What Do We Think About Climate Change

[Guillermo]

Originally Posted by Boston

....its an agnotist party and has nothing to do with the science...

We have a saying in my country: "Cree el ladrón que todos son de su condición"

(The thief thinks everybody is like him)

P.S.
Here what Steve McIntyre says about his speeching at the Heartland's Conference:

"I'll be in New York to present a paper at the Heartland conference. I'd be just as happy to go to a Pew Center conference if I were invited. By presenting a paper at a conference, I do not endorse the views of other contributors nor the sponsor. I will present my own views. And any tailoring of the presentation will be in the direction of challenging the audience rather than trying to reinforce their preconceptions.

I don't know about this particular conference, but it's my understanding that the Gavin Schmidts of the world have refused to attend such venues in the past. I don't understand the purpose of such refusals. I don't understand what harm could possibly be done by preaching to the heathen. Maybe some of them would be convinced by Gavin.

In part, I'm attending this conference, because, quite frankly, I don't get many invitations to speak. I've only received one invitation to speak to climate scientists at a university (from Judy Curry and Julien Emile-Geay at Georgia Tech) and they were pretty severely criticized for this. (I was invited by an engineering seminar at Ohio State.) Anyway, I'll guess that henceforth speaking at this conference will feature prominently in all future profiles of me on the internet, but, as I said above, I'd be delighted to speak to the Pew Center or the Sierra Club or the World Wildlife Fund."

[BillyDoc]

Hi Guillermo, here's a report on the conference from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/sc...pagewanted=all

Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other


By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: March 8, 2009

More than 600 self-professed climate skeptics are meeting in a Times Square hotel this week to challenge what has become a broad scientific and political consensus: that without big changes in energy choices, humans will dangerously heat up the planet.

The three-day International Conference on Climate Change — organized by the Heartland Institute, a nonprofit group seeking deregulation and unfettered markets — brings together political figures, conservative campaigners, scientists, an Apollo astronaut and the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus.

Organizers say the discussions, which began Sunday, are intended to counter the Obama administration and Democratic lawmakers, who have vowed to tackle global warming with legislation requiring cuts in the greenhouse gases that scientists have linked to rising temperatures.

But two years after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded with near certainty that most of the recent warming was a result of human influences, global warming’s skeptics are showing signs of internal rifts and weakening support.

The meeting participants hold a wide range of views of climate science. Some concede that humans probably contribute to global warming but they argue that the shift in temperatures poses no urgent risk. Others attribute the warming, along with cooler temperatures in recent years, to solar changes or ocean cycles.

But large corporations like Exxon Mobil, which in the past financed the Heartland Institute and other groups that challenged the climate consensus, have reduced support. Many such companies no longer dispute that the greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels pose risks.

From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil, for example, contributed more than $600,000 to Heartland, according to annual reports of charitable contributions from the company and company foundations.

Alan T. Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said by e-mail that the company had ended support “to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion about how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Joseph L. Bast, the president of the Heartland Institute, said Exxon and other companies were just shifting their stance to improve their image. The Heartland meeting, he said, was the last bastion of intellectual honesty on the climate issue.

“Major corporations are painting themselves green around global warming,” Mr. Bast said, adding that the companies have shifted their lobbying and public relations efforts toward trying to shape climate legislation in their favor. He said that contributions, over all, had continued to rise.

But Kert Davies, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace, who is attending the Heartland event, said that the experts giving talks were “a shrinking collection of extremists” and that they were “left talking to themselves.”

Organizers expected to top the attendance of about 500 at the first Heartland conference, held last year. They also point to the speaker’s roster, which included Mr. Klaus and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist, Apollo astronaut and former senator.

A centerpiece of the 2008 meeting was the release of a report, “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Planet.” The document was expressly designed as a challenge to the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This year, the meeting will focus on a more nuanced question: “Global warming: Was it ever a crisis?”

Most of the talks at the meeting will challenge climate orthodoxy. But some presenters, including prominent figures who have been vocal in their criticism in the past, say they will also call on their colleagues to synchronize the arguments they are using against plans to curb greenhouse gases.

In a keynote talk Sunday night, Richard S. Lindzen, a professor at M.I.T. and a longtime skeptic of the mainstream consensus that global warming poses a danger, first delivered a biting attack on what he called the “climate alarm movement.”

