Saturday
Dec052009
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Unthreaded
Dec 5, 2009 Climate Some of the comments threads are going way off topic, so I'm setting up an unthreaded post for people who want to point to interesting stories or put forward their own theories.
Reader Comments (472)
The only scientist in the bunch pipes up:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/09/stringer_on_russell/
Heartening.
Your book is seeking prominence at the National Post, Bish.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/07/09/peter-foster-checking-the-hockey-team/
Your Grace
Trevor Davies of UEA to join panel of experts at Guardian debate.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/30/guardian-debate-climate-science-emails
I made it to the GWPF meeting on 13th July to see David Holland and Steve McIntyre. I greatly enjoyed the event, and played 'spot the name' with some success. Good to see Josh, and I suspect quite a few other Denizens of the Diocese, but having driven 300miles to get there and needing to rush to find a bite to eat before heading straight back (arriving home at 0400 on 14th!) I didn't have a chance to say 'Hi' properly, So 'Hi' to those of you I think I bumped into outside the meeting on the way to find sustenance!
A Statistical Climatology conference in Edinburgh this week attracted a range of key climategate figures including Michael Mann.
http://cameronrose.blogspot.com/2010/07/controversial-climate-scientists-in.html
The link to 'list of speakers' includes abstracts of the papers presented.
I went to the meeting on climate at the Royal Society in Edinburgh yesterday evening. Here is my summary and my reactions to it:
'Climate Change During the Last 10,000 years: Reconstructions and Uncertainty'
Royal Society of Edinburgh, 14th July, 2010
This summary is based on my notes and my recollection, necessarily subjective and no doubt incomplete, of the meeting.
Speakers: Prof Heinz Wanner, University of Bern, and Prof John Haslett, Trinity College, Dublin.
Panelists: The two speakers, and Prof Gabriele Hegerl, University of Edinburgh
Chairman: President of the RSE, David Wilson (Lord WIlson of Tillyorn)
Vote of Thanks: Sir John Toland, Director of the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences
Attendance: my guess 12 to 15 rows of 10 seats, with 8-10 people per row, plus an overflow room (which only had a few people left in it when I moved through to the main room). Total in the range 120 to 160 people.
The speakers were pleasant and personable, and gave temperate presentations. But overall, it was all a bit anodyne and uninformative re 'uncertainty' in particular.
Prof Wanner gave a lucid overview of the results of some Greenland ice core temperature reconstructions for the past 10 to 15,000 years. Prof Haslett talked around 'what statisticians do', without telling us much beyond aphorisms such as 'We do uncertainty' 'We sit between theory and data', 'Uncertainty is difficult' - all leavened with often amusing quips and asides. Prof Hegerl only took part in the panel, where her somewhat more incisive and to the point answers gave me the impression that she would have given a decent presentation.
Prof Wanner had arrived fresh from the Outer Hebrides, and recounted how the locals had noted the strong winds, the driving rain, and assured him it was often like that, they saw no 'climate change'. He showed a slide of temperature reconstructions for the past 17,000 years derived from Greenland ice cores, and picked out different stages spanning this range: the first three divided it roughly into 3 parts, the 4th was the modern period squeezed in a line at the edge. He told us of the many warmer and cooler periods, and that while some could be accounted for by volcanic events and orbital variations, there were many unexplained. He noted dramatic sea-level rises associated with the melting of ice sheets at different times, stating that while sea-ice was a 'key-factor', our knowledge of it was very limited. He showed a diagram which showed a smooth and steady decrease in insolation in the northern hemisphere due to orbital variations, and what looked like an equal and opposite rise in insolation in the southern hemisphere.
