With respect, this is idiotic. Clearly your credulous mind has been stupified by all of the green propaganda. If I propose some research on how warmer temperatures will increase biodiversity and be beneficial to man (as it was to man in Medieval times and before that in Roman times), I am unlikely to get a grant. If I propose research on how warmer weather will destroy the Earth, about a dozen funding bodies will be falling over themselves to give me cash. I have to pay the mortgage, what shall I do?
I think you need to take a deep breath and realise that most of what you hear from the catastrophists is complete and utter bollocks. But in any case, feel free to write up your alarmist predictions right here. We can "audit" them to see if they are justified by the science.
Yes, that's true. But one side has a much greater financial incentive.
This is false, although a common misconception. Al Gore has interests in carbon trading companies, for example. Besides, the science is politicised not just by politicians, but by activist scientists (James Hansen for example). There are strong interests to support the paradigm in the scientific community in general, not least because of the allocation of grant funding (tag your paper with a Global Warming angle and you're more likely to get it published, or to get funding for your research in the first place). The amount spent by Environmental groups on this issue dwarfs that spent by fossil fuel lobbyists.
This may be a very important story, but it references as evidence two websites which are used by conspiracy nuts,
Nice try, but not good enough. CA is not a conspiracy nut website. It is a website run by a mathematician to show the follies of various "climate science" statistical analysis. It turns out, if you pay attention, that much of what passes for "science" in climate circles is nothing more than unmitigated rubbish. The latest, Steig et al, used PCA and deliberately chose the number of components that maximised the result they wanted, when no rational reason (other than this) would lead them to choose such a number. This is just one example. There are lies, damned lies and climate scientists.
Why wouldn't consciousness be fit to be made into an algorithm? You think somehow consciousness doesn't follow the same rules of physics as everything else in the universe?
Frankly, no, I don't. Consciousness is not supervenient on the physical, so there's no reason to believe that you can code an algorithm for it (how?). It does correlate with physical mechanism (hence neural correlates of Consciousness), but otherwise the connection cannot be studied, i.e. equations cannot be written concerning Consciousness. When physicists have explained all of the fields, forces and particles in the Universe, they will still have something left to explain.
Now that is not to say that some device cannot be made conscious (our brains are, after all). It is, however, to say that the action of such a device must be capable of generating the physical effects that are the correlates of consciousness. An algorithm (a model), does not behave in such a manner in itself. With an appropriate physical mechanism, it might.
I guess I prefer to stay on the positive side since no one ever made progress by deciding things were impossible and giving up. Always surprised to see people not getting that. I realize that's my silliness though
You don't make progres by randomly flailing around or by applying erroneous principles to the problem at hand.
That is, of course, making the assumption that intelligence doesn't require Consciousness and that Consciousness can be captured in an algorithm. Two somewhat dubious pre-requisites.
I agree with your comments but to be frank I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Mono is a subset of Microsoft.NET technology. Windows Presentation Foundation and.NET 3.5 (including all of the associated namespaces and libraries) are where it's at today on the Windows platform. I don't think you'll ever see a port of those onto Linux unless Microsoft provides them. To be honest with you, I've used Netbeans for a Java project,C++/Win32/OLE (my most recent project) and I've done development work in.NET (VB.NET and C#) and I prefer.NET by a long way. It's head and shoulders above other development platforms out there (in combination with Visual Studio of course). All of this is true of course only on Windows. It seems absurd to try to emulate it on Linux. I can only assume that there are a whole lot of people out there forced to use Linux (perhaps at University) wanting to learn C# to benefit their later careers.
I know a lot of people don't like to admit that Microsoft has got it right, but in this one case I would find it very hard to fault them in comparison with other development environments and platforms.
I'm guessing you're an MMO troll yourself with an attitude like that. A subtle but no less interesting point you may have missed here is that in virtual worlds the rules can be set by the players themselves. The developers in this context are enablers, rather than Gods passing down "rules".
Trees is a wellknown problem of SQL, but the fact is that SQL can't handle most datastructures and complex relations, only very simple one dimensional ones.
Trees aren't so difficult to manage in SQL. There are various strategies you could use, the simplest of which is to store a path string with each node (of the form 0001\0002\0041, etc.) there are more complex solutions of course). MSSQL now has hierarchyid enabling native tree structure handling too. I'm not saying that they are conceptually easy to implement or particularly efficient if that is your primary requirement, but they can be done without too much pain and suffering.
How about calling them hypotheses?
Let's reserve "theory" for something that actually has solid evidence.
Yes, to quote self, "...Physics community believe it's a plausible hypothesis". But then of course you have to define what you mean by `solid evidence'.
