Open Thread 28

I just finished Ian Enting's book Twisted. Recommended, very useful.
See comment here.

Here's a good laugh!

http://www.climatesceptics.com.au/OurPolicies.html

What morons... Wonder if Cohenite is a member

>Here's a good laugh!
climatesceptics.com.au
What morons... Wonder if Cohenite is a member

Is there something in the Australian air?

re: climatesceptics.com.au
"We oppose the funding of âThe Greenhouse Officeâ and every other Australian Government department and program whose existence is based on the belief that carbon emissions are a pollutant."

Erm, it changes the ph level of the seas, isn't that enough to label it a pollutant?

Here's a good laugh!

http://www.climatesceptics.com.au/OurPolicies.html

What morons... Wonder if Cohenite is a member.

Short answer, [yes](http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/03/introducting-the-climate-scept…).

[According to Tim Lambert](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/05/plimer_and_arctic_warming.php#c…), cohenite is the secretary, and cohenite [did not deny it](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/05/plimer_and_arctic_warming.php#c…) when I pressed him on it. A cursory googling [confirmed it](http://www.agmates.com/blog/2009/03/30/climate-change-sceptics-politica…).

Some of my friends and I had a chuckle about it over dinner last week. It fascinated us that these people are leaving such a concrete trail of material detailing their ideological misinterpretation/misrepresentation of the climatological science.

"Biting" and "bum" are two words that spring to mind...

I've caught a troll still using the "GW stopped in the last 10 years" talking point, although it's now 2009 and the cherrypick doesn't work any more. In fact it now radically overstates the warming trend. Details

NSIDC: Arctic sea ice extent falls below 2007 mark set for June 9. FYI.

William Connolley's betting again this year on sea ice extent. It's somewhat notable that it's dipped below 2007, but it happens to be at a time when 2007's dropping evened out. Also, I vaguely recall 2008 doing that, too. I wish I could find links that compare 2007 to 2008...

Anyways, it wouldn't surprise me if it goes below 2007 (when it counts) and it wouldn't surprise me if it doesn't. I'm looking forward once again to this year's edition of the slowest race!

I would guess that 2009 has a 1 in 3 chance to beat 2007. That is because 2007, 2008 and 2009 are significantly different from earlier years but not from each other, so there is a one chance in three that 2009 will be the minimum of those three.

I've caught a troll still using the "GW stopped in the last 10 years" talking point, although it's now 2009 and the cherrypick doesn't work any more.

It's interesting that they can get away with using 10 years in the talking point because it sounds like an arbitrarily chosen round number but if they use 11 years then it's rather more obvious that it's a cherry pick.

> compare 2007 to 2008...

From: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

bottom of the right sidebar:

NOAA Arctic Report Card 2008: Sea Ice
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/seaice.html

http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/images/essays/seaice/s2.jpg

The annual variation of the extent of the Arctic sea ice cover in 2007 and 2008, relative to past years, is shown in Fig. S2. As explained in Comiso et al. (2008), the 2007 Arctic ice cover was comparable to the 2005 ice cover through mid-June but then began a more precipitous decline. In 2008, the rapid decline did not begin until mid-August.

On another interesting side show,
is it my imagination or is Jan Pompe getting pwned over on Niche Modelling?

Here is a 'fascinating' discussion of something in Miskolczi's 'theory'.

http://landshape.org/enm/the-value-of-tau/

It even appears that Cohenite has given up on Misko.

I debated Jan Pompe and his friends for a long time on landshape.org, but I finally had to give up--I was drowning in the great floods of stupidity. These were people who did not believe the greenhouse effect existed, defending Miskolczi, who believes the greenhouse effect exists. They wouldn't admit there was a discrepancy, either. And, to his not-unexpected discredit, Miskolczi never called them on it, either, despite his hanging out at that blog. And despite carefully working out numerical examples for them, I could not get them to admit that back-radiation from the atmosphere did not violate the second law of thermodynamics. When I said that you could measure it with a device called a pyrgeometer, they disputed that that was what the pyrgeometers were measuring. How do you deal with militant, invincible stupidity like that?

Barton.
I have a quick read of the stupidity and it seemed like someone called Steve Short was vigorously debating Jan Pompe, and basically backed him into a corner.
I agree that they live in a different universe with different physics, but it does look like the penny is starting to drop over there. It's kind of funny.

In case you missed it: Looks like the SPM of the NIPCC finally [found its report](http://www.nipccreport.org/index.html). The "report" was presented to the public during the [3rd ICCC on June 2](http://www.heartland.org/events/WashingtonDC09/proceedings.html) (remember, their second conference was March 8-10 this year). The "880 page book" is available as a PDF file of 868 pages. Of these the pages 739 to 855 (or about 15% of the book) are dedicated to the Oregon Petition (6 pages) and a complete listing of signatories.

