It Is The Sun

[MSimon]

Thus the comments in this thread about population control as the other side of the warmists solution.

Cough. Cough. John Holdren the President's Science Adviser.

[MSimon]

I'm not sure if you have followed the Drug War literature ...

And as he was eventually bound to, he steps in it.

Well do you follow the literature? It is a very good example of "the government gets what it pays for". With the discovery of the endocannabinoid system things are going the other way but we still have a significant part of the population frozen in time.

“Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out. Thus, Science advances one funeral at a time” Max Planck

Your current difficulty is that enough people have now grown up in this new era to represent a dominant force in politics.

The same will happen to climate "science".

Tom is a remnant of the CO2 era in climate science. You are a remnant of the "Refer Madness" era of drug science. My condolences to both of you.

Very few people are open minded their whole life. Their minds gets locked when the body's endocannabinoid production declines at around age 25. There are studies on this. You can look it up. Most people are "old" at age 30. Governments - mostly supported by old people - are ALWAYS behind the curve. Which why it is best that they do not have too much power.

And BTW hanelyp you will note that the argumentation of you and your friends is quite similar to Tom's (different issues though). I'm sure you can see the errors of Tom's. You fail to see your own. Twas ever thus. Human nature being what it is.

[tomclarke]

For scientists, the pressure to publish is real, the pressure to do new work is real. Conformity is not valued, because it is the opposite of novelty.

You need to be a little more skeptical.

You seem to think that the pressure to publish non-conforming work is what is valued as the overriding motivation. What about supporting reality? Ostensibly, this is what both sides say they are trying to do. So what other factors are involved?

That is not exactly what I mean. Scientists don't care much about conforming - it really is not an issue. The point is that novelty and scientific value is not judged along a conformist/non-conformist axis but:

• slavishly following other people's ideas is not what good scientists do, and is not rewarded.
  there is a strong imperative to try to be correct, and to be honest about mistakes if they are made.

I would say those pressures apply to all the "real scientists" who publish. 97% of them support the tenet that CO2 causes AGW. There are dissenting views, and the whole point about the scientific method is that it supports dissenting views - but they do not win unless evidence for them accumulates.

The large number of badly written essays on the internet do not have the same motivation or pressures. In particular to get a paper through peer review is a pain but usually (it is not perfect, and some journals have lower standards than others) means it must be well written and properly researched, showing awareness of the related literature.

It is easy to have a neat sounding idea in a vacuum. A lot more difficult to do NEW research which checks out when validated and adds to what has already been done.

There are in addition a few decent scientists on both sides who are overtly political. In that case pay attention to the science they do but not the political spin, lectures, etc. Lundqvist for example is a decent scientist who has a pet theory which he pursues single-mindedly. I don't criticise that, we need such people and occasionally their maverick ideas pan out. But all the evidence is that Lundqvist's ideas are not in the grand scheme of thing significant.

It is all too easy to be seduced by a well-argued (but totally wrong) theory. The only way you can get a sense of overall balance, looking at all the evidence, is a literature review - a big job. A short cut is to read somone else's literature review - in this case the IPCC report (not the Summary) is as good as it gets, though not uptodate, and also there is no substitute for coming to ones own independent opinion from source material only if one has enough time.

I get annoyed when people think that reading a collection of disconnected and mostly wrong blogs can provide a decent overview of the science. It can't.

[JoeP]

For scientists, the pressure to publish is real, the pressure to do new work is real. Conformity is not valued, because it is the opposite of novelty.

You need to be a little more skeptical.

You seem to think that the pressure to publish non-conforming work is what is valued as the overriding motivation. What about supporting reality? Ostensibly, this is what both sides say they are trying to do. So what other factors are involved?

That is not exactly what I mean. Scientists don't care much about conforming - it really is not an issue. The point is that novelty and scientific value is not judged along a conformist/non-conformist axis but:

• slavishly following other people's ideas is not what good scientists do, and is not rewarded.
  there is a strong imperative to try to be correct, and to be honest about mistakes if they are made.

