Scientists discover that climate-change skeptics are bozos

[Ulaven_Demorte]

So, that's all you got...



Weak. More ad hominem. Just so very typical. Even Lovelynice avoids that.

You have nothing against a little ad hominem or name calling Cap'n Disingenuous, as evidenced in your very next post.

There is no "consensus."

That's the point.

Moron.

They just act as if they have a consensus and discredit and dismiss anyone who would dissent to the point that the only "accredited" peers left to review anything are the True Believers...

They knew Curry did not agree with their "finding" so they fucking ignored her and said the hell with the review, we have a headline that will, again, make it look like the argument is over and further enable the Holy Crusade. First word out wins the day in the world of Political Science.

So therefore, you have no contradiction, just your burning hate and poor education.

You are engaging in the ad hominem of the fallacy of ascription.

So which is it Cap'n? Consensus in science is bad or you need to get consensus through peer review on everything?

You seem to be arguing that everything must be peer reviewed, but that those who actually make it through the peer review process aren't to be trusted because they've drowned out and/or marginalized all dissent.
Keep in mind that multiple peer reviewed studies backed by a myriad of sources (even the Koch brothers) reached the same conclusions.

You're still arguing both sides of the street here, sprinkled throughout with your very own ad hominem attacks and fits of namecalling.

edit: One can always tell when you're on the ropes Cap'n, you turn Dizzybooby/Jen and start spamming a thread with consecutive posts.

 

[Ishmael]

756 scientists from 453 research institutions have worked on the Medieval Warming Period. Virtually all data supports the notion that that period was significantly warmer than it is today. It's a contradiction of all that Mann and the followers of his new age religion cannot explain. So, rather than explain that phenomena, they have contrived to make it 'go away.' By selectively erasing the MWP from his data sets Mann was able to come up with his infamous 'Hockey Stick' graph.

The records show something entirely different, or at least brings the issue of climate change into better perspective. The ramp up of the temperature at the beginning of the MWP was as sudden, if not more so, than the ramp up we observed up until 2002. And the ramp down leading into the Little Ice Age was just as precipitous. And all of this occurred pre-industrial age. This effectively eliminates CO2 as a consideration as the major forcing factor in climate change. (And the various ice cores support this observation as well.) When the MWP is overlain in true perspective on Mann's 'Hockey Stick' today's rise in temperatures (which effectively ended in 2002) start to appear as nothing more than part of a cycle which we do not fully understand yet.

Just as an aside, it's interesting to note that the 'Black Death' pandemic in Europe coincides with that precipitous drop in temperatures at the end of the MWP.

Ishmael

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I guess the problem you have is that you can't see that this is an

ETHICS

problem in the Scientific community.

That might be because Socialism and its religion of Gaia cannot afford ethics since it is a plunder-based system...

Shut up U_D...

It's not about anything you keep trying to ascribe to me.



Good post Ish...

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

Shut up U_D...

It's not about anything you keep trying to ascribe to me.



Good post Ish...

What am I ascribing to you Cap'n?
Are you trying to now say that you have never argued against scientific consensus?
The memory is the second thing that goes I'm told.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

What am I ascribing to you Cap'n?
Are you trying to now say that you have never argued against scientific consensus?
The memory is the second thing that goes I'm told.

I have said, yes, that consensus does not imply truth when it comes to political science and end of the world scenarios. It only implies truth when no one is left that can deny it (as we see in hard Sciences like math and chemistry. Hell, even in physics, there is consensus AND debate as the one Nobel winner pointed out when he resigned from the glow-ball warning movement).

I have also patiently pointed out that this "consensus" was based upon fraud, fear, and government education and the call to Holy Crusade to save mankind.

The movement is corrupted by government money and the prestige of fame.

I have said all of these things. There is no contradiction, just a pattern.

They are no longer even bothering with the polite fiction of peer review (I peer review which I called flawed, and it was), and we can clearly see that anyone not on board with the predetermined outcome is just cut out of the loop after having been deemed qualified enough in climatology to actually be on the team in the first place, and isn't that one of the charges, that the "deniers" are not in the actual field and therefore have no standing (or if they are in the field, they are discredited people with a Christian-based agenda) in order to dispute the findings?

Peer-review means an objective and impartial review of the actual science. This field has not been properly peer-reviewed because it has been corrupted by government funding, funding that only comes if you prove that government must take action, in this case action against CO2, therefore Curry, and all other skeptics are a clear and present danger not just to their "peers" but to government and Socialism.

You take away the money and prestige and this is nor more than internecine department squabbles like you see with other disciplines where the outcome brings neither fame or fortune and is of great interest only to those intimate with the same area of "expertise."

 

[patrick1]

756 scientists from 453 research institutions have worked on the Medieval Warming Period. Virtually all data supports the notion that that period was significantly warmer than it is today. It's a contradiction of all that Mann and the followers of his new age religion cannot explain. So, rather than explain that phenomena, they have contrived to make it 'go away.' By selectively erasing the MWP from his data sets Mann was able to come up with his infamous 'Hockey Stick' graph.
Ishmael

This is in itself a highly misleading quote. Adding up the number of researchers who contributed to a particular 'factual' finding doesn't in this case make it truer - because the vital information is missing: yes, Virtually all data supports the notion that that period was significantloy warmer in that period than it is today - but not globally. Only in certain regions.

