Mar 172008

THIS PAGE HAS BEEN ACTIVATED AS THE NEW STATESMAN BLOG IS NOW CLOSED FOR COMMENTS

At 10am this morning, the New Statesman finally closed the Mark Lynas thread on their website after 1715 comments had been added over a period of five months. I don’t know whether this constitutes any kind of a record, but gratitude is certainly due to the editor of of the New Statesman for hosting the discussion so patiently and also for publishing articles from Dr David Whitehouse and Mark Lynas that have created so much interest.

This page is now live, and anyone who would like to continue the discussion here is welcome to do so. I have copied the most recent contributions at the New Statesman as the first comment for the sake of convenience. If you want to refer back to either of the original threads, then you can find them here:

Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with all 1289 comments.

Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.

Welcome to Harmless Sky, and happy blogging.

(Click the ‘comments’ link below if the input box does not appear)

 

10,000 Responses to “Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs.”

  1. Peter 3999

    I dont know which of my posts you are referring to but I did not mention disputed levels of co2 in my last two posts, so please stop sidestepping and refer to my 3982 and 3997.

    These asked you to confirm your understanding of how meaningful certain data is, and in particular global temperatures.

    I would like your understanding as to how they have been constructed since 1850. I am saying the information often came from a tiny number of stations and is so inconsistent as to be of little value. It is certainly not reliable enough to base an extremely expensive and life changing hypotheses on.

    I am waiting for your reply so it can be judged as to how scientific your belief in this data is.

    TonyB

  2. Hi Peter,

    You called my attention to different rates of temperature change over land and at sea, so I have looked at the record more closely. Below is a graph comparing the overall Hadley land and sea temperature record from 1850 to 2008.
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3262/3244585543_e86bbe6fa5_b.jpg

    The Hadley land and sea temperature record shows us that the “land” values (air temperature measured near the surface) had much greater inter-annual swings and also a 45% higher overall rate of warming over the entire time period as compared to the “sea” values (water temperature at the surface). “Land” temperature increased by 0.87C and “sea” temperature by 0.60C, with an averaged “land and sea” temperature increase of 0.65C over the 150+ year record.

    If we ignore the impact of the observed UHI distortion (which affects only the land portion), and assume that the entire difference is real, rather than just an artifact, we can make some observations.

    The seawater of the upper ocean has a specific heat per unit mass that is four times as large as that of the atmosphere. In addition its mass is significantly higher, so that its overall heat capacity is many times as high. This greater heat sink results in a “more sluggish” rate of diurnal, seasonal or inter-annual temperature change.

    This explains why northern hemisphere seawater temperatures at temperate latitudes in early September are usually warmer than those in early July, despite normally lower air temperatures. Over an even shorter time period it explains why air temperature fluctuates from day to night more rapidly than seawater temperature.

    You pointed out that over the shorter-term period 1970-2000 the land temperature rose more quickly than the sea temperature. The short-term graph below confirms your statement: Land temperature rose at a rate 2.5 times as fast as sea temperature (for the reasons cited above). The measured linear land temperature increase was 0.8C and the sea temperature increase was 0.32C over the period.
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3525/3247684987_0d26f889fa_b.jpg

    The same lag can be seen if we look at the even shorter-term period 2001-2008. Here we see that land temperature cooled at a rate 2.5 times faster than the sea temperature, with a measured cooling on land of –0.26C and at sea of –0.10C over the period.

    It is interesting to note that both the land and sea cooled from 2001-2008, in other words, there was no “delayed” inter-annual ocean warming attempting to find “equilibrium” that continued over several years once the land temperature began cooling. The sea just reacted a bit more “sluggishly” due to the much higher heat capacity.

    Hope this info is helpful.

    Regards,

    Max

    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3262/3244585543_e86bbe6fa5_b.jpg

    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3525/3247684987_0d26f889fa_b.jpg

  3. Hi Peter,

    You wrote (to TonyB and me): “I suppose that you two will be arguing that there is no consensus on CO2 levels next.
    The consensus is that it rose naturally to 280ppmv during the early millenia of the current interglacial period and has risen smoothly in the past 150 years to the current level of 384 ppmv.
    All this talk of spikes in the CO2 record is just so much BS espoused by crackpots. (incidentally, that is Max’s word for it).”

    Consensus?

    Apparently there are a few people out there that question this so-called “consensus” (or we wouldn’t be talking about it).

    There certainly is no “unanimous consensus” (as Beck’s studies show).

    Is there a “general consensus” among IPCC contributors and supporters of the AGW hypothesis? This is very likely, although I have seen no survey results.

