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Comment on What matters (and doesn’t) in the G7 Climate Declaration by Ragnaar

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I looked at about 6 stories on the subject. Almost all of them had the above picture in them. “How do dolphins protect themselves?
A lot of dolphin self defense relies on strength in numbers. When a predator threatens, the entire pod may take part in neutralizing the threat. For example, dolphins will ram a shark’s soft underbelly to kill it or drive it away. Dolphins are also adept at communicating danger to one another through the various sounds they produce.” http://www.key-largo-sunsets.com/bottlenose-dolphins.html In a fair fight, I am betting on the dolphins. I suppose the bear’s defense is that global warming caused him to do it.


Comment on Driving in the dark by Mike Flynn

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Joseph,

You wrote –

“Yes, why save money for your retirement when you don’t know whether you are going to live to retirement age, put money in a college fund when you don’t know if your child wants to go to college (or is capable of going to college), or buy insurance for your home when you don’t know if your home will subjected to some unforeseen damage. Why do it if the future is completely unknowable?”

Setting aside the snark, one makes assumptions in most cases. Some don’t save money for their retirement because they assume they won’t live that long, or for many other reasons.

I never put money in a college fund. I assumed I would do better not paying someone else for their presumed ability to see into the future better than I, and it appears I was right.

I don’t buy insurance for my home. I bear my own risk, and so far so good. I point out that the list of failed insurance companies grows ever longer. You obviously assume that your choice of retirement or college fund, or insurer, will not result in you losing 99.7%, or more, of the money you paid in.

The future is completely unknowable. That doesn’t mean it wont exist, if you get my meaning. You hope your assumption that the Sun will rise tomorrow comes to pass. So do I.

Comment on JC calendar by beththeserf

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Fergot ter mention Latimer.

Comment on JC calendar by Jim D

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Since no one else is mentioning it, the International Conference of Climate Change just ended and it is all online already.
http://climateconference.heartland.org/
Their leadership on climate change award went to Senator Inhofe, and it didn’t look like they were joking.
Also Monckton gave a keynote with the usual political/economic alarm bells about Marxists, the Third Reich, bird-killing windfarms, energy poverty, and wondering why the Pope didn’t listen to their arguments on this. He also was opposed to Obama’s trade bill, which may be a misstep because the Republicans are pushing it more than the Democrats, and the audience was rather quiet as he went on and on about it. Anyway this talk was a humorous interlude.

Comment on JC calendar by ossqss

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Why did you not participate in the ICCC 10?

Just curious….

Comment on JC calendar by Jim D

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The closest approximation they had to scientists were Soon and Legates. Soon was trying to revive the urban heat island argument, possibly including the Arctic, but I am not quite sure, and I don’t think he was either. Legates is blaming the heavy rainfall increase in the US on an instrumentation change.

Comment on Driving in the dark by Mike Flynn

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Willard,

Thanks for agreeing with me about the future. I’m not concerned about the past. It’s finished, gone. It’s history, regardless of climatological attempts to change it. One good thing about the past is that it can’t be altered. If something bad happened, you may wish to attempt to avoid it happening again. If past climatological predictions have come to nought, you might decide to ignore future ones, and pay attention to predictions of a different sort.Wouldn’t you?

If your financial adviser’s advice resulted in bankruptcy a couple of times, do you keep going to him, or possibly try someone else’s vision of the future? I know what I’d do, but you might think otherwise!

You wrote –

“You’re just using verbal defenses, Mike. Either you accept that knowledge is justified and true belief, or you don’t. If you reject knowledge as justified, true belief, then you need to reject the notion of knowledge altogether. Redefining knowledge as assumption cuts you no slack.”

Thanks for telling me what I’m thinking, and what choices I have, and what I need to do. Only joking, of course!

I’m not interested in whether you wish to cut me slack (whatever that means), or even why you think I should be interested in any of your opinions. I don’t need to defend myself. You’re doing that for me, I feel.

Thanks.

Comment on Improving climate change communication: moving beyond scientific certainty by Punksta

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The problem is, “communicate” in the context of mainstream climate science, invariably means “miscommunicate” – convey fake certainty so as to fit in with the overriding political agenda of their paymasters..


