Global Warming/Climate Change

The Peer Reviewed Literature Has Spoken

Much confusion and spin infects current public discussion of “peer reviewed” research: first we had Maurice Newman, the Chairman of the ABC, who suggested that “distinguished scientists” challenge the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change by “peer reviewed research”, although he oddly failed to name such research.

Now we have John McLean, an author of a lone article that was celebrated by some media scribes as overturning the scientific consensus on climate change, cry “censorship” because his response to a devastating deconstruction of his work in the peer reviewed literature was not accepted for publication.

So what exactly is peer reviewed research? How does it work?

To understand the current controversy, one must understand that peer review is egalitarian but not indiscriminate; that it is fallible but self-correcting; and that it exercises quality control but not censorship.

Those three attributes of peer review are brought into sharp focus if we examine the recent article by Mr McLean, and colleagues Chris de Freitas and Bob Carter, in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Mr McLean is a perfect example of the egalitarianism of peer reviewed science.

Authors of peer reviewed articles normally live in the daylight of scholarship and seek maximum visibility—who wouldn’t want to say “Look here, I published this great article and I am at MIT!” Curiously, Mr McLean has proved rather more elusive.

Mr McLean’s published affiliation is given as “Applied Science Consultants” in Croydon, Victoria.

This entity does not have a web page. This entity does not have a recorded phone number. This entity does not have an ABN and it is not registered as a business in Victoria.

The author’s home page can eventually be traced to Switzerland, where it identifies J D McLean as a “computer consultant and occasional travel photographer”.

Does it matter that the author of a scientific article is an occasional travel photographer?

Yes.

But only because it nullifies any claims that the peer reviewed literature is “elitist” and that it favours the academic establishment and “in-group” thinking over the views of outsiders. The fact that an occasional travel photographer can publish in the Journal of Geophysical Research underscores that in science, what matters most is the strength of one’s evidence and arguments and not one’s professional standing.

According to the Australian National Library, no J D McLean has ever submitted a thesis for a research degree at any institution in Australia, for any program in any discipline.

Does it matter that Mr McLean has no verifiable research credentials from an Australian tertiary institution?

No.

I have frequently published peer reviewed papers with students as co-authors before they obtained a higher degree. One must therefore applaud Mr McLean’s entry into the egalitarian world of peer-reviewed science with this first publication.

However, peer reviewed science is not indiscriminate: not all opinions are equal and one cannot choose what to believe on the basis of whim or ideology. What counts are evidence, logic, and competence.

Peer reviewed science is egalitarian but not indiscriminate.

Science carries with it responsibilities such as accountability and subsequent scrutiny—peer review is a spam filter, which works well but not perfectly. The true value of a peer reviewed article lies in whether or not it survives scrutiny upon publication.

If it does not, then peer reviewed science is self-correcting and eventually cleanses the occasional junk that penetrated the spam filter.

The article by McLean and colleagues is a perfect example of the fallible but self-correcting nature of peer reviewed science.

Although the authors loudly proclaimed to the media that their work shows that “no scientific justification exists for emissions regulation” and that it “leaves little room for any warming driven by human emissions”, these claims have now been shown to be wishful thinking at best, and mendacious propaganda at worst.

The Journal of Geophysical Research is publishing a devastating rebuttal of Mr McLean’s work, authored by a team of nine of the world’s leading climate scientists from Japan, the UK, the US, and New Zealand.

This rebuttal uncovered numerous errors and, most crucially, it unambiguously showed that the paper by McLean and colleagues permitted no conclusions about global warming, let alone the lack thereof.

None.

Peer reviewed science is fallible but self-correcting.

In a recent ABC interview, Mr McLean claimed that he was “censored” because his reply to this rebuttal was rejected and thus will not appear in the peer-reviewed literature.

The rejection of this reply is a perfect example that peer review exercises quality control and not censorship.

To understand the difference between quality control and censorship it helps to consider my own experience as editor. I just ended a three-year term as an Associate Editor of a leading journal in my field. During that term, I made 300 editorial decisions based on around 700 peer reviews.

I accepted only 50 manuscripts. Does this mean I censored the remaining 250?

No.

Because in science, a decision against publication is (almost) always quality control and (almost) never censorship.

How can we be certain that the decision to reject a reply by McLean and colleagues was quality control and not censorship?

By analysing their original, now devastatingly critiqued, article.

Fact is that their article was not about long-term global warming. It was about the association between ocean currents and air temperature—in particular the time lag between the warm El Niño current and the ensuing increase in temperature.

Fact is that the article does not contain the words “climate change” except in a citation of the IPCC.

Fact is that the article’s only connection with climate change arises from the phrase “… and perhaps recent trends in global temperature…” in the final sentence.

Those facts are jarringly at odds with the authors’ grandiose claims in press releases that humans do not cause climate change.

Might there nonetheless be a grain of truth about climate change, or lack thereof, in the authors’ public pronouncements?

No.

This is best explained by an analogy involving daily temperature readings between, say, July and December anywhere in Australia. Suppose temperature is recorded twice daily, at midday and at midnight, for those 6 months. It is obvious what we would find: Most days would be hotter than nights and temperature would rise from winter to summer.

Now suppose we change all monthly readings by subtracting them from those of the following month—we subtract July from August, August from September, and so on. This process is called “linear detrending” and it eliminates all equal increments. Days will still be hotter than nights, but the effects of season have been removed. No matter how hot it gets in summer, this detrended analysis would not and could not detect any linear change in monthly temperature.

Astonishingly, McLean and colleagues applied precisely this detrending to their temperature data. Their public statements are thus equivalent to denying the existence of summer and winter because days are hotter than nights.

It is precisely this detrending that was identified by the devastating rebuttal that has now put to rest the paper by McLean and colleagues. (More on the relevant science can be found here, a superb site run by an Australian.)

Thus, in an exemplary demonstration of the self-correcting nature of science, the peer reviewed literature has spoken loudly and clearly: The paper by McLean and colleagues permits no conclusions about global warming, let alone the lack thereof.

None.

The decision to reject a reply by McLean and colleagues, which was made on the basis of three detailed reviews of their work, was thus quality control and not censorship.

It is not censorship to put an end to illegitimate attempts to interpret detrended data as evidence against global warming.

It is quality control.

It is not censorship to put an end to pronouncements based on a botched figure that splices together two discordant temperature series without correction.

It is quality control.

The peer reviewed literature has spoken loudly and clearly: The paper by McLean and colleagues permits no conclusions about global warming, let alone the lack thereof.

This outcome puts to rest the only peer reviewed article that was purportedly about climate change and claimed to challenge the scientific consensus, to have come out of Australia since the IPCC’s 2007 report.

This single article is no more.

What is left standing instead are, for example, the 110 peer reviewed articles on climate change that were published by scientists at the University of New South Wales’ Climate Change Research Center alone since 2007.

Yes, 110 peer reviewed articles since 2007 from just one Australian research center that add to the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change and its human causes.

110 peer reviewed articles which in the service of humanity seek ways to manage the problem.

110 to 0.

That is the score of the peer reviewed science between just one Australian university and the Australian “skeptics”.

Care to make it 200 to 0? 300 to 0? Just add in a few more Australian universities.

Care to make it umpteen thousands to virtually none? Just read the peer reviewed literature surveyed by the IPCC.

Stephan Lewandowsky is a Winthrop Professor and an Australian Professorial Fellow at the University of Western Australia.

51 Comments

  1. Great article, Stephan. It is indeed telling how few contrarian papers are published in respected scientific journals.

  2. Reasic, you may be interested in reading my comments on Eli Rabett’s blog (https://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/03/too-bad-to-be-believed.html) about Professor Lewandowsky’s biassed commentary.

    I copy it here.

    The opening link provided in this article to Stephan Lewandowsky’s “The peer reviewed literature has spoken” (Note 1) in which Lewandowski expresses confidence QUOTE: .. that peer review .. exercises quality control but not censorship UNQUOTE in the peer review process. He also claims that QUOTE: Because in science, a decision against publication is (almost) always quality control and (almost) never censorship UNQUOTE. The evidence from those leaked EUA CRU files (Climategate) and all of the other IPCC-gates that have followed suggest that “almost” is appropriate for the numerous different scientific disciplines involved in understanding those horrendously complicated global climate processes and drivers. The change within the scientific community (and amongst voters) since Climategate in November 2009 does seem to support Lewandowsky’s QUOTE: Peer reviewed science is fallible but self-correcting UNQUOTE. It is just such a shame that it took the leaking of CRU files to kick it into motion regarding The (significant human-made global climate change) Hypothesis. As a consequence public confidence in the pronouncements of individual scientists and scientific bodies in fields beyond the catastrophic human-made global climate change field has been shattered.

    Open, honest and professional enquiries that are independent of the kind of political influence inherent in the UK’s Commons Science and Technology Committee enquiry are needed, but it appears unlikely that those set up by the UEA and IPCC will suffice (Note 2).

    Lewandowski gives the impression that he QUOTE: .. is a perfect example of the .. UNQUOTE arrogance of some who live in the world of academia compared with the humility of some who line in the real word. He uses McLean as an example of how the QUOTE: .. fallible but self-correcting .. UNQUOTE peer review process even allows the publication of papers by non- academics with only one peer-reviewed paper to their name. What he chooses to overlook is that co-authors Chris de Freitas (Note 3) and Bob Carter (Note 4) are well-respected academics within relevant scientific disciples (cherry-picking?).

    In my previous comment I referred to the attempt by McLean et al. to get their response to the rebuttal by Foster (Tamino?) et al. published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Lewandowski provides a link to Sceptical Science’s “A peer-reviewed response to McLean’s El Nino paper” (Note 5). Many helpful comments appear there and the last one (#50) provides two links (Notes 6 & 7), the first to the McLean et al. response to the rebuttal by Foster (Tamino?) et. al. along with commentary on the Journal of Geophysical Research’s refusal to publish. This refusal was allegedly on the basis that it did not pass peer review. Professor Carter, Associate Professor de Freitas and Dr. McLean, complained that the real reason was censorship. Many sceptics would agree with “censorship”, as can be seen in the comments on the other link (Note 7) which provides some balance to the debate.

    NOTE: it is possible that some of my links provided in the NOTES are unacceptable on this blog, e.g. pdf’s so I have placed some extensions in () away from the main part of the link. You’ll have to reconstruct them and pop them into you r browser.

    NOTES:
    1) see https://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2858332. (htm)
    2) see https://globalpoliticalshenanigans.blogspot.com/2010/03/can-there-be-independent-investigation. (html)
    3) see https://www.sges.auckland.ac.nz/about_us/our_people/defreitas_chris/index. (shtm)
    4) see https://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/
    5) see https://www.skepticalscience.com/peer-reviewed-response-to-McLean-El-Nino-paper. (html)
    6) see https://icecap.us/images/uploads/McLeanetalSPPIpaper2Z-March24. (pdf)
    7) see https://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog

    Regards, Pete Ridley

  3. Normally they go through fine Pete. The system is Askimet, which is usually very good, but sometimes it screws up. If it makes a mistake, it’s usually because of a high quantity of links, although sometimes it rejects the odd comment with only one or two links. Not sure why…. If it happens again, just email me to let me know, and I’ll take a look.

  4. “It is not censorship to put an end to pronouncements based on a botched figure that splices together two discordant temperature series without correction.”

