A nice favorable mention today in an article by Bob Carter in the Daily Telegraph today.
Bob Carter is an Australian geologist, who has carried out extremely interesting analyses of clnmate variability over the past 3.6 million years. I showed one of his graphs here -scroll to the bottom.
This is not an entirely unbiased article, as Bob was the first person to encourage me to pursue research in this area back in mid-2003 when no one had ever heard of me, I’d never written an accademic article and was just musing on the internet. He emailed me to say that I was looking at proxy issues in a different way than anyone else and that what I was doing was worthwhile. We’re about the same age, I’ve met him in San Francisco at both AGU conferences that I’ve been at and we get along famously.
Climate Audit 
118 Comments
Leave out the last eight years; the rest of the argument stands. Is it Steven or Stephen, if I may presume?
=============================================
jfleck,
It would be helpful for your argument if when making misleading statements, you didn’t do so where people could look directly at what was said and see what you’re doing.
Steve does not “approvingly cite” the article in question. He states that the article in question had a “nice favorable mention” of him in it. You can argue, if you want, that that’s the same things, but that’s not how an ordinary person would define an approving citation. One could have a favorable mention in an article one completely disagreed with.
This is especially true when you then switch to a discussion of starting point bias. Steve didn’t approve of this and wouldn’t since he’s complained about it here in other contexts.
Take-away. Let he who is without sin….
re 1:
Now which year is prominently present in the original hockeystick???
Over to you Tim!
re 1:
BTW I see a different text than quoted in this thread.
Re 5 – yeah, I’m so used to Tim trashing that Blair guy that I got the name wrong when I hit the “post” button, saw the mistake, and fixed it. I’m not too clear on all these Aussie characters.
“Given the variability in the temperature record, in any given year, even with a continuing upward temperature trend, you are likely to be a bit cooler than the previous record year – until you set a new record. So by cherrypicking the previous record year as your starting point, you can argue most of the time that things are really cooling off, not warming.”
I’m sorry, but does this mean we are seeing a turnaround in the AGW discussion?
See this is exactly what skeptics have been saying for many, many years. For instance, rather than using 1998 use 1976, as the alarmists often do, you see a dramatic warming trend. But if instead you use 1949 and end in 1976 you see a dramatic cooling trend, and if you use 1939 to present, you see a cooling trend followed by a warming trend that plateaus to just above 1939 in 1998 and today is not drastically different than 1939.
I assume this is Carter is trying to illustrate (Haven’t read the article yet), and i know it was a point of Daly’s and is a point of Milloy.
The alarmist have been highly guilty of this since the late 70’s (First with alarmism about cooling, now with warming), a bit cheeky to complain about someone else doing it now.
Oh, Sid, would please give the cooling myth a rest? I’m sure you’ve read the RC post debunking it.
Regarding the consciously fraudulent Carter, I look forward to his column admitting error when we see the next record warm year. If Jim Hansen is correct, that could be in the next two years since a strong El Nino seems imminent. Recall that 1998 was a warm outlier because of the strong El Nino.
I’m sure you know that we don’t accept any words of Bill Connelley without solid evidence. Unfortunately his website of partial quotes doesn’t constitute such evidence.
There’s no "cooling myth". There’s just denial of historical evidence and historical revisionism.
By the way, I have the books to prove it.
So you’re calling Bob Carter a liar? On what piece of evidence was Bob Carter consciously fraudulent? Be specific.
James Hansen has made a prediction of an “Super El Nino” this year but how “Super” will this be?
Oh and by the way, here’s a little historical quiz for you:
Why would I ever read RC. Anything they said to refute it is BS plain and simple.
What I have seen is the written record that confirms it, not to mention I was alive at the time and recall it personally. I didn’t have my brain washed into believing a revisionist history that is non existent.
I mean even Schneider admited as much
“Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University, recalls those stories well. “I was one of the ones who talked about global cooling””
#1, You misrepresented Carter’s point, John. He acknowledged that starting at 1998 is tendentious, and went on to point out that this failing exactly describes the self-serving starting points one gets from climate chicken-littleists when they tout unprecedented 20th century warming.
He wrote: “In response to these facts [i.e., that global average climate has been slightly cooling since 1998], a global warming devotee will chuckle and say “how silly to judge climate change over such a short period”. Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming.”
Steve Bloom in #8, publicly adducing no more evidence than what you’ve written, calls Carter “consciously fraudulent.” I.e., a liar. How charming. And so it goes, politcal character assassination in convenient tandem: Tweedledee hotly misrepresents and Tweedledum moralistically tars. Such is life with global warmers. The parallels with Lysenkoism are striking and relevant. All that’s lacked is Lysenko’s power to gaol his critics.
Steve B, Jim Hansen is on record saying that GCMs are useless. (You tried to misrepresent that, too, remember?) From where, then, do you suppose, might he get a prediction concerning future temperatures about which to be “correct”? Divine revelation, maybe?
About 1, not to make too fine a point of it but you ought to sed “s/likely/guaranteed/”.
“Leave out the last eight years; the rest of the argument stands.”
The Global temperature record (GTR) is flawed because it it is influenced by Urban heat.Temperature records from Rural stations show that the temperature at the beginning of the 20th century was comparable that of today.
Records from many rural stations cease in 1970
yet these are averaged in the GTR making it lower relative to that of today.
The crude sea surface temperatures published in Nature by Parker in 1984
http://www.warwickhughes.com/sst/
confirm the temperature record from rural
stations.
Studies of the records of polar explorers show that the extent of polar ice at the beginning of the 20th century was similar to or less than that of today.
http://www.warwickhughes.com/cool/cool16.htm
#8
Calling it a cooling myth is revisionism of the worst, and most dishonest, kind.
If there was a cooling myth then why were governments funding research into it in the 70s?
It’s funny, whilst I strongly disagree with James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis (which is the product of a simple statistical error), I have a lot of respect for him; he holds strong opinions and speaks them honestly. He openly admits that he was warning of an impending ice age in the 1970s. It is sad that there are so many who try to rewrite history in a desperate attempt to add credibility to their views.
Steve, over on Prometheus you recently criticised Hans Erren for what you claimed was effectively accusing Hansen of fraud, despite the fact that Hans had done no such thing. Yet you are very willing to fire off such accusations yourself with no real evidence. How do you square that circle? Is it double standards, or an inability to apply critical thought to your own arguments?
Perhaps the best answer to your claim, then, would be this:
Today’s Boston Globe has a piece titled “In the balance —
Is balanced journalism to blame for the lack of action on global warming?”
The author, Christopher Shea, wonders if journalists have an obligation to present both sides of an arguement when one side (guess which) is represented by so few.
About the Time piece on Global Warming Mr. Shea writes:
Re #16: Spence, if you read Hans’ comments carefully you’ll see that he retracted his original phrasing. I accepted that what he said initially wasn’t what he meant, although I didn’t comment on it there.
Hans, since you asked, the average temperature for 1998 does not feature in MBH98. On account of that study being published in 1998.
