Copenhagen Conference Crashes

Well, it’s happened. The Copenhagen climate conference has concluded with a three-page fig-leaf over its naked failure that even the New York Times can’t spin as good news for the AGW alarmists. It’s kind of entertaining to watch them try, actually, but the glum tone of the report is palpable.

The best laugh line from the article is that President Obama left before the vote on the document because he wanted to get back to Washington ahead of a major snowstorm. Yeah, I know, weather not climate, but it’s still funny. Good thing Al Gore cancelled or they’d probably be trying to dig out from under record accumulation.

I won’t say this was the best possible outcome from Copenhagen; the best possible outcome would have been an outright PR disaster that wrecked the careers of everyone even remotely connected with this boondoggle. And yes, on a sane planet the fact that they invited Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez to speak would have been that PR disaster; cripes, were they trying for the thug-tyrant trifecta? But having all that sound and fury add up to a big fat nothing is excellent.

It’s excellent because, by the time the kleptocrat gang at the UN can wind up for another try, the likelihood is that the “scientific” support for their AGW scam will have been entirely exposed as a tissue of fraud. That’s the way things seem to be heading, anyway. Faster, please!

177 comments

  1. Err … “been”, not “beem”. (I wish I could notice my own typos as well as I do other peoples ..,)

    Also I disagree: even on a halfway-to-cackling-insanity planet, inviting Mugabe should have been a complete PR disaster. Sigh.

  2. “by the time the kleptocrat gang at the UN can wind up for another try, the likelihood is that the “scientific” support for their AGW scam will have been entirely exposed as a tissue of fraud”

    I mark your words, though I don’t expect you to stand by them when you are proven wrong.

    I am so sorry this planet has people like you on it.

    Despicable.

    I can’t believe I once admired you.

    This landed in the spam bin for unknown reasons. I’m approving it by hand.

  3. Yeah, weather is not climate, most lay-people are not conscious of that, and on a day when we are hunkering down for a rare December blizzard, we Noo Yawkuhs like to say “Weah’s da’ global wawmin’?”

  4. I think the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference was one of the most unsuccessful and messiest conferences in history !!! It’s shameful ….

  5. You could say that the end was anticlimactic. As usual with these U.N. cocktail parties, the most sweeping and newsworthy statements came from murderous gangsters like Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez. I personally enjoy it when these guys open their mouths in U.N. forums. They cut to the quick of what these affairs are truly all about: A self-flagellating West giving succor to depraved third world crooks and religious madmen.

    In a civilized world, of course, Mugabi would be imprisoned in a pine box six feet down, instead of bloviating about how Western capitalism is destroying “his people.” Of course, he did a fair job of that himself, raping and mauling one of the most promising economies in Africa.

    It is an overall heartening outcome, though. People are once again thinking and speaking openly about this issue; a phenomenon which is only detrimental in the minds of Orwell’s favorite monsters.

  6. And the amazing thing is: Mugabe got applause! I’m not a leftist and dislike Chavez and his ilk, but I can see how a well-intentioned but misinformed leftist might think Chavez was a good guy. (But after Venezuela finishes crashing and burning, they lose the benefit of the doubt.) But who in their right mind thinks Mugabe deserves applause? How twisted and depraved is the “international community” to give cheers to a murderous thug who has inarguably destroyed his country for decades? People who cheer Mugabe deserve the highest possible level of skepticism about everything else they say and do.

  7. If global warming is true, does it even matter? I mean, who outside of a few coastal and island areas cares if the sea level rises several feet?

    I could see all the hubbub if somebody was claiming temperatures would rise 25 degrees C. But we are talking about less than 5 degrees from what I understand. Its worth being concerned about but its not the end of the world.

  8. techtech, global warming doesn’t mean “wow, tropical conditions in Maine!!!11” Because weather so often depends on the movement of air which in turn depends on temperature, higher temperatures — even slightly higher — are bound to vastly alter wind and weather patterns in ways we don’t quite understand — some of them undesirable. The IPCC report, for instance, describes a likely connection between global warming and hurricane strength and frequency. over the past few decades.

  9. The IPCC report, for instance, describes a likely connection between global warming and hurricane strength and frequency. over the past few decades.

    Not to mention more and better sex! It’s a tradeoff.

  10. > The IPCC report, for instance, describes a likely connection between global warming and hurricane strength and frequency. over the past few decades.

    Wow, wonderful. Except that hurricane “frequency” is only “up” because our ability to measure and track them has increased. That’s like saying that the size of universe has increased because of the Hubble telescope.

    As for hurricane strength increasing, that is simply not true.

  11. jrok,

    Regarding Mugabe, I must say it’s terribly disappointing that nobody on the scene took the opportunity to arrest him for mass murder. Incidentally, Zimbabwe’s recent abandonment of their hyperinflated currency and abolition of all foreign exchange laws is a startling example of how suddenly a country can recover from a government-imposed economic disaster when the government finally throws in the towel and lets the people go about their business.

  12. > Regarding Mugabe, I must say it’s terribly disappointing that nobody on the scene took the opportunity to arrest him for mass murder.

    Indeed. If the Copenhagen talks had turned out to be an elaborate sting operation to nail Mugabe, it would have been a smashing success. Unfortunately, the U.N. has become a birdbath for authoritarians and murdering despots.

  13. jrok Says:
    > Unfortunately, the U.N. has become a birdbath for authoritarians and murdering despots.

    “Become”? The U.N. has never been anything more than a debating society for maladjusted sociopaths.

  14. I think that the main thing history will take note of from the copenhagen conference, is that *China* saved the world from a global, communist government.

  15. >“Become”? The U.N. has never been anything more than a debating society for maladjusted sociopaths.

    That’s not quite historically fair. The UN was launched with good intentions, but it was doomed to rot from the inside by some of the political compromises made at its origin. I can’t say that I think it became a net loss to the world (“debating society for maladjusted sociopaths”) until the early 1970s. Yasser Arafat being invited to address the General Assembly makes a convenient marker for when the organization went irretrievably to hell.

  16. And the amazing thing is: Mugabe got applause! I’m not a leftist and dislike Chavez and his ilk, but I can see how a well-intentioned but misinformed leftist might think Chavez was a good guy.

    I think few on the American left would support Chavez. He’s extreme left. Noam Chomsky is one of his personal heroes: he’s a Marxist. In the U.S., we talk about “left” vs. “right” and what we really mean are “left-leaning centrist” vs. “right-leaning centrist.” Saying that leftists would support Chavez is about as realistic as saying that right-wingers would support Rocky Suhayda. (YHBG?)

  17. @Jeff Read:

    The IPCC report, for instance, describes a likely connection between global warming and hurricane strength and frequency. over the past few decades.

    I agree with jrok. That’s not true at all. I think if you look at the charts, you’ll see that there has actually been an overall decline in strength, with perhaps a small increase in frequency, if there’s any increase at all.

  18. Jean-Denis: I mark your words, though I don’t expect you to stand by them when you are proven wrong.

    This just shows you don’t know Eric’s principles. If he is proven wrong, then he will stand up and admit it for all to see.

    I think it’s far more likely that he’ll be proven correct, though. Every time the “science” behind AGW is examined, a bit more rot is exposed.

  19. Many American leftists _do_ support Chavez. Whether they do it out of ignorance of his views or agreement with them is sometimes an open question, but they do support him. On the other hand, even the hardest of hardcore radicals (and I’m talking about folks who, when you bring up Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, will try to argue that they were at least well-intentioned) don’t want Mugabe on their idols list.

  20. techtech

    >Some Guy Says:
    >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zOXmJ4jd-8
    >
    >At 1 hour into this video he shows some nice photographs of actual ice and graphs of arctic and >Greenland ice. Conclusion: The ice is NOT melting.

    Five minutes into it he cites Genesis as the instruction on how to take care of the planet that God gave us. Doesn’t exactly improve his credibility. I think a lot of his criticisms should be taken seriously, but brining the Old Testament into it pretty much turned me off.

  21. Mike H Says:
    >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zOXmJ4jd-8
    > Five minutes into it he cites Genesis as the instruction on how to
    > take care of the planet that God gave us. Doesn’t exactly improve his credibility.

    I agree, but then he went on to give as good a defense of the scientific method as anybody I’ve ever heard. I can respect that.

    And then he spent an hour and a half showing actual climate data that opposes global warming. I personally have unresolved hostility towards those knuckleheads who have read the Bible and still believe in Jesus. But I do freely admit that most Christians believe in honesty and nothing this guy said led me to believe he was lying. I especially liked the photos of the (dew line?) weather stations in Greenland that have been covered in ice since they were built decades ago. The “after” pictures showed the same stations with even more ice on them. I.e. Greenland’s ice is not melting.

  22. > But I do freely admit that most Christians believe in honesty and nothing this guy said led me to believe he was lying.

    I’m sure that’s true, but he was trying to give a talk about looking at evidence without prejudice. He’s advertising his capability for doublethink, i.e. believing in silly myths and practising science at the same time, something he might accuse his opponents of doing. I think it looks very bad.

    > I especially liked the photos of the (dew line?) weather stations in Greenland that have been covered in ice since they were built decades ago.

    I thought that that was actually one of the weak points of the talk. Even the alarmists agree that the ice sheets are getting thicker in some parts of Antarctica and Greenland, so two stations getting slowly buried does not by itself tell you much. Of course, he did have other evidence for his claims.

  23. > He’s advertising his capability for doublethink

    I can’t disagree.

    > Even the alarmists agree that the ice sheets are getting thicker

    Maybe, but that wasn’t what I’d heard as a barely-interested observer. I’ve had smart people tell me that Antarctica was thawing out and therefore we were probably all screwed. When otherwise intelligent people are having this much trouble locating the true facts, its a relief to find anybody, Christian or not, willing to go head-to-head with the mass media while also singing the praises of the scientific method.

    Not that its any of my business, but it bothers me that somebody like ESR can’t do anything about this. Other than blogging. I’m not expecting to see hacker community elders being interviewed on CNN, but at least on the internet I’d hope somebody sane and well-respected would have enough influence to quickly debunk junk science for the rest of us. Maybe we need a Hacker News Network — HNN.

  24. > The UN was launched with good intentions, but it was doomed to rot from the inside by some of the political compromises made at its origin. I can’t say that I think it became a net loss to the world (”debating society for maladjusted sociopaths”) until the early 1970s.

    This makes me curious of your opinion on if internationalism is salvageable. Thinking of doing a post on it?

  25. > if internationalism is salvageable

    The U.S. government has plenty of problems with corruption, and it was designed with major checks and balances to resist corruption.

    What’s the U.N. got to protect it?

