Debate with Monckton

I'd hoped to get some work done tomorrow, but I suppose I could just do as the denialists think we scientists do and make up some data, thus allowing me to watch the debate (sarcasm).

Long time reader, never posted before, Tim. I just wanted to wish you all the best tomorrow. I'll definitely watch the SMH feed.

I am so appalled by the way that the climate debate has turned in recent months in Australia. It also really disturbs me that some experts in the field have declined to take the fight right up to these deniers. I understand that they feel that giving oxygen to the likes of Monckton is counter-productive, but doing so has the effect of letting the general public think that he and his ilk have the scientists running scared. I admire and respect your determination.

Cheers,

Margaret

Seriously, I'll be frantically collecting data. Is there going to be a recording somewhere I'll be able to access?

Good luck. Hope you expose some of his delusions.

Thanks to the pesky timezones, I won't be able to watch it live. Will it be available to watch afterwards?

Anyway, all the best. I can perfectly understand why some people feel debating him is a waste of oxygen, but someone needs to knock him off his perch. Just don't let teh stoopid get to you; regardless of everything else, scientific fact is on your side and none of his bluster will ever change that.

Good luck Tim. I assume the 12:30 start is Sydney time. If my geographic calculations are accurate that means it will be 6:30 Thursday here in Wisconsin.

Enjoy the boos - it is World Climate Entertainment and you're the bad guy - play up to the crowd and have fun:) At the end of the day if you do lose - well heck you're only a computer scientist what would they expect;)

I think it would be interesting to come up with questions that Monckton might ask Tim.

From what I've seen, one on mitigation is a shoe-in. He'll ask something like: "How do you know that Kyoto will result in significantly reduced warming? Prove it."

I'd also expect one on SwiftHack.

Who can say what he'll ask? Any self-respecting denialist will always have a selection of misdirecting questions ready to go, things like "how accurate have climate model projections been since 2000?" or "how can you prove that CO2 is the sole cause of recent warming?". I wouldn't expect a pro like his lordship to be any different.

Personally, my favourite tack when faced with this is rather than to go defensive on behalf of the science, I simply answer the question and explain why it is irrelevant. Then I point out that in asking such a stupid question, they're betraying the fact that they don't actually understand what they're talking about. The instant you say "you'd know this if you'd actually read the IPCC report", they tend to go very quiet.

> The instant you say "you'd know this if you'd actually read the IPCC report", they tend to go very quiet.

Not Monckton. Monckton is more likely to say he has, and that he's checked the math and found it to be wrong.

At which point it descends into he said/she said, with Monckton with the crowd bias on his side from the outset, and the advantage of not actually needing to be right, just needing to spread doubt.

Hell, even if he's *wrong* he can just spin it as bravely seeking truth and asking the questions no-one dares to ask.

Excellent on the live feed...can someone tell me if I'm correct that this is Thursday, 8:30pm US eastern?

I suspect Tim already has a short list of questions for Monckton. But I think it would be smart to dress them up with a bunch of reminders that Monckton is put forward as an 'expert' who disagrees with the consensus -- but he is not an expert, he's just an ideologue who disagrees with any consensus that supports government intervention. That's all the other side has, and it would be wise to be able to list a bunch of them in rapid succession. Also I think it would be wise to include in the questions a bunch of Monckton's misstatements/overstatements/lies -- to show a pattern (eg. use Monckton's incorrect statements regarding Littlemore's boss in their debate [it's important that he get caught in the ad hom and being incorrect]). It's best to do it during the lead up to the question.

In answering questions I don't think Tim should try to explain the science very much. Point to references like James suggests. It's not Tim's job to explain climate change. It's Tim's job to show that Monckton is a jerk who tells falsehoods intentionally or unintentionally -- whatever it takes to support his preconceived notions.

Give em' hell.

Remember: he likely is going to use certain tactics to distract and dissemble. You need to point this out and state you are going to respond to the issue, not the distraction. And the issue is _____, not _____.

Keep on track and you'll wipe the floor with him. Focus. He doesn't have a chance if you remember not to fall for his tactics. Fish in a barrel if you focus. Go git 'em.

Best,

D

Going second is good, because you can use the time to show how Monckton has been wrong without him having much of a comeback.

Eli kind of likes starting with the House of Lords symbol, morphing into the Nobel Prize claim because you can use them to show how Monckton is deceptive in everything....How can you trust someone who misleads you on even such simple things

Tim, not sure what you're planning for your presentation, but I think it might be effective to find some way of fitting in Jim Prall's lists of top climate scientists:

http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/climate_authors_table.html

For example, you could start by just listing the top Australians (Pep Canadell, #111, Ann Henderson-Sellers, #122, Roger Francey, #204, Paul Fraser, #232, etc...), then generously expand to include the English, then everybody. Where are the so-called skeptics on this list?

Similarly a list of organizations who have stated their position on the matter: National Science Academy of Australia, FASTS, Geological Society of Australia, AMOS, Australian Coral Reef Society, Australian Medical Association, Engineers Australia - plus all those organizations in essentially every other country in the world...

If you find that approach useful, the focus of the challenge to Monckton could simply be why he feels he is right and all those people are wrong?

Tim,

If you haven't seen it already, try watching the debate between Monbiot anan Plimer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPenmY5kYcc

Of course, such a debate is possible only if the moderator is well informed.

good luck.

$30 at the door. Who gets the proceeds? Munchkin? I bloody hope not! Tim, that goes for you too :)

Hopefully the proceeds are going to charity....

Sorry of if the money issue has been addressed elsewhere.

If Munchkin is getting money, that is something to raise with the audience. Who to believe, moi, or that guy over there getting paid to spout BS.

One thought: have a dedicated URL (a tinyurl or something comparably short, something easy to write down or remember).

Mention that you'll put followup material solely for this event at that link, and do so, even if it's pointers to here.

Something you'll moderate that they can't rush out and overwhelm with crap while you're still leaving the building.

haha. good luck with that. i think u may have bitten off more than u can chew. i shall watch with a scientific impartiality.

I'd agree with petwer's comment Tim. The days of the Carbon Religion are numbered, and it seems that another nail is being driven into the coffin almost daily. If AR4 wasn't so loaded with non peer-reviewed rubbish it might have survived. I, fortunately, have had a longstanding distrust for the fascism which has been creeping into every aspect of the global economy (including science) for years now, so it wasn't too difficult for me to let go of my equally longstanding belief in any significant AGW effect. I wish you luck anyway.

Mark S said: ...can someone tell me if I'm correct that this is Thursday, 8:30pm US eastern?

That's what I make it.

Someone in a state of denial will be crushed. It won't be Monckton. Should be fun to watch.

Monkton is at least as well qualified to debate Mann-made Global Warming as Al Gore. I also see that the science content on this blog site is just as thin as in IPCC AR4. Luckily for all of us, an AR5 now seems highly unlikely.

I can't help liking Monckton! The Truth is that Climate Science HAS been corrupted by Advocacy & Politics. Both sides need to clean up their act. There will be no political will for major action on CO2 now, so lets get real and concentrate on what we can do!

1. Buy up large bio-corridors to allow habitats to move with climate change (whatever the cause it will happen, and we can't stop it - so give wildlife the chance to move.) This is urgently needed!

2. Go Nuclear - That will reduce emissions without (a) destoying our jobs or (b) reducing our living standards. Anything else is foolish. You'll never reduce emissions without nuclear power. Go ask the French. We can't afford to wait 20 years! It is time for the environmental movement to adopt nuclear power & QUICKLY!

But if all you want to do is moan, chant, rave & do nothing about CO2, feel free to continue, but it will not save the planet.

Aaah, denialist trolls everywhere I see. Their bravado is comical and suggests that they are actually concerned and trying to cover up their angst with bluster and intimidation.

Lord Munchkin is going to try and lie his way though another talk/debate. Nothing new there. Sooner or later though he will trip up badly, either with a scientist or even better, the law.

I love how the term "denier" is used. It's like people can't even be open to the idea that someone has a different opinion. I've watched most of Monktons debates he is always logical and never runs from showing where he gets his info from, unlike others who just use name calling and protest his facts as lies while showing no proof. It should be an interesting reaming. Especially since the IPCC's report has been totally discredited on every level. Temprature manipulations in Austraila, China, Russia, and africa. Sourcing non-peer reviewed information from activist groups. Using a magazine article as a source for galcier melt. It just gets funnier. I wonder who the true deniers are.

"If they are going to include my blog on their list of the top 30 science blogs, I canât help but link to them. There are some good blogs on their list which is only marred by the inclusion of Anthony Wattsâ anti-science blog."

-ooooooh, aren't you the Mr. Prissy.

If that's the standard of your debate, you're gonna get ripped to pieces by Monckton.

hahahha. Same thing over and over: empty accusation and no information. He LIES! Yes, he LIES. You are a denier. You are a troll! Its snowing because of global warming!

11 Mark S,

Try [this](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zones)

If you have an iPhone, the Clock app is excellent for this. On a Mac there are widgets that do the same; I assume there are Windows equivalents.

I refer the newcomers to the sidebar where Monckton has a sub category all to himself about the lies he spews.

Marred - your post contains no facts. Would you like to return when you have learnt some?

that's funny. Because my statements were factual. Just read posts above from your regulars. But i do agree, the funny part is just my personal opinion.

21 Craig,

You're in the wrong place. You want [Denial Depot](http://denialdepot.blogspot.com/).

Marred, go here for a breakdown (just one of many out there) of his lies:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/media_watch_on_monckton.php#com…

or here

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/ask_monckton_a_question.php

Now look at the slides and read the discussion at #9 and others' comments.

His "science" has been refuted over and over, now you need to take the time to actually read the refutations of his diatribes.

The hot air and misinformation Marred is coming from Munchkin, and you are gobbling it up like it is candy.

Going to intresting watching this one.. Facts vs. speculation..

James Hansen can't get his facts right either.. so this should be fun.

32 Marred,

You too.

If you think you stated facts, then you are a liar, stupid, or delusional. That is *not* an ad hom, BTW, it's a description.

bahahaha you source media watch! bhaahhaha and say the graphi was from John Mclean but dont say wether it was a valid graph nor do you say if the slight warming is statistically relevant. bahahahahah

Realize the numbers of people offering advice here has approached and surpassed parody levels some time ago, but jules above made a good point that bears echoing. Do note Monbiot's performance against Plimer. Why was he successful? Because he stayed on his front foot, and on the attack.

Plimer certainly laid the bait- throwing out stuff like, 'the CRU emails evidence the greatest crime of academic integrity in history' along the way. He was clearly prepared to debate the CRU emails and all of the aspects of climate science he could distort for effect to a lay person audience, (e.g. 'these predictions are based on models not entirely dissimilar to the kind that predicted CDO's weren't risky', etc.).

And yet Monbiot slammed that door shut. Parrying soundly before quickly shifting back to the attack, as for example with the pivot straight from Plimer's feeble CRU accusations to his accusations of Plimer's egregious violations of academic integrity. Plimer wasn't remotely able to answer for his lies, and was from there totally on the defensive. The result was that he got destroyed.

The takeaway is this: to win against charlatans you have to shine the light on their behavior or lay people who know no better will lend credibility to their meritless attacks. In short, you have to attack and do so more than you defend. And that's all there is to it.

Marred, can you not read? Did you read post #9 and others pertaining to that? I and others did not cite media watch to refute Munchkin's fallacious claims. His lies and deception about Arctic sea ice can easily be refuted using NSIDC data, for example. His claims are also refuted using (non cherry-picked) data from NASA, and other reputable agencies.

A question. How old are you Marred?

Another question for you. Why is the stratosphere cooling?

Please don't think that you are "special", the scientists here deal with your type frequently and you always end up looking like a bunch of juvenile air heads, again, not an ad hom, just stating a fact. Look what happened when Bruce Barrett came here to try and 'debate' the scientists (on another thread, I'll let you find it). He got a sound whipping.

PS: So you question the authenticity of a graph by the Australian Bureau of Met. (http://www.climateshifts.org/?p=4324) but blindly accept Munchkin's graph. Uh huh.

PPS: I do not think that you even understand a stat. sig. trend is.

Marred:

protest his facts as lies while showing no proof

You're right. What Monckton says is fact. He has no need for proof.

Looking forward to reading in MSM that you wiped the floor with Monckton.
Don't forget to put out media release immediately afterwards covering main points of your argument - you can be sure Monckton will be doing this.

I just love how anyone that questions the ideology of Global Warming.. I mean.. Climate Change is equated to "a Holocaust denier"

There is no consensus. They cannot predict the future..

The father of Global Warming James Hansen has never been right..

He predicted a Snowball Earth in the 70's..
Manhattan under water by the 80's
An Ice free Arctic in the 90's..
Another Ice Free Arctic by 2010... and now 2025.

All using the same computer models and the Greenhouse effect since the 70âs.
The Mann Hockey Stick has been resoundingly disproved..
Data has been proven to be manipulated. Contravening data was intentionally forced out of the media and reports.
Scientist who disagree with the AGW crowd has found themselves without funding and pushed to the fringe..

Consensus my a$$.

This has become a religion. Facts be damned..

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/

I don't know enough about Australia to hazard a guess as to how fruitful a dialogue with Monckton would be, but as it pertains to the broader issue of shaming his defenders by pointing out Monckton's ever-growing list of lies, I am skeptical of its potential efficacy. If you look at message boards that affix any story in which Monckton's lunacy or duplicity are paraded about for everyone to get a laugh at, his supporters simply ignore it and play martyr. Oh, why are you attacking the wondrous, logical Lord, instead of his science? No one refutes his magical science! Look at his enormous science! Why aren't pointing out that Al Gore is fat?

They don't even have the slightest idea what they are talking about, and they don't care that he's full of shit. They just stupidly assume everyone else is at least as ignorant and duplicitous, and that the whole thing is a bit of political sport.

Perhaps the only good that can come from such an event is personal satisfaction. I know that I would love to discuss mathematics in front of an audience (and camera) with Lord Monckton, who has apparently been doing a lot of interesting, if seemingly unpublished, research. Who in his right mind wouldn't love the opportunity to discover a Ramanujan, who in his spare times cures AIDS?

I don't really understand why people take on Monckton in these debates. A verbal debate is a rather poor medium for discussing complex issues (especially science issues).

Not to mention there is a serious lack of symmetry here, deniers have a huge advantage over the consensus guys.

A consensus guy has to defend a large construct of knowledge, a denier can focus on one particular sub-subject, baffle with bullshit, and then pretend the whole enterprise rests on this one little tiny branch.

A consensus guy has to defend his position while making no logical contradictions, a denier can snipe from different logically contradicting views.

Any way you cut it, verbal debates are just a terrible medium for defending AGW. It would be better to do this in print, where you can cite your sources when calling Monckton out on his bullshit.

Lindsey, do not be expected to be taken seriously when you spout nonsense like this @42:

"He predicted a Snowball Earth in the 70's.. Manhattan under water by the 80's An Ice free Arctic in the 90's.. Another Ice Free Arctic by 2010... and now 2025."

Show us the papers, and citations where these alleged statements were made. And good luck finding them....

You also then further harm your credibility by referring us to an anti-science, political blog, WUWT.

The story in question, regarding Darwin, has been soundly refuted on this very site, and by work published in journal papers.

Are you familiar with consilience? And religion has nothing to do with the radiative forcing of GHGs.

Mapleleaf..

Do your own work.. Simply Google James Hansen and Global Cooling..

Everyone of those claims he asserted..

Remember the now infamous Summer meeting on Global Warming where the heat was turned on..

He predicted that Manhatten would be under water in 10 years.. It did not happen..neither did the Snowball effect.. The Artic has returned to nearly normal levels.

He is and always has been WRONG..

"You also then further harm your credibility by referring us to an anti-science, political blog, WUWT."

Right...this blog is so much more credible. Give me a break, just because someone is skeptical of your view of the world does not make them "anti-science" and "political".

Hmm, lets see, marred.
"Monckton is always logical" - except that if he did follow logic, he might not make so many mistakes.
Where he gets his info from is frequently unclear, and his facts are cherry picked and lacking in context, as has been demonstrated on this blog many times.
Then the IPCC, which has not been discredited upon any level at all. At least not amongst anyone who does science. As for temperature manipulations, there havn't been any. You did know that the IPCC doesn't do any direct science itself, therefore it cannot manipulate temperatures?

As for the others, they might be correct, although it was hard to spot them for all the rubbish. But they don't actually affect anything to do with the actual warming of the earth, which is ongoing.

Bulldog, I would argue that you are not a true "skeptic". Is this blog more credible, on the whole and as blogs go, yes, b/c it is frequented by real scientists and run by a real scientist, not a pseudo-scientist.

Now I think we have engaged the trolls enough.

Guthrie.

Lets see. Where should we start?

Moncktons facts are cherry picked and lack context? Empty accusation as you provide nothing to support your claim.

IPCC has not been discredited because they dont do direct science and temperatures cannot be manipulated. But the source for their temperatures, CRU, has been shown to have manipulated data over and over again. And even admitted so in their own emails. Search "Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming" on blogs.telegraph.co.uk.
You just further my opinion that the writings on this blog are empty and unfactual.

Bulldog | February 11, 2010 5:06 PM said

'Give me a break, just because someone is skeptical of your view of the world does not make them "anti-science" and "political".'

No - but when their own data proves that their previous statements dressed up as science were in fact opinion and clearly wrong and yet they still refuse to admit it (like Anthony Watts has) then that does make them "anti-science" and "political".

I wish I had time to do this: compile a list of peer-reviewed research that Monckton has tried to use to bolster his case; then see how many times the authors of that research have noted that he's using their work incorrectly.

S. Lindsey:

Read this.

So the scientist quoted wasn't Hansen. One of Hansen's early models* was used... and it was modelling Venus (where Hansen, being an astrophysicist, started his research into planetary systems in general).

No hint of an alarmist claim made by Hansen himself...

*Well it had to be early. This is computer modelling from nearly 40 years ago that we're talking about!

He predicted a Snowball Earth in the 70's

@Lindsey: At least pretend to be honest if you want to be taken seriously. Hansen never predicted any such thing. A different researcher, using software authored by James Hansen, might have.

Marred reposted the lying talking point ...

IPCC has not been discredited because they dont do direct science and temperatures cannot be manipulated. But the source for their temperatures, CRU, has been shown to have manipulated data over and over again. And even admitted so in their own emails.

Plainly, the agnotologists think simply repeating claims often enough can suffice to make them so. Perception is reality, in their paradigm.

Since their paradigm is a plea to be releived of facts about the world that sit uncomfortably with their cultural preferences and the right to turn untutored anecdote and gossip as meaningdul, especially if it comes from someone culturally near to them, the above episteme makes sense. Say it often and say it loud, and it will be so.

Who'd have thought that these parochial pre-modern rednecks would render such stout support to such a postmodern approach to establishing knowledge? For the agnotologists here, quite clearly, "knowledge" is the preferred narrative and that can only be achieved through cultural struggle

Clarification to the above - it was originally modelling Venus, then was presumably applied to the Earth.

Good luck Tim. I think you will need it to debate someone who seems to have no concept of what the truth is and why it's important.

Lindsey, "The Artic has returned to nearly normal levels."

Wrong, the long term trend in Arctic sea ice is down. You cannot determine a stat. sig trend using just THREE data points. See here for the real data:

LOOK at their Figure 3.

As for Hansen and snowball earth, his research into that area was to try and determine climate sensitivity to changes in GHGs, CO2 in particular. He did not predict that is what would happen for God's sakes!

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/sohl_01/

I guess you read was the WUWT version of the truth.

You can find a discussion of his climate projections produced in 1988 at RealClimate.

Marred said:
>Because my statements were factual.

erm, yes well. Prove it as Monckton would say.
The evidence please.

Marred said:
>Sourcing non-peer reviewed information from activist groups. Using a magazine article as a source for galcier melt.

WWF is an 'activist' group??
Interesting that Marks and Spencer work with them.
They also have a credit card!
And sell commemorative coins designed by the Royal Mint.
ooooh they are so revolutionary.

Marred said:
>Same thing over and over: empty accusation and no information.

Empty accusation. hmmmm, where have I read that?

Marred @50, I gave you links for goodness sakes!! I went though numerous of Munchkin's slides, and then using actual facts from reputable scientific groups showed him to be either lying, distorting or cherry-picking. You should try it yourself sometime, it will be most enlightening.

OK, now I'm done.

Time for a run, -2 C and snow, but that is what YackTracks are for.

Fran Barlow

You just took my statement which was supported by a reference which you have failed to list. You make a claim about "their paradigm", which i presume you are including me, to be absent of facts that don't fit "their" culture.

Your statement has no support for said paradigm you profess we have. Further, you make assumptions about our culture and infer that we use gossip and hersay to support our beliefs so that we can feel comfortable within aforemention culture.

Yet my statement contains no gossip, and the meaning is quite clear and supported by fact.

Maybe, you thought by disguising your empty argument in big words you would hide its complete lack of intelligent, factual information and that it wouldn't be read as presumptuous, ignorant swill.

Further to my rebuttal of one of S. Lindsey's lies (for that's what they are, slanderous slanderous lies) above, here's another. I had an inkling about what this would be about before I did the google search.

Did Hansen claim Manhattan would be underwater within a decade?

No.

He claimed we have a decade to act, otherwise we may not be able to avoid climate change that would eventually destabilise the ice caps enough to put Manhattan underwater. No timescale is given in the article though.*

And another - is Arctic Ice nearly back to normal? Well, if 'normal' means having developed a strange new annual cycle of near average extent in winter followed by big melting in summer, then yes!

It's obviously too soon to say whether we'll see a similar pattern year on year, or if the ice will stage a proper recovery, or will continue on a downward slide, but it's definitely not getting back 'normal' as observed by satellites over the last 30 years.

*I don't agree with everything Hansen says, and I think he does act out of turn on environmental issues. Can't be having with flat out lies though, hence my posts.

MapleLeaf, i will check your links, i got caught up in other threads. I plan to research all claims of moncktons dishonesty.

Great - who linked this post and flooded it with cretins?

Seriously s.lindsey, you can't even be arsed to check that this site has *already* refuted every single point you've made in great detail. Just repeat the lie, ignore the evidence to the contrary, and accuse everyone else of the very things you are plainly guilty of... nice. Its like primary school.

Marred wrote;

Sourcing non-peer reviewed information from activist groups. Using a magazine article as a source for galcier melt. It just gets funnier. I wonder who the true deniers are.

It's amusing how the denialists say they are so concerned about a few citation errors, while they treat as gospel the words of Monckton, the batty British peer who has a degree in Greek and Latin, and the blogs of Watts the radio weather reader, and McIntyre the mining director.

@marred

This:

> Yet my statement contains no gossip, and the meaning is quite clear and supported by fact.

Is contradicted by this:

> But the source for their temperatures, CRU, has been shown to have manipulated data over and over again. And even admitted so in their own emails.

Its hard to know where to begin with this much wrongness... The claim that CRU have wrongfully manipulated data is an utter, utter lie. There is *no* evidence of this anywhere, least of all in the emails. None. This part of a vicious smear campaign, and you accept it and credulously repeat it here, presumably because it gels with your prejudices.

I say again - this is a vicious lie.

To claim it as fact, not gossip, is another lie.

And please - "the source of their temperatures, CRU"? Do you even know how many papers are assessed by the IPCC, and how many diverse and confirming data sources there are? Do you *even realise* that virtually all of CRU's data comes from NOAA where it is freely available for download by anybody? Do you even know how incredibly ill-informed you sound when you come out with sentences like that?

