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| 5/24 |
| 2003/11/22 [Science/GlobalWarming] UID:11183 Activity:nil |
11/21 Question for motd conservatives: Why is it smart to disagree with
scientific consensus on global warming, but dumb to disagree with
economic consensus on the effects of globalization?
\_ Personally, I take any consensus with a grain of salt.
"Consensus == dogma" surprisingly often.
-- conservative
\_ 1) there isn't consensus. it remains an open issue. the ability
of science to predict super complex systems like long term
global weather patterns and temp. changes is zero.
\_ Actually, there is a great deal of consensus. The only
"dissent" comes from climate scientists on the payroll
of the petroleum industry, who are kept funded to create
the illusion of debate.
\_ references, please. also, go look up consensus. it is a
very black and white word. you either have it or you
don't. you don't. there was consensus at one time that
the earth was flat. when i was a pre-teen there was
consensus that we were heading into an ice age. where the
hell is my ice age, huh? all the same scientists said so.
\_ There was never a consensus the world was flat. The
Greeks had estimates of the diameter of the world in
500 BC. The notion of a "flat earth" an
anti-clerical myth initiated in the 1800s.
2) i don't know what we motd conservatives think about the
'economic consensus on the effects of gloablization'. if you
could tell me what i think, i could tell you why.
\_ Sorry, there is no consensus. You seem oblivious to how research
grants are delegated. Global warming is a gigantic
self-perpetuating money industry. Try getting money from the UN
EU, Canada on a proposal that contradicts the warming hypothesis.
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
My favorite study as of late:
Researchers question key global-warming study
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html
As for trade, I'm with Pat Buchanan who has been predicting
this for over a decade. Fair trade I support... but what
exists today is not reciprocal in any sense of the word.
\_ the "oblivious to how research grands are delegated" argument
has become one of my favorite tinfoil hat statements. keep
up the good work! remember, the federal reserve is in league
with The Jews to take away your guns! I have applied for grants,
my grandfather spent most of his career as an NIH grants
administrator, and as a professional scientist I know a lot
of poeple who have to apply for grants constantly and
several who review grants. you have no idea what the fuck
you're talking about (I'm assuming you're the same dumbass
who usually posts this argument.)
\_ Who do you think wins grants? There are certain scientists
of a certain stature who receive 90% of the money in a given
field. They gained their stature perhaps by good science (and
sometimes not) but they are not always right. There is a lot
of politics involved.
\_ so you're saying grants aren't political? then why was the
sf chronicle printing an article last week about how several
dozen NIH grants are being cut or re-reviewed due to their
content? anyway, any idiot can apply for anything. you
didn't say how many were granted or what they were for and
if that contradicted the prevailing theories at the time and
what political connections your family or their associates
have with the grant givers or if the grant applications fit
the grant giver's other ambitions already. in short, you've
told us nothing except you can file paperwork and everyone
else is ignorant because, well, you can file paperwork.
\_ Unfortunately this same problem exists for publications
as well. In fact, Nature recently ran an editorial
decrying the incestuous review process. These journals
should do blind reviews of submissions.
\_ that doesn't solve the problem. if a field is small
and everyone knows eachother, there is no such thing
as a "blind review." when your close friends
post anonymously to the motd, don't you recognize
their posts? perhaps more useful would be removing
the anonymity of the reviewers to put more pressure
on them to do their job.
\_ I do not think that word means what you think it means. Hell, 30
years ago there was a consensus about global cooling, so I'm a bit
skeptical for just that reason. Then there are the astrophysicists
who point out a link between solar activity and global temperatures.
But the clear proof that global warming is not a scientific
conclusion was the *reaction* to the book The Skeptical
Environmentalist. It was criticized, derided, villified, etc. but
no one refuted its serious scientific claims.
\_ The global cooling theory only was out for a little while. See
it didn't add up and further research proved that. So it was
thrown away as a theory that was wrong. Global warming on the
other hand has had a hell of a lot more time spent on it
and beyong a few partisan shrills of questionable veracity,
it hasn't been refuted. Yes bogus theories sometimes get
their time in the limelight, but the idea that a theory that
has had so much further study is still considered good and
yet is a crock of bullshit is, well, laughable. Tin foil
territory about a vast conspiracy of scientists that Want You
To Fear Greenhouse Gasses For Their Own Neferious Reasons aside.
