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.
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10,000 Responses to “Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs.”
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Hey Brute,
I reckon that in reality you envy the Saudi king. Let’s face it, he has a nice beard and stuff, and exclusive access to a personal harem.
Obama, is not totally silly: he may want find out how he could emulate the king.
You are simply jealous right?
Peter Martin, Reur 5588 to Max:
UH?
All:
Iv’e just twigged what Max said earlier about posting a la Guardian. It seems that if you construct a comment in a word processor, (per me MS Works), and then paste it into that site, it greys-out the submit button, making it impossible to post. In order to overcome this, it is necessary to edit the TEXT in some trivial way. Other edits, such as enhancement in bold or blockquote do not resolve the problem. It is necessary to minimally change the text, such as in a spelling correction or addition of article.
Further to my 5599, I’ve just read a report that Bush now earns $150,000 per speech. Not bad for someone unable to speak “coherent sentences”. Mind you, Tony Blair is now the world’s highest-paid public speaker – and recently was paid $580,000 for two half hour speeches. Maybe that’s the difference between coherence and non-coherence.
Hey Pete,
Glad to read that you’re observing Christ’s resurrection/ascension.
I hope you enjoy nice weather, I mean “climate”, during your observance.
Bob,
I’m gonna get away from the Obama, Bush, Brown, Blair thing as Robin (and I’m certain TonyN) suggest…..it really doesn’t benefit the dialogue unless we’re discussing policy as it relates to AGW and I was wrong to point out the inadequacies of Obama’s understanding of diplomatic protocol and his inane rationalization for his foreign policy and domestic policy ineptness on this thread. The guy has zero executive experience…..but we already knew that going in…..so, no surprise that bumbling and failure are standard expectations from him and his administration.
As far as the harem goes…..one woman is enough (for me) to deal with.
As Paul Newman said: “Why go out for hamburger when you can have steak at home?”
Hi Robin,
Reur 5599.
Professor Deming’s article on the silliness of assuming that the “science is settled” on anything as complicated as Earth’s climate is well written and to the point.
Of course, Obama is not a scientist or even a technician, he is a politician. He sees the possibility of levying a trillion dollar carbon tax as a political opportunity of gaining more political power. For him the “science” itself is immaterial, it is simply a means for justifying the end, i.e. obscene amounts of tax-payer money to be shuffled around by his administration.
So Obama can actually be excused for his viewpoint; it is that of a politician.
But back to the “science” question. Deming quotes Socrates. It is indeed, more important to recognize that there are many things we (i.e. current science) do NOT know about what causes our planet’s climate to change than there are things that we do know.
The ignorance of the “mainstream consensus” or IPCC to actually believe that they know what causes our planet to warm or cool, based on less than 30 years of observed temperature change is appalling.
The arrogance of saying “the science is settled” because we now know it all is unbelievably unscientific.
Einstein (who certainly knew better than anyone else that “the science is never settled”) summed it up pretty well when he said, “The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance”.
In the case of those who claim “the science is settled” on our climate, we have both ignorance and arrogance at play.
Max
Hi Robin,
In your 5599 you wrote that it is “worrying” that President Obama “seems not to understand science”.
I’d say that this is much less worrying (after all, he is just a politician) than the fact that his scientific advisor, Holdren also does not understand science.
This is more than worrying; it’s potentially catastrophic..
Max
Max/Barelysane/Bob_FJ: I find it hard to understand why you persist in taking part in the absurd “debate” on the Guardian thread. What is the point in dealing with people whose level of dialogue is to describe Christopher Monckton as “the bed-wetting obsessed peer’? My advice: (to use what I believe is New Yorkers’ idiom) – fuggedaboutit. (Doubtless Brute and/or JZ will correct me on the latter point.)
PS to Max: perhaps Holdren’s excuse is that he’s doing his master’s bidding – i.e. the Nuremberg defence.
Hi Robin,
Of course you are right that it does not make much sense to get into debates with the more emotional and purile AGW-groupies on the Guardian site (of which there appear to be more than a handful). These guys/gals have nothing constructive to offer in the ongoing debate.
Boiluminescence may be an exception, since he/she appears to be rational at times, so it is more interesting to engage in debate with him/her.
But it does provide a glimpse into the psychology and intellect of many of the AGW-supporters one meets on blog sites such as the Guardian.
