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Chris G at 13:50 PM on 25 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
It is an interesting read so far, but protecting against SQL injection should be as simple as making everything that can come from outside a parameter in the statements to be executed. That way there is no way the server can receive data that look like commands; data always look like data.
Once you've got the name dictionary out of the database, you can substitute pen names for real names everywhere with a short script using tools as simple as awk and sed. Concatenating files with a predictable path name is pretty simple fair as well. This isn't common knowledge, but it isn't exactly a high degree of skill or labor either. I guess I'm chaffing a little at building the hacker up into something more impressive than I've seen evidence for so far.
Nonetheless, this is interesting. It sounds like something motivated by emotion rather than profit. I suspect that they may have actually thought they'd find something nefarious and be able to attach a name to it. I mean, look at the way some people cling to the word "trick"; Mann supposedly "tricked" people by describing in the text how he "hid the decline". Telling people exactly what you've done is a curious way to hide it from them; nonetheless, there are still people who think that. I think that has more to do with their emotional response than rational thought.
P.S. I sympathise with having to work on code that has probably grown beyond anything the original architect envisioned.
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Bob Loblaw at 13:18 PM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
paulh:
...but the graph Tom shows in #36 starts one year after the data starts (1980 vs. 1979) and it stops the same year the data ends (2014, which is barely under way). If the last value is the five years up to 2014, where does the data come from to get the value for the five years up to 1980?
You can do smoothing with methods that go to the ends of the data, but running means ain't one of them. Tamino has a series of three posts on smoothing. This is the third. You can get to the other by the links at the start of each part.
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paulhtremblay at 12:33 PM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
@36 Tom Curtis @32 Keith Pickering.
I use rolling (4 week in my case) averages all the time at my work. I don't take an average every 4 weeks. Instead, I calculate a number every week by going back 4 weeks and dividing by 4. So if I averaged weeks 1 through 11, I can still have a 4 week average at week 11 by using weeks 8, 9, 10 and 11. Of course, I would not be able to get a 4 week average for week 1 (unless I have data from the previous year, which in fact I do).
What confuses me is the manipulation Spencer engaged in by using different baselines. Can anyone explain this?(My former boss wanted me to change the scales on graphs to make data look greather or smaller--I refused.)
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chriskoz at 11:09 AM on 25 February 2014Our Facebook page reaches 20,000 likes
Even though I liked SkS some 2y ago, I don't like the presentation on figure 1. The baseline is at some random number ~4000. As such it suggests the growth rate of "likes" stronger than in the reality. It would be far cleaner and better balanced if its baseline was simply at 0. If you want to show the exponential acceleration of the trend in last two years, show the full history, from 0 likes at time of SkS facebook creation. I'd be interested in such a fuull graph.
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scaddenp at 10:59 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm. This site exists to point readers to what the science actually says about "denier myths" - ie stories being told by people who are in denial about the science is actually saying. I do not think it encourages good debate by labelling people as "deniers" or "warmists" but the myths are what they are.
As such, it is especially appropriate when talking about myths to reference this site because considerable efforts goes into the articles to collect the appropriate science papers about a subject. The whole point is that you dont have to rely on the site - from an article you can go and read the referenced material. Having found the papers, you can put them into Google Scholar to see cites and other discussion.
1/ I did not talk about deglaciation - I talked about the entire aspect of relations between glacial cycle and CO2 which is necessary if you want understand the CO2/temperature relationship in past climate. If you do not understand that then you are not equipped to understand modern relationships.
2/ Read the references there instead. I dont know a better collection of reference material so naturally I point to that.
3/ Absolutely - and as the lag shows, it takes a long time to warm an ocean to the point where that happens and its not some mystery - you pump the numbers into Henry's law plus ocean-mixing rates. Fortunately, we dont have to worry about outgassing this century. The isotopic ratios cannot be ignored however. We are responsible for the extra CO2 in the atmosphere.
And no, fire doesnt mean arson - you instead weigh all the evidence and see which fits the observed data. The sun isnt causing it. The CO2 is not from the ocean. The energy imbalance matches the GHG calculations. There is more backradiation heating the earths surface. The data fits what is more obvious - the tons of fossil fuel we burn is trapping more of the sun's heat at the surface.
