Lol, what exactly is a “climate change denier”?
And perhaps more importantly, what exactly is Barbara Boxer proposing in the way of legislation?
Horse puckey as it also denies that there is something called “the march of progress” that also changes the reconstructions and modelings for the better. Once again he is merrily avoiding the points made by modelers and computer scientists that are involved with the issue.
And finally, most data and simulations are available for others to check and find evidence of that “suspicion” as BEST showed, there is even more evidence now that there is nothing to suspect.
Brazil84, because this is still really hard to tell (and this isn’t on you so much as it’s on the discussion as a whole), please choose one:
“I am trying to discredit:
[ol]
[li]The results of the research put out by this group of scientists[/li][li]The reputations of these scientists[/li][li]The science of global warming as a whole[/li][li]All of the above[/li][li]Other (please write in)[/li][li]I am not trying to discredit any of the above; my goals are something else entirely[/li][/ol]
– and this is not particularly well separated by my post”
…We’ve been over this. Yes, of course they have a personal financial interest in that. No shit. Just like an evolutionary biologist has a personal financial interest in public belief that evolution is real and an astrophysicist has a personal financial interest in the public belief that the heliocentric model is accurate. But, correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t the lucrative money to be found not in the people who believe in global warming, but the groups who are trying desperately to discredit it? Wouldn’t there be better funding from those trying to kill it? After all, they’re basically all the major corporations. There have been very large posts on this topic explaining why their personal financial interest is essentially all but a non-issue; it’s chump change in comparison to what they could get if they became denialists.
“Warmist”? LOL! What’s next, “Evolutionist”? “Newtonist”? “Relativitist”?
But seriously, “all their work is suspect”? You mean like the NSA study that confirmed the same results and, IIRC, confirmed that the datasets were accurate via other sources? You mean like the BEST study, which was funded by a rabidly denialist corporation (who therefore basically got to hand-pick which scientists were involved) and also confirmed the research? It wouldn’t even matter if this lab screwed with the data. Multiple other sources have confirmed it to the extent that even the claim that they manipulated data in the first place becomes extremely suspect – so they manipulated it to show pretty much exactly what everyone else is showing? Or is everyone lying and manipulating data, even those who are hired by people who would want to bend it the other way?
Fair enough. That’s pretty low from Phil Jones.
I would agree if it wasn’t for the absolutely ridiculous degree to which these things are quoted out of context and abused.
And for the record: I believe a reasonable definition of a denialist in this field would be “Someone who, despite overwhelming evidence, does not believe that humans play a major role in the recent warming trend of the earth’s climate.”
I laid out my position pretty clearly in Post #136. There is very little evidence for the water vapor feedback hypothesis and climategate gives further reason to be skeptical of what little evidence there is.
I’m not sure how to make it any clearer.
I would guess that in general, a lot more money is spent on the warmist side of the debate, i.e. funding the likes of Michael Mann and Phil Jones. But I’m not sure it really matters. There is a saying that “no man should be the judge in his own case,” and that’s the problem when people like Michael Mann and Phil Jones unilaterally suppress information.
I don’t know. Do you think my use of the word “warmist” is an attempt to poison the well? If so, what word should I use for the group of people who hold that mankind’s CO2 emissions are very likely to cause amplified warming resulting in serious harm to mankind? (I realize that some smart-aleck is going to respond with “sane” or something like this. i.e. you prefer to poison the other well.)
I’m not sure what studies you are referring to, but I stand by what I said. Any climate simulation or temperature reconstruction offered by any warmist researcher is suspect as a result of Climategate. If there is a warmist researcher out there who wants to avoid the taint of Climategate, he needs to publicly denounce the likes of Phil Jones.
If you want to cite and discuss a particular study, please feel free to do so.
I think that goes a long way to answering your original post. The fact is that Climategate was significant.
Fortunately (in my opinion) the freedom of information laws do not have an exception for information which might be quoted out of context and abused.
Besides which, there was plenty of bad stuff in the Climategate e-mails even if read in context.
To that, I would respond as follows:
(1) There isn’t overwhelming evidence.
(2) More importantly, even if all of the warming in the second half of the 20th century is attributable to mankind’s activities, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we can expect dangerous levels of warming in the future.
Of course it is clear to me, as the evidence shows that there is NO good reason to be skeptical and the evidence shows that the water vapor feedback is not hypothetical the Brazilian one here is just like Jeremy - Mr. Boo from the Yellow Submarine, making plans for nobody and just stuck in his nowhere land.
To be fair, I know nothing about the water vapor feedback hypothesis, so I’m gonna have to pass the ball on this to someone who does understand it. GIGO?