Michael

wow. This is too easy. Another agument based on assumptions and no facts. Did i ever mentioned i believed everything Monckton said? Just goes to show that personal attacks and empty vapid statements are what is called debate for some here.

GREENPEACE-GENERATED LITERATURE CITED BY THE 2007 NOBEL-WINNING IPCC REPORT

* Aringhoff, R., C. Aubrey, G. Brakmann, and S. Teske, 2003: Solar thermal power 2020, Greenpeace International/European Solar Thermal Power Industry Association, Netherlands
* ESTIA, 2004: Exploiting the heat from the sun to combat climate change. European Solar Thermal Industry Association and Greenpeace, Solar Thermal Power 2020, UK
* Greenpeace, 2004: http://www.greenpeace.org.ar/cop10ing/SolarGeneration.pdf accessed 05/06/07
* Greenpeace, 2006: Solar generation. K. McDonald (ed.), Greenpeace International, Amsterdam
* GWEC, 2006: Global wind energy outlook. Global Wind Energy Council, Bruxelles and Greenpeace, Amsterdam, September, 56 pp., accessed 05/06/07
* Hoegh-Guldberg, O., H. Hoegh-Guldberg, H. Cesar and A. Timmerman, 2000: Pacific in peril: biological, economic and social impacts of climate change on Pacific coral reefs. Greenpeace, 72 pp.
* Lazarus, M., L. Greber, J. Hall, C. Bartels, S. Bernow, E. Hansen, P. Raskin, and D. Von Hippel, 1993: Towards a fossil free energy future: the next energy transition. Stockholm Environment Institute, Boston Center, Boston. Greenpeace International, Amsterdam.
* Wind Force 12, 2005: Global Wind Energy Council and Greenpeace, http://www.gwec.net/index.php?id=8, accessed 03/07/07

And Marred,

> Moncktons facts are cherry picked and lack context? Empty accusation as you provide nothing to support your claim.

You've been told already - check the sidebar on this blog, he's got a section all to himself and he's regularly shown himself to be a shameless liar (I'm still waiting for him to eat a few spoonfuls of DDT as he suggested would be perfectly safe...). Or do you plan on going through life with your eyes tightly shut and your mouth wide open?

Dave

its funny how you missed my supporting statment. Made no mention of it. And you fail to mention that the CRU is being investigated for failing to respond to FOI requests for their data. interesting. And of course, you list nothing to support that the emails were lies and smear campagin. oh. should i list another.

Smith has done much of the heavy lifting involved in analyzing the NOAA/GISS data and software, and he chronicles his often frustrating experiences at his fascinating website. There, detail-seekers will find plenty to satisfy, divided into easily-navigated sections â some designed specifically for us âgeeks,â but most readily approachable to readers of all technical strata.

Perhaps the key point discovered by Smith was that by 1990, NOAA had deleted from its datasets all but 1,500 of the 6,000 thermometers in service around the globe. Now, 75% represents quite a drop in sampling population, particularly considering that these stations provide the readings used to compile both the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) and United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) datasets. These are the same datasets, incidentally, which serve as primary sources of temperature data not only for climate researchers and universities worldwide, but also for the many international agencies using the data to create analytical temperature anomaly maps and charts.

Yet as disturbing as the number of dropped stations was, it is the nature of NOAAâs âselection biasâ that Smith found infinitely more troubling.
It seems that stations placed in historically cooler, rural areas of higher latitude and elevation were scrapped from the data series in favor of more urban locales at lower latitudes and elevations. Consequently, post-1990 readings have been biased to the warm side not only by selective geographic location, but also by the anthropogenic heating influence of a phenomenon known as the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI).

For example, Canadaâs reporting stations dropped from 496 in 1989 to 44 in 1991, with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations dropped to one. Thatâs right: As Smith wrote in his blog, they left âone thermometer for everything north of LAT 65.â And that one resides in a place called Eureka, which has been described as âThe Garden Spot of the Arcticâ due to its unusually moderate summers.

@Marred

Speaking of

> Another agument based on assumptions and no facts.

What's the point in that list of references? Looks like you're *assuming* that the papers are incorrect because you *assume* the source cannot be trusted and you *assume* that this materially affects the content of the report and you *assume* that the report is compromised as a result.

Still waiting for a fact to emerge...

But hey, you didn't even make an argument really. Just copied + pasted a bunch of stuff for reasons that aren't entirely clear.

@Marred

> And you fail to mention that the CRU is being investigated for failing to respond to FOI requests for their data.

Investigated does not equal wrongdoing (please see, eg. the recent exoneration of Mann in this matter) - so if that's what you're relying on, have the decency to admit its (biased) gossip, not fact. And also the subject of FOI compliance is very different to wrongful data manipulation, of which there was absolutely none. *You* brought it up in those terms, and *you* were repeating a complete lie by doing so, and *you* are now changing the subject to avoid admitting the lie.

> And of course, you list nothing to support that the emails were lies and smear campagin.

Hint: READ THE BLOG YOU ARE POSTING ON.

The rest of your comment was a lazy copy+paste job of stuff we've all seen before, and isn't any more true now.

I'm yet another long term reader who has never posted before. I've reserved myself a seat at the Hilton today and will be cheering you on Tim. Good luck!

56 Stu,

Yes, and IIRC at the time aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere were still increasing so "global dimming" was an issue: average insolation (at the surface) had been decreasing. This is why there were *some* predictions of global cooling.

Of course, anti-pollution laws meant that the aerosol effect reduced rapidly from then on.

Oh boy, WATOIDS do not understand anomalies. One of the primary reaosons for GISS being warmer then HaDCRU is because GISS does include the Arctic, whereas CRU does not. By allegedly (some sources state that there are numerous stations in the GHCN database) excluding those sites in northern Canada one is thus underestimating the warming. The absolute temperatures may be lower, but the anomalies are most definitely on the positive side.

Canada is warming, especially at the higher latitudes, this from Environment Canada:

http://www.msc-smc.ec.gc.ca/ccrm/bulletin/figmapt_e.html?season=Annual&…

Also, look here:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=3905

Actually LOOK at the image and read the text!! And it has warmed more since this image terminated in 2003.

Oh, and earlier I should have said YakTrax.

Oh, and Merred, stop moving the goal posts and please do stop cut and pasting BS from WTFUWT.

I just noticed something very odd about the temperature scale in that NASA figure. Any takers? They obviously have no clue what they are doing (sarc).

Troll @67. All but one of the reports listed (I have not verified the list, was it from WG-2?) were about, alternative energy options *solar generation* for goodness sakes! So what? Do wouldn't be so silly as to make the giant leap of logic to conclude that you think the reports in question refute the fact that GHGs warm the planet? Of course you do....

You are right, this is just too easy. And don't lie, you do believe everything Monckton says. Please go to his talk, slide provided here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8057274@N05/sets/72157623339675684/

Prove us wrong, and tell us exactly what is wrong with most of his slides and explain why. Just limit yourselves to those with pretty figures for starters.

I'm not holding my breath....

75 MapleLeaf,

You mean they've put the - (minus) figure on the right, not the conventional left?

Marred writes:

>*And of course, you list nothing to support that the emails were lies and smear campagin*

Married, how did you get there, from here:

>*The claim that CRU have wrongfully manipulated data is an utter, utter lie. There is no evidence of this anywhere, least of all in the emails. None. This part of a vicious smear campaign, and you accept it and credulously repeat it here, presumably because it gels with your prejudices.
I say again - this is a vicious lie.
To claim it as fact, not gossip, is another lie.*

How about your address Dave's actual statements rather that making up a strawman than you want to answer?

And if you want evidence that the CRU hack was used as the basis of a smear job, there is ample evidence such as this "hide the decline" meme employed in a complete distortion and propaganda smear job . More evidence is the [erroneous Fox "News"](http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610#p/a/029130BFDC78FA33/2/P70SlEq…) claims made about "Climate Gate".

Marred dissembles;

wow. This is too easy. Another agument based on assumptions and no facts. Did i ever mentioned i believed everything Monckton said? Just goes to show that personal attacks and empty vapid statements are what is called debate for some here.

GREENPEACE-GENERATED LITERATURE CITED BY THE 2007 NOBEL-WINNING IPCC REPORT..........

What's with the meaningless list???

If you even bothered to look at them, you'd se that the Greenpace reports cite the peer-reviewed literature. Heck, even your own list demonstrates that.

And of course, they come out of the WGII report of AR4, not WGI which is the summary of the scientific detail.

And the "Nobel Winning IPCC Report"?? - see, you do just believe everything the denialts throw up. A report did not win a Nobel Prize. You denialists seem to have an infinite capacity to get every detail wrong.

These so called 'sceptics' are an amazing bunch, if there is a sloppy citation, ala the IPCC report, they'll all wailing and gnashing of teeth, no matter that the science is correct, but with the demonstrated lies and mis-representations of the denialati, they're as gullible as a mob of Salem witch-burners.

Hi TrueSceptic,

Close. According to their legend/scale the blue areas have warmed and vice versa. The number on the RHS of the scale should be "+2.5C" not "-2.5 C", and on the LHS "+2.5 C' should be "-2.5C".

80 MapleLeaf,

That's what I thought I said : the scale is reversed. :)

No worries TS. Sorry, my fault, misinterpreted your post.

82 MapleLeaf,

No prob. I sometimes (often?) don't spell things out clearly enough, it seems.

Any news on whether there will be a live feed or not yet? Can't find anything on the SMH website.

P.S. Give him hell Tim

There is a live feed (see above 12.30 AEDST) though if you are not in Australia you should reconcile the time for your location.

I've just rung SMH online - they will be streaming it as a video at 12.30 - it will appear as a video on their main page in the picture top left!

http://www.smh.com.au/

I doubt this will go well. He gets to lie, and you don't. He doesn't need to defend his lies, while you have to take your time trying to counter them. Lies take hardly any time or attention, while the truth takes concentration and logic. A public debate is a poor forum for facts or detailed logic.

Your only hope is copious visual aids.

It's up and [running!](http://media.smh.com.au/monckton-challenged-live-debate-1105706.html?%3…)

So Monckton's first point is that Haiti couldn't feed its population turning into severe food riots because they converted to biofuel production.

And he's turning that into "millions of deaths resulted" from "not applying the precautionary principle" to mitigating measures.

Apparently that may not be entirely true.

Now he says CO2 is beneficial for agricultural yields, and for power generation to lift people out of poverty.

And he claims CO2 emissions are correlated with life expectancy, and negatively correlated with child mortality.

Now the "if we shut down the CO2 emissions for a year it would forestall 0.02 degrees C of warming" argument that IIRC Tim showed was fundamentally flawed some time ago.

"Australia's emissions would make virtually any difference because China is emitting so much".

"Focused adaptation to climate change ... is orders of magnitude more effective than trying to prevent it".

"And he claims CO2 emissions are correlated with life expectancy, and negatively correlated with child mortality."

Per capita emissions might, but so does pretty much anything that scales with per capita GDP. Pick anything that you find more of in developed countries than developing countries, and you can say the same thing. Though Europe has higher life expectancies and lower per capita emissions than the US, so it's only useful for separating developed from third world.

300,000ppm CO2 in the atmosphere? He is ridiculous.

Now the key scientific question - "How much warming will we get for a given level of CO2".

[BTW - don't assume my on-the-fly notes are entirely accurate.]

Looking at a curly mallee (sp) tree in the Flinders Ranges, which grows only on a type of rock that is 40% CO2 (750M years ago), and there was a glacier there at 300,000ppm CO2.

UN is using a bogus graph to demonstrate that "acceleration in temperature" is occurring. (UK Government said to confirm no acceleration.) [Graph not visible on SMH Online stream :-(] Some relatively rapid periods of warming; looking at satellite data; graph from Pinker et al 2005 (sp?) showing reduction in cloud cover leading to radiative forcing of 3.04 W/m^2 over 19 years. Compare with UN saying entire human effect from 1750's is just over 1 W/m^2.

Now the "if we shut down the CO2 emissions for a year it would forestall 0.02 degrees C of warming" argument that IIRC Tim showed was fundamentally flawed some time ago.

My jaw was hanging open during that entire strand of his argument. The guy has no shame.

[I'm not trying to do much analysis on the fly...mostly getting down the argument.]

Climate sensitivity - his back of the envelope calculation gives him about 0.2 degrees C per doubling of CO2.

More detailed calculation "by a mathematician" gave even lower numbers.

Following Monckton logic - CO2 is positively correlated with cancer.

Go Tim!

Hey, Monckton's back of envelope is peer reviewed so it must be true /giggle

300,000 ppm CO2?

Tim begins...I'm a computer scientist with my 1st degree in maths, as much an amateur at climate science as Lord Monckton.

1st thing to note - CO2 levels shot up from about the 1950's.
2nd thing - radiative forcing. Incoming shortwave radiation; outgoing longwave radiation. If more energy coming in than going out, planet will warm. Difference in energy is "radiative forcing".

Agrees with Monckton - climate sensitivity is most important question. But "in the long run" is the important caveat. Full amount of warming due to forcing may take a couple of hundred years. Low sensitivity, no big problem; high sensitivity gives us real problems.

We can't see the slides on the video. :/

Nervy start from Tim, but he's getting into his stride nicely now. Seems comfortable and confident talking about the science of climate sensitivity, which is a good sign.

Going through calculation of sensitivity from simple equation.

Does Monckton think climate scientists are fools?

Monckton breaks in [I think this was a recording from another Monckton presentation, can't hear very clearly] - they made a fraud in order to ignore the implications of Pinker's paper.

Monckton breaks in again - Pinker is a satellite nerd who only cares about that, not global warming.

Pinker speaks [recording] - you can't compare these two numbers in the way Monckton does; the IPCC did it right.

Pinker's detailed description will be up at the website.

Summary from Tim: clouds have two effects on radiative forcing. They block some incoming shortware radiation; they block some outgoing longwave radiation. Monckton's mistake was only looking at blocking incoming radiation; not blocking outgoing.

[Comment submission held for moderation at this point. Will keep going and try with extended comment in case the first one doesn't make it but a subsequent one does.]

Let's look at last Ice Age - best way to get a handle on climate sensitivity is to look at a very different climate; bunch of factors (drawn from Plimer's Heaven & Earth) - ice albedo, vegetation cover, dust, CO2, and so on...

Tim wiped the floor with him. Science FTW!

Re: 69 (Marred)
Perhaps the key point discovered by Smith was that by 1990, NOAA had deleted from its datasets all but 1,500 of the 6,000 thermometers in service around the globe.

That's not a key point discovered by Smith, nor were stations deleted. The large number of stations in the database prior to 1990 is the result of a large-scale effort to go to stations that did (and many still do not) transmit their observations in any electronic form, copy the hand-written observations down and then digitize them. Stations weren't dropped--there is a period where someone has gone and collected a lot of old observations.

Yet as disturbing as the number of dropped stations was, it is the nature of NOAAâs âselection biasâ that Smith found infinitely more troubling. It seems that stations placed in historically cooler, rural areas of higher latitude and elevation were scrapped from the data series in favor of more urban locales at lower latitudes and elevations. Consequently, post-1990 readings have been biased to the warm side not only by selective geographic location, but also by the anthropogenic heating influence of a phenomenon known as the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI).

Since the trends are computed based off of the anomalies compared to long-term records at stations, changing from "historically cooler" stations to other stations doesn't have an impact of warming. If people averaged absolute temperatures, and not anomalies, it might matter, but since they use the anomalies, it doesn't. (Actually, it might matter if higher latitudes have been warming more rapidly than lower latitudes, but the impact of the change would be to underestimate the warming trend, rather than overestimate it.)

Smith's lack of understanding of where and how the time series of the number of stations in the record came about and the nonsense about selection bias to warmer stations indicates he has no idea of how the average temperature calculations are done.

trolls -n 5 -t "IPCC" -o "http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid"

No net accumulation of heat in the oceans over >50 years??

Monckton's 1st question: how can the 750M year-ago ice age have 300,000ppm in the atmosphere and still have huge mile thick ice sheets at the equator?

Tim Lambert: you have to do the calculation with *all* of the factors, not just CO2.

Tim's 1st question: if Pinker's correction is accurate, how will you correct the record?

Monckton: I will firstly check with Pinker and the IPCC, but her conclusion is to do with low clouds and theirs is high cloud. Let's look at other ways to determine that we have low climate sensitivity. Argo buoys, ocean surface cooling over last 6 years.

Douglas and Knox 2009 (sp?) analysing last 68 years finds no accumulation of energy in the ocean. If that's true, doesn't that raise questions about the magnitude of the radiative forcing [?].

Tim: new papers need looking at; probably will turn out to be wrong; surface/air[?] temperatures clearly going up.

Looking at several lines on Monckton's trend line graph.

[Monckton: you didn't say "lies" did you [hard to hear the rest]].

When you calculate trend lines you need to calculate uncertainty...as you go to shorter and shorter time period, the trend gets more and more uncertain.

Monckton: I'm calling the IPCC graphs "The Great Lie" because you may not apply multiple trend lines to a stochastic data set and then draw conclusions about an acceleration in the warming rate from the trend lines.

Look at this data set starting from 1993/1997/2001/2005; these four trend lines show we're heading for a new ice age, so the method is wrong.

Could start in 1905 vs 1945 and show slowdown in warming.

[Can't see the graph, but he's saying 3 parallel warming periods, but no acceleration].

Between 1695 & 1735 central England went up 2.2 degrees C vs 0.7 degrees C in 20th Century.

Tim's response: you're statistically wrong. Need 20-30 years to have a statistically valid trend.

Monckton: there's extreme uncertainty over the last 25 years [25 years' data?]

Wow, Tim wiped the floor with him in the opening round. Tim appeared a bit nervous, but it was brilliant to have a video clip of Pinker refuting Monckton's interpretation of Linker!

Excellent Tim! No question who won the opening round!!

John

And here comes Alan Jones, abusing the chair with some bizarre argument about anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere...

I'm not able to watch this (I'm at work - no streaming allowed) but it sounds like Tim's doing fine.

I will ask, what's all this about 300,000ppm CO2? The atmosphere wasn't close to 30% carbon dioxide 750 million years ago, was it?

The first questioner is completely clueless!

Jesus. CO2 in the ocean... cloud factor... tides... How can someone so stupid parade their ignorance so willingly...

I can't bear it.

That must be a reference to the Sturtian snowball earths, but I don't think CO2 was anywhere near 30% then, or anytime after 4 billion years ago. I'd have to check that, but that might be something Monckton slipped by because Tim doesn't know the entire geological history of the earth by heart.

Tim is doing just fine.

Does anyone have an reasonably accurate figure for the CO2 concentration 750million years? Best I can find is around 5000ppmv 600million years ago.

And now he's he's bringing Pachauri's race into the equation. Classy, Chris, very classy. Nothing like a bit of old-fashioned foreigners-taking-our-jobs alarmism though.

OK, this debate is almost all over. The questions from the audience are just too whacky.

The 750 million years ago question was about the "Snowball Earth" period. Wikipedia [says](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_earth#Breaking_out_of_global_glac…)

The carbon dioxide levels necessary to unfreeze the Earth have been estimated as being 350 times what they are today, about 13% of the atmosphere.[53] Since the Earth was almost completely covered with ice, carbon dioxide could not be withdrawn from the atmosphere by release of alkaline metal ions weathering out of siliceous rocks. Over 4 to 30 million years, enough CO2 and methane, mainly emitted by volcanoes, would accumulate to finally cause enough greenhouse effect to make surface ice melt in the tropics until a band of permanently ice-free land and water developed

Jones: Where does the money go?

Monckton: It goes to pollies and bankers. Does anybody want that?

Audience Member: Noooooo

Bring on the panto horse!

[One of my earlier posts was held up for moderation for some reason. The gap should get filled in eventually.]

Alan Jones: what percentage of CO2 present in atmosphere is naturally occurring vs manmade; given our piddling population isn't our contribution infinitesimal?

Tim: About 30-40% is human activity. [Monckton?: 39%]

AJ: Does Monckton agree?

M: Up to a point. There used to be heaps (dolomite, curly mallee). But if you count the CO2 elsewhere (not in the atmosphere) the manmade level is tiny.

TL: The stuff in the ground is not relevant; it's the level in the atmosphere.

M: Back to 750M years ago when that level of CO2 was in the atmosphere; that gives 22 degrees C.

TL: You're ignoring every *other* forcing.

M: The ice albedo isn't enough of a countervailing effect.

AJ: Manmade CO2 is infinitely less than 39%.

M & TL: agree in atmosphere it's 39%.

M: repeats previous position to cut off debate

Q to TL: How much CO2 is in the ocean; [M: 70 times as much in the ocean as the atmosphere]. How much bearing does the CO2 in the ocean have on clouds and radiative forcing. [Somehow this is supposed to show that cloud factors are wrong.]

TL: [very confused with questioner who is not clear - who thinks clouds are formed from CO2(!)]

Q to M: Is it true CO2 in atmosphere in Mars is also increasing despite lack of industrial revolution.

M: Haven't recently looked; some dry ice which probably evaporated - NASA SUVs ;-)

Q to ?: Local council actually/preparing to spend money predicated on ETS (plus carbon market)

M: No. ETS can set so low a price that it makes no benefit to climate; or so high a price it shuts down industries all over Australia [what, no middle ground? Tut, tut - fallacy of the excluded middle.] If so you'll be transferring your industries to China which is just not going to have an ETS (despite their letter to the Secretariat of the UN Convention).

EU Commissars now make "90%" of the laws in UK, mandated an ETS. Closing down a steel factory gives government carbon credits; industry will go to Pachauri's India...

You're going to shut down Australia's economy for no climate effect.

Q: 1976 UN Treaty on weather modification technology; why aren't we using it to deal with climate change?

AJ: Bit removed, anyone have a comment?

M: Very briefly, no :-)

Q to TL: If ocean levels rise by several metre & glaciers melt, isn't the good news that one of the first impacts will be the submersion of the desalination plant? ;-)

Q: Skeptical about gov't using environment for [can't hear - extra tax?]

M: Extra tax goes to making pollies & bankers richer.

Q to both: 7 natural warming/cooling cycles since 1018[?]; why is this one the only one that's attributed to man when natural cycles are ignored (based on sunspot cycle).

TL: Sunspot activity affects climate; right now lowest sunspot activity for 100 years. We should be "back to temperatures of 1900". Last Jan warmest ever in satellite record.

M: Back 600M years (beginning of Cambrian). From then till now most of time temp has been up to 7 degrees C warmer than now.

Each of previous 4 inter-glacial periods; up to 6 C warmer than now; no SUVs or power stations.

Holocene (current interglacial) at end of Younger Dryas; optimum (warmest point) 6000 years ago [etc.] Hundreds of papers by lots of scientists from countries claim MWP was worldwide and warmer than now.

Hence today's warming is nothing to worry about.

Tim should be letting Monckton field some of these first. Here's the 'adjustment' question from the audience. He has to start getting the last word.

Right, which alone points in the direction that Monckton made up a number out of his behind. If you would need 13% CO2 to get out of that snowball earth, you sure didn't have 30% going into it.

I'm sure I have a couple papers about this period lying around somewhere; more tomorrow. I really doubt 30% CO2 at any point in the last 3-4 billion years.

This is the most relevant paper regarding Neoproterozoic CO2 levels, is one of the most highly cited Earth Sci papers of the last couple of decades. CO2 might have reached about 120k, which was enough to bust the earth out of a full-blown "ice-house" state (earth would still be frozen solid now, otherwise).

