Mathieu Rouault @316 “I would like to see a debate on science in developing country.”
OK, having worked as a science teacher trainer in West Africa, I feel I can comment with some degree of familiarity. There is certainly interest in science. One of my first free-flowing conversations I had as I was learning French was trying to explain to an African why his perpetual motion machine wouldn’t work–it was really pretty sophisticated. As I worked with teachers, I found a lot of creativity, but also a lot of despair and feelings of isolation. If you think people don’t understand scientists here, imagine what it is like in a very traditional culture where most people lack all but the most rudimentary education.
Now, granted, this was 20 years ago, but I think that the biggest problems in science in Africa are still lack of resources and isolation. I am sure the internet has helped immensely with isolation, but it is still hard when you don’t have somebody to chalk things out with at the blackboard. And as far as resources go, everything was expensive–from sheet metal, to lumber to tools.
One thing that was interesting–even 20 years ago, lay persons were way ahead of Americans in accepting the reality of climate change. Why? Because they listened to the oldest people in the village who had all experienced the changes. I specifically remember one very old man who had a mango orchard. He’d planted every tree himself by hand, and now he had an impressive number of 40 and 50 year old trees producing some of the best mangos I’d ever had. Even he didn’t know how old he was, but he spoke German and remembered the German colonists–and Germany was tossed out of the country in 1914 by French and British colonists. Now completely blind, but mentally very sharp, he talked about how much hotter it was, how the rains were fewer and more unpredictable. He was just one of many old people who told similar stories.
“I did find these original, popular press reports, however, from both Time and Newsweek. Please re-read them. I would suggest that these articles below are not easily dismissed as “myth” and it does appear that, in the 1970’s, there was a scientific consensus about a coming ice age. ”
The answer is in the names of the ‘journals’ you are reading. So far as I recall, neither Time or Newsweek is a scientific publication.
There was NO scientific consensus about global cooling.
There were a few journal articles that posited it might be a reality.
Some news outlets picked up on these and ran scare stories.
This is IN NO WAY comparable to the THOUSANDS of papers, and researchers, looking at climate today, and reporting a very strong concensus.
If you /want/ to believe that scientists in the 70s thought the earth was going to get colder, and a similar number of scientists today believe the earth is going to get warmer, with a similar amount of evidence, then that’s fine.
This is not even close to being a reflection of reality, however.
Ray Ladburysays
Lady in Red,
The hypothesis of a cooling period due to aerosols (Schneider’s hypothesis) rested on the assumption that CO2 sensitivity was significantly lower than it was. There most certainly was no consensus on this issue. It was considered a possibility. Some scientists thought Schneider was right; some thought he was wrong, with this latter group probably being larger.
Lady, it is useful to think of scientific consensus not in terms of a “vote” or an “agreement”, but rather in terms of the ideas, techniques and phenomena without which one cannot understand the phenomenon being studied. There is a consensus that we are warming the planet because the ideas that support that (CO2 as a greenhouse gas with a sensitivity around 3 degrees per doubling, etc.) are indispensable for understanding Earth’s climate. It is why the consensus scientists are publishing (that is, progressing in their understanding of climate) while so-called skeptics have an abysmal publishing record and an even poorer record for having their work cited.
I need your help. I am working on a blog post called How to Talk to a Conservative about Climate Change and would enjoy your comments to make this a better tool to use when faced with a conservative-leaning skeptic. The goal is to end up with something that we can all use. I need no credit – I want this to be a goup effort.
I did find these original, popular press reports, however, from both Time and Newsweek. Please re-read them. I would suggest that these articles below are not easily dismissed as “myth” and it does appear that, in the 1970’s, there was a scientific consensus about a coming ice age.
So, let’s see, on the one side we have a survey of refereed papers coming down on the side of global warming, not cooling, by something like a 4:1 ratio.
On the other hand, we have popular press reports from both Time and Newsweek.
And your conclusion is that the popular press reports trump the literature survey and “prove” there was a scientific consensus about a coming ice age?
By which I assume you mean one coming earlier than tens of thousands of years in the future? (there was and is a consensus that milankovich cycles do exist, obviously).
Douglas Wisesays
re Anne van der Bom #313
Anne, it would be instructive if you were to contribute your opinions on BraveNewClimate which not only considers climate change but also solutions thereto. You repeatedly attack those with a pro nuclear stance (and even David MacKay who attempts objectivity). However, RealClimate appears averse to diluting its input with debates about climate solutions. Why not do as Hank Roberts suggests and comment on BraveNewClimate threads? There are several there who are also hostile to a nuclear solution. As one who has gradually been convinced that renewables do not offer a satisfactory, politically possible or affordable solution, I have been left with the view that nuclear fission power (and 4th generation power in particular) represents the only hope of a solution that would avoid the scenario that Barton Paul Levenson speculated about in #339. Clearly, you don’t agree. Why not come over and see how your opinions stack up against those who share my view but have greater expertise on the subject?
Marcosays
I don’t know if it’s already been mentioned, but this lecture by Richard Alley should at least be a permalink: http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml
(I hope it stays on forever, it’s going to be my favorite link to ‘skeptics’/contrarians/deniers)
and also would make an interesting discussion point on realclimate. That’s my 2 cents…
John Atkeisonsays
Hey, David (#58),
I think you misunderstood the question (#11):
“Has the onset of climate changes and their symptoms been accelerating beyond expectations?”
I did not mean teh *warming* but the resulting climate changes.
John
Spaceman Spiffsays
@347 Lady in Red said:
“I did find these original, popular press reports, however, from both Time and Newsweek. Please re-read them. I would suggest that these articles below are not easily dismissed as “myth” and it does appear that, in the 1970’s, there was a scientific consensus about a coming ice age.
Which leaves me with the question: what changed?
I will work through the other suggested references and, actually, I will read Connolley’s article about the Ice Age Myth. I would be interested in how he handles dismisses all the perceived concern below. ”
The Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck paper I linked to is simply an accounting of what was published by whom, when, and what the scientific issues were. There is no “handling” or “dismissing” involved. BAMS is the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
The 1960’s and 1970’s were the early days of modern climate science (e.g., satellite observations of the Earth and Sun, “fast” computers made their appearance, break-thrus in paleoclimatology, amongst many other developments). Climate scientists (which comprise many disciplines in science) were amassing data and piecing it together to help them understand how and why Earth’s climate changes. By the late 1970s, a large majority of the publications were investigating the implications for our climate of the rising C02 content in the atmosphere. There was no scientific “consensus” of global cooling.
In fact at home I still have a front page news article I cut from the Chicago Tribune written by their science writer (gee, what a concept) around 1980 (I’d have to check) on climate scientists’ concerns of a potentially rapidly warming climate due to the rapidly increasing C02 content of our atmosphere.
Always Searchingsays
Ray Ladbury seems to be suggesting that listening to the personal local experiences of elderly in West Africa is some laudable inferrence that is somehow remotely relevant to global climate. I would take issue with praise of this inferrence (though not climate science in general) as very unscientific and anecdotal. This is important because such inferrential chains could actually easily have gone the other way (and people probably have stories of other regional shifts that do!). So, it is a bad argumentative precedent.
