Beth, the Glencairn “Over Fork Over” motto is our family’s. I never knew whether it was an exhortation to hard work on the land or because they were Border bandits. My gran’s family, the Halls, were Border reivers, I don’t know if that supports the banditry option.

Beth, the Glencairn “Over Fork Over” motto is our family’s. I never knew whether it was an exhortation to hard work on the land or because they were Border bandits. My gran’s family, the Halls, were Border reivers, I don’t know if that supports the banditry option. [Wrongly posted on the other sub-thread.]

Discomposing ter a serf
that those she comes in
contact with tend ter
be connected with the
gentry or nobility. :(

Edit 1st line. ‘Disconcerting’ ter a serf …

Say who are the scientist yr can trust?
Do they …
*Present a testable hypothesis?
* Show their werk?
* Avoid gate-keeping other arguments?
*Refrain from arguing consensus ‘ nine
outa’ ten say’ or ‘no true Scotsman
would,’ as confirmation in place of
correlation ter data ?

Michael,

If by “denialist” you mean someone who denies that human actions have any effect on climate… well, I do not know of any scientists who take that view.

“Denialist,” when applied to actual scientists (e.g., Curry or Lindzen) is just a smear term used to attack someone who claims that numbers matter: how can we figure out if the human influence on climate is 10%, 30%, 50%, 90% or whatever of the observed change?

Scientists are supposed to be concerned about details like that, you know!

Uh, no.

VP – Thread drift!

I thought that was a positive statement. Changing “everything” to “anything” would be pessimistic. I didn’t mean to be pessimistic. When everyone agrees it is usually at best boring or worse dangerous. I still think there are good sub controversies in most all fields of science. I don’t really agree or disagree with ideologies. They all seem to maximize some benefits at the expense of others. I might disagree on how effective they are in practice at achieving benefits, or the weighting of costs and benefits.

I don’t think climate will be resolved in my lifetime. But you may be picking up that I may be a little pessimistic that evidence will bring us all together as it emerges. I haven’t seen a lot of cases where that can be don in a short time. Do we agree now on the predictions made in Erlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb”?

Shifting gears, my trouble with the academic piece was that the Academic seemed almost like a religious zealot – concerned with passing on the “truth” rather than teaching the next generation to build upon and better uncover truth. You commented:
and then asked WW Newton, Jesus and Mohammad do.
Surely you’re not suggesting that the referenced author or the current crop of Climate Scientists are on par with the reputations of Newton et al, such that it will be difficult to find successors?

Tying to this who topic. When Academics have the “truth” there is not need for science – we can turn it over to a priesthood and a police force to handle heresy.

In the above I tried a method to indentify quotes, which led to them being left out.

Here are the parts from VP I was referencing above.

@ape: I don’t think we will ever agree on everything

Aren’t you being a little pessimistic there, ape? After all, what’s to disagree on besides ideology?

And then

Fully agree. Famous academics at the pinnacle of their career are seriously handicapped in that respect. Where should they look for their superiors?

I’m a little astonished at Vaughan Pratt’s disagreement with von Storch’s excellent presentation. It seems to me that his main point is absolutely powerful: science has “capital”, and it can be used up.
We the people are willing to give credence to scientists because we know that science has a devotion to truth and an ability to (sometimes) achieve truth. That’s the capital. How do scientists use it up? By giving the public the impression that they care more about the politics than the truth. We don’t trust politicians worth a darn. “After you have convinced people that you fervently believe your cause to be more important than telling the truth, you’ve lost the power to convince them of anything else.”
Everyone involved in scientific activism should take this into account: there is a cost involved in activism. You may think you’re gaining something in furthering your goals, but you are losing credibility at the same time. It may turn out to be a tremendous net loss.
This is something that pro-AGW people never understood about Climategate. It wasn’t the “fraud” or “academic malfeasance”. What it did was show people that climate scientists are partisans, politicians. We don’t trust politicians.
I am heartened that I see some pro-AGW climate scientists show scorn toward people like Dana and John Cook and their work. I am disheartened that so many think that they’re on their side. They are killing you. Their opponents don’t even really need to refute your work anymore, they just need to point to these PR guys. Listeners will say – Oh, who cares what politicians say, and you’ve lost.

Good points, Nickels.

