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snafu at 21:55 PM on 11 March 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #10
In regards to Australia's 'angry summer' (superstorms, angry summers, snowquesters).....LOL.
World record of most consecutive days of 100 °F (40 °C) or above, during a period of 160 days from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924. Marble Bar, WA.
(-snip)
Moderator Response: [JH] Please note that posting comments here at SkS is a privilege, not a right. This privilege can be rescinded if the posting individual treats adherence to the Comments Policy as optional, rather than the mandatory condition of participating in this online forum. 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. -
Leto at 21:47 PM on 11 March 20132013 SkS Weekly Digest #9
Perhaps you could add this remarkabe Curry quote to your profile on her (uless it's already in there somewhere and I missed it):
Is it “cherry picking” to start a trend analysis at 1998? No, not if you are looking for a long period of time where there is little or no warming, in efforts to refute Hypothesis I*
*[Hypothesis I = AGW].
(http://judithcurry.com/2012/02/07/trends-change-points-hypotheses/)
The ignorance demonstrated in that single statement really tells me everything I need to know about this woman. Cherry-picking is bad enough, but defending it because, well, you were earnestly trying to pick the bit that was cherry-flavoured... is amazing. And note that this is not a bit of ill-considered daydreaming that popped out when she wasn't paying full attention. It's there on her own blog, in the main post.
I can't see how someone capable of saying this can be employed by a university.
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Doug Bostrom at 17:10 PM on 11 March 2013Skeptical Science launches PDF
Snafu, try the "search" box to learn more about the topics you're wondering over. This thread is a housekeeping announcement and isn't going to be a productive place for your sense of curiosity, or much of a useful soapbox for that matter.
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Doug Hutcheson at 16:53 PM on 11 March 2013Skeptical Science launches PDF
snafu, if you want proof without any doubt, you are wanting religion, not science, which means you are in the wrong place.. If, on the other hand, you want reasonable projections based on the available evidence, you are in the right place. Which will you choose? I think double-posting may not the only thing you have trouble with at SkS.
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snafu at 16:41 PM on 11 March 2013Skeptical Science launches PDF
Are SkS going to release any PDF's on why the Global average mean temperature hasn't risen in 15 years according to the Uk Met and the Hadley centre?
1997 - 14.37C
2012 - 14.45C(which I might add is lower than Hansen's pre 1988 Global average mean temperature of 15C). Oh wait.....I thought the GAMT was 14.5C. Never mind.
Are SkS going to release any PDF's explaining, according to your own 'trend calculator', HadCrut4 from 1850, shows two distinct and almost identical warming periods of ~0.5C and two distinct cooling and almost identical cooling periods of ~ -0.4C, each of around 35-40years to present?
Are Sks going to release any PDF's with the evidence that proves, without NOW occuring on their own 'trend calculator' using HADCrut4 1850-2013?
Moderator Response: (Rob P) - Use the search function to find the most relevant thread and post your enquiry there. I can assure you that the myths you are propagating are hardly novel. -
Rob Honeycutt at 14:24 PM on 11 March 2013Conspiracy Theorists Respond to Evidence They're Conspiracy Theorists With More Conspiracy Theories
Oh, why do I ever click the WUWT links? I've met a lot of people in my years but never have I run across such who are so self-unaware.
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Bernard J. at 13:27 PM on 11 March 2013Greedy Lying Bastards - Now In Theaters
Interesting to note that Anthony Watts' response was essentially "it's a fake because they photoshopped the oil slick on the cover". He could as well have gone with "it's a fake because they photoshopped a guy floating on the ocean in an arm chair".
This is the (ground-) level of thinking of which Watts is only capable.
Apparently it would be more believable in Watts' opinion if the producers has prepared a real oil slick for the publicity photo (would a photoshopped guy floating in a chair then escape notice?). Of course, had it been a real oil slick Watts was all oiled up to rant about the environmental damage thus caused...
On a more interesting note (for me), is there any indication when the documentary will be released in Australia?
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Tom Curtis at 12:56 PM on 11 March 2013Conspiracy Theorists Respond to Evidence They're Conspiracy Theorists With More Conspiracy Theories
Shollenberger has noticed my critique, and responded at WUWT, saying:
"Over at Skeptical Science, Tom Curtis responded to this post by saying this post is a non-substantive response. All I have to say to that is… wow. It’s already been established the authors grossly misrepresented the views of Jeff Id in their paper, and now it’s been established they misquoted multiple people.
