Climate-gate

[joepistole]

There are NOT "several theories allowed." That's the sort of talk one only gets from deniers. The reason is quite simple - the standard models MATCH the data available. Case closed.

That is exactly correct. Deniers and their fellow conservative brethren like to play the victim card (e.g. the imaginary conspiracy) when confronted with a dose of reality. That tactic gets old quick for those with at least half of a functional brain.

 

[wellwisher]

There are NOT "several theories allowed." That's the sort of talk one only gets from deniers. The reason is quite simple - the standard models MATCH the data available. Case closed.

I think you have this wrong. All those theories are acceptable in physics and all physicist are allowed to study and move back and forth. However, all are complicated and each would take years to master so people tend to pick one. It is not one or the other, or we will boycott you. One may say the standard model is the consensus, but the others are free to be explored, without name calling and buzz words to force conformity. One might also notice no political divide, just science, since all these theories conform to the principles of the scientific method. Why is climate theory so intolerant of any other POV even it it conforms to the scientific method?

Loop quantum gravity is string theory’s biggest competitor. It gets less press than string theory, in part because it has a fundamentally more limited goal: a quantum theory of gravity. Loop quantum gravity performs this feat by trying to quantize space itself — in other words, treat space like it comes in small chunks.

In contrast, string theory starts with methods of particle physics and frequently hopes to not only provide a method of creating a quantum theory of gravity, but also explain all of particle physics, unifying gravity with the other forces at the same time. Oh, and it predicts extra dimensions, which is very cool!

The Standard Model falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions because it makes certain simplifying assumptions. It does not incorporate the full theory of gravitation[2] as described by general relativity, or predict the accelerating expansion of the universe (as possibly described by dark energy). The theory does not contain any viable dark matter particle that possesses all of the required properties deduced from observational cosmology. It also does not correctly account for neutrino oscillations (and their non-zero masses). Although the Standard Model is believed to be theoretically self-consistent[3] and has demonstrated huge and continued successes in providing experimental predictions, it does leave some phenomena unexplained.

One may notice how objective to itself the standard model is and who does not sales pitch, we know all for popular appeal. Why is this done in physics and not in climate science?

 

[joepistole]

I think you have this wrong. All those theories are acceptable in physics and all physicist are allowed to study and move back and forth, although all are complicated and each would take years to master all the math. It is not one or the other, or we will boycott you. One may say the standard model is the consensus, but the others are free to be explored, without insecurity. One might also notice no political divide, just real science, since all these theoryies conform to the principles of the scientific method and have the math. Why is climate theory so intolerant or uses emotion?

You don't seem to understand the difference between speculation and observed fact. In the case of climate change, the facts are overwhelming.

 

[Trippy]

I think you have this wrong. All those theories are acceptable in physics and all physicist are allowed to study and move back and forth. However, all are complicated and each would take years to master so people tend to pick one. It is not one or the other, or we will boycott you. One may say the standard model is the consensus, but the others are free to be explored, without insecurity. One might also notice no political divide, just real science, since all these theoryies conform to the principles of the scientific method and have the math. Why is climate theory so intolerant of any other POV?





One may notice how objective to itself the standard model is and it does not sales pitch we know all. Why is this done in physics and not in climate science?

Because all of the alternative theories have already been examined and discarded by climate science over the last 150 years. Climate change caused by anthropic atmospheric carbon emissions is the only one to withstand the test of time and evidence.

 

[rpenner]

One of my biggest concerns with manmade climate change,

Oh, dear. You have “concerns.” Ohmygosh, we should halt everything until your concerns are assuaged, or possibly, just possibly consider the possibility that the lack of demonstrated good intent and fact-based argument makes it far more likely that you are a concern troll rather than any sort of legitimate critic of science.

• http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/concern_troll
• http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Concern_troll

So how, scientifically, might we distinguish your “concerns” from illegitimate criticism of science which is the null hypothesis for any post that criticizes science without a clear factual basis? c.f. our experience in [post=2019950]anti-LHC trolling[/post] and anti-AGW trolling.

is the way this particular area of science silences the opposition,

[Citation required.] Not proven! Scientific papers critical of AGW and/or claiming very low CO₂ sensitivity have been published in legitimate peer-reviewed journals. They just weren't very good. Other papers were published to demonstrate that they had unreliable methodology. As a result, anti-scientific publications like Heartland's NIPCC or the fake journal Pattern Recognition in Physics were created just to dress up anti-AGW propaganda as if it were science.

• http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/media/erl460291datafile.txt
• http://skepticalscience.com/abraham-2014-cosmopolis.html
• http://skepticalscience.com/contrarian-backlash-difficult-lesson-for-journals.html

Very few papers (1991-2011) explicitly advocated that most of global warming was not due to anthropogenic effects:

1993,Evidence On The Climate Impact Of Solar Variations,Energy,Baliunas| S; Jastrow| R,4,7
2003,Global Warming: Are We Confusing Cause And Effect?,Energy Sources,Khilyuk| Lf; Chilingar| Gv,2,7
2006,On Global Forces Of Nature Driving The Earth's Climate. Are Humans Involved?,Environmental Geology,Khilyuk| Lf; Chilingar| Gv,2,7
2008,Cooling Of Atmosphere Due To Co2 Emission,Energy Sources Part A-recovery Utilization And Environmental Effects,Chilingar| Gv; Khilyuk| Lf; Sorokhtin| Og,4,7
2009,Greenhouse Gases And Greenhouse Effect,Environmental Geology,Chilingar| Gv; Sorokhtin| Og; Khilyuk| L; Gorfunkel| Mv,2,7
2009,Potential Dependence Of Global Warming On The Residence Time (rt) In The Atmosphere Of Anthropogenically Sourced Carbon Dioxide,Energy & Fuels,Essenhigh| Rh,2,7
2010,Empirical Evidence For A Celestial Origin Of The Climate Oscillations And Its Implications,Journal Of Atmospheric And Solar-terrestrial Physics,Scafetta| N,4,7
2010,On Some Achievements And Major Problems In Mathematical Modeling Of Climatic Characteristics Of The Ocean (critical Analysis),Izvestiya Atmospheric And Oceanic Physics,Sarkisyan| As,4,7
2011,Is Global Warming Mainly Due To Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas Emissions?,Energy Sources Part A-recovery Utilization And Environmental Effects,Zhao| Xb,4,7

more like mafia style politics than science.

