UN climate talks in the mire?
It's not being touted as such, but the latest document from the United Nations climate convention (UNFCCC) is the clearest admission we've yet had that UN talks are in the mire.
Add it to the latest word from the US Senate, and "mire" hardly seems strong enough.
Let's take the global document first.
At the last round of UNFCCC negotiations in Bonn, the convention's secretariat was asked to prepare a "what if?" document.
In this case, the question is "what do we do if the Kyoto Protocol discussions don't agree a set of carbon cutting targets and other outstanding issues that can come into effect in 2012 when the current set of targets expires?"
The secretariat's role in this isn't political, but legal. Its mandate was to set out options that governments could elect to pursue; what to do is their choice.
The reason for the discussion of Plan B options is this: if there are no agreed industrialised country targets agreed by the time the current ones expire, how are governments supposed to set regulatory frameworks on carbon emissions, and what would induce companies to make low-carbon investments when the financial carrots and sticks might vanish in less than two years' time?
The document throws up a range of options.
One would see governments agreeing to continue the existing arrangements until 2014 rather than 2012. A second would see the adoption of some kind of "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" rule; another would see measures adopted by a majority of countries rather than by consensus, as of now.
Stepping back from the minutiae of what's being proposed to the wider issues thrown up here, there are two to pull out.
One is the sheer complexity under which the UN negotiations are currently labouring.
Try this for size:
"The acquisition and transfer of emission reduction units (ERUs), certified emission reductions (CERs), assigned amount units (AAUs) and removal units (RMUs)27 under Articles 6, 12 and 17 of the Protocol for the purpose of fulfilling commitments under Article 3, paragraph 1, of the Kyoto Protocol relating to the first commitment period until one hundred days after the date set by the CMP for the completion of the expert review process under Article 8 of the Kyoto Protocol, otherwise known as the true-up period..."
As Star Trek's Mr Spock might comment: "It's English, Jim, but not as we know it."
Or maybe the UNFCCC has been infiltrated by the spirit of James Joyce bent on penning a sequel to Finnegans Wake.
The more complex things get, the more scope there is for governments to pick holes in any text and prolong negotiations, whether for genuine or for tactical reasons.
The other issue is what's signified by the document's mere existence: essentially, that the UN process is in trouble.
Yes, the rounds of talks go on and yes, a wide range of governments have pledged action, through the Copenhagen Accord, than ever before.
But the carbon curbs so far generated are a pale shadow of what is needed if you accept the 2007 conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - which virtually every government says it does - and the process doesn't look like generating anything stronger any time soon.
The year 2012 is an obvious deadline because of the expiry of the Kyoto targets.
If that's missed, then effectively there is no target date for a new set - extension to 2014 can easily become 2016, then 2020, and before you know it governments will still be talking about what to do by the time CO2 concentrations top the 450 parts per million figure that some profess to regard as an unbreachable upper limit.
The single biggest factor missing from the negotiations is, as it has been for a decade, the lack of a strong and equitable US commitment.
The emergence of such a thing looks even less likely following the admission that the Senate will not be able to pass domestic cap-and-trade legislation during this session.
With mid-term elections due in November, the mathematics of the Senate next term are likely to be worst for those backing legislation.
And already, less than two years after green fanfare surrounding Barack Obama's election, some observers are giving the bill its last rites.
If President Obama couldn't deliver climate legislation, who can? There are reasons to argue that a Republican president would be better placed than any Democrat - but only, of course, if he or she backs such legislation in the first place.
As I've mentioned before, the mood and tone within the UN process has shifted a vast distance since the run-up to December's Copenhagen summit.
You could say it's now much more in tune with the political realities than the ebullient trumpeting of seismic global optimism that characterised the arrival of delegates into the snowy Danish capital.
There are something like 700 international environmental agreements in operation across the world now; about most of them, we hear nothing. Meetings happen, progress is made or not, delegates come and go, and the years pass by.
Back in December, it would have seemed unthinkable to raise the possibility that the UNFCCC, charged with tackling what many held to be the planet's most pressing problem, could join their ranks.
Based on facts on the ground since, it doesn't seem half so incredible now.
I'm Richard Black, environment correspondent for the BBC News website. This is my take on what's happening to our shared environment as the human population grows and our use of nature's resources increases.
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~25~RS~)
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In 5 years time we'll look back at the "war on carbon" the way we look back at platform shoes now.
"What were they thinking?"
"What on earth were all those windmills about?"
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Hi Jack
Is that a paraphrase or Terry Wogan this year...
Veteran presenters (sorry Terry Alan!) not part of the BBC groupthink AGW delusion..
Terry Wogan - 10th April 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/terrywogan/7575889/Nobody-likes-a-smart-alec-so-Ill-do-my-gloating-quietly.html
"I believe that in 50 years' time, a bigger penny will drop, and our descendants will look at each other in disbelief and say,
"All those windmills! What were they thinking of?"
Putting aside the late Michael Crichton's theory that regular scare stories are used by government to take the public's eye off the ball, it's still remarkable how readily politicians jump on every passing pseudoscientific bandwagon. "
Alan Titchmarsh - 31st January 2010: Climate scientists should stick to the facts and not use guesswork
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/7111356/Alan-Titchmarsh-Climate-scientists-should-stick-to-the-facts-and-not-use-guesswork.html
"We live on a volatile planet. The very term 'climate change' is tautological in that that is what climate does – change. It would be a great story indeed if there was no shift in the climate at all."
"If you look back, there have been times in the planet's distant past – long before any human intervention – during which it has been very warm indeed. But nowadays, if you say this kind of thing, you're immediately branded as a CLIMATE CHANGE DENIER, which I find frustrating, particularly when it comes from scientists, who should be prepared to put all the facts on the table."
"I've been gardening on the box and on the radio since the mid 70s, so for 35 years, and every spring without fail I'll get a phone call from a newspaper saying that the daffodils are either terribly early or terribly late, and what's going to happen. And it happens every year. Daffodils have an enormous capacity for waiting. "
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Perhaps this is a good time to think about "the tragedy of the commons" (or the "prisoners' dilemma"). Sceptics like myself tend to steer discussion away from such topics, because the tragedy of the commons really does have a sort of tragic inevitability -- unlike global warming which strikes me as distinctly un-inevitable, and un-tragic if it actually occurs.
So after that quick reminder that I don't think global warming is a bad thing at all, nor that we have much reason to think it's happening, my real point: even if it were happening, even if it were a frightful tragedy, it would still be practically impossible to get people to reach agreement on how to prevent it, as long as it's in each individual's interest (or individual country's interest) not to comply with that agreement.
If you non-sceptics really are worried about global warming, I suggest you hope for and invest in new technology, not to prevent warming, but to reverse its effects after it has happened. And less of the it-will-be-too-late religious nonsense. It's never too late for most things, and most people know it. We have no idea of what technological marvels will be at our disposal in 100 years, so cut it out!
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Jack Hughes at post 1
Carbon capers have gone through fashion phases in the past. You only have to look at backdated copies of National Geographic to see this. However, this time I think it is for real. Why? Because this time a much bigger proportion of the planet's population are scrambling for the finite resource which may have reached its peak.
Jack, are there sufficient resources available to maintain a stable supply of energy to an ever growing world population? I don't think a few oil producing plants are going to do the job. Did I say oil?
At least some of the carbon excess can be used to make windmills. Perhaps we should be harvesting the carbon and using it as a useful product. All those millions of women who want younger looking skin.
I wish I was brainy enough to be a scientist.
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4 sensibleoldgrannie wrote:
this time a much bigger proportion of the planet's population are scrambling for the finite resource which may have reached its peak.
If you think about it, it's stunning that it probably hasn't reached its peak yet. But even if it has, what's the big deal? Humans have changed their sources of energy many times already, and steadily increasing prices of oil will mean less CO2 emissions, right?
are there sufficient resources available to maintain a stable supply of energy to an ever growing world population?
The world population has only been growing because of increasing resources. The idea that it's "ever growing" is a sort of quasi-biblical myth, the idea being that first there was Adam and Eve, then all of their children, then all of their children's children...
In reality, the speed at which we reproduce is almost irrelevant. If you don't believe me, put a grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, then two on the next, then four on the next, eight on the next, and so on.
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The parrot is dead, the IPCC emporer has no clothes, but this will go on, and on:
"Meetings happen, progress is made or not, delegates come and go, and the years pass by."
The eco-crisis research-industrial complex just loves meetings, especially in nice beach resorts.
Cancun anyone?
P.S. #4. sensibleoldgrannie wrote:
"I wish I was brainy enough to be a scientist."
That's funny. Your enquiring mind makes it obvious that you are indeed more than "brainy enough" to have been one had you chosen that route.
Too many of the IPCC types are simply "clever."
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2. Barry Woods wrote:
"Putting aside the late Michael Crichton's theory that regular scare stories are used by government to take the public's eye off the ball, it's still remarkable how readily politicians jump on every passing pseudoscientific bandwagon."
As I'm sure you know, that 'theory' goes much further back than Crichton. Fear is perhaps the oldest sheople herding trick in the book, and today's pseudoscience is no different than the old religious methods. It actually goes back to basic primate behaviour, with fear generating social bonding.
The high priests with their sun gods were using climate/weather as their tool and here's something more recent on climate related fear at work... I have posted it before but its a classic:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32396573/Witch-Hunting-Maunder
Excerpt: "The Age of Witch-Hunting thus seems pretty congruent with the era of the Little Ice Age. The peaks of the persecution coincide with the critical points of climatic deterioration. Witches traditionally had been held responsible for bad weather which was so dangerous for the precarious agriculture of the pre-industrial period... The 1420ies, the 1450ies, and the last two decades of the fifteenth century, well known in the history of climate, were decisive years in which secular and ecclesiastical authorities increasingly accepted the existence of weather-making witches."
Nothing like a little witch burning to distract the public!
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#1. Jack Hughes wrote:
A agree with you sentiment but
"What on earth were all those windmills about?"
I like windmills. I'd like to see tidal energy and solar farms too as well as the maximum use made of hydro, and properly insulating all property and an increased use of heat pumps. But not for anything to do with limiting CO2 - but just energy efficiency. By the way one good way of carbon capture is to feed the exhaust CO2 into greenhouses to encourage plant growth! Again I would support that but not for anything to do with CO2!
#6. CanadianRockies wrote:
"Too many of the IPCC types are simply "clever."
Don't think so - for if they were 'clever' they would have been more persuasive, better scientists and not would have not failed so badly!
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#1. Jack Hughes wrote:
"What on earth were all those windmills about?"
Indeed. Here's some info I posted on the last (Schneider) thread but are relevant to your question... and somehow Don Quiote (sp?)seems relevant too.
"As a €120m wind farm is approved, scientists David Sowby and Frank Turvey argue that the Government ignores the nuclear option at its peril"
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/why-are-so-many-people-windy-about-nuclear-power-2262609.html
More from the real (American) world...
"the relative subsidies for various energy sources... wind and solar get in the neighborhood of 100 times the subsidy that oil and gas do, per unit of energy produced (according to the Energy Information Administration: $23.50 per MwH for wind, $24.50 for solar, $0.25 for oil and gas, whereas coal gets $0.44, nukes about $1.60, and dams $0.60)"
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/231257/yes-lets-give-renewables-chance-compete/chris-horner
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ETS is a money making scheme for bankers and governments and will do little to deal with the issue. Provding the right to pollute is difficult to be viewed as a solution. China and India will not get on board and if they do I would question any numbers produced by either be questioned. A new clean energy source is needed and the vested interest of coal and oil and the influence they have with governments will make almost anything more expensive than it should be and of little or no benefit. People are buying small and hybred cars, wind and solar are being installed and once again the people will be leading their governments as the governments are owned by big business and banking. This will all take longer but it is how chance takes place. Some investor(s) or current energy providers will buy up the alternatives and become the vested interest of the future and lobby against more efficient forms that may be developed. Governments are corrupt, it is just the way they are and there is always someone out there willing to corrupt. When greater effort is put toward finding alternatives then one can say that these governments are serious but that is unlikely with the way the current governments kow-tow to coal and oil. As we endure the hottest year in recorded history the deniers claim victory over the idea of global warming as a result of climate change. Sweat must be blinding their vision. Keep singing the song as you obviously think that by saying it alone that it will happen..chanting like monks trying to stave off the Vikings...they were slaughtered at the alters.
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Bill Clinton: (march 2010)
Noting that it was spring: "otherwise known to Al Gore as proof of global warming."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7495834/Bill-Clinton-pokes-fun-at-Al-Gore-during-Gridiron-dinner.html
A funny comment, but maybe most profound, IF Clinton REALLY believed in CAGW, would he have said that under any circumstances.. Similarly, how many other politicians are merely doing what the groupthink, cheif sceintists, IPCC lobby them do do..
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Barry Woods @2
Fantastic to have the lowdown and skinny on your font of knowledge on AGW... These guys Terry Wogan, Michael Crichton and Alan Titchmarsh must be some heavy dudes in the PhD stakes on climatology.
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As far as windmills are concerned most likely in the future aliens will surmise that we must have thought we could solve global warming by using them as fans.
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More on the UN's 'credibility'...
"After Climategate and Glaciergate the UN (Mr. Ban Ki-Moon) and IPCC (R.Pachauri) have selected, who should investigate them... Ban and Rajendra chose the InterAcademy Council and the InterAcademy Council established a 12 member investigation panel... This is probably the first attempt to asseses them all."
http://climatechange.thinkaboutit.eu/think2/post/iac_the_dirty_dozen
P.S. 8. John_from_Hendon
I didn't mean "clever" in the most positive light as some kind of equivalent to intelligence... I meant more more like "devious." But I was trying to be "nice."
That said, if it was not for the hero who leaked the Climategate emails and opened the floodgates they may well have pulled it off.
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UN climate talks in mire.
US talks stalled in Senate.
Email leaks, Climategate.
Weather patterns obviously changing.
Kyoto running out 2012...
I wonder how many people take climate change seriously. I wonder how many peoiple believe in climate change. What else but disbelief and therefore lack of seriousness could explain the lack of urgency.
I mean if the elite thought there was some real jeopardy, wouldn't they be making plans to get off planet earth?
Oh, wait a second - they are making plans, aren't they? It's called the commercialization of space flight!
What if Kyoto dies in 2012? It seems doomed to me.
The entire UN process is in trouble.
Why?
What do some elitists know that the rest of us do not know?
Do you think the elites would sit around if they believed floods and draughts, hurricaines and tsunamis were awaiting them in the very near future?
Of course not!
I mean if the elite thought there was real jeopardy, wouldn't they be making plans to get off planet earth?
Oh, wait a second - they are making plans, aren't they? It's called the commercialization of space flight!
So the talks go on. No country establishes parameters. Talks go on. No regulations get set. Talks go on. Pledges get made; most lie forgotten.
No on seems too excited, except maybe third world countries that homes, maybe even entire land surface may be washed away.
If the elite thought there was real jeopardy, wouldn't they be making plans to get off planet earth?
Oh, wait a second - they are making plans, aren't they? It's called the commercialization of space flight!
Time slips by. Targets come and go. No "elite" seems distressed.
This suggests to me that somewhere, some countries have more control over the weather than we've been told. Of course, I'm talking about HAARP and SURA to name only two - weather weapons of mass destruction.
Peons worry; elites do not.
The elites have their weather toys and when they are through playing with us, they will take their commercialized spaceships to some other planet or asteroid watch the Reality Show - people getting wiped off the face of the earth.
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"Climatology" is not a science. It's a bubblegum subject like golf psychology.
These people have been "studying" climates for some 20 years and discovered nothing. No laws. No correct predictions. No understanding. Nothing.
At any time half the earth is in the day and half is in the night. It can be freezing at the poles and 40 degrees in Africa. Summer in one hemisphere and winter in the other. The idea of a "global" temperature is bogus nonsense.
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Richard Black.
"..the UN process is in trouble.."
while I do think that a reformed United Nations is our best (only?) hope to create a worthwhile planetary society -- necessary to address all our global environmental problems -- there has been no progress in a long time.
it appears that the problems begin at the top, with the US's secretary general of choice Ban Ki Moon who, by all accounts, has surpassed his predecessors in his lack of leadership.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/22/ban-ki-moon-secretary-general-un
btw, some comments here show a touching naïvety, berating the scientists, ignoring the politicking. :-(
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#17. jr4412 wrote:
"btw, some comments here show a touching naïvety, berating the scientists, ignoring the politicking. :-("
But many of the "scientists" were politicking as much as anyone. That's the problem. They became more political advocates than scientists and thus their "science" and peer review process was corrupted.
In any case, all humans are political animals, including the ones working as scientists. That's the point to always remember.
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15. BluesBerry wrote:
"I wonder how many peoiple believe in climate change."
Change is the only constant. For climate and everything else. So anyone with any knowledge of anything acknowledges that the climate changes over time.
I assume you mean how many people believe in man-caused climate change.
Believe. That's the right word.
How many people believe in the 2012 end times? Ghosts? Alien abductions? Iraqi WMDs? Government economic statistics? Bank stress tests? Jehovah?
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Manmade climate change isn't going to go away - it's a scientific fact.
Even skeptical climate scientists accept that man-caused climate change is a fact. They disagree on the magnitude, but not to a degree that the change becomes insignificant.
The lowest amounts of warming per doubling of co2 that the skeptical scientists put out is comparable to the entire warming of the 20th century so it certainly isn't insignificant. If humans double equivalent co2 in the space of 200 years and cause 0.7C warming that may very well make humans the primary driver of temperature over that period.
That's despite 0.7C warming being an extremely optimistic and unlikely amount of warming compared to what most climate scientists think is the case. Climate scientists have worked tirelessly over the past few decades to obtain data of distant past climate changes and to figure out how mechanisms in the climate interact. The amount of knowledge is much greater than it was even 20 years ago.
The result of this painstaking work reveals that the amount of warming per doubling of co2 is probably within the 2-4C range. That is, anything outside this range is either not compatible with current understanding of how climate works and/or not compatible with understanding of how much climate has changed in the past. That is why most climate scientists accept such a range as being most likely, and is therefore why manmade global warming is a subject of concern.
There are a few skeptical climate scientists who believe it's lower than the 2C low end (and I dare say there are probably skeptical scientists who think it's higher than 4C too). In all cases I can think of this is because they are pushing their own pet hypothesis for how such value could be. Inevitably these hypotheses involve non-warming types of climate change to offset the warming that would otherwise occur from increased co2. For example some propose various mechanisms involving clouds that would reduce incoming sunlight in response to elevated co2. That would mean human co2 emissions were increasing clouds and reducing sunlight (hmm wouldn't that make for a human induced climate change in itself?)
