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Stephen Leahy at 07:02 AM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
@Albatross here it is" Canada's govt kills climate bill public wants -
batsvensson at 06:48 AM on 20 November 2010Solving Global Warming - Not Easy, But Not Too Hard
@actually thoughtful I am not trying to discuss the motive behind this post. That would lead to an guaranteed deletion of my post according to the policy rule which clearly states accusations of deception is not allowed. "So, ironically, your main point that it is political is essentially the point of the post. So I remain confused what it is you are complaining about?" Precisely what I wrote in the last statement in my post: this article has nothing to do with the goals (as I perceive them) of this site. Anyway, if you believe there is nothing technological that stops use now, then I understand that as you either are over/under estimating what current technology can do and is able to do or that you would need to rethink this issue much deeper. Again, such claim is an indication about simplifications around the problems related to issue. -
muoncounter at 05:44 AM on 20 November 2010Climate is chaotic and cannot be predicted
#43: "evidence of the chaotic nature of climate." OK, I'll see your evidence and raise you this bit: Even though climate is chaotic, with weather states impossible to predict in detail more than a few days ahead, there is a predictable impact of anthropogenic forcing on the probability of occurrence of the naturally-occurring climatic regimes. ... it is a false dichotomy to suppose that some recently-occurring drought or flood is either on the one hand caused by global warming, or on the other hand is merely due to natural climate variability. Rather, the correct way to address such an issue is to ask instead whether anthropogenic climate change will increase or decrease the probability of occurrence of the type of drought or flood -- emphasis added All that is similar to the comments here: Weather in a given region occurs in such a complex and unstable environment, driven by such a multitude of factors, that no single weather event can be pinned solely on climate change. In that sense, it's correct to say that the Moscow heat wave was not caused by climate change. However, if one frames the question slightly differently: "Would an event like the Moscow heat wave have occurred if carbon dioxide levels had remained at pre-industrial levels," the answer, Hansen asserts, is clear: "Almost certainly not." So even if we accept your premise that climate has chaotic behavior, that does not mean it is unpredictable. End of story. -
actually thoughtful at 05:20 AM on 20 November 2010Solving Global Warming - Not Easy, But Not Too Hard
Batsvensson - the purpose of the post is to point out, contrary to "skeptic" (actually ignorant) claims - there is NO technological hurdle to a carbon free economy (work - yes, decades of it! Profitable work at that) - but nothing technological is stopping us. So, ironically, your main point that it is political is essentially the point of the post. So I remain confused what it is you are complaining about? BTW - humans are pack animals (socially, not as beast of burdens). If you want more solar in the world, put it on your roof. When we get to a critical mass (1 in 100?; 1 in 50) - it will take off exponentially. This is a conversation we can win - and are winning. But it takes every single person who gets the problem taking action. Every one of us MUST act - this is the leadership you can bring to the equation. -
DSL at 05:12 AM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
To further Rob's point, one also does not crack into a university computer system and go directly for emails related to climate science. There are much more juicy targets for free-lance crackers. This was a commissioned job; the buyers had no idea what they'd get. It's not only possible but likely that other systems were hacked but nothing juicy was found. The buyer had to go with the best bet, because having multiple systems hacked would obviously suggest a well-organized effort. The best they could get was to pull "trick" and "hide the decline" out of context, roll up the rhetoric machine, and wait for it to go viral amongst the gullible and those in need of such ideas. -
Marco at 04:47 AM on 20 November 2010Climategate a year later
Ken, please send me your business mails (John can be the intermediate). Don't worry, I will promise NOT to take the most positive view of your business dealings, but try and twist any and all honest remark you made, such that it looks like you are a big fraud and extorted large amounts of money from your customers by not providing them with all required information. More seriously: FOI requests are not something a professional scientist feels very confident with, as it is nothing but administrative work that does not positively affect their work. I know, I *am* a professional scientist, and know there is nothing more likely to get me and my colleagues all upset when yet another administrative rule interferes with our actual work: teaching students and doing research. As a professional scientist I also frequently discuss ways to suppress publication of other's work, most importantly through the peer review process. This, of course, is all related to papers that make fundamental mistakes, willingly or unwillingly. In fact, next week I will submit a "reject" recommendation for a paper, and by the end of this year I will submit a comment that should get the author or the journal to retract a published article. I guess that makes me a bad person in your opinion. My colleagues, however, are happy that someone is willing to do the job several reviewers clearly were not able to do (for whatever reason). You see, that's what we do in science: when people write nonsense, they are called out for writing that nonsense. Gatekeeping, as in keeping nonsense out of the literature, is part of our job. Scientists know that not every opinion is equally valid. -
