Bishop Hill A case of little substance
Mar 20, 2013 Climate: sensitivity There are a lot of people venting about David Rose's article in the Mail on Sunday and I keep pressing them to be clear about whether Rose has got anything of substance wrong. As far as I can see, the only person who has made any kind of a case is James Annan.
Today it's Myles Allen's turn. Writing in the pages of the Guardian he says this:
...I find David [Rose] quoting me in the Mail on Sunday as saying that "until recently he believed that the world might be on course for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than five degrees this century" and "adding that warming is likely to be significantly lower".
I have argued for years that the odds on a high climate sensitivity are largely irrelevant to the warming we should expect over the coming century, and I certainly never suggested to David that my assessment of the odds on any particular level of warming by 2100 had changed. Sure, current rates of warming in the highest-response models are looking iffy, for reasons that may or may not be relevant to their forecasts for 2100, but at the rate emissions are rising, you don't need a particularly high climate response to get to four degrees by 2100 and five degrees not long thereafter. The only time I mentioned five degrees in our conversation was in the context of the long-term response to doubling CO2.
Myles has previously issued a press release telling us that warming could be as high as 11°C (see p4 here) a position he has repeated on other occasions (see transcript here):
What we found – here are the two just sort of accepted consensus range of uncertainty in the warming expected if, for example, one were to double pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels–that’s a level of carbon dioxide which is expected within the next few decades– would be between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Centigrade...Anyway, that is the consensus up until now. What we found is these models being fed back to us from our participants show– by just varying the things within the ranges of uncertainty, varying certain aspects of the model within the range of uncertainty– these models are giving us warmings to that same increasing carbon dioxide, ranging to up to over 10 degrees Centigrade.
I'm therefore not sure he is protesting much. Like so many others, this looks as though it's being seen to be rude to the sceptic rather than actually making a case of any substance.
Bishop Hill
Ann Widdecombe has more in the Express.
Reader Comments (48)
What Allen is actually miffed about is that the interview didn't go his own way. Tip for Myles, if you dont want to be quoted dont say it! What do you expect journalists to do? Otherwise dont be interviewed! And another thing, dont bring silly props onto Newsnight, any experienced interviewee would have told you they rarely work! On another matter Myles, given your turnaround I would trust more the information given to me by (certain) bloggers and David Whitehouse, since you mention him in your article. How many times has Whitehouse written something, been moaned at, and then proven entirely right. More than you I suspect.
It seems it is necessary to go for higher and higher scary numbers as the actual weather fails to cooperate. It would be interesting to know whether current weather was seen as the result of X degrees of warming or if it is acknowledged to be stalled. It would be interesting to know what is the desired global temp or the correct CO2 ppm. Do we need to return to 280ppm and thereby a degree of cooling? Anybody going to sign up to that? What is wrong with the warming we have had so far?
Are Myles (and Richard Betts) really serious about the steep rises in temp over a short period which they have been touting? Really? Or are those just scary numbers in support of a weakening position?
It's really quite beautiful the curve that the rhetoric is making as it approaches a limit, the true? sensitivity.
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All you need to know about Myles Allen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1Mv8xWHU44
(Oh, and his departments annual research income is 93 million pounds, so strong an appreciation of which side his bread is buttered is only to be expected).
Myles Allen's position is quite clear.
1. We are at war with Eurasia.
2. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
3. Our ally is Eurasia.
4. Our ally has always been Eurasia.
5. We are at war with Eurasia.
I think the problem is that certain bloggers and commentators are actually way ahead of Myles and his ilk in terms of science. Sounds strange I know but when was the last time you read something from Myles and his ilk that took the science forward? Then go read the GWPF or Climate Audit or Bishop Hill. Myles is always playing catch up?
I can hear the sound of toys hitting the floor next to the pram.
His reality is different from mine. Within his, the dice roll his way, even on television. Within it, the computer modellers are as gods commanding the very skies. Within it, Guardian readers are a set distinct from all others, and in need of more careful more nuanced briefings because of their delicate sensitivities and influential circles. And of course within it, climate outreach specialists like his good self are heroic figures battling on behalf of humanity with complexities of great import and with simplicities of even greater. In mine, none of these things apply. Quite the reverse
Kim, you're on fire. And if that isn't due to the red hot sensitivity of licensed climatologists blow me down. And if the hot air of accumulated climatologists that just blew me down isn't due to etc. Truth you little beauty.
