What? No. I'm fighting for the future of our civilization, not making assumptions about anything as boring as party affiliation. Are you serious about supporting Art Laffer and Bob Inglis? If so, future generations just might have a fighting chance!
Excellent. Let's reach across the aisle and support these Republicans who are fighting for the future of our civilization. (Oops, meant to post this here.)
I won't read a wall of text. But you don't need to look far for me catching you in a lie. You just did, above. [ShakaUVM, 2013-02-04]
There's no need for you to read it, because you obviously read it (without comprehension) the first time around:
... I don't have time to link everything now, but here's the story: Phil Jones used to fulfill FOIA requests regularly. Then crackpots started flooding his office with too many requests to handle, in a type of harassment that reminds me of the Lenski affair.... You can't mean McIntyre, who deliberately flooded his office with over 50 requests in a single week.... Notice that even if all those anti-AGW M's only filed one request a month, that would still be 18 total requests per month, or 324 person-hours per month, which is two full-time jobs spent handling frivolous requests. Then imagine what would happen if there were some anti-AGW people with names that don't start with "M"... [Dumb Scientist to ShakaUVM, 2011-01-27]
Defenders of Jones like to pretend he was being spamflooded by FOIA requests, but this is quite simply a lie from people unwilling to admit that "their team" could ever be in the ethical wrong. [ShakaUVM, 2011-10-30]
When you find yourself in a hole, it's better to stop digging than to keep baselessly accusing scientists of lying.
Though I do agree we need more scientists in cabinet positions, his banner solution to global warming was painting rooftops white. Good riddance to him.
To be precise, he suggested that any roof which needs to be replaced anyway be replaced with a white roof, and that roofs on new buildings be white. The costs of this strategy are negligible. The benefits include lower air conditioning bills for homeowners, lower CO2 emissions because of the reduced electricity demand, and reflecting sunlight back into space which helps cool the planet. Roofs in Siberia should remain black, but white roofs are optimal even away from the tropics because snow covers them during much bitterly cold weather anyway. Also, black roofs aren’t efficient heaters because heat rises, and there’s less sunlight in the winter. Plus, black roofs radiate heat away better than white roofs.
I've run the cost comparison on it. It's horrendously expensive for very little benefit.
Nonsense. Making a new roof white rather than black has negligible costs, and many benefits.
Your recent lull in attacks on scientists prompted me to ignore your accusation that I'm quite simply lying, and your attacks on other scientists. However, your renewed misinformation campaign makes it clear that this was a mistake. I'll add your other baseless accusations back to my list of contrarian arguments to debunk. Stay tuned.
Who are you, and why are you arguing with me? [Lonny Eachus]
Are you cruising the web hunting around for someone to argue with over trivialities, or what? Not very friendly. [Lonny Eachus]
I'm the Dumb Scientist, and I'm pointing out that you're spreading misinformation. Again.
I didn't claim, I said "looks like", and was referring to the popular sense. This is Twitter, not some science journal. [Lonny Eachus]
No, it doesn't even "look like" dark energy's dead, in any sense. You were just wrong. Again. Spreading misinformation on Twitter is still spreading misinformation. Please stop.
@jimmygle Interesting article. The other day it was announced that there is almost certainly no "dark energy" making the Universe expand. [Lonny Eachus]
Again with this nonsense? Physicists have never claimed that dark energy makes the Universe expand. Dark energy makes the expansion of the Universe accelerate.
@jimmygle "Almost certainly" to like 5 nines +. That is... apparently it is expanding. But not due to invisible "dark energy". [Lonny Eachus]
Lonny's confusion between expansion and acceleration reminds me of Jane Q. Public's similar confusion.
@jimmygle I read about it on Ars Technica the other day. Or maybe it was... wait. Here it is. bit.ly/S7dwQv[Lonny Eachus]
@jimmygle Haha. Well, the basic idea was that there must be SOMETHING forcing everything apart. So some bigwig physicists came up with the [Lonny Eachus]
@jimmygle... idea that there must be some kind of invisible energy doing it. Great on paper but I don't think there was ever good evidence. [Lonny Eachus]
Posting that link must be your way of retracting your claim. In it, Dr. Perlmutter explains how the accelerating expansion of the universe reveals the existence of dark energy.
Your other responses were even more disappointing...