Rob Honeycutt at 04:43 AM on 20 November 2010The Climate Show #2: Merchants of Doubt and Twitterbots
ClimateWatcher... I believe the IPCC says 2C to 4.5C with 3C as best fit based on the results of dozens of papers on the topic. Call it "Merchants of Scientific Range of Uncertainties." -
Bibliovermis at 04:35 AM on 20 November 2010The Climate Show #2: Merchants of Doubt and Twitterbots
ClimateWatcher, Are you claiming that detailing multiple results based on differing scenarios is sowing doubt? -
Rob Honeycutt at 04:11 AM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
RSVP @45... "At the end of the day, the leak, hack, or whatever, may have been someone's desire to provide certainty on a different level." The claim made by fydijkstra was that the leaked emails "proved" that scientists were attempting to hide the uncertainties in climate science. With over 1300 references to "uncertainty" in WG1 fydijkstra's statement is nothing short of absurd. It's a colossal case of missing the trees while standing in the middle of the forest. At the end of the day, the person or people who hacked and leaked the emails had to go to extreme lengths to create an image of impropriety by cherry picking a total of 3 or 4 quotes out of 10 years of emails. The only certainty of a different level this provides is the certainty that there is a well orchestrated attack campaign against climate science. -
ClimateWatcher at 04:05 AM on 20 November 2010The Climate Show #2: Merchants of Doubt and Twitterbots
The IPCC offers a range of 1.1°C to 6.4°C warming. I think we know who the real 'Merchants of Doubt' are. -
The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect
Michele - Your statement "the feedback radiation isn’t possible" is quite simply incorrect. This is a measured value, observable everywhere on Earth. Your statement contradicts both physics and observations. The sum of upwards and downwards energies is (at equilibrium conditions) zero. Heat flow from incoming solar photons warms the earth, the atmosphere, oceans, etc., and then goes upwards out to space. The greenhouse backradiation (which is always less than the upward IR) slows the cooling of the earth, limits the outgoing radiation, and causes the Earth to stabilize at a much higher temperature than it would have otherwise. Please read the links I provided here. Heat flow requires an inequality in energy flows, not a uni-directional energy flow. Basics: An object has 100 watts of energy coming, warming it until it radiates 100 watts. If you then place a nearby cooler object that (back) radiates 25 watts to the object, it has 125 watts coming in, but is only radiating 100. It will heat up until it's thermal radiation matches incoming energy at 125 watts. Multiple vectors, Michele, not a uni-directional flow. -
Michele at 03:50 AM on 20 November 2010The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect
I try to write my thought in other way. Energy is a scalar physical property that acts in different forms, all equivalent between them. If not confined (potential energy form) it spreads in order to be shared with surrounding, flowing according to the gradient of its density that’s a vector. In other words the energy flow field is a vectorial field and it’s well known that the lines of a vectorial field never intersect, i.e. at any point of such a field exists only one vector (the resultant of whatever number of presumable components) tangent to such a line and the effect caused at that point (the effect of the resultant vector, not the resultant of the effects of component vectors, that are different between each other if there isn’t a linear relationship tying causes and effects) is only one: the vector, if not zero, solely operates in a direction or in the opposite direction. At the Earth’s surface the energy flows as sensible and/or latent heat and as EMR. There will occur only a single sensible heat flow, only a single latent heat flow, and, for any frequency into the whole spectrum, only a single EMR flow that, in not zeros, are directed or upward or downward. Then, the feedback radiation isn’t possible because in this case the vector of energy flux doesn’t comply with the vectorial field line uniqueness rule and it would be in contrast to its gradient and hence to the second law of thermodynamics, that has a general value for any form of energy, not only for the heat. Otherwise we have to come back to 19th century’s *caloric theory*. -
Daniel Bailey at 03:35 AM on 20 November 2010Solving Global Warming - Not Easy, But Not Too Hard
Re: batsvensson (163)"So how to solve global warming, even if we assume every one agrees it is a real threat, is not a technological nor a scientific question but a political issue. Science and technology are only tools in this process not a solutions."