Rattus Norvegicussays
Ray, it is important to note that even Schneider was in the “Schneider is wrong” camp :).
Normansays
#302 dhogaza says: “Well, climate science doesn’t support the notion of a “runaway greenhouse effect” (ala venus or whatever), so perhaps it is better to focus on what climate science *is* telling us”
I got the idea of the runaway (not like Venus but still plenty hot) from reading a peer reveiwed article on mass extinctions millions of years ago. The theory was that a small increase in global temperature will melt the permafrost which has a vast amount of methane hydrate. When this melts large quantities of methane will be released and react with the atmospheric O2 to produce a vastly greater amount of Carbon Dioxide than we are currently releasing. This will create the runaway effect which was claimed to have killed of 95% of the living species of that time.
Character assassination from the usual suspects to follow, I’m sure.
[Response: Oh dear. Dr. Lu’s mechanism has been comprehensively debunked. See links from here. This extension of his results to global warming is based purely on a correlation with CFC levels and is very dubious (for obvious reasons), whether it is reported in the ‘prestigious’ Physics Reports or not. – gavin]
Normansays
#323 Ray Ladbury says: “5)Come up with ideas yourselves!!!”
Thank you for your thoughtful and reasoned response to my questions.
I do not know how to solve this one. I am of strong opinion that greed is the number one problem here and I have no solution on how to stop this human motive. I can state I think it is the Number One problem but that will not stop it. Nor do I, in my lowly status, have enough influence in any circle to even attempt a solution.
The current U.S. economy is a consumer driven spend and waste system. In order for huge profits to be made. Consumers must purchase many products. I do not have an economic solution that would work to employ everyone but not have a consumer driven economy (“Are you still wearing those clothes, they are so out of style”….only a year old…this type of thinking in needed to keep factories open and people working.)
Now employ all 6 billion, give them good living standards and food. Tell me how many windmills and solar cells would you need just to grow and transport all the food?
Lady in Redsays
Snowed in as I am, with 30 inches up my quarter mile drive and no plow man in sight, I have read the Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck paper about scientific opinion in the 1970’s regarding climate. I found it fascinating! ….as I did reading the original 1970’s Time and Newsweek articles about the looming ice age.
Peterson et al wrote: “During the period from 1965 through 1979, our literature survey found 7 cooling, 20 neutral, and 44 warming papers.” In the years Time and Newsweek were writing cover stories about serious scientific concern about the new ice age, it looks like only 1/5 of one paper was published concerned about cooling. One fifth of one paper? How can that be? My very quick count of references found 97, between ’65 and ‘79. Peterson only identifies 71 in Figure 1. Why the discrepancy? How can I determine which ones were part of the cooling, neutral or warming piles? Is there a possibility there is a mistake here? When this paper was peer-reviewed by AMS, did someone actually check those numbers? Is there scientific consensus about Peterson et al’s definition of what a cooling/neutral/warming paper might be? How can/was Peterson’s “paper count” verified for accuracy?
On the one hand, it appears that scientific consensus for global warming was building during the 1970’s and, yet, mainstream media were writing dire stories about an ice age. (According to the paper, Andrew Revkin dubbed the media’s attention to ice their need for a “media peg.”)
All this creates dissonance in my mind. Time and Newsweek were too stupid to get it right in the 1970’s, are they getting it today? When Revkin checks in with Phil Jones before publishing in the New York Times now, is that more accurate? Or, when Seth Borenstein, part of the bag of released CRU emails, writes that Associated Press has done an exhaustive review of the CRU emails and there’s nothing there, should I believe that? What are Id and Watts and McIntyre concerned about?
Can you give me something more impartial to bite into? Or, explain how the mainstream media went so over-the-top crazy about an ice age at a time the preponderance of scientific opinion was concerned about warming? Why did mainstream media refuse to write about global warming when that was where the science actually was?
Also, can you reference a continuing thread of IPCC predictions from the beginning, to the present which will help me?
….Lady in Red
PS: Apologies for the cut/paste instead of a link. They are here:
I have always and only been interested in peeling the layers of the onion to a genuine understanding — at least for myself.
Doc Savage Fansays
The evidence continues to build for substantial GCR climate forcing. An update on this would be nice since most everything you have here is quite dated….much has changed the last few years.
I believe that we are finding an “occam’s razor” test being passed, not by AGW hypothoses , but by observable cosmic ray evidence. In this peer reviewed paper, Qing-Bin Lu presents evidence that CFC’s and cosmic rays have had a much more profound impact on our climate than CO2. I would imagine that CERN’s CLOUD findings will also provide empirical data consistent with Lu’s experiments. At least Lu’s findings will give AWG proponents an “out” as technically CFC’s impacting the climate would mean that climate change is, in part, anthropogenic; just not in relation to CO2 emissions. http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=8012
JCHsays
There are two subjects I would like to better understand: clouds and oceans. Awhile ago there was a post about why greenhouse gasses heat the ocean. I think a post with another go at that would be particularly interesting.
David Millersays
PeteB in 311 suggests increases in CO2 may be self-limiting due to “peak fossils”.
Pete, I’d agree with you if fossils were limited to oil, or maybe oil + natural gas.
Unfortunately, it also includes an immense amount of coal, tar sands, and shale “oil”. Hansen suggests that there is enough carbon in those sources to assure the Venus effect.
We may be smart enough to leave the other sources in the ground. There may be a sufficiently little energy returned for energy invested for it to make economic sense to mine these sources.
Economic depression from rising energy prices and climate change – not to mention current economic problems – may considerably reduce consumption.
But we’re a very creative species, and if someone can make a buck turning a ton of bitumen into a gallon of oil with in-situ combustion to heat the tar, that’s probably what will be done.
It’s not at all clear that oil becoming more expensive will reduce carbon emissions; for some length of time it may well increase them.
Another issue is that at some point it ceases to matter whether we keep emitting carbon or not. At some point positive feedbacks kick in (permafrost melting, for example) and it doesn’t matter what we do. It’s not clear where that point is. I, for one, would like for it never to be clear where that point is.
Jeffsays
I am curious if there are examples of the CRU homogenization process leading to a decrease in warming trends. I have seen several examples of cherry-picked examples where warming was added by the process. I also read the rather well considered random sample post here showing near comparability between raw and adjusted. For full balance, I would like to see (admitted up-front) cherry-picked examples of the CRU adjustments leading to lower temperature reading trends from a station. Links to such a thing would be appreciated. Thanks!
Doug Bostromsays
Rattus Norvegicus says: 22 December 2009 at 2:04 AM
“In reading my previous comment, it might be good to have a page with links to seminal papers in the study of the climate system.”
“If you think people don’t understand scientists here, imagine what it is like in a very traditional culture where most people lack all but the most rudimentary education.”
Ray, I think we in the U.S. have a pretty large population living in a very traditional culture lacking in all but the most rudimentary education. That’s why the statistics on AGW comprehension in the U.S. are so dismal. The acceptance of industry-funded propaganda is diagnostic of lousy education.