My observation is that they are usually not too bright, but make up for this by being very aggressive and emotional. They tend to resort to ad homs, name calling, silly inuendos, etc. rather than discussing specific issues (where they often appear to be out of their depth).
As I’ve said before, thank God for Peter on this site. He’s someone with whom one can really debate the issues constructively (and actually learn something in the process).
Regards,
Max
Robin,
Are they still arguing with those two knuckleheads?
Hah, Your interpretation of the New York idiom reminds me of Hugh Grant in the movie Mickey Blue Eyes…..Something not quite right with an Englishman’s pronunciation of a Brooklyn New York phrase.
Choose a typical British phrase and my pronunciation would sound just as odd.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Xu9UcOdj0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgpUf1psloY&feature=related
Brute: your 5611 – brilliant! Thanks.
Brute, Robin
The debate on the Guardian site with one of the more rational AGW-groupies there does point out how these guys debate.
You make the point that IPCC has ignored published reports that do not agree with its party line.
They come back with “this is not true, give me an example”
You show the example that IPCC ignored reports that contradicted its claims of ice mass loss in Antarctica.
They deny that this point is correct.
You show them why your point is correct.
They find technicalities (one report came out after cut-off date) to rationalize why IPCC may have overlooked the report.
You correct their statement on publishing date and remind them of the earlier report that was also ignored and show them that reports that came out even later were not ignored.
They show that the error range of the reports and the IPCC claim overlap slightly, therefore that IPCC agrees with the reports.
You correct them on the error ranges and point out that IPCC says mass loss while the reports say mass gain.
They come back with the publishing date of one of the reports.
You correct them again on this point.
They come back with the flat statement that the conclusion of the reports (net ice gain) really does not disagree with the IPCC claim (net ice loss).
And round and round we go…
But any lurker who reads this exchange can see exactly what is going on here, and that is the only reason I waste my time doing this.
Besides, it’s fun to watch these guys squirm when they are in a corner.
Max
Hi Peter,
Coming back to your 5586 to JZ Smith and myself, you wrote: “You’ve both claimed that Antarctic sea ice is 30% above normal. Suppose I now dispute this with: ‘No it isn’t it’s 10% less than normal’”
You also asked for references.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135
What is “normal”? If you define “normal” as the 1979-2000 mean used by NSIDC as a baseline we have for end March (figures in millions of square km):
Arctic is at 15.16 or 3.7% below the 1979-2000 mean of 15.75
Antarctic is at 4.99 or 15.8% above the 1979-2000 mean of 4.31
Global total is at 20.15 or 0.4% above the 1979-2000 mean of 20.06
So Antarctic sea ice is not “10% less than normal” (as you wrote) but 15.8% above “normal”.
And the global sea ice extent is slightly higher than “normal”.
Just to clear up this point based on the actual reported facts.
(BTW, I’m not sure whether or not NSIDC corrected the Arctic numbers for the 0.5 million sq.km. error they found. It does not appear so, because the reported numbers for December and January are the same as before the error was found.)
Of course, if you add in this “missing” ice, it looks even more positive.
But either way it is clear that the global sea ice extent is above “normal”.
Regards,
Max
U.N. Con on Global Warming Nearly Foiled
Tuesday, March 31, 2009 3:15 PM
By: Philip V. Brennan
The con game is about over. The attempt to portray a life-giving natural gas as a dire threat to this planet is failing rapidly, as well it should.
It is becoming more and more obvious to the American people that carbon dioxide, the very substance that gives life to the world’s plant life, is not a pollutant, as the global-warming hoaxers would have us believe, but a vital element that keeps the earth green and healthy.
This is bad news for the would-be masters of the universe at the United Nations who have been using the supposed threat of global warming to advance their desire to turn the United States of America into a vassal state and its citizenry into its subdued subjects.
If increased atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are not causing the global climate to undergo a dangerous rise in temperatures, the United Nations has lost its strongest weapon in its attempt to assume world hegemony.
Those of us who have been warning about the U.N.’s covert ambition have found an ally in Mother Nature, who has managed to cool things down despite the rapidly increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the past decade. The climate stopped warming around 1998. During the past 10 years, she’s lowered the thermostat to the extent this year is moving rapidly toward the distinction as one of the coldest on record.
