You’ve heard about the “scientific method.” If your memory is excellent, and you took a lot of science classes in American schools, you learned two of them, because life science textbooks and physical science textbooks teach somewhat different concepts called “scientific method.” If you study the history of science, even at a superficial level, or do actual science, you will find that the “scientific method” you learned in high school, the very same “scientific method” people who either love or hate science, but are not scientists, and talk a lot about science, incessantly refer to, is not what scientists actually do. Neither the procedures for developing a study nor the inferential process of advancing understanding follow this method, or at least, not very often. Doing science is much more haphazard and opportunistic, nuanced and visceral, much less clean and predictable. Like the famous physicist once said, “The scientific method; that is what I fall back on when I can’t think of anything else do to.”
But there is one thing that is found common to most scientific endeavors, and without this thing science would not progress very quickly or very far:
The honest conversation.
Scientist talk to each other about their work. You see it best in lab meetings or seminars. Perhaps a visitor comes to a lab and presents on his or her research, research of interest to the lab group hosting the talk. Everybody listens. Everybody hears the scientists questions and concerns, and maybe finds problems of their own in the research being presented. Then they sit down for a meeting and talk. Turns out the magnetics expert has something to say about the sampling procedure, the the isotope person has some as yet unpublished insight on fractionation, the taphonomist knows of an old and nearly forgotten study of pollen rain dynamics in the tundra. Next think you know, the visiting scientist has a list of things to do with their lake cores that will help make sense of the as yet enigmatic results showing an increase in salinity as the lake level goes up (it should decrease) or some other thing.
A lot of these conversations happen by email these days. That is why email exists. The Internet was invented to extend the conversation among scientists across time and space, to fill in the gaps between visits and conferences. Email emerged as one of the better ways to use that resource. A great deal of science advances at the leading edge of wave after wave of emails.
Several years ago, nefarious science deniers intent on stopping action on climate change, presumably funded by the Koch Brothers or the likes, got their hands on a bunch of emails sent back and forth among climate scientists. They took lines out of the emails, and thus out of context, and made up fake stories about what the scientists were actually communicating about. You can read about that event and all that accompanied it in Michael Mann’s book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines
More recently, David Schnare, a science denier who gets paid to do this sort of thing, running a fossil fuel funded anti-science group, attempted to get even more emails out of Michael Mann, but lost in that effort in the Virginia Supreme Court. After losing that battle, Schnare went after other emails, in Arizona. According to scientist and anti-science victim Michael Mann, he
…targeted two other prominent climate scientists at the University of Arizona, Jonathan Overpeck and Malcolm Hughes (the latter being one of my longtime co-authors), seeking a total of 13 years of emails from them, including correspondence with or about me or my research.
…
I have spent much effort in the years since “Climategate” explaining why scientists’ research correspondence needs to be protected from legal bullying. Anyone who truly cares about the research can and should review the published papers and underlying data, directly evaluating a study’s methodologies, analyses, and conclusions. But seeking thousands of emails serves only to stifle collaboration and discourage the frank, creative exchange of ideas, and chill the candor needed during the confidential peer review process.
…
E&E Legal will no doubt post the Arizona emails once they receive them, distributing them online with a series of misleading and disingenuous mischaracterizations, choosing a few phrases here and there to misrepresent me and other scientists and to falsely accuse us of all manner of misdeeds.
Consequently, I am sharing my emails here (enter “mail_guest” for both username and password). Moreover, a group of independent climate science experts have gone through the emails providing context for interpreting the exchanges and discussions contained within.
So, at least some of the emails currently under attack are now available. Some of these emails, released by Michael Mann preemptively, have notes added to them to provide context. Some time later today (Friday) Schnare is expected to do his own release of all of the Arizona emails.
Do read his biographical notes at DeSmogBlog. And stay tuned.
See also: “But their emails!” by David Kirtley.
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Smart of Mann to get out ahead of this.
I look forward to seeing the emails (I will get them from Schnare).
It will be fun to see how the experts “interpret” the email language for the layperson.
The fact that he needed to do that indicates there will be language which is problematic – such as “hide the decline”.
But I will have to wait to see.
Hopefully, by now, all University professors at institutions which receive Federal or State funding realize that all emails they write or receive using their University account are public (in the sense they are subject to FOIA requests).
If you want to talk about how you are spinning the data to hide the proxy decline (or how to kept papers you don’t like out of the journals), I recommend using a private email, such as gmail or yahoo or hotmail – not your work email.
I’m sure that as worthless as the emails will be to your having of denying established science you’ll find a way to lie about it rickA, since lying is what you’ve settled on.
“Hide the decline” still eh? Sigh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz8Ve6KE-Us
Deniers are such utter PRATTS.
See what you did there, trollA?
Maybe read this bit again, then try to understand the actual science and so the context of the emails? But lying to promote a political agenda is so much easier than doing any real work, isn’t it?
Word games. Malicious word games. Rock your hobby horse, Rickey, rock it good. It’s all you’ve got.
There is no language there that is problematic to the scientists involved, or anybody else who does not have a foul agenda, as you should well understand by now.
As for getting the e-mail dump from Schnare – would that behaviour stand up in a court of law, getting statements from an untrustworthy, in this context, source which should be treated as conjecture.
Maybe it is just that your scientific knowledge is not up to interpreting the e-mails and you need to cheat.
Human brains are hungry for patterns. Lie on your back and gaze at the clouds. You can find all sorts of amazing things, pirate ships, Jesus, dogs chasing cats, Jimmy Durante’s nose…
Rick:
Wow, throw in confirmation bias and you start to believe that clouds aren’t really clouds.
RickA, your comment is predicated – still, after all these years – on the conceit that there is a nefarious conspiracy by the world’s scientists to manufacture a whole corpus of false scientific understanding. You in your incompetence in honestly enbgaging in science can never arrive at a parsimonious, logical, and empirically-defensible conclusion when you start from the ideological base that you have.
The physical principles are clear: human-caused global warming is incontrovertible. The ecology is clear: this warming is exceeding the grimmest predictions of biologists, and species extinctions and ecosystem destruction is already locked in.
