't look at his job title to decide his qualifications, I look at his performance to decide his qualifications.
"“97% of the world’s climate scientists” accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere have begun to claim.
This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers – in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout."
75 out of 10,257 earth scientists. I wonder what those 75 had as performance on any sort of quantifiable predictions of either CO2, global average temperature, or any sort of regional weather :)
Okay - on the science AGW is dishonest because it doesn't start off with a falsifiable hypothesis statement that isn't just "AGW is falsified if humans don't exist" - the statement must contain those features both necessary and sufficient to show that there is no other alternative.
And for the policy question, we have no reason to believe we can force 2 billion chinese people to do what we want them to do, so any sort of mitigation strategy is dead on arrival.
There, separated :)
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.
So a low rent pretend University for people that are unemployable at the real ones and a parking space for those with the right parents and still too young to get into politics? That's still zero credibility in a lot of places.
I'm a little surprised that Watts would use the Lenaerts paper. After all its results are based on Atmospheric Climate Models. Aren't those supposed to be totally wrong? And when you get into actual physical measurements using the GRACE satellites to detect changes in gravity, Antarctica, particularly West Antarctica is losing ice mass over all. (Velicogna 2009)
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?
but your whole reasoning for doing so was to prove that they are a bunch of crackpots that don't discuss science, only propaganda, and that they only talk to "Republican ideologues terrified of any government intervention is the free market". But when given examples to the contrary you hide behind the semantics of a specific thing you are looking for.
Either you stand behind your assertion that Watts et al don't know what they are talking about in the face of evidence to the contrary and look the fool, or you could simply admit that while not all discussion that takes place there is of the utmost importance, they at least allow for open dialogue and do discuss science. It's up to you.
Well, they took the SMB from the model and claim it aligns with empirical measurements:
"The modeled SMB is in good agreement with ±750 in-situ SMB measurements (R = 0.88), without a need for post calibration."
But hey, if you want to throw all models out, I'm good with that too!
Steven Goddard gives short shrift to GRACE:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/29/amazing-grace/
So does Tom Fuller:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/06/grace-under-fire/
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.
I held my nose and went an looked at your WUWT citations. Neither of them has anything that calls into question the GRACE results. What Steve Goddard missed is that glacial ice not only melts but it flows as well. The places losing ice in Antarctica are near the coast where the ice can flow into the sea. Temperatures don't matter much in that case. Tom Fuller says "I am not a scientist" and goes on to prove it. He speculates about what could be wrong with the GRACE satellites. I doubt he can think of anything credible that the scientists involved haven't already thought of. He provides no evidence, just a bunch of statements.
I suppose there are some people around who think sea level rise is going to be quick but the latest scientific projections I've seen are for 1-2 meters (3-6 feet) of SLR in 2100, most of it after 2050. The only thing that could change that would be a rapid disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Most of it is grounded below sea level. But at this point it appears to be a remote possibility.
From the first cite:
"Assume for a minute that we accept the GRACE numbers. The first problem is Antarctica contains a lot of ice : 30 × 10^6 km. At 100 km per year, it will take 300,000 years to melt."
"I overlaid the Antarctica summer temperature map on the GRACE “melt” map, below. As you can see, GRACE is showing ice loss in places that stay incredibly cold, all year round."
If you look at his map, you can see that it isn't showing flow patterns at all - it's a gravitational dip (unless you wanted to assert that a topographical map would show surface bump there shrinking in height to "flow"). And don't forget, flow increases when we have *more* ice :)
As for the second cite:
"In essence, what we have here is a new satellite using new tools to take measurements. The data recovered is analyzed using guesses and inferences. Their analysis is presented with a margin of error as large as the amount of ice they say is melting from Antarctica. The loss is is less than 1% of the normal annual melt."
I don't think we're talking about questioning the GRACE results, we're questioning the interpretation of them.
Given that we had 20cm of sea level rise in the past 100 years, I'd bet we're in for another 20cm for the next hundred, if we don't hit a Maunder minimum type event. So, 8 inches, tops.
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.
"Assume for a minute that we accept the GRACE numbers. The first problem is Antarctica contains a lot of ice : 30 × 10^6 km. At 100 km per year, it will take 300,000 years to melt."
(BTW, I think you should have used km^3 for cubic kilometers) The rate at which Antarctic ice is melting increased at a rate of 26 gigatonnes/year^2. In other words it's accelerating, losing 26 more GT each year than the year before. At that rate it will take a lot less than 300,000 years to melt. But it would still take several thousand years for all of it to melt regardless of what happens. There's a lot of ice there, enough to raise sea level by nearly 200 feet it all were to melt.
The GRACE satellites don't measure the flow of ice at all so flow would not show up on his map. You would have to actually visit the site to at least set up some instruments in order to measure flow. Flow increases when the ice gets warmer too.
Given that we had 20cm of sea level rise in the past 100 years, I'd bet we're in for another 20cm for the next hundred, if we don't hit a Maunder minimum type event. So, 8 inches, tops.
Sea level was rising at about 3 mm/year in the 2000's. In 1900 it was rising around 1 mm/year. So the rate of SLR is accelerating. A Maunder Minimum type event would slow projected global warming down by 5-10 years at best.
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)
Okay, so let's test our hypothesis here again - flow increases when things are colder (since we get more snow, which creates more pressure, which causes flow). Flow increases when things are warmer (because when ice melts into water, it gets slippery, and things slide more).