This guy calling himself @dumb_scientist jumped into my twitterstream to argue about an article I linked to from Ars Technica. [Lonny Eachus]
Holy crap. Seems this @dumb_scientist guy has been stalking me online. His blog links to here bit.ly/13IPIVO.. [Lonny Eachus]
Oops. To be consistent with the raw data quoted in my first comment, I should change "without restricting the time period, it only goes back to 1980 because that's when the satellite was launched." to "without restricting the time period, it only goes back to December 1978 because that's when the first satellite was launched."
When I saw your post, I clicked the link to look at it again, in case I had been in error, but now the site is not coming up for me. So any comment on my part will have to wait until such time as that page appears again. [Jane Q. Public]
You're right, woodfortrees is down. Instead, you could try the Skeptical Science trend calculator which also provides uncertainty bounds on the trend. Notice that when you select UAH without restricting the time period, it only goes back to 1980 because that's when the satellite was launched.
All I saw was a graph with some years on the tick marks, and a line that looked like it was supposed to be a regression fit. Except that it went from the lowest point to near the highest point, which is not at all typical of a regression line. I saw nothing further to clarify it. The site seems to be having problems right now (10:16 pm CST). The page won't load. So there is no way to sort out the issue. [Jane Q. Public]
You could always download the UAH data yourself and run a least squares regression using your own software. I've done that using R; here's a PDF of my results. The regression line and its uncertainty come directly from R's generalized least squares algorithm. It looks similar to the regression lines from woodfortrees and SkS. (Both my trend and SkS's are closer to 0.14C/decade; perhaps this is because SkS and I haven't updated our local UAH datasets in over a year?)
The second page of my PDF calculates the trends and uncertainties of the UAH data up to 2012, for different starting years, using an ARMA(1,1) noise model. This graph shows why scientists prefer trends calculated over at least ~20 years. Shorter timespans, such as 1998-2012) have larger uncertainty bounds (the red lines in that graph are 95% confidence intervals).
Here is a graph of global temperatures using skeptic Roy Spencer's satellite reconstruction: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/plot/uah-land/trend Temperatures have gone from -0.25 to 0.25 since 1980. That is 0.5C in 30 years or 0.16C/decade. [Layzej]
Here is a classic case of cherry-picking your data in order to try to prove your point. You are comparing the low temperature from one year to the high temperature of another. [Jane Q. Public]
That's nonsense, Jane. Click on "raw data" then scroll down:
#Time series (uah-land) from 1978.92 to 2013
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0175687 per year
1978.92 -0.295807
2013 0.302992
So Layzej actually understated the warming trend, which his link calculates (not cherry-picks!) based on all the UAH satellite data to be 0.175C/decade.
Note that the supposed average starts at that low point on the left. In a curve that accounted for prior data, the line would start somewhat further up. [Jane Q. Public]
The supposed average? Do you mean the trend line fit to the UAH data with ordinary least squares? Also: what prior data? Again, there is no prior UAH data.
Also, look at the years chosen: if you choose instead 1998 to present, you end up with (roughly) 0.4 to 0.3, or a change of -0.4. [Jane Q. Public]
Again, this is nonsense. Layzej didn't choose any years, as anyone who glances at the URL can tell. He loaded the entire UAH dataset.
Ironically, right after baselessly accusing Layzej of cherry-picking data to show that the Earth is warming, you once again endorse cherry-picking a shorter timespan, despite the fact that shorter timespans have larger error bars.
These error bars can be shrunk by accounting for natural variability. I've recently discussed warming trends and uncertainties over the last 16 years. This graph removes natural variations like solar activity, ENSO, volcanos, etc. Notice that the warming trends since 1998 for all 5 adjusted datasets are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level, and they're all statistically indistinguishable from the IPCC's projection.
I'm not arguing with you about AGW. I'm just saying that the evidence you have used to support your point is almost laughably weak. [Jane Q. Public]
No, you're not arguing about anthropogenic global warming; you're baselessly (and ironically) accusing Layzej of cherry-picking data to "try" to prove the obvious point that the world is warming as scientists predicted.
Jane, please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It's staining your legacy and threatening the future of our civilization.
Looks like the concept of "Dark Energy" that many physicists have been so fond of, is dead. bit.ly/S7dwQv[Lonny Eachus]
No, Lonny. The gizmag article you linked just shows that one type of dark energy (the cosmological constant) is more consistent with long-term observations showing that the proton to electron mass ratio (PEMR) has remained roughly constant over billions of years. Even wikipedia makes it clear that the cosmological constant is a type of dark energy:
In the standard model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for 73% of the total mass–energy of the universe.[2] Two proposed forms for dark energy are the cosmological constant, a constant energy density filling space homogeneously,[3] and scalar fields such as quintessence or moduli, dynamic quantities whose energy density can vary in time and space.
