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Virginia High Court Rejects Case Against Climatologist Michael Mann
ananyo writes "The Virgina Supreme Court on Friday tossed out an investigation by the state's conservative attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, into Michael Mann, the former University of Virginia climatologist whose work on the now-famous hockey-stick graph has become a lightning rod for climate skeptics. 'In a dense and conflicted 26-page ruling (PDF) covering a century and a half of case law — including references to kings as well as modern "functional incongruities" that divided the judges themselves — Virginia’s high court ruled that the university is not a "person" and thus is not subject to Cuccinelli’s demands under the state’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.' The 'climategate' scientist has been cleared of wrongdoing by a number of investigations."
Interesting-- so corporations are persons, according to the Supreme court, but universities aren't, according to the Virginia court.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Everybody's got an agenda.
There is no fact.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
--Phillip K. Dick.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Tell that to the computer you're using which depends on two centuries worth of scientific advancement. The goal of science is to account for bias and get closer to truth in spite of it, and it's obviously worked. The same system that brought you electromagnatism, antibiotics, and plastic has now brought you climate change. You can bet against them but history isn't on your side.
I'm sure CERN will be thrilled to know that they're disqualified from being scientists.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
The real takeaway is "Don't do research that irritates Republicans, or they might conduct partisan witch-hunts devoid of any actual basis."
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
Everybody's got an agenda.
There is no fact.
Yeah, and everyone has a bias.
But that's absolutely no reason to ignore what folks have to say and many times, there's a system in place to compensate for one's bias - like peer review.
From the decision:
Government is above the law. All hail the king. Welcome to Braveheart.
"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." - a stupid sentiment, regardless of who said it.
Anyhow, your assertions have been investigated and found to be false.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
Facts do exist. The only role that "agenda" and "bias" play are when accepting said facts. Any agenda and bias have absolutely no impact on the factuality of the fact, however.
Let me give you an example. Take JavaScript. The fact is that it's a shitty programming language. When you analyze it objectively, every single aspect of it is a failure or is horribly wrong in some way or another. Of course, there are people with bias and an agenda (usually people who only know JavaScript, and nothing but JavaScript) who insist that it's not a shitty programming language. But their ignorance or bias does not change the fact that JavaScript is a shitty programming language.
The same goes for many other subjects, including climate change. There are facts that will exist regardless of what one or more people believe about them. Nothing will change that these facts are factual. They just inherently are.
No sorry. This conservative witch hunt against this work has been clearly shown to be politically biased and non factual. Stop perpetrating the myth.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
According to the IPCC report 2007, the Himalayan glaciers ought to have melted in 2035. (The word was in there prior to changing the sentence, though not afterwards.)
Well said!
It can easily be seen by your reference to "hiding the decline" that you simply don't understand what youy're talking about. One doesn't "hide" anything by publishing papers about it that get hundreds of citations. A piece of advice: read less denialist propaganda, more actual scientists' work. Michael Mann didn't "hide" his work, reproduced it more than once, and his results have been supported by all other work in this area -- with decentered PCA, without it, using other statistical methods etc. Heck, even Wegman trying to discredit Mann had to remain content with the "bad method, good results" diagnosis. You're just throwing the same old mud that didn't stick the first time -- while each year, as more reserach is done, Mann's work is more vindicated. No wonder the denialosphere is getting openly hostile to science in general -- there's no other way to ignore the fact that science unequivocally supports Mann, not you.
This, while publicized, was a misprint and has since been retracted. The proper arrangement if digits is "2350". It was a transcription error and if you read the report that cites the source, the source material is the 300-year later date.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Clearly the court didn't want to pass judgement on the nature of the case (no pun intended) and instead chose to throw it out on an Angelina Jolie-ish thin concept.
It also sets an interesting precedent. If, as the court claims, the university is not a person as a requirement for a legal claim on the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, then one could argue that no university should be allowed to get taxpayer funding because there can be no oversight.
Excellent news. Its a BS case anyway.
Temperatures did not stop rising 14 years ago.
Interesting... so which Koch funded "institute" are you quoting?
You do know how easy it is to lie with statistics don't you? Oh right scientists can do no wrong in your world view and we should dispense with reproducibility of their claims
You are aware that right now six different independent groups are analyzing the temperature records, using ground, ocean, balloon, and satellite measurements, and getting very consistent results?
You are aware that an independent analysis, "BEST" (by U.C. Berkeley), was set up (and funded by, among other things, many skeptics) with the explicit purpose of doing an independent analysis without the purported "biases" that critical claim other temperature groups had.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/10/climate-skeptics-perform-independent-analysis-finally-convinced-earth-is-getting-warmer.ars
Here's a quote from leading skeptic Anthony Watts about that BEST study (March 2011):
Guess what-- the results are still the same. The data showing the planet is warming is real.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111020/full/news.2011.607.html
How much "reproducability of their claims" do you want?
Satellite measurements, ground station measurements,ocean measurements, balloon-sonde measurements, microwave measurements-- very different techniques, same answers.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Wait, I'm confused. Corporations are persons that can be sued but universities aren't?
If, as the court claims, the university is not a person as a requirement for a legal claim on the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, then one could argue that no university should be allowed to get taxpayer funding because there can be no oversight.
This is nonsense. You can oversee a university just as you can oversee a person. It has nothing to do with the Act.
I give this troll 0/10: you're being too obvious and heavy-handed about it.
Unlike the pretenders to the throne, I am a real scientist. I can back my claims. I worked in hyperspectral satellite data acquisition at one point in my career and the relative IR impact of water, methane and CO2 is common knowledge. Maybe we should stop the water cycle instead of the carbon cycle (yes, that's a joke).
Water vapor H2O ~54 %
Carbon dioxide CO2 ~9%
Methane CH4 ~7 %
Ozone O3 ~5 %
Further From New Foundations for Classical Mechanics:
**BEGIN QUOTE**
Celestial Mechanics is the crowning glory of Newtonian mechanics. It has
revolutionized man’s concept of the Cosmos and his place within it. Its
spectacular successes in the 18th and 19th centuries established the unique
power of mathematical theory for precise explanation and prediction. In the
20th century it has been overshadowed by exciting developments in other
branches of physics. But the last three decades have seen a resurgence of
interest in celestial mechanics, because it is a basic conceptual tool for the
emerging Space Age.
The main concern of celestial mechanics (CM) is to account for the motion of
celestial bodies (stars, planets, satellites, etc.). The same theory applies to the
motion of artificial satellites and spacecraft, so the emerging science of space
flight, astromechanics, can be regarded as an offspring of celestial mechanics.
Space Age capabilities for precise measurements and management of vast
amounts of data has made CM more relevant than ever. Celestial mechanics
is used by observational astronomers for the prediction and explanation of
occultation and eclipse phenomena, by astrophysicists to model the evolution
of binary star systems, by cosmogonists to reconstruct the history of the Solar
System, and by geophysicists to refine models of the Earth and explain
geological data about the past.
To cite one specific example, it has recently
been established that major Ice Ages on Earth during the last million years
have occurred regularly with a period of 100,000 years, and this can be
explained with celestial mechanics as forced by oscillations in the Earth’s
eccentricity due to perturbations by other planets. Moreover, periodicities of
minor Ice Ages can be explained as forced by precession and nutation of the
Earth’s axis due to perturbation by the Sun and Moon.
**END QUOTE**
Bullshit.
Global temperatures are still rising. Anybody saying otherwise has come unmoored from the data.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.E.gif
That's wrong. It was not a misprint, the article appeared exactly as it was written and it was written exactly with the intention of writing 2035 and not 2350, because the IPCC article was based on a false news report on a scientific paper. As you could read here on slashdot 2 years ago.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/01/23/2211222/claims-of-himalayan-glacier-disaster-melt-away
And even the revised date has since been found out to be false, as the glaciers that weren't measured are growing and make up for the losses measured thus far. They weren't measured because they were less convenient to measure, and understandably so, because the terrain is simply very difficult. But it is shoddy science to take a non-representative sample of glaciers and extrapolate the total ice-loss of all glaciers from their average ice-loss, without reporting any of the caveats arising from the necessarily bad sample. That said, out of about 200,000 glaciers worldwide, only 0.075% were actually measured in the last decade (with some areas such as the Alps being heavily over-represented) and those 0.075% necessarily form the base on which scientific claims have made. A base which is just too small to make any claims.
As Wittgenstein said:"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"
If you can't disprove a theory go after the messanger?
And why, then, is this graph flat towards the end?
When was the last time a Rebublican read a science book? First, carbon dioxide is a heat trapping gas. It absorbs infrared and converts to kinetic energy. This is the basis of IR spectroscopy. Alternatively, read about the planet Venus. Then, burning fossil fuels will dump carbon dioxide that has been fixed by living things over the last 500 million years. That is why they are called fossil. Putting that together, things are going to warm up if we keep burning the fuel. I dont need a Phd to figure that out
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
That's a weak argument -- essentially a mass scale argument from authority. The strong argument is that the data support the conclusion that the climate is warming and that much of that warming is due to human activity -- and no other possible cause has been shown to be sufficient to cause what has been observed.
THAT is why the smart money is on continued warming and on conservation or other measures to contain it.
No sorry, this is clearly a witch hunt.
Read here: http://spectator.org/blog/2010/05/17/top-mann-nemesis-hes-not-a-fra
it was an extremely odd audience reaction: McIntyre received a standing ovation upon his introduction, thanks to his dogged research and unrelenting demand for information and accountability, but then his blase' attitude about scientists' behavior -- particularly Mann's -- left most of the audience cold and some even angry. The applause for McIntyre was tepid upon the conclusion of his remarks.
Clearly the supporters of the audit are not interested in the truth, they are only interested in seeing Mann fail, regardless of the evidence. Get off your high 'this is fraudulent use of tax dollars!' horse and actually look at the evidence and conclusions - not what the crackpot right wing tells you to think.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
No. The scientists were being attacked because they dared to publish science results that some politicians didn't like. Those politicians were Republicans. You're entitled to your own opinions but not to make up your own facts.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8511670.stm
Hmm, it appears Phil Jones of the CRU disagrees with you. In case you don't know who he is, he is the one that writes all the reports that the IPCC uses and is the ONLY person on the planet that has had full access to all unmanipulated weather data. He manipulated the data to prove it was still raising but had to admit even after doing that he couldn't prove it. NASA does not have worldwide historical data despite what you or anyone else claims, only the CRU in England does.
Why are you ignoring facts that don't agree with your prmisie? Are you anti-science?
You mean this one? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8282028/Michael-Mann-vows-to-keep-up-the-street-fight-against-climate-change-deniers.html
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Really, please show the data and graph to support your claim.
Oh give it up. Even McIntyre says it wasn't fraud.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
So how do you explain that the changes we're seeing are happening within a century or two while glaciation happens on the order of millennia?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Fascinating that you sometimes need to quote a guy who at one point hallucinated being taken over by the prophet Elijah to some people, because he makes more sense than their ramblings, Scary, actually, given how often I have to use your quote myself.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/IPCC-20071.png
HadCrut3 disagrees with GISS on that.
GISS is well known for fabricating their data using 1,200 km radius circles with just one temperature station in them. That is not permitted in science when you are representing that the data is actual temperature measurements since it leads people - such as your self - to the incorrect conclusions about the data. GISS data is NOT pure raw observational temperature data, it's got tons of fabricated data in it. Thus GISS can't be relied upon for factual temperature data.
Also in the graph is the bonus that you'll see how the IPCC "climate models" are worth nothing as their predictions were ALL falsified by Nature herself.
Oh, and yeah, the temperature hasn't risen in the last decade or so, sure it goes up and down but as the graph shows... it more trending down than up.
But, but, making up their own facts is what their whole propaganda machine runs on! And they are too big to fail!
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I'm sure you'd have posted evidence if you had any, just as you wouldn't have posted anonymously if you had any evidence.
This troll is also 0/10.
Nonsense. McIntyre generated 10 000 random runs and then picked up a hundred that showed an upward blade:
http://deepclimate.org/2010/11/16/replication-and-due-diligence-wegman-style/
If you seriously believe that disproves Mann's hockey stick graph, you need a 101 on statistics.
Listen, the tactics of repeating a lie until it becomes perceived truth has gotten a bit stale since the times of Goebbels. You might want to search for an alternate strategy. At least give us something more creative. It has become annoyingly boring at this point.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It also gave us eugenics, Aether, the fixed universe, phrenology, and Fleischmann/Pons cold fusion.
Many scientific theories that are accepted as truth at the time turn out to be false, or are superceeded as science finds out more.
And sometimes, as in the case of phrenology and eugenics, people are harmed in the name of science.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
As the court didn't even look into the case, whether the accusations have any basis remains in question. The fact that one side happens to have a political motivation in the matter does not disprove the accusations either. The university could easily clear its name by complying with the FOIA request, but for some reason it's reluctant to do so...
I suspect the U is fighting the FOIA request because it's a fishing expedition and they know it. Cuccinelli doesn't have any evidence of wrongdoing or he'd have presented it by now and used it as probable cause to continue the investigation, so he's using FOIA in an attempt to grab up everything.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Say whatever you want to support the DNC, and you don't have to show your work at all. If you can get the government to pay for it(local, state, fed), and you get the army of brainwashed hipsters to support your opinions masquerading as facts, then you have pulled off the Intelligentsia trifecta.
"UVa is a state school, not a private entity. As such it enjoys sovereign immunity."
Sovereign Immunity is such a crock, it's what the ruling elite use to enslave the rest of us and what they use to literally get away with mass murder death killing on a vast scale around the globe and here at home.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbp6umQT58A
I doubt your word that you're a scientist.
1) Who are you, and what are your qualifications, published papers, credentials, etc.? A scientist should be proud of his work and reputation.
2) Which field are you a scientist in? If you're not a climatologist, you're not qualified.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Or, more properly, don't do research that inconveniences industries (like carbon-based fuels) that patronize the Republicans. A few well-funded public relations firms will have more weight than any amount of science you can muster.
There's nothing about climate science that is inherently conservative or liberal, and no reason that conservatives should be upset about it except that it is one of several threads that may motivate us to lessen our reliance on the oil companies. That's it. And the attacks on climate science by conservatives didn't begin with a bona fide scientific controversy, but rather with a bunch of PR firms that were hired by Exxon-Mobil (among others) to sow doubt among conservative commentators and the public. That is what passes for scientific credibility among conservatives these days.
1. Make completely false claim causing alarmism
2. Regulate and tax the crap out of people based on false claim
3. Get called out that you lied in #1 then just simply claim it was a misprint
4. Keep taxes and regulations on people since they already passed - Profit!
Its amazing how often AGW data is a "misprint". Its almost as if every shred of it is a lie and as they get called out there are claims of "misprints" or people being brought up on law suits for fraud are aquitted and they think that means their lies are ok.