China and the US DOE are collaborating on a molten salt rector.
http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-china-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor/

Ed Darrell | September 5, 2015 at 12:45 pm says:

“We should be looking FOR more ways to pay attention to what Hansen said…”

Ed, first you irritate me with your Hansen-worsship and then you are too lazy to spell out what he did say and send us looking for it in the literature. As far as I go Hansen was the worst thing that happened to NASA-GISS. When he went to England to call trains carrying coal “death trains” he should have been fired immediately. NASA has no business with that but he was falsely represented as carrying NASA opinions. What he did there was to interfere in the internal affairs of a foreign nation for his own personal ideological reason. Which is of course his pseudo-scientific belief that climate change is caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Just to bring it up to date, the existence of the “pause” in warming for the last 18 years is sufficient proof that carbon dioxide does not cause greenhouse warming, and never has. In case you need a picture drawn about it, currently carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing but global temperature is not. The Arrhenius greenhouse theory, however requires that it should cause warming. Since there is no warming Arrhenius has made a false prediction and belongs in the waste basket of history. But IPCC has been claiming that AGW – anthropogenic greenhouse warming – is caused by greenhouse warming which we must stop by not burning any fossil fuels. All that greenhouse warming stuff got started by Hansen in 1988 when he claimed to the Senate that he had discovered greenhouse warming. What was his proof? you might want to ask. He claimed that he had observed a hundred year period of warming. He concluded that “…the earth is warming by an amount which is too large to be a chance fluctuation …the similarity of the warming to that expected from the greenhouse effect represents a very strong case.” We are asked to trust his opinion and that is just what IPCC has been pushing ever since. Fortunately the appearance of the hiatus/pause has set the record straight. Failure of the Arrhenius theory of greenhouse warming tells us that it is time to start putting an end to irrational and costly emission control and mitigation measures based on belief in the existence of an imaginary greenhouse warming.

@jc: Nierenberg, Jastrow and Seitz hardly seem to be the villains portrayed by Oreskes in Merchants of Doubt.

I was surprised too, Judy. What I was expecting was science-is-settled type arguments that climate change is not a problem. But the book is much more nuanced than that.

Had it not been it would have been easy for Washington to dismiss as just more of the same sort of denial as with heliocentrism, evolution, etc. back in the day.

The overview section (five chapters) is authored jointly by the three editors (J, N, S), and concludes with the estimate that if no action is taken before 1995 while the uncertainties are being narrowed, the cost of the delay in terms of temperature by 2100 will be at most 0.1 C.

(Who in Washington would worry about 0.1 C? A frog in a warming pot won’t care about 0.1 C, or even 0.2 C. If you can repeat that argument every five years for a century, which seems to be what’s happening today, when will the frog notice?)

Brilliantly the opening chapter of the technical background section, “The Great Climate Debate” (Chapter 6, pages 71-93), was solicited from Robert M. White, a meteorologist who headed NOAA during 1970-1977, was president of the National Academy of Engineering during 1983-1995 (Seitz was president of the National Academy of Sciences during 1962-1969), and was first chairman of the World Climate Conference in 1978. Consistent with the rest of the book, White emphasized the great uncertainty and concluded with “the effects of a global climate warming are likely to take 30-50 years to become serious, and that is a long enough span in which actions to adapt to these changes should be possible”, adding that “what would be unwise would be to lapse into apocalyptic thinking or ostrich-like denial”.

White presents what on the face of it comes across as a very balanced view throughout, even if your average climate scientist in 1990 might protest strongly, as did Stephen Schneider, that the arguments against are ridiculous. However one obvious complaint about White’s reasoning that requires no knowledge of climate science is his assumption at the very end that no action is needed until the effects have become serious. How is this different from arguing that no action against a gunman is needed until the effects of his gun have become serious?

White is now 92, it would be interesting to know if his position on global warming is any different today. Anyone here in contact with him?

Chaper 7 is by Roy Spencer and John Christy on satellite measurements made over the decade 1979-1989. I would think one decade is far too little to go on compared with many times as much lower-tech data, not to mention the egregious errors Spencer and Christy made that others pointed out during that period.

Chapter 8 by Plantico, Karl, Kukla, and Gavin (Joyce Gavin, not to be confused with Gavin Schmidt) asks “Are recent climate changes in the US related to rising levels in greenhouse gases?” Since it was only 1990, and they were only looking at 8% of the planet, no one should be surprised that they found no statistically significant difference between CO2 warming and natural warming.

Chapter 9 by Mitchell, Senior and Ingram argues that clouds give a negative feedback offsetting global warming. Ferenc Miskolczi has updated this theory in considerably more detail, which David Wojick could defend far better than I.

Chapter 10 by Mark Meier is a three-page demonstration that global warming will lower sea levels, thereby contradicting David Springer’s claim above that there is no connection, to say nothing of the obvious positive correlations between CO2, temperature, and sea level in the Hansen-Sato-Englander graph that I reproduced above.

