We need to have those debates. What if it rises 4 degrees by 2100, good or bad? I want to see both sides of that debate. So far there are not enough people even considering 4 degrees to be good to make a mark on that debate. Let’s see them write articles. They shouldn’t be afraid of being laughed down if they have good science to back them up. Hopefully they can be immune from lawsuits if their advice is taken and proved wrong, but I think I am seeing now why they are not stepping forward.

temp,

And just what might be the point, temp, of this last facile bit of reasoning of yours, temp? Could it just possibly be your best shot at keeping the CAGW scam alive that has been so good to you and your Lysenkoist hive-bozo buddies? I think so, temp.

Temp, let me ask you this. Would you buy a stock on the recommendation of a broker that you knew was shorting the same stock, himself? I wouldn’t. And I don’t buy any carbon-peril scare-stories from a bunch of carbon piggie gluttons either.

Temp, with regards to your trite, stale, carbon-demon-gonna-getcha! flim-flam–Yawn. And, of course, the point of the whole, CO2 bogey-man drill, temp, is for you and your flunky ilk to establish a pretext which your make-a-buck/make-a-gulag betters can then use to rip-off the “little” guy tax-payer big-time. Not to mention, temp, that the spillage from your masters’ tax-payer haul, fills your own good-deal, carbon-porker, hypocrite, hack-grade trough. I mean, like, temp, although it is surely a source of discomfort to your tender, greenshirt sensibilities, us “little” guys have figured out the con-job deal you’ve been pushing some while ago–sorry, guy.

But my perfectly reasonable, no-brainer expectation that you and your Big-Green masters should be leading the carbon-reduction crusade from the front and by personal example has really stuck a nerve with you, hasn’t it, temp? I mean, like, it’s the sort of leadership expectation that us “little” guys respond to because it is the sort of leadership we admire, understand, practice ourselves, and respect. But, curiously, the idea that someone like you, temp, should lead from the front and by personal example scares the wits out of you, temp. Why, temp?

I’ve got my own theory, why, temp. Allow me to share it. I suspect, temp, that you recoil from the idea of leadership by example because it philosophically clashes with your utopian dreams of the perfect hive-heaven. That is, I can well imagine you see your leadership style as one of Comrade temp, commissar super-dude whip-cracker strutting arrogantly like a giant among the cowering pygmies. You know, like, there’s temp! proud possessor of a much coveted, well-flashed, senior-cade, party-ration card!–I’m so sorry now that I called him booger-eater, geek-ball, sneaky little weasel creep-out in high school! You know, that kinda thing, temp.

Temp, the only thing left at this point to save your dying CAGW scam is for you and Al Gore and the rest of the hive to take vows of carbon-poverty, don the hair-shirt, and set the example–personally and from the front. ‘Cuz the scare-mongering razzzle-dazzle has lost all its former magic. And, really, temp, why shouldn’t you set the example if you are really convinced of all this carbon doom-and-gloom?

tempterrain
This may not be the place for this debate, but 9 years back I analyzed suicide for the US and the state of Maryland. In that study I compared suicide for the US and other countries — some having severe restrictions on firearms (e.g. Japan). There are many countries with severe restrictions on firearms that have higher rates of suicide than the US (Japan had about twice the rate). People try to justify restrictions on guns from the fact that the use of guns for suicide is high in the US, but the experience in Australia and Canada and many other places is that restrictions on guns will drive down the gun suicide rate while leaving the overall suicide rate unchanged — people will find an alternative, See http://www.mcrkba.org/Suicide.pdf.

SM,10/07 1.15pm cites Erich Heller on narrative. I’m reading Heller’s chapter on Otto Spengler and history now:
‘If Spengler is, after all, not quite out of date, this is because he has reduced to a wicked kind of absurdity a tendency of the mind which is certainly not unfashionable yet; the habit of applying to historical necessity for the marching orders of the spirit.’

