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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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lucia at 11:12 AM on 24 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
1) It would be nice to know the IP that hit you and the time it hit you so we could check if it was really Tor here https://exonerator.torproject.org/
2)It's trivially easy to block Tor. The IPs are publicly available for free.
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villabolo at 11:05 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Moderator-JH @5:
"The use of all caps is prohibited by the SkS Comments Policy"
In all fairness the word nazi is an acronym like, for example, the nra. :-)
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scaddenp at 10:53 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Someone actively publishing climate-related research in mainstream peer-reviewed journals would be my definition. Works by replacing "climate" for any other science discipline too.
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Terranova at 10:35 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Dana,
What is the definition of a "climate scientist"? Is it based on training, education, research, etc...?
Anyone can answer the question, but I am most interested in Dana's reply.Thanks
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nealjking at 10:30 AM on 24 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
HK (#76):
I don't know if this was covered earlier on; but you need to be careful about trying to apply Beer's law to thermal radiation.
Beer's law describes an exponential dying away of intensity as radiation progresses. But thermal radiation does not fritter away to zilch, it fritters away until it reaches the intensity of radiation appropriate for the frequency and the temperature of the gas through which it is passing.
If thermal radiation were simply dissipated by passing through a medium, visible light would never escape the Sun. Visible light is the thermal radiation in the Sun, just as IR is the thermal radiation in the atmosphere.
The subject to look into regarding this is "radiative transfer".
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John Hartz at 08:45 AM on 24 February 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #8
@YubeDude #3:
Thank you for your suggestion.
The CNN interview that you linked to was posted on Thurs, Feb 20. It will therefore not be included in the next News Roundup which will focus on articles posted on Sat, Feb 22 thru Fri, Feb 28.
Given the volume of articles about climate change that are posted each day on websites throughout the world, it is impossible to list them all in a weekly roundup that provides only a carefully selected sample of such articles.
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scaddenp at 07:48 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
TC - no need to wrestle in the mud with them.
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chriskoz at 07:37 AM on 24 February 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #8
YubeDude@3,
If US congress is composed of such silly buffons as Cruz, I'm just realy happy right now that I defected from that country 10y ago (now I'm living in Australia). I'm saying that in public for the first time.
Back to thte topic, the climate science myths and misrespresentations by this buffon have been debunked many times. His last myth however:
It is ironic that he sees a greater threat from your SUV in your driveway than he does from the nation of Iran, with their radical Islamic jihad...
has not been debunked here because it falls outside of this site's scope. Read the book by Thomas Friedman Hot, Flat and Crowded in order to understand the role of radical jihad in this phenomenon of western civilisation's quest to quench their urge for petrol like that of a doper's for drugs. That book could be an eye opener for lots of americans and not only.
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Tom Curtis at 07:33 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
funglestrumpet @6, I have been through this a couple of times with others (and given my poor memory, possibly with you). Let me again categorically reject the idea nurnberg climate trials. There is a case that can be made for the trial of deliberate misinformers where the misinformation leads to deaths but in such a trial, it must be established "beyond reasonable doubt" that:
1) The person being tried knew the information they were providing was false;
2) That they also knew that people acting on their false information would result in very many deaths;
3) The people who acted would not have acted in the way that resulted in many deaths even without the misinformation; and
4) That the deaths actually occurred.
That is a set of conjunctions. That means to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt, each individual term clause must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. It is very dubious that we will ever have sufficient information about any individual to prove all four terms, and we certainly will not and do not have that information about prominent deniers in general at the moment. Until you have a prima facie case that you can prove these points beyond reasonable doubt about anybody, you should not call for the trial of anybody.
I will add that if we had enough people convinced to make such trials possible, we would have enough people convinced to make mitigation possible politically. Consequently such fantasies about trying the deniers are pointless, in addition to being wrong.
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Tom Curtis at 07:23 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Further to my @13, I would be more persuaded by scaddenp's point if it were not so obvious in so many cases that the offense taken by our opponents is false umbrage - as is demonstrated by the sheer distortion of the language involved, and by their free use of the term to describe others with whom they disagree.
