238 thoughts on “The trouble with Revkin’s critics.”

1. Lucia: I did get on thing out of MT’s rant. Will you knit me a pair of wooly-eyed fantasies.

2. Freezedried– Somehow wooly-eyed fantasies sound like they would get a naught “R” or “X” rating.

3. maybe I missed it. I saw not one statement of fact or reference in ANY of Tobis’s postings.

   Absolutely NOTHING to back his position. Only emotionally laden rhetoric.

4. Les
   Those statements that could possibly be evaluated as fact or reference are utterly vague. Word choices are sometimes mysterious.

   Evidently “disruptions” have occurred. Did that word come out of a PR mis-education workshop called “How to sound like Dilbert’s pointy haired boss trying to bamboozle customers or employees in three easy lessons”?

   Yes. There Tobis laying emotion on thick in that post, comments at Roger’s and elsewhere. I can definitely tell Revkin’s post made Tobis angry. (I think it made Romm angry too. But everything makes Romm angry.)

5. My “position statement” was not intended as an argument; it was a summary of my conclusions, so that people would know what I think when they start to talk with me. I freely admit that there was no supporting evidence provided. That would have made it quite long, more like a book than like a brief summary. It’s intent was descriptive, not polemical.

   Defending everything I believe about this matter all at once is a tall order.

   I make it a policy, though, not to name people who are being disingenuous. I am pretty convinced there are plenty of those, but if you choose to attack me at that point I will just give way. I don’t want to name names. I’m cowardly that way. More specifically, I don’t want to fall into the trap of accusing an honest dupe of dishonesty. That makes two people unnecessarily miserable, and one of them would be me.

   I do believe that it’s well-established that deliberate and malicious misrepresentation of the evidence exists and is responsible for the huge distance between reasonable policy and actual policy. You’ll have to find someone else with a different personality to name names. You shouldn’t have to look very hard.

   I am quite willing to clarify and expand on any of the other points at leisure. You may understand that the sudden glare of remarkably misguided attention focused on me makes this a difficult moment to do so.

   As a down payment, with regard to “might MT name the “serious, moderate thinkers” who are painted as extremists by “them”? I was quite specifically thinking of Mr. Gore when I wrote that phrase.

6. I do believe that it’s well-established that deliberate and malicious misrepresentation of the evidence exists and is responsible for the huge distance between reasonable policy and actual policy.

   I would love to see this evidence. After 10 years of considerable research, I have found no “deliberate and malicious misrepresentation”. On either side of the debate.

   As for Gore being a “serious, moderate thinker”?

   1. Gore has done no actual research. He quotes others, at best.
   2. Gore’s presentations, especially AIT, are riddled with errors. CO2 precedes warming?
   3. Gore is hypocritical. His carbon footprint is nearly 20 times the average American. And nearly 100 times the world average. Gore also buys ocean front property, when predicting 20 foot sea level increases.
   4. Gore is not a disinterested party. He has made nearly 100 million since leaving office, mostly on the subject of global warming. A damn good investment in Power Point, granted. He is founder and on the board of an environmental company, that Forbes estimated as having 5 billion in assets. Of course, that was last years estimate.

7. Dr. Tobis,

   There is a moral obligation when posting on blogs not to put the reader’s keyboard at risk of damage. Your statement that you consider Mr. Gore to be a “serious, moderate thinker” puts thousands of keyboards at risk due to the rapid expulsion of beverage. Think of the children’s keyboards!

8. Micheal–
   I don’t believe I am attacking you. I didn’t consider your original post an attack on Revkin or Pielke. I think what we both commented on discussions other people posted in public.

   As a description of what you think your discussion at your blog is vague as to communicate almost nothing. After reading it, I have very little idea what you think. One hopes the thoughts actually in our head are more fleshed out that those you are willing to post.

   I have no idea who you think is misrepresenting evidence or who is responsible for what you consider a the distance between reasonable policy and actual policy. I don’t even know what you consider reasonable policy. If you will not say, I have no idea where to find people who will reveal your positions or ideas to me.

   Thank you for clarifying who you consider to be a serious, moderate thinker. At least we now know.

9. I want to make a significant complaint about Exxon-funding of the sceptical movement.

   My complaint is how come all 10 million global warming sceptics are getting paid and I am not.

   All kidding aside, it seems to me that it is the global warming sceptical side which is examining the evidence and the facts and it is the pro-AGW side which is just relying on the climate models and the simple physics calculations (and ocassionally, some exagerated evidence).

   My view is that the climate system and the EM radiation absorption and emission budgets of a nearly infinite number of land, ocean and atmosphere molecules and a literally infinite number of EM photons coming in from the Sun every day is far, far to complex to estimate with simple physics or simple qauntum physics or, especially to model. We have to rely on the empirical evidence only.

   As an example, here is a “real earth climate” 1-year, every single hour animation of clouds produced by NCAR which will completely change how you view the climate from now on. (You don’t need to watch the whole movie but there are a lot of subtle climate hypotheses which one could test just from just watching this movie once – like the central pacific drives the lower US48 climate and the winds drive the major ocean currents etc.) It is remarkable how fast the heat at the equator is tranported pole-wards.

   https://www.ucar.edu/publications/nsf_review/animations/ccm3.512×256.mpg

   And here is a climate model animation. Pretty different and I would not stake having electricity versus not having electricity on the difference between these two animations.

   https://www.ucar.edu/publications/nsf_review/animations/Warming_1950_2100.mpg

10. Lucia

    “I don’t believe I am attacking you.”

    What?
    How can you say that this post was not an attack?

    Once again you hide behind a facade, and snipe from the bushes.
    We hear gunshots ring out, Lucia is standing with a gun, but exclaims “I was just seeing how it operates, I wasn’t attacking you.”

    Why not do an analysis of what George Will wrote? No, you wouldn’t do that…

    What’s really interesting about all this:
    “As a description of what you think your discussion at your blog is vague as to communicate almost nothing. After reading it, I have very little idea what you think. One hopes the thoughts actually in our head are more fleshed out that those you are willing to post.

    I have no idea who you think is misrepresenting evidence or who is responsible for what you consider a the distance between reasonable policy and actual policy. I don’t even know what you consider reasonable policy. If you will not say, I have no idea where to find people who will reveal your positions or ideas to me.”

    Is that it very closely mirrors what goes on here on your blog. You make these grand “analyses” of data, but come to almost no conclusions, for example your post on the GMT of models had no conclusions. You couldn’t tell us what was important about it, why was it relevant? You don’t accurately reveal what thoughts are in your head either. Who knows why you post about the things you do. Who knows why you posted about the ‘rally’ in Washington DC?

    And this statement:
    “I’ve been reading the various criticisms of Revkin. I have concluded that the trouble with Revkin’s critics is simple: they are incoherent. ”
    what is this? You decide they are incoherent and that’s all? Then give one example?

    By the way, this is not an attack on you, just merely commenting on discussions that are happening in the blogosphere. People just need to be able to flesh out their ideas first.

11. Nathan–

    How can you say that this post was not an attack?

    I can say it because what I wrote was not an attack.

    Why not do an analysis of what George Will wrote? No, you wouldn’t do that…

    What’s to analyze?

    I did comment on Will. I said this ” As it happens, Gore and Will both happened to have committed similar errors in recent presentations. ”

    In other words: I said George Will committed an error similar to Gore’s error. This is what Revkin already observed. Many others have agreed with Revkin. Yet, Revkin was criticized for observing Will and Gore both made similar errors in facts.

    If you wish to say more about Will’s errors, you are free to do so.

    I happened to focus on the the criticism of Revkin because I think that criticism presents the greater impediment to negotiating action on climate change.

    On the DC rally: I posted on the rally at DC because it was well publicized, I think rallys of all sorts are generally amusing, and I was curious to see what would happen at this rally. So I watched it. I blog. So, as I spent time watching, I was inclined to post. That’s it.

    On camera, the rally appeared more or less as I expected: A staged PR event that accomplished little, where the participants provided some spin about what was accomplished.

    I have concluded that the trouble with Revkin’s critics is simple: they are incoherent. ”
    what is this? You decide they are incoherent and that’s all? Then give one example?

    Yes. I am giving one example, not fishing out numerous examples from the web.

    If you have examples of a coherent argument criticizing Revkin’s post, feel free to provide a link. I would be interested in reading the any that may exist. I suspect some of my readers would also like to read any blog post that provides a reasonly coherent explanation of why whatever Revkin wrote was in some way “bad”.

    By the way, this is not an attack on you, just merely commenting on discussions that are happening in the blogosphere. People just need to be able to flesh out their ideas first.

    It never occurred to me that your comment was an attack on me. It appears to be what you say it is: A comment.

    I think it’s great that people can flesh out ideas on the blogs.

12. Wow! Isn’t it fun to see how totally different the world looks in different cocoons of alternative reality?! Alarmists and skeptics look at each other through the looking glass and are appalled at the idiots and evildoers they see on the other side.

    Learning what some people consider “facts” can be a real education!

    When Mann published that incredible screed of vitriol and slander directed at Solomon, replete with accusations of conspiracies and evil machinations, it was difficult to comprehend what kind of environment would produce a professor with such a mindset. What was he thinking? But now, Professor Tobis has provided us with another glimpe inside. And the onslaught directed at Will, Revkin and the Post has provided us with even more to see, perhaps more than we really cared to see.

    It seems the science gave way to voodoo religion a long way back. Are human sacrifices next?

13. And here is a climate model animation. Pretty different and I would not stake having electricity versus not having electricity on the difference between these two animations.

    I don’t think those two animations are showing the same thing so they can’t be compared. The first shows cloud cover, the other shows temperature anomaly. And what do you mean “having electricity versus not having electricity”?

    My view is that the climate system and the EM radiation absorption and emission budgets of a nearly infinite number of land, ocean and atmosphere molecules and a literally infinite number of EM photons coming in from the Sun every day is far, far to complex to estimate with simple physics or simple qauntum physics or, especially to model. We have to rely on the empirical evidence only.

    If you want to calculate the velocity profile of fluid moving through a pipe, you don’t need to concern yourself with the “nearly infinite” number of molecules involved. You can use bulk properties of the fluid and a fairly simple calculation based on very reasonable assumptions will give you the answer you need. If you need to calculate the heat transferred from a hot pipe to the environment, you don’t need to calculate the energy transferred by conduction and radiation to each air molecule. Just crack open any heat transfer text book and use an empirical correlation to solve the problem. There are many problems in science that are solved by reasonable levels of simplification. You mentioned the “literally infinite number of EM photons coming in from the Sun…” Well, you can characterize it by the flux of energy they represent (about 1366 W/m^2). You can figure how it will interact with the atmosphere by considering how the energy is spread out across the EM spectrum…. Such calculations are not impossible.

14. Chad–

    If you want to calculate the velocity profile of fluid moving through a pipe, you don’t need to concern yourself with the “nearly infinite” number of molecules involved.

    Absolutely correct. At climate audit, I sometimes used to joke that I don’t really believe in molecules. . .

    Of course, I do believe in molecules, but if the continuum assumption works well, lots of problems can be solved without ever thinking about the existence of molecules. In those cases, I don’t think about molecules, and neither do most people.

15. As an evil denialist (actually a militant lukewarmist) I want to know if the 1,000 deaths that I am responsible for causing in the future have been discounted for fewer freezing deaths and fewer famine deaths due to the additional food produced from a longer growing season. Also, given the lack of warming over the last decade and the increased likelihood of a lower rate of global warming than projected, how many additional years out are my deaths? I mean if they are delayed long enough don’t I get a natural causes discount?
    Also, if we were to implement immediate draconian worldwide cutbacks in fossil fuel use it is undeniable that it would cause horrific economic losses, more poverty and concomitant deaths from famine, violence and disease. So if by being an evil denialist I have forestalled those deaths shouldn’t that also count against my 1,000 kills? How many net kills is Prof. Tobis advocating?
    I also don’t get all the emotionalism about the WIll article. Prominent alarmists did predict the disappearance of Arctic ice in 2008. They were in fact wrong. The Gore-like habit of overstating, over-hyping and misrepresenting the state of the science and the risks and costs is a stupid way to advance energy reform. Will’s point was carefully written and well-reasoned. It deserved a more mature, well-reasoned response than that which Prof. Tobis produced.

16. Wow… I am flabbergasted. Politically active scientists should perhaps return to science and forget about politics. The two seem to be mutually exclusive. I believe that these political meanderings must poison the critical thinking required for the scientific process. Especially those who purportedly predict, project, or forecast our future for the next hundred years must remain focused on science, not politics. It seems that the PolActScis are the most inept at public relations and the fine art of manipulation, so why not concentrate on one or the other?

    A couple of respectable scientists weigh in on the subject of forecasting:

    “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”
    –Nils Bohr, Nobel laureate in Physics

    ” I never think of the future, it comes soon enough. ”
    – Albert Einstein

17. Nathan [11006]

    Come on Nathan! Here we go again, more guns. Our host doesn’t fire guns she crochets/macrameses caps and slippers…

    You should really make an effort and try to get over my comments on the Monckton thread a couple of weeks ago.

    As politically incorrect as some may find this, an old code of ethics forbids men to use guns when dueling with women. Anyone familiar with the subject will attest that successfully dueling with women requires a set of entirely more subtle means….

    Besides, Shakespeare teaches us that men meet women early on misty mornings for entirely different reasons….

    And Tobis should move on to better weed. Whatever he’s smoking is messing up his brain.

18. Tetris, she may knit sweaters and slippers, but that doesn’t mean she’s not passive aggressive.
    Posts like this, on what is a partisan blog can only be viewed as an attack. Certainly it has prompted a lot of attacks from other bloggers here (like yourself).

19. tetris,
    I did once fire a gun. When I was an undergraduate, I went to the U.P. to ski at Iron Mountain. We stayed in a cabin owned by a co-workers of my mother’s. (His son was a fellow under-graduate)

    Anyway some of the guys brought some 22s (or some such). They persuaded me to shoot at an empty beer can. I actually hit it which amazed me and everyone. But the whole experience was noisy, boring, cold and generally pointless. So, I went in and made hot chocolate.

    The others who didn’t want to plink beer cans joined me.

20. Chad-

    It doesn’t seem to be analogous to a simple pipe flow problem here. Sun, land (and what’s covering it), ocean, atmospheric concentrations of gases, etc, are all dynamic. There are lots of feedbacks involved. If you’re going to compare it to a piping problem, it would be akin to a huge pipe network, with dynamic pipe diameters and roughness coefficients, dynamic water demands (outputs), dynamic water supplies (inputs) and storage, etc. And if we’re talking open-channel flows in pipes instead of pressure flows, things get really interesting really quickly.

    No, you don’t have to model every molecule…but it’s not so simple as a flow profile in a single pipe.

21. Michael–
    I don’t think Chad meant modeling climate is as simple as predicting pipe flow. He just meant to explain that we don’t need to track anything down to individual molecules.

22. While skeptics and alarmists both have trouble understanding the other side, there is one major difference I see. I’ve never heard of a prominent skeptic question the right of alarmists to have and express their own opinion. But there are many instances of alarmists calling for trials, and even prison sentences for skeptics, attacking academic freedom (the attack on Bjorn Lomborg was one example). I have seen any such totalitarian impulses on the skeptics side.

    Tobias of course doesn’t go so far as to say Revkin should be prosecuted, after all Tobias is only speculating that Revkin might be morally responsible for killing a 1000 unnamed people. But it certainly fits with the trend.

23. Nathan [11017]
    “prompted a lot of attacks from other bloggers here (like yourself).” Maybe you and Tobis should get together and start the new and improved “Superior Weed Co-Op” because scatter shot comments like that are pretty telling.

24. Lucia,
    I hate to say this, but it seems that the alarmists believe that if someone is a sceptic or a LUKEWARMER, they will vomit you out of their mouth.
    I guess you’re going to have to be silenced too. Do sceptics deserve prison? Maybe lukewarmers only need reeducation camps…
    Mike

    PS Dispassionate reason is to be avoided at all costs. There are a few examples here of the type of speech and advocacy you must adhere to.

25. Let us start from the beginning. There are three active climate reservoirs, the UPPER ocean above the thermocline, the atmosphere and the biosphere/soils. They are roughly the same size. Carbon interchanges between these three reservoirs in a period of a couple of years, put a pulse of carbon into one and it spreads to the others rapidly. The two slow reservoirs are the DEEP ocean and lithosphere. Interchange btw the upper and deep oceans takes ~ a thousand years or so. On longer scales the CO2 gets first incorporated into CaCO3 and then into igneous rocks on even longer time scales. Some knowledge of the carbon cycle is basic to discussion climate change. Your lame attempt to belittle Michael based on your not knowing this is a good indicator of your goal.

    Michael self identifies as a person working for a long time in climatology who is concerned with the consequences of business as usual to the poitn that he has become politically active on the issue. That is the “us” baby. you have a problem with that?

    If you want to know what the expected consequences of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations are go read WGII of the IPCC AR4 report. If you want it in pictures go look at Figure 2 in the summary for policymakers .

    Eli will give you a hint, if global temperature goes up by 2 C about 30% of all species will be at risk. At 4 C there will be a major wave of extinctions.

    At 2 C there will be increased damage from floods and storms. At 4 C we lose 30% of coastal wetlands.

    Those are conservative estimates.

26. Lucia re:(Comment#11008)

    So because you declare it not an attack, it isn’t? Are you claiming it was some sort of objective analysis?
    When you indulge in partisan analysis, it is difficult to see anything that you write as anything other than an attack, despite the slippers.