But that's so 2012. The winds of change, my dear boy, aka events. Or whatever.
While I have no doubt that tweaking all the knobs to "max" on a GCM will produce a very scary sensitivity number, the resulting increased discrepancy with observation should indicate that these are not, in fact, the settings which Mother Nature has chosen.
Allen may well be right that increasing emissions will bring unwelcome results, but I find the "4 degrees by 2100" to be implausible. Even the IPCC has a midpoint value for TCR -- more appropriate for a 2100 forecast than ECS -- of something like 1.8 K, so it would require a pCO2 over 1000 ppmv for a 4 degree increase.
From the link given by the Bish:
Thanks Bish and MartinA
So Myles says doubling of CO2 would give 11 degrees one day and 2 degrees another day, and on another day he moans about a bad press and misrepresentation!
Rich and priceless.
Discounting people quoting temperatures in Fahrenheit, eleven (!) degrees is the "scariest" number I can recall being wielded like a pillow filled with duck-down. Is there a league table somewhere to see who holds the record?
Martin A: Do you know the details of the experiment? I assume it's just another failed computer model that he conflates with an experiment. We need some proper science, not GIGO.
Martin A: I should read more carefully. His global experiment is more computer modelling. Not what I was taught an experiment to be. I guess these professors are prime examples of the dumbing down of education - or he wilfully knows he is being deceptive - take your pick.
As others have pointed out this is just a mixture of two conflicting pressures for people like Dr. Allen.
1. How to keep the funding flowing by still predicting enough CAGW ( and 11 K has to be outlier even in that category doesn't it??)
While at the same time
2. Gradually winding back ones previous predictions slowly enough to fit reality and thus claim eventually that you never did believe in that CAGW daftness in the first place.
The trouble is that if you make bold statements and then deny them as such, it is less than a day before the Bish has your earlier quotes up on The Hill. This aspect of the Web is increasingly frustrating for the likes of alarmists, Green organisations, and politicians'
I have said for a couple of years or so that as the leading players in AGW gradually developed exit strategies ( they had to notice it wasn't warming eventually ) - the foot soldiers would go on with the story until the ice appeared over the horizon.
It just staggers me that these people still seem to think that they are modelling the Earth's climate. A whole generation of scientists have been told CO2 is a major problem and that they can model its effects with a supercomputer - problem is neither of these things is anything like proven.
As Richard Feynman told us - the easiest person for a scientist to fool is him/her self.
Miles Allen who cofounded CliamtePrediction.net, seemed content for the mass media to parade the initial results from their simulations:
"Climateprediction.net, one of the biggest climate predictions ever run, says global temperatures could rise by 11C, melting the ice caps."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4210000/newsid_4210700/4210725.stm
Some would say outlandish predictions
We even have his opinion on people suing due to damage through climate change
"Who will pay for the damaging consequences of climate change?"
http://www.climateprediction.net/science/pubs/Allen&Lord.pdf
What about the public getting their research money back for some of the iffy science? I am sure there are many candidates throughout climate science.
I have argued for years that the odds on a high climate sensitivity are largely irrelevant to the warming we should expect over the coming century,
In that case why doesn't Myles Allen try and meet sceptics half-way by arguing that the only predictions from climate models using low values for climate sensitivity should be taken seriously? If the predicted temperatures are still too high will that be because what he considers to be a low value for climate sensitivity is also still to high, or because the models have other serious flaws, or both?
All sorts of wonderful things went on with climateprediction.net
For example
http://climateaudit.org/2006/04/18/earths-climate-crashes-in-2013/
' by 2100' which is 'usefully' long time away which allows Allen to claim its always 'going ' to happen no matter what does , until by the time there is no more 'going ' time left Allen will be long dead.
This 2100 idea is being pushed hard has a way to 'cover' for years of temperatures failing to match the 'doom predictions' being spouted.