Not sure why you didn't post this when we last "debated" the idea.;)
All such theories should be described as tentative, in the absence of solid physical evidence (i.e. not just correlation). The CERN experiment will at least show what and how cloud condensation nuclei can be generated by Cosmic Rays. This may, or may not, be the start of a paradigm shift in Climate Science. We will wait and see.
he guy describes himself as an "amature scientist", he has published a few un-notable papers in obscure journals that have been universally cited as bad examples. As for "attacking the man", don't be a hypocrite, you had a preety good go at attcking an internationally recognised expert on climate who has written over 60 papers and had them published in journals such as Science and Nature. Not a single peep from you about his facts.
You seem to be in a bit of a tizzy. I note with great interest your many attacks on the man and not much discussion on the facts of the matter. Your posts are almost entirely ad hom, even comparing me to a creationist. Now you're arguing that some peer reviewed papers are more worthy of respect than others. Who is to be the judge of that? Did you even read Wegman? I'm not interested in your hero worship of Gavin Schmidt either. As I've pointed out, he wasn't smart or honest enough to understand what Steig was doing (in the latest example from "team warming" of dishonest statistical practices); indeed there has been little discussion on the criticisms of Steig on RealClimate (I wonder why!), apart from some hand waving.
Unsurprisingly he can't get his drivel published anywhere except his own web site.
Again, you attack the man, not his work. As I've pointed out many times before, if your view is contrary to the warmist paradigm it's very difficult to get your paper published, as Steve McIntyre discovered. As you don't have much faith in peer review (obviously, as you consider Landscheidt's papers to be drivel and they were peer reviewed and published), I don't understand why you think Watts would have any incentive to publish. Obviously his audience isn't the grant hungry activist Scientist Global Warming lobby.
Interestingly, you seem to think publishing opinion/analysis on blogs is a bad thing. Again, you argue against yourself as you freely admit to be a big fan of RealClimate!
Harsh words from someone who's politics forces them to swallow a "scientific" report that references an expert astrologer
Attack against the man? Theodor Landscheidt has published `peer reviewed' papers. I thought you were all in favour of peer review as some guarantee of correctness? Or are you withholding judgement in his case because he believes in Astrology? Attack the facts, not the man.
I can only assume you are suffering from what is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect
Put your post in Wikipedia, and it'd be tagged with a dozen "Citation Needed" and "Weasel Words" tags inmediately, for good reasons.
I assume this guy is clever because he holds a degree in Physics and a PhD. I believe that demonstrates more than enough intelligence to understand the issues on either side of the argument.
He claims that tempratures have been trending downwards for the past 11yrs - this can be debunked by a simple google search and is laughable to anyone who has looked at the temprate records.
If you look at the temperature anomalies he's cited, they are indeed trending downwards since 2000. Of course, being a warmist, you'll be quite used to placing the trend line at the start date most likely to produce an alarming upwards movement. He says, "Global temperatures have declined (Figure 1a) - extending the current run of time with a statistically robust lack of global temperature rise to eight years (Figure 1b), with some people arguing that it can be traced back for 12 years (Figure 1c)." I don't think your debunking, unless you're relying on GISS (or as it's otherwise known the graph of Urban Heat Island and Dodgy Sensor Placement effects).
He blathers on about sunspots and cosmic rays - a theory born from a book by a self-agrandising author and completely unsupported in the litrature, debunked in detail by yours trully here.
The book review (The Chilling Stars) you're happily posting, indeed proudly posting, is by none other than Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate! If you think that he is an unbiased reviewer, then you're as stupid as you say the sceptics are. Schmidt is an activist, heavily involved in anti-CO2 propaganda. He uncritically accepts almost all studies that show increasing warming/co2 relationships, even when they are statistical nonsense. If he fails with what seems to be a fairly simple critical analysis of a paper like this, I don't see how you can call him an expert, or take on trust that his views are, as he claims, purely based on the Science.
He complains the last IPCC report is 3 years old and thus out of date
Again, you've pointed everyone to RealClimate, the warmists armchair propaganda website. In general, what Carlin says is correct however. The great bulk of the dodgy statistical methods cited by Governments, is from IPCC 2007. Further, Carlin points out that it's unlikely predictions made in that report will turn out to be correct. What a shock!
He claims that the 1998 temprature spike cannot be explained - maybe it's a mystery to him but yet another simple google search shows it's well known that the 1998 spike was due to El Nino.
No he doesn't. He provides a good disussion of the PDO and AMO.
I stopped there because my head was about to explode.