I would say those pressures apply to all the "real scientists" who publish. 97% of them support the tenet that CO2 causes AGW. There are dissenting views, and the whole point about the scientific method is that it supports dissenting views - but they do not win unless evidence for them accumulates.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/wor ... 71033.html

I'd say that ALL the scientists listed in the above article are wading through a pile of political conformance crap so thick that any science being done is extremely filtered, either the data or the methods used to arrive to conclusions, to further support whatever is desired.

You describe an ideal. Unfortunately, climate science is probably one of the furthest disciplines from such purity.

[MSimon]

97%? It only takes one. And in my view there have been hundreds.

But no matter the coming little ice age is completely unpredicted by the CO2 aficionados. The solar folks are predicting it.

BTW people who have looked critically at the "97%" paper can only find .5% who meet the criteria.

[choff]

I've noticed the warminista sophists only come out of the woodwork during peak summer heat temps, they hibernate during the winter. Check in January to see how many are blogging about the world getting baked.

[tomclarke]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/wor ... 71033.html

I'd say that ALL the scientists listed in the above article are wading through a pile of political conformance crap so thick that any science being done is extremely filtered, either the data or the methods used to arrive to conclusions, to further support whatever is desired.

You describe an ideal. Unfortunately, climate science is probably one of the furthest disciplines from such purity.

We are not likely to agree. I am going on:
One climate scientist I know personally - who has genuine scientific curiosity and desire to seek the truth - and who is an IPCC lead author. (I should say that the ideas I'm espousing here come from my own reading - not from discussing things with her).

Many other scientists I know who have reached senior positions in a world class institutions (Cambridge, Imperial College) - about half of them have the same quality of "science comes first - politics is very annoying and I hate it". Given that a facility with politics tends to help getting senior positions - and frankly a senior scientist can do well as a good leader and administrator encouraging others to do the real science - this high percentage of political idiots says a lot for science being based on science not politics.

My understanding of how science works. Individual scientists are only human and will have personal biasses. But the process of open publication and peer review means that over time - and climate science has had a lot of time on the basics of CO2 based AGW - the wheat is winnowed from the chaff. That also is why I give no great credence to any one paper published - it is on its own an indication, but could turn out to be a dead end.

[tomclarke]

I've noticed the warminista sophists only come out of the woodwork during peak summer heat temps, they hibernate during the winter. Check in January to see how many are blogging about the world getting baked.

Interesting. I can only answer for myself, assuming you consider me a warminista sophista (BTW can you give an example of my sophism here?).

I happen to have more leisure time over the summer months. That might also be true of many who are real scientists of course...

[MSimon]

At institutions scientists are graded on the grant money they bring in. The government is not giving out grants lavishly for anything but CO2 causes global warming. Now why would that be?

Think of the power they would get being totally in control of energy supplies...

But not to worry. A little ice age is coming. The presage of that is the current cold in the Southern Hemisphere and the cold records broken in the US this summer. Of course it could just be weather. But it should at least extend quite nicely the flat line in global temperature. So Tom how much longer in your estimation would the flat line have to extend to falsify the idea that CO2 drives global temperatures?

====================

The government gets the science it pays for:

I am so angry the president said what he said and completely ignored the science

[tomclarke]

At institutions scientists are graded on the grant money they bring in. The government is not giving out grants lavishly for anything but CO2 causes global warming. Now why would that be?

Really? they are giving out grants for good contributions to climate science - no mandated results, as you can see from the fact that published work covers a 3:1 range of possible ECS. Hardly a stitch-up.

[choff]

Next time there's an ice storm, the power lines are down and your neighbor is shoveling out his driveway, try explaining CO2 induced global warming with him, I think that will explain the one point. Sophistry would be arguing CO2 is the main climate driver instead of the sun. For a small fraction of public money spent trying to prove global warming, ( itself much smaller than what we are told to spend stopping it) we could protect the power grid from a much more serious solar driven concern.


http://www.hyzercreek.com/Infrared%20Sky%20001.jpg


“Thermal Physics” by Blundell, Oxford U Press


http://www.history.com/news/a-perfect-s ... gton-event

[choff]

I will add that if the power grid is down for a year we will have a much bigger problem with the nuclear reactors and spent fuel rod pools, not one or two but all of them.