[Citation Required] Not proven! As the third link in the above section documents, it is the anti-AGW side that has used threats of baseless lawsuits to halt scientific publication.

If you look at physics theories, for the essence of matter and energy, there are several theories allowed side-by-side. The consensus may prefer the standard or quantum model, but there is no political effort to silence those who accept string or loop theories. Why the difference?

Here is where you prove your lack of goodwill in doing recent reading in the very thread you are posting. Multiple times I have explained the reason for this -- the correspondence principle. Einstein's new gravity was promising because as a first approximation it exactly reproduced the motion of the planets previously explained by Newton's Universal Gravitation. In detail, it did better for Mercury and the Moon. That's the thing in science, we don't throw away the old observations, we strive to understand them better. String and Loop theories are exactly as viable as they are in reproducing the standard model and general relativity in the applicable experimental limits. If someday loop gravity says that electrons come in 3 spin polarizations, it dies. Likewise, because anti-AGW people are HORRIBLE at forecasting climate changes their claims are considered bunk.

No less than four times did I explain that the correspondence principle bounds what future science will say about anthropogenic global warming:

In response to Paul Mulshine's ridiculous post comparing climate and cholesterol.

The statement "Climate science is infinitely more complicated than human physiology." is a red herring in a discussion of anthropogenic global warming, because of the correspondence principle. Simple conservation of matter means the CO₂ in the atmosphere is held at an equilibrium between sources and sinks. Simple conservation of energy means the heat content of the biosphere is held at an equilibrium value between sources and sinks. Thus complete knowledge is not required to both identify anthropogenic causes as the primary cause of CO₂ increase and identify CO₂ increase as the primary cause of energy imbalance. All that is needed is bounds on ignorance which are tighter than knowledge of the identified effects.

To objections [including Paul Mulshane's ridiculous insistence that I predict what the consensus will be 30 years hence]:

While it is obviously true I am ignorant of what the consensus will be, because of the correspondence principle I have bounds on my ignorance. I know that the primary cause of global warming won't be attributed to volcanoes, or the sun, or El Niño or foreseeable shift in Earth's orbit or inclination. I know that people of the future will not regard the current climate consensus as hasty or willfully ignorant of well-established physical and chemical principles.​

To the author of the article who has always claimed science was on his side and who demands an answer to question "what the consensus will be 30 years from now":

Paul, Paul, Paul, Why do you persecute science?

You don't get to demand answers to questions predicated on untruths.

I replied to your challenge 19 hours ago. "While it is obviously true I am ignorant of what the consensus will be [30 years from now], because of the correspondence principle I have bounds on my ignorance. I know that the primary cause of global warming won't be attributed to volcanoes, or the sun, or El Niño or foreseeable shift in Earth's orbit or inclination. I know that people of the future will not regard the current climate consensus as hasty or willfully ignorant of well-established physical and chemical principles."​

....
To someone who denigrates peer review, expertise, and the idea that man can damage the biosphere:

Short answer: Scientific peer review operates as a filter to save scientists with the duty to keep up with the state-of-the-art and the economic limitation of finite reading time from having to read proposals that are trivially wrong.

Scientific peer review does not protect against incorrect hypotheses being proposed per se, but it does tend to cut down on the number of hypotheses and arguments published without good empirical support. (Like saying correlation implies causation or requiring the energy balance of the biosphere to be magical.) Science isn't about guessing -- it's about making good guesses informed from all the relevant data and then when you have more than one viable guess the scientific method requires you gather more data to distinguish which guess is best. In that way a hypothesis of what might be right is promoted to a scientific theory, the current state-of-art best synopsis of the behavior of all related empirically observed behaviors. (For example both general relativity and the standard model of particle physics are the best state-of-art scientific theories. Because of the correspondence principle, they overlap the domains of earlier theories where at best only sensitive measurements near the limits of usefulness of those older theories distinguish the two. This is why Newton's law of Universal Gravitation is good enough to plot the course of the Apollo missions, even though it was 50-years "out-of-date.") ...​

Thus, I conclude you aren't even trying to present a rational basis for doubting the science of anthropogenic global warming, and that the label “concern troll” is an accurate description of the way you are trying to poison the discussion.

Normally science is open minded and not this way or the highway.

There is a difference between being open minded and empty headed. That difference is the correspondence principle. Specifically, acceptable scientific theories have to correspond with reality, so they tend to correspond with each other. Anti-AGW theories don't do so well. I covered this quite recently in my follow up to jgfox:

To someone who compared the consensus of 97% of all professional climate opinion with a much smaller set of relativity deniers:

jgfox, presumably then like the physicists who accepted Einstein, you would want a demonstration that those that deny anthropogenic global warming have better accuracy at predicting the behavior of global temperature given historical inputs than those that agree and thus form the scientific consensus. Is this correct?

Have you seen this comparison: http://skepticalscience.com/comparing-global-temperature-predictions.html[/indent]​

​

I was wondering if anyone knows why this area is so different?

[Citation Required.] Nowhere have you met your burden of demonstrating your claim. Therefore is it just empty assertions, which is the meat-and-potatoes of the type of sterile denial of science that we have come to expect from "contrarians."​

 

[rpenner]

Just a few pedantic clarifications of how I read Read-Only:

One of my biggest concerns with manmade climate change, is the way this particular area of science silences the opposition, more like mafia style politics than science. If you look at physics theories, for the essence of matter and energy, there are several theories allowed side-by-side. The consensus may prefer the standard or quantum model, but there is no political effort to silence those who accept string or loop theories. Why the difference? Normally science is open minded and not this way or the highway. I was wondering if anyone knows why this area is so different?

