Scientists discover that climate-change skeptics are bozos

[thør]

The balance is between CO2 levels before the tree started to grow, and after it was burned. No difference.

That's a flat earth model...and assumes subsurface carbon to be all of non-plant origin. Coal seams were evidently created by divine design, just to test our faith.

 

[Peregrinator]

That's a flat earth model...and assumes subsurface carbon to be all of non-plant origin. Coal seams were evidently created by divine design, just to test our faith.

Someone--someone with a Ph.D in chemistry who I know very well--told me about a study that showed that an ideal way to sequester carbon was...coal.

 

[thør]

Someone--someone with a Ph.D in chemistry who I know very well--told me about a study that showed that an ideal way to sequester carbon was...coal.

So, that carbon came from the air.......

And the carbon in Yedoma?

 

[phrodeau]

So, that carbon came from the air.......

And the carbon in Yedoma?

All the trees didn't fall into the seas at once. The process that made coal took hundreds of thousands of years, and that carbon has been out of the natural cycle for hundreds of millions of years.

We're releasing as much as we can get into the atmosphere in the space of a dozen decades.

 

[Peregrinator]

So, that carbon came from the air.......

And the carbon in Yedoma?

At some point in the past, I guess. I don't know enough about Yedoma to speculate. I will speculate that you, however, know plenty about it. Tell me.

All the trees didn't fall into the seas at once. The process that made coal took hundreds of thousands of years, and that carbon has been out of the natural cycle for hundreds of millions of years.

We're releasing as much as we can get into the atmosphere in the space of a dozen decades.

Long view v. short view. This is why our posts at the end of the last page apparently contradict each other.

 

[thør]

All the trees didn't fall into the seas at once. The process that made coal took hundreds of thousands of years, and that carbon has been out of the natural cycle for hundreds of millions of years.

We're releasing as much as we can get into the atmosphere in the space of a dozen decades.

And the world has been warming for a very long time.

 

[thør]

At some point in the past, I guess. I don't know enough about Yedoma to speculate. I will speculate that you, however, know plenty about it. Tell me.


Long view v. short view. This is why our posts at the end of the last page apparently contradict each other.

Yedoma is a permafrost loess with a high carbon content. As it melts, it add a lot of CO2 and CH4 to the system. Interesting stuff.

 

[Sonny Limatina]

I told you yanks don't understand irony.

I'm a yank.

 

[patrick1]

I expect there will be lots of these news items, but here's the first I've heard from Muller after the release of the Berkeley data. It's only Phase 1, confirming the temperature data. It doesn't, to be clear, speculate about causes. But on the evidence of this interview the data are clearly a surprise to Muller. He even has nice words to say about Koch charities Hey, that's right! All hail!

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-...firms-climate-change/3613058?section=business

Patrick

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Last week, a research team at Berkeley led by a former climate change skeptic released a study of global temperatures that intended to set the record straight on controversial data collected by the East Anglia Project, NASA, and other organizations that have acted as advocates for action based on anthropogenic global warming. Professor Richard Muller put together a graph of the data that supposedly showed warming from 1800 (roughly the beginning of the Industrial Era in Europe) through 1975, and then a steeper rise in temperatures that appears unstopped. When this data was released, newspapers and other media proclaimed it the end of AGW skepticism and demanded capitulation from the “deniers.”

This led to an interesting e-mail exchange between myself and one of my blogging friends, whom I won’t name because (a) the e-mails weren’t really intended for publication, and (b) he’s a good guy who is passionate about doing what’s right. I got an e-mail from him challenging me on this point, saying the correlation between rising temperatures and mass release of CO2 was undeniable. I explained to him that AGW skepticism doesn’t rest on the notion that global temperatures aren’t rising, but that the AGW crowd has yet to show causation between CO2 release and actual warming. He replied that correlation was enough to prompt action, but that’s neither scientific or wise. Correlation only shows that two trends parallel each other; if one isn’t the cause of the other, then “solutions” designed to change one trend won’t impact the other anyway — and it will waste time, money, and perhaps lives while the perceived problem continues unabated.

As it turns out, the correlation isn’t exactly equal, either. A closer look at the data and a Daily Mail interview with one of Muller’s team shows that the chart hides the fact that no warming has occurred in the last 11 years, as has been repeatedly pointed out:

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.

Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.

Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago. …

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.’

Let’s take a look at Muller’s chart, and then compare it to the chart for the last 13 years — which the Daily Mail labels an “inconvenient truth”:

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/10/30/surprise-no-warming-in-last-11-years/

This will be followed by severe denunciations, ad hominem, a clear statement of disaccreditation and enough links to fill Bozo's pocket for a three-minute schtick...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

And in fact, Curry explains that the failure of those models finally has some scientists going back to the drawing board:

‘This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.’ …

‘Of course this isn’t the end of scepticism,’ she said. ‘To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, “Oh my God”.’