27. Lucia [11018]
    Your OT. Firearms are nothing more than tools. Like a hammer, the purpose of which is to enable you to efficiently put a nail into e.g. a 2×4, a firearm is a tool designed to efficiently kill. Hammers don’t put nails into a 2×4, the carpenter does. And by extension, as much as the politically correct among us don’t like this, guns don’t kill game [or people for that matter] it is the person looking through the sights and his/her hand on the trigger.
    I hunt for the freezer. Superb meat and you can’t get anymore organic than that… And I do enjoy target shooting. It is difficult to convey, but there is a truly zen element to target shooting when after much exercise you achieve your “bubble” on the range and put three rounds in succession through the same hole [.22 = 5.5mm] in the target at 50 yards. The same thing goes for the deer or moose. Shot placement is the one and only thing that counts: one shot only, and the animal never knows what hit it. Unless you are confident the bullet is going to go where it is intended, don’t squeeze the trigger.
    Cool, calm and collected: early one misty morning…. 🙂

28. Nathan,
    And this statement:
    “I’ve been reading the various criticisms of Revkin. I have concluded that the trouble with Revkin’s critics is simple: they are incoherent. ”
    what is this? You decide they are incoherent and that’s all? Then give one example?

    Nathan, did you read Professor Tobis’ position statement? Do you believe that was an example of clear, concise well-reasoned prose? Enough said.
    Mike Bryant

29. Eli [11026]
    The Argos data of the past 5-6 years is starting to tell us a lot about ocean temperatures from the surface down to 6000 ft. There is no warming “hiding” there. That is a long past its best-before-date “explanation”. It is very difficult to quarrel with “unadjusted” data derived from several thousands of sonds with unmatched spacial distribution.

    And since we have been given to understand elsewhere in the blogosphere that you teach at an institution of higher learning, could you please give us, the great unwashed, your considered explanation as to why a rise from 380 ppmv [it might be said in passing, one of the lowest CO2 concentrations on the geological record, matched only by the Carboniferous Period 175 million years ago] to say 500 ppmv should deterministically cause us all to fry by 2100. How about the Cambrian, Jurassic, etc., etc. when the earth had CO2 concentrations of 2500, 4000 or 7000 ppmv and temperatures not significantly higher than we have today? Please proceed.

30. Tobis, just admit that you should be sending your essays to lucia prior to publishing them. But that kind of editorial skill comes at a hefty price. You owe her a plate of damn fine brownies.

31. Eli [11026]
    “Interchange btw the upper and deep oceans takes ~ a thousand years or so.”

    Dear Eli,
    this argument I heard before,
    wonder how this could be,
    uppers x’change we can’t ignore
    great anual flux we see.

    Even C13-depletion studies seem to be able to track the CO2-dumping process, there is a significant interchange between these two reservoirs every year. AFIK Craig(1957) estimated a time constant of about 8 years for this exchange.

    All the best,
    LoN

32. #11026
    “baby”??!!
    lucia tries to help Tobis improve his critical thinking and writing, and this is her reward? Tobis needs help, dude. (And so do you, apparently.)

33. #11026
    “Those are conservative estimates.”
    Really? You could be right. What’s the uncertainty on your “estimates”? How do you divine that they are “conservative”? Show your calculations please.

34. I think Revkin’s critics are showing themselves to be even more troubled than what lucia describes. That style of fundamentalist appeal to authority is never going to convince a rational person to change their behavior. If you’re serious about your cause you better start arguing rationally instead of dismissing as a sick denier every person you disagree with.

35. Bender,
    This essentially has nothing to do with Revkin,
    It’s about a conflict between Roger Pielke Jnr and Michael Tobis. Lucia here is just doing what she normally does and weighs in to support the ‘no action’ side.
    She’s keeping you all on side… It’s called Dog-whistling.

36. Nathan,
    1. Where have I suggested this was about Revkin? It’s about Revkin’s critics.
    2. Where has lucia advocated “no action”? I don’t recall seeing that written on the blackboard. What I’ve seen her advocate is careful and thoughtful analysis. But maybe I missed something.

37. lucia dog-whistling to keep bender onside? You are truly delusional.

38. Rabbett’s ocean mixing lecture was unnecessary – if you actually read what lucia wrote. Another problem with Revkin critics: prone to making presumptions, pretending people said things they didn’t, lecturing, proselytizing, playing gotcha on points that are irrelevant to the argument.

    lucia asked Tobis to clarify what were these “other perturbations” that he referred to. Did he do that? No. Another problem with Revkin critics: they dodge issues when a simple answer would do so much to prevent heated, unenlightened debate. lucia was suggesting Tobis strive for clarity. I think that’s good advice.

39. Bender,
    apologies I meant the post has nothing to do with Revkin’s Critics. It is only about the discussion between Roger PielkeJr and Michael Tobis.

    And yes, she dog whistles to keep up the energy levels of no-action people.

    “What I’ve seen her advocate is careful and thoughtful analysis.”
    yes, of one side of the debate. Hers is a partisan blog.

40. Bender

    “2. Where has lucia advocated “no action”? ”

    does Global Luke-warming ring any bells?

41. bender [11041]

    Based on what Nathan has posted on The Blackboard over the past while, this is unfortunately par for the course.

    Since he actually accuses our host of “standing with a gun” [11006], I would say you are correct, he is delusional. In that context, pls see my suggestion to him at [11024].

    As Nathan is so into referring to guns, he might want to tell us which combination he prefers: “side by side” or “over and under”.

42. 
    

    could you please give us, the great unwashed, your considered explanation as to why a rise from 380 ppmv [it might be said in passing, one of the lowest CO2 concentrations on the geological record, matched only by the Carboniferous Period 175 million years ago] to say 500 ppmv should deterministically cause us all to fry by 2100. How about the Cambrian, Jurassic, etc., etc. when the earth had CO2 concentrations of 2500, 4000 or 7000 ppmv and temperatures not significantly higher than we have today? Please proceed.

    I suspect the reason why you can have comparable temperatures now and millions of years ago despite dramatic differences in CO2 concentration is because the Sun, since its formation, has been putting out more radiation as time goes by. According to this:

    “during the Carboniferous, about 300 million years ago, when the first dinosaurs appeared and tropical vegetation grew abundantly, it was about 2.5% less than today.”

    According to Wikipedia, during the Carboniferous period, CO2 concentrations were at about 800 ppm and the surface temperature was same as today. Perhaps 2.5% less radiation + 3x as much CO2 (relative to pre-industrial level) explains the same temperatures.

43. Tetris,
    How nice of you to mis-quote me so eloquently!
    If you read what I said you will find it’s what’s called a “metaphor” I know it’s a big word…

44. Eli [11026] ref: tetris [11032]

    We are all waiting with baited breath…

    Hint: Phil Jones’ [@ HADCRU] song and dance to the effect that La Ninas somehow have been “masking” AGW and that the flat lining since 1998 and the increasing downward slope in the global temp trend since 2003 are only an interruption of sorts in the inexorable man-made CO2 driven global fry-up that “models” predict for 2100, is complete and utter drivel. El Ninos and La Ninas are integral parts of the climatic system and therefore can not account for anything as “forcing” variables.

45. Hey tetris,
    A quick back of the envelope calculation shows what I said in my last comment is plausible. See the wiki page on radiative forcing. The change in solar forcing due to a decrease of 2.5% is (1367 W/m^2)*0.7*-0.025/4 = -5.98 W/m^2. The change in forcing due to CO2 concentrations 3x their pre-industrial level is 5.35*ln(3) (W/m^2) = 5.88 W/m^2. So both changes in forcing nearly cancel each other out.

46. Lucia, Laymen like me depend on fair-minded and rational people like you and Anthony Watts to debase (Arthur Koestler’s word) difficult science to our level of comprehension.
    But I’ve grown so bored with two groups of supposed scientists slagging each other off with a ferocity that is clearly more religious than rational. George Will may be mistaken but at least he’s literate; do we have to bother with some scientist who writes English according, so far as one can guess, to the rules of Urdu grammar?

47. Nathan [11047]
    There is no “mis-quote”. Pls refer to your own entry. You seem not to have enjoyed the training of those who subjected themselves to the rigours of a debating club. Always keep in mind what you argued.
    Fact is: [11006] ” We hear gunshots ring out and Lucia is standing with a gun”. That is one mighty accusation. Bender is right: you’re delusional. Go get some help.

48. Tetris, you can mis-quote someone be leaving out details… So you still mis-quoted me.
    Oh and spare me you ‘debating club’ Skillz. Good grief.

49. Chad [11046 and 11049]
    Thx for the rejoinders. Given what has been demonstrated beyond any discussion about the rigorous dogmatic pro-AGW/ACC gate keeping at Wiki, the source has lost any credibility as a reference for anything related to the subject matter [both the gate keepers/”moderators” and their affiliations are now a matter of public record].

    As far as your argument about the sun’s radiation influence over the eons is concerned, maybe Lucia could get Leif Svalgaard to comment [here or on another thread].

50. Nathan [11053]

    I don’t know who you are and what your background is, but you truly don’t get, do you?

    If what you wrote about Lucia [as quoted above] were read back to a jury, and you, while under oath and in cross-examination [the pleasures of which you clearly also have not enjoyed] denied having made those statements, you would be crucified for perjury. Go get some help.

51. re Eli (or Josh H.?) and his conservative estimate. Would that be as conservative as (M.Tobis’) Mr. Gore?

52. Kazinski (Comment#11021) March 3rd, 2009 at 10:18 pm

    While skeptics and alarmists both have trouble understanding the other side, there is one major difference I see. I’ve never heard of a prominent skeptic question the right of alarmists to have and express their own opinion.

    Where’ve you been? Have you missed all the calls for Hansen’s head, for example, because he testified as an expert witness on climate change at a UK trial (where, as it happens, the defendants were found not guilty)? Do you not think that calling for someone to lose their job because they express their judgment is demanding an infringment of their rights?

    By the way, I have no reason to think that you are a sceptic and you have no reason to think that I am an alarmist.

53. she may knit sweaters and slippers, but that doesn’t mean she’s not passive aggressive

    Interesting. I remember myself weighing years ago into an emotional message board debate with some facts and also getting labeled as passive-aggressive. Must be some pattern there…

54. Rabett wrote: > Michael self identifies as a person working for a long time in climatology who is concerned with the consequences of business as usual to the poitn [sic] that he has become politically active on the issue. That is the “us” baby. you have a problem with that?

    Yes, for obvious reasons, none of which have a thing to do with your atrocious syntax. To begin with, laissez faire is the diametric opposite of this business-as-usual baloney you never tire of talking about, insofar as business-as-usual implies a stasis. But laissez faire, through the implementation of pure freedom and the incentives that grow naturally out of that, creates the exact opposite: it constantly progresses; and for this reason the whole business-as-usual bunk, which Hansen popularized and the rest of you groupies made into a veritable cliche, discloses in full the depths of your economic illiteracy. (Just for the record: in the last twelve years alone, over 51,000 new laws have been put on the books; so the business-as-usual you’re both concerned about need not concern you after all: in fact, business is being strangulated out of existence.)

    Laissez faire, by definition, produces what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. That term refers to the inevitable transformation that comes through innovation. Innovation comes through the advancement of knowledge, which in turn comes through the human mind mind unfettered. Reason does not function by coercion but by choice. Coercion — be it direct, as in battery, or indirect, as in expropriation or taxation — is the antithesis of reason. Only a fool could look back upon the last 200 years of this country’s history and call that unprecedented explosion of technological growth business-as-usual.

    Only a fool in the throes of cognitive dissonance could observe how in less than two centuries this country went from whale oil to the discovery of energy inside the nucleus of the atom and call that business-as-usual.

    Only someone who can’t see beyond his leftist agenda could look back at the discoveries and inventions of Thomas Newcomen, James Watt, James Hargreaves, Samuel Crompton, A.L. Bowley, Eli Whitney, G.H. Wood, J.H. Chapham, Cornelius Vanderbilt, James Hill, John Wilkinson, Dr. Robert Koch, Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, John Roebling, William Lebaron Jenney, Louis Sullivan Nikola Tesla, William Proctor, James Gamble, Fred Maytag, Elias Howe, Isaac Merritt Singer, George Westinghouse, Charles and Frank Duryea, Henry Ford, Clinton Peterkin, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Charles Steinmetz, Willis Carrier, Robert Goddard, Edwin Howard Armstrong, Philo T. Farnsworth, George Washington Carver, David Sarnoff, and hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of others, and call those inventions and discoveries business-as-usual. And if you do, what’ s your referent, since it’s unprecedented in world history?

    Only an utter fool could ignore the freedom that fostered and nourished those inventions and discoveries.

    In fact, that type of mentality is what philosophers call a concrete-bound mentality, which is not to be confused with a blockhead, although in Rabett’s case both terms do apply.

    Rabett would have you believe that a bureau of centralized planners, with their attendant army of special-interest, is more expedient than the human mind unfettered at solving technological problems.

    Rabett would have you accept the fact that the state should regulate industry, and the federal government has legitimate primacy over your property.

    Because they’re “concerned with business as usual,” Rabett and Tobis would have you simply accept the fact that complex economies are to be determined not by the free market and the voluntary exchange of goods and services, but by bureaucratic decree and rule by special interest, despite the fact that it’s impossible for a bureau of energy czars to plan complex economies.

    Rabett would have you believe that government bureaucrats are so smart, so efficient, so impervious to interests other than those of our imperiled planet that they, these bureaucrats, not free human beings, are whom we should put our trust in, the inalienable right to property be hanged.

    Rabett, in other words, would have you believe that the right to property (money, never forget, is property) isn’t, after all, inalienable, but rather may be transferred or even revoked at any time by governmental decree.

    Presumably, Rabett would also have you ignore or forget the fact that over 97 percent (that’s a conservative estimate) of species that have existed on planet earth went extinct before Homo sapiens sapiens ever emerged onto the scene.

    Rabett would have you ignore the incontrovertible fact that the free market voluntarily, through technological advances and competition, reduced air pollution, and did so long before the so-called Clean Air Act of 1970.

    Quoting the EPA:

    “From 1950 until 1970, the amount of volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide in the nation’s air fell by more than 20 percent, even though total vehicle-miles traveled in the country rose by 120 percent, from 458 billion to 1.1 trillion. The level of sulfur dioxide in the air began falling as far back as 1920, and the total amount of airborne particulate matter has been reduced by 79 percent since 1940.”

    He would have you ignore the fact that after nearly forty years of regulation “the EPA is still unable to produce evidence that its efforts have independently improved air quality” (Dr. Thomas Dilorenzo).

    Rabett would evidently have you forget that technological problems require technological solutions, that the human mind unfettered is, by light years, more capable of dealing with technological problems than any elite bureau of politicians, and laissez faire, with its vast technological superiority (via the profit motive), is the only political system that’s able to provide those technological solutions, as history has proven time and again.

    Because Rabett, like his man Bill McKibben, doesn’t understand economics, he’s incapable of grasping the fact that as long the capital base of a society remains limited, the means to deal with societal issues necessarily remains limited — which is why underdeveloped countries (where, incidentally, fewer people drive cars) are more polluted, use dirtier, less efficient fuels, and destroy more woods and wetlands than industrial countries — and that production and production alone is responsible for the creation of wealth.

    It’s called Say’s Law.

    Nuclear power, the cleanest, most abundant, and most ingenious form of energy we’ve yet discovered, is for all intents and purposes forbidden by environmentalists and their lobby groups; so that over a thirty-year time-span, these anti-nuclear groups have brought the world 400 million more tons of coal used per year, because for thirty years now, since 1979, following the Three Mile Island accident, we’ve been using more coal. The government bureaucracy and rule by special interest, which Rabett would have us put our trust in, has in this way directly and demonstrably caused more pollution, and it has done so by stupendous amounts, which the free market, through its natural adoption of the most efficient option (what Hansen and Rabett call business-as-usual) would have abolished long ago, had laissez-faire capitalism been permitted to operate as it by definition will: freely.

    So, yes, Rabett, I agree: let us start from the beginning. Now, then, get yourself back to the drawingboard, friend.

55. One thing is abundantly clear – the frequency and ferocity of storms in teacups is accelerating unprecedentedly…

56. Eli–
    Thanks for confirming my observation that Michael’s reservoirs must include atmosphere and ocean. So, you say that word choice also includes the biosphere. So, given the precise meaning of his choice of the word “reservoirs”, are we to infer he is concerned here is too much carbon stored in trees? I’d sort of assumed he really only meant the atmosphere and ocean. Thanks for clarifying that for us!

    Now, since you’ve clarified too much carbon in “reservoirs” could be read to mean there is too much carbon stored in trees, can you move on to explaining what a perturbation is?

    Nathan–
    Both Roger and I support action to reduce CO2 emmissions. I’d like co2 plants replaced by nukes. Roger has discussed many possible actions.

    bender–
    I think there are some people who actually believe that the way Gore behaves will increase the amount of support for action.

    I believe otherwise. This is why I applaude Revkin for his article, which, references a paper explaining how Gore’s tendency to rely on crisis-and-calamity errors combined with occasionally taking walks the “false” side of that fine line separating “true and untrue” will discourage action.