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Tom Curtis at 07:20 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
scaddenp @12, that depends on the purpose of the conversation. Due to the unusual nature of the situation, we are forced (at various levels) to have conversations with people who are not open to rational persuasion on the facts. We have those conversations for onlookers, not the person with whom we are debating. For those onlookers, it is convenient and appropriate, IMO, to signal that our opponents are not open to rational persuasion. That is, to signal that they will use (variously) blatantly fallacious arguments, outright falsehoods, and deceptive graphing to win the debate.
Not only is it appropriate. It is necessary. In any discussion, we will face a gish gallop of sorts. It may not be intentional, but simply as a matter of fact, we will have far more points of disagreement than can be covered in any single discussion. Therefore, we need to advise onlookers to no trust our proponents claims, even if we did not get around to discussing a particular point.
Our opponents feel the same need, and have no hesitation in making accusations of fraud and conspiracy against working scientists to serve that need. Are we then to hesitate in likewise advising onlookers that we do not trust Watts or Spencer to pursue, or be persuaded by rational argument?
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scaddenp at 07:08 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Regardless of the rights or wrongs associated with labels, it is still got a good idea to labels which cause offense when trying to a have dialogue with someone.
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Dumb Scientist at 06:13 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Dr. Spencer's outrage presumes that the first stage of grief is "Holocaust denial" and not "denial". However, some accusations of denial are more explicit:
"While most environmentalists continue to insist that there is no connection between international bans on DDT and human deaths, such protestations really are like denying that the Holocaust ever happened." [Dr. Roy Spencer, 2008]
Because I deny Dr. Spencer's DDT conspiracy theory, Dr. Spencer referred to me using a more explicit version of the "repulsive, extremist" comparison that pushed his buttons. But I won't call Dr. Spencer names, because that seems unproductive and incredibly unprofessional.
(h/t to Kilby at Hot Whopper and Tim Lambert.)
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nigelj at 06:02 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
I may be wrong on this, but doesnt Roy Spencer have a huge conflict of interest? Someone with those particular types of religious and political beliefs, putting together satellite data? It must be right on the edge of acceptability.
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Tom Curtis at 05:40 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Andrew Mclaren @7, very interesting. I fact checked this to the limits I was able without going down to a good university library, and can confirm that while the term does not appear in Johnson's original dictionary of 1755 (at least as searchable on the internet), it does appear in the version of 1785 (page 567 on the 127 MB PDF).
We also have from the online version of Mirriam-Webster:
"1 de·ni·er noun \di-ˈnī(-ə)r, dē-\
Definition of DENIER
: one who denies <deniers of the truth>
First Known Use of DENIER15th century"
I can also confirm that the term appears in the 1992 edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:
Denier: One who denies.
They also give a as a different term:
Denier: The act of denying or refusing
with an earliest noted precedent in 1532; and which is the meaning used by King Charles in the passage quoted by Johnson.
The term "denier" has a more ancient history than that, being a moderately common title of the Apostle Peter. I that use it appears as the title of a poem by William Preston Johnston.
It is offensive that AGW deniers are trying to blacken the name of people who describe them with a very standard word of the English language that has been in common use for over 500 years. It is even more offensive that while doing that, they use the term themselves of more extreme deniers, thereby showing that their puffing and blowing about the term is sheerest hypocrissy. But more offensive even than that is Spencer's latest where, in essence he claims that because he has been compared to people who downplay the Nazi's greatest crime, it is OK for him to compare his opponents to the Nazis themselves. In doing so, he treats inaccurate history of the holocaust as morally equivalent to the holocaust itself. And, of course, he does so on the on false grounds. Calling him a denier is not a direct comparison to holocaust deniers, and is only an indirect comparison in that they are alike in denying facts well established as true. No moral equivalence is asserted by the term.
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Andrew Mclaren at 03:30 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
For those who might find such a reference useful, according to Johnson's English Dictionary (5th ed, 1773) the word DENIER is defined as follows:
DENI´ER ∫. [from deny]
1. A contradictor ; an opponent. Watts.
2. One that does not own or acknowledge. South.
3. A refuſer ; one that refuſes. King Charles.==========
Always a good excuſe to uſe thoſe long letter ſ's...(ſmile)
Johnson's annotations refer to his contemporary literary sources, so that first citation is from the logician Isaac Watts, definitely not Anthony Watts!
