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FAO Australia (pg. 3)
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| R!CH |
i'm sorry, but i don't base my understanding of climate change on al gore's graph. i base my understanding upon the fact that carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas and an industrial pollutant that mankind is dumping into the atmosphere at an exhaustive rate without even questioning the limitations of this model or accounting for the economic externalities intrinsic to this process. my concern in this regard is just an extension of my concern for mass consumption, mass wasting and exploitative commerce. i value the quality of the air i breath as well as the environment i live in. were climate change a farce, i would still oppose coal-fire power plants because they are utterly toxic to all life. |
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| Lira |
I think this is the best reply I could never give about this nonsense:
| quote: | Science forgotten in climate emails fuss
No one identifies any scientific flaws in Phil Jones's work, yet the 'fallen idol' narrative is too alluring for the media to resist
By Myles Allen
It is odd that we still don't take climate change seriously.
Judging from the acres of newsprint being devoted to the subject right now, you might find that remark surprising. But look at the furore over the University of East Anglia emails: environmentalists hand-wringing as if the end of the world had suddenly been brought forward; their opponents crowing that the whole of climate science has to start again from scratch.
Can you imagine this kind of response if the subject of the emails had been something we actually care about, such as health or the economy? The discovery of the HIV virus involved one of the murkiest incidents in the history of science. It's an insult to UEA's Phil Jones and his colleagues to even suggest the comparison, but it serves to make the point. Reporters on the HIV affair always scrupulously stressed that although the integrity of some of the individuals involved was called into question, the evidence that HIV causes Aids was unaffected. People might have died if the public had been misled on that point. Whereas if it's only about climate change …
A colleague working in astrophysics was expressing bemusement to me yesterday about why the reputation of British science was apparently under threat, given that no evidence had actually emerged of scientific misconduct. Her specific question was: "Has anyone found evidence of an error in a published paper or dataset?" If they had, then of course the error would need to be corrected, which happens in science all the time.
If it could be proved that figures had been deliberately altered to give a specific result then it would be very serious, but so far no evidence has emerged from these Climatic Research Unit (CRU) emails of any error in the HadCRUT instrumental temperature record at the centre of the row, never mind proof of deliberate intent to mislead. How often have you heard that repeated, clearly, by the mainstream press reporting on this incident? Even if they were reporting on Berlusconi's sex life they would be more careful. Berlusconi can afford better lawyers than Jones can.
Take, for example, the "trick" of combining instrumental data and tree-ring evidence in a single graph to "hide the decline" in temperatures over recent decades that would be suggested by a naive interpretation of the tree-ring record. The journalists repeating this phrase as an example of "scientists accused of manipulating their data" know perfectly well that the decline in question is a spurious artefact of the tree-ring data that has been documented in the literature for years, and that "trick" does not mean "deceit". They also know their readers, listeners and viewers won't know this: so why do they keep doing it?
What is particularly ironic is that a favourite graph in the climate sceptic community a few years ago entitled "Most accurate global average temperature" did precisely this. It stitched temperatures from the satellite-based temperature record from 1979 onwards together with the surface temperature record before then. At that time the satellite record showed no evidence of warming, so one might call this a handy trick to hide the recent warming in the surface temperature record. Did that make it evil? I wouldn't say so: there were concerns about the impact of incomplete coverage and something called the urban heat island effect on the surface temperature record, so combining the two data sources might have been legitimate, provided it was clear what was done and why. This particular figure has fallen out of favour since an error was discovered in the satellite data processing which, when corrected, revealed the satellites were actually showing warming after all.
Perhaps the most concrete example of journalists claiming to reveal "problems" with the CRU temperature record was a report on Newsnight (widely redistributed) in which a software engineer criticised computer code contained in the leaked email package. Neither of the two pieces of code Newsnight examined were anything to do with the HadCRUT temperature record at all, which is actually maintained at the Met Office. Newsnight's response, when I challenged them on this, was: "Our expert's opinion is that this is climate change code." Presumably, then, the quality of the code I use to put together problems for our physics undergraduates shows that we should not trust results from my colleagues who work on the Large Hadron Collider on the grounds that "it is all physics code". Newsnight have declined to retract the story.
One can understand the blogosphere reacting as it has done, but why has mainstream journalism collectively decided to treat the story in this way? The bottom line is that journalism deals not in facts, but in "narratives". And the narrative of the fallen idol is clearly a great way to fill the airwaves – witness the reality television industry.
