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by Sounder » Mon Feb 01, 2010 1:12 pm
It's about an attempt to squeeze out ROI on hundred-year-old tech without upgrading before the last possible minute, everyone else be damned. It's about the industrial and infrastructure regimes, which has exactly jack shit to do with compact fluorescent light bulbs.
by tazmic » Mon Feb 01, 2010 3:17 pm
Come-on tazmic, that was a good post.
We have serious issues in front of us and this is a make work non-solution.
I would think you would heartily agree with this:
It's about an attempt to squeeze out ROI on hundred-year-old tech without upgrading before the last possible minute, everyone else be damned. It's about the industrial and infrastructure regimes, which has exactly jack shit to do with compact fluorescent light bulbs.
by Iamwhomiam » Mon Feb 01, 2010 5:17 pm
No Joe. All models are specific to their context, the interpretation of which may be contentious.
The answer to that is all about the science, and not comparative class ignorance.
But why does such a grotesque deception make the details of the underlying propaganda (with its implicit agenda) irrelevant?
Because it's a distraction from all the news reports on 'cancer rates in parts of Long Island' that tptb would love to be putting out if only they could get a chance?
Do you really think that ignoring the highly politised nature of the science of global warming and the blatant propaganda surrounding it makes a general turning towards the real problems facing us any more likely? And by whom? Do you think tptb actually don't know what the major problems are?
The people aren't going to effect change as long as they believe that it's not only the governments job, but that it's what the government wants.
If we don't try to separate the truth from the propaganda because it's a distraction from issues that aren't being dealt with by the people who clearly have no interest in the truth, then what are we expecting to happen exactly?
"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones." Machiavelli
by Iamwhomiam » Mon Feb 01, 2010 6:18 pm
by tazmic » Mon Feb 01, 2010 6:19 pm
But why does such a grotesque deception make the details of the underlying propaganda (with its implicit agenda) irrelevant?
Let's be clear, this is merely your contrary opinion to that of thousands of scientists and learned people from around the world.
by smiths » Mon Feb 01, 2010 9:20 pm
propaganda of global warming
by smiths » Mon Feb 01, 2010 10:03 pm
January 18, 2010
MEMO TO IPCC: If you are going to review the apparently mistaken claim in your 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 — please review all of the latest scientific literature and observations on that subject AND please update your equally outdated sea level rise projections.
MEMO TO MEDIA: It isn’t news that the 2007 projections by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are not accurate. The real news is that the 99% of their “mistakes” are UNDERestimates of likely impacts. Indeed, they lowballed the sea level rise projections so badly that even the Bush administration rejected them within a year (see “US Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections).
It does look like the IPCC used some out-of-date projections for a pretty minor piece of the report, but of course the IPCC basically froze all scientific inputs to its Fourth Assessment Report around 2005, so they missed the dramatic acceleration in melting of the Arctic sea ice, the inland glaciers, and the great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. Thus it is absolutely crucial that — if the IPCC re-examines the issue of glacial melt in the Himalayans — that it re-examine the entire issue based on the staggering new observational data in the scientific literature:
http://climateprogress.org/2009/11/23/s ... sing-mass/
http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/26/n ... s-glacier/
http://climateprogress.org/2009/08/13/w ... evel-rise/
by smiths » Mon Feb 01, 2010 10:04 pm
Since 1975, global temperature has shown long term warming while at the same time, the sun has shown long term cooling.
by smiths » Mon Feb 01, 2010 10:06 pm
the real conspiracy,
a conspiracy to denegrate science,
to elevate belief to the same standing as peer-reviewed science,
to enable vast amounts of fossil fuel industry money to attack a well-proven scientific case,
to manufacture doubt where little exists
by smiths » Mon Feb 01, 2010 10:08 pm
NASA Makes it Official: 2000-2009 Was Hottest Decade on Record
by smiths » Mon Feb 01, 2010 10:11 pm
Interception bore hallmarks of foreign intelligence agency, says expert
A highly sophisticated hacking operation that led to the leaking of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia was probably carried out by a foreign intelligence agency, according to the Government's former chief scientist. Sir David King, who was Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser for seven years until 2007, said that the hacking and selective leaking of the unit's emails, going back 13 years, bore all the hallmarks of a co-ordinated intelligence operation – especially given their release just before the Copenhagen climate conference in December.
The emails were stolen from a backup computer server used by the University of East Anglia. They contained private discussions between climate scientists that have embarrassed those involved, particularly Professor Phil Jones, who has stepped down from his post as head of the unit pending an independent inquiry into whether there is any evidence of scientific misconduct. He is not implicated in the hacking.
In an interview with The Independent, Sir David suggested the email leaks were deliberately designed to destabilise Copenhagen and he dismissed the idea that it was a run-of-the-mill hacking. It was carried out by a team of skilled professionals, either on behalf of a foreign government or at the behest of anti-climate change lobbyists in the United States, he said.
"A very clever nerd can cause a great deal of disruption and obviously make intelligence services very nervous, but a sophisticated intelligence operation is capable of yielding the sort of results we've seen here," Sir David said.
"Quite simply, it's the sophistication of the operation. I know there's a possibility that they had a very good hacker working for these people, but it was an extraordinarily sophisticated operation. There are are several bodies of people who could do this sort of work. These are national intelligence agencies and it seems to me that it was the work of such a group of people," he said.
by Joe Hillshoist » Mon Feb 01, 2010 10:37 pm
tazmic wrote:Look all someone has to do is show conclusively that anthropogenic Co2 emissions are not having a significant effect on the current rate of global warming (specifically due to radiative forcing) and this whole debate is over.
