So a few years ago you wouldn't believe it because there wasn't enough observational evidence, and now you won't believe it because of the sheer quantity of the observational evidence? Tricky business. Exactly how much evidence is neither insufficient nor excessive? Do you have the exact date and time we should have stopped providing evidence?
Actually, I have never heard of an excess of evidence before.
Can I use this method to destroy all science? Bwa-ha-ha!
All I have to do to create a perpetual motion machine is to fail enough times. Then the second law of thermodynamics will be destroyed, utterly obliterated, by an excess of evidence! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-hahhh!
On the whole, yes, well said, but I have to argue with your emphasis on observations.
Foresight is important. Observation isn't everything. Both human behavior and the climate system have momentum, for present purposes adding up to tens of years between making a serious decision to change and having the change be effective.
If you base everything on empirical data and not on theoretical understanding, you are saying you would not hit the brakes until your car hits an obstacle. Usually it is better to react before the big crunch.
Unfortunately, politicians and corporations experience little consequence of errors that bite on a thirty year time scale. That is a big part of why we are handling this problem so stupidly.
Some leading climate scientists ( Ray Bradley, Malcolm Hughes, Michael Mann, Michael Oppenheimer, Ben Santer, Gavin Schmidt, Stephen Schneider, Kevin Trenberth and Tom Wigley) submitted the following to the Muir commission:
if one's research findings tend to support human-caused climate change - means to live and work in an environment of constant accusations of fraud, calls for investigations (or for criminal prosecutions), demands for access to every draft, every intermediate calculation, and every email exchanged with colleagues, daily hate mail and threats, and attempts to pressure the institutions that employ us and fund our research. Through experience, we have learned that there is no review of climate scientists' work that isn't deemed a "whitewash" by climate change contrarians; there is no casual remark that can't be seized upon, blown out of proportion and distorted; and there is no person whose character can't be assassinated, no matter how careful and honest their research.
Internal communications of the IPCC to authors of the scientific review now say the following:
My advice to the authors on responding to the media is only in respect of queries regarding the I.P.C.C. Some of them are new to the I.P.C.C., and we would not want them to provide uninformed responses or opinions. We now have in place a structure and a system in the I.P.C.C. for outreach and communications with the outside world.The I.P.C.C. authors are not employed by the I.P.C.C., and hence they are free to deal with the media on their own avocations and the organizations they are employed by. But they should desist at this stage on speaking on behalf of the I.P.C.C.
As a climate scientist and a computer scientist and an advocate for openness and replicability my position is greatly weakened by people using "openness" as an excuse for harrassment and witch-hunting.
The inevitable short result of this approach to openness is going to be that scientists will do as much work as possible on their laptops and their yahoo email accounts. Using their funded platforms will be only for production runs and final drafts of publications; this will minimize the amount of exposure of their actual work to hostile parties. We will also see far fewer really good people getting into work with any controversy, lest they be subjected to public abuse; eventually only work of little consequence will attract the intellectually adventurous.
I really want the open science movement to be about making science more accessible and more appealing and more part of the culture. This subversion of the open science movement in the name of derailing climate science, which in turn hides the real intent of delaying climate policy until all the fossil reserves are cashed in, is a disaster on more fronts than one. One unfortunate aspect is that it drives important segments of the scientific community to treat the open science movement as a threat to science. Advocates of open science would do well to think twice about the motivations and actions of this gang.
Where are the papers that deserved publication that somehow were kept out of every peer reviewed journal on the planet?
URLs please?
Or did the internet unfairly refuse them publication as well?
mt
That's, what, a 100 word article? It has to mention everything? "Scientists have determined that a number of human activities are contributing to global warming by adding excessive amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere." does not contradict the existence of other influences. It simply doesn;t take the space to mention them.
Unlike your 100 words, your link has no obvious errors. Your claim that we are still coming out of the ice age is incorrect insofar as global temperature is concerned. Global mean surface temperature probably peaked 5000 to 8000 years ago and was gradually declining until the abrupt 20th century rise. It is now a close call whether we have caught up to the 5ka peak, but we will likely surpass it soon enough.
Ummm you do realize that if part of the claim of "climate-gate" is that peer reviewed journals, or the reviewers of said journals, were discriminating against contradictory papers then stating that no contradictory papers have been published in those journals isn't exactly proof that there was no conspiracy?
This was a stronger argument in pre-internet days. Now you can always self-publish a paper. If they had anything serious they would have come up with something convincing enough, by now, to convince some competent people.
The reason they are not in serious journals, and the reason that journals that publish them lose status could be a) a vast conspiracy or b) the stuff they write is worthless crap. The conversation in the stolen emails is consistent with both theories.
By the way, you can always read some of the naysayer sciencey stuff in their captive journal Energy and Environment. Decide for yourself.
The "leaked source code" was a one-off diagnostic hack. Try not to make a federal case out of that, OK? How would you feel if a quick diagnostic hack of yours was posted on the internet as evidence of the criminal intentions of your organization?
