This is a complicated problem, but it turns out that it is one amenable to numerical integration. There are now very good simulations.
This is rubbish. The numerical problem is confounded by the gridded nature of most model simulations, with grid resolution being too low to effectively model natural processes such as turbulence, which, by the way, completely alter the outcome. Moreover, not enough is known about things such as cloud formation, the sun or the oceans to generate plausible models. The models we do have use hind-casting techniques to calibrate their output to recorded temperature history and are then run forward, in a kind of curve fitting excersise. This is, frankly, about as naive and silly a way of predicting the future as I can imagine.
I'm not sure why this was modded "insightful". The assumption isn't whether it's linear or non-linear, it's whether feedbacks are net positive or negative. There are reasons to believe they are negative and that the models are wrong. There is no evidence for the kind of strong positive feedback this prediction requires. Indeed positive feedbacks are rare in nature, exhibiting as they do greater instability.
But anyway, the idea that this "complex feedback cycle" is understood well enough to provide any predictive power through modelling is, to be frank, laughable.
Karma be damned indeed;).
What you say is true, but this is the problem: how to setup a system that provides the opportunity for private profit, individual recognition, but that also promotes integrity? This is not about Science as such, it's more about the human condition, isn't it? Scientists are Human, they are fallible. The balancing mechanism here is scepticism of scientific results. If they are valid, they will stand the test of time. If not, there's no harm done. The problem occurs where science intersects policy and informs political decision making. It's difficult to know what the agenda is on either side. For example, governments can brow beat Scientists to produce the results they'd prefer to see and scientists can brow beat governments into changing policy on their advice. We've seen this recently in the UK with our Home Secretary firing a scientist who gave a speech against government policy. But we also see it with policies such as DDT, where a perfectly safe anti-Malaria chemical was banned for 40 years, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of people, on scientific advice.
How to square this circle? I'm afraid my brain isn't large enough. Truth be told, I don't think anyone's is; we just have to muddle along with our raised eyebrows.
But you're demonstrating here the process of adaptation. To say we must plan effectively so far into the future is whimsical; I don't believe it can be done. We seem to have a problem: the GCM's predict the future out to 2100/2200. How? It's no more credible to predict future climate than it is to predict future city planning requirements. Think about city plans 100 years ago. How realistic would they have been projected 100 years hence? They would have taken into account the horse, not the car. Your plan has to be flexible; it has to make room for unforseen events. I think basing it on unreliable and unverifiable computer models is more than a little conceited.
Just might work too. American's are sick of the Iraq war, and this is being carefully positioned to look like a solution that will reduce the need for foreign adventures in the middle east.
Well, that's my point exactly. Energy security is an issue when you have to place your tanks in a foreign country to secure it. But why not just be honest about it? I don't think undermining public trust in the integrity of the scientific process is going to ultimately benefit the position. If my Government said, "we're going to add 2p to the income tax rate and spend that money on research and development into alternative energy and energy efficiency technology to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels", I'd sign on. It seems to me that recourse to deceit is a kind-of reflex action.
The fact that tree ring sizes are dependent on temperature has been a long established fact.
Sorry, but this isn't so. Tree ring sizes are dependent on a variety of factors, many of which cannot be isolated from ring width alone. Temperature is just one factor and may not even be the most important limiting factor for growth.
That's true but it kind-of destroys the "integrity of the Scientific method" argument often used in debates between proponents and sceptics. I think that's the only point being made here. Science is no longer the egalitarian, leisurely pursuit of wealthy country gents as it was back in the 19th century; everyone has an agenda nowdays.
CO2 emissions mitigation policies cost money (as does climate change itself), but they're not going to destroy the economy or "roll back the industrial revolution". Sheesh . That's the skeptic scare version of "global warming alarmism". FUID against climate policy is at least as bad, if not worse, than FUD against climate science. More here on the economics of climate policy, and a good book.
My reference to rolling back the industrial revolution refers to the Green agenda, which at its heart is exactly that. I read Konrad Lorenz when I was a radical greenie at University, so I think I understand the general philosophy (anti-technocracy). I don't say it's shared by those Scientists (some of whom are activists, such as James Hansen) referenced in the emails, but I think it informs at least the extremist end of the AGW political spectrum.
