The biggest problem here is why the press (for the purposes of the example I count slashdot as being "press") thinks it needs to publish every single press release of every idiot green-activist scientist who has an cretinous idea for reducing this minor trace-gas (and plant food). I would genuinely be interested to know just how it is that a mortal scientist, with no particular talent, gets a write-up online whenever he farts.
Give us the musings of Feynman types, yes, but Green activists are so utterly boring, you might as well give us the thoughts of Olive from On The Buses.
Example of GWB (Global Warming...rhymes with Rollocks). If I had a pound for every scientific press-release the sub-text of which is that the author is a blithering idiot, I'd have several thousand pounds by now.
If your area of expertise has a professional body that gives accreditation (and a licence to practice), then you're quite right, but Software Engineering is not constituted that way, so you can call yourself a Software Engineer regardless. We also have Electronics Engineers who are not accredited by a professional organisation, but are still able to give themselves that title.
If you want to take ownership of the word "engineer" and define it in such a narrow way, then there are all kinds of professions that must fall by the wayside.
I'm not sure I agree to be honest. Very often developers get defensive about sharing their burden or want to retain control, even over the smallest details. It's really not that hard to get multiple people working on a project together. You just have to be able to divide up the tasks intelligently.
To legitimately call yourself a 'software engineer' you have to hold an engineering degree and be a licensed engineer.
What? There is a subject, body of knowledge and literature concerning Software Engineering. If you graduate with a degree in Software Engineering you can legitimately call yourself a Software Engineer.
Superfluous article. Obviously Goldman are in on just another pump and dump scam. They'll talk up the IPO, make a few billion on it and then dump their stock.
But isn't that simply applying the maxim: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? I.e. it is not asserting the evidence doesn't exist, only that the evidence isn't strong enough to make the assertion that the hypothesis is true with any confidence. There's a subtle difference.
It's a shame the same people don't apply their enormous wits to Climate Science, especially if the complaint is a lack of statistics expertise in the review process.
Please mod me troll.
Thanks.
CO2 in the atmosphere has the exact same effect in absence of other factors. See for example Venus. Unless you want to discount a century of physics this is not in any way in dispute.
Venus has orders of magnitude more CO2 in its atmosphere than Earth does. It's also a lot closer to the Sun. I think you've been reading too many Al Gore circulars.
Uh, what? Yes, yes there is. You only have to look to Venus to see what CO2 can do
Again, you're making a fallacious comparison. We aren't talking about 90% atmospheric CO2, we're talking about a trace gas here on Earth, measured in parts-per-million.
If you were to take the albedo of Earth and the solar energy input to the planet and calculate the mean temperature the Earth would be a frozen wasteland
Yes, with such a stupefyingly simplistic model I'm sure you're correct. Only you need to include land masses, a biosphere, oceans, clouds, convection, water vapour and all of the other things your model is missing. Also, if your simple model had, say 1000 parts-per-million worth of CO2 in its atmosphere, how much warmer do you think it would be? I think, perhaps, around 1K or less. I think you'll find the physics backs me up on this.
This is an elementary homework exercise in planetary science
But anything in the range of everyday experience counts little when we're discussing phenomena that happen on time scales of at least several decades. Only data and evidence gathered over those decades as well as the preceding decades, centuries and millennia will help there.
And what do they show? A slight 20th century warming? A warming since the LIA. The LIA itself? The MWP, the Roman Optimum? Going back further, with the Greenland and Vostok cores, do they show current temperatures or trends to be outside of the bounds of natural variability? No, they don’t
The last two years don't count either, nor do the two before that, but if you look at actual data globally and from a longer period of time, you can see that the previous decade was statistically warmer than the previous ones.
Where did I deny that warming has occurred?
Well, the last couple of winters have been a rare occurrence. The very fact that you've noticed them as a "drastic change" pretty much points towards that. If they went on for a couple of decades we'd have data, but right now it's just a rare event. Do you have any actual reason to believe that they aren't?