Here's one critique I was looking at for another reason - because it's from an article about the anti-climate science campaigner David Rose. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/dec/08/david-rose-climate-science

<<Rose:

"Earlier this year, a paper by Michael Mann – for years a leading light in the IPCC, and the author of the infamous 'hockey stick graph' showing flat temperatures for 2,000 years until the recent dizzying increase - made an extraordinary admission: that, as his critics had always claimed, there had indeed been a ' medieval warm period' around 1,000AD, when the world may well have been hotter than it is now."

Rose, as usual, provides no reference for this paper, and none of the scientists I've contacted, including Mann, has any idea what he's talking about. But Mann points out that neither "we, nor any other researchers, have ever denied there was a period of relative warmth sometime during medieval for many regions. What we – and other competent researchers – have all found is that the warmth was far more regional than modern warmth, with some large regions, like the tropical Pacific, having been unusually *cold* at the time, and when you average over the globe, the warmth of the medieval warm period/medieval climate anomaly simply doesn't reach modern warmth. Every peer-reviewed scientific study of the matter comes to the same conclusions.">>

Patrick

 

[patrick1]

Gump is entirely mistaken in his earlier posts about peer review. The work by Berkeley team will be peer-reviewed. They have released data in advance of peer review, then different members of the team have made comments about what's been released. I can't find a single verifiable quote that a single one of them said the data, these particular data, show humans cause global warming. But the mere release of the data seems to have alarmed people who think humans don't cause global warming.

Patrick

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Contacted via email, Curry tells me that she “does not regard their initial findings and analyses as the last word on any of this” but adds, “Their interpretation is not unreasonable.” She pointed to the BEST FAQ on the issue which concludes that “the decadal fluctuations [in global temperatures] are too large to allow us to make decisive conclusions about long term trends based on close examination of periods as short as 13 to 15 years.”

A new study [PDF] just now being published by a leading group of climate modelers argues that “temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.” Considering that the warming pause in some temperature records has already been going on for 13 to 15 years perhaps we will soon find out if the climate models are producing valid results or not and get a better idea of how much warming can be attributed to accumulating greenhouse gases.

While statistical quibbling about its results will occur, the BEST project has set admirable standards of scientific transparency with regard to data and how it’s treated. This will help repair a bit of the damage to the public’s trust in climate science caused by the insular authoritarian-minded band of climate scientists involved in Climategate.

*Disclosure: BEST received some funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. His brother David is a trustee of Reason Foundation which publishes this website.

Reason.com...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Gump is entirely mistaken in his earlier posts about peer review. The work by Berkeley team will be peer-reviewed. They have released data in advance of peer review, then different members of the team have made comments about what's been released. I can't find a single verifiable quote that a single one of them said the data, these particular data, show humans cause global warming. But the mere release of the data seems to have alarmed people who think humans don't cause global warming.

Patrick

Will be...

All I said is that it hasn't been prior to the publication, for effect, an effect sonny took to heart, so therefore, as you contend, I am not wrong.

The release of the data does not alarm me or any other skeptic one little bit because we accept and know, for a fact that climate changes.

It's the CAUSE that gives us pause, for we know that climate is not a simple equation...

It's an analog feedback loop, a recursion, like the weather in which today's "climate" is affected by the climate of the past. Therefore, we have little faith in models which try to tell us about last year or the last decade knowing that the changes should be observed in much greater increments to be able to make a valid conclusion about the bounds of its bifurcations.

 

[Ishmael]

This is in itself a highly misleading quote. Adding up the number of researchers who contributed to a particular 'factual' finding doesn't in this case make it truer - because the vital information is missing: yes, Virtually all data supports the notion that that period was significantloy warmer in that period than it is today - but not globally. Only in certain regions.

Here's one critique I was looking at for another reason - because it's from an article about the anti-climate science campaigner David Rose.

<<Rose:

"Earlier this year, a paper by Michael Mann – for years a leading light in the IPCC, and the author of the infamous 'hockey stick graph' showing flat temperatures for 2,000 years until the recent dizzying increase - made an extraordinary admission: that, as his critics had always claimed, there had indeed been a ' medieval warm period' around 1,000AD, when the world may well have been hotter than it is now."

Rose, as usual, provides no reference for this paper, and none of the scientists I've contacted, including Mann, has any idea what he's talking about. But Mann points out that neither "we, nor any other researchers, have ever denied there was a period of relative warmth sometime during medieval for many regions. What we – and other competent researchers – have all found is that the warmth was far more regional than modern warmth, with some large regions, like the tropical Pacific, having been unusually *cold* at the time, and when you average over the globe, the warmth of the medieval warm period/medieval climate anomaly simply doesn't reach modern warmth. Every peer-reviewed scientific study of the matter comes to the same conclusions.">>

Patrick

It was global, only the religious followers buy into the regional bullshit. The data sets from all over the globe, both above and below the equator show it was global. And the reason that the priests of the church of AGW had to deny the global reach was so they could erase the MWP from their data sets. How convenient?