    Is there a broad “majority consensus” among historians or experts on analytical measurement of atmospheric trace gases? Who knows? TonyB may be in a better position to answer this question.

    Beck’s work has shown that there are several pre-Mauna Loa CO2 readings that are slightly higher than those of today and significantly higher than your “consensus” “pre-industrial” number of 280 ppm.

    He points out that the Callendar/Keeling record threw out many points of data that did not fit the desired outcome and were rejected as “outliers”.

    Unlike IPCC, which claims that the 200-year record from Vostok ice cores is a “global” record, Beck does not make such a questionable claim. He states that they are local measurements made at a specific point in time.

    Beck also points out that readings from locations other than Mauna Loa give different CO2 values today (before they are adjusted and “massaged” to agree), raising the question of how “global” the Mauna Loa record truly is.

    I have not taken a stand on Beck’s studies.

    Yes, there probably are “crackpots” out there on both sides of the overall AGW debate, but I certainly would not “close my mind” and simply write Beck’s postulations off as coming from a “crackpot”, just because they do not agree with Callendar/Keeling or IPCC. Would you?

    Regards,

    Max

  4. Yes, Robin Guenier you are wrong. This is the press release from the same joint statement:

    http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf

    G8 nations have been responsible for much of the past greenhouse gas emissions.

    There may be individulas such as Lindzen who may agree, or pretend they do to qualify for their $10k Exxonmobil ‘bonus’, with some of the nonsense which is written on this website. Dissenting individuals don’t break the consensus. That’s not what it means.

    If you are claiming that the Chinese, Russian or Indian academies support the denialist line, let’s see some references to back that up.

  5. Hi Peter,

    Pardon me for cutting in, but you just wrote to Robin, “Dissenting individuals don’t break the consensus”.

    You’re wrong here, Peter.

    That is EXACTLY what breaks the consensus, i.e. rationally skeptical individuals who question the scientific validity of the ”consensus” and find and expose the errors, omissions and weaknesses in the “consensus” view.

    And if you look about you a bit, Peter, you’ll see that that is what is causing the so-called “consensus” view to start crumbling today.

    Regards,

    Max

  6. Hi Peter,

    Back to your point to Robin that there are no Chinese, Russian or Indian academics “that support the denialist line”, I would recommend you read what Yuri Izrael, head of the Russian Institute of Global Climate and Ecology and past vice chaiman of IPCC has written.
    http://cecaust.com.au/main.asp?sub=releases&id=2007_04_23_1.html

    “I think the panic over global warming is totally unjustified. There is no serious threat to the climate.”

    “There is no need to dramatise the anthropogenic impact, because the climate has always been subject to change under Nature’s influence, even when humanity did not even exist.”

    Izrael does not dismiss that there are changes in climate going on, but writes that “we are more threatened by the cold than by global warming”, given that the present interglacial period has lasted beyond the normal interglacial periods of 10,000 years, which separate the 100,000-year periods of glaciation.

    Regards,

    Max

  7. Brute Reur 3981, you pondered the imponderable, in part with:

    “…Peter has failed to bring any facts to the table that would compel any Realist to support his crusade… …Waste of time?”

    I really don’t know if it is a waste of time debating with Pete, but maybe some explanations are held for why we do it, in those two great educational movies; “The meaning of Life” and “Life of Brian”.

    Mountaineers go to great trouble to climb great mountains…. Because they are there, or what?

    Some fundamentalist Christians insist, (for example), that the Grand Canyon was carved out during Noah’s great flood about 4,000 years ago, despite overwhelming evidence that it is millions of years old. (I’m bemused by Pete’s somewhat similar devotion to dogma)

    Some people want to do “waste of time” activities like breaking world speed records on land or water.

    My challenge here, when I’m in the right mood, is to try and educate Pete in some elementary matters of science and non-science, (without fee), in which he makes some quite laughable statements.

    I also admire him for his resilience, and I think of the sport at funfairs, where one can be entertained by hurling a ball at say a “clown’s head”, and win a prize for knocking it over, only to see it pop-up again later. Amazing stuff!

  8. Hi Peter,

    Further to your philosophical discussion with Brute on Darwinism versus environmental awareness (3999), let me add my thoughts.

    Humans (homo sapiens sapiens) evolved in Africa from ancestral primates over a period of a few million years. This mammal became the “king of the evolutionary jungle”, not because of its speed or its brawn, but because of its brain. This Darwinian selection process has been called “the survival of the fittest”.

    Along the way, humans caused several extinctions of much larger and more powerful species.