Why is it if AWG is so obvious and undenyable they have to lie about every little aspect of it?
Actually, no. McIntyre proved that there was a technical flaw in Mann's method of statistical analysis that could occasionally cause an artifactual upturn (or, with equal probability, a downturn) at the end, but despite analyzing a large number of noise data sets, he was not able to find even one case that generated an upturn that approached the magnitude of Mann's "hockey stick" analysis. So, correctly interpreted, McIntyre's results proved that it was highly unlikely that Mann's Hockey Stick curve could result from the artifact. So it is not surprising that numerous subsequent studies, using analyses not subject to this error, and also looking at other types of climate data, have confirmed that the hockey stick is correct.
So in the end, McIntyre's technical criticism of Mann's approach (which at worst involved a subtlety of statistical analysis that no reasonable scientist would have called a "fraud") turned out to be correct, but irrelevant to Mann's conclusion.
There is no independently verifiable evidence that CO2 is the cause of the slight warming that has occurred since the Little Ice Age in the real atmosphere.
There's plenty:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/10-Indicators-of-a-Human-Fingerprint-on-Climate-Change.html
Repeating "linear+cyclic" is not gonna save you as a magic incantation would do: if you want to claim that a cycle is causing the warming, you need to specify WHAT is undergoing the cycle, i.e. you need to pinpoint the forcing. And the same for the linear component. In presence of a decrease of radiation to space in CO2 absorption bands (satellite data), an increase of radiation in CO2 radiation bands (surface data) and rising temperatures, all your arguments are just hand waving. And you haven't even started explaining why in the earth physics should be suspended and our CO2 emissions (and we KNOW how large they are and how much of them stays in the atmospehere) wouldn't increase the GH effect.
Guess we just lost the whole field of statistical thermodynamics. The theory guys in the next building over will be thrilled...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Watch this and ask if you still have a question. Nature of things, David Suzuki, 1 hr. We're 200 years into a 1000 year cycle of magnetic pol revrsal. This is why they keep having to change the numbers on runways periodically.
CERN reproduced the findings which does explain the climate. Then the CERN lab director put a gag order on the results. Look this all up for yourself.
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/poles/
Need Mercedes parts ?
Tell you what -- since you think that mass-scale arguments are "weak" (in chemistry no less!). How about NASA and history... you might consider their "facts" more relevant. Please notice that we are, statistically, well within NORMAL oscillations of the historical climate record...
***BEGIN QUOTE** ...By 5000 to 3000 BC average global temperatures reached their maximum level during the Holocene and were 1 to 2 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today. Climatologists call this period the Climatic Optimum. During the Climatic Optimum, many of the Earth's great ancient civilizations began and flourished. In Africa, the Nile River had three times its present volume, indicating a much larger tropical region.
From 3000 to 2000 BC a cooling trend occurred. This cooling caused large drops in sea level and the emergence of many islands (Bahamas) and coastal areas that are still above sea level today. A short warming trend took place from 2000 to 1500 BC, followed once again by colder conditions. Colder temperatures from 1500 - 750 BC caused renewed ice growth in continental glaciers and alpine glaciers, and a sea level drop of between 2 to 3 meters below present day levels.
The period from 750 BC - 800 AD saw warming up to 150 BC. Temperatures, however, did not get as warm as the Climatic Optimum. During the time of Roman Empire (150 BC - 300 AD) a cooling began that lasted until about 900 AD. At its height, the cooling caused the Nile River (829 AD) and the Black Sea (800-801 AD) to freeze.
The period 900 - 1200 AD has been called the Little Climatic Optimum. It represents the warmest climate since the Climatic Optimum. During this period, the Vikings established settlements on Greenland and Iceland. The snow line in the Rocky Mountains was about 370 meters above current levels. A period of cool and more extreme weather followed the Little Climatic Optimum. A great drought in the American southwest occurred between 1276 and 1299. There are records of floods, great droughts and extreme seasonal climate fluctuations up to the 1400s.
From 1550 to 1850 AD global temperatures were at their coldest since the beginning of the Holocene. Scientists call this period the Little Ice Age. During the Little Ice Age, the average annual temperature of the Northern Hemisphere was about 1.0 degree Celsius lower than today. During the period 1580 to 1600, the western United States experienced one of its longest and most severe droughts in the last 500 years. Cold weather in Iceland from 1753 and 1759 caused 25% of the population to die from crop failure and famine. Newspapers in New England were calling 1816 the year without a summer.
From 1550 to 1850 AD global temperatures were at their coldest since the beginning of the Holocene. Scientists call this period the Little Ice Age. During the Little Ice Age, the average annual temperature of the Northern Hemisphere was about 1.0 degree Celsius lower than today. During the period 1580 to 1600, the western United States experienced one of its longest and most severe droughts in the last 500 years. Cold weather in Iceland from 1753 and 1759 caused 25% of the population to die from crop failure and famine. Newspapers in New England were calling 1816 the year without a summer.
The period 1850 to present is one of general warming. Figure 7x-1 describes the global temperature trends from 1880 to 2006. This graph shows the yearly temperature anomalies that have occurred from an average global temperature calculated for the period 1951-1980. The graph indicates that the anomalies for the first 60 years of the record were consistently negative. However, beginning in 1935 positive anomalies became more common, and from 1980 to 2006 most of the anomalies were between 0.20 to 0.63 degrees Celsius higher than the normal period (1951-1980) average.
Falsification of AGW
Why there is no valid evidence that justifies accepting the AGW hypothesis
The Null Hypothesis is a well-established foundational element of the scientific method as currently practiced by professional scientists [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis]. It requires no proof.
In the context of AGW, the Null Hypothesis is that changes in global temperature are dominated by unspecified natural causes other than the human emission of CO2, such that any contribution of human CO2 emissions to changes in global temperature are too small to be worth the costs of mitigating human CO2 emissions by political means. The Null Hypothesis is formulated that way precisely because the issue to be decided isn't whether human emissions of CO2 have any effect at all on temperature, but whether the effect (if any) is large enough to justify political action. Whether there's any effect at all is a valid scientific question, but it's not the point of the political controversy.
Skeptics (all scientists are skeptics, by definition) have no need to prove what causes nature to do whatever it does naturally. Some AGW skeptics do prefer other specific hypotheses which are not the Null Hypothesis (e.g., the Sun is the principal driver to terrestrial temperature,) and those hypotheses do require proof. But most skeptics make no such claims.
What should skeptics be required to prove? Their only common claim is that there is no valid proof of AGW. Valid proof must withstand criticism in general, and valid proof must especially withstand the criticism that it fails to show at least a 3 sigma probability that AGW fits the evidence better than the Null Hypothesis does.
Note that the claim that 'there is no evidence for AGW' is a negative claim, and a negative cannot be proved, only falsified (as is true of any scientific hypothesis, by the way.) AGW believers should be able to easily disprove it, if it's false. But that's properly and necessarily their burden, not that of the skeptics.
AGW believers would falsify the skeptics' claim by demonstrating that valid proof of AGW does in fact exist. The only responsibility of the skeptics would be to show why any such claimed proof isn't valid--or to accept the evidence of the AGW believers as valid, and admit that the claim that no valid proof exists has been falsified.
Of course, most of those reading this are neither scientists nor climatologists. But others are, and they should already have published one or more peer-reviewed papers which show, step by step and point by point--quantitatively, not qualitatively--that there is at least a 3 sigma probability that AGW fits the evidence better than the Null Hypothesis does. So if you are an AGW believer, go find those peer-reviewed scientific papers. That should be easy to do, shouldn't it?
Shouldn't it?
So why can't you find any such papers?
You can't find any because the observed warming is fully consistent with the Null Hypothesis. Which means there is not at least a 3-sigma difference between the probability that the Null Hypothesis explains the evidence and the probability that AGW does so. Which means the observed warming is not evidence of AGW.
Were there to be cooling of sufficient magnitude for a sufficiently long period of time, that would falsify AGW. Pinning down "sufficient magnitude" and "sufficiently long" requires a full, scientifically and mathematically rigorous quantitative analysis. An AGW believer would of course demand to see that formal analysis in a peer-reviewed scientific paper before accepting any claim that AGW has been falsified. So you will of course understand that we skeptics must do the same before accepting the claim that AGW should be accepted as sufficiently proven to be worth the costs of mitigation--which are extremely expensive, and not just in terms of money.
But if warming is not evidence for AGW, then there is no evidence for AGW (by "AGW," we mean the hypothesis that there is positive feedback in the climate system
and did these oscillations always occur? If not, when did they start? When the ice ages happened, or was that a product of Panama coming out of the ocean and breaking the pacific-atlantic current? Real scientists stand by their work and don't hide as anonymous cowards.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The goal of science is to account for bias and get closer to truth in spite of it, and it's obviously worked.
If you are willing to wait decades, or even centuries, science will come to the correct conclusion. It corrects itself. But that doesn't mean for any given question, right now, that science has the correct answer.
As other people have pointed out, scientific institutions are wrong a lot in the short term. They'll get it sorted out in the long term, though.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Cuccinelli loves the Koch.
Alleging a cause is not the same as proving it is the cause conclusively!
Besides CO2 hasn't caused temperature to deviate in the REAL ACTUAL ATMOSPHERE as noted above thus the CAGW claims of "CO2 driving Temperature" are falsified by Nature.
Looks like I've got to add a step to the list.
The Republican 9^H10 Step Global Warming Denial Plan
1) There's no such thing as global warming.
2) There's global warming, but the scientists are exaggerating. It's not significant.
3) There's significant global warming, but man doesn't cause it.
4) Man does cause it, but it's not a net negative.
5) It is a net negative, but it's not economically possible to tackle it.
6) Litigate against scientists that don't follow the Republican party line.
7) We need to tackle global warming, so make the poor pay for it.
8) Global warming is bad for business. Why did the Democrats not tackle it earlier?
9) ????
10) Profit.
The American south is really a pathetic backwater.
Protip: in America only NYC, SF and LA are civilized. Outside of those metro areas your results may vary widely.
It is, however, more correct than a random Joe's gut feeling on the matter. Not only more correct, but correct more often. Furthermore, argument from authority is NOT a fallacy when there is an actual authority in the subject matter. It is a weak argument, yes, as it is easily countered. It is, however, NOT a fallacy.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
There's nothing about climate science that is inherently conservative or liberal, and no reason that conservatives should be upset about it
Actually, if your science doesn't upset conservatives, it is because it doesn't change the world enough. Conservatives, by definition, oppose change. Nothing inherently bad about it, as if we'd go chasing every new fad, we wouldn't go anywhere either.
But any scientific discovery that either implies change is required, or results in a technological advance that changes the world, will be strongly and vehemently opposed by conservatives. That is their nature.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Well, to be consistent, you should extend that claim to all the following studies that reached the same conclusion. With different methods, differnet datasets, different observations. By different researchers.
Otherwise you at least also have to admit that Mann actually did a brilliant fabrication, since people have been able to replicate the result with real data.
Anyway, until you tell us what you mean by "hide the decline" fraud (what decline was hidden, from who, and where?) there's not much point continuing. You seem to be the kind of sceptic who can't be convinced otherwise (which, you should know, is very anti-sceptic behaviour).
Meanwhile we could get back to the normal scienctific process, where fabrications and frauds are relatively easy to point out, since they won't stand on their own. If the DA really believes Mann is wrong, he can publish his research and get the Nobel, he don't need all old correspondence of Mann to do that, now. Especially since Mann, so I've been told, fabricated all the data...
Is there any more ways to repeat the same message for you to see the utter undefendability of your position?
Does my identity somehow modify the truth or falsehood of quoted assertions from standard literature available to all? Do I have to do the orbital mechanics calcs in real-time? Use your own head and God-given brain.
And I assume you are referring to Pangea not Panama... as Panama, as far as we know, has never been undersea..., at least not in the timeframe of the Ice Ages. And of course, Pangea is much older and not relevant to this discussion.
"It took years of sleuthing to find the "hidden decline", and it wasn't found by official peer review."
If you actually took the time to read the email, instead of the usual denialist echo chamber, you would've found that the decline that was hidden was in a specific proxy record that suddenly diverged from actual real world measurements. The decline was "hidden" by throwing out the bad data and replacing it with actual real world measurements.
And I gather that your reasoning for the entire climategate PR assault was investigated multiple times finding no fraud, academic or otherwise, would be an organized conspiracy among, basically, the entire scientific community of the industrialized world? Tell me, are the greys or reptoloids involved? Are they providing support by heating the planet from the hollow interior? Idiot.
Too lazy to google it yourself?
Clearly you do no understand the scientific method.
Ones does NOT need to provide why the temperature is rising as the Null Hypothesis rules in science and the Null Hypothesis in this case is that the warming is Natural and/or unknown.
When falsifying the claims of a hypothesis all that is needed is to refute the claim, one does not have to provide an alternative explanation. In this case the central claim of CAGW is that "CO2 Drives Temperature", clearly as the Girma Analysis which compares those two sets of observational data to each other the central equation "CO2 Drives Temperature" is falsified by the observational data from Nature.
Please see this more extensive comment on Falsification of AGW on this same article thread: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2705663&cid=39231567, it goes into the Null Hypothesis and CAGW in depth.
Alleging a cause is not the same as proving it is the cause conclusively!
We have a mechanism, lab experiments supporting the mechanism, and real world data matching the predictions generated from the mechanism. That's called science. It's been reproduced by different people, different groups using different methods from all over the world. At this point, yelling correlation is not causation just means you don't know what's going on.
Besides CO2 hasn't caused temperature to deviate in the REAL ACTUAL ATMOSPHERE as noted above thus the CAGW claims of "CO2 driving Temperature" are falsified by Nature.
As opposed to the fake unreal atmosphere everybody has been working with so far? I'm sure you have a link to support that theory? Maybe even a peer-reviewed paper of sorts? Just one?
No? I thought so. You're a fucking moron.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
We're 200 years into a 1000 year cycle of magnetic pol revrsal.
You're off by a factor of 100. The average time between reversals is 100,000 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_magnetic_field
Oddly, I'm not sure which side you are on...
Statistics can be a scientific tool, if you're careful. Calling a model with a statistical certainty of 99% "virtually certain", however, is unacceptable. For the simple reason, that out of 100 models or experiments, at least one will unavoidably produce such results. Given the amount of data available and the number of models being created, a mere 99% is just not enough. Particle physicists insist for very good reason on 6-sigma-signals - a certainty of 99.9999% that your result is not just a statistical figment. And even then, it is plausible that your result may merely be the result of systematic errors, rather than statistical ones. The faster-than-light neutrinos were the result of such an error - the measurment itself easily had that 6-sigma certainty. (I seem to remember it being something as absurd as 15 sigma.)