Wiki on Helger writing on Freidrich von Schiller. Schiller presented:
‘a striking instance of a European catastrophe of the spirit: the invasion and partial disruption of the aesthetic faculty by unemployed religious impulses.’ * and Heller, ‘Truth must be embodied in external reality.’

* Green movement religious narrative?’

David L. Hagen, it is a matter of record that Mann’s views are modest, polite, centrist, and factual. So can’t we all get along?      

Stupid comments are stupid:

As for climate-change hockey sticks, isn’t there a new one pretty much every week? The evidence looks strong to me!

Apparently to some, evidence looks strong because there’s lots of it, even if one never bothers to look at what any of that evidence is actually like.

hunter, that is not my argument. I do believe I’ve stated it a number of times in the thread above. My argument, essentially, is that because the release was selective, the first impression was very strong. Even George Monbiot (UK leftie greenie) was calling for heads on plate. First impressions are hard to shift – as noted in the Cracked article, once people have a position they have a tendency to stick to it.

I’ve seen scientists be horrible to one another in the field of astrophysics, so I was a little surprised by some of the emails but probably not as shocked as others.

Jim D,

What if it rises 4 degrees by 2100, good or bad? I want to see both sides of that debate.

I don’t know what you mean by both sides of the debate. I just want to see objective, unbiased analysis like scientists used to do before they became overwhelmed by policy driven science, group think and government funding.

Nordhaus’s work considers the full range of climate sensitivity
reported by IPCC. (Why don’t you read it?). He concludes “not so dismal consequences”. And no evidence of severe consequences – yet.

We also need to take into account we have limited resources to tackle threats and climate change is not the only threat we face. It would be bad policy to waste our wealth on a low risk, so we are not able to deal with higher risks (risk = consequence x probability).

This article http://www.tnr.com/blog/critics/75757/why-the-decision-tackle-climate-change-isn%E2%80%99t-simple-al-gore-says was summarised in a post by JC some months ago. I think it is excellent and well worth re-reading. Below I quote three paragraphs from near the end (but I’d suggest reading the whole article because I believe it addresses your comment well)

In the face of massive uncertainty, hedging your bets and keeping your options open is almost always the right strategy. Money and technology are our raw materials for options. A healthy society is constantly scanning the horizon for threats and developing contingency plans to meet them, but the loss of economic and technological development that would be required to eliminate all theorized climate change risk (or all risk from genetic technologies or, for that matter, all risk from killer asteroids) would cripple our ability to deal with virtually every other foreseeable and unforeseeable risk, not to mention our ability to lead productive and interesting lives in the meantime.

So what should we do about the real danger of global warming? In my view, we should be funding investments in technology that would provide us with response options in the event that we are currently radically underestimating the impacts of global warming. In the event that we discover at some point decades in the future that warming is far worse than currently anticipated, which would you rather have at that point: the marginal reduction in emissions that would have resulted up to that point from any realistic global mitigation program, or having available the product of a decades-long technology project to develop tools to ameliorate the problem as we then understand it?

The best course of action with regard to this specific problem is rationally debatable, but at the level of strategy, we can be confident that humanity will face many difficulties in the upcoming century, as it has in every century. We just don’t know which ones they will be. This implies that the correct grand strategy for meeting them is to maximize total technical capabilities in the context of a market-oriented economy that can integrate highly unstructured information, and, most important, to maintain a democratic political culture that can face facts and respond to threats as they develop.

On a lighter note, ‘Give us back our old style globes, the new ones are sending me blind!’ .. need to read by lamplight, do you do that Fanny?

Frank,

Why should any scientist be paranoid when someone tests their scientific work or theory?

The question should be put to the IPCC Coordinating authors and lead authors such as Michael Mann and Phil Jones.

thisisnotgood:

Nature 391, 678-682 (12 February 1998) | doi:10.1038/35596; Received 14 May 1997; Accepted 11 November 1997

Reduced sensitivity of recent tree-growth to temperature at high northern latitudes

K. R. Briffa et al

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6668/abs/391678a0.html

The email was initially interpreted by many commentators to relate specifically to the surface temperature record which given the blogospheric controversy at the time (surfacestations project) was the most obvious issue.

