25! 25! Do I win a prize?

Umm.......see Lynn's post...

" Seems like most folks just blowing off hot air."

And contributing to "global warming" in the process. How ironic.

It's probably right up there with India's cows at a contributing factor.

"Now, I have no opinion on the merits of the carbon flame war discussion."

I'm dumbfounded. ;}

"25! 25! Do I win a prize?"

Nah. You gotta be the first on 100. But be patient, Doug; we'll get there. :))

If the goal is to get to page 100, I'm happy to continue contributing non-useful and probably off-topic posts. Stuff like belching taxes...

What's a belching tax?

"Stuff like belching taxes..."

Heh heh. You just know where this one is going.

Doug, are you there? Take it awaaaay, Idester.

Belch Tax:

Because New Zealand is the only developed country with more than half its total greenhouse emissions from livestock (mainly methane belches), the NZ government decided it would look good to put an emission tax on livestock. This was called a 'belch tax' (but only after a period of public ignorance where folks thought it was a 'fart' tax). Never mind the fact that all that would do is make a lot of farmers get out of livestock, leaving the rest of the world to take up the slack, resulting in no nett reduction in methane emissions...

"Almost everyone in my institution is hanging by a thread, every grant round. An inability to procure on-going grant funding means unemployment,..."

Exaggerate much?

A PI's job is rarely, if ever, dependent on a grant funding. Not in any uni I've ever worked at. While particular (junior) positions can be dependent on grant money, I've never seen a post-doc fail to find some source of funding for continued employment if they wanted to. Ie., the job may depend on a particular grant, the person's employment does not.

None of which changes the fact that winning more grant money does not get you a bigger salary. And since you get the grants to carry out the research, how is grant money an incentive to lie about the *results* of that research? They don't come back and take the money off you if they don't like the results. Results that get peer-reviewed when they are published anyway...

I'm trying to get across that "grant money" is not an incentive for a climate scientist to lie about the results of their research. It's not like they're going to be given a fat wad of cash if their research shows global warming and a smack around the head if it doesn't. It simply doesn't work like that.

Claims that scientists have lied about climate change are baseless, offensive, absurd, and shows just how pathetic and desperate the deniers are.

"Dave, think of it as a vuvuzela: one note, droning on and on and on and...."


Rick, you are either SAVED the Carbon Flame War thread, or DESTROYED the rest of the World Cup.

Either way, that's a great line.

:)

I also question the assumption that climate scientists who find evidence supporting Global Warming will somehow get more grant money than those who find opposite evidence. I bet quality, peer-reviewed science that disproved Global Warming (in part or whole) would receive lots of attention/funding/etc.

As you know, all governments/corporations (are those the same?), especially the U.S., are not too excited to have to deal with curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, from cars, industry, belching cows, and everywhere else. I'd posit that they would jump over themselves to fund/promote/etc. hard science which helped avoid any caps/limits/regulation on industry.

Lord knows eight years of the Bush administration should have proved some correlation between funding and GW-disproving science if there was any. (Of course, they mostly just acted like science isn't any better than faith and/or the economy, but that's a different thread.)

Edited by DaveT on 06/30/2010 22:21:29 MDT.

Rick, nice cherry picking of an el nino year there. Ably assisted by the fact that red seems to be the only colour left in the NOAA's crayon box. I notice you chose to show us the May anomaly chart. How about a quick look at what is happening to the rate of change of Sea Surface Temperature (SST) in the nino34 area (5N-5S 120-170 degrees W) now the el nino is over. This chart is bang up to date, June 17th.

.

And just in case Rick doesn't think the nino 34 region is representative of the global oceans, here's a comparison graph of the actual sea surface temperature there and globally.

.

The scientific fact is, ocean heat content has been level since 2003 and is now falling as the oceans give up the heat they acquired during the second half of the C20th during the run of high, short minimum solar cycles. As the heat leaves the oceans in bi-annual belches, it raises the surface temperature for a while in an el nino. I predicted a while ago that by jan 2011 the sea surface temperature will have dropped to below jan 2008 levels. Brace for another cold winter like the last one I successfully predicted (to much scoffing from the warmista), and like the one started in the southern hemisphere right now.