RE: sea ice extent. Wow. Immediately after it was noted that it dropped below 2007's line, it flattened out. What a tease!

Just to distract people from climate change for a bit, Michael Fumento has been writing about the swine flu:

http://www.fumento.com/

eeeeeeeeeeeep! And i only looked at the picture.

Jennifer Marohasy has [posted]( http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/06/in-defence-of-%e2%80%98heaven-…):

DON Aitkin, a former member of the Australian Science and Technology Council and Foundation Chairman of the Australian Research Council, wrote to Kurt Lambeck, President of the Australian Academy of Sciences, concerning his public criticism of Ian Plimerâs new book Heaven and Earth. Professor Aitkin waited ten days for a response, and, in its absence, has decided to release his letter more widely.

At the time I read this post, there was no reference to where Aitkin had "decided to release his letter more widely", so I can only assume that Marohasy and the IPA are Aitkin's "more widely". Great forum for disseminating your 'scientific' correspondence, Don.

Aitkin rambles on for an impressive number of paragraphs without actually saying anything that is supported with references or with proof, nor at any time does he address the substantive points of Lambeck's review.

I'll leave the body of Aitkin's guff for those feeling adventurous, but there is one paragraph I can't resist commenting on:

Indeed, the IPCC reports, the last two of which I have read, seem to me very similar, in that respect, to âHeaven and Earthâ. There is abundant use of refereed journal articles, and thatâs fine. The science there described is used for the purposes of the IPCC. And thatâs fine too. We use what others have done for our own purposes. What then distinguishes the 4AR from Heaven and Earth? Ian Plimer uses what he can find to build a case, and so do the IPCC authors. Both think they are right. I canât myself see a difference. [emphasis mine]

I feel the need to clarify something for the old emeritus, whose grip on the IPCC process has [never been firm](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/05/don_aitkin_and_ipcc_history.php):

Ian Plimer misuses what he can find to build a case, and the IPCC authors use the best scientifically-derived evidence. Plimer imagines that he is right, whilst the IPCC carefully determines, using the best available statistical processes, the odds that 'it' is 'right'.

There, much better...

If Aitkin can't "see a difference", it is a sad and a serious indictment indeed of his failing understanding of basic science.

Aitkin was a political scientist, not a real one, and doesn't it show.

Political scientists tend to see beliefs as just attributes of a particular societal groups. Whether the beliefs are scientifically coherent or not seems to be no big deal for these people.

Bernard J,

You are obviously a fully paid up member of the orthodoxy. The IPCC is a politically led organisation with a political agenda. Far from using the best scientifically derived evidence it completely ignores evidence that runs counter to its political objective.

I have to ask if you have ever worked in a large bureaucracy and whether you understand how such organisations operate?

> Dave A posts his usual

The IPCC, being a political organization that vets the scientists' recommendations, thus publishes nothing beyond what every single country was willing to agree on.

The IPCC understates the problem, admitting to only what every single government participating agreed to say.

Meanwhile, inside Senator Fielding's head, the play-offs continue.

The Best Scientific Advice team went down fighting in round one, the debate about climate change.

And now it looks like Best Scientific Advice is going to be smashed by the Wilful Ignorance team again in [round two](http://www.smh.com.au/national/fielding-treated-for-swine-flu-20090623-…), deciding what to do when your sister's got swine flu and quarantined in your home.

Do you still go to work at Parliament House, against medical advice, and risk infecting the nation's leaders and hundreds of others working there?

Or do you do the sensible thing and stay home?

You guessed it.

As with climate change, the Senator's approach is to ignore the science, go with what's convenient at the time, then act too late if it turns out he's wrong.

He's nothing if not consistent.

Can anybody comment on this op ed by Peter Schwerdtfeger?

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25673679-7583,00.html

Can anybody comment on this op ed by Peter Schwerdtfeger?

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25673679-7583,00.html

Connor posts:

Can anybody comment on this op ed by Peter Schwerdtfeger?

Yes. He ignores, or is not aware of, the fact that the global climate models predicted the decline in precipitation in continental interiors without taking the new proposed mechanism into account. That strongly suggests that the latter is not as robust a theory as he thinks it is.

Note, too, that "The Australian" is deeply dedicated to climate science denial and has published pretty much all the famous denialist crackpots.

Someone put a large pile of paper from Leon Ashby, a climate sceptic, into my mailbox.. I glanced through it and chuckled at the inadequacy of his thinking, He is obsessed with the inadequacies one can find in the ETS, but failed to see any motes in his own eye.

