The Great Global Cooling/Warming Thread

[WoodDragon]

Still going strong? I'll tell you what's going strong. Whats really going strong is the rejection by a nation of your alarmism.

Eh? Even if the majority of people in a country disagree with something, that disagreement isn't necessarily correct. Science and fact aren't democracies.

This point has been made before. People can believe in fairies, and that the world is flat, but the mere believing doesn't make it so. Believing that the world's scientists are wrong about fundamental physics... well, that's just mere believing too, but that doesn't make it right.

And don't forget - as I said once before, half of the country's population is of below-average intelligence.

Edited May 16, 2012 by WoodDragon

[whitewind]

Take a look at where world consensus is today to where it was back then...not much over 12 months and it has collapsed. Why? I've tried to explain to you why but you continue to deny the obvious. Do you deny that more people now reject apocalyptic climate change as a nonsense and alarmist?

 

Well, apart from the fact that all scientific institutions and most scientists agree with the consensus view that man-made climate change is real, and serious, I'm not even convinced by your rhetoric that most people now reject the science. I think most people generally accept the science, especially after reading forums like this where clearly the sensible point of view is the one not held by the Deniers, who tend to rant and rave a lot but produce very little in the way of evidence.

Of course, if you were right in saying that people are rejecting science and logic, then all it says is that education and / or intelligence amongst the population is quite low. It says nothing at all about the science itself.

As far as I am concerned, I'm not that alarmed about climate change. What I am alarmed about is the inability of our species to quickly realise it has a problem and change it's habits to negate the problem. Action on this issue has been way too slow, and it has been badly harmed by lies told by vested interest. The main problem we face is vested interest, capitalism, and the unwillingness of people to challenge their basic precepts - not science or knowledge.

[Dolos]

Well, apart from the fact that all scientific institutions and most scientists agree with the consensus view that man-made climate change is real, and serious

 

Thats where you fall down every time...cause that is just crap....All scientific institutions my arse...you do nothing but talk crap over and over again...Better back that statement up sunshine..Oh that's right...you can't...So far you and your little friend have been unable to put any facts on the table other than ancient IPCC inaccuracies.... every time you are shown up you just change tack and go on to attack those who wish for open debate.

[Halcyon Daze]

Man, You in DENIAL!

Catch up with the rest of the world.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/a_new_plan_to_save_the_planet/?fpla

Edited May 17, 2012 by Halcyon Daze

[Dolos]

Ha ha ha..."a new plan to save the planet"... that's cause so far every plan they have come up with are flops...Why would I catch up with a minority group? The so called " Rest of the world" have moved on....Keep up children..

[woof woof woof]

Dolos,.. Hope you are just messing with us..... in case your not,... here is some history

Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: a book review

Posted by: JeffMasters, 12:48 PM GMT on May 16, 2012 +33

No climate scientist has been subject to more attacks on their science and character than Penn State's Michael Mann, originator of the famed "hockey stick" graph of Earth's temperature history. Dr. Mann has an excellent new book called "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines" that takes the reader on a fascinating journey to the front lines the high-stakes battles between climate scientists and their detractors. It's a must-read for every serious student of Earth's climate. Along the way, you'll learn about tree rings, the IPCC process, the fossil fuel industry's savvy PR campaigns to discredit climate change science, and get an insider's view of the notorious stolen emails of "climategate."

For those unfamiliar with the "hockey stick", the shape of the graph showing Earth's temperature has a long, relatively flat portion representing the period 1000 AD - 1800 AD--the shaft of the hockey stick--followed by a sharp upward rise that began in the late 1800s and continues to this day--the blade of the hockey stick. When Dr. Mann first published the hockey stick graph in papers he wrote in 1998 and 1999, it quickly became a central icon in the climate change debate. As he writes in "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars," the hockey stick graph "told an easily understood story with a simple picture: that a sharp and highly unusual rise in atmospheric warming was occurring on Earth." Contrarians bent on discrediting the science of climate change have fiercely attacked the hockey stick, attempting to portray it as the key piece of evidence upon which all of climate change science depends (which is not correct, since many different data sets unrelated to the tree ring studies under attack show a hockey stick-like shape.) The contrarians have adopted "the Serengeti strategy" towards Dr. Mann--"a tried-and-true tactic of the climate change denial campaign...isolate individual scientists just as predators on the Serengeti Plain of Africa hunt their prey: picking off vulnerable individuals from the rest of the herd."

