This is a continuation of a remarkable thread that has now received 10,000 comments running to well over a million words. Unfortunately its size has become a problem and this is the reason for the move.
The history of the New Statesman thread goes back to December 2007 when Dr David Whitehouse wrote a very influential article for that publication posing the question Has Global Warming Stopped? Later, Mark Lynas, the magazine’s environment correspondent, wrote a furious reply, Has Global Warming Really Stopped?
By the time the New Statesman closed the blogs associated with these articles they had received just over 3000 comments, many from people who had become regular contributors to a wide-ranging discussion of the evidence for anthropogenic climate change, its implications for public policy and the economy. At that stage I provided a new home for the discussion at Harmless Sky.
Comments are now closed on the old thread. If you want to refer to comments there then it is easy to do so by left-clicking on the comment number, selecting ‘Copy Link Location’ and then setting up a link in the normal way.
Here’s to the next 10,000 comments.
Useful links:
Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with 1289 comments.
Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.
The original Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs thread is here with 10,000 comments.
Brute, James P, yes I suppose barbecues are deemed acceptably green, but only when the charcoal is ethically sourced from sustainable forests and organic seasonal vegetables are used instead of meat. As for ice cream though, loaded as it is with obesity-inducing sugar and fat, and coming from GHG-emitting dairy herds – pure evil!
Re car scrappage, as Peter M has said in #481, this is more an attempt to kickstart/rescue the economy (like the bank bailouts, quantitative easing, etc) rather than anything to do with CO2.
On the subject of greenness in general, I find it ironic but true that there is something of value there, once the planet-saving smugness and our old friend CAGW have been removed from the equation.
Some good things that are associated with being green:
* Energy efficiency: LED lights, A-rated boilers, decent insulation, etc. What’s not to like?
* Waste reduction: re-using and repairing stuff: being ingenious. This pre-dates modern greenery, of course.
* Protecting and looking after the natural world. Although we should be under no illusion that we’re doing this for any other reason but our own interests. Nature doesn’t care if elephants, dolphins and pandas go extinct, but I do.
* Self-sufficiency and self-reliance. Again, these pre-date modern greenery.
Anyway, there are probably some more, but it’s late and I’m off to bed. Just one more thing – Brute, I take my hat off to you re maintaining old TV sets (#474). I was proud of my own second-hand early-1990s TV, but you take the prize!
Alex
“A-rated boilers”
You’d think you were on safe ground there, but I’m not so sure. The fact that the government is encouraging us to buy them with a ‘boiler scrappage’ scheme should ring alarm bells, and I know of several that have shown alarming unreliability, especially compared to the old-fashioned, non-electronic, cast-iron variety that often last even longer than Brute’s TV. Like modern cars, modern condensing boilers rely on gas sensors to control their combustion processes, and shut down at the drop of a hat if anything is not quite right. They also have fans to control the airflow (more to go wrong) and because they only work at their stated efficiency when the incoming air is within a limited temperature range, they do not give of their best when most needed, i.e. when it’s really cold outside. To keep costs and weight down, their heat exchangers are mostly aluminium, which has a limited life, although this may not matter too much if it becomes uneconomic to repair before then.
As with old cars, keeping a slightly less efficient version going is still ‘greener’ than scrapping it and replacing with new, especially if that is likely to have a shorter life and fail just when you most need it.
Brute
“The Met Office is promoting outdoor barbecues?”
Not as far as I know! That was really a reference to their rash promise last year of a ‘barbecue summer’, which left them with so much egg on their face that they announced this year that long-range forecasting wasn’t really feasible, especially as they had also forecast a mild winter here (spring only arrived about two days ago).
As for the charcoal, we simply had a garden bonfire and grilled our food on the embers. No unsustainable fuel involved, but an awful lot of CO2!
Brute,
You put the 17.5% VAT (and soon to be even higher? )in the UK down to its inherent socialism. I doubt if it’s so simple. Maybe someone from the UK will fill us in with its history? Didn’t Maggie bring it in at 15%?