Yes, my reason for believing they aren’t is that I believe the main driver of climate on Earth is the interaction between the oceans (1000x the heat capacity of the atmosphere) and the Sun, possibly with a cosmic ray correlation. The exact mechanism isn’t well understood (CLOUD should report results by 2013, which will give some hints for further study). The Sun is currently entering a very quiet phase and the PDO is changing from positive to negative. The two combined should give us some cooling, if the hypothesis is correct.
But my point is that our Met Office (and through it the CRU) were right in their medium-term forecasts when the temperature was rising, because their models have a warming bias. What did Warren Buffet say about investing? “it’s only when the tide goes out that you get to see who’s been swimming naked”. In other words, if the temperature is increasing any model that shows an increase in temperature, no-matter how wrong, will look correct. When the PDO changes and solar activity drops off, the model increasingly diverges from reality. We are at that point now.
and often it just doesn't make economical sense to invest much in preparing for something that's rare and exceptional.
Again, I don’t think it’s a rare event. I believe it’s an entirely predictable event. The Met Office (and through it, the CRU) doesn’t agree, which is why our councils failed to spend the pennies required to stock-pile salt and grit and why our airports and motorways ground to a halt. It’s a shame you can’t be as objective in your analysis of the warmist position as you seem to be when considering the sceptic position. What would it take to get you to question the consensus?
Do you disagree with the reconstructions of the global temperature record?
If you’re referring to hockey-sticks and the paleo-climatological record often used as “proof” of current exceptionality, of course I do. If you’re referring to the instrumental record, not so much (Hansen is clearly an outlier at present). I’m not disputing that it warmed by a small amount during the 20th century and has been warming since the end of the LIA. I don’t dispute that climate changes. The reconstructions I’ve seen show that current temperatures and trends are well within the bounds of natural variation (I’m especially thinking about the GISP2 Greenland and Vostok ice cores). There the debate should end. The rest is a hypothesis upon which you can have absolutely zero confidence, because historically temperature and CO2 haven’t correlated well and they don’t at present (again, PDO and solar activity are a stronger correlation). But still, you continue on with the paradigm. Why?
The ensemble of climate models that predict a long term trend of increasing global average temperatures? The ocean circulation models?
The model is programmed to predict a long-term trend of increasing temperature. I wouldn’t expect it to be “wrong” on that count. But let us take, for example, an economic model. You program it such that it has an inherent “bull market” bias. You make predictions. The predictions show an increase in stock prices. The market is going up anyway. They’re together in lock-step. Everyone thinks you’re a genius. As soon as the downturn comes, you look like a ****ing idiot. And so it goes with climate models. They are right until they start to diverge from reality and then they’re wrong, but as they’re continually being fiddled with, the projections of catastrophe are pushed further away into the future. What value do they have? None whatsoever as far as I can see.
Perhaps you disagree with climate feedback models for polar ice caps?
Clearly the polar ice caps aren’t ice-free today and, if the models of 5 years ago are correct, they will be ice-free by 2013 (in the summer). What do you think? 2 years to go.
The volume of work and literature in this field is enormous.
Yes and the volume of work and literature on the dietary causes of peptic ulcers was enormous. It was all bollocks of course, because someone came along with a microscope and found a little H. pylori.
There is no one single "Theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming". There is a general consensus among thousands of researchers and scientists that all available evidence suggests increasing atmospheric CO2 will increase the mean global temperature.
Of course it will. The debate is about how much. I suspect it’s a few tenths of a degree.
However, if your underlying physical model is close to reality the long-term behavior will be statistically similar.
My mistake. I’m slightly dyslexic, so sometimes misread words. The point I’m making here is that this whole debate is over what the world will look like in 100 years time (or 200). Run your climate model backwards, with current forcings as they are understood and your best approximation of the current state, and tell me what the climate looked like 100 years ago, or 200, or 1,000. You can’t. The reason you can’t is because you don’t know the forcings with enough accuracy, you’re ignorant of the feedbacks, and you don’t have sufficient understanding of the interactions of the system as a whole. As an example, your model will probably hind-cast a decrease in hurricane activity, say, 30 years ago, because it’s programmed a priori
Oh, the NASA guy. Wasn't he arrested (along with a 90+yr old congressman) for protesting against mountaintop-removal mining. That's where they blast the top off frickin' mountains and dump the waste in the valley below. Not exactly radical environmentalism to object to that.