This edition of Johnson's dictionary was the last revision by himself during his lifetime, and set the standard for the more widely disseminated editions printed in the Georgian period. The word "denier" clearly has hundreds of years of precedence as a generic term for a person adopting a contentious and contrarian position in argument, making an appeal of ignorance, or actively refusing to consider, or grant something. Such have been common understandings of the term for at least a dozen generations of common use.
Roy Spencer and others who claim that 'denier' impugns holocaust deniers specifically and exclusively, are truly oblivious to the broader basis of the language and concepts they engage with. Let alone in invoking Godwin's Law as it is called, in such a mawkish and pious claim of victimhood.
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funglestrumpet at 02:54 AM on 24 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
It seems to me that we have let the origin of global warming get in the way of taking action on the matter. We have let concerns as to whether the 'iceberg' of climate change has 'Caused by Humans' stamped on its bottom get in the way of avoiding the damn thing.
The fossil fuel industry has not funded a campaign to ascertain the whos, whats, whens and whys of the matter i.e. the science. It has funded a campaign to deny the need for action so that b.a.u. is maintained. And a very successful campaign it has proved to be.
We need to seriously consider whether we have lost the fight to combat climate change and face up to it. With a 97% consensus on the science, yet little in the way of action, it is difficult to consider any other conclusion?.
If we cannot hand down a safe planet for future generations to live upon, perhaps we can seek retribution on their behalf while there is still a functioning system of law and order. We know that many nay-sayers are funded to a greater or lesser extent by the fossil fuel industry and as a consequence it is possible to legitimately investigate whether they have let personal gain sway their professional advice on the matter. Opinions which upon whatever basis have in turn succeeded in detering action to combat climate change; action that has been so evidently needed for so many years.
Surely, considering the consequences of that failure to act, the least these nay-sayers should face is a jury of their peers who can judge their actions and their motives, both stated and hidden. A jury that can, on the basis of their considerations, determine the level of culpability and upon which they can thus mete out any appropriate punishment.
It needn't be a dull affair. We could have a lovely bonfire of the membership papers of scientific societies from which they have been expelled and the letters patent for those then ex-members of the peerage who have been found to have harmed their nation for personal gain. And there would also be the opportunity to take the keys to their punishment cells and see who could throw them furthest away.
I write this on behalf of my current family and any future members of it.
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Daniel Bailey at 02:18 AM on 24 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
"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."
Except that we know that the oceans are not the source for the ongoing rise in atmospheric CO2.
Starting with an erroneous premise, as you do here, leads you further into error.
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YubeDude at 02:15 AM on 24 February 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #8
Maybe this can get posted in next weeks round-up.
Ted Cruz: Global warming not supported by data.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/02/20/cruz-to-cnn-global-warming-not-supported-by-data/
It is worth listening to this video as a lesson in erudite spin-meistering and political hyperbole with that affable and dismissive smug arrogance that only a delusional ideologue and self righteous ego can produce. Note the re-direct to Iran and political base issues while smirking disdainfully about the considerably larger and more global reality.
The best way to deal with AGW is to diminish politicians who spout this kind ignorance. Hopefully he has just created the sound bite that will be the foundation for the demise of his presidential aspirations.
Pay close attention to the prop in the background, just off his left shoulder. -
rasmus at 01:10 AM on 24 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
Would it be possible to set up a server to deny requests from TOR-servers, if their IP address were known? (and would it be possible to map TOR servers by using it oneself?).
Moderator Response:[BL] Yes to blocking Tor IP addresses, and many web sites do, but building the map is a huge task. Generally you have to pay to get a good Tor IP list, or you can get a less reliable and complete list for free. Just google it.
It's something we've discussed, but again, there's a lot to do and not many people available to do it, so it's a lower priority task.
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How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
Thanks for the information and warning, Tom!
I didn’t study Best’s graph very methodically, just noted that at a first glance it more or less resembled the results from the Nimbus satellite and the MODTRAN model. He even estimated the forcing from doubled CO2 to be a little higher than the most commonly stated 3.7 watt/m2.