So the $64,000 question is this: How do you provide a solution to the problem without the tools to achieve the solution? One cannot effectively compete in a marathon without legs to run on. Hence the need to begin to address the solutions part of the equation. The Yooper -
batsvensson at 03:25 AM on 20 November 2010Solving Global Warming - Not Easy, But Not Too Hard
If a pessimist may speak, this is just another example of "if we just simplified enough it doesn't look so hard any more". Ex: Assume as scenario such that it (technological) can be so arranged that we can replace all energy sources with nuclear energy. Then who will be the producer? Will, say, Iran be allowed by the international community to produce energy on their own terms or will Iran be allowed consumption only and thus be forced to be a dependent nation. If so, dependent on which country for energy delivery? North Korea maybe? Will Iran care? My pessimistic claims is that this is not a pure technological issue. There is always a politics issues involve when we talk energy production. In my pessimistic opinion it is simplified, ignorant, naive or shallow thinking to believe there is a "not to hard" solution to these problem. The more important question to address first is if there is any (humane) solution at all to this? To know the answer to that question we first need to make sure we actually are asking the right questions to start with and those question will involve growth, urbanization, populations density, birth control, economy, use of land/sea/energy etc, etc, etc. These are known to be hard questions. So how to solve global warming, even if we assume every one agrees it is a real threat, is not a technological nor a scientific question but a political issue. Science and technology are only tools in this process not a solutions. Therefore, and this is my final conclusion/opinion in this matter, this article is not part of the mission statement of what questions skepticalscience.com claims to have as a goal to address and answer. -
Paul D at 03:00 AM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Actually it should be pointed out that British scientists are less fazed by the label climategate than nutty skeptic intellectuals: http://lovelywaterlooville.blogspot.com/2010/09/climategate-and-ghost-train.html There have been many positive outcomes from 'climategate' mostly confounding the skeptics I'm afraid, at least in the UK. -
It's the ocean
h-j-m - Actually, increased CO2 directly increases the backradiation from the atmosphere, warming the ground, the air, and the water. I believe latent heat carries something like 78 W.m^2 averaged over the globe (higher over water, of course), while IR involves ~396 W/m^2 upward, and the atmosphere gives 324 W/m^2 downward, the sun 168 W/m^2. The IR exchanges and incoming sunlight are dominant. Increased evaporation (as someone correctly pointed out) is really dependent upon increased air temperature, as increasing temperature increases the possible partial pressure of water in the air. -
h-j-m at 02:49 AM on 20 November 2010It's the ocean
muoncounter, my point is simple. Repeatedly there are statements made claiming that rising ocean temperatures provide evidence for the anthropogenic global warming theory. Now, let's have a closer look. The logical consequence of this claim is that rising atmospheric temperatures (due to anthropogenic global warming) causes rising ocean temperatures. There are two ways this could happen: Either the warmer atmosphere actively warms the underlying oceanic waters or the energy transfer from the oceans to the atmosphere via evaporation (latent heat) is slowed down. For the first possibility I have not seen any evidence presented so far while the second possibility directly contradicts the implied main positive feedback mechanism (more evaporation causing an increased green house effect of warming). A simple lab experiment could be conducted to prove (or disprove) the possibility to increase water temperature via warmer air above. Create a water column of let's say of 10 m perfectly insulated at the sides and the bottom. Lower a strip with temperature sensors (equally spaced to measure the downward propagation of heat) into that column that is adjustable so that the first measurements will occur just below the water surface (to allow for evaporation losses) and expose the water surface to a (monitored and controlled) warmer layer of air. Now let's say we consider a rise in temperature of 0.05 C at 2 m below the water surface significant that then will be the end point of the experiment. If the sensor indicating 2 m below surface hits the bottom of the container before that it should be considered a disprove. Else you have a partial success and data (energy usage, propagation speed of heat etc.) to start calculations how these findings relate to the reported warming of the oceans. -
Paul D at 02:49 AM on 20 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Arkadiusz Semczyszak@49 the text you quote is not in the text you reference. Hence it isn't a conclusion. Maybe in future you will refrain from misleading. -
Ken Lambert at 01:14 AM on 20 November 2010Climategate a year later