In Australia we have it (GST) at 10%. Brought in by the Liberal (really the Conservatives) and opposed by the (socialist) Labour Party.
Having said that, it’s not a bad tax, as taxes go, providing that it stays about the same level. As a business, we claim back all the GST we pay, and charge it on new sales – except on exports. So effectively we pay the difference every quarter.
Manacker,
You say “During the US Bush administration, most of the tax burden was paid by those taxpayers with the highest incomes”
In principle that’s how most tax systems work. However, from the taxman’s point of view, getting the rich to cough up what they are supposed to requires such a large effort with the involvement of lawyers, the courts , uncovering secret accounts in Switzerland (!) and other tax havens, that its often just too difficult. The poor don’t have any money anyway, so that leaves the working and middle classes….
I’m not sure I agree with everything that Michael Hudson says:
http://michael-hudson.com/
But I do have some sympathy for his general line that there is a “class war of finance against labor and industry.”
and that “The wealthy won’t pay their taxes, so labor must do so”
James P, re your #502 you have a point there, actually. Our boiler was quite old when my wife and I moved here 13 years ago and hasn’t failed once. We got a quote for a modern condensing boiler, and would probably qualify for the scrappage scheme, but looking at online reviews for the type they recommended, I was dismayed to find a litany of problems, PCB faults being a very common one.
So we might find ourselves keeping our old one going – more “bangernomics” in action!
Re the link in your #490 (“Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming-related causes by 2012”) this appears to have been written back in 2007. The prophecy now has but 2 years to prove itself – time’s a-ticking!
Peter
On the Hockey Stick thread we are merely duplicating the material cited here ad infinitum so I have replied here to your last graph.
A slow gentle rise (with intervening peaks and troughs) over many hundreds of years, caused naturally, is not the same thing at all as the temperature jumping vertically in recent years ’caused by CO2’as shown in your graph.
The natural cyclical nature of the predominantly cold periods followed by predominantly warm periods is not explained by the Co2 hypothesis.
I am therefore asking you to explain the causes for these shifts, with particular regards to this current centuries old rise (and the MWP and the Roman Optimums and the Holocenes) all of which took place without apparently a rise in Co2.
Some big clue for the sudden upturn you seem to beleve in can be found in the way that global temperatures are calculated. If you were to look at the ‘dying of the thermometers’ and my own site which unravels the individual strands of temperature spaghetti we can see things in much better context.
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/05/the-great-dying-of-thermometers/
great animation from 1701 showing rise and fall of thermometers.
http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/
If you were to read Hansens seminal 1987 paper constructing the 1200kms grid system and see how it is used in practice, the increasing urban bias of the ever changing stations; the tiny UHi allowance made; the measuring of micro climates completely different to the one that was started off with (the apples and oranges syndrome) can be clearly seen.
You might then be able to see just why the notion of a unified global temperature- upon which the hockey stick and its derivatives hang-is flawes.
The individual stations plus observations give us a much better idea of what is going on as we can idfentify the biases individually rather than try to pick them out of a giant pot full of dubious ingredients.
It aslso helps to see our own era in a much wider historic context by looking at the various charts indicating the climate changes over the last 7000 years or so
Tonyb
TonyB,
I’m not sure why you’ve switched to this thread. What’s wrong with ‘hockey stick’ graphs on the ‘hockey stick’ thread?
And as I showed, the CET record agrees very well with Mann’s hockey stick graph and for which many scientific ignoramuses have berated him.
Just try it for yourself if you don’t believe me and post up your own graph. If you aren’t capable of drawing and understanding graphs you should stop wasting other peoples’ time with pseudo-scientific drivel and take up stamp collecting, or something similar, to occupy your retirement time.
