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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 104351 to 104400:

  1. It's the ocean
    h-j-m wrote: "But my understanding about science tells me that in order to establish any hypothesis (e. g. anthropogenic global warming caused by increasing emissions of - mainly - CO2) you need to look at all possible causes and either rule them out or show their insignificance. The history of the AGW hypothesis seems to have developed the other way round." You must be reading a different history than the one I've seen. When Arrhenius first proposed enhanced greenhouse warming from human CO2 emissions in 1896 a whole host of objections (CO2 absorption is saturated, water vapor absorption overlaps, oceans can absorb all the extra CO2, human emissions are too low, et cetera) were raised and the idea was dismissed. It is only as each of those, and many other, objections has been disproved over the subsequent decades that it has become clear that Arrhenius was correct.
  2. It's the ocean
    h-j-m - In that case, prior to accepting your hypotheses (and yes, you did propose three of them) and dismissing the mass of evidence for greenhouse enhancement via increased anthropogenic CO2, you need to display both some evidence for your hypotheses. And point out why that evidence is better than the evidence for CO2. You don't do science by hunting for and debunking all possible and dreamed of hypotheses (as that is an infinite set), which is what you seem to be asking for - you do it by following the evidence, learning what common events and generalizations can be made, and examining the evidence for and against them.
  3. It's the ocean
    KR, no I don't have any evidence, but neither did I forward any hypothesis. But my understanding about science tells me that in order to establish any hypothesis (e. g. anthropogenic global warming caused by increasing emissions of - mainly - CO2) you need to look at all possible causes and either rule them out or show their insignificance. If I were a scientist that is I would do prior to finding evidence to back my intended hypothesis. The history of the AGW hypothesis seems to have developed the other way round. About water vapour: I just wanted to point out that the cited quote can't be correct as there is an established method of heat transfer from the ocean to the atmosphere while I still could not find any hint of significant heat transfer the other way round. By the way, so far the only explanation I encountered about AGW causing oceanic temperature rise was that the oceans are (due to their thermal capacity) the only available heat sink. That clearly qualifies as an assertion without evidence. muoncounter, Thanks, this is the kind of reply I would have generally expected (but seemingly I'm asking too much). Unfortunately the data that is referred to are from a paper published in 1993 and is therefore rather useless given the fact that reports about rising ocean temperatures state them to be most significant in the last decade. Besides, due to the theme of this site you should have selected the alleged additional heat flux from anthropogenic global warming as comparison.
  4. How significance tests are misused in climate science
    Eric - What was Newtonian physics prior to the more accurate measurements? Was it a universal proposition? A complete truth? Or was it rather the best we could do at the time? As is Einstein's physics now? I would recommend for your reading topics on The Problem of Induction, in particular David Hume, Karl Popper, and Wesley Salmon (who I had the pleasure of taking some courses with). Those links contain some overviews and multiple links to further discussions.
  5. Are ice sheet losses overestimated?
    "What I am saying is that based on the known conditions of Greenland at the time of the MWP, compared to the current conditions, it is very likely that the ice loss was as great or greater than it currently is." What are these known conditions that you assume are contributing to ice losses? You know that there is more that matters than just melt right? We have to remove sea-ice, buttressing ice shelves and provide warmer water into the fjords so that the grounding lines of glaciers begin to retreat and cause glacier accelerations when backpressure is reduced... We can't just say "hey Greenland was nearly as warm during the MWP so it means it lost as much ice!"
  6. Are ice sheet losses overestimated?
    Good testimony.
  7. How significance tests are misused in climate science
    KR, here is a simple pre-Newtonian physics: Velocity = Force * Constant. For example, as I push a shopping cart with a constant force, it travels at a constant speed. It attained that speed (from rest) as I applied the force and maintains that speed as long as I apply the force. You might argue there is some sort of theoretical "friction" in the wheels but you will have to show how to measure that friction along with your new theory. Once you demonstrate your Newtonian theory, my theory is not "useful in many cases, but not correct", it is simply wrong and discarded unless your theory allows it to be true in special cases. In your example above, Newtonian theory is 100% incorrect. The fact that it is "useful in many cases" simply indicates that measurements are being taken and utilized with low enough precision to appear correct in Newtonian theory. Those measurements are not "probabilistically correct" in any way, they are simply too imprecise to be correct (for relativity theory) or impossible to ever measure precisely (for quantum mechanical theory).