Over to you Hans, do you agree with Carter’s claim that we are in an 8-year cooling trend? Do you approve of Carter’s outrageous cherry-picking? Does Steve M? Is this comment going to get censored as well?
Maybe Carter is basing his 8-year temperature trend on satellite data?
http://wwwghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/MSU/msusci.html
Did anyone notice Shea mentioned congressional curiosity about cooked data in one paragraph and in the next quoted some Penn State climatologist?
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#19. Poor old Tim always has trouble with facts. If you look at MBH98, you will see that Mann used a figure for the first 7 months of the year. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann1998/frames.htm
I have no doubt that the 1990s were warm. My interest is in the proxies: how do they compare to the 11th century. I guess Tim agrees with Mann that it’s too hard and too expensive to verify the proxies in the warm 1990s. All those remote and inaccessible places. All that heavy equipment. Or if Tim disagrees with Mann, maybe that’s another Mann Screws It Up Again column for Tim to write.
Timmy, you mean other than the line across the top that is the level “1998 Instrumental value”
Come on Steve Bloom reply to my points in post 14.
Iv’e read Real Clomate ‘debunklng’ some of them but they censor my counter arguments .
Here’s my chance to tackle an AGW proponent on a level playing field.
I trust you won’t resort to name calling, I am neither stupid or a liar.
#8: “Oh, Sid, would please give the cooling myth a rest? I’m sure you’ve read the RC post debunking it.”
Steve Bloom, I’m still waiting for your response to the mid-century cooling over at http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=554 (See #236).
It’s been over a month since you promised a response.
Either respond or apologize for your insults in #145
I see a lot of strawmanning about the strong El Niño of 1998 being misused. There is nothing about the long (nearly 3 years) and resonably strong La Niña that followed and balanced the temperature graph again.
Source
So avoiding end point bias avoiding to start or end during a strong El Niño, you should also avoid the La Niña and end up being unable to compile a graph or accept that the ENSO is part of the complete system.
Re #25: Nanny, this is at least the second time I’ve told you there’s a paper on the way (from Stott) that deals with the geographic distribution issue. As this is a subject I’m not very interested in, but looks to be a matter of a fair amount of research if I were to put an answer together myself, it makes more sense to wait for the paper. It’s not any more likely you’ll listen to a climate scientist than me, but at least I won’t have wasted my time. That said, I strongly suspect that the answer involves clouds. But we’ll see.
BTW, you only raised the geographic distribution issue after I pointed out in #145 that your original aerosol points had easy answers that you had no doubt seen before. You also said that you relied on a World Climate Report article that turned out to be, well, unreliable. So I’ve mostly answered you already.
Or, Andre, you could take a five year moving average like CRU does and Carter failed to report because it shows a strong warming trend since 1998.
Re #24: Sorry, Thomas, the last time we did that you more or less choked. Also, I can’t imagine there’s anything I could say to you on those subjects that you haven’t already seen and decided to ignore.
Following Steve M’s link to MBH98 I find the following clue: “Revised: April 28, 1998” It seems unlikely to me, but not to Steve, that a paper last revised in April 1998 could contain data for the first seven months of 1998. April, you see, is the fourth month. Following another link takes us to the famous hockey stick graph. The legend of which includes this: “ACTUAL DATA 1902-1995”. 1998 is not between 1902 and 1995.
All this is, of course, Steve’s attempt to distract from Carter’s cherry-picking. Steve, do you or do you not agree with Carter’s claim that CRU data shows that global average temperature decreased from 1998 to 2005?
Are you going to answer or are you going to do some more censoring?
#30 – Tim, have you actually read the article? Carter states that to judge global average temperature on such a short timespan is meaningless. It was just the hook to initiate a debate on subscribing meaning to such short timeframes. The fact that you’re wiggling on the hook merely makes you look ridiculous. Here fishy, fishy…
Yes John Lish, I have read the article, and you don’t get to change what he wrote. The “it’s too short to judge” opinion is attached to his straw “global warming devotee”. Carter doesn’t say that it’s meaningless. He’s been claiming temperatures are declining for some time now. For instance:
Tim Lambert, : So ?
#30. Poor old fact-challenged Tim Lambert. The unframed link
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/paleocean/by_contributor/mann1998/nhem-dense.dat states that the data includes the first 7 months of 1998 – so Mann was right on top of 1998 temperatures. Too bad he didn’t spend the same amount of attention to the proxies. In MBH99, they were right on 1998 temperatures like Jack the Bear, or should, we say Tim the Golden Bear.
About the 1998-2005 “trend”, Carter went on to agree with the point – “how silly to judge climate change over such a short period”. That seems obvious to me and hardly worth weighing with an opinion on.
#32 Tim, Carter also states that in your linked PDF
So Carter bases his argument on long-term trends to argue that the next 100+ years will see a cooling. Hence the usage of the term “generality” in your quoted statement. To quote the OED: Generality – a statement or principle having general rather than specific validity or force. Therefore his argument doesn’t stand or fall on whether the last six years has seen the global average temperature cool slightly or not. Its an aside to his argument. It is just a hook and you have taken the bait.
“He’s been claiming temperatures are declining for some time now.”
Some time now? 2 Years is “some time. Well maybe we can see you level of time scale now.
But so far as it goes. I think we can say that tempratures have been falling “For some time now” because they have been falling for 6 years.
“Here fishy, fishy.” I like that.
re #35,
You have to think about what it is Tim is trying to do. He, and other warmers are desperate to discredit Steve M. But they can’t do it on the basis of the things he has written for publication, nor what he blogs here concerning the science of paleoclimatology. Therefore Tim specializes in attacking Steve indirectly by attacking what he posts for fun or what he allows (or disallows) to be posted here, for instance blogs by John A.
Logically, such periphial issues have nothing to do with Steve’s actual arguments, but the hope of the warmers is that they can confuse passers-by by claiming Steve is responsible for every syllable posted here and if he doesn’t either disavow or affirm something they dispute it shows he shouldn’t be listened to at all. Steve knows enough not to fall into this trap, but too often we hangers-on fail to ignore such bad-faith arguments and help Tim along in his attempts to discredit Steve.
Yeah luckily he does more to discredit himself to passers-by
Re 29
Steve
Look at data from GISS stations marked rural which are not airports and not surrounded by irrigation (you can check on Multimap and Google Earth), airports warm the surroundings progressivly ,irrigation cools the area when it is installed.
You will see that Stations such as these from all over the earth apart from some in what was the USSR show much the same pattern. which is similar to the original crude SSTs which you can find where I indicated.
Study the records of the many polar explorers of the late 19th and 20th centurys and compare them to the present day sea ice surveys produced US Navy.
If after doing that you still hold on to your faith in AGW (as I once did) then you will indeed prove that it is a religion not science
I plan to write a new textbook and try to get a new course added to the climatology curriculum called “The Science of Cherry Picking.” There will be a special chapter for dendroclimatologists called “Cherry Picking Temperature Signals from Cherry Tree Cores.” This course is needed because cherry picking is being practiced differently by various climatologists. Some standardization is sorely needed.
