Comment on Week in review 1/27/12 by David L. Hagen
Comment on Slaying the Greenhouse Dragon. Part IV by Doug Cotton
It’s Governments, not swinging voters, who need to be influenced …
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/29/making-things-matters/#comment-878941
Comment on Assessing climate data record transparency and maturity by incandescentbulb
There is a reason why all Official thermometers thermometers are located at French airports instead of in the French countryside: the ends justify the means.
Comment on Assessing climate data record transparency and maturity by capt. dallas
Joshua, “change with time?” What kind of change would you think? A picture taken now would of course be only one “time”. It would need something from another time to compare. Let’s say a building. When was it built, what was there before it was built. A paved road, when was it paved?
The National Park was just an example of how a photograph can be evidence, Joshua. Do you have an imagination? How might someone use image comparison in problem solving?
You want to teach critical thinking or critical reasoning, what will your students do with what you teach them? Teach critical thinking or solve problems?
Comment on Assessing climate data record transparency and maturity by Herman Alexander Pope
The cost for better documentation of weather stations is a tiny amount compared to the trillions it would cost to reduce CO2. Do it!
Comment on How not to save the planet by steven mosher
bass pond. now you’re talking. I bet over time the fishing licences could repay the cost of construction.
Comment on How not to save the planet by hunter
hastur,
You have explained nothing that has any place outside of religious discussions.
Additionally, you only addressed one of my points.
Comment on How not to save the planet by steven mosher
the question isnt whether or not there is reason to believe.
the question is : is it CERTAIN they are wrong.
that is no chance whatsoever of being right. Or logically impossible for them to be correct, which is the same as logically inconsistent
monkeys could fly out of your butt. highly unlikely, but not impossible.
a married man has zero chance of being a bachelor.
strictly speaking unless you can show the logical contradictions in the IPCC ( and I mean a proof) then there is some chance that truth could fly out of their butts
Comment on How not to save the planet by Jack Hughes
Sustainability means your great-grandparents shivering and hungry in the dark – but leaving you a stockpile of firewood, tripe, and whale oil for your own lantern. And hay for your horse.
Comment on Week in review 1/27/12 by Bruce
Comment on How not to save the planet by John Carpenter
Getting a handle on sensitivity seems to me to be the best way to quantify the effects of higher CO2 levels. It also seems to be a piece of knowledge that has not improved much in the last decade. It also would be the most useful piece of knowledge to know about what should be done… if anything.
Comment on How not to save the planet by huxley
I read the Brooks paper as more grist for the mill that the orthodox climate agenda has failed and that the orthodox have noticed and are seeking to reinvent themselves.
They are backing off from their brute force arguments to fear and authority, which have failed to persuade the public, and are now resorting to more more moderate sounding proposals about uncertainty and sustainability.
However, beyond the recommendation that we continue to keep an eye on climate, I find these Agenda 2.0 proposals to be specious wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing versions of the old fear and authority arguments.
Comment on How not to save the planet by k scott denison
Yes, to know the world’s temperature one needs a teleconnected tree whose growth is proportional to temperature and temperature alone. Gee, where can we find one of those?
Comment on How not to save the planet by k scott denison
Well now that steven has tortured the point and proclaimed there is a non-zero chance of monkeys flying out of someone’s butt (which, by the way, sounds both painful, and entertaining, at least to others), I will agree with Jim and Max.
There is NO chance. Yup, even lower than the chance of monkeys flying out of my butt!
My logical proof involves the many ways in which the IPCC continues to demonstrate the inability to predict anything correctly over any time period, the way they continue to move the goalposts, and the flight patterns of pigs flying in a frozen hell.
In other words, I don’t got one, but doesn’t change my opinion that there is zero chance the IPCC is correct.
Comment on How not to save the planet by Peter Davies
I agree with Omno that adaptability is required for safety but disagree with Anteros that humans are supremely adatable. The Universe as a whole would be in this category and that climate on Earth will prove to be just as adaptable with no human “assistance” needed nor indeed, desirable.
Comment on How not to save the planet by k scott denison
steven – in my book (and Roget’s), resilience and adaptability are interchangeable. So aren’t you arguing for adaption?
Comment on How not to save the planet by k scott denison
Not afraid at all. In fact, I believe there is a very strong consensus among scientist and engineers that there is no place for consensus in science.
Comment on Letter to the dragon slayers by Doug Cotton
The thrust of what I and the “Slayers” are saying could be summarized as follows …
We don’t have to wait for the climate in the next few years to tell us who’s right and who’s wrong. Physics all along has been telling us. The warmists just don’t understand physics.
The most glaring mistake they make is in saying the atmosphere has warmed the surface (like a blanket) from -18C to +15C. The first figure is a theoretical temperature (call it small t) which is only related to the intensity of radiation via the S-B law which only relates to perfect blackbodies. Such blackbodies are usually other bodies in space which are perfectly insulated by space so there is no heat loss by conduction. In contrast the Earth’s surface is continually losing heat to the first millimetre of the atmosphere by diffusion (see Wikipedia “Heat Transfer” second paragraph) and also into the depths of the Earth’s crust or the oceans. So there is less energy left to radiate.
The actual temperature (call it capital T) is a totally different entity without direction for a start. So you cannot just subtract and get T – t = 33 deg.C, because t is not a real temperature. Without carbon dioxide and its colleagues, thermal energy would still diffuse from the surface into the atmosphere, greatly reducing the radiation, as it does. In fact the net radiation from the surface is probably less than 25 W/m^2, so what value of little t would that give you? Very cold I assure you.
This is why an IR thermometer cannot calculate temperature by measuring the intensity of the radiation and using S-B law. It can only do so by measuring the frequency and using Wien’s Displacement Law which says absolute temperature is proportional to the peak frequency.
So, given the major fallacy in the warmists “science” when they calculated and widely promulgated that 33 degree “difference” between apples and oranges, what confidence could we possibly have in any other deductions of theirs? They are also wrong in assuming radiation from a cold atmosphere can warm an already much warmer surface.
The atmosphere cools the Earth by reducing the amount of incident solar radiation which gets through. Hop out of a spacecraft and see how hot you feel in the sun’s rays. But radiation “temperature” is a very different thing from ambient temperature, both in space and, for example, at the top of a high mountain where the Sun’s rays might feel like 40C but the actual temperature of the air might be -15C.
It is important to remember that a measure of radiation is a measure of energy (Watts) transferred through a unit cross section (one square metre) and it is thus a vector with both magnitude and direction, nothing like a temperature. The only “connection” with temperature can be made if a true blackbody is emitting it, and that body is not also losing thermal energy by conduction, diffusion, convection, evaporation or any other means. If it does lose energy in such ways then, at the very least, you would need much more information before making any inferences about its temperature.
Yes, the whole Earth plus atmosphere system looks like a blackbody from outer space and some average radiating temperature could be calculated by remembering that it is a spinning sphere, not a flat disk as warmists treat it as being. But whatever temperature is calculated is merely an average temperature somewhere in the atmosphere.
Comment on How not to save the planet by Jim S
History is sorely lacking in examples where one society “helps” another to their benefit.
Comment on How not to save the planet by capt. dallas
I never could remember all the proper statistical terminology