    The infamous Hockey stick graph is two discordant temperature series spliced together, but that’s OK?

    “We know that Jones and his gang tried and largely succeeded in “hiding the decline” of temperature by using what he termed “Mike’s [Mann] Nature trick.” Most people think it refers to CRU tree ring data after 1960, which do show a decline in temperature. However, I believe that it refers to Michael Mann’s “trick” in hiding the fact that his multi-proxy data did not show the expected warming after 1979. So he abruptly cut off his analysis in 1979 and simply inserted the thermometer data supplied by Jones, which do claim a strong temperature increase. Hence the hockey-stick, suggesting a sudden major warming during the past century. Only a thorough scientific investigation will be able to document that there was no strong warming after 1979, that the instrumented warming record is based on data manipulation, involving the selection of certain weather stations, [and the de-selection of others that showed no warming], plus applying insufficient corrections for local heating.” quote from S.Fred Singer, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project.

    Here is another link I posted on the other climate change thread which was an opinion piece by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky School of Psychology (besides wondering what relevance a Psychologist has in a science debate anyway)

    https://sites.google.com/site/rossmckitrick/gatekeeping.pdf?attredirects=0

    Ross McKitrick shows plainly that, despite the furore over the emails and the frantic issuing of denials, mainstream climatologists, are still determined to keep sceptic views out of the literature.

    “This is the story of how I spent 2 years trying to publish a paper that refutes an important claim in the
    2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The claim in question is not just
    wrong, but based on fabricated evidence. Showing that the claim is fabricated is easy: it suffices merely
    to quote the section of the report, since no supporting evidence is given. But unsupported guesses may
    turn out to be true. Showing the IPCC claim is also false took some mundane statistical work, but the
    results were clear. Once the numbers were crunched and the paper was written up, I began sending it to
    science journals. That is when the runaround began. Having published several against-the-flow papers in
    climatology journals I did not expect a smooth ride, but the process eventually became surreal.”

    “The paper I have talked about makes the case that the IPCC used false evidence to conceal an important
    problem with the surface temperature data on which most of their conclusions rest. In principle, one
    might argue that my analysis was wrong (though most reviewers didn’t), but it would be implausible to
    say that the issue is unimportant or irrelevant.”

    Quoted from above link.

  5. Pete,

    ad “(besides wondering what relevance a Psychologist has in a science debate anyway)” – actually, there is quite a lot a psychologist may have to say about global warming and the beliefs people develop around it.

    Personally, what I find most amazing is that, while there is an incredible amount of contradiction between the arguments brought forth by the self-proclaimed “skeptics” – on the one hand, some claim that temperatures have not gone up at all, while on the other hand, some claim that they indeed did, but so they did on other planets. Likewise, I’ve both seen the claim that “0.04 per-cent of all molecules in air won’t make any difference whatsoever” by some “skeptics” and at the same time that “the CO2 concentration is so high that the extinction length is so small that the atmosphere is intransparent anyway”. Still, despite all these contradictions, the impression is that all these groups join forces in their effort to discredit the IPCC.

    What is even more bizarre, I could name some prominent cases where an individual(!) keep on producing such self-contradicting claims, completely ignorant of the issue that what they say straightforwardly contradicts what they reasoned out a week ago.

    So, yes, there seems to be a lot of interesting psychology going on here. If you ask me – if we all invested some effort to come to a deeper understanding how consciousness keeps on spinning rational-sounding tales to itself so that it can believe in having sound reasons to hold certain beliefs it adopted for quite different reasons, that certainly would help. A lot.

    But these things aside – can you give a reference where you got that statement from Fred Singer from?

  6. Hi Thomas, I was sure I got it from https://www.sepp.org/ but I can’t seem to find it there now, a search on the text string found it at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/03/singer-on-climategate-parliamentary-inquiry/

    Another relevant piece of the puzzle is this guest post only posted yesterday.
    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/04/ipcc-how-not-to-compare-temperatures/

    “IPCC basically compares a peak in temperatures in recent years with super averaged medieval data where peaks are more suppressed to conclude how much it is warmer today than in the MWP.

    This is a problem !”

    OT: I agree “there is quite a lot a psychologist may have to say about global warming and the beliefs people develop around it.” but I’d say the chap in question clearly did not approach the subject impartially, hence his biased view distorts any possible conclusions one might come to.

  7. I don’t think it’s quite that simple Thomas.

    The proxy data Mann used did not show a warming trend after 1979, so he stopped using proxy data on the graph at that point, and added in CRU manipulated temp data (not proxy data) which did show a warming trend (which Singer seems to think is heavily influenced, e.g. by UHI, selection bias etc.), hence the hockey stick graph being two discordant temperature series spliced together.

    Singer is saying “Only a thorough scientific investigation will be able to document that there was no strong warming after 1979, that the instrumented warming record is based on data manipulation, involving the selection of certain weather stations, [and the de-selection of others that showed no warming], plus applying insufficient corrections for local heating.”

    So his position seems to be that we need to investigate, to check weather there was no strong warming trend after 1979 (evidenced by the de-selected proxy data), which I presume he suspects, as he doesn’t seem to take the CRU data as representative of reality.

    He’s clearly not stating as fact that there was no strong warming after 1979, because he’s calling for a “thorough scientific investigation”.

    There is more to the underlying story of course, I don’t know if you followed the Briffa Yamal controversy (about 5 years back), it’s well worth reading up on for a fuller picture, this is a quick overview….

    “The Yamal data had been collected by a pair of Russian scientists, Hantemirov and Shiyatov, and was published in 2002. In their version of the data, Yamal had little by way of a twentieth century trend. Strangely though, Briffa’s version, which had made it into print before even the Russians’, was somewhat different. While it was very similar to the Russians’ version for most of the length of the record, Briffa’s verison had a sharp uptick at the end of the twentieth century — another hockey stick, made almost to order to meet the requirements of the paleoclimate community. ”

    https://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/9/29/the-yamal-implosion.html

    I’m not sure I can find a link to Briffa’s original 2000 paper, my link is now invalid, it used to reside on the CRU server, but since the controversy it mysteriously disappeared. (shurg)

  8. Pete,

    first of all, considering the link that has gone invalid, have you tried using the web archive – https://www.archive.org?

    Would you agree with these statements?

    (1) Order of magnitude wise, a warming of 1 Kelvin corresponds to a shift in the radiation balance at the 1% level.

    (2) Getting the physics right that accounts for an 1% effect, in particular if the system under study features quite complex interactions, and we furthermore cannot do direct lab experiments on it but have to rely on observing an on-going experiment, is a substantial challenge.

    (3) Ground-based weather station data may suffer from a number of specific problems with respect to coverage in time and space, reliability of data, other influences, etc. While we certainly would like to have – and be able to compare – reliable data from such sources, the problem is in the details.

    (4) Satellites provide only indirect data from which temperature must be inferred, but (a) the underlying physics of spectroscopy is fairly well understood, (b) we get a lot of data from any single satellite, which is taken in a fairly uniform way, (c) validation experiments can and have been done where satellite measurements have been cross-checked against radiosondes on balloons. There are problems, however, with instrument drift, noise, and calibration of data obtained from sensors on different satellites.

    (5) This picture basically represents the present state of knowledge concerning satellite data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radiosonde_satellite_surface_temperature.png

    Concerning Singer, in particular this statement:

    He’s clearly not stating as fact that there was no strong warming after 1979, because he’s calling for a “thorough scientific investigation”.

    well, technically, that may be correct. But if he really phrased it like this:

    “Only a thorough scientific investigation will be able to document that there was no strong warming after 1979, that the instrumented warming record is based on data manipulation, involving the selection of certain weather stations, [and the de-selection of others that showed no warming], plus applying insufficient corrections for local heating.”

    …then I would certainly call this a fairly manipulative abuse of language, along the lines of “Did you finally stop beating your wife?” (when you actually never had.) There is a lot that could be said against, say, Phil Jones. I think he handled a few important issues in a very unprofessional way – if he stepped down for that, that might not be the worst conceivable outcome. With Fred Singer, on the other hand, I am fairly sure that there a serious discrepancy between his private interpretation of the professional ethics of a scientist and what the majority of scientists would consider as such.

  9. Thomas, I only wanted to supply a link to Briffa’s paper for reference, I read it all years ago, were you aware of the controversy?

    When Mann’s hockey stick was criticised for cutting off the proxy data in 1979 because data beyond that date did not show an increase (it showed a decline after 1979), and then splicing on CRU temp data that did show an increase (to get the infamous hockey stick), paleo scientists went off to find more proxy data to try to justify (or check, back up, whatever) Manns work. Briffa’s paper (based on the Russian collected data) was the first product to back Mann, it was also hailed as a hockey stick. But about 2 years later, when the original Russian scientists who did the actual data collection published their paper, it contradicted Briffa, subsequent analysis showed a selection bias/cherry picking in Briffa’s paper. I think Mann’s work should not be referenced by the IPCC for these reasons, the IPCC seem to think it is sound science. Since so much of the IPCC’s temp data referenced both Mann & Briffa, this cast doubt on the whole premiss IMO.

    1)I neither agree nor disagree. I’d have to read the relevant papers, Which I’ll do if you supply references (assuming it’s not a herculean time sink mission) first thing I’d want to know is the +/- error tolerance of your statement?
    2) I agree that getting the physics right is a substantial challenge, logically I’m not even sure it is possible to come up with a definitive 1% effect as “fact”. Since it is such a challenge, as you say we can’t reproduce it in a lab, any “definitive” results at best would have to be a range of possible magnitude effect. Clearly any results should include confidence levels, tolerance levels, so one can quantify confidence in the results.
    3)I agree. I’d encourage you to look at https://www.surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm to get an idea of how big this problem is.
    4)I agree. If NASA et al would release/open source the raw satellite data we would stand a much better chance at quantifying these issues IMO.
    5)What is the tolerance +/- and confidence level % on that graph? Assuming tolerance is low, and confidence high, how can we draw any conclusions about CAGW when the max temp is only 0.6C above average, and min temp only 0.7C below average?

    I don’t think it’s useful to get into semantic dissection of what scientists may or may not think, send SEPP.org an email asking to clarify his statement if you think it’s important.

    Given what has been presented regarding Mann & Briffa do you think the Hockey stick graph is:

    1)robust
    2)should be used in climate presentations or the media
    3)should be used by the IPCC
    4)Do you agree based on the original post I.e. “It is not censorship to put an end to pronouncements based on a botched figure that splices together two discordant temperature series without correction.” that Manns hockey stick work should never have passed peer review.

  10. Pete & Thomas, you may be interested in my follow-up comment on the Rabett Run thread I referred to previously.

    Having read several of the articles written by Lewandowsky I decided to check up on his expertise in the field of global climate change. I was surprised to find a small, staunch environmentalist UK organisation, the Green World Trust (Note 1) that was sceptical of the “consensus”. One GWF article (Note 2) indicates that it accepts Professor Zbigniev Jaworowski’s views about reconstructing ancient atmospheric CO2 concentrations from air “trapped” in ice cores. Another article links to the list of submissions to the UK’s Science & Technology Committee political enquiry (Note 3) arising from “Climategate” revelations. QUOTE:
    Memorandum .. by the Royal Statistical Society ..
    1. the UK’s only .. learned society devoted to .. statistics .. one of the most influential and prestigious statistical societies in the world. ..
    9. .. the basic case for publication of data includes that science progresses as an ongoing debate .. the quality of that debate is best served by ensuring that all parties have access to the facts. .. peer review cannot guarantee that what is published is ‘correct’. The best guarantor of scientific quality is that others are able to examine in detail the arguments that have been used … It is important that experiments and calculations can be repeated to verify their conclusions. If data, or the methods used, are withheld, it is impossible to do this UNQUOTE.

