Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: WeatherOp on November 20, 2009, 11:20:00 pm
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Just caught wind of this, very very interesting.
http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?showtopic=212689&st=0 (http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?showtopic=212689&st=0)
Note, this is a link to a forum so you actually have to look through it to understand it. Just seeing it myself, so I haven't read most of it yet.
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After having read the article and the links from it my response can only be:
:wakka: :ha:
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Can I has summary?
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Can I has summary?
Apparently a Russian hacker hacked the Hadley Centre(Climate Change based, and a huge global warming supporter) and stole ~120mbs of Emails from the past 9 years and leaked it all online. But, the real meat is what was said between the scientists who were very big named. Now the question is whether or not it is all true, but it does look to have quiet a bit behind it now and we will know all about it in the next few days and it's validity.
The big one right now is this email.
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,[email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: [email protected],[email protected]
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email [email protected]
NR4 7TJ
UK
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Man, if this is real, it is a sad day for science.
EDIT: Okay, read it over, it looks rather ambiguous. Going to wait for commentary from a neutral source.
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There is no neutral source. That's the rub. Everyone that you would think is "neutral" has a stake in proving these documents false.
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Why?
I don't have a particular stance on global warming.
My concern is more of that the 'damning statements' have simply been cherrypicked.
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It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.
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My personal concern is not whether or not global warming is actually happening or not, nor whether or not we are affecting it.
My concern is this: what if it IS happening, and what if humankind's actions are the main (or even strongly contributing) reason behind it?
I see much less risk from trying to minimize the effects on climate compared to wishing for the best by believing that nothing is wrong and that even if global climate change is going on we couldn't do anything about it.
The risks of tryign to minimize the climate change are economical expenses from trying, and possibly failing at it. Benefits would be continued status quo, or possibly taking the sharpest edge off from an inevitable change, giving us more time to adapt to the changed climate. After all, barring Venusian style climate change, the change itself is not the problem but it's rate is.
On the other hand, we keep going on as we are, and it turns out the climate does change, rapidly, and for the worse, and we have a cluster**** of unseen proportions falling over the humanity, resulting in a lot of human suffering, economic breakdown, loss of infrastructure and lives. This is the worst case scenario and in my opinion, the risks of this far outweigh the risks of actually trying to affect thigns a bit.
People equipped with rational thought know this, and combined with the fact that an economy that requires perpetual growth cannot work forever with limited resources, it would be better for long term to just put limiters of some sort in place for stuff like rate of consuming fossile fuels, no matter whether the climate is changing or not.
Of course, there's a logical conundrum there; by this logic, anyone could postulate all kinds of horrible things and say that it is better to prepare for them than not to prepare for them, but then such is the case of all risk analysis. Building a meteor shield for your home is by all statistical analysis a loss of resources in all practical sense. Building a Geofront against the invasion of powerful alien species would be folly considering we don't even know of any viable way for interstellar travel. The thing is, though, that the hypothesis of global climate change to warmer environment has some rather compelling evidence to make it plausible.
First and most important is that Earth is currently in an ice age. There are polar ice caps, and this is very unusual in geological timeframes. Most of the time Earth has existed, there have been no ice caps and climate has been a lot warmer than in the pleistocene era. On the other hand, it's equally possible that we are in a period between more powerful glaciations and that there would be another ice age behind the corner. This possibility should never be denied when talking about climate changes. Also, it is good to keep in mind that the climate is essentially a very chaotic system with too many variables for anyone to predict things with absolute certainty. At best, our long term projections are more of educated guesses than absolute authorities. The only things we know for sure is the average energy received from the Sun, and that is bound to only increase as time goes on, but that's in really long term; in the space of tens of thousands of years, the activity of the Sun remains largely unpredictable beyond the 11-year cycle of sun spots.
Nevertheless - in the long term, the prediction is that there will be no ice caps. For most of the time. Antarctic ice will melt at some point and the water bound there will be released into the water cycle, partially into atmopspheric water vapour and partially into oceans. The question is, what happens before it, whether human activity affects it, and how fast will the changes happen.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of the carbon that was in the carbon cycle in the prehistoric warm eras - I'm talking about triassic, jurassic and cretacean here - is currently bound in fossil fuel reserves which we are rapidly cycling through. Both the carbon dioxide and oxygen levels were higher if I recall correctly, which made very large insects and very flush vegetation possible. Now I don't personally really think that there's much risk of Earth turning into another Venus, but obviously some connection might be here. During the ages of dinosaurs, a lot of carbon was in the carbon cycle, and it was warm. A lot of the carbon was bound into fossil fuel as remnants of the plants fossilized and were covered in sediment layers, and then climate got a lot cooler.
Of course, correlation does not imply causation; there could be a thousand other reasons why the climate got cooler; redistribution of continents changing ocean currents and dominant winds is a good one, but the fact is we ARE pumping a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while also affecting the amount of vegetation that cycles the carbon around in the biosphere. All these things combined, and the possibility of human activity affecting climate is not exactly that far-fetched to me.
The thing is, though, that we only really have hard data from a very short time period and all who know any statistics should be aware that making projections from such a short range of measurements is unreliable at best and guessing at worst. The thing is, though, that there are other negative effects caused by the same things that allegedly drive the climate warming, and I can easily see why some people would want to politicize these things by banding them under the umbrella threat of climate warming and add some scientific credibility to the opposition. It's unscientific and ultimately harmful for any sort of cause for more sustainable, economic way of doing things, but I can see where these people would be coming from.
In other words, it's easier to get people to maybe care a little bit if you say their actions threaten the way of their life, rather than just say that cutting down the mightiest trees in the woods with an overfished herring population while burning a lot of coal and oil might be unwise in and on itself.
Of course, while some people say one thing, others say that the spice must flow, and economy must grow to appease the beast, and that everything will be good and well as long as profit is made (after all you're only in this world for seventy odd years or so, what's going to change during that time).
Fear, uncertainty and doubt are powerful propaganda tools for any cause, and I can see why using them is so tempting.
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Several mainstream media outlets have confirmed that the leaked material is real.
There is something about it in New York Times and in Washington Post.
However, I suspect that the quoted email messages have been taken out of context. Given the importance of correct decision, I think there needs to be a public hearing about this.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quote_mining
Nothing more to say.
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I think there's plenty more to say, given the implications of what this release reveals. You shouldn't blindly accept one side's opinion on such a controversial topic, especially when the primary sources have been made so easily available to examine.
Searchable archive of the emails:
http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/index.php
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You shouldn't blindly accept one side's opinion on such a controversial topic
Yeah, this goes for everyone. I'm pretty sure the truth lies somewhere between 'OMG THEY LIED' and 'OMG QUOTE MINING'
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Someone should copy all that down and bury it deep on a hardware to ensure its survival.
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It's already gone to ground, there's no way to hide it. Too many people have it.
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Yeah, but we still don't know if there's anything here worth hiding.
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from what I've seen the most worrying email out of the batch is the one telling the other guy to delete his emails. there is also a lot of 'the data must be wrong' 'they don't agree with me so they must be wrong' type statements here and there that don't fit with the attitude of a scientist.
I've seen a few warm knives but no smoking guns.
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I concur. That's bad stuff.
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I agree. This doesn't necessarily say anything at all about the implications of global warming, but it does at least point to some pretty massive violations of good scientific practice at an individual level.
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See, this is very bad. Why? Because bumbling moronic retards like Liberator will latch on to this and say GLOBAL WARMING IS ALL A HOAX LOLOLOL. This in turn will cause a massive economic collapse of alternative energy sources, which means we'll attempt to go back to our old coal reserves only to discover that they're all but depleted and then be like F-CK.
If this gets too extreme, then the entire public will start thinking its perfectly ok to abuse the environment, which could in fact start global warming if it hasn't already happened! If people use this to rationalize littering, wasting, etc, then we'll have massive destruction of ecosystems across the world in a matter of decades and global warming will be the least of our concerns.
So basically the entire human race is now doomed to its own stupidity. I hope you're happy, Liberator.
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Yeah, supporters of anti-global warming policy forged some of their data, so their opponents are responsible for imminent end of the world... :rolleyes: Anyway, I think that global warming theory won't be discredited because of this leak, people will just take relevant news with a grain of salt.
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In science word "trick" actually is some suspicious fraud, not a a normal way of dealing with problems. THE MORE YOU KNOW. Destroying emails and using a normal procedure to match datasets to another are the biggest proofs of fraud someone can find in 15 years' worth of emails? Seriously?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/#more-1853 has a
Noise, noise, no substance. Scientific politics as petty and hateful as they are. People being *****es at each other. No falsification of AGW.
edit: removed unnecessary flaming
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I think there's plenty more to say, given the implications of what this release reveals. You shouldn't blindly accept one side's opinion on such a controversial topic, especially when the primary sources have been made so easily available to examine.
Searchable archive of the emails:
http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/index.php
I've done researches about similar matters many times, and the result has always been the same. Quote mining. The quote of "trick to hiding the decline" doesn't explain what decline refers to, and the guy who quoted it didn't bother to give the proper context (probably because it wouldn't help the implication that a decline in temperature was meant), and if this is the worst he can find I don't need to waste my time perusing that material. I've wasted my time that way too often already.
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I don't think Liberator's a bumbling moronic retard. C'mon, now - if your argument is strong, you don't need to belittle your opposition.
Liberator takes the time to post his beliefs here knowing he'll probably be jumped on. Let's show a bit of respect.
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Agreed, let's cut it on the personal attacks.
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For the love of.... STOP CALLING IT 'GLOBAL WARMING'!
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I egerly await seeing the best evidence of fraud that the anti-global warming group can find in this, it's a huge chunk of data so it will take some time, but if this group is up to something they should be able to find a few smoking guns in this haystack, I hope they can do better than personal snipes and that out of context 'hide the decline' statement referring to a data set with a known error in it, with this volume of data I hope for there sake that they can find something real.
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I don't think anything more substancial will surface.
The only issue is if measurement data has been destroyed or withheld. Suggesting it is odd coming from a mouth of a scientist, but to actually destroy it is still another thing. It is not clear if they have carried out this. This is the part I referred to by saying there needs to be a public inquiry. It might be so that one or two persons have to resign after this, but that's the worst that I can expect to happen.
This incident serves as a remainder that emails can get published at any time whether author wants it or not, and this should be remembered when writing one.
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I don't think Liberator's a bumbling moronic retard. C'mon, now - if your argument is strong, you don't need to belittle your opposition.
Liberator takes the time to post his beliefs here knowing he'll probably be jumped on. Let's show a bit of respect.
It wasn't aimed at Liberator, though. Sorry.
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I don't think Liberator's a bumbling moronic retard. C'mon, now - if your argument is strong, you don't need to belittle your opposition.
Liberator takes the time to post his beliefs here knowing he'll probably be jumped on. Let's show a bit of respect.
It wasn't aimed at Liberator, though. Sorry.
It was aimed at Blackhole, not at you. No worries.
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...people will just take relevant news with a grain of salt.
:wakka::wakka::wakka:
I think you're vastly overestimating the rationality of most people.
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The hoax in Global Climate change isn't that it's happening. Climates change, that's what they do.
The hoax is that we're to blame for it and that we can do something to stop or slow it by forcing the adoption of overpriced, underpowered technologies that aren't ready for prime time because they're too complex and/or too expensive to manufacture at meaningful levels all in the name of saving the world from ourselves.
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I approve this topic as it makes no difference in my life :yes:
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See, this is very bad. Why? Because bumbling moronic retards like Liberator will latch on to this and say GLOBAL WARMING IS ALL A HOAX LOLOLOL. This in turn will cause a massive economic collapse of alternative energy sources, which means we'll attempt to go back to our old coal reserves only to discover that they're all but depleted and then be like F-CK.
If this gets too extreme, then the entire public will start thinking its perfectly ok to abuse the environment, which could in fact start global warming if it hasn't already happened! If people use this to rationalize littering, wasting, etc, then we'll have massive destruction of ecosystems across the world in a matter of decades and global warming will be the least of our concerns.
So basically the entire human race is now doomed to its own stupidity. I hope you're happy, Liberator.
You've constructed a ridiculous strawman here. If global warming is proven a hoax, people are not magically going to start polluting the environment like their life depends on it. There's already an environmentalist movement independent of the presence or absence of global warming; that will continue. And people generally want to be good stewards of the Earth - reuse, recycle, don't litter, etc.. That's not going to change.
And suppose suppose global warming is a hoax; do you really want the hoaxers to run wild with laws and regulations to suit their own interests?
You can make your argument without personal attacks. Do so, or you'll be prevented from posting in this thread.
I've done researches about similar matters many times, and the result has always been the same. Quote mining.
You're generalizing. Just because something was true about a previous controversy doesn't mean it's true here.
Furthermore, "quote mining" is dishonestly stringing together quotes taken out of context. These emails are quotes taken in context, and which can stand on their own without being strung together.
I don't think anything more substancial will surface.
The only issue is if measurement data has been destroyed or withheld. Suggesting it is odd coming from a mouth of a scientist, but to actually destroy it is still another thing. It is not clear if they have carried out this. This is the part I referred to by saying there needs to be a public inquiry. It might be so that one or two persons have to resign after this, but that's the worst that I can expect to happen.
How about these emails then?
At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote:
Mike, I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc !
Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it !
To: santer1@XXXX
Subject: Re: A quick question
Date: Wed Dec 10 10:14:10 2008
Ben,
Haven’t got a reply from the FOI person here at UEA. So I’m not entirely confident the numbers are correct. One way of checking would be to look on CA, but I’m not doing that. I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails - unless this was ‘normal’ deleting to keep emails manageable! McIntyre hasn’t paid his £10, so nothing looks likely to happen re his Data Protection Act email.
Anyway requests have been of three types - observational data, paleo data and who made IPCC changes and why. Keith has got all the latter - and there have been at least 4. We made Susan aware of these - all came from David Holland. According to the FOI Commissioner’s Office, IPCC is an international organization, so is above any national FOI. Even if UEA holds anything about IPCC, we are not obliged to pass it on, unless it has anything to do with our core business - and it doesn’t! I’m sounding like Sir Humphrey here!
Makes you wonder very strongly what Jones is trying to hide, doesn’t it? Also makes you laugh all over again at his claim once that the data being sought had, sadly, been ... um, lost.
And, most damagingly...
From: Phil Jones To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment - minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil:
There's a lot more available with only a few minutes' worth of Googling. I've just posted the tip of the iceberg here.
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Goober,
that's no evidence of fraud;
that's academia for you.
They can be even worse and they can hate some other scientists, but it's not like all those thousands of studies are based on personal vendettas against McIntyre et al. I have no idea what the entire "delete e-mails" stuff is, but if I have to guess some conservations could've been leaked to unwanted sources. No idea.
Actually hey Goober, I have a question for you!:
If ACC is a hoax, then who is to benefit? How do these thousands of scientists which are testing 0-hypothesises against working hypothesises and get their result published benefit? Why does this huge conspiracy exist? Why?
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that's no evidence of fraud;
that's academia for you.
Deleting correspondence and data so someone else can't see it is academia? How long was I asleep last night?
If ACC is a hoax, then who is to benefit? How do these thousands of scientists which are testing 0-hypothesises against working hypothesises and get their result published benefit? Why does this huge conspiracy exist? Why?
Funding?
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that's no evidence of fraud;
that's academia for you.
Deleting correspondence and data so someone else can't see it is academia? How long was I asleep last night?
Hey, I don't like it either, and I have no idea what these guys are doing, and why they are deleting some messages, and what it has to do with anything, but if you know your academia this kind of petty **** and fierce competition goes on all the time, despite the standards of science. The reasons are theft, jealousy and other way too human attributes. They show when you deal with groups of like 15 people. People talk **** around water machine. But overall the entire fumbling machine of empirism produces relatively good results, despite the fact that academia is filled with dicks.
This is not some arcane knowledge, this is natural sciences, and even Bachelors know this is how it works - if they don't, they don't know their scientific bull****. No one really likes it. It's not what is supposed to happen. It's just what happens.
Welcome here. I'm in biology. Publication is power. Power is funding. Funding is publication. Allow anyone to snatch anything from you and they'll do and they'll publish and you will be ridiculed for allowing it to happen. Ever read Terry Pratchett? The Unseen University sadly is not complete fiction.
Funding?
You cannot be serious.
You are completely insane if you actually believe this and there's no other way to put this.
Do you think climatologists drive around in BMWs or even get adequate funding? Where do you live in?
Lets deal with some sound presumptions. After all, a fraud theory has to explain some of the facts away, which I am certain everyone who believes in fraud can probably dissect my comment in logical way. Let's begin:
So, this huge click of different scientists from all around the globe starts to run this hoax in early 1980s to convince people that something is happening.
They keep this cabal secret for 20 years and publish, publish and publish. People dont' react to their alarms for about 20 years, after which these scientists have a mountain of practically similar evidence. People start to pay some kind of attention (late 1990s).
They then are faced with multi-billion assault from energy giants which freely fund junk science via front groups. The governments that actually are sometimes even responsible for the scientists' funding are reluctant to do anything about the problems.
These scientists are spread all around the globe, hundreds of them lose all funding every years, competition is absolutely fierce and yet they manage to get relatively similar results. And still the fraud keeps on running, and even 15 years' worth of e-mails from these conspirators has one example of people deleting e-mails which no one knows the context to! After this, they somehow "get funding" (from whom?) to... ummm, live like masters, which doesn't seem evident, because most of them certainly don't and apply for research grants and don't get them, and those who do use the funding to... do more research. This is only explainable with superhuman powers and most elaborate money laundering scheme I can imagine.
They truly seem to be omnipotent if they can manage this.
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Janos is correct.
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so it is unpossible that they would falsify data to provide results that would get them published that would lead to more funding, totaly unpossible.
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No, that's completely possible.
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Also, they don't have to convince everyone. They only have to convince enough politicians that they're right to foist they're beliefs on the rest of us. And why would they do this you ask? Because they have the hubris to think that they know best and the rest of us are too stupid to be left to decide for ourselves, so we have to be "guided" to the correct decision.
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so it is unpossible that they would falsify data to provide results that would get them published that would lead to more funding, totaly unpossible.
No, it is not. Theoretically this is possible, yes.
But it's not like this field of study only has three datasets. Such a fraud would still require completely extraordinary organization, because data is collected from... God knows how many sources. To tweak the primary data - numbers - in all of these (which would be necessary if the results were to have consistency) would be both impossible and idiotic. This would require co-operation with hundreds of people and organizations all around the globe, and the rigorous testing actually tests several datasets against each other to find significance. How could this stay secret, when quite often the testbeds, satellites and so on are closely inspected before any data is even collected? Every engineer, bachelor, professor, statistician and maintenance dude is part of some conspiracy? No one figures this out?
The other method is even more unbeliavable: everyone tweaks their results, in unison, all around the globe, for... something, and manages to keep this secret.
You see, the guy who actually manages to prove ACC wrong in a falsifiable way, passes rigorous peer examination and has his results verified by independent testing would be a huge star, would remove most of the angst in this and cause a paradigm shift in an entire field of study. And that's exactly what the scientists are trying to do - falsify the current consensus! And yet, all that is verified points in one direction.
It's not like some of the data hasn't been wrong, this has been published before (I am no expert or particular enthusiast of the field, but some of the satellites have measured wrong readings, there are dozens of calibration errors, even satellite orbits have caused weird readings, there is a well-known divergence problem which makes some of the older datasets suspect unless properly calibrated, and these have been analyzed in scientific studies before). Problem is, most of the other data is still consistent with the prevailing explanation which is the scientific consensus.