    Notable among these were the mammoths in North America. Unlike in Africa, where elephants and other large mammals had been exposed to humans and their ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years and had figured out how to avoid them, the North American mammoths had not seen humans before, when they arrived 10,000 to 20,000 years ago over the Bering Strait. As a result, they were killed off fairly quickly.

    Eliminating a source of food by over-hunting is not a very good survival strategy, but it was all a part of the survival of the fittest.

    Tigers are a good example of an “endangered species” today. These do not represent a source of food for humans, so they have no “inherent value” for us (except for a few Asian lovers of “tiger balm”). In fact, humans have been a source of food for tigers, so they represent a threat to us instead.

    In a book on endangered species (pp. 1494-95) we read the following excerpts:
    http://books.google.com/books?id=wFdWlrnz_uoC&pg=PA1494&lpg=PA1494&dq=historical+human+deaths+from+tigers+in+Singapore&source=web&ots=ysOpuSLDZO&sig=Z2SiV3briKYARxHXj7wMyGU9gdQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA1495,M1

    “Tigers are probably responsible for more human deaths than any other wild mammal. In India during the early 1900s, some 1,000 human deaths were attributed annually to these ferocious hunters. While extensive settlement was taking place in the 1840s, some 1,000 people were killed annually on Singapore and nearby islands.”

    “In the Kheri district of India’s Utar Pradesh state”…”170 people were killed by tigers from 1978 to 1982.”

    “As the human population of India and other Asian countries continues to grow at a staggering pace, the conservation of animals has become less of a priority”.

    “Because of this, Project Tiger – a very successful conservation operation – is now struggling.”

    So humans, with their large brains, managed to outsmart, out-reproduce and outlive all large wild animals, killing off not only those that represented a danger to them (like tigers), but also those they needed as a food supply (mammoths), moving on to new locations until there were none left.

    Modern humans have developed the ability to reason, and with it a sense of ethics, of “right and wrong”: a conscience. With this came an awareness of our “environment” and a sense of responsibility for not allowing other species go extinct if we can help them avoid it. This sense of responsibility for other species and for our “environment” represents a basic difference between humans and other animals that do not have this.

    Of course this sense of responsibility is felt more strongly for other (especially “cuddly”) mammals, beautiful birds, etc. than it is for less attractive species, such as Rattus rattus, the black rat or Anopheles, the malaria mosquito (neither of which is an endangered species today, despite human efforts to eradicate them).

    It runs contrary to the basic “survival of the fittest” strategy that helped humans become the real “king of the jungle” in those portions of our planet that are habitable for us.

    But I think all the posters on this site will agree that awareness of the environment and respect for other species is a very good thing, as long as it is not driven by “guilt” or “fear”.

    Regards,

    Max

  9. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/29/obama-cranks-up-white-hou_n_162127.html

    “We can’t drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times, whether we’re living in the desert or we’re living in the tundra, and then just expect every other country is going to say OK, you know, you guys go ahead keep on using 25 percent of the world’s energy, even though you only account for 3 percent of the population, and we’ll be fine. Don’t worry about us. That’s not leadership.” ~~ Barack Obama

    Obama Cranks Up White House Thermostat: “You Could Grow Orchids In There”

    Huffington Post | Dave Burdick | January 29, 2009 08:40

    Uh oh.
    Hey, remember all that fuss about how Obama was bucking tradition by not wearing his suit jacket in the Oval Office? And how it was going to be much more casual in there? Well, there’s this other side to it: energy waste.
    The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

    “He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.”

    Sure, but didn’t he spend some time in Chicago? And don’t they make their politicians go through some kind of rigorous acclimation training to get used to the cold? Why, just look at these Chicago politician stock photos I’ve found:

    In any case, I think Obama wears a suit better than most politicians. Keep the jacket on, I say, and the thermostat down around 68.

  10. Max,

    A consensus is general or widespread agreement among all the members of a group. It’s not the same thing as unananimity.

    Neither is it a simple majority. 51% wouldn’t imply a consensus. I’m not sure if it is possible to define a consensus in terms of an actual percentage but I’d say that it would have to be around 80% or 90% minimum.

    When there is a widespread agreement, in the scientific community, that a particular theory is correct, it is accepted into what might be termed ‘orthodoxy’. Like the Darwinian theory of evolution, Quantum mechanics, Relativatity etc. That’s not to say that there is unamanimous agreement on all of these. There isn’t, but they are part of the consensus and unless compelling new evidence comes to light its not generally considered good science to continually argue against it.

