Quote from flymike91 :

We don't owe other countries anything. If Africa wants to get out of the third world they should start creating exportable products, stop killing each other, stop spreading AIDS, and replace warlords with democracies. Other countries have improved their standard of living all by themselves. I read an article about africans murdering and harvesting the body parts of albinos for their magical properties WTF.

You could really use some historical and cultural perspective here.

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of such an approach, many scientists would unkindly compare it to astrology, phrenology or some other murky or outdated modality.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.

I'm just saying that no one else is going to (or should) turn 3rd world countries into a 1st world countires. They need to do it on their own. At some point donor countries are going to have to step back and say "we did all we could for them without sacrificing our own country's well-being. They didn't take what we gave them and make lasting and meaningful changes to their way of life. There is nothing more we can do"

Then again this actually has very little to do with Climategate. When is Obama going to make his decision on the Copenhagen treaty?

Quote :

The justification is not making our planet an uninhabitable wasteland.

I guess we'll have to see who is right hundreds of years from now. No agreement will ever stop the US, China, India and Australia from producing CO2. And I don't care. Breathing in San Francisco in 1973 was like smoking a pack a day and we had global cooling. That smog is gone now and we have global warming? I call shenanigans and so do millions of other AGW deniers.

Quote from flymike91 :

I'm just saying that no one else is going to (or should) turn 3rd world countries into a 1st world countires. They need to do it on their own. At some point donor countries are going to have to step back and say "we did all we could for them without sacrificing our own country's well-being. They didn't take what we gave them and make lasting and meaningful changes to their way of life. There is nothing more we can do".

If the donor countries are the ones who exploited the third-world countries and helped transform them into the warlord-dominated hellholes they are today, they have some sort of debt to repay. That much is obvious.

Quote :

I guess we'll have to see who is right hundreds of years from now. No agreement will ever stop the US, China, India and Australia from producing CO2. And I don't care. Breathing in San Francisco in 1973 was like smoking a pack a day and we had global cooling. That smog is gone now and we have global warming? I call shenanigans and so do millions of other AGW deniers.

And why exactly do you think the smog is gone, these 35 years later? Yep, that's right. Tougher regulations on emissions and waste byproducts. Consider how shitty the environment was in England around the time of the industrial revolution. Or even much later.

To me, the question of global warming or cooling (though obviously important) is secondary to the question of unchecked pollution. 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 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.

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

If the donor countries are the ones who exploited the third-world countries and helped transform them into the warlord-dominated hellholes they are today, they have some sort of debt to repay. That much is obvious.

But we living now in this modern age shouldn't feel the need to apologise or pay reparations for something which was deemed perfectly socially and morally acceptable back then, which brought benefits (however questionable they may seem now) not just for us evil westerners but also benefitted those living in a 'third world' country

Quote from Electrik Kar :

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

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?

Quote from Electrik Kar :

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

there is however a certain bit of disagreement in the graphs as to when exactly the warming occured how long it lasted and whether or not it was a period of warming or just a period of large oscillation in temperature
a large enough sample base should smooth things out somewhat and the warming and cooling is still there in the single site graphs of the cru and also but naturally less pronounced in the world wide dataset

Quote from flymike91 :

I don't believe CO2 is a pollutant.

It is, that's not the point.
I think the debate is about knowing the consequences on the global temperature. Is CO2 really so important for global temperature?

The problem is, we can't debate about science here... we aren't scientists...
The only thing I can observe is that the answer is not very clear apparently even for scientists.

@mookie
As we are in a "modern age" we should not accept that there are people starving, at all

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)

Quote from Sir moi 407 :

I think the debate is about knowing the consequences on the global temperature. Is CO2 really so important for global temperature?

The problem is, we can't debate about science here... we aren't scientists...
The only thing I can observe is that the answer is not very clear apparently even for scientists.

You have a point, I'm just afraid the alarmist AGW groups are more powerful than skeptics for the wrong reasons and that they will continue to use that power to 'silence the non-believers'

Quote :

As we are in a "modern age" we should not accept that there are people starving, at all

The world is overpopulated. Everyone is competing for food and resources. That is one thing that has not changed since the dawn of man, why is it suddenly wrong now?

