From the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, April 17, 1969, regarding the justification for funding the then-unbuilt Fermilab:
Senator John Pastore: Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?
Robert Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.
Pastore: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Pastore: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.
I am aware of Boisjoly's views; I attended a talk he gave (basically after he was blackballed from the industry after speaking out against his management). But NASA didn't place MTI into any unescapable position; it was MTI's own decision to alter their recommendation.
As I said, NASA wasn't eager to postpone the launch, and as I said, and they wanted a strong justification for postponing (when they should instead have wanted a strong justification for launching - again, as I said, a poor decision but not the same as having "entirely commercial motives"). However, culpability ultimately rests with MTI management. If they hadn't reversed their no-go recommendation, there's no way NASA would have gone ahead with the launch. Certainly NASA wanted to go ahead with the launch, provided it was safe, but there's no blame in that. The blame is in MTI management telling NASA that it was safe.
Contrary to your original claim, NASA did not "ignore all warnings from Morton Thiokol"; to the contrary, they followed MTI's final recommendation that the launch posed little risk. There is no justification for invoking crass commercial motivations: ultimately NASA launched because they believed it was safe to do so. (And certainly they're not going to be financially ahead if the mission fails.)
NASA ignored all warnings from Morton Thiokol to postpone the launch.
No, they didn't. Morton-Thiokol initially recommended that NASA postpone the launch. After much debate, they decide to go offline and reanalyse the risks. (It's not clear whether NASA explicitly asked them to reconsider their recommendation, or whether it was Morton-Thiokol's own idea) Morton-Thiokol came back and told NASA they'd determined it would be okay to launch after all. NASA then acted upon Morton-Thiokol's recommendation.
Morton-Thiokol management ignored warnings from Morton-Thiokol engineers to postpone the launch. (Strictly speaking they didn't ignore the warnings, they overruled them, because they didn't think the engineers presented a sufficiently strong case for a catastrophic risk. Of course this was a foolish thing to do.)
NASA's reasons for pressing on, in spite of these warnings, was entirely commercial.
NASA's reasons for pressing on were that M-T told them it would be safe to do so. We don't know what NASA's reasons were for asking M-T to reanalyze the risks, if in fact they even did so. It's true that NASA wasn't eager to postpone the launch until April, and wanted a strong justification for doing so which M-T ultimately failed to provide. (Arguably that's backwards, they should have demanded a strong justification to proceed with the launch if doubts were present, but this decision failure is not the same as having "entirely commercial" motives.)
Of course, you wouldn't believe a scientist hired by Inhoffe.
Of course I wouldn't believe a scientist hired by a politician. As I said, I'm talking about regular academic-type scientists funded by organizations like the NSF, who are not hired by politicians.
However, sometimes a scientist will make a discovery and THEN get hired by those that want to see his findings reported.
Even if that were true, it has no relevance to the discovery or how the research leading to that discovery was funded.
Now, who is National Science Foundation? Or to be more accurate, who makes up the National Science Board?
The National Science Board doesn't decide which proposals to NSF are funded, so your entire response is irrelevant. That being said, your response is still stupid even if they did make funding decisions, so let me eviscerate it further.
Director of the US Dept of Energy's Renewable Energy Laboratory. Gee, I wonder what would happen to his funding if we found out that AGW is not really a problem.
Yeah, because fossil fuels are infinite and the only reason to pursue renewable energy is climate change. The DOE NREL was in existence long before global warming became a political issue; it was created in response to the oil crisis of the 1970s.
You then attempt to smear a civil engineer as "biased" on the basis of being affiliated in some way with some organization which spends some fraction of its time dealing with climate change. That's a pathetic stretch, and furthermore has nothing to do with how climate scientists get funded. Clough certainly doesn't get to direct funds to the Smithsonian, if that's what you're insinuating. Nor does Droegemeier get to direct funds to Oklahoma.
Psst: here's a shocking secret: the NSF has actual climate scientists on the review panels which supervise climate science funding. Some might say that's sensible, but no, I'm sure that's just another proof of "bias".
Clue: "bias" doesn't mean "being remotely involved in climate science in some way". Simply being a climate scientist doesn't make you biased. In the case of fossil fuel companies, we have examples of them directly paying people's salaries to reach requested conclusions. That is very far from how NSF funding operates, as I already explained to you.
I should qualify this by saying that scientists sometimes are hired by politicians, as science advisors, but I'm speaking about the vast majority of publishing scientists funded through the usual government agencies (and typically hired by universities).
Those hired by politicians via governmental grants
Scientists are not hired by politicians, and politicians do not direct grant funding decisions at agencies like the National Science Foundation.
do have an interest in findings which support the politicians expansion of power via energy regulation,
Yeah, I wonder how well that particular conspiracy theory holds up when viewed against funding for anthropogenic climate change research during, say, the 8 years of the Bush adminstration, or the Republican control of Congress, or the previous Bush administration. You know, the well-known energy regulation advocates. Nope, no AGW-supportive research got funded then.
You can't discredit scientists who work for oil companies who have something to gain unless you discredit scientists who work for governments that have something to gain.
I easily can do the former without doing the latter. Your inability to distinguish between government and corporate funded scientific research only demonstrates your bias, not your supposed "impartiality".