Peter
Tony N’s hockey stick thread specifically says;
“If you are commenting here on what Sam has to say then please, please, lets not have yet another discussion of what Michael Mann’s work may or may not tell us about climate over the last millennium. That is not what the article is about. The Hockey Stick saga has far more interesting things to tell us about the relationship between politics, science and belief at the beginning of the 21st century than whether the 1990’s were the warmest decade for a thousand years – if that matters -and that 1998 was the warmest year.”
We were doing precisely what TonyN asked us not to do, hence my suggestion we address the subject on the correct thread.
You always seem to revert to bluster and incivility when you are unable to provide answers and never seem to bother to read the numerous graphs we post, or try to take them out of context.Did you actually read ‘the dying of the thermometers’?
Why don’t you give us YOUR opinion on the validity of the construction of Global temperatures (not Real Climates) and then try to put todays modest gentle warminmg into the context of the last 7000 years of ups and downs, of which the current modest ‘up’ is neither precipitate nor unprecedented.
The spaghetti graphs would be more helpful if they reflected more acurately previous periods of warmth, as today would be seen in its proper context. At present todays values are grossly exaggererated over previous periods although it’s much better than the first attempts.
The world has not violently warmed since around 1900-it is doing what it always does-change.
tonyb
PeterM
The effort “getting the rich to cough up what they are supposed to” (your 505) apparently does not stop the “rich” from paying the largest share of the tax burden (in the USA, at least).
But you are right: it is primarily the middle class that ends up getting squeezed by higher taxes, be these based on income, purchases (VAT or GST) or on “carbon footprint”.
That is why average citizens should fight tooth and nail against any new taxes.
Max
PeterM
On the other thread you wrote to TonyB (69):
Wrong, Peter.
To start off, there are two basic “disagreements”.
The first is in scope: CET does not show the MWP (which Mann tried unsuccessfully to erase from history with his bit of “junk science”); nor does it show the onset of the LIA.
The second basic “disagreement” is in methodology: CET is a record of actual thermometer readings (i.e. empirical data), while Mann (and the copies) are based on cherry-picked and statistically manipulated proxy data from tree rings, spliced onto the latest thermometer record, where the tree-ring data no longer fit the theory, etc. (i.e. bad science).
But you are correct that they do agree in the conclusion that there has been gentle warming (with no apparent acceleration trend) since the mid-19th century.
On this thread you wrote (508):
Peter, not only have “scientific ignoramuses” berated Mann for his phony hockey stick. But serious statisticians have done the same (M+M, Wegman). Even the (IPCC-friendly) NAS begrudgingly stated that his findings prior to 400 years ago are doubtful.
Two questions:
Have you read Andrew Montford’s “The Hockey Stick Illusion”? (If not, you are not completely informed.)
Would you refer to Montford as a “scientific ignoramus”?
Max
Max
You write
“But you are correct that they do agree in the conclusion that there has been gentle warming (with no apparent acceleration trend) since the mid-19th century.”
Correct, as I have frequently said Dr Hansen and Michael Mann merely plug into the end game of the gentle warming (Giss since 1880) that has been apparent for centuries from empirical data. To minimise the MWP or LIA in Dr Manns longer series (now being modified) therefore changes the apparent trend to give the apparent hockey stick shape. Hardly pseudo science (when even Phil Jones specifically agrees that we have got less cold rather than notably warmer)
tonyb
Max and TonyB,
So let me get this straight – you are both agreeing that the ‘blade’ of various hockey stick type graphs, not just Michael Mann’s, isn’t a problem. This part of the graph shows a sharp increase in temperatures from the start of the 20th century.
Its just the flatness of the ‘handle’ that bothers you? A flat handle implies that the MWP may not have been as warm as the late 20th century.
PeterM
You wrote (513) to TonyB and me:
Wrong again, Peter (as far as I am concerned). The “blade” of Mann’s hockey stick is the result of a graft of the recent surface temperature record onto a phony record based on cherry-picked and statistically manipulated bristlecone pine tree ring data, so both the “blade” and the “handle” are a totally meaningless piece of composite bad science, which has been comprehensively discredited.
