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.”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Rather than descending to insults as you always do when you’re losing the debate, Peter, I suggest you actually answer the simple requests put to you. For example, as Max has just said, provide “the empirical data based on actual physical observations (stage 3) to support this “interesting hypothesis”, if you can”.
Peter
History keeps trying to tell you something, but you simply refuse to listen.
This from 1817
”Mr. Scoresby, a very intelligent young man who commands a whaling vessel from Whitby observed last year that 2000 square leagues (a league is 3 miles) of ice with which the Greenland Seas between the latitudes of 74° and 80°N have been hitherto covered, has in the last two years entirely disappeared. The same person who has never been before able to penetrate to the westward of the Meridian of Greenwich in these latitudes was this year able to proceed to 10°, 30?W where he saw the coast of East Greenland and entertained no doubt of being able to reach the land had not his duty to his employers made it necessary for him to abandon the undertaking.”
This preceded a forty year period of melting that I wrote about in this article
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/20/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice/#more-8688
This from 1922
“The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and, in some places, the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.
Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 m showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while, at many points, well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds,”
This 30 year period is written about here.
http://www.arctic-heats-up.com/chapter_1.html
We can follow these melts right back to the 400 year warming in Greenland 1000 years ago
and the 500 year warming experienced by the Ipiatuk in the Arctic 2000 years ago.
The arctic melts. The earth warms and cools periodically. Its called climate change.
This is my site that identifes some 100 historic temperature data sets back to 1660.
http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/
Look at the information on population and how a ‘global’ temperature is constructed. The only human effect is UHI-80% of the major global temperatures relate to urbanised areas yet neither Hansen or Jones make proper allowance for its effect.
Plenty of articles in the site about uhi.
I’m off skiing tomorrow in Maxs home country. Its perishing cold there.
Tonyb
Alex,
As I’m certain that you already realize, I was teasing.
Glad that you’re back safely.
PeterM
Your last waffle was even more nonsensical than usual.
Are Lindzen, Christy, Spencer, and the hundreds of scientists that have openly stated that they do not support the AGW premise “remnants of the pro-tobacco lobby”?
Please explain.
But don’t let that side-track you from providing the empirical evidence to support your AGW premise, as both Robin and I have requested.
Max
Alex, Reur 8599, in part:
YEP! I don’t know if that mole-theory was set-off or added-to by Steve McIntyre’s suggestion of pangs of conscience in Briffa’s writing, in apparently just one Email, but I think it is a dubious hypothesis. May I suggest that Briffa intelligently saw that it was very dangerous to openly discuss it all in Emails, and he was taking out some “insurance” against potential later exposure. Furthermore, although there was probably coercion on him to bend to the will of Mann et al, and thus to “adjust” his graph in 3AR/2001, he might well still plead coercion upon his need to avoid likely unemployment/ funding loss or whatever.
However, it seems to me, that it is extremely unlikely that his pathetic Yamal sample was anything other than his own choice. Thus, I argue that he is NOT squeaky-clean, but was instead uncomfortable about the risky paper-trail scattered by his colleagues in UEA and PSU etc.
Further my 8605:
Mousing error; I clipped off the following:
It seems more likely to me that a “junior” person having true pangs of conscience within CRU uploaded stuff that was, according to some analysts, specially selected!
Robin Guenier,
In case it drops off the recent comments list, could I please draw your attention to my #10 at the slow moving HS thread:
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=240#comments
Where I seek your assistance as a lawyer and review process expert.
Bob_FJ (8606)
I would be inclined to agree with you that the Climategate leaks were the work of an insider “whistle-blower” (rather than a Russian ex-KGB operator or an extra-terrestial alien).
It just makes more sense.
But, of course, we will have to see what the “inquiry” shows.
Max
GeoffChambers, Reur 8597, in part:
Yep, I largely agree, particularly where some here respond to that QQ person. Me, I prefer to skip across that stuff, both to and from, because it has negligible net value or interest for me.
I’ve found it difficult to avoid real anger with some Moonbat stuff in the past and so have not been there for a long time. Are you suggesting that it is recently more tolerable? Could a post or two from me make any difference? Got any links to there or to any other less silly thread that you recommend that I visit and contribute?
Bob_FJ: I’ll try to find time to look at that item on the other thread. But I’m very busy on other matters & time is a commodity in short supply at present.
TonyB,
Is the same area, 46,000 km and not very much compared to recent losses, of the Greenland Sea more or less ice free now than it was then?
Max and Robin,
We’ve been down this empirical evidence path before. Empirical data means data obtained by observation. We agree, at least we did a few posts ago, that the earth has warmed at the same time that CO2 levels have increased. There is no evidence that the solar flux, or anything else, can have caused it. So it looks like CO2 is the most likely cause.
