Quote :

Having just upgraded again, some 12 years later, I now have three orders of magnitude more storage than I did back then (post upgrade). I would have struggled to believe that a decade ago.

When we bought our first PC, 1 GB harddisks were around but very rare and expensive, no average computer person had one. The guy we bought the computer from was a very rich man who had a need for lots of storage and he had a GB drive in his own computer (our computer had about 40mb storage as far as I can remember). I remember thinking how 1GB was so impressive- those drives were selling for over $1000 back then...

Now when I go to officeworks there are 1GB USB drives at the counter in the impulse buy section!!! - it's crazy when I think back to this guy and his amazing GB drive and the expense. I could have never imagined back then that in the future you'd be buying GB drives in the same way you'd buy a lollipop at the supermarket.

Enjoyed the MIT forum Sam.

Overall the actual contents of the climategate emails were touched on very lightly (which was good actually), instead focusing on concerns over the broader public image of scientists (and science) was helpful and a few very important (but too short) points were made I felt including the problem of the increasingly partisan divide in the media and the treatment of climate change in lower education as a belief structure.

Lindzen's 'cleanhouse' comment (towards the end of the video) was the most directly relevent here though, imo

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:23.

Quote from Shotglass :

just case of someone with a bachelor (not even a master) of arts talking about something he doesnt fully understand

I wonder how much is the case of him being gullible, or him relying on us being gullible

Just saw these in a Turkish newspaper about a competition in Russia for scary cats.

http://www.milliyet.com.tr/gal ... galeriid=8278#galeriStart

Which is your favourite? I'd go with no.11. Maybe 6.

I didn't really mean to sound like a biologist back there (or wank over wit), but I do actually want to become a biologist. (i've been reading a a fair amount of dull, technical stuff lately and I guess it's rubbing off)

Marine Biologist: Leelu is a rare toothed female narwhal who got disoriented and washed up in Atlantic City, as we all do from time to time...

...

Marine Biologist: And the third reason whales kill is for the pure fun of it
Leela: Is there anything else?
Marine Biologist: Yea, you smell funny and your suits lumpy

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:42.

Quote :

legoflamb

equally you learn from a young age that yellow and red are colours used on warning signs and thus your reaction is entirely based on previous experience with a very common theme in signage

Quote :

The bio-hazard sign is a perfect example of prejudice. Firstly, the color yellow is synonymous to caution. People have seen images contained in yellow triangles that refer to relevant dangers like ice on the road or traffic signals. Secondly, the image in the center of the sign. Most people have seen these in movies, if not in real life. In the movie there is usually some sort of carcinogenic material that is shown to be dangerous. Someone can reasonably assume that most yellow signs seen on the road are warnings for dangers that may not be apparent.

In biology this is observed as an evolutionary anti-predation strategy called aposematism and is seen in certain brightly coloured animals which tend to be highly toxic or poisonous (I studied this quite a bit for a project I was working on last year). This works fine overall in the animal kingdom but when applied to human thinking it's obvious that we're often totally betrayed by our dramatic simplification of complex things down into symbols which are then taken to be true. This can lead to things like racism.

It frequently happens that when you push a racist person to explain why they have problems with a particular race, it's never really about the colour of a persons skin but the things they imagine that those people are doing or what those people believe. Racists often don't notice that the points they're describing often apply equally to members of his/her own race, but then they're going by symbols, not reality. Colour or some other such thing then takes on a significance because without the symbol things get messy again and the person is left without a properly defined object to focus their frustrations on.

Anyway, I believe Kev explains all this much better than I, and with much more humour, so I'll bow out and let the racist bashing continue.

I just wanted to say 'aposematism'. Atleast click on the link, it's pretty awesome..