In my 1997 series, Behold, The Iceman Cometh, I warned about the U.N.’S attempt to use global warming to achieve its dream of putting the United States in its hip pocket, writing that the U.N.’S Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was setting the stage for the international body’s attempt at world domination.
I wrote that the document, allegedly the result of many years of careful study by some of the world’s top experts on global climate, was a corruption of the original that distorted its meaning and that key parts were omitted deliberately.
I quoted Frederick Seitz, chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, as saying that the report was “not the version that was approved by the contributing scientists listed on the title page.”
“In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process,” he said.
The pet theory of the global warming adherents — that evil mankind is guilty of overheating the climate — was anything but universal among scientists, a fact that was edited out of the report as it was issued, Seitz said.
“No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of climate change] to anthropogenic [human] causes,” he said, adding that this vitally important clarification was removed from the report.
“Nearly all of [the changes] worked to remove hints of the skepticism with which many scientists regard claims that human activities are having a major impact on climate . . . Nothing in the IPCC Rules permits anyone to change a scientific report after it has been accepted by the panel of scientific contributors and the full IPCC.”
Seitz concluded with this withering blast: “IPCC reports are often called the ‘consensus’ view. If they lead to carbon taxes and restraints on economic growth, they will have a major and almost certainly destructive impact on the economies of the world. Whatever the intent was of those who made these significant changes, their effect is to deceive policy makers and the public into believing that the scientific evidence shows human activities are causing global warming.”
This one shocking display of the sheer dishonesty that marks the political drive to impose destructive “carbon taxes and restraints on economic growth” as Seitz put it, should have warned the world that these would-be tyrants riding the wave of the global warming hysteria they have created simply cannot be trusted.
The U.N. is not the only entity that would like to impose monstrous burdens on the shoulder of the American people. The administration’s onerous cap and trade proposal would send income taxes skyrocketing.
Dan Simmons, state affairs director at the Institute for Energy Research, cap-and-trade would create the largest back-door tax in U.S. history.
“In the budget, it said $646 billion. They then are telling people on Capitol Hill that it is going to be $1.3 [trillion] to $1.9 trillion,” he says. “That will make it the largest tax increase of all time of all American history and probably all world history.”
The problem with cap-and-trade is that it makes all people poorer today in order to tackle an alleged problem tomorrow, he says. And the Heritage Foundation’s Ben Lieberman says cap-and-trade would usher us into in a permanent recession.
“We might never really have a full recovery if we have to live with these tremendous constraints on affordable energy use,” he said, “so we would be talking about exactly the kind of thing that we are worried about now — job losses, high energy costs — these things being exacerbated and staying that way for years and years.”
He believes that the EPA may be using the finding to force Congress into passing legislation instead of leaving the regulation to the EPA.
Finally, in its study U.N.’s Global Climate Change Plan Would Cause Economic Earthquake, the Heritage Foundation showed what the U.N.’s plan would do to wreck our economy.
Who was the idiot who once called the United Nations the world’s “last best hope”?
Hi Robin
To Holdren and the Nuremberg excuse.
Let’s look at his biography
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/john-holdren .
John P. Holdren is Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School, as well as Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. He is also the Director of the Woods Hole Research Center and from 2005 to 2008 served as President-Elect, President, and Chair of the Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His work focuses on causes and consequences of global environmental change, analysis of energy technologies and policies, ways to reduce the dangers from nuclear weapons and materials, and the interaction of content and process in science and technology policy.
OK. There’s the Heinz-Kerry connection and the mention of global environmental change, but the bio sounds pretty innocuous.
But looking a bit deeper we find:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=1FDD71E4-B9E4-4FAD-9868-2936193BF8F1
Holdren is a globalist who has endorsed “surrender of sovereignty” to “a comprehensive Planetary Regime” that would control all the world’s resources, direct global redistribution of wealth, oversee the “de-development” of the West, control a World Army and taxation regime, and enforce world population limits. He has castigated the United States as “the meanest of wealthy countries,” written a justification of compulsory abortion for American women, advocated drastically lowering the U.S. standard of living, and left the door open to trying global warming “deniers” for crimes against humanity.
Oops!
How about Holdren’s personal views on anthropogenic global warming?
Holdren advised former Vice President Al Gore on the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, and at the Woods Hole Research Center he put together this AGW for dummies powerpoint show.
http://www.whrc.org/resources/online_publications/warming_earth/index.htm
Ouch!