Your participation in the science denial industry has already successfully contributed to the decades of delay that have stymied the development of a fossil carbon-free economy. You have played your part to ensure that there can now not be a planet capable of sustaining into the future the seven plus billion people alive today, and that even societial structures will be lost over the coming centuries. You’ve willfully participated in the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, and the Arctic, and the Amazon, and the SWWHA, and the giant kelp forests, and the southern hemisphere nothofagus associations, and the alpine systems, and many of the mangrove forests. To name but a few…
You’ve done this wifully, and deliberately, and consciously, with reckless disregard of the years of advice from experts who understand the science where you have no idea at all. You’ve done it because you want to preserve your temporary wealth and privilege at the expense of millions of species and billions of people alive now and who are to come (and will now not come…) in the future.
You are a despicable, malign, repungant blot on humanity. You operate purely on your own self-interest, even when that selfishness will rebound to punish those in your circle whom you leave behind.
You may gloat and rejoice at your success in contributing to the delay of cessation of the use of fossil fuel, but there is one thing that you can never, ever change, one thing where you will never triumph… you are wrong, and the inexorable and implacable unfolding of time will prove you to be wrong, and whatever memory of you there is in the future will reflect that you are not worth pissing on if you were on fire.
This is just so.
That you persist in your campaign to obfuscate even at this late juncture is a damning reflection of your corrupted character – and this is just so, too…
I seem to have lost my thumbs…
+1 for Bernard.
Re: ” there will be language which is problematic – such as ‘hide the decline’.”
Still hoping its all a hoax by a worldwide network including just about all active climate scientists, eh Rick.
RickA, you are a daft idiot. But we all here know that. Climategate was a non-event, but deniers like you cling to it with everything you’ve got in your last ditch desperate feeble attempt to suggest that climate scientists are involved in the mother of all global conspiracies to manipulate climate data. You are pathetic. Manipulating words to place them in a completely improper context is something climate change deniers have mastered. I am sure that you think Schnare is an upstanding citizen tirelessly seeking the truth. Please hand me a barf bag. The irony that reeks from everything that you write on here and on other blogs is a sight to behold.
I wonder when emails among deniers are going to be voluntarily handed over for public inspection? Unquestionably they are stuffed with nefarious plans to undermine scientists and to hide the truth. But I won’t expect to see you pushing for them to be handed over for public inspection anytime soon.
This comment, by a denier troll, has been deleted because it is nothing but a libelous attack. I don’t mind vigorous debate even among people who are clearly wrong, but this was over the top. I’ve deleted the comment contents rather than the entire post so responses can be seen.
In essence, Fake Troll claimed to have read all the emails and found them to be proof that all the scientists are making it all up. People are welcome to go read the emails themselves and see how that can’t possibly be true.
Are you paid in dollars or rubles? Would you care to cite one particular email that supports your point of view? Or would you rather cast vague baseless aspersions? You really think that atmospheric physicists ignored oceans, clouds, planetary tilt, and cosmic radiation in their analysis? Then you are simply a clown. Thanks for the laugh. Have a nice day.
Joseph, the answer to that question is because those factors have been eliminated empirically. What I find so utterly annoying about people like you is that you camouflage your own personal political and ideological beliefs and fears with shoddy science and even wackier conspiracy theories. It has been accepted for over a century that increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide will generate warming over the biosphere. It was discussed by the US government in 1965, with a prediction that we would see significant warming by 2000. When C02 concentrations rose over 10,000 years at the Permian-Triassic boundary to 2000 ppm, an event that generated the largest extinction event in the planet’s history, surface warming caused by a rapid rise in atmospheric concentrations of C02 attributed to intense volcanic activity was the likely culprit. Surface temperatures rose by around 8 degrees over those 100 millenia, and that was enough to kill 95% of marine species and well over 80% of terrestrial species.
You can pontificate all you like but that won’t get Homo sapiens off the hook. We are responsible for most or all of the recent warming and in doing so we are pushing natural systems toward a point beyond which they will be unable to sustain us. As for following data, its all there now in Dryad or other data despisitories. The problem is not just in analysing it but in being able to understand it. By now there is an overwhelming scientific consensus over the causes of GW, and we in the scientific community are focussed on elucidating the effects it is having and will have on ecological systems at all levels of organization and on solutions (I am a scientist, by the way). The real achievement of the well funded think tanks and denier blogs and right wing media is that they have succeeded in keeping the public debate stuck on causation. Throw in the Dunning-Kruger effect, where laypeople read a blog or two and believe that they are instant experts, and it is easy to understand why so many people believe that the link between atmospheric concentrations of C02 and the recent warming are unproven.
The science is in. You have been left behind.
Because all these factors have been exhaustively examined and CO2 emerges as the primary driver of forcing change responsible for modern warming.
You are ignorant of the scientific evidence, so you are not in a position to be ‘shaking your head’. Get off your intellectually lazy arse and do some reading.
Joseph Peck picked a peck of pickled pepper.
A peck of pickled pepper Joseph Peck picked.
If Joseph Peck picked a peck of pickled pepper
where’s the peck of pickled pepper Joseph Peck picked?
Joseph Peck needs to do some homework across a swath of Earth’s systems.
To help him out here is a study suggestion:
‘Oceanography : an invitation to marine science’ by Tom Garrison, Robert Ellis
http://www.worldcat.org/title/oceanography-an-invitation-to-marine-science/oclc/898154469/editions?referer=null&sd=desc&se=yr&qt=facet_all_yr%3A&editionsView=true&fq=
my edition is an older international student editions but the matter in the ninth edition should be much the same only more up-to-date.
“I spent the last 3 hours reading through the emails.”
I don’t believe you for a second, but to give you the benefit you probably don’t deserve: provide details of the issues you found troublesome.
“Polar ice is nearing a decadal maximum”
Since you can’t even lie convincingly about something easily checked, there is no reason to believe you on anything else until/unless you give detail on the email items you found troublesome.