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dwm at 10:18 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
Tom - the repeated use of the phrase "denier myth" shows complete bias not conducive to scientific discussion, so I would suggest that you refrain from such inflammatory rhetoric.
By the way, this is not the "appropriate place" to debate de-glaciation.
Moderator Response:[JH] Please lose the condescending tone.
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dwm at 10:11 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
To scaddenp:
1.this is not the "appropriate place" to debate de-glaciation.
2. the continuous re-referencing of this one website for all of the answers is suspect. I would suggest finding a few other sources in order to seem credible.
3. According to the article above (to quote this website) - "as ocean temperatures rise, oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere"
Just because there is a fire doesn't mean it's arson.
Moderator Response:[JH] Please lose the condescending tone.
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Tom Dayton at 09:03 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm, please focus on the purpose of this original post. It is to rebut the denier myth that human-caused CO2 rise cannot cause warming, because CO2 rise always only follows temperature rise, as seen in these de-glaciation episodes. This original post successfully rebuts that myth, by showing that CO2 rise was followed by temperature rise. The fact that that CO2 rise was a consequence of a previous temperature rise is irrelevant to rebutting that myth.
By the way, for more details of the mechanism of deglaciations, read the post about Shakun et al.'s 2012 paper.
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Tom Dayton at 08:53 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm, for details supporting scaddenp's comment, watch Richard Alley's lecture "The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth's Climate History."
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scaddenp at 08:42 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm - your chart is about what happened in the past in response to solar forcing changes. You won't find anything in any IPCC report that contradicts that. While extremely valuable to understanding climate, it is however not so relevant to the present situation.
1/ You cannot explain the glacial cycle by change in solar alone and albedo. For a start, SH and NH cycles would be antiphased. CO2 is operating as both a feedback and a forcing agent in that cycle. First the changes in solar, but this is then amplified and globalized by GHGs.
2/ If current warming was due to milankovich cycle, then we should be slowly cooling and CO2 dropping. If due to change in sun, then why warming when TSI (measured directly) is stable (see the Its the sun argument).
3/ The change in CO2 in the atmosphere is not from the ocean. The isotopic signature among other things tells you that. Actually the oceans are still absorbing nearly half of our emissions. They will continue to absorb for possibly hundreds of years more before temperature rise causes outgassing.
Science theories have to work with all of the data available not just that which works for a simple explanation. The idea that climate change this time is a natural cycle does not fit the data. It also violates the physics of GHG. And to quote a well known analogy, just because forest fires occur naturally doesnt mean arson cannot happen.
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dwm at 08:20 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
I didn't bring up water vapor, I was replying to DSL, who first referred to the water vapor feedback loop by referring me to a link.
To Dan & Dikran: As I pionted out, the chart we are discussing here goes back 400,000 years and recent history is basically not visible on this scale, so human activity has no bearing on this chart of the lag of co2 levels relative to the earth's temperature. I don't know why you keep bringing that up. Dan either doesn''t understand that or deliberatly tries to misinterperate what I wrote.
Meanwhile, his patronizing attitude ("Starting with an erroneous premise, as you do here, leads you further into error") is wildly off base.
I'll say it again: The chart above shows clearly that more Co2 is given off by the ocean after temperatures become warmer, and less co2 after temperatures become cooler. As Dikran pointed out, there is absolutely nothing erroneous about that. Since man's injection of co2 into the atmosphere has nothing to do with this chart, the only relationship on display is that as the earth's temperature rises, the oceans give up co2, and as temperatures cool, the ocean responds by absorbing co2. Despite the scientific equivilant of wrangling and wringing of hands, this chart is nothing other than a clear representation that co2 is not driving anything historically. Since you admit to the fact that the amount of solar radiation the earth receives is variable/cyclical, why assume anything other than that (solar) for the changes in temperature, which then cause co2 to go up or down accordingly? Often in science, complex theories are built up to support a set of assumptions that are later shown to be wrong. It seems to me that a lot of effort is going on to retrofit data sets to fit theories about co2 as a primary driver of climate, and that this article is a prime example.
Moderator Response:[JH] Please lose the condescending tone.
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Tom Curtis at 08:04 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
KeithPickering @32, the graph:
You might will as also, how did they get a five year average for the interval 2011-2015 for their final value?
