Posts by NomNomNom 2280 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Apr 2011
A few weeks back when the independent BEST study vindicated the warming shown in the global temperature records, skeptics were clambering to insist it was a strawman and denied that they ever denied the world was warming. "Of course we always accepted the Earth was warming" they told us.
Now here we have a skeptic claiming the warming has been faked by scientists adjusting historical measures down...
Business as usual has resumed it seems
1998 was the peak, but 1997 was the start. The last 7 months of 1997 were in El Nino and the strongest El Nino months recorded were in November and December 1997. For this reason at the time 1997 became the warmest year on record.
Hardly a fair comparison to make with 2011 which has been dominated by La Nina
If it was just natural variation then 2011, a La Nina year, should have turned out much colder than 1997 an El Nino year.
1997 was the start of the El Nino of the century (it started in May 1997). The warmest ENSO 3.4 values ever recorded (since at least 1950) happened at the end of 1997.
In contrast 2011 started with a La Nina, briefly touched ENSO neutral and it's falling into another La Nina.
The fact that 2011, dominated by La Nina, looks like it will be as warm as 1997, dominated by El Nino, speaks volumes doesn't it?
The catastrophe isn't a sure thing. The IPCC reports which make that clear.
The issue is that rapidly elevating CO2 so much higher than it's been for millions of years will very likely have a number of significant effects on climate (ocean pH drop, warming of the planet, increased plant fertilization). In turn there are a myriad of secondary knock on effects from each of these changes - physical and biological and it's domino's from there. The catastrophe is the potential result of these changes happening so fast.
The reason the word "denier" exists is to describe those who would rather trick themselves and others into believing none of the above mentioned effects are likely to happen at all and that the matter can simply be shelved and ignored.
"One of the striking things about the exchanges is that the climate scientists' private behaviour was so different to their public statements."
Shouldn't that either be their private behaviour was different to their public behaviour or their private statements were different to their public statements?
I was going to make a comment that everyone's private behaviour differs from their public behaviour (even down to people having different voices for when they talk on the phone) but I am not sure if that was the point being made.
Private communications with familiar people in general tends to be more casual and relaxed whereas public communication is more polite.
Also when you communicate publicly you have to think more about what you say. Politicians learn this well as any slight err in wording can be misused by their opponents who then claim it is a scandal and call for them to resign. Most scientists don't have to worry about that as they don't have such political opponents.
Climate scientists do. Take Dr Phil Jones factual statement in an interview that there had been no statistically significant warming for 15 years. This was widely misinterpreted by climate skeptics into headlines telling the public that Phil Jones had admitted global warming had stopped 15 years ago.
The likes of Dr Phil Jones learn from such examples that they have to be more careful with their words. Given more thought he could have simply provided the % significance figure for the last 15 years to prevent his words being misused by those with agendas.
People who claim climate scientists should just blab without thinking in public like they do in private in their emails don't understand what they are up against.
"number 2 this since we started looking at it on 1959 and the trend has been the same since the early 1800's http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_full"
No it hasn't. Even your link shows an accelerating curve. Why do you think it's called the Keeling Curve and not the Keeling Line?
"number 3 from a real scientists web page"
But he's a climate scientist. I thought you ignored them?
Also you aren't factoring in that Nature absorbs more CO2 than it emits plus some of our emitted CO2. CO2 is rising about 2ppm per year and humans are emitting the equivalent of about 4ppm per year. CO2 is rising due to human emissions.
"yes the planet is getting a little bit (roughly 1 degree c over the last 140 years) warmer and that is the result of coming out of a widely known phenomenon called the little ice age."
Rubbish. We were out of the little ice age decades ago.
"then there are over 31,000 scientists who have signed their names and placed their credentials to paper who say that co2 has at best minimal influence on real temperature."
31,000 people with BScs in some subject or other but without expertise in climate. Out of millions such people who haven't signed.
No they don't prove your point. They lack context so you are having to assume and read things into them that aren't there to make your point. They are also
If there was true corruption why are there only a dozen or so emails out of thousands that are having single sentences taken out of them without context?
Take this one for example that you think *proves* your case:
"it will be very difficult to make the MWP go away in Greenland".
Anyone who knows a thing about this subject that the MWP signal in Greenland is huge. So he cannot possibly be being serious. He's probably being sarcastic and making the point that the MWP signal exists at least in Greenland. So no this isn't proof as you claim, there is reasonable doubt. Now if you had included the full email in all it's context rather than snipping all the context out maybe you could make a case. As it stands you can't. All you prove is that climategate is about skeptics taking sentences out of context and at face value.
