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numerobis at 09:19 AM on 24 March 2013Arctic freezing season ends with a loud crack
About the piomas numbers: how well do they integrate cracks into their model? Or are the cracks representing little enough area (and volume) to be ignorable? -
Tom Curtis at 08:01 AM on 24 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
Brad Keyes @32, Indeed. I say to Geoff! There is nothing in my post that is, or purports to be a paraphrase of anybody elses opinion. When I wished to indicate Geoff's opinion, I quoted him.
The question is, why do you find it so absolutely intolerable that I should give my opinion of events in my own terms?
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geoffchambers at 07:33 AM on 24 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
Tom Curtis (comment 26)
Perhaps Cook and Marriott should read the OP more carefully. Brandon Shollenberger has found quotes in the paper which are not in the raw data. [sloganeering snipped]
I don’t find Foxgoose’s comments “absurd, and undoubtedly consperacist”. Why do you think I should? Or rather, what gives you the right to decide what comments I should or shouldn’t make?
You quote me as being a self avowed conspiracy theorist. And so I am. I believe that Guy Fawkes conspired to blow up Parliament and that the Reichstag Fire was the work of Nazis, though I have absolutely no specialised knowledge to support these beliefs.
On the other hand, I reject the consensus view that the Turin Shroud is a forgery concocted by a mediaeval religious conspiracy, and prefer to believe that it is an authentic historical document. I weigh my knowledge of art history against my atheism, and art history wins.
Of course I don’t think it‘s the job of secret services to kill incumbent presidents of their own country or royalty or major civic leaders. These people got killed, and it’s legitimate to ask questions.
One of the most serious results of 9/11 (apart from the deaths of course) was that the horror of the event suppressed the normal processes of enquiry. Important questions about the responsibility of authorities never got asked because people were afraid of being labelled Troofers. The President and Vice President being interviewed in secret by the official enquiry was a low point of American democracy.
The psychology of belief is a fascinating area of enquiry. [sloganeering snipped]
Moderator Response: [d_b] General point: insulting dismissals are marginally more acceptable when they're earned by being packaged with reasonable justification. Therefore, in order to employ mocking adjectives please be prepared to do some work; each vituperative remark that does not directly contribute to better understanding of the topic at hand will entail a heavy cost for publication. -
DSL at 06:39 AM on 24 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Harold, you claim that there's an unknown natural cycle. That's easy to say, and perhaps you think it's the kind of claim that one can make without having to provide evidence (indeed, you haven't pointed to any in making your claims). What happens to the enhanced greenhouse effect in your physical model? You can't simply discount it and replace it with another mechanism. Unless, of course, you're arguing that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist. If that's not the case, where's the evidence that you rely on that tells you that climate sensitivity is low?
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Glenn Tamblyn at 06:27 AM on 24 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Harold
Here is a line of evidence and reasoning you might find interesting. Totally the opposite of your 'specific location' approach.
Measurement of the change in the total amount of heat in the ocean. This is where around 90% of the added heat in the last 1/2 century has gone so it is a useful measure of what is going on. Total heat accumulation in that time is more than 2 * 1023 joules. And the rate of accumulation is actually faster in the last couple of decades than this longer term value would suggest.
This is a large number, a bit hard to get our head around. It is however a real number. It is a real quantity of energy. So, applying the 1st law of Thermodynamics, we need to ask where this extra heat can have come from, what was it's source. It can't have appeared by magic.
If we consider the possible heat sources here on Earth that could have supplied this heat, the largest possible source of heat is geothermal, heat from within the Earth. The total amount of heat that has built up in the worlds oceans is several times greater than could have been supplied by Geothermal heat. In the last decade or so this multiple is closer to 5 times. And all other possible terrestrial heat sources are much smaller than Geothermal.
So this leaves us with a basic conclusion. The heat acumulation in the oceans cannot have arisen due to any internal heat transfer wuithin the Earth! This warming must have an extra-terrestrial origin. Something has disturbed the Earth's energy balance with Space. Direct consequence of observations.
Additionally we know that over this period the Sun's heat output hasn't risen. If anything it has declined. We have had the Sun under continuous, 24/7 observation by satellites since the mid 70's so this fact isn't in dispute.
So if the Eaarth has an energy imbalance causing heat accumulation, and this can't have been caused by an increase in energy flowing into the planet, that means that something mut be causing a reduction in the heat flow out from the planet. Such a conclusion is hard to avoid, based directly on the observations.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 06:10 AM on 24 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Harold
It might help if you explain why the question you ask, in the specific form you have asked it, is a meaningful question. Why is looking for specific locations etc the best way to explore the issue?
"...However, I do know how to proceed to define true root cause of any current temperature PROBLEM you have good empirical data for to define. I believe available temperature data from a single location has much better and more reliable information to work with than a computed global average metric whose historical value keeps changing with every new release of a temperature database."
Some issues with this statement. Use of the word PROBLEM is conflating two separate things. That there is a temperature change. And that such a change is detrimental. Also importantly, that such a detrimental now, rather than likely to be in the future. Those things need to be unpacked. The science of climate is about addressing the first part of this. One needs to look to biology, economics and even values and ethics to consider the second part.There is a fundamental problem, conceptually, with wanting to look at specific locations. Any changes that one might observe there may not arise solely as a result of the cause you are investigating. They may have several causes.
Consider an example. I have a swimming pool and the water level is low so I turn on the tap to start filling the pool. This may take many hours. If I wish to monitor whether the pool is rising or not, what should I look at as a measure of this? I could use a ruler at one point in the pool to look at how the measurement is changing.