Re #12: Pat, I just love it when you guys say stuff like this:
“Steve B, Jim Hansen is on record saying that GCMs are useless. (You tried to misrepresent that, too, remember?) From where, then, do you suppose, might he get a prediction concerning future temperatures about which to be “correct”? Divine revelation, maybe?”
Such remarks serve to settle any question visiting clinate scientists might have about Steve M.’s motivations. Keep ’em coming. BTW, recall that Hansen said no such thing. What he did say is that models are useless relative to dynamical melting (because they don’t yet take such melting into accounts, in case you were wondering). Hansen repudiating GCMs would be a little like the pope repudiating the Catholic Church. But by all means feel free to call a reporter with your news.
As to the Carter fraud, his tactic of putatively rejecting the last eight years in order to select the mid-century slight cooling instead is a transparent tactic (although notice he didn’t quite reject it, since he cited it again later in the article). I though you guys didn’t like cherry-picking? I personally prefer the approach used by Hansen in figure 1 of ftp://ftp.giss.nasa.gov/outgoing/JEH/bams_29mar20062_all.pdf. It’s a nice clear warming trend, don’t you think?
Re #35: Carter is mendacious, not stupid, which is why he did not predict a cooling so soon. What he said is that we should worry about a sharp cooling event at some vague point in the future. But since you’re such a big fan of his, could you perhaps cite an example of such a sharp cooling that is not associated with the end of a glaciation (as in the Younger Dryas)? I have to say I’m not familiar with any such phenomenon.
Steve M, just to be perfectly clear here. You are claiming:
1. That in Figure 5b of MBH98 (the original hockey stick graph) the curve labelled “ACTUAL DATA 1902-1995” includes 1998.
and
2. CRU data shows a slight cooling trend since 1998.
Is that correct?
#27: Steve B: Do you really think that this new paper you’re waiting for will explain how North American aerosols cause cooling while Chinese aerosols cause warming?
” As this is a subject I’m not very interested in, but looks to be a matter of a fair amount of research if I were to put an answer together myself,”
Well, if you are not interested in the subject, and haven’t done the research, then why would you go and insult someone who IS interested in the subject and HAS done some research?
“BTW, you only raised the geographic distribution issue after I pointed out in #145 that your original aerosol points had easy answers that you had no doubt seen before. You also said that you relied on a World Climate Report article that turned out to be, well, unreliable. So I’ve mostly answered you already. ”
No, sorry Steve. Strawmen all around.
#27: Steve B: Do you really think that this new paper you’re waiting for will explain how North American aerosols cause cooling while Chinese aerosols cause warming?
Well, if you are not interested in the subject, and haven’t done the research, then why would you go and insult someone who IS interested in the subject and HAS done some research?
No, sorry Steve. Strawmen all around.
Steve Bloom.
Since you work for an environmental organization with a massive vested interest in global warming and ecological alarmism, perhaps you simply find it difficult to believe that anyone who checks the basis of such alarmism and finds it wanting is not working for some shadowy conspiracy.
Be that as it may:
Since when has the statements of a commenter meant that it somehow imputes on Steve McIntyre’s motivations? Since never.
After all, you post here and (hopefully) nobody imputes your drivel on Steve McIntyre’s motivations, do they?
But if you’re going for a big lie then make it as blatent as possible:
Except that Carter specifically points out the ludicrousness of picking such a short timespan and imputing any climatic value to it. Are you wilfully blind, stupid or just mendacious in not acknowledging what was actually written?
Yes, it’s a warming trend. But the data from that trend cannot be audited because it’s obviously too dangerous to be seen by mortal minds. In any case even the IPCC noted in 2001 that the rise in temperatures since 1880 was within the scope of natural variation.
So what does the rise mean? As far as we can tell temperatures have risen worldwide since the beginning of the 17th Century, well before carbon diocide began to climb
I can. The temperatures as measured by proxies fell by between 1 and 3C from about the 12th Century to the end of the 16th Century.
The only mendacity I can see is that you repeat falsehoods, and when somebody points them out, you repeat them again for emphasis.
#42. Tim, Tim, Tim, the trouble with you is having to pick spitballs off the wall so often. If you want to attribute something to me, quote me. Please don’t invent statements. Let’s review the bidding here using actual quotes.
You flashed onto the stage saying:
I checked back and I couldn’t find any record of Hans asking that question on this thread, although it’s possible that the topic came up elsewhere. So that’s how Tim dragged this particular red herring onto the stage. Maybe the best answer at this stage was – Uh, Tim, no one asked. However, unfortunately, I rose to the bait and pointed out that the archived MBH98 data included figures for 1998 as follows.
Unfortunately, the link took the reader only to the frames and one more step “Retrieve Data” was required – my bad. Anyway, Tim replied:
Here we see an excellent example of Tim’s ponderous rhetorical style. Whereas T.S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, Tim writes poetically that April is the fourth month. Such insight. And then to be followed up with the remarkable observation that 1998 is not between 1902 and 1995. One can only stand in awe of such a towering intellect. Maybe he will regale us with lists of other numbers not between 1902 and 1995.
Anyway, I replied by giving a link right to the data:
So here’s how Tim parses his reply to the archived data showing values up to 1998:
Well, did I say that? I never mentioned Figure 5b. I mentioned a data set archived in connection with MBH98 that contained 1998 data. Was that used in Figure 5b? I don’t know. You can never be sure with Mann what was used and what was not used. For example, he says that the temperature data used for his principal components went from 1902-1995, but it only went from 1902-1993. So would I bet anything one way or the other on exactly what Mann did in any particular figure – of course not. I made no mention of Figure 5b.
However, Mann unequivocally archived 1998 temperature data in connection with MBH98. Maybe some portion of the archived had nothing whatever to do with the calculations and was there for rhetorical purposes only. If so, then we eagerly await Tim’s next installment of Mann Screws It Up Again.
Additionally, as I pointed out, 1998 obviously was loud and clear in MBH99 and in IPCC TAR.
As to Tim’s second point, I have never claimed that CRU data showed a trend in 1998-2005 one way or the other. Why would you attribute claims to me that I’ve never made. I haven’t examined the CRU data for 2005 as I have many other things that I’m doing. But I believe that 8 years is too short a period to define a trend and would never make a claim about a trend over an 8 year period.
Carter does dismiss, to some extent, the use of only eight years. But he also clearly stakes the essential claim of his article – warming has stopped – on just that data.
He does seem to be playing with the time scales – interesting blog commentary here.
Speaking of cherry-picking, here’s a comment from Jacoby and D’Arrigo 1989:
In case anyone was wondering about starting in the mid-1850s.
Re #48: Well, Steve, by all means do rely on the global instrumental record from before that time. Also, while I’m familiar with such things as CO2, aerosols, insolation, etc. as forcings, I’m afraid I haven’t heard of this “recovery” forcing. Would you do me a favor and explain its effect in terms of heat flux?