  8. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Poptech, last but not least, I give you Global Warming and Ozone Hole Controversies A Challenge to Scientific Judgment, by Dr. Frederick Seitz. Here he dismisses challenges to: 1. Nuclear power reactors and the associated radioactive wastes. 2. The use of asbestos in any form - for example, for thermal insulation or brake linings. 3. Acidic and radioactive emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels, particularly coal. 4. The disposal of domestic waste in landfills or by combustion in waste-to-energy facilities. 5. The disposal of toxic chemical wastes. 6. Genetic engineering as applied to agriculture and medicine. 7. The employment of pesticides and fertilizers in agriculture. 8. The passive inhalation of even small amounts of tobacco smoke. 9. The addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels with the asso- ciated hazard of global warming. 10. The use of freons, halons, and related halogenated compounds as refrigerants, fire-suppressor agents or fumigants because of their presumed depletion of the atmospheric ozone layer. Bring a shovel.
  9. Climategate a year later
    Orsekes is a very good historical scholar on this issue. Here's detailed interview with her about role of media and christian evangelicals in pushing climate denial. http://stephenleahy.net/2010/07/13/proof-of-anti-global-warming-cabal-fossil-fuel-interests-christian-evangelicals-and-the-media/
  10. Are ice sheet losses overestimated?
    Related to this topic is Dr Richard Alley's testimony before the subcommittee on Energy and Environment given today (Nov 17).
  11. The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect
    Michele - I may have misinterpreted your post here. Are you agreeing with this article by Tony Wildish or disagreeing? It's not clear to me from your comments.
  12. Animals and plants can adapt
    h-j-m, A problem is not rendered inconsequential if an implementation of a proposed (partial) solution may cause more harm in a given area than it aleviates. Arguing against biofuel farming practices is in no way a valid argument against the effects of global warming.
  13. The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect
    Michele - EM wave superimposition doesn't create or destroy energy, it just moves it around a little. Waves pass through each other unchanged - surface energies may be redistributed by interference. Given incoherent IR (the very definition of thermal radiation involves incoherent emission scaled by object spectra and temperature), wave superimposition really has no effect whatsoever on the greenhouse effect. This is a complete red herring argument. As to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, a cold object (yet warmer than absolute zero) can keep a nearby warm object warmer than it would be without the cold object, simply by not being as much of a heat sink as empty space. See Yes, Virginia, Cooler Objects Can Make Warmer Objects Even Warmer Still and In Defense of the Greenhouse Effect, by Dr. Roy Spencer (self described skeptic). Energy flows in all directions. The sum of energy flows is what is described by the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Consider a warm object (internally heated with 100 watts) radiating 100 watts to empty space, it's at equilibrium. If a nearby cold object radiates 20 watts to the warm object, the total outgoing energy is only 80 watts - and the warm object will increase in temperature until it's radiating 100 watts again.
  14. Dikran Marsupial at 05:02 AM on 18 November 2010
    How significance tests are misused in climate science
    BP wrote "Induction is not a scientific method. It is an heuristic method (one of many) used to arrive at universal propositions of any kind, some being scientific among them. But what makes a universal proposition scientific is not the fact it is supported by data, but that it is not contradicted by any of them." No, creationism is not unequivocally contradicted by any observation, but it isn't a scientific theory. According to Popper the *possibility* of falsification distinguishes scientific theories from unscientific ones. Creationism is non-falsifiable as the deity may have buried dinosaur bones as a test of our faith etc.
  15. Dikran Marsupial at 04:58 AM on 18 November 2010
    How significance tests are misused in climate science
    BP, can you provide a deductive chain of reasoning that establishes the theory of evolution? If not, does that mean the theory is not scientific?
  16. The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect
    I don't tend to divert the attention from the talking point, but the waves superposition is more relevant to energy exchange at Hearth’s surface. Indeed, at any point of the surface there are acting (and traveling opposite each other) at least two EM waves along any direction. The energy flux (Watt/m2) coming in/out at that point is the amplitude of Poynting vector, the cross product of resultant electric field and resultant magnetic field, both obtained applying the superposition principle (notice, there’s a quadratic relationship between resultant field and flux that doesn’t allow to sum the fluxes of component fields because the flux quadruples as the field doubles). Thus, for any frequency, at any point of surface exists only a resultant electric field, only a resultant magnetic field, only an energy flux. Moreover, the standing wave that reduces the flux coming out induces the temperature increase of surface to restore the energy balance at surface. Thus both the energy transfer problem and the GH effect are simply and definitively explained by vector kinematics. The thermodynamics isn’t needed because it muddles up our ideas instead of making them clear. Yet I want to point that the 2th law of thermodynamics doesn’t refer only to the heat flow between two objects; it have an overall meaning that concerns the flow of every energy form, induced by its density gradient. The thermal radiation density, given by Planck’s relationship B(T), is a monotonically increasing function of the absolute temperature. In the empirical relationship between temperature and pressure of a gas, at constant volume, p = const*T, both the terms depict an energy density and are monotonically increasing functions of absolute temperature and pressure. For an energy exchange is needed an energy flow and that occurs only if there’s a not-zero grad(T) or a not-zero grad(p) and the flow happens along the decreasing T or p. If were true to assume that the thermal radiation energy can flow along increasing T, then also heat and the other form of energy could flow along increasing pressure/temperature. In other words it would be (almost sometimes) normal for an adrift boat to sail upstream the river, or for the outlet flow of a water turbine to return spontaneously into the higher feeding reservoir, and again, for a gas escaped by a cylinder to re-enter it naturally. All the cases are obviously absurd because all they contradict the second law of thermodynamics.