Neil Pelkey says: 21 December 2009 at 10:53 PM
“I think a thread on why this is such a male dominated site would be interesting.”
First thought: They have more common sense than to batter themselves senseless like moths against a lightbulb, endlessly arguing over the same stale topics.
RE #323 Yes the mitigation cost is reasonably low, but of course the alarmists on the pro climate change get the press, because it brings eyes to the adds they run. (The we need to decimate the population, reduce to the stone age … crowd). Do you ever see the 2-3% of gdp over 40 years run on the press (TV in particular). If you do the math and assume a 2% gdp growth rate thats only a difference between 2.23 and 2.25 times the gdp in 2050.
However the Elites in society have destroyed their credibility over time. First in the 1950s electricty was going to be to cheap to meter. Then the tobacco harm follies where it became standard to assume scientists were for sale. Now the financial follies. Combine this with the historic populism in the US and you get denialism.
Then you have the hard doomsters who lead to apocolypse fatigue, and to the conclusion lets eat drink, do drugs and be merry for tommorrow we die. These folks get the media attention not the more reasonable folks, particularly in the TV faceoff talking heads mode— (got to stop now to go to break).
Business types don’t have any trust in engineering types, who when given a reasonable challenge can meet it (see refrigerator efficiency standards 75% improvement is not bad)
So what will happen is the situation will worsen until a world wide Manhattan project style effort is needed, because thats the way society works.
WATERLOO, Ont. (Monday, Dec. 21, 2009) – Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both already implicated in depleting the Earth’s ozone layer, are also responsible for changes in the global climate, a University of Waterloo scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper.
In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs – compounds once widely used as refrigerants – and cosmic rays – energy particles originating in outer space – are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.
“My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century,” Lu said. “Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming. These findings are totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused on studying the mechanism for the formation of the ozone hole, rather than global warming.”
His conclusions are based on observations that from 1950 up to now, the climate in the Arctic and Antarctic atmospheres has been completely controlled by CFCs and cosmic rays, with no CO2 impact.
#354 How to talk to a conservative about climate change:
You can start by not overstating the science. I would advise saying that there are several hypotheses to explain global climate change ranging from natural to anthropogenic, and though AGW currently seems to be the prevailing hypothesis, the inaccuracies of AGW computer models demonstrate unequivocally that there are myriad variabilities in the global climate that the AGW hypothesis simply cannot yet account for.
dhogazasays
Just in case anyone’s wondering why all these GCR/Lu woo-woos came from, I took a quick peek and yes indeed, WUWT has a piece on Lu as its top post at the moment.
Of course, the last time Watts published something about Lu and cosmic rays it was because he thought the paper refuted CFCs role in reducing stratospheric ozone (Watts didn’t know what “halogenated” means).
Today we’ll take a closer look at Wegman et al’s tree-ring passage and do a detailed side-by-side comparison with its apparent main antecedent, chapter section 10.2 in Raymond Bradley’s classic Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary.
That comparison leaves no doubt that Wegman et al’s explication was substantially derived from that of Bradley, although the relevant attribution appears to be missing. There are, however, several divergences of note, also in the main unattributed, and some of Wegman’s paraphrasing introduces errors of analysis.
But the real shocker are two key passages in Wegman et al, which state unsubstantiated findings in flagrant contradiction with those of Bradley, apparently in order to denigrate the value of tree-ring derived temperature reconstructions.
SecularAnimistsays
Scott A. Mandia wrote: “I need your help. I am working on a blog post called How to Talk to a Conservative about Climate Change and would enjoy your comments to make this a better tool to use when faced with a conservative-leaning skeptic.”
Gary Rissling replied: “You can start by not overstating the science …” [followed by various boilerplate, scripted ExxonMobil-funded denialist pseudoscience talking points].
I would suggest that you start by telling your “conservative-leaning skeptic” that one’s political ideology has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO with the scientific reality of anthropogenic global warming. You might also ask him when did it become “conservative” to deny the existence of difficult, challenging problems, rather than proposing solutions to them? When did “conservatism” cease to be a genuine political ideology capable of proposing solutions to difficult problems, and become a fossil fuel industry propaganda campaign aimed at Ditto-Heads who believe every word they are spoon-fed by Rush Limbaugh and call themselves “skeptics” for doing so?
David Klarsays
RC, please clarify the statement “a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration increases average global temperature about 3 degrees C”. Is this based on empirical data, physical chemistry theory, or both? Is this based on some baseline CO2 concentration, or a specific CO2 value? Does my original statement need to be modified? Thanks for any clarification.
You can’t trust the Time and Newsweek reports because they did not give a clear or concise view of the ‘scientific’ understanding. If you want to know what they were saying in the report you actually need to read the report.
It is important to keep things in context. Cooling was in discussion because the Milankovitch cycles had pretty much been confirmed by the deep ocean sediment core studies. So it was in now way inappropriate to discuss cooling at the same time as warming. In other words discussions of Milanovitch and cooling in natural cycle as well as human caused global warming potentials were being discussed.
Remember, media is not climate science but rather interpretations based on the media source to sell newspapers and magazines. They are rarely thorough or representative of reality but rather tend toward glam phrasing that makes headlines.
For a post topic I would like to see some collaboration between botanists, foresters, and chemists and climate scientists about impacts of toxic greenhouse gas emissions on vegetation. The last post here had this comment:
” In fact, the description in the emails about the 20th century tree ring data makes one (me at least) believe that these researchers realized that the decline in the tree ring-indicated temperature in the face of rising thermometer measurements would lead to widespread dismissal of the accuracy of the tree ring surrogate.”
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think the researchers eliminated recent decades because they realized the smaller growth tree rings were anomalous. The question is why? I don’t know that they even attempted to determine that, because it’s another field of science entirely.
Personally I think it’s because the same pollutants that are warming the climate, particularly ozone and acid rain from volatile organic compounds which have been demonstrated to be very harmful to plants, have been suppressing the growth of trees for many years, at great distances from the generation of the gases.
This can be readily seen now because so many of them are dying.
Why is the EPA mandating the addition of ethanol to gasoline throughout the US? Not to mention, the petroleum based fertilizers required to grow the corn release nitrous oxide, another known plant poison.
I asked one forester who agreed with my opinion why there isn’t more research and discussion on the topic recently and he told me he and any others who had raised the issue of pollution were harassed and intimidated until they gave up. “These people are vicious,” he said. “BE CAREFUL.” I kid you not – that’s exactly what he wrote.
This is really important. A quote from the last article I linked: “The grocery store [for wildlife] is pretty empty right now,” he said. “It’s hard to look at the situation and not call this a mast failure.”
I have my doubts about Realclimate trying to tackle a topic like nuclear energy. This is one of the best web sites for climate just because it has contributions from serious experts. But ‘energy’ (the practical sort) is a totally different topic with different experts, often but not always with vested interests. I have also noticed that some excellent books on climate change have the odd chapter on energy and this is not always at the level of the other chapters. The one exception is that of geoengineering because attempts to change the climate (e.g. with sulphate aerosols) will involve modeling the consequences.