    It has to be that way. Otherwise science would get bogged down with endless disagreements and would never be able to move on.

  11. I’m certainly happy that Einstein didn’t goosestep along with the “consensus”.

  12. Hi Peter,

    In your 4008 you write, “a consensus is general or widespread agreement among all the members of a group. It’s not the same thing as unanimity.”

    Merriam-Webster tells me that “consensus” means
    1a: general agreement: UNANIMITY (caps by Merriam-Webster, not me)
    1b: the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned

    There certainly is no UNANIMITY on potentially disastrous anthropogenic global warming among climate scientists, as I’m sure you will agree.

    Is this the “judgment arrived at by most of those concerned”?

    How many true experts in climate science truly think that AGW is a potentially threatening problem for mankind?

    Is this a large percentage of all climate scientists? How large is this percentage?

    You wrote, “51% wouldn’t imply a consensus. I’m not sure if it is possible to define a consensus in terms of an actual percentage but I’d say that it would have to be around 80% or 90% minimum.”

    Fair enough. Do you have any real evidence showing that there is truly a minimum of “80% or 90%” of climate scientists that agree with the notion of potentially disastrous anthropogenic global warming?

    If so, please provide this evidence, listing names of all those scientists that support this postulation plus all those that do not support it, showing arithmetically that those that do support it represent “80% or 90%” of the total.

    If you cannot provide this information, your statement of “80% or 90%” support is unsubstantiated and can be discarded as either a figment of your imagination or a “statement of faith”.

    Get specific, Peter, rather than just regurgitating unsubstantiated claims.

    Regards,

    Max

  13. Peter #4008

    You said

    “There isn’t, but they are part of the consensus and unless compelling new evidence comes to light its not generally considered good science to continually argue against it.

    It has to be that way. Otherwise science would get bogged down with endless disagreements and would never be able to move on.”

    I would remind you of the motto of the Royal Society;

    ‘Nobodys word is final’
    surely unless people question things, science can’t move on?

    Look forward to your scientific reply re Global temperatures and GT to 1850.

    TonyB

  14. Speaking of science; Several weeks ago I posted a report that the Antarctic was warming (the data went around the world) and expressed my scepticism that heaven forbid there might be some further background.

    The current CA debate on this

    http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5054#comment-323917

    is summed up in comment 126 by Ross

    it seems that data from a different station was used (the only one that showed warming in the region) then spliced into another dataset. Sounds familiar? Yes, the same contributor as crafted the Hockey stick-Dr Mann. Interesting to see how the claim by StEve Mcintyre develops

    TonyB

  15. Sorry-my 4012 escaped before editing-should be comment 16

    TonyB

  16. Two thoughts for you , Peter:

    1. Had Darwin been obliged to accept the consensus of his time and to accept what, as you put it, “might be termed ‘orthodoxy’”, he would have been unable to promulgate the theory of evolution.

    2. As I have pointed out, when a leading institution such as the Royal Society refers to the so-called consensus, it allows itself sufficient wriggle room to logically change its position if the orthodoxy changes. And that’s what happens to scientific orthodoxies: they change.

    In the meantime, remember again why it’s so important for these institutions to toe the line – that way, Peter, leads to money and preferment. As I said above, your reliance on the position of the scientific academies is these days of limited worth. There’s no need to rely on conspiracy theories to understand what is happening.

  17. After all this interesting discussion about how science develops, it may be healthy to get back to the hard world of international politics. It’s reported from India that R K Pachauri (“Nobel laureate” and IPCC chairman), referring to this year’s Copenhagen Conference (the Kyoto successor) and “the need for a strict regulatory regime on emissions”, has said

    Of course, the developing countries will be exempted from any such restrictions but the developed countries will certainly have to cut down on emission … some strict regulations are going to be there.

    First, what business is it of the chairman of the IPCC (supposed to be policy neutral) to make such a statement? But, far more significant, if he’s right – and, given his senior position in all this, he probably is – that would seem to destroy any prospect of an agreement at Copenhagen given the failure of the recent EU and international interim conferences at Brussels and Poznan. Without developing country inclusion, the prospects of the developed countries agreeing to binding emission controls would seem to be close to nil.

  18. When he addressed the Senate last week, Al Gore said

    We must face up to this urgent and unprecedented threat to the existence of our civilisation … This is the most serious challenge the world has ever faced … [It] could completely end human civilisation, and it is rushing at us with such speed and force.

    So, if Copenhagen fails (as seems likely – see 4017) what happens then? Peter?

