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New Analysis Shows Lamar Smith's Accusations On Climate Data Are Wrong (arstechnica.com)
Layzej writes from a report via Ars Technica: In 2015, NOAA released version 4 of their marine temperature dataset called ERSST. The new dataset accounted for a known cooling bias introduced when ocean temperature measurements transitioned from being taken in ship engine intake valves to buoy-based measurements. The warming of the last couple decades increased ever so slightly in NOAA's new analysis. This was a red flag for U.S. House Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX), who rejects the conclusions of climate science -- like the fact that the Earth's climate is warming. Suddenly he wanted to see the researchers' e-mails and echoed the accusations of contrarian blogs about scientists' supposedly nefarious adjustments to sea surface temperature measurements. Rather than invoking scientific conspiracies, issues like this should be settled by analyzing the data. A new study, led by University of California Berkeley's Zeke Hausfather, does just that -- and Rep. Smith won't like these results, either. To test the NOAA dataset, Zeke's team created instrumentally homogeneous temperature records from sensors available only over the last couple decades. As it happens, the Argo float data, the buoy data, and the satellite data each hew closer to the updated dataset that NOAA used. The older version (3b) gives a global average that is too cool in recent years, growing to an offset of about 0.06 degrees Celsius. The researchers repeat this same analysis for two more major sea surface datasets that are used by the UK Met Office and the Japanese Meteorological Agency for their global temperature records. Both of those datasets also drift cooler than the comparison data, but less so than NOAA's old dataset.
The EU has increased their CO2 output EVERY YEAR since Climate Change was discovered. So who really cares at this point? Obviously the EU doesn't, even with all their blather.
You're not going to convince an idiot by providing evidence that he doesn't understand.
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(1) Who gives a fuck? Seriously. Nobody has demonstrated the small amount of warming we've had and can expect in future isn't beneficial to mankind and the biosphere - especially the biosphere, which quite likes CO2 and expends a lot of energy trying to keep itself warm above and below certain lines of latitude.
(2) Aren't they talking about data taken on ships by physically reading thermometers to an accuracy less than the claimed effect? As I was taught: If you don't know your error, you haven't made a measurement. In this case the error could be even greater than the effect itself!
A comment: This paper is getting so much publicity I'm going to call BS on it for now. I expect someone like Steve McIntyre will rock up in a few months time after having analysed the data to show where they fucked up their analysis. By then nobody will care of course.
OK I'm done. Start down-voting my comment.
another pile o'shite from arse technica
You're not going to convince skeptics by constantly fudging the numbers upwards. Seriously, this behavior out of any corporately funded research would be instantly rejected. However, we must worship the one true climate belief that all of us must be taxed and regulated and taxed harder and regulated harder and that the presiden'ts winners get that money.
Why am I so not surprised by this?
Suddenly he wanted to see the researchers' e-mails and echoed the accusations of contrarian blogs about scientists' supposedly nefarious adjustments to sea surface temperature measurements. Rather than invoking scientific conspiracies, issues like this should be settled by analyzing the data.
Most people wouldn't understand the data if you clubbed them over the head with it. Doubly so for politicians with no scientific training. The problem in the argument is that one side of this argument isn't arguing with facts and is actually incentivized to demonize any data that contradicts their pre-determined conclusions. They see the argument in one of two ways (sometimes both). A) They see climate change data as a threat to their personal interests - usually financial ones. If you are a politician sponsored by a fossil fuel company, this threatens your self interest. B) They see the climate change argument as something coming from the Other. It's a tribal thing - that Other group supports it ergo it must be bad. Often they frame it as a conspiracy despite the absurdity of that statement.
So in either case you have people who have no incentive whatsoever to acknowledge the data because it threatens what they hold dear. Rationality plays no role in it. The best way to combat this is to frame the argument in such a way as to align their incentives with the data. Point out how much money there is to be made/saved by working on the problem. Put it front and center as an economic issue. Figure out how to align solutions to the problem with economic and political self interest. Until you do that you're going to have this problem of certain politically powerful factions sticking their fingers in their ears and getting in the way.
I'm shocked, just shocked!, to hear that the foxes have declared the henhouse to be perfectly safe under their watch.
Unless I'm missing something, the graph in the Ars article is hilarious. The red and blue lines agree no better in the "new and improved" fiction than they do in (what I hope is) the actual data, but now they point in the right direction, and that's what really matters.
Is this the end then? The last uncorrupted dataset has fallen now? Are we finally ready to start executing the unbelievers?
See that "Preview" button?
But not fast enough, I'm freezing here dammit!
We need to figure out how to accelerate this process.
It popped automatically in the warming ambient air! WIN!
Silence is a state of mime.
Climate scientists haven't established Human caused global warming is real.
You are wrong. It's not even really a debate among climate scientists at this point. So far all the data seems to clearly show that humans are a key factor in recent climate change. And even just on the face of it the notion that we could be dumping so many billions of tons of CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere without any effect or consequence is just absurd. If you want to argue that we are still pinning down the exact extent of the effect of our activities then you might have an argument. But to pretend that our activities have had no effect on global climate is ridiculous.
That said, it doesn't really matter anyway. Even if hypothetically speaking humans weren't responsible at all for climate change we still would need to take action to deal with the reality of it. It's going to affect food supplies, energy resources, ecosystems, pollution, geopolitics, etc. The US Department of Defense (hardly a bastion of liberal thinking) considers it real and a significant threat to national security.
So far we just have a gently upward trend starting about 400 years ago, very similar to the previous upward trends that were entirely natural.
Yeah sorry but the data is just a tad more complicated than your little made up and cherry picked sound bite.
You don't really seem to understand how the data works, they collect some data and missing data is filled in statistically. For v3b they exclude a whole bunch of under-sampled areas, effectively ignoring the data that was there and creating it all statistically. This was done because that data from the sparse sensors in many of those areas was questionable and without other nearby sensors you had no sanity check. And they refused to use the satellite data because it was biased toward the cool side. For v4, they decided to include data from the under-sampled areas, excluding any individual "anomalies" (i.e. things that didn't fit in with their expected analysis models).
