Bishop Hill The deflation of the IPCC
Apr 20, 2011 Climate: Surface I thought this was interesting - a blogger called DR Tucker describes his conversion from scepticism to alarmism:
I began reading the report with a skeptical eye, but by the time I concluded I could not find anything to justify my skepticism. The report presented an airtight case that the planet’s temperature has increased dramatically (“Eleven of the last twelve years [1995-2006] rank among the twelve warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature [since 1850]”)
If one recalls Doug Keenan's WSJ article, it is absolutely clear that we don't even know if the Earth's warming is statistically significant, let alone that it has "increased dramatically". Far from being airtight, the IPCC case looks like a sad old football, left outside over the winter, battered by ice and snow, and now rather deflated.
Reader Comments (43)
There's always one.
Perhaps "DR Tucker" underwent his Damascene conversion when he received his diploma from the Hyperthermalist's Communication Skills Creative Writing Program.
What a dipstick.
If this spiel is to be believed he hasn't enough scepticism to get out of a wet paper bag.
My! if his opinion was so easily swayed by the fact less feast at the I.P.Cress.C then it wasn't much of a mindset to change !.
This guy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Tucker
Otherwise its a fake.
There is hope:-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1378483/Do-global-warming-fatigue-Just-25-Britons-think-climate-change-important-environmental-issue.html
I was a sceptic from the start, even before learning of the Roman and Medieval warm periods and Little Ice Age. Since then, I have constantly looked at "warmist" arguements - without reading AR4 - and have never seen anything which comes close to refuting the sceptical view. As for the Chairman of IPCC - "The Flakey Fakir" ..........
What I cannot understand is how people can be so gullible, but perhaps this explains it - follow the money. "in 1991 Dr. Tucker founded GeoHazards International (GHI)"
What a twerp. He writes:
That's a very crappy reason to be skeptical. Even Al Gore could be right by accident. Scientific questions have a basic root in facts rather than political opinions (although the latter can sway the theories for some time), so being a climate sceptic because that's what the right believes is really stupid. Reading the IPCC report, and only the IPCC report apparently, and deciding on that basis alone to be a consensus-believer, is almost equally stupid...
A whois search on this domain name says it was registered by a Timothy King. Could this possibly be a PR drone?
I looked up www.frumforum.com in case anyone wants to double check.
This clumsy writing and clumsy logic, is yet another warmists attempt to reverse reality.
Many sceptics have come to their position after being believers, myself included. I read AR4 and could see it was a scam. This common story is a very damaging narrative for the believers.
Hence we have this anti-reality website created, to give the opposite impression, and create a contradictory talking point.
Fortunately we have public polls, which show that as people gain more knowledge, they become more sceptical.
Re: Latimer
No this guy:
Note: HE IS NOT A DOCTOR . That is his initials
@J
I find the reasons given for becoming skeptical of the CAGW viewpoint interesting in general.
In my own case, this certainly started out for what you might call the "wrong" reasons: I saw a comment on RealClimate rebutting a comment on Climate Audit and decided to follow it through to see just what kind of self-interested idiots the acknowledged experts were having to deal with.
Surprisingly, the RealClimate rebuttal looked weak and inaccurate, so I dug into the exchanges on both sides. What I saw was that, almost without exception, the RealClimate comments were an obvious distortion of the points being made.
And the points being made at Climate Audit were couched in the most neutral terms; very matter of fact, very specific with references, and with a policy against vitriolic and offensive comments that wasn't being applied on the RealClimate side of the divide. (This was pre-Climategate, there may have been some recent relaxation in the ClimateAudit side).
So there was very clear and obvious evidence that RealClimate (and associated supporters) were willing to relax the truth and fling any old mud, rather than engage in an honest fashion. And this was something I could see out in the open as a layman with no special experience or qualification.
Asking myself the question "Why do they need to lie like this?" was the trigger to attempt to follow the technical arguments, and that at least allowed me to see that genuinely well qualified and disinterested experts expressed grave doubt, uncertainty and outright criticism.