In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.

They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.

And what of Muller? When confronted by the Daily Mail about the data from the past 11 years, he denied that temperatures had plateaued, and then admitted that the data shows exactly that:

Yesterday Prof Muller insisted that neither his claims that there has not been a standstill, nor the graph, were misleading because the project had made its raw data available on its website, enabling others to draw their own graphs.

However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified.

‘I am baffled as to what he’s trying to do,’ Prof Curry said.

Even perfect correlation doesn’t prove causation, and this is far from being perfect correlation. AGW scientists have still failed to prove that CO2 is responsible for the moderate rise in temperatures, nor have they proven their hypothesis that the rise is irreversible, or even bad. As I pointed out to my friend, Greenland hosted a farming community for over 200 years before getting swallowed in ice in a global-cooling period that helped spread disease, death, and starvation throughout Europe. If Greenland once again becomes farmland, then we might be entering a somewhat more remarkable climate period in human history, but until then this is more properly referred to as weather.

 

[Soiled_Raven]

Why do I believe that Mr. Limatina won a bet with someone when this thread went past page 3?

The entire thing seems to be one or two people with sharp sticks and a flock of sheep.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Thank you Jenn, Cade, whomever...

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/10/30/surprise-no-warming-in-last-11-years/

This will be followed by severe denunciations, ad hominem, a clear statement of disaccreditation and enough links to fill Bozo's pocket for a three-minute schtick...

When you post an article from Michelle Malkin's Hotair (Perfect name for her blog site by the way, since she's full of it) laced throughout with excerpts from the "Daily Mail", you should expect pointing and laughing and apparently you do. It didn't stop you from posting that tripe though did it Cap'n GluttonForPunishment?

Funny that you show disdain for links to primary research while posting links and C&P jobs from blog sites attempting to interpret the data. One might think you have an agenda of your own rather than an interest in the facts.

 

[Wrong Element]

Interesting to note that this article was published in February 2007. Why post it here now? There has been plenty of research about the hockey stick since then. Not much of it favourable to this point of view. Mostly supporting the hockey stick view.

It's not entirely clear what scientific background Micheal R Fox has. He's expressed strong opinions about the benefits of George W Bush's tax cuts too. Oh, and global smoking. His 1999 paper Toxic Toxicology expressed strong doubts about the carcinogenic nature of toxins in cigarette smoke. His website http://foxreport.org has been quiet of late.

Patrick

Wow, it's almost as if they're picking and choosing articles that conform to a conclusion they've already reached, rather than being engaged in a genuine search for the truth! Do you think??

 

[trysail]

Wow, it's almost as if they're picking and choosing articles that conform to a conclusion they've already reached, rather than being engaged in a genuine search for the truth! Do you think??

Nah. What I think is that you need to locate a copy of— and read— Andrew W. Montford's book. It might open your eyes and your mind. If nothing else, you will (if you are persistent) learn a great deal about climatology, paleoclimatology, temperature proxies, bristlecone pine tree rings, principal components analysis, the IPCC and the use (and misuse) of statistics.



The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science
by Andrew W. Montford
London: Stacey International, 2010. 482 pages.

ISBN 978-1-906768-35-5

http://www.amazon.com/Hockey-Stick-...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1286848986&sr=1-1


http://htronline.weebly.com/uploads/5/1/4/3/5143156/2010_volume_29.pdf


Humanities and Technology Review
Fall 2010, Volume 29.
Pages 79-86
ISSN 1076-7908

©2010 George Sochan. This is an Open Access article distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-
Commercial, No Derivatives license which permits non-commercial
use, distribution, and reproduction of this article in any medium,
provided the author and original source are cited and the article is
not modified without permission of the author.

Reviewed by George Sochan, Bowie State University.

For two decades, certainly since the early 1990s,
anthropogenic (manmade) global warming has been one
of the most prominent issues discussed in academic
seminars, written about in scholarly journals, reported by
the media, taught in schools, publicized in certain
nongovernmental assemblies, legislated on in some
governmental assemblies, decried by many activists, and
dramatized in documentaries. An example of the
conspicuous attention given to this topic would be Al
Gore‟s book, An Inconvenient Truth, which inspired a
film documentary by the same name in 2006. A less
famous but more scholarly expression of anthropogenic
global warming is the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change‟s (IPCC‟s) Third Assessment Report
produced for the United Nations in 2001. The iconic
depiction of this type of global warming is the so-called
hockey stick graph that originated in a paper published in
Nature, a science journal, in 1998, and, since then, has
appeared ubiquitously, including in the third IPCC
Report and Gore‟s film, as if it were the Gospel truth.
One source that assumes a less than laudatory view of
the graph is A. W. Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion:
Climategate and the Corruption of Science. In his well-documented,
450-page book, Montford, a blogger with a
background in chemistry, covers eleven years of history
that is centered on the hockey stick graph, beginning
with its introduction in the 1998 Michael Mann article in
Nature and closing with the email scandal centering on
Dr. Mann in 2009. In the process of unfolding the story
of a deceptive graph, upon which anthropogenic global
warming has been set, Montford establishes the general
framework of some of the debate on global warming;
shows the important place of the graph in the debate;
unfolds the work of two Canadians who revealed the
many flaws in the graph‟s construction; reveals the
unprofessional conduct of many climatologists; and
exposes the corrupt connection between politics and
science.