The ERSST should be viewed as pre-cleaned data to help produce reliable results, but bias can easily creep in by how the data is scrubbed. I'm not saying it did, and certainly not intentionally, the NOAA folks are awesome to work with and I would never question their motives. But I think it is great we have "dissenters", both educated and not, who are questioning the data, the analysis techniques and the conclusions. I just wish the constructive debate that you see among the bulk of the community would overtake the mass media and few select loud mouths on both sides who want to declare something as done/fact/decided when everyone knows it is still a work in progress to understand both the magnitude and the outliers to improve the existing models.
The "fudged data" is a core belief in the Church of Climate Denial. The fact that it wasn't fudged could cause serious cognitive dissonance among some of the most devout members. Although to be fair, it won't be reported at Breitbart or InfoWars, so maybe they'll stay blissfully insulated from this information.
It's probably for the best that they be left that way.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Who is Judith Curry?
She a real-life climate scientist who dares to be skeptical of the current climate "science" diktats.
She just quit.
Why did I resign my tenured faculty position?
I’m ‘cashing out’ with 186 published journal articles and two books. The superficial reason is that I want to do other things, and no longer need my university salary. This opens up an opportunity for Georgia Tech to make a new hire (see advert).
The deeper reasons have to do with my growing disenchantment with universities, the academic field of climate science and scientists.
A deciding factor was that I no longer know what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science. Research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment — funding, ease of getting your papers published, getting hired in prestigious positions, appointments to prestigious committees and boards, professional recognition, etc.
How young scientists are to navigate all this is beyond me, and it often becomes a battle of scientific integrity versus career suicide (I have worked through these issues with a number of skeptical young scientists).
Let me relate an interaction that I had with a postdoc about a month ago. She wanted to meet me, as an avid reader of my blog. She works in a field that is certainly relevant to climate science, but she doesn’t identify as a climate scientist. She says she gets questioned all the time about global warming issues, and doesn’t know what to say, since topics like attribution, etc. are not topics that she explores as a scientist. WOW, a scientist that knows the difference! I advised her to keep her head down and keep doing the research that she thinks interesting and important, and to stay out of the climate debate UNLESS she decides to dig in and pursue it intellectually. Personal opinions about the science and political opinions about policies that are sort of related to your research expertise are just that – personal and political opinions. Selling such opinions as contributing to a scientific consensus is very much worse than a joke.
When will you give up the fraud, guys?
Nobody has demonstrated the small amount of warming we've had and can expect in future isn't beneficial to mankind and the biosphere
Nobody who is actually informed about the issue agrees with you. Heck the US Department of Defense disagrees with you. Please explain how even the more modest of predicted consequences such as rising sea levels, food supply disruptions, extreme weather events, melting ice caps, etc are beneficial to earth.
especially the biosphere, which quite likes CO2 and expends a lot of energy trying to keep itself warm above and below certain lines of latitude.
Umm, what? The biosphere "quite likes CO2"? Are you trolling or just ignorant? We're releasing billions of tons of CO2 that has been sequestered out of the atmosphere for millions of years and you're arguing that's somehow a good thing? Support your (absurd) statement with a viable hypothesis and actual data.
Aren't they talking about data taken on ships by physically reading thermometers to an accuracy less than the claimed effect?
It isn't about the accuracy. It's about what is actually being measured. It's like the difference between trying to do astronomy in the middle of a light polluted city versus doing it in a dark and remote desert with calm dry air. You're trying to look at the same thing but the noise in the measurements is quite different and has to be accounted for.
Interesting thought...
What if the actual end of humanity is caused, because as an aggregate, we are smart enough to understand and avoid it, but the majority of our biomass isn't smart.
Perhaps, we've got too much of a spread in ability between intelligent folks and those who are constitutionally incapable of understanding the complexities of a large data set. Or the mathematics needed to interpret it. Or lack the desire to do the work that leads to understanding.
There's so many factors involved.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Therefore this will be yet more "evidence" that there's a conspiracy among scientists, and Smith will demand THEIR emails too.
But don't you ask for HIS emails.
And don't set up any body to investigate HIM for corruption, either. They're both "proof" that he's being persecuted by the NWO scientists.
Funny how corrections always show more warming, not less. QUICK, stop correcting!
The evaluation was performed by a third party that is not associated with NOAA. In fact, lead author Zeke is associated with the Berkeley BEST skeptics that were once the darlings of the climate contrarian movement - until the results of their audit were released and ended up confirming the consensus position.
Regarding the graph, what you are looking at is the difference between the reference and the reconstruction. A negative trend means the reconstruction is lower than the reference. A positive trend means that the reconstruction is higher than the reference. A zero trend means that the reconstruction is bang on. You'll notice that the ERSSTv4 matches the instrumentally homogeneous reference datasets quite well. That's a good thing!
But when there aren't adjustments, you complained it was all "Urban Heat Island Effect", and that the data needed to be adjusted downward.
Now they ARE adjusted, you complain that they're adjusted.
So your complaint is self-defeated by your refusal to accept any data unless it gives an answer you like.
And moreover the raw unadjusted data gives a higher trend than the adjusted data.
Maybe AGW is happening, maybe it isn't.
Nobody cares because if we were to attempt to improve the Earth's climate, warming it up and adding CO2 is exactly what we'd do.
To be specific, the denier crowd, since they are uncritical of anything that "disproves" AGW. She was lackluster in her job and found that she could get the adulation she "deserved" by playing up for the deniers.
And your quote says fuck all about this news, so is 100% irrelevant.
She's "cashing out" for one or both of these reasons:
1) Her work was so poor she was asked to resign
2) Leaving lets her cash in on the denier crowd. See the appearance fees.