David B. Bensonsays
Roger Tan (312) — Being unsure what degree of technicalities would interest yoou, I’ll just suggest reading climatologist W.F. Ruddiman’s popular “Plows, Plagues and Petroleum”. He did a guest thread here on RealClimate awhile ago and his professional papers, available from his website, are quite readable.
Why you think it is useful to compare two Time and Newsweek articles to the work over decades by 1000s of scientists of many disciplines from all over the world? As a matter of fact, in 2006 Newsweek did a retraction article of their “famous” April 1975 article. Q: did your source of the 1975 Newsweek article also post the retraction article? Maybe it did and you just missed reading it? Or…?
This is a nice decade by decade review of the topic of “global cooling”, along with cited references and external links for more information.
Finally, in addition to the tallying of journal papers and citations thereof re. earth’s climate, the Peterson et al. paper gives an excellent overview of climate science in the decades leading up to 1980.
#211 Ron Kent
“So my point is if there’s an urgent need for action instead of fighting AGW deniers we’re better off focusing on convincing laymen and corporations alike of the need to take these actions in the name of peak oil, not AGW.” You’re not eh only person thinking along these lines – see http://transitionculture.org/ – this is what the Transition Town movement is all about.
Jerry Steffenssays
#375
“I would advise saying that there are several hypotheses to explain global climate change ranging from natural to anthropogenic”.
Yes. (Except that “hypotheses” would be better rendered as “mechanisms”.) But do you not realize that this information is a result of research by climate scientists? They’re not trying to hide anything!
“there are myriad variabilities in the global climate that the AGW hypothesis simply cannot yet account for”
A straw man. YOUR version of the “AGW hypothesis” apparently is something like this: “Because of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, all natural climate processes have ceased.” This is NOT a hypothesis being put forth by any respected climate scientist.
Ray Ladburysays
Norman@364, While I agree that you won’t stop greed, that does not necessarily preclude coming up with a solution. Adam Smith’s triumph was his realization that the human vice of greed could lead to a societal good–just as Marx’s downfall was his failure to realize that human nature cannot be educated out of us (I’ve always liked social-insect biologist Ed Wilson’s quote: “Marx was exactly right. He just had the wrong species.”)
If we’re to solve this problem, some people are going to get filthy rich off of the solution. We just have to make sure that what gets rewarded actually leads to the solution.
An analysis of 89 projects done in from 1998 to 2007 show an installation cost of 1000-1800 dollar per kW.
I made that back-of-the-envelope calculation to show that it is not blatantly obvious that renewables are impossible.
Anne van der Bomsays
Oops, make that page 20.
DocumentTheDatasays
It is precisely because of sites like this that non-AGW skeptics do not trust your science or scientists. You demonstrate group-think and self-reinforcing logic with little objective and open debate necessary for real scientific advancement. The labels you chose to use for those who aren’t in your club are revealing such as: “anti-science crowd” which is more accurately the “anti-junk-science crowd”.
As others have noted here (and especially elsewhere), it’s the unbelievable lack of controls over source data and the complete lack of transparency on the specific homogenization actions taken *on each piece of raw data* that leaves those with an open mind left with no alternative than to reject your work. This does NOT mean your work is wrong, but it means you MUST improve your scientific practices if you are to be believed. The CRU leaked code and email attests to these real problems and has brought this problem to the attention of a much wider audience, myself included.
This brings me to the primary point of my post which follows the intent of this thread:
1) Please conduct a thorough review of the process used to homogenize the data in the GHCN dataset (the strict policy that is followed IN ALL CASES to refute the current impression that it is haphazard policy that is open to the whims of and political presures placed on the homogenizer)
2) Show the details and the reason behind every raw data point that was changed in the GHCN dataset including any code that was used to enact this change so that there is a clear path from raw value to homogenized value with every step in between clear to all including the reasons for those changes (claims of fudging the numbers would be easily put to rest with such transparency; there ARE many good reasons why homogenization is needed but the current practices leave AGW proponents wide open to legitimate skepticism regarding this all to critical “base data” on which much of the AGW theory rests)
P.S. Those who have observed that the American public is woefully inept at evaluating scientific literature and can be easily fooled are dead one but it’s not the anti-junk-science crowd that is fooling them, it’s YOU!
Normansays
#372 Hank Roberts says: “Norman, what article are you talking about? Pointer, please?
I’d guess it was probably referring to the PETM events:”
Mr. Roberts, the article I was reading is in this link.
Lady in Red and the persistence on the cooling myth. Name ANY myth and you will find support for it in the popular press. Sometimes journalists just write anything to fill pages.
Save your energy for things that really matter.
Jiminmplssays
#356 Doug Wise – I’ve been over to Brave New Climate. They claim that new nuclear power plants in the US will cost less that $2k/kWe. Of course, NONE of it is backed with any real world data. The fact is that the ONLY cost projection that is publicly available is that for Turkey Point in FL at $5-8k per kW. Toshiba and Areva have declared all other cost projections “proprietary” and have deleted the cost projections from the applications on the NRC site. They’re asking for tens of billions in subsidies – shouldn’t they at least be required to make their cost projections public?
China has the most ambitious nuclear power program in the world right now – yet nuclear will only provide 15% of their electricity by 2030. Wind will overtake nuclear in capacity by 2020.
If Toshiba or Areva could manage to build JUST ONE plant on time or on budget, then maybe we could reconsider nuclear power. As it is, nuclear power too expensive to matter.
David B. Bensonsays
John Atkeison (358) — Changes in the cryosphere seem to me to be proceeding faster than anticipated. I don’t know enough about changes to flora and fauna to comment.
James McDonaldsays
Fwiw, I stumbled across the following response that is often a very good reply to many confused posts out in blogland:
“Local weather. Global climate. Learn the difference.”
It’s surprising how many times that comes in handy…
You repeatedly attack those with a pro nuclear stance (and even David MacKay who attempts objectivity).
If what I wrote merits the label ‘attack’, I did with facts. That is fair.
Do you have anything to say about the specific problem I have with prof. MacKay’s book? Since neither Paula Thomas nor Didactylus responded, can you perhaps tell me why he spends 100 pages suggesting the UK needs 195 kWh per person per day of renewable energy, a benchmark that is nowhere to be seen when he treats nuclear power? I find that a very weak attempt at objectivity.
I am very much aware that discussions about renewables are mostly OT on RC. But this is sort of a ‘free thread’, so I allowed myself some comments on this subject. And when I think other posters misrepresent the facts, I do react.
As for BraveNewClimate, I don’t know if I can find the time to follow yet another blog.
Anne van der Bomsays
Sorry, should be Douglas Wise.
When do we get the preview back? Indispensable to catch these unnecessary typos.
Mathieu Rouault @316 “I would like to see a debate on science in developing country.”
OK, having worked as a science teacher trainer in West Africa, I feel I can comment with some degree of familiarity. There is certainly interest in science. One of my first free-flowing conversations I had as I was learning French was trying to explain to an African why his perpetual motion machine wouldn’t work–it was really pretty sophisticated. As I worked with teachers, I found a lot of creativity, but also a lot of despair and feelings of isolation. If you think people don’t understand scientists here, imagine what it is like in a very traditional culture where most people lack all but the most rudimentary education.