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:28.

slightly OT, as I just can't bring myself to take anything Al Gore says super cereal


Q. What percentage of carbon dioxide is caused by human activity relative to other sources?

Al Gore says, 'The majority of it is caused by human activity'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ... ;feature=player_embedded#

He also says that 'the north polar ice cap is 'completely disappearing right now' (he has apparently made the statement recently that the north polar ice would be completely gone in 5-10 years, in the winter)


PS, check out the awesome Gore effect in full force right at the end of the video! Hilarious!!!

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:30.

Quote from Shotglass :

assuming the noise in the data is uncorrelated (fair assumption when using 2 trees that grow at opposite ends of the world) the variance of the mean would decrease steadily with the number of samples

Yeah. But that would apply right through to the end of the record though, right? Which would potentially smooth out any kind of dramatic hockeystick shape, along with the various rises and dips preceding it. That was Briffa's problem with Yamal, a very low sampling for 20th C temperatures using an extreme outlier to skew the final result. As more data (from a nearby forest) were included, the hockeystick shape vanished.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:39.

Quote :

if anyone sees a political organisation as the face of science theres a fundamental problem in their thinking as far as im concerned

Scientists who know their stuff can argue about the contents of the IPCC reports all day long. (edit: I like to watch but can't really comment too much because I'm no scientist) But I continually bump up against people who are scientists (of different fields) and who automatically claim the IPCC represents the pinaccle of understanding on climate matters and that there's no uncertainty. It's the appeal to authority trick but it can sometimes mean that the person is too lazy to find out things for themselves, or their politics happen to agree with the IPCC, or they simply don't have time to investigate further. I'm sure there are good scientists out there (perhaps people you know) who understand the motivations and potential biases of the IPCC and are wary enough of atleast some of the claims being made.

In terms of the publics awareness of current science though, I think most people would put the IPCC at or around the top as a hard science organisation. This is as I say a fault of the media and politicians mostly and amplified by the current global warming craze. Of course people on the far right don't like it. And then there are the radicals who say that the IPCC is a conservative organisation which doesn't go far enough (in regards to alarmism and scary statistics).

Quote :

also as ive said before most of these studies disagree wildly on the time axis
eg heres a pretty standard one
http://www.science-skeptical.de/wp-c...Sicre-2008.gif
and then theres for example this one where the warming doesnt even set in until were well into the cooling on the first one
http://www.science-skeptical.de/wp-c...strom-2006.gif
and then to drive the point home theres this one which if you look at it honestly is nothing but noise
http://www.science-skeptical.de/wp-c...Liu-Z-2006.gif
find enough of those build the mean of them to get an idea of global temperatures and im sure the whole thing will start to average out quite a bit

I'm sure you're right. But with so much data I'm guessing the range of uncertainty would end up much greater than in the IPCC graphs.

Quote :

so what else is new?

nothing really new under the sun

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:18.

Quote from Shotglass :

hm is it just me or does it seem like the made up graphs were only used in the ipcc releases while all their papers showed the actual unaltered data?

More uncertainty is conveyed in the deeper studies (from what I can gather). The IPCC is the public face of those studies and really the whole point of the hockeysticks is for presentation within the IPCC. No IPCC, no hockeysticks. I don't think the hockeyteam are doing this for fun. A point to be made is how many scientists not directly invested or particularly interested in climate change rely on the IPCC reports? How many have even read the IPCC reports? By burying and excluding data and research methods and evading FOI requests, by not publishing their own studies which have contradicted stated Team goals, by manipulating graphs to show proxies which are in fact real temps, by publicly announcing that the science is 'robust' while privately admitting that things are very uncertain, by ignoring 100's of previous studies which show a MWP and LIA, all this has lead to a very confused understanding as to the actual state of scientific knowledge. Toss in a clueless media with a penchant for alarmism and further gross simplification and politicians looking to bend any kind of data or graph to suit their political goals and you can see that none of this is being very helpful at all.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:24.