Unlike corporations, the NSF does not hire scientists to work on specific projects to reach particular conclusions. Fossil fuel companies have been known to literally send out calls to hire scientists to write papers supporting a low impact of humans on climate. By contrast, scientists propose projects to the NSF; the NSF does not hire them with the project already in mind. And the scientists don't propose to arrive at particular conclusions, like "proving anthropogenic global warming". Rather, they propose to study specific research areas, like "quantifying the climate sensitivity to CO2". The NSF doesn't care whether they get a high number or low number, as long as they study what they said they'd study. In fact, if they get a number which disagrees with the existing literature (either lower or higher), and they can convincingly support it, they're more likely to get future funding. That's because they've shown there is now a discrepancy in the literature, and by establishing this new line of research have demonstrated themselves uniquely qualified to continue working on it.
Just like the scientists who are asked by an energy company to study something don't have an agenda to kill polar bears...
False analogy. Those hired by an energy company do have an interest in findings which support the energy company's bottom line, namely that no restrictions on fossil fuel use are necessary. Whether polar bears are killed are incidental to that.
you should also have doubts about science done by someone who is paid by people, with, say, a political agenda that happens to include making life painful for businesses.
Climate scientists don't have a political agenda to "make life painful for businesses". And believe it or not, they like economic prosperity as much as anybody.
There is no alternative energy source that can replace oil, coal, natural gas, etc., anywhere even close to being on the horizon for the next several decades - at least, none that can possibly meet the hugely expanding economies of India, China, and soon to be Africa. Taxing energy use is simply a tax on economic activity. Period. That will incredibly impact GDP.
That contradicts what actual economists find (e.g., here, here).
The initial carbon tax would be low, ramping up over time as alternative energies continue to improve. Emissions reductions gains will come first mostly from energy efficiency measures. Such measures currently have an insufficient economic incentive because of the artificially low price of fossil fuel which neglects environmental externalities. A carbon price changes that equation. Efficiency measures will be followed later by gradually increasing investments in alternative energy (which is also incentivized by a carbon price). The large majority of the revenue raised by the tax would be returned to the public in the form of tax rebates, direct dividends, or a tax shift; the remainder would be invested in further alternative energy R&D and to cushion the economic impact to particularly vulnerable sectors.
It does have an impact on GDP, on the order of the total amount of money invested in environmental regulation and remediation so far (which hasn't bankrupted anybody). But it's not pure suppression of economic activity with "incredible" devastating impacts, either.
As we now know, many of the leading climatologists working in AGW research have refused to publish their work in scientific journals that post criticism of their work.
We don't "know" any such thing. All peer reviewed journals criticize authors' work during the review process. (And assuming you're referring to the Climate Research boycott advocated in the "Climategate" e-mails, note how "a few climatologists" suddenly become "many" and "one scientific journal" becomes "scientific journals".
Would you listen to Khabibullo Abdusamatov, mathematician and astronomer at Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences?
No, I wouldn't listen to a solar astronomer's opinion on the terrestrial greenhouse effect. Especially not one so absurd as to claim that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist because all the greenhouse gases float up and radiate above the troposphere, which has absolutely nothing to do with how actual greenhouse gases are observed to behave in the atmosphere.
How about Richard Lindzen
No, I wouldn't listen to his claims that the increase of CO2 should lead to more warming than has been observed, because those claims ignore both the transient effect and non-CO2 forcings, as has been pointed out by others (e.g., Rahmstorf in his response to Lindzen's claim in the book Beyond Kyoto).
This finding was based on a groundbreaking research paper by renowned climate economist Professor Richard Tol, who showed that a high, global CO2 tax starting at 68 dollars could reduce world GDP by a staggering 12.9 percent in 2100,
Lomborg is being really dishonest by implying this is the conclusion of the Copenhagen Consensus.
$68/tCO2 ($250/tC) starting in 2010 is way higher than any proposed policy being seriously considered, and it has all the abatement money being spent in 10 years and no spending thereafter. Of course it's going to be uselessly expensive. Tol himself calls it a "silly" scenario.
Most economists have a tax starting out at $10/tC, less than 10% of Tol's high policy, which increases over the rest of the century.
Tellingly, you left out the part where Tol found that a mitigation "trust fund" policy starting at $2/tC investment and ramping up to $161/tC has benefits outweighing its costs. (You can see Tol's scenarios in his Challenge paper, including the ridiculously high outlier of the scenario you quote.)
Kuik's Perspective response to Tol's Challenge paper summarized Tol's findings as, "These scenarios basically say that 1) climate change is a long-term problem that requires a long-term policy, 2) an optimal mitigation policy is a global policy that starts with a relatively low tax that increases with the discount rate (compare the Hotelling rule for optimal depletion). This is a conventional and reasonable view on optimal CO2 mitigation policy."
Hardly "groundbreaking".
(By comparison, look at, e.g., Nordhaus's "optimal" policy in A Question of Balance, which is a squarely mainstream economic proposal. It starts at about $25/tC and ramps up to a little over $200/tC in 2100, not so far from Tol's estimate, which unlike Nordhaus did not attempt to optimize the benefit-cost ratio.)
Kuik goes on to note: "The assumptions in [Tol's] calculations leads to very conservative benefit-cost ratios: i.e. relatively high discount rate, no equity weighting, zero value for impacts on biodiversity, no risk premium, no effects on economic growth itself. Further, even for the scenarios that have a policy during the entire century, the cut-off date of the year 2100 has a serious negative effect on the benefit-cost ratios. Due to the relatively long lag times of climate change (represented in the FUND model), the rather high carbon taxes in, say, the last quarter of this century will reduce emissions that will mitigate climate change mainly after the year 2100. Thus, in the benefit-cos
The graphs are incorrectly labelled, it's obvious to anyone that they are
The graphs did not claim that those papers were the only source of data, and the text of the document confirmed that there were multiple sources of data.