I’m sorry, but I just don’t get why there being a personal financial stake in this matters so much, especially when there’s far more money to be played fighting for the other side. I mean, let’s take a very, very clear example: evolutionary biologists working in the research field can expect to get paid, say, $50k/year for their research from the government. However, the “Church of Dishonest Fuckwits”, a creationist megachurch, is willing to pay them almost ten times that much to lie and misrepresent the information and data. If money was a motivating factor here, the reason why this would matter in the first place, they would go and play ball for the other team, the truth be damned.
Hell, let’s take an example which actually happened. We need look no further than the famous “tobacco science”, where the tobacco industry basically paid off scientists to offer poor and misleading scientific results about the connection between cigarettes and cancer. Now, some scientists who worked on this from outside the tobacco industry probably got grants to do their work, but this has nothing to do with the government wanting to “buy the right results from them”. No, it’s simply a matter of them being able to do their job and live off of it. Nothing more, nothing less. To then claim that they have a personal, financial stake in their research being accurate is completely uninteresting – even if it is true, the only reason it would matter would be if they care primarily about the money. And this is apparently not the case for two reasons:
- Playing for the other team is simply has more lucrative business opportunities; we’re talking about some of the top corporations in the world here!
- They get their grant money paid whether the science turns out to be right or wrong, so long as they release their info.
My apologies… “-ism” has some very serious negative baggage attached to it, especially when you speak with someone who makes destroying creationists a hobby. It denotes a belief system or a doctrine; applying it to a field of science, especially one you disagree with, is akin to a slap in the face. That said, I have no present replacement, so whatever.
Whoops. NAS, not NSA. But anyways, let’s just go down the list.
First of all, there’s the Penn State Paper on the subject, which essentially clears Michael Mann’s name and claims that he did not commit any actions which could be represented as misrepresentation or falsification of data, intent to destroy information or data, or misuse of privileged or confidential information. The question of deviation from accepted academic practice was, at the time of publishing, still open, but Mann was finally completely cleared in July, with the praise, “[Mann’s] scientific work, especially the conduct of his
research, has from the beginning of his career been judged to be outstanding by a broad spectrum of scientists.” But hey, that’s just Penn State. They’re a mediocre college anyways, right? And plus, they recently had a huge scandal! Can’t trust what they have to say! And that’s just one scientists. What about all the others?
Well, then there’s the Science and Technology Committee of the British Parliament. What they did is not quite “light reading”, but ABC sums it up nicely (as does Parliament.uk); apparently the science itself was all well-done and accurate, but the scientists were wrong to be so non-transparent. But hey, they’re british. Nobody cares about them, right? Plus, the committee was full of liberals, and lord knows they can’t be trusted…
And of course, let’s not forget the Science Assessment Panel (secondary source), which said pretty much the same thing all these other guys have been saying: there’s absolutely no evidence of misconduct at all! But hey, I’m on a roll, let’s keep going!
Then there’s Kerry Emanual of the NAS with a scathing editorial basically saying the same thing that everyone else has been saying. Not exactly the greatest source, but a fun and interesting read nonetheless .
Oh, and of course, who could forget Sir Muir Russel’s panel, which, again, offered the same results: the science was clean, the scientists were a little too defensive against someone who was basically harassing them.
And of course, there’s the EPA’s take on the matter. A few great quotes:
HOLY SHIT! That’s almost everything I’ve been saying throughout this entire thread!
But that’s not the end of it. In fact, to a lot of denialists, this long list of accredited, well-respected, and well-informed organizations, both academic and otherwise, is just a list of people trying to white-wash the issue; professors defending each other out of dedication to the profession; sheep trying to push the warming agenda for “personal profit” (however the hell that’s supposed to work); and of course the government trying to shove fascist regulation down our throat.
But then came along a study that really, really puts an end to all of that. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, also known as “BEST”. This study was funded largely in part by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. You know, the guys who are trying very, very hard to discredit global warming. So if there’s any real tilt here, it’s likely to be against warming, right? Well, guess what it showed… From the first sentences of the two-page summary:
Another great quote:
So… Not only did they show that global warming is happening, but they showed that it’s happening at the rate that previously published articles showed. No points for guessing which studies come immediately to mind there. :rolleyes:
So, in short:
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG!
To quote the famous Billy Madison:
I mean, hell, even ignoring those studies I just posted, there is no way I could let logic this poor slide. Because one climate research station maybe messed with data, none of them can be trusted? REALLY?! That’s just weak, dude, I’m sorry. That’s a leap in logic over a chasm of darkness that maybe The Human Flea could pull off. Not me. I try to stay grounded, logically speaking.