This kind of science is collecting a huge amount of numbers, making some hypothesises and then crunching numbers, testing them, crunching them again, testing them, and finally they always manage to come up with quite similar results, if the methods are sound.
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Also, they don't have to convince everyone. They only have to convince enough politicians that they're right to foist they're beliefs on the rest of us. And why would they do this you ask? Because they have the hubris to think that they know best and the rest of us are too stupid to be left to decide for ourselves, so we have to be "guided" to the correct decision.
What are "their" beliefs, then? Why do They (who are they) advocate policy and a vision of future that is unpleasant for everyone? To discuss this, we have to decide
A) who "They" in this statement are
B) what are their motives in here
Define them, please.
If you seriously believe you have as good of a grasp of a highly technical field of science as people who are fully educated on said field, you can go ahead and start to test their hypothesises. It's not like it's a secret, you can start here: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/CODES_MBH.html
Unless it's, of course, some kind of elitist conspiracy.
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so it is unpossible that they would falsify data to provide results that would get them published that would lead to more funding, totaly unpossible.
No, it is not. Theoretically this is possible, yes.
But it's not like this field of study only has three datasets. Such a fraud would still require completely extraordinary organization, because data is collected from... God knows how many sources. To tweak the primary data - numbers - in all of these (which would be necessary if the results were to have consistency) would be both impossible and idiotic. This would require co-operation with hundreds of people and organizations all around the globe, and the rigorous testing actually tests several datasets against each other to find significance. How could this stay secret, when quite often the testbeds, satellites and so on are closely inspected before any data is even collected? Every engineer, bachelor, professor, statistician and maintenance dude is part of some conspiracy? No one figures this out?
You see, the guy who actually manages to prove ACC wrong in a falsifiable way, passes rigorous peer examination and has his results verified by independent testing would be a huge star, would remove most of the angst in this and cause a paradigm shift in an entire field of study. And that's exactly what the scientists are trying to do - falsify the current consensus! And yet, all that is verified points in one direction.
It's not like some of the data hasn't been wrong, this has been published before (some of the satellites have measured wrong readings, there is a well-known divergence problem which makes some of the older datasets suspect unless properly calibrated, and these have been analyzed in scientific studies before). Problem is, most of the other data is still consistent with the prevailing explanation which is the scientific consensus.
This kind of science is collecting a huge amount of numbers, making some hypothesises and then crunching numbers, testing them, crunching them again, testing them, and finally they always manage to come up with quite similar results, if the methods are sound.
QFT. Scientists can certainly be wrong, but there's a lot of data pointing in a likely direction at the moment.
I can't help but feel that the issue has been politicized to the point where people on both sides pick a stance and then cherrypick data to support their beliefs.
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and the rest of us are too stupid to be left to decide for ourselves, so we have to be "guided" to the correct decision.
ironic comment is ironic
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I can't help but feel that the issue has been politicized to the point where people on both sides pick a stance and then cherrypick data to support their beliefs.
also unpossible.
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Huh?
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The scientists are not guilty of conspiracy, they're guilty of groupthink. This has happened with many scientific developments in the past (exhibit A: plate tectonics) and will happen again in the future, because it's human nature. If the political or social atmosphere is proceeding under the assumption that global warming is exactly as claimed, then scientists' funding, careers, and reputations depend on finding evidence to support it. Any evidence contradicting it is ignored or trivialized.
There have been many attempts to publish refutations of global warming in peer-reviewed journals, but the problem is that the peer review process is susceptible to the very same groupthink that pervades climate scientists in general.
And this is not mere speculation. It has actually happened, as evidenced by yet another email (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=295&filename=1047388489.txt). Bold sections are my highlights:
From: "Michael E. Mann" <[email protected]>
To: Phil Jones <[email protected]>,[email protected], [email protected],[email protected],[email protected]
Subject: Re: Fwd: Soon & Baliunas
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 08:14:49 -0500
Cc: [email protected],[email protected],[email protected], [email protected],[email protected],[email protected], [email protected]
Thanks Phil,
(Tom: Congrats again!)
The Soon & Baliunas paper couldn't have cleared a 'legitimate' peer review process
anywhere. That leaves only one possibility--that the peer-review process at Climate
Research has been hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board. And it isn't just De
Frietas, unfortunately I think this group also includes a member of my own department...
The skeptics appear to have staged a 'coup' at "Climate Research" (it was a mediocre
journal to begin with, but now its a mediocre journal with a definite 'purpose').
Folks might want to check out the editors and review editors:
[1]http://www.int-res.com/journals/cr/crEditors.html
In fact, Mike McCracken first pointed out this article to me, and he and I have discussed
this a bit. I've cc'd Mike in on this as well, and I've included Peck too. I told Mike that
I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper. They've already achieved what they
wanted--the claim of a peer-reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but
the last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper, which will be ignored by the
community on the whole...
It is pretty clear that thee skeptics here have staged a bit of a coup, even in the
presence of a number of reasonable folks on the editorial board (Whetton, Goodess, ...). My
guess is that Von Storch is actually with them (frankly, he's an odd individual, and I'm
not sure he isn't himself somewhat of a skeptic himself), and without Von Storch on their
side, they would have a very forceful personality promoting their new vision.
There have been several papers by Pat Michaels, as well as the Soon & Baliunas paper, that
couldn't get published in a reputable journal.
This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the
"peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that--take over a journal!
So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a
legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate
research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also
need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently
sit on the editorial board...
What do others think?
mike
At 08:49 AM 3/11/2003 +0000, Phil Jones wrote:
Dear All,
Apologies for sending this again. I was expecting a stack of emails this morning
in response, but I inadvertently left Mike off (mistake in pasting) and picked up Tom's
old address. Tom is busy though with another offspring !
I looked briefly at the paper last night and it is appalling - worst word I can
think of today without the mood pepper appearing on the email ! I'll have time to read more at the
weekend as I'm coming to the US for the DoE CCPP meeting at Charleston. Added Ed, Peck and
Keith A. onto this list as well. I would like to have time to rise to the bait, but I have so
much else on at the moment. As a few of us will be at the EGS/AGU meet in Nice, we should consider what
to do there. The phrasing of the questions at the start of the paper determine the answer they
get. They have no idea what multiproxy averaging does. By their logic, I could argue 1998 wasn't
the warmest year globally, because it wasn't the warmest everywhere. With their LIA being
1300- 1900 and their MWP 800-1300, there appears (at my quick first reading) no discussion of
synchroneity of the cool/warm periods. Even with the instrumental record, the early and
late 20th century warming periods are only significant locally at between 10-20% of grid
boxes.
Writing this I am becoming more convinced we should do something - even if this is
just to state once and for all what we mean by the LIA and MWP. I think the skeptics will
use this paper to their own ends and it will set paleo back a number of years if it goes
unchallenged.
I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it
until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor. A CRU person is on the editorial board, but
papers get dealt with by the editor assigned by Hans von Storch.
Cheers
Phil
Dear all,
Tim Osborn has just come across this. Best to ignore probably, so don't let it
spoil your day. I've not looked at it yet. It results from this journal having a number of
editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers
through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I've had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got
nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !
Cheers
Phil
X-Sender: [email protected]
X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 14:32:14 +0000
To: p.jones@uea
From: Tim Osborn <[email protected]>
Subject: Soon & Baliunas
Dr Timothy J Osborn | phone: +44 1603 592089
Senior Research Associate | fax: +44 1603 507784
Climatic Research Unit | e-mail: [email protected]
School of Environmental Sciences | web-site:
University of East Anglia __________| [2]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/
Norwich NR4 7TJ | sunclock:
UK | [3]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email [email protected]
NR4 7TJ
UK
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
______________________________________________________________
Professor Michael E. Mann
Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903
______________________________________________________________ _________
e-mail: [email protected] Phone: (434) 924-7770 FAX: (434) 982-2137
[4]http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml
References
1. http://www.int-res.com/journals/cr/crEditors.html
2. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/
3. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm
4. http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml
-
Climate Research?
It's not quite that simple as you make it to be
http://www.sgr.org.uk/climate/StormyTimes_NL28.htm
This left many of us somewhat confused and still very concerned about what had happened. The review process had apparently been correct, but a fundamentally flawed paper had been published. These flaws are described in an extended rebuttal to both Soon and Baliunas (2003) and Soon et al. (2003) published by Mike Mann and 11 other eminent climate scientists in July (Mann et al., 2003). Hans von Storch and I were also aware of three earlier Climate Research papers about which people had raised concerns over the review process. In all these cases, de Freitas had had editorial responsibility.
My main objective in raising the concerns of myself and many others over the most recent paper was to try to protect the reputation of the journal by focusing on the scientific rather than the political issues. Though I was well aware of the deliberate political use being made of the paper by Soon and Baliunas (well-known ‘climate sceptics’) and others. Chris de Freitas has also published what can be regarded as ‘climate sceptic’ views.
Eventually, however, Inter-Research recognised that something needed to be done and appointed Hans von Storch as editor-in-chief with effect from 1 August 2003. This would have marked a change from the existing system, where each of the 10 editors works independently. Authors can submit a manuscript to which ever of these editors they like. Hans drafted an editorial to appear in the next edition of Climate Research and circulated it to all the other editors for comment. However, Otto Kinne then decided that Hans could not publish the editorial without the agreement of all of the editors. Since at least one of the editors thought there was nothing wrong with the Soon and Baliunas paper, such an agreement was clearly never going to be obtained. In view of this, and the intervention of the publisher in editorial matters, Hans understandably felt that he could not take up the Editor-in-Chief position and resigned four days before he was due to start his new position. I also resigned as soon as I heard what had happened. This turned out to be the day of Inofhe’s US senate committee hearing and the news of the two resignations was announced at the hearing . Since then, another three editors have resigned.
So Climate Research (CR) has lost half of its editors and the five remaining include Chris de Freitas. The latest twist in this story is an editorial by Otto Kinne in August’s edition of the journal (Kinne, 2003) which cites the two conclusions of Soon and Baliunas quoted earlier in this article and then states that “While these statements may be true, the critics point out that they cannot be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in the paper. CR should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication.’.
You can even look at the year and the dates and start to connect the dots!
-
Groupthink is certainly an issue.
-
I just love these guys' utter contempt for freedom of information requests
-
I just love these guys' utter contempt for freedom of information requests
... which is shown in one e-mail, which's context and motives are unknown
:rolleyes:
-
Climate Research?
It's not quite that simple as you make it to be
That sounds rather like spin than a different explanation. As they conceded, it initially passed the peer review process. Which means that the editorial board had no problem with it until they started getting harrassed by all the other scientists.
... which is shown in one e-mail, which's context and motives are unknown
Au contraire, good but misguided sir. Several emails posted on this thread discussed evading FOI requests and deleting emails. Here's another one (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=940&filename=1228330629.txt):
When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide
by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions - one at a screen, to convince
them otherwise showing them what CA was all about.
And one about withholding data in general (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=1039&filename=1254756944.txt):
And the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that
affects both you and Keith (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons -- but
many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The
trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something,
and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is
being hidden.
So there are "good" scientists and "bad" scientists, in these climatologists' eyes. But even the "good" scientists are unsympathetic to their attempts to withhold data. Gee, I wonder why they would want to withhold data in the first place, seeing as it's so controversial? This email (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=1048&filename=1255352257.txt) might explain it:
From: Kevin Trenberth <[email protected]>
To: Michael Mann <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider <[email protected]>, Myles Allen <[email protected]>, peter stott <[email protected]>, "Philip D. Jones" <[email protected]>, Benjamin Santer <[email protected]>, Tom Wigley <[email protected]>, Thomas R Karl <[email protected]>, Gavin Schmidt <[email protected]>, James Hansen <[email protected]>, Michael Oppenheimer <[email protected]>
Hi all
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in
Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We
had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it
smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a
record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies
baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing
weather).
Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth's global
energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained
from the author.)
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008
shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing
system is inadequate.
That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are tracking PDO on a
monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is the
change in ENSO not real PDO. It surely isn't decadal. The PDO is already reversing with
the switch to El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time since
Sept 2007. see
[2]http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitoring_c
urrent.ppt
Kevin
There's climate science for you. They're making hash of the scientific method.
-
While I agree that this conduct is improper, I don't think it can be said to reflect on climate science as a whole.
-
I can't help but feel that the issue has been politicized to the point where people on both sides pick a stance and then cherrypick data to support their beliefs.
And this is the crux of the problem, along with the aforementioned groupthink. The GW issue is so "hot" that it's hard to take anyone's claims at face value.
The end result is that real science is getting buried under so much controversy and shady practices (on all sides!) that it's rendered useless.
:mad:
EDIT:
Another way to put this is that the politics of climate change are getting in the way of the science of climate change, even among many scientists. And that blows chunks and does nobody any good.
Still :mad:
-
I can't help but feel that the issue has been politicized to the point where people on both sides pick a stance and then cherrypick data to support their beliefs.
And this is the crux of the problem, along with the aforementioned groupthink. The GW issue is so "hot" that it's hard to take anyone's claims at face value.
The end result is that real science is getting buried under so much controversy and shady practices (on all sides!) that it's rendered useless.
:mad:
Sort of like nuclear research...
-
Climate Research?
It's not quite that simple as you make it to be
That sounds rather like spin than a different explanation. As they conceded, it initially passed the peer review process. Which means that the editorial board had no problem with it until they started getting harrassed by all the other scientists.
http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/deja_vu_all_over_again/
... which is shown in one e-mail, which's context and motives are unknown
Au contraire, good but misguided sir. Several emails posted on this thread discussed evading FOI requests and deleting emails. Here's another one (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=940&filename=1228330629.txt):
When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide
by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions - one at a screen, to convince
them otherwise showing them what CA was all about.
I decided to browse the discussion backwards and guess what this all relates to?:
First some bit older emails from the same discussion.
The unfortunate fact is that the 'secret science' meme is an extremely
powerful rallying call to people who have no idea about what is going
on. Claiming (rightly or wrongly) that information is being hidden has a
huge amount of resonance (as you know), much more so than whether
Douglass et al know their statistical elbow from a hole in the ground.
Thus any increase in publicity on this - whether in the pages of Nature
or elsewhere - is much more likely to bring further negative fallout
despite your desire to clear the air. Whatever you say, it will still be
presented as you hiding data.
The contrarians have found that there is actually no limit to what you
can ask people for (raw data, intermediate steps, additional
calculations, residuals, sensitivity calculations, all the code, a
workable version of the code on any platform etc.), and like Somali
pirates they have found that once someone has paid up, they can always
shake them down again.
blaa blaa blaa. This, although very useful to remember in this highly focused and nitpicky debate, has little practical value to arguments at hand. What then, hmm? Let's browse backwards a little. These guys started to talk about McIntyre, big surprise, and how he has demanded some data. Data that is apparently completely available to him.
Thanks for your email regarding Steven McIntyre's twin requests under
the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. Regarding McIntyre's request (1),
no "monthly time series of output from any of the 47 climate models" was
"sent by Santer and/or other coauthors of Santer et al 2008 to NOAA
employees between 2006 and October 2008".
As I pointed out to Mr. McIntyre in the email I transmitted to him
yesterday, all of the raw (gridded) model and observational data used in
the 2008 Santer et al. International Journal of Climatology (IJoC) paper
are freely available to Mr. McIntyre. If Mr. McIntyre wishes to audit
us, and determine whether the conclusions reached in our paper are
sound, he has all the information necessary to conduct such an audit.
Providing Mr. McIntyre with the quantities that I derived from the raw
model data (spatially-averaged time series of surface temperatures and
synthetic Microwave Sounding Unit [MSU] temperatures) would defeat the
very purpose of an audit.
[Sidenote: these guys absolutely despise McIntyre]
Seems like certain Someone wants to issue FOI for... some reason, even though the data is apparently freely available, and these guys seem to be pretty pissed off about it. Hey, I just wonder - and these are honest questions, because I do not know at all - are FOI requests handled individually?
And one about withholding data in general (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=1039&filename=1254756944.txt):
And the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that
affects both you and Keith (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons -- but
many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The
trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something,
and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is
being hidden.
So there are "good" scientists and "bad" scientists, in these climatologists' eyes. But even the "good" scientists are unsympathetic to their attempts to withhold data. Gee, I wonder why they would want to withhold data in the first place, seeing as it's so controversial?
There are definitely good and bad scientists in general, that's not a question of personal taste, but a question of rigidity of methods. It certainly has it's all-too-human aura of groundbreaking results, originality of research yadda yadda, but generally it's about how logical and well-argued your conclusions are.
But I wouldn't be surprised that the good scientists would be the guys that generally agree with these people (who do not form the complete click of "prominent climate scientists" completely by themselves, not by a long shot) because catty infighting is a part of academia.
I don't know why Keith chose to withhold data but COME ON, you could read the conversation you linked to:
Keith,
Here's a message from Tom. It might be worth sending anything you've got to him to have
a look through. [...]
Cheers
Phil
"Perhaps these things can be explained clearly and concisely -- but I am not
sure Keith is able to do this
as he is too close to the issue and probably quite pissed of."
That exchange seems to work like Phil is actually encouragind Keith to release something. Why? What is Keith withholding? What are his motives? What are the motives of the people who request this information? Is Keith pissed off? Does Keith have a permission to forward the primary data? Is it his? Is he about to analyze or publish stuff about it? What are the reasons for giving up the primary data? Does FOI require it? Why would Keith give his data freely to everyone who requests it?
That aside, withholding some data is sometimes quite relevant: most of these people get grants for doing some very specific runs, after which they will analyze and publish several studies out of it. Handing out primary data when you're about to publish stuff about it can be suicidial. However, such does not suit them eternally - you have to release appropriate primary data at some point[/i] or you could just as well be a complete fraud. Maybe some day someone will explain to me why Keith decided to hold the data and what it is and whatever.
But still people publish raw data all the time, because sometime's it's just necesarry, and more than called for. And not all the instances that allow them to use data are British, or publicly funded. I mean, you can just look at IPCC's site and find ****loads of primary data there.
This email (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=1048&filename=1255352257.txt) might explain it:
From: Kevin Trenberth <[email protected]>
To: Michael Mann <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider <[email protected]>, Myles Allen <[email protected]>, peter stott <[email protected]>, "Philip D. Jones" <[email protected]>, Benjamin Santer <[email protected]>, Tom Wigley <[email protected]>, Thomas R Karl <[email protected]>, Gavin Schmidt <[email protected]>, James Hansen <[email protected]>, Michael Oppenheimer <[email protected]>
Hi all
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in
Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We
had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it
smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a
record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies
baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing
weather).
Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth's global
energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained
from the author.)
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008
shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing
system is inadequate.
That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are tracking PDO on a
monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is the
change in ENSO not real PDO. It surely isn't decadal. The PDO is already reversing with
the switch to El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time since
Sept 2007. see
[2]http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitoring_c
urrent.ppt
Kevin
There's climate science for you. They're making hash of the scientific method.
[/quote]
Data has been wrong before, though! (And then someone does similar measurements with different tools and gets results that are roughly similar or have no significance at all) Saying that a particular dataset is in contradiction with another dataset could very well mean that, yes, this set of data is wrong. That does not mean it should be discounted completely, or that is a fraud. Satellites have been calibrated wrong before. The calculations do not work. When some data does not fit the larger empirical evidence (=more data) you should take a closer look. Mind you, I am taking all of these emails at face value, assuming they are completely true.