And so to the HSI; and so to chasing references for myself' and so to sticking statistical reference books on my Christmas list; and so to skepticism, and a position of "not proven by a *long* way, convince me".
This is purely political spiel - as was recently noted (and withdrawn) by Andy Revkin, scientifically literate folk tend to be on the sceptical side of this - so Mr Tucker clearly doesn't qualify.
@Latimer: 'This guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Tucker?'
Don't think so. Our man is D R Tucker, (NOT Dr) who I guess gets off on being mistaken for Dr.
His piece in FrumForum seems to be based on the fact - as he sees it - that all sceptics are nasty right wing libertarians, while all the good warmists, having only the planet's good at heart, are big-hearted social democrats.
Methinks that D R Tucker spent a lot of time at school having his name mis-spelled by the nasties in the senior years and it has affected his mind. Dick 'ead!
Update:
'D. R. Tucker is the operator of the Massachusetts-based political blogs Notes from D.R. and The Urban Right. He is also a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in the Boston Herald, Human Events Online and BookerRising.com. Mr. Tucker was the host/producer of The Notes on Blog Talk Radio from August 2009 to June 2010.'
Tucker shows all the hallmarks of a dilettante trying on some new clothes. I would not take him seriously. For example take this point that moved him:
"...that sea levels have undergone a dramatic and disturbing increase since the 1960s (“Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 [1.3 to 2.3]mm per year over 1961 to 2003 and at an average rate of about 3.1 [2.4 to 3.8]mm per year from 1993 to 2003”) "
He says this without apparently noticing the step change in rate, or realising that from 1993 to 2003 the method of measurement had changed (to using satellites).
He doesn't strike me as a person too bothered with the underlying technicalities.
His agenda is clear. He's decided he would like to use the word "horror" more often and get blog hits.
@mrsean2k - I agree, those are very good reasons for becoming sceptical. If you look at loads of comments on sites like this (e.g. This at Judith Curry's site), you will see many people with similar histories - mine certainly is not unlike yours. Amazing how often RealClimate crops up as a counter-example. The key point is: we are not motivated by politics first and foremost, as this Tucker bloke said he had been.
The smallest false claims can start the route to questioning if they overlap with some personal experience or knowledge. The CAGW camp bemoan their poor track-record of communicating the dire consequences of current developed country lifestyles when in fact it is often those communications which set alarm bells ringing.
"Starving polar bears eat their young (as a result of AGW)" got me when it is well known that male polar bears do should the opportunity arise. The fragrant Louise Gray in the Telegraph is one of the best sources of such easily seen-through propaganda. Today we had this about the cricket season lengthening. Another author, same propaganda mistake. There must be many cricket fans who will spot the false claim to start down the route which will take them eventually to Climate Audit, WUWT and BH enlightenment.
This is a pure propaganda piece.
The Bish is right. Take out all the adjectives used by this person and there is nothing left.
'I was shocked by the health horrors of the climate ...' Give me a break. No one, I mean no one talked about 'health' and climate until recently, when these people realized that 1) all the emotional eco-wrecking ball tactics sourced from the IPCC (the Himalayan melting, the rainforest disappearing, the Africans starving and the Australia continent drying) actually came from guess work or activist pamphlets 2) people care about health issues more than 'the climate' and therefore 'reframing' could be a help.
This is the usual leftists playing games, throwing sand in our eyes for their billion dollar delusions.
10:10 goebbels imagery did not work, so now they push converted lambs to the scene.
This is not to say I am against windmills, not at all: Let the USSA and Germany fully invest in windmills, it is time others in the world have a chance to produce some wealth at the expense of the leftists in charge in the ussa.
I find the UHI windy nights narrative interesting..
A side remark on this would be the detrmination of Prof Jones on what constitutes a windy night.