I am a weather enthusiast and even have a fairly popular (though local) website. I've read a great deal about how warming/cooling works and I cannot come to a conclusion that any warming/cooling is any more than a cyclical climate change but I also cannot say that's it's not at least partly anthropogenic. I wish I could find more dispassionate reporting about how any current, global, climate change is occurring. A lot of what I read is very one-sided. Both sides of this argument cherry pick scientific data/evidence to support their opinion.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Well if you're a scientist you're getting the facts wrong or presenting them wrong. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 is not "~9%", it's distortions like yours that make this a difficult conversation to have. In fact the CO2 concentration of the Earth's Atmosphere is 393 parts per million!!!! That's 0.0393% not ~9%.
"The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth's atmosphere is approximately 392 ppm (parts per million) by volume as of 2011[1] and rose by 2.0 ppm/yr during 2000–2009. [1][2] The concentration with respect to pre-industrial concentration of 280 ppm has increased roughly exponentially with a growth rate of 2.2% per year in the last decades[2] Carbon dioxide is essential to photosynthesis in plants and other photoautotrophs, and is also a prominent greenhouse gas."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere
January 2012 it was 0.393% as reported here: ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_mm_mlo.txt.
The rise in CO2 since the 1950's has not increased temperature as shown by the Girma Analysis (posted in other comments on this thread). CO2 does not do what is claimed by alarmists in the real actual atmosphere, no where close as the failed and now falsified IPCC climate models verses actual temperatures proves conclusively.
For a scientist, you have a remarkable lack of understanding how scientific work is done, what peer review is, what references mean and what statistical analysis is. I'm pretty sure you're lying about your status as a scientist, which means you're probably lying about a whole lot of other things as well.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Phrenology was scientific? How was it supported? And no, putting "ology" at the end of it doesn't count.
Is it a fact that there is no fact?
And guess who found the error? Other scientists. Climatologists. Not one of the skeptics actually figured out that that particular bit of information was wrong.
It's really trivial to look at past errors and say "see, these guys know nothing". I'll be much more impressed if you'd actually come up with some science of your own that makes some sort of verifiable prediction. In the meantime, you're nothing but a Monday morning quarterback.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
That was a very loud and powerful NO you started with, followed by an assertion of fact that had no evidence. Followed up by what can only be called slander, and a vague reference to some emails and an article series by a rag UK newspaper, which you didn't even link to.
Please demonstrate some credentials that give you the right to speak about climate change. Please take just ONE of the studies published over the last 20 years about climate change and show how they are entirely wrong. Please...
You can't? Ok, shut up!
Reading his comment, I think the numbers were infra-red reflectivity. He certainly didn't say they were atmospheric concentration.
Have you even been in a university, and made the comment that the domain you're the expert in directly contradicts climate change ? (just take one of the many mathematical problems that affect applied sciences) See the effect. At once people who work in administration claim that they know your domain. People from biology know with certainty that combinatorial mathematics can't possibly have anything useful to say about statistics, and that you're wrong anyway. And they actually band together on this ! It is so unbelievably stupid.
Oh and point out that the first 2 IPCC ARs (ie. the basis for the Kyoto accords) were flat-out wrong ... and you've just caused a shitstorm. Yet there can be no mistake. They predicted A, and ~A happened. Simple, testable, and, according to just about the entire scientific community, wrong. WTF ?
And the worst of it is, by stating that you will have made a few enemies.
For those who don't know, there's gaping holes in the mathematical underpinnings of pretty much every science with only one small exception (it's not maths, only a very small subset of maths, sadly). And yes, climate change is particularly bad for a supposed exact science, being only based on indirect historical non-repeatable observations and not even claiming to have the laws that govern the climate. I said "climate", the only laws we have that apply are about interactions of very small numbers of molecules, in situations with extremely low entropy. Yet climate science applies those laws to a system that has so many secondary effects it isn't even funny and literally enough entropy to entire villages of the map on a monthly basis.
Technically we "know the laws", but the laws prohibit drawing conclusions once you pass a certain rather trivial volume or complexity (the so-called chaotic behaviour). Needless to say, the atmosphere is so far beyond that limit that it's not at all funny. The measurements are so extremely limited it's just plain sad. The athmosphere is a 100km shell above the earth's crust. We measure (and this is being generous) a ~ 1m shell, and have point measurements, spaced far apart in both space and time outside of that tiny shell. It's like the nuclear fusion problems. We are perfectly aware of every possible interaction that can occur in the reactor vessel, just as long as it involves less than a few thousand ions and neutrons. Of course a real reactor vessel involves billions of billions of billions of ... of ions and slightly less neutrons (initially we thought neutrons would stay out of the way ... seems almost funny today. Believe it or not, reactor vessels have edges, superconductors have to actually exist somewhere and when neutrons meet either of those, hilarity ensues). We have models, simulations, laws, supercomputers, ... you name it. And every time they turn on that vessel a few hundreds of billions of ions decide to band together and try to blow it up in a new, very exciting, very bad and very unexpected way.
In reality the workings of climate science, never mind it's hypotheses and theories, don't pass the standards of most applied sciences. They certainly don't have anything like the rigour that is applied to fusion designs or lhc experiments. Climate scientists should be laughed out of conferences, yet just about everywhere I go one such presentation is made to make the conference "socially relevant". It is without exception a bunch of pretty pictures, accompanied by mathematics a first-year high school student should know to be horribly wrong. Yet lo and behold : ... at these presentation you get the questions like "what can we do to help this ?". Every single speaker at a maths conference gets torn to shreds, either because they're wrong, or because they bruised the ego of one of the senior researchers (very easy to do, just prove something that just might be useful for proving their research is never going to work). Just by comparison, in one of my present
Actually the data supports that the climate is warming due to a feedback loop that's unrolling in the oceans that's warming the planet. And yes, the initial push that started this feedback loop is started by a combination of human and volcanic activity. That push also occured centuries ago, long before your grandfather was born.
The evolution of climate, so the models tell us, is like a grenade exploding in slow motion, it's about a third through the fireball. And what we're trying to do is to put the pin back in.
Pretentious. Climate change is a tautology. Climate changes because nutation and precession of the Earth and Moon affect the solar incidence angle and distance not to mention the primary factor, ripples in the output of the sun. Before all the pretentious nonsense of the "climate change/global warming" nobody would worry about this. In fact, the astrophysics literature shows a wonderful correlation between the orbital parameters and the various Major and Minor Ice Ages that given our knowledge of astronomy rises to proven causation.
These things take thousands of years. Climate change is occurring over the span of less than a hundred.
Never mind that the primary gases for the terrestrial greenhouse effect are water and methane, with CO2 representing a single digit contribution to the effect
Tell that to Venus.
Note that while water's effects on the greenhouse effect are much larger per unit than CO2, it's already in equilibrium in the atmosphere; and that it acts as an amplifer to the effect of the increase in CO2. Methane, while 25 times as effective as CO2 at retaining heat per unit, is 1/400th as abundant as CO2 (390ppm vs 1.7 ppm) in the atmosphere.
-- which means (for the truly dense among you) that if we stop the carbon-based economy climate change will go on exactly like before and the only thing that will happen is that you will die of cold and starvation.
Good thing no one is asking to stop the carbon-based economy. Not even the enviro-wackjobs want that.
This is about control and pushing upon individual sovereign nations a supra-territorial tax to fund the UN independent of its current strictures.
I'm sure you think so. I couldn't possibly say.
Can you please at least agree that this looks very bad. "We've got data that proves bla-bla, now agree to Kyoto and pay trillions !", "Okay, let's see that data", "no you can't have you'll just use it to discredit our cause".
Can you explain why it would be such a bad thing to give climate skeptics full access to the data ? Why wouldn't that be a very good thing ?
Both sides are obviously political. Neither plays by the rules of science at all.
You ever read a few social "studies" sponsored by democrats ?
Both parties are sick in the same bed here.
And they choose to use a peculiar act as a weapon when there is the ordinary research ethics complaint available. The Republicans don't obviously do much science.
"Guess what-- the results are still the same. The data showing the planet is warming is real."
Guess what? Not the real question and everyone knows it including you.
I was responding to a parent post stating that data showing that the planet is warming is "lying with statistics," stating that one of the scientists who measured this warming "fabricating many temperature readings" and "commit these frauds" and "have disqualified themselves as scientists by their scientific and financial frauds" and that " in your world view we should dispense with reproducibility of their claims and take them on faith."
OK. The scientists who measured global warming are not "lying with statistics;" these data have been reproduced by many different institutions, using many different data measurement methods. The scientists who collated surface temperature readings did not "fabricate many temperature readings" nor "commit frauds". It is not my "world view" that we should "dispense with reproducability" because every attempt to reproduce the temperature data by every independent study has shown the same overall result.
I will agree that this does not show a cause for warming. That needs to be done by measuring forcing functions and response functions, which is also done. However, the claim that I am addressing, that temperature measurements are a "fraud" and "not reproducable," and therefore the greenhouse effect is a scam, is blatantly false
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
No I can't, because you're deliberately framing it to make the scientist look bad.
Nice attempt at using false-equivalence to try to hide the fact that you're an AGW denialist, by the way, but your use of standard denialist talking points (cost, where's the raw data that I'm not equipped to understand, misconstruing what skepticism is) puts the lie to it.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
"God-given brain" - the brain is not given by a god
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Don't look at year-to-year variations - you need at least a decade (I think it was 11 years) before you can have any statistical significance. Imagine a moving average of that decade, and you'll get something more easy to understand. That graph has the 11 year cycle removed, and you can see the rise right there. This is HADCRUT3, but feel free to repeat with different datasets. We're clearly seeing an increase here.
The real takeaway is "Don't do research that irritates Republicans, or they might conduct partisan witch-hunts devoid of any actual basis."
I think you have some Glieck dribbling from your mouth.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
We're 200 years into a 1000 year cycle of magnetic pol revrsal.
This would mean that 200 years ago magnetic north was oriented with the axial south. This would mean that all compasses built more than 200 years ago would point south with the north end of the needle.
Considering this would be significant, and this patently easy to demonstrate, yet is patently false... would you like to try again?
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
How exactly is eugenics (as a science) a bad thing? As a science all it is is the observation that we humans have changed the evoluionary pressures on our own species, with the exensino that it is in ways that most likely will favor mutations that we don't really want. For example poor eyesight is no longer a negative evelutioary pressure so you can expect it to grow in the general population.
That is the science bit, what you are probably objecting to are the mass steriliztions in the US (if you are aware of them) or the influence those same ideas had on some of the Nazi justifications for the death camps. But the science is reposnible for neither, just as you can't blame the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge on the philophy of equality.
And if you think that eugenics (the science) has in any way been proven false, then you are completely mistaken.
"enthusiast" vs "scientist with tons of data" - i know whose word i'd take.
"A lot of what I read is very one-sided" - if it is produced by the real scientists then you can't argue with the data but if its Heartland Inst. derived data then your "Both sides of this argument cherry pick scientific data/evidence to support their opinion." comment is only relevant to the Heartland Inst.
Sounds like you come from a faith-based environment and don't rely on data backed up by facts.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
About your signature ... why should "many bleed" ?
Why don't you run the whole quote when it doesn't agree with your "prmisie" (sic)? Are you anti-science?
B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
C - Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?
No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.
He's giving a scientist's answer to a specific question about statistical significance at a 95% confidence level, and then he talks about how the time period quoted is too small for statistical significance. To find significance, we would need to look at a period that makes sense, not a period that shows the trend we want to clap our hands and believe in.
And later,...
E - How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
If you're going to try to throw cartoon dynamite, be sure to use a long enough fuse, so that it doesn't blow up in your hand...
read the latter part of the summary - michael mann has been vindicate twice. Theres a link to this slashdot story
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/25/1640224/michael-mann-vindicated-again-over-climategate.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
*ahem* Sorry, forgot to add, emphasis is completely mine
Why don't you put your real name to your slander of Michael Mann in the open by writing a letter to the Washington Post and state he's a fraud and/or committing fraud. (and copy him in so he knows you've written and its been published.)
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Look at the last decade of the graph and it is flat.
In the meantime, even if you insist that this trend needs to continue for another 20 or 30 years before it is established, read my original "(Score:-1 Troll)" posting and you will find that I suggest reducing our use of coal, oil and natural gas anyway in the meantime. Which just so happens to be what everybody else is saying, including those behind the most bogus and apocalyptic claims in climate "science". The problem with those is, that in 20 or 30 years, when people will (as far as I can tell) laugh the apocalypticists out of the room, they may very likely conclude that *everything* they said was a lie - which is patently false.
There is an effect of CO2 on climate, it's just not nearly as bad as the propaganda says, which is trying to put the worst possible spin on climate change on the assumption that otherwise nobody will do anything. The result are overreactions to the point of burning some 10% of the worlds grain harvest in order to reduce CO2 emissions (which they don't) and save the world from starving because of climate change (or so their claims go). When people can rationalize burning food in order to safe people from starving, something is very wrong with their perception of reality.
Want the raw data? Here! The first segment, as you can see, is called "Climate data - Raw". Want the code? Here! They're cleaning up the scientist-written code to see if it performs the same as the published results.
There's plenty of scrutiny, that dosen't involve harassment or intimidation of scientists and shifting goalposts.
With that in mind, why spend literally trillions of dollars trying to prevent the climate from changing, when it's going to change anyway? Maybe not in the exact same way as it would sans humanity, but it's going to change. Better to use the resources and effort to address that, than using it tilting at the useless windmill of trying to make the Earth's climate static.
If you're going to die of cancer anyway, why spend literally tens of thousands of dollars in treatment to prevent it from metastasizing when it may happen anyway? What a question!
Here's my answer: I live on the coast. In a place about 7 metres above the mean sea level. In a "third world" country. In a part of the country that's relatively borderline between arid and lush. In the tropics, yet. My city and region both have several millions (several hundreds of millions, even) of people living here, and a good couple of billion should be living in similar areas around the world. A few degrees increase in the global temperature may not seem much for someone living in the arctic - indeed, it may even be welcome, but for us, this would mean the end of any kind of sustainable life.
Do you really want to create a billion-strong exodus of people who've got nothing to lose anymore if it can be prevented at all? If there's even the tiniest chance of preventing it?