A cooling phase was shown from about 6,000 years BP ('before present'). He showed blue and red spots scattered over a map of the world to denote local cooling or warming - thereby revealing more unexplained complexity. Glaciers advanced in the nothern hemisphere, with an increase during the Little Ice Age, while in the southern hemisphere there were 'fewer glacier advances'. Climate models of this era showed movement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, and some weakening of monsoons. He mentioned cycles of Greenland sediments found in the Atlantic and attributed to southerly excursions of icebergs carrying materials from Greenland. The Medieval Warm Period was described as the Medieval Climate Anomaly, dated as 900 to 1000AD, followed by the Little Ice Age (LIA), dated 1250 to 1350AD (during which time some areas showed some warm anomalies - another complexity which we 'are not yet able to explain'). He showed a 3-diagram slide, credited to Jansen (IPCC, 2007) with multiple temperature reconstructions, CO2 levels over time, and solar and volcanic events over time. He noted that some of the temperature movements were accounted for by solar and or volcanic events, but by no means all of them. He then asserted that in recent times the anthropogenic forcing has been getting 'higher and higher'. No justification. No talk of uncertainty. Just stated as a fact. He mentioned that some climatologist think that without it we'd still be in the LIA. His last slide was of projected precipitation changes, for some unspecificed period in the future (labelled IPCC 2007), and showing decreases in the tropical zones, and increases elsewhere. Another model output, without quantified uncertainties, but he sought to engage our sympathy for the poor people in the tropical regions who were already short of water. He finished neatly by recalling conversations with farmers in the mountains of Switzerland, where they were in no doubt that the climate was changing.
Prof Haslett introduced himself as being 'asked by Gabi' to bring some numbers to the meeting, given that Prof Wanner would 'tell stories'. As it turned out, out Wanner gave us numbers, and Haslett gave us stories.
His first slide was a sentence, 'What do statisticians do?', followed by a quote from Tom Lehrer concerning mathematicians and the query 'how did they get that way?'. His eventual description was to the effect that 'statisticians do uncertainty' and 'statisticians are placed between theory and data'. With regard to temperature reconstructions, he said hard questions were 'How do we know?' and 'How much of this do we know?', but he did not begin to answer them with regard to reconstructions or indeed anything else. He noted that during the Younger Dryas period, just before the Holocene, the ice sheet over Loch Lomond made a very sudden advance, and later a very sudden retreat. He made what I thought was the wittiest aside of the evening by noting that 'The Loch Lomond Advance' sounded like something you might face in a ceilidh. Another apercu was that the BP measure is zeroed on 1950, meaning that we live in 'Minus 60 BP'. He talked about media uncertainty, scientific uncertainty, and other uncertainties, without further elucidation except for talking around a picture used in a newspaper to illustrate rapid ice movements in Glenalough in Ireland. The paper had taken a picture of a hill and a lake, and made the left hand side of it covered in snow on the hill and ice on the lake. He showed a picture of the lake with himself and a student in the foreground, and explained how researchers were looking at pollen in the sediments there. He noted that inverse relationships had to be found to map pollen data to climate, and sediment depth to age, but said nothing about the uncertainties or techniques used for either. He said that periods of very rapid temperature changes had been found, such as '16C over decades'. He mentioned an advanced study seminar on modelling at Durham University in 2008, at which his 10 companions included a poet, a philosopher, and a linguist. He didn't tell us what they concluded, but he did display a poem shaped like a swan created by one of them, and declared that 'uncertainty is complicated'. He moved on to note that statements which admitted no uncertainty could be refuted or discredited by a single counter-example. He urged us to visit David Spiegelhalter's website 'Understanding Uncertainty'. He, Haslett, asserted there was, in regard to climate, a 'complete disconnect between scientific and public opinion', and furthermore that almost all scientists had the same view about climate. Shortly after that, and presumably reaching a time limit, he abruptly stopped.
