You can’t trust Popular Mechanics. They are part of THE Conspiracy, as is clear by their piece demolishing the Truthers.
gahrie
I wonder why Al Gore has suddenly cancelled his appearance, with no explanation, in Copenhagen?
David K.
I wonder why gahrie is so keyed in to Al Gore’s schedule? Secret crush maybe?
gahrie
Well..I write less about Al Gore than you do Sarah Palin…..
David K.
I bring up Sarah Palin when she is the subject at hand, or directly relevant. You bring up Al Gore because this article proves that you are, as always, wrong about something, and are trying to draw attention elsewhere.
You know, I don’t have a vested interest in the question of global warming, I don’t wear a badge that says “Global warming skeptic” or “Global warming true believer”, so I think my self-esteem will remain intact whichever result is true. However, I am concerned about the future of my children, which actually is on a badge…
As regards the East Anglian climate scientists attempting to subvert the peer review process, that’s very bad as everyone from Nate Silver to Sean Hannity to Gahrie has pointed out. What almost no one has discussed is the actual paper they were attempting to subvert: Soon and Baliunias’ 2003 submission to Climate Research that argued that the sun, and not CO2, was responsible for global warming. The sun.
Ever heard of Soon and Baliunias? Know what their research focus is? Are they meteorologists, geologists, or some similar field that would have knowledge about things like atmospheric concentrations of CO2? Of course they aren’t. What are they? Wait for it. They’reastrophysicists.
They study solar phenomena. They wouldn’t inherently know anything more than your average dentist about issues like CO2 concentration in global ice floes. And the Gahries of the world base their (dangerous) conclusion that AGW is fradulent on the (obviously self-motivated) argument from a couple of astrophysicists that the sun, and not CO2, is warming the earth. Cue the church lady: Isn’t that conveeeeeeeenient?
What’s worse, Baliunas at least, has been caught being dishonest about the alleged recent cooling of the planet,, which assertion the satellite temperature record linked on her Wikipedia page clearly shows to be false.
In conclusion, while I remain a skeptic, it is howlingly outrageous – and frankly dangerous – to endorse dismissive observations about the implications of CO2 concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere – in favor of solar-based explanations – based on the observations of astrophysicists like Soon and Baliunias, whose vested interest in a solar-based explanation is obvious and whose truthiness is well-documented.
Gahrie, your skepticism regarding AGW is the right way to proceed in science. Your trust in the contrary viewpoints of not entirely honest, solar-pushing astrophysicists, not so much. The money quote in the Discover article:
More generally, scientists may judge that the public can’t understand all the complexities of the data, so they provide a filtered version that they view as truthful, and limit “amateur” access to “confusing” data that might be “misleading.”
If I had to guess, I’d say that quote probably pretty well explains the East Anglia scandal, with some additional comments that Jones et al empirically behaved quite poorly.
Jazz
In fact, from a distance, it seems strange to me that conservatives allow an empirically-not-entirely-honest individual like Baliunas to enter this conversation at all. Wasn’t ours the political philosophy of skepticism? Didn’t we decry those pinko commie liberals who just thought that everyone is nice and upstanding and why can’t we all just get along?
And now, on a topic as vital to our future as the potential for AGW, we’re just gonna shut our eyes and put our heads in the sand, and trust a solar-based explanation without any skepticism, because a not-empirically-honest, obviously-vested-interest solar researcher says so?
Have we conservatives all become liberals?
Jazz
In fact, I am recalling this guy who used to drive up and down the main drag in the city where I did my undergraduate degree. He drove in this beat up old station wagon, which was all painted over with bible verses and stuff. He had a big megaphone rigged up on top of the car, which would broadcast to students that they were instruments of the Devil and needed to attend his church to be saved, which, from the looks of the station wagon, was not a particularly effective recruiting tool.
However, if Climate Research is willing to publish the results of astrophysicists saying ‘hey its the sun, and not atmospheric issues (about which we know relatively little and anyway, misrepresent)’, causing the hot button and lucrative issue of global warming, perhaps the guy with the megaphone should submit a paper that it is Satan causing global warming, probably cause of bad things we students did.
Jones and the East Anglia crowd would try to suppress his Satan research in a terribly inappropriate manner, and in the end, it would probably be great for his church, and maybe he could even upgrade to a minivan.
gahrie
Jazz: As I have laid out on my blog in a post I linked on another thread, during every historical period of global cooling, we have had solar minimums and no solar maximums. During every historical period of global warming, we have had solar maximums and no solar minimums.
