Who are the climate denialists now?

n recent years anyone daring to question the imminent reality of catastrophic global warming has risked being labelled a denialist with implicit, and sometimes even explicit, reference to holocaust denial as well. Ironically, over the past year in the face of a cooling climate and collapsing scientific credibility, climate alarmists have themselves begun to increasingly express opinions that can only be seen as denialist.

Even though exposure of the Climategate emails and other material from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit was unequivocally a major blow to the credibility of AGW science, warmists reacted by trying to downplay the significance as being only an academic spat with no relevance to the scientific validity of any of the research involved. However, as it became apparent that serious breaches of scientific standards and ethics were involved, basic honesty should have called for a clear condemnation. By opting to attempt to dismiss such serious matters as only trivia, damage to credibility with the public was compounded.

Then, to make a bad situation even worse, investigations that were obvious shams were conducted. Predictably they announced finding nothing of any real concern. Instead of resolving suspicions about a few researchers this only served to widen them to the institutions themselves and even to the government.

At the same time, the Climategate scandal also turned public attention onto various other false or doubtful claims about climate change. The result has been a large increase in mainstream media coverage for climate scepticism and a significant decrease in stories promoting climate alarmism. Unable to effectively refute all of the doubts being presented, the proponents of dangerous warming have responded by ratcheting up the level of proclaimed threats. Without any convincing new data, everything was suddenly claimed to be much worse than previously stated.

For persons purportedly committed to reason and evidence, the response of climate change researchers would be more than a little incongruous. It is however, fully in keeping with the politically correct, postmodern perspective which now dominates in academia. In this view objective truth is only a delusion and basic research a bourgeois elitist indulgence. In environmental research in particular, advancement of basic understanding has been largely abandoned in favour of that having “relevance” to “problems” and only findings which support a politically correct agenda may be publically presented. Even researchers strongly committed to the AGW hypothesis have found themselves viciously attacked for offering opinion or findings not fully in accord with alarmist dogma.

When confronted by reasonable doubts or conflicting evidence, the warmist response has been to refuse debate and to instead proclaim authority, expert consensus and moral virtue while attacking the knowledge, standing and motives of any who question the threat of catastrophic climate change. While this kind of denigration may be an accepted practice in academia, to the broader public it only looks like juvenile schoolyard bullying by adults who haven’t grown up. It certainly has not aided the alarmist cause.

Although the climate change bandwagon may appear to roll on unstoppably regardless of all doubts or discredit, it has in fact suffered a serious loss of momentum in public acceptance. It has lost power and is now only coasting while trying to maintain a face saving facade for those so deeply committed that any graceful retreat is unthinkable.

Worse still from the alarmist perspective, has been the painfully obvious failure of climate itself to cooperate. For the past three years all over the world savagely cold winter weather has repeatedly set new records for snow and low temperatures. Time after time global warming conferences have been greeted by record and near record cold weather. Trying to dismiss this as merely coincidence or just weather, not climate, has lost all credibility; especially after it has happened repeatedly amidst a background of extreme winter conditions over large areas. Continuing to offer this increasingly lame excuse has only made it look more like a lie or delusion than an explanation.

Regardless of the ongoing hype and spin of the diehard proponents of AGW, the attitude of a large majority of the electorate has turned decisively against the idea of any imminent threat. This shift in sentiment is unlikely to reverse anytime soon. It developed over time and involves not just the Climategate emails but a much wider shift in the balance of public awareness as well as a sense of betrayal and dishonesty by researchers claiming certainty and righteousness. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Once a belief is abandoned, few people readily return to something they have decided was false. All the spin and hype is now achieving is to exacerbate the discredit. For supposedly intelligent people, this kind of behaviour does not indicate it.

Meanwhile, as the warmists continue their doomscrying and seeking further hundreds of billions of dollars to carry on their vast charade, the whole economic structure upon which everything depends is teetering on the brink of disaster with little effort to address or to even recognise the very real and present dangers which confront us.

All over the developed world, governments have committed to unfunded liabilities and fostered a proliferation of bureaucracy which their increasingly uncompetitive productive sectors cannot sustain. Most are now running on empty with no credit left, no plan B and no apparent recognition that the path they are on leads only to the edge of a cliff. Read more here.

There is no fact to AGW but just a belief system

The underlying atmospheric physics and chemistry of the greenhouse effect are (easily) experimentally demonstrated facts, and no reputable chemist or physicist I'm aware of disputes them at the level of laboratory demonstration.

