Scientific Fraud becoming endemic?

[Ellen Stuttle]

What defeats all common sense is that there can be such a consensus on AGW.

There isn't any "consensus" beyond:

To whatever extent atmospheric CO2 warms the atmosphere, human-produced CO2 contributes about 1/40th.

If agreement with that minimal statement is what's taken as defining an "AGWist," then Lindzen, Singer, Ball, Christie, Spencer, Plimer, Carter,.... are "AGWists." I.e., how to mislead by setting the bar practically on the ground.

The only people I'm aware of who would disagree that human-produced atmospheric CO2 makes a small contribution to whatever (so-called) "greenhouse effect" general atmospheric CO2 has are those who deny that there is any (so-called) "greenhouse effect."

But the term "denialist" isn't used to refer only to those who literally deny the existence of any (so-called) "greenhouse effect."

It's used to encompass Lindzen, Singer, Ball, Christie, Spencer, Plimer, Carter,..., people who do not think human-produced CO2 has or might be headed toward having catastrophic effect.

(I write "(so-called) 'greenhouse effect'" because the term, although so commonly used as to be unfightable, is technically a misnomer for the atmospheric process.)

Ellen

[anthony]

William :

Another non-partisan read - I recommend - is a book collection of notes from a lecture series: "How the Earth Works". [2008, Prof. Michael E. Wysession, Professor of Geophysics, Washington University, St. Louis].

I had never heard of him, and bought it on impulse recently to learn something about the formation of the Earth. At least half is given to magma, building of rock and plate tectonics,etc. and is interesting and quite sobering, although presented mostly in bullet points.

Then he gets to the sections on 'Long Term Climate Change' and 'Short Term Climate Change', (which was unexpected to me but a bonus.)

After explaining Milankovitch Cycles (by which the amount and distribution of sunlight changes on Earth throughout many solar orbits, simply) he states that the M-cycles...

"...changed climate patterns on Earth over time-scales of tens to hundreds of thousands of years".[p.179]

That's big.

Hang on, that's nothing.

He goes on:

" Plate tectonics drive climate change over tens to hundreds of *millions* of years. "

!!

Highly simplistically by me, he presents the ultimately-vastest climate influence, in magnitude and time-scale, and then beneath it a significant but intermediate one... and, so on and so on, further down the hierarchy.

That's where I imagined the 'Rock Concert' metaphor - Plate tectonics: colliding, subducting, convecting and all the other stuff that goes on right under our feet, and for aeons before - releasing carbon in bicarbonate molecules from rock, eventually into the atmosphere.

And by comparison at the bottom end - mankind's contribution, the Swiss watch.

I'm not seeking out a conspiracy, but tectonics dwarfs all the other 'forces' you listed, and I've never heard it mentioned. I admit my knowledge is sparse.

Plate tectonics then are well prior to ocean currents, volcanic eruptions, sunspots...etc....with an intricate interplay of many of these.

Not forgetting the process of worms(!) on the ocean bed, apparently.

..."[which] churn up marine sediment, preventing methane and carbon dioxide from getting locked away within them.

"Once worms evolved, greenhouse gases may have been better kept in circulation..."

"Although it seems as though humans are working hard to become the planet's most significant agent of geologic change, we have a long way to go before we attain the same level of impact as the worm".[M.E.W]

(Dry fellow).

(Nobody mentions just killing the worms, btw. A protected species?)

So, somewhere beneath the worm comes man (heh) - with his 7billion tons of carbon emissions to the atmosphere per annum.(6 years ago.)

What I enjoyed was this completely impartial, factual over-view, the scope of which I haven't begun to do justice. He lacks any agenda and plays no favorites. I've over-simplified what is actually a highly complex presentation by Wysession. But a decent conceptualist, he puts forward simplicity where there can be simplicity, in all the phenomena.

[Jonathan]

Here's a hypothetical chart, with the orange areas representing the predictions of "the scientific consensus" (dark orange representing 75% certainty, light orange representing 95% certainty), and the black line representing actual recorded temperatures.