  19. When President Obama spoke about reducing dependence on fossil fuels in both his inauguration speech and the statement that he made on energy a week or so later, he was careful to emphasise energy security rather than AGW.

    At the moment, energy security is portrayed as a concern primarily of the US and the EU, but of course it must be of equal importance for the Chinese, given the rate at which their economy has been growing, And for China, this means coal; they have an awful lot of it.

    http://energytribune.org/articles.cfm?aid=1257

    It would seem unrealistic to expect them to sign up to any measures that would restrict or regulate free use of this recourse at any time in the foreseeable future.

  20. Robin and Brute,

    Unfortunately science isn’t as democratic as you might have wished it to be in the 19th century and the 1930’s.

    Darwin would have received some opposition from the scientists of his day but mainly it came from the Church. As far as the scientific consensus was, and still is, concerned, they don’t count.

    Neither does it count what individual stormtroppers may or may not have thought of Einstein’s theories in 1930’s Germany.

    It doesn’t really count what we think either about AGW as far the scientific consensus is concerned. It isn’t done by vote, there’s no real procedure for deciding who has and has not got a say. You may well think the process to be unsatisfactory but the only way I can describe it is that ‘it just sort of happens’.

    Max,

    Naomi Oreskes has addressed the question of the percentage of support for AGW being a serious problem in

    http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

    http://www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/documents/Chapter4.pdf

  21. Peter: so Darwin received “some opposition from the scientists of his day”. Oh dear – have a look at the facts. He deferred publication until 1859 (when a letter from Alfred Wallace forced his hand) partly because he was so worried by the likely criticism – particularly from his professors of natural science at Cambridge and even from his friends and colleagues, such as Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker. And that concern was justified: much of scientific establishment of the day, not just the Church, was horrified when he did eventually publish. One distinguished critic, for example, was Richard Owen, described as “an extraordinarily clever scientist … the leading comparative anatomist of his day”; Owen was a ferocious opponent of Darwin. Even Lyell, who came to support The Origin of Species, never fully accepted natural selection as the basis of evolution. To claim that all this doesn’t count is foolish nonsense. Differences such as that between Darwin and Lyell are the essence of science.

    A footnote: Owen (see above) was the founder of the National History Museum in London and his statue, which has had pride of place there, has just been removed in favour of one of Darwin.

  22. Robin,

    I really don’t know where you have got all this about Darwin’s fellow scientists being horrified. True Darwin did delay publication but more because he was something of a perfectionist and didn’t want to leave any loose ends.

    The letter from Wallace, which you mention, demonstrated to Darwin that he wasn’t the only one to entertain similar ideas and that he couldn’t afford to delay indefinitely.

    You don’t mention the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wlberforce. He was Darwins main contemporary critic and argued not from a scientific but a religious viewpoint.

    Darwin’s ideas didn’t go unchallenged but neither was he nor his arguments dismissed. His ideas were well accepted during his lifetime. Afterwards, he received a state funeral and was buried in Westminster Abbey. You can’t get much more accepted by the scientific establishment than that!

  23. Owen, unlike Darwin, had to earn a living. He did so as an academic (Uni. of London, I think) and at a time when the clergy still had considerable influence in universities, including appointments, agreeing publicly with Darwin would have been more than his job was worth. There is evidence that he was prepared to accept that Darwin was right, but only in private. Remind you of anything?

    There are many possible explanations for Darwin’s delay in publishing, one of which concerns his wife’s strongly held religious beliefs. It seems to have been a particularly close and happy marriage.

    References, A N Wilson: The Victorians, and Bill Bryson: A Brief History of Nearly Everything.

  24. Peter: just have a quiet look at the facts, they’re readily available. Darwin encountered a good deal of opposition, criticism and uncertainty from the scientific establishment (orthodoxy if you prefer) of his day. Some were horrified – others more constructively critical. Some were dismissive – others not. In other words, he encountered a range of views, including strong support. I ignored Wilberforce and other religious critics precisely because, as you say, they argued from a religious, not a scientific, viewpoint. Therefore, they are irrelevant to this discussion.

    Yes, he had been fully accepted by the scientific establishment by the time of his death thirty one years after he published The Origin. And quite right too!

  25. Peter,

    You’ve really stepped in this one. Both Einstein and Darwin were considered “skeptics” in their time……both went against the “consensus” and were ostracized for it.

    Darwin would have received some opposition from the scientists of his day but mainly it came from the Church.

    Right, and “the Church” was “the consensus” at the time, (primarily because they funded the “consensus”) as the Church of AGW does now. So, was the “consensus” correct in this case? I believe that you would flatly say no.

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