There followed a brief question and answer session that was also a bit disappointing. Questions included asking the panel what they though about reports of a drop in temperatures when contrails disappeared after the grounding of flights after 9/11, whether they thought that the earth was a living organism, and why had they not mentioned that we are killing tigers and elephants. More relevant questions included one about the IPCC overstating its case, countered by Prof Hegerle who said the scientists were very careful to explain their uncertainties but the media did not care to. Prof Waller mentioned advice he had received from a politician to the effect that including uncertainties with policy suggestions meant that nothing would get done. Prof Haslett at one point swept his arm across the audience and told us that almost everyone in the room had learned all they knew about climate from the media. This at least explained his decision to keep his presentation very light. One questioner asked for opinion on the debate between Mann and McIntyre on the use of regression. This was not really addressed, and I got the distinct impression that the entire panel was very uncomfortable about the hockey-stick saga, and had no wish to get into it. Prof Haslett basically noted that 'it was not a yes/no question'. Another good question was asked about feedbacks, and the emphasis on positive feedbacks in models. Prof Hegerle mentioned that they were working on this, doing more modelling and finding that positive feedbacks were required and justified. She also stated that they were finding a climate sensitivity (in response to doubling CO2) of 1.5 - a result which I think requires positive feedbacks to dominate in the models. I was busy formulating a question or two of my own to ask and trying to catch the eye of the chairman (who did a pretty good job of running the session), and did not pay full attention throughout the Q&A. I do recall Prof Haslett telling us of how he asked his taxi driver coming into Edinburgh what would he do if he knew his steering was faulty and his brakes in need of a service, and was then told by Haslett 'I think there is a very steep hill just round the corner'. The emphasis was on the 'think', to convey, presumably, the need for action in the face of uncertainty. Earlier, he had asked the audience for a show of hands if they had ever paid for insurance. Most hands of course went up. He then sat back, declaring something like 'I rest my case', and turned his attention to his glass of water. This seemed to be by way of a pre-emptive strike, as if he was engaged in a heated debate about climate policy. Since there was no sign of that, I can only suppose he had vivid memories of previous ones. The vote of thanks by Sir John Tolland ended with a reference to Pascal's wager involving a finite probability of infinite harm - perhaps another not so subtle hint that policy decisions need not be based on hard evidence. Unable to stay for the wine reception, I set off for the drive home through a strange mixture of torrential rain and fog, trying to pin-down my overall impressions of the event.
They all seemed like decent, temperate people, no doubt highly skilled in their crafts, talking about, or around, their work, and putting in an effort to communicate to the public. What was lacking was any explicit acknowledgement of the immense economic, and potentially totalitarian, transformation that is being promoted using their work through the IPCC. At the heart of it all, is the astonishing elevation of a trace gas into a major threat on the basis not of observations, but of models using a theory which does account for real greenhouses, and which requires additional and speculative feedbacks to enhance the projected impact to alarming levels. On the one hand, we have the researchers poring over pollen and programs on their computers, and on the other we have the politicians pursuing power and punitive taxes in their various assemblies, pressure groups, and NGOs. A third group, the financial one, has seen fabulous money in prospect from carbon trading, while others make more modest gains from government subsidies for renewables. There is a veritable juggernaut out there, and the work of these academics is part of it.
John:
Thanks for the account. It has been overshadowed by the Guardian debate.
What is clear is that there is no evidence for AGW and the so-called "climate scientists" base their assertions on nothing other than unvalidated models.
How does Haslett know that that "almost all scientists had the same view about climate". None of the scientists and engineers of my acquaintance share the alarmists' view.
Climate Panel Clarifies Its Media Plan.......Pachauri has another go.....
“I want to reassure everyone the I.P.C.C. is a transparent organization. At a time when the work of climate scientists is undergoing intense scrutiny, it is essential that we promote clear and open communication with the media and the public.”
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/climate-panel-clarifies-its-media-plan/?ref=science
In Australia, I see the BBC are blaming the non-implementation of the Carbon Trading scheme as a reason for Kevin Rudds downfall. The impression I had was that it was KR's support for the scheme that made him unpopular.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10674878
Via Samizdata ( samizdat.net/blog ) there is a rather long, but immensely erudite and insightful essay at The American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/print
It is by Angelo M Codevilla, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University. His proposition is of a ‘progressive’ ‘ruling class’, which is steadily eroding constitutional rule of law as big government accretes more and more power and control.
He makes a number of references to the climate change issue. Among them, after setting out how an ‘in’ progressive academic uses a graduate student to write his book, how the graduate student in so doing then plagiarized an earlier book, and how the malfeasance of both was swept under the carpet in a secret inquiry by the university dean (now a member of the US Supreme Court!), Codevilla says:
“By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about "global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.”
If that last comment is right, the resistance from the ‘ruling class’, which we have seen so frustratingly often, means that is going to continue to take an enormous effort to turn the tide regarding climate. So kudos to you for your work – and to those who comment here with so much expertise and support.