What will happen if, in the future (represented as the blue band), observations from reality become increasingly more distant from the predictions?

Perhaps the observations will be seen by AGW advocates as proof that the actions that governments have taken so far to restrict certain human activities are working? Perhaps they'll claim that some unexplained phenomenon caused temporary cooling, but it's not going to last (we're still doomed, and we can't wait and see, we have to act now!)?

How likely do you think that those with the "consensus" view would be to admit to error? How many years would have to pass, and how distant from predictions would the black line have to be before the current "consensus" view was abandoned?

J

[Ellen Stuttle]

What will happen if, in the future (represented as the blue band), observations from reality become increasingly more distant from the predictions?

[....]

Perhaps they'll claim that some unexplained phenomenon caused temporary cooling, but it's not going to last (we're still doomed, and we can't wait and see, we have to act now!)?

They're doing that now.

Copying a post of mine from another thread ("How to deal with Global Warming"):

Interesting analysis by Climate Depot's Marc Morano:

link

January 14, 2014

Climate Depot Analysis: There have been at least seven separate explanations for the standstill in global warming 1) Low Solar Activity; 2) Oceans Ate Warming; 3) Chinese Coal Use; 4) Montreal Protocol; 5) Readjusted past temps to claim pause never existed 6) Volcanoes 7) Decline in Water Vapor

Ellen

[Selene]

[Selene]

212 paper on:

Climate change: no consensus on consensus

J. A. Curry and P.J. Webster

School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Georgia Institute of Technology

Atlanta, GA 30332-0340

Correspondence: curryja@eas.gatech.edu

Conclusions

The climate community has worked for more than 20 years to establish a scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. The IPCC consensus building process arguably played a useful role in the early synthesis of the scientific knowledge and in building political will to act. We have presented perspectives from multiple disciplines that support the inference that the scientific consensus seeking process used by the IPCC has had the unintended consequence of introducing biases into the both the science and related decision making processes. The IPCC scientific consensus has become convoluted with consensus decision making through a ‘speaking consensus to power’ approach. The growing implications of the messy wickedness of the climate change problem are becoming increasingly apparent, highlighting the inadequacies of the ‘consensus to power’ approach for decision making on the complex issues associated with climate change. Further, research from the field of science and technology studies are finding that manufacturing a consensus in the context of the IPCC has acted to hyper-politicize the scientific and policy debates, to the detriment of both. Arguments are increasingly being made to abandon the scientific consensus seeking approach in favor of open debate of the arguments themselves and discussion of a broad range of policy options that stimulate local and regional solutions to the multifaceted and interrelated issues of climate change, land use, resource management, cost effective clean energy solutions, and developing technologies to expand energy access efficiently.

No consensus on consensus - Climate Etc.

[anthony]

William: The "twin prongs" of What Is Out There - and What Is Necessary In Here (the magnitude of forces in uncaring Nature, vis-a-vis the standard of man's life) establishes that all facts are not 'born equal'. (The best way I can put it.)

Ignoring context, and both hierarchical characteristics (of Man and Nature) sometimes appears to be an AGW-er 'thing'.

"Sheeple" was gratuitous of me. What other way to describe populaces -everywhere- which gratefully and unchallengingly accept whatever they are told from On High?

(I wasn't thinking of you: clearly, you're much too independent a thinker for that.)

[Jonathan]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10752606/We-should-give-up-trying-to-save-the-world-from-climate-change-says-James-Lovelock.html

"James Lovelock, who first detected CFCs in the atmosphere and proposed the Gaia hypotheses, claims society should retreat to ‘climate-controlled cities’ and give up on large expanses of land which will become uninhabitable."

South Park guy overcome by global warming:

J

[william.scherk]

I'd rather you just tell me what you think rather than post links to others' opinions that apparently don't represent your views anyway.