  17. Animals and plants can adapt
    CBDunkerson, I just wanted to point out that at the current time loss of biodiversity is due to direct human intervention by far outranking that what can be attributed to global warming. Chances that tropical rainforests are threatened by it are rather slim as studies show that in the tropics forestation is the main factor governing local weather patterns(i. e. they show that deforestation leads to major changes in weather patterns). Some small scale endeavours on the other hand show that rainforest farming (using the biological productivity of rainforests to support the local population) is a viable and sustainable alternative - capable not only to fight poverty but even to allow for modest prosperity -, but they are not getting a chance due to the profits that biological fuels are promising. So far I can only see that in result the global warming theory has led to nothing but an increasing pace of destroying the ability of this globe to support human life.
  18. Are ice sheet losses overestimated?
    I keep hearing this theme from TIS that the current warming is not out of the ordinary. Problem there is, I don't believe that is what sciences asks. The question is not, is current warming out of the ordinary, but rather why is it warming? What are the causes? What might this mean for the future? You can't just say, "Eh, it's been this warm before" and just abandon why. I would be as excited as anyone if science turned up an alternative mechanism to CO2 that has driven current warming, and that mechanism showed that we were just in a temporary warming phase and would now be headed into a cooling phase. The whole world could breathe a huge sigh of relief. But that's not what's happening. CO2 clearly explains past climate change as well as current warming. And the continuing trend in the rise in CO2 suggests that we are in for much more warming that could potentially cause a great deal of disruption. There is a well understood mechanism here with CO2. There is no viable alternative theory that explains what we currently see. Saying, "It's natural" does not explain anything. In fact, it is a casual abandonment of scientific explanation. John, if current warming is "natural" and not driven by man made CO2 it is incumbent upon you to explain the natural mechanism behind that warming. You need to show what it is, why it works, how it explains paleo record of climate, all at the same time as showing exactly why the basic physics of CO2 is so widely misunderstood.
  19. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Poptech, I hate to break it to you, but caps and bolding do not make your failed "arguments" any more compelling.
  20. How significance tests are misused in climate science
    Ned - I think you may be right! I must have mixed that story with the Diskworld series, where the disk rests on the back of four elephants (who themselves stand on a turtle). Sigh. I have to work on my metaphors a bit, obviously. One more note on induction - Our data (outside the most simplistic cases) is never perfect, there's always some noise in the measurements. Newtonian physics was fine until our measurements improved, whereupon we got Einstein. We take these inductively generated hypotheses, test them against the data (hopefully increasing the probability, the inductive likelyhood of being correct), and judge them against other hypotheses based on those inductive supports. After enough evidence accumulates, enough tests performed, we can accept these hypotheses as generally applicable. But - our knowledge is not perfect. Newtonian physics was thought to be a 'universal proposition'; turns out it's useful in many cases, but not correct. We have to keep in mind the separation between the world we live in [the baseline against which we work] and our theories of how it operates [which are our best evaluations, not crystalline truths].
  21. Climategate a year later
    KL...In another thread, we get an unfounded claim that climate scientists don't know how to code and annotate code. Then when someone properly annotates code to clearly indicate what is going on to avoid later confusion, you pick it up out of context as evidence of malfeasance. This feels like another of the internally inconsistent set of arguments used to confuse, in your words, "the great unwashed" about the evidence for climate change. It also makes it impossible for climate scientists to do anything right -- a proper double bind. Very convenient (from a denialist perspective).
  22. How significance tests are misused in climate science
    KR, that reference seems a bit garbled. I've seen versions where it's elephants standing on the back of a turtle, and where it's turtles all the way down ... but is there really one where it's elephants all the way down? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
  23. It hasn't warmed since 1998
    When ENSO-adjusted, why is 2006 the hottest year on record? But NASA GISS shows 2005 as the hottest year on record. Which year is the hottest 2005 or 2006?
