Slashdot Mirror
Michael Mann: Swiftboating Comes To Science
Lasrick writes: Michael Mann writes about the ad hominem attacks on scientists, especially climate scientists, that have become much more frequent over the last few decades. Mann should know: his work as a postdoc on the famed "hockey stick" graph led him to be vilified by Fox News and in the Wall Street Journal. Wealthy interests such as the Scaife Foundation and Koch Industries pressured Penn State University to fire him (they didn't). Right-wing elected officials attempted to have Mann's personal records and emails (and those of other climate scientists) subpoenaed and tried to have the "hockey stick" discredited in the media, despite the fact that the National Academy of Sciences reaffirmed the work, and that subsequent reports of the IPCC and the most recent peerreviewed research corroborates it.
Even worse, Mann and his family were targets of death threats. Despite (or perhaps because of) the well-funded and ubiquitous attacks, Mann believes that flat-out climate change denialism is losing favor with the public, and he lays out how and why scientists should engage and not retreat to their labs to conduct research far from the public eye. "We scientists must hold ourselves to a higher standard than the deniers-for-hire. We must be honest as we convey the threat posed by climate change to the public. But we must also be effective. The stakes are simply too great for us to fail to communicate the risks of inaction. The good news is that scientists have truth on their side, and truth will ultimately win out."
Even worse, Mann and his family were targets of death threats. Despite (or perhaps because of) the well-funded and ubiquitous attacks, Mann believes that flat-out climate change denialism is losing favor with the public, and he lays out how and why scientists should engage and not retreat to their labs to conduct research far from the public eye. "We scientists must hold ourselves to a higher standard than the deniers-for-hire. We must be honest as we convey the threat posed by climate change to the public. But we must also be effective. The stakes are simply too great for us to fail to communicate the risks of inaction. The good news is that scientists have truth on their side, and truth will ultimately win out."
Have you ever met someone who watched Fox "News" that wasn't an abject fucking retard?
Me neither.
They are right about Mudslums though. Those subhuman scum deserve every drone strike, no matter how poorly planned or targeted.
self promoting blowhard
Why do people keep misspelling Faux News?
Well, considering that the word "swiftboating" is derived from accusations against John Kerry that were true. when someone says they are being "swiftboated" they are admitting that the attacks against them are based in truth.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
"flat-out climate change denialism is losing favor with the public" - As all convenient pseudoscience eventually does, as reality moves in and dinosaurs die off.
Starsky and Hutch and Crime Story didn't really have much to do with climate change - but I did like the Del Shannon theme song he used on the latter.
#DeleteChrome
If Global Warming is a science issue then stop trying to make political arguments.
You are LOSING the political battle. Stop fighting. Everything since Al Gore started organizing this movement has been one political miscalculation after another.
Why would you expect otherwise? This is the same guy that lost to GWB after serving a Bill Clinton's Vice President for eight years. That election was in the bag. And he blew it by thinking that attacking guns in the middle of a presidential election was a good idea.
Every single serious presidential contender until Obama made sure they had a picture of themselves holding a shotgun or something in their national ads. Think about that.
Seriously. If you don't want this to a political campaign then stop treating it like a political campaign. Swiftboating? Are you fucking high? You're going to bring up that shit that John Kerry was whining about? Stop listening to failed politicians to structure your political arguments.
If you want sound political advice, talk to someone that wins. Talk to Bill Clinton. I'm sure he'd be happy to give you some advice. He'd probably tell you to stop being such royal pricks and try to build some bridges. Which is probably why you like Al Gore... he probably says "fuck the opposition we are right!"... which is possibly the dumbest political advice possible.
If you want to talk about science, then show me a tested climate model that has been subjected to an empirical test of its validity. It isn't that hard guys. We have a lot of very accurate historical data. Feed in past climate data and see if your climate model can predict the past or the present accurately. The first model that can do that which isn't just a collection of plug variables is something worth taking seriously.
Until you have that model... you have no theory. There is no global warming theory without a tested model. You have rather a global warming hypothesis. To get a theory you need a validated model. You do not have that at this moment so far as I know. Which means... you have jack.
Which is a problem because you're losing the political argument. If on top of losing the political argument you're also unable to provide a validated climate model... then what we have here is a platform sustained almost entirely by hubris and graft.
Please contradict me... show me your validated model.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Is that when Taylor Swift pilots a banana boat over smooth seas?
Because
[x] Fox News
[x] the Wall Street Journal
[x] Wealthy interests
[x] Koch Industries
[x] Right-wing elected officials
[x] well-funded
[x] climate change denialism
[x] deniers-for-hire
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
Society is not governed by science. We've made it to democracy and capitalism in which vote count and bank account reign supreme. And in our society, science is still poor and a minority. The truth does not ultimately win in a democracy. "It's about votes, not truth, dumb ass." And it's easier to buy votes than to inspire them with education.
Scientists completely underestimate the opposition. And the worst part is, the science doesn't even matter. It matters to scientists of course, but it doesn't matter to the deniers. They are on a mission to make money and serve their cause. And all they really need is to buy time. That is all they want. As long as they can postpone action, the more money they make. So even if they believed in the inevitability of scientific conclusion and of actual global warming, they aren't even concerned about those outcomes until they happen. All they have in mind is immediate gratification. So they've already won, and they keep winning. The battle scientists are fighting over "minds" is moot. There are no minds to find. They need to fight the money.
True scientists only echo the voice of nature. Today, nature is our slave. And nature has no voice. Global warming is inevitable. It's nature's revenge. I'd invest in a post warm economy than any attempts in saving it. Science will never have enough money to win the war on global warming.
I'm glad to see that Mr. Mann did not use the pejorative term "denier" even though the /. summary does.
"Hide the decline" Mann.
http://climateaudit.org/2015/01/08/more-mann-grafting/
In most places outside the US, science isn't accepted as something that can be so casually threatened by special interests working against all objectively observable sources of information.
I've been following the wider skeptical movement here in the US for a while now. Perhaps earlier on (over a decade ago), challenges to the scientific consensus on things like global warming had some legitimacy as a real movement - but by now, it really is just a shill movement. Every existing doubt remaining is NOT in terms of the science being wrong, but rather which implication of the science is most correct. Yes, you can always find a theory or person willing to speculate in any direction you want - but nothing that still constitutes a challenge to the science of global warming anymore. It's observed from space, observed from dozens of major lines of evidence, observed from all known history we can trace, observed from watching other planets, and passes every known line of meta-analysis that uses an actual scientific process.
It's only here in the US (or perhaps OPEC nations) that none of that really ends up mattering to what a person at random gets to hear. Don't get me wrong - nowhere is science really reported without a million biases, just the same as no scientist or agency perfect - but we really do distort our science reporting with a huge amount of false controversy. It's just painful to see how much of that twisted interpretation of so much science so heavily represented in so many of these slashdot stories.
And so often,l it's from the libertarian side, which also weirds me out - again, I come in as a close follower of the skeptical movement (got a JREF card in my wallet), which is filled to the brim with libertarian ideals. It weirds me out, because in order to have a meaningfully free society, it seems absurd that the overwhelming push is to close off so much from objective observable truth, and to use the constant barrage of logical fallacies so rampant in the global warming denial popularizers toolset.
Honestly, just follow more lines of evidence, in just about any direction you want - the pattern of global warming, and it's predictable (if chaotic at some scales) effects are as much a science as anything I've seen. The studies themselves come from all sorts of people - but they all get to the same places in wonderfully surprising ways, and the overall picture is rather resilient by this point. Skepticism should mean looking for truth, eliminating where we're lying to ourselves, and at this point, the only folks consistently lying have been the folks in steadfast and unobserving denial.
Ryan Fenton
This kind of shit belongs on DailyKos or Politico, but not on Slashdot.
Only about 20% of scholarly papers that are cutting edge science are still corroborated 5 years later.
One example of research that has been particularly well corroborated by later papers is the temperature reconstructions by Mann, Bradley and Hughes.