Quote from flymike91 :

I have nothing against reducing pollution. The regulations in place now have already cleared up the worst of it, as you've already said so i don't see any need for them to be stricter. I guess our disagreement is that I don't believe CO2 is a pollutant.

The long term transformation of energy is towards greater decarbonisation. We've typically gone from wood, to coal, to oil, to gas and the transisition was mostly underway before the current CO2 scare. Nature had an article a while ago which stated that the the majority of anthropogenic carbon contribution was from 3rd world populations burning wood. Apparently you can't find this article anymore (given the latest editorial, might have ultimately been deemed too politically incorrect or something, who knows).

I also saw awhile back that on a geological time scale the general trend of atmospheric CO2 has been steadily downwards. Sometimes when I'm feeling philisophical I just imagine that the Earth itself has created human civilization for the major purpose of releasing more CO2 into the air. This is an admittedly warped version of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, I'm sure he would hate it.

Quote :

DWB
I have little doubt that corporations will neglect environmental safety for the sake of profit (and history bears that idea out), unless regulated by government and protested by the public.

I have read there are practical business motivations for the big companies to push for tougher environmental controls, mainly as tougher standards raise the barrier to market entry for startups and smaller competitors. The oil companies would also logically like to see reductions in the demand for coal and higher prices for both oil and gas. They're also big into the carbon credits thing. Big Environment and Big Oil make strange bed partners but there you go. The UEA emails ironically revealed that the university was indeed interested in taking research money from the big companies (BP, Exxon, Shell, etc), in return allowing those companies to set research agendas, so the criticism leveled at sceptics that they are being paid by Big Oil becomes a very strange one.

edit: I totally agree though that traditionally big business and the environment haven't gotten along very well at all (understatement)

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:15.

Quote from SamH :

Can anyone clarify the tree ring issue? I know that since the (60s?) there's been a divergence of thermometer readings and tree rings as proxies.

Since the divergence is evident, surely that then invalidates historical tree rings as a proxy for historical temperatures with integrity? But unless I'm mistaken, the climatologists are ADMITTING that they're still plotting tree ring measurements as authoritative, pre-1961, AND (on the same plotted line) replacing tree ring data with real temperature readings post-1961.

I must surely be missing something because, even though I'm a layman in climatology terms, even I can't equate this practice with normal practices of scientific method.

[edit]

Sorry Sam, forgot to address the first part of your post.

Reconstructing global or hemispherical temps from tree rings is pretty shaky stuff. There is not much agreement on the usefullness of such an approach, many scientists would unkindly compare it to astrology, phrenology or some other murky or outdated modality. As a comparison, you can see how difficult it is to con ... using actual thermometres. (eye opening stuff! :Eyecrazy

Briffa wrote to Nature about the divergence problem seen mid century onwards, but acknowlodging it doesn't make it go away. If we can't take into account the various unknowns when comparing proxy data to the only period where we have 'reliable' historical temp data, then logically we can't really say anything about the accuracy of earlier proxy data either. It comes down to a matter of faith. (apparently you can strengthen the faith by trickily merging the real temps with the proxy data, naughty naughty)

The funny thing is that the Hockey Teams favourite word seems to be 'robust'. In that the science is 'robust', the reconstruction is 'robust', etc. This has become a bit of a joke in the sceptical camp- they apparently really like this word a lot! When the emails were leaked, Gavin Shmidt (I believe) said that they revealed nothing but scientists engaging in 'robust' conversations.

There's a lot of humour in the debate, and currently a fair bit of schadenfreude as well.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:05.

Quote from PhilS13 :

A pro-AGW democrat said something interesting the other day. That was on CNN

He was saying they HAD to act to get the "green jobs" in America. If they don't, China will get them he says.

Is it possible that this isn't about "saving" the planet anymore? That they don't even care about the science being right or not ?

He made it sound like this is just an opportunity to position themselves in the upcoming "green" world economy they predict will prevail quite soon no matter what the truth is about AGW.