  24. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    It is not in of itself evil to take money from tobacco companies, but that argument is obviously a red herring. Remember Poptech, the tobacco companies were succesfully prosecuted for exactly this distortion of research under US racketeering laws. Look at the executive summary published by the department of justice. A central tenet is the tobacco companies knew smoking caused cancer and was addictive, and then sponsored and disseminated false scientific research to make it appear otehrwise to the public and lawmakers to put off regulation. Seitz was intimately and knowingly (unless he is completely incompetent!) involved in that process.
  25. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Poptech #79: "NO THEY HAVE NOT LINKED TO ANY SUCH THING!" Ah, so your position is pure denial. Got it.
  26. Philippe Chantreau at 02:40 AM on 18 November 2010
    Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Poptech, I totally agree that "reports" from the Marshall Institute constitute by no means any kind of valid scientific information.
  27. How significance tests are misused in climate science
    Berényi - "Induction is not a scientific method. It is an heuristic method (one of many) used to arrive at universal propositions of any kind, some being scientific among them. But what makes a universal proposition scientific is not the fact it is supported by data, but that it is not contradicted by any of them." 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 - deduction cannot teach you anything you don't already know. Testing inductive hypotheses for validity, yes, you've described that quite well. But the universal propositions you describe are generated by induction. In fact, even deductive logic is based on induction. Given deductive logic, you can derive interrelationships and implications, starting from your premises and reasoning through first and higher order logic. 1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man 3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal But your premises - those are inductive. You believe them because you have observed them to be valid (all men are mortal), an inductive statement from experience. From a book I read recently - A: "The world is a disk, which sits on the backs of four giant elephants." B: "What's under the elephants?" A: "Oh, from there it's more elephants all the way down..."
  28. Philippe Chantreau at 02:34 AM on 18 November 2010
    Climategate a year later
    Real Climate had a complete discussion of exactly what "hide the decline" was all about, and Ken missed it. Oh well. So-called skeptics have already "redefined" what peer-review is by including such sources as E&E, a publication that claims bias as its vocation: "platform for skeptic authors" were Sonja B.M. own words. The vast campaign of harassment organized by McIntyre by underhanded way of FOI requests is more of a scandal than all the non existing whatevergates balloons launched and deflated.
  29. Climategate a year later
    It is interesting that in a thread titled "Climategate a year later" Ken Lambert quotes Monbiot from a year ago. Soundoff then updates Monbots quote. Why can't the skeptics even keep up with what their own side says? The continual wack a mole gets tiring.
  30. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Poptech - also see the Rockefeller University bio of Frederick Seitz. Seitz was apparently responsible for the disbursement of $45M in R.J. Reynolds funds donated for research - and the documents revealed in the legal case against tobacco revealed that this was part of the strategy to "obfuscate the true health effects of smoking", simply a PR campaign. Did the research give the tobacco industry political cover? Seitz - “I’ll leave that to the philosophers and priests.”
  31. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Poptech - I would refer you to the Philip Morris Feb. 1994 Activity Report, paragraph 1, on strategies for dealing with second hand smoke (ETS). "Initiated a strategy to publicize and communicate the results of a Marshall Institute report that challenges the scientific basis of various environmental regulations . The report was written by Dr . Frederick Seitz who is a world renowned scientist. Dr . Seitz is President Emeritus of Rockerfeller University and past President of the National Academy of Sciences . In addition to his criticisms of the global warming and ozone depletion issues, Dr . Seitz also addressed the ETS issue. With respect to ETS, Dr . Seitz concluded that ". . .there is no good scientific evidence that moderate passive inhalation of tobacco smoke is truly dangerous under normal circumstances" . The report will be used to challenge the EPA's report on ETS in domestic and nternational markets." - emphasis added. Dr. Seitz received approximately $585,000 over his contracts with RJR (see We should like to renew the letter agreement dated July 12, 1978 between you and RJR Nabisco, Inc., and also While Washington Slept), although he denied this in several interviews. This was a "report", not peer-reviewed. However, RJR, Philip Morris, and the other companies represented it as such, and as evidence that the science behind the tobacco/cancer link was false. That's bad science, known to be false by the tobacco companies (as per documents on record), and far outside Seitz's area of expertise; he completely compromised his integrity by doing so. For you to defend him does not do your credibility any favors.