As a citizen within Lamar Smiths congressional district, on behalf of all voters here who voted against Lamar Smith I apologize. I've been trying for years to make people aware of how awful this guy is. but he still wins by a land slide very time. I hate it.
No. Therefore DESPITE NO HEATING FROM THE GLASS, the greenhouse heats up.
And therefore one of the simplest and dumbest denier memes "how can it make"things warmer? That breaks the 2nd law of thermodynamics!" is shown to be bollocks.
You see, if it were NOT proposed as an ANALOGY (look the word up, moron), your "complaint" that greenhouse glass isn't made of CO2 would stand up. But it isn't and it doesn't.
The proof of AGW is
1) CO2 causes heat to be trapped
2) If the sun's output remains the same, the earth will warm
3) We are burning fossil fuels, increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere
The greenhouse is an analogy.
The greenhouse effect is the effect, and no greenhouses are required.
> The 'R-TX' should be a hint.
I'm an R-TX and I look at the evidence. Evidence indicates:
a) There's been some warming.
b) The rate of warming has been at least twice as fast on earth than on Mars and Venus (meaning solar changes are probably NOT the primary cause on earth).
c) San Francisco was not underwater in 2010
d) San Francisco probably won't be underwater in 2025 either.
> He's being bribed with campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry to be a denier.
There's some truth to that, and the hyperbole from the left, the utter bullshit about "X will be underwater by 20yy" hasn't helped. It's easy to call AGW "bullshit" when some people spout so much bullshit in the name of AGW.
In a poll, I bet most people would say jolly old Saint Nick isn't real. He's actually a real guy, but all the fiction layered on top for various reasons has plenty of people thinking the whole Saint Nick thing is fake. There is some similarity to global warming there. If you want peopel to take it seriously, don't make BS claims like San Francisco will be underwater in five or ten years - because five or ten years later, when SF is still there, people think everything you say is complete bollocks.
On one hand the per capita CO2 emitted HAS increased from 4.3 tons per person in 1990 to 4.9 tons per person in 2014. This suggests that the world doesn't care.
On the other hand the world is far wealthier than it was twenty-five years ago. If you look at CO2 per dollar of purchasing power (PPP GDP), the world reduced it's CO2 emissions per dollar by fifty-six percent. The per dollar of GDP emissions have declined most markedly in ... Europe. The major industrial countries of Europe scored per dollar reductions on the order of 60% - 80%. (UK 600 g/$ --> 200; France 367 g/$ --> 129; Germany 560->208; Denmar 597->148; UK 557->182). Most European countries emit less CO2 per person, in the cases of the largest industrialized countries (UK, France, Germany) dramatically so. Italy is the only industrialized country to score large increases in C02 over that period.
SO here's the TL;DR: the world has tried and succeeded at becoming dramatically more carbon efficient -- about 2x as efficient on a dollar basis. That efficiency gain have not kept up with a Gross World Product that has more than doubled, and a population increase of over 1/3.
There's a world of difference between doing nothing and not doing quite enough to solve the problem. What we have done is push a number of climate change consequences further into the future, and that makes a big difference. For many of us it means not living to see those changes.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
> These people can't tell the difference between "correcting for a known measurement problem" and "lying".
Unfortunately, neither side can. That's what's so frustrating - half the time the adjustments are lies, or at least intentionally skewed toward "raising awareness". Various researchers have admitted that in emails that leaked or other documents over and over again, a few publicly and openly. It's really, really difficult to get objective information. 90% of the researchers will tell you their objective is to "raise awareness of AGW" or similar, or they are funded by organizations with that as part of their stated agenda. That doesn't mean they are WRONG, of course. It just makes it difficult to get information you can trust to gauge the scale of the issue. Pretty clearly there *is* an issue, and pretty clearly San Francisco won't actually be underwater by 2020. In between the most extreme claims, it's very hard to know where reality is.
They aren't the predictions, and even if they were, they wouldn't disprove AGW or the ~3C/doubling climate sensitivity.
"There's some truth to that, and the hyperbole from the left, the utter bullshit about "X will be underwater by 20yy" hasn't helped."
[citation needed]
It's not hard to call bullshit on "skepticism" like yours because of all the bullshit claims you make.
In a poll, even in the USA, more than half the people wanted MORE done to combat AGW than was currently done. And it's not that "most people are too dumb to get the science", because the majority of those people ARE NOT POSTING BULLSHIT LIKE YOURS, but accept it, even if it's less important to them than feeding and clothing their family, which means they need a coal mining job. They get it.
Where you get that asinine claim from is that people who understand and accept the science can't work out how someone doesn't, without it being "they're too dumb", because they believe
a) people are honest
b) they're trying
c) they're as numerous as the volume they produce
and none of those have to be real, but if they were real, then the only conclusion WOULD be "most people are too dumb". The truth is they're not, it's just the shills and trolls and idiots make more noise than their numbers deserve, and being highly motivated, their vote counts for more than most people's, so the politicians pander to them (because it aligns to their financial interests too)
The new study shows that the NOAA method works quite well. It may be worth trying an alternate and seeing how well it matches the instrumentally homogeneous reference data, but since we're dealing with temperature anomalies and not absolute temperatures It's not clear to me that it would make any difference.
No really, stop tickling my sides. Skeptical Science, a shill front organisation for rent-seeking environmentalists.
Even if that is true it doesn't mean the data they are presenting is wrong. Prove the data wrong or shut up and go away.
It does matter though, imho. It matters for reasons of integrity, especially public trust in science.
The only lack of integrity is coming from the climate change deniers. They refuse to engage in a honest debate about or honest analysis of the evidence. Many of them have clear conflicts of interest (fossil fuel industry ties, etc) and don't even pretend to hide them. All the scientists are doing is presenting the evidence which is mountainous in volume at this point and growing all the time. If the climate deniers had an actual evidence based case they could easily cut through the BS by presenting actual evidence contradicting the current science models. They have no such evidence so they are making a political argument instead of a scientific one.
