43 thoughts on “Michael Mann”

  1. Before he’s completely disgraced, and any chance of legacy is lost, he should establish his own dimensionless number. All scientists and engineers know the Reynolds number, the Froude number, the Prandtl number, etc., etc. I’ll even give it to him at no charge.

    The Mann number, whose value is ideally 1, but which can also take on any real or complex value, is the ratio of the answer you want to the answer indicated by the actual data (dimensions of “answer” cancel). Apply the Mann number to any measurement, and Presto! You get the answer you want.

    This does work, by the way. My own variant, the MfK number (the ratio of the right answer to the answer I got), got me all the way through engineering grad school…

  2. It has almost been as long for the Democrats to pass a budget as the last landfall of a major hurricane.

    Despite the models calling for a greater frequency of more intense storms, we know that this hasn’t happened because of global warming. Global warming is making storms less frequent and altering the natural hurricane cycle which will surely lead something bad like dead zones or the oceans having a harder time breaking down pollutants.

    I think that’s how they do it right?

    1. It has never made any sense that AGW is supposed to reduce temperature gradients and lead to more violent weather, those two outcomes being more or less mutually exclusive.

        1. Oh, great. An hour and a half of stylized fluff I’m supposed to watch, head gently lolling, as I imbibe the teachings of the Church. Give me a break. Either explain how, if you can, or take a hike.

          3. I can explain it — Francis can explain it better. (She hypothesizes a shift in atmospheric circulation patterns due to heat from the open Arctic ocean.) Most people who want to evaluate the science actually take the time to read it first. YMMV.

          6. Wrong! Hypothesis is merely a stage in scientific development. It does not become accepted truth until it accumulates evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that it is true.

          10. The reality is that, at some point, an hypothesis must be determined either to be actionable or not. Throwing out unsubstantiated conjectures and demanding that they be taken seriously until proven wrong is the path of primitive superstition, not science.

  3. Their solution for AGW today, is more tenured positions and more gummint money scrapeoffs for us like-thinkers, oh, and all you unenlightened dolts need to ki$$ our enlightened @$$e$. Their (the very same @$$monkeys) solutions to the coming Ice Age in the ’70’s was, wait for it, more tenured positions and more gummint money scrapeoffs for us like-thinkers, oh, and all you unenlightened dolts need to ki$$ our enlightened @$$e$.

    Geez, will just one of you jackwagons stand in front of me when I need to take a wicked pissah? I’ll help you deal with personal AGW, really I will.

  4. Actually if it was “right on time” this would be 2039, so we’ve actually got 27 years of steadily increasing Greenland icecap melting before we get to the peak of the “cycle”.

      1. Even more amusing how the “skeptics” look to explain everything with “cycles”, never explaining the driver of such “cycles”.

        2. Energy flows drive cycles, the same as a mass bouncing on a spring or a bell chiming. Do you actually do engineering work? Because this stuff is ubiquitous in nature, and people who actually build stuff that works have to be keenly aware of it.

          2. “And in the case of both your examples gravity determines the length of the cycle.”

            What? Are you saying a spring will not oscillate, nor a bell chime, outside a gravity well?

          5. I hate to see you flounder like this, Andrew. I think the inchoate thought you are trying to express is, where does the excitation of the oscillation come from? And, the answer is, random and pseudo-random forcing, ulitmately from the Sun, but modulated by many processes.

            A lightly damped oscillator alternatingly transforms energy from kinetic to potential forms and back again. When it is randomly driven, its amplitude takes on the form of a random walk over timelines short compared to the interval required for substantial dissipation of energy. A random walk grows as the square root of time 1-sigma. Depending on the rate of energy dissipation, the limit to amplitude achieved over eons from very small random forcing can be very large.

            This is elementary stuff from Elements of Vibration Analysis 101. It amazes me how clueless climate “scientists” are in regard to the workings of the natural world in ways that engineers take for granted every day.

          6. BTW…

            “No bart, but the size of the weight on the spring will determine the rate of the oscillation, ditto for the bell.”

            No, it doesn’t. The natural frequency of oscillation for the spring is sqrt(K/M), independent of gravity, and the bell can be modeled as a bunch of springs tied together.

            Maybe you were thinking of a pendulum. But, gravity does not force a pendulum, it merely serves as the reservoir for potential energy, to be traded with kinetic energy during the oscillation. And, what are the oceans but a complex fluid pendulum sloshing around within their basins? Ever hear of Rossby Waves?

    2. “…so we’ve actually got 27 years of steadily increasing Greenland icecap melting before we get to the peak of the “cycle”.”

      So what? So, the warmists can make hay from it for the next 27 years, even though it has no evidentiary value vis a vis the AGW debate?

        1. It depends entirely on the frequency content of your signal. When you’ve got concentrated energy at a period of about 60 years, 30 years is the worst possible.

          2. The fact remains: if you do not know the power spectral density of the process, and there is no way we can at low frequencies with any reliability at all, then you cannot know what length of data is “statistically significant.”

            We do have enough data, however, to see a significant bundle of energy in the frequency range associated with an approximately 60 year period. There are almost two full cycles evident in the data to 1900, at the point where measurements become increasingly uncertain. That argues strongly that there is a ~60 year natural cycle in temperatures. The data you link to are certainly consistent with a ~60 year cycle.

            In any case, who the hell cares about “counts” anyway? The intensities are going down, even as the ability to detect storms increases, which might well be biasing the counts up as well.

          4. Yes, and we have discussed and determined this is meaningless. Anything else in your bag o’ tricks?

          5. A chart showing increasing ACE in the North Atlantic is meaningless? I don’t think so. Nor is it obvious that ACE is the best indicator — it does not take into account the size of a storm, for example, so it cannot be proportional to true energy. Kerry Emanuel thinks a better metric is his Power Dissipation Index, which increases as the cube of the maximum sustained wind speed (at the 10-m height) integrated over the lifetime of the storm. Emanuel finds that the PDI has more than doubled for Atlantic hurricanes in the last 30 years and nearly doubled for Western Pacific Hurricanes (Nature 436, 686-688, 4 August 2005).

          6. Sure. Let’s just gin up arbitrary measures, find any which are increasing while eschewing those which don’t, and proclaim that proves the thesis.

            This is really sad.

          7. And, as I painstakingly explained, 30 years is an arbitrary interval as well. Everything you are arguing is to completely arbitrary standards across the board, with no connection to any physically meaningful metric.

          8. Lame replies. No one is “ginning” up arbitrary measures, but trying to find a true metric that indicates changes in storms. ACE has limitations.

            And 30 years is the commonly accepted interval for climatological significance — long enough that known natural fluctuations are beneath the manmade trends. No, it’s not a magical number — there is none. On the other hand, since it’s expected that now man is influencing the climate, we need to know about it as soon as possible, so 30 years seems like a reasonable compromise.

          9. 30 years is a joke, and a very bad one, when you are dealing with a process containing an at least quasi-cyclical ~60 year component. You do not know what you are talking about.

          10. “…but trying to find a true metric that indicates changes in storms” consistent with the preconcluded narrative.

            Fixed that for you.

Comments are closed.