The hypotheses the skeptics have is all largely conjecture. They cannot yet put forward exactly how the mainstream understanding of science - as fed into climate models - is wrong or how the magnitude of past climate changes can be explained with low sensitivity. What they are banking on to answer these questions is a discovery in the future that overturns current understanding.
Feel free to bank for the conjecture, but I for one am going with what the bulk of research on the subject shows and has showed for the past few decades now. I think that's where the good odds are.
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The excerpt quoted sounds just like the kind of legalese mumbo jumbo in the European Constitution and Lisbon Treaty. Had the efforts to stem climate change been a scientific effort instead of an obvious thinly veiled effort by Europeans and their allies on the American left to destroy the American economy there might have been a chance but the lying and hypocricy was so pervasive, so blatant, so in your face that this never stood a chance of passing the United States Senate, the greatest deliberative body in the world.
How much effort did Europeans spend trying to persuade China and India that it was in their own best interest to come to terms and make committments to Kyoto in order to also enlist American support? As far as I can tell none. They went along with China's and India's arguments that the problem was created by "the West" and so they should have their chance to develop economically while "the West" suffers all the consequences of CO2 reductions. In other words we should live worse so that China and India can live better. Does anyone think that will fly politically in the US?
And what about Europe's own report card? Last I heard most of them were failing the modest Kyoto targets miserably. Only their economic downturns kept it from being even worse. This as EU leaders drive the highest CO2 emitting vehicles available on the market and tell the media it's none of anyone's business what Europe's aristocrats do. Do as they say, not as they do is their motto.
"The big fudge" revealed out of East Anglia University last December just before Copenhagen was the icing on the cake. It made it clear that there were an awful lot of lies concocted to sell this blather. The scientists didn't bother to even try to explain how they could rationalize splicing the tree ring data with recorded temperatures because the tree ring theory fell apart lacking correlation to temperature during the last fifty years. Instead they were outraged that their lies and deceptions had been uncovered and revealed. It only made their pathetic case even weaker. They did their cause no service.
"With mid-term elections due in November, the mathematics of the Senate next term are likely to be worst for those backing legislation."
Seen from the opposite point of view, it will likely be better for those who want to put a stake through its black heart which includes most Americans. I'm prepared. I've already moved to higher ground and have a lot of air conditioning capacity. That will be the best strategy for dealing with what is in all likelihood already past the point of no return.
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Bangladesh - where will these people go as their country disappears under the water? If we have a couple years of wet weather like we are having in the Canadian prairies then people will go hungry who like to eat bread products. My cousin's neighbour farming 4000 acres was able to seed 1200 and from what i have seen of the prairie weather that 1200 might be flooded out. We had such a mild winter that i only used my new leather boots twice. Insects and birds are out of balance. The huckleberry crop has failed this year and bears are hungry and are coming into towns and cities. Climate change is ugly and bad news for humankind and animals.
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@normfields #22
Bangladesh - where will these people go as their country disappears under the water?
You paint a fall simpler picture than reality:
http://www.nature.com/climate/2009/0902/fig_tab/climate.2009.3_F1.html
Notice the amount of blue (land being formed) against the red (land loss)? Maminul Haque Sarker, a morphologist at the Center for Environmental and Geographic Information Services tells us 20 square kilometers are being added every year:
http://www.gisdevelopment.net/news/viewn.asp?id=GIS:N_urxyjlzhkv
AGWers claim that sceptics spread disinformation, but that's not true either
/Mango
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ezeezee:
Alan and Terry are about as 'qualified' to talk about this as Richard Black is! (unknown qualifications)
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#12 ezeezee wrote:
Terry Wogan, Michael Crichton and Alan Titchmarsh must be some heavy dudes in the PhD stakes on climatology.
Terry Wogan is a careful observer of "fashionable trends" in popular thinking, Michael Crichton is a careful observer of the human condition, and Alan Titchmarsh is a careful observer of the growth of plants.
I would be less dismissive of careful observers and less worshipful of academic qualifications if I were you. Darwin -- a man with practically no academic qualifications -- always listened very carefully to what the local observers told him about life.
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Have you all noticed:
Kansas... has extreme weather conditions of 90F with high humidity. The consequence of this is a high mortality rate for cattle.
Baltic sea... has a vast algal bloom spreading out and reducing O2 levels in the water.
Peru....a state of emergency is declared as night time temperatures plummet and cause many people to die of cold related diseases such as pneumonia.
Philippines.... 4 rather large earth quakes in the past 48 hours
Odd weather or a global change in climate and planet behaviour?
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90F with high humidity in Kansas in July -- absolutely normal.
Vast algal bloom in low-salinity sea from Swedish farmers' effluent -- absolutely normal.
Cold weather in depths of midwinter in mountainous country -- absolutely normal.
Earthquake with several aftershocks in earthquake zone -- absolutely normal.
None of the above are even "odd", let alone suggestive of global change of any sort.
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strawberry fields;
"Bangladesh - where will these people go as their country disappears under the water?"
They should have thought of that when they demanded and got independence from what used to be called West Pakistan. No chance all of Pakistan will be under water, they have lots of high ground. They could have resettled in what would have still been their own country. That's life.
Climatologists will tell you that the weather at any one time is not indicative of global climate chanbe. What would you call the unusually cold weather in certain parts of South America like Peru now, evidence of global cooling?
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large earthquakes !!! - DUE to CO2!!!!! ?????
what are you saying ;)
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#1 jack hughes
i recall people saying the same 15 years ago
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23 Mango
"There's a lot of accretion, and a lot of erosion, and they're almost in balance," he says. "We are gaining land — but it is a net loss." That's because the new land isn't of much use right away. For these coastal areas to support many people, they need embankments to protect them from tides and storm surges, and then they take decades to become productive".
Here is a quote from the article you provided. It's interesting how you didn't provided the full context in a post discussing misinformation
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Its a shame that the "climate skeptics" have so much time and glib tongues at their disposal. That is why the majority of comments on this article are by those who are convinced that climate change is the latest conspiracy to...I don't know what they think this "conspiracy" has been cooked up to do!
The facts - that they don't want to make any change in their lifestyle, continue to consume without a care and want to keep the status quo where oil companies, polluting industries etc. continue to keep their pockets lined - are more likely motivators for their attitude.
I have little confidence that the political solution for climate change will ever come about, but after a point one can't sit about and wait for it to happen when each summer I roast a little more, have mounds of plastic accumulate in landfill, have increasingly high energy bills to pay, have to live in concrete jungles with nary a tree in sight...
For those who do want to take action, be it to just create a meaningful debate, one great place to start would be www.elpis.com. Elpis is an online community focused on responsible living and sustainable growth. You can measure, reduce and offset your carbon footprint; set up petitions, volunteering and fundraising projects for your favorite causes; help create action plans for sustainable communities; buy a range of eco friendly products and services; and network with other people who share a common interest in a low carbon, responsible lifestyle.
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Bowman
Darwin was educated at Edinburg and Cambridge
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#33 hotashes wrote:
"Darwin was educated at Edinburg and Cambridge"
...where he annoyed his father by neglecting his studies first of medicine, then divinity. His real eduction took place on board HMS Beagle, and in the fields of England, where he noticed such interesting facts as that around country villages where widows live with their cats, there seems to be more clover.
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#33 hotashes
you're wasting your breath hotashes. non-sceptics like bowman (i.e. those that have bought the corporate propoganda) idolise the concept of the 'free thinking', non-conformist lay-scientist and are hoping that one will appear to fulfill their dream of demolishing climate science (a bit like a cult awaiting the second coming).
they find it impossible to accept the facts accumulated over decades (like the last 300+ months being above the late 20th c average) and cling to their dreams even as the few mainstream scientists that did have doubts are accepting agw.
a bit sad really.
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@31 hotashes
It's still nothing to do with climate change though is it?
It's the price you pay for setting up home in a river delta complex.
It's like people who live in a "V" shaped valley carved into a big lump of igneous rock, complaining about flash floods!! They are both terminally daft places to set-up home, end of story. Might as well setup home on the summit of mount Katla!!
Regards,
One of the (fed up with the let's blame everything on the climate) Lobby
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@hotashes #31
23 Mango
"There's a lot of accretion, and a lot of erosion, and they're almost in balance," he says. "We are gaining land — but it is a net loss." That's because the new land isn't of much use right away. For these coastal areas to support many people, they need embankments to protect them from tides and storm surges, and then they take decades to become productive".
Here is a quote from the article you provided. It's interesting how you didn't provided the full context in a post discussing misinformation
normfields #22 makes the claim that Bangladesh is disappearing under the water, which is clearly wrong, but you berate me for misinformation - interesting
ok, let's try this one from the same article:
Mahfuzur Rahman, head of Bangladesh Water Development Board's Coastal Study and Survey Department, has also been analysing the buildup of land on the coast.
........
"The land Bangladesh has lost so far has been caused by river erosion, which has always happened in this country. Natural accretion due to sedimentation and dams has more than compensated this loss," Rahman said.
/Mango
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#35 rossglory wrote:
non-sceptics like bowman (i.e. those that have bought the corporate propoganda) idolise the concept of the 'free thinking'
You're right that I idolize free thinking -- I regard it as one of the the most valuable things in the world, and I despise academic conformism. But I don't know where you get the idea that I'm swallowing corporate propaganda. If someone tries to get me to believe something, I'll probably believe the opposite, and that includes corporations!
Nor do I see why you call me a "nonsceptic".
Some versions of extreme scepticism (such as "Cartesian scepticism") are extravagant rather than genuinely sceptical positions. But practically all of the philosophers and scientists whose work I admire most lean towards "mitigated" scepticism, from Hume through Ayer to Kuhn and Feyerabend. You name it, I don't believe it!
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36 & 37
"What we need is to strengthen the embankments to withstand stronger storm surges, and to raise them significantly in some areas," says Rahman of the Institute of Water Modelling. "We need to have a concerted effort on this. They were designed without considering climate change, and need to be redesigned."
Also from the same article.
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37 Mango
"Mahfuzur Rahman, head of Bangladesh Water Development Board's Coastal Study and Survey Department, has also been analysing the buildup of land on the coast.
........
"The land Bangladesh has lost so far has been caused by river erosion, which has always happened in this country. Natural accretion due to sedimentation and dams has more than compensated this loss," Rahman said."
I can't seem to find these in the article? They don't seem to be reflective of the piece 'Where warming hits hard'
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
Jack Hughes wrote # #16 :
"'Climatology' is not a science. It's a bubblegum subject like golf psychology. These people have been "studying" climates for some 20 years and discovered nothing. No laws. No correct predictions. No understanding. Nothing. At any time half the earth is in the day and half is in the night. It can be freezing at the poles and 40 degrees in Africa. Summer in one hemisphere and winter in the other. The idea of a "global" temperature is bogus nonsense."
............
Jack,
I appreciate that you are not a scientist yourself; if you were you could not conceive of making your comments (above). Any scientist that you know (and there are many in most communities) can help you; there are many that post on this blog-site also.
Geoff.
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It's not academic qualifications that matter, but the knowledge they have on a subject. SkepticalScience has an article on this very subject of why authority is important. It finds a better less-loaded term: mastery. Neither Wogan, Titchmarsh or Cricton are masters of climate knowledge.
The Nature of Authority
http://www.skepticalscience.com/The-nature-of-authority.html
Too many laypeople on this subject barge in overconfidently thinking that just because they've read something about climate, therefore they have the expertize to come up with original "research" and are capable of analyzing the science. Part of this is because they underestimate the amount of knowledge scientists have learnt over their careers. The sad effect of this is you get people confidently claiming as fact things they really don't in fact know.
Like earlier someone said with regard to climate scientists:
"These people have been "studying" climates for some 20 years and discovered nothing. No laws. No correct predictions. No understanding. Nothing."
This statement is based on ignorance. They don't understand the breadth of the knowledge obtained over the past 20 years so they just like to think there isn't any. I know the statements wrong because I can think of some very obvious discoveries in the field in the past 20 years.
The idea that any old joe can come along and come up with valid ideas about climate change which defy the experts is a myth. They can't because the scientists are just better at it than they are. Superior. Masters.
I suspect a lot of "skepticism" turns out to be old men who refuse accept that experts, perhaps younger than they are, are more knowledgeable at a subject than they are.
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#43 quake wrote:
SkepticalScience has an article on this very subject of why authority is important. It finds a better less-loaded term: mastery.
Oooh, now that's really creepy! "Mastery" -- that really makes my flesh crawl.
All of the great scientific revolutions were instigated by outsiders and newcomers, people who were prepared to turn orthodoxy on its head.
Please note that I am saying that if someone instigates a scientific revolution, he/she is likely to be a newcomer, NOT that if someone is a newcomer, he/she is likely to instigate a scientific revolution.
(That would involve the fallacy of affirming the consequent, as quake is aware now that he/she has deferred to my "mastery" of matters of logic.)
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44 Bowman
They may have been outsiders or newcomers to instigate a scientic revolution as that is the nature of a scientific revolution. People like Svante Arrhenius, Joseph Fourier, and John Tyndall helped kick start the revolution of how we understand our climate.
What people are doing now in Climate Science is the same as all the Evolutionary Biologists have done since Darwin. They are refining the theory.
The point is that through that acquisition of knowledge they all acquired a mastery of their field.
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@GeoffWard @42
"Jack,
I appreciate that you are not a scientist yourself; if you were you could not conceive of making your comments (above). Any scientist that you know (and there are many in most communities) can help you; there are many that post on this blog-site also.
Geoff."
Would you care to expand on that Geoff?
Personally, I think there's more than adequate edvidence to show that those indulging in climate studies don't understand how to pursue a scientific endeavour at all - They would therefore not really be able to call themselves scientists... studiers perhaps, curious travellers maybe, but not scientists...
Regards,
One of the Lobby
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#29 barry woods
"large earthquakes !!! - DUE to CO2!!!!! ?????
what are you saying ;)"
actually it's inevitable (but not the phillipines) and very simple science. here's a challenge, see if you can work out why (.
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#45 hotashes wrote:
What people are doing now in Climate Science is the same as all the Evolutionary Biologists have done since Darwin. They are refining the theory.
Would I be right in guessing that you were not yourself involved in the "Darwin wars"?
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47. At 7:51pm on 24 Jul 2010, rossglory wrote:
#29 barry woods
"large earthquakes !!! - DUE to CO2!!!!! ?????
what are you saying ;)"
actually it's inevitable (but not the phillipines) and very simple science. here's a challenge, see if you can work out why (.
-----------
I'm guessing you are referring to this fairy tale... CO2 causes planetary fever, heavy Greenland, Antarctic, etc. ice caps melt, with weight removed land rises, and kaboom, earthquakes uber alles.
Yes, a VERY simple "science" indeed.
Most of Canada must have been in a constant state of quaking when the Pleistocene ice sheets receded. Maybe the mammoths et al were jiggled into extinction?
But, come to think of it, isn't this a clear call for a massive UN task force to address the urgent problem of 'tectonic change'?
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@CanadianRockies #49
Thanks for that, now I can't get the image of Jiggling Mammoths out of my head... funny though... as is Tectonic Change... Ohh, no. The earth is moving...
Thanks Again,
One of the Lobby
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Re: #22 ->#23 -> #31 & ->#36 Re: Bangladesh.
Yes, there is a lagtime in cropping from new accretions.
"In search of Shelter; Mapping the effects of climate change on Human Migration and Displacement." (http://ciesin.columbia.edu/documents/clim-migr-report-june09_final) ***This is a pdf file so you will need the software to download it; most will have it.*** See: Sect. 3.4 'The Ganges Delta; Temporary Migration as a Survival Strategy'.
9.4 million people live within the seasonal 2metre inundation zone (2000 census). Seasonal migration has become a way of life for a significant percentage of these families. A 'permanent' sea level rise swamps this delta-zone 'first' and permanently, and the seasonal inundation then swamps seasonally higher up the delta.
The question is one of absorption of the permanently displaced families. Most will relocate within the country; some will wish to follow their extended families and relocate to England - particularly West Yorkshire. If the latter group becomes numbered in millions, there will need to be some serious resource redeployment by national and regional government to supplement the existing immigration support funds. [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
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It is one thing for climatologists to tell us the sky is falling and quite another to give us a workable plan to stop it. Every plan they've offered so far has been either ineffective or unacceptable. Those that could have worked required great sacrifice even though they told us at the beginning we would only need to make minor adjustments to the way we live. Some of them were inequitalbe unfairly sharing the sacrifice. And then some of them would have traded a long term threat of a climate disaster for a short term certainty of prermanent economic disaster. The current plan put forth by many of them suffers from all three flaws which is why many are unwilling to adopt it.
We'll see when the Obama cap and trade energy tax is brought before Congress how many of his party members desert him in their own political self interest wanting to save their skins more than save humanity. Many political pundits in the US think it will be DOA.
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@GeoffWard and hotashes
I'm sorry guys, but a river delta is a river delta, when it's the delta that in-part belongs to the mighty Ganges the idea of you trying to control it, with a bit of embankment somewhere is purely that, an idea.
Sediment is eroded, re-deposited and generally moved around. On the plus side delta systems tend to grow, as sediment from up river is being continually washed down into the delta system. It's really not got anything to do with climate change, it's just how delta complexes work.
Taken from wiki:
"In a tidal delta, new distributaries are formed during times when there's a lot of water around - such as floods or storm surges."
In other words what you're complaining about are perfectly normal processes in that particular geographical location - If they weren't the largest tidal delta in the world just wouldn't be there, now would it?
You could maybe dam the river, but this would just starve the delta of both sediment and water, neither of which would be much good for anyone that was trying to use the land.
On the plus side it's incredibly fertile and they could probably start mining for precious stones and stuff....
Would you perhaps like to try again?
It might be an idea for you to go for something simpler though guys, as it seems that neither of you were awake during geography classes!!!!
Regards,
One of the (1.7 mm a year sea level rise ain't a lot) Lobby
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• MarcusAureliusII wrote @ #21: “Had the efforts to stem climate change been a scientific effort instead of an obvious thinly veiled effort by Europeans and their allies on the American left to destroy the American economy there might have been a chance …. They went along with China's and India's arguments that the problem was created by "the West" and so they should have their chance to develop economically while "the West" suffers all the consequences of CO2 reductions. In other words we should live worse so that China and India can live better.”
• MarcusAureliusII wrote @ #52: “It is one thing for climatologists to tell us the sky is falling and quite another to give us a workable plan to stop it. Every plan they've offered so far has been either ineffective or unacceptable. Those that could have worked required great sacrifice even though they told us at the beginning we would only need to make minor adjustments to the way we live. Some of them were inequitable, unfairly sharing the sacrifice. And then some of them would have traded a long term threat of a climate disaster for a short term certainty of permanent economic disaster.”