However, what is very clear to me from the grap is that they used different baselines when comparing satellites to radiosondes (balloons), to that which they used when comparing satellites to baloons. Had they used the same short baseline that they used for the satellite/model comparison for the radiosonde/sattelite comparison, it would have lifted the balloon data relative to the satellite and model data by 0.05 C. That would have only slightly decreased the discrepancy between them, but would have clearly shown a disagreement between satellites and radiosondes.
Alternatively, had they used the same long baseline for satellites and models that they used for radiosondes and satellites, that would have decreased the apparent discrepancy of the models to the satellites and radiosondes substantially.
This is a cooked graph. It is designed to distort the presentation so as to suggest a misleading conclusion.
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Esop at 07:44 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
I would actually have expected Spencer to try to align more with the reality based side of the ''debate'' rather than doing this. The next El Nino will very likely push the UAH dataset to a new global record, so that would mean that somewhere between 2014 and 2016 there is a very good chance that Spencer/Christy will be thrown under the bus by the ''skeptics''. Unless there is a plan.
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Composer99 at 07:35 AM on 25 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
mgardner:
I would recommend re-posting this comment on one of the Weekly Digest or Weekly Round-Up threads, which being more-or-less "open threads" are topical for just the sort of thing you have posted, while it is off-topic for this thread.
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mgardner at 06:32 AM on 25 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
I thought this might be of interest; I hope it can be posted:
NY Times Article on Communication
Alan Alda on his work for Scientific American
Over the years, I must have done around 700 of these interviews, and I felt that in doing them I had stumbled onto something that could help solve a big problem the science community faces.
Which is?
That scientists often don’t speak to the rest of us the way they would if we were standing there full of curiosity. They sometimes spray information at us without making that contact that I think is crucial. If a scientist doesn’t have someone next to them, drawing them out, they can easily go into lecture mode. There can be a lot of insider’s jargon.
If they can’t make clear what their work involves, the public will resist advances. They won’t fund science. How are scientists going to get money from policy makers, if our leaders and legislators can’t understand what they do?
I heard from one member of Congress that at a meeting with scientists, the members were passing notes to one another: “Do you know what this guy is saying?” “No, do you?”
Moderator Response:[PS] This is offtopic. I would appreciate if you would repost here. Thank you.
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Ian Forrester at 06:11 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Keithpickering, according to Roy Spencer UAH and RSS do not use the same data anymore. UAH switched to the newer NASA Aqua AMSU satellite while RSS use data from the older NOAA-15 satellite. Spencer claims that the older satellite "has a decaying orbit, to which they are then applying a diurnal cycle drift correction based upon a climate model, which does not quite match reality".
This is what is causing the divergence between the two data sets.
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tlitb1 at 05:08 AM on 25 February 2014MP Graham Stringer and CNN Crossfire are wrong about the 97% consensus on human-caused global warming
@ 37. Tom Curtis
As such, the two sorts of ratings do not, and cannot compounded into a conglomerate rating as you suggest.
I'd like to assure you that I do not think that the abstract ratings should be merged in any way with the self-ratings. On the contrary, it seems more logical to assume that scientist self-ratings of their papers override, or displaces, the former rating.
I think you agree with on this point since you say:
...on average the pattern of ratings by authors represents a check on the accuracy of both the method of rating papers by abstract alone and on the accuracy of abstract raters.
I.e. by using the author ratings as a 'check' like this, it implies they are trusted to be a reliable bench mark. I don't see anything in Cook et al's methodology for considering errors, or throwing out false answers from the surveyed authors. So by implication they are taken to be the correct categorisation.
So when you say:
In this case, Spencer makes an explicit claim about how he would be rated, a claim which is shown to be false by the actual facts.
I am not sure what actual facts have 'shown' any of his statements as false. Currently the only 'fact' I see is the category 5 rating of his papers' abstract as assessed by the Cook et al authors and bloggers here.
I don't think Spencers contradicted that this has happened has he?
I don't think Spencers statements have been explored thouroughly, but for the sake of argument, if Spencer is now publicly rating his own paper as category 3 I don't see how it can be said to be a false rating, or have any less validity than if he did this within the self-rating process.