  26. > I’m not expecting to see hacker community elders being interviewed on CNN,

    I think it should come from honest climate scientists who should be able to explain in simple terms what’s what. I’m thinking of a Richard Dawkins type, or ideally someone a bit louder than he is, who could get on lots of TV programs. Of course, there are some who are trying, and there’s also a very good chance that one ruins his or her research career doing that. It would be an uphill battle against the big media outlets.

    1. >I think it should come from honest climate scientists who should be able to explain in simple terms what’s what.

      Yes, and I’m even fairly sure we’ll find some to do it, but not for a few months yet. It’s going to take the well-intentioned dupes a while to process the fact that they got swept up in an error cascade, but once they get through that process they’re going to be pissed. I sure would be, if I were a professional climatologist. Coming to grips with the fact that your entire field was hijacked by frauds, phoney-baloney Cassandras, and political hacks…well, it can’t be pleasant or easy. Give them time.

  27. > Many American leftists _do_ support Chavez. Whether they do it out of ignorance of his views or agreement with them is sometimes an open question, but they do support him.

    There are many on the American left who pay lip service to Chavez, but only in a tacit and cartoonish way. Both the left and the right have their weird ideological touchstones. Progressive naturally lean toward authoritarians because many items on their agenda are simply impossible when people are allowed to think and act as self-interested individuals. Chavez also fits a romanticized political narrative they enjoy: a non-white, “anti-imperialist” champion who channels the anger of the developing world. It doesn’t matter that this portrait doesn’t really fit, or that local support for Chavez is cobbled together from fear, repression and the feudal mechanics of being “one of the gang.” As long as he is singing their favorite song, they’ll never really disown him.

  28. RE: Hurricanes – From everything I know about hurricanes (in Gulf coast states we kinda pay attention to this stuff :^), the whole “increased frequency and intensity” thing sounded kind of bogus.
    When a major storm goes over the water, it churns up cooler water from below. Since a hurricane’s strength is directly proportional to the water temperature it passes over, increased frequency AND strength is kinda counter intuitive.

  29. “Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hugo Chavez… for the thug-tyrant trifecta…”

    Well, they left out Kim Jong-il. However, a satellite event featured Chavez, Raul Castro, Daniel Ortega, Eva Morales, and Manuel Zelaya. (As Roger L. Simon noted “So many despots — so little time!”

    morgan greywolf: “I think few on the American left would support Chavez.”

    His Obamaness practically kissed Chavez when they met. (Chavez has since dismissed Obama for insufficient leftyness.)

    Robert Kennedy jr distributed heating oil “donated” by Chavez in Massachusetts.

    At Mother Jones, comments overwhelmingly favor Chavez,.

    The Nation ran a suck-up interview with Chavez in September 2009.

    The current issue of Counterpunch features an interview with Chavez hagiologist Eva Golinger.

    At DailyKos, a diarist attacked Chavez’s deranged anti-semitism and anti-Zionism; many commenters defended Chavez.

    (BTW, ESR, the top item on Counterpunch.org is a post by editor Alexander Cockburn denouncing the AGW fraud. The tide is turning.)

    Techtech: “What’s the U.N. got to protect it?”

    Nothing. No police, no judges, no laws. The UN cannot legislate, therefore stealing from the UN is a crime only under some nation’s law (if any). No one has standing to press charges except the UN itself, which AFAIK never does. Well, not against insiders – I suppose if burglars stole from a UN office somewhere, they might be charged.

    ESR says: I fixed the link.

    1. >(BTW, ESR, the top item on Counterpunch.org is a post by editor Alexander Cockburn denouncing the AGW fraud. The tide is turning.)

      I knew this. I have a brother who’s a regular reader of The Nation. When I told him what I’d found in the CRU emails, I was half-expecting a barrage of predictable left-wing duckspeak in reply – but what he actually said was “Interesting. Cockburn’s been denouncing AGW as a fraud for years.”

  30. > Five minutes into it he cites Genesis as the instruction on how to take care of the planet that God gave us. Doesn’t exactly improve his credibility. I think a lot of his criticisms should be taken seriously, but brining the Old Testament into it pretty much turned me off.

    While it wasn’t exactly a turn-on, it didn’t trouble me either. It seems to me that a vast portion of the cultural support for climate change alarmism has its roots in similar pseudo-religious notions about planetary stewardship. Whether you want to call it neo-pagan “Gaianism” or secular druidism or whatever, the fact remains that many people with absolutely no scientific background whatsoever still support apocalyptic AGW theory for reasons that have more to do with faith than with facts. That being the case, what’s the big deal if Monckton or anyone else prefaces their speeches with an acknowledgment of stewardship? After all, just because you think the science is junk doesn’t mean that you think mankind should unnecessarily pollute the atmosphere or damage the ecosystem. The difference between Monckton and someone like Tim Mitchell is that Monckton’s faith is chastised as deal-breaking bias, while Mitchell’s Christianity is “forgiven” due to his support for AGW. Lots of hypocrisy at play, as usual.

    1. >While it wasn’t exactly a turn-on, it didn’t trouble me either.

      Me neither, and I am a neo-pagan who’s vulnerable by predisposition to the Gaianist pitch. If I didn’t have such sensitive antennae for junk and pathological science, the con-men running this scam might have taken me in, too.

  31. > I knew this. I have a brother who’s a regular reader of The Nation. When I told him what I’d found in the CRU emails, I was half-expecting a barrage of predictable left-wing duckspeak in reply – but what he actually said was “Interesting. Cockburn’s been denouncing AGW as a fraud for years.

    You know, I suspect this crumbling cookie will be fodder for the political and social sciences for years to come. I’m sure many of us are loathe to admit it, but the key victory of the past month has been a public relations one, not a scientific one. The science is junk, and has been in dispute for years, but until recently you wouldn’t have known this if you digested all of your news from the beaks of mainstream media outlets. The P.R. war has been an uphill battle for nearly a generation, thanks to populist support from cultural opinion leaders. The tide is turning not because the majority of these heralds are turning against the “hockey team”, but because they are rather adamantly insisting that people to bury their heads in the sand about what the leak has revealed. Nothing creates more rubberneckers than a cop standing next to a crime scene shouting “Move along! Nothing to see here!” And while people have an innate urge to huddle inside political tents, the anger at being played for suckers is much stronger.

    Also there is the Gore factor. In the arena of perpetual media, you need those crystallized moments where demagogues like Gore unmask themselves. What could be more crystallized than his poorly timed “ice cap” speech? Whether he knows it or not, he’s gave birth to a new zeitgeist with that single claim. People may be uniformed and misinformed, but by and large they are not stupid. They know when someone is trying to terrorize them.

  32. >I’ve been reading these recent AGW fraud essays and comments with ESR’s pieces on Suicidalism and Gramscian Damage providing context. I urge you to check them out if you haven’t read them.

    I’m still astounded that esr can write Gramscian Damage, and then proceed to act as such an effective vector for ExxonMobil’s meme warfare against climate science.

  33. “…ffective vector for ExxonMobil’s meme warfare against climate science.”

    What meme are *you* pushing?

  34. > I’m still astounded that esr can write Gramscian Damage, and then proceed to act as such an effective vector for ExxonMobil’s meme warfare against climate science.

    Well, at least you are calling him “effective.” That’s a step in the right direction. Another step might be to admit that there are also self-interested financial “vectors” that co-opt AGW theory in order to load their cannon.

    Or perhaps you believe there is no money in green tech. If so, you might want to hire a better financial adviser to review your portfolio. Do it quickly, though! I have a very bad feeling about green futures.

  35. What meme are *you* pushing?

    I can’t speak for pete, but I think the general meme that should be pushing back is that “science is the best we have when it comes to understanding the natural world, and no amount of armchair punditry and nitpicking will change that.”

  36. > I can’t speak for pete, but I think the general meme that should be pushing back is that “science is the best we have when it comes to understanding the natural world, and no amount of armchair punditry and nitpicking will change that.”

    Ah, but that IS the meme that is “pushing back,” after twenty-five years of climate alarmism. It’s about time, too.

  37. jrok Says:
    > after twenty-five years of climate alarmism. It’s about time

    Hey, it just occured to me. Is the hole in the ozone layer part of the global warming hoax, or is it real?

    1. >Is the hole in the ozone layer part of the global warming hoax, or is it real?

      Different issue entirely.

      Possibly also a fraud – I’ve seen some interesting claims that DuPont actually engineered that flap because its patents on CFCs were running out and it wanted a government-mandated switch to refrigerants it still had an IP lock on. But I haven’t investigated those in enough detail to form a judgment.

  38. Many American leftists _do_ support Chavez. Whether they do it out of ignorance of his views or agreement with them is sometimes an open question, but they do support him. On the other hand, even the hardest of hardcore radicals (and I’m talking about folks who, when you bring up Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, will try to argue that they were at least well-intentioned) don’t want Mugabe on their idols list.

    Blah. Maybe in a vague anti-Bush sorta way, but none of the liberals I know even have a clue about Chavez’s true political leanings.

    The problem I have with both the far right and the far left is that they each push their own version of Utopia. If hear anyone pushing a Utopia, I run as fast I can in the other direction. There’s no such thing as a world of without war, a world without poverty, a world without conflict, a world where everyone has a job and no one starves. All of the idealistic approaches don’t cut it because imperfection is part of the nature of human beings. There is no perfect system and there never will be. Anybody telling you otherwise is either lying, crazy or both.

    I’m with the anarchists: there aren’t any anarchists that will ever try to sell you that bullocks.

  39. Hey, it just occured to me. Is the hole in the ozone layer part of the global warming hoax, or is it real?

    The hole in the ozone layer is recovering, actually, mostly due to our ceasing use of CFCs.

  40. “The problem I have with both the far right and the far left is that they each push their own version of Utopia. If hear anyone pushing a Utopia, I run as fast I can in the other direction.”

    *Power don’t come from a badge or a gun. Power comes from lying. Lying big and gettin’ the whole damn world to play along with you. Once you’ve got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain’t true, you’ve got ’em by the balls.*

  41. > Maybe in a vague anti-Bush sorta way, but none of the liberals I know even have a clue about Chavez’s true political leanings.

    It doesn’t matter what they know about Chavez – they support him. They’ll insist that he’s good. They’ll lobby for policies that help him. They’ll denounce his critics.

    We give people a pass when they act out of ignorance or their acts have unintended consequences only because we think that those things are curable. When someone demonstrates otherwise, we should treat them as if they intend the evil that they cause, because for all practical purposes, they do.

  42. Ah, but that IS the meme that is “pushing back,” after twenty-five years of climate alarmism.

    Climate alarmism isn’t science.

  43. > We give people a pass when they act out of ignorance or their acts have unintended consequences only because we think that those things are curable. When someone demonstrates otherwise, we should treat them as if they intend the evil that they cause, because for all practical purposes, they do.