  32. Climategate a year later
    Re: Ken's Monbiot from NOV30 - He has somewhat backed away from he said in the heat of the moment about Dr. Phil Jones, as shown in the following: George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th July 2010 So was I wrong to have called, soon after this story broke, for Jones’s resignation? I think, on balance, that I was. He said some very stupid things. At times he squelched the scientific principles of transparency and openness. He might have broken the law. But he was also provoked beyond endurance. I think, in the light of everything I’ve now seen and read, that if I were to write that article again I would conclude that Phil Jones should hang on - but only just. I hope the last review gives him some peace. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/07/07/filth-and-fury/
  33. Climategate a year later
    Calling the Himalaya mistake a 'typo' is wrong IMO. It was a mistake from a failure in the reference reviewing process... Ken: the "nature trick" is well explained, see Briffa's 2000 paper in Quart. Sci. Rev. for an introduction to the divergence problem and elsewhere for further explanation (e.g. the caption of the WMO graph that the furore is about) The last one is from a small program of which there is no evidence it was ever used in a paper or for published data. Such programs to test stuff during research are very common. I must have dozens of them on my computer, for example, because I've recently been looking at the sensitivity of the model.
  34. Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy
    Karamanski #24 The argument that climate scientists exagerrate the role of climate change to get more research dollars has never made any sense to me whatsoever. If you want money for research, you don't go around saying that the problem is essentially solved. You argue that there is an interesting/important problem that needs solving (e.g. cancer). Think about this analogy...my car has been acting funny so I go to a car mechanic. He explains that he knows what's wrong with my car, in fact he's been predicting for years that something will happen because of how I drive it. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the tools to fix it. He then asks me to bring the car back next week so he can diagnose it again, without fixing it. Am I going to give him the money to do so? Not if I'm sensible. The irony is that only a "skeptic" (of the current climate sort) would make the mistake of doing so. (And maybe that's why they find the argument so compelling!). After talking to some crazy uncle (who has a grudge against the car mechanic) he goes back to the mechanic thinking he may be wrong, and pays him again to diagnose the car using more elaborate machinery. He then gets angry when he gets the same answer yet again. Repeat a thousand times... Now the focus on climate science has improved modeling capacity dramatically and resulted in work on a lot of processes that weren't that well understood, and that is a good thing. We would have benefitted from a better understanding of climate even in the absence of AGW. Climate relates to human health, economics, agriculture, infrastructure planning... you name it. We know it changes for a range of reasons so understanding that is important. So even if there has been an increase in funding for climate science resulting from the doubt about AGW, it has large societal benefits in the long run. Other branches of earth and environmental science (including mine) are doing a lot of work trying to suss out the less obvious implications of climate change, so you could argue that those areas could profit from an argument for AGW. But those areas are not funded via the same channels as climate scientists that argue for AGW(at least in the US), a point which climate skeptics seem to miss entirely in their case for a self-interested rational for supoprting AGW. Also I can tell you from bitter experience that those areas have been been rather flat funded over the last decade, so what has really happened is a shifting of priorities forced by the shadow of an impending disaster, not an increase in funding. It's a shift that many are not happy about, but it is unavoidable. As I tell my students, we now talk a lot about climate change in our core courses simply because it will be the main thing they will be asked to address as professionals in the future. That's not a strategy, it's just a reality.
  35. How significance tests are misused in climate science
    KR (#51), thank you for pointing to your reply here. My disagreement with Tom on the other thread was almost purely philosophical akin to arguing religion or politics and should be ended as irresolvable (my friends always say "just shut up"). Therefore I appreciate your (and BP's) efforts in this thread to keep the focus on climate science or at least empirically based science. I do not believe a hypothesis in climate or any other science can be solely conditioned on statistical measurements. If we did that, we could say (a la Nixon): "We are all Bayesians now". But in reality there are physical connections (which could be chained) and statistical measurements are merely a result of the physical connections (chained or not). We can start with the handy fact that everything in the universe is physically connected albeit in some cases extremely weakly and chained in other cases. For example, the fact that we can detect a distant quasar means its fields impact the earth in some way (thankfully not enough to complicate weather or climate predictions). I could hypothesize that having more clouds in Norway causes my garden in Virginia to be warmer. There may be some extremely small direct connection (e.g. via gravity) which I would ignore. I can make measurements and find some correlation. But I know from well supported theories of weather and geographic limits of weather systems that there is no direct physical connection. The existing theories point to many possible confounding (and causal) factors with supporting evidence including statistical measurements and direct physical connections. Based on these relationships we end up building a model which is (AFAIK) always an oversimplification. There is then a strong argument for the applicability of statistical measurements to support the oversimplified model. Assuming that there are alternative oversimplified models to choose from, do we "rank order" them based on the data as KR says? I suggest we do not. What appears to be imprecision in the data is actually inapplicability to the modeled relationship. The essential difference between the applicability of a measurement (the hypothesized causality in a theoretical model) and a conditional probability as defined by Dr Ambaum is that the former is either true or not true and the latter is a measurement. This difference may appear obvious and superficial for most directly connected phenomena, but it is easily confused in a complex model. This is because the imprecision of the measurements gets conflated with the weakness of the causality.
