Bishop Hill More retwardian discourse
Sep 9, 2014 Climate: Ward Matt Ridley Back in August, Bob Ward took a pop at Matt Ridley, berating him among other things for an alleged misrepresentation of the global record on drought. Matt's argument was, he claimed "grossly misleading". Much amusement was had when I flagged up the evidence that Matt had cited and Bob mumbled and shuffled before suggesting that the decline wasn't statistically significant. We determined that "grossly misleading" means "correct" in retwardian.
Today Bob is on the case again, spending his tax-funded time to berate...Matt Ridley. This time he is arguing about Matt's case that transient climate response - the amount of warming we will get in the short-term - might be as low as 1.35°C per doubling of carbon dioxide. This figure is sourced from the Lewis and Crok report on climate sensitivity.
Bob first tweeted that the 1.35°C was no more than an assumption. I pointed out to him that the figure was in fact the culmination of 50-odd pages of argument about climate sensitivity. At this point he backed down and said:
You mean 49 pages trying to justify the exclusion of any uncertainty!
So I think we must conclude that in retwardian, "assumes" has roughly the same meaning as "derived" in everyday English.
Reader Comments (29)
Problem is Bish you are talking about CO2 and increased CO2 does not and cannot cause any warming of the atmosphere.
However it does improve plant growth.
....CO2 does not and cannot cause any warming of the atmosphere.
Sep 9, 2014 at 10:39 AM Roger Clague
Roger, out of interest, where did you get that information?
Anyone who takes climate modes seriously is having a laugh.
What was the temperature of the Chinese land mass in the 1990s ? I seem to remember a lot of very slippery goings on in which data couldn't be released because it would upset Johnny Foreigner (who is apparently very useful to the chaps at the met office).
Hmmmmm.
.
You do know the saying about idiots?
Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
Bob who? I'm surprised that anyone takes anything that he says with any credulity.
Bob Ward is not a socialist or idealist, but a very dodgy little guy, like his stable mate Nicholas Stern, employed by $100 billion carbon trader Jeremy Grantham to lie about global warming for money.
Grantham wrote in his GMO investment Newsletter Q2 2010
'Global warming will be the most important investment issue for the foreseeable future'
http://www.responsible-investor.com/images/uploads/reports/1330_Campos_FTSE.pdf
The 1.35 K CO2 climate sensitivity assumes the Earth's surface emits IR as a black body yet Radiation Physics 101 shows net IR emission surface to atmosphere in main GHG bands is zero for equal surface and atmosphere temperature.
Real climate sensitivity from the OLR effect is near zero in our present atmosphere, shown by no warming for nearly 18 years. To claim 'natural variation' offsets it means natural variation has to be at least equal to the CO2 warming. Sort of puts a dampener on even moderate CO2 climate sensitivity, doesn't it?
Maybe the explanation to the behavior of Bob and many others like him can be explained by the findings of this study: http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/p7536_readings/kruger_dunning.pdf
Is this proof that a drowning Bob will clutch at a straw man.
"trying to justify the exclusion of any uncertainty"
I thought that was Bob's job!
Hans K Johnsen
This is off topic, but it describes how the Kruger Dunning effect can deceive individuals into believing they really understand climate science and can get very heated with 'idiots' who disagree with them.
Dr Harold Shipman was eventually caught because he tried to embezzle nearly £400,00 from the (LAWYER) daughter of one of his victims by forging her mother's will two days before he murdered her.
'Following her mother's burial Ms. Woodruff returned to her home, where she received a troubling phone call from solicitors. They claimed to have a copy of Ms. Grundy's will.
A solicitor herself, Angela's own firm had always handled her mother's affairs - her firm held the original document lodged in 1986. The moment she saw the badly typed, poorly worded paper, Angela Woodruff knew it was a fake. It left 386,000 pounds to Dr. Shipman.
"My mother was a meticulously tidy person," she later told the Shipman trial, 'the thought of her signing a document which is so badly typed didn't make any sense. The signature looked strange, it looked too big. The concept of Mum signing a document leaving everything to her doctor was unbelievable.'
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/shipman/invest_10.html
The reason for Shipman's supernatural stupidity and arrogance was that he had been reported to the GMC for being a drug addict and forging prescriptions for himself. The police had been informed about the high death rate in his surgery and in particular the high number of cremations of elderly female patients. Nothing was done
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman#Detection
It's amazing that despite nearly 18 years no statistically-significant lower atmospheric warming with c. 17% increase on CO2 concentration, there are still so many people who believe that CO2 climate sensitivity is significantly greater than zero. If I were a more suspicious person, I would consider that to be a classical indication of the Dunning-Kruger effect: http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/p7536_readings/kruger_dunning.pdf
I would be shocked if 2 x co² gets anywhere near 1.35°C rise.