It’s quite puzzling to me that someone can be an AGW skeptic (I prefer the word “denier” if they reject well-understood science) when they seem to understand the basic physics about how the greenhouse effect works by rising the altitude of heat loss, however that term is defined.
The argument “no warming over the last 12 years” in particular seems quite amateurish when Best should understand the insignificance of short periods, that only 1% of the heat accumulation happens in the atmosphere and that the alleged “hiatus” of surface warming maybe doesn’t even exist. The same applies to the argument of near-term cooling because the uncertainty of a climate model permits it. I’m not a statistician and don’t grasp the more technical aspects of Tamino’s usually excellent posts, but I do understand the simple concept that uncertainty goes both ways. It’s kind of understandable if a wrong conclusion is the result of wrong data, but it’s worse if a wrong conclusion is based on the correct data and a faulty logic.Again, thanks for the information, Tom!
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Stranger8170 at 22:59 PM on 23 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Two years ago I took the time to read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” by William Shirer. I found it interesting to learn that a big part of the coalition that brought the NAZI’s Nazi's to power was from conservative protestant Christians, anti-union working class labor and rich industrialists. Just saying!
Hitler was anti-intellectual, anti-union and anticommunist. I feel when I hear people like Spencer use the term NAZI Nazi they they're attempting to pound square pegs into round holes.
Moderator Response:[JH] The use of all caps is prohibited by the SkS Comments Policy.
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michael sweet at 22:09 PM on 23 February 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #8
From Peru,
You are correct: some scientists, like Michael Mann at the Huffington Post, have suggested a reason for the "haitus" is a general shift to a La Nina pattern. Such a sihft would effectively lower global temperatures 0.1-0.2C permanently. Mann cites paleorecords and a minority of climate models. Cai suggests the opposite, primarily based on a majority of climate models. Obviously both cannot be correct. Dueling hypothesis are how science advances. Come back in 20 years and we will know who is correct!! Perhaps improvements in models and more data will confirm one hypothesis in only 10 years.
If the shift is toward La Nina, the cooling from that shift would last about 10 years. We have used that up in the last decade. If the shift is toward El Nino, we are in for a big decade of heating in the very near future.
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ubrew12 at 20:25 PM on 23 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
Anyone who mentions Spencer gets my rejoiner "Oh, you mean the author of 'Fundanomics: the Free Market Symplified'?" Firstly, someone so enamored of Free Market ideology as to publish a book on the subject is 'fundanomically' untrustworthy as to motivation in Climate advocacy. Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation, WallStreet Journal, American Enterprise Institute: these prominant Climate denial institutions are also fundamentally anti-regulation. They see the free pursuit of capitalistic profit as a God-given Right of Man, and there are no circumstances where that Right can be curtailed. The rest of us worry about 'the Commons', these people do not recognize the Commons as a thing. There is only a God-granted exploitable resource.
Charles Krauthammer, American pundit on the Right, wrote an opinion piece about Global Warming, and also complained about the term 'denier'. One paragraph later he calls those concerned about Global Warming 'whores', quoting Deuteronomy. He repeats the slander a paragraph on: 'But whoring is whoring and the [Earth] gods must be appeased'. One wonders what sort of sympathy this 'denier' sought to generate through this tactic. Personally, I think that if we could get real 'Nazi's' and real 'whores' to sue for trademark infringement, we could yet rescue this 'conversation' we are having. Not to mention the English language.
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MA Rodger at 20:06 PM on 23 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
That's a classy presentation from Spencer. Although there is plenty to chose from (which you expect when an idiot starts mouthing off), my favourite passage from his little rant is:-
"I have read that Nazi Germany had more PhDs per capita than any other country. I’m not against education, but it seems like some of the stupidest people are also the most educated. "
As for what manner of idiot to describe Spencer as being - for myself, I call Roy a Denialist because he is in denial. But I suppose, because he also goes mouthing off about it, the term Denier is also appropriate.
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Tom Curtis at 19:42 PM on 23 February 2014MP Graham Stringer and CNN Crossfire are wrong about the 97% consensus on human-caused global warming
tlitb1 @35, it is fairly obvious even to this non-author that:
1) The papers were "captured" by the search, not "captured" into a category. That is, the literature search can be viewed metaphorically as a net which 'caught' 12,280 papers, which were then sorted into their appropriate categories. Your misinterpretation is both typical of you, and from past experience, probably deliberate. Whether deliberate or not, it has no justification in the text of the article.