J Peck:
Astoundingly stupid. Even in the simplest analyses done in areas not relating to climate science data often must often be “calibrated” — some data algorithms, for example are non-robust to differences in variability so data is scaled and centered prior to use. Some software requires data to be in a particular format — none of that make the resulting analysis wrong, but it would be under your items of concern.
If you were interested in simple analyses yourself you can find some interesting items here (as a starting point):
http://berkeleyearth.org/data/
The data could be read into R (or worked with Python: I’d suggest R) or other real software, just be aware that you’d need to remove the “header” material first.
If you search around you can find other sources for data — but I’m guessing you aren’t willing to do that.
Peck: Your comment is pure and simply a lie. I’m contemplating deleting it. I’ve also looked through all the emails, and I came to the opposite conclusion.
It’s always amusing to see the way that topic knowledge and confidence are inversely correlated in deniers. And how astonishingly lazy most of them are, too.
Bunch of comments not showing?
I can’t see Greg’s latest comment, but I think the rest of it is here, at least on this thread.
Ah, a vexatious correspondent on this thread has also gone.
Back and fixed, I think.
Every now and then I remind people that the UEA email theft was never fully resolved, but the best indication was that this was a Russian hack. Given Putin’s vast wealth accumulated from fossil fuel, and given the incontrovertible Russian involvement in the presidential election email hacks and the social media operations to sway public opinion ahead of the 2016 election, it’s worth remembering that the campaign to stymie action on fossil carbon emissions was significantly led by Putin’s Russia and was a prelude to the Trump scandal.
There’s no small irony in the fact that the same useful idiots in the USA who executed Russia’s plan ato put Trump in the Oval Office and thus to ensure the destruction of US pre-eminence, are the same idiots who similarly executed Russia’s (and the Mercers’, and similar cliques’) plans to suck wealth from coal, oil, and gas at the expense of a future habitable planet.
That we have no adequate response to repudiate and punish either the perpetrators in power or their zombie enablers is one of the faults of modern societies. We are all going to pay for this civilisational inadequacy.
+1 what Bernard said.
It does look as though the UEA hack was a Russian, state-sponsored attack that could be seen as a prototype for what they did during the 2016 US election.
Surprisingly few people seem to appreciate the level of existential threat to Russia presented by decarbonisation. IIRC the Russian economy is something like 70% dependent on hydrocarbon exports. So I think it’s safe to expect more Russian sabotage of climate policy in Europe and beyond, over coming years. As always, bastards to watch.
Re: “We are all going to pay for this civilisational inadequacy.”
Yes, and almost certainly there will not even be an apology from those who live to see the consequences of their actions and inactions. It will all be no one’s fault, everyone’s fault, some scapegoat’s fault, or God’s punishment for gay marriage.
Indeed. I was within a whisker of being vapourised at the back end of 1970 when a Russian SAM Kotlin destroyer had another go at seeing how close he could get to HMS Ark Royal by cutting across bow or stern whilst aircraft were being launched or recovered respectively. I was doing gas turbine engine repair stuff up for’ard on 3 deck just a section behind the cable deck when the whole ship began to vibrate violently. Within a minute the alarm klaxons started to sound shortly there was an almighty crash knocking me off my feet into some engineering machinery.
The Kotlin, of which I have a photograph I took as he cut across the stern at dawn earlier that day, skipper had misjudged things as night had fallen. The missile housing and launcher on the aft deck of the Kotlin was demolished. My CO was in a Phantom on the waist cat’ going full bore in afterburner just about to be launched and had a sweat inducing time as the launch was cancelled. Talking with the CO after the event I learned that those Russian missiles were notoriously unstable and go off with little provocation.
But I had a special duty that day – damage control of a section of the carrier, so after picking myself up and still not knowing what had happened, it having crossed my mind that WW3 had kicked off and nobody had told me, I went off down through the decks to eleven deck clipping all clips each hatch as I passed through going down and the same back up again. Then, also being bar manager, I had to secure the bar in my mess on 2 deck, there being much movement of bodies going to emergency stations etc. in case somebody swung by for a freebie.
I hope the lads on the new ones will be prepared, things are beginning to look decidedly dangerous politically with many similarities between now and pre-WW1.
I have still not seen the emails Schnare was going to publish. It seems there might be a delay while they review them. Looking forward to seeing them.
In the meantime I have seen some excerpts of the Mann emails he published to get out ahead of the court ordered email production.
What we see is an effort by Dr. Mann and others to create graphs and trends to help them advocate for climate action. Dr. Mann doesn’t like one trend line, he would rather pick and choose the data to get a different trend line (a bigger trend).
The problem with advocate scientists is they lose their status as “just the facts” objective seekers of truth and we see that they spin and twist to enhance the message they want to deliver.
Very dangerous in my opinion.
It is my opinion that it is the IPCC lead authors and leading climate scientists who have delayed action to solve the climate change problem and not the people who question what we know and how accurate the science is. I predict that in 100 years, people will look back on this period and lament the foolishness of the advocate scientists who shot themselves in the foot and delayed action which could easily have happened without all the confusion of messing up the data in order to try to control what they wanted to happen.
How much of the warming since 1750 or 1850 or 1950 has been caused by Humans? We still don’t know. We may never know.
Why are leading scientists still advocating for 100% renewable when we don’t have the technology to build it yet?
What a tragedy that we didn’t build more nuclear power plants in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and 00’s. Why are the environmentalists so against nuclear power?
Rather than advocate for more fossil fuel burning (because I am supposedly a denier), I actually would rather see replacing fossil fuel burning with nuclear power.
That is the no regrets action I would like to see, even if ECS turns out to be 1.8 instead of 3.0 (my personal opinion), or the opposite (the consensus).
Not that we will ever know ECS – it isn’t a real thing which can be measured – it is just a model metric and so varies from model to model, and varies as all the models change over time and as the data is also changed over time. What a mess!
Why did we pick a metric which nobody will ever agree on the value of? Since 1990, all we can agree on is its range – 1.5C to 4.5C. What a joke.
Oh well. All I can do is keep posting my opinions and see what happens in the future.