  36. Berényi Péter at 01:11 AM on 18 November 2010
    How significance tests are misused in climate science
    #51 KR at 05:17 AM on 17 November, 2010 We can only state that a particular hypothesis is more probable than others given the evidence, the statistics of our data. And whether using Bayesian or frequentist methods, we can estimate from the statistics the probability (second definition) that our hypotheis is supported by that data. That's how induction works, and how we can learn something new. Induction is not a scientific method. It is an heuristic method (one of many) used to arrive at universal propositions of any kind, some being scientific among them. But what makes a universal proposition scientific is not the fact it is supported by data, but that it is not contradicted by any of them. In Galileo's time according to the prevailing theory of heavenly bodies they were supposed to be perfect spheres. Up to the moment Galileo have constructed his first (improved) telescope in late 1609 and started to study the skies with it in November, this theory was consistent with observations. However, it was not based on induction in any sense, that is, it was not the case many heavenly bodies having thoroughly been observed and all of them found to be perfectly round with a smooth surface, a universal law of their shape was arrived at. In fact only angular extents of the Sun and the Moon are large enough to be seen as other than point sources with a naked eye. So, quite the contrary, there was a general principle stating the Heavens were eternal and perfect, while the Earth was home to transient and imperfect phenomena (supported by the cosmological role of each, well known to anyone familiar with Scriptures). From this distinction the Theory of Roundness follows easily. What is more, it is also consistent with Occam's Razor. Why should, after all, Heavenly Bodies assume any shape other than the most perfect one, the sphere? A single lunar observation of Galileo was enough to falsify this theory and replace it with another one, stating all the Heavenly Bodies are like Earth, at least in principle. Not an inductive step either. (He saw bright spots on the dark side of the Moon, more than 1/20 lunar diameter away from the terminator, concluded correctly, using simple geometry, those are peaks of mountains more than 4 Italian mile - 7320 m - high, illuminated by the rising sun at the first streak of lunar dawn). In fact the motivation behind new revelations are seldom true induction. They're more often than not based on novel application of general principles coupled to a few select facts, like Einstein's Geometrodynamics, based entirely on symmetry principles with a healthy addition of fact in the form of the Weak Equivalence Principle verified by Baron Roland von Eötvös and his team with a 10-8 precision for a few samples, as reported in 1909 at the 16th International Geodesic Conference in London. Mathematics, as the language of Natural Philosophy plays a very special role in this process. Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics Volume 13, Issue 1, pages 1–14, February 1960 DOI: 10.1002/cpa.3160130102 (article first published online: 12 OCT 2006) The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences Richard Courant lecture in mathematical sciences delivered at New York University, May 11, 1959 by Eugene P. Wigner "The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve."
  37. Climategate a year later
    Anyone care to 'reinterpret' these quotes, one year on? Just a little massaging of the story in order to avoid misleading the great unwashed or perhaps a small snapshot of the way science is done these days: Quote: Phil Jones, head of the CRU, in 1999: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” Phil Jones in 2004: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Jones in 2005 after a request for data: “I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.” Notes in the Harry_read_me computer file for CRU data: “These will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.” “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!” Endquote
  38. Climategate a year later
    Soundoff #1 This is Monbiotfrom NOV30 last year: “When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit.” So much for Monbiot. Even his name was a little preposterous - but the facts of the matter have not changed. It is hard to claim that damning quotes have been 'taken out of context' when the meaning is explicit and undeniable.
  39. Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy
    Karamanski, well there are many articles addressing whether scientists have exaggerated or not (e.g. 'Is the IPCC alarmist?')... so the issue has been covered from that side; predictions of impacts were lower than what has actually been observed, ergo the predictions were not exaggerated. I'm guessing you may mean to go at it from the other direction, how money is allocated... but that is a much trickier thing to pin down given thousands of in and out fluxes of research cash around the world. A third approach would be reviewing the results of research by scientists not in the climate field. If climate scientists were exaggerating AGW's impact on Arctic sea ice then biologists would find that seals and bears are not facing adverse impacts, oceanographers would find that the Arctic ocean was not acidifying, botanists would not find plants growing further North of their previous ranges, et cetera. Yet all these other scientific fields are finding results which support what the climate scientists are saying. Ergo, the 'skeptic' argument really becomes a claim that nearly all members of multiple branches of science all over the world are engaged in a vast conspiracy to exaggerate AGW. Which most people are rational enough to see for the complete lunacy it is.