And I'm not trying to Phil Coates you.

I know, I know. The questions in your post are measured and on point. As I wrote to you backstage, my output is languid lately. I mean to answer all your questions as best I can.

Wondering to myself about Dan Edge's seeming 'conversion' on global warming. A question unanswered: are there any Objectivish folks who accept AGW? If so, where are they?

In the meantime, an example of 'warmist' humour to balance Adam's cartoon, from the Skeptical Science blog (part-cause of the Edge conversion). Data said to be from Berkeley Earth.

Figure 1: BEST land-only surface temperature data (green) with linear trends applied to the timeframes 1973 to 1980, 1980 to 1988, 1988 to 1995, 1995 to 2001, 1998 to 2005, 2002 to 2010 (blue), and 1973 to 2010 (red).

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

A question unanswered: are there any Objectivish folks who accept AGW? If so, where are they?

William,

I'm willing to look, but I admit my bias exists due to the enormous amount of spin, outright fraud, busted emails, attempted money heists, backstage deals, failed green companies with sweetheart government loans, and on and on.

I think these crooked people have to get out of the middle of the debate for people like me to lose their bias.

If you asked, are there any Objectivish folks who accept looking at the findings of a neutral expert on AGW, I believe your success would be more promising. But where in hell are you going to find a neutral expert these days?

My question to you is why are the pro-AGW supporters still trying to sell this thing to everyone by using the same thieves?

Don't they get it that they are discredited because of all their sleaze?

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

I found this article amusing. I came across it while looking for something else.

I wish I could agree about the game being up, but I think that the game is just in a phase change.

link

The game is up for climate change believers

Charles Moore reviews The Age of Global Warming by Rupert Darwall (Quartet)

TheTelegraph

9:42PM BST 06Apr 2014

[....]

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won't last much longer [...], protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome's work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: "The world has cancer and the cancer is man.").

These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. One of the greatest problems, however, was that the ecologists' attacks on economic growth were unwelcome to the nations they most idolised - the poor ones. The eternal Green paradox is that the concept of the simple, natural life appeals only to countries with tons of money. By a brilliant stroke, the founding fathers developed the concept of "sustainable development". This meant that poor countries would not have to restrain their own growth, but could force restraint upon the rich ones. This formula was propagated at the first global environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972.

[....]

The final push, brilliantly described here by Darwall, was the Copenhagen Summit of 2009. [...] The warmists' idea was that the global fight against carbon emissions would work only if the whole world signed up to it. Despite being ordered to by President Obama, who had just collected his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the developing countries refused. The Left-wing dream that what used to be called the Third World would finally be emancipated from Western power had come true. The developing countries were perfectly happy for the West to have "the green crap", but not to have it themselves. The Western goody-goodies were hoist by their own petard.

Since then, the international war against carbon totters on, because Western governments see their green policies, like zombie banks, as too big to fail. [....] Last week, the latest IPCC report made the usual warnings about climate change, but behind its rhetoric was a huge concession. The answer to the problems of climate change lay in adaptation, not in mitigation, it admitted. So the game is up.

[....]

Ellen

[Jonathan]

Wondering to myself about Dan Edge's seeming 'conversion' on global warming. A question unanswered: are there any Objectivish folks who accept AGW? If so, where are they?

Are there any leftish folk who reject AGW? Probably about as many as Objectivish who accept it, no?

Who is more likely to go along with pseudoscience in general, to be more easily persuaded by inconclusive evidence, to not examine things very critically, and to stampede with the herd? Who is going to, say, try to ban certain products or foods because of health scares that turn out years layer to have been mistaken? Who is more likely to take advantage of any situation which might result in gaining some sort of control over other people?

J

[SoAMadDeathWish]

Wondering to myself about Dan Edge's seeming 'conversion' on global warming. A question unanswered: are there any Objectivish folks who accept AGW? If so, where are they?

Are there any leftish folk who reject AGW? Probably about as many as Objectivish who accept it, no?

