Matt, thanks for the book suggestion. I looked it up on Amazon and it looks really interesting. The comments are very positive, and make the book sound all the more intriguing. I’m ordering it!
I wish I’d had better history teachers through school. For the most part, it was presented in a very dry and boring way. But then you look at topics like this, and they’re just fascinating. I would have liked to have had history teachers with more passion, able to tell the stories of history with such engagement and appreciation.
Chris might especially appreciate the 3 Ms concept, I feel it resonates strongly with how he delivers the three "E"s
https://www.bbc.com/ideas/videos/whats-behind-denialism/p06qtycg
Just echoing what Chris has been saying for months…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-nu…
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has been caught red handed erasing record-breaking cold temperatures from its data records.
The BOM has now been shamed by media investigations into ordering a review of its procedures. But it has yet to provide an explanation as to why it made these “adjustments” first place.
These “adjustments” seem to go only one way. The BOM is perfectly happy to record and announce it whenever Australia’s temperatures hit record-breaking highs. But when the temperatures reach new lows it’s a different matter altogether.
For some strange reason that the BOM has been unable to explain, when temperatures go below a certain point it either deletes them as if they had never been - or it enters them into its records at higher temperature than the one actually recorded by its thermometers.
The dodgy adjustments were spotted by investigative journalist Jennifer Marohasy.
Earlier this month, she was contacted by bush meteorologist Lance Pidgeon who had noticed that Goulburn, a town south west of Sydney, had smashed its temperature record with a low of -10.4 degrees Celsius.
Except, the Bureau has since erased this measurement.
According to the Bureau’s own rules, the coldest temperature record during a 24-hour period to 9am is recorded as the minimum for that day. So, for Sunday 2 July the carry-over minimum should be -10.4 degrees Celsius. But instead the summary documentation shows -10.0. There is now no public record of -10.4 degrees Celsius.
This is not the first time the BOM has been accused of behaving more like a political activist organization than a scientific one. On every occasion, instead of fessing up to its dodgy antics, it has hidden behind a wall of bluster and pretend-scientific authority.
For example, against the principles of robust science, i t refuses to allow its data to be audited independently - or to discuss why or how it makes its temperature adjustments.
As The Australian notes in a paywalled editorial, these unexplained adjustments are no way to inspire confidence among a taxpaying public which has to fund the BOM to the tune of an annual 365.3 million (2015/16 figures).
That adjustment process, known as homogenisation, has got the bureau in trouble in the past. Again, the issue has been one of transparency. The bureau has made a series of changes to historical records across the country. It says it does so to adjust for the movement of a weather station site, changes to surrounding vegetation or results that look wrong when compared with nearby sites. Such homogenisation is not unique to Australia but the bureau sometimes fails to convince when asked to explain the specific local adjustments it has made, especially if these bolster a warming trend. The same goes for any practices that discount cold temperatures.
The official record must be accurate and trusted. Otherwise, claims of historic extremes - the hottest winter day! - only mislead and public policy gets corrupted. Even if the bureau does have all the answers, it needs to do a better job of taking the public - sceptics included - into its confidence.
The same is true, of course, in the US where organizations like NASA and NOAA have also been caught red-handed making adjustments to their own temperature data sets, none of these convincingly explained.
But this scandal is not as widely known as it should be, largely because it goes virtually unreported in the liberal-dominated mainstream media.
https://www.tapwires.com/2017/08/02/fraud-australias-bureau-of-meteorolo…
As for dead fish — plenty of those in 1932.
Dead fish, dead birds, and even a dead baby. The mercury hit 120F in Collarenebri. (That’s 50C).
You know it must be climate change when things are almost at hot and deadly 87 years later.
Mass fish and bird deaths in 1932 prove climate change was something that happened all the time.