Daniel Bailey #38 I appreciate your sentiments and your previous apology which I described as 'handsome'. Your apologia for the Climategate scientists' understandable errors and frustrations is quaint but misses the big point. What we say on SS might not (in the immortal words of Mark Twain) be worth anything more than a 'bucket of warm spit'. But we are not writing IPCC Reports, nor holding the great responsibility of giving expert advice to world leaders about 'the greatest moral challenge of out time'. Those paid professional scientists who are given this responsibility because of their expertise in these fields were not just conducting their private social lives in these leaked emails -they were discussing business and probably largely in business hours (no doubt out of hours too) in facilities furnished by the taxpayer. Any email I send in my business I know is a legal document which can live electronically somewhere forever. That does not prevent me expressing a robust honest opinion - but I can definitely say that if my business emails were stolen - I would sleep soundly and lay straight in bed as they would contain nothing other than normal business matters conducted in a civil manner. I find it incomprehensible that those involved could be so indulgent, devious and arrogant as to discuss ways to suppress publication of other's work, delete emails which could be subject to FOI requests etc etc...and still call themselves professional scientists. -
The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect
Michele, you have just confirmed what I said here. The amount of thermal IR coming from an object is dependent solely on it's area, emissivity, and temperature. The integrated energy over time (the flux, as you put it), is dependent on the neighborhood, and that determines temperature changes of those objects. There are no standing wave effects. -
batsvensson at 01:09 AM on 20 November 2010Real experts don't know everything
I ask myself when I read this article: does this article try to scientifically address the argument skeptics make or is this article trying to impose guilt by association? I also ask myself why any motivation behind a persons argument is of any significant for the validity of the argument itself? I can only see that a person makes an argument for some kind of motivations but I can not see how the validity of the argument is relevant to these motivations. If there is any significance to the motivation behind making a argument then I would like to know the OP's, Stephan Lewandowsky, motivation behind making his argument here before I make up my mind in this issue. -
Alexandre at 00:51 AM on 20 November 2010The Climate Show #2: Merchants of Doubt and Twitterbots
There's a politician in Brazil that was famous for his corruption scandals (and that's a field that is difficult to stand out, here). On his heydays, he would start the debates by accusing the opponent of corruption. And he happened to dispute elections with some pretty good guys. At that point, to accuse him to be corrupt as well would just give the audience the impression that "everyone accuses everyone" or maybe "everyone is corrupt" - which was already a beneficial levelling of the starting point for him. The tactics are time-honored. Wanna know who's right? Check the scientific evidence. Even the pre-80s science is pretty conclusive (unlike one of the links prom Poptech suggests). Recent science, of course, is more abundant, more accurate and even more conclusive. Once you've checked the science, it's instructive to find out how there's so much babbling about uncertainties or even conspiracies in a field where the science has already so much information. That's where Oreskes comes in handy. -
JMurphy at 00:48 AM on 20 November 2010The Climate Show #2: Merchants of Doubt and Twitterbots
Poptech wrote : "Why not have Nicolas Nierenberg, Fred Singer or William O'Keefe on to debate her and correct the misinformation in her book? Good advice on this from Richard Dawkins, relevant to discussions with deniers or so-called skeptics : Why I Won't Debate Creationists Also, the following George Bernard Shaw quote springs to mind : I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it. No more need be said or written. -
batsvensson at 00:40 AM on 20 November 2010How significance tests are misused in climate science
@KR Berényi Péter claimed that "Induction is not a scientific method.". To this you responded: "I would have to disagree. Induction is not only a scientific method, it is the scientific method. Generalizing from observations and forming a 'universal' proposition is done via induction". Perhaps Berényi claim is that we can not use positive evidence, like induction, as support for a hypothesis to be true and therefore any such attempt is an non-scientific. -
DSL at 00:30 AM on 20 November 2010The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect
Michele, you have unusual ideas about "contemporary presence." In this universe, all "things" are in the presence of all other "things." It is the universe itself as a whole that you need to apply your "unless something else feels its presence" philosophy to. All "things" radiate if they are above 0K, whether the next nearest "thing" is ten miles away and is a bowling ball or 10 million parsecs away and is a hydrogen atom in "deep" space. It sounds like you're saying that a "thing" uses some extraphysical means of "sensing" the presence of other "things." I'm saying "things" because there is actually only one thing, and that's the universe. All "things" within the universe are connected in various ways, even if we can only sense a narrow range of these connections (or not "see" them at all). -