In addition, Mann’s hockey stick does not show the late 19th century and early 20th century warming cycles (which were statistically indistinguishable from the late 20th century warming cycle he “grafted” on), or the ensuing cooling cycles.
Face it, Peter, it’s a total piece of “junk science”, so there is nothing to “agree” about except that it should be ignored.
The “spaghetti copy hockey sticks” are not much better, so should also be ignored.
There are over 20 studies from all over the world using several different techniques, which show that the MWP was between 0.4C and 3.4C warmer than today. If you wish, I can give you the references.
In addition, there are a lot of historical data, which confirm a MWP warmer than today, as well.
Have you “gotten it straight” now? (It really isn’t that complicated.)
Max
PeterM
Further to 514 (as TonyB has pointed out repeatedly) there is nothing unusual or unprecedented in the late 20th century warming cycle, i.e. it is just one of many observed warming cycles.
No need to believe that “the warmth of the last half century is unusual in at least the previous 1,300 years” (as IPCC erroneously claims in SPM 2007).
No need to create a “hockey stick” to try to negate the observed facts.
Read Montford’s book, and you will see why.
Max
Re the “flat handle” issue, NOAA’s GISP2 ice core data from Greenland would seem to show a crooked handle, and also a descending path. There are some peaks (MWP, Roman, Mycenean warm periods, etc.) but these look as though they are dwindling as they approach the present day.
This doesn’t tell us anything about the veracity (or otherwise) of AGW, of course, but does show a kind of plateau, after the deep freeze of the Younger Dryas, and a definite dip towards the end.
If the pattern were to continue, I wonder if we could expect another slight rise (lower than the MWP), and then a fall below LIA levels.
Peter
I think Dr Mann was on a hiding to nothing because it is very difficult to show a hypothetical concept-global temperatures-in a meaningful form. I doubt if you will look at any of these links, but let us try once again to show you the problems associated with this Global temperature concept.
This is the original article by James Hansen from 1987 where he identified the stations worldwide that he felt could be used in his own dataset that was to start from 1880. Figure 2 sums the numbers up. Essential reading for climate researchers as it puts the GISS datasets into context.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1987/1987_Hansen_Lebedeff.pdf
This link to Joanna gives a number of good animations showing the enormous change in station numbers and their locations since 1701. We are not even comparing apples for oranges these days, and everything is further complicated by the considerable urban bias the Giss database now shows, without any sort of appropriate allowance for this accepted warming influence.
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/05/the-great-dying-of-thermometers/
Here are two links to Warwick Hughes which goes into some of the difficulties in trying to reconcile the individual stations to the melting pot they are all thrown into.
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=317
http://www.warwickhughes.com/cru86/
Warwick Hughes runs an interesting blog-why don’t you ask him some question on what is happening in Australia and New Zealand?
This is my own site which as well as the pre 1850 stations contains a considerable number of climate related articles.
http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/
The available records show a slow gentle warming for centuries but-as noted by Phil Jones-this is caused by the decline of winter severity, not an inordinate increase in summer temperatures.
To create an average of course, temperatures will be changing at different rates in different places, and there are certainly some places where, whilst they may be showing an increase since the 17th Century, they are nowshowing a decline-or are static- over the last thirty years or more.
So I feel sympathy for Dr Mann in trying to portray a difficult concept and as can be seen by the newer spaghetti graphs our graphic capabilities improve all the time.
Tonyb
I see that Mike the Manna man has written, on 15 May, a substantial lead article over at RC about regionality, proxy data, natural cycles and various stuff:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/05/what-we-can-learn-from-studying-the-last-millennium-or-so/
I‘ve only skimmed it, and have not read the 400+ comments yet, but I suspect there could be opportunities for some fun there. For instance, how could regionality not apply to MBH99, and what about winter and nighttime growth rates?
What about the CRC record. Is that OK or is that ‘junk science’ if it agrees with Manns’ blade?