• Eccentricity wrote @#32: “The facts - that they don't want to make any change in their lifestyle, continue to consume without a care and want to keep the status quo where oil companies, polluting industries etc. continue to keep their pockets lined - are more likely motivators for their attitude.” … and then he/she follows with a lifestyle web-link & guidance.
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Eccentricity, I have been debating this with MarcusAureliusII in an earlier blog. We agree to differ on the need for developed nations to ‘take the hit’. He reiterates on this blog-topic (above) the salient points, here citing the distance between what we would wish and what can politically be achieved. I think that he would be prepared for all developed nations other than the USA to take the hit, but that the USA – being very efficient at production – should be absolved of responsibility to work in concert with the rest of the world. History shows us that superpowers do this – you will remember that Rome did the same (ah, poor Rome!).
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But the USA is the world’s greatest CONSUMER, producing also oodles of waste – so they are far from being the most efficient at consumption. The per capita total energy cost of being an American just beggars belief! So, the key question is – should the USA return to the fold and become, once more, an accepted and acceptable member state of the world community? And, in the process, should Americans be requested by the world community to reduce their consumption? OK, the American believes he has earned his right to his consumption through efficient production, and he HAS benefited from high-level consumption – but should SUPER-CONSUMPTION be a never-ending state of affairs when world circumstances (resource-depletion, AGW etc.) change?
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We are currently experiencing another ‘nation’ attempting to corner the world resource reserves, China. Is it acceptable that China becomes the new USA, with USA-levels of combined production, consumption, pollution and population - all compounding our global problems?
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Through the exercising of monopolizing power, we are experiencing the best of human nature producing the worst for human nature, driving ALL the nations of the world ‘to hell in the hand-basket’.
Slim Pickens comes to mind – manically riding the bomb from the last B52, to trigger the Doomsday Machine. Yes, we are playing-out the blackest of black comedies in the ultimate tragedy of the commons.
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MarcusAureliusII wrote @ #52:
"It is one thing for climatologists to tell us the sky is falling and quite another to give us a workable plan to stop it. Every plan they've offered so far has been either ineffective or unacceptable. Those that could have worked required great sacrifice even though they told us at the beginning we would only need to make minor adjustments to the way we live....."
....
Tell me if I'm wrong, Marcus, but it's not actually the climatologists who construct the workable plan to stop the sky falling in. They advise the 'men with power' about their best estimates of the problem and the degree of amelioration that might arrest the process. These men of power are not climatologists (scientists are never trusted with real power; they might actually excercise it!), and they each have their own agendas.
I am afeared that the application of The Art Of The Possible will fall far short of the necessity.
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Blunderbunny wrote @ #53: @GeoffWard and hotashes "I'm sorry guys, but a river delta is a river delta ...."
Thanks for the geography lesson; but could you read the link that I posted @ 51 before going all elementary on me.
I think you'll like it.
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3. At 6:37pm on 23 Jul 2010, bowmanthebard wrote:
"It's never too late for most things, and most people know it. We have no idea of what technological marvels will be at our disposal in 100 years, so cut it out!"
What ever technology is developed, I'll bet it will not be based on violating the first and second laws of thermal-dynamics. I doubt humans will need much less nourishment than present unless genetic engineering allows us to engineer ourselves into smaller organisms.
I also expect the physics of carbon and its compounds to be the same.
Appealing to magic has a long and unfortunately not very successful history of dealing with problems people don't want to deal with.
If you are interested in the tragedy of the commons I would recommend you read a book by Garrett Harden titled "The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia". It was published by Oxford Univ. Press, 1999. In it he deals with epistemology and science, which you might find interesting. Garrett Harden authored a paper in Science titled "Tragedy of the Commons" for which he took a lot of flack from both right wingers and left wingers. He played the role of Ibsen's doctor in "An Enemy of the People" (figuratively).
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7. At 7:38pm on 23 Jul 2010, CanadianRockies wrote:
"Fear is perhaps the oldest sheople herding trick in the book, and today's pseudoscience is no different than the old religious methods. It actually goes back to basic primate behaviour, with fear generating social bonding."
Oh yes, absolutely true: How about: You'll freeze to death if they limit fossil fuel use, you'll lose your job, you'll lose your freedom, you'll lose your car, you'll lose your guns, they will raise your taxes, they will take your property -- and this will all happen tomorrow if you let them get away with it, while even if AGW is true, you might expect to die of old age before it affects you personally. Who cares about the future when you are threatened with loss in the here and now.
By the way, do you consider deforestation, ozone loss, acid rain and persistent bio amplified pesticides some of the "pseudo" science concerns you object to?
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15. At 8:58pm on 23 Jul 2010, BluesBerry wrote:
Are you talking about the same all knowing elites that brought us the Great Depression and most recently the Great Recession we are still experiencing?
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16. At 8:59pm on 23 Jul 2010, Jack Hughes:
If you ever studied integral calculus you might have a clue on how "global" temperature is calculated.
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#58 HungeryWalleye wrote:
How about: You'll freeze to death if they limit fossil fuel use, you'll lose your job, you'll lose your freedom, you'll lose your car, you'll lose your guns, they will raise your taxes, they will take your property
Some of us don't own guns, and are more concerned about the effects of diminishing growth on the developing world. Just when it seems like China and India will be able to raise themselves out of their high-fecundity, low-expectation rut, they are slapped down by bourgeois Western hand-wringers.
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Surely the anthropogenic climate change debacle has lasted long enough. Time to start looking for ways of seriously harnessing all the power nature provides us with everyday of our lives, or are we just going to wallow in guilty sulking?
Low, low temperatures in Peru. So what? Let us not enter the no man's land of psychic utterances but get on with dealing with whatever it is that nature chooses to hand out in her challenges or, put another way, opportunities. How much fuel could we have saved by being better equipped to make use of all the summer heat we have been blessed with? How much fuel could we have saved by building homes and offices that keep to a steady core temperature all the year around without air conditioning? Innovation in all that we do, instead of finding reasons to panic every five minutes.
The scaremongering must stop and we need science to get back on track by dealing with REAL issues.
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#60 HungeryWalleye wrote:
If you ever studied integral calculus you might have a clue on how "global" temperature is calculated.
I've studied integral calculus -- would you mind explaining it to me?
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@hotashes
I can't seem to find these in the article? They don't seem to be reflective of the piece 'Where warming hits hard'
Right at the bottom
http://www.gisdevelopment.net/news/viewn.asp?id=GIS:N_urxyjlzhkv
/Mango
PS I'll get back to you on the other thread - i'm out today, but in the meantime see here and look for sensitivity. This page gives links to several of the papers although some links are dead:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
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@GeoffWard #56
In what way is your linked document supposed to help explain that this has nothing at all to do with climate change?
If really you want to try and promote your AGW cause, then you should stop picking such stupid battles, this is the sort of very stupid stuff that's pointed the pointy finger of ridicule at the IPCC in the first place.
Maybe we could call it "deltagate" what d'ya reckon?
Regards,
One of the Lobby
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Blunder @ 65, you obviously have still not read the link @51, otherwise you would not ask this question.
.
I feel sure that you will appreciate that, even if there were no such thing as climate change, the delta would still flood annually and millions will be displaced annually. Permanent people-movement is generated by climate change, and the greatest regional forcing-factor for the Ganges is (arguably) the sub-continental Brown Haze's cooling capacity and its ability to turn off the monsoon. A further anthropogenic factor will be the Chinese hydroelectric developments in the high catchment.
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I have no AGW cause, other than to draw attention to, through debate, the possibilities that might ensue - you know, action and consquence.
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Some of us - like Rockies, Grannie, Mango, Ashes, even Bowman! etc. - are prepared to suffer the '… stupid .... very stupid... finger of ridicule ... pointy finger ...' type people, in order that we can engage with people with interesting ideas to bring to the table.
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Climate science has been going for some 20 years now and has discovered these laws of climate
Zeroth law: anything can be linked to climate change
First law: it's worse than we thought
Second law: only experts can understand climate
Am I missing a few here ?
Have they discovered anything else?
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Geoff Ward;
"Tell me if I'm wrong, Marcus, but it's not actually the climatologists who construct the workable plan to stop the sky falling in. They advise the 'men with power' about their best estimates of the problem and the degree of amelioration that might arrest the process."
First of all, climatologists have a peculiar way of taking off their scientist hats once they've made up their minds and suddenly become advocates. At that point they become political lobbyists trying to wield influence over people who do have power. They do this by using their credentials a scientists who are an elite who are "in the know" because they have special technical expertise and have studied the problem. They also multiply their influence by enlisting the support of other scientists who have not studied the problem directly but take the validity of their work and conclusions on blind faith alone being members of the same exclusive club.
That would be bad enough but it is only compounded by the fact that their work was always regarded with suspicion by some scientists and much of the public at large. The revelations about "the big fudge" at UEA last December and their reaction to it only cast even darker shadows of suspicion over their work and diverted the world's attention from the problem at hand.
"These men of power are not climatologists (scientists are never trusted with real power; they might actually excercise it!), and they each have their own agendas."
Many of these scientists do have political agendas completly apart from their scientific work. They use their profession in the service of those agendas, their possible motives cast doubt on everything they say. Insofar as the degree of amelioration required, let's recall that they at first insisted Kyoto was the end all be all of what was required until American scientists used a mathematical model to predict that were Kyoto fully implimented it would only retard global warming by two thirds of one degree over sixty-five years. At that point they began to lay it on us that the real truth is that to halt and reverse global warming CO2 emissions would have to be reduced by 60% to 80%. This sounds entirely plausible it seems to me.
What are the options? An entirely new technology for producing energy not based on the oxidation of fossil fuel. The current alternative energy sources are both unreliable and grossly inadequate to the task. The US is now the world's largest producer of alternative energy (solar, wind, biomass etc.) yet it only accounts for about 1% of its electrical energy production. It's hardly making even a dent and is not likely to. The US is also the largest producer of nuclear power, more than the French yet that only accounts for 20% of its electrical energy production. It has exploited all of its hydroelectric power capabilities. It has no alternative but to continue to consume fossil fuel and to increase use as demand increases. There are no viable long term strategies using known current technologies that could reduce energy conumption in the US without severely impacting its economy which would bring not only America's standard of living down but the entire world's.
Anyone who cares to think about the problem for more than five seconds realizes that if the human race's carbon footprint is to remain or be reduced to limits which do not adversely impact the climate, then if the technology remains the same and population is allowed to rise without limit, the carbon footprint of every individual will have to be continually reduced. That goes for China and India as well. It's not just a matter of politics. It is a fact that you cannot have population continue to increase without limit and have CO2 remain within limits unless the consumption of everyone goes down indefinitely. This would lead to famines, mass deaths, economic collapse, and wars. There would also be a strong incentive to cheat.
"I am afeared that the application of The Art Of The Possible will fall far short of the necessity."
What are you Shakespeare now? Have you reverted to Elizabethan English?
Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
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Geoff Ward;
"But the USA is the world’s greatest CONSUMER, producing also oodles of waste – so they are far from being the most efficient at consumption. The per capita total energy cost of being an American just beggars belief! So, the key question is – should the USA return to the fold and become, once more, an accepted and acceptable member state of the world community? And, in the process, should Americans be requested by the world community to reduce their consumption? OK, the American believes he has earned his right to his consumption through efficient production, and he HAS benefited from high-level consumption – but should SUPER-CONSUMPTION be a never-ending state of affairs when world circumstances (resource-depletion, AGW etc.) change?"
This kind of ignorance combined with thinly disguised intense envy and hatred is among those things that led me to come to detest Europe and Europeans. There is so much in it to rip to shreds it defies belief. So much of its smacks of Europe's belief that it can somehow control America. The fact it that it can no longer even influence it.
Yes America has the highest per capita consumption of energy in the world. There are many reasons for it. We live an a vast geographical area which mostly has a severe climate. In most places it is very hot and humid in summer, very cold in winter. We are very spread out and by our nature and out of necessity we are a very mobile society. We have to travel long distances to and from work, to and from shopping, within work assignments, and yes for recreation. We are so spread out that public transportation including rail networks outside of the densest urban areas don't cut it for us the way they do in Europe. Neither do compact econo-cars. One large consumer of energy is our agricultural sector. We feed much of the world. The tilling of soil, sowing, tending, harvesting, storage, processing, and shipping of food across our country and around the world is a very large consumer of energy. Millions of acres are under intense cultivation. If we didn't expend that energy, much of the world would soon starve to death.
America is a pioneer of alternative fuel technologies, nuclear power and other energy saving technologies such as cogeneration. This goes back a long way into the 1970s. We depend on and expect cheap and freely available sources of fuel. Our building codes demand energy efficiency and our government demands automotive fuel economy often to an unreasonable degree. Setting targets arbitrarily is one thing, meeting them quite another.
But even if it were true, who is anyone to tell Americans what they can and cannot do. America was born out of revolution against outside rule imposed on it. It was small and weak then, it is far larger and stronger now. It is not about to submit to the capricious whims no matter how others think they are justified because someone says we are wrecking the world's climate. Europeans have even more hubris than anyone making these demands on America. When it was pointed out about three years ago that European leaders drove the most energy inefficient highest CO2 producing personal vehicles available, they said it was none of anyone's business and Europeans largely accepted that. Why should Americans think that they have any less right to do exactly the same? Europeans may see their leaders as a privileged elite who can get away with such things but we do not. To us they are no better than we are and we have every right to consume as much energy as they do. We like large homes that are comfortable all year round. We like mobility and the freedom to go where we want when we want how we want. We assert that it is self evident that it is our inalienable right to pursue happiness and if that means being mobile and comfortable and we can afford it, so be it. That is what we are used to, that is what we demand, and any government which we alone control will commit political suicide if it tells us we can't have it. We will not accept world government imposing its will from the outside any more than we accepted British rule from London 234 years ago.
I noticed how enraged Europeans were when Russia cut off gas to Ukraine a couple of times in the middle of winter and it resulted in a cutoff of gas to parts of Germany, France, Poland and elsewhere. That is what Europe is demanding of America, nothing less, a sharp reduction in its energy consumption with severe consequences. How ironic that it is the Europeans who will be the ones most likely forced to live with that eventually as a permanent reality. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.
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@GeoffWard
I've read your link from cover to cover, thanks very much, sadly that's a few minutes of my life that I'll never get back.
It's quite simply, tosh - No offence.
The Ganges delta, is the largest tidal delta in the world. It was created by continual floods and storm surges, complaining about that fact or trying to blame it on Climate Change is akin to King Canute(got told off last time I used that reference, but I'm only using it because it's a commonly understood meme), trying to hold back the waves.
It's like moving to the artic circle and complaining about the snow, ice and the days with 24 hours of darkness in the winter. The idocy of the whole thing is beyond absurd.
Regards,
One of the Lobby
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ECCENTRICITY@32
"Each Summer as I sit here roasting a little more..."
You lucky devil. Here in North West England we have enjoyed the fourth rotten July in a row with rainfall at Bangladesh levels. It is now known as "Monsoon Month."
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#71
Given reports of the demographic changes to Britain in the last few years, the many recent arrivals must feel right at home.
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Re #44: "All of the great scientific revolutions were instigated by outsiders and newcomers, people who were prepared to turn orthodoxy on its head."
This isn't the case. Scientific revolutions were instigated by people who had spent years learning the science and becoming masters at it. Such people are not newcomers.
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Interesting debate, marred by the British (Western?) disease; comment without knowledge or understanding. Complex topics require at least a bit of work to understand them. Science has spent a 100 years scrutinizing itself, to try and understand what can and cannot be claimed from scientific investigation. Can punditry, politics or puffed up ego claim the same? Science is not perfect, and cannot deliver answers to everything. There are several spectacular examples of scientific orthodoxy being overturned, but always by other science, not by how we would like the world to be. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, science is the worst form of investigation devised by writ of man, except for all the rest.
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#67. Jack Hughes wrote:
"Climate science has been going for some 20 years now and has discovered these laws of climate
Zeroth law: anything can be linked to climate change
First law: it's worse than we thought
Second law: only experts can understand climate
Am I missing a few here ?
Have they discovered anything else?"
-----
Yes. You missed:
Correlation does indeed prove causation (except when it doesn't).
Everything is unprecedented.
Less data is better, and more concrete provides optimum surroundings for weather stations.
All 'corrections' to recent data naturally show increased temperatures. All data that does not fit the schtick must be ignored because it is obviously wrong.
(http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/21/the-satellites-are-missing/)
Its not necessarily global warming, unless examples of unusual warmth are available.
Weather which fits IPCC predictions are signs of human-caused climate change, but weather which does not is not.
Any weather extreme - too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too windy, too calm, etc. - are signs of human-caused climate change.
All impacts of climate change are bad, very bad, usually catastrophic.
And this exciting new discovery: it is warming faster than anyplace else everywhere.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/24/faster-than-everyplace-else/
P.S. Also, in contrast to US Energy Secretary Dr. Chu's suggestion that global warming impacts could be slightly reduced by painting all the rooftops in the USA white, whitewash in the UK has reduced the impacts of global warming dramatically... it may even just go away entirely there, except for all the taxes and higher energy bills.
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#74 reason_ing wrote:
Science has spent a 100 years scrutinizing itself, to try and understand what can and cannot be claimed from scientific investigation.
The trouble is, the years it spent scrutinizing itself were around 1600--1700, with occasional later flashes of scrutiny from Einstein, Feynman and a few others.
Interesting debate, marred by the British (Western?) disease; comment without knowledge or understanding.
Who is to say who has knowledge or understanding? Let everyone speak their minds and be playful with their thoughts. Sometimes it's a good idea to blow a trumpet at the tulips every morning just to see what happens.
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Someone who has arguably become a master of it below.......
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/currycv.html
2002- Chair, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology
1992-2002 Professor, University of Colorado-Boulder, Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Environmental Studies Program
1989-1992 Associate Professor, Department of Meteorology, Penn State
1986-1989 Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University
1982-1986 Assistant Scientist, Department of Meteorology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Judith Curry (very qualified see cv link) seems to have FINALLY persuaded someone who posts at RealClimate to read, 'The Hockey Stick Illusion'
Tamino (a RC regular) has written a review of the Hockey Stick Illusion..
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delusion/
Judith Curry has signed of with:
"Once you'e in a hole, you can try to climb out or keep digging. Well keep digging, Gavin. My final words: read the book. "
following Judith Curry:
"I can see that RC isn't the place, people elsewhere are already describing their posts not making it through moderation."