The history of the hockey stick

The book starts with some interesting background on Dr. Mann's career. He got into climate science by accident--while working on his Ph.D. in physics at Yale, funding got tight, and he elected to switch to the Department of Geology and Geophysics, where funding to perform research on natural climate cycles was available. In the mid-1990s, while working on his Ph.D., he helped discover the decades-long natural cycle of alternating warm and cool ocean temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean thought to be responsible for the active hurricane period that began in 1995. He gave the phenomenon the now widely-used name, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), during an impromptu interview with science writer Dick Kerr. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1996, Dr. Mann moved on into using statistical methods to study past climate, as gleaned from tree ring studies. He takes the reader on a 5-page college-level discussion of the main technique used, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and shows how his famed "hockey stick" graph came about. It's one of the best descriptions I've seen on how PCA works (though it will be too technical for some.) His inaugural PCA work showing that the 1990s were likely the warmest decade in at least the past 600 years was published in 1998. Since the paper coincidentally happened to be published on Earth Day during the warmest year in Earth's history, the paper received a huge amount of media attention. His follow-up 1999 paper went further, suggesting that the 1990s were the warmest decade in the past 1,000 years, and 1998 was the warmest year. Dr. Mann was appointed as one of the lead authors of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the massive United Nations summary of climate change science that comes out every six years. We learn some interesting details about the approval process for the 2001 IPCC report, like the fact for two days, the scientists haggled with the Saudi Arabian delegation about one word in the Summary for Policy Makers. The IPCC report's summary requires unanimous approval by all nations, and the Saudis objected to the language that said, "the balance of evidence suggests an appreciable human influence on climate." They debated 30 different alternatives before finally settling on the language, "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate."

Figure 1. The hockey stick graph as it appeared in the IPCC Third Assessment Report WG1 (2001) summary, Figure 2.20, Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction. Tree rings, corals, ice cores, and historical records are shown in blue, and instrumental data in red, from AD 1000 to 1999. The grey shaded region indicates the uncertainty in the annual temperature estimates (there is a 95% certainty that the temperature for any given year lies in the gray shaded region.) The thick black line is a smoothed version which highlights the long-term variations. A similar version of this graph appeared in Dr. Mann's original 1999 paper. Climate scientist Dr. Jerry Mahlman was responsible for giving this graph the nickname, the "hockey stick".

The battle begins

The majority of the book focuses on the battles over the hockey stick that ensued in 1998, as soon as Dr. Mann published his research. He writes: For more than a decade, the scientific community, in its effort to communicate the threat of climate change, has had to fight against the headwind of this industry-funded disinformation effort. The collective battles are what I term the "Climate wars". The battle raged furiously through 2006, when an extensive review of the hockey stick was performed by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)--an organization founded in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln to "investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science" for the purpose of informing government policy. The NAS reaffirmed the validity of the hockey stick, concluding: "based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this new supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium." Dr. Mann writes, "One might think that this would have put an end to the accusations once and for all. But one would be wrong."

In November 2009, a few weeks before the December international climate summit in Copenhagen, the RealClimate.org website that Dr. Mann contributes to was hacked into, and a file with emails stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was posted. Dr. Mann explains in detail how these "climategate" emails were taken out context and distorted to appear scandalous by "a massive public relations campaign conducted by major players in the climate change denial movement." To illustrate, he gives the example of Isaac Newton's writings, which can easily be taken out context and distorted to give the impression that he was guilty of "conspiring to avoid public scrutiny," "insulting dissenting scientists," "manipulation of evidence," "knowingly publishing scientific fraud," "suppression of evidence," "abusing the peer review system," and "insulting critics." In the end, no evidence of scientific misconduct was found by any of the five independent reviews of the affair, conducted by the UK Parliament, a CRU commission led by eminent geoscientist Lord Oxburgh, Penn State University, the National Science Foundation Office of the Inspector General, and the University of East Anglia. As a result of "climategate", nothing at all changed in the peer-reviewed scientific literature on climate change. It was a phony scandal.