Comment on JC calendar by genghiscunn

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Beth, that Goons page could be the funniest thing on the net … I’ll return to it after this brief interruption.

Comment on Driving in the dark by aplanningengineer

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The relationship between planning and prediction is paradoxical. The less certain your predictions the more important planning is. With certainty in predictions, planning in easy, but not that critical. With uncertainty you need to re-evaluate your plans, hedge risks, provide for flexibility… As noted here S cenario analysis is component of a real planning effort.

Treating uncertain forecasts as THE best available understanding and prescribing a simple course of action (as if you were operating under certainty) is pseudo planning at best.

In any area where you need a forecast, it’s a good assumption that it’s going to be wrong. Some good questions are how wrong might it be, when will you know that, and how can (and will) you react to that. As I’ve said before, the difference between a good forecaster and a bad forecaster is that the good forecaster is among the first to know he’s wrong.

Comment on JC calendar by curryja

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Hello everyone, thanks for your kind wishes. Its a rainy day in Peasemore, and my brain fog has not yet lifted. I will try to get a week in review post up shortly

Comment on Has NOAA ‘busted’ the pause in global warming? by Alexander Coulter

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David Springer:

“So what do I do when I’m faced with finding myself in agreement with two of the most senior living atmospheric physicists in the world vs. being in disagreement with you, a unknown post graduate student.”

My statements are in line with researchers who have actually been working on this issue. They say that there is no difference between the two methods. But how in the world shall this statement of mine be taken? I was criticized earlier for my ending comment saying we should trust the experts—shall others now levy the same against you or will it just be repeated to me? At least the experts I cite have been working on this issue.

Regardless of statements from experts who have not done the math here, my example in the blog post holds. Your comment:

“[…]and instead used a fabricated dataset with a linearly increasing number of buoys ending the series 5 years early. That’s not what happened in the real world.”

is true in only the most useless way, and your Wikipedia link does not support your statement. Instead, Kennedy et al. (2011) gives the metadata for buoys v. ships in Figure 2, and yes it is a linear increase, no it does not stop 5 years early, so sue me. Correcting that will have literally no effect on the nature of the problem at hand.

http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadsst3/part_2_figinline.pdf

My use of a “fabricated” series is to show that the style of the correction does not depend on the data series at hand, because it is simply algebra. See my comments following up to someone who made the same bad argument as you on my blog post (was that you?).

Climate Reason:

“During which decade do you believe that global SST’s became accurate to fractions of a degree thereby making them a worthwhile matrix that can inform important policy decisions? Thanks.”

I do not believe your question to be well-posed. We do not judge relevance of data based on how accurate it is over a given decade. Homogenization methods and various means of bias correction can help to make inaccurate data more accurate, so there’s not a decade during which global SSTs suddenly “became” accurate and thus relevant. Data is always relevant, but that is not the same as saying it is without errors. As it were, part of writing those blog posts was actually reading these papers that describe the problems with the ERI or bucket or buoy measurements.

Don Monfort:

“Show us that it works the same both ways with the real data.”

I’ll briefly summarize one of my comments on my blog: if a correction is independent of the data series then it will produce the same results no matter the data series. That’s just the nature of the problem. I showed it worked with an illustrative example—it is simple algebra and will work with all data series that have a comparable change in buoy fraction, like the real data. Either way, I don’t think people have been understanding this point: the researchers themselves have been pointing out how there is no difference, they have checked it.

This has stopped being an issue of anyone’s ability to communicate how there is no difference. Now it is an understanding issue. If you do not understand it at this point, then there is nothing left for us to discuss. And yes I will keep taking my ball and leaving if you’re going to be unpleasant again.

Comment on Has NOAA ‘busted’ the pause in global warming? by captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.3

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“Nevertheless, given that the real debate is whether the 0.12 C adjustment is justified shouldn’t we be looking beyond the error/sigma debate?”

Adjusting one up or the other down doesn’t really have any impact on anomaly. Karl et al. though have a knack of choosing adjustments that raise questions. Nothing really wrong with their methods, other than there are generally better ways that are less controversial.