It's terribly hard to read through something you don't agree with, isn't it? I wonder what else you're missing out on through not being able to stomach contrary opinions to your own. Your certainty and faith in the `consensus view' is truly frightening.
If any of you read the Wegman report, you'll know that Climate Scientists make use of some very questionable statistical methods (i.e. methods often not even cited in text books), yet their papers are not peer reviewed by statisticians. As the Climatologists don't themselves understand the mathematics they're using to "prove" their hypothesis (or rather, they do understand how to make the figures point to warming, even when it's cooling), it seems to me a little churlish to accuse any interested intellect (in this case a very clever man) of being ignorant of the Science, when he's at least as smart as the so called experts themselves.
Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate had basically the same response and, further, he bemoaned the lack of statistical analysis in Carlin's paper. This is the same Schmidt who trumpeted Hansen, Mann (both well known for creating fantasy stastical analysis) and, amazingly, Steig's paper on Antarctic warming, which has been shown to be a complete load of bunk!
If I had to choose between one view or the other, purely based on the integrity and intelligence of the proponents, I would choose the sceptics. The colder it gets, the more shrill the warmists are getting. This whole scare is one of the most sordid, ridiculous and idiotic episodes in the history of the Science.
Good god, about 50% of Eve's tedium is travelling. I thought Fallout 3 had it right; once you've discovered a location, you can insta-jump to it from the map. If MMO's did this too, then you'd get the best of both worlds (1) you still have to explore to find locations, (2) once you've found them, you don't have the chore of going back there at a later date.
Wow, a whole diatribe of ad hominems and argument from authority. On the points that are worth replying to:
Yes, if it had as much study and peer review behind it.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that many of the economic models in use today have that much if not more peer reviewed science behind them and not one of them is correct over the long-term. Models are conceptual representations of real entities. Their results may be indicative, given their assumptions only, notwithstanding errors in accuracy and method that have a significant impact on results. The point I am making wih respect to peer review however, that you fail to understand because of your tunnel vision, is that it's almost impossible to get a paper published that casts any doubt whatsoever on the dominant paradigm. It is therefore obvious that a greater proportion of published research (by far the majority of it) will support the paradigm, aided by the credulous, alamist media and stupified politicians. This is the reason why peer review is an imperfect indicator of validity. Even a 10 year old can understand this point; you, however, seem to have trouble with it.
ut no surprise you'd conflate a single, now obsolete paper to somehow be the keystone of all of climate science. On, and one more FYI: if you read the original paper, it's actually all about the uncertainty levels at different points in time.
There are many issues with the kinds of reconstruction you cite, particularly if they involve activist scientist Michael Mann, e.g. Proxy inconsistency and other problems in millennial paleoclimate reconstructions. Again, this wasn't an easy paper to get published, not because it lacks merit (the authors know a lot more about statistical analysis than the average Climate Scientist), but because the conclusions go against the paradigm supported by the very people who have to peer review the paper.
Would you like polls, then? How's this? According to polls, more climate scientists think the IPCC was too lax with their conclusions than too harsh, 97% of climate scientists say that temperatures have risen, and 97% think humans are responsible.
That assertion is laughable. How many Climate Scientists agree that supporting the paradigm has grealy increase the amount of cash their institutions get in the form of research grants? 97% perhaps? Consensus is a meaningless concept in Science, if you knew anything about science, you would at least agree with this statement.
Like most scientific research. So? And where is this notion that the governments of the world are secretly trying to push global warming? The world's largest economies have been trying to *resist* global warming research. China's been trying to play it down. So has India. The Bush administration heavily was, even firing people for conducting GW research.
Of course they have. The politics of this is a totally different issue that we can come onto if you wish. Yes, China and India want nothing to do with it but I expect will be all too happy to see the West roll back their industrial revolutions on the alter of environmentalism. The issues of using or not using fossil fuels is a totally different issue to the one we're discussing. I am in favour of alternative energy, primarily because I resent the West sending 1 trillion dollars overseas every year to some pretty disgusting regimes in return for their oil and gas. As I say, it's a different issue. The interplay between activists, the media, science and politics is complex.
What part of last year's forecast of a "typical summer" that I linked did you not understand? What part of 2006 *actually being* a record summer did you not understand? What part of (had you actually read the forecast) the northern UK getting above-averag
Once again, what sort of idiot would assume that the strength of El Nino's and La Nina's influence on the climate hasn't been extensively studied?
The sort of idiot who knows that the "extensive study" you talk of is, to put it mildly, immature. Satellite measurements have only been available for the briefest period of the Earth's history. Your view, that we know all we need to know already to make 50 year predictions, is idiotic. Would you have the same confidence in an economic model as you have in these climate models? I very much doubt it.
