Not sure inflation will really help. Once inflation consistently creeps above growth, your economy could head into a downward spiral, and we've seen that in many parts of the world before.
On the other hand, devaluing the US dollar would help domestic jobs immensely, and reduce the foreign portion of the debt problem. It would also help balance the trade deficit. The trick is to do it without causing an equivalent amount of inflation.
I would be for a gradual easing of the US dollar. But what is wrong with raising taxes on the top 2% earners in the country, whilst also enacting across-the-board budget cuts? Wouldn't that solve the problem?
I appreciate not wanting to argue politics, so I am just saying =)
1000s of scientists, 20 years, 1 resignation. Small deal.
And global warming *will* bring more extreme weather.
As for other incidents -- there just aren't any. There's a minor mistake here and there, which is no big deal in reports containing tens of thousands of details.
You treat these hard working scientists like they are scum, and would point to their mis-matched socks as proof that they don't know what they are talking about.
And can you point to how it is incorrect? Bet you cannot.
If you want to have this discussion on MWP, there has to be rules. Specifically, you are not allowed to jump from point to point. We must settle each and every point one at a time, without getting distracted. Then we can tally up the score.
We could start with Broeker's article. From his own conclusion: The case for a global Medieval Warm Period admittedly remains inconclusive. (I guess you didn't read it.)
It looks like the second link is just re-hashing Broeker's article, but inflating the confidence. (ie., Broeker is not confident in the speculative conclusions.)
You never read these did you =). You never watched my video either.
Asking for a *single* thermometer for the whole world is simply absurd, as you would agree. A lot of hard work has gone into weather stations. It is really an empirical question whether they are good enough or not. Real scientists work with error bars.
As for *zero* utility for a global average temperature -- you really don't believe that do you? The earth is a big heat engine that moves warm air from the tropics to the poles. An average increase of 1 degree across the globe will increase that energy heat-difference (between the tropics and poles). It is really very simple.
*not* be consistent, and therefore falsify the hypothesis
Scientists falsified the global cooling hypothesis in the 70s. Here are some observations that would falsify AGW:
CO2 is a greenhouse gass
CO2 is increasing
Increases in CO2 are coming from human activity
Climate is warming
No alternative explanations exist to explain warming without reference to increased CO2
The amount of observed warming must be mathematically consistent with what is known about the chemistry of CO2
Actually, I could go on for pages of falsifiable hypothesis. All of the above have been proven. Running an experiment or study that disproves any of them could well destroy the AGW theory.
The Landsea incident is small in the grand scheme of things. The distortion was transparent, and outed. Bet you cannot find a single real controversy that is bigger than the Landsea incident.
Note that the IPCC deals with 1000s of people over multiple years. By any measure having that many academics together is a management nightmare. If a Landsea happens once in a blue moon, then, whatever. That hardly points to any malfeasance, or dishonesty.
Now this is dishonesty. Well not really. It is more like psychosis. Please watch the entire clip. I hope you are suitably appalled. Should we do an exercise on counting frequencies of mis-representation? I personally don't have time for that, been there done that 4 years ago. But just look at the arguments we are having over Spencer's paper, and the crowing of AGW defeated once more in right-wing media.
You can quibble about Spencer's model (not factoring the ocean's heat pattern seems like a pretty big flaw to me); however, compare and contrast to how Fox news talks about it, and you see a world of difference in the integrity of each side of the debate.
Maybe some substance of Spencer's latest efforts will stand up to scrutiny, but I suspect that the results will disappear when the data is applied to a more realistic model (e.g.: ocean's heat pattens).
The Chris Landsea issue is interesting, and an example of how open the IPCC process is. Chris had his two bobs worth to say about the process, and there is probably a lot to be learned. This is hardly a smoking gun that overturns 1000s of papers on AGW. It is just a squabble of people being accurate about what they say.
If only AGW-opponents had standards themselves. That in itself tells you something about the nature of the debate.
You could not have chosen a MORE biased source had you gone out searching for one.
By biased, I assume that you simply mean someone who is an expert in AGW science that you disagree with. Try assessing the arguments.
As for your arguments, they are . . . odd.
I am not going to engage you on these nitty gritty details, because I suspect there is no point, but you should really re-read what you wrote. Spencer and Braswell were not choosing models based on how they react to the variables being examined, they were choosing a very simplified model that gave them the results they wanted. This is self-evident in that, Spencer's model leaves out important known factors, and it *did* give the results that Spencer wanted.
By using a principled approach to modelling, Trenberth was *not* cherry-picking. By using a obvious oversimplification, Spencer *was*. Not that complex really.