    I was particularly ipressed with the end of Revkin’s articles, which said this:

    “In a paper being published in the March-April edition of the journal Environment, Matthew C. Nisbet, a professor of communications at American University, said Mr. Gore’s approach, focusing on language of crisis and catastrophe, could actually be serving the other side in the fight.

    “There is little evidence to suggest that it is effective at building broad-based support for policy action,” Dr. Nisbet said. “Perhaps worse, his message is very easily countered by people such as Will as global-warming alarmism, shifting the focus back to their preferred emphasis on scientific uncertainty and dueling expert views.”

    But Dr. Nisbet said that for Mr. Will, there was little downside in stretching the bounds of science to sow doubt.

    Criticism of Mr. Will’s columns, Dr. Nisbet said, “only serves to draw attention to his claims while reinforcing a larger false narrative that liberals and the mainstream press are seeking to censor rival scientific evidence and views.”’

    One of the problems with those criticizing Revkin is they seem overly worried that Will and Gore’s recent activities were discussed in the same article. This may have distracted them from understanding the actual point Revkin made.

57. Gore’s NAAS speech is available here:

    http://www.aaas.org/meetings/2009/program/lectures/media/gore.ram

    Pielke Jr said (my bold):

    In his speech Gore attributed a wide range of recent weather events to human-caused climate change including floods in Iowa, Hurricane Ike, and the Australian bush fires.

    http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/not-a-peep-from-scientists-4962

    Can anyone tell me at what point of the video Gore attributed these specific events to anthropogenic warming?

    Pielke Jr went on to describe this as:

    “being blatantly misled with scientific untruths”

    Can anyone tell me at what points Gore makes untruthful statements?

    Pielke Jr in his most recent post states:

    “We also concluded that climate change and variability influence disaster losses”.

    http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/another-response-to-joe-romm-5023

    Indeed so. What, then, is Pielke’s point? Gore did not use the word ‘attribute’ and nor did he use the word ‘influence’. As far as I can see, the untruths are in what Pielke wrote, not in what Gore said. Are they “blatantly misleading” on Pielke’s part? Well, his statements certainly misled me until I had watched Gore’s speech for myself. Therefore, I can understand people getting angry about Pielke Jr’s statements.

58. Tetris– Wikipedia is at least sometimes right! Chad is, in my opinion fair in evaluation of things.

59. Simon–
    You are correct that many call out for Hansen’s head for speaking out. Hansens’s speech is apparantly legally complicated. Hansen is a public employee. So, this article discusses a recent court case (there have been many on this issue):

    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/washington/30cnd-scotus.html?ex=1306641600&en=81ba57da99c33dc9&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

    Among other things, it says:

    In a 5-to-4 decision, the court held that public employees’ free-speech rights are protected when they speak out as citizens on matters of public concern, but not when they speak out in the course of their official duties.

    I think there was a story where Hansen used NASA letterhead, which is stepping past the bounds of permissible. See:

    http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/hodge_podge/001392bonehead_moves_of_th.html

    When Hansen does things on his own nickle, his own time etc. I think he’s on the right side of the law. But… being from Illinois ….(I think you heard of our most recent former governor?)…. I could easily explain why we have laws prohibiting public employees from political activities when on the job!

    After criticism for the letterhead incident Hansen seems to be more careful. Still, I think there are many who don’t understand the distinction between Hansen acting privately and Hansen acting as a NASA representative.

60. Lucia,

    The matter of Hansen’s testimony at the trial of the Kingsnorth Six is not a simple matter of a citizen’s rights to free speech. He was called as an expert witness. I would hazard the guess that a good proportion of expert witnesses testifying at trials are public employees (I can’t say what arrangements are made with employers when, for example, a publicly employed pathologist testifies at a trial, but I do take the view that objecting to the expertise of public employees being called upon represents a perilous challenge to the justice system). Hansen’s testimony was not a “political activity” (as for the letterhead incident, I’ll accept your view of that).

    Taking your example of Blagojevich, I don’t know the details, but is it not possible that there were state employees who testified at the Senate trial?

61. Thin king man,
    A voice of reason…

62. My advice for dealing with the unhinged rants of Mr. Tobis is to give him a very large megaphone, and let *** everyone *** hear his manifesto! Please – go on CNN and proclaim your wisdom to the world!

63. I make it a policy, though, not to name people who are being disingenuous.

    I have no such policy, so you can start with Heartland and you can move on down to the Watts’ of the world and then on up(?) to the Pielkes.

64. Les Johnson (Comment#10998) March 3rd, 2009 at 6:17 pm

    “I do believe that it’s well-established that deliberate and malicious misrepresentation of the evidence exists and is responsible for the huge distance between reasonable policy and actual policy.”

    I would love to see this evidence. After 10 years of considerable research, I have found no “deliberate and malicious misrepresentation”. On either side of the debate.

    Well, here’s a possible example that you may have missed, as covered on this blog:

    http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/monckton-bullet-list-version/

    I’d say definitely a misrepresentation and certainly deliberate. I won’t make a call on ‘malicious’, so perhaps you’re right – maybe such deliberate misrepresentations are well-intentioned!

    Perhaps the falsification of graphs and other misrepresentations in “The Great Global Warming Swindle” were also done with the best interests of others at heart? And so on…

    2. Gore’s presentations, especially AIT, are riddled with errors. CO2 precedes warming?

    If you mean in the ice core records, that would certainly be a serious error. Where did Gore ever say that C02 change in that period precedes warming? I think that you are in error on this, Les, not Gore.

65. Simon–
    On Blago: I’m sure state employees will testify at Blago’s trial! They did at former Governor Ryan’s. He’s in the “former governors mansion” now. A guest of The State, if you catch my drift.

    I agree that Hansen’s testimony at any trial are not a simple matter. I doubt he could be fired for that. I’d be very surprised if testimony in American courts would endager his job (unless possibly he was hired. But that’s not a free speech matter.) I’d be pretty surprised if testimony in foreign courts is a problem– but I’m not a lawyer.

    At the rally, Hansen didn’t wear NASA gear, make references to NASA etc. So, that all looks okie-dokie to me.

    I’m not calling for Hansens’s firing over these things. As a matter of policy, I

    a) don’t want the sorts of pressures we’ve seen in Illinois were people are specifically given jobs with the provision they do campaign for the cause of the elected officials giving out jobs,

    b) I also don’t want people who have public jobs to be prevented from speaking out on political issues of their own volition

    and

    c) Hansen is clearly not an example of someone given a job as an inducement to organize political events like the recent coal protest. So, prohibiting his speech would mostly fall in (b).

    I think it was a mistep the time he used NASA letterhead, but I’d hardly take off his head for one use.

    Anthony’s discussed the Hatch act… but I don’t know how that applies. (Here’s one discussion: http://www.answers.com/topic/hatch-act-1 )

    While I don’t support a number of Hansens’s actions– many of which I consider counter productive to negotiating actions– I don’t think he should be fired for appearing in court, participating in a coal march etc.

66. Boris–
    How is Heartland disingenuous? The openly fund their seminars, and state their purpose. I don’t understand your reasoning for adding the others to your list either.

67. lucia, no need to clarify your position to me. I have been following long enough to know that you’re a rationalist. You think weak arguments (Tobis, Rabbett, several posting here now) undermine the case for action. I think you’re right. Give Tobis a megaphone and put him on CNN. Yep, that’d do it.

68. Simon–
    It’s no secret I think Monkton’s presentation is distorted.

    But is he responsible for “responsible for the huge distance between reasonable policy and actual policy”?

    Out of curiosity, is Monkton heavily funded? For that matter, is Singer? (When Singer visited Argonne, I suggested dinner and tried to discrete figure out any source of funding. If there is a big pot from any organized group, he didn’t reveal it to me! As far as I can tell, he solicits private donations. He’s gotten relatively small amounts form Heartland for specific activities. Heartland seems to fund a large variety of things– but they also don’t seem all that big.)

    The reason I like to see people name names is it’s the only way to evaluate whether there is some sort of organized conspiracy or whether it’s actually working.

    I know Monckton a speaker at the Heartland conference. But does Monckton have a significant influence on policy and thought? Do newspapers cover his stuff?

    I haven’t seen the Swindle. I guess I should check Netflix to see if it’s a available. I’d have to watch it to express any opinion.

    One the Gore and “CO2 precedes warming”, I think Gore presented material in an incomplete manner that mislead about the issue. But, he didn’t actually say temperatures lag CO2.

    The manner of the presentation was carefully staged– as commensurate with the high budget for the film. Like it or not, where people like Tobis think Gore ” is constantly treading a fine line between effective politics and truthful description of risks”, I think that by often overstepping that line, leaving out important details, not explaining short comings to his argument, Gore says things that may not be technically accurate, but which are misleading as to the strength of his case. People notice this, sense a “used care salesman” aspect and, some, become suspicious of him. The result is Gore makes himself politically ineffective.

    This isn’t a value judgment: the empirical evidence suggests the way Gore presented the CO2 graphs and information has fostered doubt in Gore as a source of information. Whether these doubt are fair or unfair, they exist. By sowing seeds of doubt, Gore’s presentation was ineffective at encouraging action.

    But, I think Gore’s bigger shortcoming has been not coming out in direct favor of encouraging replacing coal baseload with Nuclear baseload capacity and limiting discussion to solar, wind and conservation only. If Gore came out in favor of Nuclear energy, promoted it frequently, and appeared to be sincere in his support, I think he might convince some detractors that he really believes we need to reduce CO2. Of course, I could be incorrect.

69. I think Will’s arguements are considerably faster and looser with the facts in this particular instance. For example, while Gore may gloss over the complexities between temperature and carbon concentrations during glacial cycles, he is largely correct that the covariance tells us something about the magnitude of radiative forcing from CO2. Will, on the other hand, picks two points in noisy global sea ice data and pretends its a trend. I have an article coming out on the subject later today, but here are the points WIll chooses to highlight in light of the whole dataset:

    http://twitpic.com/img/1u9dg-321e9855813a0143241d260a8db87fa8.49ae9e67.png

    That said, I do agree with Revkin that advocates like Gore who constantly stress the worst (and most uncertain) possible outcomes set themselves up for whiplash journalism when it turns out that one of their dire scenarios was incorrect. People see a new Webster or Emanuel paper that says that maybe there won’t be more hurricanes in a warming world, and they start to doubt even the uncontroversial things Gore says (e.g. the radiative forcing of CO2) because he presented the hurricane relationship with no uncertainty or caveats. I’ve had a number of conversations with Revkin on how science journalists can do a better job of conveying the relative certainty on climate issues: what the vast majority of folks agree on, and where there is still considerable uncertainty.

70. #11079
    There is no uncertainty to speak of. You are simply trying to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of activists. Shameful planet-hater. Your mother earth bleeds tears for your sick soul.

71. Lucia,

    I don’t know much of interest about funding for Monckton or Singer or others – but anyway I’m not suggesting that Monckton has misrepresented because he’s being paid to do so. I would guess that he is very convinced of his points of view, and that conviction has led to his ‘overstating the facts of the matter’, shall we say. This can happen on both sides, of course (as you feel is the case with Gore – and btw, I’ve said elsewhere that I think ‘AIT’ exaggerates the sense of imminence of multi-metre sea level rise). That was the point of my response, really – people emphasise whichever side of the contradiction they are presenting, so let’s not delude ourselves that any side is immune.

    I don’t think there’s an ‘organised conspiracy’ as such, but I am inclined to feel that opposition to AGW analysis is stimulated amongst many (not all) by ideological conviction rather than scientific disinterest. Of course, others think that is equally and oppositely true of AGW ‘proponents’ (as a matter of fact, I think that it is true amongst some anarchist groups who see AGW as a conveniently-evil manifestation of capitalism – but then I don’t think such groups are really very significant). Insofar as the matter is fought over ideologically, we thus gather more heat than light.

72. Hmm, looks like twitterpic doesn’t really work for hosting photos. Lets see if this one works:

    
    http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j237/hausfath/FigureThree.png

73. Zeke–
    Based on what I have read about the specifics of Will mistakes, it does appear that Will’s case about the ice hinged on connecting dots between points on two specific days. That’s wrong– as most of us here know. I think Will may need a scientific advisor to explain why that would be wrong even if the ice extent on Day N of 1979 was somewhat higher than the ice extent on Day N of 2008.

    Clearly, Will needs to read some blogs because not making conclusions by connecting simply comparing end points is something you, I, Tamino, SteveM, the majority of Anthony Watts readers, …. & etc. all agree on. It does appear Will does not understand this, I’d be happy to explain that to him. It looks like you beat me to it though. 🙂

    You can’t do that. It’s dumb. Dumber than than glossing over the CO2 lag issue which is at least a little complicated.

    I’d gathered Will was under the impression that on the day he looked the ice extent (or concentration? which?) for 2008 shown at the source he used was higher than on the same day in 1979. I hadn’t tracked down the specific dates for Will used, but it looks like you did. Good graph.

    I agree with Revkin and you on the difficulties with Gore’s presentation style. Revkin does a good job. It’s sad to see Revkin catching flack for pointing out that Gore’s presentation style has serious shortcomings.

    Journalists like Revkin do a good job. Unfortunately, Gore is very prominent, and his choice of strategy often distracts people from those presenting arguments that are more persuasive to those who stand in the middle ground.

74. From the exchange at Prometheus, I see some more trouble with at least one of Revkin’s critics (Tobis):
    -opacity, obscurity of language
    -evasiveness
    -combativeness
    -unwillingness to admit error
    -self-indulgence
    -long-windedness
    -lack of editorial diligence

    No wonder he’s so prone to being misunderstood. This guy is a professor! Yikes!

75. Re 11063

    “Author: lucia

    Eli–
    Thanks for confirming my observation that Michael’s reservoirs must include atmosphere and ocean. So, you say that word choice also includes the biosphere. So, given the precise meaning of his choice of the word “reservoirs”, are we to infer he is concerned here is too much carbon stored in trees? I’d sort of assumed he really only meant the atmosphere and ocean. Thanks for clarifying that for us!

    Now, since you’ve clarified too much carbon in “reservoirs” could be read to mean there is too much carbon stored in trees, can you move on to explaining what a perturbation is?”

    Lucia, is this really you?

    This is astonishing. You have a blog on the subject of climate change and happily critique others, and yet you really don’t know the first thing about the carbon cycle?

    To answer: Yes, trees are part of the fast reservoirs. No, it’s not a problem that there are too many trees. Yes, there is too much carbon in the fast reservoirs. How these generally accepted propositions (at least among people who have spent a few hours dispassionately contemplating the carbon cycle) might be consistent is left as an exercise for the astute reader.

    Is it really too much to ask people who want to enter a debate to know the first thing about the topic at hand?

76. QED

77. Bill Illis (Comment#11003) March 3rd, 2009 at 7:20 pm

    … it seems to me that it is the global warming sceptical side which is examining the evidence and the facts and it is the pro-AGW side which is just relying on the climate models and the simple physics calculations (and ocassionally, some exagerated evidence).

    Hmm – in a way I agree that is an impression that can be gained from reviewing the blogosphere. The ‘sceptic’ blogs have been more efficient, IMV, in driving their perceptions. There is no site equivalent to WUWT, for example, posting several articles a day that are selected in pursuit of its agenda (if nothing else crops up, a quick article on it snowing somewhere will always do). However, I do not agree that this is for lack of hard evidence to post about! Even a regular review of ‘Science Daily’ will show that’s not so. For example, this important research on oceanic ‘seesaw’ was reported yesterday:

    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090225132239.htm

    The paper is ‘Interhemispheric Atlantic seesaw response during the last deglaciation’.

    I don’t know of this having been blogged about, even though it is powerful evidence in support of previous analysis suggesting that past abrupt climate changes of this kind have represented regional warming/cooling balanced out by opposite changes elsewhere. The antithesis of WUWT would have had a story up on this for sure (arguing maybe that it supports the concept of any MWP being only regional, and so on).

    A second example – I referred on the last Open Thread here to Dessler’s recent paper on water vapour feedback, again very powerful ‘AGW evidence’. Has it been blogged about by the ‘warmers’? Maybe I’ve missed it – but I did come across a reference on Roy Spencer’s blog –

    While I have believed for years that water vapor feedback might be negative, I will admit the latest evidence is looking more and more like the real story could on the reflected solar side instead.

    http://www.drroyspencer.com/

    (I quote selectively, of course! It’s quite amusing that ‘I will admit I was wrong’ turns into ‘I will admit I could be right about something else instead’ 😉 ).

    Now, imagine if you will what a WUWT-antithesis site would have made not only of the Dressler paper but also of Roy Spencer’s words above!

    A third example – the recent paper on western tree death rates having doubled over thirty years, and this being explicitly attributed to GW –

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/22/trees-death-global-warming

    How much has been made in the blogosphere of that thumping piece of evidence? …..unless I’ve missed it…..

    So, I agree that the ‘warmist side’ is not playing a clever game (I know that’s not quite what you meant). It would be much, much more effective to be hammering home the copious scientific work that keeps appearing on a daily basis, rather than being drawn into cat-fights which serve no purpose other than to suggest there’s something worth arguing about (which, in the case of Will’s article, I think there was not – a simple statement of its inadequacy would have been enough).

78. Simon

    That was the point of my response, really – people emphasise whichever side of the contradiction they are presenting, so let’s not delude ourselves that any side is immune.

    Agreed.