    I see this as contrary to Professor Lewandowsky’s opinion that QUOTE: Peer reviewed science is fallible but self-correcting UNQUOTE regarding the reviewing of papers on global climate change. Much of the correction that takes place in this field comes from beyond the formal peer review process. Problems arise from the dearth professional statisticians involved in both preparation and review processes. This opinion is supported by the findings of the Wegman report into the suspect statistical manipulations used in producing the “hockey stick”. On this, Dr. Edward Wegman, chair of the Committee On Applied And Theoretical Statistics for the NAS, says (Note 4) QUOTE: .. the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods .. do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. .. the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. .. there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. .. Dr. Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis UNQUOTE.

    Taking these opinions of expert statisticians into consideration, where does Professor Stephan Lewandowsky expertise fit in? I could find only one Lewandowski at the University of Western Australia (Note 5) QUOTE: Prof Stephan Lewandowsky School Psychology Position Australian Professorial Fellow .. There has been no research or expertise at UWA submitted for this staff member UNQUOTE. Further search found a Lewandowsky associated with the UK’s University of Warwick through Professor Gordon D. A. Brown (Note 5) with QUOTE: .. research interests in the computational and mathematical modelling of human timing and memory; categorisation, identification, and word recognition; and the interface between economic psychology, cognitive science, and psychophysics.. UNQUOTE. I also found numerous research papers on psychology involving Stephan Lewandowsky but can find nothing in the field of global climate processes and drivers.

    If this is the same Professor Stephan Lewandowsky then I am surprised that he is quoted so widely in articles relating to global climate change.

    NOTES:
    1) see https://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Forum/forum.htm
    2) see https://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/CO2-ice-HS.htm
    3) see https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/contents.htm
    4) see https://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/108/home/07142006_Wegman_fact_sheet.pdf
    5) see https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/psych/research/gbrown/

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

  11. Related to those comments is my latest comment on the Rabett Run thread.

    In my comment time-stamped 1:44 PM I made reference to Dr. David Stockwell and that he would QUOTE: appear to support the view that natural global climate processes and drivers account for most of the claimed global temperature changes during the past 100+ years. UNQUOTE. Today a contributor to Australian Senator Steve Fielding’s “Is global warming man-made? Is global warming dangerous?” thread at comment # 477 provided a link (Note 1) to “The Resilient Earth” blog “Climate Science’s Dirtiest Secret” thread (Note 2). This thread says QUOTE: It has long been recognized that statistical acumen has been lacking among mainstream climate scientists. This dirty little secret was first publicly disclosed during Congressional hearings regarding the 2006 Wegman Report. Even newer analyses have revealed that many of the predictions made by the IPCC reports and other global warming boosters are wrong, often because inappropriate statistical techniques were applied. UNQUOTE.

    The article discusses the use of inappropriate statistical methods by climate researchers then goes on to discuss the findings presented in a 2007 paper “On the Trend, Detrending, and Variability of Nonlinear and Nonstationary Time Series” by Zhaohua Wu et al. using EMD to illustrate the determination of the intrinsic trend and natural variability in climate data. The data used were the annual global surface temperature anomalies from the Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia. QUOTE: They found that the linear trend gives a warming value of 0.005°C per year. The multidecadal trend .. showed no warming in the mid-19th century and is ≈0.008°C per year currently. The rates of change were higher during the 1860s, 1930s, and 1980s, which were separated by periods of temperature decreases. UNQUOTE.

    It links to another article “Econometrics vs Climate Science” (Note 3) saying QUOTE: What physical mechanism is responsible for the dominant 65 year trend is not known, but the cointegration analysis paper we previously examined says that is not greenhouse gas levels—CO2 is not driving Earth’s temperature change UNQUOTE. There is a further link in the “Econometrics vs Climate Science” article to a 2009 paper “Structural break models of climatic regime-shifts: claims and forecasts” by Dr. David Stockwell and Anthony Cox (Note 4). You may recall that I made reference to Dr. Stockwell in my comment time-stamped 1:44 PM.

    Have you any comments to make on the alternative statistical methods used by these specialists and their conclusions complared with those of the climate scientists who contributed to the IPCC’s AR4?

    It is interesting that this link lists two papers, that by Stockwell and Cox, preceded by their “Comment on “Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature” by J. D. McLean, C. R. de Freitas, and R. M. Carter” – the subject of this thread.

    NOTES:
    1) see https://www.stevefielding.com.au/forums/viewthread/795/P465/
    2) see https://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/climate-sciences-dirtiest-secret
    3) see https://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/econometrics-vs-climate-science
    4) see https://arxiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Stockwell_D/0/1/0/all/0/1

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

  12. Thanks Pete R,

    I’ve had a very dim view of climate scientists approach to statistics since starting to read Steve McIntyres blog at https://climateaudit.org/ a few years ago.

    If you want to get to the root if it (pun intended) I recommend the thread at Bart Vergheggen’s blog where visiting statistician (“VS” in the comments) reckons that the temperature records are a random walk (or something like one) due to the presence of a “unit root”, which means that many standard statistical approaches to measuring trends, including all the ones currently used in climatology, are invalid.

    https://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/global-average-temperature-increase-giss-hadcru-and-ncdc-compared/

    Before anyone slaps down a link to taminos blog and the attempted debunking of VS, they might want to read the comments in this thread at the American Statistics Association where VS links his reply etc.

    https://magazine.amstat.org/2010/03/climatemar10/ (links to tamino there also)

    Be warned, some of it is really heavy reading, Barts blog has over 1500 comments, it took me 2 days to read!

    Stepping back from the macro scale of climate debate for a moment, I have come to the conclusion that anyone Peak Oil aware should be able to see the underlying agenda here. CAGW is a cover for peak oil. The new political cover buzzword is “Peak Demand”, I’m hearing it more and more in the MSM.

    “the most ardent critics of the peak oil thesis – namely BP’s chief executive Tony Hayward and oil industry cheer-leader Cambridge Energy Research Associates – who now declare that the developed world has passed “peak oil demand”. However, that is nothing but a delusion to disguise the fact that dwindling oil supplies have ended economic growth in the developed world for the foreseeable future”

    https://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9694&page=1

    https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63539420100406

    Peak Demand = Peak economic growth, it’s that simple IMO.

    Using the political buzzwords “peak demand” is similar to viewing a bloated bellied, starving hungry, 3rd world child on an Oxfam advert and declaring his problem is “peak food demand”.

    In an attempt to head off the inevitable uninformed replies.. CAGW People peak aware, who dismiss this because “we need to make people aware of CAGW to make sure we don’t supply the wrong (carbon intensive) solutions” should try to put the ramifications into perspective. We need to personally address, or mitigate, for peak oil within 2-5 years or be the poster child for Oxfam ourselves. I think this is a far more important issue than CAGW. Even if the CAGW science was remotely accurate, it won’t matter a jot. The IPCC AGW model scenarios do not account for peak oil, they include ever increasing global production.

    Coal to liquids is a non starter, as are any other similar “bright idea” or high carbon replacements with low or negative EROEI, and could only put off the inevitable collapse for a very a short time.

    Peak coal by 2025 say researchers https://www.energybulletin.net/node/28287

    And this is before China started building a coal powered station per week. And before we start trying to convert it to liquid fuel to replace 85 million barrels of oil a day. We’d need to replace oil at a rate of 85m/4.5% per day (conservative depletion rate) just to keep up with demand (if demand does not increase), not counting the extra oil energy required to mine, transport, and convert all that extra coal, this amount would have to increase year on year to mitigate further production decline & increasing global demand, and we haven’t started yet.

    The only reason I’m spending time on these boards, and not out building up resilience and mitigating for my community right now, is because I’m nursing broken ribs. When I can do some work again I won’t have any time for these debates, peak aware people who do have time for this are either already sorted resilience wise, or really need to gain some perspective IMO.

    (sorry if this turned into a bit of a OT rant)

  13. Pete, thanks for that link to the “ourchangingclimate” blog “Global average temperature increase GISS HadCRU and NCDC compared” thread. Those exchanges between VS and the rest (including Eli and his bunmnies) are very interesting but also very heavy (as you warned). I’ll need a lot of time to properly read and understand them.

    Let me move swiftly on to your comments about “peak oil”. I detect a little concern about oil running out in the near future but remain unconvinced that this is going to happen soon. You also seem sceptical about the merits of coal conversion to liquids.

    According to the experts (BP, Oil and Gas Journal, World Oil, etc. – Note 1) there are global reserves of approximately 1,300 Billion Barrels oil (plus 6,500 Trillion Cubic Feet gas). These figures are hard to place in context but there is a graph at the Oildrum site (Note 2) which helps. This shows oil production peaking in 2010 with steady decline to roughly half of current rates by 2030, however, there is lots of coal available. Accordng to the World Coal Institute (Note 3) at current production rates there is enough for 130 years and QUOTE: proven oil and gas reserves are equivalent to around 42 and 60 years at current production levels UNQUOTE.

    Coal to oil conversion is attracting attention in China (Note 4) and the USA, with South Africa having 50 years experience of the technology (Note 5). When oil runs out I see coal and nuclear as the main sources of energy used to power economic growth. With increased efficiency, greater care by each of us about how we use energy and development of new technologies for fossil fuel recovery I don’t anticipate significant problems for this century. The energy companies are in the business for the long term and fossil fuels are significant in their plans. Of course, they’ll huff and puff about shortages, because that justifies price hikes which boost proffits. That’s the free market for you.

    NOTES:
    1) see https://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/reserves.html
    2) see https://www.theoildrum.com/node/5395
    3) see https://www.worldcoal.org/coal/where-is-coal-found/
    4) see https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-07/21/content_6863486.htm
    5) see https://www.sasol.com/sasol_internet/downloads/CTL_Brochure_1125921891488.pdf

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

  14. Pete,

    Seems we are making progress.

    [me] Would you agree with these statements?

    [me] (1) Order of magnitude wise, a warming of 1 Kelvin corresponds to a shift in the radiation balance at the 1% level.

    [you] 1)I neither agree nor disagree. I’d have to read the relevant papers, Which I’ll do if you supply references (assuming it’s not a herculean time sink mission) first thing I’d want to know is the +/- error tolerance of your statement?

    Actually, it’s a fairly straightforward thing: Earth’s average temperature is around 300 Kelvins (this is not very accurate, but 10 Kelvins more or less don’t make any difference to my argument). Now, blackbody radiation goes with the fourth power of temperature (this is just the Stefan-Boltzmann law), so if temperature changes from 300 K to 301 K, the relative change in radiation output is (301/300)^4-1 ~ 0.013, so, at the 1% level. If you used 290 K instead of 300 K, you would get pretty much the same result here (try it if you are not convinced). So, yes, we are talking about a 1% effect.