We are currently leaving a solar maximum, and entering a solar minimum.
AGW theory only “accounts” for the most modern period of warming…solar activity accounts for all periods of warming and cooling.
Which is more likely to be the true cause of warming?
Brendan Loy
Gahrie, “solar minimum” and “solar maximum” don’t mean what I think you think they mean.
They are relative terms. With the exception of the Maunder minimum in the 1600s, there have been “solar minimums” during every recorded overall uptick in solar activity, and “solar maximums” during every recorded overall downturn in solar activity. They’re just smaller than usual.
In any event, the relationship between solar activity and climate is not well understood, but it’s clear there is some sort of relationship. Having said that, the notions of climate change caused by solar activity and climate change caused by human activity are quite obviously not mutually exclusive.
Brendan Loy
*Also: if we have a period of “global cooling” due to the apparent downturn in solar activity that we’re evidently experiencing — which is not accurately described as a “solar minimum,” but rather as an extremely weak solar maximum — that doesn’t mean OMG GLOBAL WARMING ISN’T REAL, IT WAS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN, IT WAS ALL A LIE. It might very well mean simply that global warming is being delayed for a few decades, or more precisely, mitigated by the counteracting cyclical force of solar-caused global cooling.(Put another way, the added CO2 in the atmosphere would actually have some temporary benefit, as it would save us from a harsher cooling period. But once the unusual solar cycle resolves itself, and we go back to “normal” climate from a solar-activity perspective, we could see a really rapid rise in temperatures, as the greenhouse effect (with all the added CO2 we’ve pumped into the atmosphere between now and then) resumes being the prime mover of climate change.
Or not. Climate is complex, and I’m by no means an expert on it, which is why I rarely try to address AGW issues beyond pointing out the various obviously flawed arguments on both sides. But your belief that you’ve got all the answers — and are more knowledgeable than the many (honest) experts in the field — is pretty obviously misguided. Especially when you aren’t even fluent in the basic terminology of the subject you’re discussing.
Jazz
What we believe, in regard to the Soon and Balunias publication, is that Jones and friends tried to strong arm the journal into preventing the publication of their paper, including threatening some of the reviewers. Not nice – but is it an indication of fraud?
To understand that, we first need to introduce the concept of impact factor. As you can see on the linked wikipedia page, impact factor is an indication of how important a journal is. Though the measure has many flaws, you can see if you scroll down that the highest impact factors are journals you have heard of: Nature, (combined) score of 52, Science, (combined) score of 49, etc.
Impact rating of Climate Research: 1.725. Now 1.725 doesn’t mean the journal does bad science, necessarily, but it does basically mean that no one cares what they publish. Which if you’re an obscure journal in a field that very few people pay attention to, that’s not necessarily bad. But if you’re called “Climate Research”, when everyone and their brother is interested in ‘Climate Research’, a low impact rating is a good hint that you pretty much suck.
So before we even get back to Jones and the East Anglia group, there’s a real question of why Harvard scientists are publishing something – anything – in a journal with an impact rating of 1.725. Since Soon and Balunias’ publication in Climate Research was explosive, biased, and at least referencing bad data (Balunias’ assertion that the globe has been cooling recently), it is pretty easy to be cynical that Climate Research, a journal which by its title surely had great – and unfulfilled – ambitions, was trying to hit a home run with equally cynical Harvard researchers in publishing Soon and Balunias’ iffy and biased work.
If so, then all that we can conclude about Jones et. al. is that they deal in a heavy-handed manner with those who try to fuck with them. Which would make them different from successes in other fields…how? Are the people who made it to the top of your profession generally kind, understanding and indulgent of those who try to fuck with them?
This whole story is a tempest in a teapot.
David K.
Joe Mama, I was about to point out to gahrie that he should be more like you who doesn’t do or say stupid things even when you hold beliefs I think don’t make a lot of sense, but here you had to go and prove me wrong.
Referencing Sarah Palin as a comparisson to Mike Huckabee as I did in the linnk you posted above is completely and utterly relevant. That I have to spell it out for you is disheartening because it means one of two things:
1) You are an idiot
2) You are being willfully ignorant
Neither of which bodes well for future discussions.