Why in the world would President Obama pick this guy as his science advisor?
Could it be a setup for the old “bait and switch” (or “give and take”) approach of giving everyone who earns less than $250,000 per year a much-ballyhooed “tax cut”, and then quietly imposing carbon caps which end up levying a huge cost on every man, woman and child, many times higher than the “tax cut” savings, thereby giving his administration hundreds of billions of new taxpayer funds to shuffle around?
That would be sneaky, and politicians do not do such things. Right?
Regards,
Max
Antarctic Sea Ice Up Over 43% Since 1980, Where Is The Media?
Sea ice at Antarctica is up over 43% since 1980 and we hear nothing in the news, yet Arctic ice is down less than 7% and they’re all over it! We’ve been waiting for the main stream media to pick up on the increase of Antarctic ice but so far they’re been totally absent. Guess its doesn’t fit the plan.
Still no sign of the national media on the extraordinary growth of sea ice at the antarctic. They sure haven’t missed a chance to point out the relatively small loss of ice at the arctic. Did did it ever occur to them that perhaps there is a natural process at work that has shifted ice growth from one pole to the other? Do they not want to admit that there are things man doesn’t yet understand about how this planet works?
Remember that some of the “models” predicted increased antarctic ice, but they predicted increased “interior ice” due to increased snow fall. None of the models predicted increased sea ice around the antarctic. Yet that is what we have, and not just a little increase but a 43% increase since 1980!. This is highly significant yet hardly anyone in the main stream media (MSM) is talking about it.
Sea ice is much different than interior ice. Some of the models predicted increased ice over the interior of antarctic. If you’ve ever lived in the extreme cold temperature regions you already understand this. When it gets very cold the air become drier and it snows less, as the temperature warms towards freezing it actually snows more. Since the antarctic rarely even gets close to freezing its understandable that warming would cause more snow fall. Over time compacted snow would lead to more ice. But that is not what is happening here. We’re seeing a dramatic increase in “sea ice”, this ice is over the ocean. Sea ice is caused by colder temperatures, not by increased snow fall. An increase of 43% is highly significant, but we hear nothing from either the MSM or the scientific community. Especially compared to the out 6%-7% decrease at the arctic (this isn’t year over year, this is a 6% decline since 1980!).
Antarctic Sea Ice for March
Extent Concentration
2009 5.0 million sq km 2.9 million sq km
1997 3.8 million sq km 2.2 million sq km
1980 3.5 million sq km 2.0 million sq km
This is an increase of 45% for ice concentration since 1980. This continues a long trend that has been noted here for several months..
Interior ice is also increasing but not due to warming as the models have predicted. According to NOAA GISS data winter temperatures in the antarctic have actually fallen by 1°F since 1957, with the coldest year being 2004. All the while global CO2 levels have gone up and the main stream media has been reporting near catastrophic warming conditions. They regularly show Antarctic sea ice shelves breaking apart, which is an entirely normal process (though they never tell you that part). The main stream media and certain segments of the scientific community truly must have no shame.
If you have doubts about the increase in ice you can run the numbers yourself at the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s website (part of the University of Colorado and funded by the National Science Foundation).
Hi Brute,
No question, your figures are right (just checked them out).
Antarctic sea ice was at 3.54 million sq.km. in March 1980, and is at 4.99 MSK today (41% higher).
Globally (Arctic + Antarctic) were at 19.67 in 1980 versus 20.15 MSK today (2.5% higher).
That’s what the NSIDC data show, but we hear nothing about this from these guys.
Where are the press releases from Mark Serreze?
A “pro-AGW skeptic” might say, “you’ve cherry picked 1980”, but the same is true for over 60% of all the years since 1979.
This should be real good news for those concerned about the survival of the penguins, as well as those who are worried about the global surface albedo effect from the model-projected decrease in sea ice (since the IPCC models were wrong again and the sea ice has actually grown).
Thanks for the good news, Brute.
You can’t imagine how relieved I am.
I’m sure Peter will be pleased, too, when he returns from his Easter vacation.
Regards,
Max
Hi Brute,
Your statistics on global sea ice growth raise a question.
How can this be happening when human CO2 emissions are at an all-time high?
Why are “globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature anomalies” also dropping despite this increased CO2 (and all the pro-AGW manipulation to which they are being subjected)?