In The Hockey Stick Illusion Montford picks up the
climate story, in 1998, after the paradigm for
anthropogenic global warming had already been
established in the previous decade. Before the twentieth
century many scientists as well as millions of Americans
assumed that nature, including the weather, was fairly
stable and that any momentous change in the weather,
like the last Ice Age, would not occur abruptly but evolve
over millennia. During the twentieth century, especially
after World War II, this interpretation was overthrown as
scientists constructed a new paradigm that included the
following features: the fragile balance of the planet‟s
eco-systems; the abrupt volatility of the weather; and the
potential for humanity to change the weather, including
in a very catastrophic way. In regard to the latter item,
the main cause for concern has been the tremendous
increase in the emission of CO2 as well as other
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. By the late 1970s
the new scientific paradigm, to use Thomas Kuhn‟s term,
had been established. Since then, normal science, which
Kuhn explains in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
as the research conducted in accordance with the
prevailing paradigm to resolve particular problems, has
been conducted to show that anthropogenic global
warming is probable and has already started. Appearing
just before the new millennium, the hockey stick graph
seemed to provide the proof for many climatologists that
anthropogenic global warming had, indeed, begun.
Those who disagreed have been labeled skeptics and, in
Kuhnian terms, seemed to be engaged in a
counterrevolution against the new paradigm. The
Hockey Stick Illusion is a publication that can be set
within this so-called counterrevolution and much of its
information has been used by skeptics to challenge
claims about global warming.

In the book's introduction two graphs are shown:
The one on page twenty-five shows varying temperatures
during the last one thousand years while the one on page
thirty-four shows unvarying temperatures from the
beginning of the fifteenth century into the twentieth
century but with a sharp upward spike at the end of the
1900s. The former graph shows both the Medieval
Warm Period, occurring from 1000 to 1400, and the
Little Ice Age, lasting from 1450 to 1850. The other
graph is the hockey stick one that first appeared in
“Global Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing
Over the Past Six Centuries,” published in Nature in
1998 and that later resurfaced six times in the IPCC‟s
Third Assessment Report (TAR). This graph, which is
the work of Michael Mann and his two associates, Ray
Bradley and Malcolm Hughes, looks like a hockey stick
with the handle leveling out the Medieval Warm Period
and the Little Ice Age and the blade shooting up
temperatures for the late twentieth century. The
importance of the hockey stick graph is that it did two
things: removed the warmth of the Middle Ages when
temperatures were apparently higher than today and
indicated exceedingly high temperatures during the
carbon-dioxide-profligate years of the late twentieth
century. Stated simply, this graph supported the
contention that it was not until the massive urban
industrialization of contemporary history that
temperatures rose and, since humans had caused this
noxious rise in temperature, they were responsible to
change their lifestyle in order to save the planet.

While many persons and institutions accepted,
supported, and even propagated anthropogenic global
warming and humanity‟s responsibility to stop it, there
were skeptics. Some, like S. Fred Singer, a noted
physicist, referred to the extensive record that supported
a Medieval Warm Period while others felt that
significantly higher temperatures for the 1980s and the
1990s did not accord with their personal experiences.
Included among the latter is Steve McIntyre, who, at the
turn of the millennium when TAR was published, was a
semi-retired mining consultant who had lived in one of
the areas cited by Mann as having sharply higher
temperatures. Since McIntyre did not personally recall
these for the late twentieth century where he had been
living in Canada, he began to post questions on the
Internet about Mann‟s methods and conclusions,
especially on his own site Climate2003, where bloggers
encouraged him to critique Mann‟s work. Through much
of The Hockey Stick Illusion, especially chapters three
through five, Montford first details McIntyre‟s many
efforts at wrestling with Mann‟s evidence (the principal
components) and calculations upon which the hockey
stick graph is based and then, in chapters six and eight,
recounts McIntyre‟s responses to Mann‟s many
supporters among the climatologists. In chapter three
Montford details McIntyre‟s review of Mann‟s
development of the hockey stick graph. McIntyre, who
has a background in mathematics and is skilled in the use
of statistics, discovered serious flaws in Mann‟s work.
According to McIntyre, it was the cherry-picked data of
certain tree rings (bristlecone pines) and Mann‟s use of a
faulty algorithm that produced a graph in the shape of a
hockey stick. Montford claims that McIntyre conducted
10,000 simulations of the climatologists‟ work, but using
different data, and always produced a hockey stick,
provided that he used the few bristlecone pines. As
statistician David Stockwell noted, “a 'hockey-stick'
shape is inevitable” because the “reconstructions are
essentially already encoded into the methodology” (p.
300). When McIntyre believed he was ready to publish
in 2003, he was joined by another Canadian, Ross
McKitrick, a professor of economics, who co-authored
papers with McIntyre that were published in various
journals between 2003 and 2005.