However the pool is in use by my family. So there are waves moving around the pool, level changes are happening as they get in and out of the pool. So my readings at one location will be a mixture of the underlying rise in water level due to the tap being on, conflated with all the other factors that I have mentioned. The 'signal' I am trying to detect may well be drowned out by all the other 'noise'.
If I could somehow measure the water height across many locations in the pool simultaneously and average these results then the variability due to waves on the water would cancel out and I would have a more reliable measure of my target 'signal' - although the effect of people getting in and out of the pool hasn't been removed by this approach.
This is the fundamental issue with trying to detect an underlying signal when there is also noise - the more we focus on the individual data points, the more we are end up looking at the noise, not the signal.
Here you need to consider the difference between Proximate and Ultimate causes. Is the CO2 rise the Proximate causeof a change at a specific location. Almost certainly not. There will be multiple factors. Is it the Ultimate cause of much of that change? Yes.
Climate is defined (by the WMO) as the average of weather over a 30 years period. And with AGW we are talking about changes to Climate across all regions of the Earth and that this change will not be uniform at all locations. So seeking to examine individual locations will only be a useful exercise if that is then repeated for a large number of locations and points in time.
So let me put it to you that the way you are framing your question is wrong. Seeking to look at specific locations is the approach least likely to give you the correct answer. Or even a useful answer.
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dana1981 at 05:53 AM on 24 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Harold @51:
"the evidence to pin most of the recent global warming since 1850 AD on CO2 emissions is very weak, compared to the kind of empirical evidence I have been taught to look for, if I want to prove true root cause of a deviation from normal behavior. I believe that significant warming since 1850 AD could be due to natural climate cycles that we do not understand and don't know how to control."
Sorry, but if you believe that, you either haven't been talking to or haven't been listening to real climate scientists. Even the 'skeptics' don't dispute that humans are causing global warming. See here for a summary of the evidence.
You're also asking the wrong questions. The less data you consider (i.e. one location rather than global averages), the more uncertainty you introduce. If you want examples of specific areas that are clearly being adversely impacted by climate change, aside from the coastal areas I already mentioned, look at the Arctic and low-elevation islands like Tuvalu, for starters.
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Clyde at 05:01 AM on 24 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
Albatross 37
1) In your opinions, is the existence of this blog and the volunteers running it evidence of a conspiracy? In on case yes.
.So, either Mother Nature deigns to give the world a terrifying wake up call. Or people like us have to build the greatest guerilla force in human history. Now. Because time is up…Someone needs to convene a council of war of the major environmental movements, blogs, institutes etc. In a smoke filled room (OK, an incense filled room) we need a conspiracy to save humanity.
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geoffchambers at 04:18 AM on 24 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
KR:
Difficult to argue science with a black spot.
Albatross:
No no no and no.
You're welcome.
Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that Frontiers should withdraw the paper because Lewandowsky and Cook have been rude to me. Academic freedom must be defended, and Lew & Co have every right to investigate our beliefs or sexual preferences or whatever else they find interesting. They should correct mistakes though, and since every section of the paper is full of them, they hould perhaps start again.
My big objection to this kind of research is not so much the specific accusations, but the lack of reflection which goes into them. What has LOG12 claimed to discover, after all, except that people who are sceptical about one official “truth” are likely to be sceptical about another. Even if they had established this fact (which they didn’t, because of their abysmal research design) so what?
Similarly with “Recursive Fury”. People say stuff on blogs. So what? In the first month after the paper came out, we tore the paper to bits, and posted numerous questions to the lead author. Instead of answering, he posted a series of strange observations on our behaviour. By the time Cook and Marriott started their content analysis a month later, the paper was in tatters, and bloggers were amusing themselves commenting on the weirdness of it all, and speculating on Lew’s motives.
It would no doubt be possible to compile a “best of” of us denialist bloggers to show what a bunch of nutters we are. (-snip-). We may well be a weird lot, but again, so what? What has that to do with belief or disbelief in climate science?
Moderator Response: [DB] Inflammatory snipped. -
sidd at 03:48 AM on 24 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
That's a fine strawman you got there, Dr. Doiron. 10kiloyr ago we had deglaciation response to orbitally forced NH spring/summer insolation, amplified by various feedbacks. Today, we have radiative imbalance driven by GHG which is also triggering feedbacks. The situations are not the same. The good doctor demands that we find a single location for which the _trend_ today significantly exceeds trends over the last 10Kyr. And the good doctor knows that instrumental record does not extend for 10Kyr, error bars on trendlines are larger as we go deeper into proxy records from the past, so the strawman cannot be disproved. Nice try.
And why a single location ? because the good doctor is aware that forcings do not act at one location or a small set of locations, thus the signal at one location will be, in general, lost in the noise.
Instead of 10Kyr, lets use 60 yr. as in the Hansen climate dice paper. And instead of one location. look at all of them. An analysis of _every_ grid cell on earth shows the entire (approximately Gaussian) temperature distribution shifting to the right by one standard deviation. What used to be 3 sigma events now occur 10 times as frequently. That is the appropriate comparison,
Analyses of precipitation records also show extremes increasing. But that is a separate discussion, albeit much more interesting than dissecting strawmen from the deniers. In fact I can't believe I am wasting time on this piece of specious garbage. I have trees to plant, and solar hot water projects galore to implement, both of which give me much more pleasure than arguing with deniers on blogs. I leave it to those with stronger stomachs to carry on this particular conversation, and I again extend my thanks to the hosts here, for their patience and endurance.
sidd -
Albatross at 03:30 AM on 24 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
Geoff and Barry,
This whole faux debate that you are trying to fabricate is conveniently tangental to what really matters-- it takes the discussion nowhere and I'd argue that is your intention (conscious or not). To better understand where you are coming from could you please answer/address the following?