These facts fit very well into a theoretical explanation of why the atmosphere ought to be warming, and in turn with the observed warming since 1950.

Anyone is free to claim that the same effects are somehow irrelevant on a planetary atmospheric scale.

But if so, and they wish to be taken seriously by other scientists, they are obliged to explain why.

This is precisely what AGW skeptics have been unable to do, at either the experimental or theoretical level, which is why over the last decade serious skeptical theorizing has turned from the underlying atmospheric physics and chemistry of AGW to the question of additional or contra effects.

That is why I asked you to explain past extreme changes in climate which are known to have happen.

These are many hypothesized causes of past climate change, some relatively well established, and some speculative but quite interesting, for example the Milankovitch Theory that cyclic orbital changes are a major contributor to "ice ages".

But, so what?

None of them make the science of current AGW either more or less plausible - it stands or falls on its own merits.

The fact there there are certainly other causes of climate change which have be active in the past, may be active currently, and will certainly be active in the future is not an "inconvenient" fact to be avoided, it's just a fact, significant for the AGW debate only to the extent that it may (but does not seem to be) significantly complicating understanding of current climate change. After all, it's not as though anyone is claiming that only one factor can be affecting climate at any given time.

Now what about the many warming trends that have been observed on other planets in our Solar System? Are they also just caused by ‘other factors’ that also do not negate your belief that mankind is causing this with our achievements?

Assuming these trends are actually present (currently uncertain) you would have to assume solar luminosity as the only likely common cause - and it's not tracking really well with terrestrial temperature, so at the moment there is little evidence there is a common cause.

As for mankind causing such "achievements" as AGW, just curious: if some "natural" process was causing a similar rapid rise in CO2, would you have the same difficulty accepting that it could cause the observed warming?

Wrong and typical leftist dribble.

It is not up to the skeptics to prove an alternative explanation for why the earth has a climate and why it behaves as it does.

It is the leftist who must back up their absurd claims which AGW greenie leftists do not. The science that they claim is not science and is continually found to be corrupt.

So your claim about being taken seriously actually applies to you and not myself or my claims.

Conservatives and real scientists have given many alternative theories as to what drives the earth’s climate regardless of the BS that you are claiming that they do not.

It is the AGW leftist hacks who are being exposed consistently as being frauds. Yet you believe in them, pathetic.

You also can keep posting your ‘idiot’ question if you want but your claim (and premise that manmade CO2 is causing global warming) is simlpy unfounded and pure propaganda. Of course there are natural causes to the changes in the earth’s climate but as I said these are not being used by leftist propagandists as a means to increas the power of the statist.

You should drop the insult of forming a question based upon pure fascist tactics.

I come from a business, not a government or academic background - for around 20 years I ran a smallish business that ended up competing successfully with F500 sized players in a high-tech industry.

In that time the business evolved through 3 generations of technology - essentially we were in three different businesses, one after the other.

One reason we were successfully was that we were veryconcerned about the possibility of emergent, disruptive technologies; I was constantly asking myself, "What is the worst case challenge we face? What can happen that will change everything>, and render what we know and what we do so obsolescent that the only thing of value we possess is the ability to change along with our customers needs?

Because the experience of watching our industry, and our competitors, made it clear that if we were unable to adapt to revolutionary change as a matter of course, we would quickly go extinct.

To me, the likelihood that we are experiencing accelerating AGW is one such possibility - because if there is even a 10% chance (and that increasingly seems on the low side to me) that we are going to have to make massive changes in technology, we absolutely have to hedge our bets against the possibility - because if we do not, we will find ourselves at a fatal competitive disadvantage relative to those who do.

IMO, in that situation, the "conservative" thing to do is to make damn sure that you are a leader in identifying such potential changes, a leader in understanding what must be done to adapt to change on this scale, and a leader implementing methods of doing it.

And from this perspective it's not really important whether a move off our current level of dependence on carbon based energy is considered desirable by Al Gore or not - what matters is that we understand as quickly as possible the likely scale of climate change in this century (identification), evaluate the cost/benefits of our options to deal with it (understanding) and then developing the technologies and deployment strategies to do so (implementation).

And to do that, you have to go where the evidence leads you, and extrapolate from there, no matter how disruptive the implications. Because if you try to resist these kinds of forces, you will be displaced.

From where I sit, it looks there is a real chance that we are going to be subjected to this sort of disruption, and this terrifies many people.