As I recall (been a while) the email was evidence of the thought processes as the graphic for the front page of some WMO report was prepared. The email comes across to me as though it is being sarcastic about something Jones and others may have previously criticised between themselves about “Mike’s” graph? Mimicking something you have criticised is probably not wise, but this seems a case of self-promotion as it is not a formal presentation of a scientific result (which, as I always taught my students should be fully labelled, with titles, axes, units and captions).

Beth, when it comes to delightful styles of reading, somehow I’m sure that you and I are “on very much the same page.”     

“The reason for this is that there is NO reasonable doubt the the LIA existed and that it was a period of colder climate than before or after. What is not fully understood is why it occurred and why it ended.”

Why is cools is far more important than why it warms.

So how within a few centuries could present temperature cool?

We have many who assume we could at the beginning of a cooling cycle which may last a decade or so, but this if it occurs should fairly minor.
Change in the sun activity could have significant effect.
Large volcanoes could have significant effect..
Large forest fires.

The solar effect which decrease temperature, would be related to increase in global cloudiness.
Volcanoes or large fires would involve particle or soot in the atmosphere.
And warming and cooling cyclic decadial changes may involve cloudiness or dust in atmosphere, but probably other factors.

It is possible decadial and/or cycles of warming and cooling could related massive gain or loss of planetary energy. Something prevent heat from escaping, and so builds up like water behind dam, then mechanism ceases or is overwhelmed and gets a surge of loss of heat. And such surge of heat loss could pull more heat out of the system than it normally does. So there some talk of this regarding polar vortex, but it seems for global climate the south pole could much stronger effect. Because bigger black hole that such in lots of heat.

David Karoly just wrote some incredibly stupid things about Steve McIntyre in a book review of Mann’s new book.

“Unfortunately, the frightening aspects of this story are the details of the Climate Wars, of the repeated attacks on Mann’s research by climate change confusionists. Commentators with no scientific expertise, ranging from politicians such as Republican congressman Joe Barton from Texas, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, or Republican Senator James Inhofe from Oklahoma, to blog writers Stephen McIntyre and Marc Morano, have repeatedly promulgated misinformation and sought to launch formal investigations into Mann’s research, claiming professional misconduct or worse, even though it had been peer reviewed and confirmed by other scientists. They found a group of media reporters and commentators ready to repeat these claims without question and to amplify them. The blogosphere and some media outlets can be very effective echo chambers for communicating misinformation.”

I suspect this fool Karoly has made a very large mistake.

WebHub,

That is EXACTLY the point!
You cannot focus on one single point in science without including many other contributers.
And that is EXACTLY what current scientists have done with “observed science”.
Ignore EVERYTHING not observed.

Case in point : A glass of water.
Do scientists include that it under atmospheric pressure?
Do they include that it has different levels of pressures?
Do they include that it is on a rotating planet and it has different velocities?
Do they include the difference of centrifugal force?
Etc., etc., etc.

Rob you write “I suggest a potential 3rd option which is valid. It could be something along the lines of: Although we currently cannot determine the precise sensitivity of the climate to a doubling of CO2; the best available information today shows that it will result in a temperature increase of approximately 1.8 C +/- .3 C”

Here we disagree. Unless the “best available information” is MEASURED data it should not be used as evidence for something so important as CAGW. If we are dealing with an issue measured in trillions of mine and you taxpayer dollars, then I require measured data. Particularly as the 1.8C +/- 0.3 C is based almost exclusively on the output of non-validated models. I have yet to see this sort of number derived in a straightforward manner, with no unjustified assumptions, and a clear and complete derivation presented in one paper.

Peter Lang shows us denialism-in-action:

“By what reasonable review process, therefore, can the IPCC identify lying racketeers, and protect its process from their denialist attacks?”

