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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

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Comments 53301 to 53350:

  1. citizenschallenge at 00:12 AM on 23 September 2012
    PBS False Balance Hour - What's Up With That?
    Thank you for that informative article Dana. Thought I should let you know I couldn't resist reposting at my little blogspot. What's Up With That Watts.blogspot Keep up the great work !
  2. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Edit for #21 - link changed. There are links to the sources on that page at Neven's.
  3. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    John... Just trying to keep the information available up to date... We know what certain people will do with certain information. But yes, it is a really neat animation. I just wish they'd linked back to the original NASA sources so that we didn't need to trust their interpretation.
  4. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Thanks #20 - the correct link is the one just above in the text, pointing to Neven's blog where its context is described.
  5. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    The 'You are here'-graph of 2012 is linked to the 2011-graph, you might want to fix it.
  6. PBS False Balance Hour - What's Up With That?
    I still hope that those guys at PBS will reconsider and issue some sequel of even an appology, if presented with the evidence of their bad journalism. Their programs were such an educational inspiration for me when I was living in US and learning English (my fourth language), i.e. from WTTW "Window To The World" station in Chicago, IL... Now, I realise Hartland is also located in Chicago, and that Heartland has reccomended Watts as "a balance in this debate". I feel so shamefully disappointed... Is it just one freaky mishap, or is the quality of PBS going bankrupt?
  7. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Dave #17, That's a neat animation of the winds. From the accompanying text: "Weather data collected by NASA suggests that this summer's record Arctic ice melt may have been partially due to a powerful cyclone..." I don't think anyone's claiming that it had no role, but it was not the overall cause.
  8. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Hm...I think there's a meme left off the list: It's really more due to soot from the Chinese coal burning than it is due to Global Warming- after all Jim Hansen himself has said soot has twice the impact of CO2: Hansen 2003
  9. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Reuters reports that un-named NASA sources are blaming the cyclone: Reuters Video hosted at CNN in the meantime, well known climate change squirrel Rush Limbaugh hasn't gotten around to blaming "Feminazi's" for the shrinking ice...he's focused on matters closer to home More important that sea ice shrinking
  10. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    John Mason: We have to find a way to get the PBS News Hour folk to read your article. It prooves beyond any reasonable doubt why their recent interview of Anthony Watts was such a farce.
  11. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    John Mason: Brilliant! John Stewart and Sephen Colbert had best start looking over their shoulders.
  12. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Excellent write up there John - and that last graph really sums it up well. Also now linked on my blog.
  13. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Skywatcher - thanks for spotting that! Have edited the text with date of edit flagged. It was a last-minute addition that I got from eyeballing the NSIDC Antarctic graph. Next time I shall take my time with such alterations!
  14. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Estiben #10, Well spotted! I was enquiring after the health of said canary - Anthony assured me that it was "just resting". I have since taken the liberty of examining it properly, and I discovered that the only reason it was sitting on its perch in the first place was because it had been nailed there!
  15. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Number watching... The last two Arctic sea ice news posts at WUWT have been pushing the turning point of the big refreeze. The first one asked if the late season melt had "turned the corner" yet. No, it hadn't. A couple of days ago the agenda was a bit starker, headlining with 2012 Arctic sea ice minimum reached, it’s all gain from here WUWT must downplay this in every way possible. Latest daily extent from MASIE, which Anthony Watts himself gave the gold seal of approval, has the lowest extent for the year. 3529012.32 3452809.48 3398785.21 3520791.45 3544682.16 [WUWT: "It's all gain from here"] 3438433.28 3368882.08 It's not that WUWT was wrong, it's that Watts, who should know so much better considering the amount of text devoted to emphasising weather influence on September minimum at WUWT, needs so desperately to control the narrative he sets himself up for the gaffe. I should be a bit careful myself - that last value could be adjusted upwards tomorrow, but not by enough to mar the point.