    I don’t know about this statement. While it’s true that much of the cultural wellspring that buoys Chavez et al is actively evil, well intentioned people get swept up in the rhetoric. That’s what makes the psychological warfare so insidious: noble intentions are exploited and inverted. I’m not talking about Christian self-abnegation, I’m talking about deep notions of justice and heroism.

  44. Possibly also a fraud – I’ve seen some interesting claims that DuPont actually engineered that flap because its patents on CFCs were running out and it wanted a government-mandated switch to refrigerants it still had an IP lock on. But I haven’t investigated those in enough detail to form a judgment.

    I investigated it myself and it’s nonsense. The last IP rights on on commonly used CFC refrigerants expired well before they were banned, and the catalytic reaction between CFCs and ozone that depletes upper-atmosphere ozone has been documented and proven extensively in the literature.

    Furthermore, the thinning of upper-atmosphere ozone has been slowing since the CFC ban, and is expected to stop around 2050 or so. The CFC ban was a wholly appropriate and effective step to take.

    That’s the thing about libertarianism and the environment: Government regulation is like proprietary software. It’s upsetting and loathsome to purists but very often it’s the only thing that will get the job done today.

  45. > Government regulation is like proprietary software. It’s upsetting and loathsome to purists but very often it’s the only thing that will get the job done today.

    And inevitably screws you over in the long term.

    A lot of (most, perhaps?) regulations get there through a tendency towards immediate action, even when not effective or warranted, but merely having the facade thereof.

    Worse is better.

  46. >The last IP rights on on commonly used CFC refrigerants expired well before they were banned,

    That is why they needed gov’t help to get their less effective but patent covered replacements used.

    >and the catalytic reaction between CFCs and ozone that depletes upper-atmosphere ozone has been documented and proven extensively in the literature.

    CFCs are so much heavier than air that you could leave an open bottle of them on a shelf for years without it “evaporating”.

    >Furthermore, the thinning of upper-atmosphere ozone has been slowing since the CFC ban, and is expected to stop around 2050 or so. The CFC ban was a wholly appropriate and effective step to take.

    There was no evidence of ozone thinning, except over Antarctica (probably caused by volcanic activity and lack of sunlight). The ground level UV levels in the U.S. had been trending down for years before the ban. Skin cancers were trending up because more people were spending more time exposed to the sun, getting a tan.

    >That’s the thing about libertarianism and the environment: Government regulation is like proprietary software. It’s upsetting and loathsome to purists but very often it’s the only thing that will get the job done today.

    Only when the job is increasing the gov’t’s power is regulation required; and it might not even be *useful* for anything else. I recently saw a quote in an OB thread (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/12/shoo-libertarian-trolls.html#comments)

    Here is Coase summing up his findings with respect to regulators who thought that by infringing liberty here or there they could enhance efficiency:

    Reason: What’s an example of bad regulation?

    Coase: I can’t remember one that’s good. Regulation of transport, regulation of agriculture– agriculture is a, zoning is z. You know, you go from a to z, they are all bad. There were so many studies, and the result was quite universal: The effects were bad.

  47. The evidence for the Ozone Fraud is from my memories of this book http://www.amazon.com/Holes-Ozone-Scare-Scientific-Evidence/dp/0962813400/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261386526&sr=8-1

    I left out a line of my above post, my second point was supposed to be:

    They forgot to document how the CFCs were supposed to get up to the ozone layer, CFCs are so much heavier than air that you could leave an open bottle of them on a shelf for years without it “evaporating”.

  48. The hole in the ozone layer wasn’t a fraud, it was actually there, but it was NOT caused by CFCs. The best explanation I have seen is a combination of Antarctic volcanic eruptions (I think it was Mt Erebus but don’t hold me to that) and the long sunless period. Ultraviolet light not only breaks ozone apart, which is how the ozone blocks UV, but it creates the ozone in the first place as well by breaking the bonds in diatomic oxygen. Ozone absorbs more UV than diatomic oxygen does, so it’s more efficient at blocking it from reaching ground level.

  49. Jeff “can’t argue with melting glaciers” Read [seriously, I can’t believe you came back after that laughable post] writes:

    Government regulation is like proprietary software. It’s upsetting and loathsome to purists but very often it’s the only thing that will get the job done today.

    I think everyone would agree that a dictatorship is the most efficient form of government there is. Frequently “it’s the only thing that will get the job done.” Unfortunately, it has some side effects.

  50. William B Swift Says:
    There was no evidence of ozone thinning, except over Antarctica (probably caused by volcanic activity and lack of sunlight). The ground level UV levels in the U.S. had been trending down for years before the ban. Skin cancers were trending up because more people were spending more time exposed to the sun, getting a tan.

    I never really questioned the whole ozone layer thing since at the same time it was being reported, UV in Australia was seemingly becoming nastier and nastier which was blamed as a side effect. I don’t remember feeling myself burn when I was a kid (and considering i got so badly sunburnt once I got serious “go see a doctor” style blisters once… i would have noticed. English born kid in Australian sun == not good) but now I avoid going outside between 11 and 3 simply because i can feel my skin burn on most summer/spring days.

    Not that that couldn’t have had any number of different reasons (foremost being the recent solar maximum).

  51. > ExxonMobil’s meme warfare against climate science.

    Pete, you idiot. Who do you think would benefit the MOST from massive new regulations of Exxon’s main line of business? The more regulated any market is, the more it consolidates into larger organizations, who are better able to cope with the onerous regulations. Exxon’s getting billions of Incredible Rubber Inflatobucks as we speak for “alternative energy research”. If you think that the AGW hysteria did any damage at all to Exxon, have a look at their balance sheets over the last decade.

    1. >Who do you think would benefit the MOST from massive new regulations of Exxon’s main line of business? The more regulated any market is, the more it consolidates into larger organizations, who are better able to cope with the onerous regulations.

      Leftists have a blind spot a mile wide about this effect. They have to, otherwise their cozy virtuous-government-vs.-evil-corporate-titans worldview would fall apart.

  52. The disinformation campaign went much further then the scientific literature to on-line reference as well It turns out the ClimateGate folks were able to take over key areas of Wikipedia to influence the non-scientific literature also.

    One person in the nine-member Realclimate.org team — U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley — would take on particularly crucial duties.

    Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

    All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

    Source From http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/12/19/lawrence-solomon-wikipedia-s-climate-doctor.aspx

    1. >The disinformation campaign went much further then the scientific literature to on-line reference as well It turns out the ClimateGate folks were able to take over key areas of Wikipedia to influence the non-scientific literature also.

      This explains much. I noted some time back that the Wikipedia article on the MWP seemed to have been captured by someone determined to gaslight the MWP out of existence.

  53. > If you think that the AGW hysteria did any damage at all to Exxon, have a look at their balance sheets over the last decade.

    True, but it’s not only that. Some people still suffer under the delusional that corporations are/can be/should be moral entities, when they are in fact mechanical ones. Corporations don’t do morality very well, but adapting to new social, political and economic paradigms is something they do EXTREMELY well (or at least, they must do that extremely well, if they are to survive them). Pete either isn’t aware of this property of business or chooses to ignore it. Why else would harp on ExxonMobil, but fail to mention that CRU’s research was partially subsidized by British Petroleum and Shell? I think inconvenient portions of the “big oil” narrative are dumped, because that makes it harder to do sweeping binary pronouncements (“I’m good! And you aren’t!”).

    If any wisdom can be extracted from this meltdown, it’s that there are “none that are so blind as those who will not see.” No rational person, for instance, can read the Briffa email where he talks about “the pressure to present a nice tidy story” and expend all of his mental energies trying to forge an artificial context for it. Briffa is very plain spoken about his situation. Yet, we have otherwise intelligent people trying to bend reality until it snaps in half to erase it. This is pure, unthinking religious fervor.

    I do think that once this initial wave of sea-sickness wears off, reason will return to the conversation. It will take some time yet… so much has been invested in terms of capital, positioning and political planking that it will take many years to strip down.

    As for the researchers themselves, there should be consequences for those involved. Although, I do get the sense from the utter candor of certain emails that the leaker might very well be Briffa himself. If that’s the case, perhaps a reward of some sort is in order. I know it’s too late for Olso, but the Oscars are right around the corner.

  54. Leftists have a blind spot a mile wide about this effect. They have to, otherwise their cozy virtuous-government-vs.-evil-corporate-titans worldview would fall apart.

    That worldview only applies when the left is charge. When the right is in charge, it’s the evil-government-and-evil-corporate-titans-working-hand-in-hand worldview.

    I wonder if we should tell them that the greedy government politicians and the greedy corporate titans are actually all the same people (greedy elite ruling class)? ;)

  55. True, but it’s not only that. Some people still suffer under the delusional that corporations are/can be/should be moral entities, when they are in fact mechanical ones.

    Since they are machines and rather powerful ones at that, we should regulate their use as we do the use of cars, construction equipment, and cruise missiles.

    Instead we give them equal status with people.

  56. What are we going to do about what I call ACD?

    That’s anthropogenic continental drift, people. Due to human activities like sex, nature worship, and cosplay, the Earth’s continents have been drifting apart. The science is settled, the studies have been done, and if you don’t agree you are an antiscience troglodyte.

    Human activities must be curtailed. The rich must be tazed ( meant to write taxed but misspelled this, and I had a revelation that the rich need to be tazed as well as taxed) heavily, oil exploration must be proscribed, smoking must be banned, and children should be limited to one per family.

    We must do what is required to bring back the supercontinent of Pangea, where we can all live together in a utopian, planned society, with minimal carbon footprints and free health care for all.

    The libertarian anarchist types (and Christains and Ayn Rand fans and other right wing weirdos) might need to be rounded up and placed in re-education camps to make this happen. But one can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

    Hell the problem of ACD is at least as serious as global warming. We need to start having ACD summits in places like Copenhagen and Oslo right away.

    Also, ManBearPig is on the loose.

  57. Its always “we” that should do the regulating, isn’t it Jeff?

    Of course, it is never “we”, it is “they” – they being “the government”.

    The target of the regulations? Abstract concepts like “machines”, “corporations”, “the rich”…designed to shield the thoughtless from the realization that we are actually talking about human beings and their (supposedly) free lives. It’s so much easier to use other men, with guns, to stamp mankind into a mold you find acceptable, isn’t it Jeff? If you actually had the balls to do the dirty work yourself, I’d at least give you credit for having the courage of your convictions….but your don’t even have that going for you – you’re a coward, content to squat behind violent men while your one-dimensional game-plan is executed.

    When I read words such as yours, it literally horrifies me that there are homo sapiens (like you) that actually consider it virtuous to advocate such evil. I’ll bet you even feel noble while typing such things.

    It really is the stuff that wars are made of. Very total wars.

  58. > Of course, it is never “we”, it is “they” – they being “the government”.