Argument from peer review is not argument from authority. It's argument from science. Try it some time instead of just making sh*t up.
Oh yes it is, you're making the assumption that peer review is some guarantee of correctness. It isn't. It's a guarantee that some other people have looked at the paper for trivial mistakes and in Climate Science, often not picked them up. If you've read the Wegman report, you'll know what I'm talking about. Would you like me to list the thousands of papers, submitted and cleared by peer review that turned out to be unmitigated rubbish? I shouldn't need to, you should raise an eyebrow to any assertion, peer reviewed or not. Climate Science papers, consisting of mostly statistical arguments, are not peer reviewed by statisticians, they are peer reviewed by other climate scientists. As the recent Steig debacle shows, Climate Scientists don't understand the methods they are using.
Which you'd be aware has been *extensively* studied, literally thousands of papers, had you actually read the IPCC reports.
While we are often told about the "2,500 scientists" who contributed to the latest IPCC report, the vast majority of these contributors had no influence on the conclusions expressed by the IPCC and were not asked if they endorsed those conclusions (McLean 2007, 2008, 2009). The IPCC's key personnel and lead authors are appointed by governments, not by scientific organizations. Its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) are produced by a small group of scientists and are revised and agreed to, line-by-line, by representatives of member governments before they are made public (McKitrick 2007). The full reports of the IPCC are then revised after their executive summaries were written in order to agree with the political documents.
The scientists involved with the IPCC are almost all in careers that rely on government contracts and rely on government grants to support their IPCC activities. Does that fill you with Scientific confidence? Just how gullible are you?
Actually, it did. I don't have a graph for you starting at 1998, but I have one for you starting at 2002, if you're interested:
Do you understand what a confidence interval actually "means"? I refer you to the following article: Numerical Climate Models
Huh? Here's last year's: A typical British summer. Which it was. Only slightly warmer than average (i.e., cooler than recent years), as they forecast. And of the top 20 warmest summers in Britain's history over the past four centuries as of just 2006, three were 1995 or later. Including 2006, the hottest. Which, as you note, they forecast as a record warm summer.
The Met office have taken their AGW message to new highs (and just as well, they needed to sting the Government for some new computers). They have taken to predicting record hot summers every year recently. It's just a shame that the last three have been complete washouts: "For the third straight summer, the UK Met Office has forecast hot weather using their state of the art computer models. Summer 2007 and 2008 were complete washouts, ranking as two of the most miserable, rainy summers on record." (reference:
Your points are just plain WRONG. The US isn't the world, no, but it's one of the few countries that has been able to maintain almost continuous sensor coverage. Places like Russia/Western Europe (a vast expanse) just haven't, particularly throughout the first half of the 20th century and (in Russia) the latter quarter of the 20th century. The majority of temperature stations are in the US. A lot of those stations are cited in idiotic locations, vulnerable to the Urban Heat Island affect.
Secondly, the satellite temperature anomaly differs from the surface temperature anomaly and they only come into agreement via. "adjustment". This is the process where so called Scientists massage the data to make it fit their pre-conceived ideas. For further information about "adjustment", I refer you to Climate Audit. For information about just how dodgy a lot of these temperature stations actually are, take a look at Surface Stations.
Yes, it is well within the bounds of natural variation. Weather didn't start in year 1,000. As I understand it, temperature records from Roman times are hard to come by. Dendro records have their own problems (climate audit has a very comprehensive review of the issues, if you care to look).
Your idiotic graph stops in the year 1990. We've had 20 years of data since then. Moreover, a large part of the increasing trend shown starts around 1900, so is obviously not man-made CO2 based. Furthermore, almost half of the observed change occurred before widespread industrialisation and the increase has NOT accelerated through the second half of the 20th century (apart from in the fake graph of Dr Hansen, proven to be statistical nonsense). Moreover, look at the Y scale. What does it show? Try looking at a graph of temperature with a more natural scale, rather than zooming in to make the end look worse than it actually is.
Honestly, I give up. It's blatantly obvious that if you stand outside and the sun becomes obscured by a cloud, even with your very own biological temperature measuring system, you will notice a considerable change in temperature. The poster was quite correct that clouds are a feedback mechanism. The natural variation denialists in the adjustment/modelling movement, with their big expensive computers, seem to think clouds are a positive feedback, whereas anyone with a brain can easily see that the feedback must be negative.