There is no solid scientific evidence to back up the models used by climate scientists who warn of dire consequences if warming continues, he said. But Dr. Lindzen also criticized widely publicized assertions by other skeptics that variations in the sun were driving temperature changes in recent decades. To attribute short-term variation in temperatures to a single cause, whether human-generated gases or something else, is erroneous, he said.

Speaking of the sun’s slight variability, he said, “Acting as though this is the alternative” to blaming greenhouse gases “is asking for trouble.”

S. Fred Singer, a physicist often referred to by critics and supporters alike as the dean of climate contrarians, said that he would be running public and private sessions on Monday aimed at focusing participants on which skeptical arguments were supported by science and which were not.

“As a physicist, I am concerned that some skeptics (a very few) are ignoring the physical basis,” Dr. Singer said in an e-mail message.

“There is one who denies that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which goes against actual data,” Dr. Singer said, adding that other skeptics wrongly contend that “humans are not responsible for the measured increase in atmospheric CO2.”

There are notable absences from the conference this year. Russell Seitz, a physicist from Cambridge, Mass., gave a talk at last year’s meeting. But Dr. Seitz, who has lambasted environmental campaigners as distorting climate science, now warns that the skeptics are in danger of doing the same thing.

The most strident advocates on either side of the global warming debate, he said, are “equally oblivious to the data they seek to discount or dramatize.”

John H. Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama who has long publicly questioned projections of dangerous global warming, most recently at a House committee hearing last month, said he had skipped both Heartland conferences to avoid the potential for “guilt by association.”

Many participants said that any division or dissent was minor and that the global recession and a series of years with cooler temperatures would help them in combating changes in energy policy in Washington.

“The only place where this alleged climate catastrophe is happening is in the virtual world of computer models, not in the real world,” said Marc Morano, a speaker at the meeting and a spokesman on environmental issues for Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma.

But several climate scientists who are seeking to curb greenhouse gases strongly criticized the meeting. Stephen H. Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University and an author of many reports by the intergovernmental climate panel, said, after reviewing the text of presentations for the Heartland meeting, that they were efforts to “bamboozle the innocent.”

Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations office managing international treaty talks on climate change, said, “I don’t believe that what the skeptics say should provide any excuse to delay further” action against global warming.

But he added: “Skeptics are good. It’s important to give people the confidence that the issue is being called into question.”

[Jimbo1490]

John H. Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama who has long publicly questioned projections of dangerous global warming, most recently at a House committee hearing last month, said he had skipped both Heartland conferences to avoid the potential for “guilt by association.”

This is the innuendo that wackos like you-know-who just eat up! If a scientist even parks his car in the same lot, he might still be 'guilty' of collaboration with the eeeeevil energy companies Wackos use this as an all-too-convenient excuse to discount detractors credibility so they don't have to answer the technical merits of the detractor's arguments, or explain the big holes in their own. As I've said from the beginning of this thread, you could just as easily tar all of the warmers for their associations, if that was your wish, as many are involved with some pretty nutty folks.



Jimbo

[BillyDoc]

Originally Posted by Jimbo1490

so they don't have to answer the technical merits of the detractor's arguments, or explain the big holes in their own.

Jimbo

Jimbo, I agree with you totally that "guilt by association" is not an argument, just as "who said it" is not an argument. In fact, Aristotle said the same thing and listed both in his list of irrelevant "arguments" quite a few years ago. Along with exactly why they weren't relevant, so the point is not exactly a breakthrough in logic. This is why I tried to do as you suggest and stick to the technical merits in our interchanges.

Do you remember something in my posts about the heat content of vaporization and condensation being, in fact, exactly equal? In case you don't recognize it, that is a technical statement based on extremely well established science and exactly contrary to your own statements. YOU never addressed this issue, despite the obviousness of the problem for your position. So what are you trying to say here? I must say that it appears to me that YOU are the detractor without "technical merit" to your arguments as you appear to be ignoring anything inconvenient to your position. This is the meaning of the "ignoracio elenchi" argument mentioned earlier (also from Aristotle's list). The term literally means "ignorance of refutation" or to put it another way, the user of this method has no idea how to refute a point so he refutes some irrelevant point instead. I think you can see the problem with this!

BillyDoc

[Jimbo1490]

Billy,

We covered this earlier (MUCH earlier ) in the thread, too, but 'He Who Knows All' keeps throwing this up. You even did it a little bit a couple of pages back when you raised the question of whether or not Roy Spencer was a 'real scientist'.