    With regard to myself, I know that the contradiction I see is that some prominent AGW-activists voices often resort to exaggerating the certainty of crisis, vagueness about the specifics of consensus– so as to imply consensus is for more catastrophic scenarios, underplay uncertainties in our ability to predict, allege mysterious well funded conspiracies, and post emotion laden rants criticizing well respected journalists who will report more balanced positions.

    I see this sort of behavior as stalling action. I’m not the only one who believes the behavior delays action.

    So, when I see these sorts of counterproductive behaviors, I discuss them. (I admit I do I skip some rants because the problem commenting on some things is like trying to nail jello to the wall.)

    I know it means that I discuss these things more often than I discuss problems in stuff by someone like Will. But here’s the thing: I don’t almost never read George Will’s stuff. He could report that global warming is caused by a coven of particularly talented group of wizards led by Merlin himself, and I wouldn’t know of it until after it had been rebutted by others.

79. This is a bunch of people (MT in particular) who find it more emotionally satisfying to stand around having hysterics in public, than to actually specify what sorts of action must be taken to get CO2 ppm back under 300 within 20 years. Or whatever other targets you would like to pick.

    I’m not saying this is a reasonable thing to do, just that if the matter is as serious as they say, lets see a program which is commensurate with the problem and which will actually solve it. Not a properly worked out one either. Just some kind of sketch of what the main things are that we have to do.

    Start with the Chinese coal fired power stations, that are opening at the rate of one per week. What, if anything, do you propose doing about them? Move on to the California Freeway system and the LIE. What exactly do you propose to do about them, and by when?

    Stop emoting and start designing. Or shut up.

80. Michael–
    What do you think I don’t know?

    You used a word “reservoir” which conveys a collection of things. I wanted to know what you meant by that specific word.

    When I read what you wrote, I assumed you meant the atmosphere and ocean, but not the biosphere. But, Eli jumped in to explain your use of “reservoir” includes biosphere, which includes trees, soils etc. I assumed you didn’t mean that, right? It appears that by “reservoir” you meant “some of reservoirs but not others”.

    When I wrote my post, I chose not to write a two paragraph speculation about what you might mean, and left it as a question.

    Thanks for clarifying Eli’s answer “what’s a reservoir?” It appears you meant this word to convey: “the subset of reservoirs that contain too much carbon, but excluding the subset of reservoirs like trees which do not contain too much carbon”.

    So, now that we know what you mean by a reservoir, what’s a perturbation? Is this going to turn out to be “something that a readers should be able to guess by finding a definition that makes an iota of sense in context”?

81. Lucia –

    I think your post at 11063 is one of the very few on this whole sordid affair that actually points to the primary issue as I see it – The critics of Revkin just entirely missed the entire thesis of his article, i.e., that hyperbole and/or half-truths hurt more than help a cause. It seems that once they saw Gore and Will in the same article, they interpreted Revkin’s article through a very narrow lense without paying attention to the whole.

    When I read Revkin’s article, I did not interpret it in anyway as equating Gore and Will or implying that their transgressions were equivalent. Rather, I read the first paragraph that said to effect that hypebole can hurt rather than help your cause and then read the Gore and Will paragraphs as examples of such. Revkin noted immediately that Gore when notified of concerns with the data he presented immediately withdrew the questionable slide, while noting that Will made no such concession.

    Despite what Michael Tobis or Joe Romm or a host of other might say, I do believe that a reasonable person can conclude that Al Gore has engaged in hyperbole and a focus on catastrophe in an effort to promote action on CO2 emissions. Similarly, a reasonable person knows from whence George Will comes (i.e., conservatism) and knows that, since he is a political columnist, he will spin the information for his story. (and honestly, the biggest thing wrong with his opinion piece was the misleading (or plain wrong) statements regarding sea ice.)

    In summary, I think the attacks on Revkin are misguided and missed the point – that very often hyperbole does hurt rather than help develop broad-based support for action on curbing CO2 emissions.

82. It’s interesting to read propositions of “is our atmosphere drying up”, and unrelated, reading last week recently how plants / trees have taking up more CO2 from the air, at the same time the 280 ppmv to 387 ppmv rise causing plants to release less water vapor (I’ll not discuss the nutrient imbalance due elevated CO2). Wonder how that hooks into the Mt Kilimanjaro expert ruling by a British judge that it’s not CO2 causing less snow to show on the mountain.

83. lucia asks for clarity on specific meaning of a single word in a proponent’s argument (“perturbation”). He counters with accusations that she’s ignorant. How does this help the cause? That’s another problem with Revkin’s critics – they assume the worst of that which they perceive to be the “other side”. They appear to be blind to the damage they’re doing.

84. Bender– I also asked “what’s an “active reservoir”?” I did know what an active reservoir is, but I wasn’t sure which Tobis meant. It’s as if he said “We believe fruits are endangered.”, when he means, “Mango and grapes are endangered but not bananas or pineapples aren’t”.

    The purpose of his comment was supposedly to describe what he believes. I thought it better to ask rather than simply assume he believes what I believe.

    I have no idea what he means by the word “perturbation”. It’s appearance immediately after “reservoir” did increase my confusion about what he might mean by “active reservoir”.

    Anyway… I decided I’d just ask. They’ve nos answered about the meaning of active reservoirs.

85. Thin king Man (Comment#11059)

    Wow, what a beautifully written, on-target post! And correct, too, IMHO! I wonder if any of the lefties will take time to read it and try to understand it.

86. lucia (Comment#11077)

    “I think that by often overstepping that line, leaving out important details, not explaining short comings to his argument, Gore says things that may not be technically accurate, but which are misleading as to the strength of his case. People notice this, sense a “used care salesman” aspect and, some, become suspicious of him. The result is Gore makes himself politically ineffective.

    This isn’t a value judgment: the empirical evidence suggests the way Gore presented the CO2 graphs and information has fostered doubt in Gore as a source of information. Whether these doubt are fair or unfair, they exist. By sowing seeds of doubt, Gore’s presentation was ineffective at encouraging action.

    But, I think Gore’s bigger shortcoming has been not coming out in direct favor of encouraging replacing coal baseload with Nuclear baseload capacity and limiting discussion to solar, wind and conservation only. If Gore came out in favor of Nuclear energy, promoted it frequently, and appeared to be sincere in his support, I think he might convince some detractors that he really believes we need to reduce CO2. Of course, I could be incorrect.”

    Bingo.

87. If you actually know the basics of the carbon cycle, have a look at the Canadell work to understand the state of the anthropogenic perturbations to it. You could start here:

    http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2007/11/carbon-cycle-misfortunes.html

    I learned the basics back in the 80s from an article in Scientific American by Stephen Schneider. I’m afraid I don’t have a better reference to carbon cycle 101 handy. I would have thought you all had a grip on that much, but apparently I am asking too much. This could explain why I am perceived as opaque.

    Perhaps the whole problem is that if some people’s idea of climate science starts and ends with the climate change controversy they are missing the basics they need to think clearly about the whole situation.

88. Michael: Yes, that must be the problem, you’re opaque because no one here has the basic knowledge to keep up with you. We just can’t think clearly. You’re certainly not coming across as an elitist who argues from authority because his position is tenuous. You’re climate scientist in the mold of Gavin and Eli. I can tell because you’re insulting.

89. Michael Tobis wrote: “I do believe that it’s well-established that deliberate and malicious misrepresentation of the evidence exists and is responsible for the huge distance between reasonable policy and actual policy. ”

    Princeton physics professor Dr. William Happer testified recently that increases in CO2 are not sufficient to cause catastrophic warming. He further stated that there is little argument in the scientific community about this. In order to get the kind of warming whichwould lead to the frightening scenarios, there must be a substantial positive feedback effect. The claim of a large positive feedback has no scientific evidence to support it. Observations increasingly suggest that the feedback is close to zero or even negative.

    If Dr. Happer is correct in his description of the state of the science, the AGW crowd doesn’t have a case for making policy changes to try to “de-carbon” the environment. Real simple — if there isn’t a substantial positive feedback, catastrophic AGW is a myth.

    Is Tobis claiming that Dr. Happer is engaging in deliberate and malicious misrepresentation of the evidence? Or is he claiming that Dr. Happer is a fool who has been duped because he lacks the scientific understanding of Michael Tobis?

    Based on everything I’ve read, Dr. Happer appears to be correct. Which leaves Tobis looking like a fool (and likely a slanderer).

90. Michael–
    I think the problem is you conveyed your ideas using ambiguous terms and buzzwords.

    In this preliminary sentence:

    “There is too much carbon in the active reservoirs, and too much of other perturbations as well.

    A) “Active reservoirs” means some of the active reservoirs but excludes other active reservoirs. I now understand this because you have clarified.

    b) Perturbations could mean anything.
    When I ask you to explain what you mean by “perturbations”, you suggested I read a blog post which discusses a paper by Candell available here. The search tool for adobe and on my browser indicate the word “perturbation” is not used in that paper. So, the paper does not clarify your usage.

    The blog article also links to a powerpoint presentation. The use of “perturbation” in the titles of figures included in the powerpoint presentation suggests the authors used “perturbations” in a way that makes your usage in “too much of other perturbations as well” oddly non-standard.

    Their usage is– as I would normally expect– to describe perturbations “of” or “in” something. Your perturbations, like the cheese in Old McDonald’s farm, stand alone and are neither “of” nor “in” anything.

    So, now having said that, it appears you may have meant this:

    “There is too much carbon in the active reservoirs, and too much of other perturbation in carbon in the active reservoirs as well!”

    That would be redundant and it still uses “reservoirs” to mean “some reservoirs but not others”. So, I will assume you did not mean that.

    Moving on to a second guess, did you mean:

    “There is too much carbon in the atmosphere and the ocean, and we are losing carbon sinks as a result of deforestation?”

    That would make sense, and make sense out of your usages of both “active reservoirs” and “perturbations”. But is it what you meant? Who knows?

    If wish wish to believe that my not knowing what you mean to communicate when you assemble words in this translates into my not understanding the carbon cycle… well, ok. But bear in mind that you have been known to wonder aloud why the group you call “us” has trouble communicating with the public. The rest of us know the answer to this question.

    People don’t understand your message because many readeres find they mus treat your prose as a blank canvas onto which they must paint a meaningful message.

    Can readers try to guess what that message might be? Sure. Is it possible readers might guess correctly? Sure. But the point is if readers have to guess, they can’t be sure that was what you meant.

91. “I learned the basics back in the 80s from an article in Scientific American by Stephen Schneider.”

    Ah, it becomes clear, the famous Prof. Schneider… he of the famously disturbing statement about the need to repress doubts and foster scary stories.

92. jae (Comment#11095) March 4th, 2009 at 11:25 am

    Thin king Man (Comment#11059)

    Wow, what a beautifully written, on-target post! And correct, too, IMHO! I wonder if any of the lefties will take time to read it and try to understand it.

    Ok, I’ll bite – I’m probably what you’d term a ‘leftie’, since I do not share the absolutist libertarianism apparent in the post.

    I have no difficulty understanding it, jae. It’s structure is driven by the rhetorical device of asserting what the ‘opponent’ would ‘have you believe’, etc. Since I have little idea what Eli Rabett’s real views on these matters are (does he really wish us to ‘believe’ this and ‘ignore’ that?) I am inclined to suspect it of the dishonest approach that is always behind a straw man polemic. The writer would do better to say what he thinks rather than engage in rhetorical manipulation. Anyway, it’s quite a nice illustration of my point above about views in supposedly scientific discussion being driven by ideology.

    I can’t be bothered to debate libertarianism here, or the nature of “inalienable property rights”, or how you aquired them, or whether they should have applied to the Amerindians, and so on. People have what they have, which they got by whatever means. I do not see how we can divide the atmosphere up into protectable units of ‘property’ – do you? There is no such simple solution to this particular tragedy of the commons. As for the notion that growth and the free market drives against ‘pollution’ (which, in this case, I have to presume means GHG concentration), do I have to remind you that your country has some five times the per capita output of the world (and about nine times that of China, for example), or that mine (the UK) has contributed even more GHGs to the atmosphere? What, exactly, can the ‘free market’ be shown to have done in that respect?

    What are you suggesting? That if there is a risk of damaging climate change we should sit around putting our faith in the ‘free market’ to sort it out for us? Well, that really is a faith-based position, IMV.

    As for nuclear energy, which I happen to agree we should be (and should have been) developing, I am very unconvinced of that being the route that a truly ‘free market’ would take if companies were responsible for the potentially enormous liabilities. “Creative destruction” is all very well, but whilst I am quite calm about companies I have invested in going bust these days, I am not persuaded that the profit motive (which inevitably has a relatively short time scale) will control the “creative destruction” of its consequences.

93. Two questions, one for MT and one for Nathan:
    For MT, is that the same Stephen Schneider who in the 1970s said that at least a large number of climatoligists believed the world had entered appeared similar to the Little Ice Age? Just kidding.
    For Nathan, what kind of critique would you allow Lucia, or anyone, to provide of MT’s blog post without considering it an attack? This is not a joke, and you should be specific, as Cyrano was when he responded to the fop (a term from 17th Century England applied to men who were too concerned about clothes and appearance, which certainly applies here) who called his nose “rather large.”
    Please tell us the many ways she or others might have critiqued his statements without it being deemed by you to be an attack? Or do you consider all critiques attacks? In which case, then anything anyone says contrary to another’s view is an attack.
    Personally, I think people need thicker skins and more brownies, but of the chocolate not the mischievious kind.

94. Michael Tobis, please clarify what you meant about “perturbations”. Failure to clarify opaque language leads to misunderstanding. I hope you are not this opaque in your peer-reviewed publications. For you are opaque. And did I mention combattive?

95. Here is Schneider’s web site:

    http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/

    He shows a graphic of the hockey stick from a Mann paper. It shows a flatish anomaly back to the year 200 (unless I mis-interpret the x-axis). I would think that anyone with an IQ over 80 would not believe that graph; it implies virtually no climate change for 1800 years BP

    Also: Thin King Man: Bravo

96. Michael:
    Less heat, more light. Condescension, sarcasm and hyperbole are not compelling and generally are counterproductive.

97. Are we going to have a 500 comment thread on the meaning of “perturbation” now?

98. Boris: Are you perturbed?

99. Boris– Who knows?

    Still, I doubt it. Most people know what a “perturbation in, around or of X” would be. The word doesn’t appear to be a widely used “trigger” word for arguments.

100. Many is the word that only leaves you guessing
     guessing ’bout a thing you really oughta know

101. Boris: Are you perturbed?

     Define perturbed.

102. stan (Comment#11100) March 4th, 2009 at 1:13 pm

     The claim of a large positive feedback has no scientific evidence to support it.

     So what’s your assessment of Dessler’s recent paper? –

     The water-vapor feedback implied by these observations is strongly positive, with an average magnitude of λ q = 2.04 W/m2/K, similar to that simulated by climate models.

     http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008GL035333.shtml

     Shucks, even Spencer is close to saying he was wrong –

     http://www.drroyspencer.com/

     (though he thinks it’s all ‘internal forcings’, of course).

103. “Is it really too much to ask people who want to enter a debate to know the first thing about the topic at hand?”

     Come on, it’s not like a bunch of scientists got together and released a report no…the…um…….Hey! There’s still snow on the ground here in Tennessee!

104. Simon–
     It seems the water-vapor feedback issue is going back on “climate blog brou-ha-ha red alert”.

     http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5416

105. Boris– You have snow? There’s no snow up here. It’s colder than I like but the sky is beautifully blue, and the tops of my daffodils are showing. I’ll go take a picture.

     Maybe my “admitting” flowers are popping up in March will make Nathan happy. (Then, later, when the snow falls on the daffodils and I show that, he’ll dredge up more gun shooting analogies.)

106. Lucia,

     It seems the water-vapor feedback issue is going back on “climate blog brou-ha-ha red alert”.</I.

     Ah – there are wheels within wheels and fires within fires……

     Ok, I am possibly really, really naive, but I am hanging on to the notion that the peer review process is somewhat working and that claims of not being published because your conclusions contravene the AGW faith are just maybe a diversion from the fact of your paper was not published because it was, er , somewhat lacking…. but I shall go post over there and see what they say!

107. #11123
     Great story of politically motivated editorial censorship. How did this J. Climate editor figure that he was “advancing the cause”? The activists, ironically enough, are proving Will’s case for him. They can’t help themselves, they’re so perturbed.

108. #11125
     How generous of you to take that bias into the reading of Paltridge’s paper. See, that’s another problem with Revkin’s critics. They start by assuming the worst in everyone. Evil might be anywhere.

109. Simon–
     I’ve seen many extremes. A coworker employed as a post-doc once showed us a three sentence review that went something like this:

     “I was pleased to be selected to review this paper based on it’s title. On reading the first line, I encountered a heresy. I recommend rejections.”

     The editor for that particular journal has a reputation of never contradicting reviewers, so the co-workers advisor and she just submitted to another journal where it was accepted quickly.

     On the other hand, on a different occasion, I was talking to that that same journal editor (who was a very nice guy). He suggested I would like to read a paper by a former graduate student of his– who had later become a professor at Cal Tech and was also an editor for The Journal of Fluid Mechanics. Said professors paper had been accepted in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

     So, I phoned said Cal Tech professor. He sent me the paper. I read to page “N”… very good paper up to then. Then, flipping to page “N+1” I discovered there was no page “N+1”. The rest of the pages were present.

     So I called, and very friendly professor said “Opps” and Fed Ex’d the page. When doing so, he told me he’d checked and had become convinced the copy he sent me was exactly as sent to the reviewers. He also said that now he was sure it was true that once you have a reputation people just rubber stamp your papers. (This guys papers were always good btw.)