There is no higher standard of affirmation than reproduction by independent lines of evidence.
How can this possibly be fraud?
Neither is he self-promoting. He is science promoting. That is to be admired. Even if you're a Bush or Murdoch, so that you've an interest in not promoting it.
evolution has it's dead ends also - say goodnight, petrolheads.
coming from a known fraud: Michael "Hide the Decline" Mann
http://climateaudit.org/2015/01/08/more-mann-grafting/
http://climateaudit.org/2012/03/15/jolis-reviews-mann/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/26/sticking-it-to-the-mann/
http://judithcurry.com/2014/10/01/steyn-versus-mann-norms-of-behavior/
If you prefer to study his science, good luck finding some.
http://climateaudit.org/
FTFA&S "The good news is that scientists have truth on their side, and truth will ultimately win out."
Science is about deriving the mathematics of creation/ universe it is about creating models and knowing how given the change in one or more variables existence, local or otherwise, changes. Example :
F=Gm1m2/D^2 now this is an approximation and assumes point masses but for most things it is good enough.
Truth on the other hand is the realm of Philosophy/Theology (a combined study until fairly recently in academic worlds) and science does not speak of truth.
When I see articles that get such things as truth, fact and domains of authority wrong I know that they are biased and deliberately trying to deceive the reader, or the author is just an idiot. Take your pick as to which one this is and whether to apply Hanlon's Razor or not "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
The author, lasrick, should cite some examples. Otherwise, it just reads like an uninformed rant/conspiracy theory. As soon as someone argues that "Fox News" and right wing 'elected officials' did such and such a thing, I stop reading. Not a single name or documented is listed in this summary, lasrick - it's so generalized, it'ss laughable. The rest of the post is not worth my time to entertain.
Feed in past climate data and see if your climate model can predict the past or the present accurately.
And, surprise! It does. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07...
While I agree with most of your post, what you describe here is not science. That approach turns science on its head. The scientific method begins with a reasoned hypothesis, followed by a prediction based on the hypothesis, and an experiment to prove or disprove this prediction.
Correct. The hypothesis dates back to Arrhenius 1896 http://www.lenntech.com/greenh... The numerical calculation of greenhouse warming due to carbon dioxide was first accurately done using measured value for infrared absorption and numerical integration of the profile was done in 1967 by Manabe and Wetherald-- it's summarized in any reasonable book about atmospheric science (such as the one on my desk at the moment, An Introduction to Atmospheric Radiation, by Liou (1980), p. 188). Calculating the greenhouse effect alone (that is, assuming no change in cloudiness, and constant relative humidity), Manabe and Wetherald showed "a ten percent increase in CO2 concentration (from 300 to 330 ppm) would lead to a warming of 0.3 K." It's a logarithmic response function (Arrhenius calculated that much back in 1895, although he didn't have the data to do the complete numerical integration), so it's easy to extrapolate this to the current carbon dioxide of about 400 ppm. It comes to about 0.8 K increase by their model.
Comparing it to the data, from 1967 on... looks like the experimental result matches the prediction.
Climate "science" on the other hand does exactly what you describe here. It looks at past data and attempts to fit it to a hypothesis.
Nope. The hypothesis dates back to Arrhenius. The detailed calculation dates to Manabe and Wetherald.
In any case, while the measured temperatures are a nice validation that the models are in the right ballpark, there's plenty of other data. You seem to be unaware that there is is a lot of measurements of the atmosphere.
That's not science at all. That's little more than a statistical model. These guys believe they have their answer and are trying to fit all observations to it.
That's a description of deniers. That's not the way climate science is done.
The reason we believe that the model is more or less accurate is that there are terabytes of data confirming it. The reason we don't believe that alternative models are accurate is that there aren't any. All of the alternative models proposed so far fail when compared against the evidence.
When there's an alternative model that fits the data, believe me, people will pay attention. Many people have looked very hard to come up with an alternative model. So far, no success.
You don't seem to know much about the subject, but this is not one or two scientists doing questionable work and then everybody else saying "oh, they must be right". There are thousands of scientists working on it; supercomputer models built on five different continents; ground, balloon, and satellite measurements, terabytes of data.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It's not an ad hominem attack to call someone a fraud when they are actually a fraud.
Mann has gained wealth and fame from climate science. Therefore, he has a potential conflict of interest. Why is it that climate science is the only research area exempt from the normal safeguards against scientific bias? Just look at all the money to be gained by global warming alarmists. Case in point: Al Gore.
Additionally, Mann, in particular, has demonstrated his inability to "play with the big boys." He presents controversial theories and whines when people attack his ideas by filing lawsuits. He couldn't win the public over on ideas, so he resorts to the force of law to silence his opponents.
Doesn't sound very scientific, does it?
When Canadian columnist Mark Steyn questioned Church of Warminetics doctrine, Mann took the unusual step of filing a suit:
http://www.steynonline.com/656...
I never knew that hiring lawyers was such a crucial element of the scientific method.
Why does opposition to war automatically mean you're anti-military and vilifying soldiers?
In politics it "means" this because it is an easy argument to make. Nuance makes for crappy sound bites even if it is correct.
Mann spliced actual temps when the divergence problem made tree ring density derived temps unusable for the hockey stick graph. After 1960 the dendrochronology revealed that temps did not correlate with density of tree rings so he simply used actual temps to complete the graph. The claim is that the divergence problem in new and just showed up recently so older dendro records were suitable while after 1960 they are no good. http://www.skepticalscience.co... LOL convenient!
What most people don't get is when scientists start advocating political policy they have stopped being scientists and have become advocates for a particular cause. What's more they can expect to be treated as such.
...based on a model which takes red noise in, puts hockey sticks out, at substantial probability. An honest researcher upon being shown that would agree that yes, his model was not a good one. Mann, on the other hand, has continued to double down on the hockey stick.
From TFS:
Wealthy interests such as the Scaife Foundation and Koch Industries
Why is it that the uber-rich on the Left are never mentioned? Most of the richest people in the US Congress are Democrats. Why don't we hear more about George Soros, who collapses national currencies for fun & profit, and the leftist/progressive institutions he funds like Tides Foundation and others who then in turn fund numerous other PACs and other groups? How about Bloomberg? Or if you want to get to the real money in political contributions, look at public & private sector unions.
What is it with rich socialists that they hate the rich so much? Or do they just hate the idea of anyone *else* becoming rich? They seem to view other people increasing their wealth as decreasing how much richer they are, and consider the resulting decrease in wealth disparity the same as having been robbed.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
What else would you expect from someone who keeps insisting that he personally received a Nobel Prize---but didn't.
Michael Mann could predict that the sun will rise tomorrow morning and I would be hard-pressed to believe him.
the hockey stick is bullshit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I really liked watching Crime Story. The plot was decent, the music good, and the cars excellent. I always wanted a 57 or 58 Chrysler 300 after watching that show.
Paul
I remember a similar event:
Scientists: "Tobacco kills."
Politicians: "Jobs."
So it is written, so let it be done.
Again and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
From your link:
Recent observed global warming is significantly less than that simulated by climate models. This difference might be explained by some combination of errors in external forcing, model response and
Ginternal climate variability.
In other words, the models don't work at all, what is the excuse that the rubes will buy so we can keep draining science funds for a few more years?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anyone else catch that one?
yes, his crewmates might have varying stories about him, but his cremates on the other hand, have nothing nice to say about him, they still feel the burn
So, If you disagree you must be a paid shill. Who's making ad-hominem attacks?
This is funny. Michael E Mann is the master of the personal attack and he is a proven liar.
As far as the attack go, go read his twitter account for a bit. According to Mann, anyone who disagrees with him is 'anti-science', in the pay of big oil or a serial disinformer. Mann routinely insults anyone he that disagrees with him in anyway.
Michael E Mann:
On the other hand, serial climate disinformer Judith Curry, in a commentary for the same outlet five days later, announced, "Consensus distorts the climate picture."