Anyone seen todays Times, the front page story is about ExxonMobil financing 'climate sceptics', inside there are a couple of stories banging the "UEA is exonerated" drum. No mention of the non-existent science review, failure of Russell to even ask basic questions or the massive funding in favour of the pro-AGW agenda.
I was considering subscribing to the Times Online as I thought it was a decent news source. Clearly its reporters are either lazy or have a orders to tow the AGW line.
How is 'Oxburgh' pronounced? After hearing both versions a number of times this week ('Oxburra' or 'Oxburg') I've been wondering. I would have thought it would be the first, following the pattern of Edinburgh.
Is there any news on the Inter Academy Council meeting in London reviewing the IPCC processes and procedures it seems to have gone very quiet and I thought it was scheduled for about now or have I missed something.
Is is possible to bring the CRU inquiries threads together in the category search facility? Such as
CRU Inquiry- Oxburgh
CRU Inquiry- Muir Russell
I wonder if this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10705614
a new earth monitoring 'hub' based at Harwell, is the first step in replacing CRU as a key part of UK climate monitoring?
John Shade, wonderful to read this--Thank You!
Interesting development today between GWPF and The Times
“the Times gave the false impression that the GWPF was represented at the March 2009 New York conference and that the GWPF may have received Exxon Mobil funding too. In fact, the Foundation did not exist at the time”.
http://www.thegwpf.org/
Jonathon Leake has an article in the Sunday Times on page 5 of the print copy today, in which he presents a temperature graph of the last 200,000 years. The article discusses the privations of the ice age. No hockey stick. No mention of global warming alarm. Refreshing.
Sunday Times:
The MET office awarded its staff more than £1.4 million in performance related bonuses last year.
1700 staff got and average of £760 for hitting targets making a bonus pot of £1.3 million. Its 12 executives fared even better sharing out £155,000.
John Hirst had a £50,000 bonus bring total salary to £220,000, Alan Shepherd head of startegic marketing was paid £175,000 including a £30,000 bonus, Julia Slingo chief scientist was paid £165,000 with a £20,000 bonus.
The MET office missed a key target to cut carbon emissions by reducing staff air travel. Instead, its staff flew more than 4m miles last year an increse of 20% on the year before.
This year’s bonuses bring the total awarded over the past five years to £13 million. The latest being significantly higher than the previous years.
Nice work if you can get it!
I’m not sure whether this is news to you but Muir Russell went to a guy called Dr Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet, for background info on how journals operate.
Dr. Richard Horton is the Lancet editor who published a former colleague, Andrew Wakefield’s thoroughly discredited 1998 MMR paper. A paper, only fully retracted by him when Wakefield was found to have been “unethical” by the General Medical Council and struck off the medical register this year. Over twenty years after it all started. In Dr Horton’s own words this year -Wakefield "was dishonest. He deceived the journal." The Lancet had done what it could to establish that the research was valid, by having it peer-reviewed. But there is a limit, he said, to what peer-review can ascertain.”
Others disagree about how obvious the mistakes in the paper were and how easy it was to find out that Dr Wakefield had a major conflict of interests.
Horton’s previous statements in 2003 “But I do not regret publishing the original Wakefield paper.”; “He [Wakefield] is a committed, engaging, and charismatic clinician and scientist.”; “His [Wakefield's] reputation unfairly in tatters”.
He was more sensible with “Medical journals are simply highly specialized newspapers. We publish what is new and newsworthy in medicine and we do our best to publish work that is true. But only time, sometimes a long time, will tell if we have chosen well...”
http://www.spiked-online.co.uk/Articles/0000000CA6F2.htm
http://briandeer.com/mmr/horton-wakefield.htm
His essay to Muir Russel was concluded as follows (but it is worth reading Appendix 5 for what he actually wrote. He mentions the Bishop.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/07/findings-muir-russell-review
What an editor seeks from a reviewer is a powerful critique of the manuscript – testing each assumption, probing every method, questioning all results, sceptically challenging interpretations and conclusions and ensuring that uncertainties are fully acknowledged, measured, and reported.
