Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by Eunice
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Comment on Is global warming causing the polar vortex? by timg56
cwon14,
I see zero evidence for Dr Curry attempting to anything more than steer the field of climate research back on track. Attributing anything more qualifies you to join Max OK and lolwot in the sandbox reserved for 5 year olds.
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by lolwot
I have noticed over the years that skeptics tend not to grasp the fundamentals behind the risk of climate change (or CAGW as they would call it). Alan’s questions are an example of this, in that they miss the point.
Life on Earth has adapted over millions of years to the current range of climate. While climate bounces around that range we can be somewhat reassured that things will run pretty much as they have in the past.
But if you take the climate outside that range all bets are off what will happen.
So yes the current range of climate is optimal, but not in the sense that Alan seems to think, it’s not a miracle, it’s because life (and human civilization) has adapted to it over time.
Further there is the principle that when faced with a complex machine you don’t sufficiently understand, you have to recognize that pressing all the buttons is more likely to cause a problem than leaving well alone.
I’ve seen some skeptics kind of acknowledge all this when they balk at the idea of aerosol geo-eingneering. They recognize in that case the meddling in a system we don’t understand and the disaster it could trigger. Sadly they don’t quite get the same thing about CO2 though.
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by Curious George
@lolwot: Please provide your citation.
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Comment on Is global warming causing the polar vortex? by timg56
Pekka,
Bet I could. Err much more that is.
Now it looks as if I’m going to have to read the book.
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by GaryM
Old Europe may not be dead, but its democratic principles are under full frontal assault.
The real question is, will conservatism (classical liberalism) make a come back? Or will the populist reaction to the power drunk over reach by Eurocrats be a return to something more ugly; like say a “third way” blend of crony capitalism, central control by regulation, and a resurgence of anti-semitism and other racist hatred of the other?
All it takes is a fascist demagogue to gain electoral power. The Eurocrats are busily building the structure that would support one, and simultaneously tearing down the protections against one. One of my favorite line from one of the best movies of all time:
“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you–where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast–man’s laws, not God’s–and if you cut them down…d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”
(The laws he was referring to, by the way, were laws that restricted the government, not imbued it with ever more power.)
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by Wagathon
With all we know about Michael Mann, that he still has a job at Penn State — and the conspiracy of silence among academics concerning the ‘hockey stick’ fraud — have shown there are no consequences for academics who have no respect for truth.
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by Generalissimo Sweeping
Garth pecks out a thought:
“It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavour.”
Homey don’t think so. This is the sweeping generalization fallacy. Geology wasn’t distrusted forever, if at all, because the consensus was wrong about continental drift. Just sayin’.
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by Bart R
RickA | January 9, 2014 at 1:12 pm |
Your group of assumptions that the LIA even existed as a single event; that comparing warming to “the LIA” is any more relevant than comparing it, for example, to times when we have good thermometer records.
It’s far more appropriate to do as those like Marcott et al have, and take the whole Holocene into account and place current warming into the context of all the records we have approximately equal confidence for: our confidence about “the LIA” is little greater than that for any other period in the past millennia, and the difference in our confidence about measures of global temperature and warming trends between the past century and the LIA is far far greater than between the LIA and any other point in the Holocene paleoclimate record. To all appearances, you’ve cherry-picked an LIA straw man out from all possible ranges for no other reason than to make your argument sound more plausible, and without sufficient evidence, on the assumption that there even is an LIA distinct from the general natural temperature pattern before the Industrial Revolution.
Do you really need to have explained to you in such detail the wrong thing you apparently deliberately do?
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by Berényi Péter
<blockquote><b>Matthew R Marler</b> | <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/01/08/the-fundamental-uncertainties-of-climate-change/#comment-434952" rel="nofollow">January 9, 2014 at 1:22 pm</a> |
I hope that you do not oppose medical research.</blockquote>
No, I am not, although medical research is one of the most affected fields, surpassed only by climate science, in which even in clear cut cases of misconduct retraction is unlikely to occur. Still, I am for climate research, not against it, but it should be hard, testable science, not pseudoscientific <i>"<a href="http://dictionary.sensagent.com/Computer%20experiment/en-en/#anchorWiki" rel="nofollow">experiments in silico</a>"</i>, disconnected from both theory and reality.
As for medical research, it is in deep trouble indeed, primarily because of its dependence on business, which is almost as harmful for science as we could see in case of politics. By the way, most of the great breakthroughs of modern medical science, which have changed our life so much, are either deeply connected to fundamental research like discovery of sanitation, cells, bacteria, viruses, disinfection, vaccination, antibiotics, protein structure, genetic code, etc. or come outside of the field like most modern diagnostic devices (X-ray, Ultrasound, CT, MRI, etc.), so they do belong to "hard science".
The part which does not, let me add necessarily, because <i>something</i> has to be done to patients even if knowledge &. methods are imperfect, suffers from lack of scientific rigor, financial pressure and yes, misconduct.
<blockquote><b>PNAS</b>
<a href="http://www.ask-force.org/web/Peer-Review/Fang-Misconduct-Accounts-Majority-retracted-2012.pdf" rel="nofollow">Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications</a>
<i>Ferric C. Fang, R. Grant Steen and Arturo Casadevall</i>
"A detailed review of all 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles indexed by PubMed as retracted on May 3, 2012 revealed that only 21.3% of retractions were attributable to error. In contrast, 67.4% of retractions were attributable to misconduct"</blockquote>
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by David Springer
Conor
I don’t think they have any choice at this point. They’re far too invested in the consensus story and seeing as how mother nature betrayed them with the hiatus the consensus is all that keeps them safe. Nobody was ever fired for agreeing with a 97% consensus of scientists. There is safety in numbers.