batsvensson at 00:12 AM on 20 November 2010How significance tests are misused in climate science
@Berényi Péter Your claim: "it simply does not make sense to talk about the probability of hypotheses being true (or false). It's either true or false. Of course it is entirely possible we are ignorant about its truth value" In what respect is, given it has been deiced, a hypotheses true or false? -
cruzn246 at 23:55 PM on 19 November 2010It's not us
1. Humans are currently emitting around 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Check 2. Oxygen levels are falling as if carbon is being burned to create carbon dioxide. OK 3. Fossil carbon is building up in the atmosphere. (We know this because the two types of carbon have different chemical properties.) OK 4. Corals show that fossil carbon has recently risen sharply. I get it. 5. Satellites measure less heat escaping to space at the precise wavelengths which CO2 absorbs. Makes sense. Are they also checking to see if the waves that water vapor blocks are escaping less/more? 6. Surface measurements find this heat is returning to Earth to warm the surface. Duh 7. An increased greenhouse effect would make nights warm faster than days, and this is what has been observed. Pretty much the norm for warmer periods. More water vapor available does the same thing. We had a warm period this summer that was all about higher nighttime temps. We also had some of the the highest ever average dewpoints. 8. If the warming is due to solar activity, then the upper atmosphere (the stratosphere) should warm along with the rest of the atmosphere. But if the warming is due to the greenhouse effect, the stratosphere should cool because of the heat being trapped in the lower atmosphere (the troposphere). Satellite measurements show that the stratosphere is cooling. OK 9. This combination of a warming troposphere and cooling stratosphere should cause the tropopause, which separates them, to rise. This has also been observed. OK 10. It was predicted that the ionosphere would shrink, and it is indeed shrinking. OK again, now let's go back into the models and try it with water vapor.Moderator Response: Regarding 5, yes, they are checking to see if the waves that water vapor blocks are escaping less/more. Regarding your "now let's go back into the models and try it with water vapor": The models most certainly do already include water vapor. See Water Vapor Is The Most Powerful Greenhouse Gas, and then Humidity Is Falling. [fixed broken link] -
Norman at 23:14 PM on 19 November 2010Climate is chaotic and cannot be predicted
#41 muoncounter "Insisting that "Clouds alone roughly double Earth's albedo, from 0.15 (no clouds) to 0.31" is possible and should be put into the calculator makes no sense. We do not go from no clouds to heavy clouds. Look at satellite photos; there are always some clouds" But what is the percentage? Unfortunately we do not have satellite photos of the Earth during an ice age and cannot empirically determine the percentage of cloud cover during one of these periods. -
Michele at 23:11 PM on 19 November 2010The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect
KR, sorry I cannot agree with you because the concept of flow implies the contemporary presence of both the supplier and the receiver. There is no flow if either of them misses or neither of them exists. In other words, something exists only if there’s something else that feels its presence. Really, the idea of *absolute* doesn't belong to Physics and perhaps it not even belongs to Metaphysics since *God created the world because He felt lonely*. Conversely, the exact formula of power flux is: P = e*s*A12*(T1^4-T2^4) = (e*s*(T1+T2)*(T1^2+T2^2))*A12*(T1-T2) = K*A12*(T1-T2) formally identical to the others well known expressions of thermal flow. -
Norman at 23:11 PM on 19 November 2010Climate is chaotic and cannot be predicted
Moderator, Before I leave the topic I will post a link that has evidence of the chaotic nature of climate. Dust patterns in ice cores suggest sudden and dramic changes in Global atmopheric circulation patterns. Article suggest climate is chatotic. -
ScaredAmoeba at 22:49 PM on 19 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
@Arkadiusz Semczyszak a) Your comment is off-topic. You should post it in the correct place. b) I'm not sure exactly what your question was. It's more than a little garbled. c) Since I'm not and never have claimed to be a climate scientist (unlike some), directing questions at me will not necessarily elicit a correct answer. I willingly defer to someone who knows far more about this than I. d) I detect a more than a hint of hostility in your post that indicates to me rather more than a purely objective search for the truth. e) I have no axe to grind. I would dearly love AGW to be all a big mistake. I see no such evidence of this. I accept the science in totality, even though I have not read more than a fraction of it. f) There is clearly a great deal of pseudo-science being passed-off as science. g) Much of the climate drivel is funded by vested interests. h) Now if you have a problem with all that, well that's your problem. -
gpwayne at 22:39 PM on 19 November 2010Are ice sheet losses overestimated?