Armed with such a critique, the editors decide, and take full responsibility for deciding, whether to publish.
There is always the risk of group-think among experts which resists alternative perspectives. Editors try to reduce the risk of group-think by sending papers to different and widely dispersed reviewers, deliberately seeking or even provoking critical reviews.
Editors send manuscripts to reviewers based on a principle of confidentiality. The author expects the editor to maintain a covenant of trust between the two parties. Disclosure to a third party without the prior permission of the editor would be a serious violation of the peer review process and a breach of confidentiality.
Many who are far from the reality of the peer review process would like to believe that peer review is a firewall between truth on the one hand and error or dishonesty on the other. It is not. It is a means of sieving out evident error, currently unacceptable practices, repetition of previously published work without acknowledgement, and trivial contributions that add little to knowledge. It does not and cannot guarantee veracity. Many published papers have proved deeply flawed: many good ones have been rejected. Nor has it been efficient in identifying fraud, which has usually come to light by different routes.
However, journals, as the gatekeepers of scientific publication, have come to exert an increasing influence on the reputations of scientists, research units and universities. Many measures of academic success, promotion, tenure, grants, fame, and personal wealth depend upon journal publication. It is not surprising therefore that journals, and peer review, are the subject of constant tension and occasionally explosive controversy.
TinyCO2
Yes, I've been reading Horton's piece with great interest. He has some important points to make.
Well, OK, Horton's article may be quite interesting but it ducks the climategate issues completely.
For example
"Editors send manuscripts to reviewers based on a principle of confidentiality".
Briffa broke this rule in two ways when he wrote to 2nd reviewer Ed Cook identifying 1st reviewer Stahle and saying that Stahle had said "BUT NO GO" (email released by the Russell Review). Then he did it again in the notorious climategate email
" - Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting - to support Dave Stahle's and really as soon as you can. "
Hi, not sure of its importance but both "Order now at" links in the side bar take you to The Book Depository not Amazon.co.uk
Regards
Green Sand
Thanks. Fixed now.
Thank you Bishop for helping me across the road ^.^
Please folks I would really appreciate comments on this?
I think I just had a really good penny drop moment :) (This can take a hell of a lot of time in old peeps hehe)
I have watched videos where Prof Richard Lindzen talks about how the effect of adding CO2 to the atmosphere is not linear.
I read the article over aon WUWT by Daivid Archibald on the logarithmic effect of CO2. Today JOsh twisted my arm up my back and sent me to watch a video by Prof William Nierenberg and he talked about this logarithmic effect.... the penny finally dropped. It answers all the questions I have been asking.
It explains why temp is falling after the mid point of interglacials even though CO2 is going through the roof for 2500 years.
It explains why global temperature could fall between 1940 and 1970 even though CO2 was surging upwards.
It explains why temperature can have stalled since 1998 even though we know we humans are chucking out more CO2 than ever before.
The effect on the atmosphere of more CO2 is now almost none existant.
What a great day hehe
Is America ready to wean itself off a long-term addiction to fossil fuels? The disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has sharpened the debate about sustainable energy strategies across the developed world. John Hofmeister was for years a big player in the global oil industry. He retired as the president of Shell's American business recently but now he says he is ready to talk straight about the world's looming energy crisis. Is big oil part of the solution, or the problem?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00t8qvj/HARDtalk_John_Hofmeister_President_of_Shell_2005_to_2008/
Duration: 30 minutes
There is no energy crisis?
Natural gas from shale has hundreds of years to run, oil has at least a hundred to run, Coal has even more once we realise that carbon capture is neither possible nor needed.
Plenty of time to consider new technologies and decide which are appropriate and efficient.
Dashing for renewables right now is...er......um... words fail me :)
Dung, I think that although the logarithmic relationship has reduced the effect of CO2, I seem to remember that it is not yet negligible, and still has an effective warming contribution. This contribution is however becoming smaller with time, and hence the issue of forcings becomes even more relevant, and they are the bit we really don't understand .
Dung,
Surprisingly Hofmeister says pretty much the same as you, interesting interview.
Martyn
Surprisingly??