Steve what are you talking about? And could you make a point instead of just acting snarky? If you disagree about something, put some skin in the game.
#49. Hey, I’m just quoting from the Hockey Team. I can only comment in a specialized way on proxy records; I haven’t examined the forcing data. However, if you look at my note on Hegerl et al, you’ll see some questions on residuals. Maybe you can clarify that for me – for a start, maybe you could give me a reference to the Hegerl residuals in digital format as I’ve been unable to locate it.
Hey watch out there Steve.
If your not careful you could get skeptical about this whole mess eh.
#41 Steve B., I just love it when you — not “guys like you,” but you, personally — write stuff like this: “Such remarks serve to settle any question visiting clinate scientists might have about Steve M.’s motivations.” By making such a specious attack you reveal your own motivations.
Let’s be clear about a point that should be obvious to anyone without a pernicious political outlook: Whatever *I* write here does not reflect on _Steve M.’s_ (or anyone else’s) motivations. What I write reflects what I happen to think.
What I happen to think about you — on the basis of what I have so far observed — is that you appear unable to write an honest analysis concerning climate.
Let’s look at what Hansen wrote. “Our understanding of what is going on is very new. Today’s forecasts of sea-level rise use climate models of the ice sheets that say they can only disintegrate over a thousand years or more. But we can now see that the models are almost worthless. They treat the ice sheets like a single block of ice that will slowly melt. But what is happening is much more dynamic. … How fast can this go? … How far can it go? [italics added, and luridly inductive disaster-mongering snipped from the quote]”
Notice Hansen didn’t write: ‘Models are unable to properly predict glacial melting.’ He could have written a qualified criticism of GCM models. But he didn’t. Instead, he wrote a general rejection of them.
So here is a basic question for you, Steve B.: Why did Hansen go on to say that the “best measure” of future melting is a subjective hyperbolicalization of post-last-glacial warming?
Here’s a central truth about science for you, Steve B. Write it down. Predictions in the absence of an unambiguous and falsifiable theory are scientifically meaningless. That’s what Hansen was offering; that’s what you offer: Scientific meaninglessness.
Carter’s “transparent tactic” was merely an exemplification of what climate accusagogues like yourself do all the time with climate data.
Regarding your, “could you perhaps cite an example of such a sharp cooling that is not associated with the end of a glaciation (as in the Younger Dryas)? I have to say I’m not familiar with any such phenomenon.” Look up Dansgaard-Oeschger events. They usually end with sharp cooling. We’ve been lucky to have none of them in the last 10,000 years.
Steve Bloom
Ignoring reasonable arguments against
AGW does your case no good whatsoever .
Not answering my comments on temperature or those of ET SidViscous on aerosol forcing and nitpicking through other posts to keep up your side of the argument demostrates the unscientific approach that I would associate with religious belief.
Why oh why can I never get my reasonable arguments answered ?
AGW adherents are either too busy to respond or alternatively ignore
me when I get to a point which I believe will make or break the argument.
Stoppng discussion demonstrates a closed one track nind.
Such people are cert
Re #46.
SteveM,
You missed it. In post #4 HansE quotes post #1 regarding the use of 1998 global temperature and says; “Now which year is prominently present in the original hockeystick???” This is followed by a link to a Hockey Stick graph which prominently displays a “1998 instrumental value” and has a data set described as “Instrumental data (AD 1902 to 1999)”.
I believe TimL interpreted “the original hockeystick” to mean MBH98. This seems quite reasonable to me. Therefore in post #19 TimL says; “Hans, since you asked, the average temperature for 1998 does not feature in MBH98. On account of that study being published in 1998.”
At this point someone should have said something like, “I think HansE meant MBH99” which makes sense as the graph linked by HansE goes back to 1000 AD. This really should have been clear to anyone who actually looked at the original link provided by HansE. Unfortunately TimL elected to attempt to diffuse HansE’s point by becoming pedanticly cryptic.
Regardless HansE’s point is that 1998 was used as an end point in one version of the Hockey Stick and therefore Mann was just as guilty of using “an outlier that you shouldn’t use to establish a temperature trend”.
However, in 1999 was 1998 known to be an outlier? Is 1998 indeed an outlier?
Re 53
The Dansgaard Oeschger events (some 90-25 thousand years ago) the Bolling Allerod (14.5-12.8 thousand years ago) and the onset of the Preboreal 11,672 years ago are all marked by a sharp stable isotope jump in the Greenland summit ice cores. It has been the choice of the warmers to interpret this as temperature changes, disdaining Fretwells law about stomach aches. The only real attempt to verify that was with more isotopes (40Ar, 15N Severinghaus 1998), never with geologic evidence after corrected date calibrations.
And then you get large temperature jumps, 10 degrees within a decade No wonder the red warning flags went out at this decision.
But if they had only looked at the complete picture they would have realized that those same isotope jumps are also possible with large seasonal fluctuations of precipitation. And for that, there is an abundance of evidence, including the same ice cores.
Therefore the story of the ice cores is completely different, falsifying those temperature jumps and with that the flickering climate idea. No flickering climates means also no flipping point to dangerous warming.
It’s a completely different story. It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.
The marvelous Marvin O’s fluids weren’t iced, but your point upsets his stomach anyway.
======================================
And then we have this garbage:
“Aussies’ Suzuki heavier on rhetoric than on science
Tim Ball, For The Calgary Herald
Published: Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Unknown to most Canadians until this week, Australians have their very own David Suzuki, a self-promoting zoologist who has garnered a large and loyal following for his sensationalist views on climate change.
Like Suzuki, Aussie zoologist Tim Flannery has no professional credentials in the field and so blunders regularly while pushing governments to save the world from global warming.”
…
http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=d622e9fa-cdc8-4163-8292-a1a554f58f94
I can’t believe this crap still exists, this libel or slander. Tim Flannery is most definitely qualified to speak on this matter. I heard him speak yesterday and he was definitely much more “on the ball” than Tim Ball is, despite his last name.
These contrarians are no “Friends of Science” as they proclaim they are, but toxic to science as they are badmouthing and denegrating all true climate scientists and their reputations.
Also, with the April 6 letter to the Canadian Prime Minister by some of these contrarians, there has been a more rational response yesterday:
http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2006/04/19/climate-change060419.html
What appalls me is that certain politicians and “think-tankers” will listen to economists, mathematicians, and former mining executives (McKitrick, Essex, and McIntyre) on the topic of climate change over those who are actually climatologists (Mann, Bradley, Hughes, etc.). That’s like trusting a plumber to perform open-heart surgery on a patient. Completely irrational.
Let’s see.
Don’t listen to economists = Damn the cost, let’s do it anyway..
Don’t listen to mathematicians = Does this model work? Sure, look at the pretty chrome wheels.
Don’t listen to executives (actually he’s a statistician) = No, we don’t need to find out if the data is being salted, we’re just trying to improve the world (and when is our next $100,000 grant from your company coming through anyway?)
