V 43: I do happen to have a considerable amount of scientific training and experience, including a considerable amount of experience with statistics
BPL: You are either lying or delusional. You would not pass an elementary statistics course with what you know now. You can’t even define what a “correlation” means correctly, and that’s statistics 101.
Ray Ladburysays
Ah, Weaktor. So confident. And so wrong you don’t even rise to the level of wrong.
Since you can’t argue on the basis of the evidence, you invoke exactly the sort of ad hoc “explanations” I’ve highlighted.
Au contraire. You’ve been refuted on the evidence time and time again. That you refuse to accept this does not change that fact. It’s denial in its purest form.
nigeljsays
Al Bundy @45
“AB: Yep. Though folks pretend that comment threads are more important than the comic pages, we’re all here to waste time. I just took a break from working on my patent filing to wander by and reset my neurons.”
If by waste time you mean entertainment, to debate, and to learn things and share information, and counter the nonsense, yes I think people are here for this. I think it is also a sophisticated form of gossip, and gossip is normal and healthy. People should read the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
Ray Ladburysays
Weaktor: I do happen to have a considerable amount of scientific training and experience, including a considerable amount of experience with statistics
JP 12: Could it be that they’ve already had a considerable warming trend? Record low at the South Pole is -117 F, set back in 1982.
KIA 50: Not possible. CO2 concentrations were considerably above “pre-industrial” in 1982; the radiant energy would not have been able to produce a record cold at such high CO2 levels according to AGW theory – my money is on improperly calibrated measuring device.
BPL: For the 37th time, CO2 is not the only thing that affects temperatures, certainly not in small regions. For a single measurement on a single date in a single location, I would check the winds and currents first.
jgnfldsays
Re. vic and correlations/causes
Perhaps vic, using his extensive stats knowledge, can explain to us how the mathematics of the statistics behind causal inference–say ANOVAs–differ from the mathematics of multiple correlation analysis.
One would think it would be a cinch for him to describe how “dummy” variables allow (some measure of) causal inference under certain procedural circumstances!
William B Jacksonsays
It is evident to me that Victor is to be seen not as a possible source of information, but rather as an amusement…an ongoing joke. KIA is pretty much the same, neither are anything to develop heartburn over!
CCHolleysays
RE. Mr. Know Nothing @50
“… The latest science tells us, in actuality, based on those ice cores, the temperatures and CO2 levels actually rose in lockstep–the CO2 levels did not lag temperature rise…”
Please get with BL in post 23 above. He confirms that temperature rose ahead of CO2 levels during certain times as V indicated. When y’all get your stories straight, let us know what actually happened. ;)
No contradiction. You have to look at the complete carbon cycle between the atmosphere, land, and oceans. Exchange rate of the CO2 movement between the oceans and atmosphere is dependent on the concentration of CO2 already in both the atmosphere and the oceans along with the temperature of the ocean. When the equilibrium of the cycle is upset by a rise in temperature, less of the atmospheric CO2 is absorbed by the oceans versus that which is off-gassed and hence the level in the atmosphere goes up. This is a positive feedback to the temperature rise. At the end of a period of glaciation, minor changes in insolation in the northern hemisphere begin the temperature rise which in turn raises the CO2 levels in the atmosphere in lock-step enhancing the warming. This cycle continues until a new equilibrium is reached. Of course the atmospheric warming is initiated “first”, but the CO2 levels do rise as the temperatures rise.
Example of one of multiple more recent papers on the subject of CO2 rise versus temperatures in ice cores:
F. Parrenin et al, Synchronous Change of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature During the Last Deglacial, Science 01 Mar 2013: Vol. 339, Issue 6123, pp. 1060-1063 DOI: 10.1126/science.1226368Warming
>Victor, in his completely deluded self-importance believes that he alone, a science illiterate, is capable of pointing out the flaws of the science behind AGW.
What rock have you been hiding under, CC? A great many scientists have pointed out those flaws. I’m far from alone.
>Likewise, Victor, untrained in statistics, believes he can lecture experts on the proper use of statistics.
I’ve learned to collaborate with statisticians, who certainly know this field much better than I. But I’ve never hesitated to question results that make no sense to me — we would then work together to identify the problem — no whining or name calling required.
The so-called “statistics” offered by Grumbine et al are hopelessly amateurish, as should be obvious to anyone not already captured by confirmation bias. I’m sorry but I must question their claim to expertise. I prefer to rely on a real expert, Danley Wolfe, whose scattergrams, which place the data in its historical context, make perfect sense.
34 CCHolley says:
>The latest science tells us, in actuality, based on those ice cores, the temperatures and CO2 levels actually rose in lockstep–the CO2 levels did not lag temperature rise.
Very interesting. A great many scientists are going to have to stand corrected if this new finding holds up. Can you cite any references?
44
nigelj says:
>Victor Grauer says “I do happen to have a considerable amount of scientific training and experience, including a considerable amount of experience with statistics,
>What specifically? What degrees or certificates, and from what exact institutes?
My scientific background is in the social sciences: psychology, linguistics, ethnology and semiotics. I have degrees from Syracuse University, Wesleyan University and SUNY Buffalo. The basic principles of science are the same, by the way, regardless of what type of science one is practicing.
49 nigelj says:
>The things Victor calls ad hoc explanations are evidence. They are real things measured in the real world. His sophistry doesnt change that. He is only fooling himself and ignoring evidence and trying to pretend its an ad hoc explanation. Its Victor who ignores evidence.
Excuse me? The evidence per se does NOT support a causal relation between CO2 and temperature. In order to support that hypothesis it’s necessary to go beyond the raw data to invoke a series of hypotheses based on assumptions that may or may not be valid. The introduction of complicating factors such as this is, for better or worse, a violation of Occam’s Razor.
Excuse me? The evidence shows NO sign of global warming from ca. 1940-1979. The attempt to account for this huge discrepancy between evidence and theory is based largely on a hypothesis involving industrial aerosols that I have thoroughly debunked.
Excuse me? The notorious “pause” or “hiatus” from 1998-2016 has been widely acknowledged by a great many highly qualified climate scientists. The latest attempt to debunk it, in the paper by Karl et al, is NOT based on their “correction” of evidence but on a re-interpretation of the same old evidence, where for some odd reason, Karl has chosen to compare temperatures from 1950-1999 with temperatures from 1998-2014. Sorry but that does NOT compute.
Excuse me? According to Fasulo et al., the evidence reveals a slowdown in sea level rise rather than the expected acceleration. Their attempt to account for this discrepancy introduces precisely the type of complicating factor very wisely ruled out by Occam’s Razor. And by the way, a hypothesis is NOT evidence.
48 John Pollack says:
>OK, here goes. In juxtaposing Victor’s statement in 43 “I do happen to have a considerable amount of scientific training and experience, including a considerable amount of experience with statistics…” with his statement in 14 ” As I’ve already demonstrated, there is no long-term correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures.” I see two possible resolutions. First, Victor might be lying about his statistical prowess, either to himself or all of us. Second, he might be indulging in what Elliot Abrams famously referred to as “plausible deniability” during the Iran-Contra Scandal.
>If there is no long-term correlation, why does he proceed to state in 18 “According to evidence gleaned from Antarctic ice cores, going back as far as 400,000 years ago, CO2 levels and global temperatures appear to have been closely correlated over a substantial stretch of time” ?
OMG! How could anyone confuse my argument regarding events over the last century and a half with an observation based on evidence covering roughly 400,000 years. You know very well what I meant, John. Stop bluffing.
>For shorter periods, such as 1880 to present, it is indeed useful to examine Victor’s writings in his “a mole in the ground” blog that he refers to in 14. He “eyeballs” the period from 1880 to 1980 and concludes that there is no correlation. (Actually, there is, because both CO2 and temperature rise during that period.) He correctly concludes that there is a correlation between 1980 and 1998, but then states “I see no sign of correlation between 1998 and the present.” This is a statistical absurdity! Getting back to the co-relation: when carbon dioxide levels are higher, global temperatures are higher.
You’ve got it completely wrong. First of all, it’s not true that “when carbon dioxide levels are higher, global temperatures are higher.” For a period of roughly 40 years (1940-1979) CO2 levels rose significantly while global temperatures either fell or leveled off. And just because two factors rise simultaneously from time to time does not tell us they are correlated. From 1998-2016 CO2 levels rose dramatically while temperatures rose only slightly. As is clearly evident from the scattergram provided by Danley Wolfe, there was no correlation. See https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/clip_image008_thumb1.jpg?resize=606%2C449
nigeljsays
Victor @60
You really do believe your own rhetoric dont you. You just make yourself look like a tinfoil hat wearing flat earther. The science on the greenhouse effect goes back over 150 years. Nobody has been able to falsify it, just as nobody has falsified Newtons or Einsteins work. You certainly haven’t falsified it, but I will get to that.
“My scientific background is in the social sciences: psychology, linguistics, ethnology and semiotics. I have degrees from Syracuse University, Wesleyan University and SUNY Buffalo. The basic principles of science are the same, by the way, regardless of what type of science one is practicing.”
These are fine subjects, but have nothing to do with the physical sciences (the hard sciences). They are poles apart. Having some semblance of the scientific method in common is as far as it goes. And none of those courses normally teach statistics. Unless you can provide a link to demonstrate otherwise. You have said nothing in this post to substantiate your claim of experience in statistics, only that you have collaborated with statisticians. I collaborate with all sorts of engineers but this doesn’t give me experience in these subjects. You have mislead this forum.
You lack aptitude for the physical science. I suggest stick to psychology and linguistics and no doubt you are good at them. Well maybe you are good at them. You are utterly clueless about statistics. I’ve never seen anyone with such a poor grasp of the subject. I claim no expertise but I grasp the basics intuitively and have studied some of them formally. Even my aging mother who failed school certificate did better than you.
“The things Victor calls ad hoc explanations are evidence. They are real things measured in the real world. His sophistry doesnt change that. He is only fooling himself and ignoring evidence and trying to pretend its an ad hoc explanation. Its Victor who ignores evidence.”
“Excuse me? The evidence per se does NOT support a causal relation between CO2 and temperature.”