Humph! :)
Cumbrian Lad :)
If I remember rightly (highly improbable of course) Lindzen compared atmospheric CO2 to blackout curtains in W W II.
In order to stop light escaping from buildings (and thus giving a target to enemy bombers) thick curtains were used to achieve a blackout.
The first curtain you pull across your window cuts out about 90% of escaping light. If you add another curtain you block 90% of the remaining light.
After that there is no real benefit in adding more curtains (Or in our case more CO2 has little effect)
C Johnson
The best explanation is here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/
The comments by Lindzen I cant find atm but during this 48 minute speech by Nierenberg he does confirm it here:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2010/07/eminent-physicists-skeptical-of-agw.html. scroll to the bottom of this page for the video.
To be honest it is not an exciting video but he does confirm the logarithmic CO2 thing :)
http://ricochet.com/conversations/Manmade-Global-Warming-The-Solution
Extremely interesting concept which should be passed on to the UK Government straight away, now what was that suggestions website or did they close it down?
Basically stated if you are a true believer in AGW, 30-40% of population, then start making changes to an alternative lifestyle. Give up the car, central heating, tv and any flight travel and then in a couple of years after the changes from this percentage of population have benefitted the climate it will be plain to see for all the rest of us that this is the right path to take and we will be persuaded to join you.
As far as the Government goes how about reducing VAT to 10% on foodstuffs and goods that are low carbon rated, I'm sure that if they are convinced by the science than this is the way forward in a market economy.
They could even go as far as raising funds for wind farms through charitable donation taking into account charitable tax incentives, especially from trusts and estates. The government could set up a website showing thermometers indicating numbers of wind generators against other thermometers showing average temperature. I'm sure that all those of the belief would jump at the chance of providing for the future energy requirements of their children, they could even sponsor a blade with their name on it, to which future generations could go and observe in memorium. Just think of a future bike ride to the coast to watch Grandaddies name in 6 foot letters spinning around in the breeze, what a proud moment that would be for the younger generations.
Don Pablo
I think Barry W asked in one of the threads more in the fabric what would make the Delusion go away. Thinking that this sort of question might be something your expertise could be directed toward, may I suggest two things and you comment?
1. Delusion will go away when climate clearly doesn't do what the acolytes have been predicting. But it might, So delusion would be further fueled.
2. Delusion cannot be fought with facts. It is not fact-based, and maybe not rational either. It has the characteristics of a religion and as such, while the religious fervor continues, can only be fought by substitution of another religion or delusion (forgive me your grace for wandering into your purview).
After reading Gibbon, I concluded that a religion absolutely must be sold on "faith" not logic and that any element it contains that relies on fact or logic must be removed. This is because maybe 90% of our comrades' beliefs are inaccessible to a rational pitch but could be molded by an appeal to faith. facts clutter things up and are better left out. I suspect that this is what Goebels was getting at in his bit about repeating a lie.
It might follow that the more irrational the pitch, the quicker it takes hold - but it can't be any pitch, it has to "resonate" as today's pols are so found of saying. The lie has to resonate.
I think Number 2 is where we are. No scientist can make this go away, likely only someone high in the hierarchy - likely a politician.
What worries me is that this Delusion will be replaced by another.
This is where by uncertainty is - that a Delusion can only peter out or be replaced by another one - it is inaccessible to the "truth."
Don Pablo, my question of you is does this make any sense.
john
Dung
The logarithmic effect refers to the direct absorbtion of incoming heat from the sun at the wavelengths at which CO2 absorbs. There is another effect which is radiation at other wavelengths, which enter the atmosphere, and are then absorbed and re-emitted at wavelengths equivalent to heat. This heat is then 'trapped' under the CO2 (to put it colloquially) . The effect is small, but is a reason why increasing CO2 can produce a continuing temperature rise, despite the logarithmic drop off. The climate is after all a complex beast! What I'm saying though is that these effects are small, and don't cause the catastrophic effects predicted by the Cassandras of Climate which rely upon very poorly understood forcings to amplify the reasonably well quantified effects of CO2 itself.
Not sure about the "trapped under" bit? I remember Lindzen specifically saying that it was wrong to consider CO2 as having a "blanket effect". Instead he gave the blackout curtain analogy.