On the economics of climate policy, "green jobs" and a "green economy" are a fantasy as long as green energy has to compete with fossil fuels. That it will do so in terms of global trade, will put the West at a big competitive disadvantage. The only solution here is to raise the trade barriers again. Either way, it's going to be more expensive than mitigation or adaptation (assuming worst case scenarios aren't realised - a reasonable assumption in my view).
On a philosophical level, adaptation is the only rational policy. It's served Humanity well for a hundred thousand years; I see no reason why it shouldn't continue to do so.
Well that is to the point I think. Lindzen and Choi may well reply to the criticism, I believe that's how it works. I'm not holding this up as the answer, only using it to demonstrate that there is discussion and yet no fact of the matter. On the debate as a whole, I would be very nervous indeed as a politician hanging a trillion dollar policy on Scientists with present levels of understanding.
So I'm going to go out on a limb and say I should see about a 1000-fold to 1 million fold greater inclination to lie about
the situation on the part of those who think the status quo is just dandy.
Obviously there are economic interests on both sides. What many people don't realise is that banks like Goldman Sachs are full-square behind policies like Cap & Trade. As traders they get to slice and dice contract payments, hedge them etc and make a huge amount of money. There are billions to be lost or gained either way and these institutions are powerful lobbies. I also think that the billions being funnelled into Global Warming research, on an institutional level, can't be dismissed entirely especially when you consider "pitching" for funding is always going to be more successful if the proposal maintains topicality. There are powerful motivations, conscious or subconsious, to promote your particular view whichever side you are on.
The only conspiracy theory on either side that I'm sympathetic to is the concept of energy security (as a national security issue). Actually conspiracy is the wrong word to use; I would say AGW is a convenient policy hook to hang your energy security hat on if you're a politician. Obviously others have different motives (the Greens for instance). Either way, the waters are muddy and although I believe temperature has increased, I don't believe Earth's climate system involves powerful positive feedbacks and so I don't believe the temperature projections that raise trivial temperature increases into catastophic warming scenarios. It is a question of belief of course, because the models are demonstrably wrong (although obviously not when they hind-cast!).
1. Sun heats Earth with radiation in many wavelengths. Lots of optical-band + ultraviolet.
2. Solar radiation interacts with matter on Earth and heats Earth.
3. Some of the heat re-radiates upwards away from Earth, but much of the radiation is now in
the lower energy infrared band, since some energy has gone into heating Earth.
4. CO2, methane etc molecules in atmosphere reflect infrared radiation back down to Earth, heating Earth more.
5. Humans are pumping lots of carbon out of the ground, and burning forests that store carbon. This carbon is being
released into atmosphere as CO2, methane etc. Increasing CO2, methane etc concentrations in atmosphere
(concentration of these molecules in atmosphere is roughly doubled so far compared to recent thousands/10s of thousands of years.)
6. So there is now net heating of the Earth, due to this excess trapping of Infrared radiation by reflection.
Theory 3, the Earth warms, the heat is radiated back out into space. The warmer it gets, the more heat is radiated back into space. Some evidence, for example Lindzen and Choi, for low climate sensitivity:
Climate feedbacks are estimated from fluctuations in the outgoing radiation budget from the latest version of Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) nonscanner data. It appears, for the entire tropics, the observed outgoing radiation fluxes increase with the increase in sea surface temperatures (SSTs). The observed behavior of radiation fluxes implies negative feedback processes associated with relatively low climate sensitivity. This is the opposite of the behavior of 11 atmospheric models forced by the same SSTs. Therefore, the models display much higher climate sensitivity than is inferred from ERBE, though it is difficult to pin down such high sensitivities with any precision. Results also show, the feedback in ERBE is mostly from shortwave radiation while the feedback in the models is mostly from longwave radiation. Although such a test does not distinguish the mechanisms, this is important since the inconsistency of climate feedbacks constitutes a very fundamental problem in climate prediction.
So this PR campaign is softening up the target of your mind to make it easier for you to accept that failure.
I'm kind-of a little gob-smacked that you can think this. The PR has been all "warming" for a decade or more. Press releases for every paper, no-matter how ridiculous, linking {fill in the blank} to Global Warming have been routinely published, discussed and editorialised in mainstream media publications, with utter credulity and no raised eyebrow whatsoever. The sceptics have generally been dismissed or ignored.