He's 1 of 5 Congressmen that represents the heavily gerrymandered city of Austin.
You can reach him at: https://lamarsmith.house.gov/c...
I just sent him this message: https://cl.ly/3y18020T1A3t
It seems I've learned a word today.
But is it correct?
It does matter. Even if you believe, incorrectly, that global warming is mythical, you should still pause to consider the implications if you're wrong.
Massive droughts in some places.
Massive floods in others.
Global upset of food supplies, leading to unrest and possibly war.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Major cities being taken out by storm surges. (NYC and New Orleans are early examples.)
CO2 concentrations have been going up; this is incontrovertible. Temperatures have been rising, which is also unchallenged by any thorough study. There exists a simple and well-understood mechanism why the two should be causally related. There exists geological data showing the two ARE related.
There are subtleties, to be sure, but these are the bare facts, well established past any reasonable doubt.
No amount of data will ever be able to satisfy anti-AGW people. They're just like the anti-vax people, or pretty much any other religious group that prides ignorance over reality.
They are emotionally dependent on their POV, and attempts to prove them wrong just make them dig their heels further. That has been proven as well.
Wouldn't that strategy play directly into the "it's a money grab conspiracy" argument?
Not if you show them how THEY can be the ones to grab the money.
Other fields of scientific research -- paleontology, astronomy, etc. -- don't have to sell themselves with economic windfall arguments.
They don't have to because they don't threaten anyone's meal ticket.
Framing this as a moral argument is understandable but ultimately futile in my opinion. If we really do need to act in a short amount of time then you have to convince people that either they are in imminent danger (difficult in this case) or that they can profit from solving the problem. Point out how all those displaced coal workers can make even more money building wind turbines. That sort of thing. Work on making distributed solar so economically attractive that people stop caring about the oil companies. Work on their economic incentives to move things in the right direction.
In other words, it's politicized.
The climate deniers are the one's making it political. But because they have that's the reality we have to deal with. We can pretend it isn't political or we can deal with the fact that it is and get on with fixing the problem.
Also, I would argue that neither side is actually arguing with facts.
Nonsense. The scientists are arguing with almost nothing BUT facts. The fact that a bunch of mostly right wing fossil fuel shills are standing in the way of those facts is plain enough to see. One side has facts and scientific data. The other has economic self interest and little else. The notion that both sides aren't arguing with facts is just nonsense.
I've long argued that the right dug in their heels and let the left dictate ideas and solutions.
Probably a good point. If the political right REALLY believed in self reliance then they should be pushing for distributed renewable power. Why depend on the power company and government regulators when you can have a solar array or wind turbine and a battery pack and provide most/all of your own power? But instead they persist in acting as thralls to large corporations. Makes very little sense until you realize they don't really believe in self reliance at all.
'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'
Are fucking us to the point of doom.
The correct term now is "Climate Change", not "Global Warming", as climate change encompasses both hot and cold fluctuations.
The main concern isn't just an increase or decrease in temperature, but really is the increase in variability of temperature.
> When an actual climate scientist says ...
Some of the well known climate scientists (apparently not "actual climate scientists") told us that San Francisco would be underwater by now.
Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change, was coordinating lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report Working Group. As you may know, the IPCC is about the most credible group there is, to those who advocate for AGW policy. Professor Tol resigned his position while writing the UN's Summary for Policy Makers because the IPCC insisted on a report that was "too alarmist" and refused to report on possible adaptations and even benefits of warming. That's one of IPCC's lead scientists saying that his own team was spinning the report to be alarmist.
I don't want to get too much into the leaked emails because that'll just cause arguments without accomplishing anything. When the head of the climatic science unit says "I used this trick to hide the reduction in temperature" apparently that's proper scientific procedure. Whatever. Here's an example that's out in the open, there's no argument about taking things out of context:
Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change, was coordinating lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report Working Group. As you may know, the IPCC is about the most credible group there is, to those who advocate for AGW policy. Professor Tol resigned his position while writing the UN's Summary for Policy Makers because the IPCC insisted on a report that was "too alarmist" and refused to report on possible adaptations and even benefits of warming. That's one of IPCC's lead scientists saying that his own team was spinning the report to be alarmist. You can read Professor Tol's full and complete statements in articles he has written.
Nobody wants pollution.
Yet without it we all die.
Would not even be able to light a campfire to cook food.
No logic in the global warming crowd, just a wish for more government control.
> When an actual climate scientist says ...
Some of the well known climate scientists (apparently not "actual climate scientists") told us that San Francisco would be underwater by now.
If I wanted to use this information in a discussion, could you provide me with a reference so I am not accused of talking out of my ass?
The thesis of your argument is that other people base their opinions on something other than fact. But if we examine what you wrote:
."We need to a different way to communicate the threat" For all the reason stated above, you say the word communicate, but it seems you actually mean that other thing.
1. A. "This whole discussion is irrelevant. " This is purely your opinion. Other people may have read some of the honest parts of this discussion an found something new. Even if you are very smart, you simply can't determine relevancy for all people.
2. B. "They just won the White House, Congress, and the Senate in one swoop." This is just wrong on several levels.
C. In 2008, the democrats had control of all 3 parts of the U.S. government. The republicans won the house in 2010, not 2016. D. The republicans won the senate in 2014 not 2016. This is not one swoop, but three. One could argue that an increasing number of people seem to be growing very angry at something the democrats had done. The republican presidency is clearly not a random hiccup. E. "Facts do not matter." As it turned out, for the election, facts DID matter. Any intelligent person would acknowledge that there has been a disturbing trend of the U.S. press to hide negative facts about the democrat party. When some of these escaped via wikileaks, people's perception on Hillary and some of her policies began to chance. So, the facts really did matter. The question is, why are you so sure you have all the facts when so many indicators show that you probably do not.