Actually, the research of Michael Mann and many other climate scientists has concentrated very specifically on understanding cyclical patterns, volcanic eruptions and other natural processes that impact climate. One of the key challenges has been to figure out how to provide accurate and reliable temperature reconstructions going back a significantly long period of time (way before there were thermometers to perform direct measurements) in order to ferrit out the relative impact of cyclical patterns, single event effects (like volcanic eruptions) and anthropogenic effects on temperature. The primary method to do this has been to use proxy data derived from things such as tree rings, ice cores and the like. Because this data exists overlapping periods when direct temperature measurements could be taken the proxy data could be calibrated to within a certain error factor. The resulting findings have shown that even allowing for the effects of cyclical patterns and single occurance events the anthropogenic impact has been the dominate contributor over the last half century. Another thing to understand, and an issue even in this article is the incorrect use of the term "skeptic". These people are not skeptics (skeptics can be convinced in the presence of new data). These people are deniers who ignore data that disagrees with their world view. Scientists by their vary nature are skeptics and so to have this large of a consensus in the scientific community is even more of an indication of the validity of the conclusion that 1) the climate is warming by an unpresidented rate and 2) the dominant contributor is anthropogenic.
No one's denying that climate change exists or that the earth is getting warmer. What is up for the debate is the largely left-wing interpretation of climate change as something a) caused by man and b) preventable by man. This debate always turn into a "dumb Republicans don't believe in science" line of bullshit, but the reality is that many of them do believe it. They just question whether government should be spending our tax dollars trying to counter a force of nature that will do what it does regardless of how many "green" laws are put into effect.
Also, climate change legislation provides very clear benefits to one political party and its supporters over another, and for that reason (as well as the can-we-even-stop-it reason above), it should be roundly criticized and analyzed every time it comes up.
It's really trivial to look at past errors and say "see, these guys know nothing". I'll be much more impressed if you'd actually come up with some science of your own that makes some sort of verifiable prediction. In the meantime, you're nothing but a Monday morning quarterback.
You do realize that if we compare the validity of the IPCC prediction in 1990, with the base hypothesis "nothing happens" ... which one do you think will win ?
Haha, Virgina!
"GISS is well known for fabricating their data using 1,200 km radius circles with just one temperature station in them. That is not permitted in science when you are representing that the data is actual temperature measurements..."
Stations are usually much closer together than 1,200 km. Picking a random spot on the globe gets me in northern China, and the closest station is in Linhe. The next closest station to Linhe is 114 km away, and the 34th closest and last station listed on the page by GISS is Wutai Shan at 558 km away. Clicking again on GISS' world map, this time deliberately where there isn't much land (the middle of the south Atlantic) gets me 550 km from the station at Tristan Da Cuhna. Next closest stations to that one are a triplet 424 km away on Gough Island, and then they get distant in a hurry. Imagine that, not many stations where there are not many patches of land to put them on. But even in the south Atlantic, where there's land, there's a station. St. Helena, Ascension Island, Gough Island, South Georgia Island, Laurie Island, and the Falklands all have stations, despite being in some of the most remote and/or inhospitable places on the planet. So it isn't 1,200 km between stations, except in exceptionally remote and/or inhospitable places where there isn't land to put them on. The GISS does smoothing of data between stations, at either 250 km or 1,200 km radius, and except for where land is lacking like the open ocean, there are always multiple stations--dozens even--that are included in that smoothing.
The problem with environmentalism isn't the actual facts.
The problem is that once people try to use these facts to justify policies that will harm other people, the victims of those new policies will try to dispute the facts in order to discredit the policies that are harming them.
We don't live in a free society anymore, but a technocracy. If the "experts" say X is good, government takes your money to promote it. If they say Y is bad, the government taxes, regulates, or bans it. The very premise here, "if X is good, they should promote it; if Y is bad, they should ban it," is never actually questioned.
Liberty in your lifetime
It's a joke from a certain Usenet newsgroup.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Just because nobody can influence those pesky processes that created islands in oceans and didn't put those islands closer together, doesn't improve the data. Our data about other stars don't improve the least little bit from the fact that they are so far away from us.
Garbage in is garbage out, even if you're not responsible for your input being garbage.
And if you think that eugenics (the science) has in any way been proven false, then you are completely mistaken.
But it's an excellent lesson in why we need to separate scientific findings from policy debates, which necessarily need to include much more considerations and a great many more factors must be weighed as trade-offs.
Just as eugenics was used to justify mass sterilizations, ultimately climate change is being used to justify eliminating about 80% of the global human population.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Indeed, turns out a hockey stick looks like a ball bat...
I don't get why this hasn't been buried as a troll yet.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Look at the last decade of the graph and it is flat.
And statistically insignificant. Warming is consistent from the 1950s onwards. If the last decade is not an anomaly, and the climate has changed, we should see a drop in the next few decades. On the other hand, the trend upto now, adjusted for the 11 year cycle, shows an upward trend for several decades. There's a similar "tick" in the early 1990s, but it goes back up again afterwards. How much are you willing to bet that this is a blip, and not the signal? A few billion lives? Perpetual wars? In our lifetime?
In the meantime, even if you insist that this trend needs to continue for another 20 or 30 years before it is established, read my original "(Score:-1 Troll)" posting and you will find that I suggest reducing our use of coal, oil and natural gas anyway in the meantime. Which just so happens to be what everybody else is saying, including those behind the most bogus and apocalyptic claims in climate "science". The problem with those is, that in 20 or 30 years, when people will (as far as I can tell) laugh the apocalypticists out of the room, they may very likely conclude that *everything* they said was a lie - which is patently false.
Thank you for your statement in support of reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. Nevertheless, your statement about the flat decade needed to be fleshed out. It's incorrect to look at only one blip in the record. Your predictions of what will go on in 20 or 30 years is irrelevant unless they happen. In the mean time, we're gambling on the future. I personally feel that whatever the science may eventually say, there's a good case for doing something starting right now , and not 30 years from now.
There is an effect of CO2 on climate, it's just not nearly as bad as the propaganda says, which is trying to put the worst possible spin on climate change on the assumption that otherwise nobody will do anything. The result are overreactions to the point of burning some 10% of the worlds grain harvest in order to reduce CO2 emissions (which they don't) and save the world from starving because of climate change (or so their claims go). When people can rationalize burning food in order to safe people from starving, something is very wrong with their perception of reality.
Could you please find some citation for that 10% burning claim? I've never heard that as a viable option from anyone who's serious about doing anything.
Correct me if I am wrong but in simple terms the planet warmed a little over 10 years ago and at which time the warming leveled off.
Not much point in replying to posts by anonymous coward, since even if, as you say, "I am willing to listen to evidence that refutes it," how would I know? I don't even know what data you're willing to look at, and what data you have decided to ignore because you claim it is (quoting from the previous post) "...lying with statistics... fabricating temperature readings... committing scientific and financial frauds."
However, taking you at your word for just a moment, here is the data for the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project:
http://berkeleyearth.org/images/berkeley-earth-land-surface-average-temperature-60yr.jpg
Would you say, based on this data, that "the Earth warmed a little ten years ago and the warming stopped"?
What about if you draw a line from the 1998 data point to the 2008 data point? Would you say that this line is, or is not, representative of the data?
This despite the fact that present day CO2 levels are now even higher than worst case scenario predictions 10 years ago.
Actually, no; check your data source. It turns out that the global recession had a negative impact on the CO2 emission growth rate. It's not "higher than worse case predictions," it ended up being "slightly less than predicted." (Not enough to make much of a difference in the predictions, though).
That graph came from the BEST FAQ, which can be found here: http://berkeleyearth.org/faq/#stopped
You can also try the NASA data, NOAA data, CRU data etc. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) graphs, for example, compare data taken by several different methods; they are here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
+5 insightful? This is the worst possible argument:
"My team is right more than your team, na-na"
Even if you insist on this team thing, you are not doing your team a favor with these idiotic appeals to authority.
But it's an excellent lesson in why we need to separate scientific findings from policy debates, which necessarily need to include much more considerations and a great many more factors must be weighed as trade-offs.
The option being... what? Policy framed with no scientific input?
Just as eugenics was used to justify mass sterilizations, ultimately climate change is being used to justify eliminating about 80% of the global human population.
I'd really like a citation for that little statistic in there...
The 'climategate' scientist has been cleared of wrongdoing by a number of investigations."
In other news, mortgage banks have been cleared of wrongdoing by a number of investigations ... by the MBAA, the NAMB, investigators at the Federal Reserve and the IMF, and many other independent organizations.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
This is a scary position to take. This is not a case off someone making up data or outright fraud. This is a case where a real professor did real experiments and published the results with his conclusions. Then the government, or in this case Ken Cuccinelli, disagreed with those conclusions and decided to try to intervene with the big heavy hand of government. This is Ken's M.O. - he did when he sued Universities for having pledges/rules to not discriminate against gays and he is doing it here. I have no issues with folks saying that the conclusions that the professor came up with incorrect. But criminalization is just crazy. And the attacks on both Science and Education by the Right wing are foolish, scary, and in this case a huge waste of tax payer money.
Actually, it's not an argument from authority, it's an argument from the scientific method, which is just a human process of trying to find truth about the world. Argument from authority would be citing the position of individuals or scientific organizations, which being human, are inherently subject to bias--the key being the word root "bi", as in, there are two (or more) positions to be had among individuals or scientific organizations. The scientific method is our process of rooting out bias, argument from authority, and other fallacies in trying to find out truth in the world. Your point of "argument from authority" works only if there are other credible methods of finding out facts about the natural world--if there are none, then there is nothing for the scientific method to assert authority over. Politics, law, economics, religion, etc are not credible methods in this arena.
Your 'strong argument' is correct of course, but it is a scientific argument already contained within the results which the OP is referring to in his argument. Essentially you've just reframed the discussion to say something the OP already agrees with but that does not advance the object of the OP's argument. The OP's object is rhetorical/behavioral--to remind others that the scientific method IS our effective process of finding out natural fact, and that as history shows, acting with ignorance on this score is unwise. Someone who does not accept the OP's object does not accept any conclusions from the scientific method, your 'strong argument' included.
So... other than "experts" (nice fear quotes), who should they be listening to? The layman who doesn't know any better?
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
I dunno, once you start thinking about how economists and sociologists are experimenting on you it is kind of creepy.
I think the important thing is to educate people so they stop treating science the same way as a religion.
It is, however, more correct than a random Joe's gut feeling on the matter. Not only more correct, but correct more often.
What you say is true. However, it is not a reason to turn your brain off, and believe what people say just because they claim to be a scientist. Believing people, that's not science. Look at the evidence, that's science.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The null hypothesis is not "nothing happens", but "the fluctuations we're seeing are the result of random processes". Now try again.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The positions of the stations are given; maybe we could plot them and see what the maximum distance between them is? The means and averages too, perhaps? And overlay what 1200km or 200km would mean on the map, and see how many stations fall within?
Or maybe go read the GISS papers and see why they chose those smoothing radii?
Of course, that may be too much science for some people...
I dunno, once you start thinking about how economists and sociologists are experimenting on you it is kind of creepy.
I think the important thing is to educate people so they stop treating science the same way as a religion.
I honestly don't think I understood what you think is the alternative to science-based policy...
Warming is not really the issue. Certainly the planet has warmed and cooler for much of its existence and it will continue to do so. It has been much warmer than it currently is and much colder. I suspect we are in a warming trend currently, between ice ages at least. However real global warming that has been co-opted by some folks to support an agenda of mankind's actions being the cause. That may or may not be true. Supporting data is much weaker for specific cause than the evidence for global warming part of the linkage. Global warming can be measured in total but what is causing it can't be measured by component and indeed we don't even understand some of the possible causes so there is a lot of unproven speculation as to cause.
Just as eugenics was used to justify mass sterilizations, ultimately climate change is being used to justify eliminating about 80% of the global human population.
Don't be shy, make it 90%. Or 99%. Or 356778%. It will make as much sense as it makes already.
A part of that is being able to accept that you were wrong in questioning scientists when it turns out (as in 99% of cases, probably) that science was right.
Look at the evidence, but when it doesn't support your conclusions, honestly admit that. Launching witch-hunts is truly counter productive!
The problem with environmentalism isn't the actual facts.
The problem is that once people try to use these facts to justify policies that will harm other people, the victims of those new policies will try to dispute the facts in order to discredit the policies that are harming them.
Yes, exactly: a good deal of the criticism that is purported to be skepticism of the science (and the scientists) is actually aimed at discrediting the policy implications.
The unexpected consequence is that, since it apparently much easier to cast doubt on the science than to rationally discuss policy, there has been almost no discussion of the proposed policies.
Of course, policy discussions are so full of boobytraps and ideological landmines in the US, that's not surprising.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I'd really like a citation for that little statistic in there...
Since you asked, most Americans don't grasp it yet, but the truth is that the global elite are absolutely obsessed with population control. In fact, there is a growing consensus among the global elite that they need to get rid of 80 to 90 percent of us. The number one commandment of the infamous Georgia Guidestones is this: "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature." Unfortunately, a very high percentage of our global leaders actually believe in this stuff.
This philosophy is now regularly being reflected in official UN documents. For example, the March 2009 U.N. Population Division policy brief begins with the following statement:
This agenda showed up again when the United Nations Population Fund released its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009 entitled "Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate".
The population control agenda is also regularly showing up in our newspapers now. In a recent editorial for the New York Times entitled "The Earth Is Full", Thomas L. Friedman made the following statement:
But Friedman is quite moderate compared to many others. For example, James Lovelock stated in an interview with the Guardian earlier this year that "democracy must be put on hold" if the fight against global warming is going to be successful and that only "a few people with authority" should be permitted to rule the planet until the crisis is solved.
The Finnish environmentalist Pentti Linkola is openly calling for climate change deniers to be "re-educated", for a world government to be established and for humans to be forcibly sterilized and for the majority of humans to be killed.
This agenda is even being taught by professors at many top universities. Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin Eric R. Pianka is a very prominent advocate of radical human population control. In an article entitled "What nobody wants to hear, but everyone needs to know", Pianka said:
CNN Founder Ted Turner
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
You claimed the GISS "fabricated" their data by using "1,200 km radius circles with just one temperature station in them." The overwhelming majority of stations covering the overwhelming majority of the planet have multiple stations within 1,200 km, even in the middle of the damn oceans. Your claim has been refuted.
It's hardly a technocracy. If it was, you would probably be facing the end of using petroleum products for producing energy tomorrow. As it is, governments do just enough to appear to be doing something.
But beyond that the question becomes "If the vast and overwhelming majority of researchers in a certain field say [i]X[/i] is happening", your response should be:
A. Wow, that sounds serious, what are the solutions?
or
B. That would cost a few billion a year, so fuck you.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Appeal to authority is bad enough, but appeal to anonymous authority is worse.
It's you that doesn't have an argument. You actually are the one creating the strawman.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If you want the data, support #FRPAA so you won't hit as many paywalls trying to read the research papers your tax dollars paid for:
Petition the white house
Petition the congress
Phrenology and cold fusion were never widely accepted scientific views.
Eugenics is scientifically valid, and repugnant politically.
Aether was always a problematic idea. Read the history; the properties needed for it to be real were always contradictory to observations.