There are NOT "several theories allowed."

Specifically, a scientific theory is the current state-of-the-art most parsimonious, most precise description of all behavior in a problem domain. Things that are not as precise as current theories are not viable hypotheses. Things that were former most precise descriptions of behavior are out-of-date scientific theories. Things that are as precise as modern theories but are not the most parsimonious or that have not yet been proven to be less precise than the state-of-the-art are hypotheses -- you know, "informed guesses."

So for a given problem domain, there can be at most one theory because that's what the word best means. We see the state-of-the-art change as later hypotheses may have wider domains than the current state-of-the-art.
Example domain: Neutrino propagation physics: Quantum field theory in a background of curved space-time
Example domain: Particle physics, excluding neutrino propagation or Terrestrial physics where self-gravitation is neglected: The standard model circa 1970 in a background of curved space-time.
Example domain: Terrestrial physics where self-gravitation and bulk electromagnetic effects are the only effect studied or the celestial dynamics of astronomical bodies: General Relativity with Maxwellian electromagnetism.

Currently there are no examples of self-gravitation of fundamental particles being studied, no bulk effects of weak- or strong-force interactions, and no examples of particles deflecting astronomical bodies, so these problem domains remain experimentally distinct; each with just one best-of-class theory for each.

That's the sort of talk one only gets from deniers.

Deniers and those with so little expertise in the ways of science as to confuse accepted theories, still-viable hypotheses and non-viable hypothesis.

The reason is quite simple - the standard models MATCH the data available. Case closed.

And they are parsimonious. Just as Newton refused to speculated on why gravity acted as it does, so good science worked with questions of observable behavior, not unobservable mechanisms that purport to explain the whys of that behavior.

Now on to the meat of responding to wellwisher's post:

I think you have this wrong.

Is your opinion based on facts and rational argument? Is it based on relevant expertise? Why should your opinion matter to anyone but you?

All those theories are acceptable in physics and all physicist are allowed to study and move back and forth.

Not “all”. Just the ones that correspond with reality. And those hypotheses that correspond closely to reality closely correspond to each other. That's why for most human-scale mechanical engineering jobs, pure Newtonian mechanics in a constant acceleration field is sufficient.
In the exact same way, future theories are constrained by a need to closely correspond to the current state-of-art predictions.

However, all are complicated and each would take years to master so people tend to pick one.

To date, no one has mastered string theory or loop gravity to the point where the theories have precise answers to all the questions routinely answered by current state-of-art physical theories. Thus these are not scientific theories in the sense of being empirically verified by experiment -- they are merely hypothesis that a lot of effort has gone into to hopefully demonstrate or refute their viability.

It is not one or the other, or we will boycott you.

There may come a day when these one or more of these hypotheses will be proven incompatible with reality and thus preventing further publishing of papers predicated on the concept that they are viable hypotheses of out reality. That's not censorship of fairly held opinion, but a raising of the level of discussion above that of uneducated bloviation.

One may say the standard model is the consensus, but the others are free to be explored, without name calling and buzz words to force conformity.

One is welcome to explore the physical predictions of any assumptions, but one is not free to say those assumptions describe reality if they do not. You have assumed conformity is the result of censorship of viable ideas when using the filter of reality is a sufficient hypothesis.

One might also notice no political divide, just science, since all these theories conform to the principles of the scientific method. Why is climate theory so intolerant of any other POV even it it conforms to the scientific method?

You have not given evidence that any hypothesis in opposition to the vast majority of papers that find support for anthropogenic global warming are the best hypotheses that explain all the data in the relevant problem domain. Thus you have not demonstrated that other ideas are scientific theories. Thus you answer your own question and expose it false premise. http://skepticalscience.com/comparing-global-temperature-predictions.html

Loop quantum gravity is string theory’s biggest competitor. It gets less press than string theory, in part because it has a fundamentally more limited goal: a quantum theory of gravity. Loop quantum gravity performs this feat by trying to quantize space itself — in other words, treat space like it comes in small chunks.

In contrast, string theory starts with methods of particle physics and frequently hopes to not only provide a method of creating a quantum theory of gravity, but also explain all of particle physics, unifying gravity with the other forces at the same time. Oh, and it predicts extra dimensions, which is very cool!

Taken without attribution from http://www.alpcentauri.info/loop_quantum_gravity.html which is not a scientific reputable source of information on this particular subject.

In contrast, a brief visit to Wikipedia explains one of the major reasons that Loop Quantum Gravity is not yet proven to be a viable competitor with general relavity: The correspondence principle again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity#The_semi-classical_limit

The Standard Model falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions because it makes certain simplifying assumptions. It does not incorporate the full theory of gravitation[2] as described by general relativity, or predict the accelerating expansion of the universe (as possibly described by dark energy). The theory does not contain any viable dark matter particle that possesses all of the required properties deduced from observational cosmology. It also does not correctly account for neutrino oscillations (and their non-zero masses). Although the Standard Model is believed to be theoretically self-consistent[3] and has demonstrated huge and continued successes in providing experimental predictions, it does leave some phenomena unexplained.

[2] Sean Carroll, Ph.D., Cal Tech, 2007, The Teaching Company, Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe, Guidebook Part 2 page 59, Accessed Oct. 7, 2013, "...Standard Model of Particle Physics: The modern theory of elementary particles and their interactions ... It does not, strictly speaking, include gravity, although it's often convenient to include gravitons among the known particles of nature..."
[3] In fact, there are mathematical issues regarding quantum field theories still under debate (see e.g. Landau pole), but the predictions extracted from the Standard Model by current methods are all self-consistent. For a further discussion see e.g. Chapter 25 of R. Mann (2010). An Introduction to Particle Physics and the Standard Model. CRC Press. ISBN 978-1-4200-8298-2.

Taken without attribution from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model (hyperlinks and references restored)

One may notice how objective to itself the standard model is and who does not sales pitch, we know all for popular appeal. Why is this done in physics and not in climate science?