Firstly this is utterly unrelated to my comment but Victor doesn’t understand this. Anyway he is clearly unaware of hundreds of evidence based studies on the greenhouse effect, including laboratory experiments with CO2 in canisters exposed to radiant heat sources. And of course things like the SB laws.
“Excuse me? The evidence shows NO sign of global warming from ca. 1940-1979. The attempt to account for this huge discrepancy between evidence and theory is based largely on a hypothesis involving industrial aerosols that I have thoroughly debunked.”
Actually the southern oceans did warm mid last century. And you have debunked nothing. You clearly haven’t understood my post at 38. Read it again slowly.
You clearly just don’t grasp that climate at a point at time is often influenced by multiple drivers of different strengths simultaneously. Most people struggle with this. You have to identify these to understand whats going on. This is not the same as some ad hoc thing, its about understanding. I know where you are coming from because I am a very sceptical person as well, but you are mistaken in this instance. Temperature trends mid last century are consistent with the prevailing combination of CO2 levels, aerosols, ocean cycles, and solar forcing etcetera. The fact that there was very little warming is not inconsistent with CO2 levels at that period. People have done the maths on this. Have you done the maths?
“Excuse me? The notorious “pause” or “hiatus” from 1998-2016 has been widely acknowledged by a great many highly qualified climate scientists.”
Excuse me but I never mentioned the pause. There was obviously a slowdown in temperatures for about 8 years starting around 2002, evidenced in the solid trend line in the NASA GISS data. Due to natural variation. When a scientific paper claims to have debunked the pause, it is not claiming there was no flat period in the temperature record. It is saying there was no “pause” in the sense that 1) the flat period was not statistically significant and 2) greenhouse gas warming didn’t stop or something else mysterious happened.
The pause Its over because temperatures for the last 5 years have all been way higher than the previous decade, despite no el nino of significance since 2015, and falling sunspot numbers. How does your junk science explain that Victor? Of course it cannot. You cannot explain the totality of the data, you have nothing, but the greenhouse theory and natural variation combined certainly does whether you agree or not.
“Their attempt to account for this discrepancy introduces precisely the type of complicating factor very wisely ruled out by Occam’s Razor. And by the way, a hypothesis is NOT evidence.”
Occams Razor doesn’t rule out complicating factors. It simply says the simplest explanation consistent with the evidence is usually the correct one. Sometimes the simplest explanation consistent with the evidence has several factors driving it. For example by analogy poverty in a family is known to often be driven by several factors eg low level skills, plus job losses plus substance abuse. There is sometimes no one simple explanation. Occams razor is simply telling us to try to explain things with as few complicating factors as possible, not that there must be NO complicating factors. Understand? Its just a kind of discipline and approximation of reality.
Chucksays
Vector says:
that’s it. As good a reason as any, I would suppose, for a dreamer like myself
Vector, those are called “delusions”. In your case they’re “delusions of Intelligence”. You have none. Trust me on this. You need psychiatric care. If you need me to I can help you find a safe environment if you think you might harm yourself.
What I’m curious about is the updated work on the temporal relationship between dT and dCO2 CC Holley mentioned at #34 (et seq). CC, got links? I’d appreciate them.
Killiansays
53
Kevin McKinney says:
8 Aug 2020 at 8:15 AM
#43, Victor–
Since you can’t argue on the basis of the evidence, you invoke exactly the sort of ad hoc “explanations” I’ve highlighted.
Au contraire. You’ve been refuted on the evidence time and time again. That you refuse to accept this does not change that fact. It’s denial in its purest form.
The irony of people blasting victor for ignoring evidence even as they flatly refuse to accept a sane and correct definition of sustainability, refuse to acknowledge the FACTS of unsustainable tech/energy, refuse to even set parameters for sane discusions, refuse to havea risk-based conversation about climate… even as more and more SCIENTISTS call for these very things.
Russellsays
As climate goes, so goes covid– in both arenas of controversy, hype is a thing :
#65 It will come as a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of dead and their myriad of family members and friends when they learn that Covid19 is all hype!
MartinJBsays
Victor makes a big deal about Fasullo et. al. 2016 which somewhat arbitrarily compares SLR in the first two decades of the altimeter record, while ignoring the data showing notably faster SLR afterwards. He also, in his usual way, dismisses the author’s mention of the influence of Pinatubo (I mean, how DARE scientists incorporate more than one causal factor at a time!).
Fortunately, we have more substantial research that looks at a more complete range of altimeter data in Nerem et. al. 2018 (https://www.pnas.org/content/115/9/2022). They calculate acceleration of the unadjusted GMSL data of about 0.10mm y^-2. So, that is, to be clear, an acceleration of SLR. That acceleration is slightly higher once you incorporate an adjustment for Pinatubo (0.12mm y^-2). The nerve, of those scientists taking additional factors into account. But they don’t stop there. They note that ENSO also impacts SLR, so they adjust for that too. You ready? After that adjustment the acceleration falls to 0.08mm y^-2.
So, we can dismiss yet another of Victor’s attempts to distort the science.
nigeljsays
Killian @64, nobody refuses to acknowledge the facts of “unsustainable technology”. Nobody here is claiming we can build modern technology literally forever or that the manufacture and use of technology doesn’t sometimes damage the environment. You cannot point to a specific person who has claimed this. Everyone understands minerals are a finite resource.
CCHolleysays
RE. Victor @60
Very interesting. A great many scientists are going to have to stand corrected if this new finding holds up. Can you cite any references?
Parrenin, F., et al. (2013). Synchronous Change of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature During the Last Deglacial Warming. Science 339, 1060–3.
Developed improved methods of determining the difference between the age of the ice and the CO2. To within an uncertainty of less than 200 years, they concluded that Antarctic temperatures did not begin to increase centuries before the increase in atmospheric CO2 and that the changes were essentially synchronous.
Abstract: Understanding the role of atmospheric CO2 during past climate changes requires clear knowledge of how it varies in time relative to temperature. Antarctic ice cores preserve highly resolved records of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature for the past 800,000 years. Here we propose a revised relative age scale for the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature for the last deglacial warming, using data from five Antarctic ice cores. We infer the phasing between CO2 concentration and Antarctic temperature at four times when their trends change abruptly. We find no significant asynchrony between them, indicating that Antarctic temperature did not begin to rise hundreds of years before the concentration of atmospheric CO2, as has been suggested by earlier studies.
Pedro, J.B., et al. (2012). Tightened Constraints on the Time-Lag between Antarctic Temperature and CO2 during the Last Deglaciation. Clim. Past 8, 1213–21.
Concluded that coupling between increasing temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations was closer than previous estimates.
Abstract: Antarctic ice cores provide clear evidence of a close coupling between variations in Antarctic temperature and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 during the glacial/interglacial cycles of at least the past 800-thousand years. Precise information on the relative timing of the temperature and CO2 changes can assist in refining our understanding of the physical processes involved in this coupling. Here, we focus on the last deglaciation, 19 000 to 11 000 yr before present, during which CO2 concentrations increased by ~80 parts per million by volume and Antarctic temperature increased by ~10 °C. Utilising a recently developed proxy for regional Antarctic temperature, derived from five near-coastal ice cores and two ice core CO2 records with high dating precision, we show that the increase in CO2 likely lagged the increase in regional Antarctic temperature by less than 400 yr and that even a short lead of CO2 over temperature cannot be excluded. This result, consistent for both CO2 records, implies a faster coupling between temperature and CO2 than previous estimates, which had permitted up to millennial-scale lags.
Shakun, J.D., et al. (2012). Global Warming Preceded by Increasing Carbon Dioxide Concentration During the Last Deglaciation. Nature 484, 49–54.
Using data from eighty locations to obtain a global record following the last ice age, concluded that warming followed increasing CO2 concentrations at most locations.
Abstract: The covariation of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration and temperature in Antarctic ice-core records suggests a close link between CO2 and climate during the Pleistocene ice ages. The role and relative importance of CO2 in producing these climate changes remains unclear, however, in part because the ice-core deuterium record reflects local rather than global temperature. Here we construct a record of global surface temperature from 80 proxy records and show that temperature is correlated with and generally lags CO2 during the last (that is, the most recent) deglaciation. Differences between the respective temperature changes of the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere parallel variations in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation recorded in marine sediments. These observations, together with transient global climate model simulations, support the conclusion that an antiphased hemispheric temperature response to ocean circulation changes superimposed on globally in-phase warming driven by increasing CO2 concentrations is an explanation for much of the temperature change at the end of the most recent ice age.
What rock have you been hiding under, CC? A great many scientists have pointed out those flaws. I’m far from alone.
LOL. Victor is a dreamer indeed. A great number of scientists? Maybe a handful of fossil fuel shills claim some of the same “flaws” that Victor has dreamed up.
I’ve learned to collaborate with statisticians, who certainly know this field much better than I.
Yup. No formal training in statistics. Clueless.
The so-called “statistics” offered by Grumbine et al are hopelessly amateurish, as should be obvious to anyone not already captured by confirmation bias. I’m sorry but I must question their claim to expertise. I prefer to rely on a real expert, Danley Wolfe, whose scattergrams, which place the data in its historical context, make perfect sense.
Victor, with no formal training in statistics thinks he is qualified to judge the expertise of statisticians? What a doofus.
What I’m curious about is the updated work on the temporal relationship between dT and dCO2 CC Holley mentioned at #34 (et seq). CC, got links? I’d appreciate them.
Sigh. Only so many different ways I can make the same point. Obviously most posting here just don’t get it. As expected. You make a serious mistake, however, by relying on exactly the same crude put-downs and ad hominems I could so easily level at YOU. Which gets us nowhere. When in doubt try: science, logic, critical thinking. You’ll have better luck with those.
A couple more points and then I’m done:
1. I make no pretense to expertise in either climate science or statistics. So the implication that I am arguing from authority is totally wrong. My arguments are based on logic, critical thinking and an understanding of basic scientific principles, supplemented by references to the literature — as such, they stand on their own. Either you get it or you don’t. If you have a problem with anything I’ve written then state your problem in a reasonable manner. Questioning my “expertise” will do you no good, since I readily admit I have none.
2. I want to thank CC Holley for linking us to the paper (or at least abstract), “Synchronous Change of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature During the Last Deglacial Warming,” ( https://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6123/1060.abstract ), which finds “no significant asynchrony between [CO2 levels and temperature], indicating that Antarctic temperature did not begin to rise hundreds of years before the concentration of atmospheric CO2, as has been suggested by earlier studies.”