As IPCC Chairman Pachauri has said, what are the natural factors that are causing this?
It’s a good question, and one that IPCC should be spending a lot more time on, if they are truly interested in finding out the truth about what causes our climate to change.
What are the true solar forcing factors, which we have observed since the 17th century (not just TSI)? How do PDO, NAO ENSO affect our climate?
If, however, they are not searching for “truth”, but rather for “proof” of their AGW story on climate change, it would be best to ignore what is going on globally, and “cherry-pick” a few things that seem to support AGW.
I’m afraid they will take this route, demonstrating that they are pursuing “agenda driven science” to sell their AGW pitch rather than true scientific inquiry to find the truth about what drives our planet’s climate.
Regards,
Max
Hi Brute,
The UN “ain’t what it used to be”.
With apologies to TonyN, this is an AGW issue, since the whole AGW craze was started by a UN political group, the IPCC.
Set up in 1945 at the end of WWII to be the new hope for eternal peace, the UN has gone through a significant transformation since then.
In April 1945, 50 nations signed the original Charter of the United Nations. Poland was later added and the UN came into existence in October 1945 with 51 member naions. The members were largely the Allied powers from WWII, and the Security Council included China, France, UK, USA and USSR.
Since then all sorts of new nations have joined, and there are currently 192 nations represented.
With the breakdown of the European colonies in Africa and Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, many new ex-colonies joined as sovereign nations.
With the breakdown of the Soviet Union, many new ex-Soviet republics joined in the 1990s.
Switzerland finally broke down after a long internal debate among its citizens, and joined in 2002 (becoming member #190 out of the 192 members today).
Unlike Switzerland or the USA, for example, many of the new member nations do not have a history of democracy. Some are trying to develop democratic forms of government, but all too many are still ruled by tribal strongmen, military juntas or despotic dictators.
As a result, corruption has become endemic in the UN as more “banana republics” have become members.
The UN’s IPCC is attempting to install a UN controlled international system of carbon emission limits with taxes or cap and trade schemes to force the reduction of human CO2 emissions. Some have even proposed that the UN be the overseer of these proposed policy changes.
The UN has no business getting into the position of levying taxes or shuffling large sums of taxpayer money. The record shows that they are incapable of doing this efficiently and besides this is the responsibility of the sovereign nations themselves, not of the UN.
Regards,
Max
Robin Guenier, Reur 6608,(Also Brute‘s 5610):
You wrote in part:
Max beat me to it when he responded in part in his 5613:
That’s my feeling too. I think that the blog gets lots of visitors, and that many can possibly notice that the clique is far from rational or interested in addressing certain facts. For example, I pointed out that Andrew Dessler, an atmospheric physicist, and alarmist, has made some interesting statements of fact that ought to be discussed. Nope….. Typically; nothing scientific discussed!
Max: re your 5616. As was found at Nuremberg, using the “excuse” doesn’t always work.
Max/Brute: in Brute’s 5617 there are two columns of figures headed “Extent Concentration” – e.g. “2009 5.0 million sq km 2.9 million sq km”. Is one (5.00 MSK) extent and the other (2.9 MSK) concentration? If so, what’s the difference? If not, please explain.
Anyway, the media story these days seems to be that it isn’t extent that matters but thickness.
Hi Robin,
Yeah, these NSIDC guys are not very transparent with their data and BTW they can’t measure “thickness”, so when they play this card it’s a ruse, to get the attention off of the growing sea ice.
As to “extent” and “area”, here is what NSIDC states on the individual monthly data sheets that are updated monthly for both “extent” and “area”:
‘Important Note: The “extent” column includes the area near the pole not
imaged by the sensor. It is assumed to be entirely ice covered with at
least 15% concentration. However, the “area” column excludes the area not
imaged by the sensor. This area is 1.19 million square kilometers for SMMR
(from the beginning of the series through June 1987) and 0.31 million
square kilometers for SSM/I (from July 1987 to present). Therefore, there
is a discontinuity in the “area” data values in this file at the June/July
1987 boundary.’
The satellites cannot measure the surface area too near to the North Pole. Apparently the newer satellite can measure a bit closer to the pole than the older one.
The figure used by NSIDC in their monthly reports to express change from the 1979-2000 baseline is “extent”, rather than “area”, so this measure does not have any “discontinuity”.
Hope this clears it up.
Regards,
Max