If you are going to criticize a guy for what he believes, you ought to at least describe his argument and what’s wrong with it rather than pontificate from above the fray. Why on earth should I take your word for it?
Comment on The case for blunders by pottereaton
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Comment on The case for blunders by Jim D
Hoyle is a parallel to today’s AGW skeptics. He never believed in the Big Bang (despite being credited with coining the term). He had a steady state theory that he kept developing as an antithesis to overwhelming Big Bang evidence, even after the microwave background was discovered that he couldn’t explain and called just a fog. This is like natural variation ideas currently being promoted as an antithesis to CO2-caused warming. The resistance to the CO2 explanation parallels Hoyle’s resistance to the Big Bang. He was credited with some major advances in stellar physics, but his wrongheaded outspokenness tragically overshadows all that in his legacy.
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Comment on The case for blunders by Simon S
Surely the problem is that there is a great paucity of ‘historic climate data’. Direct readings are facts. Anything derived from e.g. ice composition or tree ring widths is not a fact: it depends on the accuracy of the derivation and whether the derivation is actually physically correct.
Climate facts – ppm of CO2, temperature, precipitation…not many direct readings.
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Comment on The case for blunders by RobertInAz
The fact verses theory discussion cuts to the heart of my skepticism of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). For 20 years I have been watching alarmists treat theories as facts. And now they are having to modify their “facts” to come close to fitting the data.
AR 5 seems to do a decent job of separating the two.
So far, the facts are few and offer little of concern. The theories are many and some are worrisome.
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Comment on The case for blunders by Rud Istvan
Even facts come with a certain amount of uncertainty. The values of G (gravitational constant) and e (charge of the electron) evolved after Cavendish and Milliken first measured them. But even the first measurements were ‘good enough’ to be useful in physics.
Climate facts carry more uncertainty if for no other reason than spacial averaging. Some are probably now good enough, like satellite estimates of temperature and radiation balance. Others aren’t, like paleoproxies. Model outputs are not facts, they are embodiments of theories. And increasingly being proven wrong by growing certainty about facts.
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Comment on Worst case scenario versus fat tail by philjourdan
Since none have been so far, and 1/7 have already elapsed, the odds are diminishing.
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Comment on Worst case scenario versus fat tail by Bart R
climatereason | April 21, 2014 at 11:36 am |
Threats don’t much interest me. My money interests me. What is mine interests me. I have a share in the rivalrous, excludable, administrable, scarce CO2E-absorbing resource of my nation’s air. It turns out, that resource is quite valuable, worth two and a half times the entire fossil fuel industry. Well, I want my split of that, as air is an unalienable private resource: just try to stop breathing, and see how long you last without it.
Shaun Lovejoy has shown to 99% confidence that AGW is caused by CO2E emissions. That’s 99 bullets in 100 chambers, and we don’t know what’s in the 100th chamber, aimed directly at my wallet.
Catastrophe? The arguments for that take up less than one percent of the IPCC reports. The arguments for damage to my wallet take up many times that space. Why do you ignore my wallet, and focus only on your dying grandchildren?
What are your grandchildren’s lives to me, when my wallet is harmed — and even Tol agrees — more by AGW than by mitigation, in the long run?
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Comment on The case for blunders by Jim Cripwell
catweazel, you write “Stop making stuff up.”
I wish. Sorry, this is a blog where our hostess, thankfully, hardly censors anything. So people like Steven Mosher, lolwot, John Carpenter, R. Gates, FOMD and here, Bart R. are going to go on writing this sort of stuff. I get the impression that they feel if they write these sorts of things over and over again, somehow they are going, by magic, to become facts. Of course, they wont.
I am learning that in many cases it is better to ignore this sort of ignorance, than to comment on it, and give it more prominence.
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Comment on The case for blunders by lolwot
We could get into a discussion on the matter of GISTEMP adjustments and criticisms thereof, but it would be easier to just summarize it as:
James Hansen: Competent with data
Jo Nova: Incompetent with data
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Comment on The case for blunders by lolwot
“Roughly two-thirds of the total anthropogenic greenhouse forcing came from CO2.”
Lets not guess with “roughly” etc.
As I said if you go and take a look at the greenhouse gas data and check out the forcings you will find emission pathway was not business as usual. The CFC and methane drops took a huge bite out of that.
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Comment on The case for blunders by Steven Mosher
Tom,
They still dont get it.
I would have expected some of them to argue that wrong science can be as harmful as bad war decisions.
Or I would have expected Dyson to be smart enough to make a stronger argument. Something like, as long as science has no effect on policy then science blunders are less worse than blunders in war.
But he doesnt make that argument. He is pretending that science blunders dont have consequences outside of science.
Or is he is simply naive. Science doesnt exist in a vacuum. Bad theories have consequences because people will use science to achieve their political ends. Dyson wishes for a time when one could just have bad theories and its no big deal. This is a concept of scientist as someone who does not live in the world.. the idea that ideas can be value free, that they are somehow free actors above politics or should be.