Even better should temperatures drop but then recovery in any way that also can be claimed to fit into the 2100 pattern , so even a decrease can be sold has 'proof' in the tails you lose head I win , world of AGW supporters .
The obsession with attacking David Rose and the Mail seems odd. I'm not sure if these have all been mentioned already, but Carbon Brief has had a go and so has climate scientist Richard P Allan, who seems to think highly enough of the BadAstronomy rant to give it a link.
What about the Express, which has published at least 4 sceptical stories this week-
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/385006/Proof-David-Bellamy-is-right-to-be-global-warming-sceptic
http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/peter-hill/385222/Met-office-results-won-t-change-Government-policy
http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/ann-widdecombe/385446/Even-scientists-are-cooling-on-climate-change
http://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/384989/Eco-taxes-are-nonsense-if-the-earth-isn-t-warming
These mostly focus on the warming slow-down, plus a bit of the expensive green policies.
Maybe Dr Myles Allan is still using James Hansen's 1988 predictions Scenario A
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/20/how-well-did-hansen-1988-do/#more-82273
and adding a bit more steepness beyond 2010 to get to 11C by 2100?
Maybe he should look at this 1979 prediction of falling temperatures from the beginning of this Century to get a dose of realism.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/1979-before-the-hockey-team-destroyed-climate-science/
I would go for the 1979 predictions rather than Myles Allen and James Hansen
When I see Myles Allen's department getting £93million of research funding I am confirmed in my belief that Osborne has a long way to go before the excess fat is taken out of public expenditure.
Well, for anyone who has worked in normal science or engineering, such misinterpretation of what was said is understandable.
One of the many strange features of "Climate Science™ " is that its practitioners seem to see no distinction between computer models and reality. To the extent that they describe running a computer program with different values of input parameters as "experiments".
What I find intriguing about Myles Allen is that it clearly became very clear to him a long, long time ago that someone as altogether erudite, altogether wise and altogether well connected as him, bolstered by the certainties of his upbringing and his education, could simply never be wrong. After all, someone so well connected, so thoughtful and so self-evidently reasonable, to say nothing of so jolly nice, must, by definition, always be right.
I look forward with a degree of only slightly malicious anticipation to seeing his hitherto precisely executed quadrille falter until, dishevelled and disbelieving, he collapses in a very un-Allen-like heap.
May be sooner than he thinks.
Agouts, you are unfair to the noble Dr Allen. In due time when the real truth emerges he will be found to have been on the right side all along. Whichever it is.
Four degrees of warming would most likely require 2^4 increase in CO2. Even with today's rate of emissions increase, I don't see how global atmospheric CO2 can increase by 16x over industrial levels. It would require an increase from 300ppm to 4800ppm. Today we see about 400ppm of atmospheric CO2. I do not believe there is any possible way to get 4400ppm of atmospheric CO2 rise over the next 85 or so years. This assumes you get 1 degree of temperature rise per doubling of CO2 and that feedback is negligible (ignoring recent evidence that feedback to CO2 increase may be negative).
We might well see another degree of temperature rise to match climate in the MWP but I doubt it. For about the past 3000 years, each warm period has topped out a little cooler than the one before and each cooling has bottomed a little cooler than the one before.
Beautifully put, Agouts and Rhoda.
To me (an aged product of NZ state schools which, to be fair, always encouraged curiosity and problem-solving)
Myles Allen is a cardboard facsimile of the worst kind of upper class, over-educated twit who has always had little trouble confusing himself in public.
Allen argues in The Guardian that the upper bound for ECS is not that important anyway. He and Dave Frame wrote in Science mag an article entitled "Call off the quest", reproduced as pdf here
Mar 20, 2013 at 5:31 PM | Roy
"I have argued for years that the odds on a high climate sensitivity are largely irrelevant to the warming we should expect over the coming century,
In that case why doesn't Myles Allen try and meet sceptics half-way by arguing that the only predictions from climate models using low values for climate sensitivity should be taken seriously?"
Yes I had the same thought - I was under the impression that sensitivity to CO2 was the "holy grail" of climate science in order to establish CO2 as the "thermostat" for the climate. Now it seems not.