LOL. What an incredible paradox! You mention the very people that Steve has PROVED can’t be trusted. I would rather trus the plumber….
#58 – Reminds me of a joke:
A doctor calls a plumber to come fix his sink. The plumber comes over, and crawls under the sink. 5 minutes later crawls out, puts his tools away and prepares his bill. The doctor can’t believe the bill. “You make more money than I do!” he exclaims?
The plumber says “Yeah…that’s why I quit being a doctor.”
Don’t knock the plumber…
re: 58. BTW, outstanding scientific references you cite. Do you believe everything you read in newspapers, too?
Re: #62, “BTW, outstanding scientific references you cite. Do you believe everything you read in newspapers, too?”
No, since most of the editorial comments are ignorant when it comes to climate science. Remember that editors are still trying to get advertisements (some for gas-guzzling vehicles, oil companies, and the mining industry), so they risk losing this revenue if they actually write the truth, that the globe is warming and that it is the result of human activities.
I trust , “Journal of Climate”, “Science”, “Nature”, and other peer-reviewed scientific journals for information on this issue.
Steve B, just like your fallacious belief how climate models work was wrong, you’re fallacious belief that people outside a field cannot contribute significantly is also wrong.
Back in the late 60’s a guy named Richard C. Heyser, who was a physicist at JPL (a rocket scientist), played around with audio as a weekend hobby. He was neither an audio engineer or acoustician. Utilizing a technique called time delay spectrometry he published a number of papers that revolutionized speaker design, acoustical measurement and the understanding of acoustical spaces. He is without a doubt one of the most famous names in the audio world. The annual AES (Audio Engineering Society) meeting includes the Richard C. Heyser Memorial Lecture named in his honor and there are a number of awards given annually in his name. In fact the world of audio is filled with people that made significant contributions without having the “approved credentials’.
A little word replacement seems in order here:
Remember that climate scientist are still trying to get government grants (some for climate model fantasies, reconstructions based on tree rings, and computer generated environmental impacts), so they risk losing this revenue if they actually write the truth …
It appears from the link it is RealClimate you trust, not the journals.
Re #63, Stephen, thanks for posting.
However, surely you must be jesting when you say that you trust Science and Nature, given their deplorable record on the question of climate science. Please read some of the interactions between Steve M. and the editors of these once-trustable magazines …
w.
I trust , “Journal of Climate”, “Science”, “Nature”, and other peer-reviewed scientific journals for information on this issue.
Remember, Stephen Berg, that Steve McIntyre has contributed to the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and he has blown the Hockey Team off the ice.
Oh, and Stephen Berg, I’ll pull a Dano on you by listing hundreds of references you can check relative to the “other side” of the AGW issue. See the index at:
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/subject/subject.jsp
BTW, I don’t claim AGW is not a reality; I just think there is little scientific proof. And the amount of scientific “proof” keeps getting diminished by the dammmmn skeptics.
Re: #68, “Oh, and Stephen Berg, I’ll pull a Dano on you by listing hundreds of references you can check relative to the “other side” of the AGW issue.”
There is no “other side” of the issue. AGW is happening and the proof is in the journals I listed above and at the WDC for Paleoclimatology:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/recons.html
Re: #65, “It appears from the link it is RealClimate you trust, not the journals.”
I trust both.
Oh yeah, and I see few if any “contrarian” studies on the WDC site. Maybe it’s because they are fatally flawed.
Hmmm. Are you sure you aren’t a computer program? I did go do a google search and looked at some of your other messages on other boards and they all sound alike. Can’t you do any original thinking? I don’t need someone saying “You’re wrong. You will be assimilated….” oops, wrong cyborgs.
I trust none of the above scientific journals to properly peer review and filter climate science stories, and certainly not RealClimate which is a political blog masquerading as a scientific resource.
I am done with anyone who is naive enough to suggest there is “no other side of the issue.” Good bye.
“There is no “other side” of the issue.”
Then why are you arguing about it?
Hmmmmm…
Re: #73, “I am done with anyone who is naive enough to suggest there is “no other side of the issue.” Good bye.”
Well, I suppose you may be correct in that there are two sides to the issue. However, the MBH, RealClimate, and IPCC side is correct and the “contrarian” side is wrong.
As for being naive, hardly. I am simply convinced that the debate is over and that we should do all we can to stop any further anthropogenic global warming (AGW) before millions of species die and ecosystems are damaged beyond repair. I think it is you that is naive in believing that everything is a-OK while corals are bleaching, desertification is occurring, drought is spreading in many areas of the world, and most of all, the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps are melting at an ever accelerating rate, which could lead to the extinction of polar bears.
Should any or all these things come to pass, us humans will be guilty of mass destruction of this planet. We will be the greatest killers the planet has ever known. And NO, I’m not being an alarmist!
#75
Well, that’s it then. There’s no further need to fund climate research, since all the answers are already known.
#69, “AGW is happening and the proof is in the journals ”
I’ve read science journals that actually bear on whether one can say there is AGW.
Those journal articles are the ones evaluating the predictive ability of the GCMs themselves, and not the ones using GCMs to validate claims of CO2-induced warming.
The articles evaluating GCMs are almost uniformly negative. As GCMs are the physical theory of climate, and as they are unable to resolve climate drivers at the level of a 90 ppmv increase in atmospheric CO2, then the necessary scientific conclusion is that there are no data that currently indicate the recent CO2 rise is causing any recently detected atmospheric warming. That may change with a radical improvement of GCMs.
Anyone who says otherwise must either demonstrate a GCM that is physically accurate to about 2 Wm-2, or else must agree they are making a claim that has no basis in science.
Science is not about inductive conclusion-mongering (which, by the way, is exactly how MBH98,99 was used; demonstrating that even many scientists don’t consciously know what science is actually about). It’s about factual results in the context of falsifiable theory. Too many in climatology have failed to keep their eye on the scientific ball — representing claims as scientific that are not. We can blame the seduction of political grandstanding savored with a dash of self-expiational salt and pepper.
Backing up #64, [Re: people working ‘outside their field’]
It should be remembered that climatology is a complex, interdisciplinary field. Many bright, honest people in the field undoubtedly have broad [but probably not deep] understanding of general scientific and mathematical principles. [e.g.- statistics]
A good example of a scientist who solved [at least partially] a fundamental problem that the mainstream scientists “in the field’ had struggled with is Bernard Chouet.
Mainstream volcanologists had been attempting, unsuccessfully, to predict eruptions using gas emissions and short-period seismic tremors. Chouet concentrated on long-period seismic patterns that other volcanologists discarded as unintelligible background noise [or similarly useless data].
Chouet’s training as an AERONAUTICAL ENGINEER allowed him to recognize what the “best’ volcanologists could not, that the long-period seismic events were harmonic patterns, indicative of magma flow below the surface.