2) Even casual readers of the paper will have noted that the abstract raters rated the papers only on the abstract and title, all other information (including date and journal of publication, and authors names) being withheld. In constrast author self ratings were based not only on the full paper, but also on whatever memories they had of their intentions for the paper. As such, the two sorts of ratings do not, and cannot compounded into a conglomerate rating as you suggest. If the authors disagree with the abstract ratings, that may be simply because they are rating a different thing. It is presume that abstracts are related to the contents of papers, so that 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. Differences in the rating of individual papers, whoever, can be the consequence of to many different factors to safely attribute them to any one factor (at least without a lot of additional information).
3) In constrast, a large difference between the author rating of the same paper by various authors can only be attributed to either misunderstanding the rating categories, or (hopefully less likely) misunderstanding their own paper by one or more of the authors. A difference of just one point in self rating, however, may simply be attributable to slighly different subjective judgements, which cannot be completely excluded. In the scenario you describe, at least two of the authors have misunderstood the rating categories.
4) 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. That is fairly clear evidence that he is misdescribing how the ratings should apply.
In fact it is very interesting to compare Spencer's reaction to that of Dr Nicola Scaffeta, who when asked a question about the rating of one of his papers had this to say:
Question: "Dr. Scafetta, your paper ‘Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900–2000 global surface warming‘ is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; “Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%“
Is this an accurate representation of your paper?"
Scafetta: “Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission.
What my papers say is that the IPCC view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun. This implies that the true climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling is likely around 1.5 C or less, and that the 21st century projections must be reduced by at least a factor of 2 or more. Of that the sun contributed (more or less) as much as the anthropogenic forcings.
The “less” claim is based on alternative solar models (e.g. ACRIM instead of PMOD) and also on the observation that part of the observed global warming might be due to urban heat island effect, and not to CO2.
By using the 50% borderline a lot of so-called “skeptical works” including some of mine are included in their 97%.”
First, Scaffeta grotesquely misrepresents the IPCC position, which is that greater than 50% of warming since 1950 has been anthropogenic.
Second, the abstract of his paper reads as follows:
"We study the role of solar forcing on global surface temperature during four periods of the industrial era (1900–2000, 1900–1950, 1950–2000 and 1980–2000) by using a sun-climate coupling model based on four scale-dependent empirical climate sensitive parameters to solar variations. We use two alternative total solar irradiance satellite composites, ACRIM and PMOD, and a total solar irradiance proxy reconstruction. We estimate that the sun contributed as much as 45–50% of the 1900–2000 global warming, and 25–35% of the 1980–2000 global warming. These results, while confirming that anthropogenic-added climate forcing might have progressively played a dominant role in climate change during the last century, also suggest that the solar impact on climate change during the same period is significantly stronger than what some theoretical models have predicted."
(My emphasis)
The phrasing, "as much as" indicates that the upper limit is being specified. With solar activity specified as only contributing "as much as" 25-30% of warming since 1980, the rating of the abstract was eminently justified.
What is interesting, however, is the stark contrast between Scaffeta's misinterpretation of the rating, and that by Spencer. Interestingly, all early commentary on the paper by AGW "skeptics" followed Scaffeta's line (if not quite so extremely). Then a new, and contradictory talking point developed, ie, that used by Spencer. Some at least Anthony Watts have happily presented both views.
I suspect it is fortunate for a number of AGW "skeptics" who self rated that their self ratings are confidential (unless they choose to release them), for I suspect quite a few of them will have rated them as rejecting the concensus, and are now publicly declaring that they ratings must be interpreted such that they are part of the 97%. As I have not seen the data, that is, of course, just a guess.
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Tom Curtis at 19:02 PM on 23 February 2014It's cosmic rays
jsmith @79, if you read further into the advanced version, you will find it later refers to a record high GCR flux; after which it shows the same diagram used in the basic version, showing the same decline in inverted neutrino flux. The key point is that while GCRs have increased over time, the increase is not statistically significant. Consequently there is no contradiction between the advanced version and the basic version, nor internal inconsistency in the advanced version.