    [me] (2) Getting the physics right that accounts for an 1% effect, in particular if the system under study features quite complex interactions, and we furthermore cannot do direct lab experiments on it but have to rely on observing an on-going experiment, is a substantial challenge.

    [you] 2) I agree that getting the physics right is a substantial challenge, logically I’m not even sure it is possible to come up with a definitive 1% effect as “fact”. Since it is such a challenge, as you say we can’t reproduce it in a lab, any “definitive” results at best would have to be a range of possible magnitude effect. Clearly any results should include confidence levels, tolerance levels, so one can quantify confidence in the results.

    Concerning “logically I’m not even sure it is possible to come up with a definitive 1% effect as ‘fact’.”, there are many examples of physical effects that are well-established, and at 1% or much lower levels. Take, for example, the anomalous magnetic dipole moment of the electron. Here, theory predicts a very precise value and experiment allows the measurement of a very precise value – and they agree to about a millionth of a per-cent. So, yes, sure, there are lots of physical effects that happen at the “1% change” level or even much less. This only means that getting sound experimental data is a bit tricky. After all, you have to measure – reliably – to better-than-four-digit-accuracy.

    Basically, we agree that satellite data can provide an important independent source of information on whether the effect is real or not.

    Considering this:

    [you] 5)What is the tolerance +/- and confidence level % on that graph? Assuming tolerance is low, and confidence high, how can we draw any conclusions about CAGW when the max temp is only 0.6C above average, and min temp only 0.7C below average?

    I have to point out that temperature shifts in the 1 Kelvin range already have quite dramatic effects on vegetation. Note, for example, that the Clausius-Clapeyron equation tells you that, for those temperatures we are talking about here, saturation water vapour pressure changes by about 7% per Kelvin of temperature change. In the two-volume book “Edible Forest Gardens” by Jacke and Toensmeyer, the plant hardiness zone map comes with a discussion of attempts of the Bush government to prevent the publication of an updated version – most likely because it made quite dramatic recent shifts fairly visible. Considering our situation in Europe, I hear the same story from gardeners, botanists, ornithologists. I won’t go into details here (because this discussion is, after all, about physics) – but there are some quite amazing observations.

    Considering this statement:

    [you] I don’t think it’s useful to get into semantic dissection of what scientists may or may not think, send SEPP.org an email asking to clarify his statement if you think it’s important.

    I don’t think this is appropriate to this discussion. Either you want to make a point, then please make that point, and be open to a detailed discussion. If you start to just take cover behind some obscure organization by trying to re-route the important questions to them once someone starts to drill deeper, you are creating a strong impression of “just trolling around”. (No – I don’t consider you to be a troll – but please please do – in your own interest – avoid sending that message to other readers.)

    Having said that, in discussions such as these, an important rule to observe is that, yes, one can disqualify oneself by inappropriate conduct. There is strong evidence that Fred Singer knowingly fabricated climate related data in the past. To me, that means that he has lost his right to participate in that scientific discussion. That may sound like harsh judgment – but there is a general issue that makes this appear the only viable conclusion on any scientific debate, regardless of the subject. If you allowed people who keep on fabricating data to participate in the discussion, they will keep on sabotaging the scientific truth-finding process – note that it is then very easy for them to dominate the discussion with fabricated evidence. We do have precisely such a situation in physics e.g. with most people in “the Perpetuum Mobile crowd”.

    Ad:

    [you] Given what has been presented regarding Mann & Briffa do you think the Hockey stick graph is:
    1)robust

    Isn’t the interesting question more along the lines of: “Do we have strong evidence that, right now, global average temperatures are rising faster than 0.1 K/decade?” (which is quite a bit above what could be attributed to noise or slow climatic processes)? On that – I would certainly say yes – too many independent observations point in that direction. Personally, I have never cared too much about what Mann/Briffa/the IPCC say, the problem exists regardless of their work. And this is what matters.

  15. Pete, further to my comment about coal conversion, here’s a bit more about South Africa and coal which I posted today on Senator Fielding’s blog (Note 1). QUOTE: South Africa is leading the development of clean coal technology (Note 2) and is in line for a $3b loan from the World Bank (Peggyb, what did you say about Maurice Strong/Al Gore/George Soros being involved with that UN organisation? As I recall it was something along the lines of what Ronald Bailey, National Review said in his 1st September 1997 article “Who is Maurice Strong” Note 3). Could this be another nice little earner for that gang? UNQUOTE

    Thomas (Fischbacher) I won’t but into the exchange you’re having with Pete but I did take a look at a comment of yours last year (in the lead up to the UN’s COP15 fiasco in Copenhagen. Your response to Hamish on the “Melting Ice Could Lead to Massive Waves of Climate Refugees” thread (Note 4) on cognitive dissonance could be applied just as well to those who blindly support the UN’s propaganda about our use of fossil fuels being the cause of future catastrophic global climate change. You know full well that the whole hypothesis is build upon a very fragile foundation riddled with uncertainty and crumbling away by the day. As you so rightly say (Note 5) QUOTE: What ultimately matters is, of course, reality UNQUOTE not the projections from computer models that are based upon a highly suspect hypothesis and which have never been subjected to established VV&T processes undertaken by independent professionals.

    BTW, on your “Research Interests” page (Note 5) you show a very nice picture of a greenhouse (from Living Machine?). Those plants look nice and healthy – I wonder what the CO2 concentration was maintained at – possibly 1000ppm. Do you know what it was?

    NOTES:
    1) see https://www.stevefielding.com.au/forums/viewthread/795/P690/
    2) see https://www.miningweekly.com/article/clean-coal-technologies-in-south-africa-2008-09-05
    3) see https://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=9401
    4) see https://www.permaculturenews.org/2009/06/04/melting-ice-could-lead-to-massive-waves-of-climate-refugees/
    5) see https://www.soton.ac.uk/~doctom/research-interests/index.html

    Best regards,

  16. Pete R,

    you write:

    ======
    Your response to Hamish on the “Melting Ice Could Lead to Massive Waves of Climate Refugees” thread (Note 4) on cognitive dissonance could be applied just as well to those who blindly support the UN’s propaganda about our use of fossil fuels being the cause of future catastrophic global climate change.
    ======

    Yes, you are absolutely right. And this is what makes the entire issue so tricky: “How do I know I am on the right track if I know that I only can trust what is going on inside my own head to a limited degree?” Many people seem to be so naive that they believe they can trust their conscious rational mind just because it tells them so. Fortunately, as with optical illusions, we do have the capacity to spot many of them – and we also can make a directed effort to improve our capacity to spot and analyze trickier deceptions. (If you bothered to take a look at my web page, you may have noticed that I do indeed teach that important issue!) To me, a key question always was: given all those different confusing signals the world is sending in, what are the things I can be most certain about (given that one never can be fully certain about anything)? There are indeed ways to find such “compasses”, and considering that in particular our educational structures often have been (are?) about “growing faithful servants”, hence depriving people of access to such independent compasses, I consider helping people to develop that capacity again a key objective.

    Had you asked me 5 years ago about climate change, I’d presumably have replied along the lines of: “given all incredible the cover-up around the peak oil issue (which ‘never must be talked about’), most of the talk about climate change to me seems to be some sort of psychological coping mechanism so people can discuss fossil fuel abuse issues without having to come close to the term Peak Oil – we just wouldn’t have the fossil fuels for catastrophic climate change.” But now that people started to use the term “Peak Oil” even in the mainstream media (it was quite an interesting process how we gradually got there), I had to re-evaluate that assessment. Of course, all this all-prevalent “don’t mention Peak Oil” attitude did not exactly help to see through things.

    Considering:

    ======
    You know full well that the whole hypothesis is build upon a very fragile foundation riddled with uncertainty and crumbling away by the day.
    ======

    Well… what, then, do I know with very high certainty?

    * Our civilization-induced CO2 output is large enough to markedly alter atmospheric concentrations over time spans of ~100 years.

    * CO2 concentrations indeed have gone up, and the rate of CO2 rise is roughly in the ballpark where I would expect it.

    Also, I am quite sure that major changes in CO2 concentrations will have a considerable effect on the climate. Just take, for example, the Azolla event in the paleontological record – quite an extreme case. So – given that we already have markedly altered the trace gas composition of the atmosphere at a stunning rate relative to other geological phenomena from the past – did temperatures change “recently”? It seems so – again, we have quite a number of independent sources. Maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with our IR satellite data. Would you give that a 10% chance? Maybe keen observers of nature with a long cultural memory, such as the Kogi, nevertheless are wrong – a 1-in-3 chance maybe? So, then, for two absolutely independent sources, one with a failure rate of, say, 1-in-10, the other one with a failure rate of 1-in-3, to both fail, the chance would be 1-in-30. Maybe my ornithologist friends are also wrong about their personal observations concerning changes of migration patterns. These are just examples of independent sources for clues about what is going on. We have dramatically increased the atmospheric CO2 concentration, the mechanism for CO2 concentrations to be linked to global average temperatures seems to be physically plausible and have experimental evidence (e.g. Azolla!), and there are indeed indications that global average temperatures do go up. Depending on what statistics games you play, you could claim that “this or that particular detail is not statistically significant” – ah, suppose you see your physician because you noticed a swollen lymphatic node, and, after some tests, he tells you “there’s a 90% chance that you’ve got cancer, but since this is not significant at the 2-sigma level, there wouldn’t be any scientific basis to the claim that your problem may be cancer – so let’s just ignore that”. What would *you* reply?

    As I said, there are many independent sources that all point in the same direction: fossil fuel abuse is a massive problem. And with all massive problems, we are usually better off if we address them rather sooner than later. Why hasn’t anything happened about this earlier? On that, I think, some fairly good answers can be obtained from a keen observer who happened to be an economist on the British coal advisory board: Fritz Schumacher.

  17. Thomas (Fischbacher), I’ve read your first paragraph numerous times and the impression that I get is that its uses a lot of words but says very little. All that I understand you to be saying is that we are brought up to conform with preconceived notions but have minds and should think for ourselves, which you encourage. Paragraph 2 tells me that you have some notion that we are abusing fossil fuels, that you mistakenly think that “peal oil” was not discussed 5 years ago and that this is somehow related to climate change.

    As for the rest of your comment, QUOTE: We have dramatically increased the atmospheric CO2 concentration, UNQUOTE – my understanding is that if we can believe the figures, mean atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen from about 315ppm in 1950 to something like 385ppm now (Note 1). I’d hardly call this dramatic, considering that plants thrive in 1000ppm atmospheres and humans experience about that order or higher in their offices, homes and other enclosed spaces. QUOTE: This is 103 ppmv (36%) above the 1832 antarctic ice core levels of 284 ppmv UNQUOTE but the claim that the levels in air recovered from ice cores is representative of that in the atmosphere in 1832 has not been validated. As Jaworowski has said repeatedly, there are many processes that can change the composition of that “trapped” air and he supports Beck’s claims about fluctuating levels of atmospheric CO2 during the past 180 years.

    QUOTE: Over 95% of total CO2 emissions are non-anthropogenic. UNQUOTE and I understand that the annual contribution to emissions into the atmosphere from our use of fossil fuels is about 3% of the total emissions – again, hardly dramatic.