Because dynamic types of dark energy like quintessence tend to imply changes in the PEMR over billions of years, these observations suggest that physicists now have enough evidence to prefer a static type of dark energy- the cosmological constant. So why is Lonny once again wrongly claiming that dark energy is dead?
One reason might be these curious sentences in that gizmag article:
The concept of "dark energy" with a negative pressure was introduced to describe this acceleration.... Dark energy must have a negative pressure to produce the observed acceleration in the standard cosmological model, a rather bizarre notion meaning that space repels itself.
A casual reader might conclude that dark energy's negative pressure distinguishes it from a cosmological constant, but both types of dark energy have negative pressure. In fact, I've explained to Jane Q. Public that "vacuum energy has pressure equal and opposite to its energy density" which is why its equation of state is w = -1. I continued, explaining why the universe's expansion accelerates for any w < -1/3.
Because -1 < -1/3, the cosmological constant's negative pressure accelerates the expansion of the universe. It is a type of dark energy, which accounts for roughly 3/4 of all the mass-energy in the universe.
Oops, I didn't mean to include the word "global" in this sentence: "So Watts and Eschenbach were criticizing Muller for showing that global mean temperature trends aren’t significantly contaminated by urban heat pollution" It's been removed.
Correction: Since that graph only shows ~10 years of data, any conclusions drawn from it will be conclusions about the noise in the climate, not the long-term trend. But this isn’t really the media’s fault: Prof. Curry started talking about absurdly short timespans herself by talking about the trend since 1998.
When you claimed that climate scientists predict temperature trends on timescales of 8 or 9 years, I pointed out that 8 or 9 years is too short to obtain a statistically significant trend. Now you've tightened your self-imposed blinders even further by talking about 2 or 3 year temperature trends. Note that any 2 or 3 (or 8 or 9) year timespan would be too short to obtain a statistically significant trend. It's not something special about the last 2,3,8, or 9 years, so contrarians can recycle this talking point ad nauseum. That's the entire point of the Escalator, in fact. (Incidentally, at least 17 years are needed to establish a statistically significant trend of global surface temperatures.)
But let's read your article, Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague, by David Rose:
[Prof. Judith Curry] said that Prof Muller's claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a 'huge mistake', with no scientific basis.... Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to 'hide the decline' in rates of global warming. In fact, Prof Curry said, the project's research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties - a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained. 'There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn't stopped,' she said. 'To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.' However, Prof Muller denied warming was at a standstill. 'We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. There was, he added, 'no levelling off'.... As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: 'This is 'hide the decline' stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline. 'To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the statement that warming hasn't paused. It is also misleading to say, as he has, that the issue of heat islands has been settled.'
Wow. These are very serious accusations. But are they valid?
The graph in Rose's article labelled "the inconvenient truth" is misleading, but mainly for the same reason that Jane's references to short term trends are misleading. Since that graph only shows 10 years of data, any conclusions drawn from it will be conclusions about the noise in the climate, not the long-term trend. But this isn't really the media's fault: Prof. Curry chose that absurdly short timespan herself by talking about the trend since 1998.
Also, the abrupt cooling shown in the BEST data in April and May of 2010 isn't real. Those months only include data from 47 stations in Antarctica, compared to March 2010 which has 14488 spread around the world. So April and
" Latour claims cooler bodies cannot affect warmer bodies, which Newton proved wrong centuries ago."
NOW who's overgeneralizing? Latour's claims are very specific; I see nowhere any claim that "cooler bodies cannot affect warmer bodies".
Latour's article says "The generalized claim that a cooler object placed near a warmer object cannot result in a rise in temperature of the warmer object stands."
I still feel that you completely missed the boat, Phil.
I agree that what MOST people are talking about (comments in the code, etc.) are really no big deal. It is the other emails that concern me... like the ones that show deliberate (and very probably illegal) failure to honor FOI requests and so on. Also, emails that indicate that the data used was improperly handled. Take this exchange, for example (I posted this same link on your other blog entry):
THAT exchange is completely IN context, showing both sides. Yet it indicates that either they used improper data in their calculations, or possibly that they simply are not aware of what data they did use (which amounts to pretty much the same thing). What it does show, pretty clearly and in context, is that they made a mess of this whole study. Add to that the missing data (whether it was done on purpose or not), and what you have is BAD SCIENCE, completely aside from any conspiracy theories.