Surely the argument here isn't just that Cook et al rated one of Spencers works as category 5 and that is enough to define his stance?
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rocketeer at 04:57 AM on 25 February 2014Our Facebook page reaches 20,000 likes
It even looks like a Hockey Stick, congratualtions!
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Paul D at 04:50 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Cornwall Alliance - "Earth and its ecosystems—created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory."
Well the bit - '...are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting...' - is correct but since God has defined the rules of Physics and let us know those rules, we know that the rules can result in harm to humans.In other words it is self regulating and correcting, but that doesn't mean that process will always sustain humans. You would have to deny there was ever an Ice Age to believe that the only outcome good be good for humans.
I think the Cornwall Alliance statement is a creation of the human mind not God.
The problem Spencer has is that he may have to create 'fictions' eventually in order for his religion to match his science. It's already looking like that, which might explain why he and others are getting cornered and becoming more extreme.
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keithpickering at 04:48 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Another huge discrepancy!
Here's Christy & Mcnider's WSJ graph:
http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/EG-AD687A_McNid_G_20140220095703.jpg
Note that these are supposed to be 5-year averages. Note that the satellite 5-year average begins in 1980, and ends in 2013.
So how did they get that 5-year average in 1980, when they only had 2 years worth of satellite data in 1980?
I smell a rat.
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keithpickering at 04:40 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Regarding mid-troposphere datasets, it’s important to note that UAH and RSS differ by a factor of three in temperature trend, despite the fact that these two groups use the exact same raw data from the exact same satellites. Thus at least one of these two groups is doing something pretty badly wrong in their analysis. So when you average one good dataset with one bad one, as Christy and Mcnider have done (and as Spencer did before them on his blog), you know for sure you’ve got bad data in the mix.
The same criticism applies to balloon-borne datasets: the underlying data is the same, but it’s being analyized differently by different groups. Thus by averaging you’re putting bad data in with the good.
A far better procedure is to actually look at the way these groups analyze data and figure out who’s doing it best. For example, when you take RSS as the best of the two satellite datasets and RATPAC as the best of the balloon datasets, most of the discrepancy between that and models disappears.
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Dikran Marsupial at 04:26 AM on 25 February 2014Models are unreliable
sapient fridge - the start date isn't cherry picked in this case as 1979 is the start of the satelite record, ut the use of a single year baseline is still incorrect for the reasons I demonstrated to jsmith on the previous thread.
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Sapient Fridge at 04:20 AM on 25 February 2014Models are unreliable
jsmith, I think it's the same tricks as described on HotWhopper i.e. they picked a nice big spike in the observation data to "align" the models starting point with. My understanding is that models should be started at a multi-year average temperature - not a particular cherry picked start year e.g. 1979 in this case.
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Dikran Marsupial at 04:13 AM on 25 February 2014Models are unreliable
jsmith, they are essentially using the very same trick I already explained to you here.
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Dikran Marsupial at 04:08 AM on 25 February 2014Models are unreliable
jsmith - Christy and McNider are using the same "on-year baseline" trick that they have been using for quite a while. This is a method used to make the difference between the models and the observations look bigger than it actually is, for details see dana's recent blog post at the Guardian (don't be put off by the title - the stuff about Christy and McNider is the second half of the post after the stuff anout Roy Spencer's unfortunate meltdown). Of course this won't fool anybody that understands how the models work and what the ensemble method does, but it does make great fodder for the media and "skeptic" blogs.
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jsmith at 03:36 AM on 25 February 2014Models are unreliable
A recent article in the WSJ by John Christy and Richard McNider (I'm sure many of you know about it) claims that the models predicted more warming than was actually observed. I'll leave it here so that other contributors can explain why it is either misleading or flat-out wrong. The image I am referring to is entitled "Warming Predictions vs. the Real World". I would just add the image, but I can't figure out how, so here's the article.
Moderator Response:[RH] Hotlinked url.
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Jim Eager at 02:56 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Elmwood, it could just be the evolution of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, since the Carbonist Barons seem to see themselves as the new Monarchy.
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Tom Dayton at 02:10 AM on 25 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm, I replied to you on an appropriate water vapor thread.