I've noticed recently, however, say over the last year or so, that comments sections on "warmist" mainstream media articles are overwhelmed with sceptics. The public just don't believe it any more and the newspapers and media are starting to reflect that. I would say that the "warmists" have overplayed their hand, with barely credible predictions of disaster, exaggeration, blatant spin and a seeming inability to accept any criticism. Their proposed policy responses to this (possibly) imaginary problem are unrealistic. I don't think the general public are up for rolling back the industrial revolution, or enacting an economic scorched Earth policy for the benefit of one half of one degree, within the bounds of natural variation and quite possibly outside of the bounds of measurement error.
Excellent post. You're underlining the simple concept that if you want to lose weight, you have to eat less. But there are some complications here. For example, if I eat refined carbs, even in small amounts, I always put on weight. For every 1lb of carb I eat, I seem to gain another 1lb of water. That's why when I diet I usually drop 6 - 8lb in the first week: it's almost all water. Exercise does almost nothing for my weight whatsoever. I cycled twice a day (to and from work) but still gained weight. What seems to happen is actually doing the exercise makes you feel hungry and more likely to over-eat, but because you've had a good workout the guilt isn't there. I also find carbs to be somewhat addictive. It takes a good few weeks of going without to stop needing them daily.
If I want to lose weight, I generally go very low carb, stop drinking caffine/diet drinks and don't eat late in the evenings. Exercise doesn't really factor into it. If you do too much at once, you'll burn-out and lose the motivation to continue.
The models are only as reliable as the known science.
Not even that reliable, because as I've pointed out before, the resolution they run at is too low to take many other effects into account. You can calibrate a model to give desired results (and they do), but as soon as you run it 1 minute past the end of your calibration period, you've lost your ability to predict anything useful from it, except through chance of course. Your local weather forecast is ample evidence of that. But anyway, I don't need to attack models, just look at their output. Did they predict the current trending level/downward temperature trend? No. Case closed! How much divergence do you want before you stand up and say "it's no longer good enough"? Because as the models are continually calibrated against past data, they will always look as if they match it, except of course their predictions will always be wrong. But nobody cares about that. The predictions of the models are for marketing impact (as long as the bar is going up). People in industry who use models know that their predictive power is severely limited. If you don't believe me, just wonder in amazement that nobody predicted the recent economic crash!
With respect to credible evidence, here's the problem: there is no credible evidence on the side of those linking man, co2 and temperature. That is to say, there are various hockey sticks that show that the late 20th century was quite warm, yes, but there's no evidence that it's unprecedented (hence the need to get rid of the medieval warm period in order to make the temperature look unprecedented - which is what James Hansen and Michael Mann actually did in their hockey stick - which was peer reviewed and published, until Steve McIntyre pointed out you could get the same shape from red noise). Indeed, I've already posted a link above showing how easy it is to generate hockey sticks from random noise, which is what a lot of these climatologists are basically doing.
Given that 20th century temperature change is well within the bounds of natural variation, what you've got in effect, is a political movement/religion, promoting a hypothesis and people like you coming here to defend it. It's very hard to shift an established paradigm. It's very hard to publish against it in the same journals, too. So overturning it with Science isn't going to be easy, but it is happening, slowly. For example, Svensmark's recent paper about cloud condensation nuclei increasing after forbasch events, or Steve McIntyre's recent analysis of Keith Briffa's studies (showing they only used around 10 tree cores to get their graph!). I don't deny temperature increased in the late 20th century, but I do think that the reason for the increase is not well understood and is unlikely to be man-made.
And as always, there's the appeal to authority:
don't have a degree in climatology (and clearly, neither do you), so what makes you think you know enough to contradict the scientific community?
I'm smart enough to understand the papers and I do read them. I'm smart enough to understand the principles. I'm smart enough to understand the criticisms and I'm smart enough to know that Scientists are Human and Humans are fallible. I'm smart enough to be able to make a decision about whom to believe. There is no bar to understanding here. I see press spinning research press releases every day (hell, our company even does it). At the end of the day, the criticisms I point out come from real experts on Statistics (mathematicians), not Climate Scientists, who perhaps do one or two Stats classes at University. My criticisms come from Atmospheric Physicists', who know how accurate the models actually are. So, you know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's all a question of which side you consider more credible.