Standard deviation though is more interesting. Some portion of the standard deviation can be reducible and some can’t. When you find an interpolation method that reduces standard error and standard deviation it is performing a smoothing that can be useful. Karl. et al’s method smoothed the 1998 peak but probably didn’t smooth the current peak which would not be all that useful unless you are into making dramatic press releases.

In five years or so the method should produce the same smoothing of the current peak, then we can see how useful it is. As it is, there is about 0.85 C of standard deviation in monthly and about 0.3C SD for five year smoothing so there is a fairly large range of possibilities.

Comment on Has NOAA ‘busted’ the pause in global warming? by climatereason

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Alex

Having studied the historic SST’s in some depth (pun intended) I would not place any credence on them prior to the 1960’s. I have had many discussions with John Kennedy concerning this.

Whilst some well travelled trade routes might bear scrutiny prior to this date the general lack of readings and the methodology utilised renders many readings pointless or highly suspect.

It is perfectly reasonable to ask you when you believe that GLOBAL SST’s started to have the scientific credence you seem to be according them. I look forward to your answer.

tonyb

Comment on JC calendar by David Springer


Comment on Driving in the dark by sciguy54

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Imagine if in 1959 the UN and several major countries had colluded on an international agreement which required that every home should have an IBM 709 in the basement and the core curriculum for every elementary math student should include training in FORTRAN. Many billions would have been spent on expanded tube/valve manufacture to support the new industry, and taxes on other productive industries would have been funneled through various governmental agencies, and the residue used to subsidize this “critically needed” new industry.

Computing was/is a wonderful thing, but would the action described above have saved the world or wasted vast sums of wealth and natural resources based on flawed vision and bureaucratic waste,bungling, and inertia?

Comment on Has NOAA ‘busted’ the pause in global warming? by David Springer

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“[…]and instead used a fabricated dataset with a linearly increasing number of buoys ending the series 5 years early. That’s not what happened in the real world.”

is true in only the most useless way, and your Wikipedia link does not support your statement. Instead, Kennedy et al. (2011) gives the metadata for buoys v. ships in Figure 2, and yes it is a linear increase, no it does not stop 5 years early, so sue me. Correcting that will have literally no effect on the nature of the problem at hand.

http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadsst3/part_2_figinline.pdf

My use of a “fabricated” series is to show that the style of the correction does not depend on the data series at hand, because it is simply algebra. See my comments following up to someone who made the same bad argument as you on my blog post (was that you?).

Yes wikipedia does support my claim. Bouy number rapidly increased in the 2000s when major programs began. It was not linear. A small number of buoys started being deployed in the late 1970s. The link you gave to Kennedy 2011 is a literature bluff i.e. it does not provide the support you claim. If it does and I missed it please quote it. And no it’s not algebra. It’s calculus.

Comment on Has NOAA ‘busted’ the pause in global warming? by sciguy54

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Alexander

Very nice article. But I have one small but important quibble. You wrote:

“After only 100 samples I can see that most people spend less than half of their income on rent, and they tend to cluster around 1/4 – 1/3″

Nope. You would be more correct to report:

After only 100 samples I can see that most people respond that they spend less than half of their income on rent, and their responses tend to cluster around 1/4 – 1/3″

There is a very key difference. You assume that your data is correct. When dealing with people that is never a wise assumption to make, even when it involves such a “neutral’ issue. Could respondents hear the answers given by their peers and then “normalize” their answers, etc, etc.?

It is also a key difference when looking at climate research. Especially when we know so little about how and why decisions were made to adjust data collected generations ago.

Comment on JC calendar by JCH

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A real American hero:

Comment on JC calendar by jorgietom

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I met Stossel a few times working on his Stossel In The Classroom project. What a great guy. He knows something about going against a dominant paradigm. In his early days at ABC News when he was liberal and reported on liberal themes like corporate greed and environmental risks, things went well for him. When he became a libertarian and reported on things like the unintended consequences of regulation and over-hyped environmental risks, there were frictions. He ultimately decided Fox would be a better place for him, but I remember he lamented going from a 20+ million viewing audience to an audience of maybe 1 million.

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