Link http://www.livescience.com/39957-climate-change-deniers-must-stop-distorting-the-evidence.html
Judith Curry: Professor and former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and President (co-owner) of Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN). I received a Ph.D. in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago in 1982. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, I held faculty positions at the University of Colorado, Penn State University and Purdue University. I currently serve on the DOE Biological and Environmental Science Advisory Committee, and have recently served on the NASA Advisory Council Earth Science Subcommittee, National Academies Climate Research Committee and the Space Studies Board, and the NOAA Climate Working Group. I am a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Geophysical Union..
Currys sin? Well, she doesn't believe that climate change will be as bad as Mann thinks. Curry is a lukewarmer.
There is more, but frankly reading Mann's tweets makes me want to shower. The man is a hate filled ass.
As far as lying goes, well Mann claimed to have won a Nobel Prize. He didn't, he did however get a fancy certificate (along with a few hundred other people) from the Nobel committee. Even after he was informed that he *did not* win a Nobel Prize from the actual Nobel Prize committee, Mann included the actually-not-a-fact of his Nobel Prize in a lawsuit against Mark Steyn. Thats right. After being informed that he didn't win a Nobel Prize, Mann sued in federal court and claimed to be a Nobel Prize winner and part of the original suit was 'defamation of a Nobel Prize Winner'.
Additionally, Mann routinely lies about his hockey stick in that he claims the hockey stick was exonerated by numerous investigations. However, the invstigations he cites did not investigate the hockey stick.
http://climateaudit.org/2014/02/21/mann-and-the-muir-russell-inquiry-1/
Regardless of where you stand on the climate change debate, Mann is dishonest. He routinely lies. He routinely insults anyone who disagrees with him. And there are serious questions about his science, mainly his mathmatical methodology.
Anti-vax?
You'll have to pry my MicroVax 3100 from my cold dead hands.
This is Slashdot, ya know. Take your politicking somewhere else
most rich donors actually support the Democrats over the Republicans, it just does not get reported because only 7% of journalists are Republican and most journalists who contribute to politicians give to Democrats
There's really no mystery here and it's no conspiracy with secret handshakes and secret meetings; the press in the US is largely concentrated in big liberal cities and these people all live and breathe in the resulting ideological/cultural bubbles while the very rich (also generally concentrated in those big liberal cities) often get that way via government-enabled crony capitalism and revolving doors between big government and big business.
Part of doing good science is being exceedingly critical of your own work. Feynman put it very well "I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen." So if he is so sure he is right, and so fragile about it, that he files a lawsuit when someone questions it, that is a bad sign. That means he's not thinking critically about it. A critical thinker would consider the arguments put forward. They might well decide they are all crap, but they wouldn't file a lawsuit to try and shut someone up.
Also this is the precise behaviour you see out of scammers. They shout down and try to use the legal system to bully critics. They know their work cannot stand up to criticism so they try to silence it with a big stick. I'm not saying that is what Mann is doing, but you do have to understand how it looks.
You realize to half the country "swiftboating" means "pointing out facts you'd rather nobody knew"?
And yeah, Mann is worried about having his papers under subpoena. Why is that, do you think?
This is the same guy that lost to GWB after serving a Bill Clinton's Vice President for eight years. That election was in the bag. And he blew it by thinking that
For the record Gore won the election in both popular and electoral votes, had they been allowed to finish counting.
People who are scientifically to uneducated to understand things in math which humankind understood 4000years ago and to lazy to even learn in school how long a stone takes to fall down to the ground (which we knew 300 years ago), and who can no predict what the expectation value for winning/losing in roulette is, want to suddenly get in the scientific discussion of the most complicated, dynamical, and coupled systems science ever examined.
Usually this happens as soon as they find the final outcome of the scientific process negative for their income expectation or their views (climate change, evolution, racism etc), even if they have been fine with radar, smarphones, TVs, nuclear bombs/power plants etc. before.
Side remark #1: When i say climate science i dont mean the IPCC (which is political in nature). As a scientist i find it pretty disturbing that they write a report in which the claims of interest groups are packed in without peer review, and declare this to be a result of science.
Side remark #2: There is absolutely no doubt that CO2 in the atmosphere will increase the absorbtion coefficient, and thus has the potential and, assuming that no unpredicted effects compensatign for that appear, likeliness, increase the global solar energy input significatnly. Hoping for such unpredicted effects as excuse for screwing around with this global parameter further is like playing russian roulette with 5 chambers filled and 1 empty.
Side remark #3: Our actions should be long-term (25y-50y) in nature, and they should be based on medium-term observations, per head consumption of ressources/energy and/or emmision of CO2 (compensated for industry production). They should be based on opening additional revenue sources and business fields for companies who delevop good products.
Nothing is new here. J. Robert Oppenheimer was legally crucified by Lewis Strauss, recently appointed head of the AEC, back before most slashdotters were born, in May-June, 1954. That was, in many ways, the mother of all swiftboating.
Zero tolerance for science frauds. Committing science fraud by data fabrication as Dr. Michael Mann did on multiple occasions and accepting monies from such science frauds makes Mann guilty of financial fraud, multiple counts (for each grant or other monies he has received based upon his science data frauds). The real question is why isn't Mann in prison for his crimes against science yet? That is the real political story, how key climate scientists have avoided prison for their science and financial frauds.
So, the online harassment that has been talked about is only a reflection of what happens in the cut-throat meat world. It's not the network that has a problem, it's the people.
Dear Michael,
The scientific high ground in this matter is to admit that the original peer review process sucked, lacking as it did any reviewer with sufficient statistical expertise to detect subtle methodological errors, and further, to admit that it does not require a PhD in any discipline to point this out (nor, especially, a peer-reviewed paper) if it happens to be true that the paper contained subtle methological errors (which it did).
It's all well and good that the main result itself seems to have held up under additional scrutiny brought to bear once these admittedly small deficiencies were aptly pointed out. This does not change the fact that the original peer review sucked.
(Perhaps you were merely lucky that your result continued to hold water after your subtle statistical errors were properly addressed. This is why a result that merely holds up isn't worth much in a high stakes debate. Proof by hindsight does not strike me as adequate given the magnitude of societal change that effective mitigation seems to require. To me, the stakes seem to be high enough to demand that critical links in the argumentative chain are right in all necessary respects before they are attached to a giant political lever; or, failing to achieve the almost impossible demand of being right in all essential particulars in peer-reviewed published paper V 1.0, that the culture of climate science embrace with a blazing passion the art of the mea culpa bug fix.)
Ordinarily, the peer review process is not expected to be 100% water tight, as the standard pace of science is stately and the stakes are modest. In this example, you paper served as the fulcrum of the biggest political mud fight of the late twentieth century. If climate scientists think that the fate of humanity and the planet lies in the balance, there shouldn't be even an epsilon gap in the quality of the peer review process.
You can't have it both ways without looking like a complete idiot. And it sure doesn't help your cause to look like an idiot when you're being attacked in a thousand illegitimate ways.
Thanks for your attention to this matter. I look forward to the future scientific culture of rock solid peer review in the first instance.
Live long and prosper,
J. Random hockey fan
(By some strange twist of fate, this was the first item to cross my feed after spending thirty minutes flipping through Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery which I'm presently reading to discovery why David Deutsch, in particular, praises it so highly.)
Well, there is about a 100 year period up to 1960 where they can compare the dendrochronology to actual measurements and they compare well. It's not surprising that the intense industrialization and pollution in the 1960's may have had an effect.
If Michael Mann actual had done all of those things you accuse him of then yes, he should be in prison. But despite trying for over 15 years no one has been able to make a case that he has done any of those things.
Given that the Mann, et. al. hockey stick paper was really the first of its kind it's not surprising that they didn't always use the best statistical techniques in their work. But when you do apply the better statistical methods to his data is doesn't change the results enough that you could detect it just eyeballing the graph. Also since the paper had techniques that Mann, et. al. invented what do you expect out of the peer reviewers? How do you judge new things like that that no one's ever seen before?
