The global warmening thing is over

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Saturday, January 7. 2012

The global warmening thing is over

At Watts: Green Movement Dead In The Water. It's been said many times before, but it certainly seems moribund. Problem is that too many people, and governments, make big bucks from the scam.

I remain in favor of more warmening for the benefit of the human species, but am preparing for the coming Ice Age apocalypse by buying a 1-BR condo in West Palm. (Just kidding. Florida is not my kind of place.)

Like this tune, though:

Posted by The News Junkie in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 10:31 | Comments (16) | Trackbacks (0)

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It is 'over' if you base this on their ability to create a new case and sell it, or give the old one a workover and get people to buy it.

But it's far from 'over' if you talk to people who still believe. This is both the strength of, and the difficulty with, a religion. No matter how many facts are provided, the faith portion overwhelms the facts.

I still know plenty of people who, despite seeing the data, despite being exposed to the acknowledgement of doctored data and restricted access to peer review for skeptics, still simply believe it's true. As a result, it's going to be a very long time before people give up the ghost.

And as long as we have a hurricane, like Irene, which impacts large urban areas, or freak storms like the Halloween snowstorm, or warm days in the winter followed by blizzards, we're going to have people saying "Global Warming".

#1 Bulldog on 2012-01-07 11:15 (Reply)

Sorry but we conservatives have to accept the science even if we don't like how the liberals politicize it.

We only make ourselves look like those nutty Jesus-riding-on-a-dinosaur fundamentalists when we deny what every scientific organization acknowledges is happening.

If we forfeit our voice, then we forfeit conservative-based market-oriented solutions.

#2 Rex on 2012-01-07 11:47 (Reply)

If "all?" the scientific organizations jumped off a cliff would you jump too?

Climate change doesn't have to be taken on faith, doesn't have to be taken at the word of scientific organizations, as the Royal Society motto 'Nullius in verba' which roughly translates as 'take nobody's word for it', used to represent "show us the data."

Oh, that's right, they don't have the data and more recent scientific research, i.e., they show the data and their work, refutes much of their assertions. Such as the ocean being colder than it was at the end of the Medieval Warming Period and that trees respond more to local moisture and CO2 than temperature.

But this only highlights the problem, so many "scientific" organizations and so many Ph.Ds, university and government employees, have their entire reputations tied up in the global warming thing. They will try to keep it alive as long as possible to save face and keep the money coming in.

#2.1 JKB on 2012-01-07 12:30 (Reply)

Eventually it will end up as the worst pseudo-scientific fad since Lysenko's biology, all the signs are there. Hiding data, erasing data (the 'divergence' problem), suppressing critics, and an utter inability to do simple statistics and compute error bars. I'd rather be on the rational side here than in the clown parade.

#2.2 chuck on 2012-01-07 12:50 (Reply)

Rex,

Sorry but we conservatives have to accept the science even if we don't like how the liberals politicize it.

True: it's not just the "looney left" that believes in this fraud. You are aware, of course, that 'their' science is based on computer models and that is where the science falls apart. Garbage in...garbage out!

#2.3 Garry on 2012-01-07 13:22 (Reply)

The "science"? Now that's a laugh. As soon as it rises to the level of science I'll be all over it.

#2.4 Texan99 (Link) on 2012-01-07 14:19 (Reply)

To a very small degree, you are correct. If we don't accept the science, then we do forfeit our voice. That I'll agree on.

Beyond that, however, show me the data. Further down the comment list, someone posted some NOAA data, suggesting this was 'the proof'. Sadly, it's not proof of anything, except for the ability of someone, somewhere to say something is happening.
What that something is, well, that's debatable.

The real clincher, of course, is the link between 'man-made' and 'warming'. The key to the global warming argument is that it's man-made. After all, if it's natural cycles (as I contend it most likely is), what can we do about it, and why should we be worried?
The fact remains there is absolutely, positively and unequivocally no link. None whatsoever. Zip. Zero.

There is some small correlation. But, as any good scientist will admit, correlation is not causation. In fact, supposing that the data of correlation proves the causation (as many of the proponents have claimed) is patently unscientific.