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Tom Dayton at 02:08 AM on 25 February 2014Humidity is falling
dwm: The NASA press release you quoted was written in 2004--ten years ago, and one of the authors was Dessler, whose more recent work is cited in the orginal post at the top of this thread you are reading now.
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Joel_Huberman at 01:06 AM on 25 February 20142014 SkS Weekly Digest #8
What is meant by "TCP"?
Moderator Response:[JH] TCP = The Consensus Project undertaken by the all-volunteer, SkS author team lead by John Cook.
The TCP culminated in the publication of the peer-reviewed paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters, 2013; 8 (2): 024024 DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024
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One Planet Only Forever at 00:48 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Reflecting on the Parking Fees point in my list of things fought against @27, it is very pertinent to the possible actions regarding CO2.
Parking is a limited opportuity that everyone tries to enjoy. But it is actually something that needs to be discouraged until the use of private vehicles is sustainable, something that everyone can choose to do forever.
However, a parking fee is only addressing part of the issue, the fighting over the limited opportunity. And it addresses it in a socially unacceptable way, by saying those with more money get the right to benefit from doing the thing that only a few can be allowed to do. A better solution would be much more effective ad affprdable public transportation systems (subsidized by taxation of the wealthier people who want to park). But even that better solution creates the socially unacceptable desires to be like the wealthy and be able to do unacceptable things.
A focus on parking, like a focus on CO2, can become a distraction from the bigger issue of the wealthy needing to be the leaders toward totally sustainable living.
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One Planet Only Forever at 00:34 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Correction of my @27 comment: My list is a muddled mix of unacceptable things that are fought for, and actions to try to limit unacceptable things that are fought against
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One Planet Only Forever at 00:30 AM on 25 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Spencer's participation in the Cornwall Alliance appears to indicate that his Doctorate of Philosophy is in Spiritual Reflections that cannot be proven or disproved, just be discussed for as long as some are willing to potentially believe them.
That explains his persistence at a hobby he has little evidence of skill in, climate science.
However, his person view that "God has ensured that Humanity can do no wrong" contradicts the clearly established and open admission of the fallibility of humans and the need many have to confess their sins. And it is not likely to be the motivation for his persistence in arguing against climate science (he is not participating in developing the fullest and best understanding. He is clearly struggling to argue against that effort.
There has always been a strong motivation in some people to disbelieve that benefiting from burning fossil fuels was unacceptable. It fits the pattern of reluctance to accept any new information and better understanding that indicates the unacceptability of what a person is accustomed to enjoy getting away with. As examples of this obvious and powerful motivation to dismiss new information and discredit those attempting to lead to a more sustainable society and economic arrangement I offer the following unacceptable things that are persistently fought against:
- driving after drinking
- speeding
- newly established parking fees
- smoking in public places
- high-fructose corn syrup
- pesticides and herbicides used for pleasure or convenience
- antibiotic use to deal with the problems developed by cows fed grains to make them grow quicker. Feeding grain to make cows grow quicker also leads to greater risk of contaminated meat because the bowels of those cows contain compounds poisonous to humans.
- non-Caucasians are equal and acceptable (and the versions that have struggled to be applied in many other cultures).
- non-Christians are equal and acceptable (and the versions that have struggled to be applied in many other cultures)
- private ownership of killing devices and carrying them in public is unacceptable.
The motivation of Spencer and others is clear. Their interest is not in the Science, it is abusing their understanding of the popularity of Non-Science to prolong the ability of some people to benefit more and longer from unacceptable attitudes and behaviours. Al Gore may be best known for "The Inconvenient Truth", but his book "The Assault on Reason" is more pertinent to the climate science 'debate' (and calling it a debate is clearly debatable)
The actions of the contrarians are unsustainable and damaging, just like the popular and profitable activities they persistently struggle to defend. The sooner they are unable to get away with the unacceptable things they want to get away with the better it will be for everyone else.
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How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
I’m aware of that, nealjking. My calculations only considered transmittance of the original radiation entering the path of air, not re-emission within the air itself. That, combined with the cooling and thinning air with altitude, is a crucial part of the non-saturation argument, as Glenn Tamblyn pointed out in the blog post.
