Atomsk’s Sanakan:

“This was my question:”

Indeed, which I answered regarding the immaturity of the climate change domain. But you didn’t actually address my answer, you appeared to address something completely different.

“For instance, one could use your same logic to claim that the science of HIV/AIDS is immature.”

No, of course one can’t. The link between HIV & AIDS is eminently replicable, and has been for a long time. That the harder journey of a search for a cure is at a more challenged stage, does not speak at all to the former issue or the resistance to the science which occurred.

“One can pull for the same move for other branches of science.”

One certainly can’t, unless by a similar sleight of hand, which helps no-one, and was in no way any line of argument that I put forth.

“any thinking person should realize that the science can be settled on one aspect of the science, even if another aspect is unsettled.”

Of course. Therefore it is entirely wrong of you to propose a nonsense substitute argument that the HIV / AIDS link is not scientifically replicable, simply because the further science to find a cure is still challenged.

“So, for instance, it can be settled science that HIV causes AIDS, without it being settled science that there’s a successful HIV vaccine ready for wide use in humans.”

Absolutely. Yet this is exactly where you were going, not I. Regarding HIV / AIDS or generally, I have made no such argument. I don’t know how anyone could possibly interpret the above answer in that manner. I have made no claim that immaturity regarding the end AR5 output, which in the end is what actually matters for humans and the environment, invalidates items which are more bounded or even perfectly settled deeper within (for example, that CO2 is a GHG).

‘…should not be interpreted as a lack of progress…’ : ‘Although uncertainties remain large, it would be presumptuous to say that science has made no progress’

I didn’t say there was no progress. I said that this factor, along with the other points made above, speak to immaturity. Nor did I question specific conclusions / recommendations of the consensus, per your further quotes. I do point to the issue that AR5 is manifestly a consensus of expert judgement, and that there are at least two significant science camps outside of this consensus who challenge its preferred range of outcomes / recommendations, in opposite directions. These are not signs of maturity.

Re Ioannidis, I’m not familiar with the podcast or its backup. All three of the camps listed above believe the principle of ‘humans causing climate change’. To say this speaks nothing to the maturity of that science which would tell us how much (and how much consequent damage as a related function), which is the essence of the disagreement that separates these camps and the essence too of the direction of effort in all three camps. Did Ioannidis address this effort, and specifically the scientific approaches / papers of the camp who think that the IPCC / AR5 consensus is way too conservative, plus the camp that thinks it is too OTT? The NAS goes further, your quote includes: ‘much of this warming is very likely due to human activities’. But two scientific camps oppose this (a 4th and also non-mainstream camp, the luke-warmers, at one end of their spectrum at least, might not be far from agreement to this), focusing mostly on lesser or greater than ‘much’. The last full synthesis judging that ‘much’ and all other detail is the AR5, which is challenged by the outside camps even though they are united in the principle of ‘humans causing climate change’.

Re pushback. Accepted. I said in the post “It’s difficult to see how this false backing could ever be questioned in the public mind, unless the mainstream science community pushes back far more strongly against such assertions.” I should have reflected the same in my comment, i.e. there is *some* push-back. And yet clearly the unsupported catastrophe narrative from rafts of authorities and orgs and influencers, including many of our highest authorities (until the exception of the current US admin), is still a huge elephant in the domain and often cited as the main reason for action. Presidents and prime ministers and the UN elite et al would not be off the tracks if science and science communicators pushed back much more both in the past and now.

“The science on those topics is not immature just because scientists are often busy people who don’t have time to correct the innumerable amount of distortions people invent.”