1998 was one of the strongest El Nino events in modern history
Given that almost ALL of the energy circulating in the oceans originates from the Sun, not the atmosphere, it's interesting that you don't raise an eyebrow at a significantly strong El Nino in 1998. I mean the oceans heat capacity is over 1,000 times that of the atmosphere, so I would suggest you have your cause and effect back to front (I could also say that about temperature preceeding CO2 rise, which is obvious from the record).
I'm loving the ad hominems about people who are sceptics, especially loving the arguments from authority. In my view the geologists have more to say on this issue than the "adjusters". They have a much broader perspective on what we sceptics call, "Natural Variation". It's also interesting to note that the "blatantly obvious signal", is not a signal of anthropogenic climate change, it's a signal of some (very small) increase in temperature, well within the bounds of natural variation.
Given that the met office has just installed a computer system that uses around 1.2mw of electricity (enough to power a small town) and that its models failed to predict the temperature trend post 1998 to present day, and that it's yearly predictions of record warm summers here in the UK are absurd and almost always wrong, I'm finding it hard to understand why you're so confident about your assertions.
Generally these changes are very slow; that's not a problem. It's when changes are rapid that there are problems. The last atmospheric change similar to what we're forcing nowadays was the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum)
Good lord, what a load of rubbish. The surface temperature, mostly measured in the USA (as it has by far the majority of sensors), mostly with stations cited next to air conditioning units, tarmack and barbeque's, surrounding by half a century of urban growth, has shown a small increase. An increase, I have to say, well within the bounds of natural variation and an increase, it also must be said, that is not outside of the scope of the possible error (2 degrees, with an increase of around 0.5).
It's rump-smackingly obvious that you and your fellow Warmists overstate your case. Your projections of doom are beyond parody. It just so happens that I'm reading a book right now called, "Irrationality" - there is a chapter in it for the Warmists. It's called: Distorting the evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
With respect, this is idiotic. Clearly your credulous mind has been stupified by all of the green propaganda. If I propose some research on how warmer temperatures will increase biodiversity and be beneficial to man (as it was to man in Medieval times and before that in Roman times), I am unlikely to get a grant. If I propose research on how warmer weather will destroy the Earth, about a dozen funding bodies will be falling over themselves to give me cash. I have to pay the mortgage, what shall I do?
I think you need to take a deep breath and realise that most of what you hear from the catastrophists is complete and utter bollocks. But in any case, feel free to write up your alarmist predictions right here. We can "audit" them to see if they are justified by the science.
This is false, although a common misconception. Al Gore has interests in carbon trading companies, for example. Besides, the science is politicised not just by politicians, but by activist scientists (James Hansen for example). There are strong interests to support the paradigm in the scientific community in general, not least because of the allocation of grant funding (tag your paper with a Global Warming angle and you're more likely to get it published, or to get funding for your research in the first place). The amount spent by Environmental groups on this issue dwarfs that spent by fossil fuel lobbyists.
Nice try, but not good enough. CA is not a conspiracy nut website. It is a website run by a mathematician to show the follies of various "climate science" statistical analysis. It turns out, if you pay attention, that much of what passes for "science" in climate circles is nothing more than unmitigated rubbish. The latest, Steig et al, used PCA and deliberately chose the number of components that maximised the result they wanted, when no rational reason (other than this) would lead them to choose such a number. This is just one example. There are lies, damned lies and climate scientists.
Frankly, no, I don't. Consciousness is not supervenient on the physical, so there's no reason to believe that you can code an algorithm for it (how?). It does correlate with physical mechanism (hence neural correlates of Consciousness), but otherwise the connection cannot be studied, i.e. equations cannot be written concerning Consciousness. When physicists have explained all of the fields, forces and particles in the Universe, they will still have something left to explain.
Now that is not to say that some device cannot be made conscious (our brains are, after all). It is, however, to say that the action of such a device must be capable of generating the physical effects that are the correlates of consciousness. An algorithm (a model), does not behave in such a manner in itself. With an appropriate physical mechanism, it might.
You don't make progres by randomly flailing around or by applying erroneous principles to the problem at hand.
As there's no evidence either way, metaphysical doubt, it seems to me, is quite a sensible position.
That is, of course, making the assumption that intelligence doesn't require Consciousness and that Consciousness can be captured in an algorithm. Two somewhat dubious pre-requisites.
I agree with your comments but to be frank I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Mono is a subset of Microsoft .NET technology. Windows Presentation Foundation and .NET 3.5 (including all of the associated namespaces and libraries) are where it's at today on the Windows platform. I don't think you'll ever see a port of those onto Linux unless Microsoft provides them. To be honest with you, I've used Netbeans for a Java project,C++/Win32/OLE (my most recent project) and I've done development work in .NET (VB.NET and C#) and I prefer .NET by a long way. It's head and shoulders above other development platforms out there (in combination with Visual Studio of course). All of this is true of course only on Windows. It seems absurd to try to emulate it on Linux. I can only assume that there are a whole lot of people out there forced to use Linux (perhaps at University) wanting to learn C# to benefit their later careers.