The vilification of Michael Mann and others like Phil Jones has come to be called the Serengeti strategy. In the Serengeti lions will try to separate one individual from the herd in order to make them easier to take down. Climate science deniers think that taking down one individual like Michael Mann will destroy the entire edifice of climate science but like in the Serengeti the herd still exists. The strategy won't work until they can take out the whole herd.
That's a very idealistic and naive view of the world.
Power will always win out.
Often truth will win out, but not always.
In wars, the victor wins the privilege to write history.
The winners of historical wars are chronicled, their strategic decisions studied and declared genious.
The losers of same wars are given shallow graves if lucky, and they do not get to hire scribes to chronicle their side of things.
Sometimes truth survives, and is carried through history, but more often, it is buried with said losers of wars.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
The single largest effector on planetary climate is the sun...that wee golden orb that hangs in the sky each and every day. The sun has cycles of varying energy output...along with the fact that the earth does not orbit the sun in a perfect circle. Also, the ancient civilizations spent a copious amount of effort calculating precession (changes in axial tilt) among other things, so they had an idea of celestial mechanics that affected their existence (and the planet they existed on). So many complex celestial motions influence how much solar energy reaches our humble orb. Previous cycles of major warming and major cooling have happened before, long before humans were even a blip on the radar of life, much less a significant contributor to the situation. [Maybe dinosaurs had a lot of gas? cows produce methane, how much more would dinosaurs fart?] There is most definitely climate change. And yes, humanity is contributing to that. And so do active volcanoes. So does the Sun. The difference is that the sun nor volcanoes nor anything else not humankind doesn't give a care about politics, nor power, no control over others, nor profit; they tend to be unresponsive to taxing or regulation. I would like to see a comprehensive study where the suns energy impact on the planet is tracked back through the ages and matched against the warming/cooling cycles our planet has gone through thus far. my humble 2 cents
I am wise enough to know how much a fool I am
Thoughts on this by me from 2008: "Re: On Climate Change vs. the Singularity"
https://groups.google.com/foru...
The key point I make is that climate change, whatever the cause, is an issue about social equity and likely unaccounted for externalities. We have enough resources as a global society to make the planet work for everyone in a good way -- including those affected by rising sea levels or changes in weather patterns. Whether we choose to use those resources (or make more) to do so (including, say, via a global basic income) is a political choice. In other areas these political decisions are made all the time, like compensating people and communities dislocated when a highway or dam goes in. Personally, give the rise of solar power and also the likely rise of hot or cold fusion soon, the political and emotional capital being spent on arguing about cutting back carbon emissions seems a waste. While fossil fuels have all sorts of negatives including mercury pollution for coal, and for that reason it could make sense to tax them and redistribute the tax revenue to all as a basic income for all to discourage their use, I'd rather see this much emotion and political energy go into positives like solar research or fusion research or also energy efficiency. Indoor climate-controlled agriculture and related agricultural robotics is another big trend we could invest more in to ensure our food supply security regardless of the weather.
Or as Kurzweil said in 2011: "Futurist Ray Kurzweil isn't worried about climate change"
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-t...
"Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly -- we are only a few years away from parity. And then it's going to keep coming down, and people will be gravitating towards solar, even if they don't care at all about the environment, because of the economics.
So right now it's at half a percent of the world's energy. People tend to dismiss technologies when they are half a percent of the solution. But doubling every two years means it's only eight more doublings before it meets a hundred percent of the world's energy needs. So that's 16 years. We will increase our use of electricity during that period, so add another couple of doublings: In 20 years we'll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been under way for 20 years.
People say we're running out of energy. That's only true if we stick with these old 19th century technologies. We are awash in energy from the sunlight."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What a bunch of incoherent nonsence.
Science is a meritocracy
Deniers are sometimes people who are indoctrinated.
Just like religious cults.
Deniers can themselves be in the dark about actual matters and be useful idiots, tools.
Brainwashed by left-wing oil baron funded propaganda.
...if it's true, Mr. Mann.
You stopped being a scientist and started being a shill decades ago. You're a fraud who sues people who disagree with you, and whine about being sued in return.
It is the Alarmist camp who is fading into oblivion while we real scientists will continue to gather data. Stand out of our way please.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
http://arlohemphill.com/2011/08/10/what-if-we-create-a-better-world-for-nothing/
I'm baffled. I don't understand the impetus to deny human-driven climate change other than straight up greed. The one argument I've heard recited is the lack of an accurate model. I can barely get an accurate weather forecast for a week from now and you want accuracy with something on the time scale of decades.
And at the end of the day, even if the models are inaccurate, it's not a question of whether it's happening but simply time frame. What difference does it make if they're off by a decade or two? Does that give us time to squander? Let me answer that. No. I think Vonnegut probably got it right. "We could have saved it [earth], but we were too goddamned cheap."
Denial of data release has no bearing on the data being released.
", regardless of their accuracy."
What a stupid statement, you really suspect the data being suspect for a good reason, then state that reason!
regardless of something is accurate, true or not we should not believe it?
What kind of stupid shit is this sithkhan? Can't you, stinkham, barf your stupid thoughts somewhere else.
Hiring lawyers is part of defending against libel and slander.
Being attacked by political mobs and Church of AGW Denialism can be quite a burden on ones life.
Ever heard of libel?
A paid troll, an unpaid troll or a useful idiot to big fossil fuel interests. ;)
Make your pick. Don't be so negative, there are choices enough
For the 18 years, look no further than Ben Santer. (is that good enough for you?)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
“Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.”
An interesting article. Let me point out that word "at least". Instead of "at least," what does that article say about "at best"?
"While previous work has focused on a single period of record, we select analysis timescales ranging from 10 to 32 years, and then compare all possible observed TLT trends on each timescale with corresponding multi-model distributions of forced and unforced trends. We use observed estimates of the signal component of TLT changes and model estimates of climate noise to calculate timescale-dependent signal-to-noise ratios (S/N). These ratios are small (less than 1) on the 10-year timescale, increasing to more than 3.9 for 32-year trends. This large change in S/N is primarily due to a decrease in the amplitude of internally generated variability with increasing trend length"
So, 32 years was the best signal to noise ratio, in an analysis looking at trends from 10 to 32 year. They concluded: the longer the better.
So: ignore the "least". What does the data say when analyzed over a 32 year trend?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Boo hu. A new congress in town, a new chair of the Env Committee, and no funding for UN (IPCC) and restricted funding for DoE (E use to the Energy but lately is Environment).
And what about the millions of cash Mann gets per year from the "Climate Defense Fund", that money laundering Op of the American Geophysical Union from moneys it siphons from membership fees and donations from foreign governments (as in India).
Boo hu.
Bang Ding Ou.
www.climatedepot.com
www.wattsupwiththat.com
Michael Mann is a lying sack of shit, all aboard the 'climate change' (what does that even mean?) gravy train, and he's been found out, and it's all over the internet...
I will let Mama Nature do the convincing by killing the people who refuse to listen. Old saying "Those who won't hear will feel."
And if someone disagrees with you then you slap them with a lawsuit rather than debate the issues raised like Dr Mann has done to Dr Ball. If anyone has been "swiftboated" in the climate debate it is Dr Ball. http://drtimball.com/
Dr Mann is a scientist for sale. He will get whatever results get more funding. His hockey stick has been dis-proven completely and has been shown to be an artefact of bad statistics and cherry picking trees.
If you want a good read about what is wrong with climate "science" and why the IPCC models are broken beyond belief and repair here is a great link by Dr Brown of Duke university
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/06/real-science-debates-are-not-rare/
...has been disproved. It did not accurately predict the current now 18-year-old lull in global warming, therefore its science is wrong, it is not an accurate predicter. That it matches the UNCC is more proof the UNCC is crap. but we knew that when their emails about "tricks" to "hide the lack of warming" were outed and it was confirmed when the UNCC whitewashed the whole thing and left the same dishonest bastards in charge.