Allen's real problem is that the Greens have get overused to having a press which does little more than reproduce without question any rubbish the Greens push out on AGW . So he simply is not used to any challenge, so can only react by attacking no matter what the facts .
Well has time goes on he better get used to it, has public interest drains away ,partly thanks to the very tricks Allen and pals get up to , he is going to see more of this type of challenge in the press. So for his own good, perhaps he should stick to 'true believer' news sources like the Guardian where 'friendly ' coverage is ensured.
timheyes -
Allen specifically uses the phrase "holy grail" in the pdf I linked above
@kim
One word:</>Millikan
And if the ECS were zero? What would you then say, Dr Allen?
Climate models ramp up the positive feedback and appear to disregard the negatives such as clouds, rain, volcanic ash et al.
The CO2 level prior to the increase was 256ppm and is now 390ppm....about a 52% rise. So what is the temp increase over the latter part of the 20th century?...0.5C. So for a doubling that would equate to about 1C, in line with the rational view that factors in the logarithmic nature of CO2 created warmth.
Myles: " but it may not exist and turns out not to be very useful if you do find it. Time to call off the quest"
Has he been reading my comments?
Ann Widdecombe's column has those definitive 'ouch' words for CAGW priests and priestesses that they've been dreading...
From the link supplied by Bishop above, (update note).
.
Ann Widdecombe's comments about Fiona Bruce has forever tainted my view of Antiques Roadshow
I noted over at James' empty blog, some hand wringing. Annan has a point that Rose should correct the one sentence about climate sensitivity. It's probably a minor point, but worth correcting anyway just to be polite.
The usual suspects are there including BBD (affectionately known as Blah Blah Duh at Judith's) who strangely cautions people: "Given what Rose is doing at the moment, it would be helpful if everybody was as clear as humanly possible. Especially in comments at BH." Is there some UK based fear of Bish as a fearsome shaper of opinion. Is BBD some kind of minister of propaganda for their "side"?
He has never said anything that showed any expertise at all in science.
Congratulations to Bish for inspiring fear but hopefully not loathing.
What a superb article by Widdecombe. Not only far smarter than Fiona Bruce, much better looking too. At least that's the way things seem this bright morning. Rejoice.
Annan, Allen and all the rest have a major problem. Credibility and trust are easily destroyed, very difficult to rebuild.
Luckily for them, few people and even fewer politicians, have noticed. Even fewer care two hoots. But, ultimately, those who purvey policy driven 'evidence' for the benefit of the big landowners, the carbon traders, the bankers and the politicians, will be marginalised and lose their huge grants of money stolen from taxpayers.
There are only so many times people will see the old fashioned grocer with his thumb on the scales, watering the milk, picking maggots out of the raisins; before they take their business elsewhere.
Sure, legal action and appropriate jail sentences would be lovely but that won't happen. Too big to fail. But, sooner or later all the alarmist charlatans will be quietly edged out.
In the mean time, I just wonder how they sleep at night.
I must give credit where it is due to Ann Widdecombe. Previously, if ever I had the remotest desire to vote Tory, I just lay back and thought of Widdecombe ....... and the desire immediately evaporated. Maybe it is the fact that she has left Parliament which is responsible ; )
Here are those NOES on that snowy night at Westminster in October 2008:
Scroll down here to see all the voters: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm081028/debtext/81028-0021.htm#0810291400061
How few they were! As that well-worn phrase goes, what an indictment of our system. That vote revealed a vulnerability to well-organised lobbying of a narrowly-targeted kind in the UK by such as Friends of the Earth, and of a broadly targeted kind by such as the IPCC.
Based on what? Speculations about CO2 as a major driver of the climate system, a role it has never displayed in the past, nor to my view, in the present. But speculations whose political potential was spotted in the 1980s and later amplified via the ingenious structures of the IPCC creating a clear example of positive feedback: the politicking leading to more suitable research leading to more politicking etc.
Yep, Widdicombe and Davies were "no" voters, as their subsequent statements have made clear.
I have a lot of time for Davies. He absolutely trashed Murdoch jnr during the phone-hacking hearings. and while everyone else waffled on for hours, he nailed the lies with just a few questions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpxfcapLBqk
Does it then disappear up its own asymptote? Or does the consensus become a singularity?