.

I ran some calculations to work out how much excess heat the ocean was absorbing at the surface in the 1993-2003 decade to make that jump in heat-energy content. Rather than rely on the Argo buoy system I worked from steric sea level rise as measured by satellite and calculated the energy required for the amount of thermal expansion indicated by the rise. The answer came out at 4W/m^2. This is far more than co2 can manage (1.7W/m^2 according to the IPCC) and in any case, downwelling radiation from the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere doesn't heat the ocean, as long wave radiation can't penetrate the surface beyond it's own wavelength, it just causes evaporation at the surface.

So the extra energy must have been coming from a combination of a very active sun, and lowered cloud albedo.

People have been misled by the IPCC that climate change can't be due to solar variation because the sun's output doesn't vary enough to make much difference. The fact is, the amount of insolation ariving on the surface (mostly ocean) depends not only on the sun, but the amount of cloud reflecting the sunlight back into space.

According to data from the ISCCP, the cloud amount fell from the late 70's until around 1998...

Here's a graph of sunshine hours in Japan against temperature in China over the C20th, can you see a possible connection? I can.

.

Edited by tallbloke on 07/01/2010 02:11:21 MDT.

Tom K said:
1) What do you know that all these scientists who study the subject professionally, some 90% of them if you can believe news reports, don't know?

2) What motive would they all have for "lying" to us?

1)You can't believe the news reports. Most of what you read and hear in the media is reported by the SEJ, the Society of Environmental Journalists. What they regurgitate are the press releases spoon fed to them by the NGO's and Institutional press offices. If they step out of line, they get excommunicated.

The 'thousands of scientists worldwide who contributed to the IPCC reports' in fact boil down to 54 lead authors who are actual 'climatologists'. They were their own peer reviewers, and they heavily promoted their own work in their chapters, as well as garnishing it with non-peer reviewed alarmism from unscientific sources like Greenpeace and the WWF, and, sadly, the Sierra Club.

You may have heard of the "Himalayan glaciers to melt by 2035" fiasco...

2)Governments are looking to raise taxes on the back of co2 emissions. You can't tax sunshine...
Big Oil is actually far more heavily invested nto green energy production than people realise, and they get fat subsidies in the form of extra levies on energy to pay for them.

The smart investors have already voted with their feet, check the prices on the Chicago Climate Exchange:
Even at 10 cents a ton, nobody wants it. At it’s peak in July 2008, it traded for $7.50 per ton of CO2.

The list of the CCX'x paid external advisers makes interesting reading. It includes the head of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri, and of course, the whole ponzi scheme is run by Al Gore.

Edited by tallbloke on 07/01/2010 01:54:34 MDT.

After 25 pages of mostly lobbying back and forth with no one getting any closer to convincing anyone of their position isn't it obvious by now that this is a microcosm of the way these arguments work on the global political scale: that it is not possible to reach a consensus this way?

"Hello, is this the right room for an argument?"

"I've told you once..."

"No you haven't."

"Yes, I have."

"When?"

"Just now."

"No, you didn't."

"Yes I did."

"Didn't!"

"Did!"

"Didn't!"

"I'm telling you I did!"

"You did NOT!"

And so it goes...

Edited by butuki on 07/01/2010 02:08:18 MDT.

>1)You can't believe the news reports. Most of what you read and hear in the media is reported by the SEJ, the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Umm, no. There are numerous studies evaluating scientific opinion on climate change. Below is a summary of one. Check out the scientific opinion wiki for more.

Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, 2009

A poll performed by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman at Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago received replies from 3,146 of the 10,257 polled Earth scientists. Results were analyzed globally and by specialization. 76 out of 79 climatologists who "listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change" believe that mean global temperatures have risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and 75 out of 77 believe that human activity is a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures. Among all respondents, 90% agreed that temperatures have risen compared to pre-1800 levels, and 82% agreed that humans significantly influence the global temperature. Economic geologists and meteorologists were among the biggest doubters, with only 47 percent and 64 percent, respectively, believing in significant human involvement. A summary from the survey states that:

It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.


It's interesting that meteorologists like the one Tallbloke is so found of sighting are among the biggest doubters. It seems like weathermen whose own science repeatedly fails to predict short term local weather patterns make the false jump to assuming that means that finding long term global patterns are not possible.

This is like saying that because one cannot predict the outcome of one coin flip it is impossible to predict the total outcome of 1000 coin flips, within a small error range. Of course we know that it's going to be pretty darn close to 50/50.

Climate change is the same thing. Tallbloke keeps pointing to local issues and phenomena to try to cast doubt. But he completely ignores the undeniable global trend. That's like saying a run of 10 heads in a row disproves the theory of probability.



edit: wrong graph

Edited by nschmald on 07/01/2010 02:27:45 MDT.

Miguel,

Proper science is not a majority vote cast by interested parties to then claim 'consensus'. It is an investigation of scientific observational facts, (not the GIGO of computer models trained to give the answer sought by the question) and the development of theory capable of prediction from those facts, to be then tested empirically against further observation.

Einstein said it didn't matter how much eveidence seemed to support a theory, it could stil be refuted by a single fact.
He said:
"Experimentum summus judex" Experiment will be the judge.

It is up to the proponents of the AGW hypothesis to prove their case. The null hypothesis that climate change has always happened and is perfectly natural, is looking fine at the moment.

Nia said:
>A poll performed by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman at Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago received replies from 3,146 of the 10,257 polled Earth scientists.

So 3,146 responded and the other 7000 kept their heads down.

I think you'll find the wording of the questions was subtly different from those reported too. I'll see if I can find the specific cases I discovered when I checked this one out last year.

>he completely ignores the undeniable global trend. That's like saying a run of 10 heads in a row disproves the theory of probability.

Are you going to have words with Rick for posting a single el nino year data too?

My arguments are based not on saying climate is a random walk, but on properly conducted scientific observations and working out what they mean. Global temperature has been on average going down for the last 8 thousand years since the Holocene Optimum if you want a really long term view on things. Your GISS graph is not only cherry picking a warm century, but contains demonstrably bad data too.

Even with it's inflated figures, it shows a century rise of ~1C. The Central England Record shows a rise of more than double that between 1670 and 1735. Not representative of the whole world, but no seperate country records in the modern era show more than a degree difference in anomaly, but quite a few show much smaller trends than GISS does.

Edited by tallbloke on 07/01/2010 02:50:45 MDT.

"It is up to the proponents of the AGW hypothesis to prove their case. The null hypothesis that climate change has always happened and is perfectly natural, is looking fine at the moment."

Well, apart from the complete lack of rain in Melbourne's catchment area. Or in the Wimmera.

Lynn wrote:

>>Because New Zealand is the only developed country...

New Zealand is a developed country??? When did this happen??

Rog,

I know that. I studied ecology and biogeography for my undergraduate degree after all and I have always followed closely the developments in science (I regularly read "Nature"), especially in the field of biology. Did I say there was something wrong with science? I was referring to the endless shuttlecocking here in this thread. I mean there is a debate going on here, isn't there? And isn't the very purpose of a debate to reach a conclusion? Otherwise why debate at all?

If science is meant simply as a springboard for supporting one's point of view, then what is the practical purpose of science? It might as well just be a philosophical exercise and all the passion over whether there really is global warming or not is rather pointless. Seen in that way the existence of global warming and its real life consequences no longer means anything; and the window of opportunity, if it becomes apparent that we may really have to DO something about it, may quickly fall behind us.

I mean, what is the point of this debate?

Edited by butuki on 07/01/2010 05:37:47 MDT.