Science 28 August 1998: Vol. 281. no. 5381, pp. 1342 - 1346

A Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth
Paul F. Hoffman, * Alan J. Kaufman, Galen P. Halverson, Daniel P. Schrag

Negative carbon isotope anomalies in carbonate rocks bracketing Neoproterozoic glacial deposits in Namibia, combined with estimates of thermal subsidence history, suggest that biological productivity in the surface ocean collapsed for millions of years. This collapse can be explained by a global glaciation (that is, a snowball Earth), which ended abruptly when subaerial volcanic outgassing raised atmospheric carbon dioxide to about 350 times the modern level. The rapid termination would have resulted in a warming of the snowball Earth to extreme greenhouse conditions. The transfer of atmospheric carbon dioxide to the ocean would result in the rapid precipitation of calcium carbonate in warm surface waters, producing the cap carbonate rocks observed globally.

Nils Axel-Morner?

Q: GISS - that's adjusted data. Compared to BOM[?] data. [Mackay?] Adjusted lower in '30's/40's; higher in 80's/90's to make it look warmer.

TL: People used to complain about this graph because the data wasn't adjusted (for UHI). Now they're complaining that they are adjusting the data.

And you can do the whole graph without adjustments without significant change.

Looking at all the stations in total shows definite warming. Details all publicly available - data and code. A team has reimplemented it and it checks out.

M: Watts has checked 1200 US stations and adjusted data changed between 1999 and 2008 to match what questioner says. Major inquiry going on into this around the world (including Australian stations). To-be published paper says satellites more or less reliable, but [Joe Daleo[sp?]] concludes 1850-1980 ground records are unreliable.

TL: Watts' group claimed number of stations is changing which is used to make it look warmer. Those guys made fundamental programming errors; don't understand how it's done.

Q: [hard to hear] data on rising sea levels over last 40 years? [T: 20 years, 3.2mm per year] I know from reliable sources that 40 year increase admitted by government has only been 1cm.

TL: Interesting, but this graph comes from CSIRO...

Q: [can't hear] [When did authorities start saying humans were causing warming]

M: 1938, Calendar[sp?] ;-)

TL: ...

M: History...1958 onwards Mauna Loa CO2 measurements.

Q: I met people designing carbon credit package in 1985 who weren't talking about global warming, so they were more concerned with money than science... [Not really a question]

Q to both: Since Copenhagen, can we limit global increase in temp to 2 C like pollies claim was agreed?

M: Canute.

Q to both: when can I buy a seaside house? How much is ocean going to rise [translation]?

TL: need to allow for 90cm this century

M: Hasn't worried Gore.

TL: His > 90cm above sea level.

M: Central UN estimate 43cm over 100 years compared to 20cm last 100 years. Niklaus Merner [sp?] wrote a lot of papers and expects 10+/-10cm.

TL: UN did not say their estimate was 43cm; up to 59cm not counting accelerating icesheets - if they start to melt at much faster rate we don't really know how much impact they will have.

Tim's busy! We can say whatever we want! Piss. Ass. Tits.

Boris, you can say those things when Tim is here. He loves at least one of those three.

More seriously... is Monckton citing a dowser!?

"It is not about climatology it is about freedom"

WTF!? can anyone say, PROPAGANDA and RHETORIC!

Science is boring. Let's talk about world government and totalitarian econazis instead.

MapleLeaf yes YOU can

Missed the debate, got held up with other stuff, and have not got time to read all this thread.

What was the overall outcome?

Thanks

I guess it depends on your point of view..

If your an ALARMEST Tim wiped the floor with'em

If your a REALIST then he got whacked..

The WATBOTS are still here.

Oh, the lies by Munchkin, I can't bear it! The crowd are, just as expected, gobbling it up like candy.

[Still going](http://www.smh.com.au/)

Oh the horrors.. the horrors I say.. A non-believer.

Heritic. Denier.. Flat Earther.. Got any more?

WotWot - still going on as I type but just about to sleep (it's early morning in my part of the world).

Tim wiped the floor with Monckton in their initial presentations on carbon sensitivity. But every single question from the floor has been hostile to Tim. Monckton has been confident, even when lying through his teeth, whilst Tim has had to resort to simply correcting and repeating people. Couple of times Tim simply said "you're wrong" which probably didn't go down great. But overall, Tim won on the science, Monckton on the irrelevent stuff (he scored points for being able to talk confidently on an obscure question about freak waves, though I've no clue if he was right or not).

Comment 137 should have read: "correcting people and repeating himself to people". Like I said, it's late...

S. Lindsey:

"I guess it depends on your point of view..

If your an ALARMEST Tim wiped the floor with'em

If your a REALIST then he got whacked.."

Would you not describe the notion that it's all a scam to implement a communist global government as somewhat ALARMEST?

More generally, have you ever approached anything rationally in your life?

I'm watching. Tim is talking about science, and winning on the science. But the science is detailed, nuanced and boring. Mockton is wining on the folksy, political, and emotional level, playing up small arguments into big battles and tiny differences into monumental disagreements.

I actually don't think it's going well for Tim with the audience. I don't know who the moderator is or where the people in the audience were drawn from, but it seems that both are rather hostile in aggregate.

Oh this is good, Munchkin is saying ENSO is caused by undersea volcanoes.

No, it is called delayed oscillator you twit!

s.lindsey

In an earlier post in response to a request for you to substantiate your claims you replied "Simply Google James Hansen and Global Cooling".

This is standard denier methodology .. if you see an unsubstantiated claim on more than one denier blog you classify it as a fact. This is not how science works you moron.

Your cross-linked lies are so in-bred most of them would have two heads by now. You would not recognise a fact if it hit you between the eyes.

Nice answer from Monkton: 'The more warming, within reason, the better.' Obviously this guy is living in his own little bubble of reality.

I agree with Bud. Tim presented good scientific responses to all the flaws in Monckton's arguments. The disadvantage was that the audience was overwhelmingly in support of Monckton and his charisma and snide remarks encouraged them so the general feeling of the room was against Tim.

I would like to congratulate Tim on his ability to maintain a professional, unbaised and unemotional approach despite the inability to do the same by Monckton and the so called "mediator".

Groan, a bit disappointing. Monckton gets asked by the 'moderator' to speak at every opportunity; Tim has to interrupt and ask to reply.
The moderator says something like, "Better to be skeptical than to be gullible." I would ask people to be skeptical of a worldwide conspiracy of published scientists to push an idea that is wrong, to be skeptical that they're all secretly agents of totalitarianism/communism/poverty, to be skeptical that someone who has been wrong as often as Monckton (his views on HIV AIDS, etc) is getting it right but everyone else is wrong.

Jody, the 'moderator' is one of Australia's worst right-wing populist talkback radio hacks. Who's been caught shilling on air and inciting racist violence.

"First we caught out noted global warming blogger Tim Lambert exaggerating IPCC predictions of sea level rises, only to have him reply that 59cm was in fact âsimilarâ to 88cm."
"Intrigued, however, by Lambertâs inventiveness in coming up with excuses for errors and exaggerations, I then asked him this:

Why did he last year claim âmost expertsâ believed hurricanes had been getting stronger and more numerous, when both the World Meteorological Organisation and the IPCC have put out statements contradicting that specific claim?

Lambert has replied here by saying I should have added that the IPCC thought that maybe in the future hurricanes would get stronger but less numerous, but of course that doesnât answer my question at all. Whatâs more (and unmentioned by Lambert) the WMO suggests tropical cyclones globally could even decrease, according to some research. "

Any of this sound familure?

Brave man Tim. Moderator at a real debate would not argue on the side of one of the debaters. People who argue from the uncertainty of science will also have a difficult time arguing against a polemicist.

Q: With M's 300,000ppm -> 22C isn't that implying a non-linear relationship.

M: Yes [...] natural logarithm.

Q: I'm naval architect, freak waves are increasing frequency over 30-40 years. Moved from 100 year [?] to 200 year? What is reason for freak waves frequency increasing?

M: First largely thought to be mythical until too much evidence accumulated. Mathematicians have concluded Schroedinger wave equation predicts/models freak waves.

Q: Didn't come here to primarily discuss climate; more concerned about totalitarian way governments treat discussion and suppress opinion. Spent my youth under very totalitarian government. Any government wants to get as much power as possible and take over media & education. My teacher friend doesn't believe about CO2 but scared to tell it to his students...many others?

AJ: many Aussies concerned about failure to listen to alternative viewpoint; virtually an intellectual scandal that this is the only debate that has occurred on this issue in Australia.

Request was made to appear at National Press Club it was denied which gives validity to [censorship/suppression].

Worry about children being taught that CO2 is a pollutant.

Freedom that people died for to exchange views.

M: You come from Czech Republic - have seen Hitler & Communism, and Vaclav Klaus's book Blue Planet in Green Shackles - "it's not about climatology, it's about freedom".

Q: Pleased to see it's not womankind being blamed for issues ;-) NY winter and London winter have been really cold, so where's the global warming.

TL: Doesn't mean we don't get winter anymore. Difference between weather (day to day) and climate (long term average). Snowstorm is about precipitation (questioner interjecting). Can I speak? [Q: no! You've changed the terminology from global warming to climate change.]

Winter snow came from warmer weather in Manitoba; a big snow storm is because you have lots of precipitation.

M: Merely 3 miserable northern hemisphere winters in a row don't make a climate trend, nor do several hot summers Down Under.

But there has been no statistically significant global warming for 15 years; begins to be long enough to raise questions of magnitude of climate sensitivity.

Global cooling for 9 years.

ClimateGate e-mail - can't explain no global warming for decade and it's a travesty.

El Nino 1998-2001; falling back since then; can't read too much into it - but it does raise sensitivity questions; raise an eyebrow and keep watching.

Q to both: Ehrlich, Population Bomb, his view is humans are the problem so we need fewer humans. To M are you worried about the conflation of the two issues. To TL do you agree that population is a problem when my wife and I want to have lots of kids?

TL: Controlling population is bad idea, against human rights and nature. It's an engineering problem - redesign our economy to have same lifestyle without the emissions.

M: If you stop people burning fossil fuels in poorer countries to have cheap electricity; that keeps them in poverty; population will increase beyond capacity of land to sustain them. So have to raise standards of living. Therefore the developing countries must burn as much fossil fuels as they need to stabilise population by lifting them out of poverty.

In 1990's[?] UN predicted 16-18 billion by 2080; now thought ~9B in 2050 - but limiting poor countries - or limiting to the point of poverty in rich countries - will give us more people and more CO2 overall.

Q: economics; suggested Australia should wait for rest of world to do something. What happens if other countries have developed renewables later this century and we're left to import it from them? Why shouldn't we lead the world in these technologies?

TL: [garbled on my feed]

M: No. Every economic analysis but Stern shows that going to low-carbon economy is one of most destructive actions you can take.

More than 5% wind power means you have to turn it off because it's destabilising the grid. Denmark stopped subsidising wind power...

Only as fossil fuel prices rise naturally without alternative subsidies, only then it makes sense. And wind farms damage wildlife. So subsidising alternative energy puts up electricity prices for everyone for no benefit.

Q: Tectonic plates shifting; does this impact sea level [and something I couldn't hear]

TL: Yes, but only over (say) hundreds of millions of years.

M: Island of Lobna Chaura [sp?] suddenly disappeared a few years ago, so can get local effects. Bangladesh. Shifting makes it difficult to measure sea level; satellite altimetry, more accurate than tide gauges. Eastern Pacific basin gets clusters of undersea earthquakes which always seem to precede El Nino...

TL: [cut off by AJ]

Q: Seems that measurements are disputed; Lindzen; sea level rise; what confidence in them?

M: How good are our measurements? Lindzen & Choi vs "ClimateGate" researchers. Enormous disputes going on; staggering uncertainty in measurements. Tools woefully inadequate. Climate mathematically chaotic therefore long run prediction is impossible by definition. Can still take some view on relationship between CO2 and warming, but no consensus on sensitivity.

TL: Lindzen and Choi wasn't about uncertainty in measurement. It was interpretation of data - their choice of cooling and warming periods seemed an artifact of an arbitrary choice [which wasn't robust].

It's a mistake to say chaotic system means you can't predict it. Weather is unpredictable long term; climate is reasonably predictable. Initial value problems vs boundary condition problems. That is doable.

AJ: one consequence of debate is apologies for being skeptical; but better to be skeptical than gullible.

Q: Wouldn't many places benefit from global warming?

TL: Sure, a little bit of warming - some places better, some worse. A lot of warming - the bad stuff outweighs the good stuff a lot. Sea levels & buildings; agriculture.

M: Warming is a good thing; the more (within reason) the better. Climate sensitivity. Until we know, making damaging and murderous decisions that we've already rushed into is an extremely bad idea.

Q to TL: If so much is driven by CO2, why did it go up so fast in 1910-1940 (down in 1970's)...when there wasn't that much CO2? And 1970's warnings about ice age warnings?

TL: CO2 not the only thing to affect climate; remember my climate sensitivity calculations. Graph [can't see it - IPCC model graphs showing natural factors only?] Talking about predictions/calculations using only natural factors and all factors...must look at all factors[etc]

Ice Age, don't trust newspapers writing about science. Two schools of scientific thoughts back then - increasing CO2 vs increasing pollution; which one is stronger.

AJ: nothing's changed in reporting.

M: These three warmings over the last 150 years can't be CO2; must be chiefly natural. These ups and downs are natural events that overwhelm the overall trend. But CO2 isn't doing much.

Ice Age - natural apocalypticism particularly in journalists - next might be the impossible issue of ocean acidification.

Monckton makes me angry. Jones too. They get away with a lot having a supportive audience - especially that extremely disingenuous attempt by Jones to claim that anthropogenic CO2 is a tiny fraction of global CO2.

Tim definitely won on science, but unfortunately that wasn't the arena on which the bulk of the debate was fought. (although Tim should have smacked him down on the pre-cambrian snowball earth CO2 concentration)

Bud Said:

Tim wiped the floor with Monckton in their initial presentations on carbon sensitivity. But every single question from the floor has been hostile to Tim. Monckton has been confident, even when lying through his teeth,

I recall a Seinfeld episode in which George Costanza says it's not a lie if you believe it. In a sense, the more delusional you are, or in Monckton's case, the more in character and in the moment you can stay, the better you can lie.

Good actors on stage do this all the time. They learn their lines. They ignore distractors. They become one with their persona. What they say is less important than that the audience should forget that it is a performance.

For the record, I do agree that Tim was winning on the science, but as many of us have noted, this debate was never going to be about the science. It was about the credibility of Monckton before the audiences that count. That's why one of Tim's best moments was his sound byte from Pinker, which put Monckton off his game and caused him to fumble in front of the crowd. If the press report anything untoward this will be what they seize upon.

Tim was also strong when he used phrases like "where Mr Monckton gets the maths wrong ..." I was almost looking for the Reagan-Carter line "there you go again ..."

That's the right tone for this audience -- gently condescending -- and it would have annoyed Monckton intensely.

MikeH.. ohhh you got me.. Moron wow did you go to college to be able to come up with that one?

Well here you go...

http://blog.survivalstation.org/a-little-known-20-year-old-climate-chan…

"While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, ?If what you?re saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?? He looked for a while and was quiet and didn?t say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, ?Well, there will be more traffic.? I, of course, didn?t think he heard the question right. Then he explained, ?The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won?t be there. The trees in the median strip will change.? Then he said, ?There will be more police cars.? Why? ?Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.?"

Tim Lambert is indeed very brave. But it was obvious how stacked against him this was going to be. Alan Jones plus Monckton's fan club ...

On the science, he was always going to win - obviously. But that is not the issue. The issue is: who wins the politics. In these kinds of debates, the bad guys win the politics pretty much every time.

wilful @146... Great. Tim is arguing in a forum with Glenn Beck as the moderator and his flunkies as the audience. I had to use an American douche as an analogue for the moderator.

As I write this, Mockton is giving his concluding remarks. He's now slamming Pinker's research, which he quoted positively at the start of the lecture until Tim called him on his shit, saying that his evaluation of her work is better than her own.

With all of the talk of freedom, humor and namedropping, if I didn't know anything about what the climate literature actually said, I'd be moved to conclude Mockton was right.

TL summing up:

Climate sensitivity is the important point. Unless you think Plimer's book is wrong about the Ice Age, then the conclusion is pretty much that sensitivity is about 0.75 (2.8C/double).

Pinker's graph heavily relied on by Monckton, but Pinker says his interpretation is wrong.

Ad for blog.

M summing up:

Pinker's graph. Top left 90S -> 90N means she took satellite data from geostationary equatorial orbit plus polar orbital satellites. [Lost feed twice here] I think he's saying the measurements allow you to determine shortwave and longwave, and graphs showing separate parts of the world. Overall effect - no point saying otherwise - is that you'll get more sunlight on surface and temperature will increase. ...which raises questions about climate sensitivity.

Other tests. Santer rewrote IPCC to say now discernible influence on human climate; his 2008 paper says atmospheric hotspot will come from ONLY anthropogenic forcing [I thought it was ANY warming?] Only one dataset shows this but the dataset is defective. Lindzen & Choi disputed by Trenberth; changing start dates/end dates criticism; Lindzen & Choi updating. Paper after paper demonstrating by measurement, not modeling, that climate sensitivity is low. UN models did not forecast 15 years without global warming. Huge departure from IPCC's projections; they've revised projections downwards. Climate is responding as low climate sensitivity implies.

No sound conclusion that we're causing serious problems. Spend money on deforestation, overfishing, rare wildlife habitat, better healthcare in 3rd world...wait and see.

No Copenhagen gives < 0.25C over next 10 years.

Tim did well I thought but Lord Monckton is a very slick presenter, very much a triumph of style over substance. He so often quotes one man or "some scientists" lots of egging on the audience with simple short answers that give them a chance to clap- he is a showman. As a debate it was hardly even handed; audience obviosuly hostile, largely RSL oldies who had come with pre-conceived ideas and were "not for turning". The worst thing for me was Alan Jone's smug bias with "well said" "here here" and other snide asisdes and also a number of times moved on without allowing Tim a ripost. He just loves short answers, don't think too much folks, go with the short emotional response and trust in Uncle Alan!

Nice analogy Jody @154. Jones isn't quite as rabid as Beck, but he's just as addled.

Gotta hand it to Monckton, he sure can bullshit.

AJ:

Thanks Tim for debate.

Apparently it's an indictment of freedom of speech that we [somehow?] want to deny expression of them.

ETS architects have refused to come on AJ's program. Variation of viewpoints (which is healthy [teach the controversy!]), therefore implies shouldn't be legislating yet.

Thanks Monckton for sponsoring the debate (in the sense of his presence has triggered it to happen), and for going anywhere for an audience.

Monckton found himself at an Australia Day political function [sounds like AJ brought him] and was "treated as pariah".

Claims atmosphere of suppression [what planet is he on? Read any newspapers lately?]

Tim, that was extremely well done, thanks for stepping up. It would be great if you could post your slides - anybody have Monckton's latest also?

Nice analogy Jody @154. Jones isn't quite as rabid as Beck, but he's just as addled.

Thanks. What I really hate is that as good as scientists are -- and Tim has to be applauded for going into that lions den -- most don't have the natural presence to counter showmen with both stylistic flourishes and science. Tim had one when he used Pinker's words against Mockton, but unfortunately he needed that kind of stuff for every point Mockton made if he was to "win."

Ahh, yes should have said that foaming-at-the-mouth denialist loonies need not respond.

Outcome sounds like what I was expecting, Tim wins the science side, but Monckton, with a friendly audience and VERY friendly moderator, wins the superficial politics, which is what these town hall style debates are really about.

Alan Jones was never, ever going to allow a fair debate. He is constitutionally incapable of it.

Thanks Bud, et al.

Simply put.. prove Beck wrong.. Break his arguments.. Just saying it does not make it so..

Get past your ideology. You guys are so wrapped up in Politics and ideology that you cannot conceive that you just might be wrong..

The Science is not settled. Is there Global Warming.. YES..
Has it ever happened before... YES.
Has Global Cooling ever happened.. YES

So answer this one thing.. If there has been.. and I know there has.. Global Warming in the past and has been shown to be cyclic.. and mankind could not possibly have caused it.. then why are you so sure Mankind is causing it NOW?

Tim successfully gets Monckton on the Pinker paper, clever use of Moncktons' own words and Pinkers' own words (although Monckton recovers well in the final comments).

But Monckton does his Gish gallop well, and gets away with a whole lot of distortion. He puts a lot of emphasis on the 750 million year old carbonates as evidence for a low carbon dioxide climate sensitivity (and it's nice and folksy with the Australian Mallee talking point). However, the key paper is "Triple oxygen isotope evidence for elevated CO2
levels after a Neoproterozoic glaciation
Huiming Bao1, J. R. Lyons2 & Chuanming Zhou3"
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7194/full/nature06959.html

Not the *after* in the title. The carbonates are the result of the *end* of the glaciation, and the accumulation of the CO2 was fundamental to the end of the glaciation.

Note that Monckton was trying to spin this as glaciation that occurred in the presence of high C02, whereas CO2 was low during the lead up the snowball earth and only grew at the end. Tim was to some degree blind-sided by this.

Overall, if you had not been aware of a fair degree of climate science, Monkton would have easily swayed you.

Smeed's wife is introduced & presents a token gift to AJ for introducing Monckton & "preaching the word[?!]". She's horrified to see what's going on in this country, because she comes from a Communist country.

FWIW, apart from his closing comments, for the most part I think AJ moderated reasonably well. And he did help weed out the rambling commenters and irrelevant questions from the audience.

On the video feed seems like Monckton is off to one side out of shot with camera flashes going off - sorry Tim, you don't have the same celebrity cache ;-)

What is all this stuff about defending democracy and communist plots? And the present for Alan for all his work!
I'm really reminded of David Irving. The agenda seems to be a weid amalgum of genuine sceptics, peopel who fera soem world government, people who fear some communist conspiracy.
It's like soemthing out of the twilight zone...

So answer this one thing.. If there has been.. and I know there has.. Global Warming in the past and has been shown to be cyclic.. and mankind could not possibly have caused it.. then why are you so sure Mankind is causing it NOW?

You haven't read the IPCC report, have you?

Short answer - as Tim pointed out - because when you sum up all the OTHER forcings that we know affect climate, they're not enough to explain what we see now.

Simple analogy. You're observing a car with a speed measuring laser gun. You see it slow down. Does the driver have his foot on the brake or not?

Hey guys, your government likes to restrict what information and content you can view on the internet. Don't you see your country inching towards a totalitarian state? (it certainly isn't moving towards more freedom) Thanks to Lambert for showing up

I watched from Canada and I'm pleased Tim took time to debate the issue. This is what's needed. Good on him for engaging in a polite dialogue. Hopefully his example will be the start of a new trend.

When the audience questions started I could only watch some of it. There was that idiot who seemed to think that CO2 in the oceans caused global warming. Or didn't. Or something. Then there was that chick who asked that stupid question about global warming on Mars... It reminded of that 'debate' after Durkin's film when the audience was stacked with LaRouche loonies.

I thought Tim did well and won overall. He murdered Monckton on the science. I thought Monckton came across as a smarmy prick who just pulled 'facts' out of his arse. But then I'm not a fan of pompous brits who think they can tell us colonials what to think.

The moderator was very biased, but i'm sure you would have loved to have Maurice Strong moderating right? haha.
This debate is pathetic, there has been personal attacks mostly from the alarmists over the years, and they can't really handle it when it comes right back.

What is all this stuff about defending democracy and communist plots?

Didn't you get the memo? For the last 100 years, tens of thousands of scientists across the world have been cooking data and forging results so that Al Gore and the rest of the Global Communist Green Conspiracy can take power and return us all to the stoneage. Thankfully, Lord Mockton and Sarah Palin have caught on to this dastardly plot and will take us to a brighter, shinier future. All you have to do is say the following magic phrase aloud:

"Drill, baby. Drill!"