Absolutely people distort (due generally to cultural bias). Yet scientists “don’t have time” to try and correct not just ‘people’, but rows of highly influential global / national leaderships?? Plenty of time seems to be allocated to trying to oppose skeptics, one would have thought rather more might be due to address a major error from (cumulatively) such huge influence, which one presumes dwarfs the combined influence of the skeptics. My point was not in any case that such distortions (even when widespread) necessarily demonstrate immaturity (of course not, otherwise the science of every conflicted domain could be said to be immature, which is patently not so). But these same distortions are even coming from the org to which the AR5 synthesis process belongs (the UN), and indeed sometimes from leadership of the specific synthesis arm, the IPCC, itself too. Such does not speak well regarding potential cultural pressure on the process of expert judgement consensus, which is a social process and so indeed vulnerable to same. And the camp thinking this IPCC consensus is far too conservative, who field various valid scientists within the appropriate areas (some noted in the post) claim inappropriate pressure of exactly the same kind, but in the opposite direction. Are they right? This tussle regarding cultural pressure upon expert judgement accords would not be an issue if the science (of AR5 output) was mature enough not to be so reliant upon judgement panels in the first place.

“Anyway, it’s now clear that you’ve failed to show that the science of CO2-induced, anthropogenic climate change is immature.”

You have not addressed my answer but substituted your own flawed logic, which of course will fail, and…

“ Since doing that is crucial for your critique to carry any weight, your critique of D&M does not work.”

…while my D&M critique references some example conflicts, it does not depend in any way upon the state of any of the conflicted domains, climate change or any other, which you would know if you’ve read it all, or indeed the points on this paper immediately above. So this is the issue for which you opened the thread, yet by this incorrect one-liner avoidance you continue to ignore the flaws in D&M while offering no workable defence for same. However, it isn’t just your own loss if you continue to try and defend science with this framing of ‘denialism’, it is the loss of the science you seek to defend, because such an erroneous approach, a flawed tool, can only fail in its task. And if you’re as confident in your ability to check at source for any socially conflicted science issue as you implied (unless I misinterpreted this?) why would you even need to defend or use this tool? Btw you forgot to answer my question of above; “..did you not say you can personally adjudicate all socially conflicted science areas and be confident of the right answer? If I have misunderstood this, can you further explain what you actually did mean?”

Re sat fats: As we noted regarding creationism / religion, cultural inertia can be huge, especially when after a long time it has become heavily integrated with one or more of authority / financial / industry / social structures and norms. So…

“It’s so well established that it’s still recommended that people limit saturated fat intake and eat as little dietary cholesterol as possible.”

…becomes ‘it was thought to be so well established that [due to cultural inertia] it’s still recommended that people limit saturated fat intake and eat as little dietary cholesterol as possible’

As JCH notes the food industry had a big hand in this, though my knowledge isn’t enough to know what the level of help from group-think on the inside was. For sure the dominant position has been sporadically challenged by scientists and others since at least the early seventies, yet it’s highly unlikely such dominance could be maintained without significant group-think / bias on the inside. I doubt there’s ever been headcounts of supporters and skeptics within science, but at any rate whatever the ratio, the dominance occurred and was sold under the name of science. The end effect on the public is the same. So start with this recent run-down: https://healthimpactnews.com/2014/time-magazine-we-were-wrong-about-saturated-fats/ . Incidentally, cholesterol is indeed still indicative of problems; how /why it gets there and what to do to best prevent that, are the issues.

The wealthy pay 15% on tax, and the middle class pay 30%. There’s enough revenue sources out there when it becomes fair. Cutting taxes has only blown up the deficit (remember that?) to trillion dollar levels. Not a good plan.

I wrote:

Every long, high-quality sea-level measurement record shows that the rise in CO2 and other GHG levels has caused no significant acceleration in sea-level rise:
https://sealevel.info/MSL_global_thumbnails5.html
How is this unclear to you?