Or this one:
"This is one reason why Tyndall is sponsoring the Cambridge Media/Environment Programme [run by BBC's Roger Harrabin] to starve this type of reporting at source.""
What type of reporting is he talking about? Bad reporting. So.... think about it. Why would a scientific organization be interested in getting journalists to report science well? You say "media bribes". Again another example of your so-called proof being absolutely rubbish.
Notice that the quote starts with "This is the reason why". So what is the reason? Why remove the preceding part of the email that gives the reason? That's an inexcusable deletion of relevant context.
What do you have to hide by removing that text?
"Calculated by whom, and was it calculated or the globe as a whole, or a specific region?"
By anyone who has tried to calculate it.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/recon_lj_with_others.png
Global and Northern Hemisphere.
"There is enormous disagreement on the magnitudes of the MWP and of the LIA regionally and globally."
There really isn't that much disagreement. Look at the reconstructions above. None of them show a MWP more than 1C warmer than the LIA. The key thing is that projections of 3C global warming definitely take us way beyond the MWP. So claims that it used to be so warm in the past that future potential warming will be fine are bogus.
"Michael Mann is on record as insisting that the MWP had to be disposed of, since some of the existing estimates make it warmer than the present. "
No he isn't.
"The causes are also disputable since the early Holocene appears to have been apparently warmer than the present"
The reason why is known. The Earth's orbit and tilt.
"with sea levels between 1 and 2 meters high than present mean sea level - conditions, mark you, that are considered dire by the IPCC"
There were no cities back then near sea level...
"All their arguments are empty hand-waving. If they had *hard*, *scientifically sound* evidence, they would present it."
They do. Read the IPCC reports for example.
Where you are no doubt confused is that like most "skeptics" you imagine there is a single simpistic "Is AGW true" issue here where in fact there are multiple issues.
Is the climate changing? yes and there is 'overwhelming evidence'.
Are humans contributing to climate change? Yes again with overwhelming evidence.
Are humans going to drive significant climate change with continued emissions? Very likely, yes based on overwhelming evidence and with a "consensus of experts" who have been convinced by this evidence. Do we know for sure what will happen? No. Are models perfect. No. Are models wrong? Yes. In many ways.
"What?" I hear you say - How can the models be wrong and yet the evidence for human driving of climate be overwhelming? Because that is not simply based on models, plus the models are not wrong enough to preclude that. They are wrong enough to prevent details of what will happen being known.
"If you read through enough of the Climategate Emails, you will see that the climate scare mongers have so little faith in their own work that they feel it necessary to 'game' peer review."
Not true. Try to actually read the emails, not just the out of context quotes skeptics take from them. The scientists didn't game peer review - they complained about papers they thought are rubbish >>including cases where they thought *skeptics* had subverted peer review<<. Yes that's right, if you want to take the emails at face value of what the scientists actually thought.
"Some went so far as to break the law to prevent anyone skeptical from reviewing their work."
There was a lot of animosity between certain people, largely due to accusations of fraud being made. That impaired judgement when it came to giving those people data.
Has no relevance to the science however. Their work has been reviewed and vindicated. BEST replicated Phil Jone's temperature record work for example and in fact found more warming. Clearly then the idea that Jones has gamed the data to make it show more warming is completely false.
FOI violations do not affect the actual science. In fact the whole focus on FOI laws rather suggests desperation on the skeptics part.
"I have for many years subscribed to the growing belief that the minor change in temperature in the last 100 years is nothing more than a fluctuation which is not out of kilter when looking back at far more significant changes through the last 500 years and further back."
That's completely wrong. There's no evidence of larger more significant changes in the past 500 years. I don't think you understand the subject at all. I don't think you realize how unprecedented 2 degrees in 100 years would be.
You say it's perfectly natural. Based on what? Are you one of the many people who have been misled by graphs of *greenland* temperature changes (an area of sizeable temperature swings and at many times opposite to changes in Antarctic) and think they actually depict global temperature changes? Global temperature changes are far more muted that individual regions. The difference between the little ice age and medieval warm period is calculated to be less than 1 degree C for example. And you talk about 2C warming in 100 years as if it represents something insignificant...
So how do you explain that the IPCC report only says that it is very likely that humans have caused most of the warming in recent decades? It doesn't claim 100% certainty. Neither do the scientists. Very likely in the IPCC iirc (and I probably don't) is defined as 90% certainty.
