2461 replies to this topic

[AnBr]

J-CA, on 05 June 2014 - 01:28 PM, said:

The problem I have with methane leak analysis is that I can't find anyplace that clearly identifies the trade off with carbon.
Methane is gone in 10-12 years, carbon dioxide is gone in anywhere from 20 to thousands of years. Methane is 80-100 worse for trapping energy.
I have no idea what is a reasonable compromise between CO₂ and methane.

And what is happening to that methane? Is it oxidizing as it breaks down? If so, you are getting CO₂ as an end product.

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However, the IPCC notes that ruminants and termites are a major source of AGW from methane.

Not just ruminants can be traced to anthropogenic origin. Clear cutting forests and leaving the "junk" timber behind to rot will encourage termites.

[J-CA]

AnBr, on 05 June 2014 - 05:41 PM, said:

And what is happening to that methane? Is it oxidizing as it breaks down? If so, you are getting CO₂ as an end product.

Mostly water.
http://en.wikipedia....moval_processes

[cmk]

dsp, on 05 June 2014 - 08:20 AM, said:

3) The honorable word "skeptic" has been ruined by people determined to make the word synonymous with denier. In my experience, the guilty parties are mainly ideologically motivated, liberal pundits and public intellectuals without science training and a political agenda.

This is ridiculous, even for you.

[Progressive whisperer]

cmk, on 05 June 2014 - 06:39 PM, said:

This is ridiculous, even for you.

Maybe DSP needs to add to his "All purpose Obama Admin Bashing Thread" a second, "All Purpose Cultural Leftist Bashing Thread". By then he might never need to post elsewhere.

Next up, bad cultural leftists are trying to make the term "Creation Scientist" synonomous with Darwinian Evolution denier.

[dsp]

LFC, on 05 June 2014 - 09:38 AM, said:

Do a bit of research on the leading denialists out there like Christopher Monckton, Anthony Watts, Richard Tol, Heartland Institute, etc.

I read some skeptical science and realclimate.org last week. This week I'm looking at Anthony Watts. As it turns out, Watts has a new article by Christopher Monckton at the top hot off the press.

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As one delves into the leaden, multi-thousand-page text of the IPCC’s 2013 Fifth Assessment Report, which reads like a conversation between modelers about the merits of their models rather than a serious climate assessment, it is evident that they have lost the thread of the calculation. There are some revealing inconsistencies. Let us expose a few of them.

The IPCC has slashed its central near-term prediction of global warming from 0.28 K/decade in 1990 via 0.23 K/decade in the first draft of IPCC (2013) to 0.17 K/decade in the published draft. Therefore, the biggest surprise to honest climate researchers reading the report is why the long-term or equilibrium climate sensitivity has not been slashed as well.

In 1990, the IPCC said equilibrium climate sensitivity would be 3 [1.5, 4.5] K. In 2007, its estimates were 3.3 [2.0, 4.5] K. In 2013 it reverted to the 1990 interval [1.5, 4.5] K per CO2 doubling. However, in a curt, one-line footnote, it abandoned any attempt to provide a central estimate of climate sensitivity – the key quantity in the entire debate about the climate. The footnote says models cannot agree.

Frankly, I was suspicious about what that footnote might be hiding. So, since my feet are not yet fit to walk on, I have spent a quiet weekend doing some research. The results were spectacular.

Long snip.

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my best estimate of expected anthropogenic global warming from now to 2100: three-quarters of a Celsius degree. The end of the world may be at hand, but if it is it won’t have anything much to do with our paltry influence on the climate.

Your mission, gentle reader, should you choose to accept it, is to let me know in comments your own best estimate of global warming by 2100 compared with the present. The Lord Monckton Foundation will archive your predictions. Our descendants 85 years hence will be able to amuse themselves comparing them with what happened in the real world.

[LFC]

DSP, I'll go out on an extremely stout limb without even bothering to read the piece and predict that Monckton has missed, muffed, or misrepresented one or more major things. Why would I behave in such a way towards a "skeptic"? Because other than the documented fact that Monckton is insane (like literally insane), every piece he has written on the subject has been incorrect and/or outright dishonest, and has no problems repeating his false statements. You can read many posts over at Skeptical Science where real scientists point out where how this non-scientist gets it wrong over and over.

You can't have this kind of track record and ever be taken seriously. And remember, this guy thinks he's a "skeptic".