A fierce advocate of good science

As I read the book, I was impressed by Dr. Mann's tremendous passion for science and knowledge that comes through. He loves figuring out how things work, and stands in fierce opposition to shoddy science and anti-science political attacks. I had the opportunity to sit down over a beer and talk with him at a recent conference, and he had little interest in talking politics. He'd much rather talk about science, and we had a great discussion about hurricanes--he's published several papers that use statistical techniques to estimate how many tropical storms we missed counting in the Atlantic before the advent of satellites. He frequently talks about how science works and the importance of following the scientific method in his book: "The scientific process--left to operate freely--is inherently self-correcting, even if the gears may at times turn more slowly than we would like...Scientists must be allowed to follow the path along which their intellectual inquiries take them, even if their findings and views might appear inconvenient to outside special interests." In the end, Dr. Mann is "cautiously optimistic" that humanity can meet the challenge of climate change, but acknowledges that climate scientists are in a "street fight" against well-funded climate change disinformers bent on obscuring the science.

Conclusion: five stars out of five

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines is a must-read for every serious student of climate change science, and gets my highest rating: five stars out of five. The book is $17.78 at Amazon.com. True to its title, the book has spawned its own mini-war in the ratings section of Amazon, where readers either loved it or hated it--75% of the reviews were 4 or 5 stars, while 21% were 1 star reviews. Only 4% of the readers gave it a mediocre 2 or 3 star rating. Some of the 1 star reviews are no doubt there because “Watt’s Up With That,” one of the most prominent climate science confusion sites, put up a post calling on readers to attack Mann’s book and to attack positive reviews.

Links

Besieged by Climate Deniers, A Scientist Decides to Fight Back, an opinion piece by Dr. Mann that appeared on the Yale Environment 360 site on April 12.

Much-vindicated Michael Mann and Hockey Stick get final exoneration from Penn State — time for some major media apologies and retractions. Climateprogress.org blog post by Joe Romm.

An interview with Dr. Mann about his book, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars", appeared on Andy Revkin's Dot Earth blog in the New York Times on May 3.

My favorite climate science blog is realclimate.org, which Dr. Mann co-founded. You can see one of the latest challenges to the hockey stick answered in a May 11 post discussing tree ring records from Siberia.

I'll have a new post by Friday at the latest.

Jeff Masters

[whitewind]

Dolos, science doesn't work the way you seem to think. In my field, propagation, information is built on information. Different methods of cuttings are trialled and every so often someone finds a new technique that, for example, disproves the "fact" that Acacia's are impossible to propagate from cuttings.

Note that this doesn't disprove anything about cuttings; it just adds new information. The science of taking cuttings hasn't changed, only knowledge increased.

This is how climate science works too. Information is built on information, and a picture is made.

But you seem to think that the entire science and method behind climate science could be disproved - by someone who isn't even a climate scientist, or even by a newspaper article. This is the same as suggesting that the entire theory behind taking cuttings could be disproved - by someone who can never get cuttings to strike, or hasn't even tried but doesn't seem to understand why cuttings should strike in the first place and writes an angry article about it.

Quite frankly, that's more than a little bizarre. Don't you think?

[whitewind]

Australasia has hottest 60 years in a millennium, scientists find

Study of tree rings, corals and ice cores find unnatural spike in temperatures that lines up with manmade climate changeguardian.co.uk,

Thursday 17 May 2012 07.52 BST

Red dust blown in from Australia's parched interior blankets Sydney in 2009. Australia and its region are experiencing the hottest 60 years in a millennium, scientists have determined. Photograph: Greg Wood/AFP/Getty

The last 60 years have been the hottest in Australasia for a millennium and cannot be explained by natural causes, according to a new report by scientists that supports the case for a reduction in manmade carbon emissions.