If this is the way climate science is typically done (and nearly everything I have seen in my several years of research into this tells me that it is)
This is just a simple analysis of Spencer's paper by someone in the climate change field. I assume that there will be a peer-reviewed paper prepared on the topic, and further responses sought from Spencer. This will take time.
I assume you know what the confirmation bias is. The human condition being what it is, there is no point taking this further unless there a rules -- like rules in a court of law.
Really I have better things to do, since a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. I already have my own opinion about Spencer's work, based on my own cursory analysis, and will wait for a paper on the matter, and that is good enough for me.
It is good to point out that they have a vested interested -- we are/all/ emotionally invested in some belief or another, and when it is your life's work...
The corrective mechanism of science is really that someone/else/ has to come along with the killer argument. AGW opponents have failed to make any such argument. I have not personally reviewed all of them, because there are so many, but I *have* looked at about 90% of them circa 2006.
If you don't have a background in hard sciences (I have math, physics, computers, and recently psychology, over 3 bachelor degrees and now working on a PhD), the easiest way to tell what is what is to read references. Almost nobody does this. Even in the scientific community it is not done enough.
So vested interests, bias, funding sources are really moot points. Arguments matter.
Credibility matters too, because of the way our beliefs interweave with our interpretations of the information we perceive. Sometimes people start to leave the planet, spouting all sorts of nonsense, and curiously, they don't seem to know that they are doing it. (Actually they are in a sort of cognitive trap.) Lord Monckton is the exemplar for this type of condition. For him to change his mind on AGW, he would have to have a psychotic break. (That is my psych training talking.)
So you really have to leave aside this idea that realclimate is just a hornets nest of ideologues. At a certain level it is true, but that doesn't mean that you cannot cognitively represent and assess their arguments. As for Lord Monckton and co., the same applies.
And the most important thing to do is to check into what people say. Just a few random assertions here and there are usually enough. When people start walking the line of psychosis, they sound very believable, because they believe in themselves, but so much garbage begins to come out of their mouths that it is really very easy to see through it, when you check into their assertions, and ask yourself if their references really are what that are purported to be.
Realclimate has just published an article on Roy Spencer's paper. As I just predicted, there Spencer's model leaves out important known aspects of climate science, like El Nino. Mike also points out that clouds are not forcing factors as Spencer assumes. (I mean really? Clouds have a time-scale of weeks at most. That makes them a feedback.)
Anyway, I suspect this makes no different to your beliefs, but note that there *is* academic discussion, and you *can* follow it.
some of the very people who were being criticized by Wegman, then they can hardly be called objective on the matter!
You think I don't know that. What happened to actually reading peoples arguments instead of simply judging them on the merits of possible conflicts of interest.
It is so *easy* to manufacture a conflict of interest. For example, you are a dirty liar. Now, if you say anything against that, I will just tell you that you are biased, and have a conflict of interest.
Spencer's paper is hot off the press, so it is not surprising that there isn't anything out there about it. From my understanding of the situation, it is not nearly so simple as saying that there is an observed quantitative discrepancy. There are always assumptions that are being made, and that is important to note. The satelitte measurements to not exist on their own, but only become anomalous when they are placed in a model.
You will see such a model in Spencer' paper. At a quick glance, I noticed that it didn't factor in the El Nino, for example. So Spencer is saying, if you use these measurements, with this model, you get a disagreement with those measurements using that model. This is hardly the water-tight hard science you think it is.
I suspect there is nothing to see here, although it is possible that some interesting new science will develop.
My question to YOU is, if nothing comes of this, will you just ignore it, and reach for the next strawman? We all have to be wary of such.
I suspect that you believe the word "bias" means group of people who see the world differently. As for the actual arguments, you should read the references on the linked article, but I suspect that you didn't read the article at all.
Which is why his paper must be examined on its own merits, or lack of same. If you want to make a real argument, then examine and logically attack the paper itself, not the guy who wrote it.
The paper and the ideas were attacked on the merit of their arguments. You can read an email discussion on the topic on Roy Spencer's website. There is no academic misconduct here, or Galileo versus religious consensus narratives. Pretty much everyone disagrees with Spencer for good reason. Perhaps you agree with him, in which case, you might find the academic discussion on the topic of some interest.
What are you talking about? All these researchers articles have been thoroughly examined, and feedback sought from the original authors. Many of them have found there way into IPCC reports. The problem with the articles, is that they are full of specious reasoning, as is amply pointed out in links provided.
Surely you don't believe that specious reasoning is acceptable just because it is an alternative point of view?
The MWP was a regional phenomena. (Watch the linked video, and read the listed references.)