[Traveler]

dsp, could you please do a little critical thinking before you link to your prejudices?

[LFC]

Not sure if I posted it before, but Sullivan made a great case on how it was past time to accept the basics of man-made warming and start an honest discussion on solutions.

In it he linked a piece by Chait dismantling the dishonest denialism of Charles Krauthammer and George Will, two men who should know better.

I had been previously gobsmacked by the ignorance of George Will's repeated denier claim that there had been no warming since 1998. When multiple scientists wrote to address it and some even contacted him directly, he simply dug in harder. This is when I figured he had just thrown clear thought and intellectualism to the winds and had become a garden variety climate change denier. After reading Chait's piece, though, I've figured out the real reason for his position, and he lays it out in great detail. (Bold mine and explained below.)

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Scientists are not saints in white laboratory smocks. They have got interests like everybody else. If you want a tenure-track position in academia, don't question the reigning orthodoxy on climate change. If you want money from the biggest source of direct research in this country, the federal government, don't question its orthodoxy. If you want to get along with your peers, conform to peer pressure. This is what's happening.

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A moment ago, we had a report here on our crumbling infrastructure, gave it a D, emergency. Who wrote it? As we said on there, it was written by civil engineers, who said, by golly, we need more of what civil engineers do and are paid to do. Again, there is a sociology of science, there is a sociology in all of this, and engaging the politics of this, we have to understand the enormous interests now invested in climate change.

So there it is, explained in his own words. George Will denies man-made global climate change because a) he has interests like everybody else, b) he wants money from right-wing TV, radio, and publications which are the biggest source of cash for the kind of thing he does, c) he has conformed to peer pressure and, d) by golly we need more of what right-wing pundits do and are paid to do i.e. spout opinions (facts be damned) that tell the audience what they want to hear.

I should have figured out immediately that Will is too intelligent to miss the very basics of trend lines that scientists patiently described for him, the overwhelming number of papers from literally across the globe, global (not local temperature anomaly maps, shipping open for part of the year in the Arctic, etc. No, he's in it for the money. He said so himself! And I'd bet dollars to donuts that George Will makes a LOT more money than the vast majority of climate scientists. And he won't have a gig at Fox anymore if he stands up and admits what nearly every climate scientist knows and accepts.

[dsp]

Christopher Monckton is answering comments on Anthony Watts' site, "Watts Up with That." I left a comment for Monckton, but it is not visible yet. If Watts lets it out of moderation, I want to see what Monckton or his supporters have to say about the "rap sheet."

dsp says:

June 9, 2014 at 2:57 pm

Mr. Monckton, I can’t find your response to this information.
http://bbickmore.wor...tons-rap-sheet/

EDIT: lol, Check out the time stamps. Monckton left a comment at almost the same time I did. Mine is in moderation though, so he can't see it.

Monckton of Brenchley says:
June 9, 2014 at 3:00 pm

Mr Ard is indeed “missing something”: for he sees no purpose in demonstrating the falsity of a hypothesis that is not yet proven. However, nearly all hypotheses in the physical sciences are not susceptible of demonstration. The “global warming is going to be dangerous unless we shut down the capitalist West” hypothesis, though neither demonstrable nor at all likely to be true, is nevertheless the political credo of the Left, and is now one of their most sacred shibboleths. The Left are notoriously unsusceptible to reason. Accordingly, it is necessary for us here to demonstrate, over and over again, the increasingly glaring scientific defects in the scientific case for what is at root not a scientific but a political theory. Since this particular – and particularly poisonous – political theory is rooted in scientific error, this is one political theory that, in the end, will not survive: for it is already evident even to the promoters of the climate scare that they must begin to modify their absurd claims, as the head posting demonstrates.
.

EDIT 2: It looks like Monckton won't see my comment. Deleted by a mod.

dsp says:
June 9, 2014 at 2:57 pm

[snip - off topic, derogatory -mod]

[AnBr]

DSP, if you want people to take you seriously, stop citing Monckton. He is a laughing stock and charlatan.

[Traveler]

AnBr, on 09 June 2014 - 05:21 PM, said:

DSP, if you want people to take you seriously, stop citing Monckton. He is a laughing stock and charlatan.

Take dsp seriously?

[indy]

I've never quite understood how people who are obviously nuts and lack any sort of credibility or credentials get invited to speak before congress. Then I remembered that pretty much describes the people in congress too.