So the narrative journalists have collectively decided upon is that a few scientists may have manipulated their data, and either (a) it doesn't matter because the evidence for human influence on climate is so strong or (b) this shows the whole edifice is now crumbling, depending on their editor's predilections. And George Monbiot laments that the high priests of his climate change religion have let him down. All without any evidence that any number, anywhere, is actually wrong. Journalists, who always find numbers irritating, are revelling in the fact that they are back in the driving seat. By making the story about the individual scientists, rather than scientific results, they can go back to reporting on the story as they see fit without being constrained by scientific evidence.
This is all particularly painful for those of us who know and have the deepest respect for Jones and his colleagues. Our instinct, of course, is to stand up and defend his integrity. But we know that if we do so, journalists weave this into their chosen narrative as "scientists circling the wagons to defend their own". The Times report accompanying the statement released yesterday by UK climate scientists was a case in point: rather than simply reporting the boring story that scientists agree there is nothing wrong with the data after all, they had to go and hunt out a "human interest" angle of some scientist who claimed that he felt pressured by the Met Office into signing the statement (ridiculously – many of us who signed spend our professional lives annoying the Met Office).
Even the senior figures in the World Meteorological Organisation are letting themselves get swept along, pointing out that even if we leave out the CRU dataset the evidence for human influence on climate is still strong. While true, this misses the point. If we allow personal attacks on individual scientists or criticism of irrelevant software to be used as an excuse to discount data that people don't like, it will be open season. Presumably they will be hunting through the emails of someone involved in the Nasa temperature series next, and so it will go on.
None of us can imagine what Phil Jones is going through, and all of us know that it might be our turn next. For all I know someone is already sorting through my emails on a Russian web server. But for the record, if they do decide to pick on me, I don't want people out there defending my integrity. I want people out there defending my results. Because we are scientists, and this is what we do. |
[Source]
It's tragic that so many people with no training in climatology whatsoever are suddenly experts unveiling a scandal... now, more than ever, because of a few leaked e-mails that say very little, if anything. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Originally posted by The17sss
You buy into utopian liberal farces, and believe massive expansions of government is for the best? Really? |
So you aren't an AGW skeptic?
I'm not using connotation here, I'm asking a question. Do you or don't you believe that there is a scientific consensus supporting anthropogenic global warming? |
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| Al |
| quote: | Originally posted by Yohan
so, lots of hot aussie chicks running around naked?
sounds like win to me |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Blame it on the satellite
* Nov 25th 2009, 15:04 by The Economist
BACK in 1970, NASA launched a satellite called IRIS that measured infrared radiation emanating from the Earth. In 1996, the Japanese Space Agency launched a satellite called IMG that did more or less the same thing. In 2001, John E. Harries of the Imperial College of Science and Technology's Space and Atmospheric Physics Laboratory compared the measurements of the two satellites to see how infrared radiation from the Earth had changed in the intervening 27 years (the IMG measurements were for 1997). What he found was this:
The longwave radiation emanating from Earth had dropped at the signature frequencies where infrared radiation is absorbed by greenhouse gases. It hadn't dropped at any of the other frequencies, indicating the drop was not due to any fall in solar radiation, but to the increase in greenhouse gases.
Energy does not disappear. The Earth was absorbing radiation from the sun, and failing to re-radiate it back into space. Where did all that extra radiation go? We already know the answer. The Earth got hotter.
This paper by scientists at NOAA, NASA, and the University of Leeds's School of Earth and Environment estimates the rise in total heat content of the Earth since 1950. The data are drawn from surface and atmospheric temperature measurements and from this paper's measurements of ocean temperatures for the top 700 metres. The figure looks like this:
And this, from Skeptical Science (where I also got the above graphs), is a graph of atmospheric CO2 versus global temperature through the 20th century.
Of course, the relationship between atmospheric particles and climate is much more complicated than a simple CO2-v-temperature graph can capture. So what happens when you combine the positive radiative forcings (tending to raise temperature) from C02, black carbon, cloud cover, ozone, and other greenhouse gases; the negative radiative forcings (tending to decrease temperature) from volcanic and man-made aerosols; and changes in the Earth's albedo (the reflective effect of color), and plot all of that against temperature? According to NASA data (again, graph courtesy of Skeptical Science), you get this:
...where the sharp dips correspond to increased volcanic eruptions. There is a high-temperature anomaly in the early 1940s; the anomaly disappears if you stop using sea-temperature data from American ships during the second world war, which were probably accidentally measuring their own engine heat. The basic story is that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are rising, and producing a long, steady trend towards higher temperatures, with variations and noise.