Watts' website is full of shameless canards that have already been disproven. It is trivial to work this out if you take a few random points from any article, and actually research them yourself, and read the references. Because most people do not do this, and hear what they want to believe, it is easy for Watts to entertain his psychotic bizarro world, and have a certain population lap it up. The house of cards falls very quickly when you read the references.
No thermometers? They've existed for centuries, and are highly accurate. Before you open respond, try to work out if you are wrong about the thermometer record, or if you are about to spout some already debunked canard about urban heat islands spoiling the data.
This data -- or at least the end-result manipulated data -- has been debunked, and the methods used to manipulate it seriously called into question (see the Wegman Report). But the alarmists just keep going along as though that never happened and nothing is wrong.
That's because there nothing wrong with the climate science as the Wegman Report affair demonstrates.
I'll start believing in CAGW when *any* alarmist makes a clear, concise list of observations that would falsify their hypothesis, and then we all try *really hard* to look for those observations, and are completely unable to find any. That's called science.
This is obviously prone to moving the goal-posts, which we have already seen. A few scientists investigated global cooling in the 70s, and found that their falsifiable hypothesis didn't stack up. This is purely the scientific method in process. By 1979, a consensus had been built on warming, and nobody has been able to make a cogent argument against it despite numerous attempts.
What you really want is to increase the burden of proof everytime more proof becomes available.
Having some personal training in statistics, physics and chemistry, (but not climate science) I was able to grok the science and follow the academic discourse personally. I also have training in psychology, and that is much more useful in understanding the "debate".
It is easy to see anti-AGW arguments fall flat on their face when you look into the history of each claim, and read the sources of each claim and the responses. It is surprisingly little work.
I agree with OP, the funding source is irrelevant compared to providing evidence of wrongness. In this instance, it is pretty easy to show, and also easy to show that Spencer is earnest in his beliefs (which include intelligent design). You can see some real academic discourse on Spencer's website, and judge for yourself.
You can start here if you really are interested in learning something. There are plenty of falsifiable hypotheses.
By not studying this material, you would be protecting your ignorance in order to hold onto your beliefs -- more commonly known as that river in egypt.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure inflation will really help. Once inflation consistently creeps above growth, your economy could head into a downward spiral, and we've seen that in many parts of the world before.
On the other hand, devaluing the US dollar would help domestic jobs immensely, and reduce the foreign portion of the debt problem. It would also help balance the trade deficit. The trick is to do it without causing an equivalent amount of inflation.
I would be for a gradual easing of the US dollar. But what is wrong with raising taxes on the top 2% earners in the country, whilst also enacting across-the-board budget cuts? Wouldn't that solve the problem?
I appreciate not wanting to argue politics, so I am just saying =)
1000s of scientists, 20 years, 1 resignation. Small deal.
And global warming *will* bring more extreme weather.
As for other incidents -- there just aren't any. There's a minor mistake here and there, which is no big deal in reports containing tens of thousands of details.
You treat these hard working scientists like they are scum, and would point to their mis-matched socks as proof that they don't know what they are talking about.
And your video is simply incorrect.
And can you point to how it is incorrect? Bet you cannot.
If you want to have this discussion on MWP, there has to be rules. Specifically, you are not allowed to jump from point to point. We must settle each and every point one at a time, without getting distracted. Then we can tally up the score.
We could start with Broeker's article. From his own conclusion: The case for a global Medieval Warm Period admittedly remains inconclusive. (I guess you didn't read it.)
It looks like the second link is just re-hashing Broeker's article, but inflating the confidence. (ie., Broeker is not confident in the speculative conclusions.)
You never read these did you =). You never watched my video either.
Asking for a *single* thermometer for the whole world is simply absurd, as you would agree. A lot of hard work has gone into weather stations. It is really an empirical question whether they are good enough or not. Real scientists work with error bars.
As for *zero* utility for a global average temperature -- you really don't believe that do you? The earth is a big heat engine that moves warm air from the tropics to the poles. An average increase of 1 degree across the globe will increase that energy heat-difference (between the tropics and poles). It is really very simple.
*not* be consistent, and therefore falsify the hypothesis
Scientists falsified the global cooling hypothesis in the 70s. Here are some observations that would falsify AGW:
CO2 is a greenhouse gass
CO2 is increasing
Increases in CO2 are coming from human activity
Climate is warming
No alternative explanations exist to explain warming without reference to increased CO2
The amount of observed warming must be mathematically consistent with what is known about the chemistry of CO2
Actually, I could go on for pages of falsifiable hypothesis. All of the above have been proven. Running an experiment or study that disproves any of them could well destroy the AGW theory.
Do you get the point?