He was arrested for helping to blockade a coal-fired power station, amongst other criminal acts that nobody seems to give a flying **** about. If you think that as a scientist he's capable of being an impartial gate-keeper of the data, then you're living in cloud-cuckoo land.
Hell, if that's the standard you've just ruled out 90% of science.
You need to view the science in the context of evidence based policy. This issue is only half about science; the other half is about politics.
Now? I've been following this issue since the '80s and I've always heard the researchers say that global warming doesn't rule out regional cooling. It's not like it's something they've come up with this year to explain a northern hemisphere cold snap.
Oh sure, they can come up with whatever they like. The theory rules everything in and nothing out. It has absolutely zero information content. Who cares what global average temperature is if you can't tell us what the weather is going to be like? Nobody!
40+ years of research. 30 years of bitter attacks on climate scientists, 30 years of government and industry funded opposition. Don't you think, if AGW was crap, we'd be a little further along with disproving it by now?
30 years of government funded opposition? Who do you think pays for the IPCC, our own Met Office, NASA, the CRU? How many billions have been spent on campaigns promoting the paradigm? How much money has been given to researchers to come up with the "right" conclusions? How many politically incorrect papers have been kept out of journals because they disagree with the hypothesis? How many environmental groups have been selflessly promoting it to all corners of the globe for the last 25 years? You're wearing some pretty thick blinkers there.
That you didn't even bother to give his whole name suggests you know how well-known, and how controversial, he is within the field. Given that, you would also know how much of his work has been debunked. Especially his whole IR-iris negative-feedback thing.
Yes, Lindzen is one of the most eminent Climate Scientists in the world. His work hasn't been debunked; he's been attacked by mentalists like you, when what he suggests is at least as plausible, if not more plausible, than what the warmistas say.
Errr, greenhouses radiate away energy too. If they didn't they would never reach thermal equilibrium.
Of course it does, but the reflection from the glass is what keeps some of the energy in, raising its temperature. CO2 is put into the greenhouse (sometimes), not to raise the temperature further (it doesn't do this), but to improve plant growth.
CO2 is the reason Earth isn't frozen. You do accept that, right?
Absolutely not. I don't accept that at all, no. There's no correlation, in geological history, between temperature and CO2 levels. Indeed, there's not much correlation now. PDO and solar activity correlate better than CO2 does.
Jesus, you really think there's some giant conspiracy?
It's called group-think and self-interest. Call it a conspiracy if you like, but I don't see a reptilian overlord pulling levers like some sceptics. I see corruption, fraud, financial gain and the marxists in the Environmental movement all coming together to support a paradigm that benefits their ideas. The Scientists are happy with the grant money.
Then you continue to gather more observations and see if the theory continues to hold up
And if it doesn't (which it doesn't at present), you continue on as before, making new claims about your existing thesis that won't be tested for another three decades. All the while, you continue to rake in grant money for your graduate students.
Uh, what? Perhaps you are confusing local phenomena with global averages?
Yes, it's "weather" when it's cooling and "climate" when it's warming. You have both bases covered. Clever!
no one in their right mind would claim that a global climate model intended to be run over centuries would make any specific predictions about the winter weather for a given year. The global climate is best described by weakly non-linear equations, which means the climate is chaotic in the short term, but there is useful information in long-term means
This is, frankly, ridiculous. Linear equations are time-reversible. Why do you think you can correctly forecast 100 years when you can't correctly hind-cast 100 years? Models calibrate with historic data (in essence an exercise in curve fitting). The argument you make here is disingenuous in the extreme and I'm sure a clever fellow like yourself will immediately see his error.
