Discussion > So where are Salby and Darwall wrong .... precisely?
Please tell me what is wrong with being wrong in science?
So you think you are doing science too? Dude, you took an out of the ass statement by some guy at the end of a WUWT comment thread (that nobody even bothered to refute despite being obviously and dramatically wrong) and spewed it out on a Salby comment thread to real scientists. Considering what you said, that really is a breakthrough moment for the denier community. Anders gave you a 'huh', I gave you a few moment of my time because this is truly truly a new low for science denialism. Seriously, you are making the denialist community look really bad. Then you claim you couldn't find the reference, something that took me thirty seconds to find. It is a unique level of delusion.
The only thing that makes you look really good is that people like Salby and Spencer have actual reputations to diminish. Lucky for you there is no reputation to diminish. Kudos for you for admitting your statement has ZERO basis in reality, something that is also very seldom seen in science. You may now return to your very important scientific work of analyzing Lamb's 'graph', lol.
Thomas Lee Elifritz
One of the problems with 13C isotope fractionation is that it cannot be relied upon as constant, E.Huxlei reporting as varying by ~7‰.
http://epic.awi.de/3786/1/Rie2000b.pdf
michael hart
Wow! I really have tickled your nerd-bone, haven’t I, Tommy? For your elucidation, WUWT was not where I saw (or at least, thought I saw) the figures, though I cannot find where I had seen – or, more likely, mis-seen – them. As for me “doing science”, where have I made that claim? Oh – you assumed it from my statement, with no basis of fact involved. How very scientific. Let me enlighten you a little: I am not a scientist, but like to think that I can have scientific thoughts. Alas, experience has shown me that I am not always successful in that endeavour, though I do try – and I do not belittle others who make similar attempts, even if they can be even less successful.
However, do not let that stop your head-spinning or mouth-frothing about me – it is so flattering that someone should take any interest in me!
Radical Rodent
BTW, nice to see you have laid your stall out for us to view. Now, tell me quite what I and others on this site are denying.
Radical Rodent
RR
at this point DNFTT any further, this one has a serious problem interacting with other humans at a civilised level.
SandyS
There are some seriously damaged unhappy people around. A sort of weird mixture of simmering hatred, borderline Asperger's, chronic anger, and OCD.
I know it's tempting - like baiting a dangerous dog safely behind a high fence - but time to stop provoking this victim of whatever it's a victim of.
Martin A
Martin, I look forward to reading it. Why not post the equations as well?
Meanwhile all other salbyites could perhaps explain how they personally get past the "well, duh!"
Raff
RR
Sandy got in ahead of me.
Trolls are bad enough; foul-mouthed trolls are worse.
Bite the bullet and let's try to stay on topic.
Raff
I'm sorry if you think we are discussing the "wrong" question.
My thread, my title: "Where are Salby and Darwall wrong?" That is what we are (or should be) discussing. You're welcome to start your own thread if you don't like mine!
Mike Jackson
Meh… you’re right. I was enjoying the baiting – and the wholly unwarranted attention! Mind you, rational discussion on this subject did stop a while back.
Radical Rodent
RR:
Mind you, rational discussion on this subject did stop a while back.
And that was the purpose. For that reason it may be wrong to FTT but useful to TATT - in other words, talking about these strange phenomena can do good for next time. Here's my take.
Someone was far from pleased by the contentful and polite discussion that broke out here two days ago - exemplified for me by the contributions of Gavin Cawley and John Shade. So the thread wreckers went into operation, starting with an ineffectual stab at John, then, when that didn't work, savaging RR completely needlessly, with the potty-mouthed sequel:
And to further illuminate how clueless the denier clique is here …
Then in the early hours of this morning the factually wrong and offensive
Dude, you took an out of the ass statement by some guy at the end of a WUWT comment thread (that nobody even bothered to refute despite being obviously and dramatically wrong) and spewed it out on a Salby comment thread to real scientists. Considering what you said, that really is a breakthrough moment for the denier community.
Not for the first time, TL Elifritz, I declare that 'denier', with its clear allusion to Holocaust deniers, is hate speech on the same level as 'nigger'. We repudiate it as the tactics of the sewer. I don't think you care because your aim is to render Bishop Hill ugly and absurd. You won't succeed.
Richard Drake
That was my point, really, RD; give the guy enough rope for him to hang himself with – which he happily did. When the more lucid alarmists read posts like this, they will see the “deniers” acting calmly and rationally (even if not always correct), and see the more rabid amongst their numbers for what they are. As I have oft repeated, this is precisely how I came to leave the dark side, and now walk in the light.
Now, call me “nigger”, and see how I react – other than to giggle at the shocked faces of those around. There was a mantra from my school days of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” It was valid then, and is valid, now; offence is not something that can be given, it can only be taken – though, in our greedy society, many will grab whatever is on offer.
Radical Rodent
Really appreciate Gavin Cawley's efforts on this thread - lucid & concise.