I still think 60% nuclear and 40% renewable is a good goal or maybe 80% nuclear and 20% renewable.
It will be fun to look back in 2050 and 2100 and see what the mix is of power generation. I look forward to watching California try to go 100% renewable by 2045.
Back to your lies about Mann’s work eh? The fact that your understanding is zero doesn’t mean his work is wrong.
And your “we don’t know how much is due to human activity” lie again? Really?
It’s pretty clear now that any college education you actually received lacked any ethics requirements (although it is possible you cheated your way through the ethics course) and that the only real hurdle to getting your diploma was waiting for the checks to clear.
You are lying again, TrollA.
The only methodological stretching I have seen is when ‘sceptics’ use narrow, biasing methodology like EBMs to generate lowball sensitivity estimates.
You want to talk about advocacy, then why don’t you talk about that?
This is not only libellous in its imputation of academic misbehaviour, it is patently wrong. There have been many, many independent studies completely separate from mann that have arrived at exactly the same conclusion. Even Muller, the darling of the Denialati, ran through the numbers and proved what he doubted – that Mann and all the other scientists were right all along.
You don’t even need to get into fancy chemical proxy or tree-ring analyses to see the impact. Years ago I calibrated Aono’s Kyoto cherry blossom data to the hockey stick and this very simple proxy shows the same trajectory, magnified because it is a regional proxy and not a global one. I used to have a number of posts on Deltoid that discussed the data and the relvant issues related to them, but with ScienceBlogs’ demise that has all been lost. There’s now only a graph left at Skeptical Science.
If you understood even the basics of science and how it operates you’d know that the evidence for not only warming, but the human cause of it is incontrovertible. But you are an investor in fossil fuel, so your profit is predicated on resisting any obstacles to the production of your planet-damaging industry.
You can persist with your ignorance and conscious lies, but you’re only fooling the fools. Sadly, there are enough fools in the world that you and your ilk have already locked in much of its destruction, which only goes to prove that one doesn’t have to be right to win.
If there was a Christian God he’d have you locked in for a one-way trip to Hell.
“You are lying again, TrollA.”
He’s also monumentally ignorant about modeling and not willing to learn. There was his famous comment about Mann’s approach to factor analysis being “wrong”, and his comments about the “problems” he sees with modeling show a level of lack of understanding that matches right wing idol Lott’s incompetence.
OK so provide evidence to back up that accusation and explain how whatever ‘evidence’ you throw up makes your case.
Without that any opinion of yours is worthless.
Lindzen, Spencer, Lewis, Curry… et al.
Fucking blind and stupid, the denier troll army…
RickA:
“I have still not seen the emails Schnare was going to publish. It seems there might be a delay while they cherrypick them.”
Fixed that for ya.
dean:
Mann’s de-centered PCA analysis is “wrong”.
Even Ian Jollife (a PCA authority Mann cited) agrees that Mann got it wrong.
https://climateaudit.org/2008/09/08/ian-jolliffe-comments-at-tamino/
You should check out this series of posts on Dr. Mann’s screw ups.
https://hiizuru.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/a-list-of-manns-screw-ups/
Finally, Dr. Mann changed his method after the criticism he received for his short centered (de-centered) technique in MBH98 – so of course it was “wrong”.
All done for advocacy and all wrong.
But the ends justifies the means – after all Dr. Mann was trying to save the planet.
You should stop repeating denier talking points and learn to understand the facts better, TrollA. Nobody – including Mann – thinks MBH98/99 were perfect. They were, after all, groundbreaking and unique reconstructions. So not likely to be flawless.
Mann’s methodological choices changed to improve the quality of his analysis, but he got essentially the same results. And all those other millennial reconstructions since have validated those results.
So tell me – in your prompt response – how Mann faked his methodology ‘for advocacy’ and how it was ‘all wrong’ when in fact it was substantially correct?
* * *
How weird that I remember explaining exactly this to you several times in the past.
So why the fuck are you repeating this bollocks unless you are just a worthless, lying, righwing troll?
No dickhead, saying that a procedure is difficult to interpret is not saying it is wrong. I don’t expect you to understand anything more statistically than how to find an average of about 3 numbers, but that doesn’t make you any less wrong.
Again, no, since the interpretations were the same. The fact that the “objections” raised by liars like you simply shifted from “oh, he used a method we don’t like so he’s lying” (which you still use) to “oh, he changed to the procedure we suggested so he’s lying” shows how empty your objections are.
The fact that you
a) Are completely illiterate when it comes to things statistical (or even, simply past basic arithmetic)
b) Have no clue about modeling in general
c) Completely willing to lie about things that have been explained to you and ignore the evidence that shows you are wrong
Combine to show that there is no reason for anyone with a modicum of knowledge to pay attention to what you say.
Finally, your ignorance-based arrogance is not on display any more clearly than in this statement:
But the ends justifies the means – after all Dr. Mann was trying to save the planet.
There are many people who have no training and no understanding of science or statistics, but there aren’t many who as willing to put themselves with as endless a stream of flat out wrong and dishonest comments as you are.
RickA, you have a learning difficulty.
It’s been explained to you many times over the years that Mann was breaking ground with his original analysis, and that the “incorrect” analytical procedure was unintentional at the time and that refinement on understanding this (which is what the scientific method is all about) only corroborated his earlier results.
You’ve also had it explained to you that there have been many independent studies that demonstrate the same warming phenomenon, and that these are arrived at by completely different processes. I even threw the Aono cherry blossom data at you because all it requires is a direct ccomparison of blossom burst with seasonal temperature increase – these are strongly correlated and so simple to grok that even a child can understand.
Further, you had the fundamental underlying physics of warming explained to you again and again, and you persist in ignoring this too. Any argument that claims that there’s no human-caused global warming needs to address the physics, and no one has ever – ever done so successfully.
You’re incapable of learning the basic subject matter. Whether this is because you are intellectually incapable of understanding it, or because you are a mendacious player, the end result is the same: you cannot move forward in a discussion and you are nothing more than a propaganda sheet for a planet-destroying industry.