I’ve already discussed the first chapter of the economics section, namely the report of G.H.W. Bush announcing the dramatic ramping up of the US global climate research budget. The other two chapters are well above my pay grade and I’d be happy to defer to others on them—everything I know about economics I learned from J.P. Morgan: “the market will fluctuate”. ;)

In summary, Judy, I would judge the book as a brilliantly nuanced undermining of the 1990 understanding of global warming to which Oreskes has failed to do justice.

I want to see probability distributions for the following information needed for policy analysis:

1. time to next abrupt climate change

2. direction of next abrupt climate change (i.e. warming or cooling)

3. duration of next abrupt climate change

4. total amount of change

5. damage function (i.e. net economic cost per degree of warning or cooling.

To me it is extremely concerning that we’ve spent 25 years on climate research (and some $1.5 billion per year on policies justified on the basis of CAGW) to get to the point where it seems we know next to nothing that is really relevant for policy analysis.

Despite me asking the above questions repeatedly, no one has made a serious attempt to answer them. The longer this gores on without any persuasive evidence that GHG emissions have negative economic impacts they more I become persuaded GHG emissions are not a significant threat.

Richard Tol’s paper “The economic impact of climate change in the 20th and 21st centuries” seems persuasive to me http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-012-0613-3 . Figure 3 shows that GHG emissions and projected global warming would be net beneficial for most of this century. In fact, with cheap energy as we could have with nuclear power if the “Progressives” would stop blocking progress, global warming would be net beneficial for all this century and far beyond.
An earlier version is freely available on the Copenhagen Consensus web site here: http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/climate_change.pdf

Well said. Politicians are not motivated by the “climbing down” resulting from better understanding of the science. They have used the rhetorical spin etc. to further political careers and sphere of influence. Meanwhile, the consensus will continue searching for ways to block any “climbing down,” e.g., by looking for ways to refute the hiatus, claiming that it never occurred, or that it is not a significant factor in the long scheme of things. The major challenge of the day is to close the gap between public opinion / policy and the science. If a global climate treaty is agreed by e.g., “executive authority” at the Paris meeting it would make it very difficult to change the course of history. How can it be done?

AK,

Not only that, but when they start thinking about the risks from large increases in CO2 that don’t involve climate, such as sudden massive eco-system changes, that means even without climate impacts, fossil CO2 is a risk ideally avoided.

Sorry, but that’s unpersuasive. It seems like belief. If there are no negative impacts, then what’s the risk. The risk of negative impacts of bad mitigation policies – like incentivising renewable energy and carbon pricing, are virtual certainties. So, unless you can provide persuasive evidence – not just statements of your beliefs – and over policies that will increase economic growth, then I am entirely unpersuaded by your belief there is a risk we should spend money on.

To persuade me that GHG emissions are a serious risk, I would like to see the information I listed here: http://judithcurry.com/2015/09/07/managing-uncertainty-in-predictions-of-climate-change-and-impacts/#comment-729729 (neatly summarised in PDF’s.

@miker613: That’s the capital. How do scientists use it up? By giving the public the impression that they care more about the politics than the truth.

Miker, it is not the scientists that give the public this impression but those who communicate with the public.

Scientists publish in scientific journals. They have no interest in communicating with the public, only with their fellow scientists. If they cared about the public you wouldn’t be encountering paywalls when you try to read the actual science.

When you talk about “scientists” you are clueless about exactly who you are accusing of “giving up capital”. You know know less than nothing about them.

There is an interesting sidelight today on how economics handles uncertainty in complex models. The NZ Treasury is required to produce long-term fiscal projections which they do from reasonably complex models. Following the recent publication of these the NZ Controller and Auditor General in reviewing them argued that the uncertainty implicit in the projections may not be readily understood by readers.

As a result the Treasury has published a Working Paper (not necessarily Treasury policy) that explicitly looks at sources of the uncertainty http://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/research-policy/wp/2015/15-10.

The Executive Summary is sufficient to give the flavour.

Two quotes highlight the differences between economic/fiscal policy and climate policy.

First the explicit statement about the assumptions:

“Uncertainty regarding the structure of the projection model itself, and the form of the various feedback relationships (as well as the many other variables which cannot be known with certainty), was ignored. The projected distributions can therefore be regarded as being conditional on these assumptions.”

And second the statement about the implications for policy:

“These results raise the important question of the appropriate policy response. Faced with projections showing a divergence between expenditure and revenue, and the consequent rise in the debt ratio, it is sometimes argued that policy responses should be made as early as possible to prevent the debt reaching unsustainable levels, although such a recommendation is subject to inter-generational equity and other considerations. In the present context an increase in the tax rate in the first period, to accumulate a fund that can be used in the event of a future possible expenditure requirement, involves a sunk cost. However, with uncertainty, it is possible that there is an option value of waiting until some of the uncertainty is resolved, particularly where policy changes involve costs that cannot be reversed.”