(Of course, I am assuming that you DO write code and that your organization ISN'T criminal. Otherwise disregard this.)
"I can't imagine the harm of the oil in the ocean being less than it would cause being burned for fuel."
Of course you are right about that. Oil refined and used is far less damaging than oil spilled. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. What I mean is that slow gradual problems can be bigger than huge obvious ones.
Anyway there was a similar event in 1979 and the world didn't end. Tens of thousands of barrels a day spilled for months into the Gulf.
Also, I've lived most of my adult life in Chicago. Don't get me wrong, I love Chicago, but one of its drawbacks is that it *always* smells like oil fumes. I don't believe you are smelling the Gulf.
Geez, calm down. I'm just trying to get some perspective.
Yes, that much oil is enough to cause the extinction of humanity, if it finds its way into our bloodstreams.
Ocean currents are, fortunately, not that selective.
This botched well is shaping up to be a terrible mess but it will, if anything, destroy America's best beaches, and its most valuable wetlands. It won't destroy the ocean. I am just advocating for directing your concerns in the right direction, not for shrugging them off.
The Gulf of Mexico is huge compared to a sailboat, but tiny compared to the whole ocean. The volume of the ocean is 1.5 x 10^18 tons. Even if a ton of oil contaminates a million tons of water, 50,000 barrels a day would take over half a million years to do the job by my calculations.
It may be a decent sized oil reservoir (it is far from "one of the largest ever" per the article) but it isn't THAT big. Sometime in the next half million years it will stop gushing on its own. Probably before that.
This is a very serious event on the scale of the Gulf, but it is nowhere near as serious as ocean acidification from atmospheric CO2, which affects the entire ocean.
My own interference with this great question, while sanctioned by many eminent names, has been also an object of varied and ingenious attack. On this point I will only say that when angry feeling escapes from behind the intellect, where it may be useful as an urging force, and places itself athwart the intellect, it is liable to produce all manner of delusions. Thus my censors, for the most part, have levelled their remarks against positions which were never assumed, and against claims which were never made.
Phil is talking like climate scientists talk. There is nothing remotely unusual in any of it. Your problem is you don't know how to spin it when you have actual scientist talk in front of you. Sorry to confuse you so badly.
"the homogenization process is a fully automatic statistical treatment for 7000 stations - it has no biases for higher or lower temperatures. The homogenization is based on the records of the nearest 5 stations, which can have a higher or lower temperature so treatment is not biased. Darwin 0 has a higher adjustment due to higher temperature records in the neighboring stations. In the cases where the "neighbors" of the 7000 stations have lower temperatures, there is an automatic downwards adjustment.
"In fact, handpicking adjustments for individual stations, which is what Eschenbach suggests for Darwin 0 in 1941, would be a method far more prone to temptations to bias the result desired."
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Just because your reading on the subject has been superficial doesn't mean the evidence is superficial.
So a few years ago you wouldn't believe it because there wasn't enough observational evidence, and now you won't believe it because of the sheer quantity of the observational evidence? Tricky business. Exactly how much evidence is neither insufficient nor excessive? Do you have the exact date and time we should have stopped providing evidence?
Actually, I have never heard of an excess of evidence before.
Can I use this method to destroy all science? Bwa-ha-ha!
All I have to do to create a perpetual motion machine is to fail enough times. Then the second law of thermodynamics will be destroyed, utterly obliterated, by an excess of evidence! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-hahhh!
On the whole, yes, well said, but I have to argue with your emphasis on observations. Foresight is important. Observation isn't everything. Both human behavior and the climate system have momentum, for present purposes adding up to tens of years between making a serious decision to change and having the change be effective. If you base everything on empirical data and not on theoretical understanding, you are saying you would not hit the brakes until your car hits an obstacle. Usually it is better to react before the big crunch. Unfortunately, politicians and corporations experience little consequence of errors that bite on a thirty year time scale. That is a big part of why we are handling this problem so stupidly.
Internal communications of the IPCC to authors of the scientific review now say the following:
As a climate scientist and a computer scientist and an advocate for openness and replicability my position is greatly weakened by people using "openness" as an excuse for harrassment and witch-hunting.
The inevitable short result of this approach to openness is going to be that scientists will do as much work as possible on their laptops and their yahoo email accounts. Using their funded platforms will be only for production runs and final drafts of publications; this will minimize the amount of exposure of their actual work to hostile parties. We will also see far fewer really good people getting into work with any controversy, lest they be subjected to public abuse; eventually only work of little consequence will attract the intellectually adventurous.
I really want the open science movement to be about making science more accessible and more appealing and more part of the culture. This subversion of the open science movement in the name of derailing climate science, which in turn hides the real intent of delaying climate policy until all the fossil reserves are cashed in, is a disaster on more fronts than one. One unfortunate aspect is that it drives important segments of the scientific community to treat the open science movement as a threat to science. Advocates of open science would do well to think twice about the motivations and actions of this gang.
Did you look at the time scales?
Please get your facts right before trying to argue on their basis. (URLs would suffice.)