I know a lot of people don't like to admit that Microsoft has got it right, but in this one case I would find it very hard to fault them in comparison with other development environments and platforms.
I'm guessing you're an MMO troll yourself with an attitude like that. A subtle but no less interesting point you may have missed here is that in virtual worlds the rules can be set by the players themselves. The developers in this context are enablers, rather than Gods passing down "rules".
Trees aren't so difficult to manage in SQL. There are various strategies you could use, the simplest of which is to store a path string with each node (of the form 0001\0002\0041, etc.) there are more complex solutions of course). MSSQL now has hierarchyid enabling native tree structure handling too. I'm not saying that they are conceptually easy to implement or particularly efficient if that is your primary requirement, but they can be done without too much pain and suffering.
Yes, to quote self, "...Physics community believe it's a plausible hypothesis". But then of course you have to define what you mean by `solid evidence'.
All such theories should be described as tentative, in the absence of solid physical evidence (i.e. not just correlation). The CERN experiment will at least show what and how cloud condensation nuclei can be generated by Cosmic Rays. This may, or may not, be the start of a paradigm shift in Climate Science. We will wait and see.
A recent paper shows that this may indeed by the case
Given that Svensmark's team has been granted an experiment slot at CERN, at least many of those in the Physics community believe it's a plausible hypothesis. There is research out there demonstrating some causal link between cloud cover and Cosmic Rays. Science is all about reaching beyond what is known. It would be pretty a pointless exercise otherwise.
You seem to be in a bit of a tizzy. I note with great interest your many attacks on the man and not much discussion on the facts of the matter. Your posts are almost entirely ad hom, even comparing me to a creationist. Now you're arguing that some peer reviewed papers are more worthy of respect than others. Who is to be the judge of that? Did you even read Wegman? I'm not interested in your hero worship of Gavin Schmidt either. As I've pointed out, he wasn't smart or honest enough to understand what Steig was doing (in the latest example from "team warming" of dishonest statistical practices); indeed there has been little discussion on the criticisms of Steig on RealClimate (I wonder why!), apart from some hand waving.
Again, you attack the man, not his work. As I've pointed out many times before, if your view is contrary to the warmist paradigm it's very difficult to get your paper published, as Steve McIntyre discovered. As you don't have much faith in peer review (obviously, as you consider Landscheidt's papers to be drivel and they were peer reviewed and published), I don't understand why you think Watts would have any incentive to publish. Obviously his audience isn't the grant hungry activist Scientist Global Warming lobby.
Interestingly, you seem to think publishing opinion/analysis on blogs is a bad thing. Again, you argue against yourself as you freely admit to be a big fan of RealClimate!
Attack against the man? Theodor Landscheidt has published `peer reviewed' papers. I thought you were all in favour of peer review as some guarantee of correctness? Or are you withholding judgement in his case because he believes in Astrology? Attack the facts, not the man.
As indeed you may be.
I assume this guy is clever because he holds a degree in Physics and a PhD. I believe that demonstrates more than enough intelligence to understand the issues on either side of the argument.
If you look at the temperature anomalies he's cited, they are indeed trending downwards since 2000. Of course, being a warmist, you'll be quite used to placing the trend line at the start date most likely to produce an alarming upwards movement. He says, "Global temperatures have declined (Figure 1a) - extending the current run of time with a statistically robust lack of global temperature rise to eight years (Figure 1b), with some people arguing that it can be traced back for 12 years (Figure 1c)." I don't think your debunking, unless you're relying on GISS (or as it's otherwise known the graph of Urban Heat Island and Dodgy Sensor Placement effects).
The book review (The Chilling Stars) you're happily posting, indeed proudly posting, is by none other than Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate! If you think that he is an unbiased reviewer, then you're as stupid as you say the sceptics are. Schmidt is an activist, heavily involved in anti-CO2 propaganda. He uncritically accepts almost all studies that show increasing warming/co2 relationships, even when they are statistical nonsense. If he fails with what seems to be a fairly simple critical analysis of a paper like this, I don't see how you can call him an expert, or take on trust that his views are, as he claims, purely based on the Science.
Again, you've pointed everyone to RealClimate, the warmists armchair propaganda website. In general, what Carlin says is correct however. The great bulk of the dodgy statistical methods cited by Governments, is from IPCC 2007. Further, Carlin points out that it's unlikely predictions made in that report will turn out to be correct. What a shock!