Are you reading this thread Joe?
new-paper-in-nature-on-co2-amplification-its-less-than-we-thought
by smiths » Mon Feb 01, 2010 10:39 pm
Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.
A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.
Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.
Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones's collaborator, Wei-Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had "screwed up".
The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.
by smiths » Mon Feb 01, 2010 10:45 pm
The "trick" was a graphic device used by Mann in a 1998 paper in Nature to merge tree ring data from earlier times with thermometer data for recent decades.
Almost all the media and political discussion about the hacked climate emails has been based on brief soundbites publicised by professional sceptics and their blogs. In many cases, these have been taken out of context and twisted to mean something they were never intended to.
Elizabeth Green, veteran head of the Canadian Green party claims to have read all the emails and declared: "How dare the world's media fall into the trap set by contrarian propagandists without reading the whole set?"
If those journalists had read even a few words beyond the soundbites, they would have realised that they were often being fed lies. Here are a few examples.
The most quoted "climategate" soundbite comes from an email from Prof Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, to Prof Mike Mann of the University of Virginia in 1999, in which he discussed using "Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline". The phrase has been widely spun as an effort to prevent the truth getting out that global temperatures had stopped rising.
The Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, in the Washington Post on 9 December, attacked the emailers as a "highly politicised scientific circle" who "manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures". She was joined by the Republican senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma – who has for years used his chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee to campaign against climate scientists and to dismiss anthropogenic global warming as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people". During the Copenhagen climate conference, which he attended on a Senate delegation, he referred to the Jones's "hide the decline" quote and said: "Of course, he means hide the decline in temperatures."
This is nonsense. Given the year the email was written, 1999, it cannot be anything else. At that time there was no suggestion of a decline in global temperatures. The previous year was the warmest on record, coming on top of a run of record warm years in the warmest decade of the century. It is only in the decade since that the rise in temperatures has slackened, due to natural cycles of variability.
The full email from Jones says: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith [Briffa]'s, to hide the decline." The decline being referred to was an apparent decline in temperatures shown in analysis of tree rings. Tree rings have historically correlated well with changes in temperature, but that relationship has broken down in the past half century. The reasons are still debated among scientists.
The "trick" was a graphic device used by Mann in a 1998 paper in Nature to merge tree ring data from earlier times with thermometer data for recent decades. He explained it in the paper. Jones was repeating it in another paper. "This is a trick only in the sense of being a good way to deal with a vexing problem," Mann told the Guardian.
Clearly this problem with modern tree ring data raises questions about older tree ring data – at least until the recent divergence from real temperatures is nailed down. And to anyone not familiar with the problems of reconstructing past temperatures from such proxy data, the "trick" may come as a surprise. But it is manifestly not clandestine data manipulation. Nor, as claimed by Palin and Inhofe, is it a trick to hide global cooling. That charge is a lie.
While he was in Copenhagen, Inhofe made a direct link between the "trick" to "hide the decline" and the second most popular soundbite from the emails. He said "of course [Jones] meant hide the decline in temperatures, which caused another scientist, Kevin Trenberth of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, to write: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."
The link is bogus. The two emails were ten years apart. Unlike Jones, Trenberth's remark from October 2009 was indeed about the slackening of the warming trend that some like to interpret as cooling. That much is agreed. But Inhofe and other sceptics latched on to Trenberth's "travesty" phrase as a revelation that scientists were trying to keep cooling secret because it undermined their arguments about global warming.
Again this is demonstrably false. Nothing was hidden. For months, Trenberth had been discussing publicly his concerns about the inability of scientists to pin down the precise reason for the "absence of warming" since 1998. He had argued in the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Stability in early 2009 that "it is not a sufficient explanation to say that a cool year [he had 2008 in mind] is due to natural variability (pdf)". Such explanations "do not provide the physical mechanisms involved." This was the "travesty" he was referring to in his email. He wanted scientists to do better.
He said the best way to improve the explanation and make it more specific was to make better measurements of the planet's energy budget. This would allow scientists to distinguish between any changes in the greenhouse effect, which would result in more or less heat overall in the atmosphere and oceans, and short-term natural cycles of variability, which merely redistribute heat. He was debating this with the former head of the Climatic Research Unit Tom Wigley, who took a different view. But their genuine scientific discussion has, since the publication of the emails online, been hijacked by ignorant or malicious invective.
Several other soundbites were subject to perverse or dishonest interpretations by commentators. Patrick Michaels, the climatologist and heavyweight polemicist for the rightwing Cato Institute published a long op-ed piece in the DC Examiner, slamming Mann for an email quote about keeping sceptics' papers out of the IPCC report "even if we have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is". Michaels is an old foe of Mann's, but this genuinely damaging statement was actually made by Jones.
In another case George Will, celebrated in some circles as an intellectual, told ABC's This Week programme that Mann had said in an email that he wished to "delete, get rid of, the medieval warming period". No such words appear anywhere in the emails. What Mann actually said was that "it would be nice to try to 'contain' the putative 'MWP'". Some bloggers suggested this amounted to extinguishing it from the data record. But an intellectual like Will should have known that, in this context, "contain" means to understand its dimensions – how warm it was and how long it was. Mann explained as much to anyone who asked. Verdict: not guilty.
by smiths » Mon Feb 01, 2010 10:46 pm
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