Then you’ll say something like ‘correlation doesn’t prove causation’. No. You are right. It doesn’t prove it , but you asked for evidence. Not absolute proof. Svensmark knows that better than you guys, which is why is his so keen to try to show his Cosmic rays theory has some credibility.
We can blame all sorts of things on Cosmic rays. No doubt some would have said they were the cause of increased Cancer rates too! Its possible he’s right but unlikely.
So, please don’t keep demanding proof when there can only be evidence. The IPCC have claimed a 90% level of confidence.
What level would satisfy you?
PS I’m a bit disappointed in Max for suggesting that it was ‘my problem’ to suggest a way to show a link between CO2 and warming.
Someone whose primary motivation was to spread a certain line of disinformation might well suggest this, but its the not sort of thing any scientist who was genuinely interested in knowing the answer would ever say.
Max,
You might have included Fred Singer in you list too!
I’m not sure about Christy and Spencer. However, Lindzen is reported to have suggested that “lung cancer is only weakly linked to cigarette smoking”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen
But that’s not too important. Industry sponsored Right wing pressure groups like Heartland won’t use climate scientists on the health and smoking issue. They have a different set of hirelings for that.
I’m surprised they haven’t given up on the tobacco issue but this is what they are still saying:
“The anti-smoking movement is hardly a grassroots phenomenon: It is largely funded by taxpayers and a few major foundations with left-liberal agendas.”
plus ça change !
Peter M
As always you deliberately miss the point and bring up something irrelevant and slightly further off the wall in order to get the respondent to diverge from the point they originally asked you to answer.
You have not provided any observational corroborating evidence that demonstrates the warming over the approximate period between 1975 to about 1998 was caused by a different process to the warming of the early 20th century or to that in the middle of the 19th century.
We all agree that the climate warmed very slightly over these three periods, big deal! But we maintain that all three warming periods had the same natural causes. You on the other hand maintain that CO2 was the driver for the last warming period. To accept your hypothesis I would have expected warming to continue during the last 10 years and I would have expected warming during the period 1945 to 1975.
Not withstanding this I would have expected that CO2 concentrations to have been on an increasing upward curve as fossil fuel use increased but we see a steady state increase irrespective of fuel use which to me raises some questions. That all these questions and many many more exist rather fly’s in the face of the ludicrous 90% confidence statement from the IPCC which is nothing more than a guess from politicians.
So peter as you have kindly been asked, stop talking about smoking, it’s irrelevant, and answer the serious questions you have been asked.
Or is it you are trying to beat some record for NOT answering a question, set no doubt by a politician somewhere.
We’ve been down this path many many times before. You ask me for evidence but when you get it, you complain that it isn’t proof.
No-one can give you absolute incontrovertible proof. I can give you exactly the same evidence that I have in the past, or you can see it, yet again, for yourself in the IPCC reports, and elsewhere, but I know you’ll say it isn’t enough.
So I ask you once again. What will be enough? What percent certainty do you require to be able to agree that governments should act? 10%, 20%, 50%, 70%, 90%?
Would even 99.99999999% be enough?
Brute – I kind of thought you might be teasing. :-) Thanks, the flight was good – it’s about 11 hours direct from Tokyo to London Heathrow, but the time seemed to go quickly. It’s something of a lifeline for us, as my wife is Japanese but we live in the UK. This is one reason why I’m an enemy of anti-aviation groups such as Plane Stupid, who want to stop us all flying (although their own members and sponsors seem to have no undue trouble flying whenever they consider it essential to do so.) The world has been transformed by aviation over the last half century, with families spread out over many different countries and time zones, and going back to a peasant existence where the edge of the world lay just beyond the next valley is just not an option.
Bob, re the ClimateGate mole, I have a relative who works at UEA and in one of the science departments (not CRU) and will ask him if there are rumours going round – spoke to him briefly last month just after the story broke, but he had only about as much information as the rest of us.
Geoff, re the recent Monbiot thread (“expanders” vs “restrainers” or something) I was tempted to jump in with a comment this lunchtime but ploughing through the hundreds of existing comments left me with a reduced will to live and a desire to take a walk in the fresh air instead! MoveAnyMountain seemed to be holding his own, anyway. At the moment I’m focussing my efforts on letter-writing, e.g. to the ASA and soon to MPs.