    The government? I wish. It sounds like Read is advocating that even extra-governmental organizations like the U.N. be granted broad regulatory powers. In other words, an unelected world government manned by untouchable bureaucrats.

  59. >I’ve been reading these recent AGW fraud essays and comments with ESR’s pieces on Suicidalism and Gramscian Damage providing context. I urge you to check them out if you haven’t read them.

    Golly. Those damn commies. McCarthy was right after all! The reds *are* under the beds.

    (For our North American readers: /sarcasm.)

    But blog posts about international conspiracies involving lefties and other undesirables are sure good fun.

    1. >Golly. Those damn commies. McCarthy was right after all! The reds *are* under the beds.

      Alas, yes…and I must say it came as rather a shock to me, because I had grown up thinking of McCarthy as an evil buffoon. Then I found out what was in the Venona transcripts, and that was pretty wrenching. Foaming right-wing paranoia turned out to have been a better description of historical reality than the liberal-centrist assumptions I grew up with. Not a complete description, but better.

  60. > It’s called transnational progressivism. Jeff Read is a Tranzi. This has been obvious to me for some time.

    Well, it’s a noble effort, and “Tranzi” is a funny epithet. But I’m not sure if all the traits Fonte lists are deserving of the, uh, esteem of a label. Most of them seem to just be the standard cancers of post-modernism, mixed in with some aftershocks of the Cold War

    1. >the standard cancers of post-modernism, mixed in with some aftershocks of the Cold War

      You’re getting warmer. Actually, the “standard cancers of (post)modernism” are mostly remnant memetic weapons from a gigantically successful Soviet active-measures operation. Kind of like Fred Saberhagen’s berserkers, still fucking up our culture after their original masters are dead; transnational progressivism is just one of the more recent forms of secondary damage.

  61. “…But blog posts about international conspiracies involving lefties and other undesirables are sure good fun.”

    Nah. The ‘lefties’ are still the same idiot pawns that fascist thugs haved used, with ease, for countless generations. To focus on the ‘lefties’ is to focus on defective monkeys….the real evil lies deeper than they are capable of comprehending.

  62. > Nah. The ‘lefties’ are still the same idiot pawns that fascist thugs haved used, with ease, for countless generations.

    Not “countless.” You can count them. Either four or five, depending on who you ask (and where you ask them.)

  63. “…Not “countless.” You can count them…”

    I know what you mean, but I was refering to the almost timeless human pattern of tyrants and sycophants.

  64. > Since they are machines and rather powerful ones at that, we should regulate their use as we do the use of cars, construction equipment, and cruise missiles. Instead we give them equal status with people.

    Isn’t the problem here that the state grants organizations immunity from the liability of its members in the first place?

  65. hen I found out what was in the Venona transcripts, and that was pretty wrenching.

    I’d be willing to bet good money that your post was the first time Tom ever heard about the Venona messages.

    I find it really odd that the information about them has somehow not made it into our societal consciousness, and that there are still many people out there who think the Rosenbergs were innocent.

  66. > ’d be willing to bet good money that your post was the first time Tom ever heard about the Venona messages.

    I admit I’m no expert, MagicDave.

    But to me the poisonous nature of McCarthyism as partisan politicking means I cannot agree with Eric’s (or for that matter Ann Coulter’s) revisionism.

  67. There are hints from the propaganda arm in the media that said propaganda arm is not, in fact, winning. Check this out.

    The setting is the “climate summit”. Speaking is the Leftist caricature of the skeptic – middle aged angry white man – saying “what if it’s all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?” Next to him there is a black woman turned around in unhappy incredulity. Meanwhile the presenter is showing a slide of all the benefits of … well, the reader can’t be sure. What could be a “hoax” about a general “climate summit”? The cartoon doesn’t say.

    So the reader has to conclude that skeptics are against “healthy children”, “livable cities”, “sustainability”, “green jobs”, “energy independence” and a generally “better world”. Because they’re white conservatives. And insufficiently sensitive in the presence of minorities.

    This is an attempt to change the subject. The cartoon has to fall back on that promise of that “better”, socialist world; and on the caricature of skeptics as reactionaries and evil.

    The cartoon knows that les jeux sont faits.

  68. ’d be willing to bet good money that your post was the first time Tom ever heard about the Venona messages.

    I admit I’m no expert, MagicDave.

    One needn’t be an expert to be aware of one of the most significant events of the Cold War, Tom. One just has to have some minimal knowledge of the issues before spouting off on them.

    Here is a good overview of some of the Venona materials.

    One needn’t endorse McCarthy’s behavior to be aware that the left-wing consensus that the Rosenbergs were unjustly accused was (and is) just plain wrong.

  69. > It’s going to take the well-intentioned dupes a while to process the fact that they got swept up in an error cascade, but once they get through that >process they’re going to be pissed. I sure would be, if I were a professional climatologist. Coming to grips with the fact that your entire field was >hijacked by frauds, phoney-baloney Cassandras, and political hacks…well, it can’t be pleasant or easy. Give them time.

    While I’m not a ‘climate scientist,’ this whole ideal has me pissed beyond belief. Either one of two things are true. (1) AGW is a fraud or (2) the credible scientists have a complete inability to communicate facts to the public. Every time I have seen or heard “climategate” talked about by a climate scientist in the media, they immediately fall back to the “scientific consensus” argument. At this point, if they are going to convince me, they have not only a clear description of the evidence supporting AGW but also a clear description of how we can be sure that the data hasn’t been tampered with.

    I think I am experiencing what many generally smart people around me are experiencing when they read about this. We trust science but are not experts. When the scientific community tells us that the evidence for something is so strong that denying it is akin to believing in creationism, we often don’t feel a need to look into it much further. Is this intellectually lazy? Perhaps. Even if I had looked into it, I probably would have turned to Nature or Science, both of which seem to confirm the message I was getting.

    The hardest part of all of this is that the prideful part of me hopes that we haven’t been defrauded by a large group of scientists funded with the public’s money. But at the same time, that means that part of me is /hoping/ global warming is true, which is a bit sickening.

    This whole issue has just left me unsure of who can be trusted on this matter. In two months will I be apologizing to my anti-AGW friends or angry that their quote-mining and shouting simply distracted people from the heap of evidence that supports AGW? At this point, I am completely unsure.

  70. If transnational progressivism is the understanding that there are different cultures besides your own, different peoples besides your own, different values besides your own, and you can’t just go around imposing your perspective and your values on everyone else, then I guess I’m a “tranzi”. I’m proud of it; I’d rather be one than the sort of neocon fanatic who has taken over American foreign policy and still continues to control it, Obama’s campaign promises notwithstanding.

  71. While I’m not a ‘climate scientist,’ this whole ideal has me pissed beyond belief. Either one of two things are true. (1) AGW is a fraud or (2) the credible scientists have a complete inability to communicate facts to the public. Every time I have seen or heard “climategate” talked about by a climate scientist in the media, they immediately fall back to the “scientific consensus” argument.

    “After several hours, Joe finally gave up on logic and reason, and simply told the cabinet that he could talk to plants and that they wanted water.”

  72. Thanks for the link, MagicDave. The Venona wikipedia article seems to express a slightly more nuanced view in relation to the osenbergs than the NSA, but as I say, I’m no expert. I’m perfectly happy to accept the NSA’s version.

    But I guess I’m struggling to understand how we get from McCarthy fingering a few actual traitors amongst his oceans of “foaming right-wing paranoia” to wingnuttery of the all-roads-lead-to-Moscow-and-goddam-those-commie-lefties-with-their-transnational-progressivism sort.

    Hence my weak sarcasm above.

    1. >But I guess I’m struggling to understand how we get from McCarthy fingering a few actual traitors amongst his oceans of “foaming right-wing paranoia” to wingnuttery of the all-roads-lead-to-Moscow-and-goddam-those-commie-lefties-with-their-transnational-progressivism sort.

      The real shocker, for me, wasn’t confirmation of the Rosenbergs’ guilt – it was what the transcripts confirmed about the nature and extent of Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government, Hollywood, and journalism. The spluttering right-wing loonies turned out to have been rather more accurate about this than the “reasonable” dismissals I grew up with. It did not make me happy to learn this.

  73. > If transnational progressivism is the understanding that there are different cultures besides your own, different peoples besides your own, different values besides your own, and you can’t just go around imposing your perspective and your values on everyone else, then I guess I’m a “tranzi”.

    I don’t think those things mean your a “tranzi” Read (at least, not by Fonte’s definition). They just mean you’re a weakling who would never dream of taking a moral stand even against cultural norms that are frankly and sickeningly evil. I can imagine folks like you on the sidelines during any great moral debate in history. Slavery? Read says this is an expression of Greco-Roman Antiquity, and must be tolerated. Child prostitution? Read says we cannot impose our repressed sexual mores on the liberated natives. I mean, there is a difference between actively pursuing a agenda of destroying individual rights and just being a long-winded wuss.

  74. > “After several hours, Joe finally gave up on logic and reason, and simply told the cabinet that he could talk to plants and that they wanted water.”

    Before this whoosed by, I just wanted to make sure everybody understood what Jeff Read means here. He is literally calling “Steve” an idiot for admitting he wanted to learn more about the key issues at stake (like, how the data was homogenized, and why the discussion of Briffa’s Yamal series in the emails was so significant). Yeah, Read, I guess he is an idiot for wanting more than the head nodding P.R. campaign these disgraced crooks are running at the moment, or the wheezing white noise from sycophants like you.

  75. > Before this whoosed by, I just wanted to make sure everybody understood what Jeff Read means here.

    Thank heavens for jrok and his Cliff’s Notes.

  76. > Thank heavens for jrok and his Cliff’s Notes.

    And thank heavens for Tom and his links to Wikipedia articles.

  77. Suppose you’re right and the entire global warming movement is a fraud. That doesn’t prove that global warming isn’t happening. Newton produced his experimental results fraudulently, so we now know, and to great personal gain, but that didn’t stop them from being true. By the same token, there were frauds and failures in the science of evolution before better evidence for the theory became available. I suspect this is often the way with good theories, since the scientists become convinced of their veracity early on, and are impatient to convince everyone else.

    Your position should be agnostic on the question of global warming, since you haven’t – even in your own mind – proved that it isn’t happening. All you’ve shown, according to you, is that certain climate models which predict a certain amount of warming are not supported by a certain body of evidence. But the question of whether or not the planet is warming is not an easy one to definitively answer, and just because one set of experiments fails doesn’t mean the question is answered.

    With all that in mind, I don’t think it’s appropriate that you take so much glee in the failure of these talks. If the political impetus to halt warming falls apart, and then warming happens (anthropogenic or not), we’re all going to suffer in the ensuing political chaos and resource panic. The monetary savings we made will seem like rather thin compensation.