I am not crying conspiracy, and I don't give the slightest damn about this politics of this whole thing. But you are ignoring the real, demonstrable goofs that these people made... some very big goofs that call their whole set of data into serious question. And when you look at all the OTHER studies done that rely on this very same data... what you have is a travesty and a tragedy. [Lonny Eachus, 2009-12-04]
These are very serious accusations, Lonny. And they're all based on this WUWT article by Willis Eschenbach:
"One of the claims in this hacked CRU email saga goes something like 'Well, the scientists acted like jerks, but that doesn't affect the results, it's still warming.' I got intrigued by one of the hacked CRU emails, from the Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth to Professor Wibjorn Karlen. In it, Professor Karlen asked some very pointed questions about the CRU and IPCC results. He got incomplete, incorrect and very misleading answers.... Professor Karlen was quite correct. The claims made by the CRU, and repeated in the IPCC document, were false. Karlen was looking at the evidence.... Now, I have not taken a stand on whether the machinations of the CRU extended to actually altering the global temperature figures. It seems quite clear from Professor Karlen's observations, however, that they have gotten it very wrong in at least the Fennoscandian region. Since this region has very good records and a lot of them, this does not bode well for the rest of the globe..."
Even if the methodologies used to establish the base data were sound, there is no doubt that it was later used improperly and irresponsibly. For months now, in these blog posts of Phil's, I have asked anybody - ANYBODY - to refute what is on this page: When Results Go Bad. I have had no takers. Not one. Anybody care to take a shot at it now? [Lonny Eachus, 2010-07-01]
Sure, why not? The next day, Zeke Hausfather wrote When results aren't bad which shows that Prof. Karlen, Eschenbach and Eachus based their accusations on a misunderstanding of the geographical region represented in the IPCC's time series. The first link in Zeke's article leads to Lonny's comment.
I see. The "actual experts in the field all have research that shows the same thing"? Interesting! I would be very interested to see some evidence for that claim! Wait... d
It was a JOKE. Regardless, you somehow you missed the thread in which neutrino oscillation was actually adequately explained to me and I admitted that I was wrong. Gee, how could you have missed that part? It exists. Go look.... [Jane Q. Public]
The last quote in my comment was the closest example I could find to a genuine admission that you'd been wrong. Even then, you manufactured unwarranted doubt by inserting words like could and theoretically. At the same time, you made additional claims which were never challenged, like equating the MSW effect with lasers.
Considering these claims led to interesting ideas. The Hamiltonians for MSW and vacuum oscillations are functionally identical in our universe. Parametric down-conversion of neutrinos seems to violate conservation of energy or imply radiation given lepton/B-L number conservation. Stimulated emission of individual neutrinos is impossible. The double-slit experiment is a good analogy for understanding the cause of neutrino oscillations. Others who found these ideas interesting might also enjoy this more productive 2010 conversation about neutrino oscillation.
To explain in a bit more detail: How would you feel, if somebody followed you around all the time, reciting mistaken comments you had made months or even years ago, and had long since publicly admitted were in error?... [Jane Q. Public]
I agree with the AC that genuinely changing one's mind is admirable, but your "admissions" often seem like evasion tactics which exploit this admiration. For instance, 5 minutes after you "admitted" this mistake, you continued to imply that astrophysicists are confused.
Again, you still haven't provided a link to this other public admission of error. After you told me to go look for it, here's what I found:
"... STFU. Even with all the snide and insulting comments you have made so far, you have managed to add exactly nothing to the conversation that would actually be of use to anybody. Get stuffed, troll."[Jane Q. Public to Chris Burke]
Your estimate of utility seems comically backward, but my opinion is clearly worthless. So:
"... in case you did not know, "STFU" is hardly helpful or humorous. It's generally considered to be a nasty, arrogant thing to say (or write)."[Jane Q. Public to geekoid, 2010-09-16]
Are there any other admissions of error to be found?
