http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=16993891&postcount=62
I’d love to see you respond to the rest of that post.
Just reading the abstract, cuz there’s a paywall. I won’t comment on the other quote because they can’t be accessedand checked for accuracy nor constext. Of course, since the summary is “sceptics teh eeevel and suxx0r” there isn’t much to comment.
“An examination of these data shows that these 91 CCCM organizations have an annual income of just over 900million,with an annual average of 64 million in identifiable foundation support.”
(my bolding, I also separate a few words)
So it’s NOT 1 billion, not even 900 million, it’s just 64 million. 900 million is the aggregate income, not the donated part.
I can play the game. NOAA’s 2012 budget was on the 5 billions. That’s five times all the evil earth-destroying guys together.
Heh. Thanks, though not precisely what I meant.
I know that was the claim that was made in the past, but new evidence refutes it.
For example, there is this paper. From the abstract:
If both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans were warmer during that period, that suggests it wasn’t a local phenomenon.
Of course the science is politicized. Scientists are people, and subject to the same pressures and biases as anyone else. This is true in every field and on every subject, but when an issue becomes wrapped up in political battles like climate science has, and when billions of dollars of funding flow based in part on political considerations, it’s foolish to think that scientists are unaffected by it. Bias is everywhere. Why do you think we do double-blind trials whenever possible?
Of course, you have no problem claiming that scientists who disagree with the consensus are doing so for political or monetary reasons. It’s only the scientists on your side who are pure as the driven snow, right?
In today’s climate, contrarian positions on global warming can cause a scientist to be shunned, to lose funding, to be harassed and threatened by AGW activists, etc. Editors who publish papers skeptical of global warming are placed under much more scrutiny than those who publish orthodox papers. In at least one case, a group of pro-AGW scientists organized an effort to have a journal editor fired for publishing such a paper.
This behavior is unscientific and has a chilling effect on open discourse. There could be many scientists who are skeptical of certain AGW theories who have looked this environment and said, “Screw it - I’m not getting involved.”
This isn’t new. Study the history of science when paradigm shifts have taken place, and you’ll see typical human behavior - closing ranks, attempts to black-ball dissenters, political interference, you name it. When the controversy is over a subject that is testable and falsifiable, the controversy and nastiness fades when evidence is produced that can’t be denied - as happened with plate tectonics. Or on the other side, the heterodox theories are forced to concede when experimental results can not be replicated - as happened with cold fusion.
Unfortunately, climate science is a lot fuzzier, changes take place over a very long time, and there are innumerable confounding factors. That means the theories are close to being unfalsifiable, at least in the short term. Economics shares this problem - there are no counterfactuals, no controls, and they are complex systems which are inherently difficult to understand and predict. That’s why there are fundamental arguments about economics that never end - both sides can always find some kind of evidence to ‘prove’ their position. The same will be true for global warming until enough time has passed that a clear trend can be sifted from the noise. And even then, we’ll probably still argue about causation.
That’s how science works in a perfect world. In the real world, science is subject to all kinds of pressures. The amount of scientific fraud across all fields is much higher than we would like to admit. The number of papers published in all fields that have results that no one can replicate has also been increasing. There are numerous ways political pressures and funding pressures can affect science.
And again, you seem to have no trouble acknowledging this for scientists on ‘the other side’, who AGW proponents consistently characterize as being underhanded, greedy, or in other ways unworthy of consideration. So a scientist with a tenuous connection to some corporate interest is immediately suspect, while a scientist who receives all his funding from a government with a strong desire for certain results is assumed to be completely free from pressure and bias, as is a scientist who receives funding from Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Foundation, the Sierra Club, or other activist ‘green’ organizations.
I’m well aware of the process behind the IPCC. That’s not what I was talking about. What I was saying is that the ‘consensus’ in the IPCC reports is not described as being certain, but in terms of probabilities - sometimes with large unknowns acknowledged which could change the results dramatically. This is a good thing, and they are to be commended for the careful language in the scientific report. Unfortunately, the nuance and uncertainty tends to be eliminated or ignored when that information is used by activists and policy makers.
Yes they are. But in the political sphere, when someone points out those unknowns and uncertainties, they are labeled a ‘denier’ and shouted down.