Atomsk’s Sanakan ignored my first sentence (“Every long, high-quality sea-level measurement record shows…”) and the link to thumbnails for NOAA’s entire list of 375 LTT tide stations, and quoted just, “How is this unclear to you?” and replied, “…one location is not the globe. So while you cherry-picked one location…”

No, I did not cherry-picked one location. I gave a link to thumbnail graphs for all 375 NOAA-analyzed locations, and I posted a graph for Honolulu, which has one of the highest quality measurement records (113 years of measurements with not even one missing month), a perfectly typical trend, and a near-ideal location (a tectonically stable mid-Pacific site, where ENSO distortions are minimal).

Every long, high-quality sea-level measurement record shows that the rise in CO2 and other GHG levels has caused no significant acceleration in sea-level rise.

Why are so many climate alarmists seemingly incapable of decent behavior, of refraining from false accusations and gratuitous insults?
 

Atomsk’s Sanakan wrote, “you make the same mistake that folks like Tamino have repeatedly corrected: you falsely assume that drawing a line of best fit shows there is no acceleration. Drawing a line of best fit, and then judging things by eye, is not a sound way of detecting acceleration.”

Don’t you understand what quadratic regression is? That is not “drawing a line of best fit.”
 

Atomsk’s Sanakan wrote, “See: ‘A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise’”

That’s Church, J. A., and White, N. J., 2006, “A 20th Century Acceleration in Global Sea-Level Rise.” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33, L01602, 4 PP. doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.

It is widely cited by confused climate alarmists as evidence that manmade global warming has caused accelerated sea-level rise. But it is not.

I did a reanalysis of their data, using their own method (minimum-variance unbiased estimator quadratic fit regression), and discovered that their data showed no acceleration after 1925 (a fact which their paper didn’t mention). In fact, it actually showed a slight (statistically insignificant) deceleration.

In 2009 they posted on their web site a new set of averaged sea-level data, from a different set of tide gauges. But they published no paper about it, and I wondered why not. So I duplicated their 2006 paper’s analysis, using their new data.

Not only did their new dataset show a greater deceleration after 1925, all the 20th century acceleration had vanished, as well. Even for the full 20th century, their data showed a slight (statistically insignificant) deceleration. Here’s a graph:

My guess is that the reason they wrote no paper about it was that the title would have had to have been something like this:

Church and White (2009), “Never mind: no 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise, after all.”

Finally, in 2011, they posted another new dataset, for yet another set of tide gauges, and this one finally showed a slight (statistically insignificant) sea-level rise acceleration even after 1925, but the acceleration was smaller in magnitude that the post-1925 deceleration in their other two datasets.

I see WUWT is asking people to write emails to support Mass. Please do, following the advice about being polite and all that other stuff. One of my comments may have been lost to interwebs a few days ago. It was supposed to be something like this: When the Left comes to get somebody, stand up. We have lost at times in the past by not doing that. Perhaps it was out of fear. One thing I’ve heard recently, and this is a paraphrase of what Dave Rubin said: The people kicked out of the Left have found themselves welcomed by the center Right. Wait, hasn’t this happened before?

Jim D:
| December 15, 2018 at 6:29 pm |
Could clarify please? Are you talking about marginal rates?

Payroll tax. With the Medicare part increasing from 1.45% to 5%, the total payroll tax increases about 3.5%. Note that the payroll tax pays for about half of Medicare (including almost all part A which is hospital care) with the rest from general revenue.

“Are Academics Cowards?”
The dangers of speaking out in academia are the same in government offices or the free-market, for-profit corporation: nobody likes the off-side voice, especially if it is speaking a truth.

There is a lot of government and corporate activity that has as its objective the same thing: the support and promotion of the goals of the executives. Both government and corporate worlds have two external groups that also demand service: for government work, the political or social activists, and for corporate (for profit), the shareholders. (You can both have both activists and shareholders: voters are “shareholders”, and shareholder groups, including investment houses, are activists economically). Regardless of type, government offices and corporations have executives whose salaries and reputations are tied to the images of their paymasters. They are also the ones who create, or at least maintain, the images, which means that their personal images rise or fail as the images of their professional associations rise or fall. All in all, there is a strong force to maintain an image of corporate and moral correctness, responsibility and quality to not just the government or corporate body, but to those at the top in the organization.