... But I have to wonder why you, and others apparently, have taken remarks made completely out of the context of my original flippant remark... It was just an idle comment and not to be taken very seriously.... I was not proposing an actual theory, rather, just idle speculation and food for thought. I wasn't being serious... or not very.... I was replying to someone who came across from the v
1. You've repeated your support for Latour's article, which is fractally wrong.
2. Scientific peer review requires rejecting bad papers. Scientists would only be conspiring to suppress legitimate papers if those papers were actually legitimate. Your baseless attack only required a few minutes of copy-pasting from hacked private emails. To debunk it, I'll have to spend months figuring out what papers those quotes refer to, examining their claims, linking to them, describing some of their worst mistakes, etc. And that's just one typical example out of dozens.
Again, if you’d prefer, I could post without replying to you so that I don't rudely interrupt you.
Slashdot Mirror
What? No. I'm fighting for the future of our civilization, not making assumptions about anything as boring as party affiliation. Are you serious about supporting Art Laffer and Bob Inglis? If so, future generations just might have a fighting chance!
Excellent. Let's reach across the aisle and support these Republicans who are fighting for the future of our civilization. (Oops, meant to post this here.)
Excellent. Let's reach across the aisle and support these Republicans who are fighting for the future of our civilization.
How about the plan proposed by Republicans Art Laffer and Bob Inglis?
I only trust the similarity between my words and those you claim are quite simply a lie.
Heh. Okay, in that case I'm defending the anonymous defenders you're accusing of quite simply lying when they echo my words.
My point was that the previously mentioned similarity deepens.
There's no need for you to read it, because you obviously read it (without comprehension) the first time around:
Defenders of Jones like to pretend he was being spamflooded by FOIA requests, but this is quite simply a lie from people unwilling to admit that "their team" could ever be in the ethical wrong. [ShakaUVM, 2011-10-30]
When you find yourself in a hole, it's better to stop digging than to keep baselessly accusing scientists of lying.
Slashdot's appetite for similar comments is insatiable.
Stop digging.
I've already already addressed this:
To be precise, he suggested that any roof which needs to be replaced anyway be replaced with a white roof, and that roofs on new buildings be white. The costs of this strategy are negligible. The benefits include lower air conditioning bills for homeowners, lower CO2 emissions because of the reduced electricity demand, and reflecting sunlight back into space which helps cool the planet. Roofs in Siberia should remain black, but white roofs are optimal even away from the tropics because snow covers them during much bitterly cold weather anyway. Also, black roofs aren’t efficient heaters because heat rises, and there’s less sunlight in the winter. Plus, black roofs radiate heat away better than white roofs.
Nonsense. Making a new roof white rather than black has negligible costs, and many benefits.
Your recent lull in attacks on scientists prompted me to ignore your accusation that I'm quite simply lying, and your attacks on other scientists. However, your renewed misinformation campaign makes it clear that this was a mistake. I'll add your other baseless accusations back to my list of contrarian arguments to debunk. Stay tuned.
I'm the Dumb Scientist, and I'm pointing out that you're spreading misinformation. Again.
No, it doesn't even "look like" dark energy's dead, in any sense. You were just wrong. Again. Spreading misinformation on Twitter is still spreading misinformation. Please stop.
Again with this nonsense? Physicists have never claimed that dark energy makes the Universe expand. Dark energy makes the expansion of the Universe accelerate.
Lonny's confusion between expansion and acceleration reminds me of Jane Q. Public's similar confusion.
Posting that link must be your way of retracting your claim. In it, Dr. Perlmutter explains how the accelerating expansion of the universe reveals the existence of dark energy.
Your other responses were even more disappointing...
Oops. To be consistent with the raw data quoted in my first comment, I should change "without restricting the time period, it only goes back to 1980 because that's when the satellite was launched." to "without restricting the time period, it only goes back to December 1978 because that's when the first satellite was launched."
You're right, woodfortrees is down. Instead, you could try the Skeptical Science trend calculator which also provides uncertainty bounds on the trend. Notice that when you select UAH without restricting the time period, it only goes back to 1980 because that's when the satellite was launched.
You could always download the UAH data yourself and run a least squares regression using your own software. I've done that using R; here's a PDF of my results. The regression line and its uncertainty come directly from R's generalized least squares algorithm. It looks similar to the regression lines from woodfortrees and SkS. (Both my trend and SkS's are closer to 0.14C/decade; perhaps this is because SkS and I haven't updated our local UAH datasets in over a year?)
The second page of my PDF calculates the trends and uncertainties of the UAH data up to 2012, for different starting years, using an ARMA(1,1) noise model. This graph shows why scientists prefer trends calculated over at least ~20 years. Shorter timespans, such as 1998-2012) have larger uncertainty bounds (the red lines in that graph are 95% confidence intervals).