How much deception has to be shown before it matters?"
First, if the misquotes were inadvertent (as Shollenberger purports to believe), they were not deception. Shollenberger's continued use of over the top descriptions and dog whistle words makes clear that his purpose is to vilify Lewandowsky and his co-authors, and by so doing to avoid the need for substantive criticism while giving the appearance to those who do not think critically that Lewandowsky 2013 has been rebutted.
Second, a substantive criticism of a paper is one which shows that its conclusions do not follow from the evidence presented. As Shollenberger himself acknowledges (ironically in the comment immediately preceding his response to me),
"The fabricated[sic] quote doesn’t even help their case much so why take the risk?"
If the quotes do not help their case, then removing them does not weaken their case. Ergo, criticizing these quotes does not contribute to showing that the evidence presented overall is faulty; or that the conclusions drawn do not follow from the evidence.
A thorough critique should indeed include criticism of the misquotes; but they cannot be the substance of the criticism because if that is all there is to criticize, the paper still stands unrefuted.
Put another way, if Shollenberger had done all that was needed to refute Lewandowsky 2013, then I can as easilly refute AGW "skepticism" by noting that Watts has "managed to do that [make a fool of himself] a number of times".
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chriskoz at 12:28 PM on 11 March 2013Greedy Lying Bastards - Now In Theaters
This "gem" piece from James Taylor pointed by philipm is very revealing. It suffice to read the very first reader's comment:
The survey the author cites isn’t “scientists” as stated in the title of the op-ed, it is a survey of the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta. That’s like surveying tobacco company CEO’s about the dangers of smoking. It would be a reasonable piece about the opinion of petroleum engineers in Alberta if that was made clear, instead that was hidden. I wonder why?
My answer to this question is: because it's a professional lie. It cannot be a "mistake" that an experienced journalist like James Taylor, confuses those two categories of professionals. And as DSL revealed that James Taylor works for Heartland, that explains it all: he's a professional liar. One more person on my black list.
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Doug Bostrom at 12:12 PM on 11 March 2013Skeptical Science launches PDF
Thanks for the heads-up, Jonas. It looks though some other PDF versions have the same quirk-- namely the last few letters of the last word cut off. We'll it out.
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Doug Hutcheson at 11:44 AM on 11 March 2013Skeptical Science launches PDF
Mods, in this article, there are numerous occurrences of the term 'PDF', meaning 'Portable Document Format', but these have become mouse-hover hot-spots(?) leading to the definition 'Probability Density Function'. I guess there is an automatic parser which embeds these hot-spots, but it seems to be a bit aggressive.
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Doug Hutcheson at 11:31 AM on 11 March 2013What doesn’t change with climate?
Just a note to the mods: on my system, in the second-last paragraph, there are many instances of the word 'molecule', where the initial 'mol' is underlined by a row of dots and is a hot spot (?) where hovering the mouse over the underlined part pops up a definition of mol = mole. I guess there is an automatic parser that looks for instances in a text, of terms defined in the database, but it seems to be a bit aggressive in this case.
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Jonas at 10:23 AM on 11 March 2013Greedy Lying Bastards - Now In Theaters
There also is a film "Climate of Doubt" from Frontline:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/climate-of-doubt -
Jonas at 10:17 AM on 11 March 2013Skeptical Science launches PDF
1) In http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm the PDF is cut a little: it tells us that
Moderator Response: [d_b] Thank you again for the tip on truncation, very helpful because quite a few of the PDFs were similarly affected due a late and poorly tested change in the generation method. That problem has been repaired. -
Doug Hutcheson at 10:09 AM on 11 March 20132013 SkS Weekly Digest #9
John Hartz, thanks for adding Curry to the list of usual suspects.
As for helping keep the database up to date, I doubt I am a suitable person to be involved in any research sense, as I am not skilled in the science and I don't read the literature widely enough to know when someone is selling a crock. I will, however, be happy to let John Cook know if I look unsuccessfully for someone in the mug shot gallery. It is a great quick-reference resource to access when I am locking horns with obfuscators on other fora.
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Tom Curtis at 09:17 AM on 11 March 2013Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
Jose_X @141, fair enough. In that case, however, you should have written "the 3.7 forcing value is a theoretical imbalance that would exist only be directly measurable if the 2x happened right away" or possibly, "the TOA energy imbalance would only equal the forcing if the CO2 was doubled instantaneously".