Moncktons's essential summation:

Authors like Lindzen and Choi show there is doubt in the literature, therefore that means global warming is rubbish. And any level of doubt such as produced by distinctly flawed paper by L&C means we should do nothing.

Doubt need not be put into context, just call the whole theory of AGW rubbish if you can construct any small article of uncertainty.

Ah, so that was AJ saying "hear hear" and other affirmations? I was listening and typing, not watching - couldn't tell who was saying it.

Lotharsson, thanks very much for transcribing. That was very thoughtful and generous of you. Much appreciated.

So answer this one thing.. If there has been.. and I know there has.. Global Warming in the past and has been shown to be cyclic.. and mankind could not possibly have caused it.. then why are you so sure Mankind is causing it NOW?

s. lindsey, I would second lotharson's recommendation to read the IPCC report, at least the summary. It's easy to understand and gives a good summation of the current science, even though the science has advanced significantly since the report was issued.

However, to answer your question in a nutshell I would say that we know several things to be facts: Humans are causing the level of Co2 in the air to increase. Co2 is a gas that traps heat radiated from the earth. Everything else being equal more co2 in the atmosphere means a warmer planet. Finally, there are no credible studies that conclude the earth has some sort of countering mechanism that will cool the planet when Co2 rises.

Again, read the IPCC report so you understand the issues and then check back into the discussion when you are better informed...no one here is going away, there is simply too much as stake.

As did others, I thought Tim did reasonably well on the science, although clearly he's currently a modest debating talent at best - and the soundbite from Pinker was an absolutely priceless riposte. It would have been superb to have more "we can measure this" moments, because Monckton tried to imply the AGW science is based on models whilst the anti-AGW science is based on measurements.

Whilst Tim did quite well, Monckton is a crowd pleasing showman, and that counts for an awful lot - especially with much of this crowd.

jakerman - Monckton's "product is doubt", which will be a familiar phrase to anyone who knows how the tobacco industry went about their campaigns...

Tim,
I am a skeptic, but I must give you my appreciation for you standing up and defending your belief. It is surprising, that in just a short time, the AGW paradigm has gone from the offensive to the defensive. I await the evolution of this "science". By the way, Lord Moncton made you look small, not by the issue at hand, but through the intervening discourse.

MapleLeaf - you're welcome, but like I said take it all with a grain of salt (I'm sure there are errors, probably even significant ones) and assume most of it is paraphrased.

I missed the the inital presentation, and joined during question time.

Monckton was as polished and self assured as the slickest of salesmen. But as slick has he was he less assured in is summation on Pinker and Lindzen & Choi. He was trying to defend his use of both paper.

Nice homework Tim, look forward to reading your correspondence with Pinker. Your preparation on Monckton's supposed big two "supporting" papers threw him off his big close.

How typical of Monckton to start out with a bit of troll bait about Haiti and biofuels.

I'm a lurker, but I have been reading this blog for a while now, and I managed to watch all of the debate. I was pleased that it was a civil debate - I heard no booing, and only marginal interference from the moderator (at least until the last "meaning drenched" moments of "Mi-Lord" reverence).

I thought Tim did an excellent job, and debated very well. (Despite suggestions on another thread, it really wasn't the opportunity to tear Mi-Lord apart.) LCM eventually looked like a bit of a bullshit artist with a formula for handling an audience. (No surprises there.)

Well done Dr Lambert.

It is surprising, that in just a short time, the AGW paradigm has gone from the offensive to the defensive.

Doesn't surprise me. For one thing scientists are lousy at PR, large companies with vested interests are necessarily very good at it, and journalists on the whole aren't very good at covering science and are mostly working for other large corporations that have a point of view regardless of the science.

Mark S:

>*So answer this one thing.. If there has been.. and I know there has.. Global Warming in the past and has been shown to be cyclic.. and mankind could not possibly have caused it.. then why are you so sure Mankind is causing it NOW?*

Start here MarkS

Or you could start with the some of the other enhanced greenhouse finger-prints such as cooling stratosphere while warming surface and warming troposhere; or why the warming is most rappily in the higher latitudes which get least sun.

Lord HawHaw has obviously picked up some geologic history from Plimer, but to continually rabbet on about stuff that happened 750 million years ago (and relate it to what is happening now) lost it for him - particularly when we have climatologists examining stuff in real time.

Did anyone else pick up that Monckton thinks satellite measurements are the ants-pants for monitoring temperature yet says we haven't had warming for 15 years? Last time I checked, GISS satellites says 2005 was the warmest year.

Tim, well done - you stuck to the science and you won the debate about the science.

As soon as it drifted into politics or economics - Monckton held sway because that hits home with people, how it will impact on them. But it was always going to be like that. The thing that most people don't understand is what to do about climate change, who's going to be doing the doing, when to do it and how much is it going to cost? Science can't help them with that, imo.

Loth/Mark

Yes I have read the report.. It fails to quantify the premise.

There have been cyclic events for ages..

There used to be glaciers over New York a mile high.. They started and ended.. Thus Global Cooling and Global Warming.. That is real hard evidence..

Greenland used to be well Green..

Iceland used to be covered in Ice..

Deserts used to be the bottom of the seas..

Mountaintops have been discovered as being islands at one time..

All this is hard evidence.. Not antidotal. Not Computer modeled.. Not FUNDED by POLITICS.. REAL HARD EVIDENCE of past Warming.. with no influence by MAN..

I find it the height of arrogance of MAN to think that we can influence the ENGINE that is called Earth.. We are a mere spec in the moment of time of this planet.. but yet somehow we have the power to change the Earth.. Simply by using a resource created by the Earth itself.. Generating a product (CO2) which is created in mass by the Earth itself and USED by every living plant on this Earth.

One question I can never get answered.. Who said this is EARTH'S perfect Temp?

Maybe a warmer Earth just might be a good thing.. Think of the WORLD WIDE HUNGER that might be cured if planting seasons where a little longer. But oh wait the Eugenics crowd, a few probably on here, doesn't want that.. Less hunger = More people to use resources not in abundance.

Saying that todayâs temp is perfect or a little high is like stating categorically that Saturnâs Methane levels harms it's environment.

Apologies MarkS, I didn't realize you were quoting s.lindsey.

Well done Tim - thank you for stepping up to the plate and for making a good case for your side and providing an excellent program. You have risen considerably in my estimation.

I am a non-scientist and a professed sceptic. Monckton clearly won the debate and yes he was probably aided by a friendly room and a friendly moderator.

People here lament that the debate was of a political nature. But the issue is inherently a political one - this is not some boring dry side ally research issue but something that has far reaching political and economic impact. If you tell me how I should run my life and the resources at my disposal without either providing me a utterly compelling, completely watertight, reason for doing so, then expect me to ask questions, form my own opinion on the matter and be generally suspicious.

Now the bulk of the professional scientists posting here making crude remarks about sceptics and at times arrogant insinuations about the intellectual capacity and integrity of the sceptical public, but to a non scientist audience, Monckton injects a very substantial amount of reasonable doubt into the whole issue.

I personally love science, and since I was an adolescent I sought inspiration from larger than life figures like Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins and many popular books by such popularisers a read and re-read over and over again.

Yet, especially in the past few months since Climategate and now almost daily revelations about the conduct of the IPCC, climate science, in the eyes of the public may now be beginning to fall into disrepute. You want to win the public's hearts and minds on this issue? Provide compelling evidence (or as Monckton put it - the silver bullet) - and stop calling the rest of us, that have the sheer audacity to call you out and express doubt, idiots.

Show some respect, especially since it is public money that provides most of you what you need so that you can pursue your professional interests.

Shorter s.lindsey:

The Earth used to be different therefore the enhanced greenhouse effect cannot affect the Earth.

robr @178 - Unlike the science (maybe), judging the debate is obviously a matter of perception and prejudice. You thought LCM made Tim look small; I thought he just stood up a lot. You thought LCM handled the "intervening discourse" well; I thought he eventually looked like a man with a fabulously retentive memory, probably a good line in bullshitting, and an almost scandalous amorality in implying concern over possible climate change is mutually exclusive of trying to address poverty and a raft of other human and environmental crises. How about our responsibility to look at all of these?

Does anyone have a journal reference for the submarine volcanic oscillations driving ENSO that Monckton raised in the debate? I have never heard of that before. I couldn't find anything definitive in a google search. A quick Web of Science search showed nothing. My search terms might have been wrong. I would have thought it would have been a "hot topic" if there was anything in it.

Andrew..

Well said.. That has been a thorn in my side since this "debate" began.. The "deniers" as they call us are generally just dismissed.. Debate is not appreciated nor wanted.

I can say every site that is run by the AGW crowd is the same..

Morons, Idiots, Denier, Flat Earther.. etc...

They do not want a debate afterall the "Science" is settled..

Tim, I thought you did an excellent job, and clearly pwned Monckton on the science. Well done. I think if there was someone there who was genuinely open to the facts, they would see that Monckton's argument was discredited.

Doesn't surprise me. For one thing scientists are lousy at PR, large companies with vested interests are necessarily very good at it, and journalists on the whole aren't very good at covering science and are mostly working for other large corporations that have a point of view regardless of the science.Legerdemain, please explain why you believe any of what you have said - it all seems conjecture.

shorter s.lindsey #2 - I can't imagine that we could influence the climate, therefore we have not.

Lotharsson..
I agree

shorter s.lindsey #3 - how I learned to stop worrying and love a rapidly warming climate.

"Who said this is EARTH'S perfect Temp?"

Straw man - no-one said that of the EARTH.

But for the current inhabitants - us and the rest of the ecosphere, it's pretty damn good. Move the temperature too rapidly and you cause massive stress to the ecosystem (let alone to human affairs) because it can't adapt fast enough.

jakerman, no worries. I'm new to blogging so my post didn't look as good as it should. I understand the confusion...

s.lindsey: Aren't you getting a bit hysterical now? I read the report and it describes the different forcings quite well. It also describes the current state of forcings pretty well. The ones that created the ice ages (orbital forcings) are currently creating a very slight cooling effect. Did you not read that? Or did you not understand? Perhaps you should reread and look at the section describing what created ice ages...

I find it the height of stupidity for someone to be offered evidence of how man is actually influencing climate and then vomit up some nonsense response about how we can't-we can't says I!-so they are arrogant. Your personal beliefs should be put aside and the evidence weighed. This nonsense about arrogance simply shows you have a bias and aren't being rational. One could say that denierism is a belief, a faith, to you if you can think of no reason to believe what you do other than belief itself.

I'll attempt to answer your question about earth's perfect temp: No one ever said the current temp is earths perfect temp. That is a straw man argument and fallacious. The important thing to know is that human civilization developed around a relatively narrow range of temperatures and the climactic stability that such temperatures imbued. To change the earths temperature is to change a fundamental premise (that of climate) upon which mankind has based it's prosperity.

Andrew and S.lindsey,

We can handle, and tolerate (well, most of us) true scepticism. But what is becoming an increasingly common part of this whole debate is irrational conspiracy theory (all the scientists are fabricating the whole theory, the UN propagates AGW to establish global government, etc etc.), and simple misinformed (or conscious deception) arguments such as: It's the sun; there's no CO2 increase; CO2 increase is all natural; CO2 is good; warming is good; it's cooling; CO2 has no effect; there isn't enough CO2 to have an effect; etc etc. The list goes on and on, really.

s.lindsey, since you think humans can't affect the earth at all, I take it you think that acid rain and the ozone hole have nothing to do with us either? What about desertification in regions that - just purely by coincidence, you understand - have suffered severe overgrazing by herds of animals put there by people?

The "deniers" as they call us are generally just dismissed..

And general dismissal is generally because they are merely recycling talking points that don't stand up to scrutiny, or rehashing discredited arguments, or relying on assumptions that have no evidence.

I'll grant you it's possible for newcomers to the debate to be genuinely working through the questions for themselves for the first time, but it's very difficult to distinguish that case via initial brief postings from the dedicated "I have my opinions and I don't care what new evidence you expose me to" case.

That said, it usually becomes clear after a little back and forth that most vocal people's basis for rejecting AGW science is not scientific; it is generally rooted in other considerations or preconceptions. And that will move you from general dismissal to specific dismissal in my book.

Lotharsson..

I think we can both agree that a large RAPID change would indeed do more harm then good.. but there's the rub.. You see even the most doom and gloom predictions are only given us a 2C increase over a span of 50-100 years.. Humans are adaptive. As a species Global changes are generally absorbed.
Will there be an extinction Level Event if temps rise over 100 years of 2-4C.. I doubt it.. Will there could there be stressors not yet revealed Maybe..

But then again I could be wrong.. Who knows..?

Let's break this down:

For one thing scientists are lousy at PR

Let me see. Scientists spend their entire adult lives studying ... um... PR? ... oh yeah, no, wait... it's on the tip of my tongue... that's right: they study science!

large companies with vested interests are necessarily very good at [PR]...

OK, you're right. Pure conjecture.

... and journalists on the whole aren't very good at covering science and are mostly working for other large corporations that have a point of view regardless of the science

[For example](http://www.smh.com.au/business/how-the-carbon-lobby-blackens-media-cove…).

Lotharsson,
You cannot build a man of more straw than this:
Move the temperature too rapidly and you cause massive stress to the ecosystem (let alone to human affairs) because it can't adapt fast enough.Believe what you want but please don't dictate those beliefs on the rest of us.

Shorter Andrew barnham: science should be conducted via public opinion

It's absolutely political what the spin of an elementary particle happens to be. Don't try to tell me where to go to the bathroom.

Well done Tim you were even as well dressed as the opposition!

Plenty of substance from Tim to encourage in the audience a little scepticism for easy lies and wishful thinking. If the audience member was half-smart and a bit motivated Tim's given them a starting point to now go off and learn something.

At one point Monckton has a slip of the tongue and accidentally admits that a mathematician he has sent some material to has told him that Monckton's sensitivity result is "too low" - the opposite of what Monckton wants to hear - but he corrects himself later and gets back to spinning the nonsense about how unnamed others agree that his sensitivity calculation isn't stupid. It is stupid, he's out of his depth; this accounts for all his quacking away about how overly complicated the IPCC stuff is. Nature is more complex and messy than Monckton's inadequate calculations can capture.

I missed Tim's best shot of all, having someone whose research Monckton's abused rebut him directly via video. Look forward to watching that later on Youtube or somewhere. Well done Tim!

s. lindsey, getting back to your specific case. If pressed based on recent posts I would put you in the denialist camp until further evidence arrives. Why?

Your comment at 186 indicates a preconception that denies the possibility of AGW before you start (namely that we simply can't have influenced climate). If you've decided the answer ahead of time, why ask the question?

You also say you've read the IPCC report and claim it doesn't say (or perhaps your claim is it doesn't *prove*) what it plainly says - that the only robust explanation we have for the observed climate is that anthropogenic CO2 played a significant part. You rest that claim on the preconception that models are not suitable evidence, when all of science in any complex field is finding the best way to explain what we know, including the use of models.

You argue that climate has changed significantly in the past so we *can't* be changing it today, a statement that is just not logical. (The temperature inside my house went up and down without me doing anything...so if I turn the air-conditioner on today that won't affect temperature either?)

Similarly that CO2 is a "resource which is created ... by the Earth itself and used by every living plant" so it cannot possibly change the climate. (Aside: water is also a natural resource provided by the planet and used by every living plant. But don't try drinking 5 litres at once - you will die from it.)

This is not meant to insult or be a personal attack; this is my best assessment of where you're coming from based on limited exposure to your posts. And I've spent enough time debating with people who have these types of thought structures to know that evidence and logic rarely brings about any change.

But that doesn't mean it won't for you ;-)

With the recent events of Climategate and the corrections the IPCC have had to make and the general overall arrogance of the AGW crowd.. i.e. If you don't believe you are simply to ignorant attitudes.. One can understand why average read..NON-Scientist..might get the idea that AGW is "cooked up".

The Science is anything but settled.. A recent petition being circulated by "Scientist, Climatologist and others" seem to dispute that fact..

IS it possible that you could be wrong.. IF you say no then this is not Science.. Its Politics and Ideology.
A RELIGON by any other name.

s.lindsey # 203

The doom and gloom predictions only 2c? What? We've already had .8c. Most doom and gloom predictions are 5c-9c by 2100 with more after that. To get the latest check out the Copenhagen report: http://climatecongress.ku.dk/pdf/synthesisreport

Doom and gloom is business as usual and is the last line on page 19.

I was actually at the debate. Although I am a sceptic, and remain so after the debate, I thought Time Lambert handled it very well. It was an excellent debate on the science and economic issues without any of the name-calling you often see on the blogs. We need more of that.

You see even the most doom and gloom predictions are only given us a 2C increase over a span of 50-100 years

2 degrees of climate change is pretty large.

It's probably worth looking at ecosystem research to see what sort of problems that might lead to. It's not possible to merely migrate everything north or south (depending on your initial location) as the temperature changes, if only because other habitat attributes besides average temperature are important for ecosystems, and these are not constant as you move north/south.

Believe what you want but please don't dictate those beliefs on the rest of us.

Sorry, I must have missed that I was in totalitarian dictator thought control mode when I typed my comment about ecosystem stress.

Oh wait, I wasn't.

Phillip W
Here here - let the debate begin.

Lotharsson..
"You argue that climate has changed significantly in the past so we can't be changing it today, a statement that is just not logical. (The temperature inside my house went up and down without me doing anything...so if I turn the air-conditioner on today that won't affect temperature either?)"

Correct climate changed without your effect.. It did so naturally..

Climate changes occurs.. That's a fact

That Mankind is causing the rise in temps.. is debatable at best.

CO2 is a contrived pollutant.. Methane and Sulfur dioxide are more in line with the generation of "Greenhouse Gas".

CO2 is beneficial to us.. We need it.. The Earth needs it.. Without it.. well we stop breathing and THAT'S NOT DEBATABLE..

Let's say we can affect the CO2 levels and we go too far.. What then?

Massive plant life extinction?

De-gassing of the Seas?

I mean can you definitively tell me this COULD NOT happen..?

S.Lindsey is wrong when (s)he says:

You see even the most doom and gloom predictions are only given us a 2C increase over a span of 50-100 years..

Not at all. The worst predictions I've seen from reasonably plausible sources are about 6 degrees C by 2100. The 2 degree figure by 2100 is what is generally agreed we'd have a 50-50 chance of achieving if concentrations by 2050 did not exceed 450ppmv.

It's worth noting though that, even if that was what occurred, that does not mean everywhere on the Earth's surface increases by 2 degrees C. Under that scenario parts of Africa and Latin America, especially those between the equator and 25 Deg S could warm by nearly twice that much. The poles are also warming faster than the bulk of the planet to the impacts there too could be closer to 4 degrees C. Increases of that magnitude would precipitate dangerous losses of snowpack and glacial melt water upon which hundreds of millions of people depend and change the pattern of flodding in large parts of the world. And remember, our chance of staying under 2 deg C at 450 ppmv is only 50-50.

That's why some think we need to aim to stablise as early as possible at about 400 and then immediately work back to about 350 ppmc. with the aim of keeping to 1.5 or less.

You speak of human adaptivity and extinction level events. The fact remains that at the moment, we have 6.8 billion going on 9 billion people by 2050 to look after. The ability to adapt or maneouvre when virtually every piece of arable land is occupied and there is simply nowehre for people harmed by climate change to go or be supported is very limited. While an extinction event is a distinct possibility (see for example Peter Ward's under a Green Sky a sudden and drastic decline in the living standards of the world's people (especially its poorest) accompanied by mass deaths would still be something about which none of us ought to be relaxed.

Sadly, all of our ports are built at sea level, and so is most of the infrastructure supporting them. Most of us live or depend on activities near the coast at the ocean and many of us who don't depend on good quality farmlands serviced by predictable rainfall. A radical change in the availablility and usage of lands and the need to redesign and reposition the world's ports would be a huge setback any way you look at it. Doing that at a time when the fossil store upon which we have built our infrastructure has become depleted and therefore very expensive and when there are 9 billion people to feed, water, clothe and shelter and who are fearful they might miss out is too horrible to contemplate.

We don't need to guess at this. We can be sure the path we are currently on bodes us ill and even worse, even if we were to change our policy right now and radically for the better, it's not clear we would escape without major damage. The lead times for ocean warming and CO2 persistence are very long. But to continue doing what we are now because a handful of scientific illiterates with a cultural agenda and/or an interest in fossil fuel combustion are squealing would be utter folly.

Shorter Andrew Barnham #2: the debate is inherently political, except when scientists take part in it!

s. lindsey - "IS it possible that you could be wrong.. "?

Yes, of course, as with any and EVERY scientific position or question.

But as time goes on more and more evidence accrues, making it less and less likely that the key tenets are wrong. And it's reached the stage where "the science is settled" is shorthand for "it now seems rather unlikely that major flaws will be found".

This does not discount the possibility (even the expectation) of minor flaws, and perhaps even fraudulent papers, being discovered. But fraud is pretty hard to sustain in any mainstream scientific field because it's a combative vocation, and you can really make your reputation (which helps get things like future grants) by showing that some highly thought of result is wrong. (And you can even get grant money from organisations that want to disprove specific results they don't like...)

That's why the "tens of thousands of scientists are engaged in a huge conspiracy" theory is a feeble joke.

Well done Tim - unfortunately I wasn't able to watch much except a couple of questions at the end due to work commitments.
I thought you did well seeing as you appeared to be debating both Monckton AND Alan Jones who pretty much said "hear hear" every time Monckton spoke.

So much for impartiality :)

Science is not decided by debate robr, and it's "hear hear" not "here here". You didn't get anything else right in your self-impressed comments above either.

s.lindsay, I think you are absolutely correct in doubting the possibility of an extinction-level event if temps rise 2-4 degC in 100 years.

However I await with baited breath to see how our "adaptive" human species goes about upping and moving London and New York City (among countless others) 30 miles inland, and what the economic cost will be. Now that will be interesting.

I also harbor no illusions that the retiree and pensioner audience at the debate couldn't give a stuff.

Shorter Monckton:

You can't trust Trenberth and thus neither his [take-down](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/01/lindzen-and-choi-…) of Lindzen and Choi, because Trenberth is part of "climategate".

I.e. Monckton wants us to distrust Trenberth on the basis that someone hacked his emails, not because of anything he did or said.

PS. this review by Curry of L&C just came to my attention

Fran..If one were to assume.. that this is actually occurring.

We can all go the doom on us route.. What if this... What if that scenarios can literally go on forever.. Can you definitively state that this WILL happen?

Methane and Sulfur dioxide are more in line with the generation of "Greenhouse Gas".

So if it warms up a few more degrees and the permafrost starts melting and releases a lot of (IIRC) methane, would that worry you? Because that worries a number of climate scientists precisely because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas.

CO2 is beneficial to us.. We need it.. The Earth needs it.. Without it.. well we stop breathing and THAT'S NOT DEBATABLE.

Straw man coupled with black and white thinking. Slow down, try to check the nuance of the argument coming from the scientists and start again.

Firstly, things that are beneficial at one level of concentration can be detrimental at another. Do you agree? Can you think of any examples?

Secondly, there isn't anyone who is saying "get rid of all CO2 from the atmosphere". And quite rightly. They would be laughed out of the room! So why do you make your own position weaker by arguing as if there is?

Lotharsson Sorry, I must have missed that I was in totalitarian dictator thought control mode when I typed my comment about ecosystem stress.
I'm so sorry but when you espouse "totalitarian dictator thought control" whether you are stressed or not, you do so.