Who is more likely to go along with pseudoscience in general, to be more easily persuaded by inconclusive evidence, to not examine things very critically, and to stampede with the herd? Who is going to, say, try to ban certain products or foods because of health scares that turn out years layer to have been mistaken? Who is more likely to take advantage of any situation which might result in gaining some sort of control over other people?

J

Forgive my presumption, but it seems to me that you're less concerned with believing where the evidence points than you are with doing everything you can to avoid looking like a leftist.

[Ellen Stuttle]

First installment; second installment to follow.

"Consensus" and Weart

This is from a review of the original, 2003, edition of Spencer Weart's The Discovery of Global Warming.

The review appears on a site called "Enthusiasm, Scepticism and Science" - home page link.

A header line describes the site's general purpose as being:

"on the origins and impacts of Global Warming Alarmism in the history and philosophy of science".

link

[first installment; second installment to follow]

[bold emphasis added]

MAY 4, 2010

BY BERNIEL

An Insider's History of the Global Warming Scare.

Review: The Discovery of Global Warming, by Spencer Weart, Harvard, 1st edition, 2003

Climate Change Science as it is known today is a very young science. Many of those that first raised the alarm about our bringing upon ourselves catastrophic global warming, like Schneider and Hansen, are still with us today. [schneider no longer is.] In the late 1960s and 70s concern was mounting about the possible local and then global affect of pollution on climate, including cooling and warming. But it was not until the 1980s that the alarm over carbon dioxide driven warming really began.

Of the most recent past, can one really write a history? The closer an account of events moves towards the present the more recedes the special virtues we seek in history, and so it is hard to pick out which recent developments really matter in the long run. With such caveats Spencer Weart begins the final chapter of his The Discovery of Global Warming (2003), but they might just as well apply to the entire subject, and this is all the more so from the sceptic's point of view; for the question of [what] has been discovered, if anything at all, may well be revealed to all in good time.

But in different ways for the advocate and the sceptic, the subject is too important to leave alone. For Weart, it is by tracing how scientists, politicians, journalists, and ordinary citizens pushed and pulled at one another in the past, we can be better prepared to deal with the fatal issues that confront us. Whereas for the sceptics, the value in examining the history of the global warming scare is to discover just how it was that this came to be seen as a fatal issue - threatening no less the survival of humanity - so as to understand the phenomenon of alarmism as it manifests in modern society (see eg Scared to Death by Booker & North).

At this blog, our particular interest is in how this scare was manifest and propagated by scientists, and through the great institutions and organs of sciences, upon a grotesque distortion of conventional scientific practice. And one thing that is well demonstrated, acknowledged and even promoted in Weart's history is that the development of the science (and so its corruption) is almost inextricable from - in fact it thrived upon - the very scare it generated across the politique.

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

Are there any leftish folk who reject AGW? Probably about as many as Objectivish who accept it, no?

There are some prominent ones, most notably in France. Paul Reiter and ___ (drawing a blank on the name, a scientifically famous one). [*]

[*] Claude Allègre - see.

There are also environmentalists who are skeptics. Patrick Moore, for instance, one of the founders of GreenPeace, who left that organization because of its being taken over by Marxist agendists. Also the person whose site I only discovered today, linked in the post above, Bernie Lewin.

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

The above names might be "about as many as Objectivish who accept it," but, folks, WHAT IS THE "IT"?

William skips around amongst GW, AGW, CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming), not making clear when he's talking about which, and in regard to which he claims there exists a "scientific consensus."

Please try to be clear what "it" you mean.

Ellen

[Brant Gaede]

The above names might be "about as many as Objectivish who accept it," but, folks, WHAT IS THE "IT"?

William skips around amongst GW, AGW, CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming), not making clear when he's talking about which, and in regard to which he claims there exists a "scientific consensus."

Please try to be clear what "it" you mean.

Ellen

I presume there is a consensus about "climate change" (CC).