Even that is not perfectly accurate, in that short term fluctuations in temperature result in short term departures from radiative equilibrium, but they are small relative to the 3.7 W/m^2 forcing from doubling CO2.
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bouke at 08:46 AM on 11 March 20132013 SkS Weekly Digest #10
typo: terrotry -> territory
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Jose_X at 08:43 AM on 11 March 2013Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
Tom Curtis, thanks for the response, but I was thinking of "theoretical" just as you explained, meaning that if we could actually do 2x over night then we would observe the full forcing value.
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ajki at 08:13 AM on 11 March 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #10
With respect to australian issues ;-) another article should not go unnoticed.
Vladimir Petoukhov (Lead Author) and Stefan Rahmsdorf have written a short introduction for their recently published study
Quasiresonant amplification of planetary waves and recent Northern Hemisphere weather extremes [pnas.org]
on "The Conversation". See:
Weather extremes: atmospheric waves and climate change [theconversation.edu.au]
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DSL at 06:41 AM on 11 March 2013Greedy Lying Bastards - Now In Theaters
philipm, actually James Taylor is paid to lie. He works for Heartland. He is much less a journalist than a spin doctor or "opinion-maker." His most recent work with the Alberta survey is an exercise in breaking accountability over his knee and throwing it in the faces of his readers while smirking in the general direction of science.
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willard at 05:00 AM on 11 March 2013Conspiracy Theorists Respond to Evidence They're Conspiracy Theorists With More Conspiracy Theories
For good measures, here's another bit the authors of Lew13 could edit:
> Conspiracist ideation is arguably particularly prominent on climate blogs, such as when expressing the belief that temperature records show warming only because of systematic adjustments (e.g., Condon, 2009) [...]
Jeff Id's emphasis:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/lewandowsky-strike-two/
I believe this does not represent Id's position, which is:
> Conspiracist ideation is arguably particularly prominent on climate blogs, such as when expressing the belief that temperature records show warming mostly because of systematic adjustments (e.g., Condon, 2009).
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/lewandowsky-strike-two/#comment-92085
My emphasis.
***
In exchange to this edit, Lewandowsky has another episode of Climateball at Jeff's to analyze. Carrick's comments are a thing of beauty. They must be cherished.
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Clyde at 04:49 AM on 11 March 2013Greedy Lying Bastards - Now In Theaters
Don't know how widely it was released, but it didn't make it on the top 43 (if i counted right) list. -
Bob Lacatena at 03:06 AM on 11 March 2013The educational opportunities in addressing misinformation in the classroom
Electroken presents us with a perfect example of why the myths must be debunked along with teaching the science. Every point he raises has been considered in far more detail than he has himself pursued, and yet he starts with the assumption that scientists shave missed all of his (rather obvious) points, rather than the reality, which is that they have considered and studied them in far, far more detail than electroken has. But of course, rather than take the hard course of thoroughly researching the topics and recognizing that scientists have been there, done that, and moved on, he charges full-steam-ahead with his assumption, applying whatever simplistic logic and anecdotal evidence comes easily to mind, and sees this self-visualized model as a reason to distrust the scientists and the textbooks.
So he has made the point of the original post rather emphatically. People must be taught about the untruths as much as the truths, or they will find ways to tie themselves into knots of denial -- without even recognizing the cognitive bias that has helped to nudge them astray.
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funglestrumpet at 01:46 AM on 11 March 2013Greedy Lying Bastards - Now In Theaters
Know your enemy. The media today is desperate for advertising revenue and it would seem to be that those who advertise with them prefer not to tackle the problem of climate change.
Until such time as the media face a sanction for failing to respect the science of climate change it is a no brainer for them to carry on as they are. That is the market system in all its glory.
I cannot see the situation changing until we get another record-breaking year and even then it has to affect the developed world most. How daft a species we are.
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John Hartz at 01:22 AM on 11 March 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #10
chriskoz & CB Dunkerson:
I intend to capture many of the high-quality MSM articles about the Marcott study in a special news bulletin. Right now, I have to crank out the Weekly Digest and finish a thrid news bulletin about the Alberta tar sands & the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
As they say, When it rains, it pours." (Especially true in a warming climate.)