The only idea that you listed that was in fact widely accepted that doesn't fit what is known now was the fixed universe.
An appeal to authority is only fallacious when the authorities being invoked are not in fact authorities. If you defend a diagnosis of macular degeneration because your dentist says that's what you have, that's a fallacious appeal to authority. If you defend a diagnosis of macular degeneration because your opthamologist says that's what you have, it is not fallacious.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Science-informed policy is fine. As long as we can all remember that scientific consensus has often been wrong in the past. The cost-benefit needs to be done with this probability in mind. Really, if you haven't yet read some macro-economics and it will terrify you when you realize what an immature "science" it is. I have been completely convinced that the government should not be in the business of monetary policy, they are making it up as they go along.
Anyway I don't think there is ever true ethics-based or science-based policy. The nature of the system makes it so that leaders will only act on the subset of "the facts" that are consistent with retaining power. If they didn't, they would lose power and be replaced by someone who did.
Eugenics is a bad thing because A. it violates basic human rights, B. it pretty much rejects the Darwinian notion that the more variation the better, and C. it has historically been applied as much to socioeconomic factors as to anything particularly hereditary.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
To translate: I'm a layman with an interest in meteorology, which means I don't actually have any knowledge of climatology at all, but that won't prevent me from making sweeping accusations about researchers on a topic that I have little more capacity to measure than does my pizza delivery boy or the kid next door.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Well, at what point does it become "science" rather than a group of scientists. I would say there are a lot of false positives out there in the published literature.
WTF? Just about every field of research uses statistics; from physics to biology. I don't have time to look up the entire quote, but I'll wager Rutherford didn't mean what you think he meant, because if he did, then that was just about the most retarded thing he may ever have said.
I mean, how the fuck would you describe quantum interactions without statistical tools? How do you describe radioactive decay? How do you describe genetics or population distributions?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
He didn't fabricate data and he didn't commit fraud. You, however, are a liar.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The US used 140mio tons of corn for fuel-ethanol in 2010 (this is easy to google), that alone is 6% of the total grain production of 2400 million tons (some 800mio tons of corn, 650mio tons of rice, 600mio tons of wheat are the three big ones - FAO figures for 2007 straight from wikipedia. I don't think they are terribly unreliable in this case.). That's 6% for about half the global production of fuel-ethanol.
Then, there is the diesel substitute. Europe is producing some 10mio tons of this (again, about half the global production), yields are typically 1t/ha from rape-seed in Europe. Wheat yields are on the order of 8t/ha, corn is 10t/ha. So, that's another 80mio tons of grain not being produced.
I have no figures for corn-cob-mix used in methane production, which is popular in Germany, but I think you can see from 50% of the world ethanol production (USA) and 50% of the worlds diesel substitutes (in the EU) what the scale of this whole thing looks like.
I'm sure you'd have posted evidence if you had any, just as you wouldn't have posted anonymously if you had any evidence.
This troll is also 0/10.
Well, the witchhunt against Bush would fill a book, obviously. Notably, Dan Rather destroyed his career trying to prove that Bush had gone AWOL, a campaign run by prominent figures in the Democratic establishment and the media establishment.
Clarence Thomas was attacked with a bogus sexual harrassment scandal when he was nominated for the Supreme Court, though unsuccessfully, as opposed to Bork whose nomination was successfully derailed. You'll notice that Republican criticisms of Sotomayor and Kagan, by comparison, have targeted their adherence to the Constitution and their legal background.
Governor Palin was forced out of office by Democrats abusing Alaskan ethics laws to repeatedly file charge after charge until she was threatened with bankruptcy. What's really odd is that she later even had her own birther conspiracy as leftists tried to prove that she was her daughters's baby's mother, or some such affair.
The recent primaries have had a number of withchunts. Obviously there's the long running hateful campaign against Rick Santorum instigated by Savage's radio show, but we also saw Herman Cain's candidacy destroyed by allegations that were published without, incredibly, detailing what the accusation actually was. For comparison, the papers sat on DNA evidence in the Lewinsky affair, and squelched a bona fide scandal with Sen Edwards.
Obama started off his presidency by going after Joe the Plumber; his life was turned upside down in an effort to discredit him. Lesser known were the journalists who were targeted as they dug into his records, I recall one radio show that was flooded with calls after his campaign put the word out that a journalist researching Obama's background was on the air.
Andrew Brietbart was routinely demonized as the hateful messages that abounded when he died prove. He's just a more notable member of the new media. Most conservative bloggers have been similarly attacked, but they're too numerous to list.
Charles and David Koch have had the White House leaning on them directly, and they are also routinely demonized by liberal interest groups, politicians, etc. They're only second to the long campaign to demonize Fox News, that has culminated in the bizarre belief that Fox News somehow controls the media.
Really? There is work showing CO2 emissions are necessary and sufficient to cause the observed warming?
No, over the last 100 years the temp record shows a steady increase when averaged globally. There is a strong correlation between CO2 emissions and global mean temperature. There is a mechanism of action to support the idea that CO2 emissions are causing the warming. There is no other real explanation available for the warming (other than "it is natural"). This makes CO2 emissions the best candidate for a cause, but proves nothing.
*I* claimed nothing of the sort.
Then change your password because someone else is using your account.
Since you asked, most Americans don't grasp it yet, but the truth is that the global elite are absolutely obsessed with population control. In fact, there is a growing consensus among the global elite that they need to get rid of 80 to 90 percent of us. The number one commandment of the infamous Georgia Guidestones is this: "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature." Unfortunately, a very high percentage of our global leaders actually believe in this stuff.
OK, I'm no American, but I'll play...
First, let's keep the anonymous polemics out of this, eh?
This philosophy is now regularly being reflected in official UN documents. For example, the March 2009 U.N. Population Division policy brief begins with the following statement:
Not related to climate change, but let's read the report:
Fast population growth, fueled by high fertility, hinders the reduction of poverty and the achievement of other internationally agreed development goals. While fertility has declined throughout the developing world since the 1970s, most of the least developed countries still have total fertility levels above 5 children per woman.
5 children per women is definitely a fertility level that's unsustainable in Nigeria. Or even here in India. This is nothing new - those countries with stable governments have been more or less going in the direction of lower fertility rates for decades. See this Gapminder plot, for example. In any case, the report says nothing about global warming. It's about health and happiness, not warming.
This agenda showed up again when the United Nations Population Fund released its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009 entitled Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate".
That would be this one
The interesting thing is, this isn't really talking about eliminating 80% of the population of the world. Both reports talk about fertility rates, family planning and improved health. The second one is a little hyperbolic about climate change, but nevertheless, it's not a call to cull 80% of the world's population.
The population control agenda is also regularly showing up in our newspapers now. In a recent editorial for the New York Times entitled "The Earth Is Full", Thomas L. Friedman made the following statement:
Indeed. The attorney general in this story is doing a publicity building exercise.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This is something I always wondered. How do you define climatologist?
That's exactly the direction we're moving. Just because it isn't an efficient technocracy doesn't make it not a technocracy.
Even though freedom is dead in this country, there's just enough of a democratic electoral process left to slow things down. Unfortunately the people in the system slowing things down are just corporate tools, and have equally as little understanding of human freedom as the progressives do.
Liberty in your lifetime
I don't consider it a valid proof of your thesis to proove based on a lack of peer reviewed papers. As long as the publications fail to publish under threat of lawsuit, such a claim amounts to nothing more than proof by threat of violence. `
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Freedom doesn't mean liberation from reality. The universe actually doesn't give one sweet fuck about your freedoms.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The US used 140mio tons of corn for fuel-ethanol in 2010 (this is easy to google), that alone is 6% of the total grain production of 2400 million tons (some 800mio tons of corn, 650mio tons of rice, 600mio tons of wheat are the three big ones - FAO figures for 2007 straight from wikipedia. I don't think they are terribly unreliable in this case.). That's 6% for about half the global production of fuel-ethanol.
Then, there is the diesel substitute. Europe is producing some 10mio tons of this (again, about half the global production), yields are typically 1t/ha from rape-seed in Europe. Wheat yields are on the order of 8t/ha, corn is 10t/ha. So, that's another 80mio tons of grain not being produced.
I have no figures for corn-cob-mix used in methane production, which is popular in Germany, but I think you can see from 50% of the world ethanol production (USA) and 50% of the worlds diesel substitutes (in the EU) what the scale of this whole thing looks like.
Ah! So, it's about alternative fuels... You should have said that instead of trying to score pot-shots...
I don't personally agree with corn ethanol; it's simply replacing one greenhouse gas emitter with another, less efficient one. I wasn't able to verify your claim that it's 10% of total world grain production.
It's possibly a high fraction of the US grain production, but not the world's.
In any case, my suspicion is that in large parts of the world, the problem is not a lack of food, but a lack of good distribution. At least, this is the case in India - and has been for a while... Growing our fuel seems like a very attractive option to many, too...
Well put.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
He didn't... It was some AC. What he claimed was, and I quote, "Garbage in is garbage out, even if you're not responsible for your input being garbage."
He'd need to demonstrate that the data is garbage, though...
Science is not about proving, it's about finding models that accurately predict the behavior of nature, testing these models, improving the models, and so on. Anthropogenic causality has been shown using these models and they are predicting a bad outcome without a change in behavior on the part of humanity. You buy insurance to protect against improbable eventualities that if they occurred would result in a very bad effect on you and your family's lives. Would you refuse to buy this insurance because it can't be proven that the predicted outcome will occur? I don't think so...
Hmm, starting with "someone who works within the field of climatology" would be good...
I'd suggest people from the disciplines of atmospheric science, meteorology, with a statistics background, maybe some physics and chemistry? But those last three wouldn't be sufficient conditions - merely necessary ones.
Basically, people who work in long-term modeling of climate, not short-term like weather bureaus.
Well, for one, burial seems to require a combination of `Troll' and overrated ratings, and that seems to be reserved for special cases. Typically, it looks to me like it might occur when posts run afoul of purchased online reputation management.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Looks like peer review for politicians.
the smart money is on continued warming and on conservation or other measures to contain it.
The smarter money is on the developing world making containment measures irrelevant.
Sorry, but you've basically fallen for a deception. In reality, climate science is one of the most open fields of science in providing access to raw data, and there is (and has been for years) easily enough data available to check the conclusions of climate science. Indeed, one of the investigatory commissions formed after the "Climate Research Unit" email theft was able to independently obtain the data and replicate CRUs conclusions with no difficulty.
What really happened was this: CRU does acquire data and does not own any raw data. They analyzed data provided form National Weather Services, but they do not archive this data, did not have permission to distribute it, and had no reason to retain copies after they were done with it. Some climate "skeptics" demanded the data from CRU, and CRU told them that CRU did not have the data available to distribute, and that they should request the data from the owners, and refused to cooperate further. Filtered through the "climate science skeptic" propaganda machine, this became "Climate scientists are hiding (or in some versions, destroying) the data!!!" CRU was not wholly without fault in the matter (they could have been more cooperative without violating their scientific and ethical obligations toward the owners of the data). But it is entirely a myth that the data to check whether the world is warming is unavailable. It is available, and it has been checked and rechecked by multiple independent groups.
No, the null hypothesis is not "random processes" either... try again.
The 6-sigma business basically applies to fields such as particle physics that pore through huge amounts of data looking for subtle statistical correlations. In this case, it is not possible to make the appropriate statistical corrections for multiple comparisons as scientists in other fields do, so they compensate by setting a very high criterion for statistical significance.
"Climate changes because nutation and precession of the Earth and Moon affect the solar incidence angle and distance not to mention the primary factor, ripples in the output of the sun. "
And changes in atmospheric composition. And in fact people have been thinking about the issue for at least 50-60 years. Roger Revelle, a primary oceanographer, wrote as much in an environmental report to the US Government. The Lyndon Johnson Administration. Is this "nobody would worry about this"?
And yes there are correlations between orbital parameters etc---and yet now climate is changing at a much faster time scale without any radical shift in our orbital mechanics or changes in the output of the Sun. The atmospheric concentration has changed as well.
"Never mind that the primary gases for the terrestrial greenhouse effect are water and methane, with CO2 representing a single digit contribution to the effect"
The effect from water is a short-timescale feedback from long lived gases, which the most important one is CO2.
You appear to accept the fact that CO2 is an IR emitter. Well, the increase in IR flux from the change in CO2 is a quantitative measured fact.
"which means (for the truly dense among you) that if we stop the carbon-based economy climate change will go on exactly like before and the only thing that will happen is that you will die of cold and starvation."
When the effective solar insolation changed by a tiny fraction due to those small orbital effects (plus greenhouse feedbacks!) it made Ice Ages. An equally small change in IR flux from CO2 changes (which humans are guaranteed to cause on present course) could just as well case a Heat Age as hot above normal climate as the Ice Ages were cold.
Ice was two miles thick in New York then. Do you want to take the equivalent chance on the hot side?
What is your reason for predicting "billions dead, perpetual war"? I have not seen that in the IPCC reports.
I call bullshit on the parent. The complete failure to mention that water is saturated in the atmosphere, that any excess condenses out as rain, as well as pretending climate scientists ignore water vapour contribution, when every climate model in existence includes it as a positive feedback dependent on temperature, tells me that he either pretends to have higher qualifications in the field than he does, or he knows full and well that he is being deliberately misleading or lying through his teeth. In particular his "joke" absolutely stinks of the usual "lol climate scientists are so stupid" nonsense we hear all the time.
Water is the main greenhouse gas in the earth's atmosphere, but it does not mean that the CHANGE in climate can be explained by water vapour, nor does it imply that carbon dioxide is irrelevant. The amount of water held by the air is largely dependent on temperature. If it gets hotter, more evaporates from the oceans, if it gets colder more will fall out as rain. Carbon dioxide on the other hand tends to stay in the atmosphere for a very long time, and is not absorbed by the oceans, plants or reactions with the earth's minerals at a rate quick enough to compensate for the vast quantities we put into the atmosphere.
Consequentially increasing CO2 concentrations will produce a warmer atmosphere, which in turn increases water concentration, which means the warming from a given amount of CO2 will be greater than you'd expect from CO2 alone.
ANY climate scientist worth his salt (or indeed anybody who even tried to learn about the topic ) would be well aware of this fact, yet the parent appears to either not know about it, or deliberately refraining to point it out in order to make a stupid joke. He's either incompetent or dishonest.
"As it is, governments do just enough to appear to be doing something." How it is that this is not a Sir Humphrey Appleby quote astounds me!
Perhaps one of these quotes could work in its place:
"Two kinds of government chair correspond with the two kinds of minister: one sort folds up instantly and the other sort goes round and round in circles."
"'The Government's position' means 'the best explanation of past events that cannot be disproved by available facts'."
"In government, many people have the power to stop things happening but almost nobody has the power to make things happen. The system has the engine of a lawn mower and the brakes of a Rolls Royce."