Myles Allen's addiction to computer modelling and simulations led to him becoming the consultant for a computer game released in November 2010, called "The Fate of the World"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8101281/Climate-change-game-launched.html
"Fate of the World is a dramatic global strategy game that puts all our futures in your hands. The game features a dramatic set of scenarios based on the latest science covering the next 200 years. You must manage a balancing act of protecting the Earth's resources and climate versus the needs of an ever-growing world population, who are demanding ever more food, power, and living space. Will you help the whole planet or will you be an agent of destruction?"
Check out http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/playing_climate_games.html
"The latest science" was from Dr Allen. The game's producers were quite pleased to have him on-board, saying:
"Dr Myles Allen, who provided the climate model, pushed us to make sure we included methane as well as CO2, but he did so for game play reasons as well as scientific ones. He pointed out that if we included methane we could include a lot of exciting/scary geo-engineering technologies. That opened up a new set of features for players: who wouldn’t want to be able to risk plunging the Earth into an Ice Age, or cause floods of biblical proportions?"
Allen is a Lead Author on AR5, WG1, Chapter 10: Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional.
In 2003 Allen started his distributed computing program at Climate Prediction.net whereby interested volunteers could download software onto their domestic computers and run climate simulations, with the results passed back to the project. The claim was that with tens of thousands of computers contributing their idle time, the number of model runs would be vastly increased compared to current practice. That's where the 11 degrees came from.
The project originally started with the BBC in the Climate Change Experiment led by Oxford University with several partners including the UK Met Office, the BBC, the Open University and Reading University. It was beset with problems and the BBC doesn't say much about it now.
In 2007, Myles Allen surprised people when he said in an interview that "The Green movement has hijacked the issue of climate change. It is ludicrous to suggest the only way to deal with the problem is to start micro managing everyone, which is what environmentalists seem to want to do."
However, he was actually receiving funding at the time from WWF, for the "Seasonal Attribution Project”, a Climateprediction sub-project. This was in order to try to determine the extent to which extreme weather events are attributable to human-induced global warming.
That was his first attempt at blaming the millennium floods on global warming. Maybe he was angry because his house got flooded. So out of a then 235 year record of rainfall in the UK, which showed a long term, virtually zero trend for precipitation, he picked out one autumn of higher than expected rainfall and said he could prove it was down to human CO2 emissions.
He also claimed that the 2003 European heat wave could be attributed to anthropogenic CO2 emissions and was at the time interested in the insurance industry:
This was his message in a BBC interview in 2003: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2910017.stm
"The vast numbers affected by the effects of climate change, such as flooding, drought and forest fires, mean that potentially people, organisations and even countries could be seeking compensation for the damage caused. "It's not a question we could stand up and survive in a court of law at the moment, but it's the sort of question we should be working towards scientifically," Myles Allen, a physicist at Oxford University, UK, told the BBC World Service's Discovery programme.”
"Some of it might be down to things you'd have trouble suing - like the Sun - so you obviously need to work how particularly human influence has contributed to the overall change in risk," the scientist, who has worked with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said." "But once you've done that, then we as scientists can essentially hand the problem over to the lawyers, for them to assess whether the change in risk is enough for the courts to decide that a settlement could be made."
Thanks, John Shade for that Hansard link. I had once found it and had remembered that Ann Widdecombe was a 'Noes' teller, but could never find it again.
She was I think the only MP from the whole of the SouthEast to be unconvinced by the 'evidence'. That is apart from the Lords Select Committee on the Economics of Climate Change (Lawson et al) three years earlier who criticised the not only the economic policies but the IPCC scientific process itself as a flawed process- 'We can see no justification for an IPCC procedure which strikes us as opening the way for climate science and economics to be determined, at least in part, by political requirements rather than by the evidence. Sound science cannot emerge from an unsound process (para 111).' The Commons summarily ignored or rejected all the recommendations of the Lords Report.
I am pleased also to see Graham Stringer absent from the voting list.