During the years that McIntyre and McKitrick
published their papers, a war of words ensued between
McIntyre, McKitrick and their supporters and Mann and
his supporters. Much of this engagement occurred on the
Internet, especially at their respective websites,
ClimateAudit for the former and RealClimate for the
latter. The importance of blogging on the Internet
became apparent when members of both camps posted
parts of their scholarly papers and aspects of their
research on the web. At the time of this web
engagement, McIntyre and McKitrick were unaware that
a concerted, behind-the-scenes action was occurring to
restrict their access to data and codes used by many
climatologists, to deny them publication in certain
scholarly journals, and to sanction journals that had
published them. In the final chapter of The Hockey Stick
Illusion Montford excerpts from numerous personal
emails, which were hacked in late 2009, that reveal the
aforementioned unprofessional conduct of Mann and
some of his associates as they wrangled publicly with the
climate skeptics on the Internet. The Internet
controversy spilled into the newspapers, such as The Wall
Street Journal, which published an article critical of the
climatologists, centered on the question “But is the
hockey stick true?” in February 2005 (cited on p. 187 in
Montford‟s book). The battle on the blogs even reached
Washington, DC where Congress set up two committees
to investigate the hockey stick graph in 2006. By this
year it had become apparent even to proponents of
anthropogenic global warming that significant flaws
affected Mann‟s methodology. The defense offered on
behalf of the hockey stick graph is that while Mann‟s
work has some errors, his conclusions, including the
spike of high temperatures at the end of the twentieth
century, has been confirmed by other professionals
working in the field of climatology. On page 254 in his
book Montford uses a diagram to show what
confirmation by others means. At the center of the
diagram is Mann and lines link him, either directly or
indirectly, to forty-two other scientists who had
published papers, often in association with Mann, on
global warming. In his report to one of the two
congressional committees Edward Wegman, a professor
of statistics at George Mason University, noted “the
isolation of the paleoclimate community” and asserted
that its “work has been sufficiently politicized” (p. 252) .

In chapter fifteen, effectively the book‟s conclusion,
Montford reflects on the meaning of the hockey stick
graph. He concludes that while the graph‟s scientific
value was successfully challenged by McIntyre and
McKitrick, it has continued to maintain its propaganda
value. Mounted on a timeline, the hockey stick clearly
conveys the message that temperatures had skyrocketed
at the same time that more and more Americans began to
drive SUVs, use air-conditioning nearly everywhere, and
fly on jets for at least one annual trip. The graph was
used in schools to teach children that the aforementioned
behavior was responsible for the melting of the glaciers
that, as shown in Gore‟s documentary, had left a lonely
polar bear floating on an iceberg in a warming Arctic
Ocean. Many scientists within that “paleoclimate
community” used the hockey stick image to promote
anthropogenic global warming as they received grant
monies for further research to confirm what they already
fervently believed. Finally, those who wanted to change
patterns of living in the developed countries also latched
onto the hockey stick as an effective weapon to beat back
skeptics and others who opposed more governmental
regulation of personal behavior.

To use Kuhn‟s terminology, A. W. Montford's The
Hockey Stick Illusion provides a detailed account of
normal science in the field of climatology. In the case
of this book the perspective comes from the side of the
skeptics who, for more than two decades, have been
challenging the paradigm that presents humanity as being
primarily responsible for global warming. In particular,
Montford focuses on two Canadians who have
challenged a key representation of anthropogenic global
warming, which is the hockey stick graph. Chapter after
chapter reveal the contentious debates between the
climatologists and the skeptics. In The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions Kuhn sees such academic battles
as comparable to those of political revolutions, wherein
the participants in the revolutionary process try to
impose a new world view or to maintain an existing one.
Since Kuhn does not perceive the history of science as
the story of one achievement progressing to another and
then to another, he might find the account contained
within Montford‟s book to be the usual practice of
professional scientists as they establish or overthrow a
paradigm. Some readers of The Hockey Stick Illusion,
however, may conclude that the book‟s subtitle, “the
corruption of science,” is the more appropriate
assessment for at least some of the so-called normal
science of certain climatologists.