Stanley Williams, who was a more respected researcher “in the field’, is alleged to have ignored Chouet’s methods with deadly results because he had his own technique he was advocating. [Book – No Apparent Danger, haven’t read it…]
Chouet had an interesting interview with NOVA, in which he touches on an outsider’s viewpoint and scientific turf battles.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/volcano/chouet.html
NOVA: What was peculiar about them?
Chouet: It stared you in the face. Anyone seeing these wiggles on paper would say, “Wow, this is obviously different.” I remembered from when I was still in engineering school what happens in hydroelectric plants in the pipelines that carry the water when you suddenly shut the valve controlling the jet of water hitting the turbine blades. If you stop the water flow very quickly it generates a very high pressure right there at the valve. That pressure pulse reverberates in the pipeline, going back and forth between both ends of the pipeline. Each time the pressure pulse arrives back at the valve, it hits the surface of the valve with a huge hammer blow. This is called the water hammer. THE WATER HAMMER EFFECT IS WELL KNOWN IN THAT FIELD AS A RESONANCE EFFECT IN THE PIPELINE. [my caps]
NOVA: So these long-period events are like water hammers, telling you what’s going on with the magma, the liquid rock?
Chouet: Yes. The long-period events are important because they reflect a process that involves the fluid. You care about the fluid. You want to know where the fluid is, what it’s doing, how much pressure it’s under, whether the pressure is going up or down. By looking at these long-period events, we have this direct window into the fluid.
……
NOVA: WHY ARE SCIENTISTS SO RELUCTANT TO ACCEPT A NEW THEORY ?
Chouet: FOR THE SAME REASON THAT PEOPLE WITH DIFFERENT RELIGIONS FIGHT EACH OTHER. EACH ONE BELIEVES THAT THEY HAVE A CORNER ON THE TRUTH, AND ACTUALLY WE DON’T HAVE A CORNER ON THE TRUTH. [my caps] You have to take all these bits of information coming from many different disciplines and reconstruct something that makes sense.
SOMETIMES PEOPLE ARE TOO NARROWLY FOCUSED ON THEIR DISCIPLINE. YOU TALK TO SOME OF THE PEOPLE MAKING GAS MEASUREMENTS, AND THEY SAY, “WELL, THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN FIND OUT ABOUT THE VOLCANO AND WHERE IT’S GOING IS BY MEASURING GASES.” [my caps] In some cases the volcano is just sealed enough to allow this gas to accumulate at depth. So if you try to interpret that volcano on the basis of quantity of gas, you’d say, “Well, the volcano is muy tranquilo”¢’¬?very quiet, and this is a good day to go in the crater.” But it would just be the opposite.
We’re not working in a vacuum where we suddenly get plopped on this planet and say, “Nobody has thought about this before.” You can be sure that almost any idea you have, people have thought about it before. Maybe they didn’t write about it, maybe they didn’t pursue it. It’s very humbling, because in a sense there’s nothing really to invent. There are only things to be perceived and interpreted. It’s a question of awareness and saying, “Am I getting all the messages there? Am I putting all these pieces together in the proper way?” If you’re not, you’re not making progress.
…Seems like a smart guy to me. Why shouldn’t an economist, statistician, or even a businessman or miner apply the hard-earned expertise from his field when he sees it is clearly applicable ? Aren’t all fields of expertise artificially limited in scope simply to make the required knowledge more manageable [for efficiency’s sake] ?
#75 “We will be the greatest killers the planet has ever known.”
The greatest killer the planet has ever known was the Permian/Triassic extinctor, which killed about 99% of all of Earthly life; followed by the Cretaceous/Tertiary extinctor, which merely killed about 95% of all animals living then.
Both of them wrecked Earth climate, too. The K/T event probably took all of a day, making it the all-time record-holder in terms of extinction velocity. Walter Alvarez had a great paper in Science about it. The entire sky across almost the entire globe became red-hot as the high-velocity bolide ejecta re-impacted an Earth rotating beneath. Talk about a planetary barbeque spit!
Anyway, here you go, Steph B: Mass Extinctions — all Gaia all the time. Or God, depending on your faith.
#76 – lol 🙂
Dude you can see it every day. It’s most prevalent in people who have been working in a field for many years (and I don’t necessarily mean scientific).
One example that has always stuck with me was when I was at work. We we’re cutting a transmission line for a display (under my direction, and in the end I thought it looked goofy, but it brought in a fair few customers). Anyways, cutting a transmission line isn’t easy. We couldn’t use a torch cuz it would ruin the ends, so we cut it mechanically. While doing it, I mentioned “Hey you what we need, a Plasma torch.” An old colleague had gone to work at a plasma torch company, and I’d gone over and seen some demos, very impressive.
So anyways, after I brought it up, they called over the guy in the machine shop that dealt with welding and so forth, obviously we had a gas cutting torch.
“So why don’t we get a plasma torch for the company?”
“Most of the stuff we cut is a curved shape, plasma torches can’t do curved shapes.”
I was actually so stunned I didn’t say “What are you thick? That’s exactly what they do.”
But, he grew up with gas torches (wasn’t even that old), so that’s what he knew, that’s what he used, and he didn’t look anywhere else.
Even closer is our phone system at work. I wrote out a detailed 5 page proposal to get everyone in sales to have a toll free number that rang at their desk.
It was summarily dismissed by my boss who said “I talked with the IT guy and we can’t do it.”
Next time I’m at the home office I plan on duking it out with him. I know we can do it, because I have done it with a colleagues phone. Takes about 5 minutes per phone, max. And more importantly would cost the company less than $0.25 US per minute, when our current phone costs are $1.30 CDN.
But again. People tend to work within their limits and don’t look outside of them. I’m sure we can all find a multitude of examples. It’s not just climate science, and it’s not limited to stupid people, it’s most people. You can easily identify the ones who aren’t like that, they tend to be gadget freaks where newer is better. I’m a cross, if I see something new I’ll give it a try, but I still prefer the older ways.
ET, What sort of phone system does Canada have if .25 US per minute is cheap? Phone companies in the US only charge .05 or .10 US per minute and you can do even better with cell phones. Of course that’s residential. I don’t know how 800 numbers are priced.
Toll free numbers (800 and 877) are priced much differently, even in the U.S.
Comercial versus Private is also much different. Any individual phone line your company has is much more expensive than the phone line you have at your house.
I also suspect that our toll free number, that we currently have, was negotiated long ago, when phone pricing structures were much different, and no one has reviewed it since then. I don’t want to get into that, I want to circumvent the (*&^@(*&%^ automated system first, the corporate toll free number someone else can deal with.
Damn Global Warming
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/04/19/D8H3C5H81.html
re #75: SM is proving the Hockey Team has no credibility. With zero evidence that anthropogenic sources are causing the warming, and much (recently suppressed/ignored) evidence that in the not-too-distant past the planet was warmer than now, AND much evidence that the sun is a far more important factor than MBH, IPCC et al want to admit…
Wouldn’t it make sense to have the humility to admit that we don’t know if it is even possible to anthropogenically control climate, and we don’t know whether any particular action will improve or worsen the situation??!!