Yes. One climate scientist apparently was a fucking human being, and that discredits the entire field. But hey, you know what? Even then, listen to what the SAP had to say on the subject:
sigh
tldr
K, here’s a short version:
http://www.research.psu.edu/orp/Findings_Mann_Inquiry.pdf
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/hc-387-i-uea-final-embargoed-v2.pdf
http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/SAP
http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?doc_id=1444
http://berkeleyearth.org/Resources/Berkeley_Earth_Summary_20_Oct.pdf
There are 7 individual investigations from well-known, respectable sources, all of which say that your view on the subject is hopelessly misguided and stupid. The last one completely destroys the idea that warming is a fantasy, and was funded in part by a group that was basically out to ensure that global warming remains seen in the public eye as “bullshit”. If you don’t trust me, feel free to read them, or just to google news stories on them, most of which offer great little sound bites about how wrong you are.
THAT SHORT ENOUGH FOR YA?
Hey, stop abusing the Bat signal! 
I posted early the evidence NASA and others rely to say that water vapor feedback is not a figment of the imagination of researchers, but guys like brazil always will remain in Nowhere-land.
For more information, for people not living in Nowhere-land, with links to the pertinent scientific papers:
Water vapor feedback is one of the central issues – perhaps THE central issue – in the entire dispute. If you know nothing about it, then you are pretty much completely ignorant about the controversy.
What I would suggest you do is take a break from the thread and read up on the skeptical side.
Here is a decent article:
Because personal financial interest has a tendency to corrupt peoples’ judgment. One way to combat this tendency is to require people to submit their work to hostile scrutiny.
But anyway, the main reason I brought it up is that I regularly hear researchers on the skeptical side of the debate being criticized on this basis, the insinuation being that their research cannot be trusted. So it’s nice to hear someone on the warmist side admitting that the likes of Phil Jones and Michael Mann might also be interested parties.
Even assuming for the sake of argument that Mann or Jones did not engage in any scientific misconduct, Climategate still casts doubt up on their work. To illustrate, imagine you are doing a temperature reconstruction based on tree ring proxy data. You have to choose which tree ring series to use. You have to choose what outliers you will discard. You have to make all kinds of judgments, each of which will have an effect on the final outcome.
It’s quite possible, at each step, to make a defensible judgment which will slant things towards the result you want to reach. Or to run aspects of your construction with different sets of data and make a defensible choice about which set to use. One which happens to support your agenda.
So you end up with a result that is free from scientific misconduct, and yet is inaccurate. Note that this does not even need to be a conscious process.
So that even without any scientific misconduct, the fact that Jones is the kind of person who wants to shield his work from hostile scrutiny; who is an advocate for a particular view; and who feels comfortable inventing questionable excuses to accomplish his ends makes a reasonable person doubtful about his results.
Again, it seems that you do not understand what the central issues are in the debate. The claim that global surface temperatures have increased over the last 50 to 60 years is relatively uncontroversial. The claim Mann made which was so controversial was that recent temperatures represent a thousand-year high.
The Berkeley study you cite doesn’t seem to address this point at all.
Again, you are completely missing the point.
Let’s break it down:
(1) Do you agree that according to Michael Mann, recent temperatures represent a thousand-year high?
(2) Do you agree that the Berkeley paper you cite does not go back anywhere near that far?
Please don’t misstate my argument. Jones was just one example of a researcher who did not meet your standards. I’m pretty confident I could come up with more.
But let me ask you this: If another climate researcher defends Jones’ conduct and/or fails to condemn it, is it reasonable for me to infer that such climate researcher probably thinks Jones’ conduct was acceptable?
As the later emails show, NO, most scientists do put their peers feet over the coals so even there very few would and did commend Jones for what he claimed to do there; as the evidence showed, it was mostly stubbornness, not real action and not relevant now as the data is available (And BEST confirmed that no improper things were done with the data)
And as pointed out many rimes before, the hackers clearly did not release the latest emails because they do not fit the early narrative that the scientists were conspiring to get a predetermined result.
No way. Solar variation dwarfs the feedback controversy. imnsho of course
Solar Schmolar!
The sun is not the one driving the increase in heat that is seen now, specially after the 70’s.
Well do you agree that water vapor feedback is an essential part of the warmist claims?
Yes. And it isn’t science.
There must be a word for what he is…
Well that’s why I think water vapor feedback is so critical. Without that hypothesis, the entire claim falls apart.
I do think that solar variation is an important question. But even if the question of solar variation were conclusively resolved in favor of the warmist side, i.e. even if it were conclusively demonstrated that changes in solar activity do not account for recent temperature increases, it would not sustain their claims.
I do think that a lot of climatology research is steadily turning into pseudo-science
If by solar variation, you mean the total output of the sun: no, that has shown a very poor correlation (at best) which has broken down over the last few decades completely. Plus, drawing that conclusion would run backwards to what we already know: warming would have to be consistent throughout the atmosphere (rather than only present in the troposphere, with cooling in the stratosphere), would be stronger in summer (rather than in winter), and would be strongest at the equator (rather than the poles).