Now, granted, this was 20 years ago, but I think that the biggest problems in science in Africa are still lack of resources and isolation. I am sure the internet has helped immensely with isolation, but it is still hard when you don’t have somebody to chalk things out with at the blackboard. And as far as resources go, everything was expensive–from sheet metal, to lumber to tools.
One thing that was interesting–even 20 years ago, lay persons were way ahead of Americans in accepting the reality of climate change. Why? Because they listened to the oldest people in the village who had all experienced the changes. I specifically remember one very old man who had a mango orchard. He’d planted every tree himself by hand, and now he had an impressive number of 40 and 50 year old trees producing some of the best mangos I’d ever had. Even he didn’t know how old he was, but he spoke German and remembered the German colonists–and Germany was tossed out of the country in 1914 by French and British colonists. Now completely blind, but mentally very sharp, he talked about how much hotter it was, how the rains were fewer and more unpredictable. He was just one of many old people who told similar stories.
“I did find these original, popular press reports, however, from both Time and Newsweek. Please re-read them. I would suggest that these articles below are not easily dismissed as “myth” and it does appear that, in the 1970’s, there was a scientific consensus about a coming ice age. ”
The answer is in the names of the ‘journals’ you are reading. So far as I recall, neither Time or Newsweek is a scientific publication.
There was NO scientific consensus about global cooling.
There were a few journal articles that posited it might be a reality.
Some news outlets picked up on these and ran scare stories.
This is IN NO WAY comparable to the THOUSANDS of papers, and researchers, looking at climate today, and reporting a very strong concensus.
If you /want/ to believe that scientists in the 70s thought the earth was going to get colder, and a similar number of scientists today believe the earth is going to get warmer, with a similar amount of evidence, then that’s fine.
This is not even close to being a reflection of reality, however.
Lady in Red,
The hypothesis of a cooling period due to aerosols (Schneider’s hypothesis) rested on the assumption that CO2 sensitivity was significantly lower than it was. There most certainly was no consensus on this issue. It was considered a possibility. Some scientists thought Schneider was right; some thought he was wrong, with this latter group probably being larger.
Lady, it is useful to think of scientific consensus not in terms of a “vote” or an “agreement”, but rather in terms of the ideas, techniques and phenomena without which one cannot understand the phenomenon being studied. There is a consensus that we are warming the planet because the ideas that support that (CO2 as a greenhouse gas with a sensitivity around 3 degrees per doubling, etc.) are indispensable for understanding Earth’s climate. It is why the consensus scientists are publishing (that is, progressing in their understanding of climate) while so-called skeptics have an abysmal publishing record and an even poorer record for having their work cited.
I need your help. I am working on a blog post called How to Talk to a Conservative about Climate Change and would enjoy your comments to make this a better tool to use when faced with a conservative-leaning skeptic. The goal is to end up with something that we can all use. I need no credit – I want this to be a goup effort.
http://profmandia.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/how-to-talk-to-a-conservative-about-climate-change/
So, let’s see, on the one side we have a survey of refereed papers coming down on the side of global warming, not cooling, by something like a 4:1 ratio.
On the other hand, we have popular press reports from both Time and Newsweek.
And your conclusion is that the popular press reports trump the literature survey and “prove” there was a scientific consensus about a coming ice age?
By which I assume you mean one coming earlier than tens of thousands of years in the future? (there was and is a consensus that milankovich cycles do exist, obviously).
re Anne van der Bom #313
Anne, it would be instructive if you were to contribute your opinions on BraveNewClimate which not only considers climate change but also solutions thereto. You repeatedly attack those with a pro nuclear stance (and even David MacKay who attempts objectivity). However, RealClimate appears averse to diluting its input with debates about climate solutions. Why not do as Hank Roberts suggests and comment on BraveNewClimate threads? There are several there who are also hostile to a nuclear solution. As one who has gradually been convinced that renewables do not offer a satisfactory, politically possible or affordable solution, I have been left with the view that nuclear fission power (and 4th generation power in particular) represents the only hope of a solution that would avoid the scenario that Barton Paul Levenson speculated about in #339. Clearly, you don’t agree. Why not come over and see how your opinions stack up against those who share my view but have greater expertise on the subject?
I don’t know if it’s already been mentioned, but this lecture by Richard Alley should at least be a permalink:
http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml
(I hope it stays on forever, it’s going to be my favorite link to ‘skeptics’/contrarians/deniers)
and also would make an interesting discussion point on realclimate. That’s my 2 cents…
Hey, David (#58),
I think you misunderstood the question (#11):
“Has the onset of climate changes and their symptoms been accelerating beyond expectations?”
I did not mean teh *warming* but the resulting climate changes.
John
@347 Lady in Red said:
“I did find these original, popular press reports, however, from both Time and Newsweek. Please re-read them. I would suggest that these articles below are not easily dismissed as “myth” and it does appear that, in the 1970’s, there was a scientific consensus about a coming ice age.
Which leaves me with the question: what changed?
I will work through the other suggested references and, actually, I will read Connolley’s article about the Ice Age Myth. I would be interested in how he handles dismisses all the perceived concern below. ”
The Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck paper I linked to is simply an accounting of what was published by whom, when, and what the scientific issues were. There is no “handling” or “dismissing” involved. BAMS is the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
The 1960’s and 1970’s were the early days of modern climate science (e.g., satellite observations of the Earth and Sun, “fast” computers made their appearance, break-thrus in paleoclimatology, amongst many other developments). Climate scientists (which comprise many disciplines in science) were amassing data and piecing it together to help them understand how and why Earth’s climate changes. By the late 1970s, a large majority of the publications were investigating the implications for our climate of the rising C02 content in the atmosphere. There was no scientific “consensus” of global cooling.
In fact at home I still have a front page news article I cut from the Chicago Tribune written by their science writer (gee, what a concept) around 1980 (I’d have to check) on climate scientists’ concerns of a potentially rapidly warming climate due to the rapidly increasing C02 content of our atmosphere.
Ray Ladbury seems to be suggesting that listening to the personal local experiences of elderly in West Africa is some laudable inferrence that is somehow remotely relevant to global climate. I would take issue with praise of this inferrence (though not climate science in general) as very unscientific and anecdotal. This is important because such inferrential chains could actually easily have gone the other way (and people probably have stories of other regional shifts that do!). So, it is a bad argumentative precedent.
Ray, it is important to note that even Schneider was in the “Schneider is wrong” camp :).
#302 dhogaza says: “Well, climate science doesn’t support the notion of a “runaway greenhouse effect” (ala venus or whatever), so perhaps it is better to focus on what climate science *is* telling us”
I got the idea of the runaway (not like Venus but still plenty hot) from reading a peer reveiwed article on mass extinctions millions of years ago. The theory was that a small increase in global temperature will melt the permafrost which has a vast amount of methane hydrate. When this melts large quantities of methane will be released and react with the atmospheric O2 to produce a vastly greater amount of Carbon Dioxide than we are currently releasing. This will create the runaway effect which was claimed to have killed of 95% of the living species of that time.