If the only radiation escaping to space came directly from the surface while the atmosphere only absorbed without re-emitting, much of the radiation shown in the MODTRAN graph in @67 would be virtually zero. -
Dikran Marsupial at 20:49 PM on 24 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
dwm wrote "All the data shows is that as temperature increases, the oceans breath out co2, then as temperatures decrease, they inhale and store it until it heats up again."
This is basically true, but only if temperature is the only thing that is changing. An important feature of the science that is missing here is that the uptake of CO2 into the oceans is also governed by the difference in partial pressure between the atmosphere and the surface ocean. If the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the solubility of CO2 in the oceans also increases. Fossil fuel emissions have caused atmospheric CO2 concentrations to rise, which in turn has resulted in a strengthening of the oceanic sink. The fact that atmospheric CO2 levels have only risen at about half the rate of anthropogenic emissions shows that the effect of the change in the difference in partial pressure dominates the effect due to the increase in temperature.Thus, as Daniel correctly pointed out, we know for sure that the oceans are not the source of the post-industrial rise in CO2 (in fact the oceans have been opposing the rise by taking in more CO2 than it emits).
The water-vapour feedback mechanism seems to be off-topic for this article, so if you want to discuss that, please take the discussion elsewhere on SkS.
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dwm at 20:39 PM on 24 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
To make my point completely clear, also from the NASA article:
"Using the UARS data to actually quantify both specific humidity and relative humidity, the researchers found, while water vapor does increase with temperature in the upper troposphere, the feedback effect is not as strong as models have predicted. "The increases in water vapor with warmer temperatures are not large enough to maintain a constant relative humidity"
Moderator Response:[TD] An appropriate place to discuss water vapor is What Does the Full Body of Evidence Tell Us About Water Vapor?
Anybody who replies to dwm about this topic in future, please do so there, not here.
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dwm at 20:21 PM on 24 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
The data on this page shows co2 rising after (lagging, as in the title) temperature rises, and vice versa. That's "all we know." I didn't say "the" source, the data shows that the oceans are a source. The data on this page is a historical record going back thousands of years and has nothing to do with anthropogenic co2 production. Your erroneous reply avoids the point of what I wrote: that "without reliable data regarding humidity, theories about the positive feeback loop caused by water vapor are no more likely than any other theory." The current climate models predicting catestrophic rises in temperature rely on humidity levels to remain constant in order to trigger a positive feedback loop from the water vapor in the atmosphere, however the most recent data suggests humidity levels are falling, or in other words, from NASA's website:
" Since water vapor is the most important heat-trapping greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, some climate forecasts may be overestimating future temperature increases. "
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/warmer_humidity.html
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Elmwood at 18:25 PM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
As far as I can tell, the Cornwall Alliance basically holds that God wouldn't let the environment be seriously harmed by the burning of fossil fuels because oil and coal have allowed some people to become more prosperous.
It sounds like a health and wealth gospel more or less, that God desires his elect to be materially rich. This is really very dangerous stuff because it’s confusing a scientific question with a religious one and will only make the denier movement more fanatical.Funny, I thought Pope Francis mentioned that "when nature-creation-is mistreated, she never forgives". I guess he's reading a different bible.
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Rob Honeycutt at 16:05 PM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
It always strikes me as self-serving to label anyone today who is ideologically opposed to you as Nazi. The Nazis were such a mish-mash of ideological positions both left and right (though, generally fascism is accepted by scholars to be a right wing ideology). Nazism is sort of a food fight buffet of positions. You can pick and choose what you like to splatter onto someone you don't agree with.
Ultimately, whenever one discusses Nazis the first thing that should come to mind is the fact that we're talking about the politics of 70 and 80 years ago. It's so far removed from today as to be mostly not comparable.
What is shocking to me is that Spencer, who is supposed to be a respected scientist, who is repeatedly being selected to present to Congress, doesn't have the presence of mind to realize this. Not only that, he's so lacking in presence of mind that he actually doubled down on his own position... and has yet to retract his comments.
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dhogaza at 15:12 PM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
"Villabolo, another good comeback would be to inform them that American socialist joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and went off to fight fascism on the side of the Republicans while Hitler gave support to Franco."
Indeed, such socialists were labelled "premature anti-fascists" ...