  78. Steven Says:
    > This whole issue has just left me unsure of who can be trusted on this matter.

    For scientists, Climategate is a bump in the road but one that will now be put behind us, according to the scientific method which says that we approach the truth over time thru persistence, and are always willing to consider that might be wrong.

    But the average member of the public, who probably thinks Ghost Hunters is scientific because it appears on the SyFy channel, is not going to quickly forget how science was wrong about global warming.

  79. Ben Says:
    > Suppose you’re right and the entire global warming movement is a
    > fraud. That doesn’t prove that global warming isn’t happening.

    But if the entire global warming movement is a fraud, do we have any other reason(s) to suspect that global warming is occurring and/or is a problem? If not, we might as well start worrying about global cooling for all the good it will do us.

  80. pete: “…ExxonMobil’s meme warfare against climate science.”
    Yeah, certainly not Shell and BP’s meme warfare, considering they’re actually major sponsors of the CRU.
    Coal companies might get badly hit by a anti-AGW scheme; Big oil ‘n’ gas will still be quids in.
    And probably making a mint on “carbon rights” trading, too.

    Ben: “If the political impetus to halt warming falls apart … we’re all going to suffer in the ensuing political chaos and resource panic.” Really? If it’s only moderate warming then the consequences of non-agreement could easily be preferable to agreement.
    If you look up the mid-Holocene climatic optimum (a term AGW agitators tend to avoid these days) c.4 to 8 k/yrs B.P. it was probably 2 to 4 degrees up on current temps. Also, a frequent trope of the AGW agitators is drought and desertification: well, the mid-Holocene appears to have had markedly more regular rain in the S Sahara (and IIRC several other modern desert areas also).

    I personally think there is pretty definitely a warming trend since in recent centuriies; and very likely the most recent part may be in part at least inreased by human CO2 output. Definitely CO2 has some warming effect, and it may be prudent not to discover what the end result of the experiment of pumping large quantities into the atmosphere will be.

    But catastrophic AGW depends on arguable interpretations of interactions between CO2, water vapour and other factors in feedback. An economically crippling response is hardly called for unless such extreme positive feedback is much more definitive.
    And certainly not when we can pick the low hanging fruit by a sustained gradual shift to nuclear, solar and other sources, plus increased energy efficiency, in a rational fashion.

    The scaremongering, sloppy science, political log-rolling have been inexcusable: especially as they have so muddied the waters regarding sound science on the CO2/H2O interactions.

    And the carbon trading scheme and the involvement of key players like Gore and Pachauri in it stinks like bucket of week-dead fish in summertime.

  81. Ben said: Newton produced his experimental results fraudulently, so we now know.

    What, the law of gravity? That was a mathematical proof; a framework that explained both orbital dynamics and apples falling out of trees. Newton was authoritarian, somewhat of a zealot, and perhaps hard to get along with. But this is the first I’ve ever heard that he fabricated results. He was, as far as I know, meticulous in his experiments and completely wedded to scientific principles in his methodology, whether it was in alchemy or the minting of coins.

    Explain, please?

  82. Ben Says: If the political impetus to halt warming falls apart, and then warming happens (anthropogenic or not), we’re all going to suffer in the ensuing political chaos and resource panic.

    I don’t recall anyone here saying it wasn’t happening, just that the facts don’t support the claims and that we are putting a strangle hold on our economies (and the critical things they support) in order to mitigate something that doesn’t appear to be as urgent as it has been laid out.

    You cannot make a decision on what MIGHT happen if the evidence for it happening in the past has been wiped out (e.g. MWP, Little Ice Age, etc.). Further, anyone who looks at the _scientific_ evidence of what’s going on with the “mitigation” efforts realizes very quickly that the cost of a “quick fix” (which is necessarily the returning of the entire world to a pre-industrial situation) is not worth the damage it will cause to man-kind as a whole.

    Say what you like about the governments of the first world countries, the people of the first world have previously produced an abundance which has been beneficial to the entire world, and taking that abundance away will leave nobody capable of producing that abundance and the starvation and death of MANY MILLIONS more people in the world. Far more than would die as a result of a 2-3 meter ocean rise the alarmists are pounding their drums about (I don’t think anybody really believes in the 20 meter crap that some of the radical alarmists have stated).

    If you want the world to deal with something, why not look at asteroid strikes (there’s a 100% chance that this will happen) or preparing for the next ice age (again, a 100% chance this will happen). These things have consequences that FAR outweigh the worst imaginings for AGW alarmists, and I can tell you, based on unmodified scientific data that these things WILL happen, and when they do BILLIONS of people WILL die. Does that mean we should bankrupt our countries to “fix” these issues? No, because we can’t do anything about it with our current technology, any more than we can do anything about natural global warming (you know, the stuff from the sun).

    The BEST thing we can do, is collect unadulterated evidence to make a scientifically significant decision on whether or not GW has anything to do with Human machinations or simply variability in the output of Sol and/or orbital mechanics.

    To use an analogy we’re doing open heart surgery on a patient, in the dark without knowing if the problem’s even in the heart. Would you sign off on that? I sure as hell wouldn’t.

    The scariest thing is these people talking about re-engineering our environment by doing things like reflecting sunlight using orbiting sunscreens and such. They’d be making their decisions based on this flawed data and likely send us spiraling into an ice age for no good purpose.

    And you want us to let this go just in case it might be true (regardless of the falsified data)? Umm, NO!

  83. James Hansen interviewed on Democracy Now!

    http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/22/leading_climate_scientist_james_hansen_on

    He skipped Copenhagen because he doesn’t think cap-and-trade works. I think he’s right about that, at least. The current and proposed cap-and-trade schemes haven’t decreased the emissions and likely have increased them. Otherwise the interview is what you’d expect. He dismisses the CRU debacle with a couple of sentences to the effect that ‘the science is settled’.

    I didn’t know that he’d been arrested protesting mountaintop removal. I’d give him points for that, because mountaintop removal is a disaster regardless of what’s happening to the climate.

  84. Depends what you mean by “fake”. We have, for instance, Bishop George Berkeley’s attack on Newton’s proof of the product rule, 1734, “Analyst”. Newton didn’t fake his results in physics but he did fake his proofs in mathematics.

    It was Cauchy who proved Newton’s product rule. But you all knew that.

    1. >Newton didn’t fake his results in physics but he did fake his proofs in mathematics.

      This is unfair to Newton. In his time, and for nearly 200 years afterwards, nobody understood how to write real proofs in calculus. He didn’t knowingly fake anything, he just failed to live up to the standard of rigor of a later age.

  85. But Newton only faked his math because of a rivalry with Leibniz. Newton had no need to fake his physics, and if he had then every physicist on the continent would have checked his work and laughed him into exile in Barbados – and so Newton didn’t dare.

    On the subject of physicists being paid to produce bullshit, Five Ideological Physics Experiments.

  86. esr said:
    > You’re getting warmer. Actually, the “standard cancers of (post)modernism” are mostly remnant memetic weapons from a gigantically successful Soviet active-measures operation.

    You know, there are times when I think this statement must be at least somewhat correct. There is ample historical evidence to suggest much of what we see is the product of a highly organized strike, as opposed to some form of cultural signal decay. In particular, like the droning Newspeak about “cultural sensitivity” goes so unexamined that it almost has the flavor of battlefield shock. And when large groups of people can no longer recognize basic morality outside of a given cultural context, it seems to me that they have been somehow psychologically wounded.

    As for the “tranzis” and their apologists, reading Fonte’s essay reminded me of one of my favorite historical anecdotes on the subject of “multiculturalism.” During his tenure as the British Commander-in-chief in colonial India, Sir Charles Napier signed an agreement with local Hindu leaders stating that the British would respect all of their local customs, except for the practice of Sati: the incineration of widows upon the funeral pyres of their husbands. When the Hindu leaders protested, Napier replied:

    “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

    1. >And when large groups of people can no longer recognize basic morality outside of a given cultural context, it seems to me that they have been somehow psychologically wounded.

      Exactly. That was the purpose of the op. The Soviets believed they could destroy our cultural will to resist totalitarian takeover by attacking the language and the ethical premises that motivated resistance to it. And they very nearly succeeded.

    1. >This site by Alexander Bogomolny thinks that Newton “faked” the proof.

      It’s asserted, but what is demonstrated is merely that Newton’s proof was flawed. “Faked” is a much stronger assertion of intentional deception. It is not news or controversial that Newton’s proofs were flawed; it is going far beyond what the facts justify to claim they were faked. (His rival Leibniz did no better, but can’t be accused of fakery either.)

      I was in training to be a foundational mathematician at one time; this controversy is as familiar to me as the back of my hand.

  87. >This is unfair to Newton. In his time, and for nearly 200 years afterwards, nobody understood how to write real proofs in calculus. He didn’t knowingly fake anything, he just failed to live up to the standard of rigor of a later age.

    I’m not talking about his mathematics, I’m talking about his empirical measurements of the force of gravity using pendulums. It turns out that he couldn’t have timed his object-rolling experiments as accurately as he needed to:

    http://www.springerlink.com/content/kl64285r2j701224/

    Galileo faced the same issue with his inclined-plane experiments, and when people have tried to replicate his experiments they found the errors were far too large to support his conclusions. In fact the record against Galileo is much more serious:

    http://www.springerlink.com/content/w5751078130136t2/

    Same kind of thing has been suggested regarding Mendel’s experiments in genetics, although I can’t vouch for these claims:

    http://www.amazon.com/False-Prophets-Fraud-Science-Medicine/dp/product-description/0631162372

    and also

    1. >I’m not talking about his mathematics, I’m talking about his empirical measurements of the force of gravity using pendulums.

      Ah, that is much more plausible.

      >Same kind of thing has been suggested regarding Mendel’s experiments in genetics, although I can’t vouch for these claims:

      I can. It’s been pretty generally understood among geneticists that Mendel probably cooked his results for, oh, at least thirty years.

      UPDATE: I did some research. I thought I had remembered hearing from a biologist in 1968 (I was 11 at the time, taking an AP class in biology that was a good five years beyond my nominal grade level) that Mendel had probably cooked his results. I am probably remembering correctly, because it turns out the accusation was actually made thirty years before that by the statistician who invented the Fisher test. Mendel has defenders; it turns out there is a reasonable case that Fisher was mistaken.

  88. >But if the entire global warming movement is a fraud, do we have any other reason(s) to suspect that global warming is occurring and/or is a problem? If not, we might as well start worrying about global cooling for all the good it will do us.

    *If* it’s a fraud, we still have reason not to be certain that it *isn’t* occurring. If it’s a fraud, we should take the stance of being unsure whether global warming is happening. It is enough that we do not have evidence to falsify the theory, but in addition, global warming is not an implausible hypothesis given the amount that we have increased carbon emissions. It is, if I may, much more plausible than a global cooling hypothesis.