F. "We can be here debating the minutiae of this data until the cows come home." In a post about people not examining facts, you make the absolutely hilarious assertion that facts should not be debated....
G. In your argument of facts should not be debated, you also make the amazing assertion that doing so would be a bad thing. In effect, you made a single emotionally charged statement that you feel all should obey.
H. The use of the word THEY means that you committing the sin of tribalism, which is generally bad. This has a tendency to limit ones world view and biases their perception of all ideas. In choosing a tribe, you are setting up an us versus them mentality. Sadly, the history of the world shows us that there are no perfect human institutions or movements. When you zealously identify with a group/cause/idea you lose the ability to deal with criticism or new ideas. In fact, someone usually will come along and warp the message and use the zealots to their own end. With this one word, you are demonstrating that you guilty of exactly what you are protesting about.You may have weighed arguments and decided democrats tend to be more correct, but if you can't see any flaws in any of their ideas or candidates, then you are a zealot.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
I pointed at a trend, examples to the contrary are not evidence against a trend. Or do you not know the meaning of the phrase "notoriously prone" ?
So no, a few scientists predicting to high is not evidence against my claim that most of time, most the scientists choose to underestimate when speaking to the public or the press. To disprove my claim of such a trend you would have to show evidence that such underestimations are rare, at the very least that the majority of public statements by active climate scientists have made predictions more severe than supported by the data or previous events.
Secondly - science is a group activity. did it ever occur to you that Richard Tol may have been wrong ? That in his dissagreement with the IPCC team - they were representing the findings fairly and he was just wrong about his interpretation ?
More-over do you GET that an IPCC report is NOT an example of "speaking to the public" at all ? Those reports are given to policymakers and the like - they DO tend to use the middle-of-the-range "most likely" figures. They are nothing like press releases - hell they aren't even like the press releases about themselves.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
...if the words coming out of Lamar Smith's mouth have anything vaguely to do with science then you can assume he's wrong (again... still...).
Now if only the idiots that keep voting him into office would quit that we'd have a much better world (until the next idiot republican comes along).
Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change, was coordinating lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
I think he may have been upset when they pointed out that that he'd swapped a minus sign for a plus sign in his study. When you use the correct sign the economic outlook is less rosy. He ultimately admitted to the mistake and issued a correction to the original paper.
Is linking to this comic strip in an article on climate change the latest way to get some cheap, easy mod points?
FUD usually "works" successfully in sales and politics. That's life.
Table-ized A.I.
In fact, humanity is almost certain to not survive even a largish asteroid hit unscathed. Billions could die in the immediate aftermath and most of the rest probably die in the long-term due to starvation.
It's a real possibility that cannot be ignored.
We should be spending our trillions of dollars to prevent that from happening! The argument is the same "Bad things might happen--or will certainly happen if other things happen first--so we should *do* *something* *about* *it*".
Some of us agree with the notion that pollution is bad, that humans have negatively affected the environment, and that human activities are probably (or even almost certainly) affecting the climate with AGW.
But we're still branded as "deniers" becuase we take strong issue with is the proposed "solutions". Few of which are science-based and almost all of which are based not on environmentalism but communism--wealth redistribution and punishment of the West. The elites preach about reducing carbon footprints while they drive a fleet of SUVs 200 yards to get from their hotel to their film festival, after arriving there in their private jets dumping untold tons of carbon into the atmosphere, having left their mansions that consume more resources than 20 of normal citizens' homes. But the rest of us need to live in caves and eat dirt, while they spend trillions. They want the population of the earth to be 500,000 people, assuming that they and theirs constitute the chosen half-million and the rest of us need to be gone.
Most of AGW "solutions" is that they are not science based, e.g. seeking to pump CO2 into subsea sequestration, but simply socialist wealth redistribution efforts, as clearly evidenced by the public statements of any number of high-profile AGW climateers...
Ottmar Edenhofer: "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole...We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy...the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated."
Christiana Figueres: "This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution...This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.
Naomi Klein: "What if global warming isn’t only a crisis...What if it's the best chance we’re ever going to get to build a better world?"
> most of time, most the scientists choose to underestimate when speaking to the public
Many scientists try to do a good job. Some scientists think (maybe correctly) that raising awareness and advocating for action is a good thing to do, and they try to do it thoroughly. I don't suppose either of us has evidence of what "most climate scientists" do, so maybe we can agree on this much:
Many climate scientists try to do a good job.
All climate scientists are human.
Some high-profile climate scientists are passionate about these issues.
When humans (including me) are passionate about issues, that affects our judgements.
Some (most?) climate scientists are employed by organisations which advocate political positions.
Agreed?
If you cry wolf enough times, you may eventually (finally) get it right once!
All the data sets used by "Berkeley Earth" have clock biases that alias minute-to-minute "records" on a yearly-repeat basis.
On a annual period the buoys drift to the equator (warm water) and the satellites "record" progressively toward the equator (warm water).
On a basis of error, the analysis and conclusions presented by the paper are irrelevant (errors too large, accuracy and precision not accountable, uncertainty incalculable).
Other than a "student's semester thesis at the last minute" the paper is worthless.
It'll keep right on orbiting the sun, and may eventually evolve different life forms long after we're gone.
Yeah, we might kill ourselves off and any number of our contemporary species with us, but the planet doesn't care and will not be put out at all.
The planet went along just fine when the cyanobacteria wiped out almost all other life on the planet by spewing toxic oxygen into the atmosphere.
The planet went along fine after the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.
The planet went along fine through multiple "snowball earth" cycles.
Quite aside from the hyperbolic name-calling, this is precisely the kind of nonsensical rhetoric that makes people turn from considering any case for warming.
Sea level rise, even if it is profoundly more than predicted, will "drown" no one. Because it is an extremely slow effect. You could have two broken legs, a large dog sitting on your back, and have your hands slipping in the mud when you tried to pull yourself along and you could still get away from sea level rise without any concerns of drowning. You can see it coming years, even decades, in advance, and you can step back at any time.