Szilard
RR: I thought you did very well here, with the desired effect of TLE making the best use of considerable rope. But I think you misunderstand if you think the counterattack on 'denier' is motivated primarily by the offence it gives to us. As I said in May it's 10% about its incredibly negative impact on the climate debate and 90% about the gross insult it is to the victims of a terrible crime. Any anger we feel about it should primarily be about the latter. But I accept these things are quite hard to separate in practice.
Richard Drake
Szilard: Agreed. And Cawley's warning to sceptics in the penultimate paragraph here is spot on.
Richard Drake
Richard, it's a bit rich for Cawley or anyone else to caution sceptics (however politely) about not swallowing everything Salby says because it might make said sceptics look foolish in the long run. We've had a pretty long run of being force fed the cAGW dogma, and anyone recommending reading something at that website has a serious credibility issue in my eyes. Here the subject can be discussed without serious objections being deleted.
michael hart
michael: Yep, context matters and the two aspects you question matter a lot. SkS is the biggest blackspot in the Cawley CV for me. The correctness of Salby's science is not something I'm prepared to endorse without study I can't afford right now. However you neglected to quote our visitor and that's something we all need to do far more. I was referring especially to what he wrote here:
Clinging on to climate skeptic arguments that are clearly wrong does neither side of the debate any good, all it does is waste time and make the skeptic side of the debate appear to be ill-informed. I would suggest you follow Fred Singers advice and drop this one, it is one of the canards he mentions in his American Thinker article Climate Deniers Are Giving Us Skeptics a Bad Name (his choice of words, not mine).
It's very unusual for a 'consensus' guy to say something like this. Even if there's more to Salby than Cawley thinks I can't fault these sentiments. Unless of course Singer's comments on the CO2 cycle cannot be fairly applied to Salby. (As a side issue I'd much prefer Singer didn't use denier in way he did in his 2012 article. But I can live with that for now. I may say more about it in another thread.)
Richard Drake
Szilard
I agree. Cawley's input was very much appeciated, certainly by me even though I was at odds with some of his arguments and some of his conclusions but if that isn't what discussion is about then what is its purpose.
michael hart
It's all too easy for people to try to close down discussion that is going in a direction they don't like by using that argument, isn't it? I'm not suggesting that Cawley was necessarily doing that but the temptation is there and "you've no business to be saying that" is certainly a tactic that has been used by warmists in the past.
RR
We have had 116 posts over four days — uninterrupted! which must be some kind of record. It's hardly surprising we've wandered off topic a bit. I think we've probably gone about as far as we can. We can leave it to the trolls to talk past each other for a bit before they realise we've gone!
Mike Jackson
Mike Jackson:
michael hart
It's all too easy for people to try to close down discussion that is going in a direction they don't like by using that argument, isn't it?
If it's a choice between Cawley doing it that way - which I agree with you he wasn't anyway - and TLE doing it with 'denier' I think we all know which is better. Because of such ugly contributions the 116 posts doesn't impress me. We've had loads of mediocre discussions in this area of BH with massive numbers of posts. But, as I said already, this one was really good for a while, not least RR being willing to admit where she or he had got something wrong, right away. Something to encourage, eh Mike? :)
Richard Drake
Richard
I fear you are confusing me with someone who gives a damn whether you are impressed or not. All I said was that 116 posts over 5 days without any other thread intervening must be some kind of record.
Most discussions on most blogs tend to be mediocre because human nature tends to the mediocre.
I thought it was a useful exercise of which the highlight, in my opinion, was Gavin Cawley's and ATTP's willingness to take part.
For you the highlight was Radical Rodent apologising for being human.
Each to his own, I suppose.
Mike Jackson
No confusion my end but you seem to be. I'd already said that Gavin Cawley's interaction with John Shade was a highlight for me, at 11:24 AM. Radical Rodent's attitude was another. I know you got the allusion at the end of my last comment and you have to pretend you didn't. All it takes is "I got it wrong" and we're done.
Richard Drake
And Cawley's warning to sceptics in the penultimate paragraph here is spot on.
Aug 23, 2014 at 12:40 PM | Registered CommenterRichard Drake
I have just explained how we can know that he is incorrect, I have pointed out that he was unaware of the existing work on this topic and pointed out where his mathematical error lies. Clinging on to climate skeptic arguments that are clearly wrong does neither side of the debate any good, all it does is waste time and make the skeptic side of the debate appear to be ill-informed. I would suggest you follow Fred Singers advice and drop this one,
Aug 21, 2014 at 9:44 AM | Unregistered CommenterGavin Cawley
No Richard, it's not spot on. It's acquiescing in the AGW Faithfull's intense desire to shut down this aspect of debate.
It might be OK if we were all agreed that that Salby is completely wrong in what he said. If you take what is posted on SkS as settling the question you'll certanly agree with that. But it's premature for the AGW Faithful to declare victory simply because they have convinced each other that Salby is "talking through his ass" (to quote one of them from this thread).
Salby is an atmospheric physicist of significant stature with an undeniable track record of research so it would be quite surprising if everything he had said in his presentations on CO₂ and climate was rubbish. It would be specially surprising if he made elementary errors in time series analysis - a subject on which (clearly from his NASA contributions and publications) he is clearly an authority.