I am, however, starting to think that people should link this quite damning quote by Treberth with Treberth's article mentioned in the same email. I will take a liberty to post some excerpts. Treberth is
Planned adaptation to climate change requires information about what is happening and why. While a long-term trend is for global warming, short-term periods of cooling can occur and have physical causes associated with natural variability. However, such natural variability means that energy is rearranged or changed within the climate system, and should be traceable. An assessment is given of our ability to track changes in reservoirs and flows of energy within the climate system. Arguments are given that developing the ability to do this is important, as it affects interpretations of global and especially regional climate change, and prospects for the future.
[...]
The stock answer is that natural variability plays a key role1 and there was a major La Niña event early in 2008 that led to the month of January having the lowest anomaly in global temperature since 2000. While this is true, it is an incomplete explanation. In particular, what are the physical processes? From an energy standpoint, there should be an explanation that accounts for where the radiative forcing has gone. Was it compensated for temporarily by changes in clouds or aerosols, or other changes in atmospheric circulation that allowed more radiation to escape to space? Was it because a lot of heat went into melting Arctic sea ice or parts of Greenland and Antarctica, and other glaciers? Was it because the heat was buried in the ocean and sequestered, perhaps well below the surface? Was it because the La Niña led to a change in tropical ocean currents and rearranged the configuration of ocean heat? Perhaps all of these things are going on? But surely we have an adequate system to track whether this is the case or not, don’t we?
Well, it seems that the answer is no, we do not. But we should! Given that global warming is unequivocally happening2 and there has so far been a failure to outline, let alone implement, global plans to mitigate the warming, then adapting to the climate change is an imperative.
Hey, turns out he says that geoengineering isn't possible because we don't know the entire energy budget and climate is too complex - yet he also mentions that overwhelming evidence exists for warming!
And to make this even more weird, I googled and found something which could be fake or not:
http://junkscience.com/FOIA/mail/1255523796.txt
Hmmmmmmm. Looks like the same guys. Could even be them talking about this?
However, the overall theme is clear: you are taking some emails from one institution and assuming that it means everything about climate science is bogus, though. This is cherrypicking.
You can probably find thirteen blogs and fifteen emails that seem highly suspicous at the first glance the time it took for me to investigate and write this email.
TL:DR: This was a goddamn mammoth of a post and I am completely exhausted right now. And I would rather like if people, instead of simply spamming single-line quotes and excerpts which they apparently pick from some external source, could even do some basic backgrounds research (such as clicking "previous emails" button) before throwing all kinds of quotes - many quite OOC - at the discussion boards. It's like it's the same talking points everywhere.
edit 3 or 6: removed some inappropriate words damnit the edits are FLOWING
-
At present, I'm damned and publicly vilified because I refused to provide McIntyre with the data he
requested. But had I acceded to McIntyre's initial request for climate model data, I'm
convinced (based on the past experiences of Mike Mann, Phil, and Gavin) that I would
have spent years of my scientific career dealing with demands for further explanations,
additional data, Fortran code, etc. (Phil has been complying with FOIA requests from
McIntyre and his cronies for over two years). And if I ever denied a single request for
further information, McIntyre would have rubbed his hands gleefully and written: "You
see - he's guilty as charged!" on his website.
-
The more I read of this the more I get the feeling that we're being told things by people who have TheBigHead and who believe that they can't possibly be wrong.
-
Yeah we are. Maybe you should talk less. :p
Cause I'm yet to see any evidence whatsoever that you're willing to admit you might be wrong and you know a **** load less about climate change than the scientists do.
-
The more I read of this the more I get the feeling that we're being told things by people who have TheBigHead and who believe that they can't possibly be wrong.
The scientific community has been wrong on many points in the past, and individual scientists do indeed grow overly attached to pet theories (what is sometimes called the 'affective death spiral'.)
Nonetheless, you've hardly shown yourself willing to admit your own misinformation in the past. The best thing to do at the moment is to wait for more information to come to light without leaping to conclusions.
This whole Hadley Centre deal is not really all that relevant to the overall issue of manmade global warming; it's more of a sideshow.
-
The more I read of this the more I get the feeling that we're being told things by people who have TheBigHead and who believe that they can't possibly be wrong.
Hello Liberator,
This (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=66681.msg1317094#msg1317094) is where you last left the thread, ignoring my questions to your previous statement. This is called ****-and-run: paste controversial stuff and flee. It is not a good tactic. Before you post another similarly vague post, I'd like to know your definitions to your previous post.
So, since you did not answer my question - perhaps you didn't read them? - I will now quote myself from page 3. Because surprisingly, this latest post yours wasn't the first of your posts with similar content in this thread - you accuse specialists and professionals about arrogance when all you can do is to post ridiculous statements like this and then escape.
What are "their" beliefs, then? Why do They (who are they) advocate policy and a vision of future that is unpleasant for everyone? To discuss this, we have to decide
A) who "They" in this statement are
B) what are their motives in here
Define them, please.
If you seriously believe you have as good of a grasp of a highly technical field of science as people who are fully educated on said field, you can go ahead and start to test their hypothesises. It's not like it's a secret, you can start here: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/CODES_MBH.html
Unless it's, of course, some kind of elitist conspiracy.
Answer the questions. You haven't shown anything that would in any way validate anything you've said in this thread. All you have a nebulous accusations and this ridiculous idea that professionals couldn't possible know more then layman about their respective fields of study. With data I presented earlier in the post you decided to ignore I even linked you to some of the material and methods, I mean, if you know this stuff it should be cakewalk for you to crunch some numbers and see if these scientists' ideas are completely wrong.
This line of thinking you represent is anti-intellectual - it is arrogant, it is stupid, and I am not afraid to say so.
-
It's the DailyKos, so take it for what it's worth but....
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/11/22/806704/-Trickn
To sum it up, it's a wording issue. The data never changed.
-
Duh. But that would require that people actually wanted to understand things, rather than more screaming at the dark.
-
Hurm. So, I've been over the emails and the discussion surrounding the topic, and I must say:
Although I was fairly neutral on global warming up until this point, I am now leaning towards the conclusion that global warming is indeed manmade.
I wasn't aware of a lot of this data, and it is quite compelling.
-
well when you go and alter the composition of the atmosphere as much as we have, what's to be expected?
Sure, volcanoes and such can put out massive amounts of gasses as well, and have climate-changing results, but we are releasing a ton of locked-up co2 (and other chemicals) -in addition to- the naturally emitted ones.
If we want to live comfortably on this planet for a long period of time, with its ice ages and hot phases, we need to work on controlling the climate deliberately on a large scale. It is within our power to do this, the technology just isn't there yet.
-
well when you go and alter the composition of the atmosphere as much as we have, what's to be expected?
Sure, volcanoes and such can put out massive amounts of gasses as well, and have climate-changing results, but we are releasing a ton of locked-up co2 (and other chemicals) -in addition to- the naturally emitted ones.
If we want to live comfortably on this planet for a long period of time, with its ice ages and hot phases, we need to work on controlling the climate deliberately on a large scale. It is within our power to do this, the technology just isn't there yet.
Not even technology, but one of the emails the skeptics used as "evidence" for climate fraud was about a paper that outright stated that we don't have a good enough model of planetwide energy balances (what goes where, albedo, feedbacks and god knows what) yet AGW is happening, which essentially means geoengineering is, even on purely theoretical basis, out of order.
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If we want to live comfortably on this planet for a long period of time, with its ice ages and hot phases, we need to work on controlling the climate deliberately on a large scale. It is within our power to do this, the technology just isn't there yet.
I think there are certain aspects that we already can control to some extent, to be honest. A good example is the loss of Arctic sea ice. As temperatures warm, more of the ice is obviously able to melt each summer, but the real killer is that this is a positive feedback loop: as more ice melts, there's a much smaller white surface area to reflect back most of the Sun's heat. As a result, the ocean warms up more, even more ice melts, and the process keeps accelerating. I've thought that a decent means of mitigating this problem would be simply deploying white/reflective floating materials on a grand scale across the Arctic Ocean. Think something like ping-pong balls, only biodegradable. Get enough of them out there, and you'd eventually be able to help mitigate the cycle and keep ocean temperatures under control. Of course, the cost would be pretty huge, and you'd need to worry about controlling where the little buggers go and trying to keep them from harming sea life to a great extent, but let's face it: if the cycle continues, there might not be all that much still alive on the Arctic surface to begin with.
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And stuff like that has happened, and most likely still will happen regardless of any efforts on our part. There was a site I found a year or so ago while researching debate (I'll try to find it again, it's a long shot) that actually came out and said "In a hundred years, people may well be surfing off the north Alaskan coast, and it will be perfectly natural." This wasn't just some blogger, so please don't just dismiss it out of hand.
However, global warming doesn't really seem to happen in Kansas very much; we had one of the coolest summers on record this year.
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Yeah, the question is whether it's man-made or not.
I'm having trouble sorting the political chaff from the actual scientific data here. What a frustrating field to explore.
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Well, if that's the question, why would it necessarily be a bad thing? :confused:
Can we at least establish WHY it would be bad first?
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Well, if that's the question, why would it necessarily be a bad thing? :confused:
Can we at least establish WHY it would be bad first?
polar and glacial melt causing a rise in sea levels. a huge amount of the world's population lives close enough to the water for that to be a serious disaster, should it occur.
rapid acidification of ocean water causing a pH decrease. if it throws things off enough, fish won't be able to adapt fast enough and could die in massive amounts.
changes in wind currents, leading to changes in moisture levels and thus fertility for lots of areas. it's not a matter of there being more or less fertile land, but its distribution would be changed, which could cause some real problems.
it's not that it would be good or bad specifically, it's that the change itself would **** over a ton of people.
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:wakka: I can't believe I missed this when it was first posted! Epic Fail. All I can say to those scientists involved, if this is true, is see ya :warp:
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:<
You didn't read a single post, did you. You suck.
Edit: more pouty faces
:< :< :< :<
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Nope, not one. Except the last few. You can get the gist of the thread from the last few posts. Besides, I can read a post in five seconds anyway, even the long ones.
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I would have thought you read the first post and went off that, since the last few posts didnt have anything to do with the thread title. :< :< :< :< :< :<
dont mine me, im hungry. in fact, blame turambar.
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Well, I did read through the emails. But I don't care about the other guys' personal feuds.
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Yeah, the question is whether it's man-made or not.
The question now is whether or not it is man-made. Twenty years ago quite a few of the people arguing against man-made global warming were vehemently arguing that the Earth wasn't getting warmer at all, pointing at their dodgy data and claiming it was proof that the Earth wasn't getting warmer and if anything was actually getting slightly colder. :rolleyes:
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Nope, not one. Except the last few. You can get the gist of the thread from the last few posts. Besides, I can read a post in five seconds anyway, even the long ones.
So, wait, you're saying you didn't read the thread because reading the thread wouldn't take any time?
I'm having trouble sorting the political chaff from the actual scientific data here. What a frustrating field to explore.
Have fun (http://www.realclimate.org/)
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Nope, not one. Except the last few. You can get the gist of the thread from the last few posts. Besides, I can read a post in five seconds anyway, even the long ones.
So, wait, you're saying you didn't read the thread because reading the thread wouldn't take any time?
"I already made up my mind before clicking this thread"
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Well, if that's the question, why would it necessarily be a bad thing? :confused:
Can we at least establish WHY it would be bad first?
polar and glacial melt causing a rise in sea levels. a huge amount of the world's population lives close enough to the water for that to be a serious disaster, should it occur.
rapid acidification of ocean water causing a pH decrease. if it throws things off enough, fish won't be able to adapt fast enough and could die in massive amounts.
changes in wind currents, leading to changes in moisture levels and thus fertility for lots of areas. it's not a matter of there being more or less fertile land, but its distribution would be changed, which could cause some real problems.
it's not that it would be good or bad specifically, it's that the change itself would **** over a ton of people.
Water has a lower density than water, correct? So why wouldn't the ice caps melting actually decrease water levels, or at least keep them the same?
And how does global warming lead to acidification of water?
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I decided to browse the discussion backwards and guess what this all relates to?:
First some bit older emails from the same discussion.
The unfortunate fact is that the 'secret science' meme is an extremely
powerful rallying call to people who have no idea about what is going
on. Claiming (rightly or wrongly) that information is being hidden has a
huge amount of resonance (as you know), much more so than whether
Douglass et al know their statistical elbow from a hole in the ground.
Thus any increase in publicity on this - whether in the pages of Nature
or elsewhere - is much more likely to bring further negative fallout
despite your desire to clear the air. Whatever you say, it will still be
presented as you hiding data.
The contrarians have found that there is actually no limit to what you
can ask people for (raw data, intermediate steps, additional
calculations, residuals, sensitivity calculations, all the code, a
workable version of the code on any platform etc.), and like Somali
pirates they have found that once someone has paid up, they can always
shake them down again.
blaa blaa blaa.
Uh huh. You'll notice that this quote doesn't actually say anything of substance; it's basically complaining at how random people can claim you're withholding data and get a great deal of mileage out of it. Nothing new there. It doesn't address or attempt to refute the fact that the agency was actually withholding data, as admitted by the emails themselves.
This, although very useful to remember in this highly focused and nitpicky debate, has little practical value to arguments at hand. What then, hmm? Let's browse backwards a little. These guys started to talk about McIntyre, big surprise, and how he has demanded some data. Data that is apparently completely available to him.
[...]
Seems like certain Someone wants to issue FOI for... some reason, even though the data is apparently freely available, and these guys seem to be pretty pissed off about it. Hey, I just wonder - and these are honest questions, because I do not know at all - are FOI requests handled individually?
So? If someone files a lot of FOI requests, it stands to reason that he might file some duplicates, whether by accident or by double-checking.
I personally do not know how FOI requests are handled, nor does it really matter.
I don't know why Keith chose to withhold data but COME ON, you could read the conversation you linked to:
[...]
That exchange seems to work like Phil is actually encouragind Keith to release something.
You'll have to elaborate because I'm not following your train of conclusions here. It sounds more like Phil is asking Keith to send his stuff to Tom, so that Tom can have a look over it before it gets released. That is consistent with "vetting" the data (and perhaps withholding some of it) before it's released.
...
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008
shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.
...
Data has been wrong before, though! (And then someone does similar measurements with different tools and gets results that are roughly similar or have no significance at all) Saying that a particular dataset is in contradiction with another dataset could very well mean that, yes, this set of data is wrong. That does not mean it should be discounted completely, or that is a fraud. Satellites have been calibrated wrong before. The calculations do not work. When some data does not fit the larger empirical evidence (=more data) you should take a closer look. Mind you, I am taking all of these emails at face value, assuming they are completely true.
Exactly: data has been wrong before. The problem is that global warming is being presented as a proven, validated, take-it-to-the-bank "global warming is unequivocally happening" conclusion based on the data that has been gathered. And now we find out that - whoops, "the data are surely wrong", which means the conclusion isn't so cut-and-dried as we've been led to believe. The reason it's a "travesty" they can't account for the warming is that it means their models -- the very models that have been used to predict disaster if immediate action isn't taken -- are incorrect.
However, the overall theme is clear: you are taking some emails from one institution and assuming that it means everything about climate science is bogus, though. This is cherrypicking.
No, I (and not only I, many other people on the Internet) am taking a huge number of emails and characterizing the institution based on what it revealed about itself through its emails. That's not cherrypicking; it's establishing a pattern.
At present, I'm damned and publicly vilified because I refused to provide McIntyre with the data he
requested. But had I acceded to McIntyre's initial request for climate model data, I'm
convinced (based on the past experiences of Mike Mann, Phil, and Gavin) that I would
have spent years of my scientific career dealing with demands for further explanations,
additional data, Fortran code, etc. (Phil has been complying with FOIA requests from
McIntyre and his cronies for over two years). And if I ever denied a single request for
further information, McIntyre would have rubbed his hands gleefully and written: "You
see - he's guilty as charged!" on his website.
Huh? Providing McIntyre, or anyone else, with data in response to a FOIA request is the law. Doesn't matter if you want to; doesn't matter if you like the guy or not; you're obligated to provide the information.
This is like saying "If I had complied with the law here, I'm convinced I would have spent years of my scientific career complying with the law. So I had to refuse to follow the law up front so the guy wouldn't bug me anymore."
This whole Hadley Centre deal is not really all that relevant to the overall issue of manmade global warming; it's more of a sideshow.
This is true; however if such systemic corruption is present in the Hadley Center, it begs the question of why it took being hacked to reveal it.
Yeah, the question is whether it's man-made or not.
The question now is whether or not it is man-made. Twenty years ago quite a few of the people arguing against man-made global warming were vehemently arguing that the Earth wasn't getting warmer at all, pointing at their dodgy data and claiming it was proof that the Earth wasn't getting warmer and if anything was actually getting slightly colder. :rolleyes:
No, there's still the question of whether the earth is actually warming. Temperatures have been dropping for the last ten years, which belies the "inexorable warming trend" that the warmists have been promoting.
Now people will say that the recent temperature drop is only a temporary dip in the face of a long-term trend, but the problem is that if climate models keep needing to be revised every time new data arrives, then they're not reliable enough yet to make any firm prediction about the future.
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I'm really not comfortable with the use of the term 'warmist'. This should be a scientific debate, not a political one. The only -ist we should need is 'scientist'.
I'm not saying this is a problem with those using the term, but if the debate as a whole is politicized to that degree, I think I'm just going to listen to the scientists.
In any case, we'll all know for sure by 2070 whether the current models are panning out. Looking at that graph of the low point of arctic ice recession each year, however, it seems like something funny is going on.
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No, there's still the question of whether the earth is actually warming. Temperatures have been dropping for the last ten years, which belies the "inexorable warming trend" that the warmists have been promoting.
Asked by whom?
Cause the position most scientists have been taking is that the Earth definitely is warming/coming out of an ice age/being warmed by mankind's actions. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone still arguing against warming as far as I know. In fact every anti-global warming argument here on HLP has focused on whether the warming is man-made or not rather than whether or not there is any warming.
Are there still any serious scientific publications by people who say it isn't warming?
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Yeah, the graphs I'd seen showed temperatures increasing, I think. I'm open to correction, but cite?
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Nope, not one. Except the last few. You can get the gist of the thread from the last few posts. Besides, I can read a post in five seconds anyway, even the long ones.
you are a good poster
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Well, if that's the question, why would it necessarily be a bad thing? :confused:
Can we at least establish WHY it would be bad first?
polar and glacial melt causing a rise in sea levels. a huge amount of the world's population lives close enough to the water for that to be a serious disaster, should it occur.
rapid acidification of ocean water causing a pH decrease. if it throws things off enough, fish won't be able to adapt fast enough and could die in massive amounts.
changes in wind currents, leading to changes in moisture levels and thus fertility for lots of areas. it's not a matter of there being more or less fertile land, but its distribution would be changed, which could cause some real problems.
it's not that it would be good or bad specifically, it's that the change itself would **** over a ton of people.
Water has a lower density than water, correct? So why wouldn't the ice caps melting actually decrease water levels, or at least keep them the same?
And how does global warming lead to acidification of water?
glacial ice is on land, moving into water. when it's locked up on land, it isnt contributing to sea levels, but when it melts, it flows into the oceans.
the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we think may cause global warming is being soaked up by the ocean water, which is a giant carbon sink. this forms carbonic acid which lowers the pH of the water.