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nealjking at 00:19 AM on 11 March 2013Greedy Lying Bastards - Now In Theaters
philipm:
The Economist has generally changed their attitude about climate change issues in the last few years; the WSJ, not so much.
Forbes alternates between sanity and insanity.
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CBDunkerson at 22:28 PM on 10 March 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #10
chriskoz, yes Watts has aready gone into a full scale meltdown about how this Marcott global reconstruction doesn't match data from a single remote location in Greenland and thus must be false. You'd think his readers would know how stupid that argument is by now, but nope... they remain clueless.
However, I agree with you on the 'momentum'. Indeed, if you read the news coverage of the Marcott study in every mainstream source you can see a profound change. I haven't seen one news outlet quoting Pielke, Monckton, Spencer, or any of the other usual deniers. Instead they are reaching out to people like Gavin Schmidt, Katherine Hayhoe, and Michael Mann. Several describe Mann as 'an expert in the field' and bring up the 'hockey stick controversy' as an example of unfounded personal attacks on scientists. It seems as if the deniers have lost the mainstream media. They told too many whoppers that proved to be false and finally people are taking notice. I couldn't pinpoint a single 'turning point', but it does seem to me that the tide has definitively turned and anti-science on AGW is rapidly imploding.
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Tom Curtis at 21:28 PM on 10 March 2013Conspiracy Theorists Respond to Evidence They're Conspiracy Theorists With More Conspiracy Theories
It turn's out that Shollenberger has had his post published at WUWT, and asked his question (with no reply). His article takes exception to three quotes in Lewandowsky et al 2013. Just three! Out of thirty-two! Here we where hoping for criticism on substantive issues, but as we expected, given Shollenburger's form, he focussed on trivial weak points because he knows any attempt at substantive critique will fail. Indeed, so unsure is he of the possibility of substantive critique that when alluding to the possibility substantive critique, he merely mentions that others "have taken issue" with aspects of the paper - no link, and no endorsement. It is like criticizing AGW by noting that the skydragon crowd "have taken issue" with the greenhouse effect while firmly believing that the skydragon crowd are wrong.
Shollenberger, it you have a substantive critique to make - make it! The longer you dance around the issue the clearer it becomes that you know that the paper is substantively correct.
But am I being unfair? Shollenberger certainly begins by suggesting the three alleged misquotes are substantive issues. He (or Watts) provides an abstract for his post which reads:
"Fabricated quotes and gross distortions are used to paint skeptics as conspiracy nuts. The question is, is it a conspiracy, or is it just incompetence?"
Later, he writes,
"People have taken issue with a number of aspects of the paper, but to my knowledge, nobody has noticed Lewandowsky and Cook fabricate things in their paper. That’s right. They make things up."
Being generous, it appears to have escaped Shollenberger's attention that he has already answered the question in the abstract. Specifically, to "fabricate" something is always an intentional act - by definition. By saying that Lewandowsky et al "fabricated" things, he says they acted deliberately to construct them. That is odd, of course, because Shollenberger later disavows the possibility that the "fabrication" and "deception" could be deliberate, so he contradicts himself.
Shollenberger, therefore, owes Lewandowsky, and Cook, and their fellow authors an apology - and he needs to delete any refference to fabrication from his article.
Indeed, I would go further. There is no suggestion by Shollenberger that the alleged misquotes may not be willful deception (apart from the dog whistle in the abstract). On the contrary, he continuously reffers to Lewandowsky et al's acts in active terms, strongly suggesting willful acts. Only in the final paragraph does he finally say,
"And for the record, I don’t think any of this was intentional."
It is almost as though he is aware of the "familiarity backfire effect" and is taking deliberate advantage of it to spread FUD, while maintaining plausible deniability. If that was his intention, it certainly workd at WUWT with a number of commentors finding it utterly unbelievable that the alleged misquotes where not deliberate (giving us yet anothe recursion on AGW skeptics love of conspiratorial tropes). Perhaps, however, it was not deliberate and Shollenberger was merely incompetent.