Yea, they've been kind-of taking it up for the last 50 years here in the UK. Still no solution in sight. Prices are sky-high, carriages are cramped, trains are often late. Services are cancelled at short notice, because the company gets fined if a train is late (!).
When the world is warming (naturally, I might add), the catastrophists with the warming hypothesis look clever. When it start to cool (naturally, again), people like Corbyn look clever. As Corbyn hasn't ever published how he does his analysis (it's a commercial secret), the jury has to remain out on whether or not he's a sage, or just a contrarian who's ideas happen to correlate with what's happening right now.
If you're from the UK, a comparison with Vince Cable, who predicted 8 of the last 3 recessions, is probably apt.
Superfluous? Maybe in the big city, but out in the sticks, or towns, it's necessary. I used to get the train to work, but as they were either (1) late, sometimes making me stand on the windy, cold platform for upwards of 2 hours, or (2) rammed full, so I couldn't get myself and my bicycle onto them, I ended up buying a car and now drive to and from work. I didn't drive before!
Why? I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious, I don't understand why people who generally accept science are so hostile to AGW. 40 years of research, thousands of scientists (many who began as critics, many who are still critical of some aspect or subtheory.) How do you convince yourself that this, and only this, field is so dramatically different from any other.
Firstly, because the hypothesis is unprovable (we don't have multiple Earth's to experiment with) and secondly the hypothesis is unfalsifiable, in a strict scientific sense. We're now asked to believe that warming causes cooling. The models that we were told predicted the future centuries ahead, didn't predict harsh winters. They do now of course, because there are so many parameters to twiddle with you can pretty much come up with any projection you like (it's called confirmation bias).
And I got yelled at for not referencing...
James Hansen. The guy who called coal trains "death trains" and regularly pickets against the opening of power stations (not in China of course, in the US and UK). He's in control of GISS and is responsible for the ridiculous smoothing algorithms they use to smudge temperature across thousands of miles with a couple of temperature stations. He's also the guy who started this whole scare with his evidence to the senate in the 1980's.
But seriously, every field in science has feuds, incompetents, even frauds. But the science itself wins out. You can't pick one guy you dislike and say, "Aha, they must all be the same!" Science doesn't work that way.
I agree it will win out eventually. Who was it who said that science progresses one funeral at a time? That's how paradigms get overturned. The question is whether or not this happens before we end up with pointless political fixes, based on implausible chains of inference (as Lindzen pointed out) and a rolling back of the industrial age.
How many physicists have you met?:)
The point here is that two scientists can argue about Dark Matter, or Dark Energy, or Dark Shikari, and nobody is going to raise my taxes and tell me I can't drive a car to work any more. Political activism and Physics are separate, except when you get into the Nuclear weapons arena. But even there, the hypothesis that nuclear bombs are bad is not particularly controversial.
AGW is like the big bang. It was never ambiguous. Since the 1970's (hell, since the 1870's) no evidence has ever countered the basic idea; CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we are releasing fossil carbon, therefore atmospheric CO2 levels will rise, therefore temperatures will rise. Nothing has ever cast doubt on that. No rival theory has ever produced any supporting evidence (not homeostasis, not sun-driving nor any other "natural cycle" theory, nor any other.)
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but we aren't living in a greenhouse. The Earth radiates energy into space. Lindzen thinks sensitivity is of the order of less than 1K, i.e. barely perceptible. The catastrophists (political activists) think it's anything from 4K to 16K. None of them know enough about the climate system to make any predictions, but they publish press releases of their model outputs as if they do. Without AGW, most of them wouldn't have careers.
In fact his "basic physics" is a load of tripe. It's entirely possible that you will have fewer storms (hurricane activity is now at a 30 year low, which contradicts his thesis). The important thing is temperature and hence pressure differences between the various parts of the globe (such as between the equator and the poles), not some fictional "global average".
Slashdot Mirror
As long as the eco-fascists don't take over, you probably won't need them.