     We both laughed a bit because I pointed out that… based on pages N and N+2 it appeared the main result of the analysis appeared on page N+1. He confirmed my theory.

     Ok… so then the page N+1 arrives. I read down to equation “M”…. which was well… not quite right. It was exactly wrong, but it was a duplicate of equation M-1. The terms clearly did not match the surrounding text.

     Worse, this equation was, to a large extent a main result! So, I called the author. Who… thanked me profusely because he was getting ready to send off the final proofs.

     (For what it’s worth, it was a very good paper. But… still… JFM has four reviewers per paper. None noticed either the missing page or the missing final result.)

     So, yes. There can be problems with peer review. Whether the paper at CA falls in this category is an example, I cannot say.

110. A teaser from CA:

     Garth Paltridge writes:

     LOADED DICE IN THE CLIMATE GAME

     Back in March of 2008, three of us sent off a manuscript to the Journal of Climate. It was a straightforward paper reporting the trends of humidity in the middle and upper troposphere as they (the trends) appear at face value in the NCEP monthly-average reanalysis data.

     …

111. bender (Comment#11128) March 4th, 2009 at 3:42 pm

     #11125
     How generous of you to take that bias into the reading of Paltridge’s paper. See, that’s another problem with Revkin’s critics. They start by assuming the worst in everyone. Evil might be anywhere.

     Au contraire, bender – the Paltridge ‘story’ starts by presuming the worst in everyone. The presumption is that his paper was not published because it didn’t fit the bias of the publishers. That’s where the story started, not where I started.

     I am not a critic of Revkin, by the way – you shouldn’t assume the worst in everyone.

112. #11131
     Don’t waste your time commenting on something you haven’t read yet. See for yourself.

113. Simon–
     This bit is key in my mind:

     Suffice it to say that after 3 or 4 months the paper was knocked back. This largely because of an unbelievably vitriolic, and indeed rather hysterical, review from someone who let slip that

     “the only object I can see for this paper is for the authors to get something in the peer-reviewed literature which the ignorant can cite as supporting lower climate sensitivity than the standard IPCC range”.

     Either a review said this or it did not. We also don’t get to see the rest of the review. But if this quote fairly describes the reviewer’s reason for rejecting the paper, then this is a stain on the peer review process.

     If the reviewer’s reason for rejecting was that the result was wrong, already well knows, unsufficiently supported etc. that would be different. Some reviewers really do act like politically motivated jerks. Most don’t. It does happen though.

114. This thread itself is a microcosm of people’s reactions to AGW. If one wants to understand why there is such a rise of skepticism in public opinion about AGW, it’s right here in black and white.
     .
     For some reason, folks like Gore and Tobis and some of the RC crowd seem to believe the following:
     .
     1. AGW must be portrayed as having catastrophic consequences in order to be taken seriously by the public.
     .
     2. Those who question the catastrophic consequences are (at best) performing a public disservice or (at worst) are immoral gluttons in the pockets of evil energy companies who care only about their own personal bank accounts.
     .
     These beliefs ooze from posts like MT’s and from Gore’s presentations. And – not to be too blunt about it – it turns people off. The implication, of course, is that if you question the canonical description of AGW, you are guilty of a crime against humanity.
     .
     Not generally an effective PR strategy.
     .
     The science of AGW is an entirely separate issue, and I’m not talking about the science. I’m talking only about the non-scientific PR battle . . . which, from a policy standpoint, is the one that matters. Unless there is enough support among lay people for AGW-related policy changes, then AGW-related policy changes will either not occur or be short-lived.
     .
     And, quite frankly Mr. Tobis, this is the battle that you are losing. You don’t have to take my word for it; you can look at polls showing the steady decline in public support for AGW-related action over the past 10 years. You can look at the Gallup polls concerning climate that show the decline in credibility of people like Mr. Gore.
     .
     The sad thing is, most of the folks you cast as doing a public disservice (I am quite certain I would fall into that category) strongly believe that the human race needs to take action to limit, reduce, and (if possible), reverse the deleterious impacts we have on the environment. We may differ in what we feel are the correct actions, but there are many actions that most of us would agree wholeheartedly need to be done:
     .
     1. Energy conservation.
     2. Strategic plan for renewable energy.
     3. Strategic plan for limiting CO2 emissions in cases where no good alternative to fossil fuels exists (CO2 scrubbers/CO burners for carbon-emitting equipment, legally mandated fuel economy increases, etc.)
     4. Strategic plan for mass transportation
     5. (More controversial) Strategic plan for shifting electric power generation from fossil fuels to nuclear
     .
     Among other things.
     .
     Yet people like you, Mr. Tobis, insist that we must take the whole package – the belief in catastrophic AGW and the draconian (and impractical) proposals like carbon taxes – lest we fall into that category of immoral gluttons who seek to destroy the world for our own gain. And while that may make you feel morally superior, the pragmatism of your approach is questionable at best.
     .
     The scientific investigation will continue largely unseen by the public. Out of that investigation, better and better understanding of our climate and the impact we have on it will emerge. Most lay people will never fully understand (nor want to fully understand) the details of the science. The limit of their desire to understand will be that level of detail that convinces them what (if anything) needs to be done.
     .
     So from the perspective of actually doing anything, Mr. Tobis, it is the PR battle that is important. And if you haven’t noticed, you’re not winning.
     .
     I would even go so far as to say that the behavior of climate alarmists has contributed as much (if not more so) to the decline of public concern about AGW as those immoral gluttons you enjoy preaching about . . . though the only real data point I have is myself.
     .
     🙂

115. #11132

     Ho ho ho (if you’ve read it, I look forward to your immediate detailed account of it, beyond what you’ve read on CA).

     The point being that a CA ‘case against’ is being pursued by the likes of you on the back of a selected quotation from a disgruntled scientist whose paper wasn’t accepted for publication. So thank you to you for taking a bias! On the basis of which you assert “Great story of politically motivated editorial censorship.” A pretty disgraceful assertion on your part, I would say, unless you can substantiate it (how about beginning by just quoting to me the first three words from page two of the paper? Hmm? I’m looking forward to it!).

     Lucia,

     Sure, I know that peer review is a pretty rough cut. Review of, and response to, work once it’s been published is more significant.

116. Simon Evans, what the reviewer said and how the editor behaved is shocking, independent of what’s in the paper. And I was criticizing Revkin’s critics, not you specifically.
     …
     Like Dano used to say: you’re trying too hard.

117. One wonders what Simon thinks this would prove if I were to quote the first three words on page two of the Paltridge paper. That I have access to a library?

118. bender (Comment#11130) March 4th, 2009 at 3:46 pm

     “Garth Paltridge writes:

     LOADED DICE IN THE CLIMATE GAME

     Back in March of 2008, three of us sent off a manuscript to the Journal of Climate. It was a straightforward paper reporting the trends of humidity in the middle and upper troposphere as they (the trends) appear at face value in the NCEP monthly-average reanalysis data.”

     The problem is that everyone knows that the NCEP reanalysis has significant problems with humidity, and anyone who doesn’t is not clued in. So any paper that uses it has to start by addressing why their use of the reanalysis is ok.

     For example
     http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/57676.pdf

119. Simon Evans (Comment#11121)

     You are not distinguishing between water vapor feedback and water feedback (water + clouds + aerosols). Spencer agrees that the water vapor feedback is ~2 W/m2. He claims that the cloud feedback is so negative that it compensates this. While there is a lot of uncertainty in cloud feedback if it were so strongly negative you could not explain observations of climate in the past.

120. Simon,
     Eli’s comment came in just as I was reading Roy’s discussion. I concur with Eli’s interpretation of what Roy says. So, if Eli and I agree that’s what Roy says, it must be what he says, right?

     On the Paltridge issue: I think you asked a useful question over at CA. As I said: We’d have to read the whole review to really know for sure whether the quote correctly conveyed the review. That said, I have read some loony reviews of other people’s papers. Maybe Paltridge will post the rest. (Or not. Might he get in hot water with editors? It’s hard to say.)

121. My perception is that Tobis, Hansen and the likes are genuinly terrified by the increased levels of CO2 and genuinly believe that this will cause the end of mankind. Fear is never a good advisor and usually clouds the mind, therefore all opposite thoughts and science is mental blocked and those who dare to even think about the opposite automatically falls into the category of evil heritics who endanger life on earth.

     “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked,and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” (Goering)

122. #11144 That Paltridge might be misrepresenting his case frankly never occurred to me. You might be right. I try not to assume the worst of people. But occasionally people do let you down.

123. I think Goodwin’s law is rearing it’s head. . . (1150)

124. stan (Comment#11100) Happer’s testimony would have been a lot more impressive if he had been winging it. If you look at the other prepared testimony in that session, each had a fairly long list of references supporting the statements made. Happer’s had none.

125. How did Dessler calculate a positive feedback of 2 W /m2 when the relative humidity declined in his study as the temperature declined ?

     This is not feedback, it is a runaway ice planet or a runaway greenhouse.

     The models have built-in slightly declining relative humidity as temperatures increase and slightly rising relative humidity as temperatures decline. They could not be stable without this assumption.

126. bender– I am agnostic on theories of whether Paltridge is more or less likely to be mis-representing. To my mind, politically motivated lunatic reviewers and disgruntled authors both exist. I don’t know Paltridge. I don’t know the reviewer.

     But, Paltridge might post more. If so, we’d have more information. The fact that the paper was eventually published is interesting. It sounds like a straight forward trend analysis. If so, we should be able to judge the contents independently of the review history.

127. Lucia, Eli,

     I agree that’s what Spencer is saying now, but he’s argued before that water vapour feedback could be negative (don’t ask me how or why!).

128. Lucia,
     In view of the large number of scientists (some who badly need English Composition 101) coming out with outrageous behavior, perhaps it is time for a recurring post titled, “Scientists Behaving Badly”.
     I believe I just felt a perturbation in the force.

     Bender,
     I never realized what a smart guy you really are…
     Enjoying your posts,

     Mike Bryant

129. Lucia, here is something simple about the carbon cycle. Eli would have thought better of you than your sad attempt to belittle Michael based on a deep ignorance about the carbon cycle. OTOH, if you really were not so ignorant about it, Eli would think even worse of you. The nonsense about perturbation from an engineer is offensive. Would you care for a short explanation of what is is?

     As to the exchange between the surface and the deep ocean,

     “Today, the oceans are a net sink for approximately 1.3 Pg C y-1 representing an anthropogenic uptake of about 1.9 Pg C y-1. Over the long term (millennial time-scales), the ocean has the potential to take up approximately 85% of the anthropogenic CO2 that is released to the atmosphere. The reason for the long time constant is the relatively slow ventilation of the deep ocean. Most of the deep and intermediate waters have yet to be exposed to anthropogenic CO2. ”

     The pmel site has a lot more about the carbon cycle. The most elegant thing about the carbon cycle is the biological pump. How the pump got started is a subject of great fascination and not complete understanding.

130. Bill Illis (Comment#11156),

     A positive water vapor feedback of 2 W /m2 relative to current temperatures in no way implies a water vapor feedback of 2 W /m2 for all possible temperatures. Not to mention that the lapse rate goes a long way toward counteracting a run-away asymptotic water vapor feedback.

131. Simon Evans (Comment#11081) The interesting thing about Singer’s funding is that he figured out a way to shelter income from taxes past 72.

132. Eli–

     What ignorance of the carbon cycle? I didn’t claim any ignorance of the carbon cycle. I said Michael picked weird words to express some idea. You and he seem to prefer to believe his inexplicable word choices are not a problem. Rather than breaking down and describing what Micheal specifically meant by the words he used, you are explaining the carbon exists.

     I please read your quote you posted and note that it includes terms like “carbon cycle”, “sources”, “sinks” “ocean” but does not mention “active reservoirs” and, more importantly, “perturbations”.

     Shall I suggest that such obtuseness in a techno-bunny chemist teaching to undergraduates how to titrate at some unnamed university is offensive. Or would you consider the idea that some are offended by your obtuseness unimportant relative to the price of carrots?

133. lucia:
     Simon Evans’s dark insinuations of misrepresentation have put some doubt in my mind. So I too am now agnostic. Happy, Simon? I hope Paltridge will clarify. I hope Simon is also ready to eat some crow. Just in case.

134. Eli Rabett (Comment#11162)

     Thanks for the link. I didn’t realize you guys were still getting your jollies by picking on teenage girls.

135. So Eli,
     Did you figure out where the money came from originally? Donations? Exxon? The Secret Federation of Funded Fibbers?

     Bill Illis is on record wanting to apply for funds!

136. Simon Evans (Comment#11158)

     Do you have a citation for Spencer “arguing that water vapour feedback could be negative” other than in the context that water vapor plus cloud formation plus precipitation is very complex?

137. JohnM: He says this right now:

     Spencer’s Mea Culpa?

     While I have believed for years that water vapor feedback might be negative, I will admit the latest evidence is looking more and more like the real story could on the reflected solar side instead. The radiation budget guys have been trying to tell me all along that it was the SW feedback that was the most

     See http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/02/what-about-the-clouds-andy/

138. Actually, in the original text,

     “There is too much carbon in the active reservoirs, and too much of other perturbations as well.”

     is a really lousy sentence. Thanks for pointing it out.

     I really, genuinely think you ought to know what “the active reservoirs” means in the contect of carbon, but the “perturbations” part is sufficiently distracting that maybe not.

     The text is changed now and the “perturbations” bit (by which I meant nitrogen cycle, trace chemicals, soot, bulk waste, fishing, groundwater extraction, and all the other first order anthropogenic perturbations to the earth system) is moved to another paragraph. Both parts are expanded for clarity.

     The pargragraph in question has been replaced by the following two:

     There is too much carbon in the active reservoirs of the earth system, by which I mean the collective stores of carbon which have large annual fluxes, i.e., atmosphere, ocean and biota. It is the total carbon in these places that matters, and it’s getting rapidly worse. There isn’t anything subtle or marginal about it. Consequences are inevitable, but not instantaneous. One thing many people don’t understand is that what we see now is the consequence of decisions made decades ago.

     Carbon is by no means the only problem of this sort. Human actions form a first order perturbation on the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, ocean biomass, fresh water, bulk minerals and many other important systems. The consequences of many of our current decisions are decades in the future. We are already committed to much larger disruptions of climate and geochemistry than we are now experiencing.

     Thanks again for the editorial input.

     mt

139. Much clearer micheal.
     I can’t pretend my comments are always clear (and I’ve been known to say “yikes” and correct on the admin side. But rarely after more than 15 minutes. )

     Speaking of which, I need to activate editing for users. (Or is it active? I can’t tell when I’m logged in as admin.)

140. #11171
     Thank you for crediting lucia for her editorial contribution to your work. That shows some class.

141. bender (Comment#11166)

     bender,

     I am always ready to eat crow – having a bigger mouth than brain, I have to get used to it 😉

     John M (Comment#11169)

     Lucia’s got there before me in her post above. Otherwise I might have linked you to some of the ruminations he previously had on his website, but he’s dumped or abbreviated quite a bit since he updated it. I’m not too sure I can remember what he’s said before, tbh, so I think I’ll shut up now and go to bed 🙂

142. lucia (Comment#11170)

     I thought that was in the context of what he has said before about precipitation and clouds, but I’ll admit to not understanding the nuances of the argument.

143. BTW, the editing feature is on for me for about 10 minutes.

144. Michael Tobis,
     You must have employed a PR specialist and a writer to help with your last comment. I am impressed. I know what you are saying now.
     As for the conclusions, however, still way too political for a GCModeler IMHO.
     I also don’t like the convention that allows CO2 to be called “carbon”. Why not just call it CO2? Is the word “carbon” technically correct or is it just another way to make the life-giving trace gas sound dirty? Perhaps it would be more effective politically to refer to CO2 as “carbonic acid” as was the convention a hundred years ago. Now that really sounds dirty. It sounds like it is black and gooey and will melt your skin. Anyway, think of this little tip (the use of the term carbonic acid) as my little gift to you for having the guts to admit you made a mistake. Maybe you should do it more often. It is very refreshing to one’s spirit.
     Thanks,
     Mike Bryant

145. Michael Tobis (Comment#11171)

     I admire your willingness to engage in debate and venture onto this and other blogs populated generally by “skeptics”.

     I’d like to remind everyone that you were just about the only climate scientist to caution Eric Steig about his approach to answering questions about his recent paper, and you drew a lot of heat about that.

     And now, you’re getting it from the other side.

     We can disagree about whether Revkin as a journalist ought to let his “beliefs” govern how he reports, but all we can ask for is a sincere effort to argue facts and ideas openly.

     Thanks.

146. Mike Bryant: not every active participant in the carbon cycle is a CO2 molecule. That is why it is called the carbon cycle and not the CO2 cycle.

     I don’t blog as a modeler. I write and run code as a modeler. I blog as a blogger. Sometimes the learning from one affects the other but there really isn’t much overlap.

     John M: Thanks. I am not really an extremist, though I voice a strong opinion from time to time.

     I have never been systematically misinterpreted on today’s scale before, though; the other (usually my) side maybe doesn’t have such WMD, but I also would be surprised to see such malign intent there.

     I can defend myself effectively in places like here but not on Fox News! This explosion of outrage just wasn’t fair to me. I did not say what I am accused of having said. It has not been a good day, but I do very much appreciate your courtesy.