Because climate science already has models that cover the question of the causes of global warming, and anthropogenic causes dominate natural ones and remaining uncertainties. Also, because Loop Quantum Gravity and the standard model attempt to answer questions in different problem domains, why anthropogenic global warming denialism doesn't attempt to answer any question in any problem domain. Scientific rejection of anthropogenic global warming assumptions leads to hypotheses that fail to match the behavior of the relevant data.

 

[Photizo]

Climate change? Ya'll mean how ya'll was sayin' it was gettin' warmer then it stopped gettin' warmer and started gettin' real cold? Cain't remember a colder winter than this last one we's just got through. I'll tell you whats changin...peoples attitudes about ya'lls nonsense. That's what's changin.

Ya'll are the same group whos found to be cookin' them weather books, right? An ya'll keep telling us we came from some sorta slop a quaa drillion years ago, right?

Ahm aimin' to tell ya, that dog don't hunt 'round these pahrts. No sir, yew take them 'fidd'ld with' facs an figgers an high tail it back to that puddle a slop ya'll come from. Gowahn, git!


http://climatechangereconsidered.org/

http://www.westernjournalism.com/climate-change-alarmist-reverses-course-bombshell-interview/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/...-game-is-up-for-climate-change-believers.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/en...Cs-alarmism-take-everyone-in-for-so-long.html

 

[Photizo]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/en...597/No-A-level-for-climate-change-denier.html

 

[Photizo]

http://www.westernjournalism.com/heres-real-scientists-think-u-n-climate-report/

 

[rpenner]

Question for Photizo, isn't this content-less spamming of the forum with links to propaganda exactly the source of anti-scientific anti-discussion that earned you your last suspension?

http://www.westernjournalism.com/climate-change-alarmist-reverses-course-bombshell-interview/

Lovelock's 2006 predictions were wild. They were not the predictions of the IPCC. http://www.nature.com/news/james-lovelock-reflects-on-gaia-s-legacy-1.15017 If you actually watch the whole BBC Newsnight interview (April 02, 2014) you get a quite different takeaway than the skewed view. He's telling politicians not to lock into "solutions" but to manage the gamut of possible risks.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/...-game-is-up-for-climate-change-believers.html

Rupert Darwall is not a scientist and his book is promoted by the Heartland Institute. It's book-length propaganda from the anti-scientists. http://heartland.org/events/heartland-author-series-age-global-warming-rupert-darwall There are no scientists reviewing this book, so it's nothing but anti-scientific whinging. The publisher seems to have no track record in science or history. Are they acting as a vanity press?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/en...Cs-alarmism-take-everyone-in-for-so-long.html

More incestuous group-think from the anti-scientific distortions from the author of a "review" of Rupert Darwall's book.

http://www.westernjournalism.com/heres-real-scientists-think-u-n-climate-report/

NIPCC is not "real scientists" -- it doesn't even use citations correctly.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/en...597/No-A-level-for-climate-change-denier.html

Unsubstantiated claims. At no point is any climate science paper demonstrated to be flawed.

 

[Photizo]

Look, you can protest all you want...you can try and confuse with the facts...bamboozle people with crap only you think you understand...all this baloney lacks the ring of truth, do you understand that? No. You don't. You're like an automaton spewing out meaningless statistics and 'fact's. It doesn't matter, do you understand? Generally speaking, people intuitively know when they're being bs'ed, and that's the case when it comes to this nonsense. This whole climate thing is a joke to most people, but you are so emotionally/intellectually invested in your fairy tale that you refuse to get a clue...you will go to your grave spouting this bs...you'll be an old man dribbling spittle from your mouth mumbling to yourself about ozone and carbon...straining your eyes while sitting in your wheelchair at the beach convinced you're seeing the waves breaking ever closer...I pity you. What's said in those articles spells doom for you and your cronies who feel compelled, lemming like, to perpetuate this bs. Have at it if it makes you feel important, just a tad better than the great unwashed, just know that people are fed up with hearing about it...they don't believe it!--no matter how you (plural--including man bear pig) try and convince people otherwise, whether that's by high falutin' gobbledygook, political theater, ram it down kids throats school curriculum, whatever. When something doesn't have the ring of truth to it you should have the sense to give it up. It's not going to 'happen' simply by wishing it to, wanting it to, calculating it to, modeling it to, if it is not grounded in reality it simply will not happen. 'Whether' its the the hoped for confirmation of the imagined phenomenon itself, or the attempts at loading a band wagon with believers. The only ones on the bandwagon are those who are bought and paid for to be on it...there it goes down main street but nobody gives a damn...everyone is too busy living in the real world trying to stay warm and avoid the toxic fallout from your geo-engineering to stave off the inevitable imaginary catastrophe. What a bunch of rubes!

 

[rpenner]

Look, you can protest all you want...

It's my right to protest against bad teachers.

you can try and confuse with the facts...

You miss the point. I'm armed with facts because I have let reality be my teacher.

bamboozle people with crap only you think you understand...

I think any physicist understands conservation of mass-energy. I think any high school physics student is expected to be able to solve for the result of a system that does not emit as much energy as it absorbs. I think anyone who has put on a second blanket understands the main concept behind anthropogenic global warming: deeper optical depth leads to diminished radiation outflow.

all this baloney lacks the ring of truth, do you understand that? No. You don't.

I understand by "ring of truth" you mean your inculcated need to put your trust in your in-group and your reliance on axioms without any empirical support. I understand that you think "truth" is some magical fairy light that immediately polarizes the listeners into obedient good children who adopt it and irremediably corrupt slaves of evil who cower in the shadows. But nothing in human discourse actually works like that so if you want to convince anyone of your position you need to give fact-based rational reasons for people to believe it.

You're like an automaton spewing out meaningless statistics and 'fact's. It doesn't matter, do you understand?

I understand the more you say facts and reason don't matter the more hopelessly sterile your position seems.

