…of Climaquiddick.
I’m struggling to say something polite about this. By way of an illustration, can you imagine the reaction if a scientist reported in the safety literature that there was a critical flaw in the design of a nuclear power station, but told policymakers that everything was fine? Do the committee really think it’s fine to hide important information from policymakers so long as you report it in the literature?
Astonishing.
Or it should be astonishing. Unfortunately, it’s become increasingly difficult to be astonished at these power mongers.
Mr. Waddington, nobody is seriously trying to get fusion working. Not with enough resources, anyway.
Tokamak? Forget it. Doesn’t work, can’t work except in a unit even bigger than the 10-story building size currently being used for testing. And even if it does work it will create even more radioactive waste than a fission plant. Focus or polywell might work but have utterly pathetic funding levels.
Of course, there are quite a lot of other carbon-neutral (or better) approaches to alternative energy that might work but also don’t have any funding. OTEC (which might actually remove CO2 because as a side effect it brings nutrient-rich bottom water to the surface), wave power, algae-based biodiesel are just some of them. Wave power and OTEC would both have beneficial effects on the environment; wave might well reduce coastal erosion, OTEC as above plus (if used enough) reducing the severity of hurricanes. And both of these work. Wave power units have been built, and a pilot OTEC plant (a few dozen kilowatts) was built in the 1930s!
Instead of working on these, the greens would have us build ground solar and wind power plants, which will never be economic for reasons connected with basic physics. Both are high-maintenance, capital-intensive, grossly unreliable and have truly terrible power density and thus will be extremely obtrusive; wind turbines in particular actually harm the environment, by killing birds and bats. One might well ask what the motives are of people who want us to pursue these two, while ignoring much better solutions.
I’ve left out one that is IMHO the best solution of all. High cost, but incredibly high return. Given which blog I’m writing this on, guess what that is?
Casey has pretty much summed up the problems with global warming research and AGW advocacy. I think the issue with 70s era global cooling is something of a red herring, that wasn’t an accepted prediction on the same scale that AGW currently is and the modelers are a bit more experienced now (also, it’s almost certain that no model currently used would predict global cooling, if only because the modelers have fit the model to the past we experienced), but the rest hits on the mark.
The problem remains that the consequences of a false conclusion are dire. I will not play Precautionary Principle with human society and the economy. The risks of great harm are too high to go with a bad risk management strategy.
Jiminator – actually, you’ve answered my question. For most of the people here (Paul Breed excepted) there is no set of evidence that would convince them global warming is real. In other words, it’s not a rational decision, it’s a decision based on faith.
I was going to walk to the park today, but I think in Mr. Gerrib’s honor I’ll drive.
Face it gentlemen, changing a true AGW believers mind is like convincing true believers that crystals, DON’T really have “powers”, astrology is not a “real” force in their lives or that the earth is not a “living, breathing organism that we need to cherish and protect”, like a child or a puppy.
You can’t change their minds. It’s continually amazing to me, but the wilder the belief, the firmer the believer is stuck to it usually.
To summarize
Chris G.:What evidence would convince you that global warming is real?
Almost Everyone: Evidence that is not tainted with shoddy data sets and mishandled data manipulation.
Chris G.: In other words, no evidence will convince you.
Chris L. – If you persist in claiming all evidence is shoddy then there is no evidence that will convince you. Rejecting all facts is a refusal to make a logical decision.
For most of the people here (Paul Breed excepted) there is no set of evidence that would convince them global warming is real.
Chris G, please stop with the condescending idiocy.
If you persist in claiming all evidence is shoddy then there is no evidence that will convince you.
Then it is good that we don’t claim all evidence is shoddy. You merely need to look in this thread.
What’s an example of non-shoddy evidence? For starters, a strong signal. Global temperature becomes 10C higher in 2050, CO2 levels double current (with solid connections to human activity say like CO2 increase tracking global GDP), and sea levels have risen by 10 meters. I’m pretty sure we’d agree that there was global warming then and it was caused by man. We don’t have such a strong signal now.
That’s the bit that you seem to ignore, Chris G. You are asking us to buy a pig in a poke and claiming there’s solid evidence that it is a pig. The problem is that the evidence isn’t solid.
If you persist in claiming all evidence is shoddy then there is no evidence that will convince you.
A logical non-sequitur. And it speaks volumes about your attitude that the science is settled.
“For most of the people here (Paul Breed excepted) there is no set of evidence that would convince them global warming is real.”
The other way to look at that is that there is “no evidence that would convince us that global warming is real”. That’s right, the evidence does not exist.
No response to Harry, Chris? Your insistence that the data sets are trustworthy in the face of Harry’s comments is as pathetic as a Japanese person after VJ-Day who refused to accept that Hirohito wasn’t divine.