 

[patrick1]

Just to point out trysail, this book has been supersede by events. I'm not saying it's wrong or right, in saying that.

Why are people so adamant about this? Nobody ever answers my question asking this. It makes it awfully hard to cut through the rhetoric to an evaluation of the material, when you're just an inquiring amateur like me. Why in particular are the 'sceptics' so un-sceptical? Modelling is dodgy. But so is assuming you're 100% right in your comments about modelling. To be explicit: Are some people being paid to spread lies?

For instance, people are widely quoting a David Rose article in the Mail. Here's a paragraph from it:

<< Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their (the BEST team's)work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it.>>

No it wasn't. 'Irrefutable' who said that? Who suggested that this dataset supported agw at all? It attempts to help the debate is all, and does seem to me on balance, but only on balance, and only on a specific reading of the data, to support the agw thesis - although it would be hard to know that from all the gloss that's been put on it!.

Another example is this two paras later:

<<The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a sceptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’>>

Well, I find an opinion piece by a specific author, Eugene Robinson, in the Post that strongly supports agw as a theory. But this specific phrase 'cynical fraud' that has been re-quoted around the world: I can't find it in the actual Washington Post. The article supporting the view that the data have 'settled the climate change debate' is this opinion piece, not a news report.

David Rose is a controversial figure. A search on him will find that he has been embroiled in similar disputes in the past. He likes to write about climate change from a particular perspective. Oddly enough, there was a debate about whether he even existed, or at least, whether he shared an identity with Johann Hari, the writer discredited for falsely ascribing quotes to people in his journalism who had nevfer said the quotes. There's some detail here - in a blog - let me point out - from the right wing of the political spectrrum, but by someone interested in digging for the truth:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/d...a-porn-site-an-extraordinary-new-development/

Whether he's the same David Rose who works for the London Times - well, I pass on that one Somebody calling themselves David Rose has been around for a while and is a different bloke.

These folk are slippery. This leftie post by Lenin suggests there is more than one david Rose, but who knows? http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/09/johann-hari-debacle.html

Patrick

 

[patrick1]

Another reminder from Andrew Montford's wikipedia entry:

'In an interview with Bruce Robbins in The Courier Montford said, "I believe that CO2, other things being equal, will make the planet warmer. The six million dollar question is how much warmer. I'm less of a sceptic than people think. My gut feeling is still sceptical but I don't believe it's beyond the realms of possibility that the AGW hypothesis might be correct. It's more the case that we don't know and I haven't seen anything credible to persuade me there's a problem.'

Patrick

 

[Peregrinator]

Yedoma is a permafrost loess with a high carbon content. As it melts, it add a lot of CO2 and CH4 to the system. Interesting stuff.

Well, I knew that much. I just wasn't sure what you were getting at.

 

[Sonny Limatina]

Dear General Board:

I am sorry.

Love,
Sonny L.

 

[trysail]

Just to point out trysail, this book has been supersede by events. I'm not saying it's wrong or right, in saying that.

Why are people so adamant about this? Nobody ever answers my question asking this. It makes it awfully hard to cut through the rhetoric to an evaluation of the material, when you're just an inquiring amateur like me. Why in particular are the 'sceptics' so un-sceptical? Modelling is dodgy. But so is assuming you're 100% right in your comments about modelling. To be explicit: Are some people being paid to spread lies?

For instance, people are widely quoting a David Rose article in the Mail. Here's a paragraph from it:

<< Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their (the BEST team's)work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it.>>

No it wasn't. 'Irrefutable' who said that? Who suggested that this dataset supported agw at all? It attempts to help the debate is all, and does seem to me on balance, but only on balance, and only on a specific reading of the data, to support the agw thesis - although it would be hard to know that from all the gloss that's been put on it!.

Another example is this two paras later:

<<The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a sceptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’>>

Well, I find an opinion piece by a specific author, Eugene Robinson, in the Post that strongly supports agw as a theory. But this specific phrase 'cynical fraud' that has been re-quoted around the world: I can't find it in the actual Washington Post. The article supporting the view that the data have 'settled the climate change debate' is this opinion piece, not a news report.

David Rose is a controversial figure. A search on him will find that he has been embroiled in similar disputes in the past. He likes to write about climate change from a particular perspective. Oddly enough, there was a debate about whether he even existed, or at least, whether he shared an identity with Johann Hari, the writer discredited for falsely ascribing quotes to people in his journalism who had nevfer said the quotes. There's some detail here - in a blog - let me point out - from the right wing of the political spectrrum, but by someone interested in digging for the truth:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/d...a-porn-site-an-extraordinary-new-development/

Whether he's the same David Rose who works for the London Times - well, I pass on that one Somebody calling themselves David Rose has been around for a while and is a different bloke.