Generally speaking, people intuitively know when they're being bs'ed,

Please demonstrate this claim. If your claim is true why do we have jury trials? If your claim is true, how come "undercover cop" is a job? Why did Aristotle's mechanics prevail for 2000 years when it was completely wrong about the nature of motion. If your claim is true why is science so damn useful? If your claim is true, why does this discussion board exist? If your claim is true, why did people let cigarette companies get doctors to endorse them? Not only do most people know when they are being fed distortions and lies and fantasies, but such ideas persist for thousands of years and entire industries have depended on them.

and that's the case when it comes to this nonsense.

Recent polls say the majority of the US believes in global warming. Of those that don't deny global warming is happening, a majority says it is from human effects. http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication/files/Climate-Beliefs-September-2012.pdf http://www.people-press.org/2013/04/02/keystone-xl-pipeline-draws-broad-support/

This whole climate thing is a joke to most people,

Where and how would you ever know what "most people" think?

but you are so emotionally/intellectually invested in your fairy tale that you refuse to get a clue...

I'm the one handing out clues. Science education is the best way to understand science. You on the other hand appear perfectly willing to regurgitate output of think tanks that produce apologetics and not science.

you will go to your grave spouting this bs...

I may be far younger and healthier than you. Seeing as you have time for this irrational vitriol, perhaps you will use some of my time reading a fact-based argument on why you are right and I am wrong so that we can have a civil discussion. Yes?

you'll be an old man dribbling spittle from your mouth mumbling to yourself about ozone and carbon...

I think you've lost the thread here, despite the vivid imagery. The ozone issue was a great historical win for people who care to see the continuation of human life and economic activity which is dependent on the natural ozone layer in the troposphere.

• The 1995 Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded for the chemical understanding of CFCs in the stratosphere which was behind the 1987 Montreal Protocol which guides nations to prevent further human harm to the chemistry of the ozone layer. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/hats/publictn/elkins/cfcs.html

Further, that global effort is paying dividends as the halting of CFC releases is allowing the levels of CFCs in the troposphere to actually go down over the past years. It seems to poke holes in the ideas that

• Nothing that humans can do will change the balance of nature
• Nothing that humans can do will threaten to fundamentally change the biosphere or chemistry of the atmosphere
• Trace gasses cannot have a large effect
• Global cooperation cannot solve problems created by unwitting market forces

Perhaps you still subscribe to some of those ideas and that is the main reason that you call anthropogenic global warming "BS" but we'll never know until you start engaging in a science discussion.

straining your eyes while sitting in your wheelchair at the beach convinced you're seeing the waves breaking ever closer...

Vivid imagery, but it doesn't color you as the most useful source of information. You seek to attack me personally and not my facts or arguments.

I pity you.

It looks more like science-envy from this side of the screen.

What's said in those articles spells doom for you and your cronies

Cronies? There's no one I've seen on this website or others in the past 5 years that I even know the email address of. Is this conspiracist ideation? And this talk of "doom" -- who's the "alarmist" now? Heh.

who feel compelled, lemming like, to perpetuate this bs.

The usual abbreviation of "anthropogenic global warming" is "AGW" but I state, with evidence, that you feel compelled to ponder things scatological.

Have at it if it makes you feel important, just a tad better than the great unwashed,

Eww.

just know that people are fed up with hearing about it...they don't believe it!

Where are all these people you are talking about? Because the polls say you do not speak for the American people. And to lie about about the people want, say or think fundamentally undermines your rhetorical position of speaking on the behalf of "the people."

--no matter how you (plural--including man bear pig)

Even if Al Gore is not a member of this forum, there's no need to call him names. That's a violation of the spirit of the forum rules even if you argue that they don't strictly apply.

try and convince people otherwise, whether that's by high falutin' gobbledygook,

A.k.a. science.

political theater,

A.k.a. attempts by governments to operate on the best information.

ram it down kids throats school curriculum, whatever.

A.k.a Science education.

When something doesn't have the ring of truth to it you should have the sense to give it up. It's not going to 'happen' simply by wishing it to, wanting it to, calculating it to, modeling it to, if it is not grounded in reality it simply will not happen.

You can't sensibly advocate both for your magical "ring of truth" and also demand that people stick to what is "grounded in reality."

'Whether' its the the hoped for confirmation of the imagined phenomenon itself, or the attempts at loading a band wagon with believers.

Your quotes around the first word of this sentence baffle me. Also, it looks like you mean this to end with a comma, not a period. Finally, your use of "imagined phenomenon" only makes sense if you deny the basic reality of decades of global warming. But because you don't make a lot of sense and don't actually name the topic of discussion other than by faecal initialism, some doubt remains what exactly your position is on anything other than this magic "ring of truth" that you don't realize is your personal cognitive bias and not some communicable rational argument.

The only ones on the bandwagon are those who are bought and paid for to be on it...

Where's my check?

there it goes down main street but nobody gives a damn...

Which is why you have never posted on the subject.

everyone is too busy living in the real world trying to stay warm and avoid the toxic fallout from your geo-engineering

Liar. I have never advocated geo-engineering. I don't have any pet solutions. I know enough about economics to know I don't know enough about economics to know the best way to solve a problem you seem to deny exists. But I can point to the Montreal Protocol as a parallel example of where humans were once smart enough to outwit their own environmental harms.

to stave off the inevitable imaginary catastrophe. What a bunch of rubes!

What a bunch of bile. And not one illustration of how this magic "ring of truth" is supposed to work.

 

[Billy T]

... I know enough about economics to know I don't know enough about economics to know the best way to solve a problem ...

Well we have changed the atmosphere but can also reduce that change, as is suggested by second photo/ graph below the first graph and the text following it.

It is the CH4 release that scares me - no known limit as there is more carbon in the tundra and CH4 hydrates than in all economically feasible fossil fuel deposits, including coal! Note the very steep changes in GHG concentration at the right edge of the above graph. This inter glacial period is very different - due to man. Also note that atmospheric CH4 is manly destroyed in reaction with OH- radical but that reaction destroys the radical too. I.e. this year's growing CH4 release will make next years be around longer. Not just theory, but fact. The measured CH4 half-life was less than 10 years a decade ago but is slightly more than 10 years now.