First, if you think public funding of science is not driven by agendas, I still want to know what you are smoking. One only need to look at the funding levels for, say breast cancer as opposed to other diseases which claim more lives but which are not as politically potent to see that. Any scientist who has been in the funding game for a long time will tell you that trends come and go, that ‘hot’ issues get more funding than ones that are not currently in the public eye, etc.
And incidentally, the amount of money that global warming research gets from organizations like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace dwarfs the amount of money coming from putatively ‘right wing’ organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute.
And on edit, I see that it was already pointed out to you that the 1B figure is bogus and represents the entire funding of some of these groups - not just the amount dedicated to global warming research.
If you don’t think money is a factor on the pro-AGW side, just think about the hundreds of billions of dollars that will change hands and flow through powerful special interests if a carbon tax can be implemented. Think of all the money and power that would flow to the U.N. - the agency in charge of the IPCC. Why would you assume that one side is incorruptible and the other isn’t, when there are powerful special interests on both sides of the debate?
Your claim was that all changes in the climate system are internal, and therefore can’t affect the net energy budget of the planet. The point behind the claim was that so long as CO2 forcing is increasing, the Earth must heat up no matter what the details of the internal system are. ‘Basic Thermodynamics’, right?
I pointed out several ways in which this is not true. Now you’re changing your claim to state that those effects have been ‘modeled’, and I guess in your mind that means the case is closed and they cannot be considered at all. But since it’s the models themselves that are in question here, this is nonsense - at least in terms of the specific claim you were making. The changes in cloud cover and its effects are one of the big unknowns called out in the IPCC 4th assessment, so I don’t think you can just handwave that away.
You’re certain of that, are you? There are numerous sequestration mechanisms, and the interactions between them are still not totally understood. And it’s not even clear that we know what they all are. And since CO2 makes up a small percentage of the atmosphere, it wouldn’t take much in the way of unknown sequestration effects to change the balance.
Paleo reconstructions are fine, but they have their limits. You can use them to suss out certain relationships, such as the relationship between CO2 and temperature in the past. But such reconstructions can’t hope to give you a complete picture of what the climate was like then and all the drivers that affected it.
I said that the previous peaks in temperature during the last interglacial periods were higher, and CO2 concentrations were lower. And that is true. Your definition of my being ‘wrong’ seems to be that I’m ‘wrong’ whenever you can come up with any kind of countervailing argument, even if the facts I stated were correct.
You know what? Every climate regime is unprecedented. The climate is a complex adaptive system. It evolves. The chemistry changes over time. Shocks are applied to it from volcanoes, meteor impacts, large scale gas releases due to geologic events, passage through interstellar dust clouds, variability in solar output, you name it. Changes in plant and animal life affect the concentrations of gases in the atmosphere. The system responds to these changes by reconfiguring itself in complex ways. This is what complex systems do. However, one characteristic of complex adaptive systems that have survived for a long time is that they tend to have strong stability-enforcing mechanisms.
That doesn’t mean we should ignore the potential problem, or that we should assume that we can dump whatever we want into the atmosphere and the planet will cope. Of course not. It does mean, however, that we need to have some humility about how much we do and can know about how the system behaves.
As for thousands of years to reach equilibrium… That’s actually good news, isn’t it? Given that somewhere around 75% of atmospheric CO2 is sequestered somewhere between 25 and 200 years, that suggests that this is a short-term problem. We will eventually run out of fossil fuels, or discover an energy source that makes them non-competitive. When that happens, CO2 output will plummet, and the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will begin to fall. This stuff isn’t going to be in the atmosphere for thousands of years. No one believes we’ll be running a fossil-fuel economy for more than a few more decades - maybe a hundred years.
Yeah, because NOAA devotes all its resources to climatology and the study of global warming. Let me see, what does the “O” stand for, again?
Looks like I can play professional basketball as well as you can play this game.
Reading comprehension skills are very useful when debating.
Since the game was dumping all the income and calling it “anti-AGW” (when only about 7% was), I played the same “game” of dumping all the NOAA budget as “pro AGW”.
3rd grade reading comprehension skills would’ve helped you realise that, since it’s a game, it’s clear to me that not all of NOAA’s budget goes to AGW.