I see the politics and the science feeding into each other in an unhealthy way. Ultimately the politics doesn't need the science (especially if it's saying something contrary to aims) and science cannot work properly with political interference.

Personally, I'd be very happy to see capitalism go green. We need better products and systems with better recyclability, better efficiency, less toxins, less strain on resources, etc. That doesn't have to have anything to do with global warming but it does have to do with responsible stewardship of the planet and perhaps even human survival. Capitalism needs to go green.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:14.

I'll definitely get it when it comes out.

Best natural environment I've seen in a racing game thus far. Put together with the very servicable physics I found I could easily immerse myself in the game. The Morocco track is a blast and if representative of the quality of the other tracks then there will be a lot of fun to be had for sure.

I feel I've got the G25 set up well, so tomorrow I'll post my settings if anyone's interested. From memory I adjusted the environmental effects down to 10%, just enough to give a slight roughness in feedback in spots but not enough to give away that the effect is canned (which I believe it is).

Frame rates are very fluid and the game automatically detected correctly the best settings for my computer. Quality all round. I've enjoyed the Colin series off and on for years but this one is a real evolution. A Beautiful game.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:20.

Quote :

Shotglass
simply one of the best if fundamentally inaccurate and merely correlated not dependant dataset there is

just because the confidence interval is as wide as the whole graph doesnt entirely invalidate the data

When you can feed in random data and still get a hockey stick shape 90% of the time then something is wrong with your methods. That's what happened with the Mann stick, Briffa and the others have tried other things over years to get the desired shape. You have to understand that this is a hockey Team, not disinterested researchers simply looking to understand past climates. Maybe tree rings are useful for helping to understand past temps (given their uncertainties) but certainly not in the way these guys have been using them. They need that hockeystick shape, I think the more you can read up on this (again I suggest climate audit, which goes into these things in extreme technical detail, you can use the search bar to help find what you're looking for) the better you will understand the lengths they've been going to to create these graphs. It's not science, and it's definitely not 'one of the best' attempts to shed light on past climates. It's quite amusing that you'd say that.

Quote :

foremost the important thing is to look for data that is honest about its inaccuracy

Stitching real temps onto proxy data isn't exactly being honest about inaccuracy. Lieing about not doing so isn't exactly being honest.

Quote :

also as for the great investigative journalism in that one piece im wondering if its that glaringly obvious why have people only figured it out now?

No-one has seemed bothered about this apart from those curious, sceptical or knowledgeble enough. You yourself were happy to simply ignore or excuse the whole thing, so maybe you've answered your own question. This issue has been known about for a while but the climategate emails did help to shed new light and confirm many prior suspicions.

Quote :

Sam
Oh yeah, and if we can't use tree ring data, which proxies are we using to identify the MWP? Do we have a dependable proxy for ~C1000?

The peer reviewed literature is full of them, many done before the time when the study of past temperatures became politicised. Before Michael Mann and the Hockey Team it was accepted in science that it was warmer and colder in earlier periods (MWP and LIA) than than it is today.

http://joannenova.com.au/2009/ ... y-sticks-and-hidden-data/

Quote :

These use ice cores, stalagmites, sediments, and isotopes. They agree with 6,144 boreholes around the world which found that temperatures were about 0.5°C warmer world wide.

Of course, an interesting thought is that perhaps many of these scientists were themselves influenced by various biases and pressures which reflected the accepted state of knowledge of the day. Here's a quote from C.S. Lewis which I plucked from the comments section in the link...

Quote :

“No model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy.
Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known in a given period,
and each succeeds in getting in a great many. But also, no less surely, each
reflects the prevalent psychology of its age almost as much as it reflects the
state of that age’s [scientific] knowledge.”
C.S. Lewis

There's an interactive graph showing the WMP as a global phenomenon using different studies, over here. A related WUWT post is here.

Maybe Shotglass would like to read the original article in German, here.