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There's your answer, then: just unwrap a massive pack of Alka-Seltzer and drop them in. Plop plop, fizz fizz, problem solved.
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No, there's still the question of whether the earth is actually warming. Temperatures have been dropping for the last ten years, which belies the "inexorable warming trend" that the warmists have been promoting.
Asked by whom?
Cause the position most scientists have been taking is that the Earth definitely is warming/coming out of an ice age/being warmed by mankind's actions. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone still arguing against warming as far as I know.
Then I'm sorry but you haven't been looking very hard. There are lot of people out there who are arguing that supposed warming "trends" are errors caused by "heat islands" or other phenomena, and there are plenty of others who will cite the fact that the warmest year on record was back in 1998.
Here's an article from the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm) written by a climate correspondent:
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.
[...]
According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated. The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO). For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too. But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down. These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.
So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles. Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."
[...]
To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years. Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers. But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.
In this interview (http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2751390.htm) of climatologist Tim Flannery by Tony Jones on Lateline, the climatologist actually admits the cooling trend:
Tony Jones: Just take one of these published emails because it goes to one of the hottest skeptic arguments, which is that since 1998, the hottest year on record, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continued to increase after that, but the temperature did not keep going up. So, the argument of the skeptics is therefore the theory, as they put it, of global warming is not actually working like it should.
Tim Flannery: Well, the thing is, we’re dealing with an incomplete understanding of the way the earth system works. We know enough to be able to say as the IPCC has said, that greenhouse gases cause warming. And they're 90%-plus sure that the warming is caused by humans. Now we can go that far. When we come to the last few years where we haven’t seen a continuation of that warming trend, we just don’t understand all of the factors that create earth’s climate. So there are some things we don't understand, and that's what the scientists were emailing each other about. We just don’t understand the way the whole system works, and we've got to find out.
Jones: The published email that made the front pages in the papers here was from a respected U.S. climatologist called Kevin Trenberth, and he says "We can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it's a travesty that we can't." He does appear to be worried that science is not doing the right things, or that the climate is not doing what he expected it to do.
Flannery: No it's not what he expected it to do. See, these people work with models, computer modeling. So when the computer modeling and the real world data disagree you’ve got a very interesting problem. And that's when science really gets engaged. So what Kevin Trenberth - who's one of the most respected climate scientists in the world - is saying is that guys, we've got to get on our horses and find out what we don't know about that system. We have to actually understand why this cooling is occurring, because the current modeling doesn't predict it. And that's just the way science progresses. We can't pretend we've got perfect knowledge; we don't. We've got to go forward and formulate policy on the basis of what we actually know now.
Jones: Is that right that cooling is occurring? I mean, 1998 was the hottest year, and there are many other of the hottest years since recorded history in that 10 year period. So am I right to say that it's cooling, or not?
Flannery: Well Tony, we had a huge cooling event here in Sydney between yesterday and today. The time scales are all important. If you take too short a time scale, you won't get a climate signal. You'll get a regional weather signal or whatever else. The scales that climate scientists use to look at the overall warming trend on the planet are a century long. And on a century long trend we are still warming. Sure for the last few years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend. We saw it in the 1940s, the same sort of thing. But that does not negate the overall warming trend.
Now naturally, Flannery couches it in a lot of circumlocution, and tries to qualify it by saying that the century-long trend is toward warming. But climate models don't fit that conclusion, as asserted in this paper (http://www.atypon-link.com/IAHS/doi/abs/10.1623/hysj.53.4.671) published by the International Association of Hydrological Sciences:
(from the abstract)
Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.
The whole paper is 14 pages long, so too long to post here, but well worth reading.
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There's your answer, then: just unwrap a massive pack of Alka-Seltzer and drop them in. Plop plop, fizz fizz, problem solved.
If only neutralisation wasn't exothermic.
How about a compromise? If global warming happens, we get to kill all the sceptics hence mitigating the food, water and energy shortages.
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Yay, I'll be dead before we get a runaway greenhouse effect on earth like what Venus has.
Suckers.
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There's your answer, then: just unwrap a massive pack of Alka-Seltzer and drop them in. Plop plop, fizz fizz, problem solved.
If only neutralisation wasn't exothermic.
How about a compromise? If global warming happens, we get to kill all the sceptics hence mitigating the food, water and energy shortages.
Ah, but to make that compromise worthwile, what if it turns out to be a cooling trend? =P
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The other side of the compromise was to allow big polluters to continue driving us headlong into an energy crisis.
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So? If someone files a lot of FOI requests, it stands to reason that he might file some duplicates, whether by accident or by double-checking.
McIntyre admitted in having this data all along unless I' m completely off the rails.
I personally do not know how FOI requests are handled, nor does it really matter.
It does, if you use the phrase "When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide
by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions - one at a screen, to convince
them otherwise showing them what CA was all about."
as an indication of some kind of conspiracy.
You'll have to elaborate because I'm not following your train of conclusions here. It sounds more like Phil is asking Keith to send his stuff to Tom, so that Tom can have a look over it before it gets released. That is consistent with "vetting" the data (and perhaps withholding some of it) before it's released.
Wait a minute, I try to parse this again.
Tom sends Phil a message, complaining that Keith has done something. Phil sends Keith a message, proposing Keith to send information to Tom.
Ok, actually I retract my previous statement. I still don't see the discussion particularly condemning, perhaps you could rephrase the reasons to me.
No, I (and not only I, many other people on the Internet) am taking a huge number of emails and characterizing the institution based on what it revealed about itself through its emails. That's not cherrypicking; it's establishing a pattern.
Ridiculous. If the skeptics are establishing a pattern, then how come it's one email today, after it's debunked - such as the "trick" email which was apparently a huge deal - they move on to next.
There has been no evidence of falsifying evidence. No evidence of fraudulent studies. All you have a series of completely OOC and misunderstood emails - maybe 10 which are in wider internet ciruclation right now - from 15 years from one institution and you think this is evidence of something? Right now the big deal seems to be about the "travesty" quote, before that we were dealing with the entire "can scientists withhold data" - when people realized that yes, they can, for example when the primary data is someone else's, people moved onwards.
Seriously, I could right now dig through your post history, rip some sentences out of the context and then claim this represents HLP as whole. The entire argument is just that ridiculous.
I hate to break it out to you, but this entire debate tactic is way too similar to "rip small things out of context, ignore everything else, think one people = all them, just moved on when challenged" tactic employed by a very special group that has been dimishing in power during the last decade. I do not name that one.
At present, I'm damned and publicly vilified because I refused to provide McIntyre with the data he
requested. But had I acceded to McIntyre's initial request for climate model data, I'm
convinced (based on the past experiences of Mike Mann, Phil, and Gavin) that I would
have spent years of my scientific career dealing with demands for further explanations,
additional data, Fortran code, etc. (Phil has been complying with FOIA requests from
McIntyre and his cronies for over two years). And if I ever denied a single request for
further information, McIntyre would have rubbed his hands gleefully and written: "You
see - he's guilty as charged!" on his website.
Huh? Providing McIntyre, or anyone else, with data in response to a FOIA request is the law. Doesn't matter if you want to; doesn't matter if you like the guy or not; you're obligated to provide the information.
This is like saying "If I had complied with the law here, I'm convinced I would have spent years of my scientific career complying with the law. So I had to refuse to follow the law up front so the guy wouldn't bug me anymore."[/quote]
No you aren't, if A) the requests are handled on a need-to-know basis (which you already glossed over as insignificant before!) and B) if the data isn't yours to hand out freely (sometimes the organizations, for example, sell primary data and then it's definitely not in particular scientist's bussiness to do it). If FOI actually demanded people would give out even the data they hadn't access to, then British science society's funding would collapse overnight. Somehow I think this is not the case.
Besides, is a private exchange between two people about some asshole they hate really indicative of what they did?
This is true; however if such systemic corruption is present in the Hadley Center, it begs the question of why it took being hacked to reveal it.
What corruption?
No, there's still the question of whether the earth is actually warming. Temperatures have been dropping for the last ten years, which belies the "inexorable warming trend" that the warmists have been promoting.
This is ridiculous. This works if your 10 year period starts in 1998 and you ignore context. And of course this is the only 10-year period that matters to skeptics: starting in 1997 or 1999 both trend warming.
Whaddaya know.
Now people will say that the recent temperature drop is only a temporary dip in the face of a long-term trend, but the problem is that if climate models keep needing to be revised every time new data arrives, then they're not reliable enough yet to make any firm prediction about the future.
i
i don't even know how to respond to this. you see this boils down to as.
"all trends show warming, all effects show warming, look at all what has happened and how well - if sometimes underestimated - our predictions have held true but these ****ING SCIENTISTS REVISE AND FINETUNE THEIR HYPOTHESISES WHEN THEY GET MORE DATA"
i have no words. Seriously, I have no words.
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I find there's more to learn from the reaction to the Emails being released than from the Emails themselves. In some ways, I was never happy with the closed system where it was very difficult to get data, but on the other hand, I feel this does more to expose scientists as real human beings, with egos, personalities and hang-ups.
I cannot say I've seen any 'smoking gun' evidence so far, at least, not of what people seem to claim, but I do see evidence of egos and conflicts developing in the team. I do see evidence of data that conflicts with their findings being severely questioned in so far as validity is concerned, but then, in truth, that data is doing exactly the same to their research, that's not really bad science, just normal, everyday science, that's where peer review is supposed to do it's job.
Imagine a comment like 'We need to process these figures more before they are released', that can be read two ways, depending on your initial assumptions regarding the author, it's easy to assume the worst of someone you want to be wrong, especially with typed text.
I think this will muddy up the waters over warming, which is not neccesarily a good thing, because regardless of the degree of impact, I'd be a lot happier if industry took what steps it could to stop pumping **** into the atmosphere, however, the more closely the data is scrutinized, be it by sceptics or supporters, the more certain we can be of what exactly is going on and, more importantly, what can be done about it either from a preventative or protectionist viewpoint.
I think it would be hard to deny that the Ice Caps are shrinking and that sea levels are rising, however, whether that is man-made or simply an ongoing natural process has become the first priority, when, in truth, it should not be.
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I find there's more to learn from the reaction to the Emails being released than from the Emails themselves. In some ways, I was never happy with the closed system where it was very difficult to get data, but on the other hand, I feel this does more to expose scientists as real human beings, with egos, personalities and hang-ups.
I cannot say I've seen any 'smoking gun' evidence so far, at least, not of what people seem to claim, but I do see evidence of egos and conflicts developing in the team. I do see evidence of data that conflicts with their findings being severely questioned in so far as validity is concerned, but then, in truth, that data is doing exactly the same to their research, that's not really bad science, just normal, everyday science, that's where peer review is supposed to do it's job.
Imagine a comment like 'We need to process these figures more before they are released', that can be read two ways, depending on your initial assumptions regarding the author, it's easy to assume the worst of someone you want to be wrong, especially with typed text.
I think this will muddy up the waters over warming, which is not neccesarily a good thing, because regardless of the degree of impact, I'd be a lot happier if industry took what steps it could to stop pumping **** into the atmosphere, however, the more closely the data is scrutinized, be it by sceptics or supporters, the more certain we can be of what exactly is going on and, more importantly, what can be done about it either from a preventative or protectionist viewpoint.
I think it would be hard to deny that the Ice Caps are shrinking and that sea levels are rising, however, whether that is man-made or simply an ongoing natural process has become the first priority, when, in truth, it should not be.
Why not? What should be the first priority? Please elaborate.
Also, if it a natural process then why does it coincidence with rapidly increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and why is it more rapid than other global temperature changes? Why aren't there any good explanations for natural causes? How would one explain away both anthropogenic increased greenhouse gas emissions with a very good correlation with changes in global temperature and weather patterns?
That aside, I find it a bit weird to say "well, it could be us, but perhaps it isn't, so we better not do anything". That's a really dumb argument, essentially an excuse out of ignorance. If it is not us yet we act like it was, the damage we do from reducing carbon emissions is negligible at best and purely economical - pocket change after a few decades. It's absolutely nothing in global view and on the long run. Even the impact of the prevention costs for single countries is mostly one-shot large-scale adjustments of infrastructure. That's hardly a nightmare.
But if it is us and we refuse to do anything about it, then damage will probably be massive, and even cold monetary calculation shows that for a short-term gain we ****ed up royally in the long run.
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Goober, you cited Tim Flannery:
author=Goober5000 link=topic=66681.msg1317739#msg1317739 date=1259133238]In this interview (http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2751390.htm) of climatologist Tim Flannery by Tony Jones on Lateline, the climatologist actually admits the cooling trend:
Flannery: Well Tony, we had a huge cooling event here in Sydney between yesterday and today. The time scales are all important. If you take too short a time scale, you won't get a climate signal. You'll get a regional weather signal or whatever else. The scales that climate scientists use to look at the overall warming trend on the planet are a century long. And on a century long trend we are still warming. Sure for the last few years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend. We saw it in the 1940s, the same sort of thing. But that does not negate the overall warming trend.
Now naturally, Flannery couches it in a lot of circumlocution, and tries to qualify it by saying that the century-long trend is toward warming.
Before I dive deeper into the horrendous abyss of statistical method analysis and weird quarrels about Koutsoyiannis article*, could you please explain how you can use someone as scientifically reputable source when he says something about models that are lacking, but when he says something about a clear warming trend in the next paragraph he's suddenly no longer reputable?
Thank you in advance.
edit: removed an obvious falsehood
*This seems to be completely out of my league, I have no idea what this stuff means in this context:
Neither Kiraly et al. (2006) nor Fraedrich & Blender (2003) establish LRD in temperature time series. They find it in the fluctuations of daily temperature. Furthermore, the methods they use remove the long-term trend from the data, so the temperature trend is already gone by the time they find LRD in the fluctuations. Fraedrich & Blender find persistence up to decades, Kiraly et al. find persistence lasting several years, so even if their analysis applied to temperature time series (which it doesn’t) rather than fluctuations (which it does), those time scales aren’t long enough to explain the trend on a century time scale in observed temperature time series. Fraedrich & Blender did find long-range persistence on century time scales, but only for fluctuations (not for temperature), and only in the output of computer model runs.
And several posts before and after that are at least as cryptic.
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Why not? What should be the first priority? Please elaborate.
Also, if it a natural process then why does it coincidence with rapidly increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and why is it more rapid than other global temperature changes? Why aren't there any good explanations for natural causes? How would one explain away both anthropogenic increased greenhouse gas emissions with a very good correlation with changes in global temperature and weather patterns?
That aside, I find it a bit weird to say "well, it could be us, but perhaps it isn't, so we better not do anything". That's a really dumb argument, essentially an excuse out of ignorance. If it is not us yet we act like it was, the damage we do from reducing carbon emissions is negligible at best and purely economical - pocket change after a few decades. It's absolutely nothing in global view and on the long run. Even the impact of the prevention costs for single countries is mostly one-shot large-scale adjustments of infrastructure. That's hardly a nightmare.
But if it is us and we refuse to do anything about it, then damage will probably be massive, and even cold monetary calculation shows that for a short-term gain we ****ed up royally in the long run.
As I said in the post you quoted, the first priority is to stop arguing about who started it and started focussing on what we need to do about it, I also stated that I'd like to see Industry cutting emmisions regardless of whether it contributes or not, but at the moment, it's like a huge case of office politics, lots of people trying to find out who made the mistake, and not enough being done about fixing it.
I'm actually wondering whether the rest of your post even refers to mine, it seems to be directed at an entirely different post, since it infers the exact opposite of what I said, so I'm not sure whether to respond or not.
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Why not? What should be the first priority? Please elaborate.
Also, if it a natural process then why does it coincidence with rapidly increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and why is it more rapid than other global temperature changes? Why aren't there any good explanations for natural causes? How would one explain away both anthropogenic increased greenhouse gas emissions with a very good correlation with changes in global temperature and weather patterns?
That aside, I find it a bit weird to say "well, it could be us, but perhaps it isn't, so we better not do anything". That's a really dumb argument, essentially an excuse out of ignorance. If it is not us yet we act like it was, the damage we do from reducing carbon emissions is negligible at best and purely economical - pocket change after a few decades. It's absolutely nothing in global view and on the long run. Even the impact of the prevention costs for single countries is mostly one-shot large-scale adjustments of infrastructure. That's hardly a nightmare.
But if it is us and we refuse to do anything about it, then damage will probably be massive, and even cold monetary calculation shows that for a short-term gain we ****ed up royally in the long run.
As I said in the post you quoted, the first priority is to stop arguing about who started it and started focussing on what we need to do about it, I also stated that I'd like to see Industry cutting emmisions regardless of whether it contributes or not, but at the moment, it's like a huge case of office politics, lots of people trying to find out who made the mistake, and not enough being done about fixing it.
I'm actually wondering whether the rest of your post even refers to mine, it seems to be directed at an entirely different post, since it infers the exact opposite of what I said, so I'm not sure whether to respond or not.
Sorry, yeah. Got a little... well. The first question in my post was aimed at you, though - maybe I am becoming paranoid because 90% of the time when I read something like "whether that is man-made or simply an ongoing natural process has become the first priority, when, in truth, it should not be" my alarms immediately go off. Apparently they are too sensitive. My apologies. This is serious bussiness, after all.
I agree with you. As you said, the question "who started it" is intervined with politics today and is, as far as politics are considered, a smokescreen for "do nothing yet and claim nothing happens even though it does." That's pretty much what you argued in this next post as well.
I find this entire e-mail thing so interesting, because it really sheds light just how catty the respectable scientists are when they are communicating privately (or not so privately). That shouldn't be surprising. Neither should one be surprised at the fact that raw data is guarded very hawkishly, which shouldn't be surprising either. What is surprising is that there's precious little of even McIntyre-level "auditioning" in this buzz - mostly it's just lots of noise over precious little content.
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Neither should one be surprised at the fact that raw data is guarded very hawkishly, which shouldn't be surprising either.
Why? If the results will be as destructive as people are claiming, why can't they show us the data that supports it (or doesn't, as the case may be)?
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Because it doesn't serve they're world view on how people should be forced to live.
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Neither should one be surprised at the fact that raw data is guarded very hawkishly, which shouldn't be surprising either.
Why? If the results will be as destructive as people are claiming, why can't they show us the data that supports it (or doesn't, as the case may be)?
What? But they do! Have you ever read scientific studies? They're charts filled with numbers - not all numbers the study gave, the ones that are actually valuable to said study.
More about this entire datastuff: Sometimes the data is not free to distribute, the data is available commercially, or they are preparing to analyze the data and publish new results. (Data is, still, often freely released when considered appropriate.)
And beyond that, if one has a problem with results they shouldn't be dependant on the actual raw data, but the methods of collecting it and the analysis (unless you suspect the data is incorrect, in which case read the following).
Let's discuss an example:
I make a study that involves three years of sitting on the top of a volcano. I make it with my own money. I get results, make a study out of them and publish the data. I describe how I collected the data, what I did with it and what my conclusions are. I present the necessary information for all of this. For reviewing the basis of my claims, no actual data is required outside the necessary I give (unless criticized for it, why would you need the eye colour for estimating the reproductive success of paratisized vs. non-paratisized trout). Methods, results, do the numbers match. I still have the data sheets I collected, but the methods and results of this one particular study are freely available. This particular data I collected is still mine and, unless otherwise necessary, I am under no obligation to hand it out if it meant possible destruction of my entire scientific career. You want similar data? You replicate the test, thus finding out if my methods were rigorous enough.