Is it in any way correlated to the amount of air moved around in a sites geomtrical area in a 24h time span? Or is it just , you know, just a tossup decision made with a measurement at 12o'clock.
the "average"(hahaha) average UHI site its internal dynamics and temperature distribution with and without wind is interesting as well. How does that evolve trendy wise over 5 decennia? a little wind in London takes a while (6h? 12h? to shift in cool wind from the See, or Basingstoke)
I am sure Jones all irrefutably analysed it, in China, on his candy trip.
After all, that's where all the standard UHI sites are,hahaha, and all the Time Series Analysis experts, hohoho.
"here, a cocktail of numbers , R code, and stats jargon nobody knows what it means really. I have irrefutably cluster sampled it with the jack knife parametric bootstrap method while keeping all unit root tests at bay"
see mght be spelled sea , I do not f-ing care, since educashion educashion educashion has been infested with old leftisto women over the years.
close down e..e..e and maybe we get informed in a proper way
not only is the temp determination an adulterated scam and there is no increase seen by any scientific method at all,
no ,
an eventual temperature increase, if there were any, would be beneficial to humankind.
so far for the essenshul sevisse of decrying the injustice and pointing the alarm to us, by BBC overpaid tw-ts, at self set salaries.
nuclear offers a panoply of promises for improvement ,innovation, efficiency improvements by a factor 10 minimum (with breeding, thorium etc)
Let our red rats make the world in Washington with windmills, hooray.
A windmll has some purpose and value in well determined locations. eg behind the huge behind of a dimmocrat professional politician.
new energies will win the day before the century is over.
For that we need more engineers and scientists working on projects. Military/nasa style projects.
No projects dreamt up by liberal retards, to park their buddies in and charge overtime.
there is no discussion that a windmill generates energy btw (at 5-10 times the cost of a nuke)
a PV panel at 20-50 times the cost of a nuke.
This extra "cost" translates in destroying jobs and putting lefto coordinators and regulators in well paid self set salary quangoes.
A windmill generates electricity, and , like in the case of Spain, a battery of windmills on some forlorn sierra mountain edges can generate a lot, as the sierras at as funnels.
Probably other places in the world offer similar (texas, and the thames estuary)
However this 5times more expensive only "benefit" evaporates when wind electricity passes the 20% mark.
that's when the electricity infrastructure , which is star oriented, cannot accomodate anymore for piccgybacked wind.
that's when the bills will drop in for changing an electricity network to allow for wind only.
One needs to build energy stores then to allow wind electricity to buffer and still provide in windstill periods (30% of the time)
This is when one will find out that wind energy is not 5-10 times more expensive but rather 20-100 times more expensive than nuclear.
So please, let germany go for it.
please.
If I were a Greek or a Portugese I would know where to put my chips.
I use the style Dr too - to denote debtor.
From the same blog post:
"You can fool all the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time."
And then there is D.R. Tucker.
Hansen, Gore, Manson, Tucker.............next up, Wayne Rooney?
This is the kind of individual for whom you could slip in footnotes referencing 'Dora the Explorer, Nickelodeon network, March 17 2004' and so forth and count on him never looking.
Either that or he's been paid off.
The Skeptic to Warmer Conversion Story always appeals to second hand information.
There is never any personal experiential event.
Obviously, there is a reason for this.
Andrew
Newbies!
After the FAR, I was asked to develop a QA'd methodolgy for reporting CO2 emissions (we burned a lot of coal, a lot). "Why would you want to do that?", I asked the Enviro. Manager. I was subsequently shown a bunch of stuff that shocked me. "How could we have screwed up so badly?!", I moaned, "Why haven't I heard of this before?", I asked, "When did this start happening?", I puzzled... and started looking around for real information which eventually lead to SEPP and John Daly. I went from wanting to quit the corp out of shame and disgust to "You know this is all BS, don't you?" in about about a month. Nobody wanted to hear, "You know this is all BS" except for a very few of the brightest.
When MBH98 came out it was a real shocker but then I started looking at the error margins (something I was attempting to wrap my mind around at the time) and knew there was something bogus. I could not get error margins that good with 1,000 times more data concentrated 1,000 times more. At the time John Daly was trying to get someone to get the data. Sigh.
Then along came Steve McIntyre.