All things being equal, the weight of evidence is very much stacked against the Team on this...

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:42.

Quote from Shotglass :

no were just looking at data reconstructed from proxies which comes with a natural uncertainty
basically what youre saying is any science that bases itself on fossile records is hokus pokus

No I didn't say that. I was just making a frustrated observation. It's impossible at this stage to seperate out all the various influences of temperature, precipitation, soil quality, bears crapping under trees, limited sampling etc to get a sound idea of temps in the past by looking at tree rings (paleoclimatology). That doesn't mean the whole fossile record is useless.

Quote :

look at the graphs again
the first one has a confidence interval of roughly 1-1.2 °C while the second one has an overall span of about 0.8-0.9 °C which lies well within the confidence interval of the first

It's impossible to compare graphs to make your point as no confidence interval is provided for the second graph, only the smoothed average is shown.

Quote :

i might if youd actually post a relevant link

There is so much history and detail here that I'm not sure where to start. My advice would be to head over to climate audit and start reading.

A few short posts on hiding declines are here, here, and here.

Quote :

so basically all he says is there has been some fudging of data
great like we didnt know this from the beginning

I'm glad you're ok with it. But these guys have been lying about this for ages.

Michael Mann has said-

Quote :

No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum [realclimate].

That's two lies in two sentences. Nice going.

Quote :

as ive said countless times before... does it make any difference? do they even understand what proxy data is? and how it differs from measured data?

just for the sake of argument one way to look at it is theyve dumbed it down for the great unwashed
case in point obama studied political science and law gordon brown has a master of arts and sarkozy did political science (according to wiki anyway)
basically the only poltician qualified to understand the graphs that i can think of is merkel who has a degree in physics

It's up to you whether it makes a difference or not.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:12.

Quote :

so again looking at the gray area you can see that you could pretty much draw any curve into that area (including the supposedly correct one on the co2science site) and theyd all be correct given the data

Which means we're basically looking at a rorschach test. Given the weighting that the IPCC has given these paleo reconstructions (front cover, etc) I would be concerned at the other evidence on offer. I give no value of authenticity to the co2science graph, but it does in fact show a period during the MWP where temps were higher than today. The first graph you posted, doesn't show this even within the rather large range of uncertainty (the year 2000 is still higher than any point on the graph). So I don't agree with your statement that

Quote :

the looks of it must be the standard deviation of the poxy data you can see that its much much larger than any warming or iceage as seen in this graph

But anyway, this doesn't have anything to do with 'Mikes Nature Trick'. Since you won't read the article I posted, and yes it was written by a journalist and not a scientist (again, please see McIntyre), I've posted the relevent section below. This is the only journalistic attempt I've seen to date which has actually carried out a proper investigation on this. Everybody else has brushed the comment off by parroting a variation of Gavin Shmidt's initial response that 'trick' should simply be understood as 'a good way to to deal with a problem'. There's more to it than that.

Quote :

Trick or Cheat Now we’ll take a closer look at exactly what Jones meant when he wrote that he had “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Why did Jones refer to the ruse as“Mike’s Nature Trick?”
As die-hard Hockey Team opponents and fans alike already know – the original 600-year version of the now infamous “Hockey-Stick” graph was dubbed MBH98 because it first appeared in the Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes paper Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries [PDF], originally published in the science journal Nature in 1998. And “Mike’s Nature Trick” received its dubious designation among CRU insiders for the very same reason.
As to the rest of the sentence — It seems Jones was working on a cover chart for a forthcoming World Meteorological Organization report [PDF], WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999, when he wrote the email. As the graph would incorporate one reconstruction of his own plus one each from Michael Mann and Keith Briffa, he was informing them that he had used the trick on Mann’s series at the same 1980 cutoff as MBH98, but found it necessary to use 1960 as the cutoff on the Briffa series.
And what I uncovered in the source code told the tale why. While Mann used multiple proxy sources, Briffa’s reconstructions were based solely on a property of annual tree ring growth known as maximum latewood density (MXD). And the MXD-only-driven plots began to diverge from actual temperatures as early as 1960. In fact, while many of CRU’s programs are designed to exclude all data after 1960 for later manual splicing with instrumental data, others employ “fudge factors” to force the generated plot to more closely adhere to measured temperatures as far back as 1930.
And as you’ll soon see, Jones’s admitted use of MNT took it to an entirely new level of fraud.
Here’s the original reconstruction, with the three proxy and measured temperature (black) series intact:

Notice how Briffa’s series (green) begins to trend sharply downward around the mid-20th Century. Jones’s series (red) soon follows but less sharply and then begins to trend higher. Mann’s (blue) appears to flatten out around the same year that Jones’s begins to fall. Meanwhile, all three have broken with the measured rising temperatures of the late 20th Century.
Now take a look at the chart actually published by the WMO, with all three proxy series having been surreptitiously subjected to MNT:

Since the release of CRU’s FOI2009, alarmists have continued their claim that there’s nothing deceptive about the “trick” and that it has been openly discussed in scientific journals like Nature since 1998.
But I defy anyone to compare the above chart – the one Jones wrote he had applied MNT to – to the unadulterated version above it, and tell me there’s been no deception committed. At least with MBH98, a sharp eye might recognize the ruse. Here — there is no indication given whatsoever that the graph represents an amalgam of proxy and measured temperatures. This, my friends, is fraud.

Quote :

the video made it entirely clear that the whole hide the decline thing was about the proxy data which by design is rather flawed anyway

But is it clear to policy makers? Especially since, going by that chart they will have no idea where the proxy data ends and the real temps begin?

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Wed, 9 Dec 2009 23:24.

Quote from Shotglass :

"its a hoax and i know it because liberals are behind it" great journalism right there and im sure the drop in iq scores in the american south is one we can fully account for thanks to fox

as for the rest of the video im sure some of you will finally see that what ive been saying about blowing this whole thing way out of proportion was right on the money

By mainly focusing on what the hard right has been saying on climategate the video hardly leaves any room for any kind of real or meaningful analysis of the subject. It's a good 'trick' if you want to make any opposing side look stupid and uninformed, just stick a microphone in front of the bloviating extremist. The video failed to come to any kind of understanding about the 'hide the decline' email. I've already posted a good link which covers this in depth. You can learn even more by visiting Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit website and researching the relevent topics there.

Of course those right wing gasbaggers blow everything out of proportion. But the video has chosen to focus on two out of 1000 emails and other data to infer a similar conclusion. There is lots of room between 'blown all out of proportion' and 'liberals are behind the conspiracy of the millenium' or however you would like to simplify things. I thought we were learning something here...

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Wed, 9 Dec 2009 21:22.

I've put myself down for 'reasonably suspicious'. It was a toss up between moderately suspicious and reasonable, although I'm very suspicious of certain elements of AGW as well. I probably chose reasonable because I think it is reasonable to hold a sceptical position (I liked the word better I guess). One thing I really dislike about climate politics as that all sceptics, even reasonable ones, tend to get lumped in with the Glenn Becks and such, labled flat earthers etc.. just because they're curious or brave enough to ask specific questions which may be unsettling to the more confident and passionate proponents of AGW. I started off as an AGW believer and became more sceptical as I went along. One thing which should be noted is that there are different degrees of thinking on AGW, from relatively harmless effects (mostly local influences, not all due to increased CO2) all the way up to CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming).

Climatology is a multi-disciplined science. As a non-scientist, I do struggle with the physics side. I accept (@ shot above) that CO2 has a warming effect (@ about 2 degrees F per doubling). I understand that this is non-controversial. By itself though the effect of CO2 is not enough to warrant real concern in regards to warming, you need strong positive feedbacks as well to invoke the kinds of futures Al Gore and others are warning about. Here I am more open minded but I'm tending towards a neutral or a slight negative feedback in the real atmosphere, referring to Richard Lindzen's work on this (I am very suspicious of current computer modeling of climate- it's hubris as far as I'm concerned). I am confident that we will learn more in time.