The thrust of the top reaches all the way down. Anyone at any level who seeks a change, i.e. an improvement, challenges the work and status of the group above him/her. It’s a challenge that says “I am smarter than you” or “I know more than you” or “I see better than you”. Doesn’t matter if the change is an improvement that, were it in place, the management would approve. The challenge is a disruptive statement that says someone or the group did not take the best route.

The more fundamental the observed need for change or benefits of the change, the higher the level that is challenged. From my experience, most top executives want to do a decent job and then go home or on vacation. Changes require more work from management, the more fundamental, the greater the work, and they especially require that a management level get other levels to buy in. Nobody particularly wants to do this extra work, especially if they have personally aligned themselves with the values that go with the previous set up.

Or challenge those values. “Make more money? You saying we weren’t focused on that already?” “Be good to the environment? You saying we are not looking after the environment?” “Be accepting of other points of view? You saying our views are not the best possible?”

Pot-stirrers are not liked anywhere in society. If they have enough power before they stir the pot, they can get their influence, but they still will not be liked and will be blacklisted professionally and socially until the wisdom of their “new” approach becomes historically obvious. Even then …. stirrers make other people uneasy.

There is a lot of danger to career advancement to “speaking up” wherever you are, not just in academia. It’s all about “Wrong Thinking”. Doing it causes “Burning bridges”, in the corporate world – your “trouble-making” nature gets out, regardless of the soundness of your thoughts. You don’t get the calls even when you are noted as smarter than the average bear. “Going along to get along” is the road to a non-disrupted life in the governmental or commercial worlds. You can be not terribly bright, but if you follow the lead set for you, you’ll be fine. Just don’t think (or say) the Wrong things.

Tenure was supposed to stop this. Academic life was supposed to – at least in an “urban legend” way – allow the Thinkers to Think without personal repercussion. Dumb thinking was even tolerated. You can correct for dumb thinking with smarter thinking. You’d have to be egregiously dumb to loose your job, profession or reputation for dumb thinking. There wasn’t supposed to be Wrong Thinking. Now there is. And, just as happens in government/corporations, you can be destroyed for having the non-sanctioned opinions.

The scythe is not new, it’s just cutting weeds in another place.

JimD
First of all the effective tax rate for the 1% is 27% per IRS archives.

But that is beside the point. Somehow I’m not communicating with you. The $10.2 Trillion is the TOTAL Income of all Americans as reported to the IRS. The total amount to be spent per her plans ($10.4 Trillion) is greater than the total amount of income. This is not about how much should be paid by the rich. All incomes, even the rich, is included in the $10.2 Trillion. Tell me how we spend on government MORE than we make.

Jim D:
I meant this:
The wealthy pay 15% on tax, and the middle class pay 30%.

Well, wolfcampcollege, talk about unsubstantiated. I can understand why your comment might have been deleted by Mass. Everything you say is opinion and I couldn’t find a single substantiation or even any reasoning for your opinions. Taking your points one by one.

1. Mass says: ”Even climate researchers are unwilling to reduce their carbon-emitting travel. I hate to admit it, but my climate research colleagues have the worst carbon emission profiles of anyone I know.” True in my experience as anyone who reads blogs of climate scientists knows they travel a lot to conferences. AGU this year is attended by virtually all the mainstream climate scientists.

2. “”The Yes on 1631 campaign is in a bind. The initiative itself is poorly written, hyperpartisan, will do little to slow global warming (.0001 degrees C!) and most folks understand the oversight board will not use the money wisely. So the Yes campaign has gone super negative in the public statements against the No campaign and its supporters.” Mass’s statement is completely true and I know from first hand experience. I was constantly bombarded with negative ads portraying the evils of Big Oil and how we needed to punish them.