You’re so unworthy that I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.
RickA:
“Finally, Dr. Mann changed his method after the criticism he received for his short centered (de-centered) technique in MBH98 – so of course it was “wrong”.
All done for advocacy and all wrong.
But the ends justifies the means – after all Dr. Mann was trying to save the planet.”
In the intervening 20 years after the original paper was published, it is impossible to believe that RickA is unaware that Mann’s reanalysis using a more standard PCA technique resulted in essentially the same result.
If Mann’s choice of a novel approach to PCA analysis was “done for advocacy” because “the end justifies the means” he did a piss-poor job of it, since it actually had no material effect on the results of the reconstruction.
I have no doubt that RickA knows this … and is simply lying.
How many ways can an advocate for anti-science be wrong? Let me count the ways.
“What a tragedy that we didn’t build more nuclear power plants in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and 00’s. Why are the environmentalists so against nuclear power?” Hey RickA. Can we build one in your backyard? Maybe in the upscale part of your town? Guess what RickA. It isn’t going to be only the “environmentalists” who are going to protest the new plant. It is going to be everybody who doesn’t want their property values to plummet. It is going to be everybody who doesn’t want to have to do periodic town wide evacuation drills , and everybody who doesn’t want to wake up every time a siren goes off and wonders if this is the next Three Mile Island. Also, anybody who doesn’t want to worry about having potassium iodide pills on hand all the time. Also, could we store the N-Plant waste in your basement Ricky? And only some of these folks protesting will be certified environmentalists. What you will have to do is to convince ordinary people to start favoring N-power. And explain to them why Fukushima can’t possibly happen again. Or Chernobyl. Or Three Mile Island. Kay?
It is apparent that one of your main motivations is to cause pain, RickA. You relate to people by causing pain. You are not here for the comraderie, or the intellectual stimulation, you are just here to throw out little turds of FUD and hope that you get somebody riled up.
The bread crumb sins of Dr. Mann that the climate denialists have picked up on do not negate the facts that the climate is warming, and that his basic premise has stood up to all the assaults of the denialists.
A rising, acidified ocean and diminishing food and water options will be the bane of future generations. And the arse holes of the current era who wasted everybody’s time with their stupid, unimaginative, cowardly, short sighted, narcissistic arguments against addressing the fossil fuel problem in favor of stasis will be much reviled.
SteveP:
I would much rather live next to a nuclear power plant than a coal burning one. Ditto for a sanitary garbage burning facility.
Nuclear is far safer than coal.
The casks of nuclear waste stored at the nuclear power sites are even less of a problem than the nuclear power plants themselves.
Someday people will far prefer being next to a nuclear power plant than to a coal plant. Wait and see.
I don’t actually want to cause pain. I just tell you my honest opinions. If they cause you pain – well that is your problem, not mine.
It is good that you admit that Dr. Mann has bread crumb sins. I was simply responding to dean’s denial about Dr. Mann’s error with regard to PCA.
It is pretty clear that I am right about Dr. Mann and his PCA technique in MBH98 – and that dean is wrong.
That makes people mad – and that is what causes the pain. The fact that I am right and everybody here knows I am right – but they don’t want to admit it. So they stoop to name calling. How weak – how pathetic.
The pain you are experiencing is cognitive dissonance. It is good for you.
Once again:
I think that humans are causing some warming. But I think it is 1/2 as much as you do. I think the seas will rise less than you do.
My solution to the warming caused by humans is to produce 60 or 80% of the power with nuclear power and the other 40% or 20% with renewable (and a splash of hydro mixed in there as well). I am not adverse to investing some research dollars into new technology – such as fusion, space based solar or grid level power storage – but don’t count on inventions to solve the problem. I go with the already existing solution – nuclear.
Personally, I don’t see how that opinion “wasted everybody’s time with their stupid, unimaginative, cowardly, short sighted, narcissistic arguments against addressing the fossil fuel problem in favor of stasis”. Because I actually do advocate for replacing fossil fuel with nuclear.
But think what you want. Everybody is entitled to their opinion.
Ah, no. The irritation we feel is not good for us and is not caused by cognitive dissonance. It is caused by you trolling. Trolling being defined in the usual way as repetitious posting of falsehoods calculated to cause irritation in others.
We’re long past the point where you can plausibly claim that your shithead ‘opinions’ haven’t been debunked, so you are just a fucking rightwing troll.
You dodged the last question I asked you because you are a dishonest little shit.
Let’s see if you dodge this one as well:
So what is causing the other half of observed warming? Please provide scientific references supporting your claim.
Or withdraw it.
RickA (I won’t even to begin saying what the ‘A’ in your lasy name means, but we all here have an idea. Bernard has already singularly demolished you and your vile bullshit. Let me pile it on. Right now humanity is teetering on the brink. This is no exaggeration. The next 20 years are going to determine the next 1000. Homo economicus is currently shredding complex adaptive systems across the biosphere in the desperate attempt to spend the last remaining capital like there is no tomorrow. The proceeds of this casino economy are largely appropriated by the rich. Biodiversity at all levels of organization – the working parts of our ecological life support systems – is being decimimated. The latest WWF-World Bank Living Planet Index makes grim reading. It is absolutely shocking, except to right wing clots like you who Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, describe well. Professor Gilbert said that climate change is “a threat that our brains are uniquely unsuited to do a damned thing about”. You epitomize the stone age mind which is simply unable to process what you perceive to be a low risk threat on the basis of a skewed understanding of scale. In the context of large scale systems, a mean temperature rise of 2 degrees celcius occurring over a century or less is an event of stunning magnitude that will have enormous and terrible consequenes; to scientifically illiterate lawyers its like two days at the beach. You aren’t the only one – comment after comment from people on blogs and media stories about climate change that I read sadly reflect the same simpleton views that cannot vaguely decipher what is at stake and so resort to ridicule and conspiracy theories. People like you also cannot deal with the consequences of climate change because the forces of selection (cultural and genetic) have programmed our brains to think only about the present, and thus we are incapable of looking generations ahead.