The Uralla Times, Feb 1, 1932
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/02/climate-change-is-real-because-we-are-s…
61% of temperature data is not measured data but estimated via computer models.
https://realclimatescience.com/2019/02/61-of-noaa-ushcn-adjusted-tempera…
Old Guy, the reason so few people are engaging with you at this point, and I would argue the reason few people are taking you seriously, is because you have, at the core, a thesis which seems to indicate you think everything is fine and nothing is wrong in the climate. This, however, not only runs counter to scientifically gathered data collected by thousands of individual scientists and challenged/uphelp by countless peer reviews, but which also flies in the face of what we are seeing unfold in the ecosystem (something you seem to blithely ignore). How do you explain the collapses of insect populations? Increasingly erratic and severe weather? The sudden death of dozens of tree and animal species across diverse ecosystems, climate zones, and continents? See, you are providing an underlying thesis which creates a fundamental cognitive dissonance between the “everything is fine” message you seem to be implying and the “shit’s going downhill” evidence that can be seen in dozens of areas of the world. In short, your assertions don’t comport (Chris, thank you for that word) with the other, non-CO2-related evidence that is mounting all around us. The “global warming” evidence at least explains part of why that is happening. Yours does not.
It also doesn’t help when people did present counter evidence and counter explanations (which, despite your protestations, they did), you ignored it. When that was followed up by requests to go read where this has been hashed out before, you also ignored it. That was then followed up by a blanket declaration by you that anyone who disagrees with your thesis is essentially superstitious, incapable of rational thought, and intellectually deficient. Yet you yourself haven’t even bothered to answer many questions levelled directly at you, and to many people (not all, because we actually do have diverse thinkers here) that’s the surest sign of a troll they have. Now, I fully expect you wouldn’t respond to my questions, especially those delivered with my tongue firmly in my cheek, but please understand that blanket statements attacking the intellectual and rational capacity of many members isn’t going to open any ears.
Ironically, Old Guy, some other things you’ve pointed out are things I’m willing to look at. The food pyramid thing is intriguing, and because your underlying assetion comports with what I know about nutrition and corporate interests, I’m diving deeper into looking at the origins of it. Learning some new things there, I am.
Snydeman-
I think there are a couple of things happening.
One is the widespread use of chemical poisons + genetically engineered crops. I’d guess these are responsible for killing off the insects, and the rest of the food chain up from them.
The other are the larger climate effects.
Armstrong thinks that we’re in a period of lessening solar activity, which leads to a sort of global cooling. Which is why we’re seeing all the freezing conditions.
Me, I dunno. I think the pesticides are a slam dunk for causing the extinction of the insects. It probably is also responsbile for a large amount of trouble we are seeing in human biology.
The rest? I think if we address the fossil fuel issue, we can address two problems at once. Even if climate change is totally bogus, getting off fossil fuels helps with the peak oil predicament. So I honestly don’t care too much about debating the issue. One way or another, we will stop using oil. Its probably more reasonable to do it under our own power, rather than with a gun to our head, but one way or another, we will stop using oil.
I’d just rather do it thoughtfully and voluntarily, rather than having to run around in panic mode, scrabbling around at the last minute. Cramming for the final is something I did long ago as an undergrad, and I’m way past doing that sort of thing at this point in my life. And I totally don’t recommend it as national policy approach.
But of course, that’s what we’ve currently selected.
Two words: Hirsch Report. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_report
Agreed. You and I are aligned on these things.
On top of all this, I was listening to an NPR report about an American scientist using the Crispr method to try to see if genetic defects could be modified/eliminated in fertilized human embryos. My first thought was “we can’t even be stewards of our own environment, much less handle the awesome ability to modify things directly at the DNA level.”
I’d rather this all play out very differently; I just don’t have any historical evidence of that ever happening at this scale.
On top of all this, I was listening to an NPR report about an American scientist using the Crispr method to try to see if genetic defects could be modified/eliminated in fertilized human embryos.I recall reading something a while back that said that CRISPR, while it definitely was able to edit the targeted gene, had a nasty side effect of making large and unexpected changes to a bunch of other, unrelated genes at the same time. Yes. Here. Real Science. A bit hard to find unless you use the precise keywords. I wonder why that is?
https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/crispr-gene-editing-can-cause-hundreds-unintended-mutations In the new study, the researchers sequenced the entire genome of mice that had undergone CRISPR gene editing in the team’s previous study and looked for all mutations, including those that only altered a single nucleotide. The researchers determined that CRISPR had successfully corrected a gene that causes blindness, but Kellie Schaefer, a PhD student in the lab of Vinit Mahajan, MD, PhD, associate professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University, and co-author of the study, found that the genomes of two independent gene therapy recipients had sustained more than 1,500 single-nucleotide mutations and more than 100 larger deletions and insertions. None of these DNA mutations were predicted by computer algorithms that are widely used by researchers to look for off-target effects.Yeah. You hit the gene target you were aiming at, but as an unintended side effect, you hit another 1500 single genes that were not targets. Gosh, let's hope none of those accdental modifications cause anything untoward to occur. And by all means, let's start using this in humans. What could possibly go wrong?