Thanks. Sadly, the other vote for flamebait appears more effective.
That's nonsense, Jane. Click on "raw data" then scroll down:
#Time series (uah-land) from 1978.92 to 2013
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0175687 per year
1978.92 -0.295807
2013 0.302992
So Layzej actually understated the warming trend, which his link calculates (not cherry-picks!) based on all the UAH satellite data to be 0.175C/decade.
The supposed average? Do you mean the trend line fit to the UAH data with ordinary least squares? Also: what prior data? Again, there is no prior UAH data.
Again, this is nonsense. Layzej didn't choose any years, as anyone who glances at the URL can tell. He loaded the entire UAH dataset.
Ironically, right after baselessly accusing Layzej of cherry-picking data to show that the Earth is warming, you once again endorse cherry-picking a shorter timespan, despite the fact that shorter timespans have larger error bars.
These error bars can be shrunk by accounting for natural variability. I've recently discussed warming trends and uncertainties over the last 16 years. This graph removes natural variations like solar activity, ENSO, volcanos, etc. Notice that the warming trends since 1998 for all 5 adjusted datasets are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level, and they're all statistically indistinguishable from the IPCC's projection.
No, you're not arguing about anthropogenic global warming; you're baselessly (and ironically) accusing Layzej of cherry-picking data to "try" to prove the obvious point that the world is warming as scientists predicted.
Jane, please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It's staining your legacy and threatening the future of our civilization.
No, Lonny. The gizmag article you linked just shows that one type of dark energy (the cosmological constant) is more consistent with long-term observations showing that the proton to electron mass ratio (PEMR) has remained roughly constant over billions of years. Even wikipedia makes it clear that the cosmological constant is a type of dark energy:
In the standard model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for 73% of the total mass–energy of the universe.[2] Two proposed forms for dark energy are the cosmological constant, a constant energy density filling space homogeneously,[3] and scalar fields such as quintessence or moduli, dynamic quantities whose energy density can vary in time and space.
Because dynamic types of dark energy like quintessence tend to imply changes in the PEMR over billions of years, these observations suggest that physicists now have enough evidence to prefer a static type of dark energy- the cosmological constant. So why is Lonny once again wrongly claiming that dark energy is dead?
One reason might be these curious sentences in that gizmag article:
The concept of "dark energy" with a negative pressure was introduced to describe this acceleration. ... Dark energy must have a negative pressure to produce the observed acceleration in the standard cosmological model, a rather bizarre notion meaning that space repels itself.
A casual reader might conclude that dark energy's negative pressure distinguishes it from a cosmological constant, but both types of dark energy have negative pressure. In fact, I've explained to Jane Q. Public that "vacuum energy has pressure equal and opposite to its energy density" which is why its equation of state is w = -1. I continued, explaining why the universe's expansion accelerates for any w < -1/3.
Because -1 < -1/3, the cosmological constant's negative pressure accelerates the expansion of the universe. It is a type of dark energy, which accounts for roughly 3/4 of all the mass-energy in the universe.
Oops, I didn't mean to include the word "global" in this sentence: "So Watts and Eschenbach were criticizing Muller for showing that global mean temperature trends aren’t significantly contaminated by urban heat pollution" It's been removed.
Correction: Since that graph only shows ~10 years of data, any conclusions drawn from it will be conclusions about the noise in the climate, not the long-term trend. But this isn’t really the media’s fault: Prof. Curry started talking about absurdly short timespans herself by talking about the trend since 1998.
When you claimed that climate scientists predict temperature trends on timescales of 8 or 9 years, I pointed out that 8 or 9 years is too short to obtain a statistically significant trend. Now you've tightened your self-imposed blinders even further by talking about 2 or 3 year temperature trends. Note that any 2 or 3 (or 8 or 9) year timespan would be too short to obtain a statistically significant trend. It's not something special about the last 2,3,8, or 9 years, so contrarians can recycle this talking point ad nauseum. That's the entire point of the Escalator, in fact. (Incidentally, at least 17 years are needed to establish a statistically significant trend of global surface temperatures.)