Nice work Robert - been waiting for a definitive context in which to consider Wu et.al. Thanks for that. (It never turned up in my email though). -
Arkadiusz Semczyszak at 22:01 PM on 19 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
@ScaredAmoeba To those who say that really this was not Climategate, I recommend especially the comments on cited by You article Nature News, 15 November 2010; Climate: The hottest year ... and Jones paper: An abrupt drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperature around 1970, Nature, 2010. One of the conclusions is as follows: “Here we show that the hemispheric differences in temperature trends in the middle of the twentieth century stem largely from a rapid drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperatures of about 0.3°C between about 1968 and 1972. The timescale of the drop is shorter than that associated with either tropospheric aerosol loadings or previous characterizations of oscillatory multidecadal variability.” If the affair - scandals, was not, how this work and this conclusions? -
ScaredAmoeba at 21:35 PM on 19 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Nature has reported on the CRU hack. "....More certain is the conclusion that the hack of the server was a sophisticated attack. Although the police and the university say only that the investigation is continuing, Nature understands that evidence has emerged effectively ruling out a leak from inside the CRU, as some have claimed. And other climate-research organizations are believed to have told police that their systems survived hack attempts at the same time...." So all the wild speculation about an 'inside-job' or 'whistle-blower' is just spin. It was most likely a co-ordinated attack, almost certainly funded by those wealthy organisations who have most to lose from a public acceptance of the reality of climate change. And it won't be too hard to work-out who the most likely suspects are likely to be. H/T to Peter Sinclair. -
Paul D at 21:03 PM on 19 November 2010Solving Global Warming - Not Easy, But Not Too Hard
actually thoughtfull - Well the Conservative party in the UK is definitely greener, but they have the problem of having to appease the traditional ideologists in the party. So instead of green 'localism' in order to reduce carbon footprints, we have Conservative 'localism' which is a re-packaging of the ideology of smaller government. The Coalition government seem to be doing OK on the issue of energy, but other issues are of concern, eg. selling forests, changing tree protection legislation etc. But if you analyse the path, it makes logical sense from their POV. Energy creates new businesses, publicly owned forests cost the tax payer. -
ligne at 20:56 PM on 19 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
RSVP: "it's hard to imagine someone "from the outside" would know what they were looking for." there are common tools for searching through large volumes of text for keywords. anyone with enough knowledge to hack a server will also be aware of them. that's certainly the impression i got, considering the zip file contained more than a thousand emails, of which only a handful ever attracted the slightest interest. the vast majority of them were the sort of boring work emails everyone here must see a dozen times a day. if they *were* manually triaged, whoever did it wasn't very selective, to say the least. perhaps more to the point, hacking a third party server to distribute "leaked" documents doesn't sound much like the actions of an honest but disgruntled scientist who just wants the truth to be known. -
Paul D at 20:46 PM on 19 November 2010The Climate Show #2: Merchants of Doubt and Twitterbots
Poptech. How about the appalling anti-engineering and anti-science information on your web site? How can you criticise others without cleaning up your own back yard?Moderator Response: Please, everybody -- there have been discussions of Poptech's list of papers in many previous threads. That subject is off-topic here.