Interestingly enough they don't apply the same argument to the LIA. Why is that? How is it possible that the MWP only effected selective parts of Europe (and Iceland and Greenland) but the LIA that followed was global in scope? In the attempt to make one contradiction go away they only uncover another.

Ishmael

 

[phrodeau]

double post

 

[phrodeau]

This is in itself a highly misleading quote. Adding up the number of researchers who contributed to a particular 'factual' finding doesn't in this case make it truer - because the vital information is missing: yes, Virtually all data supports the notion that that period was significantloy warmer in that period than it is today - but not globally. Only in certain regions.

Here's one critique I was looking at for another reason - because it's from an article about the anti-climate science campaigner David Rose. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/dec/08/david-rose-climate-science

<<Rose:

"Earlier this year, a paper by Michael Mann – for years a leading light in the IPCC, and the author of the infamous 'hockey stick graph' showing flat temperatures for 2,000 years until the recent dizzying increase - made an extraordinary admission: that, as his critics had always claimed, there had indeed been a ' medieval warm period' around 1,000AD, when the world may well have been hotter than it is now."

Rose, as usual, provides no reference for this paper, and none of the scientists I've contacted, including Mann, has any idea what he's talking about. But Mann points out that neither "we, nor any other researchers, have ever denied there was a period of relative warmth sometime during medieval for many regions. What we – and other competent researchers – have all found is that the warmth was far more regional than modern warmth, with some large regions, like the tropical Pacific, having been unusually *cold* at the time, and when you average over the globe, the warmth of the medieval warm period/medieval climate anomaly simply doesn't reach modern warmth. Every peer-reviewed scientific study of the matter comes to the same conclusions.">>

Patrick

It doesn't do any good to argue. In Senator Inhofe's mind, that only means it's 756 opinions to one.

 

[patrick1]

This odd reply is in itself oddly relligious. I don't know why, Ishmael. Why are you so determined that your view is right? Why must you use, about scientifically uncertain ideas, such certaity in phrasing? Isn't this fundamentally unscientific of you?

Here is the article by Wallace S Broecker supporting what Ishmael says. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/dec/08/david-rose-climate-science

Personally I'm uncvinced, but there you go.

Patrick

It was global, only the religious followers buy into the regional bullshit. The data sets from all over the globe, both above and below the equator show it was global. And the reason that the priests of the church of AGW had to deny the global reach was so they could erase the MWP from their data sets. How convenient?

Interestingly enough they don't apply the same argument to the LIA. Why is that? How is it possible that the MWP only effected selective parts of Europe (and Iceland and Greenland) but the LIA that followed was global in scope? In the attempt to make one contradiction go away they only uncover another.

Ishmael

 

[trysail]

I am amazed that the text of Matt Ridley's address hasn't yet been posted here. There is a .pdf version on-line that contains the referenced graphs. It can be found at: http://www.bishop-hill.net/storage/ScientificHeresy.pdf

It is probably easier to read the text on-line. It can be found at Andrew Montford's "Bishop Hill" blog ( http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/11/1/scientific-heresy.html ).

What appear below is (obviously) a c+p.

If you don't know who Matt Ridley is, you should. Trained at Oxford in science, he is the author of ( among other works ) Genome: Autobiography of A Species in 23 Chapters.

It is a great honour to be asked to deliver the Angus Millar lecture.

I have no idea whether Angus Millar ever saw himself as a heretic, but I have a soft spot for heresy. One of my ancestral relations, Nicholas Ridley* the Oxford martyr, was burned at the stake for heresy.

My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?

Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones.

Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience.

Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience.

Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience.

Vaccination is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience.

Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience.

Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.​

Are you with me so far? A few more examples. That the earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare is pseudoscience. So are the beliefs that Elvis is still alive, Diana was killed by MI5, JFK was killed by the CIA, 911 was an inside job. So are ghosts, UFOs, telepathy, the Loch Ness monster and pretty well everything to do with the paranormal. Sorry to say that on Halloween, but that’s my opinion.

Three more controversial ones. In my view, most of what Freud said was pseudoscience. So is quite a lot, though not all, of the argument for organic farming. So, in a sense by definition, is religious faith. It explicitly claims that there are truths that can be found by other means than observation and experiment.

Now comes one that gave me an epiphany. Crop circles. It was blindingly obvious to me that crop circles were likely to be man-made when I first starting investigating this phenomenon. I made some myself to prove it was easy to do.

This was long before Doug Bower and Dave Chorley fessed up to having started the whole craze after a night at the pub. Every other explanation – ley lines, alien spacecraft, plasma vortices, ball lightning – was balderdash. The entire field of “cereology” was pseudoscience, as the slightest brush with its bizarre practitioners easily demonstrated.