  16. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    Mal Adapted @34 A couple of the things that the Ars Technica article didn't point out was that since the OMB reports on climate change expenditures were produced by the Executive Office of the President, items like research into improved nuclear power plants and "clean coal" technology were included in the accounting. This can be verified through a Congressional Budget Office report from 2010 and a General Accountability Office report from last year: http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/112xx/doc11224/03-26-climatechange.pdf http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-317 That isn't the main thing that bothers me about his comment, though. First, he wants to compare an input {lobbying contributions) with an output (climate funding) and treat them as somehow equivalent, which seems odd to me. He might be better served to look at output vs. output, in terms of the subsidies provided to the fossil fuel industry, mainly permanently via quirks in the tax code, vs. the subsidies provided to green energy, which mostly sunset too quickly to count on. The Environmental Law Institute did a good paper on comparative subsidies between 2002-2008 http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/112xx/doc11224/03-26-climatechange.pdf which found that out of slightly over $100 billion in subsidies, the fossil fuel industry got $72 billion and renewables got $29 billion, nearly half of which went to corn-based ethanol subsidies ... hardly a climate scientist's wet dream. Worst of all, I am pretty sure this guy doesn't know any actual scientists. If anybody with the mental horsepower to get a hard-science PhD was that motivated by the money, they could have gone into medicine, law or Wall Street and made ten times the money for half the effort. Mostly they do what they do because they love doing it and couldn't imagine doing anything else. This may seem counter=intuitive to most people, but the more scientists you meet, the clearer the evidence becomes. Best wishes, Mole
  17. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Great article, John, and some of the links in the comments have me giggling, too. Only one complaint, your canary metaphor is a little muddled. If there is something wrong in the mine, the canary doesn't tweet louder, it keels over. I'm afraid one of the canaries is dead.
  18. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Nice article John. But a wee correction required for the Antarctic ice minimum, which is much lower than 12million sq km (depending on area/extent measure, probably 1.5-5 million sq km).
  19. PBS False Balance Hour - What's Up With That?
    "The journalist conditioning to which Rob painting so validly refers is partly a response to the fact that controversy sells." Bernard J, it was *ALL* predicted, uncannily, or at least summed up nicely, here. This tendency has been going on, since time immemorial, and how to combat it, I'm clueless. However, as said above, we *must* try.
  20. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Thank you for a wonderful article, John. I've linked to it on the ASI blog.
  21. PBS False Balance Hour - What's Up With That?
    Yes - obviously difficult because the mainstream audience must be given some serious contextualization in order to be even close to a position to start sorting bad eggs from good eggs. It's like being James Bond as the timer on the bomb ticks down, and in order to understand how to defuse it, one either guesses which wire to cut based on which looks prettier or which color has traditionally meant X (red bad! cut it!), or one uses the last few minutes to read the 3700-page manual (and an additional 84 supplements and updates). Watts offers a glossy pamphlet with the title "Don't worry about it. It's not even a bomb." Boom.
  22. PBS False Balance Hour - What's Up With That?
    The journalist conditioning to which Rob painting so validly refers is partly a response to the fact that controversy sells. If there was a widespread and organised campaign to tell PBS that they have permanently turned audience members away, especially if such a campaign accumulates Facebook, Twitter, or other counts, PBS might start wondering whether they're losing more than they're gaining. Controversy sells, but when more customers are lost than gained because they want to buy the truth rather than fallacious propaganda, it might not be worth selling that controversy...
  23. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    An article by Matt Ridley in the WSJ is right up there in the silliness stakes. It appears that in a effort to play down the impact of the loss of Arctic ice, Ridley is quite happy to make a complete fool of himself. Here is an example. "Although an entirely ice-free Arctic Ocean during at least one week a year is still several decades away at this rate, we are halfway there after just three decades." After numerous distractions involving arctic foxes and amphipod crustaceans, he gets to his main point. "But is the current rapid retreat caused only by warming? At least some of it might be caused by soot from dirty, coal-fired power stations. Some scientists have noticed that the decline in Arctic sea ice correlates better with the rapid growth of coal consumption in China than it does with global temperature. As the argument goes: Soot falling on white ice darkens it, which results in faster melting in summer sun. Correlation does not always mean causation, but if soot is contributing to sea-ice melt, then it is moderately good news, because cleaning up soot emissions from power stations could be both cheaper and quicker than cutting carbon-dioxide emissions." That is why he has a column in the WSJ.
  24. PBS False Balance Hour - What's Up With That?
    Yes, responded with more false balance in the comments section. Sheesh! I think it is extraordinarily difficult to break this journalistic "conditioning" of false balance. But we must try anyway.
  25. PBS False Balance Hour - What's Up With That?
    The PBS Ombudsman has responded.
  26. Extreme weather isn't caused by global warming
    AH, are you suggesting that humans are at the root of most of the desertification in the 4.5 billion years of Earth's existence? Perhaps you're thinking of desertification that has occurred only within the last couple of hundred years. Humans are not responsible for those big dry belts at the horse latitudes. Those dwarf any desertification caused by humans. Why am I counting standing deserts as desertification? Because those big circulation cells aren't permanent. Their development and shifting created deserts. Isn't this all a little obvious?