But here goes, why did I mention Sarah Palin in that post? Well lets see, Mike Huckabee is in the news because he did something I consider incredibly stupid. How stupid? Stupid enough that I think he is a terrible choice to lead our country. How terrible? Well in order to find that out I need to compare him to someone I have allready described as a poor choice. That would be Sarah Palin. By saying I think he is worse than Sarah Palin as a candidate I am providing a frame of reference for my feelings on Huckabee. In other words, I brought up Sarah Palin because she was a relevant and in fact the most appropriate choice for that particular comparison.
If we were to rewind before the recent Presidential election and you, after a long period of describing on this blog why you think Barack Obama was a terrible choice for President came into some knowledge that made you decide Hillary Clinton was a worse choice, it would make all the sense in the world to reference both candidates in one statement.
I can’t believe I had to explain that to you, i mean to most people it should have been blatantly obvious and frankly reasonable why i mentioned Sarah Palin, but then again you are either being willfully ignorant or just plain stupid. Besides I’m waiting for the season finale of Monk and am a little bored, so i had some time to kill.
David K.
This whole story is a tempest in a teapot.
I always liked mountain out of a molehole personally, but i think on this blog with Brendan’s weather obsession, thats probably a more apt metaphor 🙂
Jazz
Hey Gahrie, I went back and read the post on your blog, and I do have a couple of thoughts. Before I get to them, I swear the following is not an ad hominem, as I said in the other thread, I have enjoyed our conversation very much, but there are a few things that bother me in that thread.
Per that thread, you and I (and most people) would agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, and we would also agree that man’s industrial activity produces more CO2 than nature would alone. We would also agree that, in theory, too much greenhouse gas would produce too much warming, with catastrophic consequences for the planet.
Which leads to a very obvious question: is the incremental CO2 emitted by man’s industrial activity enough to lead to the feared catastrophic consequences? I answer that question agnostically, I even go a step further and say the question is basically unanswerable, but given the dramatic increase in the earth’s temperature during the last 30 years (when industrialization increased in the workshop of the world, e.g. China/India/etc), that’s enough for me to say let’s go ahead with cap-and-trade, because the costs of being wrong are far greater if there is AGW than if there isn’t.
Per your blog post, you answer the question whether there is enough industrial activity to produce global warming with a confident “no!” based on two (as I read them) rather curious arguments: that there isn’t enough incremental CO2 to create warming, and there was never a problem in the past.
The first argument is obviously a threshhold one, in isolation it obviously doesn’t mean anything to say that there’s not a lot of CO2 from man in the atmosphere. This is conceptually the equivalent of saying “Officer, you shouldn’t arrest me for driving under the influence because I only had 12/100th of 1% of alcohol in my blood. Surely I’m fine”. Threshhold arguments need to be backed up with stats or perspective, not “this is a small number so it can’t possibly matter”.
The second argument, with all due respect, I find even more odd. How would the experience of medieval man have any bearing on whether our industrial activity is creating too much CO2 to sustain our biosphere? Again by comparison, that is kind of like saying, “I know it is bad to shoot up heroin, and I have heard it might lead to an OD and death, but I am sure I will be fine, because I never had any difficulty when I only smoked pot”. You might be fine, but your experience as a pot smoker has nothing to do with whether heroin is going to kill you. Similarly, we may be fine today, but man’s experience pre-industrialization tells us nothing about whether industrial activity will ultimately kill us.
I’m sorry if this post sounds like I am picking on you, it might and I don’t mean for it to. I find you to be a pretty intelligent guy, its obvious from that post on your blog that you have spent a lot of time thinking about this issue. However, given the importance of the topic, I can’t really understand how you conclude that we shouldn’t err on the side of caution because a) there’s not much CO2 and b) medieval man never had a problem with industrially-produced CO2.
gahrie
But your belief that you’ve got all the answers
I don’t believe I have all the answers….however I think it is hubris to believe that anyone does.
I also believe that the AGW scare is an attempt by watermelons on the left to accomplish all they have been unable to do otherwise.
I believe that Earth is constantly changing , and is constantly seeking equilibrium.
However, given the importance of the topic, I can’t really understand how you conclude that we shouldn’t err on the side of caution
You want to build more nuke plants? I’m with you.
You want to develop fusion and an efficent form of hydogen use? I’m with you.
You want to encourage mass transportation and efficent use of energy? I’m with you.
You want to creat an artifical market to trade in carbon credits? No thanks.
You want to place an onerous tax on energy? No thanks.