Imagine my surprise then when I found I was the heretic and that serious journalists working not for tabloids but for Science Magazine, and for a Channel 4 documentary team, swallowed the argument of the cereologists that it was highly implausible that crop circles were all man-made.

So I learnt lesson number 1: the stunning gullibility of the media. Put an “ology” after your pseudoscience and you can get journalists to be your propagandists.

A Channel 4 team did the obvious thing – they got a group of students to make some crop circles and then asked the cereologist if they were “genuine” or “hoaxed” – ie, man made. He assured them they could not have been made by people. So they told him they had been made the night before. The man was poleaxed. It made great television. Yet the producer, who later became a government minister under Tony Blair, ended the segment of the programme by taking the cereologist’s side: “of course, not all crop circles are hoaxes”. What? The same happened when Doug and Dave owned up; everybody just went on believing. They still do.

Lesson number 2: debunking is like water off a duck’s back to pseudoscience.

In medicine, I began to realize, the distinction between science and pseudoscience is not always easy. This is beautifully illustrated in an extraordinary novel by Rebecca Abrams, called Touching Distance, based on the real story of an eighteenth century medical heretic, Alec Gordon of Aberdeen.

Gordon was a true pioneer of the idea that childbed fever was spread by medical folk like himself and that hygiene was the solution to it. He hit upon this discovery long before Semelweiss and Lister. But he was ignored. Yet Abrams’s novel does not paint him purely as a rational hero, but as a flawed human being, a neglectful husband and a crank with some odd ideas – such as a dangerous obsession with bleeding his sick patients. He was a pseudoscientist one minute and scientist the next.

Lesson number 3. We can all be both. Newton was an alchemist.

Like antisepsis, many scientific truths began as heresies and fought long battles for acceptance against entrenched establishment wisdom that now appears irrational: continental drift, for example. Barry Marshall was not just ignored but vilified when he first argued that stomach ulcers are caused by a particular bacterium. Antacid drugs were very profitable for the drug industry. Eventually he won the Nobel prize.

Just this month Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel prize for quasi crystals, having spent much of his career being vilified and exiled as a crank. “I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying.”

That’s lesson number 4: the heretic is sometimes right.

What sustains pseudoscience is confirmation bias. We look for and welcome the evidence that fits our pet theory; we ignore or question the evidence that contradicts it. We all do this all the time. It’s not, as we often assume, something that only our opponents indulge in. I do it, you do it, it takes a superhuman effort not to do it. That is what keeps myths alive, sustains conspiracy theories and keeps whole populations in thrall to strange superstitions.

Bertrand Russell pointed this out many years ago: “If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.”

Lesson no 5: keep a sharp eye out for confirmation bias in yourself and others.

There have been some very good books on this recently. Michael Shermer’s “The Believing Brain”, Dan Gardner’s “Future Babble” and Tim Harford’s “Adapt” are explorations of the power of confirmation bias. And what I find most unsettling of all is Gardner’s conclusion that knowledge is no defence against it; indeed, the more you know, the more you fall for confirmation bias. Expertise gives you the tools to seek out the confirmations you need to buttress your beliefs.

Experts are worse at forecasting the future than non-experts.

Philip Tetlock did the definitive experiment. He gathered a sample of 284 experts – political scientists, economists and journalists – and harvested 27,450 different specific judgments from them about the future then waited to see if they came true. The results were terrible. The experts were no better than “a dart-throwing chimpanzee”.

Here’s what the Club of Rome said on the rear cover of the massive best-seller Limits to Growth in 1972:

“Will this be the world that your grandchildren will thank you for? A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts.”​

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts", said Richard Feynman.

Lesson 6. Never rely on the consensus of experts about the future. Experts are worth listening to about the past, but not the future. Futurology is pseudoscience.

Using these six lessons, I am now going to plunge into an issue on which almost all the experts are not only confident they can predict the future, but absolutely certain their opponents are pseudoscientists. It is an issue on which I am now a heretic. I think the establishment view is infested with pseudoscience. The issue is climate change.

Now before you all rush for the exits, and I know it is traditional to walk out on speakers who do not toe the line on climate at the RSA – I saw it happen to Bjorn Lomborg last year when he gave the Prince Philip lecture – let me be quite clear. I am not a “denier”. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible. When a study was published recently saying that 98% of scientists “believe” in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been asked and realized I was in the 98%, too, by that definition, though I never use the word “believe” about myself. Likewise the recent study from Berkeley, which concluded that the land surface of the continents has indeed been warming at about the rate people thought, changed nothing.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed.

I also think the climate debate is a massive distraction from much more urgent environmental problems like invasive species and overfishing.

I was not always such a “lukewarmer”. In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I first saw it at a conference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine.

Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. I urge you to read Andrew Montford’s careful and highly readable book The Hockey Stick Illusion. Here is not the place to go into detail, but briefly the problem is both mathematical and empirical. The graph relies heavily on some flawed data – strip-bark tree rings from bristlecone pines -- and on a particular method of principal component analysis, called short centering, that heavily weights any hockey-stick shaped sample at the expense of any other sample. When I say heavily – I mean 390 times.