    I don’t dispute that QUOTE: the mechanism for CO2 concentrations to be linked to global average temperatures seems to be physically plausible .. UNQUOTE but the ice core records show that CO2 concentrations follow temperature rise, by as much as hundreds of years. Also QUOTE: .. there are indeed indications that global average temperatures do go up UNQUOTE, but if those indications are to be trusted (which is suspect) there has been less that 1C increase in 150 years, with no increase during the past 12, despite a claimed continuing increase in CO2 concentration – again hardly dramatic. Also, it is recognised that during interglacials the global temperature does go up, then down again towards the next glacial, so what’s new?

    Your attempt to compare the risks associated with having cancer with those associate with burning fossil fuels is futile. We know that cancer kills individuals therefore it is wise for individuals to take precautions to minimise the risk to themselves. We do not know that burning fossil fuels has any catastrophic global effects therefore curtailing our use of fossil fuels would be an irresponsible application of the precautionary principle.

    I totally reject your QUOTE: .. fossil fuel abuse is a massive problem .. UNQUOTE because you have provided no evidence that fossil fuel abuse exists.

    Regarding heterodox economist Schumacher (Note 2) I do agree with his opinion QUOTE: that coal, not petroleum, should be used to supply the energy needs of the world’s population UNQUOTE but only where and when it is more competitive economically with coal (and nuclear). I see that China is building coal-to-oil conversion facilities with the aid of those experts in the technology, the South Africans.

    NOTES:
    1) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide-en.svg
    2) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

  18. Thanks for your responses chaps.

    Firstly Thomas, you said “If you start to just take cover behind some obscure organization by trying to re-route the important questions to them once someone starts to drill deeper, you are creating a strong impression of “just trolling around””

    You asked me about Singer’s present position, after I posted a quote by him. I replied with my thoughts on the quote, you went off into further semantic dissection, how many ways can I say what I said? I have/had no further thoughts on it, hence me directing you to his organisation for further clarification. I can’t understand how this may be considered trolling, especially after I already posted a full response. Considering you have not answered my questions, could I equally assume you were “trying to re-route the important questions” by hiding behind “a better question”?

    Thomas, your question might well be a better one, but considering the original topic, peer review, can you answer the questions I posed instead, the ones regarding the Mann Hockey stick, in the context of the OP?

    Onward…

    I agree it’s theoretically possible to measure temp with satellites, it’s the interpretations of those measurements, and how they are presented that I wonder about, and how relevant a 30 yr trend is (and if indeed said trend is statistically valid). I wonder how valid any statistical trend is in a chaotic system.

    For any theory of the climate, firstly the null hypothesis must be falsified. One example would be to demonstrated the conditions of the climate today are remarkably different to any period in the past. The hockey stick work of Mann attempted this, it fails on so many levels. One would have to explain the MWP at the very least (rather than wipe it out completely). I don’t think the null hypothesis has been falsified.

    you say “* Our civilization-induced CO2 output is large enough to markedly alter atmospheric concentrations over time spans of ~100 years.” just what is human induced Co2 level per year as a % of atmosphere, and how does it compare to say a volcano eruption? (I’m genuinely interested, no-one ever seems to quantify this)

    I look at the oldest thermometer temp record I can find, and it just looks normal, a long slow increase similar in trend as that from the end of the last ice age, with a couple of similar digressions, similar to other interglacial periods. When compared to how CRU present their data, something is clearly amiss.

    https://i45.tinypic.com/iwq8a1.jpg

    Somehow in the midst of climate debate, we talk about greenhouse gasses completely separate from water vapour. This is obviously in the context of “forcing” but I see very little quantification of water vapour, which seems like an oversight to me when water vapour has many thousand times the same effect postulated. Models seem to include clouds only as net positive feedback, I do not think there is sufficient evidence for this.

    The CAGW Theory stands on a lack of evidence for anything other than Co2 causing temps to increase, yet we can’t even quantify water vapour. We have a very limited understanding of ocean current oscillations, and how the Sun transfers it’s energy etc. I wonder how relevant “iridescence” is as a total measure all on it’s own, I wonder about the full spectrum, and how magnetic fields effect our planet (specially considering the weirdness going on with Earth’s magnetic field atm), I wonder about “cosmic particles” effect during low (or high for that matter) Earth field intensity, I wonder about something new every time I look deeper into climate science. I see one small sunspot and learn the magnetic loop of ejected plasma is many times the size of the Earth, and think there just has to be more going on than iridescence is measuring.

    I wonder about the poorly understood DTR, which seems to indicate it is night time temps going up rather than daytime temps, i.e. it is getting less cold rather than more warm. This seems to point to the main papers for temp demonstrating UHI, extra cloud cover, or both, without even mentioning Co2.

    For me, there are far too many unknowns, and a lack of evidence to dismiss the null hypothesis as easy as it appears to have been dismissed by Mann, and the IPCC et al. that, and how climate science handles these questions (read what the IPCC says about DTR in AR4, they waffle over it with “a more relevant question”!), this is what sets off the alarm bells in me.

    Based on Sun/ocean cycles, I predict temps will (generally) continue to trend down for the next 20 or so years. Based on CAGW theory how long would temps have to continue a downtrend for you to question CAGW theory?
    ================================

    Pete R, The main issue regarding peak Oil/coal/energy is supply Vs demand, not speculative reserves. Since our global financial system is based on infinite growth, the crunch will come when the energy is not there in the supply line to fuel said growth, when demand is greater than supply (in a real sense rather than in economic theory where demand can never exceed supply) i.e. when fuel/energy is so expensive, economic growth cannot continue. This point has been passed IMO, the only debating point for me, is about how long the charade of continued economic growth can be kept up before it all falls apart. Based on 10 yrs research, I don’t think it will be very long. I do however realise that those of us (doomers!) who have studied the connections between energy/economy/geo politics often predict outcomes far too early to be taken seriously (e.g. we were predicting the crash of 08 in 06) so my educated guess of 2-5 yrs for almost complete global economic collapse may be on the early side. I hope the internet is still here in 5 yrs, when we can all laugh about my prediction ;)

  19. Pete R.,

    You write:

    ======
    I’ve read your first paragraph numerous times and the impression that I get is that its uses a lot of words but says very little. All that I understand you to be saying is that we are brought up to conform with preconceived notions but have minds and should think for ourselves, which you encourage.
    ======

    Ah – sadly, the problem is that, when I talk about “compasses” that can manage to give us absolute guidance on which of the claims that are made by people around us definitely must be bullshit, the problem is that the long-term process of eliminating such “compasses” has been so successful and effective that most people are not even able anymore to recognize them for what they are.

    Take, for example, simple guesstimations about basic physical correspondences. Guesstimations of the sort I just used to work out ballpark figures for the atmospheric carbon content and our impact on it. All that goes in are some widely known numbers such as Earth’s radius, our oil consumption, plus some fairly simple physics everybody should have learned at school (e.g. number of moles of gas per cubic metre), and the rule of three. If you can do that, you won’t fall that easily prey to fraudulent claims such as “volcanoes have a stronger impact on rising CO2 levels than industrial civilization”. Hence, this is one powerful compass. Of course, there are many situations where this “guesstimation compass” does not help the slightest bit. But there are some others as well.

    As I say, we often face situations – especially these days – where there is a lot of “noise” about a number of important things. Do we need GMO to feed the world? Will oil depletion become a major problem? Is free market capitalism the silver bullet to solve all our problems? What I say is: whenever you make up your mind about anything, FIRST see what your “compasses” say. I hope you have some of them which can be considered pretty much infallible. Usually, they only can give information about some specific details. But as soon as you are fairly sure about these, they provide some anchors. So, if some source claims X1, X2, and X3, which only could hold if detail Y were false, but you have very very good reason to believe that Y indeed must be true, because you’ve got an anchor there, you can dismiss X1, X2, and X3 straightaway. THEN, work outward from “secure ground” – and keep track what claim is supported by / contradicts which “fundamental thing” you know.

    You claim:

    ======
    there has been less that 1C increase in 150 years, with no increase during the past 12, despite a claimed continuing increase in CO2 concentration
    ======

    Let us look into this “no increase during the past 12”. May I please ask you to give me the corresponding global average temperatures on which you base that claim? I.e. 12 numbers, in Celsius, please.

  20. Thomas (Fischbacher), may I suggest that QUOTE: Ah – sadly, the problem is that .. UNQUOTE, when you talk about “compasses” and “anchors” you demonstrate a reluctance to use plain English. It’s just the way that politicians talk – use a lot of words to say nothing. “Compasses” and “anchors” have nothing to do with either the validity of The (significant human-made global climate change) Hypothesis or the projections of the computer models which are based upon The Hypothesis, with all of its inherent uncertainties. Like “navigational instrument for finding directions”, directional pointers from “concensus” scientists can be very misleading, especially when biased by the force of political influence. This is evidenced by the distorted interpretations of climate science as presented in the UN’s IPCC SPMs and other documentation. Fortunately the voters are awakening to the fact that the UN has been engaged in a massive confidence trick.

    You say QUOTE: Let us look into this “no increase during the past 12″. May I please ask you to give me the corresponding global average temperatures on which you base that claim? I.e. 12 numbers, in Celsius, please. UNQUOTE. You chose to overlook my full comment QUOTE: but if those indications are to be trusted (which is suspect) there has been less that 1C increase in 150 years, with no increase during the past 12, despite a claimed continuing increase in CO2 concentration – again hardly dramatic. UNQUOTE. Also, you chose to ignore my point that QUOTE: Also, it is recognised that during interglacials the global temperature does go up, then down again towards the next glacial, so what’s new? UNQUOTE. Perhaps if you spent less time playing politics and more concentrating on the facts we could make progress in this debate.

    On the matter of “no increase during the past 12″, please take a look at (Note 1). I see nothing “dramatic” there, do you? Perhaps you claim that this graph is wrong? If so then I’d appreciate a link to the evidence that supports such a claim.

    NOTES:
    1) see https://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/11/a-note-from-richard-lindzen-on-statistically-significant-warming/

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

  21. In my last comment I made reference to Richard Lindzen’s contribution on the wattsupwiththat blog but should also have pointed to another source (Note 1) that suggests that global temperatures have changed in a less than dramatic manner during the past 12 years. That graph under the heading “Global Monthly Mean Surface Temperature Change” looks pretty flat. If course, we must not overlook the fact that those temperature measurements and the statistical manipulations that they have been subjected to remain highly suspect.

    Related to this is Lindzen’s interesting article “Resisting climate hysteria” which he presented at the Quadrant Online blog (Note 2). QUOTE: “Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.” Vaclav Klaus Blue Planet in Green Shackles UNQUOTE. Polly Higgins and her “Ecocide” supporters are perfect examples of environmental extremism (Note 3), beatifully illustrated in (Note 4).

    NOTES:
    1) see https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
    2) see https://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/07/resisting-climate-hysteria
    3) see https://globalpoliticalshenanigans.blogspot.com/2010/04/ecocide-uns-next-scam-after-all-trees.html
    4) see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygY57FdRcr0&feature=player_embedded

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

  22. Hello Pete Ridley,

    Ad: “You chose to overlook my full comment” – you brought up a
    number of points I still need to address. And I will indeed come back to all of these later, including the allegation of “being reluctant to use plain English”. But first, we need full clarity about the claim that “temperature has not increased during the last 12 years”. Let us – for now – focus on this.