I would love to see you justify claims of "fraud" in the courts of Sweden on the basis of "The graphs are misleading if you intentionally ignore the text that explains what's in the graph".
The picture in question does not in any way show the shift from one set of data to another
So what? There are many examples of synthesis data products in science, e.g. the solar irradiance curves I mentioned earlier. If you download a TSI plot out of a paper, it won't plot all the different satellites in different colors, it will just plot the final product (unless it's the synthesis paper itself which explains how they were combined). Hell, the proxy record itself is a synthesis of many data sources, as is the historical record. That doesn't mean it's somehow "fraudulent" to plot the instrumental time series itself. I already pointed that out to you, more points which you ignored. There's nothing wrong plotting a synthesis curve as long as you say it's a synthesis, which they did. If you want to see the individual data sets that went into the synthesis, you read their papers. Which they cited. That's why you cite papers, to see the details of what you are summarizing.
But it was only used a cover picture! Surely our politicians disregard obviously faulty pictures and read the complete papers!
As I've pointed out to you several times, it wasn't a faulty picture. It is CORRECT to discard data you don't trust.
Since briefs and graphs are used to sway politicians, I consider them to be very important [...] The captions in the image I linked to are incorrect and deceiptful.
You may have noticed that figures have both legends (which appear in the figure) and captions, which are the text following the figure which further explain its contents. The legend correctly identifies the source papers for the proxy data. The legend makes no claims that the proxy data are the only data. The caption, which in this case is in the form of a text box at the beginning of the report, correctly describes what data sources were used in the figure.
In short, the brief correctly identified the contents of the graph. You would prefer to pretend that the contents of the brief don't exist and that the figure is the only part of the brief. Your claim of "deceipt" is based on the moronic pretense that the legend of the graph says everything about what is contained in the graph, and the text below doesn't count. You are seriously claiming that if a figure legend says "Data source X" and the text below it says "and data source Y was also included", that this is somehow fraud. Give me a break.
I don't understand why you keep posting. Your claims are laughable and based solely on ignoring the text which actually explains what the data are. Why are you wasting your time and mine repeating false and libelous claims?
So when the decisions made can affect billions of people's lives you should just make up a pretty picture that is probably invalid, but makes you point?
That is completely the opposite of what I said, so try working on your literacy skills.
I said that their graph is a more valid picture of temperature than is than a graph which includes data which they have good reason to believe is invalid. If you want to read why they decided the data they excluded was invalid, you can read their scientific publications for the justification. They didn't "hide" or ignore the conflict between data sources. They studied it, discussed it with other scientists, published their conclusions, and made a graph which they felt was the best scientific representation of the Earth's temperature history by combining multiple data sources.
You have an amazing ability to ignore everything I say and repeat your original, false assertion.
In this picture, as I posted before, the curves (note the colours) do not depict what the captions claim they depict. It's as simple as that.
The text of the report, which you never read, clearly says that the curves depict a combination of proxy and historical data. Which is what they actually represent. For some bizarre reason, you insist on ignoring the entirety of the report. The figure caption correctly says which proxy source the data comes from, and the text notes that historical data has also been included.
You can only maintain your fiction if you persist in willfully ignoring the contents of the report which directly describe what went into that figure.
Maybe you should read the report before making claims about what it does and doesn't say.
In the WMO report, in the box that discusses that figure, they say that the last 1000 years has been reconstructed on the basis of "natural archives of past temperature, [a list of proxies], in addition to historical and long instrumental records". That is, what they're calling a "reconstruction" is a combination of proxy and historical data. Which is precisely what they plotted.
Pay attention. I already read the American Thinker article you linked previously. As I said in my very first response to you, it does not actually refute anything I've said. You have not "falsified" anything in my post.
I said that in the policy document they combined the proxy and instrumental time series into one synthesis time series, which they did. You have merely reaffirmed this statement of mine, rather than "falsified" it. You then claimed they are "fraudulently" hiding the fact that the series declines, I in turn said that they explicitly discuss the decline in their scientific papers and their reasons for dropping it, and so on. Perhaps you'd like to refresh your memory of the thread before making such statements.
I know you have some emotional need to think that there has been "fraud" proven here, but mindlessly parroting poorly-argued websites that you do not yourself appear to understand does not help to make your case.
Graphs for policy documents are important, but policy documents cannot go into all the details of data sources that journal articles can. That's why there are journal articles. The purpose of a policy document is to present a defensible scientific estimate of the long-term temperature history of the planet, which requires combining data sources. Displaying data which shows cooling due to non-climatic influences on tree growth, when in reality it is known that there was no such cooling, would be misleading to policymakers.
In a document for policymakers it is not "fraudlent", not even merely legitimate, but desirable to drop a data set if you think it's no longer trustworthy and switch to a data set which you believe is more reliable — as long as you have scientific justification for doing so. Full justification for such a substitution should be, and has been, discussed in the scientific literature. It is beyond the scope of a policy document, which should cite the scientific literature to justify these claims.
For example, if a policy document were to publish a solar irradiance plot to compare solar activity to temperature, it should just plot the best available TSI time series. The fact that TSI series are composite indices from an aggregation of different satellite data sets with different bias corrections applied would not make it "fradulent" to plot a composite TSI graph. The composite graph represents the best available scientific synthesis of multiple data sources. Likewise, there is nothing fraudulent in combining multiple sources of temperature data (and, in fact, that's what each of the paleotemp and instrumental time series are to begin with, themselves; within each synthesis data product there are corrections and substitutions going on).
