Grafitti on a bikepath bridge leading to the Isla Vista:
‘THOUGH logic choppers rule the town,
And every man and maid and boy
Has marked a distant object down,
An aimless joy is a pure joy,’
Or so did Tom O’Roughley say
That saw the surges running by,
‘And wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey.
This Week’s Breaking Examples of Demagogic Denialism
Anthony Watts denies “Joe Romm has a new post up, pushing yet again his hilarious projection of the future [Romm's post is non-hilariously titled Carbon Pollution Set To End Era Of Stable Climate]”Willis Eschenbach requests (rhetorically) “Let me know when you’ve come up with the figures on how much energy it takes to push a liquid through a filter one molecule thick, and can discuss its effects on pretreatment stage of reverse osmosis plants, and we’ll continue the discussion.”
This week’s posts by WUWT‘s Anthony Watts and Willis Eschenbach are wonderfully exemplary of Trish Roberts-Miller’s thirteen traits of demagogic climate-change denialism
• Anthony Watts characterizes as “hilarious” the same concerns that one billion Catholics regard seriously, thus exemplifying Roberts-Miller’s demagogic traits #01 (polarization), #06 (refusal), and #13 (quibbling).
• Willis Eschenbach illustrates Roberts-Miller’s demagogic traits #11 (bad science) #12 (anti-intellectualism) — aka the Dunning–Kruger effect — by first ignoring, then outright censoring, comments asserting the well-known quantitative answer (for seawater) of 27 MJ/m^3, which reflects the well-understood and thoroughly validated scientific principle that thermodynamic/osmotic pressure differentials arise from entropic mechanisms that are independent of membrane thickness.
Climate Etc readers can hope that the new Pope Francis will assist — seriously, not “hilariously” — forums like WUWT to a morally mature appreciation that denialism need not cling so fiercely to juvenile demagogic tactics of polarization, refusal, quibbling, bad science, and anti-intellectualism.
Summary Heed Pope Francis’ example in the coming year, Anthony and Willis!
Deterministic chaos is simply a system that defies prediction because of either incomplete information about the initial state or its evolution is too numerically difficult to calculate.
This is not even wrong. But if it suits you, then be my guest. Why should I spend time to teach you physics ?
Spare me Bell’s Theorum proving otherwise. Physics is incomplete.
Sure. Bell Theorem’s gone. Aspect’s experiments gone. Neutron scattering gone. We could do without any pesky geometry and mathematical logics while we’re at it too.
As you surely know better than Bohr,Feynman and Maldacena united, be my guest.
It’s lacking a quantum theory of gravity and doesn’t have a clue what constitutes 75% of the stuff that makes up the observable universe (dark matter)
It is not lacking a quantum theory of gravity. It has rather too many of them – String Theory and LQG being just 2 of the most researched.
Dark matter (pretty much per definition) is not part of observable Universe and it is not 75% of the “stuff” but rather 85% of the matter and 25% of the energy.
Smart physicists of quantum gravity to whom you don’t belong (neither do I) have a rather good idea about what the dark matter is – Supersymetric partners.
The same people (those who have a clue) even say that the first supersymetric partners will be experimentally observed at the LHC in the next years.
However like Skippy, while I would enjoy a discussion about QM interpretations (QM was my major), I do not think that this is the right place and (most) posters here are not the right interlocutors either.
The Axe Helve is a good poem illustrating this particular myth of Frost’s.
Fan
Reading your post, a wonderful image came to me of the Pope sitting in front of his computer trying to convert Anthony Watts and Willis to the cult of warmism.
Incidentally,I suspect you are the only one who believes Trish’s list is renowned or in any way meaningful. Don’t you think they are rather tiresome? If that is ‘ad personam’ then so be it, although no doubt you will continue to believe that your attacks on Watts and Willis are perfectly acceptable and fall into an altogether more benign category.
tonyb
AFAICT, Andy Robinson is an utterly harmless private citizen whose chief claim to fame is that Joe Romm admires his graphical talents.
If you sincerely believe, climatereason, that Andy’s artwork reflects some sort of conspiracy, then please go nuts and tell Climate Etc readers all about it!
Bart
You simply repeat your earlier error, pretending that we have a god idea of what if any effect CO2 us having. So the rest of your comment – that rests on that blunder – simply collapses.
david,
I’m not particularly interested in your limited understanding of the law or anything else you have to say on the matter. I have yet to read anything from you that I
a) don’t already know
b) couldn’t find with the five seconds of googling.
The issue from my perspective is not what the law says about whistleblowing, its not what willard thinks about whistleblowing.
The issue is what do people actually mean when they use the term. It may be that folks using the term are at variance with the legal meaning, or at odds with what you think. What you think doesnt interest me because you tend to be contrarian. If I said white, you would say black. Just sayin
( go ahead and disagree it proves the point )
When most people argue that FOIA is a whistleblower what exactly are they trying to point to? what are they trying to do? That’s more instructive that trying to decide what a “whistleblower’ actually is “in reality”.
Are they:
1. arguing its an insider ( employee)
2. talking about the motive ( protect the public interest)
3. talking about a legal defense
4. defending the morality of the act.
Moving away from the term whistleblower facilitates this discussion.
For my own part I always thought the motive was personal which would make him an “informant” as opposed to a whistleblower.. but you see how those terms color the discussion. As a term whistleblower was introduced because Ralph Nader want to spin the description of snitches.
FOIA is a snitch. FOIA is a whistleblower.
hmm part of me wants to do an “ordinary language’ approach to the problem, but only willard would get that. For now, I’ll suggest that people avoid the labels as they are an impediment to understanding. In this case language gets in the way of communication.