    Again, I am asking for the numbers. You provided a link to graph, and we could actually read them off of that image. But then, you claim that: “Of (sic!) course, we must not overlook the fact that those temperature measurements and the statistical manipulations that they have been subjected to remain highly suspect.”

    So, what data do you then take as a source for your 12-years claim? Evidently, you cannot have it both ways and simultaneously claim that “temperatures have not gone up during the last 12 years” and “I don’t trust the temperature record on which this statement is based”. So – can you please resolve that inconsistency? Do you consider the graph as valid – or give better data to support your claim?

  23. While we’re talking about climate, I’d just like to ask a question to anyone regardless of their position.

    I was reading this article “Global Warming ‘at Point of No Return'” from…..
    https://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2009/01/29/2009012961002.html

    “Dr. Susan Solomon of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research laboratory led the study. “People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 years; that’s not true,” she said, adding the effects are well nigh irreversible.”

    People might be concerned effects are “well nigh irreversible” but to quantify this, we need to know the base state of climate, how far it is now from that base state, etc.

    Could someone define “normal” climate for me?

    Is there like, a scientific base state of “normal” climate?

  24. Pete,

    Three things first.

    a) “Trolling”: If you support SEPP’s claims, you should be able to fully explain why, shouldn’t you? At the very least, shouldn’t /you/ contact them and ask for clarification rather than me?

    b) Fred Singer as a scientist: There is strong evidence he was involved in more than one case of serious academic misconduct, such as faking data about glacier shrinkage (https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2005/may/10/environment.columnists), as well as faking the “Leipzig Declaration” (putting people on the list who never signed it). How are we ever going to make any progress in a discussion like this if we keep on taking sources of malevolent distraction as serious? Now, there are numerous people who think that, say, Phil Jones should step down as the head of the CRU, considering e.g. how he dealt with a FOI request. I don’t know whether that would be justified – perhaps it would. But considering Singer’s conduct, I would say it is very clear that whoever is calling for Jones’s head while not feeling uncomfortable about Singer’s conduct is applying dual standards(!)

    c) The infamous “Hockey Stick”. Actually, I’ve always considered it a red herring. We have numerous observations that point in the direction of rising global average temperatures. Personally, as someone who was born quite close to the Cryosphere and keeps an eye on what is going on over there, including what old people from that place have to report, I can say that the cultural memory I can directly tap into quite clearly indicates that there are major changes in that particular spot on the planet going on. Now, other people from very different places report similar things. Also, there are, for example, subtle changes in the migratory patterns of birds that indicate an interesting response to a changing climate. Then, we have Satellite data. All this is completely unrelated to whatever Mann may have published. Let us assume for the moment that “Mann’s Hockey Stick” (something I never considered that interesting, actually) were a result of, say, poor statistics – can you explain to me in what way that would then invalidate our satellite data? “Mann’s paper supports climate change – Mann’s paper is wrong – therefore, climate change is wrong.” That’s not sound logic.

    But let’s talk physics.

    [you] I agree it’s theoretically possible to measure temp with satellites,

    My claim: We actually do do temperature measurements using satellites – and they give quite interesting data that indicate planet-wide temperature increase.

    [you] it’s the interpretations of those measurements, and how they are presented that I wonder about, and how relevant a 30 yr trend is (and if indeed said trend is statistically valid). I wonder how valid any statistical trend is in a chaotic system.

    This raises the question: how much expertise do you actually have on (a) statistics and (b) chaotic systems? If your position is “I wonder how valid any statistical trend is in a chaotic system”, I seriously wonder whether there would be any sort of evidence you would be willing to accept.

    Here’s a piece of code – I’ve just asked Craig to put the output it produces up on the permaculturenews.org web server so that all the material relevant to this discussion is nicely hosted in one place. This is a very short Python script that simulates a chaotic system – a cousin of the perhaps most famous one, the Lorenz model. Yes, it is a chaotic system. Would you say that it makes sense to talk about “spotting a statistical trend in noisy data” here? The model is not *quite* the Lorenz model – the modification I made (in order to make my point) was to artificially put in such a trend. Still, it is a chaotic system. Does that then generally prevent us from spotting that trend? You decide. (By the way, the Lorenz model from which this model is derived describes many things – e.g. the behaviour of this circuit: https://frank.harvard.edu/~paulh/misc/lorenz.htm)

    ======
    import pylab, scipy.integrate

    def lorenz(xyz,t):
    (X,Y,Z)=xyz
    (sigma,r,b,k)=(10,28,8/3.0,1.0)
    return [sigma*(Y-(X-k*t)),
    r*(X-k*t)-(X-k*t)*Z-Y,
    -b*Z+(X-k*t)*Y]

    ts=[n*0.1 for n in range(1000)]
    data=scipy.integrate.odeint(lorenz,(1,2,3),ts)

    pylab.plot(ts,[xyz[0] for xyz in data],”r-“,label=”X(t)”)
    pylab.plot(ts,[xyz[1] for xyz in data],”g-“,label=”Y(t)”)
    pylab.plot(ts,[xyz[2] for xyz in data],”b-“,label=”Z(t)”)
    pylab.legend(loc=”best”)
    pylab.show()
    ======

    And here is the output (thanks again, Craig): https://cdn.permaculturenews.org/images/lorenz.png

    You also write: “* Our civilization-induced CO2 output is large enough to markedly alter atmospheric concentrations over time spans of ~100 years.” just what is human induced Co2 level per year as a % of atmosphere, and how does it compare to say a volcano eruption? (I’m genuinely interested, no-one ever seems to quantify this)

    Ok, let’s see. But please do keep in mind here that one year – geologically speaking – is an extremely short time span. But to work that out, we only need the rule of three, and a few guesstimations. The key question is: “Is the amount of fuel we burn large enough so that it could make an impact on atmospheric composition”?

    Let’s first work out how much carbon there is in the atmosphere. Surface atmospheric pressure is 101325 N/m^2, so the column of air above one square meter weighs about 10 tons. At a density of about 1.25 kg/m^3, that is equivalent to a box of homogeneous density at STP roughly of dimensions 1m x 1m x 8000 m. At STP, one mol of gas is about 22.4 liters, meaning that in one m^3, there are about 45 mols of gas. We now have roughly 400 ppmv of CO2 in the atmosphere, meaning that, in the air above one square meter of ground, there will be roughly 8000 m^3 x 45 mol/m^3 x 400*10^-6 mol CO2/mol gas = 144 mols of CO2. One mol of CO2 is one mol of carbon, weighing 12 grams, so the total mass of carbon in the air above one m^2 of ground is about 1.8 kg.

    At a radius of 6400 km, earth’s surface area is about 4pi r^2= 510 million square kilometers = 510 million million square meters. That gives us 1.8 kg x 510 million million kg of carbon, i.e. about 900 gigatons of carbon. Note that this is just a ballpark figure here – if you re-did the calculation accurately rather than back-of-the-envelope style as I did it here, you may well obtain a value that is, say, 10-20% off. What we are interested in is (for now) a ballpark figure for the anthropogenic extra load on the carbon cycle relative to what there already is in the air.

    Now, let’s see. We burn roughly 80 MBl/day of oil. That is 80*10^6 barrels/day x 365 days/year x 160 liters/barrel x 0.9 kg/liter = about 4.2 Gton of oil per year. Actually, only ~85% of oil is carbon – so that would correspond to 3.6 Gton of C. But on the other hand, 80 MBl/day is also about 10% lower than the actual figure. So, let’s say: about 4 Gton/year of extra C in the atmosphere from burning oil. In addition to oil, there also is coal and natural gas, and we derive a bit more energy from coal+gas than from oil, but coal is more CO2 intensive and gas a bit less – a crude estimate is to double that figure, meaning that we are at present pumping carbon into the atmosphere at a rate of about 8 Gton/year.

    So, civilization’s carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels alone(!) – i.e. not including soil oxidation by using the plough – presently would amount to about a 10% increase per decade if all that ended up in the atmosphere. But this is not the full story. A decent soil science textbook like that by Brady&Weil will tell you that the oceans exchange (i.e. absorb and re-emit) about 100 Gton/year of C with the atmosphere. The contribution of vegetation is roughly the same. So, of the ~900 Gton, about one quarter “gets replaced” every year. The problem is that both these bi-directional 100 Gton/year streams are fairly inelastic. We wouldn’t have much of a problem if vegetation could just increase its absorption relative to its re-emission by 8% – but it cannot. Most of the carbon emitted by civilization does indeed increase the atmospheric carbon content. Note that this matches observations: CO2 levels go up by roughly 2 ppmv/year. Note that, with 400 ppmv corresponding to about 900 Gton, 2 ppmv/year means about 4 Gton/year extra. That’s just in the ballpark of anthropogenic emissions minus what nature can deal with by increasing CO2 absorption.

    Guesstimations like these only give us ballpark figures – such numbers may easily be wrong by a factor 2. They are almost never wrong by a factor 10. So, the question: “is it us who change the carbon content of the atmosphere?” quite clearly can be answered with: yes it is.

    The ice core record tells us that the steepest historic rate of CO2 increase over at least the last 100 millenia (mainly from volcanism) only was about 1/50 of what we see today:

    https://www.geo.cornell.edu/eas/energy/_Media/ice_core_co2.png
    https://www.synapse9.com/iceco2-1.gif

    So, we can say with very high certainty that what is going on right now in terms of the changing carbon content of the atmosphere in that geological glimpse that is our life span is a massively abnormal process. Quite undeniably, we are conducting a massive geophysical experiment here. This point must be understood before one proceeds to argue along the lines of “but perhaps it might be harmless”. Geologically speaking, we see an extremely exceptional situation.

    So much about this. Now:

    [you] Somehow in the midst of climate debate, we talk about greenhouse gasses completely separate from water vapour. This is obviously in the context of “forcing” but I see very little quantification of water vapour, which seems like an oversight to me when water vapour has many thousand times the same effect postulated. Models seem to include clouds only as net positive feedback, I do not think there is sufficient evidence for this.

    This is basically a question of spectroscopy. Water vapour absorbs at different wavelengths than CO2. In fact, there are some important “emission frequency windows” where water vapour lets IR radiation through. The problem with CO2 is that it works like a shutter for one of those important windows. So, yes, water vapour is the dominant greenhouse gas, but due to this spectroscopic issue, it is not straightaway possible to come up with a conversion factor “so-and-so-much CO2 equals so-and-so-much water”.

    Unfortunately, the physics is indeed a bit involved. But suppose the idea that CO2 has a noticeable impact on average global temperatures /were/ bogus (note that even Lindzen would agree with pretty much all other physicists that the bare effect of CO2 doubling [sans all feedbacks] would be somewhere between 1 K and 5 K of warming) – wouldn’t we then have a serious problem explaining the Azolla Event?

    Then,

    [you] The CAGW Theory stands on a lack of evidence for anything other than Co2 causing temps to increase, yet we can’t even quantify water vapour. We have a very limited understanding of ocean current oscillations, and how the Sun transfers its energy etc. I wonder how relevant “iridescence” is as a total measure all on its own, I wonder about the full spectrum, and how magnetic fields effect our planet (specially considering the weirdness going on with Earth’s magnetic field atm), I wonder about “cosmic particles” effect during low (or high for that matter) Earth field intensity, I wonder about something new every time I look deeper into climate science. I see one small sunspot and learn the magnetic loop of ejected plasma is many times the size of the Earth, and think there just has to be more going on than iridescence is measuring.