The biggest problem here is why the press (for the purposes of the example I count slashdot as being "press") thinks it needs to publish every single press release of every idiot green-activist scientist who has an cretinous idea for reducing this minor trace-gas (and plant food). I would genuinely be interested to know just how it is that a mortal scientist, with no particular talent, gets a write-up online whenever he farts.
Give us the musings of Feynman types, yes, but Green activists are so utterly boring, you might as well give us the thoughts of Olive from On The Buses.
Example of GWB (Global Warming...rhymes with Rollocks). If I had a pound for every scientific press-release the sub-text of which is that the author is a blithering idiot, I'd have several thousand pounds by now.
Why would you need any other reason than that the hypothesis cannot be falsified, therefore it isn't scientific?
If your area of expertise has a professional body that gives accreditation (and a licence to practice), then you're quite right, but Software Engineering is not constituted that way, so you can call yourself a Software Engineer regardless. We also have Electronics Engineers who are not accredited by a professional organisation, but are still able to give themselves that title.
If you want to take ownership of the word "engineer" and define it in such a narrow way, then there are all kinds of professions that must fall by the wayside.
Yes, I was just thinking that when reading the headline. I was trying to work out how you capture and archive data like this "by accident".
I'm not sure I agree to be honest. Very often developers get defensive about sharing their burden or want to retain control, even over the smallest details. It's really not that hard to get multiple people working on a project together. You just have to be able to divide up the tasks intelligently.
What? There is a subject, body of knowledge and literature concerning Software Engineering. If you graduate with a degree in Software Engineering you can legitimately call yourself a Software Engineer.
Superfluous article. Obviously Goldman are in on just another pump and dump scam. They'll talk up the IPO, make a few billion on it and then dump their stock.
It was a rhetorical question :p.
True... but then choice of confidence interval is somewhat arbitrary anyway.
Who was it who said, "science progresses one funeral at a time"?
But isn't that simply applying the maxim: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? I.e. it is not asserting the evidence doesn't exist, only that the evidence isn't strong enough to make the assertion that the hypothesis is true with any confidence. There's a subtle difference.
It's a shame the same people don't apply their enormous wits to Climate Science, especially if the complaint is a lack of statistics expertise in the review process. Please mod me troll. Thanks.
Venus has orders of magnitude more CO2 in its atmosphere than Earth does. It's also a lot closer to the Sun. I think you've been reading too many Al Gore circulars.
Again, you're making a fallacious comparison. We aren't talking about 90% atmospheric CO2, we're talking about a trace gas here on Earth, measured in parts-per-million.
Yes, with such a stupefyingly simplistic model I'm sure you're correct. Only you need to include land masses, a biosphere, oceans, clouds, convection, water vapour and all of the other things your model is missing. Also, if your simple model had, say 1000 parts-per-million worth of CO2 in its atmosphere, how much warmer do you think it would be? I think, perhaps, around 1K or less. I think you'll find the physics backs me up on this.
Yes. I'm going to fail you.
And what do they show? A slight 20th century warming? A warming since the LIA. The LIA itself? The MWP, the Roman Optimum? Going back further, with the Greenland and Vostok cores, do they show current temperatures or trends to be outside of the bounds of natural variability? No, they don’t
Where did I deny that warming has occurred?
Yes, my reason for believing they aren’t is that I believe the main driver of climate on Earth is the interaction between the oceans (1000x the heat capacity of the atmosphere) and the Sun, possibly with a cosmic ray correlation. The exact mechanism isn’t well understood (CLOUD should report results by 2013, which will give some hints for further study). The Sun is currently entering a very quiet phase and the PDO is changing from positive to negative. The two combined should give us some cooling, if the hypothesis is correct.
But my point is that our Met Office (and through it the CRU) were right in their medium-term forecasts when the temperature was rising, because their models have a warming bias. What did Warren Buffet say about investing? “it’s only when the tide goes out that you get to see who’s been swimming naked”. In other words, if the temperature is increasing any model that shows an increase in temperature, no-matter how wrong, will look correct. When the PDO changes and solar activity drops off, the model increasingly diverges from reality. We are at that point now.