In 1972 Donella Meadows and her team wrote the now famous Club of Rome report, in which they looked at the number of trends in the material economy and the natural economy that underpins it. They based their differing scenarios (not predictions) on 1970 data. In 2002 they re-evaluated the data thirty years later, and found that all of their trends were on the worst level trajectories. It is as if we had learned nothing, and were spending accumulated natural capital as if there were no tomorrow. I have seen the orginal graphs and the scenarios and then the updated data and they ate terrifying to behold. Since the original report, climate change has become perhaps the greatest environmental threat of them all. Those scientists who bravely leave the herd, like Mann, Hansen, Santer et al. are harrassed, threatened, and berated by people who as Bernard has said are truly criminal. These cretins sift through emails in a desperate attempt to find any crumbs they can to smear scientists and to undermine the science that they hate. I will bet that if the emails of deniers in blogs, think tanks and corporate front groups as well as the PR firms they hire were made public, then we would see a truly nauseating amount of material that would shock the public to the core.
As is already happening, as I have seen on other blogs, the words of Mann are being misinterpreted to suggest that he and other climate scientists have an ‘agenda’. I guess this means that 99% of us who all agree that the biosphere is warming because of us, and that if we do nothing about it there are likely to be serious consequences for humanity, needless to say nature as a whole, all have an agenda then. Along with every major scientific organization on Earth as well as the National Academies of almost every nation state.
To give you some idea of how deniers and anti-environmentalists distort the words coming out of of scientist’s mouths or what we write, one needs to look no further than Bjorn Lomborg, hero of the climate change denying think tanks. In his abominable book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, his 7 page chapter on biodiversity may indeed have been the worst in the book. In it, he quotes ecologist Paul Colinvaux in an attempt to suggest that extinction rates are impossible to estimate. Lomborg writes, “Colinvaux admits that the extinction rate is incalculable”. This is a quote mine of epic proportions. It gives the impression to the reader that Colinvaux is frustratingly admitting that we jyst don’t know how many species are being lost; it implies that the number could be anywhere from small to large. Now read the full quote from Colinvaux: “As human beings lay waste to massive tracts of vegetation, an unprecedented and incalculable number of species are rapidly becoming extinct”. Read that again. What Colinvaux actually asserted was that extinction rates are HUGE and his statement implies that it is of crisis proportions. He doesn’t ‘admit’ anything. But you couldn’t learn that from Lomborg’s abuse of the word ‘incalulable’. Climate change deniers are also masters of selective quote mining. Climategate is a textbook example.
Back to RickA. The clown constantly cites links from denier blogs to make his arguments. Rarely does he ever go the primary literature. I am sure he feels right at home at ClimateAudit, ClimateDepot and Watts Up With That because they reinforce his confirmation bias. His posts are both nauseating and depressing. As I said, the pages of blogs and comments on online news sites are full of similar piffle. I have little hope that we are going to turn the corner.
No, not an error at all. But your ignorance of science and statistics, in combination with your willingness to lie and your lack of intent to actually learn anything, it’s a certainty that you will continue to include that crap in all of the other false information you spread as your opinion .
It is pretty clear that I am right about Dr. Mann and his PCA technique in MBH98 – and that dean is wrong
No, what is clear you don’t understand an efffinf thing about it, but choose to comment about it and lie about other items that have been explained multiple times.
It is clear you are a knowledge free person who believes your lack of understanding means people who understand things are wrong.
It is clear that you are simply another libertarian what values ignorance and dishonesty above taking the time to learn about things you don’t understand.
The attacks on Dr. Mann from the denialists continue, and that is okay, as, despite any minor errors that he may or may not have made in his analysis, the basic premise of his work stands firm against any denialist arguments made thus far. If the current argument from the denialists is that since he may have made an error in some part of his approach, all of his work is intolerably blemished, then they are being unreasonable. And what work are “conservatives” putting up to counter Dr. Mann’s efforts? Have they taken the time to do the work to put together their own “corrected” data sets and their own analyses? I suspect not, because the laws of nature typically don’t cooperate with attempts to fudge reality.
In the mean time, our oceans are getting more acidic, our ice caps are melting, our insect populations that feed fish and other wildlife are plummeting, storms that are supposed to be statistically once per century are becoming decadal, our oceans are rising, and our drought prone areas are having some record droughts. While this slo-mo train wreck does not justify getting hysterical, it is a serious cause for concern among people who like people. The constant attack that those of us who perceive these problems have experienced over the last several decades is really getting annoying.
As to power plant siting…. the public will be far more open to nuclear plants when the chief executive officers and key share holders and their families begin to live on site at the plant. Until then, expect the profit motive to make nuclear plants a hard sell to those who have seen its ugly side in action. The ill defined “profit motive” creates some of its own problems, because safety regulations will be fought and subverted for share holder profit and intra-plant economic gain, i.e., those that don’t go along, don’t get promoted.
RickA
I fully endorse what Jeff H has written above, I think this has also been explained to you time and again.
How we are impoverishing the Earth whilst creating increasing inequality is well explained in a book which even you should be able to understand.
Another slightly older but still very relevant is the small but perfectly formed is The Little Earth Book by James Bruges, inexpensive but of great value.
You may have had the concept of Earth Overshoot Day explained to you, do you grasp what happens when you have to live off your capital rather than interest, well that is what humanity is doing.
Your smugness may think you are in clover now but consider, if you have any, your children and grandchildren plus those yet unborn. I suspect that you are a pro-lifer – the hypocrisy of that manner of thinking need not be explained for it is self evident.
“I think this has also been explained to you time and again.”
All of it has been, yes. In a variety of ways. He continues to ignore the facts and lie about all of it. It isn’t just science though, he’s never told the truth about anything.
BBD:
No – I do not accept your homework assignment.
No – I do not have to think what you want me to think.
No – I do not have to say what you want me to say.
No – I do not have to withdraw any of my opinions because you demand it.
I will continue to think what i think and say what i want to say.
In the meantime I will point out that the global temperature has dropped more than .3C since the el nino. I see that as natural, as was the warming from el nino in the first place. Just that swing alone in the last couple of years is 30% of the warming since 1880.