Interesting. However: if both CO2 and temperatures rose and fell simultaneously, how then can one interpret this data as evidence for CO2 driven global warming? No help here for Al Gore, I’m afraid.
V 60: The evidence per se does NOT support a causal relation between CO2 and temperature.
BPL: Yes it does. It’s a matter of physics established since the 19th century. The statistical evidence only confirms what we already knew from radiation physics and planetary astronomy–not only are CO2 and temperature correlated, but the Granger-causality runs from CO2 to temperature, and so does causality as measured with the new information criteria. You simply don’t know what you’re talking about.
V: From 1998-2016 CO2 levels rose dramatically while temperatures rose only slightly. As is clearly evident from the scattergram provided by Danley Wolfe, there was no correlation.
BPL: Danley Wolfe is apparently as much of a statistical illiterate as you are, since he’s using N = 18 years of data when N = 170 points are available. Big red F in statistics class, Victor. Which I wish you would take one of.
Thanks for the link to Nerem et al. (2018). Tamino had demonstrated acceleration of GMSLR informally, but that’s the first published study on the matter that I’d actually seen. A crisp scientific read.
Extrapolation always works until it doesn’t, but interesting (and not reassuring) that theirs worked out to 65 cm by 2100.
jgnfldsays
Re. “Victor makes a big deal about Fasullo et. al. 2016 which somewhat arbitrarily compares SLR in the first two decades of the altimeter record, while ignoring the data showing notably faster SLR afterwards.”
Presenting singular, out-of-context factoids and/or subsets of full datasets without reference to full datasets and additional related/confirming datasets is pretty much Method #1 in the Denier Handbook. Any time you see such a post, you can pretty much be sure it’s from a denier or at best a lukewarmer.
mikesays
Large stocks of peatland carbon and nitrogen are vulnerable to permafrost thaw
“This study compiles over 7,000 field observations to present a data-driven map of northern peatlands and their carbon and nitrogen stocks. We use these maps to model the impact of permafrost thaw on peatlands and find that warming will likely shift the greenhouse gas balance of northern peatlands. At present, peatlands cool the climate, but anthropogenic warming can shift them into a net source of warming.”
These peatland impacts should not be a problem if we can stop the planetary warming that has been going on, so I think we should work on that. Flatten that curve.
I think the warming thing relates to this:
August 2 – 8, 2020 413.17 ppm
August 2 – 8, 2019 410.35 ppm
August 2 – 8, 2010 388.71 ppm
Cheers,
Mike
Russellsays
65
It will come as a surprise to William Jackson that the link he failed to read reports polling respondents overestimate the coronavirus death toll by two orders of magnitude– or more.
Such is the state of Covid communication that an unhealthy percentage of the Americans asked believe coronavirus has already killed 9% of their compatriots
This is not an aberration- polled Scots think 10 % of their population has already been lost, and the number is 6.8% for the UK at large.
“Human-caused climate change has “intensified” patterns of extreme rainfall and drought across the globe, a new study finds. There is a detectable “human fingerprint” on decreasing rainfall over the US, central Asia and southern Africa, according to the results. It is also detectable on increasing rainfall in the Sahel region of Africa, India and the Caribbean. In addition to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, aerosols released by human pollution and large volcanic eruptions have also been “major contributing agents” to global drought patterns through the industrial era, the research says….”
“We found that the major contributing forcing agents of this intertwined mash-up of fingerprints are the steady increase in greenhouse gases, the complex temporal evolution of particulate pollution emissions and volcanic eruptions. All of these forcing agents must be considered together in order to fully explain the observed simultaneously varying changes in temperature, precipitation, and aridity….”
(Victor, this is a perfect example of what I was trying to say @49 &61. And that others have said probably better than me, about the simultaneous influence of multiple factors. Its not an ad hoc explanation, its considering the totality of evidence and seeing how and whether it fits together to explain things)
John Pollacksays
Victor @60 Science advances, in part, by defining terms and using measurements. With your background including linguists and semiotics, I am surprised that you use ill-defined terms, freely substitute scientific and colloquial definitions, and shift contexts. Unless, that is, you are using these techniques to obfuscate, or to prepare a social science paper on how physical scientists may shifted from discussing climate science to spewing insults.
For those readers who are not scientists, and wondering at the animus directed at Victor, I offer the following analogy:
Imagine a sports blog with a discussion between fans of two teams in a hotly contested rivalry. Let Victor be a fan of team V, and climate scientists of team C, arguing about which team is best.
V – Well, admit it, our team fought yours to a standstill last night!
C – Oh, no! You again? What are you talking about? The final score was 6 points for C, and 2 for V.
V – I have demonstrated repeatedly that “score” is not a good measure of team skill.
C – Score certainly is an agreed-upon and well defined measure of team skill, although there are other statistical measures that might be applied.
V – No, there is no relationship between the score and team skill. Look, all that the score measures is the number of points. It might be related to team skill, or it might not. You haven’t proved that it is.
C – We don’t have to prove that score is related to team skill! You can’t score unless you’re skilled, although it is also possible to have a bad game, or a bad call by the ref. Team C doesn’t win all the time, but it’s won 77 times out of the last 100 against V. You can’t do that without skill! And, you can’t win a game 6 to 2 without skill.
V – Well, let’s look carefully at the last game. When I eyeballed it, I saw as much skill by team V as team C. Then, I divided up the play into 10 second intervals and did a scattergram. Did you know that there were much longer periods where the teams got an equal number of points, or V was ahead, than the scoring periods by C? In fact, those brief scoring periods were basically an anomaly in an evenly matched game, and not a significant trend on the scattergram.
C – Your eyeball method is arbitrary and imprecise. The final score tells the story.
V – But it’s not the full story. The majority of the time, V played at least as well as C. When you leave out the exceptions, it was an even match overall.
C -@#$%!
Now, back to your words, Victor. 14 “…there is no long-term correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures.” 18 “…going back as far as 400,000 years ago, CO2 levels and global temperatures appear to have been closely correlated over a substantial stretch of time.” If 400,000 years isn’t “long-term” then what is? You said that I was bluffing by confusing an argument about events over the last century and a half with 400,000 years, but they are both examples of “long-term” to me. You made an absolute statement that there was NO long-term correlation. Examining the 150 year record, there is still a long-term correlation. So, you use several other misrepresentations. The “correlation” you use is not the scientific one, with a specific formula. Instead, you use a colloquial one, one that you can “eyeball” rather than calculating. Then you shift contexts again. You tell me that I am “completely wrong” in stating that “when carbon dioxide levels are higher, global temperatures are higher.” Instead of considering the long-term, you shift to two shorter periods, 1940-79, and 1998-2016 (excluding the warmest period since the last El Nino in the process.) I’m holding you to your words. To be “completely wrong” I am totally wrong, not correct in any part. But, if I compare, the carbon dioxide levels from 1898-1916 are lower than from 1998-2016, and global temperatures are also lower. This is true for the whole 18 year periods, and every single year within them. All of those years contribute mathematically and scientifically to the correlation between CO2 and temperature. Your attempt to shift contexts to the period immediately preceding 1998 contrasting with 1998-2016 is invalid, because your claim was about long-term, and you shift to short-term. Meanwhile, you neglect the further warming at the end of the period, which also contributes to both long-term and short term correlations.
If you had said that you were using a colloquial definition of “correlation” and a definition of “long-term” that changes to suit your convenience, because you were leaving it undefined, it wouldn’t have that nice absolute ring to say that “there is no long-term correlation.” It would only be accurate. If you had said “I can identify shorter chosen periods within the last 150 years within which the correlation between CO2 and global temperature appears to be absent” you would have been accurate.
Using inaccurate or vague language, absolute statements that you can’t back up with data, and shifting contexts, is time-wasting nonsense on a science blog. You’ve been doing it for years, and you did it at length in January.
I’ve gone into specifics and at length because others have resorted to shorthand and insults. I may not address you directly again. I believe that your arguments belong in the “borehole” because they don’t add to the discussion, and they don’t appreciably change.
nigeljsays
Regarding Russels comment @65 and website article “Nae true dead Scotman…”. The embedded link to The Spectator says “Never has a virus been so oversold (covid 19)”.Paraphrasing, the Spectator says the Asian flu of 1957 and Hong Kong flue killed a couple of million people globally so why worry about covid 19, its only killed 738,000.
The Spectator, who seem spectacularly stupid, fail to mention that this was without any attempts to control the Asian and Hong Kong virus and in a much less connected world. Modelling suggests that without lockdowns or social distancing covid 19 would kill up to 40 million people globally by the end of this year, so in a relatively short time frame. This certainly suggests a robust response is justified. Unless they are suggesting too bad just let people die, everyone dies eventually. The Spectator are peddling the equivalent of “climate has changed before” neglecting to consider the speed and scale that’s happening now
MartinJBsays
KMK (@74): The other paper I like on SLR acceleration is Dagendorf et. al. (2019), which uses an interesting hybrid of altimeter and tide gauge to create a longer time series. They find acceleration may have started even further back. They also discuss regional trends.
Victor, as usual, ignores the physical mechanism for the carbon dioxide theory of climate change. He might want to read some of the studies demonstrating the observational evidence of the radiative forcing we expect with an increase in CO2.
“My arguments are based on logic, critical thinking and an understanding of basic scientific principles”
Victor your understanding of all those skills is woefully inadequate. Your understanding of Occams Razor is wrong and amazingly shallow. You dismiss climate science with nothing more than sophistry, (which is exactly the opposite of logic), and you accept every completely new sceptical paper at face value without looking hard at them, (no critical thinking), then when people point out the flaws you ignore them (head in the sand, sulky emotive denial). You are also wildly inconsistent but unable to see this ( lack of self awareness).
The Antarctic paper you reference did NOT say temperatures rose and fell at exactly the same time. It said that there is no significant delay, and not a time lag of hundreds of years. Again you dont read stuff like this either accurately or critically. I can see why people like RL lose all patience with you and fire off amusing little arrows at you.If you act like a fool eventually you will be treated like a fool.
You could completely turn this around, but first you have to admit your lack of critical thinking skills and your mistakes to yourself. That’s the first step.