Now, if my study finds out that there are Cthulhus flying around in volcanoes, one can simply review my results by replicating the study - which is the entire point of science. If they don't find out Cthulhus in volcanoes, my entire study becomes suspect. I'll be dragged in the sidelines of science. If they do, well, good for me and them! I reanalyze this data and publish some stuff out of it - it is a huge datamine, nothing else. When I have nothing more to give I can release the entire raw data under my discretion.
In science, you don't have to have the entirety of raw data to be able to either estimate the validity of claims or, more importantly, be able to test the claims yourself. That's kinda the point. Replicating the study, not copying the raw data.
TL;DR version: If you suspect a study is faulty, you either find an obvious error in the methods or you replicate the test. Actually, since all you are trying to do is to prove the dominant hypothesis faulty, pretty much all you will be doing is replicating the test, over and over again, not demanding someone else funding and doing your job for you. Replication is the key here. It's one of the cornerstones of science.
Think about of it like this: are you trying to replicate the data and results themselves, or are you trying to replicate the test to see if the data and results fit the previous test?
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Because it doesn't serve they're world view on how people should be forced to live.
Pot meet kettle.
You wouldn't believe 2+2 equals 4 if it meant it violated you worldview.
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Because it doesn't serve they're world view on how people should be forced to live.
What a surprise, Liberator posts irrelevant one-liners instead of answering questions from page three (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=66681.msg1317094#msg1317094).
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Because it doesn't serve they're world view on how people should be forced to live.
Go back to page 3 and answer the questions directed at you.
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Because it doesn't serve they're world view on how people should be forced to live.
Pot meet kettle.
You wouldn't believe 2+2 equals 4 if it meant it violated you worldview.
well the bible says pi is 3
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You wouldn't believe 2+2 equals 4 if it meant it violated you worldview.
That's only true if certain conditions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms) are met at the set of elements that is used.
For example, for a set that only has elements [0,1] I could prove that 1+1=0. Not that you could use that set for much about anything, but it is a mathematically solid arithmetic result if you go through the axioms that ARE valid in that set.
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You wouldn't believe 2+2 equals 4 if it meant it violated you worldview.
That's only true if certain conditions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms) are met at the set of elements that is used.
For example, for a set that only has elements [0,1] I could prove that 1+1=0. Not that you could use that set for much about anything, but it is a mathematically solid arithmetic result if you go through the axioms that ARE valid in that set.
I'll accept this if Liberator can describe the axioms and what they mean.
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What are "their" beliefs, then? Why do They (who are they) advocate policy and a vision of future that is unpleasant for everyone? To discuss this, we have to decide
A) who "They" in this statement are
I don't know who "they" are specifically.
B) what are their motives in here
"They" refers to the faceless people behind the use of "global warming" to manipulate society to conform to they're sociopolitical agenda. IE The limiting of freedoms and curtailing of personal rights on the basis that those freedoms and rights are damaging to the environment and that the vast majority of the population is undeserving of said rights.
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So, um, the Elders of Zion? The Reptilians?
I hadn't realized we were at conspiracy theory level here.
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Because if they show the data some other scientist might publish before they do. Given the importance of the number of publications a scientist has, it's not surprising at all that they guard it until after they publish.
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What are "their" beliefs, then? Why do They (who are they) advocate policy and a vision of future that is unpleasant for everyone? To discuss this, we have to decide
A) who "They" in this statement are
I don't know who "they" are specifically.
B) what are their motives in here
"They" refers to the faceless people behind the use of "global warming" to manipulate society to conform to they're sociopolitical agenda. IE The limiting of freedoms and curtailing of personal rights on the basis that those freedoms and rights are damaging to the environment and that the vast majority of the population is undeserving of said rights.
Thanks for answering the question, but you're still only spouting conspiracy theory without any supporting evidence. If you could, please back up your assertions.
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What are "their" beliefs, then? Why do They (who are they) advocate policy and a vision of future that is unpleasant for everyone? To discuss this, we have to decide
A) who "They" in this statement are
I don't know who "they" are specifically.
B) what are their motives in here
"They" refers to the faceless people behind the use of "global warming" to manipulate society to conform to they're sociopolitical agenda. IE The limiting of freedoms and curtailing of personal rights on the basis that those freedoms and rights are damaging to the environment and that the vast majority of the population is undeserving of said rights.
Conspiracy theories. You have no solid evidence about anything, you cannot even define the group ("faceless people") you attack, you cannot explain why thousands of scientists would take part in this conspiracy, the motives you give are simplistic to the extreme (they = evil), you talk about "manipulating society to drive an agenda". What you are essentially saying is that evil people are doing stuff to drive evil things. This is so ridiculous that I wonder why I am wasting precious ATP to write a rebuttal.
As Battuta said, this is pretty much Elders of Zion stuff. Completely unfalsifiable brainfarts.
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Hmmm it seems that CRU academics are not actually subject to FOIA, but I could be wrong. This is what has been circulating on some forums, so take it with a grain of salt.
I'm skimming through the list in FOIA, but they only mention the governing bodies of universities receiving public support (generally) and specifically I fail to find CRU, academia or even world "Anglia" from the legislation.
What bodies are covered by the Act?
The Act applies to public authorities and companies wholly owned by public authorities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. A full list of public authorities covered by the Act can be found on the Department of Constitutional Affairs website.
The list of public authorities can be found here: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/Acts/acts2000/ukpga_20000036_en_10, and also here: http://www.dca.gov.uk/foi/reference/legislation.htm#coverage
There is another legislation, EIR, which seems more relevant to this particular "disclosure" matter. http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/environmental_info_reg/introductory/eip076_guidance_for_pub_doc_version3.pdf . Even this for dummies -version includes exceptions: work in process and intellectual property are quite relevant to this particular discussion.
And, of course, IANAL.
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More interesting news.
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/11/breaking-nzs-niwa-accused-of-cru-style-temperature-faking.html (http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/11/breaking-nzs-niwa-accused-of-cru-style-temperature-faking.html)
Once again I don't really know much about the site or it's leanings, but the links contained are very interesting.
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I read most of that linked article.
Truthfully phrases like:
Well, we’re not going to run around in circles just because somebody has put out a press release. We will continue to put out what is reasonable to provide.
make it sound like Dr. Wratt and the NIWA are trying to cherry pick the information that promotes they're agenda.
Also NIWA scientists are committed to providing robust information to help all New Zealanders make good decisions.
make it sound like they think the average Kiwi doesn't make good decisions in they're worldview and need to be "helped" to make the "good" decision.
Granted I'm on the opposition here, but it honestly sounds like they're trying to do something that has nothing to do with science and everything to do with controlling people.
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Alternatively, you could read it as "it's easier to make good decisions if you have all the relevant information, so we’re going to make sure our data is as thorough and well-justified ["robust"] as possible."
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Also NIWA scientists are committed to providing robust information to help all New Zealanders make good decisions.
make it sound like they think the average Kiwi doesn't make good decisions in they're worldview and need to be "helped" to make the "good" decision.
Granted I'm on the opposition here, but it honestly sounds like they're trying to do something that has nothing to do with science and everything to do with controlling people.
You are the biggest hypocrite on HLP.
Providing information is NOT controlling people. Providing information so that people can make better decisions is how things should ALWAYS be done. People can't make good decisions without knowing all the relevant facts. That's just basic common sense.
YOU consistently promote making decisions FOR people INSTEAD of providing information so they can make their own.
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Here's the several options that are in play for Climate Change:
Option 1: The world is getting warmer. It's all our fault. So governments and private organizations are fully correct to enforce any and all restrictions and limitations on businesses, corporations and private citizens to stem the warming.
Option 2: The world is getting warmer. We having nothing to do with it. Governments and private organizations are fully correct to suggest actions and take measures that will aid in businesses, corporations and private citizens to adapting to the warming.
Option 3: The world isn't getting warmer. It is in fact getting cooler.
Guess which one I subscribe to.
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Let us find this out via scientific method, rather than the uneducated way of "guessing".
Hypothesis: Liberator is, in fact, of the opinion that option three has the greatest chances of being the accurate representation of reality.
Empirical test of hypothesis: Liberator, is option three the one you support?
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Objection: that could only be an empirical test of the hypothesis if Liberator were guaranteed to respond truthfully.
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Here's the several options that are in play for Climate Change:
Option 1: The world is getting warmer. It's all our fault. So governments and private organizations are fully correct to enforce any and all restrictions and limitations on businesses, corporations and private citizens to stem the warming.
Option 2: The world is getting warmer. We having nothing to do with it. Governments and private organizations are fully correct to suggest actions and take measures that will aid in businesses, corporations and private citizens to adapting to the warming.
Option 3: The world isn't getting warmer. It is in fact getting cooler.
Guess which one I subscribe to.
If the world were really getting cooler, we'd still need to ****ing do something about it. Are you retarded? What the hell?
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Objection: that could only be an empirical test of the hypothesis if Liberator were guaranteed to respond truthfully.
Yes, I agree in principle, but considering we do not have instruments available that would allow us to conduct more accurate experiments (like truth serums or lie detectors, or even face-to-face interaction) we'll just have to accept his word for the most accurate observation we can - currently - have of the matter, hence fulfilling the requirements of scientific method as defined by philosophical point of view called logical positivism (or logical empiricism or positivistic empiricism, whichever terminology you prefer). With the adjustments from Karl Popper of course (falsifiability > verifiability).
Questioning the accuracy of the measurements and observations is an integral part of scientific method and the definition of error bars and deliberating their width in relation to the experimental results is one of the most bothersome and arduous part of any research project or experiment. It is also often sadly neglected in popular portrayal of science, which I think largely contributes to the opinion many people have of science and scientists thinking of it as the "final truth" when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Any scientist worth their salt should always remember that a theory is only as accurate as observations supporting it.
But let us not be too hasty, considering the experiment from the last post has not yet yielded results, either positive or negative. And even afterwards, it will only remain the most recent experimental proof of the matter, and your consideration of systematic error is in fact very valid. If I recall correctly, statistical field research has to include this possibility in the error margins of every survey they complete, since people are occasionally dishonest or purposely misleading in surveys, but in this case since the sample size is just one, we'll have no chance but to interpret his answer as most likely correct, with error bars of probability being set to whatever probability you consider to be correct.
If the world were really getting cooler, we'd still need to ****ing do something about it.
I would like to add that if the world really is getting cooler, it would be just as good a reason to slow down the consumption of fossil fuels at present time.
In fact, slowing down the consumption of fossil fuels is pretty much win-win scenario in the long term no matter how you look at it.
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If the world were really getting cooler, we'd still need to ****ing do something about it. Are you retarded? What the hell?
Leave the ad hominims out of the thread (but I refer you back to your own statement regardless).
If the world were really getting cooler, reducing emissiosn as a whole would SPEED UP THE PROCESS, if anyone who publishes about global warming is to be believed about what emissions are supposed to be doing to the atmosphere.
Note: That doesn't mean we shouldn't stop using fossil fuels, that just applies to emissions as a whole.
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Given what CO2 does to ocean acidity we'd want to reduce emissions regardless. Not to mention all the other crap that gets released along the way.
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But particle emissions cool down the climate! Just look at every major volcano eruption!
:confused: :nervous:
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Given that I believe the Earth's climate is indeed warming up as part of a natural cycle either it or the sun is going through, there is no way that # 3 was it.
And I'll clear something up that I said earlier, "They" refers to the eco-whackos from the various ecological fund raising groups and the EPA(hack-spit) who are not in fact eco-whatevers, but left over communists from the cold war and they're sycphantic pet politicians who would see all us in chains or at hard labor with no freedoms other than what they deem fit to dole out.
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Given that I believe the Earth's climate is indeed warming up as part of a natural cycle either it or the sun is going through, there is no way that # 3 was it.
And of course your beliefs are more valid than anyone else's because you reached yours without the need for help from others or evidence. Specifically, it's certainly not the sun. Wait, why is pollution that is definitely making a horrible mess of several other things ok if it isn't directly heating the planet?
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And I'll clear something up that I said earlier, "They" refers to the eco-whackos from the various ecological fund raising groups and the EPA(hack-spit) who are not in fact eco-whatevers, but left over communists from the cold war and they're sycphantic pet politicians who would see all us in chains or at hard labor with no freedoms other than what they deem fit to dole out.
Seriously? You honestly believe that there are mustache-twirling politicians who want us in chains at hard labor? That actually 'hate our freedom'?
In the real world everybody's doing what they believe is right (except psychopaths and the mentally unstable.) There are no vast left-wing conspiracies to enslave you.
From what you've described of your life I can't believe you don't feel like you've already been enslaved.
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Interesting, Liberator.
So, as a whole, would you consider limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases a positive, negative or neutral action A. for the climate, B. for environment, C. humanity?
My own answers: For A, neutral or positive. I personally think it would, most likely, be best in the long run if we try to minimize our effect on the world that's supposed to sustain us, at least as long as we simply can't predict how our actions are going to affect it.
For B, definitely positive (since as a by-product it would reduce other kinds of pollutants like particle emissions or nitrous/sulphuric oxides).
For C, definitely positive as it would encourage developement on energy branch (I'm looking at you, fusion research funding!) as well as preserve valuable raw materials for various substances (plastics, for example) that are much more efficient to manufacture using oil as basis rather than fully synthetic processes.
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A. Could run the gamut. Depends on the root cause of the 'warming' and where the climate would be headed without us meddling. If we were heading into an ice age, decreasing greenhouse gas emissions would be negative. Conversely, if we aren't really headed anywhere climate-wise and emissions are heating us up, decreasing them would be a positive.
Speaking of that, I still have yet to look at evidence that conclusively demonstrates either way what would be happening without our interference (30 years isn't long enough or thorough enought to model this kind of projection on).
B. Always a positive, although not necessarily the one I pay most attention to (or enjoy being solicited to me).
C. Depends. Linked to A, since if Earth would be getting colder, well, that wouldn't help out humanity all that much. However, it surely would encourage development of new energy sources (although I don't expect we'll be able to predict how or what).
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Here's the several options that are in play for Climate Change:
Option 1: The world is getting warmer. It's all our fault. So governments and private organizations are fully correct to enforce any and all restrictions and limitations on businesses, corporations and private citizens to stem the warming.
Option 2: The world is getting warmer. We having nothing to do with it. Governments and private organizations are fully correct to suggest actions and take measures that will aid in businesses, corporations and private citizens to adapting to the warming.
Option 3: The world isn't getting warmer. It is in fact getting cooler.
Guess which one I subscribe to.
I sense innuendo:
So governments and private organizations are fully correct to enforce any and all restrictions and limitations on businesses, corporations and private citizens to stem the warming.
Hmm.
The world is not getting cooler. This is a fact. It is getting warmer. This is a fact. Scientific consensus states that correlation between human activity and the rate of warming is big. It also states that the change is very likely anthropogenic in nature. Private organizations are not enforcing anything unless you live in a banana republic. Climate scientists are not trying to curb your freedom (please explain why they were agnry at China if the civil rights are important to them?) by influencing politics.
Seriously, are you basing your stance on this particular question on paranoia?
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More interesting news.
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/11/breaking-nzs-niwa-accused-of-cru-style-temperature-faking.html (http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/11/breaking-nzs-niwa-accused-of-cru-style-temperature-faking.html)
Once again I don't really know much about the site or it's leanings, but the links contained are very interesting.
Well, I don't know much about it either, but I happened to find this:
http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-sceptics-lie-about-temp-records-try-to-smear-top-scientist/
Essentially, people conveniently forgot to mention that metering station locations were changed!
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The world is not getting cooler. This is a fact. It is getting warmer. This is a fact.
If this is indeed true, why are there reference e-mails furthur up-thread talking about projections being unable to account for a lack of warming. Stating that such and such is a fact only works if it is clearly, undisputed knowledge. Seeing as this is disputed, [citation needed].
(Quote to show I'm not just standing on my soapbox)
From: Kevin Trenberth <[email protected]>
To: Michael Mann <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider <[email protected]>, Myles Allen <[email protected]>, peter stott <[email protected]>, "Philip D. Jones" <[email protected]>, Benjamin Santer <[email protected]>, Tom Wigley <[email protected]>, Thomas R Karl <[email protected]>, Gavin Schmidt <[email protected]>, James Hansen <[email protected]>, Michael Oppenheimer <[email protected]>
Hi all
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in
Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We
had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it
smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a
record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies
baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing
weather).
Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth's global
energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained
from the author.)
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008
shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing
system is inadequate.
That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are tracking PDO on a
monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is the
change in ENSO not real PDO. It surely isn't decadal. The PDO is already reversing with
the switch to El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time since
Sept 2007. see
[2]http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitoring_c
urrent.ppt
Kevin
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So you subscribe to "HURR ITS SNOWING OUTSIDE THAT MEANS GLOBAL WARMING ISNT REAL HURRRR"?
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No, I subscribe to "The data being claimed as fact is contested, provide proof."
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I think you need to know the context of that email to know what is actually meant by that "cannot account for the lack of warming". When I saw it first time, I thought about some local place, but cannot know for sure.
Meanwhile, Daily Mash has posted something which made me grin:
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/climate-change-emails-stop-glaciers-from-melting-200911252254/
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I agree. The continued and accelerating melting of the polar ice and glaciers is worrisome. I think the consensus at this point is that the warming is very real.
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I agree. The continued and accelerating melting of the polar ice and glaciers is worrisome. I think the consensus at this point is that the warming is very real.
Only people favouring the ostrich school of thought will claim the climate isn't changing. Responsible scientists are asking why the climate is changing.
I hate the word "skeptics" because most of the scientists labeled with it aren't skeptical of climate change at all - they're skeptical that the reality is as dire as the predictions, and skeptical that human impact in reducing or changing emissions is going to make much of a difference. I count myself among them, somewhat.
Should we reduce our environmental emissions footprint? Absolutely. (My new job is in the enforcement of environmental regulations). It may even slow down changes in the Earth's climate - or it may not. I don't think emissions reduction needs to rely on sketchy (or in some cases, junk) science to tell us that we need to be responsible about what we're doing to this planet, and I also don't think it's necessary to use fear tactics and misinformation to encourage people to work towards sustainable living.
"Global warming" has become an entirely political exercise more to do with philosophy and ego than the actual impacts of the science. In essence, it's become a Earth vs economy argument, and that is absolutely stupid. We don't need to claim the apocalypse is coming to encourage sustainable research and development. We DO need governments that aren't simply interested in the money coming from big business donations provided they aren't regulated. Fortunately, the organization I work for has no capacity for political interference, but I can't say the same for some of my colleagues in related organizations, which is sad.
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The world is not getting cooler. This is a fact. It is getting warmer. This is a fact.
If this is indeed true, why are there reference e-mails furthur up-thread talking about projections being unable to account for a lack of warming. Stating that such and such is a fact only works if it is clearly, undisputed knowledge. Seeing as this is disputed, [citation needed].
This was already answered in this thread. In context, the quote is about an article the sender of the email had published earlier. It is not about lack of warming trends, it was about unsatisfactory explanations of worldwide energy balance. Treberth does not actually say that warming is not taking place even now, he says that current models for warming effects are unsatisfactionary - two quite different things.
For more idea of Treberth's quote, see the article linked before, in http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B985C-4WXB58T-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1113470190&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=0b2fec042919e53ece6d355800b26857 (I think there's an open-for-all article somewhere in this thread):
Planned adaptation to climate change requires information about what is happening and why. While a long-term trend is for global warming, short-term periods of cooling can occur and have physical causes associated with natural variability. However, such natural variability means that energy is rearranged or changed within the climate system, and should be traceable. An assessment is given of our ability to track changes in reservoirs and flows of energy within the climate system. Arguments are given that developing the ability to do this is important, as it affects interpretations of global and especially regional climate change, and prospects for the future.