I don't care a damn whether the "human responsible global warming model" is right or wrong. I'm not a climate expert and thus have always been open about the whole story.

BUT I am enthusiastically in favour of any plans to stop the production of co2 by the use of fossil fuels. Yes, you are right is saying that a change to renewable energy will lower our standard of living for a while. You pay lip service to our need to change but ignore the thousand reasons why it is necessary - you are obsessional about the ETS.

We have enough oil to last perhaps a hundred years and coal perhaps could last for about 400 years. Then there will be nothing cheap left to burn easily and we will be forced to adopt a sustainable lifestyle. Then there will then be no option.

The present movement towards living with sustainable energy resulting from the experts belief in âHuman caused global warmingâ means that we can soon wean ourselves off burning oil and coal. They are chemical treasure-houses and should never be wasted by burning them. Perhaps our generation could leave some of these treasures for future generations.

I think we are just thoughtless - we couldn't care a damn about our descendants. Oil and coal are valuable. We waste most of their properties by burning them. Our descendants would love to have a share but we are so greedy that we want to take them all and waste them for making energy - which we can have endlessly from the sun, tides, wind and geothermally. Stupid and selfish.

We believe that oil and coal are cheap. They both took millions of years to create - how much should we be valuing a resource if it takes millions of years to produce and can never be replaced? We naively think that the cost of digging them out of the earth is a real cost. Do you believe the costs we pay for coal and oil are realistic? Of course this is nonsense. That trivial cost is what we pretend is their value. This pretending lets us waste them. It also lets us pretend that their use is cheaper than renewable sources of energy. Any child could work out that their use is really a thousand times dearer than renewable energy. You know it is a pretend game and that to conserve these resources is the only sensible course. But we are greedy and of recent years, we learned that greed is good!

I like to think that our species will last for thousands or millions of years. They will need everything we are ripping out of the earth, every mineral, every chemical. But we want them all and we want them now. We have no plans to ensure that we recapture everything we use once - for every chemical and mineral will last for millions of years and all need conserving and recycling. We are just beginning to think of recycling - a momentâs thought makes it obvious that everything must be conserved, regardless of cost. But our greed allows us to argue that it is mostly too expensive because it is often cheaper to dig more from the earth. Yet every gram will be required over and over again by our descendants.

We are not sensible livers - we are plunderers. Our economic system has only money as a value measure. It ignores the intrinsic value of these permanent minerals and chemicals. Our only interest is immediate plunder - how much can we rip up, waste and disperse as quickly as we can with as much immediate profit as possible.

The Club of Rome in the 70's wrote about "Limits to Growth". It tried to look ahead, something we should have learned from them - their logic was inescapable. We should have embraced it and made it a central activity for humankind long into the future. They attempted to show how long resources of the earth would last. Technology improved and quickly made their estimates incorrect. The plunderers then made sure that their imaginative attempt at logical thinking and planning ahead was trivialised, denounced and eliminated so completely that one never hears their name today. Yet these were real and imaginative people who tried to look logically at our failure to look ahead and predict sensible consequences. Bright people today could do much better - and those in fifty years hence will be able to do the same job even better still.

Logic suggests to me that we should be grateful for those finding a reason to stop burning and wasting real resources. It suggests to me that the âclimate scepticsâ are appealing only to our greed and selfishness rather than thinking about the future of our grandchildren. Sadly logic will never overwhelm greed. So please bless the global warmers and the co2 worriers. They have just a chance of moving us to a sustainable lifestyle a hundred years before we would inevitably be forced to. They could make us pay our own way realistically sooner rather than leaving it to our grandhcildren to pay for our greedy profligate living style. Ask again and again, what is the real value of a tonne of coal or oil? Do you really think it is cheaper than renewable energy?

You are right about costs. Changing from coal and oil wasting will be expensive. It will mean thousands of people forced to change jobs. It will take enormous resources to invest in these other forms of energy. Only a fool believes that it wonât be necessary - the only question is when. This moment is history offers us a chance to decide to do it soon. We know it will hurt. We do it now or leave it to our grandchildren. The selfish and greedy ones will leave it to our grandchildren. The proud and independent ones will delight in the challenge.

I suggest that climate sceptics start some real thinking - this time outside the box in which they are locked. Humankind has a real challenge before it and the time is right NOW.

Please feel free to pass this on - it may help others think beyond next the decade.

Cheerily

Glen McBride

> The IPCC is a politically led organisation with a political agenda.

So what IS that political agenda, Ducky?

Or are you wallowing in the pit of slime again?

PS have a look at the board of the IPCC: it's led by scientists.