"Completely separate data" is not correct because we are talking about calibration: that's how the tree ring paleotemperature record was constructed in the first place. With no calibration to instrumental temperatures, there is no regression mapping from tree ring density to temperature. You're going from wrong statements to even more wrong statements. You should quit while you're behind.
Both Mann and Briffa refused for a very long time to supply independent researchers with the actual data.
That is a separate issue from accusations of "fraud".
The fraud is in using completely separate data to create an artificial correlation (by smoothing/interpolation) and use that correlation as "proof" that the proxies are good!
As I have noted twice now, they did not use this as "proof" that there is no divergence problem. They discussed the divergence problem directly in their papers, which you evidently have not read. Later manuscripts discussed more detailed ways to deal with this divergence (e.g., Briffa again in 2004). Once again, you may disagree with their assessment of the divergence problem, but you cannot claim that they pretended it didn't exist.
Also, they did not use "completely separate data" because the instrumental temperatures are used in all these methods to establish the proxy-temperature calibration in the first place.
The article merely repeats the same claims as the original poster, and so does not constitute a refutation of my response.
The fact remains, the divergence problem is not some secret that is being hidden. It is cited and discussed by these very authors (e.g., by Briffa at least back to 1998). As I said, you may disagree with their interpretation of the divergence problem (namely, that it's a non-climatic artifact that only affects recent reconstructions), but you can't claim that they pretended it didn't exist. And, as I said, you can find the actual tree ring series unblended with instrumental data in their journal publications (e.g., Briffa again in 2000, with further discussion of the divergence). Finally, as I said, it is not "fraud" to either truncate the series where you don't believe it's accurate nor to substitute data you believe is more accurate in place of the inaccurate data.
The graph was not a demonstration of the skill of their method, it was the cover graph for a report for policymakers. Their actual scientific publications show the proxy record directly. And they did not ignore the discrepancy between the two time series. The "divergence problem" is well known, well cited, and frequently discussed among dendroclimatologists. There are some reasons to believe that trees are now responding to non-climatic human influences which they previously were not subject to, such as changes in atmospheric aerosol loading, CO2 content, and pH of precipitation in some locations. You can debate whether these causes are legitimate or not, but in a graph for policymakers it's not inappropriate to drop the data where you suspect it's contaminated and switch to data you think is more trustworthy. Again, their actual publications indicate the decline which is the whole basis for the divergence problem literature in the first place. It's not like this is some huge secret that nobody knew about or the authors refused to acknowledge.
Most of whose predictions? What predictions are you talking about here?
The globe should be at least a half-degree warmer than observed
According to who?
Hansen's 1988 projections line up fairly well with current temperatures if you apply the forcing scenario which most closely corresponds to the actual emissions over that time (Scenario B). They're certainly not "half a degree" above observed. I don't know what other models were predicting at the time (there weren't too many of them), but I suspect that they were probably lower because GISS Model II's climate sensitivity has always been on the high end of the Charney or IPCC ranges.
I don't have access to the IPCC's First Assessment Report in 1990, but Wikipedia says they were projecting a 0.3 C/decade warming rate over the entire 21st century. Since warming is projected to accelerate over time, the late 20th/early 21st century rate would be lower than the century average... maybe 0.2 C/decade would be my guess. That's close to the modern projection, too. And a quickie regression I ran on the GISTEMP data 1990-2008 gives an observed 0.19 C/decade trend.
(check the "Hockey Stick" graph in its earlier incarnations),
The "Hockey Stick" graph is a paleoclimate reconstruction of past temperature, not a prediction of future temperature.
the oceans should be at least a foot deeper (up to five feet higher today, according to some predictions),
Again, according to who?
According to the Wikipedia entry on the IPCC FAR, they were projecting 20 cm sea level rise 1990-2030. That would correspond to about 10 cm (4 inches) sea level rise 1990 to present (again, probably slightly lower as it would be expected to accelerate over time). The actual observed sea level rise over that time was about 5 cm, so they were too high by a factor of 2 in that case, but not by the factor of 5-25 you claim.
and storms should be much, much more severe (they're not).
Why not add a few more "much"es to exaggerate your point?
I'm sure you can guess: according to who? How much more severe were they projected to be by 2010 (as opposed to 2100)?
As far as I know, predictions of more severe storms (why not add some hyperbole by adding a few "much"es to that?) really only gained serious traction in the last few years.
On the other hand, many of the skeptics have been supporting the solar variation side of the theory of global climate change, and (surprise!) it matches up quite nicely to observed temperature changes, including the prediction of the stable/cooling trend in the last ten years.
Yeah, except for the part about not matching up at all with global temperature changes since the latter half of the 20th century, solar irradiance being pretty much flat over that period of time when averaged over the 11-year solar cycle. And if anything, more recent estimates of 20th century variability in solar activity support even less of a solar influence.
(One version of) that code applies an "artificial correction" to the MXD tree ring density time series. Sections 4.3 and 4.4 of this unpublished manuscript describe an "artificial correction" (yes, they use those exact words) to the MXD tree ring density time series. They describe why they applied it.
I suspect they're the same thing, and that this correction was documented, but not used in a published manuscript. In any case, you have no evidence of "blatant lying" unless you can prove that (1) this correction was applied in a published manuscript, and (2) their documented procedure doesn't mention this correction.
They're not going to increase without limit forever, but there certainly is enough remaining fossil fuel for CO2 to increase beyond today's levels, and thus for warming rates to accelerate.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, April 17, 1969, regarding the justification for funding the then-unbuilt Fermilab:
Senator John Pastore: Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?