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From Peru at 15:24 PM on 23 February 20142014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #8
I am a bit confused by the Nature El Niño Cai et al (2014) paper.
It suggests that extreme Niños will increase because " Under greenhouse-gas-induced warming conditions, warming occurs everywhere but at a faster rate in the eastern equatorial Pacific, diminishing the zonal and meridional SST gradients."
Was not observed the opposite pattern in the last decade, suggesting to some scientists that global warming may be inducing a La Niña -like state that suppress Niños and enhances Niñas, due to an increase in SST differences between East and West Pacific?
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jsmith at 15:23 PM on 23 February 2014It's cosmic rays
I am a bit confused by this page, as the basic and advanced versions seem to contradict each other. From the former:
"Cosmic ray counts have increased over the past 50 years, so if they do influence global temperatures, they are having a cooling effect."
And from the latter:
"Cosmic ray flux on Earth has been monitored since the mid-20th century, and has shown no significant trend over that period."
So my questions are whether this is, as it appears, a contradiction, and if so, which one's correct and can the one that's incorrect be changed?
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One Planet Only Forever at 14:14 PM on 23 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
I think that John Kerry was being too polite when he said: "We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific fact,"
The facts of the matter clearly indicate that Non-science is popular. That popularity is what needs to be scientifically investigated and reported.
Building on my post on the recent SkS article "'Its been hot before': faulty logic skews climate debate" I postulate that:
"The desire to benefit from burning fossil fuels is causing many people to readily accept non-Science that sounds like what they wish to hear and prefer to believe. And many powerful and knowledgeable but wicked people are trying to take advantage of that potential popularity any way they can get away with."
I believe there is ample evidence that almost everyone is already aware to support my claim (though some will try to deny it, ha-ha).
The actions of many contrarians, even knowledgeable ones, are unsustainable and damaging (deliberately by some of the knowledgeable ones), just like the unacceptable economic activities they want to expand, prolong and protect. They are not interested in developing a better understanding of the complex way our planet functions and how human activity affects it. They are not interested in helping to develop sustainable ways of living that everyone can enjoy improving through the hundreds of millions of years humanity has to look forward to on this amazing planet. They only want to prolong the vicious fighting over the unsustainable and damaging ways of benefiting they, and those they act in the interest of, have benefited from getting away with. And they will even partner with the socially intolerant to provide mutual support for each other’s unsustainable and damaging ideological desires that ‘miraculously’ do not conflict in any way.
The sooner that wicked pair lose their high-stakes gamble on the popularity of non-science the better it will be for everyone else. Whenever the greedy win everyone else loses, especially the future generations (and even the greedy ones in the future lose).
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dwm at 12:51 PM on 23 February 2014CO2 lags temperature
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. According to what I've read, the humidity data (NASA's UARS satellite data for instance) doesn't support the basic requirement (constant humidity levels) of the theory of self limiting feedback loops described in the link you provided. This is a large grey area, and without reliable data regarding humidity, theories about the positive feeback loop caused by water vapor are no more likely than any other theory. For now, the apparent decrease in humidity explains the more recent cooling of the past decade, and points to what one would expect to find: the existence of an as yet unexplained mechanism that prevents small changes in atmospheric composition to have large positive feedback (runaway) effects.
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villabolo at 12:48 PM on 23 February 2014Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap
One can tell that Dr. Spencer has gone bat guano crazy by seeing his other posts such as this one.
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Tom Curtis at 12:03 PM on 23 February 2014How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
HK @85, first a word of caution. Clive Best is an AGW 'skeptic', and while he is more mathematically sophisticated than most AGW 'skeptics', he still breathlessly writes about the lack of warming over the last twelve years, and predicts cooling temperatures for the next decade because the lower uncertainty bound of the HadCM2 model short term climate forecast permits it. Any recommendation of one blog post by Clive Best should not be construed as a recommendation of any other blog post by Best, or the quality of his blog in general.