Hypothesis: CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
The Landsea incident is small in the grand scheme of things. The distortion was transparent, and outed. Bet you cannot find a single real controversy that is bigger than the Landsea incident.
Note that the IPCC deals with 1000s of people over multiple years. By any measure having that many academics together is a management nightmare. If a Landsea happens once in a blue moon, then, whatever. That hardly points to any malfeasance, or dishonesty.
Now this is dishonesty. Well not really. It is more like psychosis. Please watch the entire clip. I hope you are suitably appalled. Should we do an exercise on counting frequencies of mis-representation? I personally don't have time for that, been there done that 4 years ago. But just look at the arguments we are having over Spencer's paper, and the crowing of AGW defeated once more in right-wing media.
You can quibble about Spencer's model (not factoring the ocean's heat pattern seems like a pretty big flaw to me); however, compare and contrast to how Fox news talks about it, and you see a world of difference in the integrity of each side of the debate.
Maybe some substance of Spencer's latest efforts will stand up to scrutiny, but I suspect that the results will disappear when the data is applied to a more realistic model (e.g.: ocean's heat pattens).
The Chris Landsea issue is interesting, and an example of how open the IPCC process is. Chris had his two bobs worth to say about the process, and there is probably a lot to be learned. This is hardly a smoking gun that overturns 1000s of papers on AGW. It is just a squabble of people being accurate about what they say.
If only AGW-opponents had standards themselves. That in itself tells you something about the nature of the debate.
You could not have chosen a MORE biased source had you gone out searching for one.
By biased, I assume that you simply mean someone who is an expert in AGW science that you disagree with. Try assessing the arguments.
As for your arguments, they are . . . odd.
I am not going to engage you on these nitty gritty details, because I suspect there is no point, but you should really re-read what you wrote. Spencer and Braswell were not choosing models based on how they react to the variables being examined, they were choosing a very simplified model that gave them the results they wanted. This is self-evident in that, Spencer's model leaves out important known factors, and it *did* give the results that Spencer wanted.
By using a principled approach to modelling, Trenberth was *not* cherry-picking. By using a obvious oversimplification, Spencer *was*. Not that complex really.
If this is the way climate science is typically done (and nearly everything I have seen in my several years of research into this tells me that it is)
This is just a simple analysis of Spencer's paper by someone in the climate change field. I assume that there will be a peer-reviewed paper prepared on the topic, and further responses sought from Spencer. This will take time.
I assume you know what the confirmation bias is. The human condition being what it is, there is no point taking this further unless there a rules -- like rules in a court of law.
Really I have better things to do, since a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. I already have my own opinion about Spencer's work, based on my own cursory analysis, and will wait for a paper on the matter, and that is good enough for me.
It is good to point out that they have a vested interested -- we are /all/ emotionally invested in some belief or another, and when it is your life's work...
/else/ has to come along with the killer argument. AGW opponents have failed to make any such argument. I have not personally reviewed all of them, because there are so many, but I *have* looked at about 90% of them circa 2006.
The corrective mechanism of science is really that someone
If you don't have a background in hard sciences (I have math, physics, computers, and recently psychology, over 3 bachelor degrees and now working on a PhD), the easiest way to tell what is what is to read references. Almost nobody does this. Even in the scientific community it is not done enough.
So vested interests, bias, funding sources are really moot points. Arguments matter.
Credibility matters too, because of the way our beliefs interweave with our interpretations of the information we perceive. Sometimes people start to leave the planet, spouting all sorts of nonsense, and curiously, they don't seem to know that they are doing it. (Actually they are in a sort of cognitive trap.) Lord Monckton is the exemplar for this type of condition. For him to change his mind on AGW, he would have to have a psychotic break. (That is my psych training talking.)
So you really have to leave aside this idea that realclimate is just a hornets nest of ideologues. At a certain level it is true, but that doesn't mean that you cannot cognitively represent and assess their arguments. As for Lord Monckton and co., the same applies.
And the most important thing to do is to check into what people say. Just a few random assertions here and there are usually enough. When people start walking the line of psychosis, they sound very believable, because they believe in themselves, but so much garbage begins to come out of their mouths that it is really very easy to see through it, when you check into their assertions, and ask yourself if their references really are what that are purported to be.
So, by analogy, if someone criticizes you, you become directly involved in the criticims, and anything you have to say become moot.
Realclimate has just published an article on Roy Spencer's paper. As I just predicted, there Spencer's model leaves out important known aspects of climate science, like El Nino. Mike also points out that clouds are not forcing factors as Spencer assumes. (I mean really? Clouds have a time-scale of weeks at most. That makes them a feedback.)