What, however, of the alleged misquotes. In the first, a quote from Foxgoose is presented as alleging that no humans took the survey for Lewandowsky et al, 2012, whereas he actually alleged that no "skeptical" bloggers where contacted by Lewandowsky. This is actually a misquote. However, the meaning of Foxgoose is far from clear, even in context. Indeed, Shollenberger, having quoted Foxgoose in full, finds it necessary to refer to the original discussion for further context to show that it is a misquote. Even that further context, involving as it does a comment by Eli Rabbet, is far from clear. The most probable cause of the misquote is simple misunderstanding of Foxgoose's intentions. That, however, is portrayed in terms only appropriate when discussing deliberate deception, despite, purportedly, Shollenberger believing it was no such thing.
(As an aside, I do remember some coments to the effect that the survey results for Lewandowsky 2012 were entirely manufactured, so while few "skeptics" where that extreme, it was not (contrary to Shollenberger) a "fabricated" belief.)
The second alleged misquote is an example of quotation out of context. Lewandowsky 2013 discuss a conspiracy theory that "Shaping Tommorrow's World" (Lewandowsky's blog) had selectively barred access to the site to certain people, with the intention of then permitting access when the purported selective barring was commented on to "prove" the conspiracist thinking. As it happens, nobody was selectively barred and the conspiracist thinking was self generated. Nathan Kurz applauds the machiavelian ellegance of such a device, if true; but then goes on to disagree with the theory.
Lewandowsky et al only quote Kurz as applauding the elegance of the alleged strategy. They do not say that Kurz actually agrees with the quote. Indeed, there primary point may be the point curiously not stated by Kurz. If, as Kurz states, "there is no way for anyone to complain [about the alleged strategy] without matching the stereotypical conspiracist of the study"; and the allegations of strategy where false as Kurz maintained, and people were complaining, then they were acting just like the "the stereotypical conspiracist of the study". That logic was, of course, the key point of Lewandowsky et al's discussion of the allegations of deliberate blocking.
Because of this, I was at first unsure whether I should even call this a misquote. But the cardinal rule of quotation is that if the quote without context could lead to mistaken beliefs about the quoted persons beliefs, a clarrification is in order. Regardless of whether or not Lewandowsky et al intended people to believe that Kurz agreed with the alleged conspiracy (and it is highly dubious that they did), they should have included a simple disclaimer indicating that he did not.
This is then IMO, an example of inadvertent quotation out of context. It is not, and contrary to Shollenberger a "blatant" distortion of the quote. It is only such a distortion if Lewandowsky et al intended for people to believe that Kurz himself agreed with the conspiracy theory.
In the third case, Lewandowsky et al do not distinguish between words quoted by the person they are quoting, and those he wrote himself. This is unquestionably a misquote, apparently brought about by dropping formating. (The quote was only indicated in the original source by indentation, and not, as it should be, enclosed in inverted commas. Geoff Chambers, the person quoted by Lewandowsky et al, did indicate the source of his quote, but in a manner indistinguishable from the standard method of indicating the person to whom you are repplying in non-nested comments.)
Shollenberger finds something far worse here. He accuses Lewandowsky et al of fabricating the quote, whereas, all that happened was an indent was dropped. He further accuses them of siting an inaccessible source, saying:
"As though that wasn’t bad enough, neither comment can be viewed by readers of the paper as the comments were both edited/deleted by moderators of the site associated with two primary authors of this paper!"
In fact, the post quoted by Chambers has been deleted from the site, and hence is inaccessible, except, possibly to moderators of the site. Chamber's post has also been moderated, but it took me 5 seconds to find the full quote on the linked site and to identify that all the words quoted from Chamber's post came from that post without alteration, but with a html block quote command dropped. And, I do not have any privileged access to that site.
To sum up, Shollenberger does identify three genuine misquotes. As such, the authors of Lewandowsky 2013 should issue a correction for the paper to avoid inadvertently misleading people. Ideally they should also explain how the misquotes occurred so that we can be reassured they will not reccure in the future. But Shollenberger has still not identified any substantive issue. The first quote is a side reference and has no relevance to the substance of the paper. The second quote, if the context is established, merely shows the logic of their argument at that point was transparent and agreed to by a (presumed) AGW "skeptic". The third misquote, if corrected, merely shows that, not one, but two people found plausible an utterly inplausible conspiracy theory about Lewandowsky 2012. In identifying the misquotes, Shollenberger in no way builds towards a substantive critique of the paper. He merely resorts, yet again, to the chewbacca defense.