[D. C. Sessions]

J-CA, on 04 June 2014 - 04:39 PM, said:

Who else has their money on the top of the grey being the model's actual middle projection and everything below it being the cover-your-butt fudge-factor?

That model spread converges in 1990. Since I profoundly doubt that the models haven't been updated in the past quarter-century, the spread from (say) 2005 is likely to be quite a bit narrower -- not only because it would have ruled out the levels already past but because the model itself would have been updated.

The grey region should have been color-coded to show the different generations of models.

[D. C. Sessions]

LFC, on 05 June 2014 - 09:38 AM, said:

The problem is, they aren't really being debated in the political world, only the scientific world. And those who don't want to do anything about the problem now (mostly due to profit motives) have no interest in the separation of settled science and real skepticism, even though they call themselves "skeptics".

Would that it were so, because when someone is motivated by informed self-interest they can be appealed to by shifting the incentives.

However, surveys show that the (great) majority of climate denial is not motivated by profit or other economic incentives, they're motivated by purely political/ideological (and of course tribal) thinking. Basically, if you concede that the Earth is warming dangerously due to human actions (notably burning of fossil carbon) a whole bunch of unpalatable things follow. Not least by any means is that the damn tree-hugging hippies might have been right all along about pollution and solar, wind, etc. power. Not to mention mass transit and electric cars. Better to die a free man in Vegas than ever, ever even entertain that thought.

Heartland doesn't direct them any more than it directed the smoking-doesn't-kill resistance. Now, as then, it just manufactures excuses for people to continue to believe what they do rather than be forced to change their minds. I'm afraid that this time it will work out the same as before: progress one funeral at a time.

The big difference is that this time, one of the USA's only two political parties has made AGW denial a core Party dogma, so tribal identification is going to make a lot more funerals necessary.

Put another way, they've picked this hill to die on and there's no way they're going to back down now.

[Progressive whisperer]

D. C. Sessions, on 10 June 2014 - 06:17 AM, said:

Would that it were so, because when someone is motivated by informed self-interest they can be appealed to by shifting the incentives.

However, surveys show that the (great) majority of climate denial is not motivated by profit or other economic incentives, they're motivated by purely political/ideological (and of course tribal) thinking. Basically, if you concede that the Earth is warming dangerously due to human actions (notably burning of fossil carbon) a whole bunch of unpalatable things follow. Not least by any means is that the damn tree-hugging hippies might have been right all along about pollution and solar, wind, etc. power. Not to mention mass transit and electric cars. Better to die a free man in Vegas than ever, ever even entertain that thought.

Heartland doesn't direct them any more than it directed the smoking-doesn't-kill resistance. Now, as then, it just manufactures excuses for people to continue to believe what they do rather than be forced to change their minds. I'm afraid that this time it will work out the same as before: progress one funeral at a time.

The big difference is that this time, one of the USA's only two political parties has made AGW denial a core Party dogma, so tribal identification is going to make a lot more funerals necessary.

Put another way, they've picked this hill to die on and there's no way they're going to back down now.

The pity is they aren't the only ones dying on that hill. I wonder if the hill is high enough above sea level?

[J-CA]

D. C. Sessions, on 10 June 2014 - 06:01 AM, said:

That model spread converges in 1990... The grey region should have been color-coded to show the different generations of models.

I agree and confess that I had not considered that. On that basis I would suggest that the shaded region is probably fairly inaccurate, it should not be such a regular shape certainly.
(Am I the only one than suddenly realizes 1990 is a long time ago!?)

[LFC]

Sullivan pulls together an all too depressing roundup of opinions under the title "Will Global Warming Defeat Us?".

Ezra Klein is linked with 7 and then an 8th reason he expect us to fail:
http://www.vox.com/2...-global-warming
http://www.vox.com/2...e-change-action

A lot of the nations that are most vulnerable have little political clout. Then there's China and India, the two most populous nations in the world, who will have to "tech up" sooner than later if they don't want to take on the counterbalancing economic losses from climate change. No matter where we end up, it probably won't be pretty and getting there is going to be ugly.

[HockeyDon]

J-CA, on 10 June 2014 - 07:53 AM, said:

(Am I the only one than suddenly realizes 1990 is a long time ago!?)

Class of '91 here, so, no.

[LFC]

HockeyDon, on 10 June 2014 - 09:45 AM, said:

Class of '91 here, so, no.

Punk ass kid!

[HockeyDon]

Back to your chair, gramps.