No he doesn't. He provides a good disussion of the PDO and AMO.
It's terribly hard to read through something you don't agree with, isn't it? I wonder what else you're missing out on through not being able to stomach contrary opinions to your own. Your certainty and faith in the `consensus view' is truly frightening.
If any of you read the Wegman report, you'll know that Climate Scientists make use of some very questionable statistical methods (i.e. methods often not even cited in text books), yet their papers are not peer reviewed by statisticians. As the Climatologists don't themselves understand the mathematics they're using to "prove" their hypothesis (or rather, they do understand how to make the figures point to warming, even when it's cooling), it seems to me a little churlish to accuse any interested intellect (in this case a very clever man) of being ignorant of the Science, when he's at least as smart as the so called experts themselves.
Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate had basically the same response and, further, he bemoaned the lack of statistical analysis in Carlin's paper. This is the same Schmidt who trumpeted Hansen, Mann (both well known for creating fantasy stastical analysis) and, amazingly, Steig's paper on Antarctic warming, which has been shown to be a complete load of bunk!
If I had to choose between one view or the other, purely based on the integrity and intelligence of the proponents, I would choose the sceptics. The colder it gets, the more shrill the warmists are getting. This whole scare is one of the most sordid, ridiculous and idiotic episodes in the history of the Science.
Good god, about 50% of Eve's tedium is travelling. I thought Fallout 3 had it right; once you've discovered a location, you can insta-jump to it from the map. If MMO's did this too, then you'd get the best of both worlds (1) you still have to explore to find locations, (2) once you've found them, you don't have the chore of going back there at a later date.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that many of the economic models in use today have that much if not more peer reviewed science behind them and not one of them is correct over the long-term. Models are conceptual representations of real entities. Their results may be indicative, given their assumptions only, notwithstanding errors in accuracy and method that have a significant impact on results. The point I am making wih respect to peer review however, that you fail to understand because of your tunnel vision, is that it's almost impossible to get a paper published that casts any doubt whatsoever on the dominant paradigm. It is therefore obvious that a greater proportion of published research (by far the majority of it) will support the paradigm, aided by the credulous, alamist media and stupified politicians. This is the reason why peer review is an imperfect indicator of validity. Even a 10 year old can understand this point; you, however, seem to have trouble with it.
There are many issues with the kinds of reconstruction you cite, particularly if they involve activist scientist Michael Mann, e.g. Proxy inconsistency and other problems in millennial paleoclimate reconstructions. Again, this wasn't an easy paper to get published, not because it lacks merit (the authors know a lot more about statistical analysis than the average Climate Scientist), but because the conclusions go against the paradigm supported by the very people who have to peer review the paper.
That assertion is laughable. How many Climate Scientists agree that supporting the paradigm has grealy increase the amount of cash their institutions get in the form of research grants? 97% perhaps? Consensus is a meaningless concept in Science, if you knew anything about science, you would at least agree with this statement.
Of course they have. The politics of this is a totally different issue that we can come onto if you wish. Yes, China and India want nothing to do with it but I expect will be all too happy to see the West roll back their industrial revolutions on the alter of environmentalism. The issues of using or not using fossil fuels is a totally different issue to the one we're discussing. I am in favour of alternative energy, primarily because I resent the West sending 1 trillion dollars overseas every year to some pretty disgusting regimes in return for their oil and gas. As I say, it's a different issue. The interplay between activists, the media, science and politics is complex.
The sort of idiot who knows that the "extensive study" you talk of is, to put it mildly, immature. Satellite measurements have only been available for the briefest period of the Earth's history. Your view, that we know all we need to know already to make 50 year predictions, is idiotic. Would you have the same confidence in an economic model as you have in these climate models? I very much doubt it.
Oh yes it is, you're making the assumption that peer review is some guarantee of correctness. It isn't. It's a guarantee that some other people have looked at the paper for trivial mistakes and in Climate Science, often not picked them up. If you've read the Wegman report, you'll know what I'm talking about. Would you like me to list the thousands of papers, submitted and cleared by peer review that turned out to be unmitigated rubbish? I shouldn't need to, you should raise an eyebrow to any assertion, peer reviewed or not. Climate Science papers, consisting of mostly statistical arguments, are not peer reviewed by statisticians, they are peer reviewed by other climate scientists. As the recent Steig debacle shows, Climate Scientists don't understand the methods they are using.