  27. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Anytime I see a discussion involving Watts and "surface stations" I can't help but be reminded of Tamino's punishing review of his surfacestations.org lead photo of two California sites. Thanks to SKS it's archived here http://web.archive.org/web/20080613192826/tamino.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/surface-stations/ Urban heat index and Antarctica...that too will require some magic....
  28. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    Sirnubwub, I know you through your extensive comments on SkS. You're the author of this little gem: "Can I now present to my classes that the hockey stick argument has been discarded by the AGW proponents?" Your comments are evidence supporting the hypothesis that you're all about the message. There's absolutely no evidence that you can be engaged at depth in any area of the general subject. You want to be able to deliver a certain message, and so your goal is to try to get people on this site to say something useful to that purpose. IIRC, you tried to defend Monckton, who is the very archetype of my understanding of you. You also once said: "This makes the whole debate very frustrating to me. To have to verify everyone and everything is beyond any normal person. I can't trust anyone (Gore, UN, Wattsupwiththat, etc) to do it for me because everyone is suspect. Yet trillions of dollars are at stake." Yet now it is clear that you trust anyone whose message sounds palatable.
  29. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    SirNubwub:
    I guess I don't want to "go to the mat" on this funding issue. I will say that I may be wrong to some degree and stop here.
    Now, that's the mark of a genuine skeptic. Kudos. If you do want to follow up on the funding issue, here's an in-depth analysis of the claim that climate scientists are in it for the money. It includes a break-down of how the author's grant money gets spent.
  30. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    You illustrate a central position that is used for denial, the misdirection and confusion allowed when a particular adjective is applied. Curry’s use of “apparent” is a subjective qualifier that suggests to the reader or listener that there may be some questions as to the relative merit of this “apparent record”. Suddenly it is no long an empirical observation, now it is a “possible” conclusion and one that opens the door of doubt. Reading WUWT and SKS one is drawn to the tonal difference between the two. Where the former enjoys subjective and pejorative insights painted freely with these kinds of adjectival colorations and formulated in the conspiracy of motivation, the later details objective analysis of metrics helped along by a moderated insistence on a discourse that leaves subjective opinion at the door. Though he avoided the loaded adjective I couldn’t help but laugh when I took a look at the comments by Watts where he feels the need to mention that “most weather stations in the Antarctic are near humanity, and humanity requires warmth to survive” or “The Antarctic Peninsula is the most populated place in Antarctica.” I was struck by not only the absurdity of mentioning “humanity needs warmth to survive” but I was left trying to discern how these factoids are suppose to relate to the issue of ice loss or the supposed viability of measuring stations.
  31. uknowispeaksense at 10:30 AM on 22 September 2012
    Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    #6: "Look out behind you! The Antarctic is growing!" This tactic has become popular at places like Jo Nova. But its not just Antarctica they point to. They also choose to divert their eyes from West Antarctica and instead focus only on East Antarctica. One can only wonder which direction they will choose to look when the Antarctic inevitably starts doing what is expected in a more obvious way. No doubt they will rely more heavily on #1-5.
  32. Philippe Chantreau at 09:13 AM on 22 September 2012
    It's not bad
    AH1's style is strangely reminiscent of that of Damorbel's and a few others who cluttered the 2nd law's thread with endless repetition of grotesque nonsense and self contradictions. KR's suggestion is appropriate.
  33. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    SirNubWub,
    I don't have the line-by line expenditures for the oil lobby, nor the government, nor the NGOs.
    Just a point... A skeptical person would have demanded this before uncritically accepting the $79 billion figure published by a denial web site.
  34. Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!
    Very nice explanation. Any "shift in behavior" seems likely to require magic in order to overcome physics.
  35. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    SirNubWub, probably best to drop it, yes. As to the rest, give it your best shot. Be sure to read the reference materials found in the various articles and you'll do better; there's a tendency to get hung on what us amateurs say and forget to check the sources.
  36. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    @SirNubwub: Composer99 took the words right out of my mouth. You made a blatantly false comparison in your initial post. My post was about the stakes in the game. The fossil fuel industry will do everything in its power to preserve "Business as Usual" and to prevent and delay the governments of the world from taking meaningful actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At stake for the fossil fuel industry is Trillions of dollars of future revenue. If they can no longer extract the remaining fossil fuels from within the Earth's crust, the industry's projected revenue streams will fail to materialize.
  37. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    Doug bostrom @47 probably. I don't have the line-by line expenditures for the oil lobby, nor the government, nor the NGOs. Shall we just drop the debate and just say that lots of money is being spent by both sides? Actually, the most important thing to me is understanding the real science foundation of AGW, that being whether or not human-produced CO2 is the main cause of the last degree of warming. I will address those questions in other areas of this site. I guess I don't want to "go to the mat" on this funding issue. I will say that I may be wrong to some degree and stop here.