An economy where carbon based energy sources are the source of choice only for subset of requirements (for example, aircraft fuel) where there is no other practical alternative?

Change on that scale? Impossible! Unthinkable!

But change on that scale happens - all the time. (The change from the agricultural economy of 1894 to the industrial economy of 1944. The change from American Corporation of 1945 to the Multinational Corporation of 1995 - there are many such examples).

And this is the reason some of the smartest people I know - all from a business, not a government or academic background, and mostly conservative politically - are investing heavily in various types types of "alternative" energy - not because of some sort of "grennie" desire to re-engineer society in some "leftest" image, but because they appreciate the possibility that the technological imperatives imposed by AWG a are going to re-engineer them right off the economic map otherwise.

And this is the reason some of the smartest people I know - all from a business, not a government or academic background, and mostly conservative politically - are investing heavily in various types types of "alternative" energy - not because of some sort of "grennie" desire to re-engineer society in some "leftest" image, but because they appreciate the possibility that the technological imperatives imposed by AWG a are going to re-engineer them right off the economic map otherwise.

The real agenda begins to reveal itself.

Which leads us to the subsidies. No global warming, no subsidies for "conservative businessmen". Nobody in their right mind would go anywhere near wind, solar, or ethanol without them. And given that all propped up, nonviable business models eventually fail anyway, you have to wonder about the smarts (not to mention the ethics) of those that operating in phony businesses and ventures just to suck at the taxpayer teat.

You claim to be well versed in principles of chemistry and physics, but haven't grasped the fact that the energy just isn't there in so-called green energy? It's pure fantasy with no grounding whatsoever in reality, or the physics you are so fond of.

Wind is a bad joke that contributes nothing whatsoever to the power grid. I've worked the algorithms that need to account for the fact that wind mills can't be counted on. You will find no knowledgeable EE that has anything good to say about wind generated electricity. The mandates to include rusting hulks of garbage in the power grid is a burden and expense to every organization forced to do so. Solar? Please. Ethanol is nothing more than a fraud perpetrated by large agribusiness and farm state pols. What does that leave in the green energy quiver, other than nuclear? Algae? Get back to us on that one.

BTW: There is nothing conservative about GE business types engaging in rent seeking. They are shysters and thrives, not "businessmen".

Has the absurdity of embracing a crackpot, apocalyptic theory for fear that your competitors are doing so, and you don't want them to get too far down the road to oblivion without you, occurred to you?

"It's all about scale. If you park your car in the garage, close the door, and start up your 5 liter V8, you have cause for concern. If, on the other hand, you fire up your Testers one cylinder model air plane engine, the urgency of the situation is different, isn't it? If you could invent little engines two molecules across, you could conceivably run millions of them safely in the garage indefinitely. What physics says about the dangers of combustion and CO in enclosed spaces just wouldn't apply. The poison is all about the dose "

The casually "apparent" magnitude of a lot of physical processes is a very misleading guide to their actual effect.

For instance based on everyday "common sense" experience of physical processes, it's patently absurd that one pound of something (U235) contains around a 1000x as much energy content (as fuel) as one ton of something else (coal) - and in fact even "explosives experts" (most famously, Admiral William Leahy) raised such common "sense objections" to the possibility of creating a fission weapon.

There area a lot of such examples, for instance many catalytic processes require amounts of catalysts which are "obviously" far too small to create the observed catalytic effect.

This sort of "common sense" mis-perception is especially prevalent when the components of a process and/or the process itself are literally invisible, as is of the case with many gases.

To take your example, it may not see "intuitively" reasonable that invisible CO at 35 parts-per-million (PPM) can produce physiological effects resulting primary from cellular oxygen starvation when oxygen is present in the inhaled atmosphere at 209,500 PPM - that's an increase of only around 1 PPM CO to 6,000 PPM O!

Never the less, climical experience clearly demonstrates that this "insignificant" increase can have profound clinical effects, and once you once you understand the underlying chemistry and biology (CO binding to hemoglobin, myoglobin and mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase, and brain lipid peroxidation), the process not only becomes plausible, it's clearly inevitable.

The greenhouse effect is a similar case, on a "common sense" basis it may seem unlikely that an increase of around 100 PPM in atmospheric CO2 could produce measurable changes in global atmospheric temperature, but once you understand the underlying physics and chemistry (which has been understood in general outline for at lesat 150 years) you are hard pressed (as are AGW skeptics) to explain why there should not be such an effect.