(Gavin Schmit RC editor, Nasa employe, Jim Hansen his boss)
He won't read a book - isn't that shocking?)
RealClimate are trashing 'The Hockey Stick Illusion, and all comers, (including Judith, in their comments section..
Because many people were having comments, not apearing at RealClimate, they have been posting them at Bishop Hill. in a thread reviewing the review..
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/7/22/tamino-on-the-hockey-stick-illusion.html?currentPage=4#comments
Quite surreal watching how, RC is even editing people comments, to misrepresent them..
I think this makes it clear, far from RealClimate representing 'climate scientists everywhere. it is in fact just a PR website, set up for Michael Mann, and the core 'team' to get their message across to the world.. It's connections with EMS, Fenton Communications and Al Gore are on the record.
It is worth reading All of the Bishop HIll comments section. There are some obviously some very intelligent (older than me ) people pulling apart RC, anbd Gavins repsonses, some appear at RC, if they fail they appear at Bishop Hill. You and I may not follow the statitics completly, but we can surely recognise the 'human behaviour at RealClimate.
I have noticed in Richard Black's blogs, many references to RealClimate, yet very few, none? to Climate Audit or Watts up, or Bishop Hill
Watts up being number one science blog, Real Climate and Climate Audit, eigth and ninths respectively.... Balance?
Judith Curry's initial response at RC (looks like she is increasingly sceptical)
"I just posted this to RC:
JC's grade for the review: C-
pros: well written, persuasive
cons: numerous factual errors and misrepresentations, failure to address many of the main points of the book
If anyone is seriously interested in a discussion on this book, I can see that RC isn't the place, people elsewhere are already describing their posts not making it through moderation.
-------
unfortunately i don't have much time for blogging at the moment. hopefully the RC post will motivate more people to read the book, then we can have a more interesting discussion at a more neutral site"
July 23, 2010 | Judith Curry
Thanks for that Dr Curry. It's good that RC have acknowledged the existence of the book and I guess I am pleased that this is the best they can come up with.
July 23, 2010 | Bishop Hill
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/7/22/tamino-on-the-hockey-stick-illusion.html
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63. At 08:19am on 25 Jul 2010, bowmanthebard wrote:
"I've studied integral calculus -- would you mind explaining it to me?"
Then you must be familiar with the Central Limit Theorem. Look at integrating temperatures in a thin volume over the surface of a sphere (a close enough approximation to the shape of the earth) for a start.
Your caricature of how climate research is done can be laid to your not having read much of it. Many of the people working in the field have a PhD in Physics. Just how sure are you that Feynman never read Aristotle? What's your source? Given his wide range of interests I could easily imagine him reading Aristotle out of historical curiosity.
Given he planet's finite nature and the first and second laws of thermal-dynamics on what basis do you think either the increases in standard of living in China and India are sustainable, much less any hope of the Western countries sustaining theirs.
P.S. I made more extensive comments on the previous blog page.
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Blunderbunny wrote @ #70: ”I've read your link from cover to cover, thanks very much, sadly that's a few minutes of my life that I'll never get back………..It's quite simply, tosh - No offence. ……The idocy of the whole thing is beyond absurd.”
It is with some sadness that I write this person off as closed-minded; this in preference to calling him/her a little imbalanced.
On the other hand, perhaps some of our other colleagues on this blog-topic would like to adjudicate, for I will willingly accept that I may be wrong in seeing worth in the article (@ #51) to which I referred the blunderbunny.
Richard, perhaps you might like to say a bit because, if I'm not mistaken, you are quoted in the article and the references.
Hey, bunny, your reputation or mine is at stake here; care to go the distance?
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Spotted at Bishop Hill: ref the comments elsewhere!
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/7/24/booker-namechecks-man-of-cloth.html#comments
DennisA, did you also note this comment at the boomantribune site?
by mainsailset on Sat Jul 24th, 2010 at 06:39:00 PM EST
"Re: Most Successful Conspiracy Theory Evah (none / 1)
There are moments and there are deniers that drive me to respect the attitude China adopts and that is to whack off the heads of those who stand broadside to undermine the good of the people (not sure they'd be willing to expand that to the good of the globe, but there you have it)"
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I see many deniers like to cite Ross McKitrick who is associated with the Fraser Institute. Given that the Fraser Institute looks like the Canadian version of the Cato Institute, it is curious that the deniers see no reason to be worried about agenda driven research publications when it comes to folks on their side of the argument. Given the Fraser Institutes reason d'art one might expect them to be skeptical about AGW since dealing with it would require concerted government action. Follow the money.
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skepticalscience.com has a recent assessment of the global surface temperature records for anyone interested:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Assessing-global-surface-temperature-reconstructions.html
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#79. GeoffWard wrote:
Taking up your challenge I just tried to read that link at your #51 but got this message:
"The material you are attempting to access cannot be located. It may have been moved or deleted, or the Web address (URL) may have been represented incorrectly in your browser."
After that happened I returned to your post to read what you had summarized about it, and realized that that glitch had just saved me some wasted time. It is nothing but worst case scenario 'what if' speculation built on a false and hysterically exaggerated premise. May as well watch Gore's science fiction thriller and pretend to seriously analyze its implications.
And the fact that Richard is mentioned or, worse, cited in this study only reinforces that conclusion. Is Paul Ehrlich or James Hansen also mentioned? How about Noah?
So, with all due respect to some of your other posts, as a Vestibulian I'll accept blunderbunny's #70 verdict on it.
P.S. If pigs could fly we would all need hats. How can we plan for that?
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80. Barry Woods
Thanks to your earlier post (#77) I have just been reading that Bishop Hill blog, and learning that RealClimate is even worse than I thought... and that is saying a lot! Unbelievable censorship, comment revision, and general nastiness. Acting like cornered weasels.
One would think that NASA would cut their links to that site before everybody who hasn't been paying attention figures out what NASA has become on this file.
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I was a skeptic about global warming for the longest time. The so called envirnomentalists had done everything possible to convince me that they had gotten it wrong or were just plain lying. I still think most of them are in that category. But the comparative photographs I saw of the polar ice caps taken over many years and of recent pictures of the Columbia glacier in Prince William Sound Alaska I'd seen with my own eyes in 1988 convinced me that something big is going on. That much ice cannot disappear that quickly unless it is true. I have no better explanation for it.
What if anything can be done about it is another issue. Given the realities of this world it is entirely possible that nothing can be done, in fact it may already be too late to stop it. The best we can hope for may be to adapt to it. Efforts that will surely be utterly futile but are being done anyway because they will make some people feel good thinking that they are at least doing something should not be attempted. The process will only be slowed imperceptably if at all and that energy and money could be put to better use such as in researching real alternative sources of energy that we can actually make use of. If I had to vote for where the R&D money should go, I'd pick geothermal. If you dig deep enough there is heat more than sufficient to boil water to run a turbine generator everywhere in the world. Most of the earth's mass is so hot it's molten.
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81. HungeryWalleye wrote:
"deniers"
Oh well.
Here's some graphs that you might find enlightening. From NOAA/NCDC. They're the 'good guys,' right?
You can see two of them at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/24/eu-climate-exchange-website-hacked/
(comment July 25, 2010 at 11:15 am)
Or go straight to the source:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ndp019.html
"The cumulative effect of all adjustments is approximately a one-half degree Fahrenheit warming in the annual time series over a 50-year period from the 1940's until the last decade of the century."
So, that pretty much covers all the alleged warming, all through convenient statistical adjustments.
As Watts explains: "NOAA NCDC does in fact deliberately adjust surface temperature data, by their own admission, and the result is warming."
By the way, if you want to follow the big money, that WUWT article is also rather enlightening on that. Al Gore and Goldman Sachs et al have a lot of cash riding on this lemming stampede and their carbon trading scam, and they are relying on people like you to keep up your good work.
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@CanadianRockies
Thanks for that, you can find his quoted document in a paywall free incarnation here:
http://www.preventionweb.net/english/professional/publications/v.php?id=9870
For some reason he want to move the poor people to Yorkshire.
I salute my fellow vestibulian ;-)
One of the (doesn't seem so funny when a certain Mr. Summits is absent)Lobby
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@GeoffWard
Happy to go toe to toe, would you care to point out where I've been factually inaccurate?
What with my closed mind an’all, this should be child’s play for you.
Regards,
One of the Lobby
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CanadianRockies #18.
"..all humans are political animals, including the ones working as scientists."
you are, of course, correct in saying this, perhaps that is why the whole setup (dependence on research funds being granted, knowing the 'right' people to gain access, etc) is such a mess. still, as regards politicking, most scientists are the proverbial innocent bystanders IMO.
MarcusAureliusII #21.
"And what about Europe's own report card?"
true, unfortunately; the close collaboration with the US since WWII has left most european nations very compromised, ie we're not able anymore to claim the moral high-ground.
polly_gone #62.
"The scaremongering must stop.."
large part of the problem is our unwillingness to face up to the fact that a very large percentage (90? higher?) of humanity is in fact superfluous, 'surplus to requirements'. :-)
technology enables the few (helped by a few thousand Indonesian maids for the menial house-keeping tasks) to continue to live in relative comfort even if (when!!) the rest of humanity has gone to the wall.
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One down, Rockies makes his judgement without viewing the evidence. Considering the hypercritical nature of this blog-site, I find it is always best to see the evidence before making the judgement.
Try adding '.pdf' - it seems to work for me.
By the way, Rockie, did you check out the high-latitude research organization studying desertification processes? You seemed to doubt that such process can exist.
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Blunderbunny - Thanks for that link. Took a look and downloaded it for future entertainment/reference.
Look who produced it: "Source(s): Care International (CARE); Columbia University in the City of New York; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS); World Bank, the (WB)"
What more can one say, really? The benevolent World Bank even.
And it was published in 2009 at the height of the hysteria. I'm guessing this was produced in the runup to Copenhagen.
But nice maps and photos. No expense spared on that.
They mention the Himalayan glaciers, of course... and the not-sinking islands of Tuvalu and Maldives, of course.
There are scenarios of both 1 and 2 meter sea levels rises, which would be really serious... as Gore's science fiction movie documents.
And "As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural hazards such as cyclones, floods, and droughts..."
What? No mention of plagues of locusts or pestilence?
Clearly, the time to invest massive amounts of cash in these sponsoring bureaucracies is yesterday. Mugabe needs solar panels for his villas.
And in the conclusion, an interesting twist:
"Climate change is happening with greater speed and intensity
than initially predicted. Safe levels of atmospheric
greenhouse gases may be far lower than previously thought,
and we may be closer to an irreversible tipping point than had
been anticipated. Meanwhile, global CO2 emissions are rising
at steeper and steeper rates. Emissions reductions efforts
have been too little, too late. Therefore, the challenges and
complex politics of adaptation are joining those of mitigation
at the centre of policy debates."
Worse than we thought! The tipping point is about to tip! Its already too late to reduce emissions! So why all the fuss over doing that?
I actually agree the best option for whatever happens is LOCAL adaptation. So who needs a giant global bureaucracy and New Age global governance - let alone a Wall Streeters carbon market - for that?
In any case, this was exactly what I was expecting. Slick scary propaganda from the AGW research-industrial complex sales team.
Now, why on earth would Geoff Ward put this thing forward as serious food for thought?
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@GeoffWard
You're apparently a fan of Ockham's Razor, so why don't you try applying that to the problem of the Ganges Delta - Failing that you might just want to find yourself a geography text book and thumb through it to the section on tidal deltas, just a thought......
One of the (going back to the Hall) Lobby
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89. jr4412 wrote:
"still, as regards politicking, most scientists are the proverbial innocent bystanders IMO."
But not most of the ones 'at the top' of this heap. The majority are just troops in the crusade, going with the flow, because that has been the path of least career resistance of late. Like 'good Germans.'
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junior;
"MarcusAureliusII #21.
"And what about Europe's own report card?"
true, unfortunately; the close collaboration with the US since WWII has left most european nations very compromised, ie we're not able anymore to claim the moral high-ground."
I don't know when Europe ever could have claimed the high moral ground or why that means anything. Europe still thinks it is better and smarter than everyone else even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. All of that European pontificating trash talk about how the US was the world's villain who should shape up, fall on its sword, wreck its economy to save the world from global warming was just that, nothing more than trash talk. The only ones who believed any of it were some Europeans themselves. But then Europeans seem to congenitally suffer the worst delusion of all, self delusion. It never ends and gets them in hot water up to their necks every single time.
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@GeoffWard
Another quick one, for you, just before I go and rest my weary head:
What's the current annual rise in sea level?
Plus, you do realise that much of Yorkshire is not exactly lots of metres above sea level ;-) You might want to concentrate your efforts a little closer to home?
Regards Again,
One of the Hall(Monitor badge pending)
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MarcusAureliusII #94.
"All of that European pontificating trash talk about how the US was the world's villain who should shape up, fall on its sword, wreck its economy to save the world from global warming was just that, nothing more than trash talk."
good to see that you're still in fine shape -- unlike the rest of your country. :D
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86. At 11:03pm on 25 Jul 2010, CanadianRockies wrote:
"Here's some graphs that you might find enlightening. From NOAA/NCDC. They're the 'good guys,' right?"
Well I read the NOAA/NCDC link. They are making adjustments to address the complaints raised by critics about the raw data. If you don't think the methods are valid perhaps you could offer alternative methods for correcting the data for the effects outlined in the NOAA article.
In previous posts you claim to have been an ecologist during your working life. Did you ever take a course in basic statistics in your studies for that field? If so, do you remember the section on analysis of covariance? Do you consider analysis of covariance a valid statistical method? If not, I can see why you are dismissive of the NOAA corrections.
Let me be clear, I am far from convinced that carbon trading will provide a solution to AGW; however, in order for societies/nations to seriously investigate effective and politically possible solutions, their needs to be a consensus that there is a problem. So don't try to tie the AGW with self serving proposals from Goldman Sachs.
With everyone jockeying for advantage, it seems unlikely that AGW will be addressed in an effective manner. So your children and grand children will be able to see whether or not your projections (given the take no effective action) for the future are correct.
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97. HungeryWalleye
But rather miraculous that all adjustments increase the temperature to create a hockey stick, don't you think?
Particularly when the raw data from most of these weather stations have already been biased upwards due to increased urbanization and/or deletion of stations from rural areas.
The climate changes, always has and always will. Local and regional adaptation is the key.
P.S. Just to correct you, as I explained to you before I am retired from a career in natural resource management which involved ecology as the overall context for everything - but I was never called an 'ecologist.'
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90. GeoffWard
Thanks to Blunderbunny I did reach that link, took a first read, and downloaded it to possibly read later. But I probably won't. See my #91.
I wouldn't call anything in that report "evidence."
Re "the high-latitude research organization studying desertification processes? You seemed to doubt that such process can exist."
No. The Canadian Arctic is a very dry place to begin with and I can see how short term trends could produce local effects that could technically be called "desertification." My point was that was not what the original commenter was suggesting she saw as she flew across Canada (and that is not what most people imagine when they hear that word).
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The many staunch defenders of the law on stolen emails from UEA will be equally vocal in their condemnation of stolen US military records, I trust?
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#89 jr4412
I agree there is an 'either/or' at work. Either all humans are superfluous or all humans are not superfluous. Sticking a 'yardarm' in is like security at a pop concert - 'I decide when we are full' - which has a habit of not being relevant at all.
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#60 HungeryWalleye wrote:
If you ever studied integral calculus you might have a clue on how "global" temperature is calculated.
Would someone be kind enough to explain to me how integral calculus is used to calculate global temperatures?
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@GeoffWard
(@CanadianRockies)
Yep, I liked the maps too - very slickly presented and therein lies the problem with a lot of this sort of stuff. It's wrapped up in a nice way, we throw in a little bit of science (doesn’t really matter if it’s that relevant), we throw in some nice pictures, we throw in the standard AGW doom and gloom and hey presto we apparently have "science", better yet, we have evidence...
In the case of the Ganges delta, we ignore the fact that it's the largest tidal delta in world, we ignore that it's been doing the same thing in a relatively un-molested manner for millennia and we try to describe it's normal patterns of erosion, re-deposition, flood and storm surge in a very scary way.
It's just doing what it's always done, people are living there in large numbers now, but that's hardly the delta's fault and people naturally want to try and control their local environment and climate change and sea level rises make nice handy things to blame for their inability to do so, but the simple truth is, it's just a difficult place to live and any recent delta changes probably have more to do with the dam at Farraka than anything else.
Seems to me that some of our contributors, should do a little more research into things, before they start accusing others of being closed minded.
Who is the most closed minded, that man that reads what he wants to read and stops there or the man that researches the topic before reaching a conclusion?
I’m very happy to be judged for my opinions and conclusions and I wonder if you can truly say the same?
Regards,
One of the Lobby
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Feynman said:
"As long as you are only biased it does not make any difference, because if your bias is wrong a perpetual accumulation of experiments will perpetually annoy you until they cannot be disregarded any longer. They can only be disregarded if you are absolutely sure ahead of time of some precondition that science has to have. In fact it is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions, like those of our philosopher."
Who here is being perpetually annoyed?
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#104 SR wrote:
Feynman said:
In fact it is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions, like those of our philosopher.
I would exercise caution with Feynman's use of the word 'philosopher'. He was in fact a considerable philosopher of science himself, whose contempt for mainstream academic philosophy had much the same source as my own: it is almost universally "foundationalist". In other words, it shares the mainstream (from Plato to Descartes and beyond) assumption that knowledge has the structure of a building resting on foundations.
I think it is a disgrace that academia has for the most part not caught up with the most important figures in twentieth century philosophy (such as Quine and Wittgenstein). But alas, that's the way it is, mostly because philosophy is a "humanities" subject and most of its practitioners are scientifically illiterate. Alas, the foundationalist way of thinking has spread like a virus into second-rate "middle management" science subjects as well.
Einstein called himself a "philosopher", and Feynman might have done so too. But his persona was that of an ironist and intellectual loner, so he used the word sarcastically to refer to those he felt didn't quite live up to the part.
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It may be old news but as I understand it, the big fudge used at UEA was to take tree ring data for the last thousand years and assert that the size of the tree rings is an indicator of climate conditions at the time, growth in the diameter of tree trunks being directly related to temperature. They spliced that data to records of actual temperatures for the last fifty or so years because the correlation between the tree ring theory and temperatures fell apart in recent decades. Had the analysis used the same tree ring data for that period it would have exploded the global warming theory.
Another fudge the climatologists used to make their political point was to reduce the number of test points eliminating many in non urban areas and using progressively more data near cities which are heat islands. This automatically would skew the curve upwards with time even if global temperature were falling.