The failure of Spain’s green economy
http://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2010/05/failure-of-spains-green-economy.html
Bank of Spain seizes control of savings bank CajaSur
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bank-of-spain-seizes-savings-bank-cajasur-2010-05-23?siteid=rss&rss=1
So much for your Socialist Utopia Pete……….
Fiscal crises threaten Europe’s generous benefits
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100523/D9FSPCAO1.html
PeterM
[Am resending this with the link separate, since the “spam filter”apparently doesn’t like it.]
You ask (519):
The CRC site starts off
[see link]:
The report makes reference to a study of coral colonies in tropical waters near the Great Barrier Reef going back 237 years and continues:
This makes good sense and does not sound at all like agenda-driven “junk science”.
There is, of course, no attempt to “re-write history” by “erasing” the MWP (as there was in the Mann study).
“0.5C over the past 100 years” (HadCRUT puts it at 0.6C over the 20th century, so that’s close enough).
The report also leaves it open whether the coral changes were caused by natural environmental change, natural variability or human influences.
And, most importantly, Peter, the CRC study has not been comprehensively discredited as has the Mann hockey stick.
Some advice, Peter: let the Mann hockey stick “rest in peace”. It has been buried as a piece of “bad science”, and you only lose credibility by trying to dig it up and validate it.
Max
Brute,
Europe has a more managed form of Capitalism than does the USA. European economies are more mixed than you would be used to in the USA with a larger publicly owned sector. However, even publicly owned industries aren’t immune from the current GFC. The USA, as you’ll know from your own experience, is in crisis too. They didn’t cause the crisis but the ones who’ll have to pay for it, the American working and middle classes are in just as bad a position as their European counterparts. It many ways it is even worse, they just don’t have the same level of political organisation to defend their interests which would include getting out on to the streets if necessary.
Max,
Its not your call to say whether the hockey stick of Mann is correct or not. You and others on this blog have introduced the CET record in an attempt to do so. However, for the period of the record, the fit between the two is excellent! Of course, the further back in time one goes, the harder it is to be able to make the necessary climate reconstructions. There are many such reconstructions all showing a ‘hockey stick’ like shape. The problem that you have is not with the scientific methods used but with the conclusions that have been reached.
Max,
I didn’t get your CET link. Is this it?
There is really nothing in there to support your argument.
PeterM
You just don’t give up on Mann’s hockey stick, do you (523/524)?
No, it’s not “my call” to say the hockey stick was incorrect. It was the “call” of McIntyre and McKitrick, Wegman, John Daly and (reluctantly) the NAS. Read Montford’s “The Hockey Stick Illusion”, and you will see why and how it was discredited.
TonyB is a bit more charitable in concluding that Mann may simply have made errors, due to difficulties in drawing reliable conclusions, using his data series. Montford makes it clear that this was a piece of fraudulent bad science.
The coincidence that it may show partial overlap with other records proves nothing whatsoever. The latter part of Mann’s hockey stick was a piece of the HadCRUT record, grafted onto his proxy record (to “hide the decline”), so it is logical that this part “fits”.
What does not fit is the absence of a warmer MWP and a drop in temperature to a cooler LIA (since the CET does not cover the time periods involved). The CET record does show a 50-year period of warming starting in the late 17th century, which is even greater than the latest 50-year period (yet is much less apparent in Mann’s hockey stick). Refer to my post 37 on the “hockey stick” thread.
The corrected hockey stick shows this period more clearly (and also shows that the MWP was warmer than today).
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/cycles/fig3.htm
Give up on this one, Peter, and move on to something else. You’ve already lost it and you just make yourself look silly by continuing to beat this dead horse.
Max
PS I did not post a “CET link”. I simply downloaded the CET figures and then plotted two 50-year periods (one pre-industrial starting in 1690 and the other covering the most recent 50 years, to demonstrate that there was no statistical difference between the two (with the earlier record showing a slightly higher rate of warming, despite no CO2 increase).