This had a big impact on me. This was the moment somebody told me they had made the crop circle the night before.

For, apart from the hockey stick, there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than in the past, when it changed naturally.

It was warmer in the Middle ages and medieval climate change in Greenland was much faster.

Stalagmites, tree lines and ice cores all confirm that it was significantly warmer 7000 years ago. Evidence from Greenland suggests that the Arctic ocean was probably ice free for part of the late summer at that time.

Sea level is rising at the unthreatening rate about a foot per century and decelerating. Greenland is losing ice at the rate of about 150 gigatonnes a year, which is 0.6% per century. There has been no significant warming in Antarctica, with the exception of the peninsula. Methane has largely stopped increasing. Tropical storm intensity and frequency have gone down, not up, in the last 20 years. Your probability of dying as a result of a drought, a flood or a storm is 98% lower globally than it was in the 1920s. Malaria has retreated not expanded as the world has warmed.

And so on. I’ve looked and looked but I cannot find one piece of data – as opposed to a model – that shows either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm.

No doubt, there will be plenty of people thinking “what about x?” Well, if you have an X that persuades you that rapid and dangerous climate change is on the way, tell me about it. When I asked a senior government scientist this question, he replied with the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. That is to say, a poorly understood hot episode, 55 million years ago, of uncertain duration, uncertain magnitude and uncertain cause.

Meanwhile, I see confirmation bias everywhere in the climate debate. Hurricane Katrina, Mount Kilimanjaro, the extinction of golden toads – all cited wrongly as evidence of climate change. A snowy December, the BBC lectures us, is “just weather”; a flood in Pakistan or a drought in Texas is “the sort of weather we can expect more of”. A theory so flexible it can rationalize any outcome is a pseudoscientific theory.

To see confirmation bias in action, you only have to read the climategate emails, documents that have undermined my faith in this country’s scientific institutions. It is bad enough that the emails unambiguously showed scientists plotting to cherry-pick data, subvert peer review, bully editors and evade freedom of information requests. What’s worse, to a science groupie like me, is that so much of the rest of the scientific community seemed OK with that. They essentially shrugged their shoulders and said, yeh, big deal, boys will be boys.

Nor is there even any theoretical support for a dangerous future. The central issue is “sensitivity”: the amount of warming that you can expect from a doubling of carbon dioxide levels. On this, there is something close to consensus – at first. It is 1.2 degrees centigrade. Here’s how the IPCC put it in its latest report.

“In the idealised situation that the climate response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 consisted of a uniform temperature change only, with no feedbacks operating…the global warming from GCMs would be around 1.2°C.” Paragraph 8.6.2.3.

Now the paragraph goes on to argue that large, net positive feedbacks, mostly from water vapour, are likely to amplify this. But whereas there is good consensus about the 1.2 C, there is absolutely no consensus about the net positive feedback, as the IPCC also admits. Water vapour forms clouds and whether clouds in practice amplify or dampen any greenhouse warming remains in doubt.

So to say there is a consensus about some global warming is true; to say there is a consensus about dangerous global warming is false.

The sensitivity of the climate could be a harmless 1.2C, half of which has already been experienced, or it could be less if feedbacks are negative or it could be more if feedbacks are positive. What does the empirical evidence say? Since 1960 we have had roughly one-third of a doubling, so we must have had almost half of the greenhouse warming expected from a doubling – that’s elementary arithmetic, given that the curve is agreed to be logarithmic. Yet if you believe the surface thermometers (the red and green lines), we have had about 0.6C of warming in that time, at the rate of less than 0.13C per decade – somewhat less if you believe the satellite thermometers (the blue and purple lines).

http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/hadcrut3vgl/from:1961/plot/gistemp/from:1961/plot/uah/plot/rss/from:1961​

So we are on track for 1.2C. We are on the blue line, not the red line.

[SEE ON-LINE .pdf for missing graph]​

Remember Jim Hansen of NASA told us in 1988 to expect 2-4 degrees in 25 years. We are experiencing about one-tenth of that. We are below even the zero-emission path expected by the IPCC in 1990.

Ah, says the consensus, sulphur pollution has reduced the warming, delaying the impact, or the ocean has absorbed the extra heat. Neither of these post-hoc rationalisations fit the data: the southern hemisphere has warmed about half as fast as the northern in the last 30 years, yet the majority of the sulphur emissions were in the northern hemisphere.

And ocean heat content has decelerated, if not flattened, in the past decade.

By contrast, many heretical arguments seem to me to be paragons of science as it should be done: transparent, questioning and testable.