These are among the criticisms I've heard from scientists who dispute the arguments about global warming and I haven't heard any credible refutation from those who assert the propostion. Were it not for the evidence of the melting polar ice caps and retreating glaciers, I'd still be a skeptic myself. Climatologists tell us when we have a bitterly cold winter that it is not an indication that global warming is invalid because short term trends or localized weather patterns are not indicative of the long term process but then when there is a heat wave in the summer they say exactly the opposite. They've told us the last ten years were the hottest time in 100000000000 years. But then there were periodic warm periods long before the industrial revolution and after human civilization arrived. Their data is so confused and inconclusive they don't even call it global warming anymore, it's now referred to as climate change. As I said above, they've done everything possible to convince me they are either incompetent scientists or mediocre liars. And I am convinced even if they turn out to be right.
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@ 105.
That, Mr Bowman, was an exceptionally interesting post.
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#34 bowmanthebard
The major difference between Darwin and the anti-climate-change charalatans is that Darwin did the work, produced the data. In fact, he did what the majority of climatologists have done; science.
The anti brigade have contributed nothing to science - they haven't collected any new data, they haven't produced any new testable hypotheses. All they've done is cherry-pick the work of other, more honourable scientists, to provide fodder for the anti-climate-change cynics.
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re-arctic ice etc- and the temperature records of the poles
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/25/sea-ice-news-15/
if you were worried about the honesty of the climatologists marcus, the inforation in the link won't help.
whenever you see a temperature global map you'll see the poles in red- showing significant warming.
now the link show's how many stations they used to get to that conclusion.....
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@ 108.
slight correction- if i'm correct, the climateologists havn't collected the data either.. they're relying on the stations that are produced and maintained by various institutions and governments around the world. So in fact, they're doing precisely the same as the skeptics- but with unfetted access to the raw unadjusted data, which the skeptics don't have.
The only difference between the two 'camps' being the 'respectable' skeptics fully release all their data, calculations and theories behind their statements. Often publishing them online for anyone to see, review, rip apart as necessary.
the climatologists don't do this.
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#108 David Craig wrote:
The major difference between Darwin and the anti-climate-change charalatans is that Darwin did the work, produced the data. In fact, he did what the majority of climatologists have done; science.
Darwin was a great scientist with a powerful explanatory hypothesis. Climate science is nothing like that either in its content or its methods.
I'm always amused by the way climate "scientists" are so quick to compare their own work to that of Darwin, aeronautical engineers and suchlike!
The anti brigade have contributed nothing to science
I'm not trying to contribute to the "science" so much as point out why we don't have good reasons to believe it as it is currently practiced; therefore it should not guide public policy.
Climate "science" became a dangerous fashion when it became a moral crusade instead of honest inquiry. Nothing suspends disbelief more effectively than moral fervour, and at this stage it is considered "blasphemous" and "immoral" not to believe it. So a lot of people believe it just to keep their noses clean -- "I'm for saving the planet, me!"
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This is a fascinating discussion - but unfortunately only in that almost every post is attacking someone else. There's almost no science at all in any of the points here.
Which is a shame, isn't it? Do we really want to base decisions which might affect our survival on who can produce the best insult or who can set up the best straw man?
Is the UN (for example, but enter any government or other organisation here!) really in the position where such approaches carry more weight than the science?
If so, there's no damned point in doing the science, as someone else with a political agenda or vested interest in the opposite conclusion will be able to trump it.
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LM, It's not the number of stations that matters, it is where they are located and whether or not they've remained the same. Even if they are all the same and the global temperature were stable, the fact that some of them are near or in urban heat islands they'd show a rising temperature as those islands generate more heat. It is the fact that the data is not presented fully, openly, available for full and honest peer review to confirm or discredit the theories that leads to the inescapable conclusion that it is junk science.
Why would climatologists want to demonstrate global warming or climate change if it doesn't really exist? For some of them the motives are political. Another motive is money and fame. Who would pay them much or give them even a second of their time to listen to them if the majority of people believed the climate was stable? Nobody, that's who.
While the science they present on the face of it seems badly flawed, the melting of the polar ice and the receding glaciers are convincing. It's not because of those climatologists that I think there is global warming, it's in spite of them.
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Glad to hear it - ordinary people have risen up and comprehensively rejected this nonsense.
The UN should stop trying to milk a dead cow.
Lets have some serious, concerted action to bring non-fossil energy to consumers. There is no need for all this coercion - just make it available and consumers are ready to buy it.
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#108 David Craig
"The anti brigade have contributed nothing to science..."
I believe they have done a brilliant job of revealing how some pompous asses have delivered a pretty fancy half written fairy story based on some fact and a lot of 'huffing and puffing'. That they have found so much ill constructed criticism shows that 'science hasn't contributed much to itself' so far as climate change is concerned.
I have written about the limits of computer models to be smacked down by the 'I know better than you do' brigade, and yet, the BBC carries a rather prescriptive report dated 23 July on new computer hardware to be developed that really follows neuron processes, which kind of makes my point to those 'who THINK they know better'.
I'd rather have scientists telling us they do not know than trying to kid us they do.
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Climatologists rely on highly complex mathematical models that are often highly lauded at first and then when their flaws are discovered, ultimately discredited. Basic understanding of all of the factors which influence the earth's climate, to what degree, by what mechanism, how they interact, and data to evaluate what is happening and has happened in the past is very insufficient. For example, we have no data regarding the variations of the sun's heat output or surface temperature over time. The notion that the sun is a constant is probably false. That's just one example.
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bowmanthebard said:
"Climate "science" became a dangerous fashion when it became a moral crusade instead of honest inquiry. Nothing suspends disbelief more effectively than moral fervour, and at this stage it is considered "blasphemous" and "immoral" not to believe it. So a lot of people believe it just to keep their noses clean -- "I'm for saving the planet, me!"
This is completely irrelevant to the question of whether the core science is 'correct' or not. Just because you perceive a situation whereby it is blasphamous or immoral not to believe something does not automatically make that something false.
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#112 Marcusbailius wrote:
Do we really want to base decisions which might affect our survival on who can produce the best insult or who can set up the best straw man?
I do hope no one is genuinely feeling insulted here. I've always been a, er, "robust" arguer. But if you could see my body language and hear my tone of voice you'd probably see that I'm laying it on with a trowel a bit for effect.
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@ 113.
i agree with your post, but have another look at the link- it's the ABSENCE of stations you should be noting....
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@ 113- additional (i really should wait a 'beat' before posting.
You do realise that melting glaciers and arctic ice doesn't actually prove man made global warming, only that warming is taking place? it's s common conflation that the AGW push.
Interestingly though, sea ice and the poles seem to be doing fine.... despite what is being reported in the msm
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One 'climate scientist' seems to have given up on RealClimate (all but calling her a big oil right wing deniar now)
When are all the other scientiss in te world, going to grow a backbone, and stand up to the IPCC 'poltical' consensus and call time on the delusion that is RealClimate (a PR tool for the 'hockeystick 'team)
Judith Curry's CV,
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/currycv.html
2002- Chair, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology
1992-2002 Professor, University of Colorado-Boulder, Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Environmental Studies Program
1989-1992 Associate Professor, Department of Meteorology, Penn State
1986-1989 Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University
1982-1986 Assistant Scientist, Department of Meteorology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
---------------------
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/7/25/mcintyre-on-rc-on-bh.html#comments
Judith Curry below:
I've abandoned RealClimate (for good, I think). I've posted a few comments on climateprogress, here is the text of my latest comment.
-----------
Consensus on a scientific issue is established as science evolves through the following successive stages (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1990):
1. no opinion with no peer acceptance;
2. an embryonic field attracting low acceptance by peers;
3. competing schools of thought, with medium peer acceptance;
4. a dominant school of thought accepted by all but rebels;
5. an established theory accepted by all but cranks.
At the time of the TAR, MBH reflected an embryonic field (level 2). There was very little justification for any kind of consensus statements with “likely” and “very likely”, even by the standards of IPCC’s guidelines. By the time of AR4, the field had arguably matured to level 3, a more established field with competing schools of thought. The conflict that has ensued over the high confidence levels in the IPCC conclusions and the attempts to establish a premature consensus is described by Montford’s book.
The response of a rational person considering the evidence from both sides (which is a necessity for level 3 science) is to weigh evidence from both sides and make both sides aware of arguments from the other side and emphasize the need for refuting arguments from the other side in justify your thesis.
The response of an irrational person is to declare level 2 or level 3 science as “settled science”, “a fact on par with the theory of infrared radiative transfer of gases.”
July 26, 2010 | Judith Curry
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delusion/
------------------------------------------------
And by the way...
Hoskins, Big Chief at Uk Grantham Institute, and CAGW apologist, saying all models are LOUSEY.... rolled out regular on the BBC and in the media to say all the sceptics are non scientific and wrong, etc,etc
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/7/25/hoskins-climate-models-are-lousy.html
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@ 118... i'd say more a spade than a trowel :-)
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LM;
"You do realise that melting glaciers and arctic ice doesn't actually prove man made global warming, only that warming is taking place? it's s common conflation that the AGW push."
Yes I do. What is even more disturbing about the man made global warming theory is that data showing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and global temperatures show temperature leading CO2 concentrations over time when the theory of human caused global warming should show exactly the opposite. It is entirely possible that much of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere is the result of higher ocean temperatures driving disolved CO2 off the way heating carbonated beverages would. Heating of the oceans may be caused by entirely different sources such as increased solar radiation or from increased geothermal heat reaching the ocean through the mantle. If this is the case, cutting back on CO2 emissions by humans will have no effect at stopping it.
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This blog reminds me of a Channel 4 Programme on Dan Brown's book the, "Da Vinci Code". Reading that book was a few hours of my life I'll never get back, but it was a Christmas present. The programme took several believers (those that were convinced that every word was true) round the world to meet acknowledged experts on the topic, all of whom refuted just about every word in the book. Did this change the "believers'" minds? Not a bit of it, it just convinced them even more that there's a conspiracy going on. The facts should not get in the way of such a compelling and well-written (?) story. Seeing as this was channel 4 and not the BBC, this must have been part of the wider conspiracy, not the BBC conspiracy.
I've done some small bits of reseach myself, but I'm mainly an observer of researchers rather than a participant. A more awkward and cantankerous bunch you couldn't find, and the idea that anyone could control them is ludicrous. I have, at one time or another, studied the philosophy of knowledge and research, "What do we know and how do we know it?" but I've forgotten most of what I learnt. What I do remember is that there are plenty of fundamental flaws in how research is commissioned and conducted, but few other disciplines have done more to try and understand their own shortcomings, and much of this work has been done in the last 80-odd years (the Enlightenment having established scientific principles in the first place). In short, science is the best we have for trying to get to grips with what's going on. The other discussion board on this topic has some really great stuff which explains why this is so. Though science might help us understand complex problems, it's not much good at telling us what to do about the complex issues that arise, which is where politics comes in. I look at my kids - becoming adults themsleves now - and think "we have not practiced good husbandry". In my lifetime, it will be clear whether the climatologists are right, and then I can die, safe in the knowledge that my children and grandchildren will have to live with the mess. The researchers I know encompass the venal, the stupid, nutcases and cheats. But the vast majority are close to being the best of the best. On both sides of the argument, there will be those seeking to profit, cheats, nutters, over-heated argument (ha!) etc. Take these out, and what remains is that most of the best brains think global warming is happening, and believe they have the evidence to prove it. What's the main arument against? Much of it seems to be conspiracy theory, anti-intellectual bias (another British disease?), and Clarksonism. The intellectual argument to refute global warming theory is pretty light by comparsion to the evidence the other way, but that does not mean it will not grow, and present a rival theory of weight in time. In the interim, prudence (how I've missed her) would suggest following the precautionary principle. On the whole, I'm against the second line of defense after denial, that "it's already too late". Perhaps, but we should give it a try, it will keep us out of mischief.
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Initial: "These men of power are not climatologists (scientists are never trusted with real power; they might actually exercise it!), and they each have their own agendas."
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Response: MarcusII ”Many of these scientists do have political agendas completely apart from their scientific work. They use their profession in the service of those agendas, their possible motives cast doubt on everything they say.”
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Comment: My initial statement was on the agendas of the forms that Men of Power come in. But you are right; there are climatologists (even scientists) with agendas. Most of these view their agenda in the short-term – viz: “where will my next research funding come from?” But some go so far that they become the tools of the oil lobby, big business, etc. These latter are forever lost in the limbo-land of marginal academic credibility, published in company proceedings, and quoted in Senate hearings with high selectivity by their personal Men of Power.
……………….
Initial: MarcusII “if the human race's carbon footprint is to remain or be reduced to limits which do not adversely impact the climate, then if the technology remains the same and population is allowed to rise without limit, the carbon footprint of every individual will have to be continually reduced. That goes for China and India as well. It's not just a matter of politics. It is a fact that you cannot have a population continue to increase without limit and have CO2 remain within limits unless the consumption of everyone goes down indefinitely. This would lead to famines, mass deaths, economic collapse, and wars.”
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Comment: I’m glad you accepted that *everyone* (including Americans) will have to reduce consumption. Population control will take place by design in an ad hoc fashion; it will also take place ad lib as resources around the world reach their limiting levels. Altruistic (?) production for supporting the third world has topped-out in the USA; global population will still increase in our lifetimes, so technological fixes and the ‘consumption hit’ will still be necessary. I asked “Will the high-consuming developed nations be willing to take the hit to save the starving millions elsewhere?” – You answer “.. the best we can hope for is to adapt to (global warming)”. So, I guess you are right; millions will die – but hopefully not in the UK or in America.
……………………….
Re: "In search of Shelter; Mapping the effects of climate change on Human Migration and Displacement." & Sect. 3.4 'The Ganges Delta; Temporary Migration as a Survival Strategy'.
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Initial: Rockies & Bunny: “’Look who produced it: " .. Care International (CARE); Columbia University in the City of New York; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS); World Bank, the (WB)’
What more can one say, really? …
And in the conclusion,
"Climate change is happening with greater speed and intensity than initially predicted. Safe levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases may be far lower than previously thought, and we may be closer to an irreversible tipping point than had been anticipated. Meanwhile, global CO2 emissions are rising at steeper and steeper rates. Emissions reductions efforts have been too little, too late. Therefore, the challenges and complex politics of adaptation are joining those of mitigation at the centre of policy debates."
Worse than we thought! The tipping point is about to tip! It’s already too late to reduce emissions! …
Now, why on earth would Geoff Ward put this thing forward as serious food for thought?”
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Comment: Oh, you churlish ones! This was patently a ‘What if’ compilation, based on the likely worst scenario at the time of writing. It is about human beings – you know, people who are displaced, who suffer, who die. There is a place for these considerations, even amongst the outpourings of those here who spend their time counting the number of evil scientists on the head of a pin. Planning for population displacement based on given rises in water-level is common in the developed world (e.g. New York, Bradford, etc); why should we not afford the under-developed world the same analyses? (And, by the way, Bunny, Bradford is 250 metres above C.D.). There is room in this blog even for human geographers and philosophers.
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SR #117 wrote:
This is completely irrelevant to the question of whether the core science is 'correct' or not.
I'm trying to explain why so many people seem to believe it -- why it is a fashion. I agree that the number of people who believe it is irrelevant to the question of whether it is true. Frankly I'm rather surprised to hear the above from someone who think consensus is important in science.
Just because you perceive a situation whereby it is blasphamous or immoral not to believe something does not automatically make that something false.
You've left out my sneering quotation marks there! I don't think it is immoral not to believe the theory, nor do I think there should be an offense called blasphemy. But others seem to regard climate change scepticism as immoral, and do not hesitate to use a word for sceptics that likens us to Nazis. I have heard people earnestly proposing laws against the expression of climate change scepticism, which is to treat it like old-fashioned blasphemy.
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reason_ing #124 wrote:
The intellectual argument to refute global warming theory is pretty light by comparsion to the evidence the other way
I refudiate that!
Most sceptics are not trying to refute the theory but to cast doubt on it.
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GW;
" I asked “Will the high-consuming developed nations be willing to take the hit to save the starving millions elsewhere?” – You answer"
My answer is no. America and Europe have already proven it. Just ask the leaders of the EU if they will give up their gas guzzling high CO2 output Mercedes and BMWs. They've already given their answer three years ago and it was a firm no. The US Senate gave the American answer during Clinton's first term when it voted 95-0 NO!
"“.. the best we can hope for is to adapt to (global warming)”. So, I guess you are right; millions will die – but hopefully not in the UK or in America.""
I'm not at all concerned with the UK. That's not America's problem. I would however advise moving out of London and to higher ground though. I've read that as sea level rises, it will be under water. Much of New York City and a lot of Florida too. I live 200 feet above sea level and many miles inland so I think I'm safe already.
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@GeoffWard
So what happened, mate?
It's a little early in the game for waving the little white flag, I thought that given my closed mindedness, I was about to be shown just how wrong I was?
Plus Bradford might not be very close to sea level, but a lot of Yorkshire doesn't have such a luxury and the same could be said for great swathes of this little island that we happen to call home.
Still, a sea level rise of 1.7 mm + or - 0.5 mm a year is quite scary thing....
Do you not have any comments on the facts as they were presented?
BTW: It's not that I'm unsympathetic to people who live in poverty and deprivation, where ever they might live.
But, the case that both you and your link was trying to make is that this has something to do with climate change, when that's actually not quite true, now is it?
Whilst, you may feel comfortable with that, that the ends somehow justify the means, I do not.
Still, there we go, I promised myself I wouldn't get grumpy today, so I'm going to leave it there.....
Regards
One of the (There's at least two of us now) Vestibule
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108. David Craig wrote:
"The anti brigade have contributed nothing to science - they haven't collected any new data, they haven't produced any new testable hypotheses. All they've done is cherry-pick the work of other, more honourable scientists, to provide fodder for the anti-climate-change cynics."
Nonsense. For example they have revealed that some of these so-called "honourable scientists" were cherry picking to manufacture results (McIntyre vs the Mann-made hockey schtick) and documented the flaws with the (now cherry picked) surface temperature stations (Watts et al).
That is called real peer review.
As for alternative hypotheses, if you don't know about them you simply have not been looking.
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125. GeoffWard wrote:
"Oh, you churlish ones! This was patently a ‘What if’ compilation, based on the likely worst scenario at the time of writing."
I agree. But you called it "evidence." And after a decade of such exaggerated hypothetical worst case scenarios being passed off as 'evidence' or 'news' it is becoming tiresome and boring to even bother discussing them. To do so simply gives them a legitimacy that they do not warrant.