  38. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    @SirNubwub Before staking out a position on a particular issue, it is always advisable to view the issue from a variety of perspective. That is why I recommend that you read the article, Myth of the climate science gravy train: scientists studying Greenland forced to pay their own airfares
  39. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    In #46 I should have said "he compares them as being similar in type by saying that one pales in comparison to the other"
  40. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    Sort of a "one apple and a lot of oranges" thing going on here. All expenditures by the fossil fuel industry on legislative relations as well as PR w/an eye to influencing the electorate are an apple. Expenditures on a myriad of scientific research endeavors some small fraction of which may be indirectly or directly relate to climate change are a lot of oranges. The two don't compare easily.
  41. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    Composer99 @44 Hartz didn't make the differentiation, (he compares them as similar in saying that one pales to the other) so I didn't differentiate them either. If I misinterpreted Hartz, then I will retreat. I am awaiting his reply to my statement #45
  42. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    doug_bostrom @39 (and John Hartz #41) Doug: Yep, I probably over-reacted/misread his actual words. I will concede that. But John: aren't you really saying what I addressed? that the oil lobby spends more than the science gets? (by the way, I only included government spending and not all the NGOs and their money) If I am wrong in thinking that, then I will admit my error and retreat.
  43. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    SirNubwub: It has already been explained to you that monies pouring into science research from governments are for research, which is rather different from legal & political advocacy or marketing/propaganda. Is there some reason why you persist with conflating research with advocacy/lobbying/propaganda?
  44. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    DSL: (-snip-). You say: "Further, you would have to establish that the research supported by the government was fraudulent. I know you believe that, but you have no evidence." So you know what my beliefs are on the credibility of research and you know the quality of research I have in my possession just by my posting two links. And you call ME a bad critical thinker. I know that I make mistakes, but lets try to tone it down a bit. I am a skeptic but I am open to being swayed if people take the tone of Mal Adapted and (-snip-) show me good information. I have many graphs from skeptic's websites that I would like to post on SkS. Hopefully, you folks here at SkS can (-snip-) explain to me why I shouldn't believe what that data says. I will post those on the appropriate sections of SkS at later times.
    Moderator Response: [DB] Inflammatory tone snipped.
  45. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    SKS gets around alright, It is even copied into regional QLD newspapers. http://www.theweeklyobserver.com.au/wordpress/?p=1003 Positive feedback? ,
  46. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    @SirNubwub: Doug_bostrom beat me to the punch. He has accurately articulated what I said and why I said it. If you want to engage in serious discussion on this website, you have to do better than merely regurtitate some worn-out and debunked talking point generated by the Climate Denial Spin Machine.
  47. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    Mal Adapted So the link you showed me has a graph that shows that science reseach only received an average of about a billion dollars a year for the last 20 years. And it states that "a lot" of the 20 billion dollars goes to equipment instead of people. I maintain that the balance of 20 billion dollars is still significantly more than the "millions" that is credited to the oil lobby.
  48. Extreme weather isn't caused by global warming
    DSL, you said, " Land mismanagement is at the root of some types of desertification, but not desertification in general. " But it is (especially if you believe that human CO2 emissions cause Hadley cell widening)- changing rainfall patters or widening Hadley cells do not always cause desertification, ecosystems can and do adapt to changing rainfall patterns (a grassland, which can be much more tolerant of drought, can replace a rainforest and vice versa). The human element which directly reduces the efficiency of the water, mineral, solar, and decomposition cycles create desertification. So to be more precise, the vast majority of desertification is the result of mismanagement of land, as opposed to humans burning fossil fuels (burning trees and grass are land management issues).
  49. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    What John Hartz actually said: Given the big picture of what happens on a global basis, the fossil fuel industry has spent and continues to spend enornmous sums of money throughout the world to perpetuate the Business As Usual conditions that allow it to generate trillions of dollars annually in revenues. Revenue is not expenditure, a simple accounting principle. John can speak for himself better but for me the implication is that if an industry is defending trillions in revenue and many billions per year in profits it has ample motive and means to pursue fiduciary duties on behalf of shareholders, including helping foster a favorable legal climate for business. Is anybody claiming that fossil fuel firms are not faithfully executing their duty to their shareholders? I've not seen such an assertion but perhaps I missed it.
  50. SkS: testimony to the potential of social media and the passion of volunteers
    Mal Adapted Thank you for the link. I will read it with interest.

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