Can you grow, gather, or hunt for your own food? If not you'll be depending on those who can, like me. I've hunted with nothing but a knife, can weave a net, and know where to look for drinking water. I have also preserved my own food, by canning, dehydrating or drying, and by smoking it.
I guessed you'd been smoking it already. I live in a modern society. I have all of the benefits of technocracy and progress at my disposal. If you can get by with just a knife, a net and your own urine, then good for you. I'd rather go to a supermarket in my car, thanks very much.
If the effect of the NAO is greater than previously thought, then obviously the Science up to this point is wrong/incomplete - hence the models are wrong, hence their predictions are not to be trusted, hence why are we even discussing, "only 5 years left to save the world" (every 5 years, by the way). The second point is that these sites distinguish between "the met office" and individuals working for the met office. "the met office" publishes its hopeless predictions, in the form of alarmist press releases. It has a line on the issue and has gained an enormous funding boost (including an ironically power hungry super computer) from promoting the paradigm. Individuals, offering hypothesis and discussing the science are a different entity. There's a buffer of marketing people inbetween those doing the Science, the institutions they work for and the media (with the exception of certain activist Scientists, such as James Hansen). Watts particularly sets himself against the marketing spin.
Is New Scientist your only source of information on this issue? If it is, I think that's a little myopic. Here's a quote from a New Scientist article:
Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world's top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.
"People will say this is global warming disappearing," he told more than 1500 of the world's top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN's World Climate Conference.
"I am not one of the sceptics," insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. "However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it."
Consider my posts on this issue to be "asking nasty questions". That you are so sure of the facts is something that I find inexplicable.
Troll.
Absolute nonsense. Scientist have pretty good ideas of what the PH levels have been based on oceanic deposits over time. It may not give the finest granularity but it provides insights into how the ocean chemistry has changed over the planet's history. Tie that into the fossil record and it's not hard to make some decent approximations to how life forms evolved with the oceans over long time scales.
Remember, a troll is not someone who disagrees with you. The fact of the matter is that although pH in seawater has been measured for many decades, a reliable long- term trend of ocean water pH cannot be established due to data quality issues, in particular the lack of strict and stable calibration procedures and standards. Moreover, seawater pH is very sensitive to temperature, and temperature is not always recorded or measured at sufficient accuracy to constrain the pH measurement. (reference: a "pro" AGW paper here).
And more to the point, there is no "ideal" anything. There are ideal conditions for humans to survive. There are ideal conditions for keeping our food chain alive. There are ideal conditions for this, that, and the other. But there is no grand ideal for life on this planet (hence evolution). No one is arguing that the planet doesn't change over time.
Sure they are. That's why they had to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period. No there isn't an ideal anything. That being the case what the fuck is this whole argument about?
As far as human impacts are concerned, only a complete idiot with no understanding of dynamics would argue that we are having no impact. We've have acid rain. We've have the ozone hole. These two incidents alone demonstrate how our activities directly influence the planet on large scales.
Have I at any point said we are having no impact on the Environment? No, I haven't. I'm sorry for your straw man here but your point has absolutely nothing to do with anything I've said. It's certainly true that this whole ridiculous scare over CO2 is distracting attention and resources from those very causes you may hold close to your heart. Shoot yourself in the foot, if you like.
Now the extent of our impact, the results of said impact, and what we should do about it are all open for debate. The scientists job is to figure this out and help inform those who make decisions. This is not a few "activist" scientist, my Glen Beck worshiping ignoramus. This is the global scientific community who happen to be the best experts on the subject. I'm far more inclined to listen to them than some self-important internet troll with an agenda to feed.
As I have no idea who Glen Beck is, I'm afraid I have to avoid answering this point, except to say that the best experts on the subject of, say, stomach ulcers, or Geology, some time ago, were not believers in plate tectonics or the Helicobacter pylori bacterium. Yes, Scientists can be wrong. Yes, they often are wrong. Yes, it's very hard to get papers published that counter the current scare. Wegman showed why (hint: those same people promoting the paradigm are the same people who will have to comment on your paper before it's published).