My observation, in the cases I have looked at, is that Salby's detractors have assumed he has said something different from what he actually said and they have then proceded to ridicule what they assume he said - or, in Gavin Cawley's case, explain politely why they think it is wrong. My impression is that they have been over-eager to determine that they have found the error in whatever it is that they think it was Salby said. For example Gavin Cawley, in this present thread, said:
The mathematical flaw in Salby's argument is pretty easy to see, for anyone with a good grasp of calculus and statistics. Salby notes there is a correlation between temperature and the growth rate of atmospheric CO2. However, correlations are completely insensitive to constant offsets in the signals on which they are computed. The long term rise in atmospheric CO2 is due to the mean value of the growth rate, which is a constant offset. This means that the correlation he has observed is mathematically incapable of explaining any of the long term rise in atmospheric CO2.
It's obviously correct, from the definition of correlation, that the correlation between two time series is independent of their mean values.
"This means that the correlation he has observed is mathematically incapable of explaining any of the long term rise in atmospheric CO2"
If you follow carefully what Salby says about the time derivative of atmos CO₂ being proportional to global temperature (so that atmos CO₂ is proportional to the time integral of global temperature) it explains perfectly a possible mechanism for the long term rise in atmospheric CO₂. He gives graphs computed from publicly available data that gives a clear and simple explanation of a possible mechanism for the rise in CO₂ during past decades as being the result of natural emissions responding to increased global temperature. It's not impossible I have missed a point somewhere but I have not yet succeeded in seeing how what Cawley says about correlations in any way invalidates Salby's result.
The AGW believers have put in huge amounts of effort into rubbishing Salby. Why have the Dragonslayers not received the same treatment? Because the Slayers are obvious crackpots. That can't be said for Salby, which is why he inspires such fear and loathing.
Martin A
Martin, really you are overdoing it although I get the feeling you are sincere. There is no fear and loathing. There probably is a great deal of puzzlement that someone so clearly capable should also be capable of being so wrong. Just like people are probably puzzled at how David Evans', someone clearly not stupid, can be so silly.
Mike, I gave you an answer to your question. It is "well, duh!"
Raff
WUWT was not where I saw (or at least, thought I saw) the figures, though I cannot find where I had seen – or, more likely, mis-seen – them.
I searched it thoroughly, that was the SINGULAR reference to 4000 ppm at ~20 kya. Nobody in their right mind would suggest such a thing, but perhaps a rabid WUWT true believer at an end of a long WUWT comment thread. It's ... nuts.
You don't appear to even believe in IR active bending modes in greenhouse gasses. Feel free to confess your ignorance. At the very least it's entertaining. Hint ; the 'previous glaciation' was not in the Ordovician. That's a new denier nuttiness standard, I'll grant you that. It's nice to see you've bailed so quickly, any other nutty ideas you want to bail out on?
Thomas Lee Elifritz
I declare that 'denier', with its clear allusion to Holocaust deniers, is hate speech on the same level as 'nigger'.
I declare (correctly) that there are no hate speech laws in the US. So FU. See you in British court, denier.
Thomas Lee Elifritz
Raff - I rewatched (and re-read the transcript) of the part of Salby's Hamburg presentation where he talks about the relation between current CO₂ levels and temperature. I tried to see how Gavin Cawley's correct observation that the cross correlation function between two time series is independent of their expected (average) values but I could not see how that invalidates what Salby said on that matter. Maybe that's just a mental block on my part.
I think that some people who say that what Salby says is nonsense on this matter may not have understood exactly what it is that he is saying. Fundamentally, I think he's saying "if you do xxx with the data, you get yyy" which in principle can be verified by anybody.
I'll try to write up a description of a system involving the following:
- A large bath, the volume of water within which, in litres, represents the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ in ppmv.
- A large flow of water from the bathtaps (which are regulated by an assistant to be opened proportional to the room temperature in °C) and which represent CO₂ released by the biosphere, the ocean etc)
- A large flow of water via the plughole (which represents exit of CO₂ from the atmosphere to the biosphere, the ocean etc).
- A small flow of water from a hosepipe controlled by another assistant, whose flow rate in litres per hour represents the human-caused CO₂ release.
I think that the bathtub model is an exact analogue of the system that Salby describes - ie it is described by the same equations.
Unless I've got it all wrong, it shows how it is perfectly possible for the atmospheric CO₂ to be rising at 50% of the rate that human caused CO₂ is being added, and yet with the level of atmospheric CO₂ having almost nothing to do with rate at which the human caused CO₂ is being added.
(The 50% is just a remarkable coincidence. I confess that even I have always found the 50% almost convincing - until I remind myself that coincidences don't constitute evidence unless you have some detailed knowledge of the probabilities involved.)
I've got a fullish weekend planned so I'm not sure just how long it will be before I can post it. And if I find some flaw in my understanding, it might mean the thing has to be scrapped.