Second try: Apparently some people aren't getting the message. No more discussion in this thread from any side of Poptech's list of papers, please. -
Mela at 20:42 PM on 19 November 2010Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
Here's some information from the Phillip Morris documents (good to have it recorded somewhere). In 1992, a presentation focused on efforts in the ETS domain. As noted above, Seitz was involved in one of these efforts: "Late 1st quarter/early 2nd quarter Procedural Options for Addressing the Scientific Issue Highlighted in Global Warming and Ozone Hole Controversies, Dr Frederick Seitz of the George C Marshall Institute. 40–60 regulators—Ensure credible science TASSC" Seitz Symposium And the GMI document wasn't released to the public until 1994. Indicates that GMI were involved in behind the scenes attempts to challenge moves to regulate ETS, with Seitz as a major player. Seitz has a loooooong history of advocating for tobacco companies.Moderator Response: A reminder to everyone commenting here -- the past three pages include many, many comments about Seitz and tobacco. For the rest of this discussion, before posting further remarks on that subject, please think twice (or three times) about whether anything new is being added. Or put it another way, many many posts on this thread have been deleted as the discussion was going around in circles, with nothing new being contributed. -
terrarossa at 19:51 PM on 19 November 2010Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
I attended the Melbourne talk by Naomi Oreskes. She made the point that the MODs were motivated by strong free-market ideologies. Some of the questions after the presentation attempted to explore this further (but Naomi -understandably because it was off-topic - would not be drawn). It got me thinking, does someone who wants the government to regulate polluters, and limit resource wastage, have to be anti free-market (you may want to read that as socialist). To put this another way, should you be allowed to drive a Hummer as long as you pay for the priveledge ie pay a lot. -
Bibliovermis at 19:33 PM on 19 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Why is an external fishing expedition with the intent of finding something to spin so hard to picture? It wasn't a precise operation. How many emails were stolen to quotemine those few sliced & diced tidbits? -
RSVP at 19:04 PM on 19 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
Rob Honeycutt #36 At the end of the day, the leak, hack, or whatever, may have been someone's desire to provide certainty on a different level. Philippe Chantreau #40 Yes, the word whistleblower is overcharged in many respects, but it's hard to imagine someone "from the outside" would know what they were looking for. The other option is "disgruntled". -
Philippe Chantreau at 18:55 PM on 19 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
The harassment through FOI requests is an invention of Steve McIntyre who has encouraged his readers to outsource them from anywhere they could (so as to give the appearance of being genuine). The intent was to send a barrage of them to the scientists whose work he dislikes. It is a disgusting perversion of what FOIs were intended to be. -
Albatross at 18:52 PM on 19 November 2010Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
Poptech, No Poptech, you are actually the one arguing strawmen. To my knowledge Seitz was not directly affiliated with CTR, but I have not read the many thousands of confidential documents. Either way I did not say he was affiliated with CTR-- although upon reading my posts again, I can see why you might think that is what I was driving at. That was not the point of my posting about the CTR. Odd that it does not bother your conscience that the same company who paid Seitz was involved with forming and funding the CTR for decades. The purpose of the programs which Seitz was paid by Reynolds to oversee and evaluate were part and parcel of their misinformation campaign, and their attempt to create the air of confusion and detract from the negative impacts of smoking. Seitz has admitted that "They [Reynolds] didn't want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking". So he knew that they were trying to hide the truth about the negative impacts of smoking and trying to blame/pin the negative health impacts of smoking on "genetics" or "degenerative diseases"--so blame anything but smoke. Kinda like "skeptics" trying to blame the warming on anything but CO2. He made the choice to be paid by Reynolds, knowing full well about the tobacco companie's strategy (in concert with other tobacco companies) to delay action being taken on smoking. You have been presented the facts by several people here, and choose to ignore them. Sorry, but I can't help you with that. I'm done wasting my time on you. -
Albatross at 17:55 PM on 19 November 2010Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