NO CREDIBILITY. IT'S NOT SCIENCE IF IT EXPLAINS BOTH WARMING AND COOLING OR THE LACK OF EITHER ONE.
The New York Times has been caught lately fixing the facts to meet the narrative. The narrative is what is important to Leftists not the facts. Leftists run the New York Times and Leftists are behind the whole of AGW politics. The models and the observations are not corresponding. So what do the AGW supporters do? They dream up some new and unproven, and possibly unprovable, hypothesis into which they try to stuff the observations and then publish in the supporting, popular press to get pressure on the government. The whole of Leftist Politics is to get Big Government into the middle of every ones lives so that the Elitist Left can run every ones lives. Please watch all of the Hunger Games movies and take a close look at that fictional world. It gives Leftist wet dreams just thinking about a world like that.
Stop moving the goalpost. I made no claim other than the last 18 years has seen no warming.
The models, which we are supposed to base policy on, have been completely wrong.
Can you substantiate that with statistics? Are they completely wrong? Analyze the statistics. What does a statistical analysis say?
I can't do this for you. Don't grab somebody else's opinion from the internet; look at the data. Analyze the statistics. What do the statistics say? Is it statistically significant?
The reason they are wrong is, they cannot predict some of the most important drivers of long term climate, i.e. ENSO.
ENSO is a driver of short term climate, not long-term climate.
It is, indeed, one of the large sources of natural variation. But let me repeat something I've said many many times, and will, I expect, will have to say many more times. Human-induced climate effects are not instead of natural variations; they are in addition to natural variations.
We will see what it looks like in 32 years.I am not arrogant enough to make a prediction.
That's the problem, isn't it? None of the deniers make predictions. Because the deniers don't have any models. Not even one.
The argument seems to be "well, the measurements fit the data to within experimental error so far (which is accurate: do the analysis!) but in the future they won't. So, based on future measurements that haven't happened yet, global warming doesn't exist."
The thing is, where do you start and stop your (or mine) cherry picked data?
The easy answer: don't cherry pick. Use all the data.
That will always determine the slope.
So, don't cherry pick. Use all the data. Statistics tells us that a longer run of data will always have a better signal to noise ratio than a shorter run.
All I am saying is, the 21st has seen no global warming.
Interesting: you just changed the question. Now you are asking, "does the data show warming over a 15 year period ending in the present?" The answer to that question is the opposite of what you just said: The data shows that the climate warmed from 2000 to present. (I linked to you some sources of data: graph it yourself.) It warmed, oddly enough, just exactly according to prediction.
And if your response is "well, fifteen years is a cherry-picked number. If it warmed over that period, so what-- if you picked 18 years instead, it didn't warm!" Excellent. Exactly: if the calculation of slope depends on whether you add a single point (in this case the high point in 1998), that means that you're not analyzing a long enough run of data. A robust statistical analysis shouldn't be sensitive to any single point.
How does that track with blaming every single weather event on global warming.
I don't blame every weather event on global warming. If you hear people who are blaming every single weather event on global warming, stop listening to them. Another thing I've said many many times, and will, I expect, will have to say many more times. Weather is not climate.
How does that track with the doomsday scenarios, the scare and fear mongering, the alarmism, etc...
I am not interested in the doomsday scenarios, scare and fear mongering, alarmism. if there weren't so many people shouting so loudly that the science is wrong, I suppose I might spend some time debunking some of the worst of these. But there are always doomsday scenarios. People saying that scientists are frauds, and science is a hoax: that annoys me.
....But the thing is, if it hasn't warmed in 18 years, you CANNOT SAY anything that is going on now is worse then 10-18 years ago because of global warming , because there has been n
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
But if you look at the facts of that rpisode you will find some serious truth there. It's the same with this issue. It may be that global warming is entirely true. You all seem to think so, having studied the issue so closely over the years. And it is certainly true that some of the criticism, especially of Michael Mann, has been over the top.
BUT.......
It is ALSO true that there has been some serious fraud and disarray in the climate science field that cannot be simply explained away by some of you "climate scientists" doing the same thing to critics that climate scientists are claiming is being done to them. Watch this post get modded down if you doubt that.
For example, (and this is one of dozens), do you know what the phrase "Hide the decline" means? It was featured prominently in a YouTube post Mann didn't care for and is part of numerous howlers uncovered by the Climategate emails. Here's what happened.
In a multi-variable graph these scientists put together several plottings of temperature measurements that showed the temperature was rising. This included bona fide modern thermometers. ONE of the measurements, however, showed temperatures DECLINING during the same period when every other measurement showed temperatures RISING.
Hmm. That didn't look so good because if they published it with that sole line going down, they would have to EXPLAIN it, and they didn't want to do it. So what did they do? The Climategate emails show this clearly:
They erased the line. They HID THE DECLINE by showing it as it went into the decline, but then it disappeared and was absent as the graph showed a rising temperature, sans this errant line that wasn't behaving itself.
Tsk, tsk, you say. They shouldn't have done that. In the interests of full-disclosure and, you know, TRUTH, they should have published their results and not HIDDEN THE DECLINE.
But it gets worse:
The DECLINE was shown by the line representing tree-ring data. Now you all know about tree-ring data, right? And you know the rings get fatter when it's hot (or wet, let's not forget) and thinner if it's cold. AND since there were no accurate thermometers thousands of years ago, guess what these scientists used as a "proxy" for thermometers. This is what Michael Mann is famous for. He used tree ring data from a few trees in Siberia, among other places, but FEW TREES, to "prove" that the climate has been warming.
SO, if the modern tree-ring data is showing a decline in temperatures when every other measuring device they used was showing an increase, HOW could you reliably use tree ring data from thousands of years ago to prove anything at all? The DATA SHOWS THE OPPOSITE.
This shows and roves fraud. The emails confirm it because they are a smoking gun. They've been caught red-handed.
But you guys don't want to hear that and you don't want to investigate the truth of it. You just resort to doing what Michael Mann says is being done to him by calling the critics of global warming cooks and conspiracy nuts and suggesting they ought to be thrown in jail.
Now, do you want to hear about the famous climate scientist Al Gore who, in his huge graph on sea water temperature and CO2 levels, mixed up cause and effect when he claimed rising CO2 made the oceans warmer when, in fact, the warming oceans out gassed CO2 and made the levels rise? You don't want to hear that, do you? Al Gore refuses to debate it, too. Then he'd have to defend his screw up.
The most astonishing thing here is the attitude that if a scientist said it, it must be true, but when Michael Mann complains that he's being called names you perk up your ears. Here we have proof of massive fraud in this area and you don't seem to care.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
The more poorly targeted the better. I haven't figured out the worth of a Muslim's life relative to the life of a westerner, but my theory is we should just keep the drone strikes going until we reach parity.
"2,551 drone kills" in 7 years is OK, but the number I like better is "133,000 Iraqis" over 12 years. What Iraq taught me is "the enemy of my enemy is my enemies enemy, nothing more." The only thing better at killing Muslims than US Drone strikes is OTHER MUSLIMS. Sectarian violence is just how the CIA likes it. One thing muslims and westerner's can agree on is that killing Muslim's is a good idea. The only issue of contention is which sect should be getting the Drone Strike Love? I say: "Why chose? Heads: you kill a Muslim, Tails: you kill a Muslim!" That's a better deal than Santa Claus' free presents!
The important thing to recognize is that we need to make our munitions cheaper and less selective so that we can get more effective at killing Muslims. They don't appreciate our kindness when we spend extra to minimize the Civilian casualties, or at-least: if they do, Charlie Hebdo says they have a funny way of showing it! My point is: why spend the extra money if they don't appreciate it anyway?
I say: carpet bombing and chemical weapons until the only ones left eat bacon and sing 2+2=5. If we do it indiscriminately enough 133,000:3100 will eventually approach a ratio we can be proud of!
The globe has been COOLING for the last 2000 years.