1) In your opinions, is the existence of this blog and the volunteers running it evidence of a conspiracy?
2) If yes, please elaborate on what you think the conspiracy is.
3) Do you deny the reality of the theory of anthropogenic climate change or anthropogenic global warming?
4) If yes, do you deny that the consequences will be significant enough as to warrant action in reducing our GHG emissions?
Thank you.
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Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
geoffchamber - I believe understanding the positions and thoughts of those espousing conspiracy theories is indeed a useful consideration. And (IMO) Cohn's observations are an uncanny match to the expressed conspiratorial attitudes of many climate 'skeptics' - the "Auditor" who does no primary research (Renegade and Pendant), claims of uniform suppression by "The Team", the repeated seizing upon minor disagreements over details as somehow invalidatiing the whole field, and indeed the frequent "gross and often grotesque" misinterpretations.
A discussion of the science is always welcome; I'll just note that there has been very little of that from those who disagree with the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
[Source]
What I've observed (again, personal opinion) in objection to AGW is for the most part - not science.
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tomwys at 02:49 AM on 24 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
It is amazing how this blog attracts “ad-hominem” commentary at extraordinary high levels, even to the point where moderators must step in to keep the unruly at bay.
The CPAC presentation is available on the Media page of http://www.colderside.com. A look at the CO2 page there might be helpful too. If your readers take issue with the DATA or INFORMATION presented, that is a good place to start. I even show how the Arctic is melting, courtesy of Fowler/Maslanik NSIDC UCol and our friends at ESSA. The time was too short to get into the physics of cloud vs snow albedo – show up at one of my presentations and ask sensible questions.
Walt Cunningham and Hal Doiron have achieved great things for this country, and have their Hard Data and Observational acts together. Your ad-hom messenger shooters don’t even come close.
Moderator Response: [Albatross] Please refrain from using all caps. -
Harold H Doiron, PhD at 02:37 AM on 24 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
DSL, dana1981 and others interested in this discussion,
I know enough about your fears of a global climate disaster, and I think most of you must believe that CO2 emissions into the atmosphere will cause it; but I am not convinced. Why? I have read the IPCC arguments and interacted with climate scientists who have your same concerns.....but, the evidence to pin most of the recent global warming since 1850 AD on CO2 emissions is very weak, compared to the kind of empirical evidence I have been taught to look for, if I want to prove true root cause of a deviation from normal behavior. I believe that significant warming since 1850 AD could be due to natural climate cycles that we do not understand and don't know how to control.
There is lots of controversy about whether global average temperature is deviating from normal behavior of the last 10,000 years or not. However, it is much more straight forward to measure temperature at a given location on the planet and determine if temperature variations we are experiencing now are really that different from temperature variations that occurred at that location before CO2 became an issue. The specifics of what we find out about temperature variation at that one location will let us know whether we have a tempertature PROBLEM (deviation from the last 10,000 years of normal range) at that location for which we need to nail down true root cause with high confidence. I believe, from my experiences, that failure to prove true root cause before taking action that one believes will rectify the PROBLEM, is not rational thinking and can lead to disasterous, perhaps fatal, unintended consequences.
I'm still waiting for the simple answer from my initial simple question to all of you. At what location on earth is current temperature trend out of bounds, or headed out of bounds, of the last 10,000 years of temperature behavior? Then, with this location identified, we can start to look for true cause of that deviation from normal. If the global average temperature (a calculated value) is really behaving so differently to cause us such concern, surely there must be at least one location on earth that you could identify that has a temperature PROBLEM.
I can't identify true root cause of the disasterous climate changes you are worried about, because the data from the future are not available to examine to determine true root cause of the deviation that hasn't occurred yet. However, I do know how to proceed to define true root cause of any current temperature PROBLEM you have good empirical data for to define. I believe available temperature data from a single location has much better and more reliable information to work with than a computed global average metric whose historical value keeps changing with every new release of a temperature database.
Moderator Response: [Albatross] Harold, the basis for your argument appears to be based on two claims, a) that the current warming is natural or mostly natural, and b) current temperatures are not unusual for a specific time window. The former is essentially the number #1 myth on the left-hand side panel of the blog. Please take further discussion of (a) to this thread. As for the latter argument, one can play that game going back to about 4.5 billion years. It is a red herring, a strawman-- the reason being is that we are primarily concerned about where temperatures are heading as we will likely go on to quadruple CO2 levels in very short order in geological terms. This is how fake skeptics play the game. First it is year X (say 1998) is declared to have been warmer, then year X in the 1930s for a particular region (say the USA) is declared to have been warmer, then the claim is made that the medieval climate anomaly was warmer, then it is claimed that the early part of the Holocene was warmer. Please take that discussion to this thread. Thank you for your cooperation. -
geoffchambers at 02:32 AM on 24 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
KR at 01:05 AM on 24 March, 2013:
(-snip-)
This may be a valid observation, but it hardly advances our understanding of anything. After all, “confrontation of opposed interests” is as natural as the air we breathe, and the vast majority of humankind have always been “shut out of the political process”. (-snip-).
It’s hard what all this has to do with the debate between warmists and deniers. If ever warmists deign to debate with us deniers, it’ll turn out to be about our differing views on the likely climate sensitivity to CO2 and the efficacy of wind turbines - hardly the stuff to start a crusade or pogrom about.
Moderator Response:[DB] Blockquote snipped per Comments Policy. Hotlinked reference to other comment.
Inflammatory snipped.
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Bob Loblaw at 01:54 AM on 24 March 2013It warmed before 1940 when CO2 was low
Klapper:
I have already told you why a reconstruction using nothing but sunspot numbers is poor/limited, and KR has pointed you to literature disucssing sunspot number in more detail.