The AP submitted two data sets to the statisticians:

The last 130 years of long term temperature surface temperature anomaly data (don’t know it it was through 2009 or included part of 2010) from the NOAA series:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.html

And the last thirty years of satellite data (don’t know it it was through 2009 or included part of 2010) from the MSU and AMSU series:

http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#intro

Descriptions of the the date collection and processing details (as well as the raw data) is available at each of these sites.

it turned out that the true analogy was about 4 additional gallons in an Olympic-sized pool. This still doesn't sound like much. But what if, instead of more water, we were adding 4 gallons of ink to an Olympic-sized pool. It might have a very noticeable effect.

Yup. From a "common sense" approach, I can see why people disposed to skepticism about AGW can be thinking "How can puny little humans have this effect of climate", unfortunately, this sort of analysis can be misleading, as your example demonstrates.

Mort generally, almost every discussion of AGW demonstrates a number of more general "logical" mistakes, for example "Climate scientists can't explain everything that has happened in the past, so they are clearly incapable of explaining anything that is happening in the present".

If you want to participate in such discussions, it just comes with the territory.

Errr.... so what is the dependent variable?

I'm unclear about what you are asking.

The statistical analysis as not about experimental design, is was about the the statistical significance of a data set deliberately stripped of any identification of its source or other context.

The question asked was:

"Does this data display a statistically significant trend?".

The answer was no, it does not.

Dependent (or for that matter, independent or control) variables do not enter into this analysis in any way.

My original comment was a quote from the article:

It pretty much depends on when you start," wrote John Christy, the Alabama atmospheric scientist who collects the satellite data that skeptics use. He said in an e-mail that looking back 31 years, temperatures have gone up nearly three-quarters of a degree Fahrenheit (four-tenths of a degree Celsius). The last dozen years have been flat, and temperatures over the last eight years have declined a bit, he wrote.

This confirms the long-contended typical point of the non-warmists which is that we have far too little information to make dire predictions. As part of that, the typical non-warmists emphasizes that depending where you start, you can make a case for cooling as easily as warming.

This quote FROM THE ARTICLE confirms there is a decline over the last 8 years.

You don't like the term independent variable and of course that depends what type of statistical model is being used to ID a trend. So I'll rephrase. "What measurements were the statisticians asked to evaluate?" Was it temp data or proxies or a mix? Sea temps? Averages of observations from various levels in the atmosphere? how are the observations weighted? The whole excercise could well be pure silliness apart from answers to these questions.

"This quote FROM THE ARTICLE confirms there is a decline over the last 8 years."

The quote confirms that John Christy thinks there has been a decline, the point of the cited article is that four statisticians independently arrived at the conclusion that based on the data commonly cited by those who believe that these has been recent cooling trend, the same data contains no statistically significant evidence of such a change.

So I'll rephrase. "What measurements were the statisticians asked to evaluate?" Was it temp data or proxies or a mix? Sea temps? Averages of observations from various levels in the atmosphere? how are the observations weighted? The whole exercise could well be pure silliness apart from answers to these questions.

In a post above, I provided links to the data sets and extensive information regarding their sources, the processing techniques applied to them, and (where available, which it is, in most cases) the raw data.

Worth noting: If the believers in a recent cooling trend referenced in the article didn't think the data as meaningful, they would not be citing it in support of their opinion.

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More generally, if you wish to understand the current status of dissenting views in this area of climate science, a good place to start is by following the history of the recent McShane and Wyner paper in the Annals of Applied Statistics.

Their publication, and the responses it has elicited, are a good illustration of how things actually work in climate science:

1) Contrary to what many skeptics believe, if you are doing serious, high quality work which suggests that a current "consensus" position (in this case, statistical techniques of paeloclimate reconstruction) is flawed, you will have not have problems getting your work published in serious, high quality journals.

2) Not only will you get published, but you will receive public support for your efforts from your peers. For example many of the respondents critical of some aspect(s) McShane and Wyners' paper make a point of noting in their own papers that MW is serious and useful contribution to discussion of paleo reconstructions - the climate science community is going out of it's way to make the point that serious dissent is welcome.

3) If anything, the editors of scientific journals are becoming more careful to ensure that the authors of "contrarian" papers get a fair hearing - and in general they have become increasingly aware of the scrutiny the review process - for both the original papers and the responses - will receive. (See for example the editorial by Journal editor Michael Stein that accompanied the publication of MW).

Much of the politically motivated "blogshpere" on both the left and right is still way behind the curve in it's ability to analyze the significance of contributions like the MW paper.

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