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philipm at 21:16 PM on 10 March 2013Greedy Lying Bastards - Now In Theaters
These are of course the people who have a direct interest in lying. What about journalists. columnists and commenators who lie purely because of ideology? It's not only Fox and the lesser elements of the print media. WSJ and Economist to varying degrees embrace lunacy (the latter used to call Lomborg a "statistician" when he's actually a failed political science academic who once taught stats to social science students; not a serious fib you'd think, but it allowed them to represent him as a "scientist").
And what about this gem in Forbes, which is flat out lies?
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chriskoz at 19:56 PM on 10 March 2013The educational opportunities in addressing misinformation in the classroom
martin@4
The appropriate thread for your news is here where I have also commented. Like you I also hope SkS will comment on it sometimes. -
chriskoz at 19:15 PM on 10 March 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #10
There is the new study by Marcott et al in Science extending the Hocky Stick to the whole Holecene (11.5ka) that is making quite a stir. MM has put many links to plenty of news on his facebook, for example this one. Certaithenly big news, especially for Mike who is predicting that professional denialist will turn their attention to the new 'extended' reconstruction. Perhaps Mike will be taken a little bit off the "denialist stage", or at least he will now share that "stage" with Shaun Marcott. Personally, I think denialists and political intimidators have lost a lot of momentum behind their lies comparing with early 2000s, but who knows, we will see...
I don't have access to the full text of Marcott et al 2013 but Mike is saying the results apear to be robust (i.e. at the same time vulnerable to the political attacks) and their conclusion correct.
Moderator Response: [JH] The seoond listed article in this News Roundup summarizes the study you refer to. -
scaddenp at 18:47 PM on 10 March 2013What doesn’t change with climate?
Pluvial - large geological events certainly affect climate (the mountain ranges on the Anericas change the salinity between Atlantic and Pacific being another), but they affect climate on geological time scales - millions of years. Slow climate change isnt a problem as there is time to adjust. Having the same climate change occur in 200 years is. Glaciation and deglaciation are hardly new and not much evidence of any effect on plate tectonics whatever the value of GIA is.
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ajki at 15:55 PM on 10 March 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #10
John, you're welcome. It was you who encouraged users to provide additional material within in the "news" sections.
Beside my personal lack of scientific knowledge, I doubt the need for a specific blog post regarding the status of glaciers. There are multiple arguments listed on SkS with regards to glaciers, prominently the argument "Are glaciers growing or retreating". AFAIK these myth rebuttals are carefully updated with data from World Glacier Monitoring Service (wgms) - so there is no lack of knowledge regarding the global trend (90+% shrinking).
Moderator Response: [JH] Many of the exisitng SkS rebuttals need to be updated. The all-volunteer author team will soon embark on a major effort to do so. -
Tom Curtis at 10:23 AM on 10 March 2013Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
Jose_X @139, that is mostly correct.
As noted @138 (point 2) , the CO2 forcing is the total net change in TOA upward IR flux before (or excluding) temperature adjustments. Clearly if we add the CO2 incrementally, there will be temperature adjustments so that the TOA energy imbalance will be significantly less than the CO2 forcing. But, the forcing is the same at 2xCO2 regardless of whether it is added incrementally or as a single slug.
That does not differ from your explanation except in terms of what is meant by "theoretical variable". Roughly (as it is a while since I studied this), a theoretical variable in physics is a value which is an element of an empirical theory that is not directly measurable itself, but whose values have direct implications for measurable variables. In this sense, forcing is "theoretical". You appear to treat "theoretical" as a synonym for "hypothetical" which would be incorrect.
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Jose_X at 09:33 AM on 10 March 2013Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
Tom Curtis #138, I wanted to add (correct it if wrong) that the forcing value is a theoretical value. It's as if the entire change were done instantly. In reality, we experience CO2 increases, not from 1x (of some arbitrary value) to 2x overnight, but as small increments over time, so the imbalance is likely never to get very large at all. The 1x is a reference point and the 3.7 forcing value is a theoretical imbalance that would exist if the 2x happened right away ("with surface and tropospheric temperatures and state held fixed at the unperturbed values").
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empirical_bayes at 09:05 AM on 10 March 2013It's too hard
@Chris,
It depends upon how a carbon tax is done. First, it needs to be universal, so all carbon energy inputs are taxed, including fertilizer, biofuels, ethanol, plastics manufacturing, and imports from overseas containing carbon. Second, the proceeds of the tax need to be refunded. The tax proposed by Professor James Hansen and submitted as legislation in the last session of Congress by Representative Pete Stark of California would refund all of the collected carbon tax to households using the same mechanism that was used to issue stimulus checks during the financial crisis of 2007-2008. The refund would be per-person listed on federal income tax returns in the household.