147. We need to use Carbon as the metric because CO2 gets converted into other Carbon molecules in the ocean and in vegetation. When it gets released back to the atmosphere by the oceans and vegetation, the majority gets converted back to CO2. So, it really is the Carbon cycle.

     Michael, in the link you provided earlier about the Carbon cycle, it was noted that CO2/GHG emissions were above the IPCC A1B scenarios. (It was an older poste although there are recent news articles about the same point by noted climate reseachers) and I just wanted to note that the actual GHG concentrations are slightly behind the IPCC A1B scenario.

     CO2 is about 1 to 2 ppms behind, N2O is 1 to 2 ppb behind and CH4 is about 30 ppb behind (although the recent uptick of 2007 seems to be continuing up to the fall of 2008 so it is a little difficult to tell if it is 40 or 30 ppb behind).

     The point about this thread is that the facts count (or should at least).

148. lucia (Comment#11149) March 4th, 2009 at 4:52 pm

     Simon,
     On the Paltridge issue: I think you asked a useful question over at CA.

     Well, my original question has been snipped and all my comments in response to challenges have been pulled.

     Apparently my original comment was “an attribution of intent that is inconsistent with blog policies”. As you’ll know, my comment, asking for an honest statement of the reviewers comments in full rather than a selected quotation introduced by Paltridge’s own assessment of it being “an unbelievably vitriolic, and indeed rather hysterical, review”, was itself a response to an OP which attributed intent. Paltridge attributes intent (or prejudice) to the reviewer, to the editor and to ‘climate scientists’ in general. So, it seems that it’s very much in accord with CA blog policies to post such attributions but not in accord with CA policies for anyone to challenge them. It does, however, seem to be entirely in accord with CA policies for anyone to attribute intent to any member of ‘the team’ at any time.

     Bender – this is what I mean by hypocrisy.

149. Lucia,

     Why on Earth didn’t you just write an email to MT and ask him all those questions? If that’s all you wanted to know, why not just ask him?
     By placing this in a public domain, uninvited as it were, you are making an attack.
     I work as an editor, I edit other geologists work, you can’t edit people’s work without permission. It’s insulting and demeaning. Especially if you do it in public. It only leaves people wondering “Why?”. If this whole post is just about what he specifically meant by some terminology why did it deserve public dissection? Either you are somehow completely socially unaware or you set out to undermine him.

150. Lucia,

     We had seven inches here Saturday, which would have been great fun for my daughters and me if I hadn’t been running a fever. The hallucinations were pretty nice, though.

151. Simon… I guess I can see that it is attribution of intent. That said, I can’t make a fully formed opinion without more information. I guess someone could just email Patridge. Does anyone know him?

152. Michael and Bill,
     Thanks for the kind corrections.
     Mike

153. #11183
     That is a lie. Not all your comments in response to challenges have been pulled. You broke a blog rule where you impugned motive to Paltridge (dishonesty, attempt to deceive blog readers) and that comment has been removed. Do you really think no one is paying attention to what you say, that you can make stuff like this up without repurcussions? You owe The Blackboard readers 7200 quatloos for your transgressions.

154. The purpose, dearest Nathan, is to point out that Will is correct: your brand of fundamentalism does nothing to advance your cause in a free and democratic world. In fact, it hurts it. And THAT is the trouble with Revkin’s critics.

     Next thread.

155. Simon whines:
     “Paltridge attributes intent (or prejudice) to the reviewer”

     No. The intent of the reviewer was very, very clear from his own words: to block publication of the paper. What a dumbass – strike that – gamesman you are.

156. Bender,
     “your brand of fundamentalism does nothing to advance your cause in a free and democratic world.”
     What is this? You have simply attached a label to me and used that to prove me wrong. What this is, is a rhetorical game. This is all a big cup of steaming rhetoric, with a dash of science-lite for cream.

157. Reviewer on the the Paltridge et al. J. Climate manuscript:
     “the only object I can see for this paper is for the authors to get something in the peer-reviewed literature which the ignorant can cite as supporting lower climate sensitivity than the standard IPCC range”

     Whereas the stated objective of the authors is to highlight the need for more research given such a counter-intuitive or controversial result.

     The motive of the reviewer was clear: block publication for fear of its impact on policy. Paltridge did not impugn any motive.

158. Nathan, you asked what lucia’s purpose was in criticizing Tobis. I gave you my opinion. If you don’t count yourself among Revkin’s critics, then I apologize for lumping you in with them. Does this mean you agree that Will is right: that fundamentlism hurts the cause for action? You tell me; I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

159. Bender, I don;t have a particular opinion on what Revkin wrote. I find it not very useful to say ,well he was wrong but so was some other guy. It’s a pointless thing to do.

     “that fundamentlism hurts the cause for action?”
     I think fundamentalism is a poor choice of word. It’s like me saying:
     Doesn’t your drinking affect your driving?

     It’s a loaded question, and assumes that there are “fundamentalists” – whatever they are. It’s not a question of him being right or wrong, it’s that he is engaging in rhetoric and should be ignored. And in that same way he is not being very useful to his side either. He is presenting the ‘no action’ cause as people who just like to play rhetorical games.

     It happened in Australia after the bushfires we just had. When it was suddenly the ‘extremist greenies’ fault that the bushfires were so bad. It’s just dumb poor thinking.

160. Bender I think you need to view this in the context of what is disussed on this blog. Lucia is not an even handed commentator. She persists in presenting a ‘lets not be hasty, we don’t know what’s going on’ point of view. This is what seems to be her goal, to prevent action being taken. She does this by half-examining issues, and not drawing conclusions so that there is always this air of ‘it’s a big mystery’ and the ‘models can’t help’ and ‘we can’t trust the scientists’.
     I would suggest that Lucia is doing more to hurt the cause for action than Michael Tobis or whoever the imaginary fundamentalists are.

161. Bender [11194]
     As we have unfortunately been able to observe before on this and other threads, this behaviour is par for the course for both Simon and Nathan. Blanket attributions of intent and broad liberties with the facts and accusations. And somehow forgetting that some of those who visit here have an inculcated reaction to cross reference and verify what’s served up [Science 101, anyone?].

162. Nathan [11184]
     Here we go again. Like yesterday evening: off the deep end.

     Mercy on those whose work you decide to publish or not, because based on what you have shown us here and elsewhere about your deep seated biases, it’s pretty clear that you live in the same twisted world as the reviewer cited by Paltridge at CA [for easy reference: quote in posting # 11203 on this thread].

     Beliefs only exist because they are untestable [as in the underlying pseudo scientific hypothesis that man-made CO2 causes global warming, or proving that God does or does not exist {whichever one of the two you subscribe to}]. It must be hell to live in constant fear of having what has clearly become an overarching belief system questioned even in the least.

163. Simon Evans [11183]
     To suggest, in the face of reams of evidence, that there does not exist a fundamental and systemic pro-AGW/ACC editorial bias among the editors of leading science journals, their favourite “go-to” reviewers and their MSM contacts, is delusional. The Paltridge saga is no more, no less than just another brick in the wall. Hypocritical, you said?

164. Tetris
     #11209
     I don’t know what you are on about.
     I edit other geologists work, an in-house editor. You know, checking that what they right actually makes sense etc. Basically what Lucia was doing to MT, going through the document piece by piece making sure it’s consistent and logical etc.
     I don’t decide what to publish.

     “Beliefs only exist because they are untestable”
     Ummm What?

     ” It must be hell to live in constant fear of having what has clearly become an overarching belief system questioned even in the least.”

     oh yeah… I just live day by day you know… So scared. Always worried…

     “To suggest, in the face of reams of evidence, that there does not exist a fundamental and systemic pro-AGW/ACC editorial bias among the editors of leading science journals, their favourite “go-to” reviewers and their MSM contacts, is delusional.”
     yes, this is so unfair, just like the pro-evolution bias or the anti-electric universe bias… Tetris, this is a really poor argument.

165. Eli,

     Your lame attempts to intimidate the host demean climate scientists.

     “Eli will give you a hint, if global temperature goes up by 2 C about 30% of all species will be at risk. At 4 C there will be a major wave of extinctions.
     At 2 C there will be increased damage from floods and storms. At 4 C we lose 30% of coastal wetlands.
     Those are conservative estimates.”

     Conservative estimates?? Based on what detailed long term studies??

     NONE!!!

166. After all this childish and irrelevant arguing, there still isn’t any detectible evidence of AGW, other than in some people’s imagination. Still. Again. 😉

     Andrew

167. Why is Eli Rabett always referring to himself in the 3rd person?

168. bender (Comment#11194) March 4th, 2009 at 9:10 pm

     #11183
     That is a lie. Not all your comments in response to challenges have been pulled.

     Oh yes they have, bender. My original post no 28 still stands, with a snip, after which all my responses to challenges have been pulled. My final comment on the thread is post no 60, as follows:

     “It seems my recent comments are being snipped, so I won’t attempt to respond to any more points. I’ll point out though that my last remark was a suggestion that the thread should get onto a more interesting topic than attacking my comment. Good night”

     http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5416#comment-330421

     So, you accuse me of having lied, I demonstrate that I did not, as anyone can check out from the above link. Let’s see what sort of integrity you have – you’ll have my respect if you can apologise for making a demonstrably false accusation.

     You broke a blog rule where you impugned motive to Paltridge (dishonesty, attempt to deceive blog readers)

     Nope – I said that the honest thing to do would be to publish the full context of the reviewer’s comments. Perhaps you don’t see the difference?

     Do you really think no one is paying attention to what you say, that you can make stuff like this up without repurcussions? You owe The Blackboard readers 7200 quatloos for your transgressions.

     What have I made up? I’ve just demonstrated that your accusation of my having lied is unfounded. It appears to be you making stuff up, so I look forward to your restitution.

     11197
     The intent of the reviewer was very, very clear from his own words: to block publication of the paper. What a dumbass – strike that – gamesman you are.

     Having not seen the reviewers’ comments it is impossible to say what his/her grounds were for not recommending publication. The fact of his/her speculation upon what the point of presenting the paper was is, we must presume, in the context of his/her seeing no merit in it. By the way, you may note that I have not questioned whether the reviewer’s quoted words are genuine – this is because I have not accused Paltridge of dishonesty or deceit. I am sure that Paltridge thinks as he has stated, that the paper was rejected because it did not toe the line. Regardless, the only way for an honest assessment to be made by others of the reasons for rejection is to see the whole of the comments. Otherwise people, like you, may presume that you can make an accusation that the reviewer was engaging in malfeasance on the back of the selected quotation. I agree that the reviewer’s insinuation of motive was improper, but that does not mean that his/her prior judgment was improper.

     By the way, you make the point very well for me that the Paltridge post was itself ‘attributing intent’. You underline this in 11203 –

     …the stated objective of the authors is to highlight the need for more research given such a counter-intuitive or controversial result.

     The motive of the reviewer was clear: block publication for fear of its impact on policy. Paltridge did not impugn any motive.

     The result is hardly ‘controversial’. I suggest you read Ryan Maue’s and Steven Sherwood’s comments, and the notion that it would impact policy is thus a considerable stretch. Anyway, it’s been published, so we shall see. I find your suggestion that Paltridge did not impugn motive to be ludicrous. He states:

     “it shows how naïve we were to imagine that climate scientists might welcome the challenge to examine properly and in detail even the smell of a possibility that global warming might not be as bad as it is made out to be.”

     I’ll try to spell out my view of Paltridge’s post on CA and the reasons for my response to it. In his case, as in Roy Spencer’s case and in the case of any others who claim their papers are not being published because they go against the ‘party line’ I am sure that the views expressed are held sincerely. However, it is impossible for any reader of such views to make an independent judgment without having access to the relevant papers and communications. In such cases, moreover, these charges are being made in a context where the ‘other parties’ have no obvious means of response. It would be entirely improper, for example, for the anonymous reviewer or the journal editor to ‘reveal themselves’ on the discussion thread in order to challenge the accusations. If they were to do so, I think they would be in breach of their professional responsibility of confidentiality in respect to, in this case, Paltridge. Therefore, I think it is equivalently improper to publish such charges in such a context. We have the accusations but no means of examining their fairness, and thus we are left with what Tetris refers to as “evidence” in his post 11201 –

     To suggest, in the face of reams of evidence, that there does not exist a fundamental and systemic pro-AGW/ACC editorial bias among the editors of leading science journals, their favourite “go-to” reviewers and their MSM contacts, is delusional.

     As I indicated in my pulled comments at CA, it is extremely ironic to me to see that site fostering the presentation of ‘evidence’ by one side only which cannot be critically examined. I guess you don’t sense the irony of that – but then suggesting that I have made accusations when I have responded to a post which makes accusations indicates that you don’t really do irony.

     I do, by the way, think that the peer review process is likely influenced by confirmation bias, but I also think that authors are unlikely to be the most objective assessors of their own work or to be the best judges of the fairness of its treatment if rejected. The major journals have to reject well over 90% of papers submitted to them, I believe. That represents a considerable majority of authors who might suspect bias against them rather than recognising that their work doesn’t meet requirements.

     Paltridge’s work has now been published. If it is of significance then it will have influence. That is the way to make a statement in this case, IMV, rather than publishing unjudgable charges on a blog.

169. Simon Evans (Comment#11183)
     Simon, you are being disingenuous to say the least. At a minimum, Garth Paltridge, presumably accurately, quoted a reviewer. It is fine for you to ask for additional details before agreeing with Garth Paltridge’s description of the reviewer’s intent or motives – but to insinuate that he is not being honest is completely unwarranted. There is no hypocrisy – from bender or anyone else.

     More generally, the reviewer’s comments on the Paltridge et al paper mirror to some extent the theme of this thread, namely, that gross and emotional laden over-reactions to those with contrary viewpoints tend to be counter-productive. It would be interesting to hear Michael Tobis’ take on the reviewer’s comment on the Paltridge et al paper.

170. It would be interesting to hear Michael Tobis’ take on the reviewer’s comment on the Paltridge et al paper.

     Heh.

     On Paltridge: Boy! These people on different continents going at it while I snooze! You guys gave the “auto-troll” filter a real work out. (It did not activate– which is the intention.)

     My opinion is: On the one hand, the quote we did read does suggest the rest of the reviewer very well have intended to block regardless of scientific merit. On the other hand, to be certain, we would need to skim the whole review, read the final paper etc. In the end, the paper was published, but obviously delayed.

     I think these things and rumors of these things are worth knowing. However, it would be nice to have more concrete information. (I could say similar things on may other news reports. Many things would never be reported if we insisted that investigations must be completed to the point where there is 100.1% certainty in how we should interpret events.)

     On SteveM’s moderating policy: I don’t remember precisely how Simon worded the rest, or what else he said. Is it entirely possible Paltridge’s motives were impugned? Sure. Do I know? No. I usually try to avoid worrying about other bloggers moderation policies. I keep mine as uncomplicated as possible: Moderate very likely. So far, TCO has been banned for general obnoxiousness. Other than that…. I delete for obvious spam, have sometimes inserted a few inline comments, and take out swear words that might attract spam bots.

     But, I think if you want to discuss Paltridge further it might be wise to move to the Haiku thread!

171. Bernie (Comment#11221)

     Bernie,

     I have made a point in my tediously long post before yours of saying “I have not accused Paltridge of dishonesty or deceit” but that “the honest thing to do would be to publish the full context of the reviewer’s comments”. I think we have a problem hear with semantics. ‘Honest’ is not simply an antonym of ‘dishonest’, viz.:

     held in respect; honorable, respectable, creditable, commendable, seemly, etc.: a generalized epithet of commendation,that will not lie, cheat, or steal; truthful; trustworthy, showing fairness and sincerity; straightforward; free from deceit; an honest effort, gained or earned by fair methods, not by cheating, lying, or stealing an honest living, being what it seems; genuine; pure to give honest measure, frank and open an honest face; Archaic virtuous; chaste

     http://www.yourdictionary.com/honest

     I have emboldened those meanings which I do not think are antonyms of ‘dishonest’. I think it is clear from what I have written that I meant “creditable, commendable, fair”. Let me be clear, however, that I am critical of Paltridge publishing his assessment in the form it appears at CA, as I have argued above.

     Does this clarify my use of words? I hope so, but I will try to leave it there anyway.

     You may note that I’ve already said that the reviewer’s insinuation of motive seems improper to me. However, Paltridge’s insinuation of motives also seem improper to me. The former was a private communication, the latter has now been made publicly. As you’ll realise, I think it is a double standard to criticise the one and not the other. That’s my view, but I’m sure others think differently. I have stated my opinion, I am not seeking to ‘prove’ it.

172. On the Tobis-Revkin-Pielke front Ethon chews on the chair Roger is sitting in.

     Having listened to and watched Gore’s speech at AAAS, (on the web) it is clear the Pielke was somewhere between hysterical and flat out lying.

173. Out of curiosity, who the heck is Ethon?

174. More substantively: If Roger is hysterical or lying, why did Gore make corrections?

175. Lucia,

     Wikipedia tells us that Ethon is “the eagle that repeatedly ate Prometheus’ innards as ‘aethonem aquilam'”. Methinks that it is Eli’s literary device to argue with Roger.

176. Speaking of impugning motive, here’s Nathan on lucia:
     “This is what seems to be her goal”

177. “somewhere between hysterical and flat out lying”
     A place that Eli knows well?