Sugar cane alcohol is slightly "CO2 negative" and a renewable solar energy source.
Tons of carbon removed from the air would be stored in ocean tankers, large tanks at ports and in 100 million or so car fuel tanks. Very different from finite petroleum's strong CO2 release.
For 35 years Brazil has been running cars on sugar cane based alcohol, a few at first but now most are as it cost LESS per mile driven than with gasoline. This despite PetroBrass, more than 50% owned by the current very "left wing" government forcing PertoBrass to sell gasoline at a loss! - Effectively a "negative subsidy" on alcohol as it is the competitor of gasoline now that all the cars are "flex-fuel" - can run on any mix of gas and alcohol.

Not only that, but as alcohol is cleaner burning, repair bills and tune-up cost are less and when the mix is pure alcohol the motor is slightly more powerful. Then there is the social/ economic side to consider:

Currently dollars paid to "big oil" find there way to fund the terrorists and employ only relative few highly skilled drillers etc. Oil is capital intensive, sugar can is labor intensive. Cutting and plating sugar cane is low skill work that many now out side the cash economy (self-sufficient on small farms) could do and be transformed into buyers of cell phone, TV, motor bike, etc .- a win/ win economic change for all (except "big oil.").

Sugar cane is a grass and does not require high fertility soil to grow - will grow wherever grass can grow year round. Brazil would love to import its alcohol from Africa and Central America so all it fertile fields could be growing higher value per acre food crops. The land area required for fueling ALL the world's cars with sugar cane alcohol is only 3% of the arable land - less than the total of abandoned pasture!

You don't need a Ph.D. in economics to understand that "big oil" is screwing you royally with lies (For example the bulk cane is not valuable enough to grow in the Amazon. It must be grown no more than a few hundred miles of the distillation plants, and they are always near the major cities to keep alcohol distribution cost low.) Cane is grown for alcohol is always more than 500 miles from the Amazon rain forest - not why it is being cleared. - Rich people buying pretty hard wood furniture causes that. A single tree can be worth a couple of years salary at the minim wage so is cut by a poor man and then to hide the crime, a few square miles of forest is set on fire.

 

[rpenner]

Um, the way you quoted me out of context it looks like I am endorsing the idea that "Nothing that humans can do will threaten to fundamentally change the biosphere or chemistry of the atmosphere" when, in fact, I'm using the example of CFC's to a) show that is not the case, and b) demonstrate that we took steps to reduce emissions allowing the problem to stop getting worse and slowly fix itself.

 

[Trippy]

Well we have changed the atmosphere but can also reduce that change:

This inter glacial period is very different - due to man. Note the very steep changes in GHG concentration at the right edge of the above graph.

For 35 years Brazil has been running cars on sugar cane based alcohol, a few at first but now most are as it cost LESS per mile driven than with gasoline. This despite PetroBrass, more than 50% owned by the current very "left wing" government forcing PertoBrass to sell gasoline at a loss! - Effectively a "negative subsidy" on alcohol as it is the competitor of gasoline now that all the cars are "flex-fuel" - can run on any mix of gas and alcohol.

Not only that, but s alcohol is cleaner burning, repair bills and tune-up cost are less and when the mix is pure alcohol the motor is slightly more powerful. Then there is the social/ economic side to consider: Currently dollars paid to "big oil" find there way to fund the terrorists and employ only relative few highly skill drillers etc. Cutting and plating sugar cane is low skill work that many now out side the cash economy (self-sufficient on small farms) could do and be transformed into buyers of cell phone, TV, motor bike, etc .- a win/ win economic change for all.

Sugar cane is a grass and does not require high fertility soil to grow - will grow where ever grass can grow year round. Brazil would love to import it alcohol from Africa and Central America so all it fertile fields could be growing higher value per acre food crops. The land area required for fueling ALL the world's cars with sugar cane alcohol is only 3% of the arable land - less than the total of abandoned pasture!

You don't need a Ph.D. in economics to understand that "big oil" is screwing you royally with lies (For example the bulk cane is not valuable enough to grow in the Amazon. It must be grown no more than a few hundred miles of the distillation plants, and they are always near the major cities to keep alcohol distribution cost low. Cane is grown for alcohol is always more than 500 miles form the Amazon rain forest - not why it is being cleared. - Rich people buying pretty hard wood furniture causes that. A single tree can be worth a couple of years salary at the minim wage so is cut by a poor man and then to hide the crime, a few square miles of forest is set on fire.

Billy, You've quoted RPenner completely out of context. Please amend this...

 

[Billy T]

Um, the way you quoted me out of context it looks like I am endorsing the idea that "Nothing that humans can do will threaten to fundamentally change the biosphere or chemistry of the atmosphere" when, in fact, I'm using the example of CFC's to a) show that is not the case, and b) demonstrate that we took steps to reduce emissions allowing the problem to stop getting worse and slowly fix itself.

Sorry. I just quick skimmed. I have removed that part of my quote of you. I intended to show that not much more than being able to tell which is the less expensive fuel is needed to know it is sugar cane alcohol we should be using, and told some of the other benefits mankind would get with the switch to it from gasoline as most assume it would be more costly to partial fix man's contribution to Global warming.

 

[rpenner]

In response to Paul Mulshine's ridiculous post comparing climate and cholesterol.

Follow-up to the original author:

Wow, this is really interesting how much opinion is out there and how little of it rests on factual support. Additional followups:

Well something happened on the NJ.com site and the number of comments are down from 165 to what I think are the most recent 12. Here are mine:

To someone who feels the need to attack the concordance of scientific opinion from the relevant experts and equate it as politicking to get a party platform:

You said "about 66% of the papers regarding AGW do not state their opinion" but this is not the case. Actually, it is the case that of the 11,944 papers that were found in a keyword search for "global warming" or "climate change" that about 66% of the papers did not -- in their abstracts -- express agreement or disagreement with the attribution of most of global warming to human causes and so were irrelevant. Those 66% papers were not about AGW (anthropogenic global warming) but were focused on many other issues relating to "global warming" or "climate change". On the topic of AGW they were silent because you only discuss your research, not your personal life story, in you scientific paper's abstract. "Most journals have strict word limits on their abstracts, so authors have to focus on the specifics of their research."