In the first major study of its kind in the region, scientists at the University of Melbourne used natural data from 27 climate indicators, including tree rings, corals and ice cores to map temperature trends over the past 1,000 years.

"Our study revealed that recent warming in a 1,000-year context is highly unusual and cannot be explained by natural factors alone, suggesting a strong influence of human-caused climate change in the Australasian region," said the study's lead researcher, Dr Joelle Gergis.

The climate reconstruction was done in 3,000 different ways and concluded with 95% accuracy that no other period in the past 1,000 years match or exceeded post-1950 warming in Australia.

The study, published in the Journal of Climate, will be part of Australia's contribution to the fifth Intergovernmetal Panel on Climate Change report, due in 2014.

As part of the study, climate modellers used the natural data to analyse the impact of both natural events, like volcanic eruptions in the pre-industrial era, and the impact of human-induced climate change such as greenhouse gasses emissions on temperatures in the last millennium.

Dr Steven Phipps, from the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, who carried out the modeling, said the study demonstrated strong human influence on the climate in the region.

"The models showed that prior to 1850 there were not any long-term trends and temperature variations were likely to be caused by natural climate variability which is a random process," he said.

"But [the modeling showed] 20th-century warming significantly exceeds the amplitude of natural climate variability and demonstrates that the recent warming experience in Australia is unprecedented within the context of the last millennium."

Annual average daily maximum temperatures in Australia have increased by 0.75C since 1910. Since the 1950s each decade has been warmer than the one before it.

Australia's peak scientific body, the CSIRO, has said temperatues will rise by between 1C and 5C by 2070 when compared with recent decades. It predicts the number of droughts in southern Australia will increase in the future and that there will be an increase in intense rainfall in many areas.

[Dolos]

Oh dear...you believe in fraud....

 

Berkeley Physics professor

 

 

Richard Muller

 

succinctly explains what the “Hide the Decline” phrase found in the Climategate emails was all about.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 17, 2012 by Dolos

[woof woof woof]

still MUCH higher then it has been for a few thousand years,.....

Mr Berkley dude is clearly demonstrating that even with the new data we have swung for the warmest we've been in a long long while. And it is not solar activity or any other natural phenomena that is contributing to this warm swing.

CO2 is still the most suspicious contributor..... wouldnt you say so Dolos???

[woof woof woof]

Btw I find it very amusing such a skeptic as you Dolos on a forum of people where the majority is keenly aware of the action reaction ,... reap what you have sown / spiritual etc. But nothing wrong with someone that is a critical thinker..... just hope that you are not to critical for your own good. (just hoping the best man!)

[WoodDragon]

Oh dear...you believe in fraud....

 

Berkeley Physics professor

 

 

 

succinctly explains what the “Hide the Decline” phrase found in the Climategate emails was all about.

Ruh-roh Shaggy, you ralked through the wrong door there...

That's the same Richard Muller who subsequently ate his words, even though he choked on them doing so... Sit down, pull up a seat, watch

, and see what happens at 4:40... Really, watch it, it's very interesting. And just to entice you, James Inhofe, Anthony Watts and Rush Limbaugh have a say too.

Some discussion of Muller's humble pie here, and lots more deconstruction of Muller's silliness here.

Denialist sepuku Dolos. Your hero recreated the same temperature record that the professionals had figured out years earlier. There was no conspiracy, no fraud on the part of the world's professional climate scientists. From the conservative ideologues and fossil business lobbyists on the other hand, well that door's still wide open. And we know how much you can't resist walking through those doors, don't we Shaggy...?

Edited May 19, 2012 by WoodDragon

[Halcyon Daze]

Yes, you really do have to 'dumb it down' for those few deniers still holding out for the .001% chance of a miracle.

I guess one could think of it as trying to help educate preschoolers who'd rather watch cartoons. Just look at the standard of this whole thread.

I'm still amazed it hasn't degenerated yet, I guess we're being to kind to the trolls.

