to be precise

11 Comments

• #1 by Tom Cleland on June 10, 2014 - 5:27 pm

  Quote

  

  A lot of people seem to justify their argument by the number of people who agree with them.
  Is this logical? Probably not, but hey this is Democracy! In science, challenging conventional wisdom, and testing or scrutinizing certain ‘beliefs’ is the whole basis for its existence. Unfortunately, the extreme claims that the so-called ‘climate scientists’ (I have not seen any university course called ‘climate science’) have been to create sensation. There are very few great moments in science, usually it is a slow process of either accepting a hypothesis or rejecting and then moving forward. The climate scientists (rightly or wrongly ) have simply rejected dissent, based on nothing more than the fact they disagree. In other words the climate science has become a religion, and the skeptics ( a normal scientific position) have become the heretics to be outcast into the wilderness of ridicule because they challenged the high priests of climate change. It would appear that they are more of a threat than man made climate change itself – if it exists. Surely science cannot fall prey to these religious zealots, and all alternative points of view are to be tested.

• #2 by matt on June 10, 2014 - 5:56 pm

  Quote

  

  Tom, all I can say in response to that series of howlers is that you clearly need to educate yourself a great deal more on this topic before you are in a position to be taken seriously.

• #3 by Sonam on December 3, 2015 - 8:01 pm

  Quote

  

  Both. There’s not much to elaborate on.As a gnaerel rule (one that has been followed for centuries), when it is cold outside, wear a coat. When it is warm outside, take the coat off.The Earth’s climate has warmed and it has Cooled, many times over many millions of years with . and without . Man.Don’t let the AGW hippies fool you.

• #4 by matt on December 3, 2015 - 8:52 pm

  Quote

  

  Hi Sonam, you may want to familiarise yourself with the actual evidence to hand. Certainly, the earth has warmed and cooled in the past – hardly controversial. That represents no argument at all against the current scientific consensus that the primary driver of the current warming is human activity, nor does it mean that the future effects of current warming will not be serious.

  Past changes in climate (which were generally much slower than the current warming) had huge effects on the planet including mass extinctions, large changes in sea level and ice sheet extent, etc etc. See, for instance, What does past climate change tell us about global warming? for further reading.

• #5 by Tom on September 16, 2017 - 10:40 am

  Quote

  

  I think Matt should just read a lot more than his lefty buddies pamphlet. There are serious scientists (not the Tim Flanery types) who actually do understand that the climate changes naturally and predominantly due to Solar factors. Don’t waste my time with your parroted responses.

• #6 by matt on October 7, 2017 - 11:28 am

  Quote

  

  Hi Tom, sorry, but this is a classic appeal-to-authority fallacy, without even naming the supposed authorities.

  The data is there – solar forcings are well understood, and the combined effect of solar changes over recent decades has been a slight cooling. There are several other factors with bigger effects, and the warming effect of greenhouse gases dwarfs them all.

  Take a look at this series of infographics from Bloomberg for a visual summary.

• #7 by Tom on October 7, 2017 - 5:57 pm

  Quote

  

  OK Matt, my appeal to authority is no fallacy. There are thousands of dissenters from the ‘populist view’ that is finding it hard recently to come up with any model that without extreme tampering gets no where near the observed raw data measurements. I had accepted quite a lot many years ago about climate change however the departure from scientific method and probably the advent of Al Gore turned me. When greater minds such as Professor Ivar Giaever shows his disgust I’ll go with him rather that the sensationalist Tim Flannery or Al gore who profit from the ignorance of the faithful.
  please read this . Sorry I haven’t time to paraphrase.

  ” CLIMATE CHANGE:
  Nobel laureate breaks consensus over global warming
  A Nobel laureate has quit the American Physical Society (APS), one of the world’s leading organisations of physicists, in protest at its assertion that the evidence of damaging global warming is “incontrovertible”.

  Norwegian-born Professor Ivar Giaever, who lives in the United States, emailed the Society to say: “Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I cannot live with the [APS] statement below”.

  The APS statement to which he referred said: “Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

  “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.”

  Professor Giaever commented, “In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?

  “The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from about 288.0 to about 288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”

  Professor Giaever was one of Barack Obama’s leading scientific supporters during the 2008 president election campaign, joining 70 Nobel science laureates endorsing his candidacy.

  But he has since criticised President Obama over his stance on global warming and was one of more than 100 scientists who wrote an open letter to him saying, “We maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated.”

  Professor Giaever has criticised the global warming claims of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former US vice-president Al Gore.

  He has testified to the US Senate, calling himself a “sceptic” on global warming and citing both his birthplace and other scientific scares he has seen come and go during his career.

  “I am Norwegian, should I really worry about a little bit of warming?” he said. “I am unfortunately becoming an old man. We heard many similar warnings about acid rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation, but humanity is still around.

  “Global warming has become a new religion. We frequently hear about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not important: only whether they are correct is important. We don’t really know what the actual effect on the global temperature is.

  “There are better ways to spend the money” to control greenhouse emissions, he concluded.

  Professor Giaever is not alone in rejecting the APS’s insistence that there is consensus on the existence and severity of man-made global warming.