BTW, you tried to played smart with the “O” thingy, but it was a big fail. Oceans are motherfuckin’ crucial to climate. Heck, the pause in temps is now explained (away) by saying the heat is in the ocean. If as part or their AGW work NOAA is not looking at the Oceans, then some people have to lose their jobs and go to prison.
And I pointed at that possibility before, but I also mentioned that the evidence shows that it is not likely to had been as warm as what we see today.
I did mention before the example of statisticians that were given the temperature data with no hints about where it came from, they concluded that it showed an upward trend and that there was no significant temperature declines.
Of course most of your rant is in reality the modern political bias, Both Reagan and Margaret thatcher did listen to the scientists more than what the current republicans are, the politicization of the issue is indeed a more of a recent phenomenon, and it has to be confronted as the artificial factor that it is.
Again, uncertainty is not your friend.
I’m afraid you are falling for the same arguments from the creationists, BTW one of the luminaries of the skeptics is one. (Spencer)
Gee, it would be unlikely that just like in the evolution vs creationism issue one group just does not have the evidence on their side?
Again, that is wishful thinking, you really need to point at good cites for your certainty that it would be cheap, and of course any deployment of Geo engineering will depend on the very models that you are disparaging.
More FUD, really, it is like scientists that investigate past paleo climate do not continue to look for more evidence to get a better picture, and the more they look for the more it looks that we can not trust that CO2 has reformed from its behavior from the past.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/rapid-change-feature.html
Actually the IPCC has also explained that, surprisingly in the sense that you claim they are the ones to look for. CO2 is not the only forcing out there.
Oy.
Really? Lidzen and Svenssmark are shunned, harassed, and threatened? Even Spencer (who is consistently wrong and a creationist)?
Citation needed. Are we talking about Soon & Baliunas?
Sam Stone, you are enjoyable as well as lucid and intelligent. Thanks.
He can be, in the past he even told the ones coming with debunked contrarian points as just pushers of hot air, but as I have seen in the previous example, politics then makes some of the more sophisticated contrarian points sound valid to people that rely a lot on conservative sources. My observation here is that here a lot is missed regarding how groups that deny science also give a lot of money to support and elect politicians that deny even the basic science. Those groups even go to the extreme of unseating conservative politicians whose only fault is that they listen to science.
That leads only to what we see now: mostly inaction at the federal level and in several states. At least there are a lot of state and private efforts that are making a difference but it would be much better for the future to make a concerted and more dedicated effort.
However, the main point here is that Sam does approves of the basic science, so I would not put him as a supporter of people that even deny that Gilbert Plass is recognized as the father of modern greenhouse-gas theory or that that theory was never ever mentioned.
That was a very lengthy response, and thanks for taking the time to do it. Much of it has already been addressed, and I’m respond to what I consider to be the most egregious or annoying parts first, and as briefly as I can, so that it serves up the argument in more digestible bit-size pieces. So with that in mind… 
[EDIT: Well, that turned out to be not so brief! :)]
That is a very far cry from a refutation. That is not at all the intent of the paper and although, taken at face value, one could infer that conclusion (and the authors do suggest it might be the case) one needs to keep many, many caveats in mind:
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The proxies used by the reconstructions are sparse and lacking in both spatial and temporal accuracy. As the paper itself states, “with no additional IWT records, it is difficult to assess the global extent of the trends we have reconstructed.” Indeed with the goal of assessing 10,000 year trends from the early to mid-Holocene, the temporal scope of the MWP is a mere blip.
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The benthic foraminifer proxies used to assess water temperatures (IWTs) have a 1 to 1.6ºC error; the paper claims better but that’s not the general understanding. Even the paper’s claims of better accuracy have a greater margin of error than the claimed MWP temperature differentials – again, that wasn’t the purpose of the paper.
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Even decadal-level resolutions of such proxies tend to be found only in limited, select areas.
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The argument about the MWP’s distribution is not just about geographical distribution, about also about synchronicity: what areas were warmer, by how much, and when. Thus the temporal proxy uncertainties are just as significant as the spatial uncertainties due to sparseness of the data.