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024

So it was not true that 66% of papers regarding AGW do not state an opinion on AGW -- those 66% were precisely the papers that were found by keyword search but _did_ _not_ _regard_ AGW. They were GW papers or CC papers but did not set out to confirm or deny AGW, which is distinct from the other two. 97% of the papers that regarded AGW supported the finding that most of GW was AGW.

The error you are making is clear. When setting out to make a survey of male circumcision and doing a computer keyword search for individuals with the first name "Chris" -- some will not be male and thus should properly be excluded from the final tally. When making a survey of what urban areas have the highest density of cars more than 10 years old to try and find the poor neighborhoods only to discover that Jay Leno's garage is flagged by the DVM by your search methodology. Is Jay Leno poor or is he a classic car collector?

"Approximately two-thirds of abstracts did not take a position on the causes of global warming, for various reasons (e.g. the causes were simply not relevant to or a key component of their specific research paper). Thus in order to estimate the consensus on human-caused global warming, it's necessary to focus on the abstracts that actually stated a position on human-caused global warming."

http://www.skepticalscience.com/97-percent-consensus-robust.htm​

And:

It's untrue that 66% of papers regarding AGW do not state an opinion on AGW. The corpus of 11 944 papers were selected because they touched upon climate change and/or global warming -- topics which can be studied in many aspects, not just to ascribe causation.

You claim that you "know better" but do not describe the basis for this supposed knowledge.

You speculate and imply that you think it is possible that academics are generally as corrupt as your family, which is a confusing claim given that you yourself are a member of your family.

You talk about rumors that Bob Carter was "forced out" but did nothing to support your claims into the fact of the event or the reason for the event. Looking into this matter, he had a tenured position that he gave up in 2001 to take an unpaid, untenured position while being paid by Heartland to help drive the writing of the NIPCC distortion. Then, in 2013, the university James Cook University failed to renew his unpaid association with them. No human, legal or customary right to work for a salary was violated. Instead of clarifying or researching the claim, you belligerently repeat the unsourced claim making your position seem to say that you respect rumors more than facts.

You point to NASA retirees, but this happened twice. In 2012, 49 retirees signed a letter stating they didn't believe in AGW but none had done any research. In 2013, a report appeared which claimed that it was supported by "20 “Apollo era NASA retirees”" but they didn't claim authorship so we have no way of knowing why they allegedly hold the opinions they do. The report itself is not a basis for rational inaction because it failed to understand its own subject matter with respect to climate science and risk management.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/NASA-retirees-letter2.html

So the "NASA Retirees" (even if real) don't demonstrate that most of NASA or most of ex-NASA agree with the contents of the letter. It's just empty posturing and naked assertion of factual claims.

There is no "coincidence" that retirees are more likely to believe AGW is untrue. That's general true of older populations. "Senior citizens, those 65 and older, are the most skeptical that global warming is manmade. Though 62 percent believe the Earth is getting warmer, just 28 percent believe it's because of human activity. About half of those aged 18-49 believe global warming is caused by human activity."

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/10/15/poll-half-of-republicans-believe-in-global-warming

You imagine a conspiracy of silence in science when science automatically rewards people with the best description of the behavior of nature.​

To someone who puts up a lot of baseless talking points:

We don't have to assume CO₂ leads to global warming, we can measure the flow of heat radiation from the Earth to space that is increasingly impeded by higher CO₂ levels at CO₂-specific wavelengths. See Figures 2 and 3 of http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-global-warming-intermediate.htm and follow up with the scientific research if you wish to avoid assuming anything. It's odd that you would later invoke thermodynamics and ignore the First Law: Energy is locally conserved, so any increase means the flow in must exceed the flow out. For someone concerned with boundaries, I am surprised that you have not considered that the Earth is a nearly isolated thermal system with no convection or conduction of heat with other bodies. The only heat transfer is via radiation, which is why CO₂, solar output, short-wave and long-wave albedo are _a priori_ the most likely candidates for global warming. All of these have been long studied in the relevant research, which should not be beyond your reading level. The IPCC WG I reports are very long because they summarize hundreds of papers, but they detail each factual claim with the references that support that claim so you can easily (with a library) dig up the raw empirical report. Assuming is not required.

Climate change and global warming are two distinct topics. Since CO₂ is a well-mixed greenhouse gas with roughly equal relative concentrations in troposphere and stratosphere, its primary effect is both global in scope and energy balance related, therefore global warming is the correct term. http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming.htm

The presumed need to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere is a red herring, since with early action it would be sufficient to stop making the problem worse. Your claim that CO₂ scrubbing leads to CO₂ rises is predicated on the assumption that all human power sources originate in the burning of fossil fuels which is not true.

Your simplistic model of technology and industry ignores the fact that electrical devices don't care if the electricity they consume originates with fossil fuels or not. The entire purpose of carbon taxes and other economically motivated schemes is for consumers of fossil fuels to feel the true cost of contributing additional CO₂ burdens. Such action has to be implemented globally because each nation's CO₂ emissions is everyone's burden. (See Tragedy of the Commons.)

Climate contrarian Freeman Dyson has said the CO₂ burden could be solve by planting a trillion fast growing trees. I'm not sure anyone has taken this idea seriously enough to work out the economics of it, but it's not an all-or-nothing proposal we have before us. Probably the best solution will be a combination of mitigation (avoiding making the problem worse), climate engineering (national programs in increasing CO₂ uptake by plants, etc) and adaptation (breeding crops that are more drought and heat tolerant, etc). But without economic incentives to make this fixing this problem in everyone's short term best interest, it will likely become everyone's unshiftable burden.​

And

Also, you claim mitigation will be "too expensive" or otherwise incompatible with continued economic growth without data. It may be far cheaper than you guess.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/opinion/krugman-salvation-gets-cheap.html​

To someone who designs man-made lakes and ponds in the Pacific Northwest:

Your use of "you people" lacks basis. You don't know your audience and therefore you have no basis to address them as if you would an out-group.