That you dismiss a mathematical discussion - of how limited accuracy in observations means limited ability to improve models - as "bloviating about sociology/politics" tells me pretty much all I need to know about your scientific skills.
It is up to you to demonstrate why your back of the envelope calculation is better than what is in the literature. I won't hold my breath waiting.
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Brad Keyes at 01:32 AM on 24 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
shoyemore:
I listened to a very good poscast on conspiracy theories, and one of the scientists involved said that some conspiracy theories are TRUE
Was it Naomi Oreskes, by any chance?
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Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
For those interested in a social discussion on conspiracist ideation, I think one very relevant text (which I've referred to in previous discussions on LOG12 and RF) is Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics. There he discusses (in the light of some historically popular conspiracy theories) a number of characteristics exhibited by those holding such theories, such as dispossession, renegades/pendants, "emulation of the (perceived) enemy", and in particular the "double sufferer" - I highly recommend the embedded quote from Norman Cohn on that topic:
“...the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”
Note: The Hofstadter article dates from 1964.
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Brad Keyes at 00:57 AM on 24 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
Tom Curtis,
you say to Geoff (my emphasis):
There is no question that you first latched on to the fact that "skeptic" blogs were contacted after the science defending blogs.
That is not an accurate paraphrase of anything Geoff has ever written or, to my knowledge, believed.
As Geoff is perfectly aware, the science-defending blogs were contacted last. They received their invitation emails after the other blogs.
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Brad Keyes at 00:35 AM on 24 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
(-snip-)
Moderator Response: [DB] False claims of ad hominem snipped. Again. -
Brad Keyes at 00:20 AM on 24 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
grindupBaker:
@geoffchambers#24 I don't blame you Geoff. If I was named as 1st to say "Recursive Conspiracist Hypothesis number 4" in public I'd be mad as hell. And I don't even have false teeth.
(-snip-).
As Philippe points out,
everybody should exercise restraint. A common characteristic of internet communications is the rapid loss of respect that people would keep toward each other if they were in presence of each other. All should imagine that they actually talking to a person.
Moderator Response:[DB] It is noted that a long series of comments were removed due to inflammatory rhetoric and tone by you in an initial comment. Accordingly, all direct responses to it were also needfully removed.
Moderating this site is a tiresome chore, particularly when commentators repeatedly submit offensive or off-topic posts. We really appreciate people's cooperation in abiding by the Comments Policy, which is largely responsible for the quality of this site.
Finally, please understand that moderation policies are not open for discussion. If you find yourself incapable of abiding by these common set of rules that everyone else observes, then a change of venues is in the offing. As indeed occurred over at Shaping Tomorrow's World.
Please take the time to review the policy and ensure future comments are in full compliance with it. Thanks for your understanding and compliance in this matter.
False claims of ad hominem snipped)
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Klapper at 21:52 PM on 23 March 2013It warmed before 1940 when CO2 was low
@Bob Loblaw # 31:
Bob, your posts are too long. Don't waste your time bloviating about sociology/politics, just stick to what's wrong with my numbers. I have read your #18 post but I'm not going to respond to non-qualitative commentary (more or less, I might change my mind but for now let's just stick to numbers/quantitative type commentary).For example, if my delta TSI number of 0.09W/m2/decade is wrong, then show me a recent peer-reviewed number that is higher, and give me the reason it is better.
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shoyemore at 19:43 PM on 23 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
I listened to a very good poscast on conspiracy theories, and one of the scientists involved said that some conspiracy theories are TRUE - for example, the manipulated groupthink that led to the Iraq war, and the Tuskegee syphilisExperiment ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment )
Conspiracy theorists are reductionists who claim that because there have been SOME conspiracies, therefore EVERYTHING that undermines a core belief of theirs is a conspiracy. The critieria above are to an extent mental defence mechanisms to protect that core insight, which the theorist will perform incredible logical contortions to defend.
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Tom Curtis at 18:38 PM on 23 March 2013Newcomers, Start Here
gaiafollower @234, a Venus like runaway greenhouse effect is not currently possible on Earth based on the best evidence to date. That is, the Earth's oceans will not boil away, and cannot be made to boil away simply by adding CO2 (and/or methane) to the atmosphere; although in several billion years they will boil away due to the Sun getting hotter with time.
On the other hand, it is perfectly possible that feedbacks from anthropogenic CO2 could result in feedbacks resulting in an increase in temperature of 10 plus degrees C, a situation that will make parts of the Earth literally uninhabitable due to heat. Those scenarios are not plausible, however, in the short term. Only when temperatures start reaching 4-5 C above current levels will further increases plausibly push us into that sort of feedback regime.
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gaiafollower at 18:28 PM on 23 March 2013Newcomers, Start Here
I have a question. I read somewhere about a possible Venus effect with Earth's global warming. The writer posited that Venus' Runaway global warming hypothosis created Venus's atmosphere as it is today and could be a possibility for Earth if it succumbs to runaway global warming. The writer went on to say that the artic melt would allow large quantities of methane to be released into the atmosphere as well as acidification and warming of oceans would cause phytoplankton to die off and thereby the absorption of CO2 by the phytoplankton would cease or be greatly reduced and these along with other factors would cause Earth's atmosphere to become like Venus'. Is this scenario plausable?
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geoffchambers at 17:28 PM on 23 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
I agree with Ironcage (comment 18) that this work is “severely lacking of the social dimension”. If he wants to know more of the “life history, the societal relations of power, the practices of everyday experiences” to which this particular conspiracy theorist is exposed, please get in touch via my blog
geoffchambers.wordpress.com.