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Magma at 14:43 PM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
As I recall, many of the older, distinguished physicists who rejected the new field of quantum mechanics eventually retired, their reputations largely undamaged but resting solely on their earlier work. The same was true for the leading geologists who rejected plate tectonics ('continental drift'), and I suspect for eminent biologists who dismissed evolution in the late 19th century. The main paradigms of their fields had shifted, leaving them behind, but their contributions were acknowledged and respected.
I do not think the same will hold for the small group of climate scientists (in the broadest sense) represented by the likes of Lindzen, Spencer, Christy and more recently Curry.
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Global warming stopped in
1998,1995,2002,2007,2010, ????
jsmith - The 'Weekly Digest' posts appear to be basically open threads, I would suggest that if you find something without a relevant post (see the Search box on the upper left) you might post it there. At the very least someone might be able to direct you to an existing conversation on that topic.
The 'stadium wave' is, IMO, a case of inappropriate bandpass filtering and of curve fitting.
Band pass: Take a signal, any signal, and add a bit of noise (white, pink, red, it matters not). Then bandpass filter it (drop slow and fast variations) to remove anything outside your frequency of interest. What remains will match your filter, guaranteed. It's extremely likely that your result is part of the noise, but unless you examine the entire spectrum you may not realize (or, in some cases, care) that the dominant signal falls outside your bandpass.
An exemplar of this is McLean et al 2009, making claims about the ENSO causing climate change - after a bandpass filtering that removed long term (climate) trends.
Curve-fitting: See basically anything by Scaffeta; given a number of free parameters and an array of cyclic phenomena, you can always find cycles correlation (causation be damned) with a dataset. But if you don't have a physical mechanism, and if you don't treat such correlation as a motivation to see if there might be some causal connection, it's nonsense. At some point I'm going to have to try fitting climate change to multi-year cicada populations and grey vs. black squirrel ranges - I'm sure I can make a fit occur. But like the astrology inherent in Scafetta's work, it won't mean anything. And such a decomposition won't have any predictive power, because it's not based on actual physics.
Moderator Response:[JH] The comment threads of both the Weekly Digest and the Weekly News Roundup posts ae indeed open threads. Of course, all comments posted on them must comply with the SkS Comments policy.
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Tom Dayton at 13:35 PM on 24 February 2014Global warming stopped in
1998,1995,2002,2007,2010, ????
jsmith, the Stadium Wave Theory is nothing but curve fitting. There are a bazillion other cycles that can fit as well or better, but none of them nor the Stadium Wave has any physical science basis nor any other a priori basis. For just one devastating critique, see Stoat's Part 1 and then Part 2. A short summary was written by a rabbett. Another brief critique is at And Then There's Physics.
But as Dana noted, Marcia Wyatt herself stated: "While the results of this study appear to have implications regarding the hiatus in warming, the stadium wave signal does not support or refute anthropogenic global warming. The stadium wave hypothesis seeks to explain the natural multi-decadal component of climate variability."
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One Planet Only Forever at 13:25 PM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
I agree with TC @14,
Staged trials are not what is needed. They would just create bigger False Idols for the deniers. Winning in the court of public opinion is required. And that is an uphill battle. A lot of Science can be brought to the creation of deliberately deceptive message creation and delivery. The marketing community has tremendous amounts of research showing the effectiveness of attempts to succeeed through deliberate deception. They have less evidence of success from full communication of the facts of the matter.
I admit that the infatuation with Image makes winning public opinion a challenge. However, as Susan Cain presents in her book "Quiet: The Power of Introverts", the switch from admiring substantive claims and civil character to simple adoration of Image is rather recent. It happened in the late 1800s. That unsustainable and damaging change just needs to be reversed.
I would like to see more people actually want to become better informed. People could read the IPCC Summary Report for Policy Makers for themselves in less time than it takes to watch 'part' of a sporting event. Or they could read publications by the WMO or NOAA, or many other extensive presentations of information on this issue. However, I know that a few refuse to do that because they anticipate the result of becoming better informed will not suit their preferred interest.
Even the majority of Americans ackowledge that the CO2 from burning fossil fuels is causing consequences that people in the future will have to deal with. The main problem I see is the way the unsustainable and damaging socioeconomic system they are immersed in makes it very difficult for them to accept the small sacrifice that must be made, because deliberately deceptive fear mongering tells them they will suffer horribly.