CCHolleysays
RE. Victor @72
Obviously most posting here just don’t get it.
Oh most get it, all right. Victor is just an arrogant egotistical idiot that sadly thinks he brilliant.
When in doubt try: science, logic, critical thinking.
LOL, Three things Victor has demonstrated he has zero capacity for: scientific reasoning, logic, and most certainly critical thinking skills.
I make no pretense to expertise in either climate science or statistics. So the implication that I am arguing from authority is totally wrong. My arguments are based on logic, critical thinking and an understanding of basic scientific principles, supplemented by references to the literature — as such, they stand on their own. Either you get it or you don’t. If you have a problem with anything I’ve written then state your problem in a reasonable manner. Questioning my “expertise” will do you no good, since I readily admit I have none.
The deluded Victor, acknowledging a complete lack of expertise, claims his logic and critical thinking skills allows him to *see* what the actual experts do not. Then he demands that those having a problem with what he’s written to state their problem in a reasonable manner. What? I mean really, this has been done ad nauseam to no avail. Telling that Victor doesn’t see this. And Victor hasn’t a clue that perhaps his lack of expertise and training might just mean he doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about–the point people are trying to make.
Interesting. However: if both CO2 and temperatures rose and fell simultaneously, how then can one interpret this data as evidence for CO2 driven global warming? No help here for Al Gore, I’m afraid.
Linguistics? Yet Victor doesn’t seem to get the nuances of language. Simultaneous in the context of the paper is relative to the prior conclusions of a lag of centuries between the warming and CO2 rise. See @59 for explanation.
How can one interpret this as evidence? Does Victor really have to ask this question? Wow, he should try kicking in those critical thinking skills. What Victor just doesn’t seem to grasp is that the science behind the role of CO2 in controlling the temperature of the planet is supported by a plethora of evidence obtained over more than 150 years. Some of the evidence is strong and some by itself, not so strong, however, when the evidence is looked at in totality, the conclusion is unequivocal. Paleoclimate records are just one piece of that evidence.
jgnfldsays
@72 vic: “So the implication that I am arguing from authority is totally wrong.”
NOone with half a brain has EVER made that implication. Trust me.
Ray Ladburysays
Dan DaSilva: “As a dedicated climate denier, I would like to know how to collect my payoffs from the oil companies.”
Sorry, Dan, dedication is not enough. You also have to have a modicum of talent, and even among the ultra-dim stars that make up the denial galaxy, you are a brown dwarf.
Ray Ladburysays
Russell, I would recommend that you not downplay the risks of COVID-19. At this point, it has infected over 1.5% of the entire US population, killed nearly 160000 and left hundreds of thousands more with debilitating health problems they will deal with for the rest of their life. You dishonor their suffering as well as invite more people to be afflicted by downplaying the threat.
Perhaps a little compassion and empathy for those who have lost loved ones would be more fitting.
zebrasays
#80 John Pollack,
Very nice analogy construct…and I normally don’t like analogies at all.
The problem is that, borehole aside, people just can’t resist responding, as you say, with shortcuts and insults. If you think about it, “feeding the troll” is a kind of codependency, and it is unclear which partner is the addict.
At this point, it’s just boring repetition, and certainly doesn’t help with the question raised in the latest post about false equivalence.
Adam Leasays
81: Maybe COVID is off topic here, so I will only respond once on it.
My view on it from a UK perspective is that the high death toll is largely due to a lack of action in the early stages, and the monumental mistake of sending patients with COVID from hospitals back to care homes. Sending a contageous virus to an environment where there are a lot of very frail people in close proximity is just about the best way of maximising the death toll. It now seems that the government has swung the pendulum the other way and is hell bent on trying to eradicate the virus completely, and to hell with any destructive side effects. The result is a crashed economy, a spike in mental health disorders, and increased death tolls because people are struggling to get hospital appointments. What people need to realise is the virus is here to stay, it is not going away any time soon, if ever, and we are going to have to get used to living with it. That is inevitably going to result in an increase in the annual death toll, so what is needed is for the government to increase funding to the NHS to increase resiliance so they can deal with this new virus. We can’t have our lives severely restricted and keep paying people to stay at home forever, there isn’t an infinite pot of money in the budget. It might sound callous to suggest we have to deal with this additional annual death toll, but I think the alternative of harming children’s education and the futures of younger generations who have decades ahead of them just to protect those who are at the end of their life and will likely be dead in a few years is far worse. It would be better to advise the vulnerable to shield, and those for who the virus isn’t a life or death threat (i.e. almost everyone else) should go back to living their normal lives. Ultimately the country’s wealth comes from the productivity of its citizens, kill productivity, goodbye wealth.
I don’t see dealing with climate change as a good analogy, climate change science is well established and it is clear what we have to do based on objective research, the only question is how we do it in a way that doesn’t increase hardship and is acceptable to the majority of the global population. The current way of dealing with COVID seems to be a handful of speculations, loosely based on past pandemics and theory, combined with a “something must be done and this is something” attitude fueled largely by emotion.
70 – CCHolley: “Victor is a dreamer indeed. A great number of scientists? Maybe a handful of fossil fuel shills claim some of the same “flaws” that Victor has dreamed up.”
“Victor, with no formal training in statistics thinks he is qualified to judge the expertise of statisticians? What a doofus.”
If you fail to see the obvious flaw in Grumbine’s claim, as thoroughly debunked in my blog post ( http://amoleintheground.blogspot.com/2018/10/thoughts-on-climate-change-part-8-tale.html ), then YOU are the doofus, CC. My qualifications are beside the point, as Grumbine’s own scattergram, when understood in its historical context, speaks for itself. No need for me to rely on Wolfe or anyone else. The lack of any long term correlation is already evident in Grumbine’s graph once we add a few key dates.
Hard to believe so many of the self-proclaimed “experts” posting here refuse to acknowledge the obvious. That says a LOT about YOUR qualifications, folks.
As a dedicated climate denier, I would like to know how to collect my payoffs from the oil companies. Does anyone here have a phone number or address?
Pretty sure almost all of us do. Some of us have significant concern for the careful and precise use of language as well.
Susan Andersonsays
Victor (@~71) claims it says what it doesn’t say. Here’s the actual text that he told scientists they can’t read, while saying it says what it doesn’t say.
There should be a scientific term equivalent to “mansplaining” for what scientists have to put up with from people who think they know better but don’t.
Abstract
Understanding the role of atmospheric CO2 during past climate changes requires clear knowledge of how it varies in time relative to temperature. Antarctic ice cores preserve highly resolved records of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature for the past 800,000 years. Here we propose a revised relative age scale for the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature for the last deglacial warming, using data from five Antarctic ice cores. We infer the phasing between CO2 concentration and Antarctic temperature at four times when their trends change abruptly. We find no significant asynchrony between them, indicating that Antarctic temperature did not begin to rise hundreds of years before the concentration of atmospheric CO2, as has been suggested by earlier studies.
The point of my original post on this thread was very simple: time after time we see that the claims so often made to support the “consensus” view of climate change are NOT supported by the raw evidence. I presented several examples. In response I’ve been reminded that one cannot rely on any one set of data, that it’s essential to see the big picture and take all sorts of additional evidence into account before drawing any conclusions. That sounds reasonable. However, when one sees a pattern where over and over it becomes necessary to “massage” the data in order to produce the desired result, then a certain amount of suspicion seems justified.
In cases such as this I find it useful to consider one of the most basic, though often misunderstood, principles of science: Occam’s Razor. The Razor is NOT just some arbitrary rule of thumb, dogmatically insisting that the simplest explanation is best. On the contrary,
“Though the principle may seem rather trivial, it is essential for model building because of what is known as the “underdetermination of theories by data”. For a given set of observations or data, there is always an infinite number of possible models explaining those same data.” http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/OCCAMRAZ.html
“the preference for simplicity in the scientific method is based on the falsifiability criterion. For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an extremely large, perhaps even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives . . . [s]ince failing explanations can always be burdened with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified . . .
. . . any new, and even more complex, theory can still possibly be true. For example, if an individual makes supernatural claims that leprechauns were responsible for breaking a vase, the simpler explanation would be that he is mistaken, but ongoing ad hoc justifications (e.g. “… and that’s not me on the film; they tampered with that, too”) successfully prevent outright disproval. This endless supply of elaborate competing explanations, called saving hypotheses, cannot be ruled out – except by using Occam’s razor.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
In other words, Occam’s razor is essential for the simple reason that a potentially endless stream of complicating factors can always be invoked to support any hypothesis, no matter how unlikely. So it’s not just some arbitrary notion of simplicity that’s involved — the razor is there to guard against the very common practice, rooted in confirmation bias, of seeking out some additional factor or factors, over and above the raw data, in order to bolster an otherwise failing hypothesis.
A particularly useful example is the widely shared notion that the “hiatus” we see in the temperature record from 1940 through the late Seventies can be explained by the heavy emission of industrial aerosols prior to the establishment of pollution controls in the period that followed. Is the inclusion of this additional, complicating factor really necessary to an understanding of climate change? — or is it “necessary” only as a means of explaining away evidence that appears to undermine the prevailing theory? Of course, this explanation might POSSIBLY be meaningful — but only if some evidence of an underlying warming trend masked by the aerosols could be found. Climate scientists have conveniently ignored this essential caveat, preferring to accept the hypothesis without much in the way of careful examination. A perfect example of why Occam’s razor is so important. (Upon closer examination, it turns out that NO such underlying warming trend can be found — the aerosol “explanation” is a perfect example of the sort of ad hoc hypothesis Occam’s razor was designed to filter out.)
New research: “Thawing permafrost: an overlooked source of seeds for Arctic cloud formation”
nigeljsays
Adam Lea @90, I agree you cant close countries down for a year or have endless huge lockdowns, because it will do far more damage than the virus. The most effective approach seems to be have an initial short tough lockdown early to suppress the curve, then have social distancing, masks and hand washing and so continue keep virus numbers down.
But the Spectator article made light of a serious problem and thus undermined even basic low cost measures like hand washing.
The UK kept the borders open which is hard to understand. Italy and the UK were too slow to enter lockdown and policies were confused. The problem in America is they came out of their lockdowns just a bit too fast, maybe only a week or two, but timing is quite critical. This is well documented.