"A Civil Service computer strike would bring government to a standstill if it were not for the fact that it is already."
***
Topically speaking, I've notice the biggest problem to accepting a scientific understanding comes in the form of two anti-science options: 1) A scientifically sounding think tank or lobbyist's research seems directly in conflict with reality but fits well other people's preferred realities and 2) All scientific understanding is really an indoctrination technique, and only the ignorant can see reality.
Of course, neither is particularly exclusive in any field.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
"Ones does NOT need to provide why the temperature is rising as the Null Hypothesis rules in science and the Null Hypothesis in this case is that the warming is Natural and/or unknown."
This is false. The null hypothesis is one kind of statistical methodology used in certain technical circumstances. In practice, an explicit or implicit Bayesian reasoning is usually used.
And a "Natural" cause which somehow excludes humans requires specific physical mechanism, observations and theory which are stronger than the understanding which assumes human-emitted greenhouse molecules have the same optical and chemical properties as the ones which have been in the atmosphere before humans started digging coal and petroleum. The "natural cycle" explanation would also have to explain why the human-emitted gases *do not* cause climate change. Just saying it is 'unknown' is a baloney cop-out. After all it could be mischievous invisible gremlins, We Don't Know For Sure.
Besides, there is other internal evidence pointing to greenhouse increases, e.g. that night warms more than day, winter warms more than summer, and polar warms more than topical, and that stratosphere is cooling---all of which is compatible with increases in greenhouse gases, and incompatible with increases in solar output.
And if you really want to go for the 'null hypothesis' schtick, the better null hypothesis is, "We assume the laws of physics are correct, and if you change the IR scattering of the atmosphere the surface temperature will change."
The US produces almost half of the worlds corn.
Holy shit. People with that crappy an understanding of statistics are running the show here??? I did not realize this. I really hope he was just saying stuff for the public ears, and doesn't really believe that "almost getting p=. 05", from unrepeatable historical data at that, means anything except "reviewers might let it through". Play with this applet to see how likely it is to get a false positive when p=.05
Accompanying paper: www.stat.duke.edu/~berger/papers/02-01.ps
And website: http://www.stat.duke.edu/~berger/p-values.html
What's the physics of those "random processes"?
Climatology is not about statistics, it's about causative physical mechanism, and quantification thereof by observations.
You are correct that science is not about proving. But if you say something has "been shown", you imply that X was reported to be necessary and sufficient to cause Y. In this case, you should say that "CO2 has been shown to explain the warming in climate modeling experiments."
I think it is more a practical issue. There are so many confounding variables when studying complex systems (biology, climate) that no one would ever publish if a low criterion for "significance" was not used.
Neither experts nor laymen. As GP said, they should be questioning the premise that scientific findings necessitate legislation.
Yea but then it gets sticky. Published one paper on that topic? 10? A graduate student in the lab of a well published PI? What is the cut off?
This is why I prefer to just ignore the argument from authority approach altogether.
Republicans! Screeech! Baggers! Screeech!
Oh, yeah, nothing political about this debate at all.
And you wonder why people turn you out.
The choice of a threshold for statistical significance is dictated by the acceptable likelihood of a false positive or false negative result. Reducing the risk of false positives increases the risk of a false negative. The standard in many fields is less that a 1 in 20 risk of a false positive and less than 1 in 5 risk of false negative, but the actual choice is dependent upon the impact of a false positive or negative on the conclusions. I would not publish a paper (and likely would find it hard to get acceptance) where the conclusion was entirely dependent upon a single result that barely met the p less than 0.05 criterion
So, I think we agree. It is often cheaper to look at multiple lines of evidence with weak criterion for significance than to do one study and require a strong criterion.
Heck even Professor Muller, a noted Co2 Climate Doomsday Rapturist, says that he'll never read another paper from Mann et al. again since they can't do what they did in science, it's not acceptable.
So get your brain out of your politicized hole in the ground and wake up.
The irony is mind-boggling.
Like totally dude. Legislation based upon physical reality is what the man wants. Question the paradigm.
And sometimes, as in the case of phrenology and eugenics, people are harmed in the name of science.
When that name is taken in vain, yes.
Science provides the foundation and is often wrong for a time. But it takes someone with an agenda to put things into action. Eugenics, for a start, is not qualified as a science by most members of the scientific community - not then and not now. It is an applied science, kind of the political arm of genetics. But just like atomic physics creates atom bombs, but doesn't tell us if or where to use them, so the scientific understanding of genetics can be applied in various ways, with eugenics being one of them. That doesn't make eugenics a science any more than, say, cable TV is a science. Both have a scientific foundation without which they would not be possible, but questions of what to do with the possibilities are not purely scientific questions.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I suspect he was referring to the time it takes for the actual reversal to take place rather than the time between reversals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal#Duration
Oh I get it. When a scientist isn't held criminally liable for conducting scientific research, then we are in a "technocracy". If this were a "democracy" then Michael Mann would be arrested because he made a graph that, while broadly accurate, got some people upset.
These things take thousands of years. Climate change is occurring over the span of less than a hundred.
Tell that to the Medieval Warming Period, or the Little Ice Age, or "the year without a summer" in 1815. There are many things, natural things, that can and have affected the climate much more rapidly than thousands of years.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
One of the strongest evidences for conspiracy theories is the style of selective quoting you show: Many short quotes by many different people, all well picked to create a narrative.
It's exploiting a psychological quirk of human beings: That we are more easily convinced by consistent narratives than by complicated facts. There's a lot of very interesting, fairly recent (past few decades) research into this fascinating area.
But that doesn't make it one bit true. It's fraud, plain and simple. Exploiting psychological weakness to make a point that facts can not support is a fraudulent activity.
I'm not even saying your quotes are out-of-context or wholesale inventions, though I strongly suspect that at least some of them are. But that doesn't matter, because we know the facts and they don't match your nice story:
In fact, I believe everything you've written is made up. I've checked the Ted Turner "quote" as well, and it appears exclusively on crackpot websites like "endoftheamericandream.com" - the domain name says it all. I could not find one single respectible source for it.
Of course, that's all because the globale elite suppresses it through their control of the media. You need to pick up a good book on dissonance theory.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If you dig a bit, you will find plenty of papers showing that climate change in the past century correlates more closely to astronomical phenomena (sunspots, cosmic radiance, tidal forces) than it does to CO2 levels? If temperature increases correlate so strongly to CO2 levels then why was the increase so much slower from 1940 to 1970, than it was from 1970 to 2000, and why has it been so much slower in the last decade than predicted by every single model promulgated by the IPCC AR4?
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/US_Temperatures_and_Climate_Factors_since_1895.pdf
http://www.duke.edu/~renato/RamosdaSilvaandAvissarGRL2005.pdf
Or this, from NASA itself, which shows the decrease in sunspot activity which correlates to the current decrease in temperatures in the past decade or so.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
Yes, CO2 can and does affect the climate, but so do many other things, especially some things that aren't well understood yet. And that's not even considering whether we humans are significantly contributing to the problem or more importantly, whether we can do anything about it.
Now, correlation does not imply causation, but the current models always seem to fail to predict what's actually happening, or "retro-predict" was has already occurred.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Of course, Fox News controls the media. In fact, they control the world. Why do you think Obama has failed everything he's tried to do. It's because those insidious Fox News villains are secretly sabotaging all the President's vague^H^H^H^H^Hbrilliant platitudes^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hplans?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I'd find it funny if it weren't so depressing. The denialists of the human influence on climate use these two talking points over and over, not even understanding enough science (or more likely, not caring about truth as opposed to winning economically) that they are simultaneously contradictory!
Point 1) Water, not CO2, is the dominant greenhouse forcing!!!
Point 2) All those evil computer models that them hoaxing climate modelers put out are lying, because they stuff in these mumbo-jumbo complex feedforwards to the sensitivity computed by God's-honest-truth-Bolztzmann, in order to make the problem "alarming" instead of insignificant.
In scientific truth, yes water is a major greenhouse effect. And that's just the point of those supposedly 'mumbo-jumbo' feedfowards---it's the fact that as air warms up, it can absorb more water vapor, and yes this extra water vapor (clear, not clouds) certainly does ADD to the greenhouse effect. D'oh!
So the more you push #1 (which is true), the more you justify including the feedfowards which result in the mainstream estimate of climate sensitivity which points to a serious problem in the future. In fact it's misleading NOT to include these feedfowards.
And your own technique is a very common one, where you dismiss arguments by claiming it's all "conspiracy theory" and claiming any sources are not credible through ad hominems and guilt by association ("exclusively on crackpot websites").
Well, why would anyone but those you can label as "crackpots" point out that statement by Ted Turner anyway. And of course any other propagation of ideas for depopulating the planet - seen so far by most as very extremist - is going to be downplayed by those promoting the idea to avoid being discredited themselves for promoting extremist ideas. None of that supports your outrageous claim of "fraud, plain and simple." To the contrary, your own dismissal of my assertion and defense of the very groups and powerful, wealthy people advocating depopulation makes your own agenda questionable to an objective observer.
I've actually downloaded the 2009 UNFPA report and guess what, your alleged quote doesn't appear in it.
Not sure what you are talking about, specifically. You can find the UN Population Division Policy Brief right here, and the quote is actually the very first header on the first page. If you're referring to the quotes from the "Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate" report, the first quote starts on the bottom of page 21, and the second on page 25. It's all right there.
As for Ted Turner's quote, it (along with the entire context and his views) was first published in an interview given in 1996 to the magazine of the American conservation organisation The Audubon Society, hardly a publication many would consider "crackpot". I'm sure you can find the whole thing if you actually want to.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
lintzen is persuasive.
Agree: 1) CO2 is a green house gas
2) Adding CO2 warms, predicted about the 1deg C.
All climate models overstate gains, likely because the theorized "positive feedbacks" are not happening. The proof, the predicted hotspot "fingerprint"
does not exist.
It is getting trivially warmer. No catastrophe. The feedback element of the theory is evidently flawed, throwing off the models
Until someone produces a model that correctly predicts, I will remain skeptical.
The problem with that graph is that the time scale used is far too small. The line of best fit would have shown a downward trend in 3-4 times before present, it is only later values that pull it up. If not for the huge peak between 1995 and 2000, the trend line would still be going up!
If you expand the graph you see a much different picture. Clearly the temperature is rising quickly right? Well who is to say that this graph is any better at predicting the future than yours?
I would also point out the IPCC predictions are based on decade averages. So saying that it doesn't work because they estimated too high this year, is like saying they were wrong because they estimated too low 1998.
I understand where you're coming from. So I'll question it.
Science helps us determine that something will cause issues for everybody in the country down the road. The country is tasked with protecting the people within it. Science has determined a threat, so the government is tasked with helping eliminate, reduce, or avoid it.
Okay, done.
Not really. He said we're 200 years into a 1000 year cycle of reversal. That means we're 1/5th through it. So they would point 1/5th of the way to south.
If the PP is even correct, which I am neither arguing for or against.
lintzen is persuasive. Agree: 1) CO2 is a green house gas 2) Adding CO2 warms, predicted at about the 1deg C we have recorded. Problem is, IPCC and other Climate models overstate projected temp gains because the theorized "positive feedbacks" are not happening. It is getting trivially warmer. No catastrophe. Until someone produces a model that correctly predicts, I will remain skeptical.
Thanks for proving the point with "as science finds out more." You see, nothing else has been shown to do that. Yeah, science might be wrong. But it's the only human endeavor to obtaining knowledge that actually gets better. The alternatives seem don't have that track record.
What you describe is legislation necessitating science. Science necessitating legislation is when someone discovers that salt causes high blood pressure, and they make a law outlawing table salt dispensers in restaurants.
Yes, water is the dominant greenhouse gas, and all of them together add 30C to the Earth's average temperature. We are worried about CO2 forcing another 3-6C. The Moon, which is at the same average distance from the Sun as we are, has a global average temperature of -15C (yes, it's much hotter on the day side, but it's also much colder on the night side). The Earth has an average temperature of +15C. The difference is due to our atmosphere slowing down heat leaking out. So merely saying water is the main greenhouse gas means nothing without the context that the worry is only 10-20% *more* greenhouse effect.
Oh, and we can prove the CO2 is man-made. Plants prefer Carbon-12 to Carbon-13, because the lighter atoms participate in reactions slightly faster. Thus they have 2% less C-13 than other sources (volcanoes and carbonate rocks). The C-13 ratio in the atmosphere is changing along with the total CO2 amount. Therefore the added CO2 comes from plants. The only sources of plant-derived CO2 large enough are fossil fuels and deforestation, both man-made sources.
There is no such thing as "science necessitating legislation". Scientific truth doesn't need anybody's legal imprimatur.
Also, public safety is one of the central reasons we have laws. If you disagree with the legal protection of public safety, fine, but then argue that honestly. Don't mask your argument with extraneous BS about "science necessitating legislation".
Have you ever read even 1 paper on the climate ? "This is what happens in x% of the cases, and it tests significant ... <3 pages about the numerical method> Now given the yearly numerical variation it looks like this has to do with $known_effect (e.g. "summer in South America"), but the exact relation is not known".
From the above link:
He could still be off by a facor of ten.
Well, yes. But the hypothesis that on 1 Jan 1990 God has decreed that the temperature shall henceforth stay constant is still a better match than the IPCC's prediction for the last 20 years (by the extremely standard squared error method), as specified in the report they released in that year. I fully agree it's not a very realistic scenario, and I'm not proposing adopting that as a weather model. But that's not really the point. The point is that the IPCC's AR1 prediction is flat-out wrong. It predicted X (a fairly massive temperature increase), and Y (much less rise than predicted 1990-2000, barely any rise 2000-2010) happened. The basis for the Kyoto accord is bullshit.
So therefore you claim to weight the word of an actual climatologist the same as any old person who could be interested in hoodwinking you?
That's denialist talk.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I respect your opinion, but it puzzles me why you are not bothered when people (supposedly acting in the interest of the public) take loads of tax money but refuse to comply with FOIA requests. I understand liking and respecting prominent scientists, since they're part of what makes human civilization great. But why are you defending that misbehavior in particular?
And your own technique is a very common one,
You are right. Debunking is a common technique.
my assertion and defense of the very groups and powerful, wealthy people advocating depopulation makes your own agenda questionable to an objective observer.
I'm really curious what you would guess my agenda is...
No, seriously. Let me know.
the first quote starts on the bottom of page 21,
Now that gives it the missing context. See, you put it into a context of depopulation, but the entire chapter is about population growth, and on p. 22 it puts the necessary depth into the debate by pointing out that the relationship is varied and in some countries the per-capita emissions are even falling.