More importantly, Clive Best's attempt to calculate the effective altitude of radiation clearly fails on empirical grounds. Specifically, this is his calculated "effective altitude of radiation":
Clearly he shows the effective altitude of radiation on either sides of the spikes at 620 and 720 cm-1 as being between zero and 1000 meters. In contrast, as can be seen in the real spectrum he shows, at those wave numbers, the effective altitude of radiation is closer to 6000 meters {calculated as (ground temperature - brightness temperature)/lapse rate}:
As can be seen from his graph of the predicted IR spectra, he clearly gets the 660 cm-1 spike wrong as well, showing it as a dip (?!) for 300 ppmv, and as a barely discernable spike at 600 ppmv. That is so different from the obvious spike in the real world spectrum (at approx 390 ppmv) that you know (and he should have known) that he has got something significantly wrong.
Before addressing that specifically, I will note two minor things he omitted (perhaps for simplicity). The first is that he has not included a number of factors that broaden the absorption lines. Broadening increases the width of the lines, but also reduces the peak absorbance of the lines. In any event, he has not included doppler broadening, possibly does not include collissional broadening, and probably does not include some of the other minor forms of broadening.
The second factor is that he has not allowed for the difference in atmospheric profiles between the US Standard atmosphere and actual tropical conditions. Specifically, the atmosphere is thicker at the equator due to centrifugal "force", and also has a higher tropopause due to the greater strength of convective circulation. That later should reduce CO2 density, and might be accepted as the cause of the discrepancy except that mid latitude and even polar spectra show the same reduce absorbance relative to his calculated values (and hence higher effective altitude of radiation in the wings, and for the central spike).
Although these factors are sources of inaccuracy, they do not account for the major error in calculation. That is probably a product of his definition of effective altitude of radiation, which he defines as the highest altitude at which "... the absorption of photons of that wave length within a 100m thick slice of the atmosphere becomes greater than the transmission of photons". That is, it is the altitude of the highest layer at which less than half of the upward IR flux at the top of that altitude comes from that layer.
This definition is superficially similar to another common definition, ie, the lowest altitude from which at least half of the photons emitted upward from that altitude reach space. Importantly, however, this later definition is determined by the integrated absorption of all layers above the defined layer. Specifically, it is the layer such that the integrated absorption of all layers above it = 0.5. I think the layer picked out by Best's method is consistently biased low relative to that picked out by this later definition.
There are two other common definitions of the effective layer of radiation around. The most common is:
"Here the effective emission level is defined as the level at which the climatological annual mean tropospheric temperature is equal to the emission temperature: (OLR/σ)1/4, where σ is the Stefan–Boltzmann constant."
(Source, h/t to Science of Doom)
That definition can be generalized to specific wave numbers, or spectral lines, and is used by Best in an earlier blog post specifically on the subject. It also needs to be modified slightly to allow for the central spike (which comes from the stratosphere). The difficulty of such a modification, plus a certain circularity in this definition makes others preferable. The third definition is the one I give above of "the temperature weighted mean altitude from which the radiation comes". I take it that the three common definitions pick out the same altitude, at least to a first order approximation. In contrast, Best's definition in the blog post to which you refer is of by (in some portions of the spectrum) at least 6 kms.
Despite this flaw, Best's blog post does give a good idea of the methods used in radiative models. However, his detailed results are inaccurate, in a way that does not reflect the inaccuracy of the radiative models used by scientists. This also applies to the graph shown by scaddenp @55 above, which was also created by Best. It is very indicative of the type of profiles likely to be seen, but should not be considered an accurate source. I discuss the accuracy of actual models briefly here, and in more detail in the comments.
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Wol at 09:24 AM on 23 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
Highly interesting - so long as it doesn't become thread creep!
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John Cook at 07:38 AM on 23 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
What's wrong with discussions about cricket? Particularly with the form Mitchell Johnson is showing lately :-)
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How we know the greenhouse effect isn't saturated
I just found this excellent blog post by Clive Best about the forcing from a doubling of CO2 based on how much that will change the "effective emission height", which is another term for "altitude of heat loss". It covers much of the topic we've been discussing here, and maybe it can fill some of the holes in our understanding.
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Albatross at 02:59 AM on 23 February 2014A Hack By Any Other Name — Part 1
A great read Bob!
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