And that water is wet (WIW).

--Brant

off this foundation . . .

[anthony]

Patrick Moore also turned round on his early (Greenpeace days) anti-nuclear power stance, to become a proponent of it(as did Lovelock, apparently.) He was interviewed in RSA some years back stating this, and I admired his integrity and good sense, even then.

Wiki:

"In 2005, Moore criticised what he saw as scare tactics and disinformation employed by some within the environmental movement[...]seeking now to invent "doom and gloom" scenarios.

[...]He suggests they romanticise peasant life as part of an anti-industrial campaign to prevent development in less-developed countries, which he descibes as "anti-human"."

[it couldn't have been easy for him - PM must have made plenty of enemies out of old friends. What courage it took.]

[Ellen Stuttle]

[it couldn't have been easy for him [Patrick Moore] - PM must have made plenty of enemies out of old friends. What courage it took.]

I admire his honesty and courage.

Larry and I sometimes laugh over, and make plays on, a remark Patrick Moore made in the interview with him which appeared in "The Great Global Warming Swindle."

He tells how persons in Greenpeace, becoming concerned about fluorine, wanted to ban the element.

He says he said (quoting from memory), "Guys, I don't think that's in our jurisdiction, to ban a whole element!"

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

Claude Allègre is the French scientist on whose name I was drawing a blank in post #90 - see.

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

Second installment. Please see the first installment in post #89.

"Consensus" and Weart

This is from a review of the original, 2003, edition of Spencer Weart's The Discovery of Global Warming.

The review appears on a site called "Enthusiasm, Scepticism and Science" - home page link.

A header line describes the site's general purpose as being:"on the origins and impacts of Global Warming Alarmism in the history and philosophy of science".

This material gives a brief description of the IPCC progression through the 3rd report in 2001.

link

[bold emphasis added; one paragraph break inserted]

MAY 4, 2010

BY BERNIEL

An Insider's History of the Global Warming Scare.

Review: The Discovery of Global Warming, by Spencer Weart, Harvard, 1st edition, 2003

[T]he idea of inherent instability in the system pervades alarmist Climate Change Science. It is not so much that they observe great climatic shifts in the climate record, but that they propose the system in a precarious balance easily tipped over into a cascade of dramatic change in the future.

Climatic instability is a theme of Weart's whole narrative, and we will return to this theme below, but the specific influence of the Ice Age problematic is also evident in his history where it becomes easy to forget (and Weart often pauses to remind the reader) that an influential earlier theory is attempting to explain the slow advance and retreat of gigantic ice sheets, and not the relatively brief and small variations in the global climate of historical times.

[....]

Weart covers well the quiet and less memorable period of the early 1980s [...]. [....] The political breakthroughs of 1988, including the establishment of the IPCC, coincided with the 2nd consecutive warmest year on record, but then the heat was off again, and there ensued another lull for climate alarmism through the early 1990s. This was not helped by the release in 1990 of the remarkably sober IPCC's First Assessment, which found no conclusive evidence that greenhouse gas emissions were causing the recent warming; warming that anyway had not yet returned us to the balmy heights of the early middle ages.

After all the attention-grabbing drama of the congressional hearings, not the least Hansen testifying his 99% certainty, other activist-scientist (notably Schneider and Haughton) seemed genuinely confounded by the problem of how to argue the necessity of government action to mitigate catastrophe upon the grounds of scientific predictions that are inherently and somewhat irreducibly uncertain. These activists had by this time irrevocably politicised the debate, causing a deepening sceptic/alarmist divide to block the normal to & fro of scientific debate. Here Weart makes no mistake about which side he is on by providing us with the now familiar authority of the peer-view process to support the alarmist science, while questioning the science of the sceptics upon its motivation and its financing. Furthermore, Weart claims that the sceptical arguments that emerged in the public debate at this time were little more than industry propaganda and misleading 'junk' science. (Recently, moderates such as Judith Curry have also made similar claim of early scepticism - for her it was 2000-2006 - to excuse the slow acceptance of recent more valid sceptical auditing.)