Robert Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.
Pastore: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Pastore: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.
I am aware of Boisjoly's views; I attended a talk he gave (basically after he was blackballed from the industry after speaking out against his management). But NASA didn't place MTI into any unescapable position; it was MTI's own decision to alter their recommendation.
As I said, NASA wasn't eager to postpone the launch, and as I said, and they wanted a strong justification for postponing (when they should instead have wanted a strong justification for launching - again, as I said, a poor decision but not the same as having "entirely commercial motives"). However, culpability ultimately rests with MTI management. If they hadn't reversed their no-go recommendation, there's no way NASA would have gone ahead with the launch. Certainly NASA wanted to go ahead with the launch, provided it was safe, but there's no blame in that. The blame is in MTI management telling NASA that it was safe.
Contrary to your original claim, NASA did not "ignore all warnings from Morton Thiokol"; to the contrary, they followed MTI's final recommendation that the launch posed little risk. There is no justification for invoking crass commercial motivations: ultimately NASA launched because they believed it was safe to do so. (And certainly they're not going to be financially ahead if the mission fails.)
NASA ignored all warnings from Morton Thiokol to postpone the launch.
No, they didn't. Morton-Thiokol initially recommended that NASA postpone the launch. After much debate, they decide to go offline and reanalyse the risks. (It's not clear whether NASA explicitly asked them to reconsider their recommendation, or whether it was Morton-Thiokol's own idea) Morton-Thiokol came back and told NASA they'd determined it would be okay to launch after all. NASA then acted upon Morton-Thiokol's recommendation.
Morton-Thiokol management ignored warnings from Morton-Thiokol engineers to postpone the launch. (Strictly speaking they didn't ignore the warnings, they overruled them, because they didn't think the engineers presented a sufficiently strong case for a catastrophic risk. Of course this was a foolish thing to do.)
NASA's reasons for pressing on, in spite of these warnings, was entirely commercial.
NASA's reasons for pressing on were that M-T told them it would be safe to do so. We don't know what NASA's reasons were for asking M-T to reanalyze the risks, if in fact they even did so. It's true that NASA wasn't eager to postpone the launch until April, and wanted a strong justification for doing so which M-T ultimately failed to provide. (Arguably that's backwards, they should have demanded a strong justification to proceed with the launch if doubts were present, but this decision failure is not the same as having "entirely commercial" motives.)
Of course, you wouldn't believe a scientist hired by Inhoffe.
Of course I wouldn't believe a scientist hired by a politician. As I said, I'm talking about regular academic-type scientists funded by organizations like the NSF, who are not hired by politicians.
However, sometimes a scientist will make a discovery and THEN get hired by those that want to see his findings reported.
Even if that were true, it has no relevance to the discovery or how the research leading to that discovery was funded.
Now, who is National Science Foundation? Or to be more accurate, who makes up the National Science Board?
The National Science Board doesn't decide which proposals to NSF are funded, so your entire response is irrelevant. That being said, your response is still stupid even if they did make funding decisions, so let me eviscerate it further.
Director of the US Dept of Energy's Renewable Energy Laboratory. Gee, I wonder what would happen to his funding if we found out that AGW is not really a problem.
Yeah, because fossil fuels are infinite and the only reason to pursue renewable energy is climate change. The DOE NREL was in existence long before global warming became a political issue; it was created in response to the oil crisis of the 1970s.
You then attempt to smear a civil engineer as "biased" on the basis of being affiliated in some way with some organization which spends some fraction of its time dealing with climate change. That's a pathetic stretch, and furthermore has nothing to do with how climate scientists get funded. Clough certainly doesn't get to direct funds to the Smithsonian, if that's what you're insinuating. Nor does Droegemeier get to direct funds to Oklahoma.
Psst: here's a shocking secret: the NSF has actual climate scientists on the review panels which supervise climate science funding. Some might say that's sensible, but no, I'm sure that's just another proof of "bias".
Clue: "bias" doesn't mean "being remotely involved in climate science in some way". Simply being a climate scientist doesn't make you biased. In the case of fossil fuel companies, we have examples of them directly paying people's salaries to reach requested conclusions. That is very far from how NSF funding operates, as I already explained to you.
I should qualify this by saying that scientists sometimes are hired by politicians, as science advisors, but I'm speaking about the vast majority of publishing scientists funded through the usual government agencies (and typically hired by universities).
Those hired by politicians via governmental grants
Scientists are not hired by politicians, and politicians do not direct grant funding decisions at agencies like the National Science Foundation.
do have an interest in findings which support the politicians expansion of power via energy regulation,
Yeah, I wonder how well that particular conspiracy theory holds up when viewed against funding for anthropogenic climate change research during, say, the 8 years of the Bush adminstration, or the Republican control of Congress, or the previous Bush administration. You know, the well-known energy regulation advocates. Nope, no AGW-supportive research got funded then.
You can't discredit scientists who work for oil companies who have something to gain unless you discredit scientists who work for governments that have something to gain.
I easily can do the former without doing the latter. Your inability to distinguish between government and corporate funded scientific research only demonstrates your bias, not your supposed "impartiality".
Unlike corporations, the NSF does not hire scientists to work on specific projects to reach particular conclusions. Fossil fuel companies have been known to literally send out calls to hire scientists to write papers supporting a low impact of humans on climate. By contrast, scientists propose projects to the NSF; the NSF does not hire them with the project already in mind. And the scientists don't propose to arrive at particular conclusions, like "proving anthropogenic global warming". Rather, they propose to study specific research areas, like "quantifying the climate sensitivity to CO2". The NSF doesn't care whether they get a high number or low number, as long as they study what they said they'd study. In fact, if they get a number which disagrees with the existing literature (either lower or higher), and they can convincingly support it, they're more likely to get future funding. That's because they've shown there is now a discrepancy in the literature, and by establishing this new line of research have demonstrated themselves uniquely qualified to continue working on it.