The parallels with climate change might be more related to denialism and the rampant conspiracy theories common to both issues.
Russellsays
81
Nigel, I linked to the polling organization by name, and my piece quotes its results, not the opinions of the author that reported them in The Spectator
Here are the data in question which speak volumes to the question of whether Covid hype, like chloroquine crackpottery, is a real cultural phenomenon:
Stupid Straw Man said Nobody here is claiming we can build modern technology literally forever or that the manufacture and use of technology doesn’t sometimes damage the environment.
Idiotic and unethical to constantly argue via Straw Man fallacies. Given the context, also immoral.
V 43: I do happen to have a considerable amount of scientific training and experience, including a considerable amount of experience with statistics
BPL: You are either lying or delusional. You would not pass an elementary statistics course with what you know now. You can’t even define what a “correlation” means correctly, and that’s statistics 101.
Ah, Weaktor. So confident. And so wrong you don’t even rise to the level of wrong.
#43, Victor–
Au contraire. You’ve been refuted on the evidence time and time again. That you refuse to accept this does not change that fact. It’s denial in its purest form.
Al Bundy @45
“AB: Yep. Though folks pretend that comment threads are more important than the comic pages, we’re all here to waste time. I just took a break from working on my patent filing to wander by and reset my neurons.”
If by waste time you mean entertainment, to debate, and to learn things and share information, and counter the nonsense, yes I think people are here for this. I think it is also a sophisticated form of gossip, and gossip is normal and healthy. People should read the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
Weaktor: I do happen to have a considerable amount of scientific training and experience, including a considerable amount of experience with statistics
I’ll bet you’re a very stable genius, too, right?
JP 12: Could it be that they’ve already had a considerable warming trend? Record low at the South Pole is -117 F, set back in 1982.
KIA 50: Not possible. CO2 concentrations were considerably above “pre-industrial” in 1982; the radiant energy would not have been able to produce a record cold at such high CO2 levels according to AGW theory – my money is on improperly calibrated measuring device.
BPL: For the 37th time, CO2 is not the only thing that affects temperatures, certainly not in small regions. For a single measurement on a single date in a single location, I would check the winds and currents first.
Re. vic and correlations/causes
Perhaps vic, using his extensive stats knowledge, can explain to us how the mathematics of the statistics behind causal inference–say ANOVAs–differ from the mathematics of multiple correlation analysis.
One would think it would be a cinch for him to describe how “dummy” variables allow (some measure of) causal inference under certain procedural circumstances!
It is evident to me that Victor is to be seen not as a possible source of information, but rather as an amusement…an ongoing joke. KIA is pretty much the same, neither are anything to develop heartburn over!
RE. Mr. Know Nothing @50
No contradiction. You have to look at the complete carbon cycle between the atmosphere, land, and oceans. Exchange rate of the CO2 movement between the oceans and atmosphere is dependent on the concentration of CO2 already in both the atmosphere and the oceans along with the temperature of the ocean. When the equilibrium of the cycle is upset by a rise in temperature, less of the atmospheric CO2 is absorbed by the oceans versus that which is off-gassed and hence the level in the atmosphere goes up. This is a positive feedback to the temperature rise. At the end of a period of glaciation, minor changes in insolation in the northern hemisphere begin the temperature rise which in turn raises the CO2 levels in the atmosphere in lock-step enhancing the warming. This cycle continues until a new equilibrium is reached. Of course the atmospheric warming is initiated “first”, but the CO2 levels do rise as the temperatures rise.
Example of one of multiple more recent papers on the subject of CO2 rise versus temperatures in ice cores:
F. Parrenin et al, Synchronous Change of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature During the Last Deglacial, Science 01 Mar 2013: Vol. 339, Issue 6123, pp. 1060-1063 DOI: 10.1126/science.1226368Warming
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6123/1060.abstract
31 CCHolley says:
>Victor, in his completely deluded self-importance believes that he alone, a science illiterate, is capable of pointing out the flaws of the science behind AGW.
What rock have you been hiding under, CC? A great many scientists have pointed out those flaws. I’m far from alone.
>Likewise, Victor, untrained in statistics, believes he can lecture experts on the proper use of statistics.
I’ve learned to collaborate with statisticians, who certainly know this field much better than I. But I’ve never hesitated to question results that make no sense to me — we would then work together to identify the problem — no whining or name calling required.
The so-called “statistics” offered by Grumbine et al are hopelessly amateurish, as should be obvious to anyone not already captured by confirmation bias. I’m sorry but I must question their claim to expertise. I prefer to rely on a real expert, Danley Wolfe, whose scattergrams, which place the data in its historical context, make perfect sense.
34 CCHolley says:
>The latest science tells us, in actuality, based on those ice cores, the temperatures and CO2 levels actually rose in lockstep–the CO2 levels did not lag temperature rise.
Very interesting. A great many scientists are going to have to stand corrected if this new finding holds up. Can you cite any references?
44
nigelj says:
>Victor Grauer says “I do happen to have a considerable amount of scientific training and experience, including a considerable amount of experience with statistics,
>What specifically? What degrees or certificates, and from what exact institutes?
My scientific background is in the social sciences: psychology, linguistics, ethnology and semiotics. I have degrees from Syracuse University, Wesleyan University and SUNY Buffalo. The basic principles of science are the same, by the way, regardless of what type of science one is practicing.
49 nigelj says:
>The things Victor calls ad hoc explanations are evidence. They are real things measured in the real world. His sophistry doesnt change that. He is only fooling himself and ignoring evidence and trying to pretend its an ad hoc explanation. Its Victor who ignores evidence.
Excuse me? The evidence per se does NOT support a causal relation between CO2 and temperature. In order to support that hypothesis it’s necessary to go beyond the raw data to invoke a series of hypotheses based on assumptions that may or may not be valid. The introduction of complicating factors such as this is, for better or worse, a violation of Occam’s Razor.
Excuse me? The evidence shows NO sign of global warming from ca. 1940-1979. The attempt to account for this huge discrepancy between evidence and theory is based largely on a hypothesis involving industrial aerosols that I have thoroughly debunked.
Excuse me? The notorious “pause” or “hiatus” from 1998-2016 has been widely acknowledged by a great many highly qualified climate scientists. The latest attempt to debunk it, in the paper by Karl et al, is NOT based on their “correction” of evidence but on a re-interpretation of the same old evidence, where for some odd reason, Karl has chosen to compare temperatures from 1950-1999 with temperatures from 1998-2014. Sorry but that does NOT compute.
Excuse me? According to Fasulo et al., the evidence reveals a slowdown in sea level rise rather than the expected acceleration. Their attempt to account for this discrepancy introduces precisely the type of complicating factor very wisely ruled out by Occam’s Razor. And by the way, a hypothesis is NOT evidence.
48 John Pollack says:
>OK, here goes. In juxtaposing Victor’s statement in 43 “I do happen to have a considerable amount of scientific training and experience, including a considerable amount of experience with statistics…” with his statement in 14 ” As I’ve already demonstrated, there is no long-term correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures.” I see two possible resolutions. First, Victor might be lying about his statistical prowess, either to himself or all of us. Second, he might be indulging in what Elliot Abrams famously referred to as “plausible deniability” during the Iran-Contra Scandal.
>If there is no long-term correlation, why does he proceed to state in 18 “According to evidence gleaned from Antarctic ice cores, going back as far as 400,000 years ago, CO2 levels and global temperatures appear to have been closely correlated over a substantial stretch of time” ?
OMG! How could anyone confuse my argument regarding events over the last century and a half with an observation based on evidence covering roughly 400,000 years. You know very well what I meant, John. Stop bluffing.
>For shorter periods, such as 1880 to present, it is indeed useful to examine Victor’s writings in his “a mole in the ground” blog that he refers to in 14. He “eyeballs” the period from 1880 to 1980 and concludes that there is no correlation. (Actually, there is, because both CO2 and temperature rise during that period.) He correctly concludes that there is a correlation between 1980 and 1998, but then states “I see no sign of correlation between 1998 and the present.” This is a statistical absurdity! Getting back to the co-relation: when carbon dioxide levels are higher, global temperatures are higher.
You’ve got it completely wrong. First of all, it’s not true that “when carbon dioxide levels are higher, global temperatures are higher.” For a period of roughly 40 years (1940-1979) CO2 levels rose significantly while global temperatures either fell or leveled off. And just because two factors rise simultaneously from time to time does not tell us they are correlated. From 1998-2016 CO2 levels rose dramatically while temperatures rose only slightly. As is clearly evident from the scattergram provided by Danley Wolfe, there was no correlation. See https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/clip_image008_thumb1.jpg?resize=606%2C449
Victor @60
You really do believe your own rhetoric dont you. You just make yourself look like a tinfoil hat wearing flat earther. The science on the greenhouse effect goes back over 150 years. Nobody has been able to falsify it, just as nobody has falsified Newtons or Einsteins work. You certainly haven’t falsified it, but I will get to that.
“My scientific background is in the social sciences: psychology, linguistics, ethnology and semiotics. I have degrees from Syracuse University, Wesleyan University and SUNY Buffalo. The basic principles of science are the same, by the way, regardless of what type of science one is practicing.”
These are fine subjects, but have nothing to do with the physical sciences (the hard sciences). They are poles apart. Having some semblance of the scientific method in common is as far as it goes. And none of those courses normally teach statistics. Unless you can provide a link to demonstrate otherwise. You have said nothing in this post to substantiate your claim of experience in statistics, only that you have collaborated with statisticians. I collaborate with all sorts of engineers but this doesn’t give me experience in these subjects. You have mislead this forum.
You lack aptitude for the physical science. I suggest stick to psychology and linguistics and no doubt you are good at them. Well maybe you are good at them. You are utterly clueless about statistics. I’ve never seen anyone with such a poor grasp of the subject. I claim no expertise but I grasp the basics intuitively and have studied some of them formally. Even my aging mother who failed school certificate did better than you.
“The things Victor calls ad hoc explanations are evidence. They are real things measured in the real world. His sophistry doesnt change that. He is only fooling himself and ignoring evidence and trying to pretend its an ad hoc explanation. Its Victor who ignores evidence.”
“Excuse me? The evidence per se does NOT support a causal relation between CO2 and temperature.”