This depiction of un-scientific trashiness of early scepticism is challenged by a range of documentation from this time. [....]

The talk of confirmation and consensus only really began with the triumphant news of the IPCC 2nd Assessment late in 1995. Its Official the Science journal headline declared, the first glimmer of greenhouse warming seen. The Science article did at least refer to the 'war of words' at the final meeting of (IPCC Working Group I) lead authors and political representatives in Madrid. And it did point to the remaining 'uncertainties' behind the headline-grabbing conclusion that the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.

Weart provides no such qualifications. In quoting these same words he reports: It was page-one news everywhere, immediately recognised as a landmark. And then he glosses the ensuing scandal with an oblique reference to a nasty controversy casting doubt upon the personal integrity of some IPCC scientists. In fact, the controversy was over just how these and other conclusive statements were inserted into the report after the scientific review was complete. The long-sought breakthrough - that the 'fingerprint' of the human influence on the warming had finally been discovered - was claimed upon the authority of the yet-to-be-published research of the very lead author who was accused of drafting these modifications during the Madrid meeting.

[....] [T]he discovery of global warming was broadly accepted, and the momentum achieved in the winter of 1995-6 was maintained through the political breakthrough of Kyoto, and towards the even more conclusive 3rd Assessment of 2001.

With the release of this 3rd IPCC report, the story of The Discovery of Global Warming comes to its close, but not without giving due emphasis to the startling new evidence of unprecedented recent warming. It had been discovered [supposedly - ES insert] that 1998 had been not just the warmest year of the century, but of the millennium. And the final chapter, entitled 'Discovery Confirmed,' bares witness to just how important was this (now discredited) evidence by the fact that the 3rd and final image of this entire book is none other than Michael Manns iconic Hockey Stick graph.

Ellen

[anthony]

It feels so strange being cast as a "skeptic" contra the "realists" - for once.

Opponents and bedfellows...

One more irony, the Social-ish finding themselves in uneasy alliance with the Fasc-ish methods of AGW.

Where is William, btw? I always appreciate his pov.

[Selene]

Where is William, btw? I always appreciate his pov.

He is out seeding the clouds for the next "climate change" assertion.

By the way, has there been a single day in your life wherein the "climate" has not changed?

Can anyone give me a definition of what these "world-savers" definition of "it" is as Ellen so clearly asked.

[Jonathan]

Wondering to myself about Dan Edge's seeming 'conversion' on global warming. A question unanswered: are there any Objectivish folks who accept AGW? If so, where are they?

Are there any leftish folk who reject AGW? Probably about as many as Objectivish who accept it, no?

Who is more likely to go along with pseudoscience in general, to be more easily persuaded by inconclusive evidence, to not examine things very critically, and to stampede with the herd? Who is going to, say, try to ban certain products or foods because of health scares that turn out years layer to have been mistaken? Who is more likely to take advantage of any situation which might result in gaining some sort of control over other people?

J

Forgive my presumption, but it seems to me that you're less concerned with believing where the evidence points than you are with doing everything you can to avoid looking like a leftist.

Wow. How did you arrive at that?! I wrote specifically about people being persuaded by inconclusive evidence, and not examining things critically, and somehow you interpret that as my not being concerned with evidence?!!!

Oh, wait, I get it! You were illustrating my point by pretending to have the mindset of someone who doesn't examine things very critically? Right? If so, good one!

J

[Jonathan]

In the meantime, an example of 'warmist' humour to balance Adam's cartoon, from the Skeptical Science blog (part-cause of the Edge conversion). Data said to be from Berkeley Earth.

Yeah, I've seen AGW skeptics use the same type of humor: showing how AGWerists' often show a timeline or use a method that supports their predetermined conclusions, where a timeline which was uncropped just a little bit more to the left would refute their conclusions.

J