  Several prominent members expressed frustration that it has refused to reconsider its position — drawn up in 2007 — in the light of the “Climategate” controversy about the findings of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

  In an open letter to its governing board they wrote: “Measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th–21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today.”

  Last year, Professor Hal Lewis, former head of the physics department at the University of California’s Santa Barbara campus, quit the American Physical Society, describing global warming as a “scam”.

  Professor Lewis wrote that “the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.”

  He added, “It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave.

  “It is the greatest and most successful pseudo-scientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare.

  “I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.”

• #8 by matt on October 7, 2017 - 6:48 pm

  Quote

  

  There is no evidence presented in that piece that challenges the mainstream climate science consensus in any way. Clearly Prof Glaever has no scientific evidence of any weight to support his one-liners, or he would have presented it. If you have a serious scientific argument against the consensus, by all means bring it on.

  As for observations vs models, you might learn something from Comparing CMIP5 & observations: observations are well within the projection ranges of the major models.

• #9 by Tom on October 8, 2017 - 3:46 pm

  Quote

  

  I think the point has been made. The extrapolations from the data only since 1990 are extreme and if you look at data from the last 100years and even 200 years there is nothing to suggest that this is not normal variation and has very little relevance to mankind’s activity. I will endeavour to dig out some data to show this.
  Most global warming is natural and even if there had been no Industrial Revolution current global temperatures would be almost exactly the same as they are now, a study has found.
  The paper, by Australian scientists John Abbot and Jennifer Marohasy, published in GeoResJ uses the latest big data technique to analyse six 2,000 year-long proxy temperature series from different geographic regions. “Proxies” are the markers scientists use – tree rings, sediments, pollen, etc – to try assess global temperature trends in the days before the existence of thermometers. All the evidence suggests that the planet was about a degree warmer during the Medieval Warming Period than it is now; and that there is nothing unnatural or unprecedented about late 20th century and early 21st century “climate change”.
  This contradicts the claims of alarmist scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that “man made” global warming is a worrying and dangerous phenomenon.
  Time-series profiles derived from temperature proxies such as tree rings can provide information about past climate. Signal analysis was undertaken of six such datasets, and the resulting component sine waves used as input to an artificial neural network (ANN), a form of machine learning. By optimizing spectral features of the component sine waves, such as periodicity, amplitude and phase, the original temperature profiles were approximately simulated for the late Holocene period to 1830 CE. The ANN models were then used to generate projections of temperatures through the 20th century. The largest deviation between the ANN projections and measured temperatures for six geographically distinct regions was approximately 0.2 °C, and from this an Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) of approximately 0.6 °C was estimated. This is considerably less than estimates from the General Circulation Models (GCMs) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and similar to estimates from spectroscopic methods.
  In fact as the chart shows, recent warming is well within the planet’s natural historic climate boundaries:
  According to co-author Jennifer Mahorasy – who was behind the recent exposure of the scandal in which Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology was found to be erasing record-breaking low temperatures from its records – global temperature has moved up and down quite naturally for the last 2000 years.
  We began by deconstructing the six-proxy series from different geographic regions – series already published in the mainstream climate science literature. One of these, the Northern Hemisphere composite series begins in 50 AD, ends in the year 2000, and is derived from studies of pollen, lake sediments, stalagmites and boreholes.
  Typical of most such temperature series, it zigzags up and down while showing two rising trends: the first peaks about 1200 AD and corresponds with a period known as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), while the second peaks in 1980 and then shows decline. In between, is the Little Ice Age (LIA), which according to the Northern Hemisphere composite bottomed-out in 1650 AD. (Of course, the MWP corresponded with a period of generally good harvests in England – when men dressed in tunics and built grand cathedrals with tall spires. It preceded the LIA when there was famine and the Great Plague of London.)
  Up until the 1990s, this was widely accepted by the climate science community. But then came a concerted effort led by alarmists including Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann to erase the Medieval Warming Period from the records. Scientists who argued otherwise – among them Willie Soon and Sallie Balliunas – were harassed for their “incorrect” thinking.
  However, the new study would appear to confirm that the skeptics were right all along – and that it’s the alarmists who have some apologizing to do.
  To be clear, while mainstream climate science is replete with published proxy temperature studies showing that temperatures have cycled up and down over the last 2,000 years – spiking during the Medieval Warm Period and then again recently to about 1980 as shown in Figure 12 – the official IPCC reconstructions (which underpin the Paris Accord) deny such cycles. Through this denial, leaders from within this much-revered community can claim that there is something unusual about current temperatures: that we have catastrophic global warming from industrialisation.
  In our new paper in GeoResJ, we not only use the latest techniques in big data to show that there would very likely have been significant warming to at least 1980 in the absence of industrialisation, we also calculate an Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) of 0.6°C. This is the temperature increase expected from a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. This is an order of magnitude less than estimates from General Circulation Models, but in accordance from values generated from experimental spectroscopic studies, and other approaches reported in the scientific literature [9,10,11,12,13,14].
  The science is far from settled. In reality, some of the data is ‘problematic’, the underlying physical mechanisms are complex and poorly understood, the literature voluminous, and new alternative techniques (such as our method using ANNs) can give very different answers to those derived from General Circulation Models and remodelled proxy-temperature series.