Study shows CFCs, cosmic rays major culprits for global warming
http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=8012
Character assassination from the usual suspects to follow, I’m sure.
[Response: Oh dear. Dr. Lu’s mechanism has been comprehensively debunked. See links from here. This extension of his results to global warming is based purely on a correlation with CFC levels and is very dubious (for obvious reasons), whether it is reported in the ‘prestigious’ Physics Reports or not. – gavin]
#323 Ray Ladbury says: “5)Come up with ideas yourselves!!!”
Thank you for your thoughtful and reasoned response to my questions.
I do not know how to solve this one. I am of strong opinion that greed is the number one problem here and I have no solution on how to stop this human motive. I can state I think it is the Number One problem but that will not stop it. Nor do I, in my lowly status, have enough influence in any circle to even attempt a solution.
The current U.S. economy is a consumer driven spend and waste system. In order for huge profits to be made. Consumers must purchase many products. I do not have an economic solution that would work to employ everyone but not have a consumer driven economy (“Are you still wearing those clothes, they are so out of style”….only a year old…this type of thinking in needed to keep factories open and people working.)
Now employ all 6 billion, give them good living standards and food. Tell me how many windmills and solar cells would you need just to grow and transport all the food?
Snowed in as I am, with 30 inches up my quarter mile drive and no plow man in sight, I have read the Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck paper about scientific opinion in the 1970’s regarding climate. I found it fascinating! ….as I did reading the original 1970’s Time and Newsweek articles about the looming ice age.
Peterson et al wrote: “During the period from 1965 through 1979, our literature survey found 7 cooling, 20 neutral, and 44 warming papers.” In the years Time and Newsweek were writing cover stories about serious scientific concern about the new ice age, it looks like only 1/5 of one paper was published concerned about cooling. One fifth of one paper? How can that be? My very quick count of references found 97, between ’65 and ‘79. Peterson only identifies 71 in Figure 1. Why the discrepancy? How can I determine which ones were part of the cooling, neutral or warming piles? Is there a possibility there is a mistake here? When this paper was peer-reviewed by AMS, did someone actually check those numbers? Is there scientific consensus about Peterson et al’s definition of what a cooling/neutral/warming paper might be? How can/was Peterson’s “paper count” verified for accuracy?
On the one hand, it appears that scientific consensus for global warming was building during the 1970’s and, yet, mainstream media were writing dire stories about an ice age. (According to the paper, Andrew Revkin dubbed the media’s attention to ice their need for a “media peg.”)
All this creates dissonance in my mind. Time and Newsweek were too stupid to get it right in the 1970’s, are they getting it today? When Revkin checks in with Phil Jones before publishing in the New York Times now, is that more accurate? Or, when Seth Borenstein, part of the bag of released CRU emails, writes that Associated Press has done an exhaustive review of the CRU emails and there’s nothing there, should I believe that? What are Id and Watts and McIntyre concerned about?
Can you give me something more impartial to bite into? Or, explain how the mainstream media went so over-the-top crazy about an ice age at a time the preponderance of scientific opinion was concerned about warming? Why did mainstream media refuse to write about global warming when that was where the science actually was?
Also, can you reference a continuing thread of IPCC predictions from the beginning, to the present which will help me?
….Lady in Red
PS: Apologies for the cut/paste instead of a link. They are here:
Newsweek:
http://www.denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm
Time Magazine:
http://neoconexpress.blogspot.com/2007/02/time-like-newsweek-predicted-iceage-in.html#
I have always and only been interested in peeling the layers of the onion to a genuine understanding — at least for myself.
The evidence continues to build for substantial GCR climate forcing. An update on this would be nice since most everything you have here is quite dated….much has changed the last few years.
I believe that we are finding an “occam’s razor” test being passed, not by AGW hypothoses , but by observable cosmic ray evidence. In this peer reviewed paper, Qing-Bin Lu presents evidence that CFC’s and cosmic rays have had a much more profound impact on our climate than CO2. I would imagine that CERN’s CLOUD findings will also provide empirical data consistent with Lu’s experiments. At least Lu’s findings will give AWG proponents an “out” as technically CFC’s impacting the climate would mean that climate change is, in part, anthropogenic; just not in relation to CO2 emissions.
http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=8012
There are two subjects I would like to better understand: clouds and oceans. Awhile ago there was a post about why greenhouse gasses heat the ocean. I think a post with another go at that would be particularly interesting.
PeteB in 311 suggests increases in CO2 may be self-limiting due to “peak fossils”.
Pete, I’d agree with you if fossils were limited to oil, or maybe oil + natural gas.
Unfortunately, it also includes an immense amount of coal, tar sands, and shale “oil”. Hansen suggests that there is enough carbon in those sources to assure the Venus effect.
We may be smart enough to leave the other sources in the ground. There may be a sufficiently little energy returned for energy invested for it to make economic sense to mine these sources.
Economic depression from rising energy prices and climate change – not to mention current economic problems – may considerably reduce consumption.
But we’re a very creative species, and if someone can make a buck turning a ton of bitumen into a gallon of oil with in-situ combustion to heat the tar, that’s probably what will be done.
It’s not at all clear that oil becoming more expensive will reduce carbon emissions; for some length of time it may well increase them.
Another issue is that at some point it ceases to matter whether we keep emitting carbon or not. At some point positive feedbacks kick in (permafrost melting, for example) and it doesn’t matter what we do. It’s not clear where that point is. I, for one, would like for it never to be clear where that point is.
I am curious if there are examples of the CRU homogenization process leading to a decrease in warming trends. I have seen several examples of cherry-picked examples where warming was added by the process. I also read the rather well considered random sample post here showing near comparability between raw and adjusted. For full balance, I would like to see (admitted up-front) cherry-picked examples of the CRU adjustments leading to lower temperature reading trends from a station. Links to such a thing would be appreciated. Thanks!
Rattus Norvegicus says: 22 December 2009 at 2:04 AM
“In reading my previous comment, it might be good to have a page with links to seminal papers in the study of the climate system.”
One can hardly do better than Weart’s history:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/
Ray Ladbury says: 22 December 2009 at 10:57 AM
“If you think people don’t understand scientists here, imagine what it is like in a very traditional culture where most people lack all but the most rudimentary education.”
Ray, I think we in the U.S. have a pretty large population living in a very traditional culture lacking in all but the most rudimentary education. That’s why the statistics on AGW comprehension in the U.S. are so dismal. The acceptance of industry-funded propaganda is diagnostic of lousy education.
Neil Pelkey says: 21 December 2009 at 10:53 PM
“I think a thread on why this is such a male dominated site would be interesting.”
First thought: They have more common sense than to batter themselves senseless like moths against a lightbulb, endlessly arguing over the same stale topics.
Norman, what article are you talking about? Pointer, please?
I’d guess it was probably referring to the PETM events:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arealclimate.org+PETM
RE #323 Yes the mitigation cost is reasonably low, but of course the alarmists on the pro climate change get the press, because it brings eyes to the adds they run. (The we need to decimate the population, reduce to the stone age … crowd). Do you ever see the 2-3% of gdp over 40 years run on the press (TV in particular). If you do the math and assume a 2% gdp growth rate thats only a difference between 2.23 and 2.25 times the gdp in 2050.