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**There is much better evidence from a large variety of multiproxy sources about the distribution of the MWP anomaly **-- you can see a reconstruction here that was based on this paper.
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As the paper itself states, if the inferences about the MWP that one might make from its results are correct, then it would “indicate a strong link to global radiative perturbations rather than a regional response to changes in ocean circulation” as the cause of the MWP. That is absolutely right. Unfortunately, there is exactly zero evidence for such perturbations.
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The most important point in that paper is actually a cautionary tale: that oceans are actually heating much more rapidly now that at any other time during the 10,000 years of the Holocene.
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Just as a final note of personal annoyance, the MWP has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion of contemporary climate change, unless one is interested is introducing the hypothesis that global climate change is entirely driven by magic and we should just stay out of it. Which is the denialists’ objective and hence the elevation of a mildly interesting event to iconic status. Even if it was global it wouldn’t matter, because it assuredly wasn’t being driven by CO2 forcing, and post-industrial climate change most assuredly is.
In my many years of experience in this subject, the papers that I’ve seen that have been “shunned” or heavily criticized, or journals that published them criticized for their policies, have all been shunned because they were incontrovertible garbage and provably so. Soon and Baliunas that someone mentioned earlier are a case in point. Roy Spencer is a libertarian lunatic dedicated to preventing government regulation of anything and only pretending to be a scientist. I have **NEVER ** seen a legitimate, scientifically grounded paper shunned just because it runs counter to AGW. I don’t think any reasonable person not given to conspiracy theories would have any doubt that such a paper – of a non-garbage variety and with the requisite strong supporting evidence – would be considered tremendously important – indeed, Nobel-worthy. There’s a reason that we have the body of evidence about AGW that we do, and the reason is not scientific mendacity.
I have no interest in “activists” and almost no one listens to them anyway. I’m talking about science. Far from “uncertainty being eliminated” when the IPCC is quoted, the current political fashion is to condemn it altogether. How many Republican contenders for the presidential nomination endorsed AGW? (hint: zero, even the ones who secretly believed it was true). Something like 98% of Republican Congressmen are denialists – I think I already cited this before. The point here being that’s it’s pretty funny to suggest the IPCC reports are being waved around as a call to action by any meaningful political factions. It’s the opposite.
That is so devoid of logic that it takes my breath away. You’re going to tell us that some kids in Greenpeace financially outweigh the public influence of a $12 trillion global energy industry, PLUS all the allied industries like power generation and heavy manufacturing. You’re going to do this despite the evidence in numerous systematic studies of the climate disinformation campaign like the one I posted, which you summarily dismiss. You’re going to do this despite prior evidence of exactly such massive disinformation tactics by the likes of the tobacco industry, the health insurance industry, and virtually any industry that has ever had its interests under threat. You’re going to do this despite the fact that there are orders of magnitude greater financial stakes here for commercial interests than in any of those other cases. You’re going to do this sitting in a country that is virtually ruled by corporate power. And I’m the one who is supposedly smoking something? :rolleyes:
A “complete picture” will never be possible and is not required. We only need to understand the dominant forcings and their net long-term effects, and in particular, the absence in the record of any of the mythical self-limiting feedbacks being proposed without basis by denialists.
I’ll rephrase that, then. Your comments were not wrong, they were irrelevant. It was the implied relevance and implied conclusion of the comments that was wrong.
That doesn’t actually mean anything. What “system” precisely has survived for a long time? The planet, yes, a variety of different climate regimes, yes, but not without major and often catastrophic effects on the ecosystem. The closest analog we have to massive sudden injections of carbon into the atmosphere was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and even then the rate of injection was much slower than at present. And your hypothesized “stability-enforcing mechanisms” were nowhere to be found – it drastically transformed ocean chemistry and ultimately all life on earth.
What we need to understand is that this isn’t a trivial alteration to the carbon cycle. By burning fossil fuels we’re taking carbon that has been safely sequestered for hundreds of millions of years and injecting it into the atmosphere at that rate of I believe 30 billion tons a year for CO2 alone. This is now a de facto permanent part of the active carbon cycle. What is unprecedented here is that humanity, in all our numbers and our fragile interdependent relationship with nature, is going to be impacted by the consequent rapid changes and climate instabilities.