Paleoclimatology, atleast as practiced by the Briffa's and the Mann's, I'm very suspicious of, or basically a denier. (booooo!) Without the hockeysticks, it's pretty difficult to say that there has been an unprecedented warming in the 20th C due to CO2.

For me, the two things which really need to be focused on to bring renewed confidence in the science of global warming are the main historical temperature records (also moderate to very suspicious) and the issue of general transparency in climate science. The next few years will be very interesting and I think that the sceptics will ultimately be able to prove that a certain amount of fudging of data has been going on to enhance late 20th C warming in the temp records. The climategate prompted calls for more transparency and greater inclusiveness are very positive steps and should hopefully help to break down the barriers between the 'scientists' and the 'deniers' as Nature so eloquently put it. Maybe GW/AGW will become less politicised as people learn to stop calling each other names and instead learn to focus on the science instead. This sounds reasonable but people are people, so who knows.

edit: I've added a list of claims and responses about sceptics by Roy Spencer which I happen to agree with.

Quote :

1. Skeptics deny global warming. No, we deny that warming has been mostly human-caused.

2. Skeptics are paid by big oil. The vast majority of skeptics have never been paid anything by Big Oil (me included).

3. Skeptics don’t publish in the peer reviewed literature. Wrong…but it is true we do not have nearly as many publications as the other side does. But it only takes one scientific study to destroy a scientific hypothesis, which is what anthropogenic global warming theory is.

4. Skeptics are not unified with an alternative explanation for global warming. Well, that’s the way science works in a field as immature as climate change science. The biggest problem is that we really don’t understand what causes natural climate variability. Kevin Trenberth has now famously admitted as much in one of the Climategate emails, where said it’s a “travesty” that we don’t know why warming has stopped in the last 7 to 10 years. For century-time-scale changes, some believe it is cloud cover being modulated by cosmic ray activity, which is in turn affected by sunspot activity. A few others think it is changes in the total energy output of the sun (possible, but I personally doubt it). In my opinion, it is internal, chaotic variability in the ocean and atmosphere circulation causing small changes in cloud cover. Since clouds are a natural sunshade, changing their coverage of the Earth will cause warming or cooling. The IPCC simply assumes this does not happen. If they did, they would have to admit that natural climate change happens, which means they would have to address the possibility that most of the warming in the last 50 has been largely natural in origin.

5. But the glaciers are melting! Many glaciers which have been monitored around the world for a long time have been retreating since the 1800’s, before humans could have been responsible. A few retreating glaciers are even revealing old tree stumps…how did those get there? Planted by skeptics?

6. But the sea ice is melting! Well, the same thing happened back in the 1920’s and 1930’s, with the Northwest Passage opening up in 1940. It was just as warm, or nearly as warm, in the Arctic in the 1930’s. Again, this is before humans could be blamed. There were very low water levels in the Great Lakes in the 1920’s too, just as has happened recently. We have accurate measurements of sea ice cover from satellites only since 1979, so there is no way to really know whether sea ice cover is less than it was before.

7. But we just had the warmest decade in recorded history! Well, if thermometer measurements had started in, say 200, AD (rather than in the 1800’s), and it was now 850 AD, the same thing might well have been said back then. The climate system is always warming or cooling, and the Industrial Revolution (and thus our carbon dioxide emissions) just happened to occur while we were still emerging from the Little Ice Age…a warming period.