I’d be more than happy to discuss my “sense of disempowerment contributing perhaps to a sense of empowerment“ and “the institutional and societal relations that contribute to such unreflexive dispositions in the first place”.
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geoffchambers at 17:13 PM on 23 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
corrections to my comment 24 above:
For “Lucia Lindgren” read “Lucia Liljegren”
For:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jul/27/climate-sceptics-conspiracy-theorists
19 July 2012 (400+ comments)
read:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wray-herbert/climate-change-denial-_b_1686437.html
19 July 2012 (400+ comments)
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Tom Curtis at 16:11 PM on 23 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
geoffchambers @24, perhaps you should read the OP more carefully:
"As well as the Recursive Fury paper, we also published Supplementary Material containing excerpts from blog posts and some comments relevant to the various observed recursive theories. In the paper, we characterise this as “raw data” - all the comments that we encountered that are relevant to the different theories. In contrast, the “processed data” are the excerpted quotes featured in the final paper, where we match the various recursive theories to the conspiracist criteria outlined above."
There is no question that you first latched on to the fact that "skeptic" blogs were contacted after the science defending blogs. You are not, however, quoted in any connection with the conspiracist versions of that theory that undoubtedly developed, as for example when Foxgoose wrote:
"It does seem rather extraordinary that Professor Lewandowsky was able to put up a slide giving some of the results of his survey (including number of responses) on September 23rd 2010 - when he didn't send out final emails inviting his primary sources (sceptic blogs) to participate until September 20th.
It almost seems as if he had decided on the number and nature of responses before the final data could possibly have been received.
Is there a word for this novel form of data acquisition?"
Oddly, he wrote that just three posts after your first suggestion, and you felt no need to respond reject his absurd, and undoubtedly consperacist take on your questions.
I also think it is hypocritical of you to take offense at purportedly being identified as a conspiracist when you are a self avowed conspiracy theorist. With regards to A Scott's "replication" of LOG12, you wrote:
"I won’t be completing the survey. Here’s why. First, I strongly agree with several of the conspiracy theories, (secret services assassinate people – that’s their job) and I don’t want that fact being used to dirty the name of scepticism. Of course, my decision is a way of gaming the survey ..."
Out of curiosity, do you think it is the job of secret services to kill incumbent presidents of their own country (President Kennedy)? Or royalty and the wife of the heir apparent of their own country (Dianna)? Or major civic leaders committed to bringing about morally necessary change through non-violent democratic means (Martin Luther King Jr)? As these were the only conspiracy theories in LOG12 involving assassinations by secret services you must agree with at least two out of three of these by your own words.
How odious of Lewndowsky et al to leave open the possibility that you are a conspiracy theorist when you, in fact, are a conspiracy theorist.
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grindupBaker at 15:18 PM on 23 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
@geoffchambers#24 I don't blame you Geoff. If I was named as 1st to say "Recursive Conspiracist Hypothesis number 4" in public I'd be mad as hell. And I don't even have false teeth.
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dana1981 at 14:49 PM on 23 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Harold - whoever you spoke to was mistaken. We have not even seen your CPAC presentation. From what I read, Walter Cunningham's and Thomas Wysmuller's comments were kind of a joke, apparently denying that the planet is warming.
From the same story, you said sea level rise isn't a global problem (which is kind of silly – a whole lot of countries, including the USA, have coastal property), and said China is refusing to address climate change, which is wrong. Other than that, I don't know what was included in your presenation, so we haven't addressed it.
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Bob Loblaw at 14:38 PM on 23 March 2013It warmed before 1940 when CO2 was low
Klapper:
"Gavin ... should do a model run to see if that explains the model/observation discrepancy."
All the model runs in the world will not improve the accuracy of the observations. Gavin's quote clearly talks about the lack of suitable observations in the period in question. You cannot "improve" a model to the point where it is more accurate than the observations you are testing it with. Trying to fit the model to errors in the data will just introduce errors into the model. It is becoming increasingly obvious that you cannot see past this barrier to your learning.
"absolving everyone from having to think about this discrepancy.."
Now you're just creating strawmen. I never said the period wasn't worthy of investigation. There is a limit to what can be done, however, due to the limitations of the observations that are available to test the model. Unless the observations (or proxy reconstructions) can be improved, doing more model runs won't change that. It is far more productive to continue to work on comparing the models to more recent periods where observations are more complete.
Given the lack of any response to my question regarding my example at #18, I will conclude that you either haven't bothered reading it, don't understand it, or are just unwilling to deal with its implications. Until you provide an answer to my question (in #27), instead of avoiding it, there seems little point in watching you chase your tail.
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DSL at 12:44 PM on 23 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Well I hope Harold's not going to pull a Tom Harris and mumble some non sequitur response followed by a general disappearance. In the interest of encouraging Harold's interaction, I suggest we avoid dogpiling.
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Klapper at 11:07 AM on 23 March 2013It warmed before 1940 when CO2 was low
@Bob Loblaw #28
If Gavin thinks there's reason to believe the lapse rate, or ocean heat mixing were different in the period 1910 to 1945, then he should do a model run to see if that explains the model/observation discrepancy. As it is, I checked a GISS Model E2-R model run of the 20th century and it predicts a warming rate of less than 1/3 the warming rate of the observations in this period. There is no excuse the trend isn't long enough either. There is also no excuse that volcanoes muddled the picture.
If the error boundaries overlap, absolving everyone from having to think about this discrepancy, they probably only barely overlap. I don't think I'm going to convince you this period is worthy of more detailed investigation, and may pose a problem for model assumptions, and I don't think I'll try. I've done enough back of the envelope calculations on TSI (and also aerosols, using some guesstimates for forcing from Hansen et al 2007, chart (a)), to believe the model/observations gap is larger than the posting above would have you conclude. Please no comments on "back of the envelope" after all that's all the above calculations are too.