\_ Nefarious.
\_ IIRC, the various global warming theorists attacked the man for
having no scientific training in global warming theory/politics.
in other words, he was derided for going against the status quo
and nothing else. he wasn't in the boy's club and wasn't playing
by their circuluarly defined rules about what can and can not be
good global warming science/politics.
\_ Global warming is BULLSHIT. Enough said. -sameer (does anyone
sign their motd entries anymore? What is this world coming to?) |
| 5/24 |
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| www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/ice_ages.html -> www.clearlight.com/%7Emhieb/WVFossils/ice_ages.html Global warming began 18,000 years ago as the earth started warming its way out of the Pleistocene Ice Age - a time when much of North America, Europe, and Asia lay buried beneath great sheets of glacial ice. Earths climate and the biosphere have been in constant flux, dominated by ice ages and glaciers for the past several million years. We are currently enjoying a temporary reprieve from the deep freeze. Approximately every 100,000 years Earths climate warms up temporarily. These warm periods, called interglacial periods , appear to last approximately 15,000 to 20,000 years before regressing back to a cold ice age climate. At year 18,000 and counting our current interglacial vacation from the Ice Age is much nearer its end than its beginning. Global warming during Earths current interglacial warm period has greatly altered our environment and the distribution and diversity of all life. For example: Approximately 15,000 years ago the earth had warmed sufficiently to halt the advance of glaciers, and sea levels worldwide began to rise. By 8,000 years ago the land bridge across the Bearing Strait was drowned, cutting off the migration of men and animals to North America. Since the end of the Ice Age, Earths temperature has risen approximately 16 degrees F and sea levels have risen a total of 300 feet ! Over the past 750,000 years of Earths history, Ice Ages have occurred at regular intervals, of approximately 100,000 years each. Courtesy of Illinois State Museum D uring ice ages our planet is cold, dry, and inhospitable - supporting few forests but plenty of glaciers and deserts . Like a spread of collosal bulldozers, glaciers have scraped and pulverized vast stretches of Earths surface and completely destroyed entire regional ecosystems not once, but several times. I n the 1970s concerned environmentalists like Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado feared a return to another ice age due to manmade atmospheric pollution blocking out the sun . Since about 1940 the global climate did in fact appear to be cooling. Then a funny thing happened- sometime in the late 1970s temperature declines slowed to a halt and ground-based recording stations during the 1980s and 1990s began reading small but steady increases in near-surface temperatures. Fears of global cooling then changed suddenly to global warming ,- the cited cause: manmade atmospheric pollution causing a runaway greenhouse effect . What does geologic history have to offer in sorting through the confusion? If ice age is used to refer to long, generally cool, intervals during which glaciers advance and retreat, we are still in one today. Our modern climate represents a very short, warm period between glacial advances. Illinois State Museum P eriods of Earth warming and cooling occur in cycles. This is well understood, as is the fact that small-scale cycles of about 40 years exist within larger-scale cycles of 400 years, which in turn exist inside still larger scale cycles of 20,000 years, and so on. Example of regional variations in surface air temperature for the last 1000 years, estimated from a variety of sources, including temperature-sensitive tree growth indices and written records of various kinds, largely from western Europe and eastern North America. Shown are changes in regional temperature in C, from the baseline value for 1900. Courtesy of Thomas Crowley, Remembrance of Things Past: Greenhouse Lessons from the Geologic Record Earths climate was in a cool period from AD 1400 to about AD 1860, dubbed the Little Ice Age . This period was characterized by harsh winters, shorter growing seasons, and a drier climate. The decline in global temperatures was a modest 1/2 C, but the effects of this global cooling cycle were more pronounced in the higher latitudes. The Little Ice Age has been blamed for a host of human suffering including crop failures like the Irish Potato Famine and the demise of the medieval Viking colonies in Greenland. Today we enjoy global temperatures which have warmed back to levels of the so called Medieval Warm Period , which existed from approximately AD 1000 to AD 1350. Was man really responsible for pulling the Earth out of the Little Ice Age with his industrial pollution? If so, this may be one of the greatest unheralded achievements of the Industrial Age! Unfortunately, we tend to overestimate our actual impact on the planet. In this case the magnitude of the gas emissions involved, even by the most aggressive estimates of atmospheric warming by greenhouse gases, is inadequate to account for the magnitude of temperature increases. Causes of Global Climate Change C limate change is controlled primarily by cyclical eccentricities in Earths rotation and orbit , as well as variations in the suns energy output . Greenhouse gases in Earths atmosphere also influence Earths temperature, but in a much smaller way. Because these cycles and events overlap, sometimes compounding one another, sometimes canceling one another out, it is inaccurate to