The ocean related problems to be concerned with are ocean environmental changes such as acidification and temperature change; the land-related problems to be looking into are temperature change and rainfall pattern change. The data is leading, fairly obviously, to effects in both areas.
Barring technical solutions (likely, frankly) or some forcing that isn't notably in play and is not accounted for, either some action will eventually have to be taken WRT greenhouse gas output, or eventually, there will in fact be serious problems. Which again, will not include drowning.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Amazingly enough, if you remove the original data and ONLY show the adjustments it maps exactly to the warming that they show.
Whats that? Someone took their data, compared it to the original data, and mapped their adjustments? And they got the warming trend shown EXACTLY?!?! That must be unpossible.
Story
So if we remove the adjustments, there is no warming at all and we have a stable temperature. I wonder what that means?
I brought up a tough point to counter. I bet its time for some name calling and down modding. I'm willing to bet you never knew this and deep down you are beginning to wonder which side is the denier of science.
What a cock-up. I'm afraid your typo has come home to roost. No, the fact is, hen temperature differences are inherent in the environment. I live in Montana, and I can almost guarantee that my hens aren't at the same temperature as your hens. If you even have any hens. You're probably just another non-hen-having Internet recliner pilot / warrior. Bet you're having trouble even trying to coop with this reply, aren't you? Well, relax. I'm only egging you on. Sitting quietly by the sidelines just isn't the happy spiritual experience it was cracked up to be. So I've hatched a few replies like this one. In the hopes of incubating some laying-about to push out some remarks. Pretty hard-boiled, eh? C'mon, shell out some appreciation. That'd be pretty white of you, actually.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
> Because it is an extremely slow effect. You could have two broken legs, a large dog sitting on your back, and have your hands slipping in the mud when you tried to pull yourself along and you could still get away from sea level rise without any concerns of drowning. You can see it coming years, even decades, in advance, and you can step back at any time.
What happens is that a large storm at high tide, which would normally have been an unpleasant day, is now a Katrina-like $100 billion disaster as miles of coastline is flooded and destroyed.
James Hansen director of Goddard Institute, NASA, 1988 by 2008 the West Side Highway will be underwater".
California Energy Commission, 1989 predicted sea level rise of 1.6 to 4.9 feet. Based on this, the National Environmental Trust published a map showing that 3 feet rise puts much of the bay area underwater. The "flooded San Francisco" map "went viral", to use today's terminology.
Some oldies but goodies:
Harvard biologist George Wald claimed that âoecivilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action.
Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich April 1970 âoeat least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.â
Professor Kenneth E.F. Watt at the University of California in 1970:
"The world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but 11 degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age."
More recently:
2005 United Nations Environment Programme:
2010, some 50 million "climate refugees" will flee the Caribbean as islands are inundated with water. (In fact the opposite has occurred - people are moving TO the Caribbean, making it among the fastest growingb regions in the world.)
Also from United Nations Environment Programme, director of the New York office:
"entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000."
October 2015:
Benjamin Strauss, proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says Hollywood is a goner by 2025.
2008:
James Hansen (NASA/Al Gore Science Advisor) says New York will be flooded in 2015, as portrayed by ABC News (this is probably a case of hyperbole on top of hyperbole, with ABC says stretching what Hansen had already stretched).
2006
You may recall Al Gore's ten-year "Doomesday Clock", which expired last year. Gore is not a scientist, he was the number one leader of the global warming movement.
Climate change aside, any island that "drowns" from the centimeter-class sea level rise we're actually talking about here was an incredibly poor place to set up shop.
There's no "environmental imperative" that says you can build or live any bloody unsafe place you want without taking the environment carefully into account. Try building your home on the edge of a swamp and complaining about the alligators on your porch. Or over a massive live cave system and then complaining about sinkholes.
The environment happens. Planning is called for. And if planning won't cut it, or wasn't really part of the original settlement circumstance, then moving is called for. Not whining about the water lapping a tiny bit further up the beach. Anyone who tries to float (hah) the argument that "but the islands are drowning" is an uninformed twerp.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's not every adjustment, but the ones which make the news.
It's also not surprising that the cleaner and more reliable the dataset, the more the data matches what is understood from laboratory-confirmed laws of physics.
Great quotes!
But no references. So I have too find them myself? You're not saving me much work!
What am I supposed to say when someone like this guy claims the first Hansen quote "doesn't mean what you say it means"?
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
PPP from what I read in the wiki sounds more like you are measuring inflation and difference of production ,say , between the US and germany, adding confusing factors. PPP is used generally to comapre countries productions/consumptions... In fact there is this sentence in the middle "When PPP comparisons are to be made over some interval of time, proper account needs to be made of inflationary effects". It sounds to me that in constant dollar or constant Euro, inflation removed, the difference is actually not as great as you indicate. Taking the GDP in constant euro ( or whichever currency http://www.tradingeconomics.co...) I get a rise from 500 to 700. Granted this is still good in efficiency, but it is not the meteoric rise you indicate.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I'll tell you that anybody with stars on his collar is likely to be highly political. Promotions at the top levels of the military require approvals from politicians.
The Navy takes its orders from the Command in Chief (Obama for the past 8 years) so when the CinC says "Run your ships on $60+ per gallon biofuels and write reports justifying that" the flag officers salute and say "Aye aye, sir!". This has been happening on a limited basis in the Obama years.
When decades of Navy experience says 12 carriers are needed to cover all the duties the navy has been assigned, but the CinC says to the Navy "you only need 10", those flag officers go to congress and testify that they do not need the additional ships. (Then people say "See! even the navy says it does not need those ships!", when in reality the navy flag officers are not expressing facts r personal opinions but the things they have been ordered to say). We currently have 10 carriers and will be back up to 11 when the Ford becomes active.