The idea that the globe is getting warmer is NONSENSE!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/18/new-study-two-thousand-years-of-northern-european-summer-temperatures-show-a-downward-trend/
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/esperetal2014b.jpg
"the measured temperatures are a nice validation that the models are in the right ballpark"
Well, within a factor of two. That's some ballpark.
That's right: the current estimate for the climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide is 3C plus or minus 1.5C (that is: 1.5C to 4.5C). That's a big ballpark, but, indeed, that's the quoted uncertainty. Here's a graph of model simulations, showing this variability: http://earthobservatory.nasa.g...
But the interesting thing is, the deniers aren't jumping on that-- they are, instead, all about how confident the scientists are.
If someone were trying to base public policy on a set of computer models which predicted changes in, say, IQ scores of black Americans, or academic success of women in STEM fields, and the predictions were off by a factor of two, how seriously would people take those models, or the people who came up with those models? Their proponents would be laughed at by everyone who wasn't vilifying them.
Perhaps you'd think that. But, instead, you will be hard pressed to find a denier website that even acknowledges this. Pointing out that the scientists acknowledge uncertainty in their models would destroy their argument that scientists are unwilling to acknowledge any uncertainty in their models.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
There is another consideration that no-one seems to have mentioned.
If a scientific point of view is used by powerful political or corporate people as just a tool to gain power and money, then it may be necessary to oppose them even if it is true!
This applies to both sides. Or should I say, all sides?
The power and money are corrupting the discussion, to the point that even the scientists are becoming less reliable.
I think you made the honest mistake, that I am directly debating you with the statements I made.
The difference between you and I, is that I DO care what the alarmist are saying because they are shaping public opinion, in the media and in politics.
Putting your head in the sand and saying, but science is sound, while ignoring
And, in fact, the science is sound. You have just written three posts in this thread asserting that the science is wrong... and now you're telling me, that's not your point, you don't know or care if the science is sound, what you care about is the "alarmists" trying to "shape public and political opinion"?
OK. This is slashdot. Some of us do care about the science, and do care about people attacking science to make polical points.
The science is sound. If you don't like the alarmism, go challenge that (hopefully with actual facts) and quit making uninformed attacks on the science based on some random post you googled on some blog.
..and, by the way, what I mostly see here is you taking any possible excuse to avoid looking at the data and doing your own analysis, thinking about statistical analysis and confidence. Good job in avoiding dealing with actual science!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Mann starts off lamenting the ad hominem attacks on scientists, then goes on to describe those who disagree with him as "deniers-for-hire". He's clearly comfortable with double standards, at least. His hockey stick graph has no credibility because temperatures in the past 18 to 19 years have NOT taken a sharp turn upwards as he predicted. Scientists tend to call this a falsification of the hypothesis, unless you're a "climate scientist", that is.
First off, stop putting words in my mouth.
I am very capable of speaking for myself.
I will not do a statistical analysis of the data, because I do not have the knowledge to do so. And you insinuating that if I do not, I should just go hide in a corner, is shutting down the debate.
What I do have is enough intelligence and knowledge to read as much as I can on both sides and try and make my own mind up on the issue.
I will not follow an appeal to authority, when it has been clearly demonstrated that "the authority" has done everything it or he can to mislead.
Is fraud to strong a word? I dont know, I dont care. Mann's research is misleading. And when it was pointed out, by someone who DOES know statistics, he lashed back, viciously. And continues to do so. He has also witheld critical information, which would make it easier to try and determine if the method he used for his findings is sound or not.
Some of the science is sound, not all of it. And you know that. Or do you believe 100% every "peer reviewed" paper that is published? I didint think so. So you are being disingenuous.
My point is the whole. The science, the debate, the fear mongering, the alarmism, those who deny basic science as well as those who lie.
Its important to look at it as a whole, because policy is being written based on the whole. Its important, because if it was just about science behind closed doors, it wouldnt affect me or anyone else. But the whole world is in a battle for the truth, and scientists are humans, just like anyone else. Their shit stinks just as much as the next guy. And so one or some of them mislead us, the damages are real.
Stop talking about attacking science like its an entity. Its not.
You can talk about random posts, googled on some blog. I would aggree, if I had only read one. I have been following the subject closely for 7 years. I dont have all the answers, and I cant do the science myself. But I can use my own brain and make reasoned conclusions.
About looking at the data. What data I could look at, had the time and understanding to do, I have.
The climate has always changed, and always will. To think we're making any difference is absurd.
Mann is not afraid to fire up his own ad hominem cannon if anyone has the temerity not to agree with him.
I have heard that he smells too
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
>When there's an alternative model that fits the data, believe me, people will pay attention. Many people have looked very hard to come up with an alternative model. So far, no success.
Sadly, that isn't quite true. You've forgotten about about selection and confirmation bias.
I'm sorry, but no. The null hypothesis is that carbon dioxide emitted by humans has no effect on climate. That hypothesis has been strongly ruled out by multiple measurements. It is simply not plausible.
The greenhouse effect model-- which, basically, is a model that says human-emitted carbon dioxide has the same effect on climate as natural carbon dioxide-- is at the moment the only model that fits known observations. There is no alternate model. People have been searching for one for a long time-- there are lots of people who very much want an alternative model, and have wanted one for years. The lack of an alternate model is not for lack of trying!
In addition to the obvious (has to come up with correct values for average temperature, day-night variation, variation with season, latitude, etc.) here are three additional things an alternate model has to explain:
1. It has to explain why carbon dioxide doesn't have the warming effect predicted from simple radiative transfer models.
2. It has to come up with an alternate explanation of the observed warming over the most recent period-- a period of time in which we have had good, and increasingly better and better, measurements of the planet. (We know it's not simply a change in the overall solar intensity, for example).
3. It has to come up with an explanation for why the amplifying effect postulated in part 2 (this has to have an amplifier, since we measure the input) doesn't also amplify the greenhouse warming.
This is very difficult. So far, nobody has come up with one that isn't easily shown to be faulty. And not for lack of trying-- the person who could come up with such a model that didn't fail would instantly become the most famous climate scientist in history.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
In other words, the models don't work at all, what is the excuse that the rubes will buy so we can keep draining science funds for a few more years?
I see someone is upset with science.
Can you show me on the doll where the science touched you?
Science progresses. It is already known that the climate models will improve with improved resolution.
Astronomer's don't know what makes up 90% of the universe. Go attack them for extracting funds for a few more years so you don't look like a climate change denier.
Guess what? We're already gambling the world economy. We're already placing bets: all that science has done is to begin the process of calculating the odds and the payout. And the best thing about it? For the most part, the people making the bets aren't the ones taking the risks. We're gambling with other people's money.
If you want to place a bet against global warming, my suggestion is to buy land in Kiribati. This is a nation of small islands south of Hawai'i. As long as sea levels don't rise-- its average height is two meters above sea level-- this is paradise. A wonderful retirement home.
Land there is going cheap. Real cheap.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The way I distinguish skeptics from deniers is that skeptics are interested in the science and want to learn more, while deniers won't do one iota of work to analyze, or critically examine in any way, the conclusions that they have been carefully spoon-fed by the blogo machine.
It is amusing, in a bitter way, the lengths that deniers will go in their rationalization of why they avoid looking at data or doing any thinking of their own. But this is the signature of deniers: plenty of talk, but no critical thinking (of the opinions that support what they already believe).
I've given you links to the data. Your response is that you won't listen to others (that would be appeal to authority!) but you won't look at any data yourself either. The only remaining option is that you will just believe what you have been told.
Oh, and you say it's not about the science anyway. Well, since you have so eloquently said that you don't understand it, I will believe at least that much.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Well, not just whatever's convenient but entirely rational. Accepting that AGW is occurring means we ought to do something about it, and that something will probably cost money. But even by the worst projections, climate change won't have any catastrophic impact on most of our lives within our lifespan. Conservatives have made it clear that they have no interest in spending money to fix other people's problems. Environmentalists seem to think that they might be able to change their minds with more data, but I'm pretty sure that's a waste of time. Even if the Earth came with a big thermometer with a redline that stated "if exceeded, everyone pay $100,000 to deal with refugees from low-lying coastal areas", conservatives would still refuse to participate in any conservation efforts, or even acknowledge that AGW is a factor. Rule #1 of absconding financial responsibility is: never admit fault.