So it's fine to speculate that maybe the consensus is wrong and the warming is due to some unknown cause.
What scientists get annoyed at is when contrarians (sometimes fossil fuel funded) try to trick the public into thinking that such speculation carries more weight - as if the liklihood of human involvement is tiny - as if there is no threat or issue with climate change.
The whole climategate thing is full of skeptics deploying strawmen of like this to pretend scientists are saying things in private that contradict what they say in the public.
"As humans we have this drive to see what's just past the edge of our vision or around the next turn. It assumes this same trait in all intelligent life."
You don't need it in all. You only need it in a few. If even only a few species in the galaxy were like this they would have spread throughout the entire galaxy by now.
"Consider if there were 1 million advanced civilizations in the galaxy willing to send probes - they've got a choice of ~4e11 stars to send a probe to. OK they could rule out quite a lot but it's still one very large number of which we are 1."
Why do you assume they would only build one probe? Consider probes being able to travel to multiple stars too.
"The ethnocentric aspects of life (If a civilization were properly advanced and not using up the resources on their planet that they know and love... why spend so much time to go all over the universe?..."
It's not about resources, it's about identity.
Despite ample resources on Earth, plenty of people today would want to found their own planet, their own empire, their own "better" civilization for religious, political or other ideological reasons if they could. Maybe even because they can.
You can bet if we as individuals had the technology to survive and travel in space that there would be a constant outflow of ships heading for "the middle of nowhere"
You should play minecraft. Has nothing to do with space but you'll find the reason players spread all over the map has nothing to do with resources and all to do with finding their own space and territory.
I prefer the hunting side of the game myself rather than the creative side of it.
I make myself some armor and weapons (bow for ranged attack, sword for up close) and then go hunting players. It's surprisingly difficult to track someone from a distance without losing them. Quite often I have to hang back - particularly in deserts until they head over a ridge (less they turn round and see me). Then I rush to the ridge, look over and .... they have gone. It's real tough figuring out the sense of space sometimes and which direction you have been heading. It's easy to accidentally get lost or to go in circles.
It pays to shadow other players rather than to just rush at them, because creative players (who inexplicably play on pvp servers and moan when they are killed by other players) often go into the middle of nowhere and build a base together. Finding these bases is near impossible given the maps are massive, and on some servers can be effectively infinite - growing as they are explored - so the only sure way of finding these places is to shadow players from eg spawn. Or sometimes in chat you read stuff like player A saying "hey where's your new base" and player B will say "come to spawn I will lead you there" and then the challenge is to shadow them without them seeing you.
On servers with other pvpers it's quite fun to lure them into a trap. Eg take your armor off, run around a lot near spawn, attract their attention, run off so they chase you - don't let them know you know - get far over a ridge, put your armor back on and crouch waiting for them to come over and strike. Or best if you have time actually construct a lava floor trap, get them to walk over it, hit the button, the floor slides away and see them fall into lava. haha.
On many servers there can be teams of pvpers roaming around and they are very hard. In the unfortunate case I bump into one of them I am literally playing the mouse in the hunt and that can be quite fun too to try and escape them. Escape can involve diving in to a cave system or even (rarely have the time) tunnel downwards as fast as possible and hope they can't find you.
Anyway there's more too it than the creative side of the game where people just play lego and make massive 3D Marios.
"significant means outside NORMAL range by at least two standard deviations"
If warming is not statistically significant then you can't claim there has been any warming.
The point is that the surface temperature records show statistically significant warming over the 20th century. So does BEST. BEST confirms that.
So yes BEST does contradict prior skeptic claims.
You miss the point. Skeptics have been smearing the surface temperature records for years.
Allegations have included:
-Scientists chose a subset of stations to exaggerate warming
-Scientists removed stations in cold regions (eg siberia) to exaggerate warming (even though this claim makes no sense)
-Scientists have dishonestly altered the data, "cooking the books" , to produce more warming in recent decades
-Scientists have altered the data over time to remove the 1970s cooling.
All these allegations were proven false years ago. Others had already done the checks, just as BEST was able to - the data and methods to produce a surface temperature record have never been hidden (or BEST wouldn't have been able to do it). But a large number of skeptics ignored all this and continued making the claims.
Ironically it was their very allegations that prompted BEST. I knew what result BEST would find - the same result everyone else had found. Ie all the above skeptic allegations would be shown false. But by that point the skeptics were so deluded that they believed BEST might find something else.