Why not "plan" for a sea level rise of 50 meters, a 10C rise in temperatures, compounded by an invasion of aliens? That would certainly employ an army of bureaucrats and 'researchers' and the brochures would be very interesting.
That said, I do kind of miss David Shukman's daily AGW scare stories on the BBC. They were getting to be very entertaining.
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Re 123. MarcusAureliusII:
"Yes I do. What is even more disturbing about the man made global warming theory is that data showing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and global temperatures show temperature leading CO2 concentrations over time when the theory of human caused global warming should show exactly the opposite."
No it shouldn't
"It is entirely possible that much of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere is the result of higher ocean temperatures driving disolved CO2 off the way heating carbonated beverages would."
No it isn't. The oceans are absorbing more co2 than they emit.
"Heating of the oceans may be caused by entirely different sources such as increased solar radiation or from increased geothermal heat reaching the ocean through the mantle."
Definitely not, such a source of heat is too small.
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quakinginyourtheories;
The fact that CO2 lags temperature rise instead of leading it leads to the conclusion that increased CO2 is at least in part the result of global warmng, not the cause of it. Othewise how do you explain it? It tracks quite well which means it is not likely a coincidence.
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CanadianRockies @ #131 wrote to GeoffWard:
Re: "Oh, you churlish ones! This was patently a ‘What if’ compilation, based on the likely worst scenario at the time of writing."
I agree. But you called it "evidence."
I wrote @ #90:
"Rockies makes his judgement without viewing the evidence. Considering the hypercritical nature of this blog-site, I find it is always best to see the evidence before making the judgement."
CanadianRockies @ #99 wrote to GeoffWard:
Thanks to Blunderbunny I did reach that link, took a first read, and downloaded it to possibly read later. But I probably won't. See my #91.
I wouldn't call anything in that report "evidence."
.................
I see the problem, Rockies.
I used the word 'evidence' in the legal sense of you coming to a judgement without looking at the evidence, i.e. reading the article. You subsequently accessed it with help from Bunny, and reported that it contained no 'evidence' (of climate change/AGW etc).
Misunderstanding. No harm done!
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@GeoffWard
Seems we're still not interested in talking about Tidal Deltas then?
Ah, well. To sleep, perchance to dream.....
Regards
One of the (Apparently Closed Minded) Lobby ;-)
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Blunderbunny, I read your tidal delta definitions from Wikipedia. Have you any interesting dimensions to discuss?
You mentioned one of the hydroelectric schemes - perhaps the Indo-Chinese resource conflict?
Or, I opened up the Brown Haze monsoon issue, another interesting topic and one with high statistical uncertainty - perhaps this?
Or, you might address the topic of the article I referred you to - some real human geography issues here on climatically-induced displacements, ones you bravely dismissed as tosh and beyond absurd.
So many topics, and so little time!
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Altamont pass has 1000's of windmills, but 1/2 are not working. Blades on the ground, rusting towers etc. If they are not profitable they don't get maintained. Is this a clue? Now they want to put them in the ocean. Give me a break.
The cat is out of the bag, the global warming scheme is just another scheme for redistribution of wealth. Haven't they caught on that the "rich" nations teach the "poor" nations how to do things. They become richer, salary's increase and another nation takes the ball and it starts all over again.
Get over it!
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Now ... let's see ...
1 = E reflected + E absorbed + E transmitted
thus, in the case of a planetary body (such as good old earth)
Urrmm .... engineers and physicists, deniers and boosters alike out there ...the next lines of your diverbent arguments would be ...
Come on, come on.
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Re 133.MarcusAureliusII wrote:
"The fact that CO2 lags temperature rise instead of leading it leads to the conclusion that increased CO2 is at least in part the result of global warmng, not the cause of it. Othewise how do you explain it? It tracks quite well which means it is not likely a coincidence."
Google co2 temperature lag and you'll find out
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Re. The Ganges delta
Right I’ve done a bit of digging concerning the two links that where provided as the both give a differing picture of the same piece of research. The nature article suggesting sea level rise will be an issue, whilst the other article suggesting that nothing out of the ordinary is happening.
http://www.nature.com/climate/2009/0902/fig_tab/climate.2009.3_F1.html
http://www.nature.com/climate/2009/0902/full/climate.2009.3.html#B7
http://www.gisdevelopment.net/news/viewn.asp?id=GIS:N_urxyjlzhkv
After reading both articles and looking in to the people quoted and reports quoted, I believe the gisdevelopment article is misinformation, as it takes a great deal out of context concerning the quotes made by Maminul Haque Sarker and Mahfuzur Rahman.
Please see http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100120055024AAjf6GH
for a better response to the article than I could give. It comes from Trevor and is the best answer chosen by readers.
This link adds context to Sarker and Rahman’s work
“Sarker’s research concludes that the creation of new land was in the order of a “few tens of kilometres per year” and that this had been caused by the Assam Earthquake. The quake created some 45 billion cubic metres of sediment and much of this entered the Brahmaputra River via its tributaries.”
“Already millions of people in Bangladesh have lost their homes to rising sea levels. The largest single evacuation of climate refugees to date occurred on Bhola Island, the largest island in Bangladesh, where some 500,000 people have been evacuated.
Bhola was 6400km² and is now 3000km², the loss of land from this one island alone far exceeds the amount of land gained in Sanker’s report.”
The link also provides other useful links which you maybe interested following.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
I’m not trying to get into the debate about what is natural and what is not. Or the debate about whether or not people are silly for living near certain geographical features. All I am trying to show is that information presented on topics like this needs to be put in context, and the gisdevelopment link certainly does not do that.
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Re; Whattsupwiththat
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/21/the-satellites-are-missing/
Now read
http://www.skepticalscience.com/3-levels-of-cherry-picking-in-a-single-argument.html
Is the whattsupwiththat article providing a full picture?
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Re. Sea Ice
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/25/sea-ice-news-15/
“Conclusion: There is no polar meltdown at either pole.”
For further discussion concerning this conclusion please see
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Part-One-Why-do-glaciers-lose-ice.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Part-2-How-do-we-measure-Antarctic-ice-changes.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Part-Three-Response-to-Goddard.html
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@hotashes
just in case you missed it, on a previous thread you asked me for information on climate sensitivity which i have provided
/Mango
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@hotashes #141
I'm not sure it's cherry picking to point out that the satellite data is missing when NOAA are claiming the warmist year in the satellite era
/Mango
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Hi Mango,
Cheers for the climate sensitivity stuff - haven't had chance to look at it yet but will do as soon as I have time.
As for my link to the cherry-picking article. It's main points are
Cherry Pick #1: Select one particular temperature record
Cherry Pick #2: ignore what's happening to the rest of the climate
Cherry Pick #3: Comparing single years rather than statistical trends
I believe the whattsupwith that article does pretty much all of these.
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@ hotashes
Out of curiosity- what's your opinion on the 'smoothing' that goes on with the temperature readings across the poles- specificaly, how justified do you think 'they' are extrapolating temperatures across vast swathes of the planet, where no monitoring stations exist?
Also, given the sites they use for this extrapolation are well known and have well documented warming bias- how comfortable are you with their conclusions on the polar temperatures?
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The insidputable fact that CO2 levels are rising lagging temperature rise demonstrates that the advocated of CO2 induced global warming have not made their case. Even if they turn out to be right in the end that there is global warming and that CO2 is the cause, what they have presented doesn't prove it, doesn't even suggest it. Their junk science cannot be merely accepted on the face of it. Every time I hear about how those with credentials all believe it it makes me nauseous. 30 monts ago economists with impressive credentials told us we weren't going to even have a recession in the forseeable future. So much for credentials. The fact that they have to dance around this "inconvenient truth" is proof enough that they don't have the goods.
This would all be purely academic and immaterial if it were happening on another planet but what they are asking for is a revolution in our entire way of life that will have major negative consequences for many if not most of us. Unless they can do a lot better, the best they will get will be more science fair level windturbines and solar panels. Whatever the news in the media, the news among those in the electrical power generating industry is that it won't even make a slight dent. As a strategy it is for all practical intents and purposes worthless because even at its most intense effort it would be far too small to matter.
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Re 147:
co2 is rising due to human emissions, not as a lagged response to warming.
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#145. hotashes
Well there is cherry picking, and then there is cherry spreading.
This is enlightening, including the comments:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/26/giss-swiss-cheese/
Would certainly love to hear how you or anyone can justify these 'scientific' methods and convenient results.
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CanadianRockies,
The post immediately makes a school boy error when it claims that the method is:
"based on the idea that temperatures don’t vary much over 1200 km"
This error is repeated several times throughout the post. A 2C anomaly in one place and a 2C anomaly 1200km away doesn't mean the "temperatures don't vary much". So the post seemingly doesn't understand the difference between average absolute temperatures and average anomaly over a region, which is rather an important thing to understand!
The figures in the top right corner of the maps show that the 250km smoothing results in 0.71C temperature change 1880-2009 and the 2500km smoothing results in 0.78C. So the 1200km smoothing adds just 0.07C warmth from 1880-2009. Surely that's not enough to justify the fuss or any motive for "convenient results"?
I reran the graphs for just the satellite period (1980-2009), the difference between the smoothing methods is only 0.04C in that case.
Comparing the zonal means for the 1880-2009 period, it looks like the biggest differences due to smoothing are above 50N and below 60S. In-between that range the smoothing makes very little difference.
So the posts references to areas in that "little difference" zone such as Asia, Africa and South America miss the mark. Part of that seems deliberate - for example I notice the post ignores hot spots that disappear due to smoothing but fervently highlights any cold spots that disappear.
As for the smoothing method itself and the maps, the method is probably a little more complex than just literally smoothing. As such there really is nothing to justify. The post is just an admission of ignorance, they don't understand how the images can be. For that to convince me I would need some demonstration that they understand the underlying method to know that the images violate it. I don't see such a demonstration in that post.
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148;
"co2 is rising due to human emissions, not as a lagged response to warming."
That may be only one part of the cause of CO2 rise and may not even be the most important part. CO2 rise may not be the cause of global warming.
I believe in the scientific principle of cause first and then effect, not the sequence of political agenda first, then effect, and then cause. The CO2 cause explanation seems invalid even if there is evidence that the conclusion is correct. If the explanation is wrong, then the drastic steps that so called environmentalists insist on won't work and we'd be wasting time, money, and effort trying not to mention making huge sacrifices with no benefit. They'll just have to do better if they want people like me to take them seriously.
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"That may be only one part of the cause of CO2 rise and may not even be the most important part."
It is only one part of the rise, but is the most important part.
nature is working furiously to absorb as much of our accumulating emissions as it can, but only managing to scoop up about half of what we throw out there.
As for the rest, I get it you don't want to accept the science for some reason. Not my problem.
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150. quake wrote:
"The post immediately makes a school boy error..."
Yes, I guess you could call the way the GISS manufactured data a "schoolboy error."
And there seems to be a rather miraculous correlation between areas with no data in increased temperatures.
You note that "Comparing the zonal means for the 1880-2009 period, it looks like the biggest differences due to smoothing are above 50N and below 60S."
Remarkable. Isn't that also where The Warming is claimed to be the greatest?
And what do you make of the exceptional 'hot spot' that pops up in Brazil, where there is NO data?
Even more miraculous is the suggestion that the data from 1880 is comparably accurate to the current data, even discounting the KNOWN problems with the current surface stations -siting, reduction in number -as well as the convenient upward adjustments made to what came from ALL of them.
In case you don't get this fundamental flaw in these bogus 1880- scenarios, I suggest you read Watts's comment at July 26, 2010 at 11:54 pm. It shows the varying number of stations back to that point - which peaked in about 1970 and has DECLINED since - as well as commenting on the early methodology and another GISS graphing 'trick.'
Apparently, as you say, this has shown a "0.71C temperature change 1880-2009"... a supposed testament to the remarkable accuracy of those early readings. Or perhaps well within the margin of actual error.
So quake, here's a suggestion. You seem to be very interested in this, and take an analytical approach. Why don't you join in the ongoing debate in the comments section at this WUWT article. There are some very knowledgeable people there and most of the discussion is lively and serious. Some are defending what was done while others are definitely not, and many are bringing links to their arguments. It is not just a bunch of 'schoolboys' jumping to conclusions. If your arguments have the merit you think they do, you should try to make them where they will be challenged in exquisite detail.
That's the best part of WUWT. The posted articles are actually 'peer reviewed' through well informed debates. There are, of course, comments which jump to 'schoolboy' conclusions because this is not an isolated example of convenient results, but just more of the same very consistent pattern.
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quakinginyourfantasies;
"I get it you don't want to accept the science for some reason."
I accept real science, not pseudo junk science trying to pass as real science. I've had enough scientific training and been around enough scientists to know the difference.
Real science presents ALL of the data and ALL of the reasoning allowing full and unbiased peer review to verify or refute any theories or conclusions. These people not only didn't do that but when their "games" were exposed, they were only outraged at the discovery. They made no attempt to better explain themselves.
As I said, even if their conclusion turns out to be right and even if it for the reason of CO2 increase they said it is, they have not proven it and what they presented is not valid science. It is a fraud.
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BBC News-feed, 27 July; Latin America:
"A warming climate could see millions of adult Mexicans migrate to the US as rising temperatures cause a drop in crop yields, according to a study by researchers at Princeton University.
For every 10% of lost crop yields in Mexico, another 2% of Mexicans are likely to leave their country, the study says.
The research draws a clear connection between climate change and immigration - two heavily debated issues in the US.
It says warming may bring between 1.4m and 6.7m Mexicans to the US by 2080"
This follows hot on the heels of the Bangladesh population displacement strand on this blob-topic. Regional warming and rain pattern changes do nasty things to people, especially those that subsistence-farm in order to live. The earlier EACH-FOR research programme in (inter alia) Tlaxcala, Central Mexico is strengthened by this Princeton research. Temporary, seasonal, cyclical, internal and international migrations have all been part of life here historically. The Princeton research shows a permanent people movement to the USA.
There are presently an estimated 6.7 million Mexican 'illegals' living (and working) in the USA. I understand that much of the American fruit harvesting industry relies on this 'migrant' labour because it is not the sort of work real Americans want to do for the wages on offer (Very similar to the Spanish fruit & veg. industry that has recently shed thousands of 'New EU' workers in the climate-change-enhanced/economic downturn disaster that has become the fate of Spain).
High productivity with easily-shed overheads for the USA farmers - but it really is The American Dream for many poor Mexicans. If it's starvation in Mexico or survival over the border it really is a no-brainer.
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GeoffWard;
I am very aware and sympathetic to the plight of many Mexicans as the result of their corrupt and ineffective government and of uncontrolled population growth. I've seen first hand a fair number of the shanty towns they live in as well as the seedier sides of cities like Acapolco where tourists don't usually go. It is surely heartbraking and just as bad as many other areas around the world including places I've seen in Venezuela and in many Caribbean islands. If I were born among them, I'de find heading north the only possible way out too. But that does not change the fact that while illegal migrants supply a source of cheap labor to some American producers and other private companies, on the whole it is a drain on the American economy. It is also straining the social infrastructure as taxpayers have to foot the bill for them as well as many who are here legally who need help. We just can't afford it anymore. Trying to frighten us by raising the spector of global warming causing more illegal migrants to come here won't work. What we want is for the government to enforce the laws that already exist otherwise we'll take the law to the state level the way Arizona has.
All of this does not change the fact of whether or not there is or is not global warming, if there is whether or not it is due to increased CO2, if that is the case whether it is human activity that is responsible, or that the economic consequences of a major shif to the American economy to try to ameliorate it will bankrupt the US and the entire world but will not slow or stop global warming, especially if China, India and others continue to increase their output. If human activity is the cause of global warming then the correct course of action is to have fewer humans by limiting the birth rate, not by telling those already alive they must conform to someone elses idea of what they should or should not be allowed to consume for the greater good of someones abstract conception of what is enough. Europe's leadrs have already rejected that idea for themselves, they can't have it both ways, we are every bit as good as they are whether Europeans want to believe it or not. That is how tyrannical dictatorships arise. We won't allow it, at least not for that reason.
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
#156 MarcusAureliusII wrote:
I am very aware and sympathetic to the plight of many Mexicans as the result of their corrupt and ineffective government and of uncontrolled population growth.
1. Have you considered the possibility that the murderous drug gangs, "warlords" and common violent thugs are themselves corrupt? Why blame the government for everything? Why not blame the people for a change?
2. At the same time as blaming the government for everything corrupt in Mexico, you apparently want it to control the reproductive lives of the people it governs!
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bowmanthebard #158.
both your points, as well as MAII's portrayal of history, ignore the long-standing policies of US interference in Central America.
I'd argue that much of today's corruption is a consequence of those policies.
http://latinamcaribbeanaffairs.suite101.com/article.cfm/us_foreign_policy_blowback
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_policy_of_the_Ronald_Reagan_administration
http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?id=384
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jr4412 #159 wrote:
both your points, as well as MAII's portrayal of history, ignore the long-standing policies of US interference in Central America.
Sounds like the "blank slate" theory of the mind, according to which the mind acquires its characteristics through experiences alone.
I would argue for evolutionary theory instead. Unfortunately it means you can't blame the Americans for everything!
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147: MA2.
Assertion is not the same as fact. And here is a typical assertion which does not reflect the facts. When I read newspapers, I read the financial pages as well (I'm banned at the moment , reading from cover to cover takes hours!). It was clear from about 3 years out that most experts (how can you tell?) could see the crash coming, but did not know when exactly or how it would be manifested. They knew its source - toxic mortgage debt in the US, and predicted at least a year out that the first casualty in Britain would be Northern Rock, because of its financial model. It was only after NR crashed that I found out several relatives had (small amounts of) shares in it, or I would have warned them to get out. There were plenty of deniers around at the same time as the cautionary voices. So looking at the facts with a cold eye, it could be that the financial crisis does mirror human behaviour in relation to global warming - warnings are given and ignored, crises precipitated, the innocent suffer more than the guilty.
So how can you tell an expert? It is difficult, and one should not lower one's sceptical guard. One test is that you should be extremely cautious about people who represent opinion as fact. Is analysis of facts the same as opinion? There are grey areas here, but misrepresentation of the facts so assertions can be made to support an argument is a pretty rapid way to lose trust. And once trust has gone, the rest of the argument is regarded with suspicion. As shown by a few emails exchanged by climnate scientists. I do admire the attempt to have a rational argument; but for some here, there is so much rage, a world that has it in for them personally, as if anyone really cares.
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bowmanthebard #160.
"..the "blank slate" theory of the mind ... I would argue for evolutionary theory instead."
thing about mammals (incl. humans) is that behaviour is mostly acquired through learning.