Just like the scientists who are asked by an energy company to study something don't have an agenda to kill polar bears...
False analogy. Those hired by an energy company do have an interest in findings which support the energy company's bottom line, namely that no restrictions on fossil fuel use are necessary. Whether polar bears are killed are incidental to that.
you should also have doubts about science done by someone who is paid by people, with, say, a political agenda that happens to include making life painful for businesses.
Climate scientists don't have a political agenda to "make life painful for businesses". And believe it or not, they like economic prosperity as much as anybody.
There is no alternative energy source that can replace oil, coal, natural gas, etc., anywhere even close to being on the horizon for the next several decades - at least, none that can possibly meet the hugely expanding economies of India, China, and soon to be Africa. Taxing energy use is simply a tax on economic activity. Period. That will incredibly impact GDP.
That contradicts what actual economists find (e.g., here, here).
The initial carbon tax would be low, ramping up over time as alternative energies continue to improve. Emissions reductions gains will come first mostly from energy efficiency measures. Such measures currently have an insufficient economic incentive because of the artificially low price of fossil fuel which neglects environmental externalities. A carbon price changes that equation. Efficiency measures will be followed later by gradually increasing investments in alternative energy (which is also incentivized by a carbon price). The large majority of the revenue raised by the tax would be returned to the public in the form of tax rebates, direct dividends, or a tax shift; the remainder would be invested in further alternative energy R&D and to cushion the economic impact to particularly vulnerable sectors.
It does have an impact on GDP, on the order of the total amount of money invested in environmental regulation and remediation so far (which hasn't bankrupted anybody). But it's not pure suppression of economic activity with "incredible" devastating impacts, either.
As we now know, many of the leading climatologists working in AGW research have refused to publish their work in scientific journals that post criticism of their work.
We don't "know" any such thing. All peer reviewed journals criticize authors' work during the review process. (And assuming you're referring to the Climate Research boycott advocated in the "Climategate" e-mails, note how "a few climatologists" suddenly become "many" and "one scientific journal" becomes "scientific journals".
Would you listen to Khabibullo Abdusamatov, mathematician and astronomer at Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences?
No, I wouldn't listen to a solar astronomer's opinion on the terrestrial greenhouse effect. Especially not one so absurd as to claim that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist because all the greenhouse gases float up and radiate above the troposphere, which has absolutely nothing to do with how actual greenhouse gases are observed to behave in the atmosphere.
How about Richard Lindzen
No, I wouldn't listen to his claims that the increase of CO2 should lead to more warming than has been observed, because those claims ignore both the transient effect and non-CO2 forcings, as has been pointed out by others (e.g., Rahmstorf in his response to Lindzen's claim in the book Beyond Kyoto).
This finding was based on a groundbreaking research paper by renowned climate economist Professor Richard Tol, who showed that a high, global CO2 tax starting at 68 dollars could reduce world GDP by a staggering 12.9 percent in 2100,
Lomborg is being really dishonest by implying this is the conclusion of the Copenhagen Consensus.
$68/tCO2 ($250/tC) starting in 2010 is way higher than any proposed policy being seriously considered, and it has all the abatement money being spent in 10 years and no spending thereafter. Of course it's going to be uselessly expensive. Tol himself calls it a "silly" scenario.
Most economists have a tax starting out at $10/tC, less than 10% of Tol's high policy, which increases over the rest of the century.
Tellingly, you left out the part where Tol found that a mitigation "trust fund" policy starting at $2/tC investment and ramping up to $161/tC has benefits outweighing its costs. (You can see Tol's scenarios in his Challenge paper, including the ridiculously high outlier of the scenario you quote.)
Kuik's Perspective response to Tol's Challenge paper summarized Tol's findings as, "These scenarios basically say that 1) climate change is a long-term problem that requires a long-term policy, 2) an optimal mitigation policy is a global policy that starts with a relatively low tax that increases with the discount rate (compare the Hotelling rule for optimal depletion). This is a conventional and reasonable view on optimal CO2 mitigation policy."
Hardly "groundbreaking".
(By comparison, look at, e.g., Nordhaus's "optimal" policy in A Question of Balance, which is a squarely mainstream economic proposal. It starts at about $25/tC and ramps up to a little over $200/tC in 2100, not so far from Tol's estimate, which unlike Nordhaus did not attempt to optimize the benefit-cost ratio.)
Kuik goes on to note: "The assumptions in [Tol's] calculations leads to very conservative benefit-cost ratios: i.e. relatively high discount rate, no equity weighting, zero value for impacts on biodiversity, no risk premium, no effects on economic growth itself. Further, even for the scenarios that have a policy during the entire century, the cut-off date of the year 2100 has a serious negative effect on the benefit-cost ratios. Due to the relatively long lag times of climate change (represented in the FUND model), the rather high carbon taxes in, say, the last quarter of this century will reduce emissions that will mitigate climate change mainly after the year 2100. Thus, in the benefit-cos
It's like what Harlan Ellison said on Sci-Fi Channel: [...] judge me on who I am today"
An old brat?
(Sorry... Harlan's got a bit of a .. um.. reputation.)