All, This silliness has gone on for way too long. The contrarian has latched on to one point, and is using it to dismiss all other arguments and evidence against Seitz. They are clearly not open to reason. For example, they accuse another poster of being deceptive. The contrarian picks this quote from the Stokes memo "R.J. Reynolds Industries takes no part in the creation or performance of any research" to support their assertion. That would be highly misleading, both on the part of Reynolds and on the part of the contrarian. Reynolds may not have done the research in house, but they certainly gave a lot of money to front groups like the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR) to do the "research". Stokes says in the same memo being discussed above: "Back in 1954, Reynolds joined to help form the Tobacco Industry Research Committee -- a group made up of tobacco manufacturers, growers and warehousemen to look into questions of tobacco use and health . The organization's name was changed in the early sixties to the Council for Tobacco Research -- U-S-A" Indeed, CTR was founded by tobacco executives at an emergency meeting in 1954. Despite what the tobacco companies claimed outwardly, a memo by Panzer in 1972 betrayed the CTR's true agenda, "the CTR actually worked at "promoting cigarettes and protecting them from these and other attacks," by "creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it, and advocating the public's right to smoke, without actually urging them to take up the practice." United States Judge Hadden Lee Sarokin, who presided over two New Jersey tobacco cases, described TIRC/CTR in 1988 as "nothing but a hoax created for public relations purposes with no intention of seeking the truth or publishing it." CTR's work was described by the Wall Street Journal in 1993 as "the longest-running misinformation campaign in US business history."[Source here] Stokes states again states in the same document that Reynolds provided funds to the CTR: "The Council for Tobacco Research is one of three primary avenues used by Reynolds Industries in funding biomedical research. During the past decade, our company also has become associated with several major research studies on either a joint sponsorship or sole-sponsorship basis." And in the next paragraph: "In evaluating and monitoring the special projects that we fund --particularly the sole-sponsorship programs -- R .J . Reynolds Industries has secured the services of a permanent consultant -- Dr . Frederick Seitz, former president of Rockefeller University. Dr . Seitz is with us today and has agreed to describe these various R-J-R sponsored programs for you." Seitz monitored and evaluated programs funded by big tobacco to misinform, confuse, create doubt and delay action being taken on smoking and tobacco smoke. End of story. And now those in denial about the theory of AGW are using the exact same tactics, and even some of the same players who aided big tobacco in their misinformation campaign are (or were) involved. Oreskes and Conway, and many others have determined this. -
Marco at 17:20 PM on 19 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
gallopingcamel: Rejecting FOI requests is fully legal, an inherent part of the FOI act. If prosecution failed, it's not the fault of those that were prosecuted. -
actually thoughtful at 15:54 PM on 19 November 2010Climategate a year later
The sad thing is, most casual folks got the gist that the scientists did something bad. They did not get the message that it was all trumped up with no basis in reality. As usual, the bad guys have better marketing than the good guys. -
Megan Evans at 15:50 PM on 19 November 2010The Climate Show #2: Merchants of Doubt and Twitterbots
Great episode! Interesting that Gareth mentions steady-state economics. CASSE have just released (as of yesterday) a road map for a sustainable economy, 'Enough is Enough', based on ideas generated in a conference held in Leeds this year. There's a bunch of interesting videos of the keynote speeches from the conference on the site too. Would be interested to hear what people think about the idea of a steady state economy. -
muoncounter at 15:38 PM on 19 November 2010The question that skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'
#41: "the failed prosecution of the people who willfully defied requests for information" Yes, we must vigorously pursue the serious offense of FOIA violations: Such a breach of the act could carry an unlimited fine, but Smith said no action could be taken against the university because the specific request they had looked at happened in May 2008, well outside the six-month limit for such prosecutions under the act. Why bother with such trifles as the criminal penalties for computer hacking? penalties for the offence of attempting to gain unauthorised access to a computer being increased from a maximum sentence of six months to two years -
actually thoughtful at 15:36 PM on 19 November 2010Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
Camburn - China is leading in both coal plants and renewables. China is big. This says nothing about the validity of cap and trade as a market based solution to the climate disruption problem. -
actually thoughtful at 15:33 PM on 19 November 2010Solving Global Warming - Not Easy, But Not Too Hard
The Ville - it used to be that those ugly vent pipes for indoor plumbing were aesthetically unpleasing (and who would put their toilet INSIDE their house?! Eeeeww!) Times and attitudes change. Once we accurately price carbon, all these silly objections will simply disappear (cranks will still make them, but no one will listen). We need to act. My comments have nothing to do with Great Britain, but rather the mindless negativity and defeatism of the post Mike recommended. It looks like Great Britain, as is Germany, is on a path towards sustainability. Those of us in the US can only wish. Our recent elections are moving us backwards at a very high rate of speed.
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