DR Tucker is either a liar or a fool.
the uhi windy nights argument is going to pop up at any convenient moment.
The libtardoes know it is difficult to formulate an argument against it which can be packed in 3 words soundbites that can be wooped out by pommaded beaus on an educational yoof program
totally enjoyed the BBC radio4 Bryan Cox persiflage yesterday, btw.
good fun.
Brian is the queen's astrologist. a bit like SPN is her pippetrist.
why an astrologist btw ?come to think why a pippetrist ?? why a queen ???
Reminds me of Rupert whateverhisnameis who made the "Meet the Climate Sceptics" 'documentary' for the unspeakable BBC.
Rupert: I traveled the world (with Lord Monckton) having a great old time and listening carefully to the arguments for and against AGW.
Then I totted up the numbers of 'peer reviewed' papers for and against and noticed that there were more for than against - so that was it then - sorted!
He could have saved the BBC a ton of wonga by not bothering to make the film - a bit of counting would have done the trick.
Who would think that IPCC was the only source of information on alleged global warming?
Suppose someone said, "I was skeptical, but I talked to Michael Mann. He's an expert scientist and I'm just an average person. He told me that the science was settled, so now I believe in global warming."
Mr. Tucker has written the equivalent. He read a bunch of hysteria put out by dedicated propagandists. He says he was convinced. Ohhhhkayyy. Fine by me. Anyone who makes up his mind on the basis of what he should know is one-sided, hysterical propaganda is clearly not much of a thinker.
I guess the "worse than we thought" meme hasn't worked too well.
Nor did: "500 peer reviewed papers," even if they were "robust."
Nor the hokey stick
Nor "Antarctica is hot if you massage the data round and round"
Nor "the science is settled"
Nor "we only have 15 months to act"
Nor "2500 UN scientists agree"
Nor "the animal of the week is dying off"
Nor "the NH polar cap is melting--don't you dare look below the equator"
Now, we've arrived at "I WAS a sceptic, but I've seen the error of my ways and have come to Jonesus."
What next? I'm betting on "Prince Charles announces he's a sceptic!" That should catapult the AGW chaps to victory at last! Desperate times call for desperate measures.
It's evident from his writing that Tucker was never a skeptic in any logical or scientific sense. He was a political "skeptic" because he saw it as the alignment of his party.
D R must be a very unusual guy. He's the first i've heard of to go from skeptic to believer.
Looking at D R Tucker's Twitter page:
http://twitter.com/#!/drtucker
and his friendster page
http://drtucker.blog.friendster.com/
gives me a bad taste in the mouth. This guy is a phony, methinks
"Who moved the Stone?" all over again: http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/stone.htm
FrumForum is the creation of David Frum, an "effete policy wonk who lacks firm principles". More on Frum here.
he cld hv called it "fromfrum" ?
shorter.
for attracting ze germans there is the forum VRUMVORUM
don't want to disturb ze germans btw.
They are building and misinvesting in their windmills and pv panels..shhhh..hush..let them..bless
I am one of many who have progressed from mild acceptance of the claims of the 'scientists' via the MSM to being very sceptical of the CAGW phantasmagora. My conversion began when I dared ask a perfectly civil question on a Grauniad CiF string about standards pertinent to the collection of max and min land temps; I was immediately savaged and denounced as a troll in the employ of WUWT by what I have come to regard as one of George Monbiot's useful idiots. I duly had a look at WUWT and was immediately hooked on the science offered for all readers there, the civilised moderation standards and tone and, above all, by the Anthony Watts and volunteers' work on assessing the recording station and the data they produce.
I now regard the IPCC as being so deeply flawed that it should be disbanded and I have not much more regard for the UEA and its CRU. In my own country (NZ) NIWA, which has historic colleagial ties with the UEA, has had to discard it's official temp record after high court action but are still attempting to alter historic records and claim validity for recording sites that have changed utterly since the temp data was first recorded.
DR Tucker's reported experience suggests he has cognitive problems at the very least - he certainly has a credibility problem.