Quote from Electrik Kar :

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.

again look up the faint young sun paradox its been going down for good reason and it fits right in with the gaia idea
right up until the point where we basically decided to reverse all the work thats been done

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.

Shotglass, be a dear and vote in the poll

Quote from Electrik Kar :

The IPCC is the public face of those studies and really the whole point of the hockeysticks is for presentation within the IPCC.

thats where we disagree since the ipcc is a political organisation (its in their name after all) and thus by design not exactly trustworthy when it comes to science
if anyone sees a political organisation as the face of science theres a fundamental problem in their thinking as far as im concerned

Quote :

A point to be made is how many scientists not directly invested or particularly interested in climate change rely on the IPCC reports?

anecdotal evidence but i sure as heck dont know anyone who does

Quote :

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.

most of this boils down to playing with proxies which if you look at any of the honest graphs are just waving a hockey stick in the general direction of temperatures
ultimately i think the fundamental problem is that the vast majority of the great unwashed dont understand charts mixed with plots that give the impression the data is accurate when in fact the uncertainty is almost as large as the entire temperature axis of the graph
from what ive seen even when adding multiple sources just the measurment noise is at least as big as the chamges in temperature that theyre trying to show

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.d ... ds/2009/10/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.d ... 009/10/Weckstrom-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.d ... ds/2009/10/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

Quote :

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.

so what else is new?

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

Great article! I wrote one similar for a class project where I was attempting to cast a little light on the skeptical view of AGW after the school hired a man trained by Al Gore himself to teach us about GW using the hockey stick graph. Needless to say my presentation was not well received by my liberal California classmates, they were too far indoctrinated to be open to an opposing viewpoint.

The pro-AGW alarmists have far too much power as it is, but the most disgusting misuse of that power is their insidious effect on young public schoolchildren who will (they hope) never look into the issue past what they hear in school.

Posted today

http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/10/ipcc-and-the-trick/

"This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably concensus viewpoint we’d like to show" (Mann, sept 99)

I mean...come on...oh yeah right... out of context.

Quote from Electrik Kar :

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.

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

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.

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!!!

Quote from Electrik Kar :

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.

sure although with an averaging filter length of 50 years as from my understanding is used on most of these graphs the data would tend do get progressively worse from around 25 years back and onwards

Quote from Electrik Kar :

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#

just case of someone with a bachelor (not even a master) of arts talking about something he doesnt fully understand
then again if he just switched "it" to "the increase" hed be right which given that hed probably just stare at you not knowing what to say if you talked about the difference between a curve and its derivate isnt that far off

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

Here's an impressively insightful and straight-forward summary of the scandal so far: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new ... -admit-DID-send-them.html

Mainstream media as well.

I watched the MIT forum today, discussing sociopolitical implications of the fall-out of the scandal. If you can find a couple of hours to spare, it's a pretty interesting watch: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/730

I particularly enjoyed Lindzen's contributions. He seems to be entirely dispassionate (a model scientist?) and very up-front and honest about the implications of the emails, collusion and data deletion/integrity. I love how he's stunned by Prinn's acceptance of Mann and Jones's activities with mix-n-matching proxy and real temperatures, and how Prinn doesn't see why the recent divergence doesn't undermine the historical tree ring proxy data. Moments of clarity, notable as well for their rarety.

Quote from SamH :

Here's an impressively insightful and straight-forward summary of the scandal so far: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new ... -admit-DID-send-them.html

Mainstream media as well.

Very good article, but SamH what the hell has happened to you? Praising the Daily Mail for it's excellent journalism while the BBC falter at providing anything worthwhile on this issue.... you've change maaannn you've changed!

Quote from Intrepid :

Very good article, but SamH what the hell has happened to you? Praising the Daily Mail for it's excellent journalism while the BBC falter at providing anything worthwhile on this issue.... you've change maaannn you've changed!

Credit where it's due, Alan. The Mail's successfully put together an editorial based on reporting the facts, leaving political inferences out, and it's refreshing to see. It happens so rarely in journalism these days, even though it's a tenet of journalism.