On your thermodynamic question, all is answered in the Spencer presentations. For the highly technical version, look at the pdf of the notes of Lindzen's presentation.

The short explanation is really not hard to grasp at all. For reasons of the basic physics of cloud formation and the particular type of clouds that form under a particular set of circumstances, the clouds discussed in Lindzen's 'adaptive iris' wind up blocking more incoming solar radiative energy than the infrared that they trap, resulting in a net cooling. As you are aware, clouds can exist in many different forms. Some are very thin and spread over a wide area, while others are tall and dense. You can take the same unit of H2O and disperse it in a variety of ways as clouds. The thin layer type of cloud will cover a much larger area of sky than a compact dense cloud type using a similar mass of water. The thin layer can therefore block more incoming radiation. Yet both types took the same amount of heat energy to create, that transitional energy for water, ~540 cal/gm. The tall dense clouds bock less incoming solar radiation because of their reduced surface area, yet they also trap more heat.

So there exists a continuum of possibilities for the amount of heat retained versus the amount blocked (energy balance). What these scientists are asserting is that the energy balance is often negative. The IPCC and the warmer camp insists that this never happens, but they have no empirical data whatsoever to back up this assertion; it's really just an assumption, or guess. Again, no physical laws need to be violated for this condition to occur. Indeed, it's because of the physics of water vapor and clouds that this condition does occur. And these scientists have good data to back up their claims.

It's worth taking a look at, and it's not voodoo

Jimbo

[Boston]

there is a saying in my country to
if its got a big long nose, has big floppy ears
and weighs eight tons
its probably an elephant

if a scientist writes
on the health benefits of cigarettes
and on creationism

then his writing on other subjects should be held in question as well

kinda takes the teeth out of the hole skeptics argument

oh
and great article Billy
was funny to read how they not only disagree with the vast majority of climate scientists
but have major disagreements with even there own camps crazy theories
there disagreements with one another just goes to show that my previous statements about there view having no coherent theory
were spot on

cheers
B

[Jimbo1490]

The only '"crazy theory" out there is that any minor greenhouse gas can leverage its greenhouse potential to become, in effect, the regulator of the temperature of the entire planetary atmosphere. This implies that the climatic system is an unstable equilibrium (something virtually NEVER SEEN in nature), and that we have just been very lucky all these years that so fickle a quantity as minor greenhouse gas concentration has never run away before.

Makes you wanna thank God or someone

But don't worry; there's a big authoritarian government solution to the whole 'problem' if we can just convince everyone that it exists.

Jimbo

[Boston]

unstable equilibrium

?

he who knows all is always baffled by this little jewel

[Jimbo1490]

Originally Posted by Boston

?

he who knows all is always baffled by this little jewel

I don't know why you would be baffled, as all your favorite climate alarm
gurus have been saying this for many years now, unless of course you are actually unaware of what your camp says. Hmmm....

So we have yet another thing that you apparently don't know with respect to what your camp has been saying for years

It's just like when you apparently were unaware that your camp also admits that CO2 by itself is relatively unimportant as a greenhouse gas. (You thought that it was important, and set out to prove it )

Silly boy; it's only important if it can change the amount of water vapor up there


Look what your heroes are saying about unstable equilibrium and climate:

http://robertghansen.blogspot.com/20...1_archive.html

http://www.physics.nmt.edu/~raymond/...nergyflows.pdf

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/mov...%20Change.html


I'm beginning t think I can argure your position better than you can; if only I was a "true believer", like you



Jimbo

[BillyDoc]

Originally Posted by Jimbo1490

Billy,

The basic physics are what the AGW camp gets wrong. Heating (by ANY cause, including ANY greenhouse gas, water vapor included) causes more ocean surface evaporation. Evaporation adds water vapor to the atmosphere (of course) but also leads to cloud formation. Clouds both block some sunlight (thereby reducing incoming solar radiation) but also increase greenhouse warming. Clouds are actually responsible for both reflecting sunlight back into space, but also a large fraction of the greenhouse effect. The big question is of course which of these two opposing properties in the end dominates the equation. The AGW camp, quite predictably, asserts that the greenhouse portion dominates. But if that were true, then we should see an increase in suspended water vapor without an increase in precipitation. But in fact, what we actually observe is increased cloud formation AND precipitation, meaning that there is a net cooling effect which is precipitating the water vapor out of the air mass. Thus water vapor concentrations do not change. Precipitation becomes a heat transport mechanism which keeps all in check.