    So I am advocating a precautionary principle, yes. But it is not a precautionary principle in the mold of Michael Sandel of Francis Fukuyama. I’m neither saying that we should devote huge resources to addressing a possible threat, nor saying that we should worry about threats which are remote and unlikely. I’m only advocating that we don’t shut our eyes to realistic threats which have not been proved or disproved.

    I’m just saying that if the global warming movement is a fraud, our response should be to be open-minded and observe. Once you start taking glee in the defeat of that movement, you are committing yourself to the idea that the global warming hypothesis has been positively falsified. And it hasn’t, not by any stretch, not even if every single one of your claims of fraud turn out to be correct. It remains a reasonable, eminently plausible hypothesis.

    1. >It remains a reasonable, eminently plausible hypothesis.

      No, actually. No it doesn’t.

      Though you have to understand issues like IR band saturation and how much handwaving there is in the supposed feedback loops between CO2 and water vapor to get how implausible it actually is.

  89. jrok: Napier “Peccavi”. If it’s not true, it surely should be.

    Ben: Precautionary principle? It sounds reasonable, but a precaution that would cause massive damage to the industrialised and industrialising economies needs a very convincing rationale.

    That would be CATASTROPHIC AGW

    But catastrophic AGW depends on arguable interpretations of interactions between CO2, water vapour and other factors in feedback. And ignoring the implications of the mid Holocene optimum.
    The worst damn thing about climategate and the implications of Pachauri’s financial interests is that it taints the forecasting (and backcasting) of the climatic modeling. And we have, and will only have, modeling to base decisions upon. We must get better models and explicit error range statements, not alarmist “this hurricane/drought/heatwave/plague of frogs is due to GLOBAL WARMING!!!”

    Without extremely good cause to accept catastrophic AGW, the rational course seems to be to hold off on extreme responses, and implement policies that make sense anyway: e.g. replacing coal with nuclear or solar (depending on latitude) for baseline electricity, increasing vehicle & household energy efficiency (possibly encouraged by CO2 emission taxes), developing beeter climate science, looking at Dyson’s ideas about long term climate management.

    Oh yes, and bankrupting those who’ve invested in “carbon permit” trading (Hi Al!)

    P.S.: also, having people who talk about “carbon footprint” flogged with wet lettuce. It’s carbon dioxide, dammit! If your exhaust product was graphite, diamond or godamn buckyballs who gives a shit?

    1. Here’s my version of the Precautionary Principle: people who use junk science to press for an increase in state power should be hung from the nearest lamppost. As a precaution.

  90. > *If* it’s a fraud, we still have reason not to be certain that it *isn’t* occurring.

    But the fraud is so huge, at this point as an interested layman I have no reason to believe global warming is any more likely than global cooling. Or plagues of frogs.

  91. >Though you have to understand issues like IR band saturation and how much handwaving there is in the supposed feedback loops between CO2 and water vapor to get how implausible it actually is.

    Since you apparently don’t understand these things, how do you know how implausible it is?

    ESR says: I make correct predictions about the relationship between insolation, CO2, and GAT measures. The alarmists do not. I think that is a sufficient ratification of my understanding.

  92. Ben wrote:
    > It [AGW] is, if I may, much more plausible than a global cooling hypothesis.

    No.

    Ben, I have a Ph.D. in physics (Stanford, 1983). I’ve been following global-climate modeling efforts for four decades, since long before the global-warming hysteria.

    My own guess (and I emphasize the word “guess” – no one knows) is that we are entering a natural cooling period and that we actually need anthropogenic CO2 to stave off global cooling.

    While this is just a guess, there is some basis for it: the level temps in mid-century suggest that we have nearly finished the rebound from the Little Ice Age, for example.

    So, no, if I were to seriously try applying the precautionary principle (which is ridiculous on the face of it), I would urge the world to not cut back on CO2 emissions, so as to stave off global cooling.

    But the real truth is no one knows.

    Incidentally, the world is going to increase CO2 emissions over the next few decades, no matter what anyone says.

    Dave Miller in Sacramento

  93. ‘{Newton} counlden’t have timed his object-rolling experiments as accurately as he needed’

    Wiki Robert Brown, he of ‘discovered Brownian motion’. 1991 someone tried to reproduce his resultswith similar equitment and couldn’t. Why? Because Mr Reproducer wasn’t a genius at the top of his game. Brown was. Newton was.

    (Al Gore isn’t.).

  94. >I make correct predictions about the relationship between insolation, CO2, and GAT measures. The alarmists do not. I think that is a sufficient ratification of my understanding.

    It’s not sufficient because it’s not true. You can’t point to any climate scientists who disagree that temperatures follow insolation on the appropriate timescale.

    As to CO2 and temperature, you’re not even retrodicting that correctly.

    1. >You can’t point to any climate scientists who disagree that temperatures follow insolation on the appropriate timescale.

      Right, I’m sure this is true for some definition of “appropriate timescale”. Probably a conveniently flexible one, so that Hansen’s flooded East River Drives are always just on the verge of happening unless we cripple our economy and fork over umpty-bump billions to the U.N. to be handed over to relatives of despots the world over.

      >As to CO2 and temperature, you’re not even retrodicting that correctly.

      I dare say nobody can retrodict anything any more; by now, your allies have probably done a thorough enough job of corrupting the historical data that it might as well be white noise.

      But far be it from me to get between you and your delusions. The mountain of crow you’re going to wind up eating gets taller by the day.

  95. > It’s not sufficient because it’s not true. You can’t point to any climate scientists who disagree that temperatures follow insolation on the appropriate timescale.

    Ah, this goes to the heart of exactly how the house of cards is tumbling down. “Appropriate timescale.” Thank for this, pete. The negative assessments are piling up, now, too. “Show me a climate scientist who says X result WASN’T possible.” How lovely.

    As this silliness is slowly tickled out of its hole, it becomes apparent that far too many people have stayed silent for too long. Perhaps a counter revolution is on the docket.

  96. esr said:

    > Probably a conveniently flexible one, so that Hansen’s flooded East River Drives are always just on the verge of happening unless we cripple our economy and fork over umpty-bump billions to the U.N. to be handed over to relatives of despots the world over.

    See? I mean, I *know* what you mean when you say “It’s not THE significant falsification”, and you’re right, but it’s still hard to avoid mentioning it. I live here, and both the West Side Highway and FDR are high and dry. It’s true that this is the easy way out, but it’s significant because a lot of us actually live here (not to mention my neighbors 15 blocks north at the U.N., who bivouac here from time to time, and who was the real target of their claims). It’s important in a way that the RSS and GISTEMP refutations of Hansen aren’t. These apocalyptic visions form the core of the fraud. Without it, it’s just a boring bit of math for the layman… “The temperature will rise X degrees Celsius in X years? Big deal!”

  97. >I dare say nobody can retrodict anything any more; by now, your allies have probably done a thorough enough job of corrupting the historical data that it might as well be white noise.

    So, based on the data, your insolation/temperature predictions are correct.
    But your co2/temperature retrodictions disagree with the data because it’s been corrupted.

    Your position is unfalsifiable.

    >But far be it from me to get between you and your delusions. The mountain of crow you’re going to wind up eating gets taller by the day.

    Of course you’re not going to be eating crow if you’re proved wrong. You haven’t even corrected the clear error you repeated here.

  98. pete said:
    > So, based on the data, your insolation/temperature predictions are correct.
    But your co2/temperature retrodictions disagree with the data because it’s been corrupted.

    Pete says that Eric’s predictions are correct, but his retrodiction is wrong. Pete also says (OK, doesn’t “say” but literally “means”) that the Hockey Team’s retrodiction is correct, but that their most important predictions are wrong. Even in his small, dodgy world of shine, pete would like for you to believe that people whose theories align with their own analysis of the past have more useful insights than those who correctly predict the future.

    Perhaps it is time to consult our Orwell?

  99. @jrok
    > Pete also says (OK, doesn’t “say” but literally “means”) that the Hockey Team’s retrodiction is correct, but that their most important predictions are wrong.

    In this case your Cliff’s Notes are wrong. Pete can speak for himself, but I hope the class is paying attention.

  100. jrok wrote:

    > As this silliness is slowly tickled out of its hole, it becomes apparent that far too many people have stayed silent for too long. Perhaps a counter revolution is on the docket.

    Oh, no: con artists and liars like our boy Pete will not give up.

    Are you old enough to remember the best-selling book from ’68, The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich and his wife? Last I heard, Paul was still unwilling to admit how ludicrously wrong their predictions had been. I was in high school back then, and read the book at the time, so I remember it well.

    Or the “Club of Rome’s” Limits to Growth con game back around the same time? I think that was the first enviro-scam based on “computer models.” It impressed the hell out of all the “right-thinking” people – “computers,” wow! It was utter nonsense, of course, just like the catastrophic-global-warming fraud.

    It’s interesting that so many people can still be conned with the old “computer model” fraud. (Works in the field of finance too, it seems.)

    “Ocean acidification” seems to be the next up-and-coming con, assuming catastrophic global warming fades away.

    All that these folks care about is power (and, for some of the fake scientists, a bit of government funding), and they are not going to give up. As long as they see institutions such as the UN, the federal government, etc. that they see that they can capture and bend to advance their own dreams of power, they will persevere.

    I’ve been watching it for forty years.

    Dave

  101. PhysicistDave wrote:

    > Are you old enough to remember the best-selling book from ’68, The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich and his wife?

    I do indeed recall The Population Bomb. And when you dig into the cellars of Population Bomb or Inconvenient Truth is that you will find they adjoin, with exact same hydra of individuals and NGOs at their core. These are onetime sane conservationalists turned apocalyptic profiteers, with tendrils that reach into all kinds of Orwellian proxies like The Sierra Club’s “Voter Education Fund.” When An Inconvenient Truth finally becomes too “inconvenient” for them, they will latch onto some other faddish Doomsday Scenario, and Al Gore will be left out in the cold, a disgruntled castaway like Erlich. In twenty years, he’ll still be scribbling books about polar bears, but who will be reading?

    1. >And when you dig into the cellars of Population Bomb or Inconvenient Truth is that you will find they adjoin, with exact same hydra of individuals and NGOs at their core.

      There is one significant difference. Back in the era of “Population Bomb”, you didn’t have to dig very hard to find a Soviet case officer running the key figures, or their mentors or close associates – the same cluster of front organizations kept coming up over and over in the org chart. Nowadays that’s no longer true, because the case officers would be too busy waltzing through the revolving door between the Russian Mafia and Putin’s government to have time for ideological subversion even if the Russians had an ideology left to wave at anyone.

      Sadly for us all, their puppets learned the dance so well that they kept boogieing after the strings were cut.

  102. Yes, “PhysicistDave” has been *watching* for “forty years”, but not actually *doing*, as he admits:

    “I have not, however, worked on any global-climate simulations.”