Re Monbiot again, recall the recent notorious post depicting AGW sceptics as a bunch of over-60s clinging desperately to life and in denial of their mortality? Richard Black has just joined George in the bad psychology stakes – AGW sceptics are now a bunch of men – risk-taking and “dismissive”; we’re just macho and don’t care about the planet! I’m now expecting a slew of thoughtful articles along the lines of AGW sceptics are likely to be criminals/psychopaths/paedophiles, or AGW sceptics have more deluded/unhinged/mentally ill people among their numbers. (Anything but address ClimateGate!) Are there any other undesirable pigeon-holes we could be figuratively shoved into, I wonder?
You ask if “…. there [are] any other undesirable pigeon-holes we could be figuratively shoved into, I wonder? ”
Would you really like an answer to that question?
Hee, Hee, Hee……..
Forecast for Copenhagen
Tuesday December 15 at 11:30 hours
http://www.dmi.dk/eng/index/forecasts/forecast_for_copenhagen.htm
Peter M
You asked
I’d settle for >75%, but we are now at <10%.
This is not only because of some of the “data fiddling” exposed by the Climategate leaks, but also the observed 21st century cooling of 0.1degC, which has been attributed by Met Office to “natural variability” (a.k.a. “natural forcing factors”), more than offsetting all-time record increases in CO2, which should have caused warming of 0.2degC over the same period, according to the models.
Then there are the Spencer et al. and Lindzen and Choi studies (both of which were published after the last IPCC report), which show that empirical data from physical observations do not support the positive feedback assumptions from the model simulations, which form the backbone of the premise that AGW is a serious threat.
Peter, scientifically it does not look too good for the AGW premise right now, despite the political momentum that has been built up by various special-interest groups who support it and are trying to keep it alive at Copenhagen.
Max
Peter M
Your various sidesteps are cute, but Robin and I are still waiting for empirical data to support your premise that AGW, caused principally by human CO2 emissions, is a potential serious threat.
Max
to Alex at #8615
I know what you mean about Guardian threads reducing your will to live. Commenters rarely seem to be interested in the article, and prefer to slag each other off. And this article is a beaut. For those who can’t be bothered or can’t bear to read Monbiot, you should at least know that George, in an article designed to redefine humanity, no less, reveals that his dreams are haunted by giant aurochs.
There’s also a rather a nasty threat half-hidden in this:
“The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers … are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands”.
Any views on how the climate crisis is viewed in Japan?
CLIMATE CHANGE IS NATURAL: 100 REASONS WHY
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/146138
Tempterrain: “Would you really like an answer to that question?” Peter, feel free! I’ve probably missed out several categories; offhand, I can add another two – the business angle (Exxon/Big Oil/astroturfers) and the political (right-wingers/conservatives) but there may be more. I think that what most or all of these categorisations boil down to is a dismissal of AGW scepticism on psychological grounds (a refusal to acknowledge the climate crisis because of fear/pure selfishness/moral indifference/desperation/arrogance.) Good example of this way of thinking here (some interesting phrases in this article – “people who believe in science”, “people who are coming at the issue in good faith”.) The implied problem – scientists reveal the unpalatable and unequivocal truth of catastrophic man-made warming, but we are unable to face this truth, due to our psychological flaws. One solution (according to Kari Norgaard in the Wired article): “Any community organizer knows that if you want people to respond to something, you need to tell them what to do, and make it seem do-able.” In other words, we sceptics are suffering from mental confusion; however, given clear enough instructions on how to tackle climate change, we should eventually fall into line and comply.
Brute, given the forecast, I really hope there won’t be a repeat of Monday’s shambles, with people waiting hours in the freezing cold to get into the conference centre. Priceless irony-laden article here.
Geoff, re Japan, I know that WWF carried out a survey this year which indicated that most Japanese want their government to take “strong climate action”, but an earlier survey carried out by the government itself indicated the opposite. It would be interesting to look at how these separate surveys were worded… My feeling is that, like in Europe, many Japanese pay lip service to “tackling climate change” as a vaguely good thing to be doing, without knowing about the dodgy state of the science, and without much thought as to the implications should the government actually do the carbon-cutting it promises. While I was in Tokyo, the weather was a lot warmer than it is in London right now, but most public buildings had the heat turned way up, with air conditioners going full blast; despite the slow economic growth, there’s still every appearance of a fully modern, energy-intensive civilisation, heavily reliant on fossil fuels, with little sense of any perceived crisis or a need to cut down or conserve. That’s the impression I get, anyway.
Re George, and putting on my psychobabble hat, I think the giant aurochs haunting Monbiot’s dreams is a symbol of his inner caveman – long repressed, like the Shadow in Jungian thought, becoming ever more fed up by the miserabilist posturing of his conscious self. It’s his inner stereotypical denier, threatening to break free! And it’s getting stronger – after all, he has broken his vows and flown across the Atlantic once more. Monbiot’s inner caveman likes the ease of flying, the comfy seats, the stewardesses in their nice uniforms, even the food… He wants more… This “war” he describes – is within himself!