Add to this the hiding of data which doesn't support the meme, the partisan behavior which calls for silencing skeptics and keeping them off panels whenever possible, the inability for skeptics to get their papers published or peer reviewed, and a host of other fraudulent behaviors by these so-called 'scientists'....and, well, you can see where I'm going.

I'm sorry - I can't agree that the skeptics have lost their voice or the initiative. If anything, the warmists continue to hand the initiative over to those of us who oppose them for a simple reason. There's nothing there, and they know it.

I look at it this way. Show me the clear, unequivocal and absolute link between man and any climate change, and I'll change my tune. But be 100% certain that it's proof, not just a short term trend or a model or a correlation or anything that is open to question.

As I've said on other threads of this nature, having built business models for my entire career, you can make them say whatever you wish, even if the data seems to indicate it should say something altogether different. It's all a matter of how you set up the inputs, and manage the constants.
In my last job, I built a model which showed how we would make a 200% gain in income. This despite the fact that our revenue drivers were in decline, the market for the product was shrinking, and we owed existing inventory to current clients. Why did I build it? Because management insisted this was what was going to happen and a means to the end had to be created.
The model was completely believable, if you took it on faith that it could be accomplished.
If you weren't starry-eyed and took a look at all the footnotes, and asked the right questions then you'd realize it was just a crock.

#2.5 Bulldog on 2012-01-07 18:52 (Reply)

Bull Dog: There is some small correlation. But, as any good scientist will admit, correlation is not causation.

That's correct, however, climate models are based on causative mechanisms, not mere correlation.

Bull Dog: As I've said on other threads of this nature, having built business models for my entire career, you can make them say whatever you wish, even if the data seems to indicate it should say something altogether different.

However, independent scientists can easily determine that by comparing your finagled results to their own models.

#2.5.1 Zachriel on 2012-01-07 21:52 (Reply)

"Sorry but we conservatives have to accept the science even if we don't like how the liberals politicize it."

Sure. Agreed. Now, show me some science that supports the AGW scam, and we'll talk.

This is what happens when our education system stops producing engineers and chemists and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and geologists and statisticians, and instead sends us sociologists and journalism majors and english majors and comparative studies majors and womyns' studies majors and political science majors . . .

If you have no grounding whatsoever in the scientific method - if you think empiricism is the study of empires - if you think a computer model can prove anything - if you have absolutely none of the skills required to enable you to look, even cursorily, at the design of a scientific test or study and arrive at a judgment of the validity of its theme - then you are going to have to view actual scientists as priests. You are going to have to accept what they assert on faith alone, with no independent ability to avoid being scammed by even facially stupid assertions.

These people - a small subset of a small subset of a small subset of "scientists" - have falsified data, used meaningless data, hidden their data, destroyed their data, written computer modelling programs with hidden hard-coded "corrections", presented graphs which match no one's data or are kludged together with a number of datasets in an invalid manner which coincidentally gives their plot a shape they can crow about while hiding the data . . .

They've gathered together secretly (oops, so much for that!) in order to control the scientific publishing process and exclude many, many people who disagree with them. They've shut down many long-standing temperature-gathering stations in colder areas, but not in warm areas. Some have asserted that the "urban heat island" effect does not exist, while most have mis-corrected data that has been collected in large urban areas so as to ascribe that warming to AGW.

They have stifled disagreement and then claimed "consensus." None of their models - none! - have managed to actually predict anything correctly. Not one model has matched what has happened in the last fifteen or twenty years, and yet they want us to believe that their past data is conclusive.

The cornerstone of their marketing plan - Al Gore's favorite, the hockey stick graph - has been proven conclusively to be a lie. Not a "mistake" - a deliberate lie. Mann finagled several sets of incomplete data together, then dropped most datasets and used a very small set of numbers from bristlecone pine measurements as proxy data even as everyone was conceding that it was an invalid proxy for temperature, and then, towards the end of his graph, he stopped using proxy data and started using real numbers because otherwise it would be obvious that his bristlecone pine proxy numbers weren't agreeing with actual temperature measurements.

This is no scientific consensus. This is a marketing scam, driven by a small band of scientists who found they could garner huge funding for pushing the notion of AGW, with that funding coming from people with money who could profit politically from the AGW hysteria. Ever seen Al Gore's huge houseboat? His new rich-guy's pad right down by the bay in San Fran? His bank account, swollen with millions - tens of millions - from his AGW-connected businesses?