Wouldn’t it make sense to discover what actions (if any) will reliably accomplish what is needed — and perhaps even discover what goals are appropriate — before investing huge amounts in essentially random action?
Right now, the actions proposed seem equivalent to firing a shotgun to kill a robber, in a crowded room, in the dark, while blindfolded!! (Or better: while wearing night vision goggles that have proven to give an inaccurate image, randomly off by 45 degrees or more…)
[Cynically, I suspect the answer is: no, we MUST take action now. Because the real goal has nothing to do with climate but rather with certain political and economic results.]
Re: #84, “SM is proving the Hockey Team has no credibility. With zero evidence that anthropogenic sources are causing the warming, and much (recently suppressed/ignored) evidence that in the not-too-distant past the planet was warmer than now, AND much evidence that the sun is a far more important factor than MBH, IPCC et al want to admit…”
Absolute nonsense! If what you said were true, then M&M would have been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. However, their studies are inaccurate.
“[Cynically, I suspect the answer is: no, we MUST take action now. Because the real goal has nothing to do with climate but rather with certain political and economic results.]”
No. It IS about the environment.
As well, Sen. John McCain had sponsored a study which showed that those who believe that action would result in an economic disaster are wrong. By acting, he found that 800,000 jobs would be created in the engineering and manufacturing sectors in renewable energy and sustainable transportation. Otherwise, inaction would result in a surge in oil prices which may cripple the US economy, and therefore the economies of most, if not all other nations.
Action, therefore, IS the best way to go.
“If what you said were true, then M&M would have been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.”
Ahahahahaah.
Ahaha.
Ahem. This blog really is amusing sometimes.
Did you actually check whether that was true before you asserted it was not?
No, of course not. Why would you? After all, you’re *right* and everyone who disagrees with you is *wrong*!
They were. Sheesh!
Show us the proof.
We could create jobs by banning the use of backhoe’s too. Instead digging a hole in one hour we could employ 10 men for 8 hours to dig the same hole. That would create jobs but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense does it now?
Re #85, etc.:
What a gift to the global warming industry you and your naive likes are. In the words of a certain well-known former European leader:
#85 so so entertaining Stephen Berg, did you not see the MBH98 corrigendum in Nature?
So what in the world is Steven Berg? He almost makes Peter Hearndon sound sensible and scientific. Could SB simply be a nom de plume of a skeptic designed to discredit the warmers? If that’s the case, knock it off! We have better ways to spend our time that discrediting our opponents with disinformation.
I’ve been away for a week and missed this thread until a bit late. I am amazed that Steve himself posted this garbage, given his attention to statistical details. Here is what Carter said in his first paragraph:
“For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).”
When one looks at the actual plot from CRU, it is apparent that Carter’s statement is nothing but pure bollocks (or at least irrelevant). Come on Steve — give us your honest opinion!
“I’ve been away for a week and missed this thread until a bit late.”
Seems like you’ve actually still missed it.
John H, did you only read the first paragraph? Not the bit when Carter explained that it’s silly to take a trend from such a short period?
In any case this one has been thrashed out at Lambert’s place, to nobody’s satisfaction.
re 93:
I isn’t the length of the period that Carter chose that renders his point silly. It is that he cherrypicked the single most positively deviant year as one end of his time series, and that only if one picks THAT particular year, and therefore ignore that there is in fact much more data than just that availabe, and ignore that the previous years data in reality shifts the left end of the trend way down if it is included, can his statement be even literally true.
Even crediting that Carter’s point is as you state, he is making one kind of intentional error (cherrypicking deviant end points out of a longer record) and arguing as if the ilustration is applicable in some way to an entirely different issue, that of length of the record.
Lee, in response to your complaints about the spam filter, for now, the spam filter assigns a high negative “commenter granulairty” because you have a lot of “new posts” and 0 old posts. In hte last hour, we got over 44 spams and I am not prepared to fiddle with our settings; I don’t know how anyway. As soon as you have some old posts, the commenter granulariy will be re-set to be like other people. In the meantime, your turn-time is at present better than at realclimate where it’s all moderated. I’m not sure when your commments are classified as “old comments” but in the meantime please bear with the system. There’s nothing personal.
Actually, Ive posted 2-3 times at RC, and my “turn-time’ in every case ahs beenless than 5 minutes.
Which, of course has NOTHING to do with my comment that getting filtered, and then having to request that the filtered post be let through, (which, as an aside, is a different experience than moderation) is very frustrating, consumes additional time, is dependent on the user finding the email address and using it in a SECOND communication to get the post (in my case, a majority of posts) through, AND seems perversely designed to discourage any but the most adamantly persistent new readers from becoming active participants on the site.
Re: 96
Yes, we want to weed out the casual commenters in favor of the hardcore enthusiasts. Or something.
I wish people could see the crap we’re filtering, then they might appreciate why a little patience with the spam filtering is a good thing.
Yes Lee and every single poster here has had to go through the exact same process.
Apparently you have little understanding of the INternet in the early part of the 21st century.
A. Regarding the e-mail. Yes it is difficult to find for a reason. If it was easy a bot could scavenge it and then Steve’s e-mail would get flooded with spam. He is looking ot avoid it. I had a problem finding, it, but then eventually did, same case with you.
B. Your posts are marked as sucpicous by a piece of software that only looks at posting amounts, it is software, as such it does nothing to target any individuals or viewpoints.
C. These posts are put into a Queue for Steve to review. Regardless if you had e-mailed Steve would have found them and reinstated them. Steve is a busy guy, so this does not happen instantly. I’ve had some of my own posts take near on a week to be reinstated, that after having posted here for months.
D. Real climate puts ALL posts through a moderator. The reason yours have come back are becuase of your viewpoint, which agrees with them. Steve in particualr has had posts disapear in a context of defending scuriousl claims made about him, many other posters here have had there posts permentantly deleted.
E. As someone who’s viewpoint is “against” Steve you actually have a special place here, the likelyhood of your posts ever being censored are slim, and you would have to really cross the line for it to happen. What you also don’t realize is that the only posts I have seen permenantly deleted here recently are ones that have been specifically insulting to you. THerefore you have a higher level of protection thatn most people here. There is a reason for this.
All of your whining about posts here are completely and toally unfounded. COntinuing to complain about it makes you look ludicrous.
ET:
I am not saying I’m being treated any differently than any othe rposter here. I am saying my experience here is different from ANY other blog I’ve participated in, many of which use WordPress and dont have any noticeable spam presense in the threads. So whatever the isue here is, it is avoidable, because other blogs avoid it.
AND that it happens does i fact form a filter ont e hpeopel posting here, whether or not that is intentional.
And further,that it is a known issue, that it happened to me on my very first response (and 4th post ever here) after my ideas were called out in the first sentence of a new article, and that Steve, who says it is a known issue, didnt bother to contact me and make sure any response got through, compounded the frustration. In taht thread I was no longer some random reader trying to post.