If by solar variation, you mean the variation of sunspots… The correlation between that and warming, again, completely broke down after 1970. Not to mention that the causative link is essentially non-existent.
That’s a series of articles and videos, taking up more time than I am interested in spending.
I did myself a favor and skipped that, and instead punched “Water Vapor Feedback” into google. What a shocker: the first result was an academic paper explaining, in great detail, both how it works and how the models that incorporate it match up with reality better than those that don’t. Then the next one was an article explaining the phenomenon by Gavin Schmidt on RealClimate. And then an article on Skeptical Science that also explains the phenomenon very clearly… Then there’s this ThinkProgress article which cites peer-reviewed literature on the subject that claims that not only is the feedback heavily positive, but also points to other articles on the subject and claims that their results are very similar… Then, finally, one piece of literature from a semi-reliable source: Roy W. Spencer writing on reasons why it may not be as clear as everyone thinks. And even then, the best he can offer is this:
Huh. At the same time, the guy advocates Intelligent Design. Go figure. Not to say that that’s against him, but again: the overwhelming consensus seems to be that this is actually happening.
I just pointed out quite clearly why there is no comparison, but this really is not worth debating further, so forget about it.
Wait, what?
Congratulations, you owe me a desk. I just slammed my head into it (to make the stupid stop) so hard that it broke. Crummy IKEA furniture. :smack:
So, just to be perfectly clear. Your position is, that because it’s possible that some bias sneaked into the procedure, and because Jones is unwilling to cooperate with FOIA orders that he may or may not completely understand coming en masse from someone who is actively trying to sabotage their work, their entire field is suspect.
Wow. That’s… wow.
From the NAS article… That’s one thing worth mentioning right at the beginning.
Hey, you know what? I have an idea. How about, after I cited SEVEN papers on the subject absolving them of bias, flawed methodology, and everything beyond “not being open enough”, how about you do a little research of your own? How about, instead of insinuating, “they might have done it this way”, you go out and prove that they did? After all, all of their data is there. They released all of their raw data after the scandal, didn’t they? And there was no evidence found in any of these investigations of any data being destroyed. Then it should be an absolutely token feat for you (or any number of other denialist hacks) to go over those numbers and demonstrate that this bias was present. You know, instead of just posting empty allegations, actually backing your shit up for once.
Your empty allegations and your ideas that they might have allowed bias to slip in just seem fucking empty when you compare the evidence on my side (6 independent investigations clearing their names plus one confirming that their research matched up with reality) to the evidence on yours (jack shit).
I’ll address this later… It’s late and I have to sleep. If anyone else wants to take over, be my guest.
Lol, it’s just one article. Anyway, if you want to seriously discuss global warming, you should probably take the time to understand the position you are arguing against.
Let me ask you this: Do you think it’s a problem if somebody has a strong opinion about the global warming controversy but does not even know that water vapor feedback is at the core of the controversy?
You aren’t doing yourself a favor by simply ignoring arguments which go against your pre-held beliefs.
Anyway, as you seem to realize, the main argument for the water vapor feedback hypothesis consists of computer simulations. However, it is trivial to demonstrate that many perhaps most of those computer simulations are wrong. And as far as I know, none of them have been validated by making interesting, accurate, bona fide, consistent predictions.
In short, global warming rests upon a very slender reed.
Lol, the normal last refuge of the warmist who has been cornered.
It’s not a matter of comparison. Researchers who are funded by the fossil fuel industry should also disclose information to those they perceive as hostile to their position.
No, that’s not my position. Again, please do not mischaracterize my position.
Let’s try to figure out exactly where you disagree with me, or even if you disagree at all:
First, do you agree that doing climate simulations and temperature reconstructions require the researcher to make multiple judgments?
Second, do you agree that it’s possible for a researcher to make those judgments in such a way as to seriously bias his results?
Third, do you agree that there is a serious risk that a dishonest researcher with an agenda will do just that?
Fourth, do you agree that for these reasons, Jones’ work is more suspect than it otherwise would be?
Fifth, do you agree that another warmist researcher who defends Jones probably believes that Jones’ tactics are okay?
:shrug: As far as I know, none of your cites contradicts my point. In terms of actually demonstrating bias, that’s tricky since it’s easy enough for a warmist researcher to invent a rationalization for his decisions.
That said, Keith Briffa’s decision to truncate his proxy reconstruction around 1950 for the 2007 IPCC report seems to be the result of bias.
It is fun to point out that he has me on ignore, fine with me because by ignoring me everyone can see what a willful ignoramus brazil is, I guess he does not know that NASA and ScienceDaily do exist for starters.