I'm sure they'd gladly throw money at a military solution to the refugee crisis, though.
I don't care how serious it is... whenever I hear talk of "how serious a threat *Item X* is to man kind" I can't help but think of the Communist-threat style debate that went on in the Stargate episode, Politics. Mind you the SG team was absolutely correct in that case, I can't help agreeing with Kinsey's statment for most things:
I have spent a career listening to doomsayers in uniform. "Let us build our billion-dollar machine, and we will save America from the barbarians at the gate." Let me remind you, the Cold War is over.
even if you're a winger. You aren't arguing science, you're arguing ideology as much as an anti-vaxxer.
Because being an uber-rich leftist is a contradiction in terms, that's why.
You say that as if it means something. Protip: when those Democrats are to the right of Reagan on most issues, it doesn't.
Not a leftist.
Not lefists.
How about making it obvious that you're as dumb as Fox?
Or you could quit being a moran for five seconds. If unions had that much money or power, the GM bailout wouldn't have put a slow bleed on the UAW by forcing new hires to work for half as much money as experienced workers. Obama's RTT is going to put more unionized teachers out of their jobs than Bush's NCLB.
Denier is entirely accurate as these people aren't arguing science, but ideology. They're no different than young earth creationists who deny all evidence that the earth is older than 6,000 years, or anti-vaxxers that keep jabbering on autism, or lunar conspiracy theorists who continue insisting that the moon landings were faked on a sound stage. Denyalism is denyalism.
After Jane emphatically rejected the standard physics definition of the term "net", it became clear that Jane is hopelessly confused about the term "net". Sadly, this is typical for Jane/Lonny Eachus and other climate contrarians.
After it became clear that Jane is hopelessly confused about the very term "net" which he keeps screaming in ALL CAPS, I explained conservation of energy in a way that didn't require using that troublesome word. At this point, a real skeptic would either try to address this disagreement about a fundamental definition, or agree to disagree about the definition and solve the problem like I did without using the disputed word. But not Jane/Lonny Eachus:
Instead, Jane kept repeatedly screaming "NET" in ALL CAPS, completely ignoring the fact that his emphatic rejection of its standard physics definition reduces his rant to gibberish. Jane/Lonny Eachus also ignored me after I asked him simple questions about the definition of the word "net", so there doesn't seem to be any way to correct Jane's fundamental misconception.
Jane/Lonny tries to be tolerant of those he thinks suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome, but only if "tolerant" includes endless cussing and screaming garnished with ball washing fantasies. If Jane/Lonny wonders what a Dunning-Kruger victim looks like, he need only look in a mirror:
Michael Mann as a member of the worldwide fascist conspiracy is personally responsible for millions of deaths in third world countries. Global warming is a made up problem to keep the peoples of the world in their chains.
How adorable. Once again, the whole reason Slayers dispute Spencer's experiment is because that implies greenhouse gases can't warm the surface:
I never agreed to pretend that Jane's Sky Dragon Slayer nonsense doesn't conflict with mainstream physicists' understanding of the greenhouse effect. Mainly because I couldn't imagine a Slayer resorting to such an absurd evasion, but also because I can't imagine agreeing to look the other way while he paralyzed his brain by simultaneously insisting that mainstream physicists agree with the Sky Dragon Slayers, while also somehow completely ignoring the National Academies of Science, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the Australian Institute of Physics, the European Physi
What I am asking for is a climate model in that context. A model where I can feed in ANY data and it will output a fairly accurate prediction of how that climate system will operate. This should include being able to predict roughly what the climate conditions will be like throughout the planet over a period of some years.
This is called a "global circulation model" (usually abbreviated GCM). There are dozens of GCMs around, being run by hundreds of institutions on five continents You want a GCM, pick one.
At no point, should Mann or people like him make predictions about the climate beyond the accuracy of his own models.
The models have error bars. The quoted error bars in the consensus model of global warming is plus or minus 50% on the sensitivity to carbon dioxide.
So if his models only work to a few months or a year, then his predictions should not exceed that time period.
That's not the way it works. "Months" means weather, not climate. Now, there are also weather prediction models, and these also run using global circulation models-- but it's a different regime. Climate is what happens over decades.
And, global warming also is something that happens over decades. Longer time periods averages out the noise-- the random portion of the variation--so the longer the time period, the easier it is to pick out signal from noise.
If his models are accurate to 30 or 100 years then by all means make predictions on that time scale.
Exactly! Now you've got it. Climate is long term; weather is short term. Climate predictions need to be evaluated over decades. So, your question needs to be: how accurate were the predictions of thirty to fifty years ago? I'll reference, yet again, the classic greenhouse calculation, Manabe and Wetherald 1967. Their model predictions are within the current estimated range of climate sensitivity, so it's a good test. Their model computes a warming of about 0.7C for the measured amount of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere since 1967. The actual value is 0.6. The year to year variation about the regression line is 0.15. So, yes, so far the model looks good, well within error bars. Now, if there is the purported hiatus in warming, and it's not a statistical fluctuation (so far, it's within the historical fluctuations), and if the purported hiatus holds for roughly another decade, the prediction will move outside the measurement error. But that's equivalent to saying "although the present measurements fit the data, future measurements won't." Maybe the models will have to be reevaluated if future data shows they're wrong. But so far, the data hasn't.
From what I've been able to gather, his models are incredibly inaccurate
Citation needed.
to such an extent that they're probably not even accurate enough to handle months much less years much less decades. And yet he makes predictions that span centuries. It is absurd.
Repeat: Months are weather. Decades are climate. The longer the period, the easier it is to model.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Oops, Jane started cheerleading a few weeks later. Also, "ineffiency" should be inefficiences.
But since it was never accounted for in the original models it makes them no less wrong regardless of the ocean heat sink theory (or whatever, honestly didn't follow your link but the ocean is the hive-mind answer at the moment) being wrong or right.
It also means the models have NO IDEA what effect the ocean has on temperatures going forward. Again, just getting wronger and wronger by the second since that's not factored in at all.
Come up with any excuse you like for the pause, the original models didn't include whatever Deus Ex Machina you and the rest of the cultists harp on about, and therefore are wrong.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I find you quite arrogant and condescending.
So, basically, you consider it condescending that I insist that you should actually look at data. Real data. Not blog posts.
And you complain that I only gave you a link to one source of data. OK, here are data from four continents:
Berkeley Earth: http://berkeleyearth.org/
Hadley Center Climate Research Unit: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/d...
Goddard Institute for Space Studies: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...
Japanese Meteorological Agency: http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/t...
Australian Meteorological Agency: http://www.bom.gov.au/state-of...
NOAA: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/t...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
At this point the average prediction of all models is off by over a degree - a MASSIVE difference when you consider it's an average across the whole Earth.
It's even more massive when you consider the original estimated change - +4C or so by 2100 - would require a tremendous acceleration of warming that is simply impossible at this point.
The IPCC offered up corrected models a few years ago that are STILL wrong and getting wronger...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Right.
By present-day standards, the Manabe and Wetherald model is very simple. This was indeed the criticism at the time-- "but the model doesn't account for XXX effect"-- and all of the present-day models basically work on adding in the various feedback effects you mention.
The simplicity is both a flaw, but also a virtue. Basically, Manabe and Wetherald is a model of the greenhouse effect, and nothing but the greenhouse effect: while there are a hundred more sophisticated models these days, now all of the criticism is "but how do you know that you didn't get XXX feedback effect wrong?" Well, Manabe and Wetherald didn't have all the bells and whistles-- it was the first real greenhouse effect model that incorporated real-world, measured infrared absorptions, accurate radiative transfer, and convective equilibrium, but that's all.
This is typically the way science is done. First you make the back of the envelope models, then the simple models, then you progressively add more refinements.