For instance, earlier this year, a tenacious British mathematician named Nic Lewis started looking into the question of sensitivity and found that the only wholly empirical estimate of sensitivity cited by the IPCC had been put through an illegitimate statistical procedure which effectively fattened its tail on the upward end – it hugely increased the apparent probability of high warming at the expense of low warming. When this is corrected, the theoretical probability of warming greater than 2.3C is very low indeed. Like all the other errors in the IPCC report, including the infamous suggestion that all Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 rather than 2350, this mistake exaggerates the potential warming. It is beyond coincidence that all these errors should be in the same direction. The source for the Himalayan glacier mistake was a non-peer reviewed WWF report and it occurred in a chapter, two of whose coordinating lead authors and a review editor were on WWF’s climate witness scientific advisory panel. Remember too that the glacier error was pointed out by reviewers, who were ignored, and that Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, dismissed the objectors as practitioners of “voodoo science”.

Journalists are fond of saying that the IPCC report is based solely on the peer-reviewed literature. Rajendra Pachauri himself made that claim in 2008, saying:

...we carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry [the] credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don't settle for anything less than that.​

That’s a voodoo claim. The glacier claim was not peer reviewed; nor was the alteration to the sensitivity function Lewis spotted. The journalist Donna Laframboise got volunteers all over the world to help her count the times the IPCC used non-peer reviewed literature. Her conclusion is that: “Of the 18,531 references in the 2007 Climate Bible we found 5,587 - a full 30% - to be non peer-reviewed.”

Yet even to say things like this is to commit heresy. To stand up and say, within a university or within the BBC, that you do not think global warming is dangerous gets you the sort of reaction that standing up in the Vatican and saying you don’t think God is good would get. Believe me, I have tried it.

Does it matter? Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent. So what?

After all there’s pseudoscience and confirmation bias among the climate heretics too.

Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

At least sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.

At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.

At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.

At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.

At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel.

That’s why it matters. We’ve been asked to take some very painful cures. So we need to be sure the patient has a brain tumour rather than a nosebleed.

Handing the reins of power to pseudoscience has an unhappy history. Remember eugenics. Around 1910 the vast majority of scientists and other intellectuals agreed that nationalizing reproductive decisions so as to stop poor, disabled and stupid people from having babies was not just a practical but a moral imperative of great urgency.

“There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact,” said George Bernard Shaw, “that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.’’ By the skin of its teeth, mainly because of a brave Liberal MP called Josiah Wedgwood, Britain never handed legal power to the eugenics movement. Germany did.

Or remember Trofim Lysenko, a pseudoscientific crank with a strange idea that crops could be trained to do what you wanted and that Mendelian genetics was bunk. His ideas became the official scientific religion of the Soviet Union and killed millions; his critics, such as the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, ended up dead in prison.

Am I going too far in making these comparisons? I don’t think so. James Hansen of NASA says oil firm executives should be tried for crimes against humanity. (Remember this is the man who is in charge of one of the supposedly impartial data sets about global temperatures.) John Beddington, Britain's chief scientific adviser, said this year that just as we are "grossly intolerant of racism", so we should also be "grossly intolerant of pseudoscience", in which he included all forms of climate-change scepticism.

The irony of course is that much of the green movement began as heretical dissent. Greenpeace went from demanding that the orthodox view of genetically modified crops be challenged, and that the Royal Society was not to be trusted, to demanding that heresy on climate change be ignored and the Royal Society could not be wrong.

Talking of Greenpeace, did you know that the collective annual budget of Greenpeace, WWF and Friends of the Earth was more than a billion dollars globally last year? People sometimes ask me what’s the incentive for scientists to exaggerate climate change. But look at the sums of money available to those who do so, from the pressure groups, from governments and from big companies. It was not the sceptics who hired an ex News of the World deputy editor as a spin doctor after climategate, it was the University of East Anglia.

By contrast scientists and most mainstream journalists risk their careers if they take a skeptical line, so dogmatic is the consensus view. It is left to the blogosphere to keep the flame of heresy alive and do the investigative reporting the media has forgotten how to do. In America, Anthony Watts who crowd-sourced the errors in the siting of thermometers and runs wattsupwiththat.com; in Canada, Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who bit by bit exposed the shocking story of the hockey stick and runs climateaudit.org; here in Britain, Andrew Montford, who dissected the shenanigans behind the climategate whitewash enquiries and runs bishop-hill.net. In Australia, Joanne Nova, the former television science presenter who has pieced together the enormous sums of money that go to support vested interests in alarm, and runs joannenova.com.au.

The remarkable thing about the heretics I have mentioned is that every single one is doing this in his or her spare time. They work for themselves, they earn a pittance from this work. There is no great fossil-fuel slush fund for sceptics.

In conclusion, I’ve spent a lot of time on climate, but it could have been dietary fat, or nature and nurture. My argument is that like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts and especially when predicting the future and when there’s lavish funding at stake. It needs heretics.

Thank you very much for listening.

 

[Ishmael]

This odd reply is in itself oddly relligious. I don't know why, Ishmael. Why are you so determined that your view is right? Why must you use, about scientifically uncertain ideas, such certaity in phrasing? Isn't this fundamentally unscientific of you?

Here is the article by Wallace S Broecker supporting what Ishmael says. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/dec/08/david-rose-climate-science

Personally I'm uncvinced, but there you go.

Patrick

I see we have another idiot on the board.

You might want to do some reading before you sling around baseless bullshit accusations.