However the Elites in society have destroyed their credibility over time. First in the 1950s electricty was going to be to cheap to meter. Then the tobacco harm follies where it became standard to assume scientists were for sale. Now the financial follies. Combine this with the historic populism in the US and you get denialism.
Then you have the hard doomsters who lead to apocolypse fatigue, and to the conclusion lets eat drink, do drugs and be merry for tommorrow we die. These folks get the media attention not the more reasonable folks, particularly in the TV faceoff talking heads mode— (got to stop now to go to break).
Business types don’t have any trust in engineering types, who when given a reasonable challenge can meet it (see refrigerator efficiency standards 75% improvement is not bad)
So what will happen is the situation will worsen until a world wide Manhattan project style effort is needed, because thats the way society works.
This story would be an interesting one to cover:
#354 How to talk to a conservative about climate change:
You can start by not overstating the science. I would advise saying that there are several hypotheses to explain global climate change ranging from natural to anthropogenic, and though AGW currently seems to be the prevailing hypothesis, the inaccuracies of AGW computer models demonstrate unequivocally that there are myriad variabilities in the global climate that the AGW hypothesis simply cannot yet account for.
Just in case anyone’s wondering why all these GCR/Lu woo-woos came from, I took a quick peek and yes indeed, WUWT has a piece on Lu as its top post at the moment.
Of course, the last time Watts published something about Lu and cosmic rays it was because he thought the paper refuted CFCs role in reducing stratospheric ozone (Watts didn’t know what “halogenated” means).
http://deepclimate.org/2009/12/22/wegman-and-rapp-on-tree-rings-a-divergence-problem-part-1/
Today we’ll take a closer look at Wegman et al’s tree-ring passage and do a detailed side-by-side comparison with its apparent main antecedent, chapter section 10.2 in Raymond Bradley’s classic Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary.
That comparison leaves no doubt that Wegman et al’s explication was substantially derived from that of Bradley, although the relevant attribution appears to be missing. There are, however, several divergences of note, also in the main unattributed, and some of Wegman’s paraphrasing introduces errors of analysis.
But the real shocker are two key passages in Wegman et al, which state unsubstantiated findings in flagrant contradiction with those of Bradley, apparently in order to denigrate the value of tree-ring derived temperature reconstructions.
Scott A. Mandia wrote: “I need your help. I am working on a blog post called How to Talk to a Conservative about Climate Change and would enjoy your comments to make this a better tool to use when faced with a conservative-leaning skeptic.”
Gary Rissling replied: “You can start by not overstating the science …” [followed by various boilerplate, scripted ExxonMobil-funded denialist pseudoscience talking points].
I would suggest that you start by telling your “conservative-leaning skeptic” that one’s political ideology has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO with the scientific reality of anthropogenic global warming. You might also ask him when did it become “conservative” to deny the existence of difficult, challenging problems, rather than proposing solutions to them? When did “conservatism” cease to be a genuine political ideology capable of proposing solutions to difficult problems, and become a fossil fuel industry propaganda campaign aimed at Ditto-Heads who believe every word they are spoon-fed by Rush Limbaugh and call themselves “skeptics” for doing so?
RC, please clarify the statement “a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration increases average global temperature about 3 degrees C”. Is this based on empirical data, physical chemistry theory, or both? Is this based on some baseline CO2 concentration, or a specific CO2 value? Does my original statement need to be modified? Thanks for any clarification.
[Response: See here. – gavin]
#84 Mesa,
at last, somebody who understands me!
#347 Lady in Red
William Connolley did a great job:
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/nas-1975.html
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/misc-non-science.html
He was taking the quotes from the actual 1975 report.
I worked from his work and tried to add a little more perspective:
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/global-cooling
You can’t trust the Time and Newsweek reports because they did not give a clear or concise view of the ‘scientific’ understanding. If you want to know what they were saying in the report you actually need to read the report.
http://www.abebooks.com/search/isbn/0309023238
#365
It is important to keep things in context. Cooling was in discussion because the Milankovitch cycles had pretty much been confirmed by the deep ocean sediment core studies. So it was in now way inappropriate to discuss cooling at the same time as warming. In other words discussions of Milanovitch and cooling in natural cycle as well as human caused global warming potentials were being discussed.
Remember, media is not climate science but rather interpretations based on the media source to sell newspapers and magazines. They are rarely thorough or representative of reality but rather tend toward glam phrasing that makes headlines.
For a post topic I would like to see some collaboration between botanists, foresters, and chemists and climate scientists about impacts of toxic greenhouse gas emissions on vegetation. The last post here had this comment:
” In fact, the description in the emails about the 20th century tree ring data makes one (me at least) believe that these researchers realized that the decline in the tree ring-indicated temperature in the face of rising thermometer measurements would lead to widespread dismissal of the accuracy of the tree ring surrogate.”
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think the researchers eliminated recent decades because they realized the smaller growth tree rings were anomalous. The question is why? I don’t know that they even attempted to determine that, because it’s another field of science entirely.
Personally I think it’s because the same pollutants that are warming the climate, particularly ozone and acid rain from volatile organic compounds which have been demonstrated to be very harmful to plants, have been suppressing the growth of trees for many years, at great distances from the generation of the gases.
This can be readily seen now because so many of them are dying.
This Stanford study says the health consequences of ethanol emissions to humans and to vegetation are worse than from gasoline: http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2009/12/aauuuuuggghhhh-no-duh.html as if epidemics of cancer, emphysema, asthma, and irreversible tree decline aren’t already bad enough. Here is a story about missing food for wildlife: http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2009/12/hunger.html
Why is the EPA mandating the addition of ethanol to gasoline throughout the US? Not to mention, the petroleum based fertilizers required to grow the corn release nitrous oxide, another known plant poison.
I asked one forester who agreed with my opinion why there isn’t more research and discussion on the topic recently and he told me he and any others who had raised the issue of pollution were harassed and intimidated until they gave up. “These people are vicious,” he said. “BE CAREFUL.” I kid you not – that’s exactly what he wrote.
This is really important. A quote from the last article I linked: “The grocery store [for wildlife] is pretty empty right now,” he said. “It’s hard to look at the situation and not call this a mast failure.”
Human grocery stores and crop failures are next. Here’s a picture of what ozone does to a leaf: http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2009/09/we-are-all-watermelon-now.html
re #16
Nuclear power?
I am only a reader of RC but this is my opinion.
I have my doubts about Realclimate trying to tackle a topic like nuclear energy. This is one of the best web sites for climate just because it has contributions from serious experts. But ‘energy’ (the practical sort) is a totally different topic with different experts, often but not always with vested interests. I have also noticed that some excellent books on climate change have the odd chapter on energy and this is not always at the level of the other chapters. The one exception is that of geoengineering because attempts to change the climate (e.g. with sulphate aerosols) will involve modeling the consequences.