Firstly this is utterly unrelated to my comment but Victor doesn’t understand this. Anyway he is clearly unaware of hundreds of evidence based studies on the greenhouse effect, including laboratory experiments with CO2 in canisters exposed to radiant heat sources. And of course things like the SB laws.
“Excuse me? The evidence shows NO sign of global warming from ca. 1940-1979. The attempt to account for this huge discrepancy between evidence and theory is based largely on a hypothesis involving industrial aerosols that I have thoroughly debunked.”
Actually the southern oceans did warm mid last century. And you have debunked nothing. You clearly haven’t understood my post at 38. Read it again slowly.
You clearly just don’t grasp that climate at a point at time is often influenced by multiple drivers of different strengths simultaneously. Most people struggle with this. You have to identify these to understand whats going on. This is not the same as some ad hoc thing, its about understanding. I know where you are coming from because I am a very sceptical person as well, but you are mistaken in this instance. Temperature trends mid last century are consistent with the prevailing combination of CO2 levels, aerosols, ocean cycles, and solar forcing etcetera. The fact that there was very little warming is not inconsistent with CO2 levels at that period. People have done the maths on this. Have you done the maths?
“Excuse me? The notorious “pause” or “hiatus” from 1998-2016 has been widely acknowledged by a great many highly qualified climate scientists.”
Excuse me but I never mentioned the pause. There was obviously a slowdown in temperatures for about 8 years starting around 2002, evidenced in the solid trend line in the NASA GISS data. Due to natural variation. When a scientific paper claims to have debunked the pause, it is not claiming there was no flat period in the temperature record. It is saying there was no “pause” in the sense that 1) the flat period was not statistically significant and 2) greenhouse gas warming didn’t stop or something else mysterious happened.
The pause Its over because temperatures for the last 5 years have all been way higher than the previous decade, despite no el nino of significance since 2015, and falling sunspot numbers. How does your junk science explain that Victor? Of course it cannot. You cannot explain the totality of the data, you have nothing, but the greenhouse theory and natural variation combined certainly does whether you agree or not.
“Their attempt to account for this discrepancy introduces precisely the type of complicating factor very wisely ruled out by Occam’s Razor. And by the way, a hypothesis is NOT evidence.”
Occams Razor doesn’t rule out complicating factors. It simply says the simplest explanation consistent with the evidence is usually the correct one. Sometimes the simplest explanation consistent with the evidence has several factors driving it. For example by analogy poverty in a family is known to often be driven by several factors eg low level skills, plus job losses plus substance abuse. There is sometimes no one simple explanation. Occams razor is simply telling us to try to explain things with as few complicating factors as possible, not that there must be NO complicating factors. Understand? Its just a kind of discipline and approximation of reality.
Vector says:
that’s it. As good a reason as any, I would suppose, for a dreamer like myself
Vector, those are called “delusions”. In your case they’re “delusions of Intelligence”. You have none. Trust me on this. You need psychiatric care. If you need me to I can help you find a safe environment if you think you might harm yourself.
Ah, the Victorian Gish gallop is ongoing, I see.
Whatevs…
What I’m curious about is the updated work on the temporal relationship between dT and dCO2 CC Holley mentioned at #34 (et seq). CC, got links? I’d appreciate them.
53
Kevin McKinney says:
8 Aug 2020 at 8:15 AM
#43, Victor–
Since you can’t argue on the basis of the evidence, you invoke exactly the sort of ad hoc “explanations” I’ve highlighted.
Au contraire. You’ve been refuted on the evidence time and time again. That you refuse to accept this does not change that fact. It’s denial in its purest form.
The irony of people blasting victor for ignoring evidence even as they flatly refuse to accept a sane and correct definition of sustainability, refuse to acknowledge the FACTS of unsustainable tech/energy, refuse to even set parameters for sane discusions, refuse to havea risk-based conversation about climate… even as more and more SCIENTISTS call for these very things.
As climate goes, so goes covid– in both arenas of controversy, hype is a thing :
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-reapers-index-august-2020.html
#65 It will come as a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of dead and their myriad of family members and friends when they learn that Covid19 is all hype!
Victor makes a big deal about Fasullo et. al. 2016 which somewhat arbitrarily compares SLR in the first two decades of the altimeter record, while ignoring the data showing notably faster SLR afterwards. He also, in his usual way, dismisses the author’s mention of the influence of Pinatubo (I mean, how DARE scientists incorporate more than one causal factor at a time!).
Fortunately, we have more substantial research that looks at a more complete range of altimeter data in Nerem et. al. 2018 (https://www.pnas.org/content/115/9/2022). They calculate acceleration of the unadjusted GMSL data of about 0.10mm y^-2. So, that is, to be clear, an acceleration of SLR. That acceleration is slightly higher once you incorporate an adjustment for Pinatubo (0.12mm y^-2). The nerve, of those scientists taking additional factors into account. But they don’t stop there. They note that ENSO also impacts SLR, so they adjust for that too. You ready? After that adjustment the acceleration falls to 0.08mm y^-2.
So, we can dismiss yet another of Victor’s attempts to distort the science.
Killian @64, nobody refuses to acknowledge the facts of “unsustainable technology”. Nobody here is claiming we can build modern technology literally forever or that the manufacture and use of technology doesn’t sometimes damage the environment. You cannot point to a specific person who has claimed this. Everyone understands minerals are a finite resource.
RE. Victor @60
Parrenin, F., et al. (2013). Synchronous Change of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature During the Last Deglacial Warming. Science 339, 1060–3.
Developed improved methods of determining the difference between the age of the ice and the CO2. To within an uncertainty of less than 200 years, they concluded that Antarctic temperatures did not begin to increase centuries before the increase in atmospheric CO2 and that the changes were essentially synchronous.
Abstract:
Understanding the role of atmospheric CO2 during past climate changes requires clear knowledge of how it varies in time relative to temperature. Antarctic ice cores preserve highly resolved records of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature for the past 800,000 years. Here we propose a revised relative age scale for the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature for the last deglacial warming, using data from five Antarctic ice cores. We infer the phasing between CO2 concentration and Antarctic temperature at four times when their trends change abruptly. We find no significant asynchrony between them, indicating that Antarctic temperature did not begin to rise hundreds of years before the concentration of atmospheric CO2, as has been suggested by earlier studies.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6123/1060.full
Pedro, J.B., et al. (2012). Tightened Constraints on the Time-Lag between Antarctic Temperature and CO2 during the Last Deglaciation. Clim. Past 8, 1213–21.
Concluded that coupling between increasing temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations was closer than previous estimates.
Abstract:
Antarctic ice cores provide clear evidence of a close coupling between variations in Antarctic temperature and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 during the glacial/interglacial cycles of at least the past 800-thousand years. Precise information on the relative timing of the temperature and CO2 changes can assist in refining our understanding of the physical processes involved in this coupling. Here, we focus on the last deglaciation, 19 000 to 11 000 yr before present, during which CO2 concentrations increased by ~80 parts per million by volume and Antarctic temperature increased by ~10 °C. Utilising a recently developed proxy for regional Antarctic temperature, derived from five near-coastal ice cores and two ice core CO2 records with high dating precision, we show that the increase in CO2 likely lagged the increase in regional Antarctic temperature by less than 400 yr and that even a short lead of CO2 over temperature cannot be excluded. This result, consistent for both CO2 records, implies a faster coupling between temperature and CO2 than previous estimates, which had permitted up to millennial-scale lags.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258612791_Tightened_constraints_on_the_time-lag_between_Antarctic_temperature_and_CO2_during_the_last_deglaciation
Shakun, J.D., et al. (2012). Global Warming Preceded by Increasing Carbon Dioxide Concentration During the Last Deglaciation. Nature 484, 49–54.
Using data from eighty locations to obtain a global record following the last ice age, concluded that warming followed increasing CO2 concentrations at most locations.
Abstract:
The covariation of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration and temperature in Antarctic ice-core records suggests a close link between CO2 and climate during the Pleistocene ice ages. The role and relative importance of CO2 in producing these climate changes remains unclear, however, in part because the ice-core deuterium record reflects local rather than global temperature. Here we construct a record of global surface temperature from 80 proxy records and show that temperature is correlated with and generally lags CO2 during the last (that is, the most recent) deglaciation. Differences between the respective temperature changes of the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere parallel variations in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation recorded in marine sediments. These observations, together with transient global climate model simulations, support the conclusion that an antiphased hemispheric temperature response to ocean circulation changes superimposed on globally in-phase warming driven by increasing CO2 concentrations is an explanation for much of the temperature change at the end of the most recent ice age.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10915
RE. Victor @60
LOL. Victor is a dreamer indeed. A great number of scientists? Maybe a handful of fossil fuel shills claim some of the same “flaws” that Victor has dreamed up.
Yup. No formal training in statistics. Clueless.
Victor, with no formal training in statistics thinks he is qualified to judge the expertise of statisticians? What a doofus.
https://blog.hotwhopper.com/2015/04/danley-wolf-continues-long-drawn-out.html
Kevin McKinney @63
Provided in post above.
Sigh. Only so many different ways I can make the same point. Obviously most posting here just don’t get it. As expected. You make a serious mistake, however, by relying on exactly the same crude put-downs and ad hominems I could so easily level at YOU. Which gets us nowhere. When in doubt try: science, logic, critical thinking. You’ll have better luck with those.
A couple more points and then I’m done:
1. I make no pretense to expertise in either climate science or statistics. So the implication that I am arguing from authority is totally wrong. My arguments are based on logic, critical thinking and an understanding of basic scientific principles, supplemented by references to the literature — as such, they stand on their own. Either you get it or you don’t. If you have a problem with anything I’ve written then state your problem in a reasonable manner. Questioning my “expertise” will do you no good, since I readily admit I have none.
2. I want to thank CC Holley for linking us to the paper (or at least abstract), “Synchronous Change of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature During the Last Deglacial Warming,” ( https://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6123/1060.abstract ), which finds “no significant asynchrony between [CO2 levels and temperature], indicating that Antarctic temperature did not begin to rise hundreds of years before the concentration of atmospheric CO2, as has been suggested by earlier studies.”
Interesting. However: if both CO2 and temperatures rose and fell simultaneously, how then can one interpret this data as evidence for CO2 driven global warming? No help here for Al Gore, I’m afraid.