These folk are slippery. This leftie post by Lenin suggests there is more than one david Rose, but who knows? http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/09/johann-hari-debacle.html

Patrick

Patrick-

You're the only one who can do the work necessary to form your own opinion.


Speaking for myself, I am one of those people who when told "such and such is true because everybody says it's so" views it as a big red flag that somebody is trying to sell me something.


As I have stated previously, it seems to me we ought to be very, very damn sure about this CAGW stuff ( and that means having a long serious debate— in sharp contrast to Al Gore & Co.'s "Fire! Fire! Fire!" ) before we act. As far as I'm concerned, the CAGW hypothesis has about a billion unanswered questions. As you have correctly perceived, I trust forecasts ( whether produced by humans or computers ) about as far as I can throw 'em. Forecasts are a fuckin' dime a dozen and history is chock-a-block with forgotten forecasts made by salespeople and other windbags. Talk is cheap.


As Warren Buffett once put it, "A check separates a conversation from a commitment."


This is very serious stuff with profound implications for our economy. Somebody better be goddamned sure they know what they're talking about before they start fucking around with shit they don't understand. I've seen far too many instances of visionary idiots wreaking havoc to have a lot of faith in starry-eyed utopian dreamers. I'm not interested in saving the world if we go bankrupt in the process. In 150 years we've been told that there's been a 0.6° C. rise in average temperatures. Nobody really knows why.


Let's not forget there are a whole lot of working parts and permutations here. Solely for the sake of argument— what the hell is wrong with another 0.6°C. rise in average temperature over the next century? I, for one, would sure as hell rather have that than a 0.6°C. decline in average temperature.

 

[Peregrinator]

A large number of ancient mass extinction events have been strongly linked to global climate change. Because current climate change is so rapid, the way species typically adapt (eg - migration) is, in most cases, simply not be possible. Global change is simply too pervasive and occurring too rapidly.
Humans are transforming the global environment. Great swathes of temperate forest in Europe, Asia and North America have been cleared over the past few centuries for agriculture, timber and urban development. Tropical forests are now on the front line. Human-assisted species invasions of pests, competitors and predators are rising exponentially, and over-exploitation of fisheries, and forest animals for bush meat, to the point of collapse, continues to be the rule rather than the exception.

Driving this has been a six-fold expansion of the human population since 1800 and a 50-fold increase in the size of the global economy. The great modern human enterprise was built on exploitation of the natural environment. Today, up to 83% of the Earth’s land area is under direct human influence and we entirely dominate 36% of the bioproductive surface. Up to half the world’s freshwater runoff is now captured for human use. More nitrogen is now converted into reactive forms by industry than all by all the planet’s natural processes and our industrial and agricultural processes are causing a continual build-up of long-lived greenhouse gases to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years and possibly much longer.

Clearly, this planet-wide domination by human society will have implications for biological diversity. Indeed, a recent review on the topic, the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report (an environmental report of similar scale to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports), drew some bleak conclusions – 60% of the world’s ecosystems are now degraded and the extinction rate is now 100 to 1000 times higher than the “background” rate of long spans of geological time. For instance, a study I conducted in 2003 showed that up to 42% of species in the Southeast Asian region could be consigned to extinction by the year 2100 due to deforestation and habitat fragmentation alone.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/southeastasianextinctionpro.jpg

Figure 1: Southeast Asian extinctions projected due to habitat loss (source: Sodhi, N. S., Koh, L. P., Brook, B. W. & Ng, P. K. L. 2004)

Given these existing pressures and upheavals, it is a reasonable question to ask whether global warming will make any further meaningful contribution to this mess. Some, such as the sceptics S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, see no danger at all, maintaining that a warmer planet will be beneficial for mankind and other species on the planet and that “corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate”. Also, although climate change is a concern for conservation biologists, it is not the focus for most researchers (at present), largely I think because of the severity and immediacy of the damage caused by other threats.

Global warming to date has certainly affected species’ geographical distributional ranges and the timing of breeding, migration, flowering, and so on. But extrapolating these observed impacts to predictions of future extinction risk is challenging. The most well known study to date, by a team from the UK, estimated that 18 and 35% of plant and animal species will be committed to extinction by 2050 due to climate change. This study, which used a simple approach of estimating changes in species geographical ranges after fitting to current bioclimatic conditions, caused a flurry of debate. Some argued that it was overly optimistic or too uncertain because it left out most ecological detail, while others said it was possibly overly pessimistic, based on what we know from species responses and apparent resilience to previous climate change in the fossil record – see below.

A large number of ancient mass extinction events have indeed been strongly linked to global climate change, including the most sweeping die-off that ended the Palaeozoic Era, 250 million years ago and the somewhat less cataclysmic, but still damaging, Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago. Yet in the more recent past, during the Quaternary glacial cycles spanning the last million years, there were apparently few climate-related extinctions. This curious paradox of few ice age extinctions even has a name – it is called ‘the Quaternary Conundrum’.