Your priests have taken you for a ride. That would be fine with me - that's your business - but they, and now you, insist that I and millions of others pay the price for your ignorance. In order to affect global temperature by even one-tenth of one degree, the necessary price will cause the deaths of millions (sounds like an exaggeration, doesn't it? well, do some quick research on your own for once, 'cuz it's not an exaggeration), and it will stop dead the betterment of the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are in third world countries that are working to develop real economies.

Want to believe that cows are sacred? That you were reincarnated from your past life as a bedbug? Hey, knock yourself out. That's your business. But it becomes my business when your ignorant devotion to venal priests starts killing large swaths of people and enslaving entire countries. You change from a figure of pity to a valid target.

#3 bobby b on 2012-01-07 13:54 (Reply)

bobby b: Sure. Agreed. Now, show me some science that supports the AGW scam, and we'll talk.

Much of the evidence is technical, but the most direct evidence are measurements of a warming troposphere and cooling stratosphere, a signature of greenhouse warming.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/globalwarming/ar4-fig-3-17.gif

#3.1 Zachriel on 2012-01-07 14:58 (Reply)

Umm, no. The satellite data shows that the change in temperature profile in the tropics is *not*, repeat, *not*, what the models predict. It's one of the biggest failures of the models. Apart from their total failure to predict the flat temperatures since 1998.

The fact is, at this point no one knows what the signature of global warming would look like. They are talking tiny effects in the noise and in those situations variables unaccounted for in models come to the fore.

When the world gets warmer than in the Medieval Warm period or the Roman Optimum I'll pay a bit more attention. When it reaches Cretaceous levels (+10C), maybe I'll become concerned. If CO2 levels reach the maximum in the geologic record (~4000 ppm) maybe I'll worry. But probably not, since the temperature goes as the log of concentration.

And don't quote the IPCC or James Hansen's group to me, they don't hold any credibility in my mind.

#3.1.1 chuck on 2012-01-07 15:38 (Reply)

chuck: The satellite data shows that the change in temperature profile in the tropics is *not*, repeat, *not*, what the models predict.

Sorry, but that is incorrect. The tropical mid-tropospheric hotspot is not a signature of greenhouse warming, but warming due to any cause, and is a direct result of changes in the lapse rate. The data is incomplete, as it historically hasn't been monitored in detail or with accuracy, however, recent studies have shown that the available data is reasonably consistent with what is expected.

Thorne et al., Tropospheric temperature trends: history of an ongoing controversy, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2011: "It is concluded that there is no reasonable evidence of a fundamental disagreement between tropospheric temperature trends from models and observations when uncertainties in both are treated comprehensively."

#3.1.1.1 Zachriel on 2012-01-07 21:48 (Reply)

If the models are not predictive, they're bad models.

It's clear that there is global warming, since there were glaciers down to Missouri some 15K years ago, and there's evidence that this has happened more than once.

#4 Sam L. on 2012-01-07 20:12 (Reply)

And besides that, 40 years ago "THE NEXT ICE AGE IS COMING SOON!"

#5 Sam L. on 2012-01-07 20:13 (Reply)

chuck: And don't quote the IPCC or James Hansen's group to me, they don't hold any credibility in my mind.

Waving your hands doesn't make the data go away. In any case, we posted data from NOAA.

chuck: The fact is, at this point no one knows what the signature of global warming would look like.

That is simply incorrect. If the current warming were due to, say, solar irradiance, then the entire atmosphere would warm. The fact that the lower atmosphere is warming, but the upper atmosphere is cooling, is a signature of greenhouse warming.

#6 Zachriel on 2012-01-07 21:44 (Reply)

I understand this is a hot button topic, and I'm certainly not saying we have to accept Al Gore and the far left's spin on the issue.

Accepting the data and acknowledging that some of the climate models may be correct is a long way from saying we have to stop oil production and buy electric cars tommorrow.

Being informed but properly skeptical, challenging but offering market based solutions, I believe is the true conservative path.

#7 Rex on 2012-01-08 16:03 (Reply)

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Saturday, January 7. 2012

The global warmening thing is over