V 60: The evidence per se does NOT support a causal relation between CO2 and temperature.
BPL: Yes it does. It’s a matter of physics established since the 19th century. The statistical evidence only confirms what we already knew from radiation physics and planetary astronomy–not only are CO2 and temperature correlated, but the Granger-causality runs from CO2 to temperature, and so does causality as measured with the new information criteria. You simply don’t know what you’re talking about.
V: From 1998-2016 CO2 levels rose dramatically while temperatures rose only slightly. As is clearly evident from the scattergram provided by Danley Wolfe, there was no correlation.
BPL: Danley Wolfe is apparently as much of a statistical illiterate as you are, since he’s using N = 18 years of data when N = 170 points are available. Big red F in statistics class, Victor. Which I wish you would take one of.
#67, MJB–
Thanks for the link to Nerem et al. (2018). Tamino had demonstrated acceleration of GMSLR informally, but that’s the first published study on the matter that I’d actually seen. A crisp scientific read.
Extrapolation always works until it doesn’t, but interesting (and not reassuring) that theirs worked out to 65 cm by 2100.
Re. “Victor makes a big deal about Fasullo et. al. 2016 which somewhat arbitrarily compares SLR in the first two decades of the altimeter record, while ignoring the data showing notably faster SLR afterwards.”
Presenting singular, out-of-context factoids and/or subsets of full datasets without reference to full datasets and additional related/confirming datasets is pretty much Method #1 in the Denier Handbook. Any time you see such a post, you can pretty much be sure it’s from a denier or at best a lukewarmer.
Large stocks of peatland carbon and nitrogen are vulnerable to permafrost thaw
“This study compiles over 7,000 field observations to present a data-driven map of northern peatlands and their carbon and nitrogen stocks. We use these maps to model the impact of permafrost thaw on peatlands and find that warming will likely shift the greenhouse gas balance of northern peatlands. At present, peatlands cool the climate, but anthropogenic warming can shift them into a net source of warming.”
https://www.pnas.org/node/942110.abstract?collection=
These peatland impacts should not be a problem if we can stop the planetary warming that has been going on, so I think we should work on that. Flatten that curve.
I think the warming thing relates to this:
August 2 – 8, 2020 413.17 ppm
August 2 – 8, 2019 410.35 ppm
August 2 – 8, 2010 388.71 ppm
Cheers,
Mike
65
It will come as a surprise to William Jackson that the link he failed to read reports polling respondents overestimate the coronavirus death toll by two orders of magnitude– or more.
Such is the state of Covid communication that an unhealthy percentage of the Americans asked believe coronavirus has already killed 9% of their compatriots
This is not an aberration- polled Scots think 10 % of their population has already been lost, and the number is 6.8% for the UK at large.
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-reapers-index-august-2020.html
New study fyi: “Scientists discover new ‘human fingerprint’ on global drought patterns”
https://www.carbonbrief.org/scientists-discover-new-human-fingerprint-on-global-drought-patterns
“Human-caused climate change has “intensified” patterns of extreme rainfall and drought across the globe, a new study finds. There is a detectable “human fingerprint” on decreasing rainfall over the US, central Asia and southern Africa, according to the results. It is also detectable on increasing rainfall in the Sahel region of Africa, India and the Caribbean. In addition to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, aerosols released by human pollution and large volcanic eruptions have also been “major contributing agents” to global drought patterns through the industrial era, the research says….”
“We found that the major contributing forcing agents of this intertwined mash-up of fingerprints are the steady increase in greenhouse gases, the complex temporal evolution of particulate pollution emissions and volcanic eruptions. All of these forcing agents must be considered together in order to fully explain the observed simultaneously varying changes in temperature, precipitation, and aridity….”
(Victor, this is a perfect example of what I was trying to say @49 &61. And that others have said probably better than me, about the simultaneous influence of multiple factors. Its not an ad hoc explanation, its considering the totality of evidence and seeing how and whether it fits together to explain things)
Victor @60 Science advances, in part, by defining terms and using measurements. With your background including linguists and semiotics, I am surprised that you use ill-defined terms, freely substitute scientific and colloquial definitions, and shift contexts. Unless, that is, you are using these techniques to obfuscate, or to prepare a social science paper on how physical scientists may shifted from discussing climate science to spewing insults.
For those readers who are not scientists, and wondering at the animus directed at Victor, I offer the following analogy:
Imagine a sports blog with a discussion between fans of two teams in a hotly contested rivalry. Let Victor be a fan of team V, and climate scientists of team C, arguing about which team is best.
V – Well, admit it, our team fought yours to a standstill last night!
C – Oh, no! You again? What are you talking about? The final score was 6 points for C, and 2 for V.
V – I have demonstrated repeatedly that “score” is not a good measure of team skill.
C – Score certainly is an agreed-upon and well defined measure of team skill, although there are other statistical measures that might be applied.
V – No, there is no relationship between the score and team skill. Look, all that the score measures is the number of points. It might be related to team skill, or it might not. You haven’t proved that it is.
C – We don’t have to prove that score is related to team skill! You can’t score unless you’re skilled, although it is also possible to have a bad game, or a bad call by the ref. Team C doesn’t win all the time, but it’s won 77 times out of the last 100 against V. You can’t do that without skill! And, you can’t win a game 6 to 2 without skill.
V – Well, let’s look carefully at the last game. When I eyeballed it, I saw as much skill by team V as team C. Then, I divided up the play into 10 second intervals and did a scattergram. Did you know that there were much longer periods where the teams got an equal number of points, or V was ahead, than the scoring periods by C? In fact, those brief scoring periods were basically an anomaly in an evenly matched game, and not a significant trend on the scattergram.
C – Your eyeball method is arbitrary and imprecise. The final score tells the story.
V – But it’s not the full story. The majority of the time, V played at least as well as C. When you leave out the exceptions, it was an even match overall.
C -@#$%!
Now, back to your words, Victor. 14 “…there is no long-term correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures.” 18 “…going back as far as 400,000 years ago, CO2 levels and global temperatures appear to have been closely correlated over a substantial stretch of time.” If 400,000 years isn’t “long-term” then what is? You said that I was bluffing by confusing an argument about events over the last century and a half with 400,000 years, but they are both examples of “long-term” to me. You made an absolute statement that there was NO long-term correlation. Examining the 150 year record, there is still a long-term correlation. So, you use several other misrepresentations. The “correlation” you use is not the scientific one, with a specific formula. Instead, you use a colloquial one, one that you can “eyeball” rather than calculating. Then you shift contexts again. You tell me that I am “completely wrong” in stating that “when carbon dioxide levels are higher, global temperatures are higher.” Instead of considering the long-term, you shift to two shorter periods, 1940-79, and 1998-2016 (excluding the warmest period since the last El Nino in the process.) I’m holding you to your words. To be “completely wrong” I am totally wrong, not correct in any part. But, if I compare, the carbon dioxide levels from 1898-1916 are lower than from 1998-2016, and global temperatures are also lower. This is true for the whole 18 year periods, and every single year within them. All of those years contribute mathematically and scientifically to the correlation between CO2 and temperature. Your attempt to shift contexts to the period immediately preceding 1998 contrasting with 1998-2016 is invalid, because your claim was about long-term, and you shift to short-term. Meanwhile, you neglect the further warming at the end of the period, which also contributes to both long-term and short term correlations.
If you had said that you were using a colloquial definition of “correlation” and a definition of “long-term” that changes to suit your convenience, because you were leaving it undefined, it wouldn’t have that nice absolute ring to say that “there is no long-term correlation.” It would only be accurate. If you had said “I can identify shorter chosen periods within the last 150 years within which the correlation between CO2 and global temperature appears to be absent” you would have been accurate.
Using inaccurate or vague language, absolute statements that you can’t back up with data, and shifting contexts, is time-wasting nonsense on a science blog. You’ve been doing it for years, and you did it at length in January.
I’ve gone into specifics and at length because others have resorted to shorthand and insults. I may not address you directly again. I believe that your arguments belong in the “borehole” because they don’t add to the discussion, and they don’t appreciably change.
Regarding Russels comment @65 and website article “Nae true dead Scotman…”. The embedded link to The Spectator says “Never has a virus been so oversold (covid 19)”.Paraphrasing, the Spectator says the Asian flu of 1957 and Hong Kong flue killed a couple of million people globally so why worry about covid 19, its only killed 738,000.
The Spectator, who seem spectacularly stupid, fail to mention that this was without any attempts to control the Asian and Hong Kong virus and in a much less connected world. Modelling suggests that without lockdowns or social distancing covid 19 would kill up to 40 million people globally by the end of this year, so in a relatively short time frame. This certainly suggests a robust response is justified. Unless they are suggesting too bad just let people die, everyone dies eventually. The Spectator are peddling the equivalent of “climate has changed before” neglecting to consider the speed and scale that’s happening now
KMK (@74): The other paper I like on SLR acceleration is Dagendorf et. al. (2019), which uses an interesting hybrid of altimeter and tide gauge to create a longer time series. They find acceleration may have started even further back. They also discuss regional trends.
Here’s the link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0531-8
And it was also discussed in CarbonBrief: https://www.carbonbrief.org/global-sea-level-rise-began-accelerating-30-years-earlier-than-previously-thought
Victor, as usual, ignores the physical mechanism for the carbon dioxide theory of climate change. He might want to read some of the studies demonstrating the observational evidence of the radiative forcing we expect with an increase in CO2.
http://asl.umbc.edu/pub/chepplew/journals/nature14240_v519_Feldman_CO2.pdf
Victor @72
“My arguments are based on logic, critical thinking and an understanding of basic scientific principles”
Victor your understanding of all those skills is woefully inadequate. Your understanding of Occams Razor is wrong and amazingly shallow. You dismiss climate science with nothing more than sophistry, (which is exactly the opposite of logic), and you accept every completely new sceptical paper at face value without looking hard at them, (no critical thinking), then when people point out the flaws you ignore them (head in the sand, sulky emotive denial). You are also wildly inconsistent but unable to see this ( lack of self awareness).