I havent commetned, except in response to someone else who raised the issue, on posting at RC in particular. Posting at RC in particular is irrelevant to my (and other’s ) particular epxerience here. However, posting at other blog sites in general, where this has never been a problem for me, is relevant. And Ive already said I’m perfectly willing to put all isues of my inability to respond to that article down to a comedy of errors; I am NOT ocmplaining that I’m being censored.
My point is that the difficulty in being able to post has undesireable consequences in general, that dont seem to be an issue for other sites, and that are not good for fostering open discussion or for initial impressions of credibility of this site.
Typical RC post delay time for adverse commentators is several hours to 2 days. Many adverse posts are deleted. Here, the Spam Karma experience is the same whether you are pro or anti Steve. I’m pro and still had same expereince as you.
Lee:
I can vouch for the fact that you have not been inentionally censored here. From time to time, we periodically see people complain about being caught in the spam filter. It is nothing personal.
RC, on the other hand, does actively censor based on viewpoint (although they seem to have gotten better about this recently). The obvious proof is that there aren’t two dozen comments by Steve posted there each week. If they didn’t censor him, that would obviously be the status quo.
Indeed, the best debate would be for Gavin and Michael to simply go head to head with Steve in an ongoing dialogue. But, that isn’t going to happen. If they allowed Steve unfettered posting, it would quickly come to that at RC, and if they wanted to post regularly here, Steve would (I am fairly sure) set aside a thread devoted to just that. But that hasn’t happened either.
Please keep posting, your posts are valuable neutral/outside input.
Also, again, try to ignore the snark. It just wastes time. Try to just respond to the best stuff. Even Steve’s posts (which maintain a reasonably high tone) sometimes irk me with their snarkiness.
Lee, it’s nice to see someone so enthusiastic to join the conversation. While you wait for some of your comments to become “old” as Steve M mentions, I would also like to suggest that you be careful to spell small words like “the” correctly. JohnA has stated that he has used the spam filter button to mark certain off-color (likely PUI) posts as spam. I believe I have observed those posts he’s so marking having a lot of “teh”. So when you make that typo, it might contribute to your spam score.
Also you made a comment in another thread about your handle being an identifier. You can be sure that if someone posted that he thinks Lee is really Lee Hao-Fan (wolog) that JohnA and Steve would both actively moderate that out.
So, Steve Bloom works for an environmental group? Which one? How big is he in the group?
I believe Steve Bloom’s “day job” is as a nature photographer. He’s active in the Sierra Club and at least one local organization in the San Francisco, CA area, but I don’t know whether or not he gets any pay for it. In any case it’s not important as to what he says. Unfortunately, IMO, the quality of his posts is not very high. But others undoubtedly disagree.
I wish Gavin and Schweingruber and such would come over here and mix it up. I see Steve hold his own no problem with Rob Wilson. But still they would push him a lot more than DanO or Bloom.
CA does, in fact, delete comments just for disagreeing. It’s happened on this thread.
re:#106
Observe Tim showing he doesn’t know the difference between being disagreeable and disagreeing.
Do you think this blog is more free to contrary comments than RC?
Watch this: 2314 EDT 23APR06: I showed Ross up by pinning him down and differentiating PC1 versus overal hockey stick reconstruction arguments.
Or just read back today, where I upgraded JohnA for not even doing a simple ratio (which btw, supports the 3 deg increase by CO2 doubling). So ha!
And here observe TCO trying to brag and showing he doesn’t know the diffence between upbraiding and upgrading. gd&r
more re 93:
This is a quote from Carter. Assuming the quote is accurate, it is hard to interpret this any other way than that he is claiming that warming stopped in 1998, or at the very least that these 8 years disprove ‘deterministic models’, NOT that he is illustrating a point about time periods:
“We are at the top of a little temperature cycle. And as Professor Jones knows, since 1998, which was a peak and an extra peak because of an El Nino warm year, that since 1998 the temperature has not gone up at all. Now since 1998, in those seven years, we’ve been continuing to put out greenhouse gasses at the high industrial rate that we now do. All the computer models that is to say the deterministic ones have predicted that temperature would keep on going up from 1998 to 2005. Reality is that it hasn’t.”
Upbraid you upside yo’ haid…
Lee read the whole article. That paragraph is extreme for the point of discussion and then is examined further. Go read it and you will see. Come back with the relevant quotes and I’ll give you a bone.
This is the link to the quote I just posted (110)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today5_globalwarming_20060421.ram
It’s from a BBC radio interview with Bob Carter and Phil Jones. He uses those 8 years to explicitly dispute that warming is happening.
I just listened to it (as opposed to reading the quote I posted in 110) and find a few phrases are edited from what he said, in the quote as I posted it. They do not change the intent or meaning of what he said. He was clearly stating that warming stopped since 1998; not just in a formal sense that we havent reached temps equal to that outlier peak yet since then, but in the meaningful sense that this is evidence that warming has stopped.
IMO, it is hard to find a scientifically defensible interpretation of what he said, based on that “evidence.”
TCO, you would have known where the Carter quote came from if CA wasn’t censoring comments.
Lee, if there is a difference between he said and what I transcribed, it’s because of my lousy transcription skills. Please let me know of any needed corrections.
#113 – its a short radio interview. So Bob’s a bit naughty in his comments, so was Phil Jones. Tis the nature of the beast, soundbites rule over constructive argument. I wouldn’t place much value to either of their comments purely from such a limited medium.
#114 – the link to the programme was on CA. Hence I knew where the quotes came from.
I thought you were talking about the Australian written article.
More than half my posts to RC get lost
All my posts to CA are published.
Re #117, funny that, I though spam karma treated everyone the same? I’d say about a quarter of my posts to here have been ‘karmared’. As to RC, well I don’t post there much so can’t say.
While were on the topic, since posters like me also give a valid e mail why can’t we be identified by that and thus not ‘karmared’?
I’ve had problems at time with Spam Karma as well, but not as much as you. I wonder if some of the spanks that JohnA did on you (which I disagreed with…don’t think it crime of century…but disagreed with) lowered your rating so that now you get more auto-spankings. Maybe there is something they can do manually to qualify you as a poster? I have no problem with seeing all your posts. (I think they tend to be not that strong on the science and you admit that you can’t handle math, but still…you should have your say…and certainly you should respond to the brew crew here that Lynn-like blathers anti-GW).
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[…] Steve McIntyre approvingly cites a piece in the Daily Telegraph by Bob Carter arguing that the planet has not warmed in the last eight years. And if you pick the El Nino year of 1998 as your starting point, that’s true, making this a rhetorically powerful argument. But there’s a problem. Given the variability in the temperature record, in any given year, even with a continuing upward temperature trend, you are likely to be a bit cooler than the previous record year – until you set a new record. So by cherrypicking the previous record year as your starting point, you can argue most of the time that things are really cooling off, not warming. This is what Carter has done. But the really interesting thing here is the evidence offered by Tim Lambert that Blair himself has complained, in other contexts, that the extreme El Nino year of 1998 is an outlier that you shouldn’t use to establish a temperature trend. […]