You want to transfer large sums of wealth to third world kleptocracys? No thanks.
You want to hand an enormous competitive advantage to India and China? No thanks.
You want to give the government even more power over my life? No thanks.
C’mon..do we really want to live in a world in which the government dictates what type of lightbulb I can use and TV I can watch?
Jazz
Dear Lord I just discovered tonight that, not only were Soon and Baliunas Harvard astrophysicists distastefully slumming by publishing their anti-AGW paper in Climate Research (the paper the East Anglia crowd famously threatened), but the fricking publication was….was….a review paper.
Realize that most of you probably aren’t scientists, but the fact is that review papers don’t carry a lot of weight in the industry, for the obvious reason that they carry no new scholarship. Many institutions won’t give much if any credit for a review paper toward tenure, and typically the main reason people write them is because they will be in prestigious journals, possibly often cited, which citations help one’s status.
For Harvard astrophysicists. publishing a review paper. in a minor, irrelevant journal. outside their field. that says AGW is crap. They didn’t do that to help their careers. There can really only be one reason to do such an asinine thing – to eat the East Anglia crowd’s lunch.
To conclude, then, that AGW is false because this pissed off the East Anglia guys is somewhat akin to me concluding that you have a bad temper because you yelled at me after I slugged you.
Ridiculous. The whole thing is ridiculous.
Jazz
Seriously, to base your conclusions about AGW on the data-free opinions of a couple of Ivy League sun scientists, (one of whom misrepresented what little data she encountered), that AGW is wrong, and…”Sun, baby, sun!”…in a journal that would almost certainly be beneath publication of their data, and doubtlessly is beneath publication of “just” their opinions…
…that’s pretty much Glenn-Beck-and-a-chalkboard-esque on the hierarchy of intellectual life.
So while those East Anglia guys behaved badly, its quite possible that they were trying to do you a favor.
gahrie
Tell you what….
Come up with a model in which you can plug in the historical data until say 1990 and it will predict the last 20 years and then get back to me.
Or even just come up with a model that you can’t plug random numbers into and still get a hockey stick.
Popular Mechanics: What East Anglia’s E-mails Really Tell Us About Climate Change
This article should be required reading for anyone who ever comments on global climate change ever.
You can’t trust Popular Mechanics. They are part of THE Conspiracy, as is clear by their piece demolishing the Truthers.
I wonder why Al Gore has suddenly cancelled his appearance, with no explanation, in Copenhagen?
I wonder why gahrie is so keyed in to Al Gore’s schedule? Secret crush maybe?
Well..I write less about Al Gore than you do Sarah Palin…..
I bring up Sarah Palin when she is the subject at hand, or directly relevant. You bring up Al Gore because this article proves that you are, as always, wrong about something, and are trying to draw attention elsewhere.
again..project much?
Still avoiding the subject I see.
Surprise..a climate scientist defending climate “science”.
Why is it that you can insert nonsense numbers into the released climate models and they still produce global warming?
Why is it that none of the climate models predicted the current cooling trend?
Look it’s gotten so bad that now Mann is trying to throw Jones under the bus!
I bring up Sarah Palin when she is the subject at hand, or directly relevant.
Right.
You know, I don’t have a vested interest in the question of global warming, I don’t wear a badge that says “Global warming skeptic” or “Global warming true believer”, so I think my self-esteem will remain intact whichever result is true. However, I am concerned about the future of my children, which actually is on a badge…
As regards the East Anglian climate scientists attempting to subvert the peer review process, that’s very bad as everyone from Nate Silver to Sean Hannity to Gahrie has pointed out. What almost no one has discussed is the actual paper they were attempting to subvert: Soon and Baliunias’ 2003 submission to Climate Research that argued that the sun, and not CO2, was responsible for global warming. The sun.
Ever heard of Soon and Baliunias? Know what their research focus is? Are they meteorologists, geologists, or some similar field that would have knowledge about things like atmospheric concentrations of CO2? Of course they aren’t. What are they? Wait for it. They’re astrophysicists.
They study solar phenomena. They wouldn’t inherently know anything more than your average dentist about issues like CO2 concentration in global ice floes. And the Gahries of the world base their (dangerous) conclusion that AGW is fradulent on the (obviously self-motivated) argument from a couple of astrophysicists that the sun, and not CO2, is warming the earth. Cue the church lady: Isn’t that conveeeeeeeenient?