First of all, to say that Mann and his slavering followers have used bad science, and incomplete science to prop up their theory is NOT saying that I'm right about something.

What I am 'right' about is that the actual record is something other than what they are trying to feed the politicians and the public. As more scientists begin to look deeper into Mann et al's work, more and more are taking their names off the 'believers' list.

And most of all what I object to is the attempt on the part of politicians to leverage bad, or incomplete science, into ways of inserting themselves ever deeper into the lives of the citizenry.

Ishmael

 

[Peregrinator]

Still inventing data from thin air and spreading lies, Ish?

http://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=37990855&postcount=32

*chuckle*

Nice try Perg. I'm going to refute each and every single point that you posted, and I'm going to do it with data captured by many scientists that were out to support the whole AGW theory. Obviously this is going to take some time.

Where's that data, Ish? Four months isn't long enough?

Put up or shut up.

 

[Peregrinator]

http://www.skepticalscience.com/medieval-warm-period-intermediate.htm




The Medieval Warm Period spanned 950 to 1250 AD and corresponded with warmer temperatures in certain regions. During this time, ice-free seas allowed the Vikings to colonize Greenland. North America experienced prolonged droughts. Just how hot was the Medieval Warm Period? Was the globe warmer than now? To answer this question, one needs to look beyond warming in a few regions and view temperatures on a global scale.

Prior temperature reconstructions tend to focus on the global average (or sometimes hemispheric average). To answer the question of the Medieval Warm Period, more than 1000 tree-ring, ice core, coral, sediment and other assorted proxy records spanning both hemispheres were used to construct a global map of temperature change over the past 1500 years (Mann 2009). The Medieval Warm Period saw warm conditions over a large part of the North Atlantic, Southern Greenland, the Eurasian Arctic, and parts of North America. In these regions, temperature appears to be warmer than the 1961–1990 baseline. In some areas, temperatures were even as warm as today. However, certain regions such as central Eurasia, northwestern North America, and the tropical Pacific are substantially cooler compared to the 1961 to 1990 average.

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

Figure 1: Reconstructed surface temperature anomaly for Medieval Warm Period (950 to 1250 A.D.), relative to the 1961– 1990 reference period. Gray areas indicates regions where adequate temperature data are unavailable.

How does the Medieval Warm Period compare to current conditions? Here is the temperature pattern for the last decade (1999 to 2008). What we see is widespread warming (with a few exceptions such as regional East Antarctic cooling)

http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Temp_Pattern_1999_2008_NOAA.jpg

Figure 3: Surface temperature anomaly for period 1999 to 2008, relative to the 1961– 1990 reference period. Gray areas indicates regions where adequate temperature data are unavailable (NOAA).

The Medieval Warm Period was not a global phenomenon. Warmer conditions were concentrated in certain regions. Some regions were even colder than during the Little Ice Age. To claim the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today is to narrowly focus on a few regions that showed unusual warmth. However, when we look at the broader picture, we see that the Medieval Warm Period was a regional phenomenon with other regions showing strong cooling. Globally, temperatures during the Medieval Period were less than today.

 

[trysail]

Worldwide evidence of the Medieval Warm Period:

http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html

 

[JohnnySavage]

IT'S one of the hottest feuds in science - climate chance zealots insist that we're still destroying the planet but now another scientist has warned the cast-iron evidence just isn't there.
FOR a minute there it seemed the global warming debate had finally been resolved.

While for years scientists and sceptics have raged against each other on the crucial topic, new research hailed “the most definitive study into temperature data gathered by weather stations over the past half-century” seemed to come to an authoritative conclusion.

Global warming IS real it said, strengthening the need for us all to reduce carbon emissions and boost efforts to try to save the planet.

And this research was headed by a physicist who had previously been a sceptic of global warming and an outspoken critic of the science underpinning it, lending the results even greater credibility.
Global warming has stopped
Prof Judith Curry, a member of Prof Muller’s team

Prof Richard Muller had spent two years trying to discover if the mainstream scientists were wrong but concluded they were right. Temperatures are rising and his results, he concluded, “proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer”. Case closed.

But is it? Not according to Prof Judith Curry, a member of Prof Muller’s team, who claims the same findings have shown that global warming has stopped – plunging the rest of us into a quandary of what and who to believe.

When Prof Curry heard that Prof Muller was saying that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) findings would put an end to climate change scepticism for good she was horrified. “This isn’t the end of scepticism,” she exclaimed.


I wanted to c&p too!

(disclaimer - I don't really get too worked up over the global warming issue. We should minimize our footprint just because I like clean air and water. So the temp rises a bit... big deal. (but I know some people get passionate about the issue))

(clean energy means new industry, which means investment opportunity)

(but it's not always all about me, just sometimes)

 

[patrick1]

Why is this so rude? My question was asking why people are so rude here. They respond by being ruder.

I've been around Lit, the world and scientific reading plenty of time, thanks Ishmael. Don't bully me. Your words sound like bullying not reasoning.