You can disagree with a scientific conclusion, but you'd better have something more than Hannity sound bites to back up your claim. To date, there has not been any reputable group of scientists that can explain away our current observations without taking into account human factors. There's no shortage of critics and skeptics, but you don't disprove a scientific theory by mere criticism nor do it show it's false just because you think so. That's the great thing about science.
The fact that you spout off a bunch of conspiracy theory drivel (it's all scientists driven by grants and "publish by press release") and then make up a bunch of totally unsupported theories about "we don't know what the ideal pH of the ocean is" and "hey, it'll all just adapt" tells me you've bought into the Big Conservative Lie.
I'm not a Conservative and, frankly, in my country there's not much difference between any of the parties with respect to "global warming". All of them uncritically accept it without question, throwing their rationality out of the window along with all common sense, as you seem to have. For there to be a conspiracy, there has to be a secret. But there are no secrets here; it's all available to you if you care to read the criticisms and counter arguments to much of this work. There is no secret that Goldman Sachs is lobbying for Cap & Trade and stands to make billions from it. There's no secret that Al Gore has interests in Carbon Offset companies, even going as far as to offset his own Carbon use by making payments to his own company. You can choose to ignore things like this and assume they are acting with the best of intentions, but as I'm not an idiot like you, I don't.
If you want to argue with the science, you need to use science.
Here's a clue: the Scientific Process is broken, particularly in Climate Science. How else can papers such as Steig, Briffa, Mann, et al actually get published in the first place? These guys have been farming hockey sticks for a living for the past two decades and, despite eminent Mathematicians pointing out the folly of their methods, some links to which I have provided in this discussion, they are still held up by people like you as "experts". You can disagree with Wegman if you like, but I think you're on shaky ground if your argument rests on Authority. Wegman IS an authority. The guys he critiques in his paper aren't trained mathematicians, but they're inventing statistical techniques Wegman clearly shows are wrong in their papers. Steve McIntyre and Ross McIntrick (the former is a Mathematician and Statistician) show the same follies in paper after paper. Do you care? No, you don't read it, because you only read stories that confirm your already held position. It's called bias.
Finally, if you don't think institutions aren't farming government grant money through hyping up alarmist press releases, then I'm afraid you're very naive and, frankly, an idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
This is rubbish. The numerical problem is confounded by the gridded nature of most model simulations, with grid resolution being too low to effectively model natural processes such as turbulence, which, by the way, completely alter the outcome. Moreover, not enough is known about things such as cloud formation, the sun or the oceans to generate plausible models. The models we do have use hind-casting techniques to calibrate their output to recorded temperature history and are then run forward, in a kind of curve fitting excersise. This is, frankly, about as naive and silly a way of predicting the future as I can imagine.
I'm not sure why this was modded "insightful". The assumption isn't whether it's linear or non-linear, it's whether feedbacks are net positive or negative. There are reasons to believe they are negative and that the models are wrong. There is no evidence for the kind of strong positive feedback this prediction requires. Indeed positive feedbacks are rare in nature, exhibiting as they do greater instability. But anyway, the idea that this "complex feedback cycle" is understood well enough to provide any predictive power through modelling is, to be frank, laughable. Karma be damned indeed ;).
What you say is true, but this is the problem: how to setup a system that provides the opportunity for private profit, individual recognition, but that also promotes integrity? This is not about Science as such, it's more about the human condition, isn't it? Scientists are Human, they are fallible. The balancing mechanism here is scepticism of scientific results. If they are valid, they will stand the test of time. If not, there's no harm done. The problem occurs where science intersects policy and informs political decision making. It's difficult to know what the agenda is on either side. For example, governments can brow beat Scientists to produce the results they'd prefer to see and scientists can brow beat governments into changing policy on their advice. We've seen this recently in the UK with our Home Secretary firing a scientist who gave a speech against government policy. But we also see it with policies such as DDT, where a perfectly safe anti-Malaria chemical was banned for 40 years, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of people, on scientific advice.
How to square this circle? I'm afraid my brain isn't large enough. Truth be told, I don't think anyone's is; we just have to muddle along with our raised eyebrows.