If you read the entire report - or just a few chapters - it doesn't seem to support your claim that some mysterious global elite is planning to kill most of the world population in the slightest. It's a calm review of what we know about the relationship between various factors such as population, consumption, transporation, energy consumption, etc.
As for Ted Turner's quote, it (along with the entire context and his views) was first published in an interview given in 1996 to the magazine of the American conservation organisation The Audubon Society
The reference is all over the net. The Audubon Magazine website itself doesn't seem to know about it: http://www.audubonmagazine.org/search/node/ted%20turner
Quotes get made up all the time, and once enough people are quoting it, everyone thinks it's real. There are a nice number of examples for this effect, and too few journalists who actually check the sources. In fact, one of the pet /. topics has an example: The estimate for losses to movie "piracy" are such a thing. Someone once made up a number, and that number has been quoted and re-quoted ever since, with everyone referencing someone else who only got it somewhere else, until it has so many references that it seems real.
I'm serious, I've tried to find it. Now the funny thing is - I'm not alone. Search for "interview" in the comments here:
http://www.mediaite.com/online/ted-turner-bashes-tea-party-calling-them-mean-spirited/
Someone else is asking some other one else the same question I am - and gets no reply.
So, in the language of the IntarWeb: "Pics or it didn't happen".
And yes, the burden of proof lies with you. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I am highly sceptical, but I can be convinced. I took a few months to make up my mind about 9/11, for example. I used to doubt that ECHOLON was real, but as more and more evidence has surfaced that I was wrong, I've come around.
But depopulation on a massive scale? And advocated by the very people who have the most to lose from any major socio-political change? That's a crackpot theory and those spreading it are frauds and liars. And I say that in these clear words because I'm not on TV like Pen & Teller and thus I can say what I believe.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I choose option C. The best thing is to go read the IPCC reports and peer-reviewed literature. If I am unable to completely understand the methods, etc, I will have to take the interpretation provided for me, knowing that I am using the argument from authority heuristic.
That's funny because the greatest deniers of AGW are white evangelicals: http://www.pewforum.org/Science-and-Bioethics/Religious-Groups-Views-on-Global-Warming.aspx
What part of religion is it that some atmospheric gases absorb infrared? Ever notice how on cloudy nights the temperature falls less than on clear nights? That's the greenhouse effect in action. More greenhouse gas (water) means less heat escapes to space, thus it stays warmer. Water is the main greenhouse gas, mainly because there is a lot more of it, about 1% of the atmosphere, vs 0.04% CO2. But you cannot ignore the CO2 contribution, because water vapor concentration is highly non-linear with temperature. Thus any temperature effect caused by CO2 is magnified about 3 times by added water vapor. The reason so much more vapor can get in the air is because the Earth is mostly covered in water, and even the land parts are mostly covered in wet objects (soil and plants).
The extra CO2 is demonstrably from humans, because the Carbon-13 ratio is changing along with the CO2 level. Plants have a 2% lower C-13 ratio than inorganic sources. The only source of enough plant-derived CO2 to explain the ratio shift is fossil fuels plus deforestation, i.e humans. Where is there belief in this chain of logic, rather than observation and deduction?
Unlike the pretenders to the throne, I am a real scientist.
No, you're not. You're a wannabe Slashdot troll. Real scientists know that a) the radiative flux for water is around 75 W/m2 while carbon dioxide contributes 32 W/m2 (http://coelho.mota.googlepages.com/RadiationBudget.pdf), and that b) water vapor radiation cannot act as a forcing, i.e. cause a temperature rise, since for a given temeprature and pressure, evaporation will just cause some rainfall. Meanwhile, CO2 has been numerous times confirmed as the climate system control knob, and it's surplus in the atmospehere stays there for centuries causing temperature rises -- which are then amplified by water vapor feedback. This is high school stuff, Mr. Troll.
And I would argue that anthromorphic climate change is the misapplication of the natural heating and cooling cycle of the earth.
Yes, global warming is real. It is the rate and cause that I don't see proof for yet.
And when someone says, such was Al Gore and others that the science is "settled" my alarm bells go off.
If we can justifiably contest the law of gravity and the speed of light through experiments, then something like AGW has no special place that it cannot be challenged or scrutinized at every claim.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
"Containment" will happen because of the rising price of fossil fuels, and the declining price of renewable energy. Oil is going up because the demand for it is rising faster than production. Coal is going up because rich nations demand less pollution, and the world is getting richer on the whole. Solar and wind are going down because of economies of scale and improved technology. So we are seeing a shift in use which will become big enough this decade to become obvious to everyone:
Wind + solar added 65 GW of capacity (13 GW of average output) in 2011. That sounds like a lot, but it's only around 0.1% of the world's energy use. The thing is wind increased ten-fold in the past decade, and solar increased thirty-fold. There is every reason to think rapid growth will continue. When the addition of renewables to total energy use moves from tenths of a percent per year to percent per year, the general media will pick up on it
Note that people practice voluntary eugenics every time they decide not to have a child because the genetics of the parents risks inherited disease. Few people object to that, it's the forced eugenics that is abhorrent.
That is the correct tack. I understand "believe a climate scientist" as shorthand for what you're proposing, as opposed to the crap being shoveled out by oil companies and the like.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Appeal to authority means using the word of an authority figure to establish a fact, the truth value of a particular statement.
No ONE person can establish a fact. Facts are established by experiment, testing, REPRODUCIBILITY, etc.
Someone can be an expert in a field, and still get a specific fact wrong (See Einstein, Bohr, etc., etc., etc).
Appeal to authority is a fallacy NOT because the conclusion is wrong, but because it is not a valid form of argument. IOW the conclusion does not follow directly from the premises.
A is an authority in field F
A makes statement S about field F
Statement S is TRUE
This is NOT a valid form of an argument - thus the fallacy.
Fallacious appeal to authority is not a fallacy, but self-important way too say that the authority in question is not actually an authority.
As for A:
Like many issues of human rights, perhaps this comes down to the competing rights of different people. If Earth had to reduce its population, why not keep only the best?
As for B:
Yes, many versions of the concept purge inconsequential characteristics, which is ironically unhelpful for the gene pool.
Eugenicists complain about a lack of environmental pressure, but doesn’t evolution have a lot to do with changes in the environment?
Are some of the technical evolutionary-science debates about _natural_ selection versus _artificial_ selection?
As for C:
I've argued that the historical issues aren't an inherent problem with the idea; eugenics often gets intertwined with racist nonsense, but not necessarily. (then again, a lot of concepts work better in theory than in practice) It would be nonsensical to apply eugenics against issues of nurture, and I would advise being cautious in cases of uncertain nature-versus-nurture.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Society use your Sciences
The US produces almost half of the worlds corn.
And instead of wasting any of it to make ethanol, it should be turned into High Fructose Corn Syrup like God wants it to.
Fandroids hate facts.
The reference is all over the net. The Audubon Magazine website itself doesn't seem to know about it: http://www.audubonmagazine.org/search/node/ted%20turner [audubonmagazine.org]
Wow so you're claiming it's false? Really? You're not actually saying he didn't say it and the interview doesn't exist, are you? Surely you can't be that stupid.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The extra CO2 is demonstrably from humans, because the Carbon-13 ratio is changing along with the CO2 level. Plants have a 2% lower C-13 ratio than inorganic sources. The only source of enough plant-derived CO2 to explain the ratio shift is fossil fuels plus deforestation, i.e humans.
Go back and read the ONE peer-reviewed study on this. You're misinterpreting the results. Human deforestation and fossil fuel are only SOME of the sources, and all any of it does is confirm that, yes, humans are contributing to increasing CO2 concentration. It's not the smoking gun you religious types try to make it out to be, any more than the duckbill platypus is the smoking gun that the "intelligent design" idiots try to make it out to be.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Well, it isn't necessarily "belief", I know the conclusions found in any individual paper may be wrong, same for reviews (like the IPCC reports). The key is at least understanding the sources of uncertainty and what a variety of "experts" think about it before forming a strong opinion. For example, I know that there are no good models of cloud behaviour. The IPCC reports account for this and the authors have estimated a lower bound on negative feedback due to clouds. This is based on paleo-climate data, which relies on various proxies for climate conditions. There is some disagreement on how much confidence should be placed in these proxies. For now I will accept the IPCC number as the best available, but I do not "believe" it.
You should listen to everyone and use some critical thinking. An expert should be able to make a very convincing logical argument supported by data. If they cannot, they're probably overspecialized and speaking outside their area of expertise.
Scientific truth doesn't need anybody's legal imprimatur.
You have that backwards again, even after I explained it, so I fear you're trolling. But I'll try once more:
J'raxis said:
The very premise here, "if X is good, they should promote it; if Y is bad, they should ban it," is never actually questioned.
Once a scientific truth has been discovered, that does not create a condition under which legislation is required to be made regarding the new understanding, but some people think that it does. Some people think that freedoms like those espoused in the Bill of Rights are approximations to law that need be allowed only until enough knowledge can be derived to fully make sure that everyone is living the "correct way" (low-salt, low-fat diets, no eco-footprint, etc).
A) Science helps us determine that something will cause issues for everybody in the country down the road.
B) The [government] is tasked with protecting the people within it.
[Therefore] Science has determined a threat, so the government is tasked with helping eliminate, reduce, or avoid it.
Unfortunately, premise B is insufficient in describing the full extent of the responsibilities of government. The government is tasked with more than just protecting the people who live in the country; it is also tasked with protecting the rights of said people. If table salt dispensers spread salt uniformly throughout the restaurant or neighborhood and raised everyone's blood pressure, then there might be a cause to have them removed when science proves that salt raises blood pressure (and that raised blood pressure causes heart failure), but salt doesn't work that way. It's very specific to the person eating it and the salt dispensers only give salt to the people using them unless someone uses a shaker on another person's food; that might be assault. ;)
[Therefore] There needs to be more to a desire to legislate than mere "This is good/bad" being said by a scientist.
Strawman argument sets strawman on fire...
The reference is all over the net. The Audubon Magazine website itself doesn't seem to know about it: http://www.audubonmagazine.org/search/node/ted%20turner [audubonmagazine.org]
Wow so you're claiming it's false? Really? You're not actually saying he didn't say it and the interview doesn't exist, are you? Surely you can't be that stupid.
He's saying that unless a quote's verifiable as having been said by Turner, claiming that his views on a subject are X or Y might be a tiny bit intellectually dishonest...
So yes, he's asking you to prove - from an independent source, or by a transcript/video/audio of the original utterance, that he actually said that. If you don't have such evidence, please remember that you're accusing a man of holding views close to genocide of 80% of the world population. I hadn't thought to question this myself, but heck, it was late in the night when I responded...
Hmm, I don't think that particular question is relevant when the discussion is about Michael Mann or Gavin Schmidt. Whatever the cutoff is, they're definitely above it.
Similarly, the question doesn't even come into play for most of those who signed that obnoxious article in the WSJ - most of them even had a single paper published in the climate field (Lindzen was the exception).
Don't accept an argument from authority. I wouldn't, either. But the opposite is NOT argument from ignorance.
I wouldn't take Mann's word on something without verifying it, but the verification has to be done by someone who can understand the paper he published in the first place. A particle physicist or a mechanical engineer are not the best people to verify a paper in climate science. Someone with a better understanding of statistics, atmospheric science or similar fields would be a better bet...
-Phil Jones
It was you who posted this excerpt of Phil Jones talking about stats somewhere in this thread... What that guy was saying shows a deeply and fundamentally flawed understanding of statistics. I mean it is scary that someone of such high standing in a politically-important field would say anything about "almost getting a significant p-value of .05".
It is things like that that make me put " " around experts. I really hope I am misinterpreting his statement.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Woodrow_Wilson
There are other examples of this (see above). If you have a conspiracy you strongly support you better be able to find the primary source so people can know how much to trust it. I haven't looked into the Ted turner quote but I can easily believe it is made up or taken out of context. If you cannot source it satisfactorily, you are only doing yourself and your cause a disservice by repeating it, cunir wolf.
So you think it was wrong that when science postulated that there were invisible organisms that created disease and were spread by shitting in, or next to, drinking water and the conservatives refused to believe it, including some who wouldn't even look in a microscope because it was patently impossible for there to be invisible organisms, that it was wrong to legislate no shitting in the drinking water?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2705663&cid=39235953
Industry does spread salt uniformly through out the restaurant and neighborhood. Just about any foodstuff purchased has unhealthy amounts of salt. People have been conditioned that excessive salt is needed for taste yet it is very unhealthy. A good example is baby food. When first introduced 80 or 90 years ago baby food had no added salt and babies loved it. Nice jar of carrots in a form that they could eat. Meanwhile the mothers, who had already been conditioned that food needed excessive amounts of salt, complained that the jar of carrots was bland and the free market responded by adding salt to please the mothers as they were the actual purchasers. Babies got conditioned at an early age to have too much salt in their diet and grew up expecting unhealthy amounts of salt in their food. Feedback happens and now we get to a point where most purchased food has unhealthy amounts of salt.
The question isn't about the salt shakers, it is about all the other salt spread around the neighborhood.
Legislation can put warnings on the salt shaker which allows the people to have the right to make an informed decision about sprinkling salt on their food and also legislation to limit the amount of salt spread around the neighborhood.
I know it is communistic to say so but we live in communities. Sometimes things need to be legislated. Perhaps a simple warning in the case of the salt shaker, and sometimes a ban in the case of the free market boosting the amount of salt in our food in a viscous feedback loop.
Shitting is also a right that needs to be legislated. One of the most basic rights is the right to shit, and also really important for plants etc yet no one should have the right to shit in the communities drinking water and if society is going to help sick people then they shouldn't even be allowed to shit in their own well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The FOIA request was just a fishing expedition. Nothing more. Without some other evidence I believe this to be wrong. It would be like knocking on random peoples doors and asking them for some evidence that they did not do a crime. That is not how it should work and the courts agree.
Also I am not sure what loads of money means. I do believe the amount of money in question is actually somewhat small in relation to all things VA government related. If it were the money alone then it would seem to be to small for the AG. It would be some low level procedural event. (Unless there is a lot more money than what I see being spent here.)
Then where are the Physicists? Mann, Jones et al are not Physicists and have never claimed to be. Care to revise your blanket assertion?
Just saying it is 'unknown' is a baloney cop-out.
No explanation is better than a bad one.
Not really. He said we're 200 years into a 1000 year cycle of reversal. That means we're 1/5th through it. So they would point 1/5th of the way to south.
If the PP is even correct, which I am neither arguing for or against.
Oh, I get what he's trying to say now. However, it's just plainly not what was said. "A 1000 year cycle of reversal" says that the reversal cycles every 1000 years, and that we're 200 years into the current cycle. (So, the poles should reverse in 800 years, and immediately begin reversing again.)
This is different from "200 years into a 1000 year pole reversal process, which cycles every X years."