    Kinda shoots his judgments to heck.

  103. > Yes, “PhysicistDave” has been *watching* for “forty years”,

    Moreover, he has been “watching”, but hasn’t troubled himself with actually reading any of the published science (including IPCC AR4).

    1. >Moreover, he has been “watching”, but hasn’t troubled himself with actually reading any of the published science (including IPCC AR4).

      I have read a good deal of the published science, and I can reassure PhysicistDave that he hasn’t missed much. That is, the percentage of handwavium, bogonium, and irrelevantium is just as high as he thinks.

  104. All that these folks care about is power (and, for some of the fake scientists, a bit of government funding), and they are not going to give up. As long as they see institutions such as the UN, the federal government, etc. that they see that they can capture and bend to advance their own dreams of power, they will persevere.

    Well, sure, all they care about is power. The power to do good, or the power to prevent harm. I see little indication that most of these folks are after power for its own sake. Even Al Gore doesn’t seem to be after power for its own sake any more. He could easily have tried rehabiliatating his political career in the same way Nixon did, but instead he seems to enjoy being a prophet much more. Micheal Jordan also gave up on his father’s dreams eventually.

    I also only care about power. I care about keeping Democrats out of power now, and about reforming our currect form of government with additional checks on government power because I want to limit their (and Republican’s) power to (mostly accidentally) do harm. I say mostly accidentally because those who want power to do good mainly do harm by accident. Those who want power for it’s own sake sometimes do harm on purpose, but the wisest of them try to avoid it merely as a means to retain power.

    It’s no good to criticise your opponents as wanting power. Even libertarians and minarchists want power – the power to set up the rules that will perpetuate a libertarian and minarchist society. Socialists (and conservatives) who oppose them do so because they believe that a libertarian and minarchist society will be harmful.

    I invite pete to shut up about Exxon forever. You are better when you argue the science. It is simply a fact that there is plenty of money to be made supporting the AGW hypothesis and plenty of ways for that money to corrupt the process. Arguing about money only weakens your case, pete.

    Because, believe it or not, I am prepared to be persuaded by the science, and have been for some time. I would be very happy to spend more tax money on more sensors to pull more weather/climate data, for example, provided that the data is public domain. Instead you have convinced me of two things. One, that the science of climate modeling is in it’s infancy, and we need more computing power and more and better climate and weather data. And two, that the science of paleo climatology may never produce results accurate and useful enough on which to base policy. Historical sciences have an exceedingly hard time producing highly accurate global results, simply because what they are trying to do is so very hard. Natural processes continually degrade your data, and even the act of processing the evidence destroys information. All paleo sciences are just freaking hard, and way too easily corrupted by just so stories. Paleo conservatism is much easier. Even Pat Buchanan can do it!

    I also invite PhysicistDave to shut up about power forever. You are also better when you argue the science. It is simply a fact that there is plenty of power to be had opposing the AGW hypothesis and plenty of ways for that power to corrupt the process. Arguing about power only weakens your case, Dave.

    I’ve been waiting for Gary Strand to say something interesting for some time. Gary, you’ve probably made great arguments in your links. I’m one of those people who won’t click a link unless you sell it. And snark only sells a link if you already agree with the salesman – or if the snark is unusually funny. I can see you are funny, but “You are no comedian, Jerry Seinfeld.”

    Yours,
    Tom DeGisi

    1. >I also invite PhysicistDave to shut up about power forever. You are also better when you argue the science. It is simply a fact that there is plenty of power to be had opposing the AGW hypothesis and plenty of ways for that power to corrupt the process. Arguing about power only weakens your case, Dave.

      I think PhysicistDave’s rants about science and power are both pretty true on the mark, but I agree. He should stick to where his comparative advantage is greatest and leave the ethico-moral criticism to people like me who don’t have his degree of authority on the physics.

      (Grumble. Saying that was necessary but annoying. Yes, I am physics-literate, but I can’t wave around the kind of credentials PhysicistDave can. Grumble.)

  105. Stuck something in the span filter. Maybe Gary never sells his links because long winded comments get stuck there too often. I hate spam. But Spam is good! I’m hearing Monty Python in my head now…. Well, that’s a positive aspect of spam.

  106. leave the ethico-moral criticism to people like me

    Well you are really good at it… where really good means “writes things I find interesting and compelling”.

    Yours,
    Tom DeGisi

  107. > Nowadays that’s no longer true, because the case officers would be too busy waltzing through the revolving door between the Russian Mafia and Putin’s government to have time for ideological subversion even if the Russians had an ideology left to wave at anyone.

    Yes. One of the least “suspicious” emails to me that’s gotten a lot of play is the Shiyatov-Briffa communiques where some readers have speculated that Shiyatov was fishing for a bribe when he asked be paid via wire transfer to his personal bank account. No, he most certainly was not! Is Russia! Is more practical this way! Is less sticky fingers in cookie jar, da?

  108. I have read a good deal of the published science, and I can reassure PhysicistDave that he hasn’t missed much. That is, the percentage of handwavium, bogonium, and irrelevantium is just as high as he thinks.

    Avatar 2 is in the works; I think we just found our plot-driving minerals.

    (I was agog when I watched Avatar and the characters discussed rich deposits of unobtainium with a straight face. Yes, it was used in The Core, but I think The Core was made to troll moviegoing physicists.)

  109. Eric may have *read* some of the relevant material; whether he *understood* it or not, that’s the question.

  110. I invite pete to shut up about Exxon forever. You are better when you argue the science. It is simply a fact that there is plenty of money to be made supporting the AGW hypothesis and plenty of ways for that money to corrupt the process. Arguing about money only weakens your case, pete.

    esr’s shown himself to be unable to follow the scientific arguments. He’s now at the point where he’ll claim that any data that disproves him is manufactured by the CRU, while happily leaving incorrect arguments uncorrected here.

    What he might still be able to understand are the similarities between soviet meme-warfare and corporate disinformation.

    When you put the CRU’s behaviour into the context of past work by CEI and Heartland, you can understand (even if you don’t condone) what they’ve done.

    1. >while happily leaving incorrect arguments uncorrected here.

      And just how would you propose that I correct this? Be specific, please.

  111. >And just how would you propose that I correct this? Be specific, please.

    “80%” should be “50%” (because the axis is in F not C).

    1. >“80%” should be “50%” (because the axis is in F not C).

      Done. I wanted you, or some other AGW true-believer, to commit to a specific correction so I couldn’t be accused of shading it to fit a skeptical agenda.

  112. >I wanted you, or some other AGW true-believer, to commit to a specific correction so I couldn’t be accused of shading it to fit a skeptical agenda.

    So does this change your conclusion at all?

    1. >So does this change your conclusion at all?

      How do you propose that it should? The significant part about these “corrections” is that they’re positive-increasing over time in a shape strangely similar to the discredited Mann hockey stick, when consideration of heat-island and siting problems tells us they ought to be negative increasing.

  113. If transnational progressivism is the understanding that there are different cultures besides your own, different peoples besides your own, different values besides your own, and you can’t just go around imposing your perspective and your values on everyone else, then I guess I’m a “tranzi”.

    It isn’t. “Transnational progressivism” is the latest coat of paint on the same old dream of tyrants since Julius Ceasar: world domination.

  114. The Soviets believed they could destroy our cultural will to resist totalitarian takeover by attacking the language and the ethical premises that motivated resistance to it. And they very nearly succeeded.

    I don’t think I’m as optimistic as you are on their degree of success. I know WAY too many people who believe that world government is a dandy idea.

  115. esr: you may have already seen this, just posted at Watts site: Study shows CFCs, cosmic rays major culprits for global warming.

    Very interesting work just published, in the journal Physics Reports.

    Seems to me I heard about several other papers along these lines that were refused publication before climategate. I guess the physicists aren’t willing to be pushed around by the Hockey Team anymore.

  116. >How do you propose that it should?

    Your claim that “much (perhaps all) of the supposed global-warming signal is accounted for by “adjustments” made to the data.” isn’t particularly well supported now.

    >when consideration of heat-island and siting problems tells us they ought to be negative increasing.

    By “consideration” do you mean “guessing”?

    Heat island adjustments should be decreasing (and they are). But why would you expect siting adjustments to be decreasing? Increasing awareness of siting problems means that site moves would be biased towards cooler grassy areas.

    The fact that homogenised thermometer records agree with satellites and radiosondes suggests that the scientists are getting the adjustments right.

  117. >The fact that homogenised thermometer records agree with satellites and radiosondes suggests that the scientists are getting the adjustments right.

    I would like to know more about the likely relationship between ground-thermometer data and weather-balloon temperature data. Are ground thermometers simply trying to measure very-low-troposphere temperature, or are they trying to measure ground (meaning temperature of the ground, not temperature of the air near the ground) temperature? In any event, where is the data? Can you point to references of this agreement you’re talking about?

  118. >Are ground thermometers simply trying to measure very-low-troposphere temperature, or are they trying to measure ground (meaning temperature of the ground, not temperature of the air near the ground) temperature?

    Surface air temperature, i.e. air temperature within a few metres of the ground. Although over the oceans it tends to be sea surface temperature, i.e. water temperature near the surface.

    >In any event, where is the data? Can you point to references of this agreement you’re talking about?

    Google RSS or UAH for satellite measurements, HadAT for radiosonde.

  119. In response to cosmic rays affecting ozone levels, Gary posted three published responses. I can’t access the last two, so I don’t know what they say. But the first one said: no significant correlation exists between ozone levels and cosmic-ray activity inside the polar regions.

    I’m not an atmosphere guy, so this is just my naive response … but so what? I mean, doesn’t the ozone layer circulate globally, same as any other part of the atmosphere? And the holes are over the poles due to temperatures, or the magnetic field, or something local, right? So why on earth would a globally affected ozone layer be caused by cosmic rays particular to the polar regions? I don’t think the original paper even attempted to make a connection with local variations in cosmic rays. So this rebuttal is pretty much meaningless. Or am I missing something?

    The author goes on to say the models don’t replicate this cosmic ray/ozone layer connection either. Fantastic. The evidence shows a relationship and the models don’t, so of course the models must be right. Where have we heard that song and dance before?

    PS – Merry Christmas, everyone.

  120. Lu et.al. claim that cosmic rays are a big reason for the polar ozone “holes” (as opposed to the chlorine from anthropogenic CFCs), whereas the rebuttal says that there’s no correlation. Lu et.al. also go on to claim that cosmic rays cause some part of global warming, which is also not at all correlated.

    The point is that Lu et.al. claim to have found a non-anthropogenic source for both polar ozone depletion and global warming, but others found their work less than explanatory.

    Doesn’t have anything to do with “the models”.