LOL climatereason, at least we agree on two objectively verifiable points: (1) Anthony’s hockey-stick rhetoric has been irrational, and (2) Willis’ grasp of thermodynamic principles has been feeble!
Fan
Do you need to get some sleep or something? I am quite worried for your well being when you can read my post then write this;
“If you sincerely believe, climatereason, that Andy’s artwork reflects some sort of conspiracy, then please go nuts and tell Climate Etc readers all about it!”
Where on earth did I EVER mention ANYTHING about Andy’s artwork being any sort of conspiracy? Where did that come from? Have a nice rest. If you are at work have a strong coffee.
tonyb
Why not let the free enterprise system spend what it wants to invent a Perpetual Motion Fabrication Machine and leave government out of it? The nonsense of a ‘greenhouse’ is nothing more than AL-le-GORY –i.e., a tale told by an scientific idiot that politicians find useful to fleece the sheep.
Bart. What to do? I participate on blogs for my own education. I can put my ideas up, and intelligent people comment. I have learned a lot in the past and hope to learn more in the future.
We had an interesting discussion, even though we did not always agree. I had learned all I was going to. I tried to end the discussion peacefully by putting up a short post with a deliberate error in it. I hoped you would correct my error, which you did, I could say “Thank you”, and that would be that.
For some reason which I do not understand, you chose to continue the discussion. I am not going to participate. From now on, I will ignore you. I am sure this will be of no interest to you, since I am an ignorant non-scientist who does not know his *rse from a hole in the ground.
Fan
I am intrigued. IF the Pope is leading only 1 billion Roman Catholics (your figure) who believe in warmism, are the other 200, 000 sceptics?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-21443313
Should they be excommunicated for failing to follow the Popes teachings? Where do they live?
tonyb
Continuing anyway with the few bits that don’t rest on that blunder:
So in your fantasy world, Bart, Climategate and the organized coverups of it that followed, and the dogged refusal of the climate establishment to distance itself from the perpetrators thereof, are no evidence of crookedness and bias.
That makes you part of the problem.
Government subsidies for fossil :
Because http://www.iisd.org/gsi/ is so poorly documented.
Documented – oh no, I don’t doubt it lists the same tripe you were peddling here a few months ago.
Because the Canadian government hasn’t invested over $1.6 billion in developing tarsands. and hasn’t put on a full court press to get Keystone approved by the USA.
The odd scheme, perhaps, nothing systematic as you would have us believe.
You really need to get that fossil bee out of your bonnet.
Eli
You’ve lost me there. What year is that vertical line at the end supposed to start from and end?
tonyb
“Redating changed strongly those decades that should have been left out of the paper.”
Right, Pekka. The redating was done deliberately to strongly change those decades into the blade of a hockeystick.
The Captain is watching you, willis.
Your approach is one of either willful ignorance or deliberate obtuseness. You cannot separate the paper from its PR. The PR focuses on the uptick wrongfully shown in the headline graph – an uptick that was obtained, apparently, through deliberate manipulation of certain datasets, as show in McIntyre’s analysis and nicely summarized and explained above by Rud. Examples of the PR are shown here:
True face of climate’s hockey stick graph revealed – http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23247-true-face-of-climates-hockey-stick-graph-revealed.html
We’re Screwed: 11,000 Years’ Worth of Climate Data Prove It – http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/were-screwed-11-000-years-worth-of-climate-data-prove-it/273870/
Global warming is epic, long-term study says – http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/08/world/world-climate-change/index.html
Global temperatures are close to 11,000-year peak – http://www.nature.com/news/global-temperatures-are-close-to-11-000-year-peak-1.12564
Scientists Find an Abrupt Warm Jog After a Very Long Cooling – http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/scientists-find-an-abrupt-warm-jog-after-a-very-long-cooling/
The latter headline is from Revkin – who should know better.
So far, what we have is a relatively unexceptional plotting of early Holocene temperatures. The resolution of that plotting makes it impossible to determine whether there were any centennial (or less) temperature swings during periods such as the Minoan, Roman or Mediaeval warm periods. In fact, as you yourself argue in this thread, the study shows nothing about modern warming. The lack of resolution, however, means that you cannot compare their graphing of the early Holocene with the 0.7 – 0.8 degree C. temperature change experienced over the course of the 20th century. As Robert Rohde noted in discussion with Revkin:
“The 20th century may have had uniquely rapid warming, but we would need higher resolution data to draw that conclusion with any certainty. Similarly, one should be careful in comparing recent decades to early parts of their reconstruction, as one can easily fall into the trap of comparing a single year or decade to what is essentially an average of centuries.”
The temperature spike shown at the end of their “headline” graph was only obtained through apparently deliberate manipulation of core top dates – manipulation that resulted in excluding some data while including other. Neither the paper nor its SI includes any justification for this re-dating: while a general assumption was given (i.e., core-top dates were to be assumed to be 1950 unless otherwise provided in the source), they have changed the dating of core tops which have clear and well defined dates. Those changes were made without explanation and only by doing so, were they able to obtain the apparent temperature spike at the end of the graph (one which actually does not correspond with measured temperature changes, given that their study date stops mid-20th C).
This approach and manipulation of data should be condemned not condoned.
Peter -
To comment on personal characteristics instead of focussing on the argument is a surefire indicator of fighting a losing battle!
Just because I thought you might like a refresher!
Willis Eschenbach | March 20, 2013 at 1:07 pm
We call them “cowards”, and it is only necessary for them to continue their cowardice in order for climate science to continue its downwards spiral.
Just to be clear, not an excuse for Fan’s sillyness… Just to comment on the never-ending irony of blog foodfights… lest anyone forget.
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