Over that time, the globally averaged temperature difference between the depth of an ice age and a warm interglacial period was 4 to 6°C – comparable to that predicted for the coming century due to anthropogenic global warming under the fossil-fuel-intensive, business-as-usual scenario. Most species appear to have persisted across these multiple glacial–interglacial cycles. This can be inferred from the fossil record, and from genetic evidence in modern species. In Europe and North America, populations shifted ranges southwards as the great northern hemisphere ice sheets advanced, and reinvaded northern realms when the glaciers retreated. Some species may have also persisted in locally favourable regions that were otherwise isolated within the tundra and ice-strewn landscapes. In Australia, a recently discovered cave site has shown that large-bodied mammals (‘megafauna’) were able to persist even in the arid landscape of the Nullarbor in conditions similar to now.

However, although the geological record is essential for understanding how species respond to natural climate change, there are a number of reasons why future impacts on biodiversity will be particularly severe:

A) Human-induced warming is already rapid and is expected to further accelerate. The IPCC storyline scenarios such as A1FI and A2 imply a rate of warming of 0.2 to 0.6°C per decade. By comparison, the average change from 15 to 7 thousand years ago was ~0.005°C per decade, although this was occasionally punctuated by short-lived (and possibly regional-scale) abrupt climatic jolts, such as the Younger Dryas, Dansgaard-Oeschger and Heinrich events.

B) A low-range optimistic estimate of 2°C of 21st century warming will shift the Earth’s global mean surface temperature into conditions which have not existed since the middle Pliocene, 3 million years ago. More than 4°C of atmospheric heating will take the planet’s climate back, within a century, to the largely ice-free world that existed prior to about 35 million years ago. The average ‘species’ lifetime’ is only 1 to 3 million years. So it is quite possible that in the comparative geological instant of a century, planetary conditions will be transformed to a state unlike anything that most of the world’s modern species have encountered.

C) As noted above, it is critical to understand that ecosystems in the 21st century start from an already massively ‘shifted baseline’ and so have lost resilience. Most habitats are already degraded and their populations depleted, to a lesser or greater extent, by past human activities. For millennia our impacts have been localised although often severe, but during the last few centuries we have unleashed physical and biological transformations on a global scale. In this context, synergies (positive or self-reinforcing feedbacks) from global warming, ocean acidification, habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, chemical pollution (Figure 2) are likely lead to cascading extinctions. For instance, over-harvest, habitat loss and changed fire regimes will likely enhance the direct impacts of climate change and make it difficult for species to move to undamaged areas or to maintain a ‘buffer’ population size. One threat reinforces the other, or multiple impacts play off on each other, which makes the overall impact far greater than if each individual threats occurred in isolation (Brook et al 2008).

http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/brook_impacts.gif


Figure 2: Figure from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

D) Past adaptation to climate change by species was mainly through shifting their geographic range to higher or lower latitudes (depending on whether the climate was warming or cooling), or up and down mountain slopes. There were also evolutionary responses – individuals that were most tolerant to new conditions survived and so made future generations more intrinsically resilient. Now, because of points A to C described above, this type of adaptation will, in most cases, simply not be possible or will be inadequate to cope. Global change is simply too pervasive and occurring too rapidly. Time’s up and there is nowhere for species to run or hide.

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

Skeptic finds global warming is indeed real
October 31, 2011

".... spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right:
Temperatures really are rising rapidly."

"....Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers."
"He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data."

"Yet he found the land is 1.6 degrees warmer than in the 1950s. Those numbers from Muller,
who works at the University of California Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab,
match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA."

"One-quarter of the $600,000 to do the research came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder
is a major funder of skeptic groups and the Tea Party movement."
{gsgs comment- Why would the Koch brothers want Global Warming discredited?}

http://articles.boston.com/2011-10-...dministration-and-nasa-global-warming-skeptic

 

[KRCummings]

Dear General Board:

I am sorry.

Love,
Sonny L.

I sincerely hope you've learned your lesson.