  121. Gary Strand wrote of me:
    >[Gary]Yes, “PhysicistDave” has been *watching* for “forty years”, but not actually *doing*, as he admits:
    >[Dave]“I have not, however, worked on any global-climate simulations.”
    >[Gary]Kinda shoots his judgments to heck.

    Oh, now, you are just making a fool of yourself again and again showing your ignorance of science.

    Your comment is like saying that only professional astrologers can judge the validity of astrology – if you have not actually cast a horoscope, don’t criticize!

    I have a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford; I have worked on various academic physics experiments; I have worked in private industry; I have extensive experience with computer simulations. If I am not qualified to judge the validity of the climate fakers’ work, then no one is.

    Let us be honest – there is not a single intelligent, honest person anywhere on earth who has looked carefully at these guys’ work and believes that it is “settled science.” All their defenders are liars or scientific illiterates.

    Like you, Gary.

    The cat’s out of the bag — even the ordinary guy on the street is now getting the message: catastrophic global warming is the biggest scientific fraud since Lysenkoism.

    Dave

  122. esr wrote:
    > (Grumble. Saying that was necessary but annoying. Yes, I am physics-literate, but I can’t wave around the kind of credentials PhysicistDave can. Grumble.)

    Yeah, but of course, the failure of the catastrophic-global-warming guys to follow basic rules of scientific method is pretty obvious. My being a physicist probably makes me more annoyed at their fakery, but any bright, honest, technically trained person can see the fraud; indeed, many non-technical people can see it.

    Dave

  123. Basically, “PhysicistDave”, you’re claiming authority when in fact you have none in the realm of global climate modeling. Sort of a self-applied *argumentum ad verecundiam*.

    I’d also like a retraction of your statement that I’m a “liar” or “scientific illiterate”. That’s unnecessary.

  124. The other irony is that you seem to approve of geoengineering, particularly deliberately dumping sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere, as a “fix” for global warming (or rather, a means to avoid CO2 emissions cuts), but that relies on a far greater faith in climate modeling than climate modelers themselves have.

    Oh, and not knowing everything doesn’t mean knowing nothing.

  125. Tom deGisi wrote to me:
    > I also invite PhysicistDave to shut up about power forever. You are also better when you argue the science. It is simply a fact that there is plenty of power to be had opposing the AGW hypothesis and plenty of ways for that power to corrupt the process. Arguing about power only weakens your case, Dave.

    Well, Tom, most people are well aware of the economic forces that might oppose the global-warming fraud. There is very little discussion of the mundane, material incentives that have caused the fraud.

    So, I do think there is a reason for me and others to discuss that.

    Of course, it is true that the incentive to lie does not prove the lying.

    What does prove the lying is that proper scientific method simply has not been followed by the liars, so their work is not “settled science,” indeed not science at all.

    But, for everyone who does see the magnitude of the fraud, it really is very important to understand how the fraud happened and sucked in so many people, even some semi-intelligent people, for so long.

    The fact that it is fraud is now a settled issue for all honest, intelligent, informed people (i.e., not pathological liars such as Pete).

    The important question remaining is how and why it happened.

    Pointing out earlier frauds such as Ehrlich’s Population Bomb is highly relevant to understanding the long-term pattern of fraud.

    It’s no longer a scientific problem: the science is now indeed “settled” – i.e., it is settled that they were engaged in scientific fraud.

    The remaining issue is now a psychological, sociological, political-science question: why did they do it and why did so many people get sucked in? Admittedly, those are subjects on which I am a layperson, but since the social-science pros are unlikely to address that for a while, I feel obliged to jump in.

    A few decades from now, trying to explain the biggest scientific fraud outside of the Soviet Union (i.e., Lysenkoism) should indeed be worth several Ph.D. theses in poli-sci and sociology!

    Dave

  126. Tom deGisi wrote:
    >It’s no good to criticise your opponents as wanting power. Even libertarians and minarchists want power – the power to set up the rules that will perpetuate a libertarian and minarchist society.

    You’re way off-target in my case, Tom.

    I’m a Thoreauist: I hope that the human race will eventually come to its senses and abolish government, but I am not foolish enough to want “power” for myself to try to bring that about. The human race will have to grow up on their own, I fear.

    As Thoreau put it, I came into this world primarily to live in it, not to fix it. I try not to be part of the problem, but I do not suffer from the delusion that if I only had “power,” then I could bring about the solution.

    And, yeah, a lot of minarchists do worry me as people who want power!

    Dave

  127. Gary Strand wrote to me:
    > Basically, “PhysicistDave”, you’re claiming authority when in fact you have none in the realm of global climate modeling. Sort of a self-applied *argumentum ad verecundiam*.

    Not at all.

    I have pointed out very clearly, again and again and again, that the fact that the climate frauds have not followed routine scientific method – make firm, clear, significant, unambiguous predictions ahead of time and then see if they work out (and admit your theories are wrong if they don’t) – is why they are frauds. I expect bright grade-schoolers to understand this (I know some who do). I do not think anyone should need a Ph.D. physicist to explain that.

    But since one of the games of the climate-fraud-meisters is to throw around lies such as “The scientific consensus is…” “Competent scientists agree…” etc., yeah, I am one (of many) scientists who offer ourselves as counter-examples to those lies.

    That’s all.

    No one should believe me on the basis of authority (and it is clear that no one here does!). But a lot of people have believed the climate crooks on the basis of their supposed authority, and people like me can point out that their claims to authority based on lies about a supposed scientific consensus are unwarranted just by pointing out ourselves that we are scientists and that we are not part of their fake “consensus.”

    Rather simple.

    Gary also wrote:
    > I’d also like a retraction of your statement that I’m a “liar” or “scientific illiterate”. That’s unnecessary.

    No.

    Not a chance.

    I cannot change who you are.

    That is up to you.

    Dave

  128. Gary said: Lu et.al. claim that cosmic rays are a big reason for the polar ozone “holes” (as opposed to the chlorine from anthropogenic CFCs), whereas the rebuttal says that there’s no correlation.

    That’s not how I read it. Lu et.al. show a connection between a thinning ozone and cosmic rays in general. The rebuttal says there is no correlation over the poles. I pointed out that this rebuttal doesn’t seem relevant … Lu’s paper doesn’t depend on more cosmic rays being at the poles. Cosmic rays – if Lu is correct – reduce the ozone layer globally. That this effect disproportionately affects the poles doesn’t require a polar correlation of cosmic rays.

    The poles are just thinner in general. So anything that reduced ozone globally will also thin the ozone at the poles.

  129. Jeff Read Says:
    (I was agog when I watched Avatar and the characters discussed rich deposits of unobtainium with a straight face. Yes, it was used in The Core, but I think The Core was made to troll moviegoing physicists.)

    Funny, I just chuckled and figured the writers had been reading TVTropes too much.

    Even funnier is that according to TVTropes unobtainium is sometimes used in engineering as a term for a material that would be perfect for a specific application if only it was available within budget/actually exists etc… It’s more accurately a “Mineral Macguffin” in the context of the movie but that doesn’t sound anywhere near as good and it’s relatively easy to imagine an engineer looking for superconductor materials that can also create significant amounts of lift and may be related to the pandora neural network and terming it unobtainium.

  130. Dave,

    You also weaken your case when you call pete a pathological liar. I’ve worked for a pathological liar. He told stunningly pathological lies every day on a wide variety of subjects when it wasn’t even necessary. This guy was the most immoral person I’ve ever known. On the bright side, he generated a large number of interesting anecdotes just by being himself. But then I escaped without significant harm, so they are only interesting anecdotes to me, rather than tragedies of various magnitudes. pete is not a pathological liar. I don’t even think he is a liar. I think he is a believer.

    In addition, Gary Strand does not appear to be a liar or scientifically illiterate. He also appears to be a believer. Even if he doesn’t want to persuade me to read his links. ;)

    I know what you are doing. You are allowing your emotions to override your good sense. You don’t want to contemplate that people of good will could believe something so wrong. So you assume bad will. And you act like an intemperate jerk. I do the same thing when I yell insults at the politicians on TV.

    I guess it’s good not to be an arrogant physicist.

    Your arguments about the scientific method are spot on, though.

    Yours,
    Tom DeGisi

  131. Pete, if you have data set A, and data set B, and you have to apply corrections to data set A in order to get it to match data set B, then you only have one data set: B. Data set A is worthless.

    The only way to escape this trap is to have a theory for your corrections, you apply those corrections, and the first time you apply them to A, it matches B, then A might not be worthless. If you have to revise your corrections after finding that (corrected) A doesn’t match B, then A is worthless. When your theory behind A is that it doesn’t match B, then you’ve proven not just that A is worthless, but that you’re a fraud, and everything you have done should be thrown out until reproduced by someone else.

  132. >The only way to escape this trap is to have a theory for your corrections, you apply those corrections, and the first time you apply them to A, it matches B, then A might not be worthless. If you have to revise your corrections after finding that (corrected) A doesn’t match B, then A is worthless.

    Not quite true. Once you have a consistent theory explaining both A and B, (which may take several attempts), you can continue to add new observations to A and to B. If these new observations are consistent with your theory, is A still worthless?

  133. @ PhysicstDave
    > I have pointed out very clearly, again and again and again, that the fact that the climate frauds have not followed routine scientific method – make firm, clear, significant, unambiguous predictions ahead of time and then see if they work out (and admit your theories are wrong if they don’t) – is why they are frauds.

    Your assertion that climate scientists “have not followed routine scientific methods” is simply false.

    You would know that if you had bothered to read any of the primary published science, or even the the synthesis reports published by the IPCC.

  134. > or even the the synthesis reports published by the IPCC.

    Well, at least you are calling them “the synthesis reports.” Gary Strand keeps referring to them as though they were published science, rather then a politically rendered stew of nicely rounded numbers.

  135. @ jrok
    The IPCC’s reports are published science: they are assessments of the current published science on climate change.

    And by the way, nothing that you or anyone else foaming about “climate-gate” have said has altered any of that science.

  136. And by the way, nothing that you or anyone else foaming about “climate-gate” have said has altered any of that science.

    This is true; however, there is serious doubt only now revealed as to whether much of that science was ever valid. You can’t brush climategate aside by saying ‘it doesn’t change the science’.

  137. Tom said:
    > The IPCC’s reports are published science: they are assessments of the current published science on climate change.

    Tom, it’s becoming clear that you don’t even know the meanings of the words you are saying, let alone the scientific statements that can be extracted from the papers cited. A political assessment of scientific literature is NOT science. You are better off arguing the relative merits of the literature itself… something that Jones, Briffa, Osburn, Wigley, Mann and others did often in their leaked communications with varying degrees of “skepticism.”

    Or should we call them “denialists” now? So much Newspeak, so little time to internalize it… Al Gore predicts only 5 to 7 years!

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