Please give me a small piece of evidence. You say: 'As more scientists begin to look deeper into Mann et al's work, more and more are taking their names off the 'believers' list.' I know of no evidence for this claim. Name me the scientists, or examples of them.

I have emphasised: I'm agnostic about global warming. Why be rude to people who might be persuaded your way? What are these tirades for?

Patrick

I see we have another idiot on the board.

You might want to do some reading before you sling around baseless bullshit accusations.

First of all, to say that Mann and his slavering followers have used bad science, and incomplete science to prop up their theory is NOT saying that I'm right about something.

What I am 'right' about is that the actual record is something other than what they are trying to feed the politicians and the public. As more scientists begin to look deeper into Mann et al's work, more and more are taking their names off the 'believers' list.

And most of all what I object to is the attempt on the part of politicians to leverage bad, or incomplete science, into ways of inserting themselves ever deeper into the lives of the citizenry.

Ishmael

 

[Peregrinator]

Why is this so rude? My question was asking why people are so rude here. They respond by being ruder.

I've been around Lit, the world and scientific reading plenty of time, thanks Ishmael. Don't bully me. Your words sound like bullying not reasoning.

Please give me a small piece of evidence. You say: 'As more scientists begin to look deeper into Mann et al's work, more and more are taking their names off the 'believers' list.' I know of no evidence for this claim. Name me the scientists, or examples of them.

I have emphasised: I'm agnostic about global warming. Why be rude to people who might be persuaded your way? What are these tirades for?

Patrick

The last sentence of his post that you quoted tells the whole story. He's terrified, and he's acting like a cornered rat. He made that up about "more and more scientists." It's an act of faith on his part that AGW has to be false, so he'll post invented "facts" like that whenever he can.

Note the post I linked from back in July. He has never provided the data he promised. And he never will, because it doesn't exist. Challenge him on it though, and he'll make excuses, rather than admit he was lying.

 

[patrick1]

Worldwide evidence of the Medieval Warm Period:

http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html

Well of course, I see this is evidence. But of what? Its implications are disputed. It is rather obviously designed to promote one point of view, not to seek the truth among differing points of view. But then of course I've seen maps and tables similarly slanted by the opposing point of view: I try to understand what's underlying slanted data.

I see this specific slanted data-map might promote a sceptical view of the temperature changes in the medieval period. I've read enough about the medieval warm period to accept: (a) it existed; (b) it was regionally highly differentiated rather than global;; (c) but then such events are often highly regionally-differentiated, even the ones we think of as 'global' at present ; so (d) the question now is what does it mean for the present-day theory of global warming?

I'd welcome interpretations of this from people who agree or disagree with me But please, please, don't be rude. I don't understand why people are accompanying scientific or quasi-scientific appraisals with rudeness. I just don't get it.

Patrick

(I apologise for poor proof-reading at the mo, I'm having an eyesight problem)

 

[Sean]

The last sentence of his post that you quoted tells the whole story. He's terrified, and he's acting like a cornered rat. He made that up about "more and more scientists." It's an act of faith on his part that AGW has to be false, so he'll post invented "facts" like that whenever he can.

Note the post I linked from back in July. He has never provided the data he promised. And he never will, because it doesn't exist. Challenge him on it though, and he'll make excuses, rather than admit he was lying.

Kinda like no-one had ever been arrested in the Murdoch phone hacking scandal. This, of course, despite people already having been tried, convicted and jailed. He never came back to that thread.

 

[patrick1]

Matt Ridley is particularly well-known to me and thousands of Brits for being the billionaire chair of a bank that robbed its savers including me of a lot of money before going bust in 2008.

But I ll try not to hold that against him when discussing climate change.

Just to note, he's a very bright zoologist who became a science writer. So his specific science studies aren't that relevant.

But I know I'm telling you I'm biassed

This is a an attempt at being jovial - even to those I disagree with - sorry to spell this out so baldly but I'm not sure irony is our strong point here.

Patrick

I am amazed that the text of Matt Ridley's address hasn't yet been posted here. There is a .pdf version on-line that contains the referenced graphs. It can be found at: http://www.bishop-hill.net/storage/ScientificHeresy.pdf

It is probably easier to read the text on-line. It can be found at Andrew Montford's "Bishop Hill" blog ( http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/11/1/scientific-heresy.html ).

What appear below is (obviously) a c+p.

If you don't know who Matt Ridley is, you should. Trained at Oxford in science, he is the author of ( among other works ) Genome: Autobiography of A Species in 23 Chapters.

 

[Sean]

Matt Ridley is particularly well-known to me and thousands of Brits for being the billionaire chair of a bank that robbed its savers including me of a lot of money before going bust in 2008.

But I ll try not to hold that against him when discussing climate change.

Just to note, he's a very bright zoologist who became a science writer. So his specific science studies aren't that relevant.

But I know I'm telling you I'm biassed

This is a an attempt at being jovial - even to those I disagree with - sorry to spell this out so baldly but I'm not sure irony is our strong point here.

Patrick

Did he really say "trained at Oxford in science"? LMAO.