8. But the Antarctic ice shelves are collapsing! Well, sea ice around Antarctica has been expanding since we started monitoring by satellite in 1979….so which do we use as evidence? There is no convincing evidence of warming in Antarctica, except in the relatively small Antarctic Peninsula, which juts out into the ocean. Just as glaciers naturally flow to the sea, ice shelves must eventually break off. It is very uncertain how often this happens through the centuries, and what has been observed in recent years might be entirely normal. Similarly, it was warmer in Greenland in the 1930’s than it has been more recently.

9. But the sea levels are rising! Yes, and from what we can tell, they have been rising since the end of the last Ice Age. Again, the more recent rise might be just a consequence of our emergence from the Little Ice Age, which bottomed out in the 1600’s.

10. But we keep emitting carbon dioxide, which we know is a greenhouse gas! Yes, I agree. But the direct warming effect of moré CO2 is agreed by all to be small…and I predict that when we better understand how clouds change in response to that small warming influence, the net warming in response to more CO2 will be smaller still. This is the “feedback” issue, which determines “climate sensitivity”, the area of research I spend most of my time on. I and a minority of other scientists believe the net feedbacks in the climate system are negative, probably driven by negative cloud feedback. In contrast, all twenty-something IPCC climate models now exhibit positive cloud feedback.

11. But we can’t keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere forever! No, and we won’t. Assuming fossil fuels will be increasingly difficult to find and access in the coming decades, the continuing demand for energy ensures that new energy technologies will be developed. It’s what humans do…adapt.

12. But we shouldn’t be interfering with nature! Actually, it would be impossible to NOT interfere with nature. Chaos theory tells us that everything that happens, naturally or anthropogenically, forever alters the future state of the climate system. I predict that science will eventually understand that more CO2 is good for life on Earth. This doesn’t mean it will be good for every single species…but when Mother Nature changes the climate system, there are always winners and losers anyway. In the end, this is a religious issue, not a scientific one. Interestingly I have found that the vast majority of scientists also have the religious belief that we should not be impacting nature. I believe this has negatively affected their scientific objectivity.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Wed, 9 Dec 2009 21:51.

Cheers Sam

Here's one for fun...


'Climate Change linked to fish aggression'

Quote :

Warmer ocean temperatures caused by global warming could cause sharks and other fish to become more aggressive, according to a new Australian study.
Research conducted by the University of New South Wales found that a slight lift in water temperatures — just two or three degrees — can cause some fish to become up to 30 times more aggressive than they normally would be.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/wor ... hange-could-enrage-sharks

Quote :

The studies were conducted on young damsel fish

:goldfish:

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

http://online.wsj.com/article/ ... 04574571613215771336.html

Great article from Mike Humle there. Imo those other reporters really need to do a bit more homework and interview someone other than the very scientists centred around this controversy.

The Nature editorial is very scary and reveals much about its own political/ideological biases (this is supposed to be a reputable scientific journal after all). 'Scientists' vs 'deniers'? Pffft.. if only it were that simple.


edit: http://online.wsj.com/video/cl ... CD-A0F1-FFE48154E5F4.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/ ... 04574572091993737848.html


edit2:

Quote :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO-s_YUZ5O8 haha doh!

That guy does sound like an a**hole

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sun, 6 Dec 2009 16:53.

"Met Office to re-examine 160 years of climate data"

Quote :

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t ... onment/article6945445.ece

Quote :

“The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.”

Well Gee! - who's being paranoid and obstructionist now??

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sat, 5 Dec 2009 16:46.

Now that's good journalism

Part III of the 'Google conspiracy'

I've been looking at the google searchwords for climategate over the past couple of days.

'climategate' hasn't been showing for atleast two days now.
'climate-gate' was showing for awhile, now it has gone.
'climate gate scandal' was also showing yesterday, it too has gone.

Today there are no words referencing climategate on google.


edit: today (6/12/2009) 'climate gates' shows when you type 'climate gat'







GOOGLEGATE!!!




ps, it's still funny how climate audit is the number one suggestion for climate. Real funny.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sat, 5 Dec 2009 18:21.