The graphs are incorrectly labelled, it's obvious to anyone that they are
The graphs did not claim that those papers were the only source of data, and the text of the document confirmed that there were multiple sources of data.
I would love to see you justify claims of "fraud" in the courts of Sweden on the basis of "The graphs are misleading if you intentionally ignore the text that explains what's in the graph".
The picture in question does not in any way show the shift from one set of data to another
So what? There are many examples of synthesis data products in science, e.g. the solar irradiance curves I mentioned earlier. If you download a TSI plot out of a paper, it won't plot all the different satellites in different colors, it will just plot the final product (unless it's the synthesis paper itself which explains how they were combined). Hell, the proxy record itself is a synthesis of many data sources, as is the historical record. That doesn't mean it's somehow "fraudulent" to plot the instrumental time series itself. I already pointed that out to you, more points which you ignored. There's nothing wrong plotting a synthesis curve as long as you say it's a synthesis, which they did. If you want to see the individual data sets that went into the synthesis, you read their papers. Which they cited. That's why you cite papers, to see the details of what you are summarizing.
But it was only used a cover picture! Surely our politicians disregard obviously faulty pictures and read the complete papers!
As I've pointed out to you several times, it wasn't a faulty picture. It is CORRECT to discard data you don't trust.
Since briefs and graphs are used to sway politicians, I consider them to be very important [...] The captions in the image I linked to are incorrect and deceiptful.
You may have noticed that figures have both legends (which appear in the figure) and captions, which are the text following the figure which further explain its contents. The legend correctly identifies the source papers for the proxy data. The legend makes no claims that the proxy data are the only data. The caption, which in this case is in the form of a text box at the beginning of the report, correctly describes what data sources were used in the figure.
In short, the brief correctly identified the contents of the graph. You would prefer to pretend that the contents of the brief don't exist and that the figure is the only part of the brief. Your claim of "deceipt" is based on the moronic pretense that the legend of the graph says everything about what is contained in the graph, and the text below doesn't count. You are seriously claiming that if a figure legend says "Data source X" and the text below it says "and data source Y was also included", that this is somehow fraud. Give me a break.
I don't understand why you keep posting. Your claims are laughable and based solely on ignoring the text which actually explains what the data are. Why are you wasting your time and mine repeating false and libelous claims?
So when the decisions made can affect billions of people's lives you should just make up a pretty picture that is probably invalid, but makes you point?
That is completely the opposite of what I said, so try working on your literacy skills.
I said that their graph is a more valid picture of temperature than is than a graph which includes data which they have good reason to believe is invalid. If you want to read why they decided the data they excluded was invalid, you can read their scientific publications for the justification. They didn't "hide" or ignore the conflict between data sources. They studied it, discussed it with other scientists, published their conclusions, and made a graph which they felt was the best scientific representation of the Earth's temperature history by combining multiple data sources.
You have an amazing ability to ignore everything I say and repeat your original, false assertion.
In this picture, as I posted before, the curves (note the colours) do not depict what the captions claim they depict.
It's as simple as that.
The text of the report, which you never read, clearly says that the curves depict a combination of proxy and historical data. Which is what they actually represent. For some bizarre reason, you insist on ignoring the entirety of the report. The figure caption correctly says which proxy source the data comes from, and the text notes that historical data has also been included.
You can only maintain your fiction if you persist in willfully ignoring the contents of the report which directly describe what went into that figure.
Maybe you should read the report before making claims about what it does and doesn't say.
In the WMO report, in the box that discusses that figure, they say that the last 1000 years has been reconstructed on the basis of "natural archives of past temperature, [a list of proxies], in addition to historical and long instrumental records". That is, what they're calling a "reconstruction" is a combination of proxy and historical data. Which is precisely what they plotted.
Sheesh.
Pay attention. I already read the American Thinker article you linked previously. As I said in my very first response to you, it does not actually refute anything I've said. You have not "falsified" anything in my post.
I said that in the policy document they combined the proxy and instrumental time series into one synthesis time series, which they did. You have merely reaffirmed this statement of mine, rather than "falsified" it. You then claimed they are "fraudulently" hiding the fact that the series declines, I in turn said that they explicitly discuss the decline in their scientific papers and their reasons for dropping it, and so on. Perhaps you'd like to refresh your memory of the thread before making such statements.
I know you have some emotional need to think that there has been "fraud" proven here, but mindlessly parroting poorly-argued websites that you do not yourself appear to understand does not help to make your case.
Graphs for policy documents are important, but policy documents cannot go into all the details of data sources that journal articles can. That's why there are journal articles. The purpose of a policy document is to present a defensible scientific estimate of the long-term temperature history of the planet, which requires combining data sources. Displaying data which shows cooling due to non-climatic influences on tree growth, when in reality it is known that there was no such cooling, would be misleading to policymakers.
In a document for policymakers it is not "fraudlent", not even merely legitimate, but desirable to drop a data set if you think it's no longer trustworthy and switch to a data set which you believe is more reliable — as long as you have scientific justification for doing so. Full justification for such a substitution should be, and has been, discussed in the scientific literature. It is beyond the scope of a policy document, which should cite the scientific literature to justify these claims.
For example, if a policy document were to publish a solar irradiance plot to compare solar activity to temperature, it should just plot the best available TSI time series. The fact that TSI series are composite indices from an aggregation of different satellite data sets with different bias corrections applied would not make it "fradulent" to plot a composite TSI graph. The composite graph represents the best available scientific synthesis of multiple data sources. Likewise, there is nothing fraudulent in combining multiple sources of temperature data (and, in fact, that's what each of the paleotemp and instrumental time series are to begin with, themselves; within each synthesis data product there are corrections and substitutions going on).