[tomclarke]

No, cold weather, indeed any weather, has little bearing on AGW (OK, weird unusual weather may be caused by AGW, but weather is so weird anyway it is extremely diffciult to prove).

It would be honest for you to say (with no evidence) that you know CO2 is not the main climate driver over the last 100 years and therefore I am wrong.

By saying I'm a sophist, instead of just asserting that I'm wrong, you are trying to dress things up, but with no more evidence. In fact, you are being a sophist yourself...

Next time there's an ice storm, the power lines are down and your neighbor is shoveling out his driveway, try explaining CO2 induced global warming with him, I think that will explain the one point. Sophistry would be arguing CO2 is the main climate driver instead of the sun. For a small fraction of public money spent trying to prove global warming, ( itself much smaller than what we are told to spend stopping it) we could protect the power grid from a much more serious solar driven concern.


http://www.hyzercreek.com/Infrared%20Sky%20001.jpg


“Thermal Physics” by Blundell, Oxford U Press


http://www.history.com/news/a-perfect-s ... gton-event

[choff]

Regarding analyses of ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica, Abdussamatov wrote:



“It has been seen that substantial increases in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global climate warming have occurred cyclically, even when there was as yet no industrial action on nature. It has also been established that periodic, very substantial increases in the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere for a period of 420 thousand years never preceded warming, but, on the contrary, always followed an increase in the temperature with a delay of 200-800 years, i.e., they were its consequence.”



In an update in October 2013, Abdussamatov warned, “We are now on an unavoidable advance towards a deep temperature drop.”


Abdussamatov’s conclusions about global cooling came from his studies of the sun, but another scientist came to a similar conclusion by studying ocean currents. Don Easterbrook, a geology professor and climate scientist, correctly predicted back in 2000 that the earth was entering a cooling phase. He made his prediction by tracing a “consistently recurring pattern” of alternating warm and cool ocean cycles known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). He found this cycle recurring every 25 to 30 years all the way back to 1480. Projecting this forward, he concluded “the PDO said we’re due for a change” and that happened. No warming now for 17 years.

Asked by CNSNews about the IPCC, Easterbrook said they,


“ignored all the data I gave them…every time I say something about the projection of climate into the future based on real data, they come out with some modeled data that says this is just a temporary pause…I am absolutely dumfounded by the totally absurd and stupid things said every day by people who are purportedly scientists that make no sense whatsoever….These people are simply ignoring real-time data that has been substantiated and can be replicated and are simply making stuff up.”

He said they are driven by money and power and added, “What they’re doing in the U.S. is using CO2 to impose all kinds of restrictions to push a socialist government.”

http://blog.heartland.org/2014/03/its-the-sun-stupid/

[tomclarke]

Regarding analyses of ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica, Abdussamatov wrote:



“It has been seen that substantial increases in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global climate warming have occurred cyclically, even when there was as yet no industrial action on nature. It has also been established that periodic, very substantial increases in the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere for a period of 420 thousand years never preceded warming, but, on the contrary, always followed an increase in the temperature with a delay of 200-800 years, i.e., they were its consequence.”

This is a classic logical fallacy that comes from not bothering to look at all of the (well known, established from basic physics) evidence.

Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are highly unusual, possibly unique, in geological history. They make a 100% CO2 change in 150 years. They thus allow the forcing effect of CO2 on climate to be seen. (I guess it is possible that a mega-volcano, every 100Myears or so, might make a similar dramatic change but it would change many other things as well so it is difficult to disentangle CO2 from the rest).

Looking back of the geologic record there are many other long-term forcing effects on climate that give large temperature changes. It is well known that these temperature changes result (after a delay of 200-1000 years) in a dependent CO2 change because of outgassing from the ocean.

You can see that there are multiple possible causes for climate change, and there is a known feedback which means that CO2 will change anyway if temperature changes.