    Well… Isn’t that a bit like reasoning along the lines of “yeah, I’ve just fallen out of a window on the 50th floor, but such processes are very rare, and besides, when this happened last time to someone, the planets were in a different constellation. I know that planets influence one another in a very very complicated way, much too complicated for us to really grasp. So, maybe I should be optimistic – after all, the idea that I’m going to die in a few seconds is based on very uncertain science.

    Actually, many people think physics would be all about quantitatively describing the world with complicated formulas. That’s not correct. More than anything else, physics is about (1) getting a clue what the important effects are that determine the behaviour of some real system, and what can be neglected, and (2) finding a description of the important influences that is as simple as possible and manages to address those questions we are interested in.

    As you bring up questions like these, I get the idea that you may actually enjoy and greatly benefit from this book, written by a professional astronomer for an audience of non-scientists who nevertheless should know a bit about what science is and how science works, because science and technology have become so immensely important to our civilization:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

    Here’s an interview with the author about this work. He looks a bit unhealthy, but that’s probably due to chemotherapy. As far as I know, he died shortly after this interview. In fact, learning that he was terminally ill was what caused him to write that particular book:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afo3WT4A_K0

    The comments on Amazon might be worth scanning:

    https://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469

    But back to CO2 – let me summarize the important points – those we can be quite certain about:

    1. We /are/ at the moment conducting a massive geophysical experiment that seems to be quite unlike anything the planet has seen for perhaps millions of years.

    2. We do have satellite data that indicate global temperatures rising faster than 0.1 K/decade and are independent(!) of data taken using thermometers at weather stations.

    3. We have numerous other – mutually independent – clues that indicate global warming – such as changes in the cryosphere.

    4. Spectroscopically, we know that CO2 has an IR absorption band just in a place where water vapour would leave radiation through.

    Note furthermore that there are indeed paleontological indications that a quite massive reduction of atmospheric CO2 concentrations has led to substantial cooling.

    There are a few further sociological issues here that are not really related to the physics, but perhaps still worth knowing about. If you look at a number of general physics textbooks from before the 90s, i.e. before climate change became such a big political issue – you get the strong impression that, back at that time when our greatest fear was nuclear war between the superpowers, pretty much all physicists agreed that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would lead to warming of a few Kelvins, perhaps something like 3-5 K. But back then, in the “before 350 ppm era”, pretty much all physicists considered this a side issue of minor importance in comparison to far more pressing problems – such as the risk of nuclear armageddon, and hence usually just mentioned this in passing. Call me “old-fashioned”, but I do pay some attention to what people said about some physics detail before it got politicized. I’d say, if you subtract the lobbying of the last two decades, and all the other FUD, the reasons physicists had back then to believe in a CO2-warming-link to still are as valid as they had been then. (Physics normally is not much influenced by fashion about quite basic things, actually) Oh – let me give an example, an interview with the well-known physicist Victor Weisskopf:

    https://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/Weisskopf/weisskopf3.html

    ======
    What sorts of changes are we talking about? You’re suggesting that it’s not just cutting back the number of weapons, but changing the perceptions between the two adversaries?

    Its also cutting back, but I do not think cutting back alone will help, indeed, I would rather say cutting back will never really happen except from some small edges like the present IMF [Intermediate Nuclear Forces] treaty which is not of great significance — although it is of great significance because it is the first time that something is cut — but it is a very minimal cut.

    (…)

    to get from confrontation to cooperation. We have many common problems, not only the nuclear war problem, which is a common problem because both will be annihilated, but there are other common problems — environmental ones: the rising of the CO2 levels, the warming of the atmosphere, the thinning of the ozone layer, the dying of the forests;
    ======

  25. I repeat specially for Thomas Fischbacher QUOTE: if we can believe the figures .. CO2 concentration has risen from .. 315ppm in 1950 to .. 385ppm now .. hardly .. dramatic .. plants thrive in 1000ppm atmospheres and humans experience .. that .. in .. homes and other enclosed spaces. .. the claim that the levels in air recovered from ice cores is representative .. has not been validated. .. there are many processes that can change the composition of that “trapped” air .. Over 95% of total CO2 emissions are non-anthropogenic. .. the annual contribution .. from our use of fossil fuels is about 3% .. again, hardly dramatic. .. the ice core records show that CO2 concentrations follow temperature rise, by as much as hundreds of years.
    Also.. there are indeed indications that global average temperatures do go up .. but if those indications are to be trusted (which is suspect) there has been less that 1C increase in 150 years, with no increase during the past 12, despite a claimed continuing increase in CO2 concentration – again hardly dramatic. Also, it is recognised that during interglacials the global temperature does go up, then down again towards the next glacial, so what’s new? .. I totally reject your: .. fossil fuel abuse is a massive problem .. because you have provided no evidence that fossil fuel abuse exists. UNQUOTE.

    Here are relevant comments posted on the “Eli can retire ..” thread of Eli Rabett (claimed by some to be Professor Joshua Halpern of Howard University, Washington DC) at https://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/04/eli-can-retire-part-viii-epa-reads.html. This presents the argument about the “greenhouse effect” of award-winning Canadian science teacher Roger Taguchi QUOTE:

    Re the balance between incoming short-wavelength incoming solar radiation (visible light) and outgoing long-wavelength IR (infrared), it seems to me that all the mathematical equations in the literature ASSUME radiative equilibrium. The difference is then the greenhouse effect. No one except Nicol (and me) seems aware that there are non-radiative mechanisms (i.e. collision between molecules) for energy transfer between molecules. Thus all the equations for radiative exchange miss the fundamental mechanism for the greenhouse effect: greenhouse gas molecules (CO2, H2O, methane, etc.) absorb some of the IR emitted by the solid and liquid surface of the Earth by jumping to an upper vibrational energy level (with vibrational quantum number v = 1) and transfer this excess vibrational energy (at equilibrium at 200-300 K, the molecules would almost all be in their ground vibrational states, with vibrational quantum number v = 0) BY COLLISION to air molecules (N2, O2, Ar) which CANNOT re-emit IR radiation (because they have zero changing electric dipole moments).

    Thus BY COLLISION the energy gets exchanged with other air molecules, and the atmosphere gets hotter than in the absence of greenhouse gases. This fundamental mechanism has been obvious to me for over 4 decades (when I was a high school student around 1960, the encyclopedia “explanation” for the greenhouse effect did not totally make sense to me, since I could not see how changing visible light energy to IR would warm the atmosphere; studies in Physical Chemistry then allowed me to independently understand the greenhouse effect, and then further grad work on energy transfer during collision by excited molecules in Nobel laureate John Polanyi’s group reinforced my understanding). Has increased specialization in academic education reduced general understanding of fundamental physics so much that no one else can see the nonsense in the “220 K blackbody radiation from the upper troposphere”, supposedly the “explanation” for the greenhouse effect? UNQUOTE.

    Eli responded with QUOTE: Roger and you should go read Goody and Yung. What you write is well known and known in detail. Oh yeah, we can exclude Richard Courtney and Jack Barrett. UNQUOTE.

    Here is a relevant response which Roger Taguchi made on Australian Senator Fielding’s “Is global warming man-made? Is global warming dangerous?” thread (Note 1). This should help to shed more light on this poorly understood topic QUOTE:

    .. thank you for showing me a good explanation involving the importance of energy transfer on collision between excited CO2 molecules and surrounding air (N2, O2, Ar) molecules, in agreement with my own independently-arrived-at view. This should be emphasized in textbooks on climatology (which I admit to not having read, most of my information to date coming second- or third-hand from wikipedia and this website).

    .. it seems to me that the accepted explanation of the greenhouse effect then goes on to say that IR emitted from the solid and liquid surface of the Earth is exchanged using CO2 molecules at 300 K or so (at the surface) to an ultimately-emitting layer in the upper troposphere at 220 K. This is where we differ about the mechanism. For instance, if the Earth had absolutely no CO2, including in the upper troposphere, would there be a 220 K blackbody-emitting layer? I say no, because N2, O2 and Ar do not have changing electric dipole moments, and therefore cannot emit IR radiation. But by the accepted explanation, with no CO2, there would be even less outgoing radiation, and therefore an even higher greenhouse effect (see any college textbook on physical chemistry for the derivation of Planck’s blackbody radiation formula, which would be applicable for an opaque = black surface, not a transparent atmosphere), a logical contradiction.

    The accepted explanation is also disproven on inspection of the satellite spectrum looking down on Antarctica: the surface of Antarctica is at or below 200 K, and yet there is an observed emission at CO2 frequencies GREATER THAN the total blackbody surface emission, and this assumes even at zero net absorption by CO2! This is contrary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics (NET heat flow does not occur from a cold to a hot surface). Lamely explaining the emission over Antarctica as due to a “temperature inversion” without explaining how the molecules at altitude gained that energy is no explanation (or equivalent to saying that summer temperatures are higher than winter temperatures because the thermometer readings are higher in summer).

    I have explained the origin of the CO2 emission measured by satellite over Antarctica in a longer article I can email on request to [email protected]. The manuscript is in WordPerfect (Version X3), .. but in case your computer cannot decipher WordPerfect, I can email a scanned pdf file. Briefly, the CO2 emission seen over Antarctica (and even more so over the rest of the Earth) is caused by IR frequencies in incoming solar radiation which boost ground state molecules to much higher vibrational levels (e.g. to v=3 in bond-bending mode). These excited molecules can then emit longer wavelength IR photons, in particular the observed CO2 radiation at 670 wavenumbers, as they cascade down to the ground state one vibrational level at a time (e.g. from v =3 to v=2, then from v=2 to v=1, and then from v=1 to v=0). The incoming blackbody solar radiation in the upper atmosphere has enough energy at the relevant frequencies to explain the observed outgoing CO2 emission.

    UNQUOTE.

    Hopefully this gives the “doom and gloom” mongers some food for thought. I have seen no convincing evidence that our use of fossil fuels is causing catastrophic global climate change. The global temperature has changed both up and downm in the past long before humans started using fossil fuels. It will continue to do so in the future, long after fossil fuels have run out. Climate change is natural, we have no control over it and all we are able to do is live with whatever nature throws at us.

    NOTES:
    1) see https://www.stevefielding.com.au/forums/viewthread/795/P855/

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

  26. Dear Pete Ridley,

    you are raising a number of quite interesting points here. But let us first of all get the temperatures issue sorted out. So, again, what data is your claim about warming or no warming during the last 12 years based on?

  27. Thomas (Fischbacher), I had thought that you might be Dr Thomas Fischbacher, Lecturer in Engineering Physics at Southampton U, UK. – I suppose because you were involved in debate about an extremely complex and poorly understood scientific topic, global climate processes and drivers. Having read a few comments by Thomas Fischbacher elsewhere it appears that you are not that lecturer at Southampton but may be a psychologist, hence your mind games here.

    On the Permaculture “Active Listening” thread Thomas Fischbacher said (Note 1) QUOTE: Why is it that, at work, we associate achievement with efficiency, while at home, we associate achievement with wasteful consumption? Isn’t that quite suspicious anyhow? UNQUOTE. That seems top me to be a very rash statement with no basis in fact. It may apply to some people but certainly not all. Do you know where it came from?