The abstract is more able to explain it than I am.
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Seems to me that a lot of these emails and memos and whatnot that people are citing as showing the guys are up to bad stuff lack the context to conclude that. People are just too lazy to follow the trail and find out what the guys were actually talking about, and it's easier to tell them (whether or not it's right) than to do the work.
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Seems to me that a lot of these emails and memos and whatnot that people are citing as showing the guys are up to bad stuff lack the context to conclude that. People are just too lazy to follow the trail and find out what the guys were actually talking about, and it's easier to tell them (whether or not it's right) than to do the work.
Yes, but scientists are assholes. They're human, after all, and scientific work is more of a nightmare than an utopia people make it out to be. Humans are assholes, and scientific philosophy does promote dickness to the extreme. Extremely competitive, it is publish or die. Unless you can completely change science this is the face of things to be. Academia sucks. That's not big news to anyone involved in any empirical field of science. I would love it to change. But assholiness does not make any hypothesis more or less truthful.
The idea that humans and scientists are assholes and *****y petty ****heads isn't a new one, but the idea that such human attributes from one organization can be generalized to describe an international field of study and discredit it is both ridiculous and detrimental to scientific approach. After all, the realities of hypothesises are not determined by the general niceness of people, but by the rigour of their research. And the fact that people who criticize studies rarely have any kind of merit to do so. Statistifical analysis and measuring the truthfulness of an hypothesis is much more difficult than people think, and it is the reason why even relatively merited scientists can publish junk data.
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Odd.
Anyway, I still believe global warming is real and that the levels are not part of the naturally occurring cycle.
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I haven't been keeping up with this thread since Thanksgiving happened, nor do I have much interest in continuing to do so now that so many more pages have been written, but I felt this was too incredible not to post:
Climate change data dumped (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece)
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) [aka massaged] data.”
The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.
Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. "The CRU is basically saying, 'Trust us'. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science," he said.
Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.
He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is "unequivocally" linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.
Compare this to what RealClimate.org posted on Nov. 23rd (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/):
CRU data accessibility. From the date of the first FOI request to CRU (in 2007), it has been made abundantly clear that the main impediment to releasing the whole CRU archive is the small % of it that was given to CRU on the understanding it wouldn’t be passed on to third parties. Those restrictions are in place because of the originating organisations (the various National Met. Services) around the world and are not CRU’s to break. As of Nov 13, the response to the umpteenth FOI request for the same data met with exactly the same response. This is an unfortunate situation, and pressure should be brought to bear on the National Met Services to release CRU from that obligation. It is not however the fault of CRU. The vast majority of the data in the HadCRU records is publicly available from GHCN (v2.mean.Z).
So we now know the main impediment to releasing the data wasn't the proprietary agreements, it was the fact that the data no longer existed. Somebody is trying to cover something up here.
Feel free to regard this as a drive-by post, because it is: I don't intend to continue participating in this thread. But if you still don't smell anything wrong with this whole affair after this post, then you must not have a functioning B.S. detector. Or you've turned it off because you've blindly swallowed the party line of the cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
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Actually, er, I must say that doesn't sound that fishy. Discarding raw data and keeping the massaged data sounds like something that might happen pretty often. It's not necessarily good science, but that doesn't mean it doesn't occur.
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However, when dealing with reasearch of this reach and importance, one should not simply discard any kind of data, or stuff like this (*grand gesture at entire thread*) happens. How much easier would it be to simply avoid scrutiny like this by NOT discarding or hiding something? The fact that this has happened at all is fishy.
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I do not think the last sentence of your statement connects with the rest.
As I have said, I am generally agnostic towards manmade global warming, but viewing whatever's popped up here as evidence that it's all a fraud seems like simple confirmation bias.
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I haven't been keeping up with this thread since Thanksgiving happened, nor do I have much interest in continuing to do so now that so many more pages have been written, but I felt this was too incredible not to post:
Climate change data dumped (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece)
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) [aka massaged] data.”
The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.
Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. "The CRU is basically saying, 'Trust us'. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science," he said.
Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.
He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is "unequivocally" linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.
Compare this to what RealClimate.org posted on Nov. 23rd (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/):
CRU data accessibility. From the date of the first FOI request to CRU (in 2007), it has been made abundantly clear that the main impediment to releasing the whole CRU archive is the small % of it that was given to CRU on the understanding it wouldn’t be passed on to third parties. Those restrictions are in place because of the originating organisations (the various National Met. Services) around the world and are not CRU’s to break. As of Nov 13, the response to the umpteenth FOI request for the same data met with exactly the same response. This is an unfortunate situation, and pressure should be brought to bear on the National Met Services to release CRU from that obligation. It is not however the fault of CRU. The vast majority of the data in the HadCRU records is publicly available from GHCN (v2.mean.Z).
So we now know the main impediment to releasing the data wasn't the proprietary agreements, it was the fact that the data no longer existed. Somebody is trying to cover something up here.
Feel free to regard this as a drive-by post, because it is: I don't intend to continue participating in this thread. But if you still don't smell anything wrong with this whole affair after this post, then you must not have a functioning B.S. detector. Or you've turned it off because you've blindly swallowed the party line of the cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
Did they lose their copies of data or is it all gone? Were they the only organization in possession of this data? When did this happen? Was this unique data?
Are people even thinking about replicating it?
edit: Nope, the original raw data is still on their original sources because hey, it wasn't CRU's (this disucssion is really disjointed):
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/11/so-was-the-data-destroyed.html
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35233_Did_Climate_Scientists_Destroy_Data_A-_No
http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2009/10/14/3
And stating that "I have no interest in this thread", then posting yet another talking point whilst apparently ignoring the previous 4 pages of discussion and ignoring a direct question aimed at you is just classy. If you have no interest in the thread then why, oh why would you post in it?
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As I have said, I am generally agnostic towards manmade global warming, but viewing whatever's popped up here as evidence that it's all a fraud seems like simple confirmation bias.
Indeed. Even if we were to conclude that everything CRU does am evil it am, uh, well, they're not exactly the only source (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/)
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I'll have to agree with the general as well.
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I just have one question - how the hell do you prove if a copied e-mail if false or true?
It's jsut a bunch of text in a digital format. Anyone can write a fake e-mail.
The only concrete evidence would be if you found incriminating evidence on a persons computer.
An alleged copy of an alleged hacker is realyl no proof of anything.
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and what is an alleged copy of an alleged email that allegedly shows they have a negative view of FOI requests then. I guess that would be the the square root of the asthmatic inverse of proof then.
that's what I'm agreeing with, so I'm not sure who that's directed at.
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So many people involved in the matter have elaborated on the emails that it doesn't seem likely that the contents are false, but there have been cases where parts of them have been... well, not fraudulent, but ignored or cut away. It is very possible that often we only see parts of emails and some entire posts have been linked away, which factually is quite similar to just making stuff up.
This doesn't mean false emails can't also emerge.
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After skimming through 8 pages, it seems the best the warming deniers can come up with is basically just conspiracy theories.
"They" are out to get us. "They" are out to control your life.
About 35 minutes or so into the latest skeptics guide to the universe podcast episode (http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2009-11-25.mp3) they discuss this. Enjoy.
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After skimming through 8 pages, it seems the best the warming deniers can come up with is basically just conspiracy theories.
"They" are out to get us. "They" are out to control your life.
There's a big field of related ecological study that studies both the changes in northern and southern limits of distribution of organisms, and the field of phenology too. I have this nagging suspicion that all those entomologists that study the northward migration of beetles and macrolepidoptera and the ornithologists that discover that arrival of spring migrants have changed quite significantly and that it can be explained with changed temperatures and weather patterns are not actually doing it out of spite or to take away the precious liberties of Liberator and his ilk.
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So, does anybody remember that graph Al Gore made in An Inconvenient Truth, with the (millions?) of years of natural temperature oscillation, and then the GARHUGEAN spike on the right-hand (i.e. present-day) end of the graph?
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That was kinda the point about my rant a bit ago.
I don't have a problem with the concept that the Earth's climate is warming, it almost certainly is.
My issue with "Global Warming" is that as a concept, it's been taken over by certain individuals and organizations who would use it to further they're political goals instead of making long term plans to help humanity fulfill it's roll as caretakers of this world and adjust to the changes.
BTW, there's a image floating around that Al Gore, among others, are suggesting is representative of what the world will look like in something like 50 years or sommat. On this photoshopped image there are 4 hurricanes, 2 of which are in locations where it is impossible for hurricanes to form, also, while the Floridian peninsula has shrunk in this image to a fraction of it's original size, Cuba is completely gone. For Cuba to disappear from an orbital photo the sea level would have to rise something on the order of 6000+ feet, you know what else is that far above sea level? Denver, Colorado.
So basically, you've got a guy who is trying to cash in on a hysteria that he, himself, has been manufacturing.
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Formerly I have been of neutral opinion towards the climate science (check the last time we had an argument about climate), but came to the conclusion that it is highly likely that the IPCC is right. However, my reasoning was due to the fact that there are articles with opposing conclusions published in journals. Due to the peer-review process, I thought that there must be some validity behind them. Well, here is some explanation of that:
http://www.realclimate.org/wp-content/uploads/PETERLAUT-ANALYSIS-CLIMATE-CHANGE-CPN1.pdf
I don't think the emails are faked as any hacker would have a really hard time writing such data without revealing mistakes.
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Oh, and anyone doubting can now check the IPCC data and models. They can be found at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/
Have fun!
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I don't think liberator is talking conspiracy, I think he's talking 'bunch of unrelated groups using the same thing because it can be used to further there otherwise unrelated agenda' any group that thinks that people need to be guided to the 'right' decision will use any and all events real or imagined that will allow them to enact legislation that pushes their particular slant.
that's not conspiracy, that's human nature, what liberator needs to do is provide some specific examples.
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That was kinda the point about my rant a bit ago.
I don't have a problem with the concept that the Earth's climate is warming, it almost certainly is.
My issue with "Global Warming" is that as a concept, it's been taken over by certain individuals and organizations who would use it to further they're political goals instead of making long term plans to help humanity fulfill it's roll as caretakers of this world and adjust to the changes.
That is very relaxing to hear, but why would you use quote marks around Global warming if you almost certainly believed it is happening? Now you should only point out some prominent names that are using this to further their agenda. This would make this argument much more precise. And still why are they doing that, what are their motives, how can they bring tens of thousands of people along etc. These are the questions that can not be simply ignored, as you have for the last 8 pages and 4 years, yet you do, which makes me question the credibility of this conspiracy stuff.
By the way, back in page two your argument against global warming was that it wasn't manmade. Now you say that your problem is with Certain Individuals and Organizations that use it to further their agenda. Of course, whilst the two are not mutually exclusive, the nature of your latest statement leads me to believe that you do question the anthropogenic effect in current extremely rapid climate change, which just so happens to correlate all too well with increased emissions of greenhouse gasses and not at all with other factors, which has been tested time after time. The hypothesises for this are sound and statistically valid, and as a group they from the scientific consensus I love so much: the combined work of thousands of scientists from far and wide.
I'd like to direct you to Joint Academia Statement on Climate Change. It's pretty easy stuff, aimed at politicians. http://www2.royalsociety.org/displaypagedoc.asp?id=20742 So, for your presumption to be correct, these academia - not individual academics, but p. much a worldwide consesnsus, are either bribed, wrong - this would be enormous and if you prove this you will be the king **** of science - or a part of some kind of conspiracy. These all are very serious claims that require extraordinary evidence.
And you should also point out how people taking advantage of a current event to further their claim makes the scientific basis behind the event any less sound.
BTW, there's a image floating around that Al Gore, among others, are suggesting is representative of what the world will look like in something like 50 years or sommat. On this photoshopped image there are 4 hurricanes, 2 of which are in locations where it is impossible for hurricanes to form, also, while the Floridian peninsula has shrunk in this image to a fraction of it's original size, Cuba is completely gone. For Cuba to disappear from an orbital photo the sea level would have to rise something on the order of 6000+ feet, you know what else is that far above sea level? Denver, Colorado.
Oh, quite interesting. Could you link me to this picture? Thank you in advance.
So basically, you've got a guy who is trying to cash in on a hysteria that he, himself, has been manufacturing.
Do you really think Al Gore had any part in forming the global warming consensus? Here's a hint: he didn't. He was just popularizing stuff that was already popular knowledge in 1990s and even earlier.
And again, of course, the persona of Al Gore has nothing to do with whether the consensus is correct or not.
And one last question: is the Liberator a false flag operation?
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Liberator: Yeeeah, Cuba would not be _completely_ gone, but I wonder what percentage of the population would be forced to move? <_<
So, does anybody remember that graph Al Gore made in An Inconvenient Truth, with the (millions?) of years of natural temperature oscillation, and then the GARHUGEAN spike on the right-hand (i.e. present-day) end of the graph?
Wasn't it CO2 though and not temperature? It's been a while since I've seen it though so I might be wrong.
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Request for the photo(shop) as well as an indictment of who's benefiting from the hysteria....granted. (http://www.prisonplanet.com/with-hurricanes-at-thirty-year-low-gore-turns-to-photoshop.html)
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Skeptical of anything and everything on that site, but the pictures are... (convincing is the wrong word)
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That doesn't look like a reliable source. Nor do I see how Al Gore's slideshows have anything to do with anything.
Picking at these random circus sideshows is immaterial when such a broad scientific consensus exists, based on publicly accessible data. The more I read on this thread the more convinced I am that I should accept man-made global warming.
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I don't even see why it's a problem. If there are nefarious, evil interests propagating the "global warming myth," all they're going to do is push for renewable energy, reduced pollution, and possibly better flooding protection and drainage for coastal cities.
those are all good things anyway, the bad thing about this situation is that there needs to be some urgent world-ending pressure behind it for the changes to occur.
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Yeah, I'm honestly not sure I've seen any serious downsides to the movement towards eco-friendly industry and lifestyles. If anything it just creates new jobs and research opportunities.
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But we'll all be slaves to the New World Order of nazi-socialized obamacare and forced into gay marriages and taught to believe our grandparents were monkeys and forced to pay for lazy black people's cable tv and we'll have no guns and and and
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Yeah, I'm honestly not sure I've seen any serious downsides to the movement towards eco-friendly industry and lifestyles. If anything it just creates new jobs and research opportunities.
So long as the move occurs without a political agenda behind it and is based on sound science. Look at biofuels if you want to see an example of "green" R&D gone awry.
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I don't think liberator is talking conspiracy, I think he's talking 'bunch of unrelated groups using the same thing because it can be used to further there otherwise unrelated agenda' any group that thinks that people need to be guided to the 'right' decision will use any and all events real or imagined that will allow them to enact legislation that pushes their particular slant.
that's not conspiracy, that's human nature, what liberator needs to do is provide some specific examples.
It was more aimed at what Goober was saying. That being said Liberator's usage of prisonplanet, a well known conspiracy theorist website, as evidence does partially prove my point. :p
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But we'll all be slaves to the New World Order of nazi-socialized obamacare and forced into gay marriages and taught to believe our grandparents were monkeys and forced to pay for lazy black people's cable tv and we'll have no guns and and and
So.... kind of like Canada for the last....40 years? Except we haven't suddenly become communists.
Nazism is a form of fascism which is on the opposing side of the political spectrum from socialism/communism so nazi-socialized is impossible.
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And that's the only part of my post you had trouble with? Really?
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MP-Ryan does make a good point about biofuel being The Example of the green movement being used as a tool to prop up interests that have precisely dick to do with protecting the environment or conservationism of any kind. Anthropogenic global warming is virtually proven as far as I'm concerned, but we will have to be diligent or good science will be co-opted by special interest groups who very much do not have humanity's long-term best interests in mind. We've already seen how the corn lobby cashed in big time riding the "green" band-wagon.
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But we'll all be slaves to the New World Order of nazi-socialized obamacare and forced into gay marriages and taught to believe our grandparents were monkeys and forced to pay for lazy black people's cable tv and we'll have no guns and and and
So.... kind of like Canada for the last....40 years? Except we haven't suddenly become communists.
Nazism is a form of fascism which is on the opposing side of the political spectrum from socialism/communism so nazi-socialized is impossible.
I think she was being sarcastic......
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But we'll all be slaves to the New World Order of nazi-socialized obamacare and forced into gay marriages and taught to believe our grandparents were monkeys and forced to pay for lazy black people's cable tv and we'll have no guns and and and
So.... kind of like Canada for the last....40 years? Except we haven't suddenly become communists.
Nazism is a form of fascism which is on the opposing side of the political spectrum from socialism/communism so nazi-socialized is impossible.
I think she was being sarcastic......
lmfao, just maybe. (no offense to Icefire of course, but I just found this rather funny)
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Request for the photo(shop) as well as an indictment of who's benefiting from the hysteria....granted. (http://www.prisonplanet.com/with-hurricanes-at-thirty-year-low-gore-turns-to-photoshop.html)
Thank you! Seems quite fishy, but I do have problems of finding these in trustworthy sources - hell, I find denialist blogs and Alex Jones. And what does Al Gore has to do with whether the science is sound or not?
How about the rest of the questions?
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Yeah, I'm honestly not sure I've seen any serious downsides to the movement towards eco-friendly industry and lifestyles. If anything it just creates new jobs and research opportunities.
So long as the move occurs without a political agenda behind it and is based on sound science. Look at biofuels if you want to see an example of "green" R&D gone awry.
What is a move towards a specific goal without political agenda? Especially since it's about societies and infrastructure and enabled by leaders in these countries?
You see, changing society or the way it works is usually done by trying to influence said society or forcing it to adopt several changes. Such action is known as politics.
Even if it happens completely without coercion or any political body having anything to say about it (say, like some sort of... invisible hand?) - which is a really dumb thing in this case because there is a high possibility we simply do not have time - there will inevitably be someone who will and does influence the process in some ways. At that point, bam, political influence.
Please name a society-wide change that didn't have any kind of associated political or economic-political movement or faction either driving it or benefitting it.
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So the "fraud" isn't that there is no such thing as Global Warming, or even that its anthropogenic, its that someone or some group is using it for some sort of (nebulous) political gain?
Pot meet kettle.
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This is a truly fantastic read. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8389706.stm) Everybody should check it out. Really cuts through the politics and gives the current scientific consensus on global warming.
The broad outline, though, deviates little from the IPCC's conclusions -unequivocal evidence of warming, more than 90% likelihood that humanity's emissions of greenhouse gases were principally to blame, projections of temperature and sea level rise, declining crop yields, mountain glacier melt, and considerable damage to ecosystems and the human economy.
Fascinating stuff. Apparently the sun has been ruled out as a source of temperature variation.
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For those who are able to tune-in (FM, DAB or web if possible): BBC Radio 4's 'The Moral Maze' is discussing this tonight live at 20:00 GMT.
EDIT: Just checked the schedule. They aren't talking about climate change, rather: (taken from the Radio4 website)
Can science ever be truly morally neutral? The leaking of e-mails from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has raised the issue of where should we draw the line between science and campaigning? In a complex world of competing interests, it's vital that we have an independent and rational method to judge and inform policies. But is it naive to expect scientists to put their personal views aside when dealing with such an important issue? Do we rely too much on scientific evidence to shape policy and is it driving out political and moral debate in society?