Mulshine and you have failed to be good teachers of science because nowhere do you give a test to distinguish a global politically organized misleading consensus from the natural concordance of opinion of qualified experts that a particular statement of fact is well supported by the totality of all known lines of inquiry. You have assumed a global conspiracy that somehow derailed the competition of ideas that makes up all other scientific fields, but you haven't documented it.

Science _is_ the progressive refinement of communicable, parsimonious, precise and useful descriptions of the behavior of phenomena by means of confrontation of candidate prediction frameworks for whole domains of related phenomena with observations of reality. Science is a great unifier, for just as there is just one reality, so there is to a large extent, just one science as all nations strive to be on the leading edge of this progress. Newton began by unifying laws of celestial and terrestrial motion; Maxwell unified electric and magnetic phenomena; Einstein unified the motion of the massive and the massless. These men belonged to nations, but their science belongs to all of us.

Science requires that its workers be scrupulously honest. Thus, even if at first glance it looks like a contradiction, scientists are well equipped to deal with uncertainty. Signals aren't measured (giving a number), they are estimated (giving a distribution or a range that likely contains the value). The goal of course is to reduce uncertainty, but before that goal can sensibly achieved, the uncertainty has to be measured. The progressive nature of science could be viewed as engineering reductions in uncertainty.

In science, authority ultimately means nothing when one's statements are not rooted in empirical fact. Thus Newton's absolute time was one assumption too many. Einstein's attempt to argue the absurdity of quantum theory continues to be the source of some of its most astounding confirmations. What has Freeman Dyson published in this vein since proposing over 35 years ago that it would take a trillion new trees to undo the fossil fuel contributions? Because Professor Dyson used to be at the bleeding edge of quantum physics doesn't make him the arbitrator of science. General pooh poohing that you have unspecific fears that theory X isn't good enough is not a scientific theory to discard X. Only theory Y which is better at modeling the behavior of reality will unseat X as the best summary of all human knowledge in a particular domain.

In science, consensus means nothing, but consensus happens all the time because there is just one reality. Therefore different hypotheses, if they are useful and precise descriptions of phenomena in the same domain, must therefore resemble this one reality and are therefore are expected to resemble the predictions of each other to the extent that they precisely describe their shared subject matter. This is the correspondence principle.

So although Einstein's GR was around for 50 years already, the Apollo calculations were done with Newton's theory of gravitation because it was good enough. Just as perfect information about celestial motion is not needed to land a man on the moon, so perfect information about the climate system isn't needed to identify the primary causes of global energy imbalance. We just have to know enough.​

And:

If Bernie Taylor, author of _Big Trout: How and Where to Target Trophies_, has published research in the fields of Climate Science or even biological adaptation to climate change, I didn't find it in a journal search. I did discover that Oregon and the Pacific Northwest has regional studies on climate change. Perhaps local scientists will be better sources of information than Paul Mulshine's editorial.

But to dismiss the findings of thousands of scientists because of uniformed, unspecific grumblings that it might not be "good enough" is not a fact-based and rational reason for rejection. Thus it is not communicable to "actual Scientist".

Oregon:
http://occri.net
http://www.scribd.com/doc/44424782/Oregon-Climate-Assessment-Report
http://www.opb.org/news/blog/ecotrope/report-how-climate-change-will-affect-oregon/

US Pacific Northwest:
http://cses.washington.edu/cig/about/about.shtml ​

 

[wellwisher]

Solar energy enters the earth and heats the surface. As the heat radiates outward, as IR, it encounters the CO2 blanket (greenhouse walls), where the IR energy is absorbed. As the CO2 emits in all directs, other CO2 reabsorbs, while some of the heat is reflected back to the surface. The net effect is the CO2 acts like the clear plastic walls of a greenhouse offering some insulation value. Is the R-value of the CO2 wall, linear with concentration?

The reason I ask is, as the concentration of CO2 increases, CO2 to CO2 collisions become more frequent. Conceptually, more IR is being transferred by collisions instead of emissions between distant CO2 molecules. This would impact the reflection rate as well as the heating of the greenhouse walls for radiation into space; follow the thermal gradient.

 

[origin]

The reason I ask is, as the concentration of CO2 increases, CO2 to CO2 collisions become more frequent. Conceptually, more IR is being transferred by collisions instead of emissions between distant CO2 molecules.

What do you mean CO2 to CO2 collisions transfer IR.

This would impact the reflection rate as well as the heating of the greenhouse walls for radiation into space; follow the thermal gradient.

Huh?

 

[rpenner]

The concentration of CO₂ is below 1 part per thousand. Collisions with other molecules are likely to redistribute absorbed heat energy to other degrees of freedom, thus increased CO₂ concentration has the primary effect of heating each layer of the troposphere via long wave (IR) radiation from the ground. A secondary effect is that the lower troposphere stirs this heat around by convection. The tertiary effect is that each layer of the upper troposphere radiates in the same bandwidths that it absorbs, but in every direction. Finally, since with increasing CO₂ concentration (and increased optical depth) the part of the atmosphere that is free to radiate to space is increasingly high in upper troposphere -- where the air is colder and radiates less.

So because CO₂ is a well-mixed green house gas, increasing CO₂ reduces the rate at which heat flows to space at the IR equivalent of Earth's "photosphere" being near the top of the troposphere, because a higher "photosphere" is a cooler one.

http://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.38.1876

http://www.skepticalscience.com/saturated-co2-effect-advanced.htm
http://www.skepticalscience.com/saturated-co2-effect-intermediate.htm
http://www.skepticalscience.com/saturated-co2-effect-basic.htm
The need not to simplify overmuch is illustrated here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/postma-disproved-the-greenhouse-effect.htm