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Tie a bow in your beard;
I'm not here to discuss the politics of Mexico but if you must bring it up;
"1. Have you considered the possibility that the murderous drug gangs, "warlords" and common violent thugs are themselves corrupt? Why blame the government for everything? Why not blame the people for a change?"
Every country in the world has criminals. It is the job of government to capture, prosecute, and punish them as a deterrence of future crimes and to remove them from society at least for a time. But Mexico's government has been thoroughly corrupt from time immemorial and long before the drug cartels ever existed. What do you mean by "the people?" Some people are criminals, some work for the government to enforce the law and if they don't they are criminals themselves, and then there is the overwhelming majority of the population that just wants to be left alone.
"2. At the same time as blaming the government for everything corrupt in Mexico, you apparently want it to control the reproductive lives of the people it governs!"
In case the previous 159 posts on this thread have escaped you, let me remind you that this is a blog about the environment and we are talking about the question of CO2 causing global warming. I don't see why some who construe a right to bear children as any more justified in their position as my right to burn as much carbon based molecules as I want and can afford to make my life as interesting, comfortable, and convenient as I possibly can. Your discussion of the right to bear children is not germane to this topic but if you want my opinion, I see no reason to give up my rights and the way I want to run my life so long as others will not give up theirs within whatever context they live in. So if everyone else will not make sacrifices to save the planet, neither will I and I will defend my right to live as I choose as forcefully as I can. Others feel the same way including the Chinese, the Indians, the leaders of the EU, and most Americans. If many Europeans want to make a sacrifice all by themselves, I won't stand in their way but don't pontificate to me, I'm deaf to it.
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reason_ing;
Science does not offer absolute truths, just the best models that are consistent with observations. True scientists who want to be accepted by their colleages and by the wider public on important issues reveal all of their observations, make an honest attempt to gather all other observations made by others, and arrive at theories that are as consistent with all of them as they can. Then when they publish them, they are open to the scritiny of other scientists. The climatologists didn't do that. They concealed much and were only outraged by their concealment being unmasked. They did not even pretend to try to explain away their inconsistencies.
When they do that and are found out, they themselves are revealed to be not scientists but advocates. That is a major difference. Science tries to find an objective truth wherever the facts lead them, advocates try to impose their on predetermined truths by whatever means of persuasion they have available to them including masquerading as scientists. That's what happened here. Once someone is revealed to be an advocate, nothing he or she ever says again can be taken seriously by people who trust to science alone. It is one thing to be proven wrong, it's quite another to be proven a liar and a fraud.
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MarcusAureliusII #164 wrote:
Science does not offer absolute truths, just the best models that are consistent with observations.
This is a confusion of truth and certainty. Science never gives us certainty, but it does yield truths. Truths are as objective or "absolute" as you like -- it's just that we can never be sure when we have them.
For example, I have no idea whether the tallest mountain on Venus is higher or lower than Everest. So I have zero certainty about it. But if that mountain is taller than Everest, it really is, and the sentence 'the tallest mountain on Venus is taller than Everest' is absolutely true.
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Tie a bow in your beard;
And what does your logic have to do with the fact that the so called scientists at EAU didn't publish all of their facts and then were revealed to have fudged their conclusions that they asserted as the best theory to explain only the facts. But it was only the facts that supported their pre-determined conclusion, while the others were concealed. They lied and they never apologized for it or explained themselves. They not only discredited themselves and everyone who used their fiction as the basis for their own advocacy but they set their own cause back substantially. That is one of the contributing reasons why Copenhagen was a failure and why their movement is all but dead now. It's much harder to assert a conclusion when its principal advocates have been discredited as frauds and liars even if their conclusions were right. They blew their whole case out of the water. Since December China has fired up over 50 more coal fired power plants according to the rate of two a week BBC published some time back. Nothing is happening to slow it. It appears nothing will until the climate itself imposes its punishment.
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MarcusII @ #163: “In case the previous 159 posts on this thread have escaped you, let me remind you that this is a blog about the environment and we are talking about the question of CO2 causing global warming. I don't see why some who construe a right to bear children as any more justified in their position as my right to burn as much carbon based molecules as I want and can afford to make my life as interesting, comfortable, and convenient as I possibly can. …… If many Europeans want to make a sacrifice all by themselves, I won't stand in their way but don't pontificate to me, I'm deaf to it.”
Marcus, there IS a thread within this post on the human geographic impact of climate change on populations, starting with Bangladesh and now focussing on Mexico. ‘We the people’ reserve our inalienable human right to discuss matters other than CO2 !
What bothers me about your postings on this thread is that you (and I guess, the central swathe of the USA) totally reject the commonality of humanity. I know that you are one of the Americans that HAVE used your passport; surely this has opened your eyes to a wider vision of the world, and that whilst we might fight for our nation’s boundaries, we survive as a species together.
Though I never met the butterfly that flapped its wings in Bangladesh, I was sorry to see the result of its flap in New Orleans, Chaco canyon and the Dust Bowl. Let’s hope its next flap is not targeted on New York ….. and try TOGETHER to persuade it to flap with less vigour.
Very few of today’s nation states can INDIVIDUALLY impact on climatic vigour (USA, China; and India, perhaps). These nations truly do have the individual capacity to destroy the biosphere – by both action AND by inaction. The puny action of the UK reducing its CO2 output by 30% is brought to naught by a single day of Business As Usual in the USA or China. These nations may command the world by economic and military power – Little League. With respect to the world climate, the USA and China are in the finals of the Big Boys’ Game. For God’s sake – don’t you see that, in this game, you have got to both play on the same side!
Nations have rights and they also have responsibilities that extend worldwide. Are there populations out there in these key nations with enough understanding (and fear) to make their leaders big enough and clear-sighted enough to act decisively IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY?
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MarcusAureliusII #166 wrote:
what does your logic have to do with
Nothing much; I thought it was interesting, that's all.
A lot of statistics seems to suppose something like "true = probability 1"
and "false = probability 0", which is a terrible confusion.
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MarcusII @ #156: ”All of this does not change the fact of whether or not there is or is not global warming, if there is whether or not it is due to increased CO2, if that is the case whether it is human activity that is responsible, or that the economic consequences of a major shift to the American economy to try to ameliorate it will bankrupt the US and the entire world but will not slow or stop global warming, especially if China, India and others continue to increase their output. (***) If human activity is the cause of global warming then the correct course of action is to have fewer humans by limiting the birth rate, not by telling those already alive they must conform to someone else’s idea of what they should or should not be allowed to consume for the greater good of someone’s abstract conception of what is enough.(***) Europe's leaders have already rejected that idea for themselves, they can't have it both ways, we are every bit as good as they are whether Europeans want to believe it or not. ”
I was part of the post-wwII Baby Boom. We still live, and in great numbers - a huge drain on the resources of the state and those that pay their taxes to keep us all going (in England, that is; in the USA you pay ever-higher age-related health insurance premiums). Can I ask you, Marcus, to think about how many years it would take for the world’s population level to stabilize through world-wide birth-limitation programmes at a level that would stabilize the tropospheric CO2 level at, shall we say, a world-wide mean 600ppm? I think you will find that the key to your approach is in reducing the number of family groups of ‘consumers’ of carbon, not in reducing the number of babies – the time-lag is just too great. By the time baby-control kicks in to influence the CO2 the ambient tropospheric level should be well over 1000ppm ….. and by then the butterfly will be kicking us in the cohones.
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Marcus @ #156: “Trying to frighten us by raising the spectre of global warming causing more illegal migrants to come here won't work. ….”
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Marcus, I’m not doing this, it’s the world’s refugee agencies and Princeton University. I know you’re not part of the Gun Lobby, but please don’t shoot the messenger!
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Perhaps the solution is to make them legal; you know, by adding another star to the Union flag, and erecting a more satisfactory wall at the much shorter border just south of Mexico. ;-)
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GeoffWard;
"What bothers me about your postings on this thread is that you (and I guess, the central swathe of the USA) totally reject the commonality of humanity."
Everytime I hear a phrase like "the commonality of humanity" I put my hands in my pocket and clutch on tight to my money because it's a sure thing the next words I hear from that direction is going to cost me something.
"With respect to the world climate, the USA and China are in the finals of the Big Boys’ Game. For God’s sake – don’t you see that, in this game, you have got to both play on the same side!"
Tell it to the Chinese. I always said Euro-ecologists were wasting their time bashing America, they should have persuaded China instead. If they had succeeded doing that, America would have had no choice but to go along too. BTW, the US and China are playing on the same side in case it escaped you. It just doesn't happen to be the side you want it to be. EU leaders are also playing on that side and when it was pointed out to them in public three years ago, they told the public to mind its own business and it was no one's affair but their own. If you look at Americans as being equal to or better than your own leaders, you will accept that they won't be told by Europeans what to do. That's how we see it.
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Re 153. CanadianRockies:
"And what do you make of the exceptional 'hot spot' that pops up in Brazil, where there is NO data?"
What basis do you have for claiming there's no data? The 1200km maps are not simply smoothed versions of the 250km maps.
You might find that the 1200km analysis is able to include data in that area wheras the 250km analysis has to drop it. For example the 1200km analysis might be able to use several stations 500km apart to produce sufficient data to use, wheras the 250km analysis has to drop such data because it cannot be compared/validated against any other stations within 250km.
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bowmanthebard #165: "But if that mountain [the tallest on Venus] is taller than Everest, ... the sentence 'the tallest mountain on Venus is taller than Everest' is absolutely true."
If X then X is absolutely true.
Rather tautological.
/davblo
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#171 MarcusAureliusII wrote:
I always said Euro-ecologists were wasting their time bashing America
They're bashing America in Europe because they're not allowed to bash the Jews anymore.
Racism comes in two flavours. The first flavour is that of despising one's supposed inferiors, which generally involves treating some humans as sub-human, enslaving them, etc..
The other flavour is that of resenting one's supposed superiors. The latter are supposed to be privileged by birth, controlling, the evil and all-knowing force that lies behind every war and every bank. In the Thirties Europeans said it was the Jews. Now it's the CIA, or Wall Street, or what have you.
It's a pity racism comes in two flavours like that, because it helps the second sort of racist "see no evil" in his own prejudices.
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.
Me @#167:
"...... With respect to the world climate, the USA and China are in the finals of the Big Boys’ Game. For God’s sake – don’t you see that, in this game, you have got to both play on the same side!"
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MarcusII @ #171:
“Tell it to the Chinese. I always said Euro-ecologists were wasting their time bashing America, they should have persuaded China instead. If they had succeeded doing that, America would have had no choice but to go along too. BTW, the US and China are playing on the same side in case it escaped you. It just doesn't happen to be the side you want it to be. EU leaders are also playing on that side and when it was pointed out to them in public three years ago, they told the public to mind its own business and it was no one's affair but their own.”
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My response:
I feel sure that you are referring to your (oft repeated) posting that European leaders drive Mercedes. Can you tell me how this compares in terms of total emissions to the output of the USA and China? – which you know quite well, is what I am writing about.
Yes, the USA and China are playing on the same side; and if they win the AGW atmospheric game, then we might just be saying goodbye to world civilization as we have grown to love it. Sad, isn’t it.
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GW;
"I feel sure that you are referring to your (oft repeated) posting that European leaders drive Mercedes. Can you tell me how this compares in terms of total emissions to the output of the USA and China?"
Irrelevant. You know that. Manuel Barosso is one human being, I am one human being. He drives a car that consumes a lot of gas and produces a lot of CO2 relative to many alternatives, so do I, so do my neighbors. Most everything I buy, use, consume took oil or coal to produce, transport, and deliver as well as its use. Same for Barosso. He's no better than I am or any of my neighbors who want the same things. Neither is Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg, Angela Merckel, Nicolas Sarkozy, or Queen Elizabeth. I have as much right in the one life I live to be as comforatable, entertained, and free to move about as they have. Maybe more.
"Yes, the USA and China are playing on the same side; and if they win the AGW atmospheric game, then we might just be saying goodbye to world civilization as we have grown to love it. Sad, isn’t it."
For some people. For the young. For those who worry about the next generation and those who will follow if there are any. I'm not much concerned. They'll have to take care of themselves just like all previous generations. Let them cut back if they can't accept it. If they can't cut back or change it, then let them adapt to it. Not my problem. BTW, if you stand back and look at "world civilization" it does not have a whole lot to recommend it. I think it's highly overrated myself. And there was no man made global warming before it existed either.
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davblo #173 wrote:
If X then X is absolutely true.
Rather tautological.
Not if you include the all-important quotation marks. The sentence 'snow is white' refers to a bit of language (2 spaces, 3 words, 11 letters), but when I say "snow is white" I refer to frozen crystalline water and a very complicated colour rather than bits of language.
Truth is all about the way those two quite different things are related to each other.
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#171 MarcusII wrote: “I always said Euro-ecologists were wasting their time bashing America” etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
#174 Bowman wrote: “They're bashing America in Europe because they're not allowed to bash the Jews anymore. Racism comes in two flavours. The first flavour is that of despising one's supposed inferiors, which generally involves treating some humans as sub-human, enslaving them, etc. The other flavour is that of resenting one's supposed superiors. The latter are supposed to be privileged by birth, controlling, the evil and all-knowing force that lies behind every war and every bank. In the Thirties Europeans said it was the Jews. Now it's the CIA, or Wall Street, or what have you. It's a pity racism comes in two flavours like that, because it helps the second sort of racist "see no evil" in his own prejudices.”
I think it’s time to draw this thread to a halt. Xenophobia, spite and the covert ‘pointy fingers’ of racism are not the place I wish to be. One day, perhaps with different contributors to this set of topics, we can re-open debate in the hope of something useful coming out.
Disappointed ... but then we don't have to believe in what we write, do we?
It's just a game for lonely old people to help pass the time.
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172. quake wrote:
"You might find that the 1200km analysis is able to include data in that area wheras the 250km analysis has to drop it. For example the 1200km analysis might be able to use several stations 500km apart to produce sufficient data to use, wheras the 250km analysis has to drop such data because it cannot be compared/validated against any other stations within 250km."
Well, that's quite the answer. The word "might" is notable. And "produce." For me the bottom line is very simple. Temperatures can vary radically over even short distances - let alone 250 km - for many reasons aso this whole trick of imagining what the temperature is supposed to be somewhere - to the accuracy they allege, no less - just doesn't cut. Too much "might," too "produced" to be credible.
There's a major scandal brewing in the US over this, which is bound to get truly interesting after the November elections. If NASA et al built rockets like this they would still be on the ground.
But once again quake, I encourage you to join the debate at WUWT. You would add to it... and maybe it would add to you. Last time I checked the commenters had gone over that article rather thoroughly, and it was all very educational. And you would definitely get a much more serious and technical reply to your comments than this one. methrough that
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179. CanadianRockies wrote:
"Well, that's quite the answer. The word "might" is notable."
And notable from it's absence in the WUWT article. The WUWT article, like many of them, jumps the gun by making conclusions before the real investigation has been done.
The hotspot appearing in Brazil in my mind is too odd to not have a legitimate explanation behind it. What's the alternative? That they photoshopped the map and added a hotspot to Brazil? Why would anyone even be so brazen as to do that? What would be the motive? It probably adds no more than 0.001C warming to the Earth over the 20th century.
I could try tracking it down by going through the station data for that region month to month, but that could take weeks. Really WUWT should be doing this, or waiting for this, before making accusations which are then spun as a "scandal" and evidence of "fraud"
It's a feature of life that merely skimming a complex subject will yield lots of questions. A lot of things won't make sense. WUWT seems to interpret such questions as evidence of fraud and conspiracy.
I don't see any evidence they have undertook sufficient investigation of how the extrapolation works. They wrongly think it's extrapolation of temperatures rather than anomalies which suggests to me they have a serious misunderstanding from the outset.
"For me the bottom line is very simple. Temperatures can vary radically over even short distances - let alone 250 km - for many reasons aso this whole trick of imagining what the temperature is supposed to be somewhere - to the accuracy they allege, no less - just doesn't cut. Too much "might," too "produced" to be credible."
It's not temperatures that are being extrapolated but anomalies.
"There's a major scandal brewing in the US over this, which is bound to get truly interesting after the November elections. If NASA et al built rockets like this they would still be on the ground."
There really isn't a major scandal brewing over it. The surface temperature records have been reproduced independently time and time again. We could use HadCRUT or the NOAA temperature record of the Japanese one. It shows the similar shape and amount of warming since the late 19th century. The result apparently doesn't depend on anything NASA do.
On certain blogs there are scandals brewing every hour of every day, because as mentioned above these blogs skim a complex subject and interpret their own ignorance as a conclusion of fraud.
"But once again quake, I encourage you to join the debate at WUWT. You would add to it..."
I don't see the point. The article draws a premature conclusion and the readers seem to accept that. I think they all know it. I could point it out, but I think that would only serve to flame.
Additionally if I spent weeks tracking down the reason and it was legitimate, WUWT's credibility wouldn't be hit at all and they would just continue making the same kind of baseless accusations day in day out. So what would be the point?
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quake #180 wrote:
I generally don't follow discussions of climate science minutiae too closely, but this stands out as one of the most magnificent follies I've ever come across. On the face of it, it sounds so insanely stupid that I simply must have misunderstood something:
It's not temperatures that are being extrapolated but anomalies.
Think about this for a minute. What can we extrapolate reliably, and what can we not extrapolate reliably? Give me your best shot at an answer, please!
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180. quake wrote:
"So what would be the point?"
The point would be that your conclusions would face the kind of 'peer review' that is rarely found here and you might actually learn something. Moreover, the readership at WUWT is about 10 zillion times higher than here so your arguments would go further - or not.
"WUWT seems to interpret such questions as evidence of fraud and conspiracy. I don't see any evidence they have undertook sufficient investigation of how the extrapolation works."
You clearly have not read the comments. Each article at WUWT is just the starting point. If it alleges "fraud" or whatever, the commenters put that to the test from both sides.
"The hotspot appearing in Brazil in my mind is too odd to not have a legitimate explanation behind it. What's the alternative? That they photoshopped the map and added a hotspot to Brazil? Why would anyone even be so brazen as to do that?"
Well, they photoshopped polar bears onto ice flows, created fake hockey stick graphs, 'accidentally' used alarming dates for glacier melting projections and ridiculous rates of sea level rise, warned of drowning islands that were not, etc., etc., etc. so what else is new.
To be as charitable as possible, the manufactured Brazil hot spot reveals that there is a flaw with their methods, which in turn questions the validity of all their results. Just another 'accidental' error, to the warm side of course.