  40. Climate cherry pickers: cooling oceans
    TimTTM #38 I saw this paper somewhere before. Certainly is counter-intuitive, but if it is confirmed then it will certainly have significant effect on the incoming solar radiation budget. Can't say anymore than that.
  41. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Poptech, your repeated demand for evidence of Seitz having overseen research on tobacco inherently misrepresents the issue. Let's say there are no records of Seitz having directed research on the health effects of tobacco. I don't know for certain, but let's assume there aren't any. However, there definitely ARE records of Seitz, RJR, and the George Marshall Institute having CLAIMED that he directed such research and found that there was no scientific link between tobacco and cancer. Muoncounter, Albatross, and others have linked to these records above. So, if we accept your argument that there is no evidence of such studies then they either lied about having conducted them or have managed to destroy or suppress all records. In either case, the supposed evidence that tobacco is safe which they advertised to the public is non-existent. Frankly, it would be better for Seitz's reputation if you were wrong and there ARE records of him having directed such research. At least then it could be pretended that the research was simply in error... rather than completely falsified.
  42. Animals and plants can adapt
    h-j-m, setting aside the primary point that CO2 emissions ALSO causes loss of biodiversity and thus is every bit as worth addressing on that front as the other problems you list... there are also several studies showing that rising CO2 levels may further threaten the rainforests by increasing evaporation and decreasing precipitation in the region. Thus, addressing CO2 emissions can also help prevent further rainforest loss. That would also cause rainforest recovery, but only if the land were allowed to revert.
  43. The Inconvenient Skeptic at 23:18 PM on 17 November 2010
    Are ice sheet losses overestimated?
    Robert, Of course I cannot substantiate that the MWP had comparable mass loss. While there are many clever things that can be found from proxies, this is not one of them (so far at least). What I am saying is that based on the known conditions of Greenland at the time of the MWP, compared to the current conditions, it is very likely that the ice loss was as great or greater than it currently is. I will read the papers in detail today and reply later tonight.
  44. Climategate a year later
    "So one year’s worth of climategate has given us exactly one typo ...." I'm sorry to have to say that no proper examination of the Himalayan glacier error could correctly sum it up as a 'typo'. There just might have been a typo somewhere between the uncertain source of this claim and its eventual publication in AR4 but that is beside the point - the IPCC not only repeated the obvious error, and ignored the warnings of an "IPCC author", but stubbornly stuck by the claim for 3(!) years: "Georg Kaser, an expert in tropical glaciology and a lead author for the IPCC, warned that the 2035 prediction was clearly wrong in 2006, months before the report was published. "This [date] is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude," he said." (The Guardian) ...which as anyone who followed this episode would be aware was but one of numerous times when the claim was questioned - not from skeptics - but from proper glaciologists. The IPCC response was two years too late, but more importantly, came after an embarrassing episode of dogmatic refusal to accept fallibility that has damaged the reputation of this important body. I think the customary high standard of rigour at Skeptical Science has slipped in this piece.
  45. Solving Global Warming - Not Easy, But Not Too Hard
    actually thoughtfull. I think you are mixing up two different things. I managed to cut my electricity use by changing the way I used it. During the winter I put on more layers of clothing and use the heating less, or turn the thermostat down. I stopped using a tumble dryer for drying clothes. I made a record of my efforts on my blog: http://lovelywaterlooville.blogspot.com/search/label/energy%20consumption Regarding 'green electricity tariffs'. In the UK we have various electricity companies that either invest in renewable energy only, or have a mixture. They set up consumer/business electricity tariffs where by the money taken from consumers is used to invest in more renewables. Usually the cost per kwh is slightly higher although not always. Generally it can be viewed as an accounting exercise, however for a consumer it can be a way of assuring their money is being spent in an appropriate place and encourages companies to invest in renewables. Probably the leading company in the UK is Ecotricity. They have been putting up wind farms since about 1995 and recently started supplying customers with bio-gas produced from Anaerobic Digestion plants and set up a dual fuel tariff (electricity and gas). http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/ The companies owner also developed an electric super car based on a Lotus chassis: http://zerocarbonista.com/ 'Good Energy' and 'Green Energy UK' are another two, also some NGOs such as the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) have tariff schemes with the bigger electricity suppliers.