This would put a price on carbon wherever it came into the United States economy, and then, since, as you say, companies would pass the costs on to people, it would refund these costs to them in proportion to the average use of carbon. If a household reduced its overall consumption of carbon by simply buying the cheaper products in the new carbon-penalized marketplace, not only would their purchases be offset, they could earn money from the deal.
I don't like cap-and-trade. I think it gives companies too much wiggle room to cheat.
The point of the carbon tax is to internalize the actual costs of carbon consumption in prices on the street. So, sure, gasoline would go up in price, concrete would go up in price, food grown with oil-sourced fertilizer would go up in price, and those silly plastic bottles of water would go up in price because the plastic they are packaged in would be taxed. But competing products which did not use these sources would not go up in price. People would buy more economical cars because they would be cheaper to drive. And they would probably buy less overall, build less (wood would go up in price, too), and generally consume less.
The marketplace would figure the relative disincentive into its workings, and would be stimulated to produce carbon-free or minimal carbon products to get people to buy them. The transition would probably be pretty quick, and would be easier because most carbon taxes are introduced over a period of time.
Food prices are going to go up a lot because of climate change. Insurance premiums are going to go up. And companies are eventually going to have to shut down during summers in places because they simply cannot operate.
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Daniel Bailey at 08:19 AM on 10 March 2013Cherrypicking to Deny Continued Ocean and Global Warming
Just conveying my disdain of sock-puppetry.
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Glenn Tamblyn at 08:04 AM on 10 March 2013Cherrypicking to Deny Continued Ocean and Global Warming
Toenails!
Not only off-topic but way too much information Yooper!
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John Hartz at 07:49 AM on 10 March 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #10
ajki:
Thanks for the links.
Would you be interested in drafting a guest blog post about the status of glaciers worldwide?
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Daniel Bailey at 07:01 AM on 10 March 2013Cherrypicking to Deny Continued Ocean and Global Warming
It is truly sad that some have no better thing to do than to serially troll a website. And to impersonate others much more respected and far more knowledgeable than they.
On to more fruitful and interesting ventures. Like clipping my toenails...
Moderator Response: [JH] With all due respect, clipping toenails is off-topic. Please refrain from further discussion of this activity on this forum. Thank you. -
Hansen's 1988 prediction was wrong
A minor note, inspired by re-reading Myhre et al 1998 on the radiative forcing of various greenhouse gases:
The forcing from a change in CO2 is estimated as F = α * ln(C/C0) - this is a shorthand fit to what is calculated from a number of line-by-line radiative calculations.
The 1990 constant, which is what I presume Hansen used in the 1988 model, had a constant α = 6.3, while Myhre et al 1998, using better radiative estimates, has α = 5.35. And that value has been used ever since in modeling estimations.
I suspect that difference in estimating radiative forcing may be responsible for much of the 4.2°C/doubling sensitivity Hansen 1988 (over)estimated, as opposed to the roughly 3°C/doubling value used now.
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ajki at 06:54 AM on 10 March 20132013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #10
As reported by several newspapers and blogs there's a very nice visualisation (well, technically...) available on "The Future of Glaciers" as part of an exhibition "Mathematics of Planet Earth (2013)" [imaginary.org].
Another source is the webpage of one of the authors: Guillaume Jouvet, Free University of Berlin.
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Rob Painting at 06:52 AM on 10 March 2013Cherrypicking to Deny Continued Ocean and Global Warming
Damn, you beat me to it Dan Bailey! I was going to email ya that this bore the hallmarks of James Dey.
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keystonexl at 06:28 AM on 10 March 2013Cherrypicking to Deny Continued Ocean and Global Warming
(-snip-).
Moderator Response: [DB] James Dey, please note that sock puppetry is frowned upon in this establishment. Your previous impersonation of Judith Curry in this venue and your other many sock puppet alter egos you have used here have not gone unnoticed. Please get a life; one apart from this venue. Good-day. -
keystonexl at 06:24 AM on 10 March 2013Cherrypicking to Deny Continued Ocean and Global Warming
(-snip-).