Anyway, I suspect this makes no different to your beliefs, but note that there *is* academic discussion, and you *can* follow it.
some of the very people who were being criticized by Wegman, then they can hardly be called objective on the matter!
You think I don't know that. What happened to actually reading peoples arguments instead of simply judging them on the merits of possible conflicts of interest.
It is so *easy* to manufacture a conflict of interest. For example, you are a dirty liar. Now, if you say anything against that, I will just tell you that you are biased, and have a conflict of interest.
Spencer's paper is hot off the press, so it is not surprising that there isn't anything out there about it. From my understanding of the situation, it is not nearly so simple as saying that there is an observed quantitative discrepancy. There are always assumptions that are being made, and that is important to note. The satelitte measurements to not exist on their own, but only become anomalous when they are placed in a model.
You will see such a model in Spencer' paper. At a quick glance, I noticed that it didn't factor in the El Nino, for example. So Spencer is saying, if you use these measurements, with this model, you get a disagreement with those measurements using that model. This is hardly the water-tight hard science you think it is.
I suspect there is nothing to see here, although it is possible that some interesting new science will develop.
My question to YOU is, if nothing comes of this, will you just ignore it, and reach for the next strawman? We all have to be wary of such.
I suspect that you believe the word "bias" means group of people who see the world differently. As for the actual arguments, you should read the references on the linked article, but I suspect that you didn't read the article at all.
Which is why his paper must be examined on its own merits, or lack of same. If you want to make a real argument, then examine and logically attack the paper itself, not the guy who wrote it.
The paper and the ideas were attacked on the merit of their arguments. You can read an email discussion on the topic on Roy Spencer's website. There is no academic misconduct here, or Galileo versus religious consensus narratives. Pretty much everyone disagrees with Spencer for good reason. Perhaps you agree with him, in which case, you might find the academic discussion on the topic of some interest.
Yeah, you just proved my point.
What are you talking about? All these researchers articles have been thoroughly examined, and feedback sought from the original authors. Many of them have found there way into IPCC reports. The problem with the articles, is that they are full of specious reasoning, as is amply pointed out in links provided.
Surely you don't believe that specious reasoning is acceptable just because it is an alternative point of view?
The MWP was a regional phenomena. (Watch the linked video, and read the listed references.)
Watts' website is full of shameless canards that have already been disproven. It is trivial to work this out if you take a few random points from any article, and actually research them yourself, and read the references. Because most people do not do this, and hear what they want to believe, it is easy for Watts to entertain his psychotic bizarro world, and have a certain population lap it up. The house of cards falls very quickly when you read the references.
No thermometers? They've existed for centuries, and are highly accurate. Before you open respond, try to work out if you are wrong about the thermometer record, or if you are about to spout some already debunked canard about urban heat islands spoiling the data.
This data -- or at least the end-result manipulated data -- has been debunked, and the methods used to manipulate it seriously called into question (see the Wegman Report). But the alarmists just keep going along as though that never happened and nothing is wrong.
That's because there nothing wrong with the climate science as the Wegman Report affair demonstrates.
Give me *real* scientific process.
Just go to Roy Spencer's website, and read the discourse on the paper for yourself.
I'll start believing in CAGW when *any* alarmist makes a clear, concise list of observations that would falsify their hypothesis, and then we all try *really hard* to look for those observations, and are completely unable to find any. That's called science.
This is obviously prone to moving the goal-posts, which we have already seen. A few scientists investigated global cooling in the 70s, and found that their falsifiable hypothesis didn't stack up. This is purely the scientific method in process. By 1979, a consensus had been built on warming, and nobody has been able to make a cogent argument against it despite numerous attempts.
What you really want is to increase the burden of proof everytime more proof becomes available.
Having some personal training in statistics, physics and chemistry, (but not climate science) I was able to grok the science and follow the academic discourse personally. I also have training in psychology, and that is much more useful in understanding the "debate".
which they cannot come close to proving
Climate science was pretty much proven in 1979 by any reasonable objective scientific standard. You can learn learn about the history of the "debate" here. This is a short 10 minute clip on what we know about climate change.
It is easy to see anti-AGW arguments fall flat on their face when you look into the history of each claim, and read the sources of each claim and the responses. It is surprisingly little work.
I agree with OP, the funding source is irrelevant compared to providing evidence of wrongness. In this instance, it is pretty easy to show, and also easy to show that Spencer is earnest in his beliefs (which include intelligent design). You can see some real academic discourse on Spencer's website, and judge for yourself.
You can start here if you really are interested in learning something. There are plenty of falsifiable hypotheses.
By not studying this material, you would be protecting your ignorance in order to hold onto your beliefs -- more commonly known as that river in egypt.