I believe the real focus needs to be on using issues like climate change and other evidence of unacceptable impacts of human activities, particularly when one group benefits frmo creating harm that other suffer the consequences of, to highlight that the socioeconomic system needs to change. It needs to include consideration for thsoe in the future who have no vote and have no buying power.
The unsustainable and damaging activities need to be seen as unacceptable, rather than somehow deserving a 'fair and balanced' treatment (that is heavily biased in their favour), compared to the fundamental requirements of sustainable activity. No amount of percieved profit or popularity should trump the requirement to meet the fundamentals of sustainability.
Paul Hawkin presented an example of the type of changes that could be made and would be benficial in his book "The Ecology of Commerce" written in 1993. Of course Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" was published in 1962. And there is so much that has been provided over the decades that I hope it eventually all "Just Makes Too Much Sense to be Ignored Anymore". The sooner the better for the future of humanity.
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Sceptical Wombat at 13:15 PM on 24 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
Bob@2
Thanks for the response. Of course you need to determine your own enhancement priorities. I only make the point that the fact that you can decrypt the passwords means that the method for doing so is somewhere in your code and in principle at least hackable. That's one reason why secure sites use one way encryption and only ever send out new, temporary passwords which have to be changed on first use. That's why I was surprised when I received my old forgotten password in plain text via Email.
Moderator Response:[BL] The thing is, a site like this shouldn't need all that much security. All you can really do (now) by stealing someone's password is to post comments using their user ID... annoying, but it's not like stealing credit card info.
Of course (as you'll learn in future posts) at the time of the hack, that wasn't the case.
And I am all in favor of salting passwords -- and we have on the new forum -- but salting is protection against dictionary attacks, rainbow tables and other intricate password hacking schemes. Our DoS protections would pretty much also thwart a dictionary attack or brute-force attack.
If I had the time, and for any site that I set up from scratch, salts are easy and painless. Working with a site that's been in existence for 7 years, and has evolved considerably over that time, however, presents a much greater coding problem.
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Stranger8170 at 13:02 PM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Rob @19
I can only read a few of those comments. It's too bad that for what ever reason, we don't teach students any relevent history. I suspect they're just to many inconvient truths that the status quo finds disturbing.
I think Jonah Goldberg got the ball rolling on the whole of liberals and Nazi's. What folks don't realize is that in 1932 all German political parties and their members were socialists, except Hitler who also ran as anti abortion as well as restoring German values.
Villabolo, another good comeback would be to inform them that American socialist joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and went off to fight fascism on the side of the Republicans while Hitler gave support to Franco.
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jsmith at 11:57 AM on 24 February 2014Global warming stopped in
1998,1995,2002,2007,2010, ????
I wasn't exactly sure where to put this, so if it's considered "off-topic" here just tell me and I'll repost it in the appropriate thread. A new study in Climate Dynamics, according to its lead author, Marcia Wyatt, identifies a stadium wave signal which may be responsible for the pause in global warming and, Wyatt said in a press release, "predicts that the current pause in global warming could extend into the 2030s." Is there some reason we should not believe her but instead believe those, such as the IPCC, who contend that this is a short-term trend that will soon be overtaken by more global warming?
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villabolo at 11:36 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Rob @19:
A good comeback to that is to inform them that Hitler killed the Socialist leaders in the Nazi party. The Nazis originally drew from both left (socialist) and right (Nationalists) Germans. This was to attract disaffected Germans from both sides and win (barely) the elections. After they won the real face of anti-left Fascism showed itself.
Then there's Franco, Spain's Fascist dictator. The Socialists were trying to kill him during Spain's civil war.
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lucia at 11:19 AM on 24 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
To be more complete:
http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/
or:
https://check.torproject.org/cgi-bin/TorBulkExitList.py?ip=198.41.222.255
after ip= you can put the IP of your server to get a list of IPs whose exit policies hit your server. -
Rob Honeycutt at 11:13 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Stranger @5...
You should go read the comments on Spencer's website. I can hardly count the number of times people post saying, "Oh, you know, actually, Nazis were left wing...blahblahblah."
If you can stomach the comments, it's fascinating to read.
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