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Comment on The case for blunders by sunshinehours1
lolwot, 2004 is not recent. It was 10 years ago.
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Comment on The case for blunders by Steven Mosher
Sorry JJ you still dont get it.
When Dyson quotes somebody else to make his argument for him, when he takes those words and takes no exception to those, when he makes no caveat, he accepts that statement and all it implies.
Scientists are human. As such they cannot live without having beliefs.
Doubt is a tool of science it is not the goal of science.
To do great science you must have a belief, espouse a theory.
Dyson agrees that skeptics are not doing great science.
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Comment on The case for blunders by lolwot
do scientists then need to consider the political ramifications of what they publish?
Would this extend to a consideration of how journalists (*cough* david rose) may report what they publish in a blundery way?
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Comment on The case for blunders by Bart R
Faustino | April 22, 2014 at 4:17 am |
Why make it about whether the wrong response was wrongly responded to Brandon or to me?
Who cares _who_ you are saying incorrect things to on an open forum?
Why should exchanges about Science be so peppered with ad personam where it serves no function.
I can see the purpose of using names to link exchanges by topic as names are easier to recognize and associate with past comments, make the thread more humanly readable in what is, after all, an absurdly ill-formatted blog comment apparatus, but to entirely ignore what one has said or read and only talk about whom one has labelled for it seems pointless.
It seems not coherent.
It seems not cogent.
It is a bad model.
At best, communication of complex and advanced ideas is always difficult. The ideas in FJ Dyson’s writings are generally in this range. That he instead of clarifying what his writing attacks people spitefully and maliciously to obtain disapproval of them from his audience does nothing except elicit subscription to himself — not his claims — on invalid bases where his writing does this. And his writing does this frequently.
Note, my claims are “his writing”, not “him”. My comments are on his behaviors, not his character. I personally might be perfectly sure he personally is a nice guy with a great personality. However, we’re giving an exchange of ideas, not an exchange of personality.
So while Vice President Mosher earlier alludes to Science always having been personal, and he is correct insofar as scientists have always been miserable, insulting trolls especially toward the people in the world most like them in character, bespeaking self-loathing or daddy issues or whatever it is psychology speaks of in such circumstances, Science has always striven and been at its best where it simplifies what it says to the world of pure ideas and pure observation of phenomena, not of the people who harbor the ideas or make the observations; Science has been more improved where it has shown more parsimony of taking exception to the smelly breath or warty complexions or squeaky voices of the technicians who practice it; Science has been more universal in the universe of accuracy and truth where it doesn’t nitpick the nose hairs of its neighbors.
FJ Dyson’s writing isn’t Science when it focuses so nearly exclusively on ad hom, and has been so focused for a long, long time.
I’m all for a world where we strip off names entirely from discourses in Science, replace them with anonymous labels, and simply reject from any exchange any commentary on identifiable people at all. I know this idea would have support from those writings which lately supported the pulling of the Lew psychology paper about online denialism for exactly that reason.
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Comment on The case for blunders by sunshinehours1
lolwot, the question is,
Why has the post-1945 warming rate been lower than the pre-1945 warming rate considering that 1945 is when man-made CO2 really started to climb.
I’ve seen some poor excuses, but no explanation that has any validity.
Surely if CO2 was an an important GHG the warming rate would be higher after 1945 by a significant amount.
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Comment on The case for blunders by lolwot
1944 was not recent either.
The point is that the modern warming is faster and a large magnitude than the early 20th century warming.
This is what both HadCRUT4 and GISTEMP show and BEST has confirmed the good accuracy of these records.
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Comment on The case for blunders by lolwot
One other stat to think about:
In the last 100 years,
The last 11 years has the lowest sunspot activity
The last 11 years has the highest global temperature
The last 11 years has the highest CO2 level
So what fits better, CO2 or the Sun?
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Comment on The case for blunders by Steven Mosher
rather than just admit that he pulled newtons tables out of his ass
Bart doubles down.
and
“The details of how Newton laid the groundwork for British naval dominance are really not pertinent. Quibbling over the trivia of a dead empire doesn’t do anything for us now. In particular, as the topic is blunders, and by no means could the British be accused of failure of Science in the advancement of their maritime prowess.”
Look at Bart. He brings up the wrong example to prove dyson wrong.
he makes up military history and attributes success to Newton when the topic is blunders. And then when people with knowledge of military history and weapons show up ( I love the army of davids) Bart walks away.
Jesus Christ. Hey Bart, you see up stream where I admit that I misremembered the bits about training? see that? that is called
admitting ones limitations. George knows better.
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Comment on The case for blunders by Eunice
Don’t need to rely on Hansen or Nova to understand the erroneous Hansen forecasts.
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