But you're demonstrating here the process of adaptation. To say we must plan effectively so far into the future is whimsical; I don't believe it can be done. We seem to have a problem: the GCM's predict the future out to 2100/2200. How? It's no more credible to predict future climate than it is to predict future city planning requirements. Think about city plans 100 years ago. How realistic would they have been projected 100 years hence? They would have taken into account the horse, not the car. Your plan has to be flexible; it has to make room for unforseen events. I think basing it on unreliable and unverifiable computer models is more than a little conceited.
Well, that's my point exactly. Energy security is an issue when you have to place your tanks in a foreign country to secure it. But why not just be honest about it? I don't think undermining public trust in the integrity of the scientific process is going to ultimately benefit the position. If my Government said, "we're going to add 2p to the income tax rate and spend that money on research and development into alternative energy and energy efficiency technology to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels", I'd sign on. It seems to me that recourse to deceit is a kind-of reflex action.
Sorry, but this isn't so. Tree ring sizes are dependent on a variety of factors, many of which cannot be isolated from ring width alone. Temperature is just one factor and may not even be the most important limiting factor for growth.
That's true but it kind-of destroys the "integrity of the Scientific method" argument often used in debates between proponents and sceptics. I think that's the only point being made here. Science is no longer the egalitarian, leisurely pursuit of wealthy country gents as it was back in the 19th century; everyone has an agenda nowdays.
My reference to rolling back the industrial revolution refers to the Green agenda, which at its heart is exactly that. I read Konrad Lorenz when I was a radical greenie at University, so I think I understand the general philosophy (anti-technocracy). I don't say it's shared by those Scientists (some of whom are activists, such as James Hansen) referenced in the emails, but I think it informs at least the extremist end of the AGW political spectrum.
On the economics of climate policy, "green jobs" and a "green economy" are a fantasy as long as green energy has to compete with fossil fuels. That it will do so in terms of global trade, will put the West at a big competitive disadvantage. The only solution here is to raise the trade barriers again. Either way, it's going to be more expensive than mitigation or adaptation (assuming worst case scenarios aren't realised - a reasonable assumption in my view).
On a philosophical level, adaptation is the only rational policy. It's served Humanity well for a hundred thousand years; I see no reason why it shouldn't continue to do so.
Well that is to the point I think. Lindzen and Choi may well reply to the criticism, I believe that's how it works. I'm not holding this up as the answer, only using it to demonstrate that there is discussion and yet no fact of the matter. On the debate as a whole, I would be very nervous indeed as a politician hanging a trillion dollar policy on Scientists with present levels of understanding.
Obviously there are economic interests on both sides. What many people don't realise is that banks like Goldman Sachs are full-square behind policies like Cap & Trade. As traders they get to slice and dice contract payments, hedge them etc and make a huge amount of money. There are billions to be lost or gained either way and these institutions are powerful lobbies. I also think that the billions being funnelled into Global Warming research, on an institutional level, can't be dismissed entirely especially when you consider "pitching" for funding is always going to be more successful if the proposal maintains topicality. There are powerful motivations, conscious or subconsious, to promote your particular view whichever side you are on.
The only conspiracy theory on either side that I'm sympathetic to is the concept of energy security (as a national security issue). Actually conspiracy is the wrong word to use; I would say AGW is a convenient policy hook to hang your energy security hat on if you're a politician. Obviously others have different motives (the Greens for instance). Either way, the waters are muddy and although I believe temperature has increased, I don't believe Earth's climate system involves powerful positive feedbacks and so I don't believe the temperature projections that raise trivial temperature increases into catastophic warming scenarios. It is a question of belief of course, because the models are demonstrably wrong (although obviously not when they hind-cast!).
Theory 3, the Earth warms, the heat is radiated back out into space. The warmer it gets, the more heat is radiated back into space. Some evidence, for example Lindzen and Choi, for low climate sensitivity:
I'm kind-of a little gob-smacked that you can think this. The PR has been all "warming" for a decade or more. Press releases for every paper, no-matter how ridiculous, linking {fill in the blank} to Global Warming have been routinely published, discussed and editorialised in mainstream media publications, with utter credulity and no raised eyebrow whatsoever. The sceptics have generally been dismissed or ignored.