imply a statistically significant trend in climate or temperature patterns from just a few years or a few decades of data. Unfortunately, a lot of disinformation about where Earths climate is heading is being propagated by scientists who use improper statistical methods, short-term temperature trends, or faulty computer models to make analytical and anecdotal projections about the significance of man-made influences to Earths climate. During the last 100 years there have been two general cycles of warming and cooling recorded in the United States We are currently in the second warming cycle. Overall, United States temperatures show no significant warming trend over the last 100 years 1. Each year Government press releases declare the previous year to be the hottest year on record. The UNs executive summary on climate change, issued in January 2001 , insists that the 20th century was the warmest in the last millennium. The news media distribute these stories and people generally believed them to be true. However, as most climatologists know, these reports generally are founded on ground-based temperature readings, which are misleading. The more meaningful and precise orbiting satellite data for the same period which are generally not cited by the press have year after year showed no warming. Patrick Michaels has demonstrated this effect is a common problem with ground- based recording stations, many of which originally were located in predominantly rural areas, but over time have suffered background bias due to urban sprawl and the encroachment of concrete and asphalt the urban heat island effect . The result has been an upward distortion of increases in ground temperature over time2. Satellite measurements are not limited in this way, and are accurate to within 01 C. They are widely recognized by scientists as the most accurate data available. Significantly, global temperature readings from orbiting satellites show no significant warming in the 18 years they have been continuously recording and returning data 1. A Matter of Opinion H as manmade pollution in the form of carbon dioxide CO2 and other gases caused a runaway Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming? CO2 in our atmosphere has been increasing steadily for the last 18,000 years- long before humans invented smokestacks Figure 1 . Unless you count campfires and intestinal gas, man played no role in the pre-industrial increases. As illustrated in this chart of Ice Core data from the Soviet Station Vostok in Antarctica , CO2 concentrations in earths atmosphere move with temperature. Both temperatures and CO2 have been steadily increasing for 18,000 years. Ignoring these 18,000 years of data global warming activists contend recent increases in atmospheric CO2 are unnatural and are the result of only 200 years or so of human pollution causing a runaway greenhouse effect. Incidentally, earths temperature and CO2 levels today have reached levels similar to a previous interglacial cycle of 120,000 - 140,000 years ago. This is known as the Eemian Interglacial Period and the earth returned to a full-fledged ice age immediately af... |
| www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html -> www.uoguelph.ca/%7Ermckitri/research/trc.html We then apply MBH98 methodology to the construction of a Northern Hemisphere average temperature index for the 1400-1980 period, using corrected and updated source data. The major finding is that the values in the early 15 th century exceed any values in the 20 th century. UPDATE: March 19, 2004 In response to a couple of requests for an update, here is a quick one. A few papers are undergoing review at some journals, including Steves and my contributions, and there is not a dull page to be found in any of them. McIntyre has been winning squash tournaments and I have started bagpiping lessons . UPDATE: January 22, 2004 Despite the long quiet on this page, the past 7 weeks have been very busy for us. A number of people have written to ask about progress on Part II, while others have interpreted the 7 week gap as a sign that maybe we ran out of material. No, there is a lot of material, and the challenge has been to sift through it and put it into coherent form. There are now some new journals involved in handling material that arose from our paper, and we have held back releasing any of the Part II contents connected to these review processes. Professor Manns response focuses on the role of 3 out of 22 key indicators available in the 15th century portion of the data base. His calculations show that without these series the MBH98 results would look like ours, and his assertion is that we improperly omitted the series in question. Our response will establish that the series in question are in fact inadmissible. Of course the discovery that the 1998 conclusions rest so sensitively on only 3 series already points to the lack of robustness of this famous graph. UPDATE: December 1 We are continuing to work on Part II of our response, which has required a detailed examination of Professor Manns ftp site, hence the delay. We also traveled to Washington DC on November 18, to present a briefing on Capitol Hill, sponsored by the Marshall Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, on our work to date. Some interested experts at a European climate lab had privately criticized us for what they regarded as an insufficiently wide circle of reviewers for the E&E paper. We offered to them that they could review Part II before its release, on the condition that if they found errors they could hold us to public account to rectify them, but if the document checks out they would have to issue a statement saying so. After