[Halcyon Daze]

Found this quite interesting. Analysis of Ice cores and what the scientists say to the deniers who deliberately mis-represent their findings.

 

[whitewind]

Catalyst

Full script and video here

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3488105.htm

NARRATION

The Rocky Mountains of North America - home to some of the most beautiful, pristine forests in the world. But the shades of burnt golden reds aren't the changing tones of Autumn; they're dead and dying trees.

Dr Craig Allen

We're looking at tree mortality over a scale of tens of millions of hectares in the last decade alone.

NARRATION

In fact, right across the globe, there are reports of trees dying in mass numbers.

Anja Taylor

From Europe, from Africa, even right across the Amazon, and right here in Australia.

NARRATION

Here in the Perth hills, trees have been dropping by the tens of thousands.

Anja Taylor

This big eucalypt took hundreds of years to grow. And died in just a couple of weeks.

NARRATION

In fact nearly every tree you see here, died suddenly and at the same time.

Prof Giles Hardy

Last summer was the hottest, driest period on record, and we had some hundred and twenty-two days with no rain, we had weeks with over forty-two degrees, and we started to see large areas just collapsing and dying. So we took an aeroplane up and it was amazing to see the extent of the yellowing and purpling and the numbers of trees that were dead. In the Perth hills, we lost approximately twenty-thousand hectares of trees.

NARRATION

Sadly, it's not just a one-off extreme event. Since the 1990s, trees of many different species have been declining across south-west Western Australia. Along the highways, thousands of Marri Trees are in blossom. They look healthy from a distance, but step a little closer, and you'll find they are marked for death.

[WoodDragon]

Here's a site that's worth a look:

http://earththeoperatorsmanual.com/main-video/how-to-talk-to-an-ostrich

[Dolos]

 

A study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change

 

 

 

finds that people who are not that worried about the effects of global warming tend to have a slightly higher level of scientific knowledge than those who are worried

 

 

 

MMMMmmm.....I would have to say that sounds about right...hey huey and dewey...my little 'case in point'...LOL!

 

Read more:

http://www.foxnews.c.../#ixzz1wETVFK8W

 

 

Edited May 29, 2012 by Dolos

[Halcyon Daze]

A study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change

finds that people who are not that worried about the effects of global warming tend to have a slightly higher level of scientific knowledge than those who are worried

MMMMmmm.....I would have to say that sounds about right...hey huey and dewey...my little 'case in point'...LOL!

 

Read more:

http://www.foxnews.c.../#ixzz1wETVFK8W

 

 

 

You come here to get punished don't you Dolos. You're really scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one and I think you probably read the (misleading) title and not much more.

The reason scientific people are not worried is because they are not alarmists, they are focused and calm, so tell us something we don't know. YOU on the other hand seem quite worried and irrational and that must therefore be... because you lack scientific knowledge. Once again, thanks but we're all too aware of this.

But don't get too cut up about it, it's just Fox news trying to put spin on a scientific study to make it look like it's giving a meaning that it's not. Fox is actually telling you the opposite meaning of the study and you are gulping down the Kool-aid.

My critique of the crappy article is as follows...

It's a highly political news piece, full of spin and the study itself looks kinda lame and would be close to being statistically insignificant anyway (nothing to have a miscarriage over). Scientific knowlege is very different from scientific understanding. Those random facts are not exactly related to climate change. And just because people believe it or not doesn't make it true anyway. It just means many people are suckers, thanks to mis-information like fox news. If you can't come to these conclusions yourself then good luck mate. But I'm always happy to do the thinking for you Dolos.

Fox is making you believe that you are smarter than everybody else Dolos, Don't believe it! You really should give up on scientific appraisal after this lame effort, guess it never was your strong point though.

Oh and thanks for all the many different nicknames you've made for us. I guess the most fitting one I can come up with (for you) would be 'DOPEY' the dwarf. Did that hurt??? Neither do any of yours so why persist with such lameness?

You are a true champion for your cause Dolos, be sure to let us all know how things turn out. And if you don't like getting a taste of your own shit then maybe stop trolling us with your crappy Fox BS and your demeaning insults.