I've noticed recently, however, say over the last year or so, that comments sections on "warmist" mainstream media articles are overwhelmed with sceptics. The public just don't believe it any more and the newspapers and media are starting to reflect that. I would say that the "warmists" have overplayed their hand, with barely credible predictions of disaster, exaggeration, blatant spin and a seeming inability to accept any criticism. Their proposed policy responses to this (possibly) imaginary problem are unrealistic. I don't think the general public are up for rolling back the industrial revolution, or enacting an economic scorched Earth policy for the benefit of one half of one degree, within the bounds of natural variation and quite possibly outside of the bounds of measurement error.
Studies have shown that caffeine contributes to insulin resistance, thus making it harder to lose weight.
Excellent post. You're underlining the simple concept that if you want to lose weight, you have to eat less. But there are some complications here. For example, if I eat refined carbs, even in small amounts, I always put on weight. For every 1lb of carb I eat, I seem to gain another 1lb of water. That's why when I diet I usually drop 6 - 8lb in the first week: it's almost all water. Exercise does almost nothing for my weight whatsoever. I cycled twice a day (to and from work) but still gained weight. What seems to happen is actually doing the exercise makes you feel hungry and more likely to over-eat, but because you've had a good workout the guilt isn't there. I also find carbs to be somewhat addictive. It takes a good few weeks of going without to stop needing them daily.
If I want to lose weight, I generally go very low carb, stop drinking caffine/diet drinks and don't eat late in the evenings. Exercise doesn't really factor into it. If you do too much at once, you'll burn-out and lose the motivation to continue.
I know this is slashdot, but saying Windows 7 is not Ubuntu is just plain ridiculous.
The article waffled on a bit and at the end of it I'd learnt absolutely nothing, because they didn't actually say anything.
Indeed, I get most of my games from Steam! I haven't seen a retail game box for years.
Would you care to show some figures to go along with your wild assertions?
This guy goes all the way back to Doom. It's almost as if he was, you know, in his mid-twenties!
Not even that reliable, because as I've pointed out before, the resolution they run at is too low to take many other effects into account. You can calibrate a model to give desired results (and they do), but as soon as you run it 1 minute past the end of your calibration period, you've lost your ability to predict anything useful from it, except through chance of course. Your local weather forecast is ample evidence of that. But anyway, I don't need to attack models, just look at their output. Did they predict the current trending level/downward temperature trend? No. Case closed! How much divergence do you want before you stand up and say "it's no longer good enough"? Because as the models are continually calibrated against past data, they will always look as if they match it, except of course their predictions will always be wrong. But nobody cares about that. The predictions of the models are for marketing impact (as long as the bar is going up). People in industry who use models know that their predictive power is severely limited. If you don't believe me, just wonder in amazement that nobody predicted the recent economic crash!
With respect to credible evidence, here's the problem: there is no credible evidence on the side of those linking man, co2 and temperature. That is to say, there are various hockey sticks that show that the late 20th century was quite warm, yes, but there's no evidence that it's unprecedented (hence the need to get rid of the medieval warm period in order to make the temperature look unprecedented - which is what James Hansen and Michael Mann actually did in their hockey stick - which was peer reviewed and published, until Steve McIntyre pointed out you could get the same shape from red noise). Indeed, I've already posted a link above showing how easy it is to generate hockey sticks from random noise, which is what a lot of these climatologists are basically doing.
Given that 20th century temperature change is well within the bounds of natural variation, what you've got in effect, is a political movement/religion, promoting a hypothesis and people like you coming here to defend it. It's very hard to shift an established paradigm. It's very hard to publish against it in the same journals, too. So overturning it with Science isn't going to be easy, but it is happening, slowly. For example, Svensmark's recent paper about cloud condensation nuclei increasing after forbasch events, or Steve McIntyre's recent analysis of Keith Briffa's studies (showing they only used around 10 tree cores to get their graph!). I don't deny temperature increased in the late 20th century, but I do think that the reason for the increase is not well understood and is unlikely to be man-made.
And as always, there's the appeal to authority:
I'm smart enough to understand the papers and I do read them. I'm smart enough to understand the principles. I'm smart enough to understand the criticisms and I'm smart enough to know that Scientists are Human and Humans are fallible. I'm smart enough to be able to make a decision about whom to believe. There is no bar to understanding here. I see press spinning research press releases every day (hell, our company even does it). At the end of the day, the criticisms I point out come from real experts on Statistics (mathematicians), not Climate Scientists, who perhaps do one or two Stats classes at University. My criticisms come from Atmospheric Physicists', who know how accurate the models actually are. So, you know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's all a question of which side you consider more credible.