Posted by: Andrew Barnham | February 11, 2010 11:36 PM

"People here lament that the debate was of a political nature. But the issue is inherently a political one."

No it's not Andrew but one side has done their very best to turn it into one. By doing this they avoid the science as much as possible and demand equal time when the scientific arguments themselves are far from equal and don't deserve equal time.

The place for that sort of debate is within the scientific community where the science can be judged on it's merits alone rather than by who put on the best show.

Thanks all for the somewhat civil debate.. It has been informative.

This producer class "denier" must make enough to surpport the recepiant class tomorrow.

Life continues..

I'd just like to echo others in here and say a big "Thank You" to Lotharsson for transcribing the debate. Watching it live at work wasn't possible because of my employer blocking video feeds, so it was good to be able to keep tabs on what was going on.

Congratulations on your performance Tim. Well done. You were always on a hiding to nothing with Alan Jones as moderator and a hostile crowd, so you've acquitted yourself very well. If you've managed to put even a speck of doubt in the mind of one person there so that they pick up a scientific paper on the subject (and not an E&E one), then it's a worthwhile exercise.

It's also attracted more than the usual number of trolls. I think we should start a troll bingo card and just answer their questions/distractions with the relevant number off the Skeptical Science site: http://www.skepticalscience.com/

Dear Tim Lambert, the first post on here tomorrow should be, simply, links to the portions of each of the first four IPCC reports on estimated climate sensitivity. They haven't really changed, which puts the lie to Monckton's conclusion that the IPCC is constantly revising downward, and shows how willing he is to say things that are demonstrably untrue.
In posting these links, you'll also have a simple answer for the claim (not by Monckton, but by a questioner and paraphrased by the 'moderator') that the label "Global Warming" has been deviously changed to "Climate Change".

Baton down the hatches Mr. Lambert. You don't know what you've gotten yourself into.

But at least you're braver than Al Gore who has been avoiding debating Monckton for years.

I'm so sorry but when you espouse "totalitarian dictator thought control" whether you are stressed or not, you do so.

LOL! That's priceless ;-)

My comments about ecosystem stress that you quoted when alleging I was engaging in totalitarian thought control:
(a) were not about me being stressed. The stress was on the ecosystem.
(b) were not telling anyone they must believe what I believe (hint: it's a blog post about a debate that is itself a debate; people are by definition going to disagree.)

But I do love that you know what my intentions were better than I do. That would be a really handy resource - can I have your e-mail address so I can ask you for your insight in the future? ;-)

@206
Posted by: Alex | February 12, 2010 12:06 AM

Artful strawman Alex.

Here's a more accurate short version which I cheerfully sanction you to use if you wish to quote me in future: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

The extraordinary claim: is that the whole world economy and every person on the planet must radically and rapidly change in the coming few years in order to avert impending global disaster and resultant human suffering on an unimaginable scale.

As is self evident from the way I have chosen the frame the claim at least - that the claim is largely a political/economic claim.

The evidence supporting this claim is the fruits of climate science.

I am not telling you or any other professional scientist on this Blog how to suck eggs and do science. But if you want to influence public policy and exert influence over how I choose to conduct my life - I demand better quality of evidence than what climate science has so far provided.

Correction @226
"Thanks all for the somewhat civil debate.. It has been informative.
This producer class "denier" must make enough to support the recipient class tomorrow.
Life continues.."

Don't want to support the theory we deniers are all ignorant..

In response to the comment on 2-4 degree global changes in average temp:
Megafauna extinctions happened during the ice ages with 10 degree changes in temperature (Rapid heating over a thousand years, slow cooling, both due to greenhouse effects). Two degrees in one hundred years would be twice that rate. An extra 4 degrees C will take global average temperatures to those the earth has not seen for about three million years. Extinctions happen. Extinction of species is the norm, not the exception for life on this planet. There is no knowing what will be the species mix. The extinctions will be exacerbated by other human pressures on habitat. The key issue, as I see it, is the rapidity of habitat change compared to the time for speciation to occur.

s.lindsey says:
Let's say we can affect the CO2 levels and we go too far.. What then? Massive plant life extinction? De-gassing of the Seas? I mean can you definitively tell me this COULD NOT happen..?

Well, we know that we can artificially increase Co2 levels by 100ppm within, say, 100 years, so if we overshoot it's easy to put back in the atmosphere. But that is probably moot because we also know that Co2 stays in the atmosphere for a very long time. So even if we stopped Co2 emissions completely, today, we wouldn't 'overshoot' as you put it, for about another 1000 years, maybe never. I think we can safely answer your question as 'yes'.

Also, your statement 'CO2 is a contrived pollutant.. Methane and Sulfur dioxide are more in line with the generation of "Greenhouse Gas".' is wrong in a very basic way. Sulfur dioxide is NOT a greenhouse gas. In fact it has a cooling effect. Pretty basic stuff lindsey. You really need to go back to the IPCC summary and read it like five times.

And saying that we need Co2 is a fallacious statement. You are either implying that more Co2 than we have now is better or you are railing against someone who has suggested we should eliminate all the co2. The latter person does not exist and the thought is patently absurd. And if you are suggesting the former how do you know this is the case? Have you seen and studies that show worldwide plant growth, including the temperature effects of increased co2, would benefit from additional co2? What if the temp kills more plants than the increased Co2 helps plants? Do you have ANY data to go off of? Also, remember that the world got by just fine on 180ppm of co2 during the ice ages. Trees still grew, all the plant life alive today somehow survived just fine, yet you know think those same plants need more than 390 ppm? Why?

S.lindsay said:

Climate changes occurs.. That's a fact

Yes. Sydney is the capital of NSW. That's also a fact. But is it relevant, and if so, what is the relevance? Although a great many phenomena qualify as climate change not all of them have the same significance for human life. Very slow climate change in the pre-human past is not as salient to humans as very rapid climate change in the present. It also matters how great the change is, what base it starts from and what drives it. Climate change driven by Milankovitch forcings are orders of magnitude slower and allow us humans to adapt. The period of the early holocene warming of 13,000BP was pretty significant for humans, and fairly rapid (though still less than today and off a lower base) but the small number of humans meant adaptation was possible.

That Mankind is causing the rise in temps.. is debatable at best.

No, it is not. The markers are very clear. But even if this were "debatable", so what? If there is a reasonable prospect that we are altering the climate from that which allowed the least well equipped of our ancestors to prosper in circumstances where we have no margin for error, should we not stop altering it?

CO2 is a contrived pollutant.. Methane and Sulfur dioxide are more in line with the generation of "Greenhouse Gas".

Wrong. While emthane (CH4) is a potent GHG, SO2 is not, and indeed, SO2 as an aerosol was the principal driver of the mid-20th Century warming hiatus. It is very short-lived.

CO2 is beneficial to us.. We need it.. The Earth needs it.. Without it.. well we stop breathing and THAT'S NOT DEBATABLE..

Specious. Nobody is suggesting we biosequester all CO2, or even try reducing it below pre-industrial levels. Even this most ambitious of aims will be neither cheap nor technically simple nor likely to be realised within the next 150 years.

One should note though that the mere fact that Co2 at trace levels is beneficvial to us does not ential supposing that above trace level concentrations would be better for us. We humans need trace levels of copper and selenium and B12 and various fat-soluble vitamins in our diet, but if we went above trace levels we would be poisoned, in some cases lethally. Oxygen is vital to our lives. At 20% of the atmosphere we have an elegant sufficiency. At 25% we would probably suffer from elevated rates of cancer and at 35% even wet organic matter might spontaneously combust. Your reasoning is a composition error on both sides. You assume a desire to reduce concentrations is the same as a desire to eliminate them and assume that if something is good in one quantity it must be even better in greater quantity.

What you miss is that ecosystems are complex and dynamic. Each of the elements shapes each of the others. messing with one messes with all of the others.

Let's say we can affect the CO2 levels and we go too far.. What then? Massive plant life extinction? De-gassing of the Seas? I mean can you definitively tell me this COULD NOT happen..?

Yes, I can tell you definitively this can't happen.

Andrew Barnham, the key question is what sort of evidence you (and in general the population) would accept and whether you (and in general the population) are competent to analyse and weigh that evidence.

Hence the IPCC...and hence why the efforts to discredit the IPCC (in part because discrediting the science has been fairly challenging).

I've probably written enough on one thread for the moment. There may be a couple of comments of mine that got stuck in the moderation pipeline too (I'm pretty sure there is one section of the debate liveblog that is still missing.)

What if.. MarkS.. What if.. Isn't that the question?

What if is therefore not definitive.
But I digress.. Later..

Congratulations Tim, you acquitted yourself well. It was always going to be difficult debating science, when the other side were using political ideology with a smattering of cherry picked data (often wrong)to convey their message. From a scientific standing you clearly outclassed Monckton.

I have the feeling, given the standard of some of the questions, that there were a few "Bolt Stooges" in the audience. Could that have been El Gordo, asking the question about ocean based CO2 ????

This is obviously a complex subject and most people would find a purely scientific discussion tedious. Given that there is no single defining event to confirm AGW, science is going to have a difficult time persuading the average person this is happening. Monckton is aware of this and plays on the Big Brother Government, and taxation bogeymen to carry his point, as most people will react to those. Interesting too that quite a few in the audience appeared to be "political refugees".

I would hope this will be the start of a sensible public scientific debate on the issue.

Well done, Tim.

It's a tough task when your opponent isn't constrained by reality or the ethical use of persuasion.

Fantastic with the Pinker video - stopped at least one of Monckton's lies dead in its' tracks.

@225
Posted by: Peter Pan | February 12, 2010 12:41 AM

Respectfully I disagree with your point of view. Anything that deals with allocation, access, control and distribution of resources is fundamentally a political/economic issue - not a scientific one.

So what you are essentially saying is that only the scientific community is allowed to contribute the development of human response to this perceived issue and that the rest of the public is to be politically excluded from the process?

If my representation of your view is correct then this reminds me of the R.Heinlein novel whether only people who have performed military service are franchised citizens. So you, knowing nothing about me whatsoever other than my admission that I am not a scientist, I am not permitted to contribute at all to an issue that directly affects me unless I join your highly exclusive and highly respected fraternity?

Andrew,

If you want to influence public policy and exert influence over my environment by continuing to conduct the extraordinary experiment of dumping 100s of millions of years worth of sequestered co2 into the atmosphere, I demand better quality of evidence that this is safe than what the deniers have so far provided.

@240 Andrew Barnham;

I think "Peter Pan" was talking strictly about the issue of whether AGW is a real effect; whether the globe is warming, oceans acidifying, etc, and whether the human species is responsible. That's clearly a scientific question, and it's a separate question from the political question of: "What should we do, if anything?"

The fallacy that the denialist camp encourages is that the answer to the second question--that we may well not be able to do much--can influence the answer to the first.

Shorter Andrew, "The science is wrong because it's undemocratic!"

Tim,
You looked like you got hit by a Mack truck, no wonder so few want to take on Monckton. I mean he even had you on the simple maths. Respectfully suggest you get yourself to a few Toastmasters meetings to help with future bouts.

I was at the debate, and Tim was superb.

His annihilation of Monckton's central scientific argument - the CO2 climate sensitivity based on Pinker's results - was brilliant.

To anyone with a functioning brain able to understand just a bit of science, it was a slam-dunk win to Lambert.

Jones, unfortunately, allowed rambling nonsensical questions from the floor that gave Monckton the opportunity to use his oratorical skills to bring the audience on side - which was easy: just mention taxes, totalitarian governments, and so on.

After Monckton's speech the 'moderator' applauded; after Tim's speech he just sat there.

Get some balls Monckton and moderator.

@241 Posted by: lenny | February 12, 2010 1:18 AM

The way you frame the issue is very interesting "100s of millions of years worth of sequestered co2 into the atmosphere". I can easily frame the issue as % of atmospheric content which is human generated CO2 and it will be an equally unimpressive and minuscule number. All this exercise does is reveal our respective biases. It is just a dull exercise in polemic and neither of us gets closer to the truth of the matter. But it touches on the core issue - is what we are doing now actually harmful? (to which your argument is no more impressive than the counter argument I just put forward). What are the consequences (intended and unintended) the proposed alternative - throttling back on CO2 emissions?

In the debate Monckton touches on this issue with the issue of poverty. Having spent alot of time myself in rural Asia and witnessing the effects of grinding poverty directly, poverty and helping people move out of poverty is an issue very close to my heart. As such I am very sympathetic to Monckton's arguments where he links the issue of AGW to the issue of poverty.

@242 Posted by: Nils Ross | February 12, 2010 1:18 AM

I agree they are separate issues, and presumably like yourself, I have little patience for people who try to join issues and confuse issues in order to advance their own point of view.

I only watched the final summing up , but for what it's worth I think you won Tim. Fortunately the SMH video will be viewed by more than the RSL types in the audience at this forum. You'll have to put up a discussion of [Pinker's](http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~pinker/) paper to show how dissembling Monckton was.

>*The way you frame the issue is very interesting "100s of millions of years worth of sequestered co2 into the atmosphere". I can easily frame the issue as % of atmospheric content which is human generated CO2 and it will be an equally unimpressive and minuscule number. All this exercise does is reveal our respective biases.*

Yes, one puts the amount of atmospheric CO2 into the context of history, the other obscures that comparison.

One is biased towards clarity in terms of relative concentrations the other towards obscuring that context.

Andrew Barnham:

"The extraordinary claim: is that the whole world economy and every person on the planet must radically and rapidly change in the coming few years in order to avert impending global disaster and resultant human suffering on an unimaginable scale"

This is actually a strawman argument. First off, most people on this planet don't need to change much, because their greenhouse gas output is already quite low. And even for the "rich" nations, there are major differences in CO2 emissions per capita between countries with similar standards of living.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissi…

For reasonable policy discussions, it is important not to get sucked into economic alarmism.

Well done Tim.

Monckton does these debates for a living and has had decades to hone his presentation, whereas you had just a few days, yet you still wiped the floor.

Congrats!

@243 Posted by: lenny | February 12, 2010 1:23 AM

Heh heh.

I'll make it easy for you : any of the following will get you on the path to providing proportional level of evidence to support your claims and expectations on the human race in its totality.

a) A computer model that actually models the climate accurately restrospectively against all sensible metrics (temperature, precipitation etc) where near every constant in the model is empirically verified - from the radius of the planet to how clouds form and behave. Instead of just fiddling with constants in some sort of overly complex regression analysis, curve fitting, exercise.

b) A methodology for measuring climate sensitivity that stands up to close scrutiny.

c) A temperature record that has not been passed through a series of arbitrary and human selected filters, that acknowledges and correctly compensates for UHI and that clearly shows a correlating relationship between Co2 and temperature.

Any of the above and I'll consider throwing a U-Turn.

Keep on trucking scientist guys.

Congrats Tim. You slaughtered him on the science. However, you were hard pressed with a biased moderator, an audience stacked with LaRouche loonies and an opponent who felt he wasn't constrained by such old-fashioned notions as truth or accuracy.

Nevertheless, overall, I'd give the debate to you.

"I can easily frame the issue as % of atmospheric content which is human generated CO2 and it will be an equally unimpressive and minuscule number."

No, actually, it won't be.
But the point which went right over your head is, you suggest the the onus is on the science to prove without a doubt that continued unimpeded releasing of fossil co2 into the atmosphere is harmful. In fact, that isn't any more necessary than you proving beyond a doubt that such behaviour is harmless. What is necessary is looking at what the balance of scientific evidence suggests. And that balance of evidence is pretty clear - including the fact that the suffering of the poor that Monckton sheds his crododile tears for, is nothing compared to the suffering that can be expected from unmitigated warming.

Alright Andrew, you come up with all those things showing co2 causes negligable harm, and I'll throw a U turn and allow you to continue your experiment of drastically altering the earth's atmosphere.

@252 Posted by: rocco | February 12, 2010 1:58 AM

Good point - I concede that my post does sound a little like economic alarmism. Thanks for pointing this out to me.

You are assuming that most people though wish to live as they are and are willing to submit to living under a carbon glass ceiling - for the near to medium term at least, effectively cementing in the economic disparity that exists across the world today inspite of the leaps and bounds the emerging economies in the world has made in the past two decades. People aspire for better lives and under what circumstances is it appropriate for someone else to limit those aspirations to enjoy a quality of live that you and I take for granted?

Your argument that the change to a carbon throttled world will not incur costs - either immediate costs or opportunity costs is something I will scrutinise in more detail - but my initial reading of this is that it is unlikely. As Monckton pointed out in the debate, all economic analysis of the cost of switching to a carbon throttled world indicate that it will incur economic costs - with one notable exception - the Stern report. Which as I understand it, is the foundation stone of Garnaut's ETS.

If you were looking at my live blogging attempts rather than the video feed, the comment that was held up has now appeared (and in chronological order too).

And one other thought came to mind.

It was interesting that Monckton excised most of the more loony stuff from his normal slide deck (which I presume was designed for a much longer timeslot). Nothing on DDT or Al Gore, for example. Perhaps that's a side benefit of an actual debate - harder for him to throw red meat to the faithful...

GISTEMP acknowledges and attempts to compensate for UHI, and it finds that it isn't worth much globally. All analyses show a "clear correlating relationship between CO2 and temperature." e.g.

http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2009/03/does-co2-correlate-with…

The following papers derive climate sensitivity using three independent methods: temperature change since Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), temperature change over 20th century from instrumental record, and recovery of temperatures after explosive volcanic eruptions. These estimates are used by Annan and Hargreave (http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frcgc/research/d5/jdannan/GRL_sensitivity.pdf) to confine sensitivity between 2 and 4 degrees.

20th Century Warming

Knutti, R., T. F. Stocker, F. Joos, and G.-K. Plattner (2002), Constraints on radiative forcing and future climate change from observations and climate model ensembles, Nature, 416, 719â723.

Gregory, J. M., R. J. Stouffer, S. C. B. Raper, P. A. Stott, and N. A. Rayner (2002), An observationally based estimate of the climate sensitivity, Journal of Climate, 15 (22), 3117â3121.

Andronova, N. G., and M. E. Schlesinger (2001), Objective estimation of the probability density function for climate sensitivity, Journal of Geophysical Research, 108 (D8),22,605â22,611.

Forest, C. E., P. H. Stone, A. P. Sokolov, M. R. Allen, and M. D. Webster (2002), Quantifying uncertainties in climate system properties with the use of recent climate observations, Science, 295 (5552), 113â117.

Volcanic
Wigley, T. M. L., C. M. Amman, B. D. Santer, and S. B. Raper (2005), Effect of climate sensitivity on the response to volcanic forcing, Journal of Geophysical Research, 110 (D09107).

Frame, D. J., B. B. B. Booth, J. A. Kettleborough, D. A. Stainforth, J. M. Gregory, M. Collins, and M. R. Allen (2005), Constraining climate forecasts: The role of prior assumptions, Geophysical Research Letters, 32 (L09702).

Yokohata, T., S. Emori, T. Nozawa, Y. Tsushima, T. Ogura, and M. Kimoto (2005), Climate response to volcanic forcing: Validation of climate sensitivity of a coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, Geophysical Research Letters, 32 (L21710).

LGM
Ballantyne, A. P., M. Lavine, T. J. Crowley, J. Liu, and P. B. Baker (2005), Meta-analysis of tropical surface temperatures during the Last Glacial Maximum, Geophysical Research Letters, 32 (L05712).

Bintanja, R., and R. S. W. V. de Wal (2005), A new method to estimate ice age temperatures, Climate Dynamics, 24, 197â211.

Taylor, K. E., C. D. Hewitt, P. Braconnot, A. J. Broccoli, C. Doutriaux, J. F. B. Mitchell, and PMIP-Participating-Groups (2000), Analysis of forcing, response and feedbacks in a paleoclimate modeling experiment, in Paleoclimate Modeling Intercomparison Project (PMIP): proceedings of the third PMIP workshop, edited by P. Braconnot, pp. 43â50, Canada, 1999.

Crucifix, M., and C. D. Hewitt (2005), Impact of vegetation changes on the dynamics of the atmosphere at the Last Glacial Maximum, Climate Dynamics, 25 (5), 447â459.

Claquin, T., et al. (2003), Radiative forcing of climate by ice-age atmospheric dust, Climate Dynamics, 20, 193â202.

von Deimling, T. S., H. Held, A. Ganopolski, and S. Rahmstorf (2005), Climate sensitivity estimated from ensemble simulations of glacial climate, Climate Dynamics, (Submitted).

@257 Posted by: lenny | February 12, 2010 2:16 AM

Hi Lenny. No, I did not miss your point about burdon of proof. I just choose not to respond, but since you insist.

Where you or I assign burden of proof is merely a reflection of our individual biases and opinions on the greater issue. There is no compelling data point that I am aware of that makes your point of view more compelling than mine - or vice versa. So there is no point debating this I feel. Lets just agree to disagree on this minor point.

I feel we need to spend more money on this - more money on research. I assume that you don't disagree with me at least on this point.

What we do in the meantime is a question of politics and biases.

BTW there is no false dichotomy at work here either. A interum middle path may be possible and this is exactly what Tony Abbott is suggesting - a policy to reduce Co2 that is cheap and has additional benefits should co2 turn out to be a non existent problem so the Abbot policy won't be a complete waste of time and money should this turn out to be the eventual result. Whether or not the Liberal Party policy actually fulfils what it asserts is an entirely different matter.

Nice work with the live blog, Lotharsson. ;-)

# 254 "..a temperature record that has not been passed through a series of arbitrary and human-selected filters". Priceless,A. Barnham. Don't bother with the U-turn,just keep going. Please.

Obviously my parodying of your post is still flying over your head.

Andrew Barnham | February 12, 2010 1:06 AM
Hi Andrew â yes Nils is correct. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

You said in your earlier post:-

âIf you tell me how I should run my life and the resources at my disposal without either providing me a utterly compelling, completely watertight, reason for doing so, then expect me to ask questionsâ

With respect no scientists are telling you how to run your life â just that there is a serious and pressing issue and that we all have to work together to limit the damage. How we respond is what governments are for and of course you are entitled to have your say on their approach.

Unfortunately lay sceptics want to have their say on the science too and have been encouraged to do so by vested interests and misinformation specialists in the media. Asking questions is fine but then disagreeing and refusing to accept explanations that you don't really understand (or simply hurling unfounded accusations of corruption instead) gets tiresome very soon and yes of course scientists get frustrated and sometimes lash out.

As for compelling evidence I think the reduction in long-wave IR escaping into space is pretty compelling empirical evidence myself and there are at least half-a-dozen papers which discuss this (although I haven't had a chance to read them all).

I am not a professional scientist working in a relevant field however so my opinion is just that - opinion. I am however qualified as a scientist (physics) so I have some hope of understanding the arguments involved. I only became seriously interested in the subject a few months ago when I stumbled across bloggers arrogantly posting mind-numbingly stupid and grossly incorrect statements about science.

Just a small correction to Lotharsson's amazing live coverage in #104: Monckton's apparent interruptions were audio recordings that Lambert was using to nail Monckton. Which he did. Superbly.

Andrew claimed above:

A interum middle path may be possible and this is exactly what Tony Abbott is suggesting - a policy to reduce Co2 that is cheap and has additional benefits should co2 turn out to be a non existent problem so the Abbot policy won't be a complete waste of time and money should this turn out to be the eventual result.

No, this is not what Abbott is suggesting. Abbott's policy is a figleaf for hiding his desire to do nothing at all. Abbott's proposal on soil carbon, if implemented, would require covering (and maintaining) an area 4.25 times the size of Germany on non-agricultural land (because the farmers won't give up agricultural land). There's simply no way that could be cost- or even technically- feasible.