considering it for a week they declined the offer, saying they dont have time to do the review, and would prefer to follow the debates progress in journals. UPDATE: November 11 Our response to the replies thus far from Professor Mann and his colleagues will be presented in three parts. Our overarching goal is to ascertain exactly what data and what computational steps were used by MBH98, so as to focus in as quickly as possible on the real sources of differences between our results. But along the way there are a few new isses that must also be dealt with. Part 1, available here in PDF format responds to the claim that the data we audited was prepared in April 2003 in response to McIntyres request to Mann, and that we ought to have gone to Professor Manns ftp site instead. We show that the data file we were sent was in existence long before April 2003 and had we gone to the ftp site we would have found it contains the same data anyway. This document, by establishing the practical equivalence between Professor Manns ftp site and the data file we were sent, returns our focus to the basic question of data quality and sets the stage for the subsequent parts in which we will extend our existing critique. Part 2 will present a detailed examination of the contents of Professor Manns FTP site, in light of the claim that it is the official repository for the MBH98 data. This document has been sent to some colleagues for their comments and will be made available shortly thereafter. Part 3, now under way, will seek to resolve the outstanding differences between our computational methods and those of MBH. Completion of this part will be contingent on our receiving the specific computer programs MBH used, and we are seeking this disclosure. McKitrick is going to an economics workshop in Manitoba for a couple of days, to discuss the question Does the possibility of climate change imply that we should wash our laundry in cold water? Professors Mann, Bradley and Hughes have revised their reply to our paper, see here . They have also corrected some errors in their goodness-of-fit calculations. Professors Mann, Bradley and Hughes have made a more detailed reply to our paper, available here in PDF . His reply and our response are available here in MSWord and here in PDF . It introduced the multiproxy method to the study of past climates, and produced what was purported to be a 600-year history of the average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere. It is the basis for the claim by Environment Canada and many other governmental agencies that the Earth is warmer now than it has been for 600 years. A companion paper published a year later in Geophysical Research Letters extended the 600-year series back to 1000 and spliced a surface temperature record to 1998, producing the famous hockey stick graph of the NH climate. This graph figures prominently in the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has been reproduced many times. It was the basis for the claim in pamphlets mailed by the Government of Canada to Canadians in 2002 that said The 20 th Century was the warmest globally for the past 1,000 years. The pamphlets were sent to generate support for ratifying and implementing the Kyoto Protocol in Canada. In 2003, Steven McIntyre, a Toronto business man who specialized in mathematics at university, got interested in the process by which IPCC Reports were being put together and used for driving major policy decisions. Long experience in the mining industry, including close observation of the delinquent accounting that led to the Bre-X scandal, gave him a good nose for promotions based on unaudited claims. It also taught him that when big investments are at stake, due diligence requires relentless testing and independent verification of the data by all parties at every stage. Also, attention must be paid to potential conflicts of interestfor instance the author of a project feasibility study should not also be a major shareholder in the project. These are rigorous requirements in the private sector, yet in the case of the IPCC, chapter authors routinely promote their own research. This makes it even more important that there be external auditing of the reports foundation. The Mann hockey stick curve was given central prominence in the 2001 IPCC Report. If this is true, the Mann, Bradley and Hughes paper should have no problem passing a detailed audit. Since governments around the world including here in Canada are making some very expensive policy decisions based on uncritical acceptance of the IPCC Report, an independent review seemed in order, and indeed should be a mere formality. McIntyre obtained the underlying data set from Professor Michael Mann of the University of Virginia. Based on some apparent difficulties experienced by Manns associates in supplying the data set, he surmised that it was possible that no one had ever previously requested the data set and that it would be a worthwhile endeavour to try to replicate the famous graph. In the summer of 2003 he contacted Ross McKitrick , an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph and coauthor of Taken By Storm: the Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming , to discuss his findings to that point. Their paper has been published in the British journal Energy and Environment . We have created an audit trail so that third parties can verify these findings for themselves. This includes what we think is the first Internet posting of the original proxy data used in Mann et al 1998. To verify the collation errors resulting in duplication of 1980 entries in the data, one needs only inspect a few numbers. Weve created excerpts from the data ... |