Where are the papers that deserved publication that somehow were kept out of every peer reviewed journal on the planet? URLs please? Or did the internet unfairly refuse them publication as well? mt
Everybody has a stake in those questions. What's more, everybody with enough knowledge to answer any of them well has a bigger stake.
It's like you had a medical condition and you asked for a competent diagnosis from somebody with tho stake in health care.
Unlike your 100 words, your link has no obvious errors. Your claim that we are still coming out of the ice age is incorrect insofar as global temperature is concerned. Global mean surface temperature probably peaked 5000 to 8000 years ago and was gradually declining until the abrupt 20th century rise. It is now a close call whether we have caught up to the 5ka peak, but we will likely surpass it soon enough.
Ummm you do realize that if part of the claim of "climate-gate" is that peer reviewed journals, or the reviewers of said journals, were discriminating against contradictory papers then stating that no contradictory papers have been published in those journals isn't exactly proof that there was no conspiracy? This was a stronger argument in pre-internet days. Now you can always self-publish a paper. If they had anything serious they would have come up with something convincing enough, by now, to convince some competent people. The reason they are not in serious journals, and the reason that journals that publish them lose status could be a) a vast conspiracy or b) the stuff they write is worthless crap. The conversation in the stolen emails is consistent with both theories. By the way, you can always read some of the naysayer sciencey stuff in their captive journal Energy and Environment. Decide for yourself.
(Of course, I am assuming that you DO write code and that your organization ISN'T criminal. Otherwise disregard this.)
Of course you are right about that. Oil refined and used is far less damaging than oil spilled. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. What I mean is that slow gradual problems can be bigger than huge obvious ones.
Anyway there was a similar event in 1979 and the world didn't end. Tens of thousands of barrels a day spilled for months into the Gulf.
Also, I've lived most of my adult life in Chicago. Don't get me wrong, I love Chicago, but one of its drawbacks is that it *always* smells like oil fumes. I don't believe you are smelling the Gulf.
Geez, calm down. I'm just trying to get some perspective.
Yes, that much oil is enough to cause the extinction of humanity, if it finds its way into our bloodstreams.
Ocean currents are, fortunately, not that selective.
This botched well is shaping up to be a terrible mess but it will, if anything, destroy America's best beaches, and its most valuable wetlands. It won't destroy the ocean. I am just advocating for directing your concerns in the right direction, not for shrugging them off.
The Gulf of Mexico is huge compared to a sailboat, but tiny compared to the whole ocean. The volume of the ocean is 1.5 x 10^18 tons. Even if a ton of oil contaminates a million tons of water, 50,000 barrels a day would take over half a million years to do the job by my calculations.
It may be a decent sized oil reservoir (it is far from "one of the largest ever" per the article) but it isn't THAT big. Sometime in the next half million years it will stop gushing on its own. Probably before that.
This is a very serious event on the scale of the Gulf, but it is nowhere near as serious as ocean acidification from atmospheric CO2, which affects the entire ocean.
Those aren't forcings; they are components of the system being forced.
Relevant quote:
My own interference with this great question, while sanctioned by many eminent names, has been also an object of varied and ingenious attack. On this point I will only say that when angry feeling escapes from behind the intellect, where it may be useful as an urging force, and places itself athwart the intellect, it is liable to produce all manner of delusions. Thus my censors, for the most part, have levelled their remarks against positions which were never assumed, and against claims which were never made.
- John Tyndall, 1881
http://transcribingtyndall.wordpress.com/2008/08/
Phil is talking like climate scientists talk. There is nothing remotely unusual in any of it. Your problem is you don't know how to spin it when you have actual scientist talk in front of you. Sorry to confuse you so badly.
Well, there haven't been any major asteroid strikes either. Got any other candidates?
Bus? He isn't saying anything substantially different from what the climate science community says.
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~brianpm/charneyreport.html from 1979 seems pretty close to what is being said now.
Do you have any idea what you are talking about?
How much money went into it, do you think?
"The whole thing is just too convenient for the big guys."
Wow. All I've got in response to that one is punctuation.
!!!!!!!!!
and
??????????
The possibility that they will be voted out doesn't mean they are substantively wrong about the science. Obviously.
You have to cite somebody to refute them. It's the rules.
Geez, that doesn't represent any climatologists I know very well. Yes, I do know quite a few.
Interesting how eager people are to believe Eschenbach without any "auditing".
Anyway, check this comment and this comment in the McArdle thread before jumping to conclusions.
"the homogenization process is a fully automatic statistical treatment for 7000 stations - it has no biases for higher or lower temperatures. The homogenization is based on the records of the nearest 5 stations, which can have a higher or lower temperature so treatment is not biased. Darwin 0 has a higher adjustment due to higher temperature records in the neighboring stations. In the cases where the "neighbors" of the 7000 stations have lower temperatures, there is an automatic downwards adjustment.
"In fact, handpicking adjustments for individual stations, which is what Eschenbach suggests for Darwin 0 in 1941, would be a method far more prone to temptations to bias the result desired."