While we are often told about the "2,500 scientists" who contributed to the latest IPCC report, the vast majority of these contributors had no influence on the conclusions expressed by the IPCC and were not asked if they endorsed those conclusions (McLean 2007, 2008, 2009). The IPCC's key personnel and lead authors are appointed by governments, not by scientific organizations. Its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) are produced by a small group of scientists and are revised and agreed to, line-by-line, by representatives of member governments before they are made public (McKitrick 2007). The full reports of the IPCC are then revised after their executive summaries were written in order to agree with the political documents.
The scientists involved with the IPCC are almost all in careers that rely on government contracts and rely on government grants to support their IPCC activities. Does that fill you with Scientific confidence? Just how gullible are you?
Do you understand what a confidence interval actually "means"? I refer you to the following article: Numerical Climate Models
The Met office have taken their AGW message to new highs (and just as well, they needed to sting the Government for some new computers). They have taken to predicting record hot summers every year recently. It's just a shame that the last three have been complete washouts: "For the third straight summer, the UK Met Office has forecast hot weather using their state of the art computer models. Summer 2007 and 2008 were complete washouts, ranking as two of the most miserable, rainy summers on record." (reference:
Your points are just plain WRONG. The US isn't the world, no, but it's one of the few countries that has been able to maintain almost continuous sensor coverage. Places like Russia/Western Europe (a vast expanse) just haven't, particularly throughout the first half of the 20th century and (in Russia) the latter quarter of the 20th century. The majority of temperature stations are in the US. A lot of those stations are cited in idiotic locations, vulnerable to the Urban Heat Island affect.
Secondly, the satellite temperature anomaly differs from the surface temperature anomaly and they only come into agreement via. "adjustment". This is the process where so called Scientists massage the data to make it fit their pre-conceived ideas. For further information about "adjustment", I refer you to Climate Audit. For information about just how dodgy a lot of these temperature stations actually are, take a look at Surface Stations.
Yes, it is well within the bounds of natural variation. Weather didn't start in year 1,000. As I understand it, temperature records from Roman times are hard to come by. Dendro records have their own problems (climate audit has a very comprehensive review of the issues, if you care to look).
Your idiotic graph stops in the year 1990. We've had 20 years of data since then. Moreover, a large part of the increasing trend shown starts around 1900, so is obviously not man-made CO2 based. Furthermore, almost half of the observed change occurred before widespread industrialisation and the increase has NOT accelerated through the second half of the 20th century (apart from in the fake graph of Dr Hansen, proven to be statistical nonsense). Moreover, look at the Y scale. What does it show? Try looking at a graph of temperature with a more natural scale, rather than zooming in to make the end look worse than it actually is.
Honestly, I give up. It's blatantly obvious that if you stand outside and the sun becomes obscured by a cloud, even with your very own biological temperature measuring system, you will notice a considerable change in temperature. The poster was quite correct that clouds are a feedback mechanism. The natural variation denialists in the adjustment/modelling movement, with their big expensive computers, seem to think clouds are a positive feedback, whereas anyone with a brain can easily see that the feedback must be negative.
Given that almost ALL of the energy circulating in the oceans originates from the Sun, not the atmosphere, it's interesting that you don't raise an eyebrow at a significantly strong El Nino in 1998. I mean the oceans heat capacity is over 1,000 times that of the atmosphere, so I would suggest you have your cause and effect back to front (I could also say that about temperature preceeding CO2 rise, which is obvious from the record).
I'm loving the ad hominems about people who are sceptics, especially loving the arguments from authority. In my view the geologists have more to say on this issue than the "adjusters". They have a much broader perspective on what we sceptics call, "Natural Variation". It's also interesting to note that the "blatantly obvious signal", is not a signal of anthropogenic climate change, it's a signal of some (very small) increase in temperature, well within the bounds of natural variation.
Given that the met office has just installed a computer system that uses around 1.2mw of electricity (enough to power a small town) and that its models failed to predict the temperature trend post 1998 to present day, and that it's yearly predictions of record warm summers here in the UK are absurd and almost always wrong, I'm finding it hard to understand why you're so confident about your assertions.
Good lord, what a load of rubbish. The surface temperature, mostly measured in the USA (as it has by far the majority of sensors), mostly with stations cited next to air conditioning units, tarmack and barbeque's, surrounding by half a century of urban growth, has shown a small increase. An increase, I have to say, well within the bounds of natural variation and an increase, it also must be said, that is not outside of the scope of the possible error (2 degrees, with an increase of around 0.5).
It's rump-smackingly obvious that you and your fellow Warmists overstate your case. Your projections of doom are beyond parody. It just so happens that I'm reading a book right now called, "Irrationality" - there is a chapter in it for the Warmists. It's called: Distorting the evidence.
Happy days!