I thought I would try to sort out some of Old Guy’s arguments.
- Models - Yes its true that models are frequently wrong, in fact I would argue that they are almost always wrong at least to some extent. However, they are useful. When I think of models I always flash on hurricane track predictions we see on TV every time there is a hurricane somewhere. The “spaghetti” models with the squiggly lines are a case in point. Each squiggly line represents one model. None of the individual models is ever entirely right. There are continuing arguments about which is best, but all are wrong to varying degrees.
It turns out, however, the National Hurricane Center invariably comes out with the most accurate predictions of the track of hurricanes. That’s because they take all those wrong models and average them out. That comes out to something like drawing a line right down the middle of those squiggly lines.
https://www.postandcourier.com/news/european-hurricane-model-might-be-be…
Strategies like this have been proven successful in other fields involving uncertainty and predictions. Consider electoral polling. Different polling organizations have better or worse track records but sites like Fivethirtyeight have been able to consistently outperform individual polls by combining all of them into one average.
The NHC produces their forecasts using the data generated by models, and when they do they are able to consider how each model has performed in the past. This is why its forecasts are, overall, better than individual models.
So, bottom line is that models are almost always wrong, but in the aggregate they can be very accurate.
Contrary to the notion, often spread by denialists, that all climate science is based on models, the best evidence of climate change is observational data well represented by the picture Chris posted in his article. For those, like myself, that like data illustrated in charts, graphs and pictures there are many that clearly demonstrate the progress of climate change my various metrics. Here's one:
https://skepticalscience.com/Climate_Carbon_Bookkeeping.html
I don't have time to go into many more.
2. Old Guy's "authorities". All of the scientists he listed are, curiously but not surprisingly, among the very small number of climate scientists who make up the 3% who differ from the 97% "consensus" of climate scientists who agree that the climate is changing due to human activities. That doesn't make them wrong, just suspect.
He specifically named Willie Soon, John Christy and the clown prince of climate denial "Lord" Christopher Monckton (He is not a Lord, nor does he have any scientific credentials).
Willie Soon:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/13/peabody-energy-coal-mining-climate-change-denial-funding
Biggest US coal company funded dozens of groups questioning climate change
There are many possible explanations. Maybe the tricky and often-adjusted estimates of the atmospheric temperature made by instruments on orbiting satellites are biased. Maybe there’s something wrong with the models, or our understanding of Earth’s atmosphere. Maybe the inputs used in the model simulations are flawed. The answer is likely a combination of these possibilities, but in congressional testimony earlier this year, Christy tried to place the blame entirely on the models, with a denier-style framing:
the average of the models is considered to be untruthful in representing the recent decades of climate variation and change, and thus would be inappropriate for use in predicting future changes in the climate or for related policy decisions.
New study tests and falsifies Christy’s assertions
On the other hand, research has identified a number of real-world cooling influences in the early 21st century that weren’t accurately represented in the climate model simulation scenarios. The sun went into an unusually quiet cycle, there was a series of moderate volcanic eruptions, and the boom in Chinese coal power plants added sunlight-blocking pollution to the atmosphere. Using statistical tests, Santer’s team showed that those unexpected cooling effects combined with shifts in ocean cycles best explained the model-data discrepancy in atmospheric temperatures over the past 20 years.there are no large systematic model errors in tropospheric cooling following the eruptions of El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991.
Well, that's all I have time for at the moment. Perhaps I'll pick up on some more of the BS presented by Old Guy in the future.
From Doug’s post:
From: https://rebirthofthecool.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/7-billion-people/
From https://www.capsweb.org/blog/continuing-human-population-growth-overwhelming-wiping-out-world-wildlife
Doug,
Do you see any similarities in the graphs? (There are many more similar graphs out there.) I’m sure you can figure out which one is the cause and which are the consequences. Why do you still think that fighting a symptom is the best approach? Nature will fix the problem all on her own.
Grover