What’s worse, Baliunas at least, has been caught being dishonest about the alleged recent cooling of the planet,, which assertion the satellite temperature record linked on her Wikipedia page clearly shows to be false.
In conclusion, while I remain a skeptic, it is howlingly outrageous – and frankly dangerous – to endorse dismissive observations about the implications of CO2 concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere – in favor of solar-based explanations – based on the observations of astrophysicists like Soon and Baliunias, whose vested interest in a solar-based explanation is obvious and whose truthiness is well-documented.
Gahrie, your skepticism regarding AGW is the right way to proceed in science. Your trust in the contrary viewpoints of not entirely honest, solar-pushing astrophysicists, not so much. The money quote in the Discover article:
More generally, scientists may judge that the public can’t understand all the complexities of the data, so they provide a filtered version that they view as truthful, and limit “amateur” access to “confusing” data that might be “misleading.”
If I had to guess, I’d say that quote probably pretty well explains the East Anglia scandal, with some additional comments that Jones et al empirically behaved quite poorly.
In fact, from a distance, it seems strange to me that conservatives allow an empirically-not-entirely-honest individual like Baliunas to enter this conversation at all. Wasn’t ours the political philosophy of skepticism? Didn’t we decry those pinko commie liberals who just thought that everyone is nice and upstanding and why can’t we all just get along?
And now, on a topic as vital to our future as the potential for AGW, we’re just gonna shut our eyes and put our heads in the sand, and trust a solar-based explanation without any skepticism, because a not-empirically-honest, obviously-vested-interest solar researcher says so?
Have we conservatives all become liberals?
In fact, I am recalling this guy who used to drive up and down the main drag in the city where I did my undergraduate degree. He drove in this beat up old station wagon, which was all painted over with bible verses and stuff. He had a big megaphone rigged up on top of the car, which would broadcast to students that they were instruments of the Devil and needed to attend his church to be saved, which, from the looks of the station wagon, was not a particularly effective recruiting tool.
However, if Climate Research is willing to publish the results of astrophysicists saying ‘hey its the sun, and not atmospheric issues (about which we know relatively little and anyway, misrepresent)’, causing the hot button and lucrative issue of global warming, perhaps the guy with the megaphone should submit a paper that it is Satan causing global warming, probably cause of bad things we students did.
Jones and the East Anglia crowd would try to suppress his Satan research in a terribly inappropriate manner, and in the end, it would probably be great for his church, and maybe he could even upgrade to a minivan.
Jazz: As I have laid out on my blog in a post I linked on another thread, during every historical period of global cooling, we have had solar minimums and no solar maximums. During every historical period of global warming, we have had solar maximums and no solar minimums.
We are currently leaving a solar maximum, and entering a solar minimum.
AGW theory only “accounts” for the most modern period of warming…solar activity accounts for all periods of warming and cooling.
Which is more likely to be the true cause of warming?
Gahrie, “solar minimum” and “solar maximum” don’t mean what I think you think they mean.
They are relative terms. With the exception of the Maunder minimum in the 1600s, there have been “solar minimums” during every recorded overall uptick in solar activity, and “solar maximums” during every recorded overall downturn in solar activity. They’re just smaller than usual.
In any event, the relationship between solar activity and climate is not well understood, but it’s clear there is some sort of relationship. Having said that, the notions of climate change caused by solar activity and climate change caused by human activity are quite obviously not mutually exclusive.
*Also: if we have a period of “global cooling” due to the apparent downturn in solar activity that we’re evidently experiencing — which is not accurately described as a “solar minimum,” but rather as an extremely weak solar maximum — that doesn’t mean OMG GLOBAL WARMING ISN’T REAL, IT WAS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN, IT WAS ALL A LIE. It might very well mean simply that global warming is being delayed for a few decades, or more precisely, mitigated by the counteracting cyclical force of solar-caused global cooling.(Put another way, the added CO2 in the atmosphere would actually have some temporary benefit, as it would save us from a harsher cooling period. But once the unusual solar cycle resolves itself, and we go back to “normal” climate from a solar-activity perspective, we could see a really rapid rise in temperatures, as the greenhouse effect (with all the added CO2 we’ve pumped into the atmosphere between now and then) resumes being the prime mover of climate change.
Or not. Climate is complex, and I’m by no means an expert on it, which is why I rarely try to address AGW issues beyond pointing out the various obviously flawed arguments on both sides. But your belief that you’ve got all the answers — and are more knowledgeable than the many (honest) experts in the field — is pretty obviously misguided. Especially when you aren’t even fluent in the basic terminology of the subject you’re discussing.