And this is a graph of global CO2 levels for the past 10,000 years.
What else? Ninety-seven percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree that anthropogenic global warming is happening. Apparently a few climate-change scientists got so annoyed at denialists that they sent some strategising emails to each other. The latest climate-change summary statement from Britain's Met Office, NERC, and Royal Society notes that the decade 2000-2009 was the warmest decade since humans started reliably measuring temperatures 150 years ago, and that things look significantly worse now than they did at the time of the last IPCC report in 2007. And Australia is on fire again.
And that, for those who are asking, is what I think a balanced post on the climate-change situation as of today should look like. |
http://www.economist.com/blogs/demo...n_the_satellite
The only thing I'll add as an addendum is this, from Gallup:
You're really going to write off hundreds of scientific opinions in studies ranging from carbon analysis of Antarctic ice shelves to the carbon in oyster fossils by saying that all of science is built on a pre-conceived conclusion? You're one step away from saying that evolution is a pre-determined conclusion that some shadowy corporations are willing to shell out money to confirm.
In fact, in answer to "do you believe in evolution?":
So maybe you are. More of the general population in the US believes in AGW than evolution. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
Another must-read:
| quote: | I Read Through 160,000,000 Bytes of Hacked Files And All I Got Was This Lousy E-Mail
by Nate Silver @ 4:45 PM
Bookmark and Share Share This Content
It's the global warming scandal of the century, says Michelle Malkin!
The exposure of the warmist conspiracy, says Andrew Bolt!
The final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming, bleats James Delingpole!
A stunning tour de force -- four stars, says Leonard Maltin!
OK, so that last quote is made up. But the others aren't. What is it these conservatives are so excited about?
Apparently, the networks of University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit were hacked into last night. Approximately 160 megabytes of files, containing hundreds or thousands of e-mails and documents were leaked as a result of the security breach, reports The Guardian.
The conservatives are mainly zeroing in on one particular e-mail from the center's director, Phil Jones, dated from November 16th, 1999, which reads as follows:
| quote: | From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@[snipped], mhughes@
[snipped]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@[snipped],t.osborn@[snipped]
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later
today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature
trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20
years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from1961 for Keith’s to
hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine
values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N.
The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for
1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers, Phil |
There you have it! The smoking gun! Irrefutable proof of the Anthropogenic Global Warming Super-Duper Major-Mega International Socialist Conspiracy!
If you see Al Gore parking his Ford Fusion hybrid near any major bridges, make sure to call the police!
Actually, what you have is a scientist, Dr. Jones, talking candidly about sexing up a graph to make his conclusions more persuasive. This is not a good thing thing to do -- I'd go so far as to call it unethical -- and Jones deserves some of the loss of face that he will suffer. Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that happens all the time in both academia and the private sector -- have you ever looked at the graphs in the annual report of a company which had a bad year? And it seems to happen all too often on both sides of the global warming debate (I'd include some of the graphics from An Inconvenient Truth in this category, FWIW.)
But let's be clear: Jones is talking to his colleagues about making a prettier picture out of his data, and not about manipulating the data itself. Again, I'm not trying to excuse what he did -- we make a lot of charts here and 538 and make every effort to ensure that they fairly and accurately reflect the underlying data (in addition to being aesthetically appealing.) I wish everybody would abide by that standard.
Still: I don't know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger. And yet that's literally what some of these bloggers are saying!
Incidentally, 2009 is shaping up to be the 5th warmist year on record, according to the conspiracists at NASA:
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http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009...0-bytes-of.html |
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| Arbiter |
| You can't stop us; we will achieve global warming. You don't realize it yet, but you have already lost the war. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Arbiter
You can't stop us; we will achieve global warming. You don't realize it yet, but you have already lost the war. |
Still, we can avoid making it worse. Or better, depending on your point of view :p |
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| Lilith |
For every litre in a Prius some liberal hipster saves, I'm burning ten!  |
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| ToF |
| Can I just say we are awesome! :gsmile: |
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| Al |
| quote: | Originally posted by ToF
Can I just say we are awesome! |
No |
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