Peter Lang denies If this was a major issue, it would have been exposed long before now. But it hasn’t been.

Peter Lang, thank you for your vivid example of denialism in action!      

Haven’t numerous recent books and articles thoroughly documented racketeering attacks on climate-change science; attacks that take precisely the same form as racketeering attacks on tobacco science? To cite just the books named in David Karoly’s recent Australian Book Review:

• Michael Mann’s The Hockey Stick And The Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines,

• Naomi Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming,

• Stephen H. Schneider’s Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate,

• Guy Pearse’s High and Dry: John Howard, Climate Change and the Selling of Australia’s Future, and

• Clive Hamilton’s Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change.

Peter Lang, your post’s breathtaking denial of even the existence, of all of the factual material in all of these works, has provided Climate Etc. readers with an outstanding example of the willful ignorance that is so characteristic of polemic denialism. For which example, thank you Peter Lang!      

THE EXAMPLE OF THE SURGEON GENERAL

The role of IPCC reports is not the Sinclair Lewis-style muckraking of the above books, but rather the role of US Surgeon General Luther Terry’s report “Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the United States” (1964, a Google search finds it).

The job of Dr. Terry’s “Smoking and Health” was simple:

• Summarize the science, and

• Summarize the policy implications of that science.

Simple … yet as history thoroughly documents, and legal prosecution affirmed, tobacco industry racketeers vehemently attacked the science, for precisely the reason that Steve Milesworthy admirably summarized in his Climate Etc. post:

“Many wishing to avoid the policy implications are avoiding the discussion with baseless challenges to the science.”

WHAT CAN BE DONE

What can be done in a positive sense? A positive role model for science in general, and the IPCC in particular, is provided by the aggregate body of James Hansen’s work, which is usefully summarized, and available to all citizens free-as-in-freedom, on the web page James Hansen’s articles on arXiv. These articles include:

• Scientific Case for Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change to Protect Young People and Nature

• Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications

• Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change

• Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?

• Implications of “peak oil” for atmospheric CO2 and climate

• How Can We Avert Dangerous Climate Change?

Viewed as a (most impressive!) whole, these articles ask all right questions, and seek the answers diligently, and face-up to the policy implications bravely (and this is precisely the proper role of the IPCC too).

As happened in the tobacco wars, racketeering denialists (and their dupes!) will abuse and deny and threaten and deny and obfuscate and deny and litigate and deny … and the racketeering denialists will never stop … because denialism is all that they know. But in the long run, who cares?      

The best response for climate-change scientists is to do what medical scientists did: relentlessly produce better-and-better science, with greater-and-greater transparency, and thereby slowly overcome feebler-and-feebler, flabbier-and-flabbier, denialism.

For which, good on `yah, science!      

Past history has shown that 99% in many cases is NOT absolute fact!

Cutting Through Gobbledygook Distractions, . . . because society is collapsing and even world leaders are now frightened

A + B + C => D + E . . . . .Equation (1)

Input:
A = Government models of Reality, Truth, God, etc.
B = Abundant public funds to research & confirm A
C = Anonymous reviews of proposals & manuscripts

Output:
D = Fear, confusion, depression, addiction in society
E = Mental illness, unrest, instability of governments

Proof: Since 1945 collusion between world leaders and leaders of the scientific community have generated the fear, confusion, depression, addiction, mental illness, and social unrest that threatens the lives of all of us on planet Earth today in 2012 – including world leaders and leaders of the scientific community.

http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-284

Fan shows us racketeering alarmism-in-action. Despite overwhelming evidence of the inherently politicized and corrupt nature of the IPCC cadre, he still urges unquestioning acceptance.

He does though half-stumble on a truth : that climate science urgently needs to relentlessly produce better-and-better science, with greater-and-greater transparency, and thereby slowly overcome feebler-and-feebler, flabbier-and-flabbier, alarmism.