Roger Tan (312) — Being unsure what degree of technicalities would interest yoou, I’ll just suggest reading climatologist W.F. Ruddiman’s popular “Plows, Plagues and Petroleum”. He did a guest thread here on RealClimate awhile ago and his professional papers, available from his website, are quite readable.
> Liu
Those relying on that should first look for something more than a reprint of the press release, which originates here:
http://newsrelease.uwaterloo.ca/news.php?id=5152
re. #365 (Lady in Red)
Why you think it is useful to compare two Time and Newsweek articles to the work over decades by 1000s of scientists of many disciplines from all over the world? As a matter of fact, in 2006 Newsweek did a retraction article of their “famous” April 1975 article. Q: did your source of the 1975 Newsweek article also post the retraction article? Maybe it did and you just missed reading it? Or…?
This is a nice decade by decade review of the topic of “global cooling”, along with cited references and external links for more information.
Finally, in addition to the tallying of journal papers and citations thereof re. earth’s climate, the Peterson et al. paper gives an excellent overview of climate science in the decades leading up to 1980.
BPL
22 December 2009 at 9:12 AM
Thanks for the compliment, but I must disappoint you. In the Northern part of The Netherlands, Anne is also a male name.
See these two (sort of) known male Dutchmen called Anne:
Anne de Vries
Anne Vondeling
#211 Ron Kent
“So my point is if there’s an urgent need for action instead of fighting AGW deniers we’re better off focusing on convincing laymen and corporations alike of the need to take these actions in the name of peak oil, not AGW.” You’re not eh only person thinking along these lines – see http://transitionculture.org/ – this is what the Transition Town movement is all about.
#375
“I would advise saying that there are several hypotheses to explain global climate change ranging from natural to anthropogenic”.
Yes. (Except that “hypotheses” would be better rendered as “mechanisms”.) But do you not realize that this information is a result of research by climate scientists? They’re not trying to hide anything!
“there are myriad variabilities in the global climate that the AGW hypothesis simply cannot yet account for”
A straw man. YOUR version of the “AGW hypothesis” apparently is something like this: “Because of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, all natural climate processes have ceased.” This is NOT a hypothesis being put forth by any respected climate scientist.
Norman@364, While I agree that you won’t stop greed, that does not necessarily preclude coming up with a solution. Adam Smith’s triumph was his realization that the human vice of greed could lead to a societal good–just as Marx’s downfall was his failure to realize that human nature cannot be educated out of us (I’ve always liked social-insect biologist Ed Wilson’s quote: “Marx was exactly right. He just had the wrong species.”)
If we’re to solve this problem, some people are going to get filthy rich off of the solution. We just have to make sure that what gets rewarded actually leads to the solution.
Rod B,
22 December 2009 at 10:24 AM
Look at page 14 of this report: http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/reports/lbnl-275e.pdf
An analysis of 89 projects done in from 1998 to 2007 show an installation cost of 1000-1800 dollar per kW.
I made that back-of-the-envelope calculation to show that it is not blatantly obvious that renewables are impossible.
Oops, make that page 20.
It is precisely because of sites like this that non-AGW skeptics do not trust your science or scientists. You demonstrate group-think and self-reinforcing logic with little objective and open debate necessary for real scientific advancement. The labels you chose to use for those who aren’t in your club are revealing such as: “anti-science crowd” which is more accurately the “anti-junk-science crowd”.
As others have noted here (and especially elsewhere), it’s the unbelievable lack of controls over source data and the complete lack of transparency on the specific homogenization actions taken *on each piece of raw data* that leaves those with an open mind left with no alternative than to reject your work. This does NOT mean your work is wrong, but it means you MUST improve your scientific practices if you are to be believed. The CRU leaked code and email attests to these real problems and has brought this problem to the attention of a much wider audience, myself included.
This brings me to the primary point of my post which follows the intent of this thread:
1) Please conduct a thorough review of the process used to homogenize the data in the GHCN dataset (the strict policy that is followed IN ALL CASES to refute the current impression that it is haphazard policy that is open to the whims of and political presures placed on the homogenizer)
2) Show the details and the reason behind every raw data point that was changed in the GHCN dataset including any code that was used to enact this change so that there is a clear path from raw value to homogenized value with every step in between clear to all including the reasons for those changes (claims of fudging the numbers would be easily put to rest with such transparency; there ARE many good reasons why homogenization is needed but the current practices leave AGW proponents wide open to legitimate skepticism regarding this all to critical “base data” on which much of the AGW theory rests)
P.S. Those who have observed that the American public is woefully inept at evaluating scientific literature and can be easily fooled are dead one but it’s not the anti-junk-science crowd that is fooling them, it’s YOU!
#372 Hank Roberts says: “Norman, what article are you talking about? Pointer, please?
I’d guess it was probably referring to the PETM events:”
Mr. Roberts, the article I was reading is in this link.
http://www.iscv.cl/pdfs/PDFSeminars/BioGeografia/Bibliografia/IIFundamentosteoricosymetodosBiog/2Especiacionextincionmodosdeevolucion/ENDPER1.PDF
Lady in Red and the persistence on the cooling myth. Name ANY myth and you will find support for it in the popular press. Sometimes journalists just write anything to fill pages.
Save your energy for things that really matter.
#356 Doug Wise – I’ve been over to Brave New Climate. They claim that new nuclear power plants in the US will cost less that $2k/kWe. Of course, NONE of it is backed with any real world data. The fact is that the ONLY cost projection that is publicly available is that for Turkey Point in FL at $5-8k per kW. Toshiba and Areva have declared all other cost projections “proprietary” and have deleted the cost projections from the applications on the NRC site. They’re asking for tens of billions in subsidies – shouldn’t they at least be required to make their cost projections public?
China has the most ambitious nuclear power program in the world right now – yet nuclear will only provide 15% of their electricity by 2030. Wind will overtake nuclear in capacity by 2020.
If Toshiba or Areva could manage to build JUST ONE plant on time or on budget, then maybe we could reconsider nuclear power. As it is, nuclear power too expensive to matter.
John Atkeison (358) — Changes in the cryosphere seem to me to be proceeding faster than anticipated. I don’t know enough about changes to flora and fauna to comment.
Fwiw, I stumbled across the following response that is often a very good reply to many confused posts out in blogland:
“Local weather. Global climate. Learn the difference.”
It’s surprising how many times that comes in handy…
David Wise,
22 December 2009 at 11:38 AM
If what I wrote merits the label ‘attack’, I did with facts. That is fair.
Do you have anything to say about the specific problem I have with prof. MacKay’s book? Since neither Paula Thomas nor Didactylus responded, can you perhaps tell me why he spends 100 pages suggesting the UK needs 195 kWh per person per day of renewable energy, a benchmark that is nowhere to be seen when he treats nuclear power? I find that a very weak attempt at objectivity.
I am very much aware that discussions about renewables are mostly OT on RC. But this is sort of a ‘free thread’, so I allowed myself some comments on this subject. And when I think other posters misrepresent the facts, I do react.
As for BraveNewClimate, I don’t know if I can find the time to follow yet another blog.
Sorry, should be Douglas Wise.
When do we get the preview back? Indispensable to catch these unnecessary typos.