• #10 by Tom on October 8, 2017 - 4:15 pm

  Quote

  

  Climate alarmists have finally admitted that they’ve got it wrong on global warming.
  This is the inescapable conclusion of a landmark paper, published in Nature Geoscience, which finally admits that the computer models have overstated the impact of carbon dioxide on climate and that the planet is warming more slowly than predicted.

  The paper – titled ‘Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5?°C’
  – concedes that it is now almost impossible that the doomsday predictions made in the last IPCC Assessment Report of 1.5 degrees C warming above pre-industrial levels by 2022 will come true.

  In order for that to happen, temperatures would have to rise by a massive 0.5 degrees C in five years.

  Since global mean temperatures rarely rise by even as much as 0.25 degrees C in a decade, that would mean the planet would have to do 20 years’ worth of extreme warming in the space of the next five years.

  This, the scientists admit, is next to impossible. Which means their “carbon budget” – the amount of CO2 they say is needed to increase global warming by a certain degree – is wrong.
  This in turn means that the computer models they’ve been using to scare the world with tales of man-made climate doom are wrong too.
  One researcher – from the alarmist side of the argument, not the skeptical one – has described the paper’s conclusion as “breathtaking” in its implications.He’s right.
  The scientists who’ve written this paper aren’t climate skeptics.
  They’re longstanding warmists, implacable foes of climate skeptics, and they’re also actually the people responsible for producing the IPCC’s carbon budget.In other words, this represents the most massive climbdown from the alarmist camp.
  According to the London Times:
  Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate change at University College London and one ofthe study’s authors, admitted that his previous prediction had been wrong.
  He stated during the climate summit in Paris in December 2015: “All the evidence from the past 15 years leads me to conclude that actually delivering 1.5C is simply incompatible with democracy.”

  Speaking to The Times, he said: “When the facts change, I change my mind, as Keynes said.
  “It’s still likely to be very difficult to achieve these kind of changes quickly enough but we are in a better place than I thought.”
  and
  Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and another author of the paper, said: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”
  He said that the group of about a dozen computer models, produced by government research institutes and universities around the world, had been assembled a decade ago “so it’s not that surprising that it’s starting to divert a little bit from observations”.
  He said that too many of the models used “were on the hot side”, meaning they forecast too much warming.
  Grubb is claiming that the facts have changed. Which they haven’t.
  Climate skeptics have been saying for years that the IPCC climate models have been running “too hot.”
  Indeed, the Global Warming Policy Foundation produced a paper stating this three years ago. Naturally it was ignored by alarmists who have always sought to marginalize the GWPF as a denialist institution which they claim – erroneously – is in the pay of sinister fossil fuel interests.
  Allen’s “so it’s not that surprising” is indeed true if you’re on the skeptical side of the argument. But not if, like Allen, you’re one of those scientists who’ve spent the last 20 years scorning, mocking and vilifying all those skeptics who for years have been arguing the very point which Allen himself is now admitting is correct.
  That’s why Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation says, this is a “landmark” moment in the history of great climate change scare.
  “It’s the first official confirmation we’ve had that CO2 is not as big a driver of climate change as the computer models have claimed; and it’s the first official admission that the planet is not warming dangerously.”
  The alarmists are yet to admit the full scale of their errors.
  This is little more than a damage limitation exercise by scamsters who know they’ve been caught cheating and have now been forced to concede at least some territory to their opponents for fear of looking ridiculous.
  Paul Homewood has their number:

  1) We have known for several years that the climate models have been running far too hot.
  This rather belated admission is welcome, but a cynic would wonder why it was not made before Paris.
  2) I suspect part of the motivation is to keep Paris on track. Most observers, including even James Hansen, have realised that it was not worth the paper it was written on.
  This new study is designed to restore the belief that the original climate targets can be achieved, via Paris and beyond.
  3) Although they talk of the difference between 0.9C and 1.3C, the significance is much greater.
  Making the reasonable assumption that a significant part of the warming since the mid 19thC is natural, this means that any AGW signal is much less than previously thought.
  4) Given that that they now admit they have got it so wrong, why should we be expected to have any faith at all in the models?
  5) Finally, we must remember that temperatures since 2000 have been artificially raised by the recent record El Nino, and the ongoing warm phase of the AMO

• #11 by matt on October 8, 2017 - 5:46 pm

  Quote

  

  Mate, instead of copy-pasting whole articles from somewhere, just paste the link.

  You’ve just pasted in two pieces on right-wing-nutjob website Breitbart, by James Delingpole, who has a long history of peddling falsehoods in the name of climate denial. This is someone who claims Great Barrier Reef bleaching is “fake news”.

  There are many debunkings of this rubbish out there. Do some actual research, try to weigh the arguments and the balance of evidence.

  There’s a reason why every national academy of sciences in the world has endorsed the mainstream consensus: because the evidence supporting it is utterly overwhelming.