Abbott of course is planning nothing of the sort. He's talking about increasing the number of trees in Australia by by an amount equal to 0.013% of forested land. Food luch getting any signifcant amount of biosequestration out of that.

And does anyone think the sums involved as incentives to industry will be of interest to anyone in industry at the margins? Of course not. People with greenwash programs will take the subsidy and that will be it. One giant pork barrell.

Personally, I'd prefer Abbott were honest and simply said that as he believed climate change was "bulls**t" he wasn't planning to take any action on it. Handing out lumps of money to polluters doesn't fit into any middle path I can imagine.

Andrew Barnham:

"You are assuming that most people though wish to live as they are and are willing to submit to living under a carbon glass ceiling - for the near to medium term at least, effectively cementing in the economic disparity that exists across the world today inspite of the leaps and bounds the emerging economies in the world has made in the past two decades"

Ha! Did you know that Monckton actually claimed that: "The second purpose [of the conference in Copenhagen] is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world"?

(the first purpose, by the way, was supposedly to "impose a communist world government on the world." :-))

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/16/obama-poised-to-cede-us-sovereign…

"all economic analysis of the cost of switching to a carbon throttled world indicate that it will incur economic costs"

Actually, I find the whole idea of quantifying the economic cost of AGW mitigation nonsensical.

With all the uncertainties, how can one reasonably estimate the economic cost of global warming?

And even if there was no global warming, it is not clear that we will lose wealth with mitigation, without knowing:

- The future prices of fossil fuels
- The cost of future wars for fossil fuels
- The rate of technological development of renewables

etc. etc.
Might as well use tarot cards, really.

As I have shown, massive CO2 emissions are not a prerequisite for decent living standards in the west.

And from my perspective, it is much better to financially support the development of renewables in poor countries, instead of having them go into fossil fuels on their own. Especially if we consider the fact that fossil fuels can't remain competitive for very long.

http://www.oftwominds.com/photos08/coal-cost2.gif

The reference to Pinker at al by Lord Monckton was the basis of his point that CS to AGW is much lower than IPCC estimates. Tim's rebuttal was forensic to the extent that he obtained an opinion from the horse's mouth, as it were, to state that the Pinker paper found nothing inconsistent with the IPCC estimates of 2-4.5C for 2XCO2. Unfortunately I feel Tim undermined his point by putting up an image depicting incoming SW blockage by cloud albedo and outgoing LW blockage by low level cloud. To impugn LM's estimate of reduced CS relies on an equivalence between the reduced forcing from cloud albedo and increased forcing from cloud LW blockage; this is not the case:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/243/4887/57

Ramanathan et al found negative SW forcing from cloud albedo to be 4 times forcing through SW/2XCO2; 4 times is not as much as LM's 7-8 reduction of CS from 2XCO2 but well on its way.

One point of Monkton's speech that no-one seems to have really picked on:

He claims to want to lift the poor out of poverty. Nice idea. Who could argue against that?
But how? What is his mechanism for lifting the poor out of poverty by not cutting CO2 emissions?

Do we transfer the money that we would have spend on reducing our carbon footprint to poor nations? Wouldn't that have the same drag on our own economies as a carbon tax or trading scheme - maybe worse, as we would be removing all that capital from our economy? Remember this needs to be a real lot of dosh indeed - otherwise there isn't much substance to the economic alarmist position. But I didn't hear his gracefulness suggest this - my guess is that it would be quite contradictory to his solid conservative position.

This of course leaves another problem.

He is arguing against AGW on the grounds that any scheme to reduce carbon output would result in the massive transfer of jobs to the developing world. We would suffer, with strict emissions targets and higher taxes, while China and India, develop and burn their way through the worlds fossil fuels with utter abandon. Now here's the rub: wouldn't this all have the effect of lifting the poor out of poverty far more effectively than any government aid package ever could do?

Or...?

Something smells here.

Is there a link to the SMH footage, or are they now too embarrassed to show it, following Tim's drubbing? Anyone....

I have read enough garbled nonsense from S. lindsey on this thread to last me an entire month.

He/she coughs up the usual armchair expert gibberish: humans are adaptive, warming is good, etc, etc.. Clearly this person has not an inkling of knowledge about the effects of rapid warming, synergized with a suite of other anthropogenic stresses, on complex adaptive systems.

The thrust of the matter is this: the question is not have adaptive humans are, but how adaptively natural systems respond to the continued human assault. I have said this on Deltoid a million times before but then new examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect like S. lindsey drop by to add their pennies worth of wisdom on areas that are well beyond their competence. To reiterate: natural systems generate a wealth of conditions - ecosystem services - that permit humans to exist and persist. There is little doubt that natual systems exhibit various degrees of resilience to changes over certain scales of space and time. But humans are challenging these systems to respond to stresses that they have not experienced in many millions of years, perhaps since the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. Climate change can be added to the mix of habitat loss and fragmenation, invasive species, various forms of pollution, overharvesting and others, and there most certainly will be and already are ecological consequences that are manifesting themselves up the food chain. Humans are damaging critical ecological networks and this is reducing their ability to respond to the many challenges that they are facing.

Again, humans depend on a wide array of critical ecological services - water purification, nutrient cycling, maintenance of soil fertility, pest control, stabilisation of coastlines, climate control, and many others that have few if any technological substitutes and even those which do are prohibitively expensive. These services do not carry prices and thus we have little idea of their value until they are lost. I would have hit Monckton with this point - how the hell can he say that warming is good whilst not understanding one iota of the effect that warming will have on natural systems and the services that emerge from them? What can Monckton contribute in the area of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning? Effectively, humans are carrying out a single, non-repeatable experiment on systems of immense complexity which provide life-support conditions and upon which our civilization depends, and yet those in denial, who clearly expunge the link between the viability of natural systems and human welfare, are arguing that we should "stay the course" and see how the entire situation plays out. This is the sprint of folly in m,y opinion, speakign as a population ecologist.

These are precisely the kinds of issues that are discussed and debated at conferences and workshops which I attend and where I have presneted lectures. There is little doubt that the denial camp are winning the war of words, not because empirical science is on their side, but, as one poster said earlier, because they have immense amounts of money to invest in think tanks and public relations groups that are experts in manipulating public opinion. One of the major tenets of public relations has always been to "put the words in someone else's mouth", and this is exactly what the corporate elites opposed to regulations limting greenhouse gas emissions have done and are doing very effectively.

As ecologist Peter Vitousek said some 15 years ago, we are entering a period of consequences. Further procastrination on various issues including climate change will affect the way in which complex adaptive systems function. Cause-and-effect relationships will not necessarily be easy to predict, because these systems function non-linearly and thus there are tipping points beyond which system properties respond quite dramtically, leading to alternate states. There are plenty of examples of this in the history of our planet, and some of these changes have been predicated on relatively minor forcings. Humans are tinkering with nature in ways that will lead inevitably towards thresholds where we can expect nasty surprises. On this point there is certainty; the uncertainty lies in predicting exactly when these tipping points will be reached. The current climate forcing experiment humans are conducting across the biosphere are pushing systems that are largely deterministic, at least within the context of a human lifespan. This is what makes comments by the likes of S. lindsey so utterly devoid of logic: the attempt to suggest that 2-4 C of warming over the planet surface (with much higher regional increases) in the space of a century is nothing to worry about. This kind of insidious logic reveals a clear lack of even the most basic understanding of natural systems.

>*To impugn LM's estimate of reduced CS relies on an equivalence between the reduced forcing from cloud albedo and increased forcing from cloud LW blockage;*

Why, what is Monckton's claim about climate sensitivity? Where can we see the details, in which journal is it published?

There is nine minutes of footage on the front page of the SMH,most of which goes to Monckton pulling out The Big Lies on Pinker,the IPCC being forced to" repeatedly revising sensitivity downwards",and the number of 'credible' 'observation-not-models' papers that point to climate sensitivity being low. Included is his slip up where he claims to have sent Pinkers stuff to several physicist,one of whose calculations suggested that his lordships sensitivity estimate was an underestimate! He then finishes with the concern-troll Lomborgian world-poverty-or-climate-science false dichotomy and false equivalence. ilajd,Monckton is self-refuting...

Best of luck, Tim. I really don't care who wins this or any other debate. I care about the reality that nature bats last. I care about the probabilities. Good stewardship suggests we ought to take AGW pretty seriously.

MisCount "...one of them came back, as I've said, with a detailed calculation, based on having read Dr Pinker's paper suggesting that my evaluation of CS, here, is if anything an underestimate!"

Foot meet mouth!

You really had to be there to appreciate how comprehensively Lambert demolished Monckton.

Monckton concluded his 15 minute initial speech by discussing what he said was the key question: climate sensitivity - the ratio of temperature rise to CO2 in the atmosphere. He used Pinker as his key authority. Lambert was brilliantly prepared, with copies of Monckton's slides from earlier talks, and with an email from Pinker herself (not "himself" as Monckton had assumed) specifically referring to Monckton's errors. Lambert also used audio recordings of Monckton so that there was no wriggle-room left. It was a masterful performance.

During Q&A from the floor, Monckton misquoted Kevin Trenberth's "travesty" email as has been pointed out before. I was going to challenge him on this, and on his made-up Sir John Houghton quote, but wasn't chosen to ask a question.

Marred said:
>"Yet my statement contains no gossip"

Which translates to... "I'm gossiping"

Marred said:
>"...and the meaning is quite clear and supported by fact."

Which translates to... "my writing is like a really bad fog and full of porky pies"

Andrew Barnham says:

"I can easily frame the issue as % of atmospheric content which is human generated CO2 and it will be an equally unimpressive and minuscule number."

So you would be happy to swallow 2 micrograms of nice fresh [polonium](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium)?

That amount is an almost immeasurably tiny percentage of your body mass, small enough to measured in parts-per-billion. You might even say it was a very unimpressive and miniscule number indeed.

How could it possibly hurt you?

Marred said of opponents:

>"Just goes to show that personal attacks and empty vapid statements are what is called debate for some here."

and:

>"...empty accusation and no information."

Then Marred qualified this moral superiority with:

>"Its snowing because of global warming!"

and:

>"Temprature manipulations in Austraila, China, Russia, and africa. Sourcing non-peer reviewed information from activist groups. Using a magazine article as a source for galcier melt. It just gets funnier."

Having accused hundreds of scientists in Australia, China etc. of fraud, Marred said:

>"Moncktons facts are cherry picked and lack context? Empty accusation as you provide nothing to support your claim."

and so on...

Micheal thanks for the update, I'd missed the initial presentations, so I wasn't sure of details of how Tim put the otherwise cocksure Monckton into such as defensive frame for his conclusion.

I hope that Tim can get hold a recording for us to see bits we missed.

Is S.Lindsey paid to be stupid or is it a super power?

I was there also, Michael Ashley must have been in the bathroom. Lambert's fatal mistake from the start was not to address the question and instead go for cheap points. The question, skillfully constructed, was this "Does AGW endanger mankind?" Monckton condensed this at the start to three points - Moral questions, Economic issues and Scientific issues and provided good points and data for all. Lambert did not address the question throughout the debate, indeed his closing argument was to advertise the Deltoid blog. (Well that worked I'm briefly back). Monckton was full of facts while Lambert was full of farce. The attempt to use audio from Monckton's previous lectures and Pinker's audio failed due to audio feedback and was barely audible. And Powerpoint 101 states "avoid large chunks of text" no one read the slides! At about 13:12 Lambert shows a graph that confirms Monckton's contention of bias by the IPCC in showing accelerating warming. The audience gets this but Tim misses the point. At numerous stages Tim forgets questions from the audience and had to be prompted from the chair. Lambert stumbled over Monckton's use of recent work by Douglas and Know 2009 on ocean heat build up, apparently unfamiliar with it. One of the killer moments for Monckton came when he quickly came up with a figure of 39% for the amount of CO2 from anthropogenic CO2 while Tim was apparently looking in his pockets for a calculator.

As stated above I think Tim needs some public speaking lessons and based on his performance today I dare him to disagree. I don't mean to be mean but face the facts, maybe David Karoly could have had a better chance.

By the way Mike, perhaps you can model the next debate and, in that model your dream can come true and Tim can slay the dragon - seems to work with climate models (the real world of course it's another story).

We can all go the doom on us route.. What if this... What if that scenarios can literally go on forever.. Can you definitively state that this WILL happen?

Of course we can't definitively state what will happen - it would be much better for all of us if we could. Instead we are heading for global temperatures never experienced since the beginning of human civilization and although we can make some projections and estimates of the effects we won't know for sure until they actually happen. Are we supposed to take some kind of comfort from this?

Thanks Tony - long time no see, how are you doing? (Sorry, a bit OT.)

>*Monckton was full of facts while Lambert was full of farce.*

Like Pinker, Lindzen & Choi?

Iljad seems to have reversed the definitions of facts and farce.

I saw Tim forget a question, and I heard numerous interruptions, and people saying they wouldn't let him speak. I saw Jones weighing repeatedly to support skeptical talking points (did he think Monckton and the partisan crowed needed help), I saw Jones try and give the last word to Monckton for nearly all the Q&A.

Nice job Tim in getting Monckton to go first in at least one case!

@263 Posted by: Nick | February 12, 2010 2:42 AM

Nick - I am glad I am providing you amusement, presumably at my own expense, but that's not the reason why I am here.

The basis of my comment stems from Anthony Watt's work and others like Anthony, and my assumption that his work is broadly sound. I know Anthony is spoken quite poorly of here, but people do pay attention to him and his website enjoys alot of traffic.

In particular, this blog post more than any other captured my imagination as something that casts doubt on the validity of the homogenization process.

http://statpad.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/ghcn-and-adjustment-trends/

Of course - if this is all wrong and I am indeed making a public fool of myself, then by all means please put me out of my misery and illuminate me as to the truth and where I may seek it.

Thanks in advance.

Ah, I see that [cohenite](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/debate_with_monckton.php#commen…) has once more graced us with his presence.

Cohenite, your presence is missed on the [Roy Spencer hides the increase thread](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/roy_spencer_hides_the_increase…) and the [Russian analysis confirms 20th century CRU temperatures thread](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/russian_analysis_confirms_20th…).

You have unfinished business. Best deal with that before your current pretense at scientific understanding is picked apart.

@282 Ilajd that's a very one-eyed account. Nit-picking at Tim over rhetorical mis-steps is meaningless: the substance of his scientific presentation was spot-on, whereas Monckton hadn't even investigated the paper upon which his entire (flawed) scientific calculation rested well-enough to know that the author happened to be female.

Monckton was pwned on his scientific thesis; he has independently calculated a variable measurement for climate sensitivity with which not one other working scientist in the world agrees, and even Monckton's mathematician mate said he'd got the number wrong.

Monckton's moral and economic points were also a false dichotomy - it is not an either/or choice between lifting the developing nations out of poverty and reducing carbon emissions. That chart correlating high per capita carbon-emissions with high life expectancy was spurious. One could make the same argument that we should lift taxes, because countries with high income tax rates are correlated with high life expectancies. It's nonsense on both counts.

Lambert's audio recordings were perfectly audible, you need to get your hearing tested.

As for 'Powerpoint 101', since you seem to be in the mood to nit-pick, Monckton's slides looked like they'd been composed by an 8 year old girl. Complete with brightly coloured 3-D effect typefaces, different fonts all over the place, and that ridiculous faux House-of-Lords logo that looks more like it's from an album cover for Ministry of Sound. And that bloody coronet/crown thing on the front slide. What kind of clip-art travesty is that? Lambert's slides were clear, clean, and if you had trouble reading the words perhaps you need to get your eyes tested too.

Finally, there were three occasions on which Lambert asked to be prompted for a reminder of what was the second part of double-barrelled questions he'd been asked. So what? Mate, they had 90 minutes of open questions from the floor, and there were dozens of questions thrown at both speakers from all directions. Do you know what it's like going on the spot like that and having questions thrown at you? Alan Jones as moderator was gracious enough to thank Tim for making himself available for the debate, you would do well to emulate Jones' courtesy. I'd like to see you get through that barrage without asking the moderator for a reminder, especially since you seem to have difficulty with both your hearing and your eyesight.

I would have hit Monckton with this point - how the hell can he say that warming is good whilst not understanding one iota of the effect that warming will have on natural systems and the services that emerge from them?

Jeff, that's very similar to what I thought; it lets Monckton slide by on his claims that doing nothing will be cheap and prudent when the conservative position is to conserve the ecology that we have that is well-adapted to current climatic conditions. Hitting this point by someone with expert knowledge would really challenge one of his core tenets, one that he uses to hook into people's self-interest.

And as duckster implied, I see no real evidence that Monckton's concern for the 3rd world poor (both on financial terms, and on the DDT issue) is anything more than a cynical attempt to wedge apart a couple of different constituencies - although Monckton could indeed be working on laudable initiatives in that area that I am not aware of.

Missed it I'm afraid (started 1.30AM where I am) but I think I have got a flavour from comments (thanks everyone). I see from #122 that Monckton claims 'EU Commissars now make "90%" of the laws in UK'. The proportion UK laws originating in the EU is actually very difficult to determine, but 90% is a totally outlandish and exaggerated figure. Daniel Hannan - Conservative MEP, Euro-sceptic and also climate change denier - claims 84% based on a flawed analysis of the number of laws passed in (ironically) Germany that ignores all laws passed by German federal parliaments. The reality is explained well [here](http://www.jcm.org.uk/blog/?p=2230):

"No one agrees on how much legislation and regulation stems from the EU. The 9.1% figure stated by the House of Commons Library is too low, as it only covers Statutory Instruments, not ALL laws; the higher figures of 84%, 75% and even 50% claimed by the likes of Hannan, Farrage and Cameron are based on miscalculations, misunderstandings, or sources unknown, and often derive from parts of the EU other than just the UK â and so with no hard evidence to support them must be dismissed as either too high or inapplicable to the British situation."

Monckton misquoted Kevin Trenberth's "travesty" email as has been pointed out before...

This needs pointing out again for those who are visiting for the first time and don't know what you mean (preferably on a post-debate thread dealing with specific issues). IIRC what Trenberth was talking about it wasn't anything like what Monckton claimed he was (just like some of the quotes from Harry Readme made famous by the blogosphere); Monckton used this false implication to imply that Trenberth's paper criticising Lindzen and Choi should be ignored or downplayed - which by that stage for anyone into the science rather than the politics or showmanship was something he desperately needed.

I was unable to see the debate due to time zone differences. The debate was broadcast on this link, however it seems to be defunct now.

The concluding remarks can be seen here:

Yes, ilajd, I know Monckton and Tim is no Monckton - at least as far as debating skills go. Learning better skills would be really really useful, but unlike Monckton, Tim has another day job. (Although Monckton is apparently working on a cure for AIDS and the common cold, so that could be keeping him busy ;-)

I think Tim did alright, given what he wanted to achieve.

I think Monckton will also be sufficiently pleased to feel the debate was worth doing, even if some of his schtick was exposed for those who had ears to hear. (Especially if that summary of the highlights showing on SMH is accurate. It seems awfully friendly to his case.)

His product is doubt, and he sold it pretty well, even under a bit of pressure on the facts. Those who came and wanted to be reassured that there remains room to doubt we should do anything right now would have gone away satisfied that they were correct. And Monckton knows for many people it doesn't matter if your opponent shows you are wrong as long as you confidently continue to repeat the lies. He probably also knows research shows that refuting lies may actually reinforce them in many people's minds if you don't phrase your refutations very carefully. And finally, he knows his marks and plays on their foibles rather well.

Cohenite, you got anything more recent than a 21 year old paper on cloud forcing? 'cause you know the skeptics keep reminding us that clouds are the biggest source of uncertainty in the models, so if that's the case now I'm betting they must have been even worse 20.5 years ago after this paper came out and what it says was absorbed by the field...

That chart correlating high per capita carbon-emissions with high life expectancy was spurious.

And that was particularly rich since Monckton's normal presentations have a slide pointing out that correlation need not imply causation, followed by an example of an apparently spurious correlation.

bluegrue - the summing up is not entirely representative of the debate; it was where Monckton was able to present his largely unsubstantiated view of the world unimpeded, and Tim's summing up will not go down as one of the strongest in debating history - although he did hammer on the key scientific points (and IIRC referenced Plimer as being at odds with Monckton once more in doing so).

You go right ahead and pick away Bernard; start with my question at 269: is there an equivalence between the negative forcing from LW reflection from the tops of clouds and LW blocking from the bottom of clouds?

Tim's second point in attacking LM's use of Pinker to establish a lower CS for 2XCO2 was that sunspot activity has been declining during the last cycle; but the Pinker paper indicates that solar radiation reaching the surface has increased since 1983; LM married that with the point about reduced cloud cover during that period; the point is that even if sunspot activity, if not TSI, has been declining, with less cloud cover more insolation is happening; if that is correct than the solar forcing is more than the IPCC allows and the CS from 2XCO2 must be less.

"you got anything more recent than a 21 year old paper on cloud forcing?"

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL037527.shtml

I don't know what you mean by "absorbed by the field."

The other thing I noticed is that Monckton's closing (IIRC) implied that models were not good for drawing conclusions and that only direct measurements will do. However Susan Curry at ClimateAudit says that the Lindzen & Choi paper Monckton builds his case on is based on a relatively simple model (with some notable flaws, which may or may not be fixed in their updated paper). Sounds like a contradiction on the surface, but I don't have the time to drill into it. Have at it if you're interested...

Cohenite, by "absorbed by the field" I mean the climate science research field; this paper would (presumably) have become common knowledge in the field within (say) a year of publication, so any insights it had would presumably be found in the climate models not too long after that. I assume that means it is not definitive, given that the (AFAIK accurate) criticism of current climate models is that they don't do clouds well, but I could be mistaken.

...is there an equivalence between the negative forcing from LW reflection from the tops of clouds and LW blocking from the bottom of clouds?

Do you mean SW reflected from the tops of clouds, LW blocked from radiating away into space by the whole of clouds?

Or did you actually mean LW is (say) reflected from the tops of clouds back downwards to the earth from whence it came (although in that case I'm not sure how to make sense of "LW blocking from the bottom of clouds", which seems like a very similar action).

And while we're at it, what do you mean by "is there an equivalence..."? Equivalence in action? Necessary balance in forcing? Coincidental balance in forcing?

ilajd: I was not there in person and had to watch it over the internet. On the internet, Tim came across extremely well. While I could not see the slides, I could hear Pinker very well and that sound clip was devastating for Monckton. I don't know how Tim was able to arrange it but to the outsider it was a very strong point. Here is the actual author of the paper telling Monckton that he misunderstood the points in the paper.

Monckton never recovered from that.

Regards,
John

[Ilajd](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/debate_with_monckton.php#commen…).

[Other folk](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/debate_with_monckton.php#commen…) had no difficulty hearing Tim Lambert's audio. It would appear then that your inability to do so is more a reflection of your internal cognitive dissonance creating a block where any fact that threatens your ideology is rejected.

There's a treatment for your affliction.

It's called education.

[Cohenite](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/debate_with_monckton.php#commen…).

You'd love to shift the questions from the other threads to your own at #269 here, wouldn't you? That would then take the heat off the dozens of questions that you failed to answer on those other threads, and shift the focus from your discomfitted embarrassment there.

You can try that lawyer distraction 'trick' (it's in your Nature, after all...), but it's not going to work. I'm happy just to keep reminding you about your unfinished homework.

Of course, if you can satisfactorily address all the questions put to you on the other threads, I'll then visit your dearly beloved #269, but I suspect by that stage it'll have been well and truly plucked and roasted by others here.