But let's read your article, Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague, by David Rose:
[Prof. Judith Curry] said that Prof Muller's claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a 'huge mistake', with no scientific basis. ... Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to 'hide the decline' in rates of global warming. In fact, Prof Curry said, the project's research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties - a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained. 'There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn't stopped,' she said. 'To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.' However, Prof Muller denied warming was at a standstill. 'We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. There was, he added, 'no levelling off'. ... As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: 'This is 'hide the decline' stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline. 'To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the statement that warming hasn't paused. It is also misleading to say, as he has, that the issue of heat islands has been settled.'
Wow. These are very serious accusations. But are they valid?
The graph in Rose's article labelled "the inconvenient truth" is misleading, but mainly for the same reason that Jane's references to short term trends are misleading. Since that graph only shows 10 years of data, any conclusions drawn from it will be conclusions about the noise in the climate, not the long-term trend. But this isn't really the media's fault: Prof. Curry chose that absurdly short timespan herself by talking about the trend since 1998.
Also, the abrupt cooling shown in the BEST data in April and May of 2010 isn't real. Those months only include data from 47 stations in Antarctica, compared to March 2010 which has 14488 spread around the world. So April and
Latour's article says "The generalized claim that a cooler object placed near a warmer object cannot result in a rise in temperature of the warmer object stands."
These are very serious accusations, Lonny. And they're all based on this WUWT article by Willis Eschenbach:
"One of the claims in this hacked CRU email saga goes something like 'Well, the scientists acted like jerks, but that doesn't affect the results, it's still warming.' I got intrigued by one of the hacked CRU emails, from the Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth to Professor Wibjorn Karlen. In it, Professor Karlen asked some very pointed questions about the CRU and IPCC results. He got incomplete, incorrect and very misleading answers. ... Professor Karlen was quite correct. The claims made by the CRU, and repeated in the IPCC document, were false. Karlen was looking at the evidence. ... Now, I have not taken a stand on whether the machinations of the CRU extended to actually altering the global temperature figures. It seems quite clear from Professor Karlen's observations, however, that they have gotten it very wrong in at least the Fennoscandian region. Since this region has very good records and a lot of them, this does not bode well for the rest of the globe ..."
Sure, why not? The next day, Zeke Hausfather wrote When results aren't bad which shows that Prof. Karlen, Eschenbach and Eachus based their accusations on a misunderstanding of the geographical region represented in the IPCC's time series. The first link in Zeke's article leads to Lonny's comment.
The last quote in my comment was the closest example I could find to a genuine admission that you'd been wrong. Even then, you manufactured unwarranted doubt by inserting words like could and theoretically. At the same time, you made additional claims which were never challenged, like equating the MSW effect with lasers.
Considering these claims led to interesting ideas. The Hamiltonians for MSW and vacuum oscillations are functionally identical in our universe. Parametric down-conversion of neutrinos seems to violate conservation of energy or imply radiation given lepton/B-L number conservation. Stimulated emission of individual neutrinos is impossible. The double-slit experiment is a good analogy for understanding the cause of neutrino oscillations. Others who found these ideas interesting might also enjoy this more productive 2010 conversation about neutrino oscillation.
I agree with the AC that genuinely changing one's mind is admirable, but your "admissions" often seem like evasion tactics which exploit this admiration. For instance, 5 minutes after you "admitted" this mistake, you continued to imply that astrophysicists are confused.
Again, you still haven't provided a link to this other public admission of error. After you told me to go look for it, here's what I found:
"... STFU. Even with all the snide and insulting comments you have made so far, you have managed to add exactly nothing to the conversation that would actually be of use to anybody. Get stuffed, troll." [Jane Q. Public to Chris Burke]
Your estimate of utility seems comically backward, but my opinion is clearly worthless. So:
"... in case you did not know, "STFU" is hardly helpful or humorous. It's generally considered to be a nasty, arrogant thing to say (or write)." [Jane Q. Public to geekoid, 2010-09-16]
Are there any other admissions of error to be found?
Okay, I'll take that as a polite request that I post without replying to you so I don’t rudely interrupt you.
1. You've repeated your support for Latour's article, which is fractally wrong.
2. Scientific peer review requires rejecting bad papers. Scientists would only be conspiring to suppress legitimate papers if those papers were actually legitimate. Your baseless attack only required a few minutes of copy-pasting from hacked private emails. To debunk it, I'll have to spend months figuring out what papers those quotes refer to, examining their claims, linking to them, describing some of their worst mistakes, etc. And that's just one typical example out of dozens.
Again, if you’d prefer, I could post without replying to you so that I don't rudely interrupt you.