What we believe, in regard to the Soon and Balunias publication, is that Jones and friends tried to strong arm the journal into preventing the publication of their paper, including threatening some of the reviewers. Not nice – but is it an indication of fraud?
To understand that, we first need to introduce the concept of impact factor. As you can see on the linked wikipedia page, impact factor is an indication of how important a journal is. Though the measure has many flaws, you can see if you scroll down that the highest impact factors are journals you have heard of: Nature, (combined) score of 52, Science, (combined) score of 49, etc.
Impact rating of Climate Research: 1.725. Now 1.725 doesn’t mean the journal does bad science, necessarily, but it does basically mean that no one cares what they publish. Which if you’re an obscure journal in a field that very few people pay attention to, that’s not necessarily bad. But if you’re called “Climate Research”, when everyone and their brother is interested in ‘Climate Research’, a low impact rating is a good hint that you pretty much suck.
So before we even get back to Jones and the East Anglia group, there’s a real question of why Harvard scientists are publishing something – anything – in a journal with an impact rating of 1.725. Since Soon and Balunias’ publication in Climate Research was explosive, biased, and at least referencing bad data (Balunias’ assertion that the globe has been cooling recently), it is pretty easy to be cynical that Climate Research, a journal which by its title surely had great – and unfulfilled – ambitions, was trying to hit a home run with equally cynical Harvard researchers in publishing Soon and Balunias’ iffy and biased work.
If so, then all that we can conclude about Jones et. al. is that they deal in a heavy-handed manner with those who try to fuck with them. Which would make them different from successes in other fields…how? Are the people who made it to the top of your profession generally kind, understanding and indulgent of those who try to fuck with them?
This whole story is a tempest in a teapot.
Joe Mama, I was about to point out to gahrie that he should be more like you who doesn’t do or say stupid things even when you hold beliefs I think don’t make a lot of sense, but here you had to go and prove me wrong.
Referencing Sarah Palin as a comparisson to Mike Huckabee as I did in the linnk you posted above is completely and utterly relevant. That I have to spell it out for you is disheartening because it means one of two things:
1) You are an idiot
2) You are being willfully ignorant
Neither of which bodes well for future discussions.
But here goes, why did I mention Sarah Palin in that post? Well lets see, Mike Huckabee is in the news because he did something I consider incredibly stupid. How stupid? Stupid enough that I think he is a terrible choice to lead our country. How terrible? Well in order to find that out I need to compare him to someone I have allready described as a poor choice. That would be Sarah Palin. By saying I think he is worse than Sarah Palin as a candidate I am providing a frame of reference for my feelings on Huckabee. In other words, I brought up Sarah Palin because she was a relevant and in fact the most appropriate choice for that particular comparison.
If we were to rewind before the recent Presidential election and you, after a long period of describing on this blog why you think Barack Obama was a terrible choice for President came into some knowledge that made you decide Hillary Clinton was a worse choice, it would make all the sense in the world to reference both candidates in one statement.
I can’t believe I had to explain that to you, i mean to most people it should have been blatantly obvious and frankly reasonable why i mentioned Sarah Palin, but then again you are either being willfully ignorant or just plain stupid. Besides I’m waiting for the season finale of Monk and am a little bored, so i had some time to kill.
This whole story is a tempest in a teapot.
I always liked mountain out of a molehole personally, but i think on this blog with Brendan’s weather obsession, thats probably a more apt metaphor 🙂
Hey Gahrie, I went back and read the post on your blog, and I do have a couple of thoughts. Before I get to them, I swear the following is not an ad hominem, as I said in the other thread, I have enjoyed our conversation very much, but there are a few things that bother me in that thread.
Per that thread, you and I (and most people) would agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, and we would also agree that man’s industrial activity produces more CO2 than nature would alone. We would also agree that, in theory, too much greenhouse gas would produce too much warming, with catastrophic consequences for the planet.
Which leads to a very obvious question: is the incremental CO2 emitted by man’s industrial activity enough to lead to the feared catastrophic consequences? I answer that question agnostically, I even go a step further and say the question is basically unanswerable, but given the dramatic increase in the earth’s temperature during the last 30 years (when industrialization increased in the workshop of the world, e.g. China/India/etc), that’s enough for me to say let’s go ahead with cap-and-trade, because the costs of being wrong are far greater if there is AGW than if there isn’t.