Why is it that just about every Denialist employs drive-by tactics? Can't any of them actually ever stick by their claims and defend them with science (as opposed to mere mindless repetition of the same fact-free pseudoscientific mantras)?

Oh, of course...

Some useful commentary on the question Tim received about what the snow storms on the US East Coast mean about global warming theories.

Most people should be able to understand this, if they follow along. On the other hand, people who follow Fox News would be nicely misinformed...and many likely congratulating themselves for the new and superior understanding.

It is hilarious. I listed greenpeace references not because i felt that they were wrong or invalid. Eventhough the source is dubious at best. It is because they are non-peer reviewed. As well as the WWF sources cited. But it just goes to show who the true deniers are. CO2 is not killing our planet, how about our GMO food, poisoned soil, sulled waters just to list a few. And the solutions to CO2 aren't solutions at all. China is still going to be building their coal plants. They are manufacturing the green energy equipment with the very thing that we want to stop. Does it get any funnier and ironic than that! Do you think big oil is trying to stop this movement? Why do you think Monckton is against it? Big Corporations are destroying our planet in a myraid of ways and we are all caught up on one factor. Alarmism. Fear. Wake up. See the big picture. CO2 is your bin laden. The would isn't so simple. You are being duped.Its Snowing due to global warming. There is a flood, its global warming. Learn how to think for yourself. Seems anything the media says is taken as truth. When will you learn.

Lotherason:

>Some useful commentary on the question Tim received about what the snow storms on the US East Coast mean about global warming theories.

I missed the debate.
But I would have responded with a comment about the Winter Olympics suffering from a lack of snow, because of unusually warm weather!

Thanks for the transcript/notes and comments, Lotharsson - still can't load the SMH video, presumably due to high demand.

I reckon that it would be a hoot, and quite possibly of some real impact, to have Tim Lambert and [Peter Sinclair](http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610) collaborate on churning out a series of Denial Crocks of the Week based on the debate with Monckton. Perhaps even a full-length documentary-style deconstruction.

Monckton will always be galloping around a la Typhoid Mary, spreading disinformation, but perhaps such a production might actually have enough teeth that broad-scale referral to it would actually bite the Viscantcount on the arse, and provide some immunisation to his viral misrepresentation of science.

DCotW has popular recognition, and the format is one that is accessible to the same folk who swallow Monckton-style propaganda hook, line and sinker. Throw in a dash of [Skeptical Science](http://www.skepticalscience.com/) style, and they could have a hell-hound with enough legs to drench the peripatetic heels of ol' Chris with slaver, wherever he tries to promulgate his brand of scientific malarky.

With a bit of luck, they might even entice Mr Monckton to threaten suit...

Marred said:

>And the solutions to CO2 aren't solutions at all. China is still going to be building their coal plants. They are manufacturing the green energy equipment with the very thing that we want to stop. Does it get any funnier and ironic than that!

ah, it's nice when someone starts wandering into areas they don't understand.

Even if the energy to build the wind turbines in China were built using energy from coal. Their carbon footprints would still be tiny compared to any fossil fuel equivalents.

There is an analysis of wind turbine production in Italy, which lists the materials used. Amusingly, the turbines constructed in Italy have a tiny radioactive input, in the materials stream. Puzzling at first, until you realise that Italy doesn't (or didin't) have a any nuclear power stations and inputs electricity from neighbouring countries that do!

But Marred, I suggest you do your homework before making "empty vapid statements" (your words).

Marred said:

>Its Snowing due to global warming.

But not at the Winter Olympics it seems.
Both are weather events.

Is it snowing in Australia?

Anyone see Jon Stewarts spoof this week about weather events?

Until the Skeptics are allowed to "debate" without prejudice from the "Alarmist" crowd then you will never win that debate..

You guys call yourself Scientist, but yet one person comes here to question the "Science" and what happens?

Name calling? Is this the playground of some Ivy League Elementary school?

Dismissal? If you cannot harbor descent then this is not Science it's just politics.

We little people canât understand Science so we do not deserve the opportunity to debate..??
I mean listen to you people.. Do you hear yourselves? Stupid, Moron, Idiot, Denier, Canât understand Science.. Blah..Blah..Blah..

I am an ENVIRONMENTALIST.. My DEGREES are in Environmental Sciences.. You see you donât know me. I have been in this field for 20 years and am considered one of the experts in the field of Environmental Compliance. I am one of few who hold International Certifications and have taught for years on the subject. I work Superfund sites.. I assist Industry and Educational facilities clean up and stop polluting the Environment.. What do you do? Talk.. Theorize.. Talk some moreâ¦

I do more in 1 year for the Environment then most of you do in a lifetime..

Some of the worst polluters I deal with are Professors who have PHDâs who somehow think it is perfectly ok to pour Mercurial compounds, Heavy Metals and other Organics down the drain.. or simply toss them in the Garbage.

Contrary to popular belief Dilution is not the solution to pollution..

Yes I have doubts.. I came here to discuss those doubts and maybe learn something.. but what did I get..?

Well you can go back and read them for yourselves..

Until you put aside the insults and condescending arrogance you will not win this debate.
All the theories and Computer models in the World will not change anything unless you can clearly and without the egos explain to the people of this Planet why we need to change.

Skeptics should be welcomed with open arms not the middle finger.. Even if their minds have been âmade upâ you miss an opportunity to educate us if you fail to try.

You wrote several paragraphs of text that contained nothing of value. No one cares about your martyrdom--it's very much irrelevant. You come here, dismiss carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and proffer up sulfur dioxide in its stead and want to be taken seriously? No. No, I won't take you seriously. You're silly. Go take your imaginary degrees and insert them where the sun doesn't shine.

You guys call yourself Scientist, but yet one person comes here to question the "Science" and what happens?

No, Lindsey, you did no such thing. You instead listed a bunch of transparent lies.

So quit whining and address the rebuttals that have been made, if you can.

s.lindsey, if you are who you claim you are, and do what you claim to do - then hats off to you. Very sorry you're feeling hurt - but please tell me, why I or anyone should take an environmental scientist seriously who makes false claims and/or builds strawmen, uses CAPITALISATION to prove his/her point and generally displays a considerable level of hysteria in his/her posts:

"[...]Correct climate changed without your effect.. It did so naturally..

Climate changes occurs.. That's a fact

That Mankind is causing the rise in temps.. is debatable at best.

CO2 is a contrived pollutant.. Methane and Sulfur dioxide are more in line with the generation of "Greenhouse Gas".

CO2 is beneficial to us.. We need it.. The Earth needs it.. Without it.. well we stop breathing and THAT'S NOT DEBATABLE..

Let's say we can affect the CO2 levels and we go too far.. What then?

Massive plant life extinction?[...]"

[Fran Barlow](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/debate_with_monckton.php#commen…) has deconstructed most of these points above, and has done so in measured and reasonable language. No response to her yet from your side.

As a scientist, can you tell me, supported by literature, why you think AGW is not a problem, or even non-existent, how most other scientists working in the field (meteorology, paleoclimatology, biology, ecology, oceanology etc. etc.) are wrong, and how you come to the conclusion that a CO2 level higher than the past 15 million years is going to be beneficial to current life on Earth?

Yes I have doubts.. I came here to discuss those doubts and maybe learn something.. but what did I get..?

Well you can go back and read them for yourselves..

Posted by: s. lindsey | February 12, 2010 8:55 AM

Okay, let's...

... All using the same computer models and the Greenhouse effect since the 70âs. The Mann Hockey Stick has been resoundingly disproved.. Data has been proven to be manipulated. Contravening data was intentionally forced out of the media and reports. Scientist [sic] who disagree with the AGW crowd has found themselves without funding and pushed to the fringe..

Consensus my a$$.

This has become a religion. Facts be damned..

Posted by: s. lindsey | February 11, 2010 4:28 PM

Hmmm...?

Furthermore, s.lindsey, discussion of most of your claims has been ongoing for years now and have been addressed and debunked over and over. Try [Skeptical Science](http://www.skepticalscience.com/). John Cook has an extremely accessible and clear writing style, and addresses all the talking points with reference to the current scientific literature. There's your education.

S. there is a very old saying among chemists that the dose makes the poison and if you read some old papers where they actually tasted the stuff they made it as true as CO2 being a pollutant when it gets above ~350 ppm. Oh yeah, before you tell me how wonderful CO2 is for the plants, remember that fainting Victorian ladies would dose themselves with arsenic to improve their appearance, the difference being that they were right, at least for a while.

Lotharsson, thanks for the coverage of the debate. I know Monckton is wrong on the facts, but it is impressive - and frightening - to see with just how much nonsense Monckton can get away with, because of his polished rhetorics and an audience that wants to believe him.

But Eli, SL can't even see the irony in his own stated position...

Contrary to popular belief Dilution is not the solution to pollution.

s. linsey said:

>"Until the Skeptics are allowed to "debate" without prejudice from the "Alarmist" crowd then you will never win that debate.."

Debating is politics is it not?
Not sure how you do science by debate alone. Not sure where Monckton fits in with science?

s. linsey said:

>You guys call yourself Scientist, but yet one person comes here to question the "Science" and what happens?

In order to 'question the science' one has to understand it first, from first principles. Otherwise any 'questioning' has political motives. eg. either the discussion is on an equal basis (two scientists) or it is unequal (layman vs scientist). In order to educate a layman, they have to want to learn something new. If they come to the lesson refusing to believe anything said to them, because of their political views, then they aren't going to accept what you tell them.

And I actually call myself an engineer/lecturer most times.

s. linsey said:

>Dismissal? If you cannot harbor descent then this is not Science it's just politics.

Any descent should be based around science. But the likes of Marred refer mainly to what they read in the media.

s. linsey said:

> I am an ENVIRONMENTALIST.. My DEGREES are in Environmental Sciences.. You see you donât know me. I have been in this field for 20 years and am considered one of the experts in the field of Environmental Compliance...Skeptics should be welcomed with open arms not the middle finger.. Even if their minds have been âmade upâ you miss an opportunity to educate us if you fail to try.

Their minds are made up because they see it as a political battle and nothing to do with science. You are pretty naive if you think hardcore skeptics can be turned.

You seem to think what is going on now with skeptics is has something to do with science. Many lie in the name of maintaining the current state of economics and commerce. You have to be shockingly naive to think otherwise.

*I am an ENVIRONMENTALIST.. My DEGREES are in Environmental Sciences.. You see you donât know me. I have been in this field for 20 years and am considered one of the experts in the field of Environmental Compliance. I am one of few who hold International Certifications and have taught for years on the subject. I work Superfund sites.. I assist Industry and Educational facilities clean up and stop polluting the Environment*

Good for you. But, given the nature of your earlier posts, which reflected an exceedingly simple understanding of the workings of complex adaptgive systems and the effects of global change (including climate warming) on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, your qualifications appear to have provided you with little insight in critically important areas. These areas involve a whole gamut of ecological research exploring climate change effects on interaction network webs in natural communities and on a suite of other ecophysiological processes.

You also should let others assess your 'expertise'. For my part I am a senior scientist (population ecology) in The Netherlands; I did my PhD at Liverpool University in the U.K. (1995) and, amongst other positions before my current job, I was for a short time an Associate Editor for the journal *Nature*. I frequently interact with colleagues working in climate science as well as systems and population and evolutionary ecologists exploring the effects of recent regional warming on phenology of interacting species, changes in breeding cycles, distributions including plant invasions of thermophilc plants, etc. (Some of my research involves the latter area).

I was critical of you because you waded in here like some kind of ecological expert when it was clear that you know a lot less than you think you do. This is common trait amongst the denialati, many of whom make outrageously superficial comments on the effects of warming on both the natural and material economy. If you want to discuss these issues I am more than willing to oblige. But you could have packaged your thoughts originally in a much more thoughtful way; as it is, your posts thus far on thios thread have been pretty thin empirically.

The Mann Hockey Stick has been 'resoundingly disproved?'

Really? To say this with such conviction you'd not only have to reject the broad conclusions of the NAS report.

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11676

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/06/national-academie…

You'd also have to examine, and reject, the other independent hockey sticks being produced by climate science.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Compari…

Paying particular attention to the Oerlemans recontruction http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/oerlemans2005/oerlemans2005.html

If you have really satisfied yourself that, this entire body of (peer reviewed) work has been 'resoundingly disproved', so be it.

ilajd - I thought Tim's forgetting questions was delightful. To be a good liar, you need a great short-term memory to avoid too-blatantly contradicting yourself. Forgetful people (including many scientists) are forced to tell the truth to be self-consistent. Short-term forgetfulness is a wonderful sign of honesty, to anybody who's lived in this world for long (claims of long-term forgetfulness, on the other hand, are often used for deliberate obfuscation, but that's another matter).

Andrew Barnham seems to have think he can trust what Monckton says - hah! He repeats "As Monckton pointed out in the debate, all economic analysis of the cost of switching to a carbon throttled world indicate that it will incur economic costs - with one notable exception - the Stern report." This is simply false. In fact, the majority of economists agree that we need to enact government policies to reduce GHG emissions (in that survey, 94% of economists agreed that the United States should join climate agreements to limit global warming.)

Further to Arthur's point in 323, the Stern Review was a REVIEW of the economic literature. It's kind of an odd claim to make that everyone disagrees with Stern, when all Stern did was merely compile the economic literature on the topic into a synthesis report. Even if one thinks Stern was being selective, that would still falsify Monckton's claim.

---

Also, does anyone have a link to Pinker's 2005 study?

Marred @69

For example, Canadaâs reporting stations dropped from 496 in 1989 to 44 in 1991, with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations dropped to one. Thatâs right: As Smith wrote in his blog, they left âone thermometer for everything north of LAT 65.â And that one resides in a place called Eureka, which has been described as âThe Garden Spot of the Arcticâ due to its unusually moderate summers.

I had to laugh at this. My brother-in-law was the senior government official at Eureka in the 70s (population about 8). He built a small greenhouse on the side of the building using some plastic sheets and grew a few tomato plants in it. He then designed a postmark for Eureka (he was also effectively the postmaster) which had 'Eureka, Garden Spot of the Arctic' around the circumference in reference to his half dozen tomato plants. I think we still have an envelope around the house with this on it. The design was also put on some tee-shirts. If you were to met him, you'd quickly realise that this is how his sense of humour works.

Due to the lack of contrary evidence, I take it that Tim kicked some aristocratic ass.

Up the Republic!

I'm heartily encouraged by Arthur Smith's

I thought Tim's forgetting questions was delightful. To be a good liar, you need a great short-term memory to avoid too-blatantly contradicting yourself. Forgetful people (including many scientists) are forced to tell the truth to be self-consistent. Short-term forgetfulness is a wonderful sign of honesty, ...

And there was me thinking I had early-onset Alzheimer's.

I'm heartily encouraged by Arthur Smith's ...

Monckton is right about climate sensitivity whe just uses the wrong arguments about it. Instead for referring to silly Lindzen he should use the arguments Roy Spencer uses:

First of all, the warming isnt "unprecedented":
http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-background-articles/2000-yea…
I wouldnt use any other proxy studies than Loehle since the Tilnjander series is still being used inverted and that there is no statistical method to add thermometer records in to proxy-records. Proxied have a "smoothed" average but the thermometer has a single year peak record 1998. Second, the scale cant be easily justified.

Second, big part of the component in the warming we've seen has a natural component:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/01/evidence-for-natural-climate-cycles…
Anyone who beileves ocean currents do not release any extra water wapor to the atmosphere? You will have hard time try to give me evidence claiming that's not the case. Anyone try to convice me extra water wapor means no extra clouds?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/research-articles/global-warming-as-a-natur…

Now, to the key point, modellers think that the imbalance in earth radiation budget measured from space is being interpreted as a positive feedback parameter for extra CO2, when actually the clouds have negative feedback but the change in total radiation budget is due to natural changesin clouds:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Spencer-and-Braswell-08.pdf
http://www.drroyspencer.com/research-articles/satellite-and-climate-mod…

And on top of that, the sunspot index correlates very well with the PDO indexes, CLOUD-experiment will give us more information soon.

This just can't be ignored or be called some "denier bullshit". You have been fooled with the context of the mighty "hockey stick" and missing of a natural component, which has not yet a physical model. The truth is we dont really know what is going on except it indicates the effect of CO2 is low.

Wow. Thanks to Richard Simons for
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/debate_with_monckton.php#commen…

-- if you have a little spare time, you might spend some chasing down this story, which appears quite popular with people who don't know the explanation and want to use it to argue for their climate notions. It's been growing legs:

Google Results ... about 4,770 for +Eureka +"garden spot"

Indeed, thank you Richard Simons for a wonderfully funny personal insight.

[Wikipedia on Freak Waves](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave#Causes).

The phenomenon of rogue waves is still a matter of active research, so it is too early to say clearly what the most common causes are or whether they vary from place to place. The areas of highest predictable risk appear to be where a strong current runs counter to the primary direction of travel of the waves; the area near Cape Agulhas off the southern tip of Africa is one such area; the warm Agulhas current runs to the southwest, while the dominant winds are westerlies. However, since this thesis does not explain the existence of all waves that have been detected, several different mechanisms are likely, with localised variation. Suggested mechanisms for freak waves include the following:

* Diffractive focusing â According to this hypothesis, coast shape or seabed shape directs several small waves to meet in phase. Their crest heights combine to create a freak wave.[6]. The Bay of Biscay is known for its extremely rough seas.
* Focusing by currents â Storm forced waves are driven into an opposing current. This results in shortening of wavelength, causing shoaling (i.e., increase in wave height), and oncoming wave trains to compress together into a rogue wave.[6] This happens off the South African coast, where the Agulhas current is countered by westerlies.
* Nonlinear effects â It seems possible to have a rogue wave occur by natural, nonlinear processes from a random background of smaller waves.[7] In such a case, it is hypothesised, an unusual, unstable wave type may form which 'sucks' energy from other waves, growing to a near-vertical monster itself, before becoming too unstable and collapsing shortly after. One simple model for this is a wave equation known as the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS), in which a normal and perfectly accountable (by the standard linear model) wave begins to 'soak' energy from the waves immediately fore and aft, reducing them to minor ripples compared to other waves. The NLS can be used in deep water conditions. In shallow water, waves are described by the Kortewegâde Vries equation or the Boussinesq equation. These equations also have non-linear contributions and show solitary-wave solutions.
* Normal part of the wave spectrum â Rogue waves are not freaks at all but are part of normal wave generation process, albeit a rare extremity.[6]
* Wind waves â While it is unlikely that wind alone can generate a rogue wave, its effect combined with other mechanisms may provide a fuller explanation of freak wave phenomena. As wind blows over the ocean, energy is transferred to the sea surface. Theories of instability mechanisms for the generation and growth of wind wavesâalthough not on the causes of rogue wavesâare provided by Phillips[8] and Miles.[9]

The spatio-temporal focusing seen in the NLS equation can also occur when the nonlinearity is removed. In this case, focusing is primarily due to different waves coming into phase, rather than any energy transfer processes. Further analysis of rogue waves using a fully nonlinear model by R.H. Gibbs (2005) brings this mode into question, as it is shown that a typical wavegroup focuses in such a way as to produce a significant wall of water, at the cost of a reduced height.

Bad formatting above... that's probably unreadable.

The phenomenon of rogue waves is still a matter of active research, so it is too early to say clearly what the most common causes are or whether they vary from place to place. The areas of highest predictable risk appear to be where a strong current runs counter to the primary direction of travel of the waves; the area near Cape Agulhas off the southern tip of Africa is one such area; the warm Agulhas current runs to the southwest, while the dominant winds are westerlies. However, since this thesis does not explain the existence of all waves that have been detected, several different mechanisms are likely, with localised variation. Suggested mechanisms for freak waves include the following:

Diffractive focusing â According to this hypothesis, coast shape or seabed shape directs several small waves to meet in phase. Their crest heights combine to create a freak wave.[6]. The Bay of Biscay is known for its extremely rough seas.

Focusing by currents â Storm forced waves are driven into an opposing current. This results in shortening of wavelength, causing shoaling (i.e., increase in wave height), and oncoming wave trains to compress together into a rogue wave.[6] This happens off the South African coast, where the Agulhas current is countered by westerlies.

Nonlinear effects â It seems possible to have a rogue wave occur by natural, nonlinear processes from a random background of smaller waves.[7] In such a case, it is hypothesised, an unusual, unstable wave type may form which 'sucks' energy from other waves, growing to a near-vertical monster itself, before becoming too unstable and collapsing shortly after. One simple model for this is a wave equation known as the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS), in which a normal and perfectly accountable (by the standard linear model) wave begins to 'soak' energy from the waves immediately fore and aft, reducing them to minor ripples compared to other waves. The NLS can be used in deep water conditions. In shallow water, waves are described by the Kortewegâde Vries equation or the Boussinesq equation. These equations also have non-linear contributions and show solitary-wave solutions.

Normal part of the wave spectrum â Rogue waves are not freaks at all but are part of normal wave generation process, albeit a rare extremity.[6]

Wind waves â While it is unlikely that wind alone can generate a rogue wave, its effect combined with other mechanisms may provide a fuller explanation of freak wave phenomena. As wind blows over the ocean, energy is transferred to the sea surface. Theories of instability mechanisms for the generation and growth of wind wavesâalthough not on the causes of rogue wavesâare provided by Phillips[8] and Miles.[9]

The spatio-temporal focusing seen in the NLS equation can also occur when the nonlinearity is removed. In this case, focusing is primarily due to different waves coming into phase, rather than any energy transfer processes. Further analysis of rogue waves using a fully nonlinear model by R.H. Gibbs (2005) brings this mode into question, as it is shown that a typical wavegroup focuses in such a way as to produce a significant wall of water, at the cost of a reduced height.

Oh, and in case any of you were wondering how Monckton was able to so easily answer a question that so threw Tim, [here's a pretty big clue](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/05/the-1998-super-el-nino-possibly-a…)

Hank, there's a lot of "wrong" garden spots in that search. Google hits for +Euraka +"garden spot" +arctic: about 9,940, actually 188.
Google hits for +Euraka +"garden spot of the arctic": about 15,600, actually 55.
The usual google inflated link estimate. A few of the links are of philatelistic interest, documenting the use of the phrase back to at least 1972. The info was added to the wikipedia entry [back in 2005](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eureka,_Nunavut&oldid=20760035). Echoed by the usual suspects like WUWT, chiefio, icecap/d'Aleo, americanthinker ...

HILARIOUS! When clicking on Bud's link to WTFWT, I got this google ad:
http://www.america.gov/climate_change.html

I don't know if others get the same ad, but one almost starts to believe Lawrence Solomon's claim about google being firmyl in the AGW camp... evil bastards putting CAGW ads on WTFWT!

OMG! 300 comments in less than a day! SOMEBODY SAID SOMETHING WRONG ON THE INTERNET, I BETTER RUSH ON OVER AND SET THEM STRAIGHT IMMEDIATELY! :)

We're nothing short of arrogant in assuming that we could possibly have a more significant energetic effect on this planet's climate than our sun or our galactic neighbours. I still have not seen a single convincing rebuttal for the observed temperature increases on other planets in our solar system (including the argument that the sun is cooling. so what? the sun is not the only energetic influence on our solar system) Is someone driving Hummers on Mars, where it also appears to be SNOWING?

http://www.livescience.com/environment/070312_solarsys_warming.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html
http://www.canada.com/topics/technology/story.html?id=b39346d8-294b-4d2…

>I still have not seen a single convincing rebuttal for the observed temperature increases on other planets in our solar system...

You haven't actually read the articles you link to, have you?