Please use spellcheck when posting on this subject in order to ensure that
the "W" in retwardian is not accidently omitted.
Are we talking of a Ward of caught?
Anthony banned Sky Dragons. So you let them come here? How’s the skeptical PR effort coming along? Badly, that's how. At this point they also amount to overt trolls, likely funded by the usual alarmist bigwigs to make skeptical blogs easy to ridicule, which indeed they still are.
Who are you calling a Skydragon Nik?
turnedoutnice
I think that Nik must be referring to the first comment...
@Jimmy: but the empirical data suggest that the 1st comment's assertion may be correct!
"The 1.35 K CO2 climate sensitivity assumes the Earth's surface emits IR as a black body yet Radiation Physics 101 shows net IR emission surface to atmosphere in main GHG bands is zero for equal surface and atmosphere temperature."
(turnedoutnice )
Well of course the earth's surface doesn't emit as a black body; there aren't any. It's a theoretical construct. Then they use the Stefan- Boltzmann equation for gases, which is even more ludicrous. But they are real fizzycysts, honest.
Thanks, ESmiff - appreciated that one....
"Retwardian" is clearly a typo. Not quite sure how to fix the spelling......
The climate kooks and paid schills like Bob are desperate to keep the faithful in line for their fleecing.
Think of the bets Ward's puppet master has made with his insider crony status that a reasonable outcome on climate would put at risk.
Without a crisis, people might question why Lord Grantahm and his pals ned so many billions in subsidized energy programs that do not work.
Without a crisis Ward's fat gig becomes an obvious bit cynical deceit and manipulation.
Yet the climate does not seem to want to cooperate with Grantham or his dancing organ monkey at all.
@Allan M: the use of the S-B equation for gases in the two-stream approximation assumes a grey body atmosphewre. It isn't a grey body, being semi transparent to IR. Furthermore, the partial emissivity at any wavelength varies according to whether that plane it is at a heterogeneous boundary or is in the gas phase. (the variation is by a factor of ~2 for CO2).
It's a perpetual motion machine of the second kind: 40% increased energy over reality.
Bob 'fast fingers ' Ward is not actual tax payer funded , Grantahm who signs his pay cheques as paid shrill is the private individual Bob is running PR for in order to help them get richer still, Bob merely hides out at a university who in turn for a big bag of cash have allowed part of one their buildings to be used and they reputation to be trashed , while Bob and gang do no research nor teaching at the university.
Why anyone should continue to pay Bob to be a paid shrill given how bad he is at it , is a good question but at least in this case its not joe public that picking up his bills.
KNR,
Hope that was deliberate :-)
I suspect we ARE picking up the retward's bills though, many times over.
Ok greenhouse gases don't cause warming. In fact they retard cooling :) Using Stefan-Boltzmann with guesstimated emissivities usually also produces reasonable approximations to the rather more intricate quantum mechanics but the amount of warming that CO2 causes is finally dependent on uncertain feedbacks. Of course there are also legitimate queries about natural variation, CO2 longevity, overlapping spectra and whether CO2 was ever a driver of climate in the past, that have been ignored but none of the guesses were testable until we compared the modeled assumptions with reality: That's what really told everyone that models were injected with too much CO2 pessimism and not enough natural variation. Most climate scientists (the pause deniers) prefer to just ignore the obvious conclusion but at some point surely it will become too obvious to mainstream journalists that most climate sensationalism is just made up and even contradictory. That point really should have been reached very early on but the trendiness of being faux-green, the paucity of science education among the chattering classes, faith in government-funded science and an inexplicable middle-class lefty angst against consumerism, industry, growth and the necessary fossil fuels that drive it seem to have drowned out any and all common sense in otherwise clever people.
Sorry JamesG, no professional scientist or engineer taught standard physics accepts the claimed physics in the IPCC climate modelling. The reason is conservation of energy, a 40% increase over reality and you can't do that.
turnedoutnice: Well that's a sweeping statement you made; have you seen the eco-nuttery on the IMechE site lately? I think you have just put out a variation of the 'no true Scotsman' argument. There's a lot in the physics that doesn't hold up to close scrutiny but there is nothing to be gained from nitpicking at the circular reasoning behind the inputs; it's the comparison of reality to the outputs that is important.
Sep 10, 2014 at 9:20 AM | Unregistered CommenterJamesG
I usually try to avoid getting too deep into the CO2 debate ('cos sooner or later it does me 'ead in) but the rest I agree with unreservedly.
AGW has been a political (small 'p') exercse from the very beginning and the only reason it's been allowed to get as far as it has is that there are too many people in positions of power and influence who either don't have the science or for whom their interpretation of the science is plausible enough to convince the layman.
Your confluence of trendiness, scientific illiteracy, and midlle-class bien-pensant angst sums up the situation perfectly.