Max, Reur #11, over at the “CRU whitewash?” thread, you wrote;
Yes indeed, MBH99 is listed as amongst the 13 bits of spaghetti in Fig.6.10.b, 2007, although it is an almost invisible pale shadow of what it was in 2001 or as it was clarioned more recently in Gore’s AIT movie. Furthermore, I find it very difficult to trace it in 6.10.b because of the IPCC’s use of nice uniform pastel coloured lines involving overlaps. (that are not delineated, say with enlargements and/or clarifying broken lines in detail views).
However, what is more important I think, is that the (independent?) Swiss Dendro paper; Esper 2002, (but recalibrated by Cook 2004! ….UH?…. see table 6.1), and also the (independent?) multi-proxy Moberg 2005, both show a distinct MWP that is “warmer” than THEIR modern proxy maxima at around 1940. Also, several other pasta squirmings are very different to MBH99, and outside of its therewith unshown declared uncertainty range. Nevertheless, but rather conveniently for the IPCC, the arguably meaningless average overlay of that wide disparity as shown beneath in Fig. 6.10.d is somewhat similar to the original hocky stick. (Erh…. Does that mean they didn’t trust any of the thirteen and that there is a wide margin of error?). Note however that the borehole curve (PS 2004) infers a very strong LIA, which is arguably the simplest yet most obvious very strong contradiction of MBH 99.
There is also a logical argument that the more recent “reconstructions“, twelve of them through to 2006, should carry more weight than the very oldest, that being MBH 1999. (Yep, even the listed JBB 98 should probably be dated 2001 because of it’s stated later recalibration per table 6.1).
An additional indication that MBH 99 was a tad problematical for the IPCC in 2007, was that Mann himself was excluded this time from titled authorship in paleo-chapter 6 of AR4, although his well known UK/USA colleagues; Briffa, Overpeck & Osborn were listed authors. (BTW; given Mann’s apparent ego, I think that may have rather discomforted him, but I strongly doubt that he had no influence on Briffa et al in AR4)
Another curiosity is that in responding to adverse expert review comments to the first and second order drafts, a common reason for IPCC rejection of such comments was that they had limited space available to include them. However, starting on page 466 Chapter 6, is an extraordinarily long treatise that attempted to support MBH 99, despite the contradictions in Fig 6.10.b and elsewhere! Incidentally, Jan Esper, the probably independent (?) Swiss Dendro, objected to this over-long discussion in his expert review comments, where, paraphrasing, he diplomatically suggested that Mann might be described as innovative but little more. However, Esper was ignored.
Among other nonsense in that long allegory, the IPCC referred repeatedly to several Wahl and Amman papers of VERY confusing written date, version, and publication status, that amongst other things, allegedly “reproduced the MBH 99 curves as true”
However, curiously, no W & A curves are included in the spaghetti graph.
I’ve just done a Google to get the latest on W & A and have discovered this astonishingly clear Bishop Hill study in plain language, which is a MUST READ:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
That seems a good point to pause; end of part 1.
Part 2 to follow……
Bob_FJ
The Bishop Hill chronology (Mann et al. Hockey Stick, McIntyre, Wahl and Amman, IPCC) is fascinating.
It explains how the comprehensively discredited MBH hockey stick got resurrected and made it into IPCC AR4 as a key piece of evidence to support the IPCC claim (SPM 2007, p.9):
Looks like Lenin and Goebbels were right about the often-repeated big lie.
Max
I’m a great fan of the Bishop’s and it’s probably fair to credit his Caspar and the Jesus Paper piece with my final conversion to scepticism (Peter M, please note!). If his forthcoming book about the Hockey Stick is half as clear, it should be a good read.
There was a programme on BBC4 (TV, not radio) discussing The Age of Stupid, which I might have missed, except that I noticed Richard Lindzen on the panel. He’s not especially telegenic, but has a pleasant manner and looks learned next to Bob Watson, who was generating a lot more heat than light, as usual (although he didn’t swear again on camera, sadly). Bjorn Lomberg was also on, from Copenhagen (inevitably) but managed to sound reasonable, and Zenaib Badawi hosted it without too much apparent BBC bias (I wonder what was being shouted into her earpiece?).
The programme is here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00pft7c/The_Environment_Debate/
As Brute has pointed out, it’s getting colder in Denmark right now. It just needs someone to turn off the heating… :-)