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So the "fraud" isn't that there is no such thing as Global Warming, or even that its anthropogenic, its that someone or some group is using it for some sort of (nebulous) political gain?
the earth's temperature is rising, or seems to be at lease, it would be unpossible for someone to try to use this to wip people into a blind panic to try to pass some sort of agenda, nothing like that ever happens.
it would be unpossible that scientists who entered into the field to try and reverse humanities damage to the planet would be biased toward assuming human causes for any changed seen in the climate.
it would be unposible that the earth is experiencing changes that are totaly normal and well within the norms. humans must be far more destructive than all the asteroids and supervolcanos that have hit it over it's billions of years.
it would be totally out of line to suggest that people who might suggest such suggestions are lambasted with religious like fervor.
MP-Ryan does make a good point about biofuel being The Example of the green movement being used as a tool to prop up interests that have precisely dick to do with protecting the environment or conservationism of any kind. Anthropogenic global warming is virtually proven as far as I'm concerned, but we will have to be diligent or good science will be co-opted by special interest groups who very much do not have humanity's long-term best interests in mind. We've already seen how the corn lobby cashed in big time riding the "green" band-wagon.
see now, this is the sort of attitude I wish more people would have.
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I assume "unpossible" means "impossible"?
Its not a "blind" panic, and its a correlation to human presence as well as an anomalous change in rate and measurable (if by proxy) temp that indicates a probably cause-effect relationship. Its dramatic, and marked in time with our change from non-technologic to very technologic. And I'll be damned if someone tells me "don't worry, it will all be fine."
The only "evidence" to the contrary is people screaming at the dark because they don't like the political implications. Apparently they only care about the future generations when it means health care debt. **** the planet, its clearly less important than my desire to see liberals fail politically.
Of course that brings out their political opponents. These morons can rally around various flags and scream at each other. At the end of the day, there is real, repeateable expirmental and observational science here. You just need a grounding in chemistry, thermodynamics, and a smattering of other disciplines to see past the politically motivated arguments. And when you do that, the data has unpleasant connotations.
Unfortunately, nobody actually does that except for the investigators, and they are all part of this assine conspiracy.
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unpossible is a sarcastic impossible
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Inq, the only real way to reverse it, if we are the ones causing it, it to revert to horse and buggy type technologies. And somehow even if you managed to convince the populations of every western and eastern power to revert. There's a not so small minority that would say "**** IT! NOWS OUR CHANCE!!" and take over.
Besides, good luck telling that mother of 4 that has to carry her kids to soccer(futbol) practice that she has to start using a horse and cart and you'll have a riot and a whole lot of injured politicians and scientists.
I do not subscribe to the idea that the warming trend is our fault. The world has been warming since the 1400s when The Little Ice Age ended, before there were cars and busses and trains and 1/125th of a trillion people living on this mudball.
Technology doesn't go backwards, and you can't put it back in the box it came out of.
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Personally, I believe that if global warming is man-made, we are already past the point of no return and the best thing we can do is adapt to the coming changes. Every single human activity from building roads to driving vehicles to generating power causes CO2 emissions, and the only way for humans to completely eliminate our CO2 emissions is for all of us to die. Even if we go back to medieval tech we are still emitting lots of CO2 from all the wood we are burning to heat our crappy un-insulated thatch houses. And guess what, our dying corpses will release a bunch of carbon into the environment, so I guess we can't completely eliminate human CO2 emissions even if we all decide to commit suicide and save the planet from ourselves.
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Read posts plz:
The broad outline, though, deviates little from the IPCC's conclusions -unequivocal evidence of warming, more than 90% likelihood that humanity's emissions of greenhouse gases were principally to blame, projections of temperature and sea level rise, declining crop yields, mountain glacier melt, and considerable damage to ecosystems and the human economy.
Apparently there is stuff we can do to moderate the effects of the warming, and no it doesn't require horse and buggy type technologies (talk about a defeatist attitude.)
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Inq, the only real way to reverse it, if we are the ones causing it, it to revert to horse and buggy type technologies.
I'm not at all convinced that this would be a bad thing.
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The culture of 'bigger, faster, more' is not vital to our survival, that's an external pressure put on us by organisations attempting to exploit us to our maximum. Whilst I can understand the need for faster modes of transport etc, the truth is that a lot of society could get by just fine without it. Also, particularly in the West, there is a fake need for the newest and shiniest of everything, people will buy new IPods and Mobile phones for no other reason than they have new applications on them, ones that are quite often never used by the person who bought it, but because it's more 'modern' people assume it's an improvement. The level of waste we generate is horrendous, and a moderate percentage of the electrical goods we so casually throw out are perfectly workable or repairable, but society doesn't support the 'repair over replace' mentality any more.
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:wtf: Are you people serious? "Horse and buggy"???
There are scads of things that can be implemented now that, even if imperfect, are so much better than what we currently have. Discussion of reverting back to pre-industrial technology is disingenuous at best, and an outright strawman at worst. Do you really need a list of existing viable technology that's better than snorkeling oil out of the Middle East or sending more fly ash into the air? Ok. I'll give you an extremely abbreviated one.
1) Natural gas. Build more gas fired plants rather than coal ones. Still releases green house gases, but it does so with virtually no mercury or heavy metal emissions, and the green house gas emissions are 50% (or better) lower than coal fired plants. We've also recently developed technology to go after gas deposits in North America that were previously unrecoverable. Look up unconvesional gas plays re: shales. Upped our estimated reserves quite a bit. The recovery process is also significantly less environmentally destructive if done right.
2) Nuclear fission. Duh. And the reactors we have now are using 40 year old technology. New plants using liquid metal cooled fast neutron reactors (lead-bismuth eutectic as pioneered by the Idaho National Lab is my favorite) have the potential to address both fuel efficiency and proliferation issues.
3) Wind and solar. Imperfect, inconstant, not always there during peak load, yeah yeah yeah, it STILL can supplant the existing power supply and reduce the amount of power that has to come from non-recoverable sources. And improvements to temporary energy storage technology are reducing the severity of even that issue.
4) Better emissions post-processing on existing equipment. Emissions control technology has seen huge improvements over the last few years. Start using it now rather than later. It'll never happen without regulation! But if there is a way to reduce the amount of toxins our plants and refineries pump into our air, shouldn't we be doing it?
5) Geothermal. Do you have any idea how many oil and gas wells have been drilled in the continental US? How many of those have been plugged and abandoned because the productive zones "watered out?" Do you know what that means? It means those zones were producing so much water that they weren't getting an economically viable amount of hydrocarbon from those wells anymore. In a lot of cases, the bottom hole temperature of those "dead" wells is over 300ºF, and they were shut off because they were producing water. Hot water. That's practically screaming for someone to step in and put a geothermal turbine on it. But, despite that, it has only been done in a couple places, usually by university research groups. http://www.seco.cpa.state.tx.us/zzz_re/re_geopowering2007.pdf (http://www.seco.cpa.state.tx.us/zzz_re/re_geopowering2007.pdf)
From the linked article: Geothermal electrical power conjures images of volcanoes, geysers, and hot springs, of which only hot springs are present in Texas, specifically in the Trans-Pecos region and some areas in South Texas near the Rio Grande. However while Texas does not have sufficiently hot shallow geothermal resources of the type mentioned above, it does have literally tens of thousands of oil and gas wells that have drilled sufficiently deep to reach temperatures of over 200, 300, and sometimes 400ºF within well bores. The oil and gas industry has generally considered these high temperatures, and often the water found behind pipe in these formations as a major liability when in fact this hot water is an undeveloped energy asset that can develop out of the existing oil and gas industry. Similarly the existing geothermal industry tends to be unaware of high temperatures and thermal gradients, documented permeability, porosity, and abundant formation brine that exist within deep sedimentary basins, as recognized by the oil and gas industry. Although many of the same subsurface engineering and geoscience techniques are used in both industries, each industry has focused upon specific geological environments for entirely different energy goals. Thus the oil and gas and the geothermal industries are like brothers who rarely speak to each other, which in this case is a detriment to both.
That's an extremely abbreviated list of stuff that's out there right now. Today's technology, not some "maybe someday, with enough money and research we'll be able to-" Today. Now. It just needs to be implemented. It's much better than building more coal plants. And there are certainly plenty of people out there right now who could use the work.
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Er... only one person mentioned the horse and buggy ;)
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The level of waste we generate is horrendous, and a moderate percentage of the electrical goods we so casually throw out are perfectly workable or repairable, but society doesn't support the 'repair over replace' mentality any more.
While I agree with you, I'd like to point out that products are usually not easily repairable due to lack of spares and the culture of "it's cheaper to buy new one than to repair it".
If I could, I would still be using my Nokia 3310 that broke down last summer. That mobile phone was pretty much all I needed and already had plenty of features I never used. I'm disappointed of the camera in my newer Nokia. I would need to install PC Suite to get the stored images from phone? I don't think so.
The mixer also broke down after six months of use (six months!). I would have repaired that one if I had been able to get the spares. Unfortunately, the part that broke down utilized rubber that was vulcanized on top of a metal shaft and could not be replaced. Oh well, at least I tried. So back to shop and bought several times more expensive mixer. I'll be damned if this one breaks. The bad thing about the broken one is that it has a powerful electrical motor that cannot be used anywhere else, or I haven't figured out a place. High power and high thermal load, so no-no for a sustained use. Sounds like they optimized the price/sustainability ratio too well in that case.
Yes, a couple of tens of years back these would have been easily repaired.
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While I agree with you, I'd like to point out that products are usually not easily repairable due to lack of spares and the culture of "it's cheaper to buy new one than to repair it".
In many cases it actually is cheaper to throw them out than repair them.
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Er... only one person mentioned the horse and buggy ;)
* Perihelion sneaks in, grabs his soap box, and sneaks back out hoping no one will notice. :nervous:
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@Liberator: That's the most assinine and ignorant thing I have seen you post. This is not a binary discussion, the choices are not "do nothing" or "throw away everything."
That belies a fundamental ignorance of carbon credits, for starters (not that those are the best solution).
Try again. You are a smart guy, or claim to be. Try again. This time actually try rather than spout Alex Jones bull****.
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carbon credits
The pope did this back in the middle ages, except he called it "Indulgences".
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So now man-made carbon emissions are a sin?
Don't you want to place things under the control of the market?
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Inq, the only real way to reverse it, if we are the ones causing it, it to revert to horse and buggy type technologies.
And because you can't reverse something you should never attempt to mitigate the damage instead?
"Sorry, we can't reattach his arm and give him back 100% usage instantly so we're just going to let him bleed to death." :rolleyes:
If you want to take part in adult discussions you really need to stop with this kind of asinine post. When you post something like this it shows that you don't care about the facts and simply wish to push your own agenda. Which is highly ironic since this is exactly what you claim the other side is doing.
Could it be that you find it so easy to believe in a conspiracy to shape people's opinions regardless of the facts because that is exactly what you know you are doing yourself?
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Ok, so you are actually a moron. guess we're done. Cheers.
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Carbon credits are not a free market tool. Carbon credits are only brought into existence by government mandate, and the only value they have is through artificial government-created scarcity.
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Explain them.
No more free rides, if you are not smart enough to explain your objections, or even what you are objecting to, this is not a conversation, its more arguments with dining room tables.
I have heard Glenn Becks arguments, what are yours?
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carbon credits
The pope did this back in the middle ages, except he called it "Indulgences".
Thanks Mr Beck. Have something substantive to say about it?
EDIT: Dammit Inquisitor, I'm not letting you steal my Glenn Beck reference :p
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Ok, so you are actually a moron. guess we're done. Cheers.
Keep ad hominems out of this. If you have an issue with his arguments, address it. Do NOT waste time and space with a personal attack. I know I'm not a mod, but mods say that often enough.
Explain them.
Carbon credits are are an amount of "credits" doled out to businesses limiting the amount of emissions they can produce without being heavily fined by the government. If we want to go the cap-and-trade route, those credits can be traded by businesses that don't necessarily produce many emissions to emissions heavy businesses for a monetary sum or other agreed on payment.
Carbon credits are not a free market tool. Carbon credits are only brought into existence by government mandate, and the only value they have is through artificial government-created scarcity.
This is correct in all necessary aspects. Credits are indeed only brought about by governance, as no business would voluntarily handicap itself (unless it doesn't care about profit, which is really a poor business to begin with, but that's an argument for another thread) in that way. If there is anything wrong with this, it's the last sentence, and then only partially. Any value they have would be subjective, rather than objective, and the government has no real control over subjective value.
The way I see those working is low emissions companies giving them away, high emissions companies buying them, and nothing changing at all except the emission producers would have to pay more money.
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Carbon credits are only brought into existence by government mandate, and the only value they have is through artificial government-created scarcity.
So you're saying that carbon credits are currency?
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Do you really want to know how cap-and-trade is not a free-market system? Fine.
The cap for starters. The government comes in an says that production of CO2 can't exceed a certain amount. That's a mandate. Mandates are not a free-market tool.
Carbon credits are also an artificial product. They wouldn't exist except for said cap on CO2 emissions. Also, certain business that produce CO2 as part of their normal operations can't reduce CO2 emissions below a certain amount. This wouldn't be a problem except for the cap on emissions. So in order to avoid a fine (again, not a free-market tool) they buy carbon credits. They only buy said credits to avoid the fine, which means there is an artificial demand for carbon credits created directly by government intervention in the marketplace, which is the cap on CO2 emissions. Said carbon credits also have an artificial value, since there is an artificial demand for them since they would not arise as part of normal free-market operation, CO2 emissions being a valueless product.
Saying cap-and-trade is free-market is like saying ethanol mandates are free-market. Both have government intervention in the marketplace and both create artificial demand and hence artificial value for valueless or low-value products.
TL;DR: Trade is by all means a free-market tool as it arises naturally as a result of supply and demand. The cap, and everything that derives from it, are not because they are the result of government intervention creating artificial supply and demand in the free-market.
Scotty, I'm saying that the value of carbon credits is somewhat artificial, since they do not arise as part of natural free-market processes, and the demand for them is created by government intervention. The artificial demand leads to an artificial increase in value, much like what has happened to ethanol thanks to the government mandate that it be included in all gasoline sold in the United States.
mxlm, that's dead wrong. Money has value because it is used to secure goods and services. There is a free-market demand for money for use as a transaction medium. Money would arise without the government printing it. Money is merely a reflection of the value of the goods and services being produced. All government does is provide said medium. Inflation occurs because there is more money than the value of the goods and services, and so currency is devalued in order to more accurately reflect its buying power. Deflation occurs because there is less money than the value of goods and services, and so its value increases to reflect its buying power.
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The way I see those working is low emissions companies giving them away, high emissions companies buying them, and nothing changing at all except the emission producers would have to pay more money.
Companies that emit less don't give the credits away, they sell them. That's the point. It's altering the incentive structure to tie financial benefits to socially positive outcomes. Companies can go on as they have, but it's going to get more and more costly. Meanwhile, companies with ecologically sound policies can use the competitive advantage created by the credit to expand their market share.
Carbon credits promote socially optimal behavior by creating a direct financial incentive. It's as simple as that.
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Ah, social engineering (not that kind) by economic penalty. I can see how that wouldn't backfire at all. :rolleyes:
This, by its nature, penalizes production businesses. Penalizing production businesses reduces the amount of goods on the market. This drives prices up. This creates inflation (or demand for higher salries and strikes, which then creates inflation anyway). Inflation reduces confidence in the economy (and reduced confidence from investors overseas). Reduced confidence (of a rather sudden variety) is what caused the Great Depression in America.
Also, socially positive outcomes != environmentally friendly outcomes. I firmly disagree with the idea that the government should be able to mold the economy on a societal level.
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Wow, that kind of simplistic view of economics could have only come from high school. Nobody knows how the market works with that degree of confidence; we cannot forecast economics and have not been able to for a century.
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Ah, social engineering (not that kind) by economic penalty. I can see how that wouldn't backfire at all. :rolleyes:
This, by its nature, penalizes production businesses. Penalizing production businesses reduces the amount of goods on the market. This drives prices up. This creates inflation (or demand for higher salries and strikes, which then creates inflation anyway). Inflation reduces confidence in the economy (and reduced confidence from investors overseas). Reduced confidence (of a rather sudden variety) is what caused the Great Depression in America.
Also, socially positive outcomes != environmentally friendly outcomes. I firmly disagree with the idea that the government should be able to mold the economy on a societal level.
Ah, I apologize for my loose terminology there. By "socially optimal" I meant "good for society," that is, "not likely to render large swathes of the planet uninhabitable." Note that I used the term interchangeably with "ecologically sound," which was sloppy of me but does not alter my main argument.
More to the point, you're overlooking an entire half of the equation here. Yes, the system increases the costs associated with unsustainable practices. This will cause the companies employing these practices to raise their prices, and consumers will turn to the more cost-effective alternatives: namely, the companies that are practicing responsible, sustainable production.
By imposing penalties on companies with unfavorable characteristics, you create opportunities for other companies. The point is to raise the costs associated with unsustainable practices, while reducing costs for responsible ones. The companies that are squandering resources and destroying the atmospheric balance become competitively unfit, and they die out because they deserve to. Meanwhile, newer companies with more effective practices make bank, and there's very little change on the consumer end of things.
Oh, and unregulated markets don’t ****ing work. Or did you not notice that whole global financial crisis thing?
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The global financial crisis was spurred by a bunch of self serving politicians trying to buy votes by removing the regulation that would have prevented it from happening in the first place. BTW, those same politicians are trying to "fix" it now.
@Bat
Economics is simple.
One person has a good or service that they want to offer up for sale. Another person wishes to buy said good or service. The only really useful place government has in that equation is to provide a standard of value that all partied agree upon and to act in the best interests of they're citizens by handling the sales people who behave immorally and unethically. Beyond that, GTFO.
It's only made difficult by pointy headed "intellectuals" who only seem to want to make it hard for the sake of making it hard.
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Nope, economics is not simple, nor is that model of economics accurate. If you had any knowledge of economics or psychology you would be aware of this. Honestly, it's a bit odd to see you arguing in favor of increased government regulation; I come from the Chicago neoclassical school which I imagine you'd idolize.
Your two paragraphs do not even appear to have been written by the same person, since the first advocates extensive regulation and the second decries it.
I'm kind of tired of your ad hominems. We take the time to address your arguments, I even take the time to defend you personally, and then you just attack people instead of arguments in response. I think maybe you need some time off.
Please stop ignoring multiple posts directed at you. You look like a troll. In fact, by skipping from topic to topic spouting flamebait and ignoring discussion, you act like a troll.
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Minor clarification: government inability to force economic changes on a societal level != unregulated market.
The problem big problem I see with this is that this idea arbitrarily alters the balance of competitive markets. It becomes less the "most effective company survives" but more "the company that I agree with survives," which is a dangerous slope to start down.
The issue to agree or disagree with here is irrelevant. The arbitrary and artificial alteration (alliteration, heh :D) of cost-effectiveness I fundamentally disagree with. By imposing penalties on companies that have proven their ability to compete on the market that operate simply on a method you disagree with, other, actually otherwise less effective companies come to the forefront, reducing overall quality or effectiveness as a whole.