178. Simon, I’m not going to play word games with you. Your insinuation was clear. That you won’t admit it is dishonest. And of the few comments of yours that were cut at CA, your opponents were equally cut. So your claims of mistreatment at CA are a distortion. Lastly, Paltridge is free to describe motive if it’s *his own* motive he’s describing. You see what a poor gamesman you are?

179. Zeke–

     Ahh! Well, my memory for Greek mythology missed out on the name of the large bird. (Wikipedia says it’s a and eagle in one paragraph and a vulture in another.)

     The liver always grew back… right? Hercules eventually Hercules kills the overweight lazy liver eating scavenger and frees Prometheus, right? And Prometheus forsees all of this, right?

180. Bender– I should add. I permit impugning motives, even mine. But, I think people can read what Nathan wrote, assess his reading skills, read what I write and decide for themselves. Everyone will form their own opinion of both me and Nathan regardless.

     What I’ve noticed of Nathan is he is particularly prone to:

     * Appeal to authority.
     * Begging the question.
     * Bare assertions (though he doesn’t like it when other people do it.)
     * False dilemmas and most especially
     * Fallacy of the single cause.

     I’m sure there are others. But at a certain point, I figure it’s better to just ignore much of this stuff.

181. bender (Comment#11237)

     bender, your comments are not making much sense to me, so there’s not much point in attempting further to answer them all – besides, I think Lucia has already suggested that we should leave the dialogue. I am not a liar and I am not dishonest, but you think I am – that’s fine, you are entitled to your opinion, etc. I did not claim ‘mistreatment’ at CA, btw – I pointed out what I think is a double standard. Anyway, I shall leave you to continue to post insults if that’s what does it for you.

182. Eli: I never trust anyone who refers to him/herself in the third person.
     .
     😉
     .
     On a different subject, hello, bender! Nice to see you in action over here, too.

183. Simon:
     Your dishonesty is a matter of public record and is before the court of public opinion. Meanwhile, I haven’t heard your apology yet for accusing me of hypocrisy re: Paltridge vs. The Team. If you feel you’ve been misrepresented at CA, go re-post using less inflammatory language and without breaking blog rules. If you don’t, that would be telling. I think it’s great that the blogosphere allows someone like you to call upon someone of Paltridge’s stature for full disclosure. What you need is a megaphone.

     Ryan O:
     Thanks. But may I respectfully point out that flaming Eli for using 3rd person in reference to himself is an ad hom dismissal. bender would like to note that sock puppets often refer to themselves in the third person.

184. #11243 lucia,
     Nathan is a new character to me. I wasn’t aware he had a track record of irrational commentary. I will avoid him in the future.

185. Bender:

     But may I respectfully point out that flaming Eli for using 3rd person in reference to himself is an ad hom dismissal.

     .
     100% agree. However, I stand by my statement. I developed the rule based on watching interviews with Joe Horn. I stick to this rule with irrational zeal. Call it a personal problem.

186. Ryan O:
     I actually had the same thought, but didn’t want to say so in public: what kind of egomaniac refers to himself in the 3rd person like this, as though he were appealing to his own authority? Quite a few in pro sports do this – none of them likeable. But knowing that “Eli” is really Josh, I don’t find it so distasteful. It’s kind of funny. If Josh were always referring to what “Josh” thinks, it would be a different story: creepy.

187. Simon was not victim of a double standard at CA, but of a single standard. I’ve explained the single standard, as has Steve M. Simon may be an honest person in general but has engaged in dishonest behavior in this instance. He also has failed to apologize for his allegations of hypocrisy, which I have refuted. In the future he will find his dodgy line about “doing the honest thing” being used against him in beautiful irony. Until then, Simon.

188. Bender, the creepy adjective gave me a chuckle. 🙂

189. bender,

     You are being really boring and, frankly, puerile. Everything has been laid out on this thread. You stated that I lied, I have demonstrated (with linked evidence) that I did not. I have stated my view that it is hypocritical to say I was being ‘shameful’ and ‘pre-judgmental’ to ask for disclosure of the Paltridge reviewer’s comments when you think it proper to demand disclosure from others. I will not apologise for that because I think it is true. As I have said, you are entitled to a different opinion. However, you cannot demonstrate that my criticism is ‘false’ as I have demonstrated that your accusation of lying was false.

     I note that you state your plans to attack me in the future. Very well, I shall look forward to it. In the meantime, I wonder whether you might consider not continuing to trash Lucia’s blog with your personalised attack upon me? Thank you in anticipation of your recognition that you must, by now, have made whatever point you wished to make.

190. You are being equally boring by insisting on having the last word. I have no plants to “attack” you. I simply see a pattern of behavior in you that is predictable enough to be repeatable and I confidently predict there will be a time when your words will come back to haunt you. At that time I will be gleefully reminding you of your dictionary definition of “honesty”.
     .
     By the way, you STILL haven’t apologized. Never mind. Dessler’s on the stand at CA.

191. RE NATHAN 11211: “I edit other geologists work, an in-house editor. You know, checking that what they right actually makes sense etc. Basically what Lucia was doing to MT, going through the document piece by piece making sure it’s consistent and logical etc.
     I don’t decide what to publish.”

     I hope you mean you check what they “write” and not that what they (are) right (about) actually makes sense. Also glad to see that Lucia was just going through a document that had become a tad controversial to make sure that it made sense, which the author now has classily clarified so it is more understandable to others, thanks to Lucia’s critique.

192. Is Garth Paltridge the savior de jour? Why is he hanging out with the septics at NRSP? Steve M’s glowing intro doesn’t mention that Paltridge is a bona fide inactivist, much less that he has the bad judgment to appear on a list of “experts” that includes nutters like Bob Carter and Zbingnew Janikwhoski, or ever how you spell it.

     Maybe his paper is good. Me, I’m jaded as all hell, I know.

193. Boris,
     That’s a logical fallacy called “guilt by association”. I know you’re prone to logical fallacies, Boris – and they obviously don’t bother you – but I thought you might appreciate a little reminder when you’re slipping into that mode.

194. That’s a logical fallacy called “guilt by association”. I know you’re prone to logical fallacies, Boris – and they obviously don’t bother you – but I thought you might appreciate a little reminder when you’re slipping into that mode.

     Give me a break, bender. It’s a logical fallacy to say X’s argument is wrong because X associates with Y. I never claim Paltridge is wrong–haven’t read his paper. I even state his paper could be good.

     I’m just pointing out that hanging out with nutters shows bad judgment–like how Steve M has a hot and bothered posting relationship with Anthony Watts.

195. Lucia

     “* Appeal to authority.
     * Begging the question.
     * Bare assertions (though he doesn’t like it when other people do it.)
     * False dilemmas and most especially
     * Fallacy of the single cause.”
     well my most sincerest apologies.
     The problem I have is with your honesty, you say you think that AGW is real, that it’s important and that we should do something about. Yet every post you make actually implies the reverse. It certainly doesn’t ring true.

     And Bender, good grief man,
     “Speaking of impugning motive, here’s Nathan on lucia:
     “This is what seems to be her goal””

     Yes, this is what I have posted about consistently on this blog. She will not admit that she has a goal, which is to promote the ‘no-action’ line. I’m not saying that she’s wrong for doing it, not trying to prevent her from speaking out.

196. Bender:
     “Nathan is a new character to me. I wasn’t aware he had a track record of irrational commentary. I will avoid him in the future.”
     But why B? We had just formed such a beautiful friendship…
     So who are the fundamentalists?

197. Yes, this is what I have posted about consistently on this blog. She will not admit that she has a goal, which is to promote the ‘no-action’ line. I’m not saying that she’s wrong for doing it, not trying to prevent her from speaking out.

     .
     So what you are saying is that those who question the accuracy of the predictions of future climate do so with the intent of preventing any action regardless of numerous statements to the contrary?

198. Ryan O
     I am not talking about anyone else.
     I am saying that she contradicts herself.
     She says she thinks AGW is real, that we should reduce fossil fuel usage and take action against climate change, YET every post she does is backing up the case for no action.

     Tell me, if you were really concerned about the accuracy of models, for whatever reason, why wouldn’t you go straight to the modellers and discuss it? Why all this parading around on a blog?

199. Nathan, with respect for your views, and even though I suspect that I would share most of them, I don’t agree with your assessment of Lucia’s ‘position’. I think that Lucia considers current model prjections to be over-egged, but that nevertheless we should be taking measures to plan our energy policy with a view to reducing emissions. I am a lot more comfortable with her scepticism, which I consider to be honest and thoughtful, than I am with the “We call it life” brigade. Personally, I think you are attacking the wrong target if you wish to influence thinking about what we should do. There is no way in which the case for mitigation can be made unless it can articulate a convincing response to the sort of scepticism that is ‘headlined’ on this blog, in my opinion. Personally, I have taken on board the probability of hitting 550 ppm. I think we need to knock out some sort of consensus as to where we may eventually stabilise.

     That does not mean that I agree with everything that Lucia says, or every attitude she takes – I think she’ll know that.

     Anyway, she can speak for herself. IMV, though, you are not doing good service by questioning her motives. Address the content of posts as they come up, I would respectfully suggest.

200. “She will not admit that she has a goal, which is to promote the ‘no-action’ line. I’m not saying that she’s wrong for doing it, not trying to prevent her from speaking out.”

     I believe that everyone here, almost, understands what Lucia’s goal is here… accuracy and truth. If the numbers don’t add up, Lucia wants to know that. If some ‘action’ must be taken, she would like that action to make sense. I think ‘truth’ is a very admirable goal.
     Lucia believes that the earth has warmed and wants hard evidence that the warming is of such a degree to warrant action.
     I think I got that almost right. Lucia?
     Mike Bryant

     What is your goal, Nathan, action no matter what? Ignore the icebergs, full speed ahead…

201. Mike
     “What is your goal, Nathan, action no matter what? Ignore the icebergs, full speed ahead…”
     Well to be sure, I personally can’t DO very much, so my goal is to attempt to use less. I have never seen an iceberg. I believe we should subsidise home owners to put solar power on their homes, assist people to develop alternate energies (like Hot dry rocks here in Australia) etc.

     My goal, on this blog, is to find out why Lucia only ever posts about the ‘no action’ path. There’s only a discussion about how terrible the models are, or this global lukewarming joke, etc.

     Simon, well perhaps you are right, I don’t know. The thing that confuses me is none of her posts actually support her position. Why would she want to take action, if the models are so wrong and we only have global lukewarming?

202. Since this thread has become ‘why does Lucia do what she does’ I now feel emboldened to delurk. To me Lucia’s blog is a call for action on climate change not a call for no-action, it is just that the first action she calls for is better models and the second is a more carefully worded and honest and open debate.

     Now if you don’t feel the models need to be improved and the debate doesn’t need to be more cerefully worded, honest and open then I can see why you might mistake her call for action as inaction. But if you think that the models are poor and so not only give us little help in deciding if our actions are having or will have the desired effect and that their errors mean they are easy targets for deniers, and if you think the AGW postion is robust enough to withstand careful, honest and open debate then you are happy to see Lucia continue her work.

     And if you find her foresnic examination of mahtematical models interesting or educational in the abstract then you (or should I say me) are even happier.

203. Nathan asks me to identify the fundamentalists, then declares that his mind is made up despite what facts lucia might dig up. Humor.

204. Nathan (Comment#11345)

     The thing that confuses me is none of her posts actually support her position. Why would she want to take action, if the models are so wrong and we only have global lukewarming?

     Well, my view is that if we only have ‘lukewarming’ in terms of temperature gain falling below current projections then nevertheless we have warming, and a slow heat will cook the pot eventually. It seems to me to make rather little difference as to what we should do if we are to hit a certain global mean temperature in 2120 rather than 2100, say. Perhaps Lucia is calmer about the pressing need to act than I am, I don’t really know. It’s evident that what we have done so far is entirely inadequate if the IPCC projections are ‘accurate’, and so if they are over-egged by 20%, 30%, whatever, it remains the case that what we have done so far is inadequate.

     I actually think that an assessment of the accuracy of projections is somewhat irrelevant, given that our current measures signally fail to address even the most ‘diluted’ expectations of future climate evolution. In that respect, I think Lucia’s approach is interesting but not, in a binary sense (do we do something or don’t we), critical.

     I also think that the current responses to the limited warming we have experienced so far are ‘alarming’ in themselves. So, regardless of the future rate of change, I think that sensible people should be worried.

     Whether Lucia thinks that or not, I really don’t know. But regardless, I think the issues raised here need to be addressed.

     A lot of what comes up is, of course, deeply irrelevant to the real issues. It really doesn’t matter in the long run whether Gavin/Hansen/Mann/whoever have behaved badly or well. It doesn’t matter whether bender and I can get along. But this is human nature stuff, and we’re not going to get away from it on a blog, where people chat about human stuff.

     I don’t think we’re going to sort this out here and now by anyone presenting some brilliantly conclusive argument. I think we need to hang in here, and see what happens, and keep trying to persuade ourselves towards some understanding of what we should do.

205. MikeB

     Lucia believes that the earth has warmed and wants hard evidence that the warming is of such a degree to warrant action.
     I think I got that almost right. Lucia?

     Also: I believe the evidence of warming certain, and the amount of warming is sufficient to act. I think the best course includes keeping roadblocks out of the way of nuclear (because I think it’s got better odd for baseload.) I also think it’s worth knowing how much precision and accuracy we can expect from models, and how well we can predict.

     Having some foresight, a realistic assessement of predictive ability will be important when we begin to discuss things like carbon recapture, or any other mitigation that might involve active measures to not only reduce carbon emissions but to actually remove carbon.

     Plus…I’m just curious about predictive ability and rhetoric surrounding it. I happen to be that way.

206. Boris (Comment #11302). This is to provide some details of Garth Paltridge’s career over the past 30-odd years, and of some of those he has been ‘hanging out with’.

     Garth Paltridge, BSc Hons (Qld), MSc PhD (Melb), DSc (Qld) is Emeritus Professor and Honorary Research Fellow, Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies, University of Tasmania (UTas). He was Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research, during the 1980s and then held the dual appointment of Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Research at UTas and Chief Executive Officer of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre until his retirement in 2001.

     Garth was elected to the Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science in 1980 and was a member of the Academy’s Council from 1991 to 1994. He is, by a large margin, the most senior FAA in the climate sciences field.

     Emeritus Professor Paltridge has maintained an active research career since his ‘retirement’. He was the first-named author of Paltridge GW, Farquhar GD and Cuntz M. (2007) Maximum entropy production, cloud feedback and climate change. Geophysical Research Letters 34, L14708, doi:10.1029/2007GL029925, his two co-authors in that paper being Graham Farquhar – Distinguished Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the Australian National University and a lead author of the Global Carbon Cycle chapter of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report – and Dr Mathias Kuntz, now of the Max-Planck-Institut. Professor Farquhar is also a Fellow of the Academy of Science, and of the Royal Society of London.

     One of Dr. Paltridge’s co-authors of the paper rejected by Journal of Climate and now accepted by Theoretical and Applied Climatology was Dr Albert Arking, formerly a Senior Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where he was honoured with the Goddard Exceptional Performance Award in 1981 and the NASA Exceptional Service Medal in 1986. Dr Arking moved to Johns Hopkins University as Principal Research Scientist at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in 1992.

     Boris criticises Professor Paltridge’s judgement for allowing his name to appear on the same list as ‘nutters’ such as Bob Carter. Professor Carter is a former Chair of the Australian Research Council’s Panel on Engineering, Applied and Earth Sciences, and the former Australian leader of the internatiional Ocean Drilling Program.

     Please see also Douglas Hoyt’s comment at CA (#89): ‘Of all the climate scientists I have met over the years, Garth Paltridge has impressed me as the most intelligent and competent of them all.’

     Boris, are all of these scientists ‘nutters’, and why should we take your word for it?

207. The NCEP data (from the surface to 300MB) shows there is constant specific humidity (and declining relative humidity) as the temperatures have increased.

     The data (up to 300MB) shows there is NO water vapour feedback AT ALL, either positive or negative. The weighted-average specific humidity is very, very close to constant for every year over the 1948 to 2008 period.

     This would be much more consistent with the actual temperature trends to date and the paleoclimate data which shows it is more the albedo of Earth, the Sun and the ocean’s ability to redistribute heat (rather than CO2 with a 90% water vapour feedback) which controls the average temperature of the planet.

     CO2/GHGs still provide the basic physics calculations of warming (about 1.2C per doubling) but water vapour does not provide an enhanced greenhouse effect at 3.0C for a doubling of CO2.

     While the NCEP data is very, very inconsistent with global warming theory and with the global warming models, it is at least very consistent with our actual experiences to date.

     Empirical data beats theory for the complex climate in my mind.

208. Thanks Lucia,
     I also believe that nuclear is the correct first step, and that action without nuclear is suicide. I think it is odd that Jim Hansen is pro nuclear, (I think he still is) while most alarmists are not.
     Mike

209. Yah, Hansen earned some bonus points from me for being pro-nuclear. I was surprised. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been . . . I’ve probably allowed myself to become too jaded in that regard.

210. “…my goal is to attempt to use less… I believe we should subsidise home owners to put solar power on their homes, assist people to develop alternate energies (like Hot dry rocks here in Australia) etc.”