Per your blog post, you answer the question whether there is enough industrial activity to produce global warming with a confident “no!” based on two (as I read them) rather curious arguments: that there isn’t enough incremental CO2 to create warming, and there was never a problem in the past.
The first argument is obviously a threshhold one, in isolation it obviously doesn’t mean anything to say that there’s not a lot of CO2 from man in the atmosphere. This is conceptually the equivalent of saying “Officer, you shouldn’t arrest me for driving under the influence because I only had 12/100th of 1% of alcohol in my blood. Surely I’m fine”. Threshhold arguments need to be backed up with stats or perspective, not “this is a small number so it can’t possibly matter”.
The second argument, with all due respect, I find even more odd. How would the experience of medieval man have any bearing on whether our industrial activity is creating too much CO2 to sustain our biosphere? Again by comparison, that is kind of like saying, “I know it is bad to shoot up heroin, and I have heard it might lead to an OD and death, but I am sure I will be fine, because I never had any difficulty when I only smoked pot”. You might be fine, but your experience as a pot smoker has nothing to do with whether heroin is going to kill you. Similarly, we may be fine today, but man’s experience pre-industrialization tells us nothing about whether industrial activity will ultimately kill us.
I’m sorry if this post sounds like I am picking on you, it might and I don’t mean for it to. I find you to be a pretty intelligent guy, its obvious from that post on your blog that you have spent a lot of time thinking about this issue. However, given the importance of the topic, I can’t really understand how you conclude that we shouldn’t err on the side of caution because a) there’s not much CO2 and b) medieval man never had a problem with industrially-produced CO2.
But your belief that you’ve got all the answers
I don’t believe I have all the answers….however I think it is hubris to believe that anyone does.
I also believe that the AGW scare is an attempt by watermelons on the left to accomplish all they have been unable to do otherwise.
I believe that Earth is constantly changing , and is constantly seeking equilibrium.
However, given the importance of the topic, I can’t really understand how you conclude that we shouldn’t err on the side of caution
You want to build more nuke plants? I’m with you.
You want to develop fusion and an efficent form of hydogen use? I’m with you.
You want to encourage mass transportation and efficent use of energy? I’m with you.
You want to creat an artifical market to trade in carbon credits? No thanks.
You want to place an onerous tax on energy? No thanks.
You want to transfer large sums of wealth to third world kleptocracys? No thanks.
You want to hand an enormous competitive advantage to India and China? No thanks.
You want to give the government even more power over my life? No thanks.
C’mon..do we really want to live in a world in which the government dictates what type of lightbulb I can use and TV I can watch?
Dear Lord I just discovered tonight that, not only were Soon and Baliunas Harvard astrophysicists distastefully slumming by publishing their anti-AGW paper in Climate Research (the paper the East Anglia crowd famously threatened), but the fricking publication was….was….a review paper.
Realize that most of you probably aren’t scientists, but the fact is that review papers don’t carry a lot of weight in the industry, for the obvious reason that they carry no new scholarship. Many institutions won’t give much if any credit for a review paper toward tenure, and typically the main reason people write them is because they will be in prestigious journals, possibly often cited, which citations help one’s status.
For Harvard astrophysicists. publishing a review paper. in a minor, irrelevant journal. outside their field. that says AGW is crap. They didn’t do that to help their careers. There can really only be one reason to do such an asinine thing – to eat the East Anglia crowd’s lunch.
To conclude, then, that AGW is false because this pissed off the East Anglia guys is somewhat akin to me concluding that you have a bad temper because you yelled at me after I slugged you.
Ridiculous. The whole thing is ridiculous.
Seriously, to base your conclusions about AGW on the data-free opinions of a couple of Ivy League sun scientists, (one of whom misrepresented what little data she encountered), that AGW is wrong, and…”Sun, baby, sun!”…in a journal that would almost certainly be beneath publication of their data, and doubtlessly is beneath publication of “just” their opinions…
…that’s pretty much Glenn-Beck-and-a-chalkboard-esque on the hierarchy of intellectual life.
So while those East Anglia guys behaved badly, its quite possible that they were trying to do you a favor.
Tell you what….
Come up with a model in which you can plug in the historical data until say 1990 and it will predict the last 20 years and then get back to me.
Or even just come up with a model that you can’t plug random numbers into and still get a hockey stick.