Again, I don’t think it’s a rare event. I believe it’s an entirely predictable event. The Met Office (and through it, the CRU) doesn’t agree, which is why our councils failed to spend the pennies required to stock-pile salt and grit and why our airports and motorways ground to a halt. It’s a shame you can’t be as objective in your analysis of the warmist position as you seem to be when considering the sceptic position. What would it take to get you to question the consensus?
If you’re referring to hockey-sticks and the paleo-climatological record often used as “proof” of current exceptionality, of course I do. If you’re referring to the instrumental record, not so much (Hansen is clearly an outlier at present). I’m not disputing that it warmed by a small amount during the 20th century and has been warming since the end of the LIA. I don’t dispute that climate changes. The reconstructions I’ve seen show that current temperatures and trends are well within the bounds of natural variation (I’m especially thinking about the GISP2 Greenland and Vostok ice cores). There the debate should end. The rest is a hypothesis upon which you can have absolutely zero confidence, because historically temperature and CO2 haven’t correlated well and they don’t at present (again, PDO and solar activity are a stronger correlation). But still, you continue on with the paradigm. Why?
The model is programmed to predict a long-term trend of increasing temperature. I wouldn’t expect it to be “wrong” on that count. But let us take, for example, an economic model. You program it such that it has an inherent “bull market” bias. You make predictions. The predictions show an increase in stock prices. The market is going up anyway. They’re together in lock-step. Everyone thinks you’re a genius. As soon as the downturn comes, you look like a ****ing idiot. And so it goes with climate models. They are right until they start to diverge from reality and then they’re wrong, but as they’re continually being fiddled with, the projections of catastrophe are pushed further away into the future. What value do they have? None whatsoever as far as I can see.
Clearly the polar ice caps aren’t ice-free today and, if the models of 5 years ago are correct, they will be ice-free by 2013 (in the summer). What do you think? 2 years to go.
Yes and the volume of work and literature on the dietary causes of peptic ulcers was enormous. It was all bollocks of course, because someone came along with a microscope and found a little H. pylori.
Of course it will. The debate is about how much. I suspect it’s a few tenths of a degree.
My mistake. I’m slightly dyslexic, so sometimes misread words. The point I’m making here is that this whole debate is over what the world will look like in 100 years time (or 200). Run your climate model backwards, with current forcings as they are understood and your best approximation of the current state, and tell me what the climate looked like 100 years ago, or 200, or 1,000. You can’t. The reason you can’t is because you don’t know the forcings with enough accuracy, you’re ignorant of the feedbacks, and you don’t have sufficient understanding of the interactions of the system as a whole. As an example, your model will probably hind-cast a decrease in hurricane activity, say, 30 years ago, because it’s programmed a priori
He was arrested for helping to blockade a coal-fired power station, amongst other criminal acts that nobody seems to give a flying **** about. If you think that as a scientist he's capable of being an impartial gate-keeper of the data, then you're living in cloud-cuckoo land.
You need to view the science in the context of evidence based policy. This issue is only half about science; the other half is about politics.
Oh sure, they can come up with whatever they like. The theory rules everything in and nothing out. It has absolutely zero information content. Who cares what global average temperature is if you can't tell us what the weather is going to be like? Nobody!
30 years of government funded opposition? Who do you think pays for the IPCC, our own Met Office, NASA, the CRU? How many billions have been spent on campaigns promoting the paradigm? How much money has been given to researchers to come up with the "right" conclusions? How many politically incorrect papers have been kept out of journals because they disagree with the hypothesis? How many environmental groups have been selflessly promoting it to all corners of the globe for the last 25 years? You're wearing some pretty thick blinkers there.
Yes, Lindzen is one of the most eminent Climate Scientists in the world. His work hasn't been debunked; he's been attacked by mentalists like you, when what he suggests is at least as plausible, if not more plausible, than what the warmistas say.
Of course it does, but the reflection from the glass is what keeps some of the energy in, raising its temperature. CO2 is put into the greenhouse (sometimes), not to raise the temperature further (it doesn't do this), but to improve plant growth.