So how do we know one flow increase from another?
http://climateresearchnews.com/2009/01/short-term-sea-level-rise-slows-by-20/
And it looks like sea level rise, like many things, fluctuate. In this case, although apparently we're in the hottest years ever recorded, sea level rise has fallen off. In fact, over the past few years, dramatically more:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
So, I'll argue that, short term cycles aside, we can expect, at most, 8 inches of sea level rise from 2000 - 2100.
As for Maunder minimums and slowing global warming, I'll wait for the data to come in rather than depend on already falsified models :)
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
Sea level has fallen the past couple of years mainly because the heavy rainfall around the world has put a lot of water on the land that takes time to drain back to the oceans.
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?
And there's no reason to expect that heavy rainfall will stop suddenly (especially if you assert that hotter means more humidity, and therefore more rain over land). It's one of those truly neat negative feedbacks :)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/08/support-for-the-saturated-greenhouse-effect-leaves-the-likelihood-of-agw-tipping-points-in-the-cold/
"Computer models of AGW show positive feedback from water vapor by incorrectly assuming that relative humidity remains constant with warming while specific humidity increases. The Miskolczi theory of a ‘saturated greenhouse effect’ instead predicts relative humidity will decrease to offset an increase in specific humidity, as has just been demonstrated by observations in this paper. The consequence of the Miskolczi theory is that additions of ‘greenhouse gases’ such as CO2 to the atmosphere will not lead to an increase in the ‘greenhouse effect’ or increase in global temperature."
Certainly it deserves more study, but these are very interesting results.
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.
Heavy rainfall may continue but there is a limit to how much rainfall the land will absorb once it becomes saturated. Then the rainfall just runs off. At some point the effect loses the ability to continue to lower sea levels as the ocean continues to warm and land ice continues to melt. But I don't expect that we will see rainfall like the past two years in every year. There is still natural variation and there will be dry and wet years. Two years of sea level drop is pretty meaningless. If it continues for another 8 years then I'll take it more seriously.
I had to look up the "Miskolczi theory of a ‘saturated greenhouse effect’". I'd never heard about it before. But if even Dr. Roy Spencer is debunking it I have to think there is not much validity to it. Other debunkings here.
Fair enough. Got a quantification of that? How much rain can the landmasses of the world absorb? Not sure what the rough orders of magnitude would be, but I would imagine that the dates would be in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years and the error bars would be greater than observed natural variation.
Also fair. In 2020, we'll have another go at this :)
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.
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 don't have a quantification for that but "tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years" sounds wildly off base to me. I would think decades at most would be more realistic. Also, you seem to assume the rainfall will eventually hit all of the landmass of the world but that doesn't seem realistic to me either.
Actually, if anything, hundreds of thousands of years is probably a conservative estimate - it's more like millions of years, if ever.
Put another way, is there any evidence, that throughout the entire history of the planet, that all the land mass has ever been completely saturated? Even before the Late Eocene and the step-change global cooling we had due to new ocean circulation patterns, when the antarctic was tropical in climate, did we ever have a point in time where all rainfall on the planet contributed to sea level, not land moisture?
To think that this could happen in decades seems unfathomable...
"Given the Earth's surface area, that means the globally averaged annual precipitation is 990 millimetres (39 in), but over land it is only 715 millimetres (28.1 in)."
Even if we dramatically increased the average rainfall from 28.1 in, to say, 200 in. (x10), you still probably wouldn't saturate the planet's land mass (rainfall ranges from less than 0.1 in. to upwards of 900 in.).
I don't think we're talking about the same thing. What are you talking about when you're saying "hundreds of thousands of years"? Rainfall never contributes to sea level because the sea is the source of nearly all of the water vapor anyway. I was never saying all of the land mass in the world could become saturated. Most of the drop in sea level over the last two years can be attributed to the heavy rainfall in Packistan, Northeast Australia and the Northern Amazon basin. The GRACE satellites showed and increase in the gravity in those regions attributable to retained rainfall. Most of that water will return to the oceans within a few decades. Some of it may replenish aquifers that store the water long term but most aquifers like that are being tapped by humans for irrigation.
Wait, didn't you say earlier that the reason why we saw stalling or falling sea levels was because of record rain over land?
"Sea level has fallen the past couple of years mainly because the heavy rainfall around the world has put a lot of water on the land that takes time to drain back to the oceans"
I'm not sure how both of your statements are compatible.
But isn't it also true that over the next few decades, we'll also have more rain over land? Heavy rainfall isn't a one-time occurrence, so until we have a reliable predictor of how heavy or light rainfall over land will be over the years, decades, centuries and millennia, it essentially represents a big fat unknown variable in regards to its contribution (by omission, as it were) to sea levels.
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 :)
I should have said rainfall never contributes to a rise in sea level but it can contribute to a temporary drop in sea level.
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."
I'm sorry, but I think that semantically doesn't make any sense. We're not just talking about literally, just "falling rain", we're really talking about "the amount of falling rain", and more importantly, *where* that rain lands.
If rainfall happens primarily over water, it will contribute to a general rise in sea level (moving water evaporated off of land into the oceans).
If rainfall happens primarily over land, it will contribute to a general fall in sea level (moving water evaporated off of the oceans onto the land).
As for what a "temporary drop in sea level" is, I'm afraid that's a bit too broad - *every* change in sea level is temporary. There has never been *permanent* change in sea level, because it's *always* changing. We can talk about rate of change, and whether or not rainfall rates over land/sea can change sea level by a certain amount over a certain time period, and put constraints perhaps on what those rates are, and maybe that's what you're intending.
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.
Ok, as we agreed before, lets see where sea level is in 2020.
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.