As far as I know, this is the first time that Ann Widdecombe has spoken out about her views, and unequivocal they are too. A rare breed, a bit like that other politico stalwart Ruth Lea, as here from 2006 bravely stating her opinion, again in no uncertain terms.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2937837/Personal-view-The-idea-everyone-agrees-on-climate-change-is-a-fallacy.html
Printed T-shirt from ShotDeadInTheHead "Politicians - putting the N in cuts"
At the moment there are so many articles on this site which touch upon the issue of climate sensitivity.
I consider AGW proponents' stance on climate sensitivity to be one of the more disengenuous areas of climate science. Unfortunately, little honesty is being displayed. The reality is that until we know all about natural variation and its bounds, it is not possible to assess climate sensitivity. I consider that to be an irrefutable fact. It is also important to appreciate that natural variation is a two way street; it can warm, it can cool, it just depends upon the natural factors involved and the climatic response to these natural factors.
Since we neither know all there is to know about natural variation, nor its bounds, we are not in a position to assess climate sensitivity and therefore any figure put forward is just a guess. It is not even impossible that adding more CO2 triggers negative feedbacks which make net sensitivity below zero, ie., some negative figure. I doubt that is the case, but it remains a possibility.
IF climatescientist were being more honest, they would acknowledge that we do not know how large climate sensitivity is and it could be any figure between about -2degC to say plus 7degC. We just do not know, nor are we in a position to make a stab at it since the required high resolution data simply does not exist.
That said, we can get some feel for climate sensitivity, namely no matter how large climate sensitivity is we know that it is smaller than the bounds of natural variation! Why do I say that? For a couple of reasons;
First we know that natural variation has at least equalled any climate sensitivity these past 17 years. Natural variation has been able to cancel out the warming effects of climate sensitivity and this explains why there has been no warming these past 17 years.
Second, natural variation can be even more powerful than the above. Consider the period 1940 to 1955. During this time there was a steady rise of CO2 emissions and yet there was global cooling, which according to Hadcrut4, was some 0.3degC (or thereabouts). Indeed, there is a cooling of 0.3degC right through to about 1975 notwithstanding some 35 years worth of increasing CO2 levels. Thus, during this period (of some 35 years), natural variation was so powerful that it not simply cancelled out the warming effect of any CO2 climate sensitivity but was so powerful that it was in addition able to drive temperatures downwards.
This clearly demonstrates that natural variation can not simply be equal to climate sensitivity but can over power it to such a degree that significant downward temperatures can be driven by the forcings of natural variation.
If one were to really cherry pick to see extremes of natural variation one could look at the cooling between say 1947 and 1951 where there is about 0.8degC of cooling.
Now I realise that this is less than perfect, but it does demonstrate that if a low figure for climate sensitivity is chosen then the bounds of forcings due to natural variation can also be low. But if a high figure is chosen for climate sensitivity, it follows that the bounds of forcings due to natural variation must also be high (since we have seen examples where climate sensitivity has been more than overcome).
Thus in summary, what climate scientists need to do is to consider how large the forcings from natural variation would be if climate sensitivity is say 5degC per doubling so as to account for the temperaure changes seen during the period 1940 to 1975. This needs to be done wich each figure they propose as being the possible figure for climate sensitiveity.
Finally, this leads to the resultant problem. if you assert a high figure for climate sensitivity given that that leads to a correspondingly high figure for the bounds of natural variation, it becomes immediately apparent that natural variation can fully explains the observed late 1970s to late 1990s warming. It is no longer the position that the only explanation for that warming is warming brought about by CO2 emissions.
Mar 20, 2013 at 5:34 PM | clivere
http://climateaudit.org/2006/04/18/earths-climate-crashes-in-2013/
thanks for that link :-) what an amazing thread, gob smacked !! (2006 & yet the same sh*t today, amazing)
flavour - "oh come on, a random sampling of posts here reveals it to be the sort of Yahoo board Republicans, Free Republic readers, CEI/Cato types, etc, it’s really hilarious you dopes are trying to hide this fact underneath statistical pseudo-science."
.
ps - bender advised any new CA commentator/lurker to read all the blog before making assumptions , which I try to do (from 2009 approx)
then CG1 appeared & never got round to finishing the exercise (just to much to read, wears you out at times, how do you do it Bish).
interesting to read SM early posts with no comments tho to see how far & influental he has become.