(and simplistic or not, I don't really have the ability to take a class in economics right now. The closest my school has that I know of is Business Math :ick:)
EDIT BEFORE THE POST FOR LIBERATOR'S BENEFIT: The financial crisis was caused by banks trading future interest and payments on loans as actual currency. For example, say I lend you one hundred dollars and ask for one hundred ten dollars back whenever you can. Say then, that I trade away the promise of that loan being repaid for one hundred twenty dollars. Say that the person I trade the combined package to then trades THAT to another person for 150 dollars. If you default on that loan, then I can't pay the guy I traded it to back, HE can't trade back, etc. EVERYONE comes up short money. Basically, banks trading money they didn't have caused this. (This example feels off somehow, like I mixed up one of the links. Gist is still there though)
Granted, regulation during the Clinton administration even allowed this to happen, but that is well before the fact, and only relevant in passing here.
Personally, I prefer the Austrian School of Economics.
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One person has a good or service that they want to offer up for sale. Another person wishes to buy said good or service. The only really useful place government has in that equation is to provide a standard of value that all partied agree upon and to act in the best interests of they're citizens by handling the sales people who behave immorally and unethically. Beyond that, GTFO.
Could you show me some US money issued by the government then?
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Minor clarification: government inability to force economic changes on a societal level != unregulated market.
The problem big problem I see with this is that this idea arbitrarily alters the balance of competitive markets. It becomes less the "most effective company survives" but more "the company that I agree with survives," which is a dangerous slope to start down.
The issue to agree or disagree with here is irrelevant. The arbitrary and artificial alteration (alliteration, heh :D) of cost-effectiveness I fundamentally disagree with. By imposing penalties on companies that have proven their ability to compete on the market that operate simply on a method you disagree with, other, actually otherwise less effective companies come to the forefront, reducing overall quality or effectiveness as a whole.
So you don't think companies should be discouraged from running the planet into the ground? Say my chemical company is dumping heavy metal waste into your backyard. Would you or would you not like the government to drive my company out of business? This is the same thing, but on a global scale. Certain practices must be discouraged because they will lead to global economic and environmental collapse if allowed to continue unconstrained. That's not arbitrary or opinion-based, it's a decision that can be made solely on rational, empirical data. There is no slippery slope there.
EDIT BEFORE THE POST FOR LIBERATOR'S BENEFIT: The financial crisis was caused by banks trading future interest and payments on loans as actual currency. For example, say I lend you one hundred dollars and ask for one hundred ten dollars back whenever you can. Say then, that I trade away the promise of that loan being repaid for one hundred twenty dollars. Say that the person I trade the combined package to then trades THAT to another person for 150 dollars. If you default on that loan, then I can't pay the guy I traded it to back, HE can't trade back, etc. EVERYONE comes up short money. Basically, banks trading money they didn't have caused this. (This example feels off somehow, like I mixed up one of the links. Gist is still there though)
What you're missing is that (in theory, anyway) the money is invested in industry and creates more wealth between the steps. All banks make money by loaning out money that belongs to other people. My background is in political science and technology policy, not pure economics, so I can't tell you the details of how the system broke down, but it's nowhere near as simple as you describe.
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The global financial crisis was spurred by a bunch of self serving politicians trying to buy votes by removing the regulation that would have prevented it from happening in the first place. BTW, those same politicians are trying to "fix" it now.
@Bat
Economics is simple.
One person has a good or service that they want to offer up for sale. Another person wishes to buy said good or service. The only really useful place government has in that equation is to provide a standard of value that all partied agree upon and to act in the best interests of they're citizens by handling the sales people who behave immorally and unethically. Beyond that, GTFO.
It's only made difficult by pointy headed "intellectuals" who only seem to want to make it hard for the sake of making it hard.
Everything Battuta said, plus more.
First you blame Democrats for deregulating the market and causing the economic downturn, because you can blame the "pointy-headed intellectuals" for doing it. Besides the fact it's completely out-of-character with what we know about your ultra-free market positions, I'll accept it.
But then you turn right around and get pissy when people implement regulations on the market to keep the economic crisis from happening again, and since they happen to be the same people who deregulated the market in the first place, you get all high and mighty and imply them as hypocrites.
Top that with the ad hominem horse**** "pointy-headed intellectuals", and it's absolutely 100% clear you're just trolling. I really hope you enjoy your inevitable two week vacation.
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Wait... did Liberator seriously call economics simple?
Christ dude, read an economics book. There's a crap load more to it than just the idea of "supply and demand."
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I don't look at gendisc for more than 30 seconds at a time to avoid eyestrain. But seriously. What the ****.
Liberator. Do you own a High School diploma?
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I'm not going to ban Liberator from this discussion purely on the grounds that I'm interested in seeing if this hole he is digging for himself will go all the way through the Earth's core. :p
Seriously Lib, you really need to stop parrotting talk radio and actually think once in a while. You first complained about government regulation, then deregulation and then finally regulation again. You can't have it both ways. If you are not in favour of a completely unregulated market (and you would be a fool if you were) then you are in favour of regulation. Your disagreement simply lies on what should be regulated.
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did he just say deregulation caused the economy to collapse?
yes I think he did, lib your conservative card and complementary tee shirt are to be returned at once, you are no longer allowed to display them.
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That's just the basic hypocrisy you get from certain conservatives though. They bang on about wanting a small government except when it's doing something they like. Then the government can be as intrusive as you like.
So government stepping in and making federal laws to prevent flag burning, nudity on tv, porn, gay marriage, abortion, anything Obama likes is fine. Just small government for other stuff. The stuff they like.
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As long as it's Big Government stepping in to trample the rights of the people God hates, it's all fine. But as soon as someone steps in to undo the injustices done by big business (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_the_United_States), the religious right (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_Marriage_Act), and the ultranationalists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare).
Big government makes America great. No one likes taxes and the bureaucracy, but I'll gladly suffer through it as long as the federal government is protecting Yellowstone, ensuring fair economic competition and guaranteeing all Americans the right to see a doctor. Too bad none of the teabaggers or blind Fox followers want it.
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They more or less do want it, despite their protestations. See: "keep your hands off my medicare" (Medicaid? Whichever). Conservatives talk a good game, but go ask the average GOPer if they'd be okay with, I dunno, a 20% reduction in benefits from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
ETA: incidentally, I'm not sure it's fair to be beating up lib for his hypocrisy. He's a conservative. The GOP has been the party of raging hypocrites since at least Reagan. They talk about fiscal responsibility but they haven't actually exercised fiscal responsibility in twenty nine years. The deficit grew enormously under Reagan, comparatively modestly under Bush the Better, and then enormously under Bush the Worse. For chrissake, BtW proposed an enormously expensive prescription drug benefit plan and didn't make any arrangements to pay for it. And how did the GOP respond to this proposal? By passing it!
That American conservatism can lay claim to the position of fiscal responsibility without being laughed off stage is itself hilarious.
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Keep ad hominems out of this. If you have an issue with his arguments, address it. Do NOT waste time and space with a personal attack.
No. When he starts making arguments, I'll take issue with them. right now he might as well be an Alex Jones rss feed. That demionstrates a complete lack of respect for the argument and from what I can tell, a complete lack of indepenent, rational though. So no. If he wants to stop acting like a moron, fine.
You have at least take the time to answer the question (well, you think you are answering the question),
Yes, carbon credits are a way to regulate emissions, if we were going back to horse and buggy, there would be no credits, it would be a ban. If you want to emit more, you buy more credits. I honestly am not sure that's the right approach, but its hardly eschewing technology.
You might think they are too expensive to buy, so that "limits" you, but they are an EXPLICIT mechanism to allow for some folks to emit more. You can do this thing that we thnk is dangeorus, but it will cost you more. The concept is to me, like treating it as a consumeable, finite resource.
I used to carry a radiation badge, the NRC (or whatever they are called nowdays) has it on file I am told, so I know what my lifetime dose of radiation is (and if it ever exceeds a certain number, I am not allowed to work with radioactive materials again). I see it as a similar principle, if I wanted to take the risk, and if I could pay to be allowed a higher dose, I might.
But that's not the issue at hand, is it? That's a potential policy direction based on the issue at hand, but that is 100$ seperate from the questions about the science. Does science drive policy? Sometimes yes it does, nuclear waste disposal regulation is strongly driven by the science of radiooactive decay. Does radioactive decay happen regardless of regulations around wasste disposal?
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I'm saying that the value of carbon credits is somewhat artificial, since they do not arise as part of natural free-market processes, and the demand for them is created by government intervention. The artificial demand leads to an artificial increase in value, much like what has happened to ethanol thanks to the government mandate that it be included in all gasoline sold in the United States.
Could you explain how the import tariffs do not skew the markets artificially?
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Um. Of course the tariffs skew the market artificially, and I wish the tariffs didn't exist. While ethanol would be cheaper if they didn't exist, I doubt ethanol would still be a viable fuel source.
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his topic is bubbling over.
Liberator, cool your jets plox or i'll remove your fuel pipe :)
Thanks :yes:
xx
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So you don't think companies should be discouraged from running the planet into the ground? Say my chemical company is dumping heavy metal waste into your backyard. Would you or would you not like the government to drive my company out of business? This is the same thing, but on a global scale. Certain practices must be discouraged because they will lead to global economic and environmental collapse if allowed to continue unconstrained. That's not arbitrary or opinion-based, it's a decision that can be made solely on rational, empirical data. There is no slippery slope there.
Actually, I think that if something is bringing immediate harm to an individual, it should be curtailed. In the above example, had I the power, I would forbid that company from dumping anywhere people can be directly affected and harmed. (In essence, I wish the government's job did not exceed "keep us from being physically harmed, and keep the infrastructure passable. Then you can have some of my money as taxes." but I highly doubt that's going to happen) (as I typed that, I realize that's far too simplistic to sum up my thoughts. Add regulate interstate commerce, a Federal court system and maintenance of a standing army to that, and I won't take up any more space with this since this isn't about my beilef in exactly what government should be able to do.) So, to answer your question, no. I would not want the government to drive a company out of business for an easily rectifiable issue. What I'm saying is that the market, and conscious consumers, should do the dealing with that, not the government.
What you're missing is that (in theory, anyway) the money is invested in industry and creates more wealth between the steps. All banks make money by loaning out money that belongs to other people. My background is in political science and technology policy, not pure economics, so I can't tell you the details of how the system broke down, but it's nowhere near as simple as you describe.
I'm aware of how banks work, I'm was just trying to illustrate how the banks were going beyond trading other people's money, but rather trading the promise of said money being available sometime in the nebulous future as concrete capital, more specifically on a risky loan. The bank that bought it would then trade it to ANOTHER bank at a large rate, with still no great likelyhood of it ever being paid off.
AND NOW TO RECENT ARGUMENTS:
ad hominems still have no place. If you disagree with him, fine. Say so, and say so scathingly. Just keep phrases like "you're a moron" out of it please.
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I don't think you can say "you're a moron" to Liberator is an ad hominem at this point. All available evidence suggests it to be more like a statement of fact. "You're a coward" and "you have no independent thought at all" would also appear to fall into this category.
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Well, truth be told, fact is irrelevant. It's still a personal attack, and disrupts the thread (case in point).
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That statement is not conducive to an intelligible discussion, NTGM-1R, and in a sense makes you no better (or worse, for that matter) than Lib.
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That statement is not conducive to an intelligible discussion, NTGM-1R, and in a sense makes you no better (or worse, for that matter) than Lib.
On the contrary. Dismissing Liberator from the discussion is one of the most important aspects to make it intelligible, since he's not discussing, he's trolling.
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Honestly, when he refuses to respond to arguments against his points, he leaves himself open to ad hominems since there's no other way to relate to him.
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I would forbid that company from dumping anywhere people can be directly affected and harmed.
Its defining "directly affected" that seems to be part of the problem here, if you don;t deny the premise of warming outright.
It took YEARS to figure out that dioxins were as terrible as they were. Lots of people got very sick because we didn't act quickly enough (and curiously, there was a not dissimilar level of denial from a pretty similar segment of the political spectrum) and HEAVILY regulate their use (not to mention stop using them in weapons).
Or Thalidomide? Years to figure out what the affect was and then it was heavily regulated, spawning all sorts of new rules and regs from the likes of the FDA.
So, if it doesn't affect people for a generation or two, no regulation? I am not trying to trap you, I just don't understand where people draw the line?
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Okay guys, calm down with the personal attacks. Personally I agree that Liberator has left himself open to nothing else since he is not actually bothering to debate and simply is engaging in a policy of repeated "**** and run" posts.
However the solution to that is not to insult him but simply to report his post so that the admins can deal with his repeated attempts to troll this topic.
HLP's policy on flaming is pretty clear, it's not allowed. I'm not prepared to make an exception for Lib simply because he can't debate like a rational adult. Scotty is 100% correct that it is just as much of a disruption as the original trolling it is a response to. I'm not going to start handing out bans and monkeyings to anyone who insulted Liberator this time but I will if it continues.
Not doing so would simply invite complaints that the admins do not apply penalties for such behaviour fairly.
If Liberator continues to troll, report it and he'll be doing it elsewhere as he'll be joining the other monkeys.
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This is my last post in this thread, and I'm just gonna sum up my thoughts on this subject.
1) Is the climate of the Earth getting warmer?
Yes.
2) Do we have anything to do with it?
Not in my opinion.
3) Is the movement toward more efficient technologies a bad idea?
Not on it's own, but the way it's being handled is horrible. Any adoption of more efficient tech should be market driven, not by the government forcing immature, unproven, and potentially unsustainable(from a raw materials standpoint) down the throats of industry and the public.
Lastly, since I wrote this over the course of several hours as I had to go do something. It's becoming more and more obvious that any position that doesn't fall lock step into perfect alignment with "yours"(and you know who you are) is what is not tolerated. I may be a moron, I may be the stupidest person here, but by God I will say this. I am through with the condescension and insults. Take your holier than thou, self-righteous bull**** and stuff it someplace, cause I'm done.
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No offense, mate, but the criticism leveled at you had nothing to do with your opinions, it had to do with your failure to defend them or engage in normal debate rather than drive-by behavior.
*shrug*
And no, there is no 'you' who is conspiring against Liberator. We have people like Sushi and Goober and Scotty who do not hold liberal views, but who get along fine here.
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It's becoming more and more obvious that any position that doesn't fall lock step into perfect alignment with "yours"(and you know who you are) is what is not tolerated.
Incorrect. You are welcome to hold and espouse whatever position you like. However in a debate you must actually debate. You have failed to do this. Those who have defended their opinion have been tolerated perfectly well.
The "I'm a victim" defence is the last refuge of someone who has acted badly but wants to make out that they are being persecuted for their opinions rather than their actions. It rarely holds up because you can always point to someone with a similar opinion who hasn't been victimised.
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I remember someone calling him on some picture in al gore's book, and when he presented it everyone jumped on him for trying to distract from the importaint points. or at least that's how I remember it going down, too busy with something else, and too lazy to hunt down and review that section of the thread.
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I am through with the condescension and insults. Take your holier than thou, self-righteous bull**** and stuff it someplace, cause I'm done.
Funny how that's something very similar to what I've wanted to say to you, but never did, mostly because I don't throw tantrums when people call me out for acting like a little child in political debates.
You're not a victim here, stop acting like it. You've routinely insulted people who hold liberal views, but we usually just take it as a result of you being brainwashed by conservative talk radio. When people finally start telling you it's unacceptable to call liberals "pointy-headed intellectuals" without any basis for such claim other than it's what Glenn Beck likes to call the people who disagree with him, you don't lash out and go BAWW BAWW BAWW I'M BEING PERSECUTED!
You stop what you're doing, look at yourself, and think of a way you can avoid it in the future.
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Any adoption of more efficient tech should be market driven, not by the government forcing immature, unproven, and potentially unsustainable(from a raw materials standpoint) down the throats of industry and the public.
Government doesn't design the technology. They guide companies to research and public to adopt them. This is not very different from using import tariffs on products "NOT manufactured in the good old US of A". However, I don't understand how exactly it's unsustainable?
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I remember someone calling him on some picture in al gore's book, and when he presented it everyone jumped on him for trying to distract from the importaint points. or at least that's how I remember it going down, too busy with something else, and too lazy to hunt down and review that section of the thread.
That's really only one case though. And his **** and run style of posting probably contributed directly to that happening.
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I don't see why all this moral outrage about carbon permits and all their government control isn't also directed at similar things like fishing permits (as poor a job as they are doing).
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So wait, we're being condmend for jumping on him because he posted a link to ALEX ****ING JONES website as evidence? Give me a break, Bob.
On that note, on that very page of evidence, is a series of direct contradictions to:
1) Is the climate of the Earth getting warmer?
Yes.
Not to mention the poing of this very thread calling all the science a fraud and those who advance its conclusions liars. Its unmitigated bull**** from someone either unable or unwilling to debate. Which is it Lib? Is the rational part of your brain actually rebelling against teh garbage its being fed and you ACTUALLY see there might be evidence of warming independent of the policy argument? Or is it all a fraud brough by "you people" and we're all out to get you, your family, and your religion?
If that's a grand conspiracy to **** on poor Liberator, so be it, but I have been listening to assinine arguments from uneducated fools for 20+ years on this subject. I am tired of being "polite" to those who have no interest in reciprocation. According to some in this thread, I am part of some global conspiracy to remove freedom, I am an evil man for participating. I am lying. The accusation is VERY thinly veiled,
It doesn't get more personal an attack than that.
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Which is why he'll be banned if he repeats it.
Like I said, we take personal attacks quite seriously here.
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I don't see why all this moral outrage about carbon permits and all their government control isn't also directed at similar things like fishing permits (as poor a job as they are doing).
Short answer: people don't want to change.
There's too much at stake here: peoples' unsustainable lifestyles and quaternary economy are at complete odds with climate change, which requires long-term planning and forcefully moving away from stuff like coal, vast gasoline consumption and "every day's a beef day".
Markets do not like to move to more expensive means of production to produce same commodities as their competitors do at half the price. There is significant inertia to this change, and it is slow. This is detrimental if society's goal is to transform into something else and on a fast pace too! As such, governing bodies dictate - as their right is - what the markets should do. The markets resist. A crisis is born. No matter what the deal is, they resist. Such is their mission as completely amoral profit machines. An insignificant number of them will probably profit immensely from the paradigm shift, but those who are large now will probably suffer.
People are quite conservative as well. The modern western lifestyle is pure rubbish, literally: our entire economy revolves around people buying, buying and buying stuff, casting away 3 year old iPods, two year old cars, yesterday's food, all wrapped in several layers of plastic. The legacy of our great free market experiment can be seen in landfills. The goals of all these policy changes are to reduce carbon emissions and not surprisingly peoples' behaviour is also a target. Most people don't like this at all. The idea that your very actions can actually have some meaning in either good or bad has negative implications for people who have been all about rampant individualism. And the idea that world might became a pretty ****ed-up place during our lifetime because of what we have been doing is very unpleasant. Everyone would just love to see that the worst-case scenarios won't happen, and everyone would be really, really happy if it wasn't us or if nothing will happen. The inertia is subconscious.
And about the rage against fishing quotas? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33553385/ns/us_news-environment/
"They have been devastated and dwindled and in many places there are no more fish left, but goddamnit MY PROFITS!" Tragedy of the commons indeed. I have a nagging suspicion that this is what is happening on a larger scale with all this heavy industry stubbornly resisting any kind of change to more sustainable lifestyle.
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Like I said, we take personal attacks quite seriously here.
Then warn me for my unwarranted attack on the poor guy, split the thread and **** can the contents. Enforce your rules. Monkeying might be good for my blood pressure.
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This topic devolved into a non-hadley blamewar discussion a while back. I'm tempted to put it in a lockbox but i'll wait a bit and see how it goes.
EDIT- nah inquisitors blood pressure comes first.