I guessed you'd been smoking it already. I live in a modern society. I have all of the benefits of technocracy and progress at my disposal. If you can get by with just a knife, a net and your own urine, then good for you. I'd rather go to a supermarket in my car, thanks very much.
If the effect of the NAO is greater than previously thought, then obviously the Science up to this point is wrong/incomplete - hence the models are wrong, hence their predictions are not to be trusted, hence why are we even discussing, "only 5 years left to save the world" (every 5 years, by the way). The second point is that these sites distinguish between "the met office" and individuals working for the met office. "the met office" publishes its hopeless predictions, in the form of alarmist press releases. It has a line on the issue and has gained an enormous funding boost (including an ironically power hungry super computer) from promoting the paradigm. Individuals, offering hypothesis and discussing the science are a different entity. There's a buffer of marketing people inbetween those doing the Science, the institutions they work for and the media (with the exception of certain activist Scientists, such as James Hansen). Watts particularly sets himself against the marketing spin.
Consider my posts on this issue to be "asking nasty questions". That you are so sure of the facts is something that I find inexplicable.
Remember, a troll is not someone who disagrees with you. The fact of the matter is that although pH in seawater has been measured for many decades, a reliable long- term trend of ocean water pH cannot be established due to data quality issues, in particular the lack of strict and stable calibration procedures and standards. Moreover, seawater pH is very sensitive to temperature, and temperature is not always recorded or measured at sufficient accuracy to constrain the pH measurement. (reference: a "pro" AGW paper here).
Sure they are. That's why they had to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period. No there isn't an ideal anything. That being the case what the fuck is this whole argument about?
Have I at any point said we are having no impact on the Environment? No, I haven't. I'm sorry for your straw man here but your point has absolutely nothing to do with anything I've said. It's certainly true that this whole ridiculous scare over CO2 is distracting attention and resources from those very causes you may hold close to your heart. Shoot yourself in the foot, if you like.
As I have no idea who Glen Beck is, I'm afraid I have to avoid answering this point, except to say that the best experts on the subject of, say, stomach ulcers, or Geology, some time ago, were not believers in plate tectonics or the Helicobacter pylori bacterium. Yes, Scientists can be wrong. Yes, they often are wrong. Yes, it's very hard to get papers published that counter the current scare. Wegman showed why (hint: those same people promoting the paradigm are the same people who will have to comment on your paper before it's published).
Again, I don't know Hannity and ye
I'm not a Conservative and, frankly, in my country there's not much difference between any of the parties with respect to "global warming". All of them uncritically accept it without question, throwing their rationality out of the window along with all common sense, as you seem to have. For there to be a conspiracy, there has to be a secret. But there are no secrets here; it's all available to you if you care to read the criticisms and counter arguments to much of this work. There is no secret that Goldman Sachs is lobbying for Cap & Trade and stands to make billions from it. There's no secret that Al Gore has interests in Carbon Offset companies, even going as far as to offset his own Carbon use by making payments to his own company. You can choose to ignore things like this and assume they are acting with the best of intentions, but as I'm not an idiot like you, I don't.
Here's a clue: the Scientific Process is broken, particularly in Climate Science. How else can papers such as Steig, Briffa, Mann, et al actually get published in the first place? These guys have been farming hockey sticks for a living for the past two decades and, despite eminent Mathematicians pointing out the folly of their methods, some links to which I have provided in this discussion, they are still held up by people like you as "experts". You can disagree with Wegman if you like, but I think you're on shaky ground if your argument rests on Authority. Wegman IS an authority. The guys he critiques in his paper aren't trained mathematicians, but they're inventing statistical techniques Wegman clearly shows are wrong in their papers. Steve McIntyre and Ross McIntrick (the former is a Mathematician and Statistician) show the same follies in paper after paper. Do you care? No, you don't read it, because you only read stories that confirm your already held position. It's called bias.
Finally, if you don't think institutions aren't farming government grant money through hyping up alarmist press releases, then I'm afraid you're very naive and, frankly, an idiot.