The problem is cumulative. If it was just one example of apparent "fraud and conspiracy" that would be one thing. But there is a very consistent pattern, all of which conveniently supports the desired result. And the Climategate emails revealed that there is indeed a "conspiracy" that has totally corrupted the 'scientific' leadership of this thing as well as their chosen "peer reviewed" journals.
And, yes there is a scandal brewing, and it is going to be a wonderful thing to watch... though it will be another sad event for the legitimate science which will be coincidentally damaged. That is what irks me the most about this whole thing. It has done untold damage to the credibility of all environmental science, including that which we really do need to take seriously.
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#155. GeoffWard wrote:
"BBC News-feed, 27 July; Latin America:
"A warming climate could see millions of adult Mexicans migrate to the US as rising temperatures cause a drop in crop yields, according to a study by researchers at Princeton University."
Well, Geoff, if you make it back here you might want to look at this article, which reveals what utter bunk that study is:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/28/border-transgressions/
Eventually you will realize that there is a pattern to these AGW alarmist papers, and it isn't on the side of truth.
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@quake #180:
What makes you think that anomalies don't vary significantly over short distances?
Anomalies are merely a convenient way of expressing temperatures - expressing anomalies does not necessarily reduce the size of the error bars.
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Rockies wrote @ #183:
#155. GeoffWard wrote: "BBC News-feed, 27 July; Latin America: "A warming climate could see millions of adult Mexicans migrate to the US as rising temperatures cause a drop in crop yields, according to a study by researchers at Princeton University."
Well, Geoff, if you make it back here you might want to look at this article, which reveals what utter bunk that study is:http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/28/border-transgressions/
.
I have read Mr Watts' recalculations. Interesting. Has the relationship been destroyed in the recalculation? I imagine the statistical certainty is changed.
Have you noted that Watt fails to spot the link between rainfall and yield differences in each State. Just looking at the temperature relationship is good, but plants also need water. Check it out with Mr. Watts, if you wish; or perhaps do the calcs yourself.
No water is just as potent a driver for patterns of migration as is no food.
Mr Watts is vitriolically graceous about the death of the author; not the sort of person I like, but, when I have time/inclination I might introduce myself to him.
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#185. GeoffWard
Well, Watts did not do that analysis so your comments about your perceptions of him are irrelevant.
And does this kind of statistical manipulation not bother you?
Apparently you did not read the comments which would have addressed some of your points and added still more.
For example, don't plants also need CO2? Don't commercial greenhouses elevate their CO2 levels to increase yields? Yes they do. Hmmm.
As commenters there explained, the North American Free Trade Agreement has had more impact on Mexican agriculture than any real or imagined climate factors.
Mexico is a large country. If one imagines that climate change would cause significant droughts in some current corn growing areas, that production could be shifted to other areas now in the moister tropics or at higher elevations which would become more suitable.
Personally, in terms of food production, I worry far more about the impact of GM foods creating vast monocultures - susceptible to pathogens - than about the impacts of climate change.
The migration trend from Mexico has been reversed recently due to economic factors and the trend in the US is to strengthen its southern borders - despite Obama's current use of the issue for purely political reasons.
Could there be climate change that would impact SOME parts of Mexico (and other countries)? Of course. There always have been and there always will be. Here's one relevant example:
Climate change and population history in the Pacific Lowlands of Southern Mesoamerica
Neff, Pearsall, Jones, Pieters and Freidel 2006.Quaternary Research
Volume 65, Issue 3, May 2006, Pp 390-400
"Abstract: Core MAN015 from Pacific coastal Guatemala contains sediments accumulated in a mangrove setting over the past 6500 yr... document Holocene climate variability that parallels the Maya lowlands and other New World tropical locations. Human population history in this region may be driven partly by climate variation: sedentary human populations spread rapidly through the estuarine zone of the lower coast during a dry and variable 4th millennium B.P. Population growth and cultural florescence during a long, relatively moist period (2800–1200 B.P.) ended around 1200 B.P., a drying event that coincided with the Classic Maya collapse."
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WPN-4HHH5YK-1&_user=10&_coverDate=05%2F31%2F2006&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1416042055&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=791416ba15887c1da3986d98b8af4f3d
In case the link doesn't get through, just google the title. You have to pay to see the whole paper but I think the abstract says enough. Imagine, pre-industrial climate change! What could have caused it? Why do the high priests of the Sun Gods remind me of the IPCC? Should we start sacrificing virgins or will higher taxes do?
Needless to say Geoff, I find the whole overhyped AGW hysteria to be a crock. But the issues you raise about human migrations and other future problems will be real in the future for other real reasons. Like population pressures and scarce resources.
In the meantime, why bother premising your points with alarmist predictions about things which may not happen?
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116. At 1:49pm on 26 Jul 2010, MarcusAureliusII wrote:
"For example, we have no data regarding the variations of the sun's heat output or surface temperature over time. The notion that the sun is a constant is probably false. That's just one example."
Actually that is false, variations in the Sun's output have been observed for some time. Have you heard of the Sun Spot cycle? In the 1980's NASA launched a satellite to measure the Earth's radiation budget, which is a function of incoming and outgoing radiation.
Just because you don't want to believe something, doesn't make that something ipso-facto false. Stop blaming the science community for your inability to deal with bad news.
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98. At 05:43am on 26 Jul 2010, CanadianRockies wrote:
"P.S. Just to correct you, as I explained to you before I am retired from a career in natural resource management which involved ecology as the overall context for everything - but I was never called an 'ecologist.'"
Well in your training for a career in natural resource management, did you have occasion to study basic statistics? If you did, did you learn about analysis of covariance? If so, do you consider it a valid statistical method?
How would you have adjusted the station measurements? It seems NOAA was making corrections for the factors that previous critics had claimed made the station measurements bias. If the adjustments had shown a cooling would you be so critical?
I've noticed you have a hate list of some of the most prominent names in the environmental movement and ecological science. Could you give us a complete list all in one place. Perhaps with a side note listing their sins. I am sure the readers of this blog would find it entertaining.
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101. At 10:20am on 26 Jul 2010, polly_gone wrote:
"I agree there is an 'either/or' at work. Either all humans are superfluous or all humans are not superfluous. Sticking a 'yardarm' in is like security at a pop concert - 'I decide when we are full' - which has a habit of not being relevant at all."
You might want to check out Garrett Hardin, "The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia" 1999, Oxford Univ. Press, where he quotes Malthus second edition on pages 100-101.
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120. At 2:05pm on 26 Jul 2010, LabMunkey --
Just in case you missed it in my post on an earlier page:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antarctica_Melting.html
So what is your explanation for the increased melting?
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154. At 10:14pm on 27 Jul 2010, MarcusAureliusII
I don't know if you keep copies of your own posts, but if you do you might find it revealing to read them all in one sitting and see if they even make sense to you.
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@HungeryWalleye #190
Just in case you missed it in my post on an earlier page:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antarctica_Melting.html
So what is your explanation for the increased melting?
I'm not sure we need to give an explanation since NASA explained on your link page:
The latest data reveal that Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate, too. How is it possible for surface melting to decrease, but for the continent to lose mass anyway? The answer boils down to the fact that ice can flow without melting.
They also tell us that little, if any, surface warming is occurring over East Antarctica (East Antarctica is by far the lager proportion of the continent)
Later on in the same article, they do state that the waters around the WAIS have warmed, but tell us nothing about what caused the warming. But wait! Could the reason for the melting be wind related:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008GL034939.shtml
Results are presented from an isopycnic coordinate model of ocean circulation in the Amundsen Sea, focusing on the delivery of Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) to the inner continental shelf around Pine Island Bay. The warmest waters to reach this region are channeled through a submarine trough, accessed via bathymetric irregularities along the shelf break. Temporal variability in the influx of CDW is related to regional wind forcing. Easterly winds over the shelf edge change to westerlies when the Amundsen Sea Low migrates west and south in winter/spring. This drives seasonal on-shelf flow, while inter-annual changes in the wind forcing lead to inflow variability on a decadal timescale. A modelled period of warming following low CDW influx in the late 1980's and early 1990's coincides with a period of observed thinning and acceleration of Pine Island Glacier.
To quote a poster on this thread:
"Just because you don't want to believe something, doesn't make that something ipso-facto false."
/Mango
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HungeryWalleye #188 wrote:
did you have occasion to study basic statistics? If you did, did you learn about analysis of covariance? If so, do you consider it a valid statistical method?
I wonder why you ask this. I have many problems and conceptual faults to find with the "analysis of covariance" -- in my opinion it's a showcase of statisticians' epistemological naivete . Could you please explain in layman's terms what covariance has to do with natural resource management?
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PS
Don't forget there is an active volcano below the WAIS close to the Pine Island Glacier:
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/press/press_releases/press_release.php?id=341
?Mango
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193. At 08:57am on 01 Aug 2010, bowmanthebard wrote:
"I wonder why you ask this. I have many problems and conceptual faults to find with the "analysis of covariance" -- in my opinion it's a showcase of statisticians' epistemological naivete . Could you please explain in layman's terms what covariance has to do with natural resource management?"
Always interesting how the deniers team tag on questions not directed at them. I do not think this blog is the place for me to start a course on basic statistics; however, if you are really interested you might try reading a copy of "Biometry" by Sokal and Rohlf. It has been a standard text in applied statistics for people in graduate studies in Natural Resource Management and Biology for decades.
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@HungeryWalleye #195
Always interesting how the deniers team tag on questions not directed at them.
it's a blog, that's how these things work
/Mango
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HungeryWalleye #195 wrote:
"Always interesting how the deniers team tag on questions not directed at them."
A blog is a "public" forum -- views are openly expressed so that anyone who wants to respond can do so. The public nature of a blog is essentially an invitation for responses, and I would have thought that most bloggers welcome responses. Apparently not.
The internet provides other places where specialists can send private communications to each other, refer each other to "authorities" and so on, but a blog just isn't that sort of thing.
I know b*****-all about natural resource management, but I have given quite a bit of thought over the years to co-variance and the logic of identity. If you deigned to stoop from the dizzy heights of graduate study in Natural Resource Management and Biology, by honestly trying to explain things in your own words, you might actually learn something.
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197. At 7:39pm on 01 Aug 2010, bowmanthebard wrote:
"The public nature of a blog is essentially an invitation for responses, and I would have thought that most bloggers welcome responses. "
I have no problem with your commenting, I was just hoping to get a response from CanadianRockies since he disparaged the adjustments made by NOAA to the station readings. I was trying to gauge whether he accepted the idea of adjusting for unwanted sources of variation.
"...but I have given quite a bit of thought over the years to co-variance and the logic of identity...by honestly trying to explain things in your own words, you might actually learn something."
Yes, please do expound on the results of your thoughts on analysis of covariance and the logic of identity. In your own words of course. But please no blowing the horn at the tulips. They might not flower next year and I wouldn't want you to take the heat for it.
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198. HungeryWalleye wrote:
"I was just hoping to get a response from CanadianRockies since he disparaged the adjustments made by NOAA to the station readings. I was trying to gauge whether he accepted the idea of adjusting for unwanted sources of variation."
OK. I will try to explain this is the simplest possible terms. Yes, I do accept the necessity for adjustments to data when the conditions of their collection have changed. That is essential if the data is supposed to be standardized for comparisons.
However, if you look at the conditions which have actually changed - increasing UHI effects - as well as the changes to the composition of the sources of that data - fewer of them with an increased bias towardsstations influenced by UHI effects -, the only logical adjustments would have been DOWNWARD, not upward as done.
So your use of the word "unwanted" was actually very revealing.
Moreover, the whole idea of comparing older data, back to 1880 in the extreme case with more recent data, and doing so to one-tenth of a degree, is a joke due to what should be obvious reasons - like changes in monitoring and data collection technology. Or are you suggesting that 1880s monitoring was as rigorous and precise as modern monitoring is alleged to be?
So, it all comes back to the raw data, no matter how many statisticians work it over, and no matter how valid their methods might optimally be.
No doubt they could have done some very impressive statistical analysis of the destructive power of those Iraqui WMDs. And I hope you are enjoying all the impressive statistics on the 'green shoots' in the US economy, those 'better than expected' corporate results and all the jobs that were 'saved.'
Walleye, I must say that I think your faith in 'official' data is seriously naive, at least as long as it supports your predetermined beliefs. But then, given that you are in Phoenix (as I recall), a hot place now made even hotter by vast areas of concrete, I can see why you might be predisposed to believe in The Warming.
And by the way, do you have an air conditioner? Lot of them in Phoenix. What comes out of the external vents of one of those?
The real walleye is a fish that is found in cool to cold water (and a most delicious one when caught from the latter). Perhaps living in that hot climate has made you too prone to chasing shiny lures?
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
199. At 10:34pm on 01 Aug 2010, CanadianRockies wrote:
"But then, given that you are in Phoenix (as I recall)..."
Nice try, I've never lived in Phoenix or even
Arizona (unless you want to count some time spent in motel rooms while on work assignments in another Arizona cities).
I know about Walleye -- I have caught and eaten them -- substantially further south than the U.S. Canada border. My favorite too. You just need a lake deep enough to have an oxygenated area below the thermocline during the summer months.
And just what do you consider my pre-determined beliefs to be? Given how far you missed my place of residence it would be interesting to know.
What about your own pre-determined beliefs? -- do they determine your take on the AGW issue? If not, how do you manage -- perhaps you could give the rest of us misguided souls pointers on how to be more objective.
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#201. HungeryWalleye wrote:
"Nice try, I've never lived in Phoenix or even Arizona"
Sorry, I confused you with someone else; now that I think of it, that was a blogger named 'Wichitazen,' originally from Wichita but now living in Phoenix. But at my age that happens. And, on that tangent, thanks for identifying the author of 'The Selfish Gene' for me on another thread here.
My favorite walley fishing and eating memories come from lakes in northern Alberta, cooked over a fire on white sand beaches. Caught tons of them, up to about 10 pounds, and much bigger northern pike... mostly catch and release but had to eat a few. But my favourite eating fish are rainbow or cutthroat trout - little ones - caught from mountain streams.
No human is objective Walleye. That includes the ones working in science, particularly those working in any 'missionary' type science that claims to be saving the world. The only pointer I would offer to anyone is to be more sceptical. After all, what is the opposite of sceptical?
P.S. I actually prefer to spell it 'skeptical' but I'm just going with the flow here.
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202. At 06:07am on 02 Aug 2010, CanadianRockies wrote:
"No human is objective Walleye. That includes the ones working in science, particularly those working in any 'missionary' type science that claims to be saving the world. The only pointer I would offer to anyone is to be more sceptical. After all, what is the opposite of sceptical? "
Have you ever considered the possibility that their zeal is informed by the results of their science? I've known some who prefer to just publish in journals, get their grants and make no effort to alert the general population when their results have serious policy implications. They want to avoid the assaults inflicted on their more publicly minded colleagues. Do you prefer those who take the latter position?
I've also known folks with technical expertise who sell out to business interests. In one case, a former employee of Fish and Wildlife Service formed his own company and started doing wetland delineation for developers. In one case he delineated an area as uplands that was still flooded in the middle of a regional drought. A fact that was video taped and sent to the local Republican Congressman who then raised hell with the Army Corps of Engineers. He has since lost his seat in a primary election where the Club for Growth was a major source of funds for his Republican opponent. The Democrat won the general election.
I have a great deal of respect for people like James Hansen, who are willing to come out and inform the public about what they see as major issues. I don't have much respect for the propagandists and hit men that work in the employee of organizations like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute or the Fraser Institute in your own country.
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The BBC moderators are such a curious lot. I post a comment that I cut and pasted in whole from an earlier page of this blog, with a snip from another and a little introduction to give it context and it gets rejected as defamatory. Given the rabid charges against particular climate scientists I've seen on this blog one has to wonder, is it because the denier "researchers" have more aggressive lawyers? In an earlier post I simply raise rhetorical question:
"Oh yes, sss and rrr of the fff Institute, how could anyone suspect them of agenda driven "research" publications?"
It too was rejected as defamatory.
Seems mild compared to accusations of fraud, lying and conspiracy launched against real climate scientists I see on a regular basis on this blog.
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@ 204 walleye. it may have somethig to do with what's already in the public domain
for example- with the cru lot, there was the whole hoo-hah over climategate, which meant numerous 'institutes' were reporting on it, therefore the bbc could 'report' it as well without being seen as either instigating or condoning the accusations.
If the person/people's you were reffering to have not had any such 'revelations' about them, perhaps that is why the mods are blocking it- as it could be seen as the bbc condoning a particular 'questionable' (from a legal viewpoint) stance?
just a thought.
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205. At 08:56am on 03 Aug 2010, LabMunkey wrote:
"If the person/people's you were reffering to have not had any such 'revelations' about them, perhaps that is why the mods are blocking it- as it could be seen as the bbc condoning a particular 'questionable' (from a legal viewpoint) stance?"
Who knows, I appealed the first one which was the rhetorical question. I pointed them to Wikipedia entries that documented the association between rrr and the fff Institute. If you read the description of the founding of the fff Institute and its mission in the Wikipedia, you will see that they are very similar in outlook to the Cato Institute in the U.S. with a tinge of Heritage Foundation thrown in. My second post was, except for the introduction, just a copy and paste from a more explicit list of the actions of sss and rrr, which is still on an earlier page of this blog, that indicated why I wouldn't give them much credibility.
In regard to your earlier claim that the temperature records are not available, I went to the NOAA web site and noted that they can be obtained for free by domains that resolve to .edu, .mil and .gov. Others do have to pay. Perhaps asking others to pay is a way of avoiding a DOS attack by the more extreme deniers.
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@206.
they may be something in the link they don't like or some issue with the accusation? not sure- but good luck getting a response off the mods. i've asked them to explain a few decisions before and heard nothing.
Re data. interesting 'sugestion' there on the reason for paying. complete fantasy of course- but didn't stop you writing it.
There are indeed large swathes of data available. However a lot of it is purely anomolous data, some shows the adjustments and not the RAW data, some only shows the stations they include in the IPCC reports- not ALL the stations.
The issue is by far not as 'clear' as you are trying to indicate and there are indeed vast amounts of raw data that isn't released and infact is jealously guarded.
Hungery, instead of jumping from issue to issue, taking superficial looks and deciding you're right- how about addressing mango's questions on climate sensitivity.
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207. At 10:32am on 04 Aug 2010, LabMunkey wrote:
"Hungery, instead of jumping from issue to issue, taking superficial looks and deciding you're right- how about addressing mango's questions on climate sensitivity."
So you think I should repeat JaneBasingstoke? I believe she has addressed Mango's assertions on climate sensitivity quite adequately. I would rather make other points and not spend my time repeating all of her work.
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