Jimbo

Jimbo, the problem seems to be that your explanation is morphing as we go along. That's OK, of course, only dumb asses hold to ideas proven wrong. But look at your explanation quoted above, then look at your more recent explanation about four posts up where you are talking (I think) about differential cloud dispersal (from what mechanism?) giving rise to differential albedo? Which is in a negative feedback relationship to global warming? Do you see why I might be confused by this?

What say we give this another try. Let me pose the question once again. By what physical mechanisms are you claiming that an increase in CO2 (did we agree that it's increasing?) which is well established as a greenhouse gas for the simple reason that you can easily demonstrate this effect in a laboratory, does NOT result in global warming. Or is it that you don't think that all this CO2 which you can measure with instruments and is turning the oceans acid really exists? At this point I've lost track of what you are trying to say. Really!

I really think that if we can just stick to the evidence as presented by whomever, and known and well established physics, we can get this thread finished!

Oh, and who gets the promotion to "He who knows all?" It sounds useful!

BillyDoc

[Guillermo]

From Sunday's speakers:

"The first Plenary Address was given by President Vaclav Klaus, who is President of both the Czech Republic and (for a 6 month current term) the European Union. His talk was greeted, both before and after, with standing ovations.

In response to a question, he reported a just-released Czech poll, which shows that only 11% of persons questioned in a recent poll believe that man has a significant influence in warming the global climate.

The President commenced his talk by commenting that little change had occurred in the global warming debate since his talk, 12 months earlier, at the Heartland-1 conference. He likened the situation to his former experience under communist government, where arguing against the dominant viewpoint falls into emptiness. No matter how high the quality of the arguments and evidence that you advance against the dangerous warming idea, nobody listens, and by even advancing skeptical arguments you are dismissed as a naïve and uninformed person."

.....................................

"Dr Lindzen started by making the important observation that being skeptical about dangerous human-caused global warming does not make one a good scientist, and nor does endorsing global warming necessarily make one a bad scientist.

He then pointed out the professional difficulties that are raised for many skeptics when scientists whose research they respect nonetheless endorse global warming. In most such cases, however, the science that such persons do is not about global warming in the strict sense. It’s just that supporting global warming makes their life, and especially their funding life, easier.

Thus, it is a particular problem for young scientists to oppose the prevailing alarmist orthodoxy, because to do so is to cruel their chances of receiving research funding. For as long as it is the AGW spin that attracts the research funds, for so long will there be a strong disincentive for most scientists to question the hypothesis in public.

Lindzen commented that the politicization of the AGW issue has had an extraordinarily corrupting influence on science. Most funding that goes to global warming would not be provided were it not for the climate scare. It has therefore become standard to include in any research proposal the effect of presumed AGW on your topic, quite irrespective of whether it has any real relevance or not"

...............................

[Guillermo]

If the scientific community were convinced that we could reliably forecast future climates, or that the consequences of some warming would be catastrophic, then perhaps no price would be too high to pay to save the Earth. But that is not what the scientific community is telling us. According to the most recent international poll of climate scientists,

Most climate scientists believe global warming “is a process already underway.”

But that “consensus” drops to below 60 percent when climate scientists are asked if “climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.”

65 percent of climate scientists do not believe “climate models can accurately predict climate conditions in the future.”

68 percent do not believe “the current state of scientific knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climatic variability on time scales of ten years.”

73 percent do not believe it is possible to predict climate “on time scales of 100 years.”

About 70 percent of climate scientists think “climate change might have some positive effects for some societies.”

Finally, on the question that might matter the most, climate scientists are perfectly split over the question of whether they know enough about global warming to turn it over to policymakers to take action, with 44 percent saying we do and 46 percent saying we do not.

[BillyDoc]

Guillermo, could you please post a source for these data?

Thanks,

BillyDoc

[Guillermo]

Hey Boston, you're going to love this guy!
Ian R. Plimer Ph.D. is an Australian geologist and academic. He is a prominent critic of creationism and of the theory of human-induced global warming. He has published over 120 academic papers and six books.

I think you'll find interesting his presentation:

http://www.sydneyminingclub.org/pres...er/player.html

I love the very last slide....

Cheers

[Guillermo]

Originally Posted by BillyDoc

Guillermo, could you please post a source for these data?
Thanks,
BillyDoc

The same place where Boston found his 97%.....

Cheers.