They need a way out that saves face. Lukewarmers like Mosher are offering them a path. They’re nibbling around the edges of it. I’m in it to win it however. Take no prisoners. I want the ugly truth of it all exposed to the disinfecting light of day. What these clowns did to my love of science is simply unpardonable. I’m not blaming all scientists or even a significant number of them though. This is one point I don’t think Partridge gets right. Every scientist isn’t going to get vilified because of a dirty few who broke the rules. Lots of people understand that groups instinctively act to protect other members of the group. I don’t condemn all cops just because most of them are willing to lie to protect a fellow officer. That’s just natural human behavior. Of there are limits to how much of that kind of charity I can muster up but it’s a lot and I don’t think I’m more than average charitable in this regard.
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Comment on IPCC AR5 weakens the case for AGW by John
Re: “AR5: Confidence remains low for long-term (centennial) changes in tropical cyclone activity, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. However, it is virtually certain that the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic has increased since the 1970s.”
NOAA has decadal records of land falling, Category 3-5 hurricanes going back to 1860. There is no trend in the number of these strongest hurricanes making landfall in the US since 1860. The decades of 1890s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s had the largest number of Category 3-5 hurricanes making landfall in the US. See Table 6 in:
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/nws-nhc-6.pdf
So if the AR5 sees an upward trend since 1970, it is cherry picking. Using longer time scales, starting in cooler times, there is no trend. It is a certainty that if there were a downward trend since 1970 in something related to harmfulness in the climate — let’s say a downward trend in drought, or flood, or whatever — but not in a longer time frame, the IPCC would rightly say that you would want to look at the longer time frame. But they do the opposite here.
If they want to make the case that stronger hurricanes are forming in the Atlantic basin because of climate change, they need to explain why hurricanes were stronger in these earlier decades, including the last decade of the 19th C.
(If there is another record of North Atlantic tropical cyclones going back 150 years or so, I don’t know of it, and I can’t see how you could get such a record back in the day on a basis comparable to modern records except in landfalling hurricanes.)
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Comment on IPCC AR5 weakens the case for AGW by John
Josh, regarding cherry picking, in particular in regard to: Re: “AR5: Confidence remains low for long-term (centennial) changes in tropical cyclone activity, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. However, it is virtually certain that the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic has increased since the 1970s.”
NOAA has decadal records of land falling, Category 3-5 hurricanes going back to 1860. There is no trend in the number of these strongest hurricanes making landfall in the US since 1860. The decades of 1890s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s had the largest number of Category 3-5 hurricanes making landfall in the US. See Table 6 in:
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/nws-nhc-6.pdf
So if the AR5 sees an upward trend since 1970, it is cherry picking. Using longer time scales, starting in cooler times, there is no trend. It is a certainty that if there were a downward trend since 1970 in something related to harmfulness in the climate — let’s say a downward trend in drought, or flood, or whatever — but not in a longer time frame, the IPCC would rightly say that you would want to look at the longer time frame. But they do the opposite here.
If they want to make the case that stronger hurricanes are forming in the Atlantic basin because of climate change, they need to explain why hurricanes were stronger in these earlier decades, including the last decade of the 19th C.
(If there is another record of North Atlantic tropical cyclones going back 150 years or so, I don’t know of it, and I can’t see how you could get such a record back in the day on a basis comparable to modern records except in landfalling hurricanes.)
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by Curious George
David Springer says “Clouds adjust for maximum entropy in the dissipative self-organizing system represented by the earth.” Citation, please?
Also It appears to have escaped either your attention or understanding that you have been asked to clarify your reference to Prigogine’s work.
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by Generalissimo Skippy
Geologists? Tectonics?
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by David Springer
Derek H | January 9, 2014 at 2:09 pm | Reply
“Mr. Springer, apparently you don’t read very well. The article he linked to simply announced the publication of the paper and gave the citation. Had you read it, you would have seen (twice) the following citation:”
No I read okay I just relied on experience to save me the time of clicking on something that Willard linked.
Steven Mosher accurately summed it up. Although the article was indeed published in a scientific journal the article published wasn’t science it was satire.
I believe my original point was that scientists don’t get published in the peer reviewed literature using anonymous pseudonyms. I’ll amend that to scientists don’t get scientific research published anonymously in the usual trade rags. I will concede that in one instance a scientist got a piece of satire published in one using a pseudonym.
Happy now?
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by captdallas 0.8 or less
R. Gates, “So, 22C average world temperatures might indeed stress our ability to fee 10 or 12 billion humnas.”
I think the fee part is under control :)
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by Richard Drake
Mosher:
To keep the kimbot from merely repeating itself there is a random infusion of new behavior.
Ah, that’s what I need.
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by maksimovich
<i> I believe my original point was that scientists don’t get published in the peer reviewed literature using anonymous pseudonyms</i>
Bourbaki says you are wrong.
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Comment on The Fundamental Uncertainties of Climate Change by Don Monfort
I am with webby on this one, Micro. I bet you he can use that SEASALT gizmo to duplicate the other temp series to a gnat’s eyela.. No wait. Let’s go with elephant’s trunk. No! No! whale’s belly.
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