"Completely separate data" is not correct because we are talking about calibration: that's how the tree ring paleotemperature record was constructed in the first place. With no calibration to instrumental temperatures, there is no regression mapping from tree ring density to temperature. You're going from wrong statements to even more wrong statements. You should quit while you're behind.
All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time.
Both Mann and Briffa refused for a very long time to supply independent researchers with the actual data.
That is a separate issue from accusations of "fraud".
The fraud is in using completely separate data to create an artificial correlation (by smoothing/interpolation) and use that correlation as "proof" that the proxies are good!
As I have noted twice now, they did not use this as "proof" that there is no divergence problem. They discussed the divergence problem directly in their papers, which you evidently have not read. Later manuscripts discussed more detailed ways to deal with this divergence (e.g., Briffa again in 2004). Once again, you may disagree with their assessment of the divergence problem, but you cannot claim that they pretended it didn't exist.
Also, they did not use "completely separate data" because the instrumental temperatures are used in all these methods to establish the proxy-temperature calibration in the first place.
The article merely repeats the same claims as the original poster, and so does not constitute a refutation of my response.
The fact remains, the divergence problem is not some secret that is being hidden. It is cited and discussed by these very authors (e.g., by Briffa at least back to 1998). As I said, you may disagree with their interpretation of the divergence problem (namely, that it's a non-climatic artifact that only affects recent reconstructions), but you can't claim that they pretended it didn't exist. And, as I said, you can find the actual tree ring series unblended with instrumental data in their journal publications (e.g., Briffa again in 2000, with further discussion of the divergence). Finally, as I said, it is not "fraud" to either truncate the series where you don't believe it's accurate nor to substitute data you believe is more accurate in place of the inaccurate data.
The graph was not a demonstration of the skill of their method, it was the cover graph for a report for policymakers. Their actual scientific publications show the proxy record directly. And they did not ignore the discrepancy between the two time series. The "divergence problem" is well known, well cited, and frequently discussed among dendroclimatologists. There are some reasons to believe that trees are now responding to non-climatic human influences which they previously were not subject to, such as changes in atmospheric aerosol loading, CO2 content, and pH of precipitation in some locations. You can debate whether these causes are legitimate or not, but in a graph for policymakers it's not inappropriate to drop the data where you suspect it's contaminated and switch to data you think is more trustworthy. Again, their actual publications indicate the decline which is the whole basis for the divergence problem literature in the first place. It's not like this is some huge secret that nobody knew about or the authors refused to acknowledge.
Most of whose predictions? What predictions are you talking about here?
The globe should be at least a half-degree warmer than observed
According to who?
Hansen's 1988 projections line up fairly well with current temperatures if you apply the forcing scenario which most closely corresponds to the actual emissions over that time (Scenario B). They're certainly not "half a degree" above observed. I don't know what other models were predicting at the time (there weren't too many of them), but I suspect that they were probably lower because GISS Model II's climate sensitivity has always been on the high end of the Charney or IPCC ranges.
I don't have access to the IPCC's First Assessment Report in 1990, but Wikipedia says they were projecting a 0.3 C/decade warming rate over the entire 21st century. Since warming is projected to accelerate over time, the late 20th/early 21st century rate would be lower than the century average ... maybe 0.2 C/decade would be my guess. That's close to the modern projection, too. And a quickie regression I ran on the GISTEMP data 1990-2008 gives an observed 0.19 C/decade trend.
(check the "Hockey Stick" graph in its earlier incarnations),
The "Hockey Stick" graph is a paleoclimate reconstruction of past temperature, not a prediction of future temperature.
the oceans should be at least a foot deeper (up to five feet higher today, according to some predictions),
Again, according to who?
According to the Wikipedia entry on the IPCC FAR, they were projecting 20 cm sea level rise 1990-2030. That would correspond to about 10 cm (4 inches) sea level rise 1990 to present (again, probably slightly lower as it would be expected to accelerate over time). The actual observed sea level rise over that time was about 5 cm, so they were too high by a factor of 2 in that case, but not by the factor of 5-25 you claim.
and storms should be much, much more severe (they're not).
Why not add a few more "much"es to exaggerate your point?
I'm sure you can guess: according to who? How much more severe were they projected to be by 2010 (as opposed to 2100)?
As far as I know, predictions of more severe storms (why not add some hyperbole by adding a few "much"es to that?) really only gained serious traction in the last few years.
On the other hand, many of the skeptics have been supporting the solar variation side of the theory of global climate change, and (surprise!) it matches up quite nicely to observed temperature changes, including the prediction of the stable/cooling trend in the last ten years.
Yeah, except for the part about not matching up at all with global temperature changes since the latter half of the 20th century, solar irradiance being pretty much flat over that period of time when averaged over the 11-year solar cycle. And if anything, more recent estimates of 20th century variability in solar activity support even less of a solar influence.
(One version of) that code applies an "artificial correction" to the MXD tree ring density time series. Sections 4.3 and 4.4 of this unpublished manuscript describe an "artificial correction" (yes, they use those exact words) to the MXD tree ring density time series. They describe why they applied it.
I suspect they're the same thing, and that this correction was documented, but not used in a published manuscript. In any case, you have no evidence of "blatant lying" unless you can prove that (1) this correction was applied in a published manuscript, and (2) their documented procedure doesn't mention this correction.
They're not going to increase without limit forever, but there certainly is enough remaining fossil fuel for CO2 to increase beyond today's levels, and thus for warming rates to accelerate.