So, yeah, the navy keeps close tabs on sea conditions, but no, you cannot trust a damned thing the navy says to the public about sea conditions while the commander in chief is a global warming alarmist. Just look at what's become of NASA. They are wasting huge piles of space agency money on Earth climate research. NOAA is the proper agency for that work, but it does not have the same political/PR value to say to the public "NOAA says..." so there is a strong pressure from the left to keep distracting NASA with this garbage (and using NASA funds on it) rather than shifting it to the agency that actually has this stuff as its core mission. NASA was created from NACA and its charter refers to studying the atmosphere (NOT the climate). This is the fig leaf that AGW people hang their hat upon, but the NACA/NASA atmosphere study role was to enable the core mission of improving flight through, out of, and back into, the atmosphere.
In the Obama era, the executive branch of government was weaponized and used as a weapon in partisan political fights like never before. The IRS was (and still is being) used as a weapon against the TEA Party. The FBI, EPA, and ATF were used to supplement the IRS in attacking TEA Party people (the "friendly visits" these agencies paid to TEA Partiers coincided too closely with the IRS abuse to be pure chance). The EPA and BLM were used against rural people who tend to vote Republican. The immigration authorities were ordered to NOT enforce immigration laws in order to change the ethnic makeup of the nation for long-term political effect. The DoJ was used to punish any state that differed from the President on policies (Now with Trump coming in of course the people who supported that suddenyl seem to be afraid HE might follow their example). The military was ordered to embrace all sorts of policies (not just gay stuff) its leadership disagreed with, but they went along (so clearly they DO say things they do not agree with when so ordered).
The coverage is quite good and more than sufficient for evaluating global temperature trends (and much more besides!). In fact, the ARGO buoys are of sufficient resolution to be used in the study of mesoscale eddies!
Sounds like we agree on a lot.
> Unless you count "universities, museums, private research centers, thinktanks and organisations like the national geographic society and the American Geophysical Union" as "organisations which advocate political positions".
I do count them, in many cases, often based on their written objectives. It's interesting to me you started with "universities". You don't think the ivory towers of academia ever have just a bit of a political bent? Enjoy your safe space, I guess. ;)
You only mentioned two organizations by name, so let's look at one those. Here's what the National Geographic Society says their goals are:
ABOUT THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY
The National Geographic Society is a global nonprofit organization committed to exploring and protecting our planet. We fund hundreds of research and conservation projects around the world each year
Which do you think an organization "committed to protecting our planet [through) conservation projects" is likely to weigh more heavily, protecting the planet or protecting the economy from the costs of misguided policies based on overblown rhetoric? If National Geographic and the Chamber of Commerce issued a joint report on climate change, I would expect that to be fairly balanced between the two concerns.
If a cancer doctor writes an article saying "everybody needs to eat more, and avoid sun exposure", a phys ed coach says "make time to be outdoors more", a pastor says "make more time for prayer and meditation", a self-defense expert says "make more time to learn self-defense", and a financial expert says "make time to write a monthly budget each month, and to review your investments", I won't be surprised, and I won't magically have an extra 8 hours each day to do all of these things. All of those people are trying to be helpful, and they are all focused on what they care about, what THEY think is important. It may be that where I need to spend more time is cuddling with my young child.
Before she finally resigned, being exorcised as a heretic by the high priests of the religion of global warming, she was being called all sorts of names by you sciencey purists. Calling the woman a slut was one of the most scientific arguments her opponents had against her, not that they were being mysogenists or anything, oh no...
The treatment of critics of AGW by supporters of AGW is one of the biggest bits of evidence the whole thing is a scam. Real, solid science does not require the rigging of the peer review process or the paper publishing process nor does it require protesters demanding that the heretics be fired, nor does it demand the de-funding of people who disagree, nor does it require females or minorities who disagree to be attacked based on their gender or skin color, nor does it demand that people getting funded by some sources supposed to align with one side be ignored as biased and tainted while people funded by the opposing interests are presumed pure as the wind-driven snow....
oh...
and real science does not require continual "re-calibration" and ongoing "adjustments" to measurements to smooth-out any data points that critics point to as counter-evidence. If all this massaging of data was truly valid and correct then why was it not done initially? Were the initial presenters of the data incompetent? Actually the answer is more simple - the entire thing is based on a mountain of invalid scientific practice: mixing data from dissimilar instruments without common traceable calibration. Even if done with the best motives and intentions, it's still totally invalid and there's just no honest way to fix this original sin.
I appreciate the tone of your posts.
If James Hansen wants to dispute that quote, fine. You'll notice I included another quote from him, not from the same article. He's very well known, serving on many high-profile committees over many years, and he has a tendency to make predictions that turn out to be wildly incorrect.
Obviously this doesn't mean that everything anyone ever said about AGW is wrong. It just means that there has been some scare-mongering.
Unfortunately, when I removed this section ("Overcoming skepticism due to past hyperbole"), from my paper, I didn't keep the formal references in a place I'm easily able to find them now. I'm sure if you plug any of the quotes above, for which I've named the sources, you can find the formal reference in seconds.
This just in.
At a press meeting in Austin Texas, Lamar Smith claimed the square root of 5 is equal to 2 for small values of 5.
Lets see how many "tolerant" progressives show how enlightened they are by down modding as Troll and then AC posting a very unpersuasive F-U to my post because they "feel" so strongly that they must be right. Just remember that ad homonym is the last bastion of a dying argument.
The entire CO2/anthropogenic global warming argument is a canard, and is only believed by the climate "scientists" whose jobs/grants depend on it and those without a degree in hard physical science or those who just believe whatever their told. The "all scientists believe global warming" bullshit came from a cherry picked poll with no scientific methodology and therefore no accuracy and they are following the Nazi path that a lie told long enough and loud enough will be believed. Truth is many climate scientists do not agree with global warming; I can point to dozens, and that is not an exhaustive list by any means, those are just people willing to be abused in the name of truth by the fascist global warming nuts. The rest of us would like to keep our day jobs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The reality is that plant growth on land/in oceans is limited by atmospheric/free CO2. Right now environuts are running around with their hair on fire because they say CO2 is at 400 PPM (parts per million) or 0.04%, which in and of its self is debatable (cities and power plants among others create localized plumes of elevated CO2, if your monitoring is anywhere near a plume, then you are measuring the plume instead of true ambient levels).