Edited May 29, 2012 by Halcyon Daze

[WoodDragon]

Halcyon Daze correctly disassembles the bad logic in Dolos's Fox News screed.

"Cultural cognition" is the term used to describe the process by which individuals' group values shape their perceptions of societal risks. It refers to the unconscious tendency of people to fit evidence of risk to positions that predominate in groups to which they belong. The results of the study were consistent with previous studies that show that individuals with more egalitarian values disagree sharply with individuals who have more individualistic ones on the risks associated with nuclear power, gun possession, and the HPV vaccine for school girls.

In this study, researchers measured "science literacy" with test items developed by the National Science Foundation. They also measured their subjects' "numeracy"—that is, their ability and disposition to understand quantitative information.

"In effect," Kahan said, "ordinary members of the public credit or dismiss scientific information on disputed issues based on whether the information strengthens or weakens their ties to others who share their values. At least among ordinary members of the public, individuals with higher science comprehension are even better at fitting the evidence to their group commitments."

Kahan said that the study supports no inferences about the reasoning of scientific experts in climate change.

Researcher Ellen Peters of Ohio State University said that people who are higher in numeracy and science literacy usually make better decisions in complex technical situations, but the study clearly casts doubt on the notion that the more you understand science and math, the better decisions you'll make in complex and technical situations. "What this study shows is that people with high science and math comprehension can think their way to conclusions that are better for them as individuals but are not necessarily better for society."

According to Kahan, the study suggests the need for science communication strategies that reflect a more sophisticated understanding of cultural values.

[Source]

Basically, if you're educated but your ideology is such that you're interested in yourself more than in the truth, you'll rationalise global warming away. It's a part of the peculiar phenomenon of cognitive dissonance.

The Yale study certainly doesn't indicate that science dismisses the fact of anthropogenic global warming. That is still rock-solid.

Sorry Dolos, but you lose again.

Edited May 29, 2012 by WoodDragon

[Halcyon Daze]

I don't know why you grace him/her with your excellent answers Wood Dragon, but I do LOVE them. Thanks for your awesome work and I really do wish I had your succinctness-ness.

Unfortunately I don't. <___base_url___>/uploads/emoticons/default_wacko.png

[woof woof woof]

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2110

greenlnd

[mysubtleascention]

Here's an impressive movie about Earth's dynamics .. a lot of satellite data ,easy to comprehend visualizations ..

EARTH FROM SPACE

Enjoy !

[Dolos]

I don't know why you grace him/her with your excellent answers Wood Dragon, but I do LOVE them. Thanks for your awesome work and I really do wish I had your succinctness-ness.

Unfortunately I don't.

 

ROFLMAO...."oh thankyou woody...your egselent answers will get me through the night...oh woody you are so wonderful I just can't take in all your goodness...Oh woody...you make me blush with excitement"

Your kidding dude?

I was going to put up this brown nose picture...it is what you make me think of...

Then I looked at your avatar and realized you've already worked out for yourself that you are a raving brown nose denier who loves the flavour of woodies poo poo...LOL

 

Stay tuned..more info to come about the paper by Joelie Gergis. Three years and three hundred thousand dollars for a paper that lasted three weeks. Nothing I love better than a lying activist that gets busted for using lies to prop up a failing argument...

 

 

Edited June 9, 2012 by Dolos

[Evil Genius]

Listen Dolos, i am trying very hard to overlook the fact that this discussion hasnt really progressed or improved in months and has now run down to primary school standard but i will not allow personal insults here. Just in case you didnt notice because you seem pretty much uninterested in anything else beside this topic; we were just warning everyone who posted personal insults and such and if i see another post like your last one from you again, you will join the club. I´ve been really patient with this thread and gave you a place where you can regularly post your stuff but thats a line that i dont want to be crossed here. Dont make me post here again.

Edited June 9, 2012 by Evil Genius

[woof woof woof]

EG,.. insults aside you have to give Dolos 1 thing...... he is a stimmulating factor for us to gather information on this subject. ;-)