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JasonB at 06:11 AM on 10 March 2013Cherrypicking to Deny Continued Ocean and Global Warming
keystonexl,
This is the strongest argument that climate scientists have and I don't yet have an argument that defeats that.
That's a pretty revealing turn of phrase. Most of us are simply trying to get at the truth.
What hasn't been identified is where this heat has gone. It's not being seen in either the earth or ocean temperature records which only leaves the atmosphere or my conclusion that the energy imbalance is due to instrument problems.
The problem is that you haven't demonstrated that "it's not being seen in either the earth or ocean temperature records".
Each of these records has noise associated with them. Have you demonstrated a statistically significant change in the long term trend? All I see are short term noise, and looking at Figure 2 in the OP I don't even see that, just a rapid increase. I don't draw conclusions from noise because it is impossible to do so. That's the whole point of the Escalator graphic. On top of that, you aren't even trying to look for where the heat has gone because you're ignoring the heat buildup at deeper ocean levels as well as the heat going in to melting all that ice that has been melting in recent years.
It's a lot harder to figure out the total change in energy by accurately measuring and adding up all the possible reservoirs in the system. Much easier just to check if the ToA energy imbalance measurements are being done correctly.
From your own statements you appear to have reached a conclusion that must be true and are searching for evidence to support that, ignoring contradictory evidence on the basis of undemonstrated "instrument problems". This is backwards. You should reach your conclusion after assessing all the evidence available.
Moderator Response: [DB] Please note that keystonexl has been extensively moderated due to repetitive sloganeering, unsupported assertions and continual off-topic contributions. Your diligence and attentiveness in responding to him is appreciated, as is everyone's forbearance in dealing with behavioral and cognitive bias issues on keystonexl's part. -
JasonB at 05:59 AM on 10 March 2013Cherrypicking to Deny Continued Ocean and Global Warming
keystonexl,
Others have gently suggested you need to read a bit more. I strongly suggest you heed their advice and follow the links you've already been given. At the very least, before asserting that Foster and Rahmstorf's paper is not "credible" on the basis that "no credible data source has included their work", you should study this figure (a variant of that already posted above) until you truly understand the implications:
You don't even need to do the straightforward statistical analysis of Foster and Rahmstorf to understand what's going on in this graph and what the implications are, so I suggest you try. (Image from www.skepticalscience.com/john-nielsen-gammon-commentson-on-continued-global-warming.html).
Moderator Response: [DB] Fixed image width. -
JasonB at 05:44 AM on 10 March 2013Cherrypicking to Deny Continued Ocean and Global Warming
keystonexl,
If every possible heat reservoir in the system was perfectly measured with zero error, and you added them all up, you would get the same change in total heat content as the top of atmosphere energy imbalance. That makes sense, correct? The change in total heat content must be the same as the difference between energy going into the system minus the energy going out?
If so, then perhaps you could show that the supposed plateau appears in the ToA energy imbalance measurements in order to eliminate the possibility that it is merely an artefact of incomplete and imperfect measurements of the heat content of the possible reservoirs within the system.
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Andy Skuce at 05:40 AM on 10 March 2013The educational opportunities in addressing misinformation in the classroom
I think that the true value of teaching in this way is that education is not so much about implanting facts or displacing myths, but rather about teaching a truly skeptical scientific way of thinking and researching things for yourself. I learned a lot of "facts' about mineralogy, palaeontology and stratigraphy as a geology undergraduate, but they disappeared from my brain shortly after the final exams. What stuck was what I learned about how to think, gained largely from interacting and arguing with professors and graduate students in labs and on field trips, and from doing my own reading outside the curriculum.
The head of the department at the time (the early 1970's) was one of the last of the plate tectonics deniers and it was doing my own reading and questioning on that subject that was more fruitful than attending hours of lectures on the evolution of trilobites. There is a lot to be said for teaching the controversy, at university level, anyway.
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JasonB at 05:28 AM on 10 March 2013The educational opportunities in addressing misinformation in the classroom
william,
While "consensus between scientists does not make something true" is correct, any statement to that effect should be combined with the observation that you're overwhelmingly more likely to be right if you accept what almost all experts on the subject believe than if you decide to believe the opposite. :-) There are very few true Galileos throughout history and an awful lot of cracks.
"They said Galileo was a fool. They said Einstein was a fool. They said the Wright Brothers were fools. What you've got to remember, however, is that they also said that about a lot of fools."
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