Absolutely not. I don't accept that at all, no. There's no correlation, in geological history, between temperature and CO2 levels. Indeed, there's not much correlation now. PDO and solar activity correlate better than CO2 does.
It's called group-think and self-interest. Call it a conspiracy if you like, but I don't see a reptilian overlord pulling levers like some sceptics. I see corruption, fraud, financial gain and the marxists in the Environmental movement all coming together to support a paradigm that benefits their ideas. The Scientists are happy with the grant money.
And if it doesn't (which it doesn't at present), you continue on as before, making new claims about your existing thesis that won't be tested for another three decades. All the while, you continue to rake in grant money for your graduate students.
Yes, it's "weather" when it's cooling and "climate" when it's warming. You have both bases covered. Clever!
This is, frankly, ridiculous. Linear equations are time-reversible. Why do you think you can correctly forecast 100 years when you can't correctly hind-cast 100 years? Models calibrate with historic data (in essence an exercise in curve fitting). The argument you make here is disingenuous in the extreme and I'm sure a clever fellow like yourself will immediately see his error.
Yea, they've been kind-of taking it up for the last 50 years here in the UK. Still no solution in sight. Prices are sky-high, carriages are cramped, trains are often late. Services are cancelled at short notice, because the company gets fined if a train is late (!).
When the world is warming (naturally, I might add), the catastrophists with the warming hypothesis look clever. When it start to cool (naturally, again), people like Corbyn look clever. As Corbyn hasn't ever published how he does his analysis (it's a commercial secret), the jury has to remain out on whether or not he's a sage, or just a contrarian who's ideas happen to correlate with what's happening right now.
If you're from the UK, a comparison with Vince Cable, who predicted 8 of the last 3 recessions, is probably apt.
Superfluous? Maybe in the big city, but out in the sticks, or towns, it's necessary. I used to get the train to work, but as they were either (1) late, sometimes making me stand on the windy, cold platform for upwards of 2 hours, or (2) rammed full, so I couldn't get myself and my bicycle onto them, I ended up buying a car and now drive to and from work. I didn't drive before!
Firstly, because the hypothesis is unprovable (we don't have multiple Earth's to experiment with) and secondly the hypothesis is unfalsifiable, in a strict scientific sense. We're now asked to believe that warming causes cooling. The models that we were told predicted the future centuries ahead, didn't predict harsh winters. They do now of course, because there are so many parameters to twiddle with you can pretty much come up with any projection you like (it's called confirmation bias).
James Hansen. The guy who called coal trains "death trains" and regularly pickets against the opening of power stations (not in China of course, in the US and UK). He's in control of GISS and is responsible for the ridiculous smoothing algorithms they use to smudge temperature across thousands of miles with a couple of temperature stations. He's also the guy who started this whole scare with his evidence to the senate in the 1980's.
I agree it will win out eventually. Who was it who said that science progresses one funeral at a time? That's how paradigms get overturned. The question is whether or not this happens before we end up with pointless political fixes, based on implausible chains of inference (as Lindzen pointed out) and a rolling back of the industrial age.
The point here is that two scientists can argue about Dark Matter, or Dark Energy, or Dark Shikari, and nobody is going to raise my taxes and tell me I can't drive a car to work any more. Political activism and Physics are separate, except when you get into the Nuclear weapons arena. But even there, the hypothesis that nuclear bombs are bad is not particularly controversial.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but we aren't living in a greenhouse. The Earth radiates energy into space. Lindzen thinks sensitivity is of the order of less than 1K, i.e. barely perceptible. The catastrophists (political activists) think it's anything from 4K to 16K. None of them know enough about the climate system to make any predictions, but they publish press releases of their model outputs as if they do. Without AGW, most of them wouldn't have careers.
In fact his "basic physics" is a load of tripe. It's entirely possible that you will have fewer storms (hurricane activity is now at a 30 year low, which contradicts his thesis). The important thing is temperature and hence pressure differences between the various parts of the globe (such as between the equator and the poles), not some fictional "global average".