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Klapper at 10:50 AM on 23 March 2013It warmed before 1940 when CO2 was low
@KR #26:
I checked the graph (a) from Hansen et al 2007 at the GISS website link you provided. In the period 1910 to 1945 the reflective aerosol and indirect aerosol effects combined look to almost cancel out the forcing from GHG's. There are postive forcings from BC and TSI in this period but these forcings estimates appear to be small compared to GHG's and aerosols.
To me this confirms what I've been saying all along: there is some forcing at play in the 1910 to 1945 period which the models have not captured. Since these forcings come from the GISS E model, I also checked the warming rate from a GISS Model E2-R model run of the 20th century from the CMIP5 database. The warming rate in the 1910 to 1945 period from that model is 0.043C/decade. Compare that to the actual observations of 0.14C/decade.
By including aerosols, the model/observations divergence just becomes that much worse. The error on the GISS model trend would have to be +/- .06C/decade to close the gap with the observations.
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Tom Dayton at 09:21 AM on 23 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Harold, the major problem is the rate of change of temperature and the resulting other climatic effects (precipitation, sea level, sea chemistry, snow and ice cover, etc.). For example, nearly every dang land-living plant and animal (and some water-living ones) that people eat nowadays has been bred over decades to millenia to suit the current particular conditions of growing, harvesting, marketing, preparing, and eating. Changing those conditions makes those plants and animals less suitable. Re-breeding those plants and animals to suit the new conditions will take lots of time and money, during which time the producers and consumers of those products will suffer (in some cases starve to death). Production of the existing breeds cannot simply be moved to new locations that now have the desired conditions, because those locations already are being used for other things.
For example, some of my friends have a 20,000 acre cattle ranch. Their success depends on lots of climate factors, including not just how much it rains in a year (to make the grass grow), but also the precise timing of the rain in order to have the cattle fattened at the right time for market and even for the cattle's survival. If the rain total or timing change so that their ranch now is unproductive but the north-neighboring land's conditions now are suitable, my friends can move their ranch there only if they buy out the entire town that happens to occupy that land, level the town, haul out the resulting rubble, and plant grass everywhere. That's not feasible in the span of just a decade or two.
If instead that same change were spread out over 10,000 years, the compensating transitions would be inconsequential. My friends and many generations of their descendants would be long gone. The neighboring town might well have disappeared, rotted away, and turned into grassland anyway, making it available for someone else to ranch it.
Before you reply that we must just bite the bullet and pay the cost of accomodating the change to the new climate, stop to realize that there won't be any "the" new climate. As long as humans keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, the climate will keep changing. The target we try to accomodate toward will keep moving constantly. It is stupid for us to consciously accelerate the motion of that target.
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Dumb Scientist at 09:14 AM on 23 March 2013Tung and Zhou circularly blame ~40% of global warming on regional warming
You can not assume that ocean circulations only move heat around the earth system and have no effect on the net energy budget. [ptbrown31]
Lee and I already discussed the fact that AMO can change surface temperatures through strictly internal variability and by changing radiative forcings. I'm only focusing on internal variability because Tung and Zhou used that term six times in their paper.
This possibility can not be dismissed out of hand as simply being "unphysical"
Note that I'm not dismissing AMO radiative forcings as unphysical. Instead, I've repeatedly pointed out that it's unphysical to assume that anthropogenic radiative forcings are the same before and after 1950.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 08:53 AM on 23 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Also Harold, a general class of problem one could study.
Take any agricultural region and look at which of the major grain crops are grown there and what the average climate is at that location. Then apply the various studies that have been done into how much yields for those crops vary with temperature. Apply different possible warming scenarios to that location, factor in that locations current climate and the temperature/yield data and estimate how much yields from crops at that location are likely to vary due to the warming in diffferent scenarios.
Then one would need to repeat such studies for many locations in order to integrate the results. In some locations this may be positive, in others negative. The common conclusion from the Biological Science community that has looked into this is that the projected climate change is more likely to be a net negative for larger levels of warming.
Critically, given the importance of sustained crop yields to food security, this needs to be considered as a probabalistic risk assessment, with appropriate weightings given to different possible outcomes based on what the severity of particular consequence might be.
Crop yeld changes due to temperature alone is only one possible impact of a changing climate at each location; precipitation changes, variations in the proportion of more extreme weather events occuring, changes in the timing of the growing season, changes in the timing of the life cycles of the crop plants relative to that of associated, necessary other species such as polinators are also potential impacts.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 08:32 AM on 23 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Harold
Depends how 'specifc' you want your location to be. So here are two examples for some moderately specific locations.
The Arctic. Rising temperatures there have resulted in melting of the permafrost beginning. This is causing erosion, land subsidence, damage to roads, destruction of pipes and buried infrstructure. It is also causing venting of elevated amounts of Methane. Future projections of impacts can be based on known studies of permafrost distribution and temperature profiles overlaid by patterns of human infrastructure. The Russians have identified several entire cities at risk from these problems. Also potential risks to major Natural Gas supply pipelines.Next, 'dead zones; in the ocean. It is basic chemistry that warmer water cannot hold as much gas in solution. This matters particularly for oxygen. Colder waters are better oxygenated which is why the most productive parts of the oceans are mainly in the higher latitudes. The clear waters of the Tropics are so clear because there is much less microscopic life within them - biologically the tropical oceans are like deserts with coral reefs being like little oases. In the extreme, there are regions where there is virtually no life - oceanographers have colloquially labelled these regions 'dead zones'. These can be found for example in the Gulf of Mexico. With higher water temperatures, oxygenation will decline and such dead zones will expand. Generally, warmer oceans will be less biologically productive. Since the oceans are the primary source of protein for around a billion people, any decline in the biological productivity of the oceans must unavoidably lead to a reduction in available protein.