But you go ahead and think what you want to – I surely do.
Oh my!
You know, Rick, if you just wait and don’t say anything for a little bit, it won’t sound like you’ve lost it.
“I will continue to think what i think and say what i want to say.”
It takes a certain type of person to say what you just did: “I don’t care what the facts say, and I don’t care that everything I say about this topic is wrong, I’m going to keep saying it.”
Not a good type of person mind you, just a certain type of person.
That’s not ‘homework assignment’.
I asked you the most fundamental question raised by your ‘opinion’ that humans are only responsible for half of observed modern warming.
And you refused to answer it.
Then you refused to walk back your bullshit.
Which makes you a dishonest little shit.
Again.
Accounting for ENSO variability, GAT is now >0.9C above preindustrial.
All of that (and more, when you include aerosol negative forcing) is us.
That’s not my ‘opinion’, it is what the scientific evidence shows.
I didn’t make up 50% of it and then refuse to admit that I made up 50% of it when called out for bullshitting.
That’s the difference between you and me.
That’s the difference between liars and bullshitters and scientific evidence.
RickA
What a childish response, is this from another man-child?
Now where do you think the ENSO cycle gets its energy from?
Why is the ENSO cycle becoming more pronounced at more frequently oscillating?
Note recent reports that the ocean contains more heat energy than previously thought, what effect is that having on ENSO?
Also why do you think this is happening?
RickA, you claim that your opinions are based on ‘thinking’. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The problem is that you don’t think. Your views are manufactured nonsense that correlates directly with your warped right wing political ideology. Why you even attempt to engage in scientific discussions is a mystery. You are totally and utterly clueless, yet you persist. Whether or not a simpleton like you ‘thinks’ that only 50% of the recent surface warming is due to the human combustion of fossil fuels, or whether you ‘think’ that is serious or not is irrelevant. Science has spoken and the scientific community is in consensus. All or virtually all of the warming is anthropogenic and if we follow a business as usual trajectory there will be consequences that are very likely to be profoundly serious. The scientific community, me included, is focused on evaluating the significance and harm of these effects and in searching for solutions.
The only consolation, if one is daft enough to call it that, for dumbwits like you, is that it seems like much of the planet, and humanity, is headed into the abyss because of criminal neglect by the political classes and ruling elite. Some consolation.
As for your 30% drop in surface temperatures in the current La Nina, this is another one of your pathetic and feeble attempts to escape reality. It is still warmer than in the enormous 1998 El Nino, which is remarkable and terrifying. The next major El Nino will crank temperatures well above the most recent one, and the inexorable rise in surface temperatures will continue.
>70% likelihood of EN going into 2019 IIRC…
Lionel A asks:
Now where do you think the ENSO cycle gets its energy from?
. . . The sun.
Why is the ENSO cycle becoming more pronounced at more frequently oscillating?
. . . I don’t know if this is correct, or why it is happening, if it is correct. Do you?
Note recent reports that the ocean contains more heat energy than previously thought, what effect is that having on ENSO?
. . . Those recent reports were in error – so no effect on ENSO.
Also why do you think this is happening?
. . . Because it is warmer than it was in 1950, in 1850 in 1750 and than 20000 years ago. Natural warming melts ice just as human caused warming melts ice. The question is how much of each are we experiencing? I think it is 50/50, not 0/100. We don’t know the answer to this yet – or we would know what ECS is, and not have the same giant range we had in 1990.
What caused the other 50% of warming? What evidence do you have to support your claim?
Yes, we do. With lots of evidence to support the conclusion that it’s most / all anthropogenic.
Over to you, Mr Bullshit…
Answers this time, please.
Or you have to walk the BS back.
If you don’t, and instead persist in the full knowledge that you have no evidence whatsoever to support your claim and all the evidence available contradicts it, then you are a liar.
This really isn’t complicated, so get up to speed with the rest of us please.
You forgot to reference your statement.
Those ‘recent reports’ were not in error; only the degree of certainty was reduced.
When RickA says “I think its 50/50”, its impossible not to laugh. A right wing scientifically illiterate lawyer ‘thinks’ what he does on the basis of his warped political ideology. This is why he ‘thinks’ like he does.
Sadly for him, science has left him in the dust.
RickA, put Mann aside for a monent.
What’s wrong with Muller’s BEST reconstruction?
References to the scientific literature would be helpful.
Bernard:
I am not aware of anything wrong with the BEST reconstruction. I think it is a wonderful effort. I really like the scalpel approach rather than homogenization.
I don’t recall having complained about the BEST reconstruction. Do you bring this up for a reason?
Yes, there’s a reason: BEST shows the same thing that Mann does…
It’s warming.
We’ve warmed the planet ~1.2 C since ~1750. We’ve already locked in ~0.5 C more, according to Eelco Rohling, and to date we’re doing nothing substantial to avoid further warming on top of that.
~2.0 C warming will severely damage the planet’s biodiversity and humanity’s capacity to maintain a cohesive global civilisation. ~3.0 C will see the commencement of a full 6th great extinction event, and will pretty much guarantee that a globally cohesive civilisation is not possible. More than 3.0 C and all that’ll be left will be the job of picking up the pieces.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/07/its-a-sad-reality-a-troubling-trend-sees-a-97-decline-in-monarch-butterflies
BBD asks “What caused the other 50% of warming? What evidence do you have to support your claim?”
Up until a decade or so ago, any change in the climate was assumed to be caused by nature. This was the null hypothesis (actually it still is the null hypothesis). So the burden is on those who say that 100% or 110% of the warming since 1950 is caused by humans.
Any human effects are going to be laid over the natural effects. But the natural effects are not going to just disappear because humans are emitting a lot of CO2 since 1950. So I see natural changes as still occurring and there is simply no reason for them to have stopped.
So what caused the other 50% of warming – Nature. By which I mean anything non-human. It could be the sun, it could be our magnetic field interacting with charged particles, it could be the heliosphere, it could be volcanic activity (under the sea, under Antarctica). It could be things we haven’t even discovered or thought of yet.