I remember reading an article about the way warmists are able to tell us that we are causing the rising levels of CO2 by burning fossil fuels.
They do this by measuring the mix of two CO2 isotopes, one containing Carbon12 and the other C13, in the atmosphere. Apparently all plants prefer the C12 isotope of CO2 so when you burn fossil fuels you release more of the C12 isotope into the atmosphere and so change the mix.
The mix is changing, there is a rising amount of C12 compared to C13 and so the finger is pointed right at us for our burning of fossil fuels!
What they completely ignore is deforestation which is going on at an alarming rate. If you remove a large part of a forest then you are preventing it from absorbing C12 CO2 from the atmosphere and so you raise the level of C12 CO2 in the atmosphere.
I dont have figures but it is clear that the change in the mix is not all down to burning fossil fuels.
I did say I used 'trapped' in a colloquial way, rather than get overly detailed!
More specifically radiation that reaches the earth is absorbed and then re-radiated at longer wavelengths, including in the CO2 absorption bands. This part of the radiation does not make it back out into space, but is in its turn absorbed by the water vapour and CO2. The more CO2, the lower altitude at which this will happen. Now it will in turn be re-emitted by the CO2, but the point is the energy is still bouncing around in the atmosphere, not having being directly radiated into space.
It is of course just one element of a complex and interdependent set of interactions and equilibria.
j ferguson
As I have noted elsewhere, while I was trained as a "Physiological Psychologist" I am very much more a physiologist interested in behavior. Long ago, I decided Freud et al were full of it. Most aberrant behavior appeared to me to have a biological basis. Witness the use of psychotropic drugs, the effects of brain lesions and countless other clearly biological effects on behavior.
Now I am not so sure.
There appears to be a class of learned aberrant behavior, perhaps more than one. One of interest is "learned helplessness.". The basic thesis is you can train animals, and by analogy, people to sit an take it, whatever it is, if you do it right. One of the first to explore this theory was Marty Seligman, who has made quite a successful career out of it. (see here)
I knew Marty Seligman while he was at Cornell, and indeed he shared laboratory space with the group I was with, so I got to see his work up close. At the time I was fairly negative about it, but over the years, I began to see his point. You can be taught to sit and take it. However, one must be very careful is making that statement. I would paraphrase Lincoln's famous statement, to "You can teach all the people to be helpless some of the time, some of the people all the time and but you can't teach all the people to be helpless all the time."
For example, Marty used beagles to train them to sit on a shock grid and howl, but they would not move to get off even if they could. I did not endear myself to him when I suggested that he try it on pit bulls instead. I might also add that even some of the beagles took a dim view of the training and "turned vicious" trying to bite their handlers. And if you know dogs, you know making a beagle do the is quite a feat. In short, Marty's theory is based on complacent subjects.
Getting to my point: You can teach some of the people to believe whatever it is what you want. There are all sorts of interesting cases, particularly the "True Believers" ready to blow themselves in the name of Allah. Another group are the extreme right and left who "know that they alone are right!" and, of course, the Green nuts who are sure that they alone recognize the eminent danger the world is in because of [fill in the blank].
You might call this cultural, but I think is is due to some of us are complacent enough to believe whatever we are taught. Such people believe and do not think. RC is full of them. On the other hand, there are a number of people, such as many of those here at BH on a regular basis, who prefer to think for ourselves.
To get to your question: I am afraid that there are many of us who would prefer to believe in place of thinking and thus would, as you put it, move from one delusion to another. The only cure is to teach them something useful. Which we are failing to do. The nutters have taken over our educational system and are train the next batch of true believers to bleat like sheep what they want. Of course there will be a few like us who will think for ourselves. But not many.
And there is no known "pill for stupidity" I know of. And if there were, it would be outlawed by the politicians in an instant. They much prefer to teach people to be helpless.
Marty, if you are reading this: You were right about at least some of the dogs -- and us.
Interesting thoughts Don Pablo. On Freud, family member spent maybe 10 years with an analyst who I met and agreed was a very smart guy - one of the top in Psychiatry at the time (late -50s.) and a genuinely good person. On the course of the treatment, I suppose as with most of these things there wasn't any real progress that you could point to.