 

[Peregrinator]

Sorry this is a formatting mess. I would have just linked it, but that makes 4est have feelings, apparently. Everywhere you see a (name date) is, on the original page, a link to the primary literature. The original page is here:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negatives-intermediate.htm


The negative impacts of global warming on agriculture, health, economy and environment far outweigh any positives.
The best way to put this in perspective is to compare the positives of global warming to the negatives (note - this list is by no means comprehensive - please feel free to suggest additional papers in the comments below):

Positives

Negatives

Agriculture
Improved agriculture in some high latitude regions (Mendelsohn 2006)
Increased growing season in Greenland (Nyegaard 2007)
Increased productivity of sour orange trees (Kimball 2007)

Agriculture
Decreasing human water supplies, increased fire frequency, ecosystem change and expanded deserts (Solomon 2009)
Decline in rice yields due to warmer nighttime minimum temperatures (Peng 2004, Tao 2008)
Increase of Western United States wildfire activity, associated with higher temperatures and earlier spring snowmelt (Westerling 2006)
Encroachment of shrubs into grasslands, rendering rangeland unsuitable for domestic livestock grazing (Morgan 2007)
Decreased water supply in the Colorado River Basin (McCabe 2007)
Decreasing water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin (Cai 2008)


Health
Winter deaths will decline as temperatures warm (HPA 2007)

Health
Increased deaths to heatwaves - 5.74% increase to heatwaves compared to 1.59% to cold snaps (Medina-Ramon 2007)
Increased heat stress in humans and other mammals (Sherwood 2010)
Spread in mosquite-borne diseases such as Malaria and Dengue Fever (Epstein 1998)
Increase in occurrence of allergic symptoms due to rise in allergenic pollen (Rogers 2006)


Arctic Melt
An ice-free Northwest Passage, providing a shipping shortcut between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans (Kerr 2002, Stroeve 2008)

Arctic Melt
Loss of 2/3 of the world's polar bear population within 50 years (Amstrup 2007)
Less compacted ice, hazardous floes and more mobile icebergs posing increased risk to shipping (IICWG 2009)
Drying of arctic ponds with subsequent damage to ecosystem (Smol 2007)
Warming causes methane to escape from Arctic regions, contributing additional greenhouse warming. The following have been observed:
Melting of Arctic lakes leading methane bubbling (Walter 2007)
Leakage of methane from the East Siberian Shelf seabed sediments (Shakhova 2008)
Escape of methane gas from the seabed along the West Spitsbergen continental margin (Westbrook 2009)
Environment
Greener rainforests due to higher sunlight levels due to fewer rain clouds (Saleska 2009)
Enhanced plant growth, particularly in Amazon rain forests due mainly to decreased cloud cover and the resulting increase in sunlight (Nemani 2003).
Increased vegetation activity in high northern latitudes (Zhou 2001)
Increase in chinstrap and gentoo penguins (Ducklow 2006)
Increased plankton biomass in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (arguably ENSO/PDO might be dominant influence) (Corno 2006)
Recent increase in forest growth (McMahon 2010)
Bigger marmots (Ozgul 2010)
Increased Arctic tundra plant reproduction (Klady 2010)


Environment
Rainforests releasing CO2 as regions become drier (Saleska 2009)
Extinction of the European land leech (Kutschera 2007)
Decrease in Adélie penguin numbers (Ducklow 2006)
Disruption to New Zealand aquatic species such as salmonids, stream invertebrates, fishes (Ryan 2007)
Oxygen poor ocean zones are growing (Stramma 2008, Shaffer 2009)
Increased mortality rates of healthy trees in Western U.S. forest (Pennisi 2009)
More severe and extensive vegetation die-off due to warmer droughts (Breshears 2009)
Increased pine tree mortality due to outbreaks of pine beetles (Kurz 2008, Bentz 2010)
Increased risk of coral extinction from bleaching and disease driven by warming waters (Veron 2009, Carpenter 2008)
Decline in lizard populations (Sinervo 2010)
Decline in global phytoplankton (Boyce 2010)
Decline in global net primary production - the amount of carbon absorbed by plants (Zhao 2010)


Ocean Acidification
Note: this is not caused by warming temperatures but by the oceans absorbing more carbon dioxide (Dore 2009).
Oceans uptake of carbon dioxide, moderates future global warming (Orr 2005)

Ocean Acidification
Substantial negative impacts to marine ecosystems (Orr 2005, Fabry 2008, Kroeker 2010)
Inhibiting plankton development, disruption of carbon cycle (Turley 2005)
Increased mortalities of sea urchins (Miles 2007)
Threat to fish populations (Munday 2010)


Glacier Melt
Severe consequences for at least 60 million people dependent on ice melt for water supply (Barnett 2005, Immerzeel 2010)
Contribution to rising sea levels (Pfeffer 2008, Vermeer 2009)


Economical
Increased cod fishing leading to improved Greenland economy (Nyegaard 2007)

Economical
Economic damage to poorer, low latitude countries (Mendelsohn 2006)
Billions of dollars of damage to public infrastructure (Larsen 2007)
Reduced water supply in New Mexico (Hurd 2008)
Increased risk of conflict (Zhang 2007) including increased risk of civil war in Africa (Burke 2009)
Drop in primary productivity due to unprecedented warming at Lake Tanganyika (Tierney 2010)

Sea Level Rise
Hundreds of millions displaced within this century (Dasgupta 2009)
Coastal erosion in Nigeria (Okude 2006)