3. Dog whistles that you claim Mass used. This is utter nonsense. The whole dog whistle thing is a lie designed to tar someone with prejudice when there is no evidence of prejudice. A dog whistle can’t be heard by people so saying its a dog whistle implies that those listening are dogs. That’s the worst form of prejudice isn’t it? Perhaps your statement is clear substantiation of Mass’ claim (point 2 above) that the Yes campaign went “super negative” on opponents.

4. You failed to cover the large payments to special interest groups that will only marginally impact emissions. The tax was regressive and harmed those least able to pay.

I have made comments at Mass’ blog many times and they always appear perhaps because they contain real substance and/or science. You will be more likely to have your comments appear is you try to make them more substantial.

I think its well known that Salby’s analysis is not quite right. CO2 increases are perfectly correlated with human emissions. It’s implausible that all of it will be absorbed by the biosphere and oceans. It also happens that temperature increase have been correlated with increasing CO2 but the warming oceans have been absorbing CO2, not releasing it into the atmosphere.

Inorganic coatings on black carbon particles multiply the warming potential?

“The coating materials of atmospherically aged BC consist mainly of sulfate, nitrate, ammonium, and organic carbon (OC).”

“The figure illustrates the systematic underestimation by factors 2–3 of the AAOD in current climate models relative to observational programs in the key regions of East and South Asia, which may originate from an uncertain combination of several factors described in the text.”

The aerosol uncertainty paper is not one that can be taken seriously.

Ragnaar

I’m sure he means effective tax rate. The IRS shows those in the top 1% pay 27% effective income tax rate. I just looked up the IRS data again and those making $50,000-75,000 pay an effective income tax rate of 8.7%.

Jim is way off on both counts. But more importantly, as I pointed out to him is that Ocasio-Cortez plan spends more than all Americans make, including the rich, very rich, and filthy rich. I’m not sure why that is not clear to him.

You need to provide a source for that 10 trillion in spending. Are you sure that’s not spread over ten years? That would be 15 times the current military budget per year.

The Warren Buffet rule. Many of the wealthy pay mostly the capital gains rate because most of their income is in that form, and that is taxed at a lower rate. Romney was at about 15% when he released his tax forms.

The basic middle-class rate is 22% plus you’re paying payroll tax at another 8% and maybe local and state taxes on top of that.

“Walker used simulations of ocean temperature from a model and compared them to actual measurements from sensor-tagged marine mammals. She found that recent changes in winds and sea ice have resulted in an increase to the heat delivered by the ocean waters to the glaciers in Wilkes Land and Vincennes Bay.”

This was from the article about East Antarctica glaciers. So the conclusion is that the Totten, et al, glaciers were experiencing an increased melt rate due to wind and sea ice changes. It would be more informative to know how much those ocean waters that actually come in contact with those glaciers have warmed in the last 100 years. Not the OHC globally, but those specific waters that are melting those particular glaciers.

That kind of longitudinal study might give a clue as to whether this rate of melting is unprecedented.

I’m not sure which we will see first, these data or an analysis of how much of the West Antarctica glaciers (Pine Island and Thwaites) are melting due to geothermal activity.

It’s dismaying to see quadratic curve-fitting being used to project SL rise into 2100AD. Despite pro forma disclaimers, that’s a highly specious, manifestly unreliable basis.

Jim

You are watching too much Bill Maher and reading HP too much. I just looked at the latest IRS annual report. You have no idea what you are talking about. $50,000-75,000 Effective Income Tax Rate 8.7%. Get over it.

Do something useful and tell me how much the waters melting the Totten Glacier have warmed in the last 100 years.

It never occurred to me you haven’t read the Annual Federal Budget. Here is the link.

But when I talk about $10.2 Trillion in Income that is an IRS number which represents what all Americans make and report to the IRS.

Do you know the difference? Read my first comment again to make sure you understand what I am saying.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/historical-tables/