That is, quite simply, baseless and downright dangerously incorrect speculation. The IPCC emissions scenarios (or the equivalents that are now called “representative concentration pathways”) provide no realistic circumstances under which this magical nirvana will occur.
Yep, which is exactly why we see something like the “study” in the OP, which wants to take a very short time period, of satellite data, and cobble it into the surface station dataset that GISS uses, to make the recent period “hotter”, for the arctic. Anyone who knows the situation with GISS data knows that the arctic is one of the many regions that has almost no historical data, and very little or no surface data even now. This is exactly why we see maps that have an impossible thing displayed. The scant surface stations are “smoothed” out over the areas not covered. The grey is areas not covered at all.
The farther back you go with GISS the more grey you see, as there is simply no data for the time period.
But even now there are simply no surface stations actually within the arctic, over the ice, or the ocean when the ice melts. It’s why the GISS problem exists.
No surface stations within the arctic, over the ice, or the ocean when the ice melts?
I wonder how the International Arctic Buoy Program was missed.
This point is worth re-emphasizing. The denialist sites, such as Co2science, run by the infamous Idso clan, who argue for global warmth of the MWP tend to define the MWP as some broad period extending from about 800 to 1500 AD…And then if a proxy shows, say, a century of warmth anytime during that period, it is taken as evidence of the global nature of the MWP and in support of the notion that the warmth now is therefore nothing out of the ordinary.
The problem is that the warmth seen during that general period in various studies tends to be asynchronous, so when you average all of them together, what you get is a broad shallow hill, rather than the much more pronounced feature of the late 20th century-early 21st century warmth, which is much more synchronous and hence leads to a more pronounced feature.
If a proxy shows warming during the MW period, it is ignored as evidence of the global nature of the MWP, because if the MWP was global, and it was warmer then than now, the alarmists is faced with a terrible problem. The enemy will use such knowledge to dismiss the fears over what is happening now.
So the alarmists works from the sure knowledge it couldn’t have been warmer then, and all evidence must support that view. This is how climate science works.
Nonsense, the reality is that a lot of the original idea of the medieval warming was given by early IPCC graphs that concentrated on a local area of northern Europe, the reason why Mann and many others are hated is that they found that the medieval warming was not as impressive as that early graph, one of the moments I realized the deniers were at the levels of moon hoaxers was that they based their eternal idea of the MWP on early partial information from the same group they are condemning right now.
There is no march of time or march of science for the deniers, they deny the presence of better and more recent observations to preserve their beliefs.
Once again, simple opinion with no evidence, such is climate science.
Anyone can notice that I showed how you did not have evidence for that say so of “No surface stations within the arctic, over the ice, or the ocean when the ice melts” it is no different for this one. In the past I have linked to what got me involved in this subject in the first place.
And yes, one has to notice that you claim that you do not follow the talking points from the deniers, but this item is one of the original denier talking points, so you are even wrong on that claim of not following their lead.
The original graph from H.H Lamb was seem by me posted by deniers in the SDMB before.
It was that graph, the first one in the following link the one that was used in a German site where it claimed that it was warmer in the medieval period. It was copied and reused many times, and never changing or having an update from many denier sites; only that, as mentioned before, even then (circa 2006 when I got notice of this creationist like talking point) deniers were ignoring the march of time and the progress of science.
On a more personal level this whole episode sounds like many high school students that find a urban rumor on the internet and even if they are pointed at the correct information they still bug the teacher with sites that they claim show the opposite.
A real example (Name changed to protect the innocent and willful ignorant):
No, the Jerusalem cricket is not poisonous Mr. Grubberman, stop killing it only because you think is ugly and believe that rumor. No Mr. Grubberman, that site says that it is a rumor that the Cricket is poisonous, not that it is, read carefully… No, that you tube site says that on the title but the poster on the notes reports that that title is the rumor, please read more carefully. :smack:
You can be 100% sure that there are no surface station in the arctic ocean, or any other ocean for that matter. The best we get is an island located within a sea or ocean basin, but there can not be a surface station on water. Or ice that moves, melts, and is wind driven in to crazy lumpy patterns.
Which is why the only good data for the arctic is the satellite data, and that is questioned by some.