Regardless of how one might concoct a diagramming of the phrase (even in wrong diagrams!), the phrase still comes out to mean a 1000 year cycle, which gives a period to the cycle of 1000 years.
The crosswise definition of "cycle" being used can be best demonstrated with: "we are 2 days into a 7 day cycle of lunar waning." ... wait, what? "Lunar waning" is only a part of the lunar cycle, and while it does last 7 days, it's not a cycle itself.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
I am saying that you have not provided any evidence for your claim.
I fail to see what this simple statement of fact has to do with intelligence.
Also, you conveniently forgot about everything else I wrote by acting all upset and angry. So I will add this: The evidence you produced for the other claim of yours has also, on checking, failed to uphold the point you were trying to make with it. While the quote was real, read in context it does not mean what you alleged.
But you claimed that the interview would be easy to find. So please, entertain me. I will apologize if you can produce the actual interview, and if it makes the points you claim it makes, I may very well change my mind on the subject matter.
Until then, I'll call you a liar and a fraud.
Oh, and since you also dodged my request to take a guess at my agenda: Google for some of the writings of Hakim Bey. There's a guy ripping the established powers to shreds and pulling away the curtains without having to invent quotes and make up conspiracies.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
So then, you're a delusional conspi...*reads sig*...oh, as long as you know.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Is it a lie if the liar truly believes the falsehood?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Co2 Climate Doomsday Rapturist
There's no freaking way you're a scientist. At least not in any remotely related field, and not working in academia, where the PR liability of someone who flaunts such astounding ignorance could not be risked. If you're any kind of "scientist" at all I'd bet you're working in business in a completely unrelated field, similar to Burt Rutan.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Haha I know, search through his posts in this thread for more perfect delicious irony.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I think the "oppose change" thing is a mis-labeling. Drop a conservative in a liberal country and you can bet your ass they won't be cautious towards change.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It appears the Right is using the same tactics used by the Left to silence those they disagree with. Mann has been found innocent of any wrong doing and the data is valid *twice* now, yet they continue to to to prosecute him. As some one in a different thread commented to me; If you go far enough either tot he right or left you will find yourself on the other side. OTOH I do consider the Left's stated tactics to be a bit more violent.
"I am the government. If you hand me a FOIA request, and I don't like your reasons for asking, I will refuse it."
And you... approve of this? That's kind of a rare and remarkable attitude to find on Slashdot, even besides your apparent ignorance of the actual FOIA law (hint: it's not the document-holder's decision whether it's important to release). Congratulations on being a very special person!
BS, people ONLY defer to "authority" when THEY are too incompetent to come to a rational conclusion themselves, because of their OWN shortcomings, and lack of ability to decide, based on the facts.
That makes everyone's precious "science" and "authorities" no more valid than religious-based "faith".
Deferring to "science" without a full understanding it isn't enlightened, intelligent, or moral. It's mere superstition.
Electromagnats -- is that "I can has del dot B?"
Seriously though, the 'Climategate'-style science is more out of the same system that brought you phlogiston, phrenology, and eugenics... and tried gaming the system and the ways of academe when it didn't get things exactly its way.
A previous teacher of mine had his early academic career ruined because he claimed there were chemical influences in nerve transmission. Since it was so well known in the '30s that neurotransmission was electrically (I lump positive-ion conduction in there), his claims were obviously 'unscientific'. We are STILL denying with some fervor that there is any potential mechanism whereby S. marcescens coinfection might induce apoptosis/regression in tumorigenesis.
Sure, science ain't perfect. But there's a very long history of 'scientists' using jargon and wacky models to justify pet theories, and demonizing those who disagree with them, sometimes on a suspiciously well-oiled basis. Scientists ought to shun such people whenever possible...
Ah yes of course, because you say so!
Bottom line. We depend on science (the method and the global community) to give us the best predictions available to us. It's not perfect but it doesn't have to be to still be the best. Climate researchers and departments exist at prestigious and respected universities all over the world and there has never been a reason given other than "We don't like their conclusions" for why we shouldn't listen to them.
Given all of that: The global climate scientist community says climate change is happening, that's it due to human activity, and that there could be dramatic negative consequences to not trying to slow it down. That's it. That's the end of the argument in terms of what facts we should consider when forming public policy. It really is that simple.
If you have some stunning evidence or argument to the contrary then get involved and publish a paper but until it's accepted as true by the majority of climate scientists public policy shouldn't be affected. I'm sorry if you wish it were otherwise.
So, is gravity settled? Or are you currently floating off into space?
Every claim in climate science is scrutinized and challenged. However, it's far more helpful when actual scientists do it, rather than say retired engineers who used to work for oil companies who are paid by libertarian think tanks to take a hostile position and then lie to the people who read their blog all while claiming to be "impartial" and "neutral".
The science is settled because people more qualified than you haven't been able to disprove the claims. You're free to dedicate your life to proving them wrong, but better people than you have tried and failed. That's what it means. Not that you can't question it, but that it's has been through the crucible already.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
What, no Miami Vice reference?
You are correct that once science identifies a previously unknown mechanism by which some person's acts may harm another, there is no intrinsic requirement to create a new law to address the harm per se. People could simply try to protect themselves under our existing legal system by suing others under existing statutes, many of which are quite broad in giving plaintiffs ground to seek damages, especially those of common law. We could, if we desired, simply let the courts deal with the issue. We could choose to saddle ourselves with a litigious nightmare and burden everybody with great uncertainty until the courts finally clear everything up.
Or we could make and enforce clear regulations to address the emergent issue.
Obviously the second way is far superior in terms of efficiently upholding justice, but you are right that we could choose to do the stupid way if we wanted to.
Science is never "settled", there are always caveats and room for further discovery. Always.
To state otherwise is to show a misunderstanding of what science IS, and is to reduce "science" to little more than religion/superstition.
The "better people than you" argument is an ad-hominem; concepts and ideas are the issue, not the type of judgement of individuals that is the hallmark of religious zealotry and cheap politickery.
The "people more qualified than you" argument is also of suspect integrity - what you REALLY mean is "people more qualified in their own little peer group/discipline/vocation/guilds to be vested the sole arbiters of Truth.
And, finally, if everyone is so certain of the data, let's talk about the data. In this ongoing debate very little discussion of that incontrovertible "proof" is the one thing that is most lacking.
If you understood the data, you'd talk about it.
People are justified in their skepticism, and all the self-righteous anger, ad-hominems, politicization, hidden agendas, and elevation of "climate science" to the level of other sciences without actually having to validate assertions, is not going to change a thing.
If you don't know, just admit it, you don't know. It's obvious that "the lady doth protest too much."
The correlation between CO2 emissions and global mean temperature has nothing to do with it. Fourier first noted that CO2 absorbed infrared radiation in the 1820's, John Tyndall quantified the absorption of infrared radiation by CO2 in the 1850's and Svante Arrhenius stated that an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere would cause a rise in temperature in the 1890's. All before human CO2 emissions had raised the CO2 level significantly enough to see any correlation. Scientists don't assume CO2 is the cause of global warming because of correlation, that's just corroborating evidence. They can measure the absorption of infrared by CO2 in the atmosphere.
That may be a trollish comment but it's accurate too.
Full access to Michael Mann, et. al.'s 1998/1999 "Hockey Stick" data and methods is available here.
I think it is commonly accepted that the presence of positive feedbacks (water vapor, decreased albedo, etc) are the important factor. There is not enough CO2 to have a large direct effect. So, on its own, knowing that CO2 absorbs IR tells you little about how the system will react. For that reason I view the CO2 absorption spectrum as the corroborating evidence.
Really? There is work showing CO2 emissions are necessary and sufficient to cause the observed warming?
More or less. The work tends to be more detailed than your over simplication, but recent studies that have attempted to separate natural and human effects on temperature have found that human activity accounts for over 100% of the warming. This is possible because natural effects have recently been cooling rather than warming the atmosphere. For example, we've had back-to-back La Nina's and the sun is in a period of minimal activity. However, the increase in CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) and the attendant feedback effects are still causing the oceans and the atmosphere to warm despite the natural effects.
This graph shows what I'm talking about, it's from this review of the causes of global warming.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Assuming, for the moment, that your numbers are accurate here:
That said, out of about 200,000 glaciers worldwide, only 0.075% were actually measured in the last decade (with some areas such as the Alps being heavily over-represented) and those 0.075% necessarily form the base on which scientific claims have made. A base which is just too small to make any claims.
A random sample of 150 glaciers would actually be sufficient to get a reasonably accurate view (+- 10%) of the overall trend.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Hey, someone did that. The IPCC won.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
True. But that's the problem. It's not random at all. E.g. only covering the lower glaciers, not those at higher altitude in the Himalaya.
That's a different problem, and one that has to be shown to be significant. The measured glaciers show about 10% of glaciers increasing in mass, so growing glaciers have been sampled. As I understand it, a pair of satellites have been used to measure the global change in glacial mass and they confirm that the measured results are broadly correct and the total glacial mass on earth is shrinking at around 500 billion tons a year.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
The problem is that your premise is flawed. The role of government is not protecting people against every conceivable threat. That very premise is the root of the problem.
And what you described in your post is exactly what I mean by an un-democratic, un-free "technocracy." "If experts say X is bad, we automatically have to do something about it."
Liberty in your lifetime
This is exactly what I mean.
And anyone who believes in science and wants to protect its reputation as actually being a method for researching and revealing the truth about reality should oppose technocrats, too. As I've said in other posts, if science is used to justify controversial policies, people try to discredit the science when what they really intend to do is discredit the policy. The end result is science becomes politicized and people end up supporting only whatever research or study serves their interests.
There are many fine examples of this in history: Biology poisoned by "Lysenkoism" in the Soviet Union. Anthropology poisoned by "scientific racism" in the west. Mental health research poisoned by numerous factions insisting their pet social problem is in fact a mental illness. And so on.
The solution is to keep science out of politics and people will keep politics out of science. This is similar to the "separation of Church and State" doctrine. Jefferson's rationale for such separation was not just to keep religion out of government, but to keep the government out of religion. One merely need to look at the religious wars in England in the 1500s and 1600s to see not only how much damage State religion did to the people, but how much damage it did to the Protestant, Anglican, and Catholic Churches themselves, too.
Liberty in your lifetime
And I would argue that anthromorphic climate change is the misapplication of the natural heating and cooling cycle of the earth.
You're an idiot, a fool and a fraud. Yes, those terms are necessary.
We have very, very solid evidence that the global temperature is rising due to human influences. That part is completely scientific.
If and what to do about it, that part is political.
Yes, global warming is real. It is the rate and cause that I don't see proof for yet.
Because you are ignorant. Al Gore is right, the question is settled. It has been challenged constantly for decades, every claim has been scrutinized, and the basic answer has remained the same. Like all continuously improved scientific theories, the precise details are constantly improved, but the direction has never changed.
Even studies funded by climate change sceptics for the express purpose of getting a different result have only supported the general consensus.
The question is settled as much as our current knowledge allows us to. If you don't have new facts to add, at least evolve the intellectual honesty to state the real reasons you want to close your eyes: That you don't want to support the changes to politics and economics that would be necessary to prevent catastrophic changes, because your habbits and wealth and standard of living are important to you and you don't really care if a couple million niggers and asians drown.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The climate change doubters are currently employing some of the same strategies that the creationists have been using.
One of them is constant repetition. Instead of actually checking the facts and actually pointing to the flaws the claim are all over the place, they write stuff like yours, asking the other side to show evidence. Again and again and again and again and again.
And then, when the real scientists want to get some real science done and say "sorry, don't have time for this bullshit, I've done it a thousand times already", they claim victory because there was no proof shown.
Few scientific data is as readily available as the data on climate change. Go and get it, read it, understand it, write to peer-review journals if you find any flaws with it.
in their own little peer group/discipline/vocation/guilds
Those "little" groups are one or two orders of magnitude larger than the group sizes at which a conspiracy has a reasonable chance of working.
Also, those groups are open. All you need to do is become a scientist in one of the fields. Of course, you can't do that from your couch...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I think it is "less". Look, I get what you are saying, but people really need to stop acting like CO2 has been added to the atmosphere and caused warming, then taken out and the warming went away. This is what would be required to actually do the experiment "showing" that it is CO2 emissions. As it stands right now human activity is the most plausible explanation for the warming. There may be some unknown factor (although I doubt it). Without removing CO2 and seeing what happens we will not know if the CO2 emissions were necessary to cause this warming. Even then there will be no "control earth", but such is the nature of this type of science, all we can do is look for very strong correlations and a mechanism of action consistent with known physical laws.
Under the simplifying conditions of a number of climate models, CO2 can account for over 100% of the warming. This is not the same as adding CO2 to the atmosphere and seeing if it warms. But, oh wait, we did do that and it did warm. So is CO2 sufficient to cause warming? Well, we don't have a negative control, so it is hard to say for sure. It sure looks like it though.
There is no need to exaggerate this.
Do you even know what "hide the decline" refers to?
Most scientists actually show their work. Mann did not. Heck he can't even reproduce it. He can't even show others his work. It took years of sleuthing by many to uncover the details and depths of Mann's frauds in his Hockey Stick Statistical Lies.
Here is the data and methods from Mann, et. al. (1998/1999), the "Hockey Stick Graph". Mann's temperature reconstruction is pretty much in agreement with at least 10 other reconstructions done since then by different researchers using different data sources and methods. His hockey stick is the blue line in this comparison graph of 11 temperature reconstructions.
I think when you say "he can't even reproduce it" you are conflating Mann with Phil Jones.
My criticism was not with the scientists, adn you would know that had you actually read the post to which you are responding.
I never made any remarks about conspiracies, and have no desire for such straw man arguments.
Again, if all the supporters of MMGW, like yourself, are so certain, tell the rest of us why, talk about the specific data that convinces you.
Again, the type of dialogue on the subject I've observed here is lacking any substance, and indicates to me that most of the supporters of MMGW are unable to even articulate WHY it is they believe, beyond simply saying "because the experts say so".
Equating these observations with creationism - well that's just childish. My criticisms and observations stand - you don't talk about the specific data that's convinced you because you can not. This comes across as a faith-based type of ideology. Obviously you don't like that observation - to bad. If the bible fits, wear it.
The fundamentals of climate are mostly physics/thermodynamics. It's the transfer of energy through radiation, convection (and maybe a little conduction) that drives the engine of climate. James Hansen is an astrophysicist who started out studying the atmosphere of Venus then applied what he learned to the other planets/moons with atmospheres, including Earth.
CO2 was not a significant factor in the Earth's warming until the 2nd half of the 20th century. Before that it was mostly the Sun increasing its activity level and a lack of large volcanic eruptions.
That point needs to be emphasized, and it was clearly explained what Mann did in the published paper.