@Craig Stone

That was pretty incoherent, please concentrate when typing. Also, you mentioned Mars, so [here is the rebuttal that climate on Mars has much to do with climate on Earth](http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-on-mars.htm). Please focus on finding fault with the rebuttal, rather than repeating already discredited claims.

We're nothing short of arrogant in assuming that we could possibly have a more significant energetic effect on this planet's climate than our sun or our galactic neighbours.

@Craig Stone: Don't you think it's more arrogant to believe that no one has considered your simple insight before?

To put it in simple terms, it's not us who warm the planet. It really is the sun, as you say. What we do is 'help' the sun, if you will. Without the sun, we couldn't warm the planet one degree if we tried.

I attended the Lord Monckton Tim Lambert debate and I am accepting Tim's invitation to record my views here. As a complete layperson here is my honest appraisal while it is still fresh in my mind:

Firstly I would say that the audience was 80 - 90% pro Monckton and many were politically motivated with a very shallow understanding of the complexities of climate change. This was demonstrated with some of the loony questions that Tim Lambert could not understand because it was also apparent that the questioner did not either.

This fell into the hands of LM who quickly grasped what the questioner was getting at and turned it into his advantage by proving his knowledge of every subject. He even gave us a convincing dissertation on rogue waves and was able to help out with answers for questions directed at TL that TL did not know.

TL was no lightweight however and kept his argument simple and scientifically to the point. He has also greatly earned my respect by showing the courage to stand up to a world celebrity like Lord Monckton as the underdog and demonstrate to the weaklings of the AGW movement that if you passionately believe in something you should be prepared to stand up and fight for it. LM is a much more imposing figure in the flesh, much taller than I had previously imagined and it did look like David and Goliath at the start.

TL's main thrust and attempted first round knock-out was that the whole argument on AGW hinged on CO2 sensitivity and not only had LM ridiculed Prof R Pinker's thesis on this (the recording of this TL cleverly played back), LM even thought that she was a man. On the other hand TL had spoken to Prof Rachel Pinker on the phone, illustrating on slide and repeating on recording what she had said which was that LM was absolutely wrong and had misinterpreted her hypothesis that the IPCC had exaggerated the effect of CO2 sensitivity by up to 8 times.

LM was visibly shaken by this body blow but quickly staggered up from the canvas, firstly to apologise publically and courteously to Prof Pinker about the wrong gender assumption and later to try and address the issue of clouds and CO2 sensitivity with other evidence in his wrap up.

I would have liked to have seen a completely independent adjudicator than right wing radio commentator Alan Jones who tried to be fair but couldn't help himself throw in the odd political statement for LM's corner. I felt somewhat for TL but then again LM has been in the same situation many, many times and TL handled it well. However, this will be no doubt be used by the AGW side to say that it was an unfair contest.

For the rest of it, despite the looney questions, it was for me an informative debate. It was well conducted and enthusiastically received by the audience. TL only made one faux pas, which might have been deliberate, when questioned about the 1970's predictions of a forthcoming ice age by summarising "never believe what you read in the newspapers" which was enthusiastically applauded. I was also a little surprised that he thought that the recent weather in Europe had been snowing alright which he said fits into the AGW regime but it had not been too cold - warm snow? But both speakers agreed that these sorts of events did not affect the bigger picture of long term climate.

There was some discussion on what did, such as when and how a trend could be established. LM discredited the IPCC's take on it and how a trend of cooling could be demonstrated from the IPCC's own graphs. TL argued this point and showed the mathematical reliabilities of trends over different periods. There was also discussion on how CO2 could have been present in such large quantities in our long distant past when there were ice ages. TL argued that the ice quantities at that time were so vast that they outweighed the effect of the CO2 greenhouse effect.

LM summarised that instead of wasting money on global warming we should be attacking the real problems of poverty and disease and population explosion in the third world by using fossil fuel, not denying it.

There was no winner for me except the public. A proper debate has started, at least in this country. Why has it taken so long? But I would hate to think that people like Lord Monckton are the be all and end all of the case against AGW and people like Tim Lambert are the case for it. What we need now is specialist scientist v specialist scientist, geologist v geologist, climatologist v climatologist, economist v economist and last of all politician v politician. This would have been a much better debate with all politics barred, a different audience and better questions. The political flame needs to be turned down on AGW if not extinguished. Sure a political decision is required but this should be when the scientific argument for that moment in time is all over.

Where do we go from here? I started off a few years ago as a believer in Al Gore but couldn't find much discussion in the MSM except that Al was right until I found blogs with all views on the internet which I now read all the time and at times am game to make the occasional naïve comment.

I do not agree however with Lord Monckton in that we should do nothing. There are too many intelligent people with well researched scientific papers to ignore. There are also many problems of pollution, soot deposits and how to replace fossil fuel etc that need to be addressed. But I do believe that the IPCC is dead and so is global carbon trading.

What I think we need is an independent body where all legitimately researched theories and predictions are put forward for regional politicians of the day to consider and decide which ones are more convincing. There should be then open public debate on the appropriate action for their particular region, not the globe. To fit this scenario I believe a global Emissions Trading Scheme is inappropriate and perhaps Regional Direct Action is the go. How do we reconcile economic competition that may advantage countries like China and India with this? This is where I do agree with Lord Monckton in that these countries have a lot of catching up to reach our standard of living and maybe the playing field does not have to be level.

We're nothing short of arrogant in assuming that we could possibly have a more significant energetic effect on this planet's climate than our sun

Good job no-one is that arrogant then, isn't it.

Where the damn fuck do you think the heat for global warming comes from?

So - anyone know the most effective process to get Tim up for Australian of the Year next year! Bravo Tim Lambert!

Spontaneous celebrations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDdPuCsOLaQ&feature=related

Still puzzled about LM's claim about the link between submarine volcanic activity and El Nino.

I found this Peruvian paper from 2005 [ http://is.gd/8gGtG ] ""El Niño" Phenomenon's origin for energetic decompression the Earth" Diaz and Torres. Google translate does a half reasonable job of turning it into something like English (my Spanish is rudimentary). If this paper is what he is basing his claim on, then he himself would have a field day tearing it apart. It reads like something put together the day before publication, with sparse references, conjecture with no evidence and no alternative mechanisms discussed.

Is there better evidence for LM's claim than this?

John, I'm not quite sure what you're getting at with regard to Tim's reply to the 1970s and the approaching ice age being a faux pas. This issue has been researched and a paper published by Peterson et al. with the take home message being basically "never believe what you read in the newspapers".

John said:

There was no winner for me except the public.

I have to disagree with that statement. The public are not well served when known liars and distorters of scientific facts are allowed to distribute their nonsense.

A panel of respected scientists should be sitting at the table with loud buzzers which should be activated when a participant tells a lie (Monckton's would have been going all the time since he told so many lies). That is what is wrong with the deniers, they look for stages where the audience is lacking in scientific ability so they can say what they want and appear to be knowledgeable.

How do you think Monckton would have fared if he had made that presentation at a meeting full of scientists? He would have been laughed off the stage. He picks his stages very carefully. I suspect that a large number of the questions were planted.

How on earth could a non-scientist suddenly start on about the Schrodinger Equation being able to describe rogue waves? He was wrong, the equation he should have referred to was the "non linear Schrodinger Equation" a very different kettle of fish.

Cohnite writes:

>*To impugn LM's estimate of reduced CS relies on an equivalence between the reduced forcing from cloud albedo and increased forcing from cloud LW blockage; this is not the case:*

Cohnite links to this reference:

Cohnite your reference is no defense of Monckton. read [Pinker's correction](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/upload/2010/02/debate_australia_tim_lam…) to Monckton's misuse of her SW surface record:

>*[...] The numbers that we quote [Pinker et. al.] in our paper represent the change in surface SW due to changes in the atmosphere (clouds, water vapor, aerosols). These two numbers [change in surface SW; and Net cloud forcing] cannot be compared at their face value. [...]*

Ramanathan (1989) take a snap shot of the radiative contribution of clouds for the period of April 1985. This coincides with a period that Pinker finds to have a [decreasing trend in surface SW](http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/243/4887/57), but which temperature records show global warming.

I found this Peruvian paper from 2005 [ http://is.gd/8gGtG ] ""El Niño" Phenomenon's origin for energetic decompression the Earth" Diaz and Torres.

It's a hypothesis paper. To support the hypothesis, they claim to have found a strong association between volcanic activity since 1600 and El Nino cycles. Further, they claim that the intensity of cycles can be correlated with the amount of atmospheric Sulfur and volcanic ash. This should not be difficult to verify.

Additionally, they claim that the 1982-1983 "mega-Nino" was triggered by the Chichon eruption in Mexico.

I stopped reading Bud's link after a couple of paragraphs. I'm sure someone will enlighten me if my reasoning is way off base.

It looks like they're arguing "hey, 1998 was a freak wave type phenomenon perhaps caused by a coincidental confluence of several factors peaking all at once. So let's remove it from the data set to get a more reasonable trend." At least at first glance this appears to be the point of showing the graph "Trends with and without Disconntinuity" (their spelling).

If that's a fair interpretation, they're idiots. The underlying factors that combined to form the "freak wave" they think they saw are part of the whole system, so pretending for one particular year that those factors were not part of the system - that they were an abnormal "disconntinuity" - is just ... well, self-bamboozling bulldust ("SBB"?!)

OMG! 300 comments in less than a day! SOMEBODY SAID SOMETHING WRONG ON THE INTERNET,

OMG, SOMEBODY SAID SOMETHING WRONG ON THE INTERNET - that wrongness was that this thread was about something said on the Internet, when it was about a debate that took place in the real world.

;-)

I was also a little surprised that he thought that the recent weather in Europe had been snowing alright which he said fits into the AGW regime but it had not been too cold - warm snow?

Tim's explanation here could have been a bit ... crisper ... but he is right.

Snow is precipitation, as is rain. To have snow you must have moisture in the air. To get that moisture in the air, the primary mechanism is evaporation from a body of water. The warmer the conditions at the body of water, the more evaporation you get. The key is that the weather may carry the moisture in the air from where it evaporated to some other place else entirely, with a very different local temperature. If that temperature is low enough, precipitation comes as snow, not rain.

John:

TL only made one faux pas, which might have been deliberate, when questioned about the 1970's predictions of a forthcoming ice age by summarising "never believe what you read in the newspapers" which was enthusiastically applauded.

John's view reflect how successful denialism has been in making the public believe that scientists were predicting an imminent ice-age. Better informed people know that this is a myth but this hasn't stopped the disinformation campaign from being quite successful, as John's comment illustrates.

What I think we need is an independent body where all legitimately researched theories and predictions are put forward for regional politicians of the day to consider and decide which ones are more convincing.

You're so right! Because using scientists to figure out what's what in science has been such a massive failure (look, the IPCC is a giant political conspiracy!), and politicians like Steve Fielding and Tony Abbott are so much better equipped to understand the science and would _never_ let their political ambitions and perspectives interfere with their unbiased assessment of the science!

/end sarcasm.

Seriously, that's the problem in a nutshell. Politicians on the whole have no idea how to assess the science. And the reason you didn't see much critique of Al Gore early on in the Main Stream Media was that he was largely reporting scientific consensus. It took some time for the anti-science propaganda machines to fire up and start undermining that view in the minds of people who weren't personally equipped to assess the science.

Or to put it succintly - if people think the IPCC is politicised, then removing scientists from the process to leave ONLY politicians can only make politicisation worse.

Lotharsson #348 - I make no pretence to expertise on the El Nino issue, but I'm actually prepared to be quite generous towards that particular WUWT post and assume that Watts was genuinely speculating about the cause of super El Ninos, and that the occasional sniping at Hansen or trendlines was just par for the course background-noise. Main thing I'd be asking is why he doesn't pay any mind to the notion that sinusoidal waves are subject to influence from external physical factors and seems to be suggesting El Nino is just a collision of independent waves - but let that go and assume I misread.

The point of the link was to show that Monckton's ability to answer a seemingly irrelevent question about rogue waves was not as a result of his extensive knowledge of the subject - if it was his answer would most certainly have been more nuanced and hesitant - but because the topic had come up in a climate related discussion on WUWT and the explanation their focused entirely on the non-linear Schrodinger equation. Which was exactly Monckton's own explanation. Monckton took great delight in answering that question, and looked very clever to the unsuspecting eye doing so, but it appears he was merely regurtitating the contents of an old WUWT blog post.

Bud, I'm with you on your second paragraph - I just wanted to make it clear my bulldust detectors went off fairly quickly.

I also suspect the climate system is probably too complex for "El Nino to be just a collision of independent waves" - but that's actually not a bad line of thinking to engage in as a starting point. If you get that concept down, you can start thinking of outcomes as an aggregation of behaviours from many different forces, and that may get you to understanding that adding CO2 won't mean temperatures going up relentlessly every single year (for example).

Monckton will anhialate you with the facts pity your return will not be based on science but sheer smearing of character. When someone cannot return with the facts they simply attack the character. I'm not gonna pretend that I know how the climate ultimately works but the evidence of the data is pointing to a cooling trend. See if your answers are scientifically as substanced as his. I doubt it. I Bet the audience are all hand picked climate nuts from greenpeace or someother advocacy group like 350. The event hasn't happened yet but based on previous events you'll go for the two wolves and sheep deciding whats for dinner approach. With science the debate is never over because you can always improve on a theory

David...er, you realise your first error is that the debate has already happened?

And most of the rest of what you write has no basis in fact? Or is directly opposite to fact? As can be relatively easily verified?

Please tell me your post was an attempt at performance art...

[John had this to say](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/debate_with_monckton.php#commen…):

There was no winner for me except the public. A proper debate has started, at least in this country. Why has it taken so long?

Thew answer is simple - there is no 'debate' to be had in the context of whether anthropgenic global warming is occuring or not. It is, and this is simple scientific fact. Any 'debate' that might validly be had in a scientific context would be over arcane subtleties that the average lay person would not understand, or be bothered to understand.

Does evolution require a public debate to decide whether it holds scientific water? Does the HIV origin of AIDS require a public debate to decide whether it holds scientific water? No, and no. The "public" might want to spend years, decades, and even centuries trying to argue against the science for their own subjective reasons of ideology, but it doesn't change the science by even one iota.

In the case of evolution there was no obvious threat to comfortable Western society if the science was correct, so the jabbering from the fundamentalists was not immediately dangerous in that context. In the case of HIV/AIDS there is still, in the minds of the HIV/AIDS denialists, no major threat to comfortable Western society even if the science is correct (which it is), because in the minds of those who dispute the connection, the druggies, the poofters and the blackies who suffer from it are non-persons anyway. Of course, immunologists and virologists would beg to differ, but at least there are options for treatment and avoidance in this case.

With the AGW case the denial of the science is just as misinformed, but this time the Denialists are taking the future security of modern civilised society, and of the integrity of planetary ecosystems, down with them in their ever-continuing requests for 'debate'.

Denialists might like to debate it as much as they are able to, but it won't change the science, or the final consequences. Physics just doesn't care for public opinion.

The trouble is, the longer that AGW denialism holds sway, the worse it will be for the younger amongst us, and for future generations and for many non-human species. And all because a raucous minority of selfish ignorants want a few bucks per weeks less off their utility bills, or as many 'round-the-world holdays as they can squeeze out.

Oh well, evolution will sort us out in the end...

"I am so appalled by the way that the climate debate has turned in recent months in Australia."

Sorry to have to appall you a little more, but in cas you haven't noticed, it's turned around worldwide, not just here in Australia.

Probably time for a proper debate and the "science" to be opened up to scrutiny?

MW, be off with your nonsense. The science IS A RESULT OF scrutiny. I'm sorry science didn't wait until you woke up.

David Valentine | February 12, 2010 10:28 PM:

The event hasn't happened yet

The debate finished at February 11, 10:30 PM Scienceblogs server time (I think the Scienceblogs server is 16 hours behind Sydney time).

And people like David Valentine probably wonder why they're considered to be nutty.

What we need now is specialist scientist v specialist scientist, geologist v geologist, climatologist v climatologist, economist v economist and last of all politician v politician.

The problem is that you'll have trouble finding a geologist to take the "no warming" stance, and you can't find a climatologist to do so. There just isn't a legitimate debate about this. Politicians and economists, sure, but you can find politicians and economists to take either side of ANY debate.

Now, there is legitimate room for debate in the "what should we do?" department - but that debate just isn't happening because of the sheer volume of the people who claim we shouldn't do anything because they don't want AGW to be happening.

361 Michael,

Bob Carter and Ian Plimer are 2 well known (infamous/) geologists who dispute (A)GW. I'm sure there are more.

TrueSceptic - true, but I reckon Plimer will be a bit shy of debates after his inability to defend his shoddy workmanship against Monbiot...unless the debates are on very friendly turf.

Although I think Monckton is probably right that CO2 is unlikely to be a major factor in the current warm trend he quotes the Uni of Illinois average global surface temperatures that show no real trend up or down. I checked his figures and he is correct for SURFACE temperatures but when I graphed the NEAR-SURFACE temperatures for the first day of each month for the last 11 years there was a clear upward trend in average global temperatures. The equation of the trendline is
y = 0.0562x - 128.25 and the correlation coefficient,
R² = 0.8432. Thus there is an average increase of 0.0562°C per annum with a reasonably good correlation (1.0 is perfect). Perhaps the surface temperatures that he quotes are stablised by melt-water from glaciers and don't give the true picture. Just like him I don't believe either side has been able to deliver the "killer blow" but I agree that we are like King Canute trying to reverse the tide if we think we can effect climate trends. The thing that intrigues me is that the climate has been warmer in the past when the CO2 levels were much lower. This suggests that much bigger forces than CO2 might be responsible for the current warming too and that it just happens to coincide with increasing CO2 levels. It was warmer in medieval times than it is now and humanity prospered because of it.

This suggests that much bigger forces than CO2 might be responsible for the current warming too and that it just happens to coincide with increasing CO2 levels.

Strangely enough this thought has occurred to the climate scientists, and they have done things like attribution studies to study the possibility. The IPCC summary and reports might be worth a read on that topic...

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no âstatistically significantâ warming.

-Phil Jones

John Ellerman said:

The thing that intrigues me is that the climate has been warmer in the past when the CO2 levels were much lower.

Just when did this occur, what were the temperatures and what were the CO2 concentrations? Knowledgeable people, rather than people who just make things up, support their comments with a scientific cite to a paper which provides evidence for their comments.

The thing that intrigues me is that the climate has been warmer in the past when the CO2 levels were much lower.

I was driving my car today, and when I looked at my gauges the thing that intrigued me was that my speed has been much higher in the past at much lower levels of instantaneous fuel consumption.

As I reached the top of the hill I wondered whether I would ever figure out why that is so.

[stupidity filter applied - Tim]

Methinks John Ellerman gives himself too much credit for knowing the "facts".

First of all, there is no evidence whatsoever that it was warmer in the medievel period than now, and in fact most proxies show that it was indeed significantly cooler at the global scale. If there was any warming, it was regional. The denialists constantly dredge up this dead turkey.

Second, the argument that humans thrive in warmer climates is a no-brainer. Ellerman writes like a typical urban bound business professional, confident in the belief that humans are exempt from the laws of nature. In fact, many people with this mindset think that the natural economy is of little value to the material economy, except in terms of consumption, and leave it at that. But, as I have said before, and I am sick of saying it by now, natural systems generate a range of life-sustaining services that permit our species to exist and to persist. Thus, it is not the actual mean surface temperatures that matter, but the rate of change given that complex natural systems are largely deterministic and can only adaptively respond to changes within certain thresholds. Regional temperature shifts in the order of 7-10 C have occurred over the past 120 years, which is certainly likely to be well beyond the capacity of many natural systems and the species within them to adapt. In other words, the current global experiment humans are conducting is almost certain to reduce biodiversity, thus reducing systemic resilience and stability. This will have a deleterious knock-on effect on the ability of these systems to generate and maintain services that sustain civilization and which have few technological substitutes.

That's right Tim hide the obvious.. You can't handle the truth..

If you could you would respond instead of delete.. Feel free to delete this one also.

Ian Forrester said
Just when did this occur, what were the temperatures and what were the CO2 concentrations? Knowledgeable people, rather than people who just make things up, support their comments with a scientific cite to a paper which provides evidence for their comments.

Sorry, Ian, I was just quoting the scientific literature without citing it. Here is a citation.
Science 29 November 1996:
Vol. 274. no. 5292, pp. 1503 - 1508
DOI: 10.1126/science.274.5292.1503

The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period in the Sargasso Sea

Lloyd D. Keigwin

Sea surface temperature (SST), salinity, and flux of terrigenous material oscillated on millennial time scales in the Pleistocene North Atlantic, but there are few records of Holocene variability. Because of high rates of sediment accumulation, Holocene oscillations are well documented in the northern Sargasso Sea. Results from a radiocarbon-dated box core show that SST was approx 1°C cooler than today approx 400 years ago (the Little Ice Age) and 1700 years ago, and approx 1°C warmer than today 1000 years ago (the Medieval Warm Period). Thus, at least some of the warming since the Little Ice Age appears to be part of a natural oscillation.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA 02543 USA.

If you want to go back further...
Science (12 February 2010), Vol. 327, No. 5967, pp. 860-863; DOI: 10.1126/science.1181725

Sea-level highstand 81,000 years ago in Mallorca
Jeffrey A. Dorale,1,* Bogdan P. Onac,2,* Joan J. Fornós,3 Joaquin Ginés,3 Angel Ginés,3 Paola Tuccimei,4 and David W. Peate1

Abstract
Global sea level and Earthâs climate are closely linked. Using speleothem encrustations from coastal caves on the island of Mallorca, we determined that western Mediterranean relative sea level was ~1 meter above modern sea level ~81,000 years ago during marine isotope stage (MIS) 5a. Although our findings seemingly conflict with the eustatic sea-level curve of far-field sites, they corroborate an alternative view that MIS 5a was at least as ice-free as the present, and they challenge the prevailing view of MIS 5 sea-level history and certain facets of ice-age theory.

1 Department of Geoscience, University of Iowa, 121 Trowbridge Hall, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA.
2 Department of Geology, University of South Florida, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, SCA 528, Tampa, FL 33620, USA; and Department of Geology, Babes-Bolyai University, Emil Racovita Institute of Speleology Cluj, Romania.
3 Departament de Ciències de la Terra, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Carretera Valldemossa km 7.5, Palma de Mallorca, 07122, Spain.
4 Dipartimento di Scienze Geologiche, Università di Roma III, Largo St. Leonardo Murialdo, 1, 00146 Roma, Italy.

Jeff Harvey makes a good point about the fact that rapid changes are more difficult to adapt to than slow ones. Very true (and its the same in economics)! I'm sure that mass extinctions have occurred in the past because of just such changes and we may well be seeing something like that occurring today. That too would be part of the normal pattern if fossil records are anything to go by. We are at the end of summer here in Sydney and when it's hot we hang out for a southerly change. The temperature drops ten or fifteen degrees in as many minutes when it hits and I haven't noticed any extinctions around here:-) (Don't bother haranguing me for my levity - this topic needs some!)

John Ellerman commits the usual sin of AGW deniers. John, do you know what the "G" in AGW stands for? It stands for "global" meaning over the whole of the earth, not some isolated single point.

Usign the Med for global sea levels is just plain stupid. You do know that the Med is as near an inland sea as you can get? I don't know when the Straits of Gibraltar opened up but whether they were open or closed would make a tremendous difference in Med sea level as opposed to global sea level.

I suggest that you do more reading in scientific texts and stop citing papers which you find on denier sites such as junkscience and whatsuphisbutt.