  46. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    "Dr. Seitz's credentials are impeccable," Seitz took funding from tobacco companies and oil companies, how can he have credibilty ? Seriously Poptech ? In an interview with PBS Frontline, he remembers receiving money for travel expenses from oil companies, but not $65000 that went directly into his pocket. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/seitz.html He might have contributed to solid state physics, but in other areas it seems he was not ready to bite the hand that feeds.
  47. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Poptech #Yawn (you do become boring after a short amount of time I'm afraid). 1. "The Marshall Institute PDF you linked to confuses personality with science, and ignores/misrepresents the USDoJ's successful prosecution of the tobacco industry under racketeering laws." There is no confusion because they do not have any published science criticizing the link between tobacco and cancer. No, but they do sow the seeds of confusion in their reports which purport to be scientific reviews. You seem to have a rather selective view of what constitutes science, and this view seems to change depending on what you are trying to defend. 2. I've never counted any institute's report as part of the scientific literature to imply that it is peer-reviewed. I have stated repeatedly that reports that fully reference the scientific literature are on equal standing with other reports that do the same thing. The list of "peer reviewed research" which you've referred to repeatedly in the past completely fails to discriminate scientific quality and validity. Your subsequent justification for this failure has been pathetic. Your counter-argument here is a continuation of this failure. 3. "Typical so-called-sceptic approach of taking a position, emphasising a very small part of the argument (without examining the validity of the argument in the broader context) and then using that to generalise to the whole argument without justifying your case properly." You have presented only strawman arguments in attempting to make your point. I am em-phasing the most serious charge here as it is the knock-out blow to your position, Where is the research that Dr. Seitz oversaw or produced that questions the link between cancer and tobacco? Why is this so hard to produce? Your counter argument here completely fails to deal with the substance of my position by continuing to focus on the minutae rather than the big picture view which I demand from you in order for you to be able to validate your argument. I take it from this that your argument is strong on rhetoric, but that the substance is completely absent. The remainder of your rather tedious post has nothing to do with material that I have posted, so I leave it to others to deal with (or hopefully to ignore - unfortunately I lack the self control to ignore your insightless missives).
  48. Climategate a year later
    Meanwhile co2 concentration has gone from 385ppm to 388ppm.
  49. Climategate a year later
    Philippe Chantreau #3 What more do you want, the subject is climate?
  50. actually thoughtful at 17:51 PM on 17 November 2010
    Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
    * The Cantwell/Collins Cap and Dividend bill should be addressed (this is simply a tax, that is then refunded to the American people) www.capanddividend.org It is the most efficient because it is a tax (you tax what you don't want). I don't believe these studies adequately consider innovation. When you put a tax on Americans - they respond with innovation to avoid the tax. Some will work against the policy - buying gas in Mexico, black market fuel, etc. Some will be neutral - under-the-table biodiesel, for example. Some will be good - increased insulation, car pooling, buying more fuel/energy efficient products (this is what IS in the analysis). Some will be very bad - burning everything. The initial response will be a run on wood stoves, and a huge increase in burning wood/tires/trash for heat (this is "renewable" in the same vague way that mashed potatoes are renewable. Yes you can regrow the wood, yes it is current cycle carbon but NO it is not good for our air quality, and it will release a few hundred years of current cycle carbon in about a decade plus all sorts of products of combustion nasties). And there WILL be paradigm shifting solutions that are to the good. The rate of increase in PV efficiency will increase, solar thermal with above 100% energy conversions (imagine reflectors and other concentrators), wind/wave stuff that is economically viable. This is baked in the models. But the paradigm shift is not (a technology that we are either not thinking about, or currently believe it is on the 50-year horizon). The breakthrough that a tax on energy WILL produce because AMERICANS HATE TAXES! So I will go on record to say that a tax on carbon (especially an efficient one like cap and dividend) will actually INCREASE the GDP over BAU by at least 1%. Another thing that I doubt is in the models is what Americans will do with the money from the energy savings. I have customers who are increasing their retirement savings, using their savings to double down on renewables (ie add renewable electric in a round 2 of energy investments). I have customers who are using the savings to invest in education. I myself am doing two things - affording a house I otherwise could not (somewhat of a waste...) and saving up for my own double down with PV/wind. In other words, there will be tons of unintended consequences from any tax effort - but you can predict that the upside will easily outweigh the downside. (note to the wise - when the tax policy comes into existence and energy prices approach a true cost - incentives will evaporate (no longer necessary). Put in your renewable systems now, with the incentives and laugh all the way to the bank when cap and trade or cap and dividend or a straight tax finally comes to be). Even if the tax never comes, you will make (save) money just based on the inflation of energy costs.)

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