One day, Doctor said he had read a paper that suggested the problem might be solved with exercise. Patient took up Canadian Air Force exercises and the depressions disappeared.
On the thermal alarmists, I really do worry that the next Delusion could be worse than this one.
I also think that the presence of a widespread delusion inhibits politicians that know better. Maybe they can use the Delusion to advance ends of their own - which seems the clear message of the right - that that's what the globalists have in mind.
My choice of how to look at it is that a successful politician picks his fights - actually tries to avoid them. Do you think turning this coming catastrophe nonsense around would really advance any politician's position? I know we'd like it, but at 67 I've gotten used to nonsense.
I hope, but do not expect, that it will morph into something like everyone painting their houses pink.
JeffID at the Air Vent has an excellent piece by Roddy Campbell on the apocalyptic view being a driver for folks believing in the "coming catastrophe." "We've been very naughty and we deserve it" sort of thing.
Dung and others, the logarithmic effect of CO2 (meaning that more CO2 has less and less effect) is something that the IPCC types like to keep secret.
It is hidden away in a bracket on page 140 of the AR4 (2007) report:
"(The formula used for the CO2 RF calculation in this chapter is the IPCC (1990) expression as revised in the TAR. Note that for CO2, RF increases logarithmically with mixing ratio.)"
The formulas are not given anywhere in AR4, but they are in the TAR (2001) in section 6.3.5, table 6.2.
Forcing = a log(c/c0)
where c is the CO2 concentration and a and c0 are constants.
The logarithmic response to the concentration of a greenhouse gas (such as CO2) is not an absolute law. Rather, it is a curve fitted to values which are produced from solving radiative transfer equations, with varying gas concentrations. In the case of CO2, over a reasonable range of concentrations near the current one (300 to 1000 ppmv), the radiative forcing response fits very well to a logarithm. But apparently for very low or very high concentrations, the logarithmic rule is no longer a good approximation. For CFC's, the response is linear in the concentration. And for CH4 & N2O the response is, well, messier.
See Myhre et al.'s paper "New estimates of radiative forcing due to well mixed greenhouse gases", GRL 1998. Especially Table 3 for the various functional forms.
I'm still trying to learn about these methods, so I'd appreciate any corrections or amplifications.
j ferguson
The major reason I gave up on Freud et al is that the majority of patients I got involved with while at Columbia College while taking their Abnormal Psych course were far happier being the way the were. They did not want help and they went to the shrink to have somebody to talk to.
Some do get better.
But not many.
I firmly believe that these folks can be focused, but nobody is willing to force the issue. Politicians the least of all.
Ty ty Paulm and Haroldw :)
I would like to read more about that stuff but I have 2 books on statistics arriving tomorrow so it will have to wait ^.^ .
I did note the point made by David Archibald over at WUWT that the IPCC graph showing water vapour temperature rise due to CO2 started at 288ppm thus assuming that none of the 288 ppm of CO2 had caused any water vapour feed back???
If they predict a rise of 4 degrees surely we have already had 2 degrees of that?
Must read post over at Devil's Kitchen: The Green Agenda
It's a bit scary, that.
But then, so are these.
and
Also worth reading Irish journo Phelim McAleer slam a now-dead professor
The Maurice Strong quotation is amazing, but even more stunning is that it appears to be part of his speech at the opening of the Rio Summit in 1992, which means all political leaders would have been aware of it, and can only be assumed to have acquiesed to the sentiment expressed.
Jack, can you tell me where I can verify the quotes from Maurice Strong and Timothy Wirth mate?
I first saw them on Devils Kitchen - he was quoting from Dick Puddlecote who got the quotes from Green-Agenda.com.
Doing a Google search for a fragment of text using double quotes usually works - but finds 22,600 results for this search:
most are just repeating so I have not found the original
More stuff here green-agenda.com
According to Caroline Spelman "Defra has around 90 arm's-length bodies"
I wonder if Josh could draw them?
http://www.thegwpf.org/news/1300-its-all-over-green-quangos-unsustainable.html