What skeptics don't like is being proven wrong very publicly. That's all there is to it. If skeptics don't want headlines like "Climate skeptics dealt 'clear and rigorous' blow" then maybe they should have been more careful about their accusations.
hmm you are not a skeptic but you use two of their talking points which can only have come from reading skeptic blogs...
"They discovered that 2/3 of the temperature stations recorded a temperature rise, while 1/3 recorded that temperatures had gone down."
Overall they find the globe has warmed on average. Just because n% of the land surface has actually cooled, that doesn't mean there's an n% chance the global average has cooled.
Well here's one very prominent skeptic doubting there's been any significant warming over the 20th century:
"“Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and uni-directionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.”" - IIRC that was from the "surface record - policy driven deception" report Anthony Watt's co-authored back in 2010.
More to the point though, as in the above quote, skeptics have been claiming that the surface records, eg GISTEMP, HadCRUT, etc could not be trusted because they've tampered with the data.
We knew these skeptic claims were incorrect. The surface records had been independently replicated (by the 3 teams above, plus others) making it virtually certain that the result follows from the recorded station data.
So along comes BEST, and we all knew it was also going to find the same result. Skeptics were still apparently oblivious however.
So BEST releases the same results. What happens? Skeptics backpeddle and try to pretend they never made any claims doubting the surface record processing.
"This study is not "massive" nor is it anything new. It is simply a re-plotting of the same data everyone else has already plotted. If I have a set of numbers and you plot them on a graph and someone else plots them on a graph and both plots look similar, well, it means both know how to plot numbers on a graph."
It isn't new to anyone else. But it sure as hell should be new to climate skeptics.
Climate skeptics have been claiming for years that scientists have mishandled the surface record data, even going so far as to accuse them of fraudulently "cooking the books". Now that those records are independently verified you claim it's nothing new.
Ha! nice try
The thing that annoyed me about the second one - the one with the van on the cliff - is that the main characters killed dozens of people through utter recklessness, yet they are made out to be the "heroes" or "victims" of the movie, the ones we are meant to sympathize with. Didn't they even bring a kid to the island for some reason? how reckless is that?
The hunters came with the right gear. Sure they came to capture dinosaurs, but they weren't recklessly endangering people's lives. They had a plan and a load of equipment to do so. My thinking is that they would have succeeded perhaps with no casualties if the "heroes" of the movie hadn't interfered.
Because what "heroes" decided to do was sabotage the hunters camp by releasing the caged dinosaurs. In particular a very large one. That alone could have killed many people, they were lucky that charging dinosaur didn't crush anyone (movie director made sure of that, would have been too obvious to the audience I guess that the cage release was wrong if anyone had died). All we got was a jeep exploding and tents destroyed. But it did destroy the hunter's communication equipment leaving them stranded.
Two of the "heroes" then compounded their negligence by taking the captured and injured T-Rex baby back to the van, jeopardising their own team - and in fact one of their team was killed as a consequence. He even tried to warn them of danger (before coming to try and help them) but they ignored his frantic phone calls (which is highly reckless in that kind of environment).
The "evil" hunters actually ended up rescuing the "heroes".
If you remember, after that, there was an entire journey across the island where hunters were picked off one by one by raptors and other beasts - that only happened because a) they all had to move across the island because the "heroes" had p***ed off the T-Rex mum and dad and b) they couldn't call for help because their caged dino-release act had destroyed the hunter's communication equipment and their reckless act of bringing the t-rex cub back to the van had ended up destroying their own.
So the deaths of dozens of men were very much on their hands.
Yet in the end they are made out to be nice people who were victims of a terrible ordeal. I can't remember which, if any, of the hunters survived, but if I was one of them in that situation I would definitely want the "heroes" of the movie prosecuted when I got home.
I don't know why this annoys me so much, it's the way the wrongdoing is so obvious yet the audience, script writers and move directors seem so oblivious to it.
the night before he had eaten 24 carrots
his name was "moran"? you kidding me?
"Judge McFarland told Moran: “It was an interesting experiment to fulfil the alchemist’s dream, but wasn’t going to succeed.”"
Did a judge really describe heating up shit as an interesting experiment?
It hasn't been done before! The cutting edges of science! Next week in the lab stroke house I attempt to turn my piss into sparkling spring water.
Something about a gold ring
shit this flood is a real tragedy and couldn't have happened at a worse time. i only have 10gb left and a load of torrents lined up for the weekend. are they saying there will be a run on stores for hard drives? should i be buying now? where is the government response to this? wheres the information?
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