The Antarctic paper you reference did NOT say temperatures rose and fell at exactly the same time. It said that there is no significant delay, and not a time lag of hundreds of years. Again you dont read stuff like this either accurately or critically. I can see why people like RL lose all patience with you and fire off amusing little arrows at you.If you act like a fool eventually you will be treated like a fool.
You could completely turn this around, but first you have to admit your lack of critical thinking skills and your mistakes to yourself. That’s the first step.
RE. Victor @72
Oh most get it, all right. Victor is just an arrogant egotistical idiot that sadly thinks he brilliant.
LOL, Three things Victor has demonstrated he has zero capacity for: scientific reasoning, logic, and most certainly critical thinking skills.
The deluded Victor, acknowledging a complete lack of expertise, claims his logic and critical thinking skills allows him to *see* what the actual experts do not. Then he demands that those having a problem with what he’s written to state their problem in a reasonable manner. What? I mean really, this has been done ad nauseam to no avail. Telling that Victor doesn’t see this. And Victor hasn’t a clue that perhaps his lack of expertise and training might just mean he doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about–the point people are trying to make.
Linguistics? Yet Victor doesn’t seem to get the nuances of language. Simultaneous in the context of the paper is relative to the prior conclusions of a lag of centuries between the warming and CO2 rise. See @59 for explanation.
How can one interpret this as evidence? Does Victor really have to ask this question? Wow, he should try kicking in those critical thinking skills. What Victor just doesn’t seem to grasp is that the science behind the role of CO2 in controlling the temperature of the planet is supported by a plethora of evidence obtained over more than 150 years. Some of the evidence is strong and some by itself, not so strong, however, when the evidence is looked at in totality, the conclusion is unequivocal. Paleoclimate records are just one piece of that evidence.
@72 vic: “So the implication that I am arguing from authority is totally wrong.”
NOone with half a brain has EVER made that implication. Trust me.
Dan DaSilva: “As a dedicated climate denier, I would like to know how to collect my payoffs from the oil companies.”
Sorry, Dan, dedication is not enough. You also have to have a modicum of talent, and even among the ultra-dim stars that make up the denial galaxy, you are a brown dwarf.
Russell, I would recommend that you not downplay the risks of COVID-19. At this point, it has infected over 1.5% of the entire US population, killed nearly 160000 and left hundreds of thousands more with debilitating health problems they will deal with for the rest of their life. You dishonor their suffering as well as invite more people to be afflicted by downplaying the threat.
Perhaps a little compassion and empathy for those who have lost loved ones would be more fitting.
#80 John Pollack,
Very nice analogy construct…and I normally don’t like analogies at all.
The problem is that, borehole aside, people just can’t resist responding, as you say, with shortcuts and insults. If you think about it, “feeding the troll” is a kind of codependency, and it is unclear which partner is the addict.
At this point, it’s just boring repetition, and certainly doesn’t help with the question raised in the latest post about false equivalence.
81: Maybe COVID is off topic here, so I will only respond once on it.
My view on it from a UK perspective is that the high death toll is largely due to a lack of action in the early stages, and the monumental mistake of sending patients with COVID from hospitals back to care homes. Sending a contageous virus to an environment where there are a lot of very frail people in close proximity is just about the best way of maximising the death toll. It now seems that the government has swung the pendulum the other way and is hell bent on trying to eradicate the virus completely, and to hell with any destructive side effects. The result is a crashed economy, a spike in mental health disorders, and increased death tolls because people are struggling to get hospital appointments. What people need to realise is the virus is here to stay, it is not going away any time soon, if ever, and we are going to have to get used to living with it. That is inevitably going to result in an increase in the annual death toll, so what is needed is for the government to increase funding to the NHS to increase resiliance so they can deal with this new virus. We can’t have our lives severely restricted and keep paying people to stay at home forever, there isn’t an infinite pot of money in the budget. It might sound callous to suggest we have to deal with this additional annual death toll, but I think the alternative of harming children’s education and the futures of younger generations who have decades ahead of them just to protect those who are at the end of their life and will likely be dead in a few years is far worse. It would be better to advise the vulnerable to shield, and those for who the virus isn’t a life or death threat (i.e. almost everyone else) should go back to living their normal lives. Ultimately the country’s wealth comes from the productivity of its citizens, kill productivity, goodbye wealth.
I don’t see dealing with climate change as a good analogy, climate change science is well established and it is clear what we have to do based on objective research, the only question is how we do it in a way that doesn’t increase hardship and is acceptable to the majority of the global population. The current way of dealing with COVID seems to be a handful of speculations, loosely based on past pandemics and theory, combined with a “something must be done and this is something” attitude fueled largely by emotion.
2019 was among the three warmest years on record. The six warmest years on record have all occurred in the past six years, since 2014.
https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/international-climate-report-finds-2019-was-among-three-warmest-years-record
70 – CCHolley: “Victor is a dreamer indeed. A great number of scientists? Maybe a handful of fossil fuel shills claim some of the same “flaws” that Victor has dreamed up.”
See https://electroverse.net/the-list-scientists-who-publicly-disagree-with-the-current-consensus-on-climate-change/ for a long list.
“Victor, with no formal training in statistics thinks he is qualified to judge the expertise of statisticians? What a doofus.”
If you fail to see the obvious flaw in Grumbine’s claim, as thoroughly debunked in my blog post ( http://amoleintheground.blogspot.com/2018/10/thoughts-on-climate-change-part-8-tale.html ), then YOU are the doofus, CC. My qualifications are beside the point, as Grumbine’s own scattergram, when understood in its historical context, speaks for itself. No need for me to rely on Wolfe or anyone else. The lack of any long term correlation is already evident in Grumbine’s graph once we add a few key dates.
Hard to believe so many of the self-proclaimed “experts” posting here refuse to acknowledge the obvious. That says a LOT about YOUR qualifications, folks.
Victor, #72–
So far you haven’t found even one… though you’ve found innumerable ways to repeat the same old non-points.
Sigh.
CCH, #71; MJB, #82–
Thanks for the references. Much appreciated!
DDS, #75–
Pretty sure almost all of us do. Some of us have significant concern for the careful and precise use of language as well.
Victor (@~71) claims it says what it doesn’t say. Here’s the actual text that he told scientists they can’t read, while saying it says what it doesn’t say.
There should be a scientific term equivalent to “mansplaining” for what scientists have to put up with from people who think they know better but don’t.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6123/1060.abstract
The point of my original post on this thread was very simple: time after time we see that the claims so often made to support the “consensus” view of climate change are NOT supported by the raw evidence. I presented several examples. In response I’ve been reminded that one cannot rely on any one set of data, that it’s essential to see the big picture and take all sorts of additional evidence into account before drawing any conclusions. That sounds reasonable. However, when one sees a pattern where over and over it becomes necessary to “massage” the data in order to produce the desired result, then a certain amount of suspicion seems justified.
In cases such as this I find it useful to consider one of the most basic, though often misunderstood, principles of science: Occam’s Razor. The Razor is NOT just some arbitrary rule of thumb, dogmatically insisting that the simplest explanation is best. On the contrary,
“Though the principle may seem rather trivial, it is essential for model building because of what is known as the “underdetermination of theories by data”. For a given set of observations or data, there is always an infinite number of possible models explaining those same data.” http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/OCCAMRAZ.html
“the preference for simplicity in the scientific method is based on the falsifiability criterion. For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an extremely large, perhaps even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives . . . [s]ince failing explanations can always be burdened with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified . . .
. . . any new, and even more complex, theory can still possibly be true. For example, if an individual makes supernatural claims that leprechauns were responsible for breaking a vase, the simpler explanation would be that he is mistaken, but ongoing ad hoc justifications (e.g. “… and that’s not me on the film; they tampered with that, too”) successfully prevent outright disproval. This endless supply of elaborate competing explanations, called saving hypotheses, cannot be ruled out – except by using Occam’s razor.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
In other words, Occam’s razor is essential for the simple reason that a potentially endless stream of complicating factors can always be invoked to support any hypothesis, no matter how unlikely. So it’s not just some arbitrary notion of simplicity that’s involved — the razor is there to guard against the very common practice, rooted in confirmation bias, of seeking out some additional factor or factors, over and above the raw data, in order to bolster an otherwise failing hypothesis.
A particularly useful example is the widely shared notion that the “hiatus” we see in the temperature record from 1940 through the late Seventies can be explained by the heavy emission of industrial aerosols prior to the establishment of pollution controls in the period that followed. Is the inclusion of this additional, complicating factor really necessary to an understanding of climate change? — or is it “necessary” only as a means of explaining away evidence that appears to undermine the prevailing theory? Of course, this explanation might POSSIBLY be meaningful — but only if some evidence of an underlying warming trend masked by the aerosols could be found. Climate scientists have conveniently ignored this essential caveat, preferring to accept the hypothesis without much in the way of careful examination. A perfect example of why Occam’s razor is so important. (Upon closer examination, it turns out that NO such underlying warming trend can be found — the aerosol “explanation” is a perfect example of the sort of ad hoc hypothesis Occam’s razor was designed to filter out.)
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab87d3
New research: “Thawing permafrost: an overlooked source of seeds for Arctic cloud formation”
Adam Lea @90, I agree you cant close countries down for a year or have endless huge lockdowns, because it will do far more damage than the virus. The most effective approach seems to be have an initial short tough lockdown early to suppress the curve, then have social distancing, masks and hand washing and so continue keep virus numbers down.
But the Spectator article made light of a serious problem and thus undermined even basic low cost measures like hand washing.
The UK kept the borders open which is hard to understand. Italy and the UK were too slow to enter lockdown and policies were confused. The problem in America is they came out of their lockdowns just a bit too fast, maybe only a week or two, but timing is quite critical. This is well documented.
The parallels with climate change might be more related to denialism and the rampant conspiracy theories common to both issues.
81
Nigel, I linked to the polling organization by name, and my piece quotes its results, not the opinions of the author that reported them in The Spectator
Here are the data in question which speak volumes to the question of whether Covid hype, like chloroquine crackpottery, is a real cultural phenomenon:
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2020/08/covid-hype-20-nae-better-dead-scotsman.html
Stupid Straw Man said Nobody here is claiming we can build modern technology literally forever or that the manufacture and use of technology doesn’t sometimes damage the environment.
Idiotic and unethical to constantly argue via Straw Man fallacies. Given the context, also immoral.