Declining oceanic productivity due to reduced oxygenation is something that biologists could predict with high confidence since the chemistry of Henry's Law is well understood, as are the relationships between biological productivity and oxygenation levels.
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geoffchambers at 08:17 AM on 23 March 2013Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations
This is the post I've been trying to put up at Frontiers...
To the editors, Frontiers in Personality Science:
In table 3 of this paper, I am mentioned by name and identified as having been the first to have mentioned in public Recursive Conspiracist Hypothesis number 4 - namely that Sceptic blogs were only contacted after a delay. This hypothesis is quite true, as Professor Lewandowsky has admitted. Nonetheless, the fact of having been the first to make this accusation leads to me being accused of exhibiting the following symtoms of conspiracist ideation:
nefarious intent, nihilistic skepticism, “must be wrong”; “no accident”, and unreflexive counterfactual thinking. From the definitions of these criteria given in the paper I extract the following:
Nefarious Intent: “... A corollary of the first criterion is the pervasive self-perception and self-presentation among conspiracy theorists as the victims of organized persecution. The theorist typically considers herself, at least tacitly, to be the brave antagonist of the nefarious intentions of the conspiracy; that is, the victim is also a potential hero.”
Nihilistic Skepticism: “The conspiracy theorist refuses to believe anything that does not fit into the conspiracy theory. Thus, nothing is at it seems, and all evidence points to hidden agendas or some other meaning that only the conspiracy theorist is aware of.”
“Must be Wrong”: “The underlying lack of trust and exaggerated suspicion contribute to a cognitive pattern whereby specific hypotheses may be abandoned when they become unsustainable, but those corrections do not impinge on the overall abstraction that 'something must be wrong' and the 'official' account must be based on deception.”
“No Accident”: “To the conspiracy theorist, nothing happens by accident ... Thus, small random events are woven into a conspiracy narrative and reinterpreted as indisputable evidence for the theory.”
Unreflexive Counterfactual Thinking: “Contrary evidence is often interpreted as evidence for a conspiracy [...] the stronger the evidence against a conspiracy, the more the conspirators must want people to believe their version of events.”
These definitions clearly identify me as being irrational and paranoid, and are therefore defamatory. I therefore request you to withdraw this paper.
I note further that , in the section on hypothesis (4) (“Skeptic" blogs contacted after delay) in which I am named, only one piece of evidence is produced, and that is a quote from Lucia Lindgren. If you don’t withdraw the paper, you might at least correct it and replace my name with that of Ms Lindgren.
However, that won’t absolve the authors of having defamed me. If we turn to hypothesis (3) “Presentation of intermediate data”, we see that the person accused of having been the first to pronounce it is Steve McIntyre. Despite the fact that this hypothesis also turned out to be true, it leads him to being accused of exhibiting the same irrational and paranoid tendencies as me, (except for “No Accident”). The link provided
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/ccc2.html#22
leads to a comment by Dr McIntyre (comment 8) to an article by Professor Lewandowsky. However, Dr McIntyre’s comment is not about the presentation of intermediate data, but about four entirely different subjects. The reference to the presentation of intermediate data is in two previous comments by me to the same article (comments 3 and 6). In Comment 5, a commenter notes that I had already made the same point in a comment at SkepticalScience, a blog run by second author John Cook, which for some reason was not included among the blogs analysed, despite being one of the “Principal web sites involved in blogosphere's response to the publication of LOG12” (title of table 2).
One reason for not considering SkepticalScience, despite the fact that this blog is widely regarded as one of the leading blogs commenting on climate scepticism, can perhaps be found in the paper, where, under the heading of “Potential Limitations”, it is explained why the content analysis of blogs was entrusted to authors Cook and Marriott:
“Two of the present authors also contributed to LOG12, and the present analysis may therefore be biased by a potential conflict of interest. This possibility cannot be ruled out [...]. [B]ecause data collection (via internet search) was conducted by two authors who were not involved in analysis or report of LOG12, the resulting “raw" data - available in the online supplementary material - cannot reflect a conflict of interest involving the LOG12 authors.”
It might have been wise to indicate that:
1) the two authors whose data collection “cannot reflect a conflict of interest” both run blogs which concentrate on countering the views of sceptics (SkepticalScience and WatchingtheDeniers)
2) John Cook of Skeptical Science is coauthor with first author Stephan Lewandowsky of “Debunking Skepticism”; and
3)SkepticalScience was the scene of some of the most lively debates about (LOG12) and of at least one of the first occurrences of a conspiracist hypothesis.
I therefore suggest that, in the interest of accuracy, the authors replace the name of Dr McIntyre with mine, (since I do believe that my comment at Skeptical Science was the first to raise this hypothesis, the truth of which has been confirmed by Professor Lewandowsky) and my name with that of Lucia Lindgren.
I haven’t looked at the attributions of earliest mention to the other hypotheses mentioned in table 3. However, I noticed that a quote attributed to me is false, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there are other errors.