I’d like to point out that there’s a little bit of talking at cross purposes going on here. When we (that is, most of us here) say that the evidence for global warming is poor to nonexistent, we mean two things: the evidence for recent global warming is poor, and also that the evidence for anthropogenic global warming is therefore at least as bad. We aren’t saying that climate change has never occurred, or that it can’t.
I don’t think you’ll find anyone on this blog who believes that the Earth’s climate hasn’t changed in the past twenty thousand years. Right now we’re in an interglacial era, and the changes within the past ten thousand years from purely natural causes have been — as near as we can tell from current methods — at least as large as the changes claimed for the past century.
Even if global warming has occurred in the the past century — and it might have! — the causes are still unknown, given that similar changes are known to have happened in the past without human intervention.
And here’s the kicker: according to at least one of the techniques used to infer temperatures over the past thousand years — “dendroclimatology” — there has been no rise in temperature in the past fifty years. That’s what the “hide the decline” scandal was all about. The researchers deliberately omitted data that didn’t support their favored hypothesis, and substituted data from a different, possibly tainted source. Even if the substituted data were known to be 100% trustworthy and accurate, this would be drylabbing — do this in class and you’d be kicked out for cheating.
When you try to argue in a media that requires reading with a person that has reading comprehension problems, this is what you end up with:
For most of the people here (Paul Breed excepted) there is no set of evidence that would convince them global warming is real. In other words, it’s not a rational decision, it’s a decision based on faith.
Get that? We’re not the rational people. He just painted with a broadbrush an assumption that can not be backed up with facts. Yet, it’s our decisions that are based on faith. Psychologist call this projection.
Chris Gerrib wrote: I may regret asking this, but what would you consider to be acceptable evidence of global warming?
Presuming you mean catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW), rather than a transient warming phase due to the Earth’s natural cycles, then any observation that verifies a unique/unambiguous prediction of the theory (i.e. any evidence that would allow verification/falsification via the Scientific Method).
Observations of a ‘hot spot’ in the equatorial troposphere may go some way to achieving this although my understanding is that current measurements appear to falsify, rather than verify, the theory.
Chris G.,
Since this blog is usually devoted to subjects that involve science and technology, it tends to attract people who are interested in those subjects. Such people tend to also have backgrounds in science and technology. In other words, they are rational beings who tend to believe in things like evolution, the germ theory of illness, and a heliocentric universe (the part our solar system occupies anyway). They are scientists and engineers, not knuckle dragging cavemen.
If these people have a problem with the way the data has been collected and handled, it just might be because they have some familiarity with how such thing are supposed to be done. Concepts like maintaining data integrity and being open about the processes you used to work with that data (so that others can reproduce your results) are
not right wing talking points. They are part of the scientific method.
While I prefer not to blow my own horn, I will note that I’ve received a couple “pats on the back” from my last post, yet I find it …interesting… that M. Gerrib doesn’t even acknowledge my post. His first response is to Jiminator’s rather flip comment. In fact, he seems to dote on Jiminator’s posts, while ignoring other, more substantiative remarks.
…Is it too soon to call this habit “denial?” 🙂
What is truly sad is that true skeptics (those who refuse to affirm or deny without proof) have been frequently ignored in this debate.
I (again) cite Jerry Pournelle, who has observed that what we truly need now is a Bayesian analysis to determine the value of knowledge with respect to possible effect of AGW. This argument runs parallel to Bjorn Lomborg’s “Skeptical Environmentalist,” wherein the possible benefits of global warming are balanced against the possible costs.
Chris g, above you suggested that Hansen’s predictions panned out. When you include the data up to about 2009 instead of cutting it off in 1998 like your link did, only scenaio C is close to correct. C was based on halting all future increases in CO2 production, which did not happen. His predictions were wrong.
You later claim that the 2008 sea ice max is lower than the 1979 minimum. This is just flat wrong.
The periodic nature of that last linked graph should give you pause.
Can you tell me why the total adjustment for time of observation in UHCN data has a linear trend for the 20th century with a slope 3 times the linear trendline for the raw data? The tobs adjustment data neatly follows a quadratic fit with R-squared .97. Why would that be the case? I took the UHCN v2 data and threw it in excel to come up with these values. I exported what i could to google docs. I artifically added 520 to the adjustments to put it on the chart in a simple way… but the data is included in the link if you want to check it.
I find it deeply suspicious that their adjustments served to decrease average temperatures, but add warming, and in an extremely consistent year to year fashion, with the largest size of the downward ajustment serving to remove the warm period in the 30’s. Without adjusting, we have yet to hit as high a peak as 1931. Again, USHCN data, because GISS uses USHCN adjusted values.