Surprisingly, the other effects matter less than you might think. Clouds was the first criticism made (and all modern models have cloud effects)-- but clouds aren't actually a huge effect. If clouds blocked visible and infrared light equally well-- and to first order they do-- cloud cover would have little effect on average temperature: the infrared radiation scattered downward heats the planet, the albedo scattering cools the planet, and in the simplest model the two balance out. Of course, the real world isn't the simplest model, but in some places clouds can actually increase the temperature (you see this in models of carbon dioxide clouds on early Mars.) What clouds mostly do is tend to equalize the daytime and nighttime temperatures. This is actually a good way to separate cloud effects from infrared absorption effects. (Another way is to look at vertical profiles).
As for the constant relative humidity assumption-- well, what would you suggest would be a better input assumption? Again, it's a good simple assumption. It does implicitly include a feedback effect, but it's pretty much the most transparent way to incorporate it. Most importantly, note that by assuming constant humidity, there aren't any adjustable parameters. If you worry that models have been "tweaked" to make the output match the data, well, there isn't any feedback to tweak here.
With the advent of supercomputers in the 70s, models got more detailed. The next good summary of models would be the U.S. National Academy of Sciences report 1979, by which time the report could look at and compare several models. The '79 NAS report is a good go-to reference for models of the '70s; and is still a bit before the politically-motivated attacks started muddying up the conversation. That still gives 35 years of data that can be compared to prediction -- a long enough run to average out some of the year-to-year variation and compare the models to reality. I graphed (but haven't yet added the most recent data, 2014, yet) and, yes, the measured temperatures fit inside the error bars of the NAS models.
After that, models got much more sophisticated very quickly (and so did the attacks on the models, resulting in a fast evolution as ever more sophisticated models addressed ever more complicated critiques). Today there are hundreds, and probably thousands of models being run. Comparing them to measurements is more like looking at statistics than looking at an individual model. There's some good graphs comparing models to reality in the IPCC working group 1 report, if you're interested in tracking them down.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
On topic, I'd like you to look at something:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... This is the sort of thing that throws up ugly red flags in my mind and tends to make me a bit dubious about AGW in general.
According to the link, this is from "The report by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) ... the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields".
This is something I've noticed. While climate scientists mostly agree with the physics models, whenever you see a headline about a group of scientists who disagree, when you look at the details, you usually find it's commissioned by the energy industry. There was a headline article in Forbes a year or so back, similar: the headline was "here's a poll of hundreds of scientists who aren't sure about global warming," and when you looked at the details, it was a survey of the people working in the Alberta coal and petroleum extraction industry.
When you look at the details here, nothing seems to be new. People have been looking for a connection between solar activity and climate for a hundred years; this has been studied a lot, and as far as I know, nobody has found a correlation large enough to drive climate. At a top level, the issue is summarized in the IPCC WG-1 report: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm... (There's a fifth assessment report out now, but the one I'm familiar with is the fourth, so that's what I link to.) A summary is in section 1.4.3, (Solar Variability and the Total Solar Irradiance); and the more detailed analysis is chapter 2.7, Natural Forcings, section 2.7.1 "Solar Variability."
(I'll also note that solar forcing tends to have a different signature from the greenhouse effect warming. Solar forcing tends to increase day/night temperature differences; the greenhouse effect tends to reduce them).
On the subject of the Japan Society for Energy and Resources critique, this is the page from the Japan Meteorological Agency: http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/t...
So the 2009 criticism by the Japanese Society for Energy and Resources doesn't seem to have made any influence to the actual people in Japan studying climate.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Your claim that the models are out of range is incorrect. It's based on the incorrect claim that "temperatures have remained flat", which they haven't, compounded with your incorrect claim that the models claim that over the period you are probably claiming "remained flat" for should not be flat. THEY SAY NO SUCH THING.
Before making vague bullshit claims about the models, two things:
1) investigate the models
2) make the claims you make less vague
As to the virtue of the green house effect studied on its own, the issue is that the atmosphere just might not work that way.
And that's why we have more detailed models.
But it ends up being a no-win situation, when the objective is to criticize rather than to understand. If the model is simple, they say "that model's too simple! The real world is complicated! You need to include X Y and Z!". And if the model is modified to include X, Y, and Z, they say "The model is too complicated! You can't believe any complicated models like that!"
The actual answer is, you start simple, understand the simple models, and progressively add complexity. This is the way science is done. Planets don't move in uniform elliptical orbits. Nevertheless, starting with Kepler's laws and then adding peturbations is a good way to analyze planetary motions.
As for comparing models to reality, and asking what we know and how we know it, there isn't really time for me to go through this model by model since 1967 (since I do have other things to do). I'll again suggest as a start reading the WG-1 summary report, it goes into detail on this (and has references for more details). The one I'm more familiar with is the fourth: https://www.ipcc-wg1.unibe.ch/... (although there seems to be a more recent one, fifth, here:
http://www.climatechange2013.o... )
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
There you go, a model. And a pretty accurate one. Accurate enough to plan what must be done and where the climate is going.
Of relevance in the article was that the climate model was inputted into the super computer and was unable to accurately model the climate.
The model creators from the US were contacted to correct the problem and they solved the problem by inputting plug variables that forced the super computer to give the correct answer.
That is what the article was about.
As to consensus from the climate community... I've seen a lot of meteorologists and quiet a few geologists take issue with them. And I remember quite clearly there was a virologist that was furious that his research was taken out of context for an IPCC report that effectively claimed his research predicted a massive increase in disease if global warming continued. In fairness you have to admit there is some hype coming out of the IPCC. That inclusion of the interview from a climbing magazine that claimed the Himalayan glacier was melting was a big scandal. And these "errors" only seem to go in one direction. That implies bias does it not?
Beyond this, every day I see some silly article that pops up... you must see them as well blaming everything on global warming. You know they're going to go into high gear next summer just as they have every summer for years.
I hear all sorts of stuff. The polar bears are dying off they say... and then I look into it and the polar bear populations are healthy and fine. In fact, the whole report was based on some scientist noticing a dead polar bear and casually noting that to a journalist and before you know it... the polar bears are dying. I see pictures of polar bears stuck on little bits of ice like they're trapped... when I know they like to swim. Sort of like showing a fish "trapped" in a bowl of water. Oh god no... save the fish... it might drown.
There is just so much propaganda coming from ALL sides that I have a hard time knowing what to take seriously. I have to process it myself because I can't hold any source as reliable at this point. There is too much money flowing around and the politics have gotten too intense.
When I see how close the temps match between earth, mars, and Venus at equal pressures despite entirely different chemical compositions... I have a hard time taking the chemical composition of the atmosphere's seriously. The data from what I can see implies it isn't that important. It doesn't seem to make that much of a difference. Again, at equal pressures, the earth and Venus are only 50 degrees apart. What does the math say they should be apart without Venus's greater green house gas content? Mars and earth pretty much match exactly at equal pressures which is sort of weird. I assume some sort of compensation has to be made for being that near the ground which would of course change the way I'm looking at the venus numbers a bit.
I read some stuff by a mathematician that was looking into it and he was calculating the surface area of the planetary atmosphere's, solar radiation, etc. And that is basically where I got fixated on this idea of the atmospheric density.
Perhaps he didn't know what he was talking about. He stated quite clearly that he wasn't a climate guy. He just did the calculations out of curiosity. And when the numbers came up so close he felt it was a little suspicious. I basically agree with that assessment. It is really close given all the hay being made out of the greenhouse concept. Obviously the atmosphere matters and obviously the density matters. But I'm not sure the chemical composition matters on a planetary scale for heat trapping potential.
I don't know. I get fed all that and then the usual suspects show up asking for money and power to save the children, save the world, and whatever else they seem to think will pull heart strings. So many people crying wolf it is very hard to know what to take seriously.
And as much as I want to believe science is incorruptible... they've been able to corrupt just about everything so I've grown pretty paranoid about sources unless I can vet the information. Sort of where I am at this point.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.