     Just wondering… why not replace coal, and natural gas with nuclear? Wouldn’t that get things done quicker? Also, you are giving dear Lucia grief over her goals while she is actually accomplishing something worthwhile, while you are still “attempting” to use less… It’s not that difficult. Have the utilities turned off at your house and live like your great grandparents did. Buy a few candles, extra blankets, hot rocks, hand-powered fans and start a garden. buy a bike and get rid of your car. Then, in a few weeks let us know how it is going. Perhaps you can lead by example. I hope you succeed in this endeavor. Maybe you can use the computer at the city library and start a blog. I know I will be a steady reader. I also would like to be off-grid, but only if it is MY idea… not something thrust upon me.
     Mike

211. Mike
     Sure Nuclear is an option. Probably not so good here in Australia, we don’t have surplus water anywhere near our cities, so our best option is things that either don’t ned any water or can safely recycle it.
     “Have the utilities turned off at your house and live like your great grandparents did. Buy a few candles, extra blankets, hot rocks, hand-powered fans and start a garden. buy a bike and get rid of your car.”
     Well a few of those options are silly, but I do cycle to work, I do have a garden, I turn off lights when I don’t use them.
     Do you know what Hot dry rock geothermal power is?

     ” I also would like to be off-grid, but only if it is MY idea… not something thrust upon me.”
     Mike, no one is suggesting that. No one is suggesting you won’t have power, just that the source should be something else than coal.

     “Also, you are giving dear Lucia grief over her goals while she is actually accomplishing something worthwhile”
     well, I don’t know if I am giving her grief, my whole point was that what she was doing didn’t seem to match her goals (as she outlined them above).

212. Off grid nuclear

213. Re: Bill Illis (Comment#11365)

     Quote This would be much more consistent with the actual temperature trends to date and the paleoclimate data which shows it is more the albedo of Earth, the Sun and the ocean’s ability to redistribute heat (rather than CO2 with a 90% water vapour feedback) which controls the average temperature of the planet. unquote

     Does anyone know of a blog/website which is looking at albedo changes? When one considers the fact that smooth water has an effective albedo of zero and a thin layer of cloud can reach 60, it puts CO2’s 2w/m^2 into perspective. Ideally I’m searching ing for someone like Lucia crunching the data and presenting what we know in a layman-friendly form.

     Quote Empirical data beats theory for the complex climate in my mind. unquote

     The really odd thing about this entire argument is that, for some people, data doesn’t seem to be the more important. I can’t get my mind round that.

     JF

214. Eli–It’s nice to see someone putting the nuclear in! Do you know if the facility is operating in the remote Alaskan village yet?

     MikeB– Yes. Hansen gets brownie points for being pro-nuke. Now…. if we could get him to say that in front of the microphone at these anti-coal demonstrations he helps organize. That could speed action.

     Among the reasons I watched that was to hear whether Hansen mentioned that he supports nuclear and to listen to what other said. The protestors changed “no-nukes”. Hansen didn’t say a peep about his favoring nukes.

215. Nathan

     I used the term “no-action”
     Does this mean you actually want action taken? What action do you think should be taken?

     Also nuclear is not always appropriate, it’s no silver bullet. There are many many other options available, from solar to geothermal, to wind and tidal. It’s horses for courses.

     All those actions are good. Oddly enough, my undergraduate senior project was to assist on a project for solar desalination of water. So, yes, I’m for all those things where they can be used and are helpful. My brother-in-law works at Dupage county, where he proposed and implimented the project to use gases from the waste to replace purchased natural gas for energy needs. I’m for that. I’m for people adding insulation to their own homes (and we did so in every house we bought.) I’m for more energy efficient furnaces.

     I don’t know why you think my discussing uncertainties in modeling, or listening to hear whether the protesters at the anti-coal demo proposed nukes is “anti-action” or “no-action”. As far as I can tell the reason is “Nathan thinks this because the notion popped into his head.” Is your reason that I don’t discuss which alternative I’m for very often? Well… seems to me Real Climate, Open Mind, In it for the Gold and the Rabbet don’t do this very often either. So, that wouldn’t seem much evidence for being for “no-action”.

     Anyway, you can keep repeating what you think. We can all keep explaining. This will keep providing evidence that I am for action! (Though you will insist it’s not true.)

216. Boris, are all of these scientists ‘nutters’, and why should we take your word for it?

     Well, Bob Carter is pretty bad. He doesn’t even engage with the actual arguments, which is a dead giveaway. For instance, instead of critiquing radiation codes, he just cites some random dude’s website as evidence that CO2’s first order effect is small. Is he unaware of the evidence or is he intentionally avoiding it?

     Despite Paltridge’s accomplishments, he’s joined an inactivist group that states “CO2 is very unlikely to be a substantial driver of climate change and is not a pollutant. Global climate change is primarily a natural phenomenon.” Maybe he’s got evidence to back that up. The other NRSP scientists don’t, despite their Lyndon LaRouche publications. So I wouldn’t put much hope in him.

     And if you can’t tell Zbnignew Jankiwhorski is simply an angry crank, I’d question your ability to judge scientific matters.

217. “And if you can’t tell Zbnignew Jankiwhorski is simply an angry crank, I’d question your ability to judge scientific matters.”

     I never heard of him, but if YOU say he is, it is undoubtedly true.

218. Boris–
     Zbnignew Jankiwhorski is a new name to me. I googled, and it appear to be a new name to google.

     Did you know the Democrats in Illinois once slated two LaRouchies? (Link to the Larouchie Debacle. (After that, the Democrasts learned you really do have to campaign a little during the primary even if the only other people running appear to be… what’s the polite word… ‘weak’ candidates.)

     Out of curiosity, I visited Wikipedia to see what they have to say about Larouche. Evidently:

     LaRouche was credited by press in Italy, Argentina, and Mexico as the economist who successfully forecast the financial crisis of 2007–2009.

     This just goes to show if you predict upcoming crises 100% of the time, you are bound to be correct when one comes along!

219. Zbigniew Jaworowski

     Polish names, eh? Wish I had a link to a takedown of ZJ’s ice core nonsense, but I’ve lost it and can’t find it. Clearly Google’s fault.

220. Who is this Zbnignew Jankiwhorski?

221. I believe the correct name is Zbigniew Jaworowski. He doesn’t believe that the ice core CO2 data is accurate. His prepared statement to a US Senate hearing is here.. To put it somewhat politely, he’s a little outside the mainstream on this. He’s on the banned list of discussion topics at CA along with Beck and Miskolczi.

222. Boris,

     You need to work on your google-fu. It wasn’t all that hard to find.

223. Zbnignew Jankiwhorski is a typo, or an example of Boris’s sparkling wit. Zbigniew Jaworowski is a scientist with dozens of research papers (some in Nature) who has published worked on ice cores, see
     http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/
     He is clearly not a supporter of the IPCC.
     But as Mike says, Boris has declared him to be a crank, so we can safely ignore everything he says.

224. PaulM & DeWitt,
     My impression is that:

     a) most people do ignore Jaworowski,
     b) just as some people agree with some things some people agree with individual sub-arguments but this does not mean they agree Jaworowski. (Example J cites SteveM. SteveM won’t even let people discuss him at CA.)
     c) Jaworowski’s opinions are definitely way far out on the cold side of the “stone-cold cooler to hell-fire and brimstone warmer” axis of climate blog addicts.

     No matter how far out someone’s beliefs are, their ideas overlap those of other more moderate people. Example: Lyndon LaRouche is pro-life, anti-semitic, pro-nuke, supported JohnKerry and was anti-Bush. Tom Chalko believes in Global Warming, and also posted to explain warming would cause the world to explode.

     When people create lists of those who support a specific cause, there is always the possibility the signatories will include both sober moderates and wooly eyed fantacists.

225. OT

     Ian Castles (Comment#11363) March 5th, 2009 at 9:06 pm

     Are you the same Ian Castles who wrote the letter to Pachuri in 2002? Criticizing the use of MER, over PPP, as the basis for the IPCC economic models?

     If so, I would like to thank you. Or curse you. That letter was the start of my conversion from “warmer” to… umm…well, whatever I am now….

226. I like Chalko’s site. Especially the disclaimer at the bottom which warns you to use your Intelligence.
     .
     Interestingly, Tom appears not to limit himself to global warming. His contributions are wide-ranging:
     .
     http://www.thefreedomofchoice.com/
     .
     http://www.thiaoouba.com/seeau.htm
     .
     http://sci-e-research.com/
     .
     Truly a modern da Vinci.
     .
     Tom has gained some adherents, too:
     .
     https://www.goldenplanetforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1164
     .
     Long live Tom.

227. No, the Toshiba system is in the early stages of licensing but it looks promising. The first one, of course, is the hard one.

228. The best of Jaworowski Each a classic.

229. Les Johnson, Comment #11401.

     OT, but replying to your question. Yes, Dr P invited me to write to him on the PPP/MER issue when I met him in Canberra in 2002, and I did so. The IPCC subsequently asked me to present my critique at an Expert Meeting in Amsterdam in January 2003, in conjunction with David Henderson (former Head of the Economics and Statistics Department at the OECD), and we did so. Despite the fact that the Meeting was attended by scores of experts from around the world, including Co-Chairs of all three IPCC Working Groups, no report was ever produced. At an IPCC Plenary meeting in Paris in the following month, Dr P told journalists that David H and me were akin to members of the Flat Earth Society; and at a press conference called at a UNFCCC meeting in Milan in December 2003 Pachauri issued a news release on IPCC letterhead implying that David and I were spreading ‘disinformation.’

     I subsequently co-authored several papers on PPP/MER and other aspects of the IPCC’s economic work with Henderson. More recently David has extended the ambit of his critique. In a paper to be published in the forthcoming issue of World Economics he questions the characteristic treatment of climate change issues by his fellow-economists.

     The focus of the latter paper is not on economics but on what David sees as ‘the uncritical and over-presumptive way in which … various [recent articles, books and reports] have dealt with the scientific aspects of the subject.’ One section of the paper (which can be accessed now at the NZ Climate Science Coalition website) is headed ‘Inadvertence and misplaced trust’, and its subheadings are ‘Disregarding evidence’, ‘Overlooking bias’, ‘Sanctioning a culture of conformity’ and ‘A failure of due diligence.’

     You can thank me, or curse me, for commending this paper to your attention.

230. Rabbits sure love their strawmen.

231. Bender,
     Is this your tough talk? Crikey mate, this is hardly ‘martial arts’ science talk…

232. Ian, nice to hear from you. I remember some of the discussions you had on the net a while back. I was interested in the way China fit into the discussion with its economy. My interest was of the base load for computing ratios of productivity per energy units and productivity per pollution units.

     If you get a chance, I wonder if you could suggest to someone of the economic sections to state base rates, such as $/decatherm and other factors more plainly. My interest was based on the assumption that the US will not engage in more than lip service to climate change legislation unless China and India are part of the deal. In which case, I would expect that the opponents would point out pollution and energy effiencies as a reason that China should do “whatever”. The “whatever” is whatever the speaker would think would help derail the legislation. I tried to determine some simple ratios from the AR4, such that it appeared that the US was about $10/decatherm and China was about $7, but could not be sure due to the nature of the writing.

     Though perhaps after the PPP/MER, this is less likely, 😉

233. Thanks John. The conventional practice is to characterise energy use and emissions (typically measured in million tons of oil equivalent or of CO2 equivalent) per unit of GDP as, respectively, ‘energy intensity’ and ‘emissions intensity.’ This is relatively straightforward for comparisons for a single country over time, though it is necessary to recognise that declining intensity ratios do not necessarily imply increases of ‘efficiency’ or ‘productivity’, because the aggregate ratios for the economy as a whole are affected by factors such as changes in economic structure.

     However, when it comes to measuring differences in energy or emissions intensities between countries, these comparisons are fraught with difficulty, mainly because there is dispute about whether relative GDPs (the denominator of the energy and emissions ratios) should be calculated by converting GDPs in national currencies into a common currency using prevailing exchange rates (MER) or purchasing power parities (PPPs). Economic statisticians and index number theorists are unanimous in arguing that PPPs must be used – and that MERs must NOT be used – for this purpose. This common but erroneous practice implicitly assumes that the overall average price level is the same in the countries being compared – e.g., that, contrary to common observation, average price levels in Japan are no higher than in China.

     In their press release in December 2003 excoriating Castles and Henderson for spreading ‘disinformation’, the IPCC claimed that ‘the economy does not change by using a different metrics (PPP or MEX), in the same way that the temperature does not change if you switch from degrees Celsius to Fahrenheit.’ The analogy is faulty because temperature measures in C or F both measure the same thing – whereas comparisons of output between countries using PPP converters assume a common price level (i.e., they represent differences in volumes only) and are therefore measuring something quite different from comparisons using MER converters (which measure an amalgam of price and quantity differences). Economists and national accounts statisticians have been pointing this out for decades.

     It is true that there is controversy about the particular PPP measure that should be used in cross-country comparisons, especially if the comparisons are being made between countries at widely differing levels of development. But that is no reason for using MER converters: this practice is (to quote Professor Bill Nordhaus of Yale) simply wrong.

234. Ian, do they use MER rather than the absolute numbers of tons CO2, tons pollution, decatherms consumed (produced) as a way to compare the economic impact in the IPCC AR4? It would seem using the actual basis (tons or energy produced) would be more informative, and useable as an international standard since it would be easier to audit, and measure compliance and the reality of the energy and pollution. But, perhaps that is why when I was trying to figure cost/pollution ratios from the AR4 I couldn’t make sense out of it. The basis of say cost per decatherm kept changing from one paragraph to another as far as I could tell. I also concluded that there were either unstated assumptions or intrinsic assumptions that need to be explained. However, it could be the difficulty arose from the manner of the way the text was written.

     But, using a basis woud also mean that PPP would make more sense. It would be easier to give a number with a confidence interval based on production/emission units with a PPP factor such that the basis would be evident without having to read 20 pages of material and 10 more pages of supplemental information… my POV, I admit.

235. John. No the problems that I’m discussing aren’t with the NUMERATOR of the energy/emissions/pollution ratios. The Paris-based International Energy Agency is the main source of country-specific data on the absolute quantities of energy produced and used (in tons of oil or coal equivalent) and of CO2 emissions from fuel combustion (measured in tons).

     The difficulty in cross-country comparisons arises in specifying the units to be used for the DENOMINATOR to be used in the ratio. If the object is to compare the efficiency of (say) two electric power plants, it’s legitimate to relate the physical input of fuels at the plants to the output of electricity from those plants. also measured in physical units such as kWh or Joules. Such comparisons do not raise the issue of whether MER or PPP converters are used to value output in a common unit.

     But the valuation issue cannot be avoided if the objective is to make cross-country comparisons on an economy-wide basis. The comparison of an aggregate of tons of output of cement, computers and all of the other physical commodities produced in the countries concerned might be a relevant input in an assessment of freight transport requirements, but it would be meaningless to aggregate the weight or volume of output of all the myriad products produced by a modern economy and expect the result to be usable as a measure of the volume of output assessments of energy efficiency or productivity. This is where the PPP vs MER argument comes in.

     We read in the daily news headlines of the economic woes of ‘Asia’s biggest economy’ or ‘the world’s second biggest economy’, and then find the subject of the article is Japan. So the claims are nonsense: Japan’s output PER HEAD is higher than China’s, but China has ten times as many heads and its TOTAL output is far greater than Japan’s (and the margin of difference has been growing year by year).

     If you have access to the UK-based journal ‘World Economics’, please see David Henderson’s article ‘Over-Presumption and Myopia: the IMF on climate change issues’ in the April-June 2008 issue (vol. 9, no. 2), and note especially the discussion under the heading ‘A specific lapse’ on page 198. In this section, David criticises the IPCC’s handling of the PPP/MER issue and characterises statements about energy intensities and emission intensities by the IMF in a recent issue of the Fund’s World Economic Outlook as ‘slipshod’. On an issue of such great and topical importance, it is strange that no governments seem to care.

     Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with the section of AR4 which compares costs per decatherm and so am unable to say whether the use of PPP-based output measures would improve or simplify their exposition. But I will say that on no account, in this context or any others, should cross-country based measures of energy, emissions or pollutants, or of their intensities be based upon or derived from MER-based measures

236. Thanks Ian. I was myopic myself looking at just the energy information since this is my main interest. In specific, I find the discussion in AR4 on energy costs and comparison of mitigation versus adaptation underwhelming. I understand your point of the denominator. I was starting in an area I was familar with, rather than an overall economic outlook, in order to get a handle on what was written. Though I wonder if it is a matter of governments do not care, or whether there is some precieved advantage to prefer MER to PPP.

     It may be my approach is simplistic. I am an engineer and have found determining a basis in units and areas that I understand helpful to understand the whole. As your comments have been.

237. The trouble with statisticians (yes you Lucia).
     http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/correlation.png
     

238. Boris:

     “And if you can’t tell Zbnignew Jankiwhorski is simply an angry crank, I’d question your ability to judge scientific matters.”

     Of course, Ian Castles specifically listed all the Scientists about whom he knows you are wrong. You of course, came back with ad-homs and this strawman that wasn’t in contention.

     I am continually amazed how you and others slander reputable, lettered, PUBLISHED (isn’t that what you always whine about?) scientists who have beliefs that disagree with yours while screaming that the Scientists you agree with are virtually PERFECT whether they are nut jobs like Hansen or not!?!?!?!

     By the way. Mind proving your ANGRY charge?? I won’t bother with the crank part as his beliefs are as plausible as the IPCC’s and Hansen’s!!

     I would characterise Hansen as an angry crank after his latest comments about coal death trains… Can you come up with something approaching this on Jaworowski??

     HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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