Finally, I would like to point out that by the time Cook and Marriott began their content analysis (August 28), the paper (LOG12) had already been the subject of numerous comments on blogs for at least five weeks, beginning with:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jul/27/climate-sceptics-conspiracy-theorists
19 July 2012 (400+ comments)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jul/27/climate-sceptics-conspiracy-theorists
29 July 2012 (1300+ comments)
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/discussion/post/1904675
30 July 2012 (70 comments)
http://manicbeancounter.com/2012/07/30/lewandowsky-et-al-2012-motivated-rejection-of-science-part-1/ http://manicbeancounter.com/2012/07/30/lewandowsky-et-al-2012-motivated-rejection-of-science-part-2/
30 July 2012
http://talkingclimate.org/are-climate-sceptics-more-likely-to-be-conspiracy-theorists/.
August 2 2012
The claim to have identified the earliest occurrences of the conspiracist ideation starting on 28 August is therefore moot.
I therefore respectfully suggest that the wisest course might be to withdraw this paper.
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Bob Loblaw at 07:18 AM on 23 March 2013It warmed before 1940 when CO2 was low
Klapper: if you haven't already seen it, I suggest you read the comment here, posted on another thread. Look for the quote half way down, from Gavin Schmidt (RealClimate) on the 1910-1940 period.
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Bob Loblaw at 07:09 AM on 23 March 2013It warmed before 1940 when CO2 was low
Klapper @25: "They are the most recent I could find so I'll assume they are the best."
Why would you assume that? If they do not reflect the range of reasonable values that are supportable in the literature (remember, we have no direct satellite-based measurements of TSI from the 1910-1940 period to check the reconstructions against), then you are assuming that TSI for the period is known with greater accuracy than it is. "The best" in science isn't necessarily decided by "the most recent".
You just may be on your way to assuming your conclusions again.
Have you read and understood my example in #18? Do you agree with it, or do you find fault in the reasoning? IMO, you keep sending yourself off on the Bad Idea path...
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Tom Dayton at 07:02 AM on 23 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Harold, in the "It's Not Bad" post, be sure to click the links in the "Further Reading" green section below the post (but above the comments).
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Paul D at 06:59 AM on 23 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Harold H Doiron "I am trying to define one specific temperature problem for at least one location on earth that will help me be able to prove root cause of the problem."
Simple question...
Why?
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Doug Bostrom at 06:55 AM on 23 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Harold, thanks for visiting.
I can't answer your other questions, but here's a question for which I was unable to find an answer when your letter made the rounds earlier, despite my contacting some of the parties apparently involved in promoting your opinions. Who paid for the press campaign around your work? I see that your summary was mostly publicized via PR Newswire, which of course charges for service. Did you guys pass the hat amongst yourselves, or failing that who stepped forward to pay for your PR campaign?
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Tom Dayton at 06:53 AM on 23 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Harold Doiron, you can start with the post that responds to the myth "It's Not Bad". Be sure to click the Intermediate and Advanced tabs for more details and links to the peer-reviewed scientific publications containing even more specifics. You might also check out the U.S. Department of Agriculture's reports.
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DSL at 06:49 AM on 23 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
Harold, you're constructing a strawman. No one ever said that the average temperature increase for any given location was going to be the feature problem of the climate change associated with rapid global warming. You can look at, for example, Petoukhov et al. (2013) and Johanson & Fu (2009) and research on the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a decent analogue for the current situation (although we're warming much, much more rapidly than that extreme event).
Unless, of course, you're going to utter some nonsense about the greenhouse effect not existing.
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Harold H Doiron, PhD at 06:34 AM on 23 March 2013NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority
I will identify myself as the leader or Chairman of The Right Climate Stuff research team that published a one page summary of our findings (discussed above in this blog and comments) from a year long study of the question: Are human related CO2 emissions causing alarming warming of the planet that requires swift corrective action by our government?
I have two questions for the author or readers of this blog:
1. Can anyone define for any current specific location on earth, a temperature "Problem" stated in terms of a harmful deviation in temperature from the normal variation range at that location of the last 10,000 years of very stable climate on earth? What are the high confidence projected consequences of this problem or problems if no corrective action is taken? I'm not interested in global average temperature that seems to be a metric subject to anthropogenic mischief. I am trying to define one specific temperature problem for at least one location on earth that will help me be able to prove root cause of the problem.
2. Can anyone tell me what the critique published at SkepticalScience regarding my Powerpoint Presentation given at CPAC on March 15, 2013 said? I was encouraged by a well-known climate scientist to visit this blogsite to review and respond to it, but apparently that critique has been removed from this site? Why?
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2013 SkS News Bulletin #4: Alberta Tar Sands and Keystone XL Pipeline
sotolith7 - Having read MacKays book, I would have to agree with him - on the point that the UK cannot generate enough renewable power within the confines of the UK to replace all of their energy use. Not enough area, too far north WRT solar, etc. Note that he does not argue this on a world-wide basis, however.
Of course, even now the UK is an energy importer according to the World Bank, importing between 20-30% of its energy over the last few years. If they were to import that as electricity sourced in, say, North Africa, rather than oil from the MidEast, I really don't see that as a barrier.
If you wish to discuss such matters further, I would suggest taking it to whichever thread on renewables you feel is most appropriate. Most readers follow the recent Comments page, and will see such a post on whatever thread it is made.
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Tung and Zhou circularly blame ~40% of global warming on regional warming
dvaytw - I always think of it as Anything But Us (ABU), an attempt to disavow all responsibility so that we can keep on with what we're doing without change.
And yes, the holding of multiple, contradictory crack-pot hypotheses is a red flag. To everyone else. But apparently not to those who push such nonsense...
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It warmed before 1940 when CO2 was low
Klapper - I would suggest as a starting point following the link I previously provided for tables of forcings, and from there to the tropospheric and stratospheric aerosol measures. Those include listing multiple supporting references that you can read for questions you might have regarding those measures and uncertainties.
Again - if you are leaving out major forcings such as aerosols, you are basically guaranteed to have incorrect results.
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