My evidence is the LIA, the MWP and the temperature increase from 1950 to 1940 ish. The temperature swing from the height of the MWP to the bottom of the LIA was almost 1C. All natural (non-human caused I mean).
Also, since I think ECS is 1.8C and not 3.0C, that causes me to subtract almost 1/2 of the warming from 100%. My evidence ECS is 1.8 are the three observationally constrained energy balance studies (two Lewis and Curry studies and one Otto study).
I understand that nobody here agrees with what I am saying or finds my evidence persuasive – but that is the evidence which informs my thinking.
Since the ocean has risen 120 meters in the last 20,000 years, and all of it except for the last 11 inches or so is admittedly caused by nature, and since the high stand was several meters higher during the last interglacial, I don’t see any reason why some portion of the 11 inches isn’t caused by the same trend which caused the 120 meters of rise in the first place. I say 1/2 of the sea level rise since 1880 was caused by nature and 1/2 by humans.
This is what I think. This is honestly what I think. Therefore I cannot be lying about what I think.
Note that I don’t say this is the objective truth of the matter. It is just my opinion (what I think). I could be wrong and I have always admitted this. That is why I say we will have to wait and see.
We have had this conversation before and I have said many of these things to you before. But I repeat them because you asked.
We first encountered each other in 2009, and since 2009 neither of us has changed our opinion about global warming (oops – I mean climate change). That is because the science hasn’t really changed – the ECS range is still 1.5C – 4.5C, so 1.8C is still within the range and therefore physically possible (in my opinion).
I wish we could measure ECS or TCR. I still think it would be interesting to use the global temperature at 560 ppm of CO2 (the doubling point) to estimate TCR and ECS – but we have discussed that many times before and I don’t think anybody will ever agree that this data point will have any meaning. But I wait and will see and will keep reading and trying to learn.
WTF? Utter bullshit.
Burden of proof claim is bullshit stacked on bullshit, but it’s been done, as already explained.
But *you* haven’t answered the question: what caused the other 50% of modern warming per your BS claim? Specific evidence not diversionary bullshit is required at this point. Science already has the evidence stack to support most / all anthropogenic causation. The burden of proof to support your counter-claim is on you.
And bullshit does not suffice.
Try again, with references, of course.
If you can’t back it up with evidence, withdraw it.
Nope. IPCC AR5 range was distorted by (misleading) EBM stuff subsequently shown to be biased by methodology. Actual range is 2 – 4.5K per doubling of CO2 or equivalent forcing change with a most likely value of ~3C. As it was in 2009.
This has been explained to you over and over again, so you know the facts but keep saying something that contradicts them, which makes you a liar.
Utter bullshit. There was no global and synchronous ‘MWP’ nor ‘LIA’ so your claim is specious.
Reference this crap or withdraw it.
You’ve come out with this rubbish before so you know it’s wrong because it has been pointed out, several times. So:
…this is evidence of complete dishonesty on your part. More lies, in other words.
“.But I wait and will see and will keep reading and trying to learn.”
You can’t keep doing something you’ve never started.
“So what caused the other 50% of warming? NATURE”… followed by, “This is honestly what I think”.
So once again, a right wing lawyer with bare scientific literacy has a view that conflicts with 97% of statured experts, and which is at odds with every relevant scientific organization and National Academy on Earth. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or tear out my eyes. This is Dunning-Kruger folks combined with political ideology. Unfortuneately, society is filled with intellectual wannabes like RickA whose views on science overlap with policy because they are polluted by their ultra conservative political views.
It is of no use responding to this level of ignorance. RickA is the kind of guy who would believe in creation theory or intelligent design (knowing the piffle he writes, he probably does) if this in any way had a political dimension that was linked with profit. There are a lot of RickA’s out there with similar kindergarten level understanding of science but who write as if their views are empirically sound. The comments pages of blogs and media outlets are full of them. It doesn’t matter how much evidence accumulates that dismiss their myopic arguments, they will not budge because to do so would knock them off of their political ledge.
The facts are these and they are beyond discussion. The Earth’s surface is warming significantly and well outside of natural forcings. The reason is completely (100%) due to the combustion of fossil fuels by humans combined with other stresses such as land use changes. Of course there is short term variability but we are the culprit, and among the scientific community there is no longer any dispute over that fact. Trying to convince people like RickA of this incontrovertible truth is a waste of time because to accept it means a paradigm shift in their political thinking. Essentially, the planet will have to be in systematic flames before he will acknowledge the truth and of course by then it will be much too late.
Bart Verheggen will give a lecture for a Master’s course I run at the VU University next week and in it he addresses the psychology of the RickA’s of this world. The scientific community, he stresses, is focused on solutions. Causation is no longer on the table. Again, its warming COMPLETELY because of us. This is a hard fact. However, because of the well funded industry of denial, the public debate is miles behind the scientific discussions and is stuck on causation or extent. People like RickA, and again society is full of them, are easily swayed by the deniers because it fits in with their pre-determined ideology. Of course they will deny this because to do so would be to admit bias, but its the truth.
No it is hearsay which informs your thinking not factual evidence. You are of course welcome to your own opinion but in the scheme of things that opinion is worthless for you cannot have your own facts.
As long ago as 1995 Ben Santer produced a seminal attribution paper to back up what was already largely understood. Your, ‘Up until a decade or so ago…’ has no backing whatsoever even given the deliberate vagueness of your words.
There is no excuse for your refusal to accept that pinned down by the empirical evidence assessed in countless scientific papers across a swath of scientific disciplines that produce input to climate science.
Wilful ignorance is not a nice look and given how often you have been shown evidence which makes a mockery of your so called ‘opinion’ you demonstrate this in spades.
Now the person who persists with refusal to get to grips with the scientific knowledge in spite of many citations being presented to them, who continues to spout the bull that you do cannot hide behind any, ‘I am not a liar’ claim.
Nature gives not a flying f about lawyerly rhetoric and sophistry for as Richard Feynman wrote, “…reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
Hence RickA, you are the fool.