Here are a few facts: Every fossil fuel that is burned today was once living matter, either plant or animal (undisputed fact). Thus it was once part of the natural CO2 planetary cycle and at a time when life was flourishing. But somehow, re-adding that carbon to the planetary system after being trapped in coal or oil or natural gas deposits will throw the world out of balance and make the world too hot to be habitable? Completely irrational on the face of it.
More facts: The oceans contain 37.4T tons of suspended carbon, land biomass has 2000-3000B tons. The atmosphere contains 720B tons of CO2 and humans contribute only 6B tons additional load on this balance. The oceans, land and atmosphere exchange CO2 continuously so the additional load by humans is ~0.0146% of the overall global exchange. A 1% change in the balance between oceans and air would cause a CO2 change 71 times larger than anything we could produce. Anyone who thinks that natural interchanges like this don't vary over time by more than 0.015% is an idiot and no student of history. We know for a fact that the planet has been both much hotter and much cooler than current day.
http://www.climate4you.com/ima...
https://noconsensus.wordpress....
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
They're heating the greenhouse with waste heat from the refinery. They're enriching the air in the greenhouse with CO2 from the refinery. These are unrelated except they both come from the refinery.
The CO2 doesn't significantly affect the temperature in the greenhouse. It makes the plants grow faster.
Greenhouses work by preventing convection of heat (generated by absorption of sunlight which entered through the transparent walls) away into the higher atmosphere. A square meter of full-on sunlight provides about a kilowatt of heating.
Should read Lamar Smith (R-TX, not a scientist, Christian Scientist, believes that reality is purely spiritual and the material world an illusion)
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
And your straw-man of the congressman's math is... just pathetic.
This isn't just true of PPP GDP, any kind of GDP or price comparison over time needs to take inflation into account. I used a World Bank analysis prepared from ORNL data and presumably the bank knows to adjust for inflation. The reason to use PPP is what matters is the amount of consumption enabled per CO2 emitted. If a bushel of wheat costs 10x in Syria what it costs in Russia, should we value a bushel of wheat produced in Syria 10x as much as one produced in Russia? For some purposes, yes, but for this purpose no.
It's impossible to do a precise comparison of standards of living across time periods because things change. How do you compare the value of computers from 1990 to the value of computers today? However if you look at the major industrial countries of Europe in general they've reduced per capita CO2 while increasing per capita GDP, often dramatically. So it's safe to say they're getting more CO2 efficient, even if we can't be entirely sure how to precisely calculate that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not really sure why your post is modded funny. Seems insightful, and not in the least bit amusing?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You wrote a lot of good stuff in these last two posts. I'm going to focus on the one point where we don't see eye-to-eye.
> It's a reality issue. You can't eat, drink or breath money. The world is ALWAYS the more important of the two
Money (and more generally, resources) does in fact buy food, clean water, and less directly clean air. You know those commercials for charities that say "just a dollar a day will feed a hungry child"? They're not lying. They spin, of course, but it's basically true. One example, fertilizers and pesticides help crops grow. If the world used no fertilizers or pesticides, many people would starve. On the other hand, they havev varying degrees of environmental impact. Good policy is about balancing those things.
Washing out a greasy paper towel so you can recycle it would have some benefit to environment, but it's not worth it. Recycling a clean aluminium can *is* worth it. It would be better for the environment if you weren't using electricity to read this, but you've decided that the minor environmental impact isn't worth giving up Slashdot.
With AGW, there is a meta-issue. As discussed, the lead authors of the UN papers on climate change disagree significantly, with one lead author saying the paper is alarmist. We don't KNOW quite what the environmental impact, or the economic impact, of some of these proposals might be. You wouldn't give up half your annual income in order to recycle a bag of cans, the benefit wouldn't be worth the cost. It's all about balancing costs and benefits.
We must be careful about this common pattern:
X is a problem. Something must be done!
Proposal Y is something.
Therefore, Y must be done.
Very often, Y isn't a good way of solving X, sometimes it has nothing to with problem X. (Frequent example: high profile shooting, using a handgun. Proposed solution: ban RIFLES.) Other times, proposal Y may mitigate problem X by $z worth, but cost $z,000. That makes it a bad idea.
So there are no priests, no heretics,none of that crap. if you are manufacturing such entities, then this is because you don't know what science is and have a problem with it,both of which indicate you are not able to judge what is going on in science.
PS The scientists who pushed the piltdown man were also treated just like Judith was. As far as you know, for the same reason.
If a cancer doctor tells you "stop smoking" and you respond by saying "I don't have time! I'm gonna cuddle my young child instead" -- you're a muppet.
> If a cancer doctor tells you "stop smoking" and you respond by saying "I don't have time! I'm gonna cuddle my young child instead" -- you're a muppet.
If I'm cuddling the kid, I'm not smoking. Just sayin'. :)
Funny thing is, for me, the next first step to stop smoking is spending time with my daughter - motivation.
Ok: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data...
This is cute but completely irrelevant. Global warming due to a higher partial pressure of CO2 is an inevitable consequence of basic physics. Then we have a strong feedback effect from H2O. There are no known negative feedbacks strong enough to prevent warming from happening (and yes, clouds have been examined in detail). Ergo, the Earth must be warming, no matter whether the GMS are right or wrong. The models are based on physical laws, you need those laws to be wrong in order for AGW to not be a thing.
Also, as I keep pointing out, rejecting climate science because you think the GCMs are wrong is like rejecting the germ theory of disease because your epidemiological model wasn't sufficiently predictive.