    NOTES:
    1) see https://www.permaculturenews.org/2009/10/05/active-listening/

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

  28. Hello Pete Ridley,

    all right, you bring up quite a strong claim in the discussion about warming or no warming during the last 12 years, but once someone drills deeper, you don’t seem to be able to provide any data which you would consider as valid that supports this. What shall we make of this?

    I’d still much like to see your data on this – but equally, I would like to see the numbers that support other claims of yours. Let us next consider this one:

    ======
    I understand that the annual contribution to emissions into the atmosphere from our use of fossil fuels is about 3% of the total emissions – again, hardly dramatic.
    ======

    Now, this immediately raises these questions: Where do the other 97% of total emissions come from – specifically, how much of that 97% comes from the oceans? How large in comparison to this then is the opposite transport, i.e. CO2 absorption by the oceans? Come on – I think you know the answer. What is it?

  29. Thomas (Fischbacher), I see that you choose to ignore my most recent comments, which of course is your privilege, just as I can choose to ignore any of yours. If you have answers to the questions that you put to me then please provide them yourself. All of us, including the scientists who specialise in this area, need help to try and make sense of those extremely complex and poorly understood global climate processes and drivers. Even suggestions from non-scientists like you and me can make a contribution.

    I will respond to one of your recent questions QUOTE: What shall we make of this? UNQUOTE. Simple answer which explains why the claim by UN-supporting propagandists that the science is settled is so ludicrous – “uncertainty”. You’ll find it all over the scientific literature with regard to global climates but unfortunately not writ large. It’s included more like the small print in a contract in the hopes that it will be overlooked.

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

  30. Hello Phil Ridley,

    Just out of curiosity: would you say that a crucial problem in all this is that most people first form their beliefs, and then interpret the world according to these beliefs, blocking out information that contradicts what they have chosen to believe in? Would you say that this is in particular a problem with politicians?

  31. Hello Terry Fischbacher, no I wouldn’t say that because, not being a psychologist (like yourself), I try not to generalise about people. I can only speak for myself on this one.

    I started my research into the subject back in March 2007 after reading a short review of staunch environmentalist Mark Lynas’s propaganda booklet “Six Degrees .. ” in The Times Magazine. That article left me very concerned about the future, mainly for my children and grandchildren (I can’t see me being around much beyond 2037 if I am very lucky – telegram from the Queen time).

    I started out being what I call agnostic about catastrophic human-made climate change – unsure and worried – but the more I researched the more I moved to being very sceptical indeed, hence my present stance when debating the subject. I genuinely believe that the issue has been politicised and propagandised, driven by the UN having other agenda, including:
    – redistribution of wealth from developed to underdeveloped economies,
    – establishment of a framework for global government,
    – enhancement of the finances of a privileged few.
    There are many others who believe as I do.

    Another problem that I have seen with people that I have discussed this with is that many are simply too busy getting on with enjoying life to have any interest in finding out for themselves what is behind all of the climate change propaganda, but this is no different from other aspects of political propaganda. We are seeing a lot of that in the UK at the moment with an election coming up in a few weeks but in this case I have found that the people that I talk to are much more sceptical than previously. This is thanks to the Daily Telegraph’s exposure of the expenses scandal. No politician can claim to be blameless in this one since all were aware of what was going on. Voters that I talk to recognise this. Climategate and all of the other IPCC-gates are doing the same with climate change.

    Best regards, Pete Ridley.

  32. Pete,

    I’d like to interject, if I may.

    I’ve been following this conversation, and I would just like to provide another point of view. What I’m seeing is something very similar to what I’ve experienced in my own attempts to discuss climate change with hardened “skeptics”: classic sophistry. The two main tactics used are “proof by verbosity” and misdirection.

    Verbosity:

    “Skeptics”, as they call themselves, actually find themselves at a great advantage in debating climate change nowadays. Fortunately for them, there is a plethora of misleading, fallacious arguments from which to choose (all being irrelevant or outright false). Therefore, a common tactic is to reply with one comment, which contains many misleading arguments all in one. The onus is then placed on the opposition to disprove all statements made, which would be a considerably greater undertaking.

    Misdirection:

    Generally, after I’ve provided rebuttals, I receive a reply along the lines of: “Yeah but [insert even more completely unrelated misinformation]”.

    As you can imagine, things typically go nowhere in a hurry.

    This comment is in response to something you recently wrote:

    Thomas Fischbacher, please don’t presume to dictate how I should respond. I decide what I post, not you.

    In light of what I’ve shared above, I believe what Thomas was doing (correct me if I’m wrong, Thomas) was simply trying to focus on just one of your “facts”. The “skeptical” sophistry mentioned earlier results in a thread that is saturated with misinformation. At some point, the conversation needs to focus on one “fact” at a time. After all, you did say:

    Perhaps if you spent less time playing politics and more concentrating on the facts we could make progress in this debate.

    That comment is very interesting, given that Thomas has repeatedly tried to focus you on one particular “fact” you have shared, and that you have continually avoided his questions regarding it.

    Therefore, I agree with Thomas. Please share with us the data which supports your claim that temperatures “have not gone up during the last 12 years”. If you truly believe that statement to be true, then this should be a win-win for you. Prove your point and make Thomas shut up about it.

    Thanks.

  33. Reasic, I wouldn’t presume to challenge your right to interject as often and agree with as many as you choose. As for making Thomas shut up, I have no right to even contemplate doing so. Finally, I’ll try to help you by suggesting that for the moment you should be able to help yourself by simply trying to focus on just one thing, that comment I made on 11th April @ 7:16 am.

    Please let me know if that was too verbose or misleading for you. Best regards, Pete Ridley.

  34. Hello Reasic,

    actually, I’d have preferred if the “discussion” had continued a bit further like this, because it so nicely documents the structure of the problem, and we could do with having such documentation at hand to better explain what the problem is. I don’t think anyone will ever be able to change Phil Ridley’s mind – considering all the links he is posting here, I take it he has invested way too much into his present views, emotionally, so he behaves pretty much like one of those of Marion Keech’s followers who gave away their house after they adopted the belief of soon being taken away by an UFO – see
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails. Note that he, by now, couldn’t ever change his views in a way that contradicts what he so actively has been fighting for without risking to be perceived as a complete fool. So, why continue this discussion then? I think, it might eventually be useful to teach readers other than Phil Ridley an important lesson or two.

    So, what is going on here? I think even so, we can do a bit of diagnosis.

    (1) Phil Ridley brings up a number of points which either are demonstrably wrong once one takes a look at the data, or have been crafted to create a false impression. Two that really stick out are (i) his “temperature over the last 12 years” claim, (ii) his “our emissions are only 3% of total emissions” (completely ignoring that those parts of the system that cause the other 97% – oceans and biosphere – also re-absorb the other 97%. Now, how would /you/ feel if there were a mere “3% imbalance” in your blood circulation, i.e. every heartbeat pumped 70 ml of blood, but lost 2 ml of that to a wound?).

    (2) He has found a great way to avoid having to look into the real situation – by just bringing up more nonsense from a long long list whenever someone dares to come close to actually looking at the validity of some such claim he has made, and then trying to present the whole situation as “I am not responding to your questions, and you are not responding to my statements”. (As I say, I would have liked to get even more evidence on this so that the pattern shows up clearly for anyone who cares to take a look.) I am fairly sure he genuinely believes that he has a valid position, and also that he is actually working very hard to help bringing out the truth – I am also sure that there is not the slightest bit of bad intentions, or intent to mislead, on his side. (Is his way of “discussing” actually valid? Let’s consider an analogy: I wonder what the jury would think of a defendant who, whenever some piece of incriminating evidence shows up, or some claim he makes is about to collapse, just keeps on flooding the truth-finding process with more nonsense and then resorts to claiming “but you selectively look only at some of the material…”)

    The conscious human mind is very good at shielding itself from any sort of input that contradicts deeply held beliefs – or would inevitably lead to a painful conclusion. It can resort to a number of tactics to do that – temporarily suspending logical reasoning (while all along re-assuring to itself that its reasoning is perfectly sound), and also suspending memory. Remember how Schiaparelli hallucinated Martian Canals into existence because he wanted to see them? Remember how Blondlot hallucinated N-Rays into existence? It is quite interesting to learn about the nature of such self-deception phenomena by looking at the pathological end of the spectrum. Ever heard of Anton’s syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton's_syndrome)? Some blind people do not believe in being blind – and keep on confabulating all sorts of stories they tell themselves that help them to avoid having the actual problem (blindness) ever show up as a conscious thought.

    Confabulation is an amazing issue. As we are all human, we all suffer from it, but to a varying degree. One can actually learn to limit its damaging effects by employing strategies that allow one to spot the self-deceptions spun by one’s own consciousness. This is why I emphasize the point of “belief management” so strongly. Little children may take some invented story – or some movie – for real. As they grow up, they develop their competence to discern between real and invented. It is expected of adult people to also have a certain amount of competence in spotting most friend-of-a-friend stories as actually being urban legends. So, “belief management” is something quite natural, we all do it, we all develop that competence to some degree. The “competence to see through urban legends” is an interesting one, for the internet has networked us so strongly that these stories found such fertile ground that society has gone through some “immunization process” that would not have occurred otherwise. Some friend-of-a-friend stories may have been going round for decades, but what happens quite often these days is that, if someone spreads such a myth, quite soon he will encounter someone who actually does a bit of research to check the history of that story. Is it conceivable that the internet will catalyze a similar step change in awareness with respect to being able to spot the difference between “I believe X because …” and “My conscious mind tries to trick me to believe X really because …”? Possibly. My impression is that, either, something like this will happen, and quite soon, or we are done. So – if you want to “solve climate change”, you better start to educate people about what confabulation is, and how it works.

    Ever noticed how strongly linked the inability to spot self-deception is with the claim to “fight for reason and against superstition”? The conscious human mind at its best protecting itself from even the slightest clue that it actually might not be as super-reliable as it keeps on re-assuring itself it is. I still don’t fully understand yet by what mechanism this “consciousness deceives itself to believe in its own superiority by calling itself ‘reason'” and the pathological drive to re-shape the world so that it fits this belief are linked to one another – and to fossil fuel abuse. But I think it’s quite hard to read e.g. Ayn Rand (say, “The return of the primitive”) without getting the idea that something pretty much along those lines must have gone on inside her head – and triggered similar thinking patterns in others.

  35. Blimey Thomas, where is this thread going! We’ve got so far from the original post about peer review, without answering anything, I’m wondering which rabbit hole we’ll drop down next! I will snip as much as I can to save space, your post was 5 pages A4 on it’s own!
    ===============
    Thomas wrote…
    a) “Trolling”: If you support SEPP’s claims, you should be able to fully explain why, shouldn’t you? At the very least, shouldn’t /you/ contact them and ask for clarification rather than me?

    [me]I independently support Sepps claim we need a “thorough scientific investigation” based on the dodgy science (e.g. as I posted: splicing together two discordant temperature series without correction) done by Mann et al. I thought I made my position quite clear in the very first post. The quote from Singer was to re-enforce my position, I think you picked on a small part of the quote (which is irrelevant to the point I was making) and called “troll” because I don’t want to argue about something irrelevant to my point. To negate the singer quote, I can quote from the recent Oxborough investigations instead….Paragraph 3 of their main report is a corker:

    “Although inappropriate statistical tools with the potential for producing misleading results have been used by some other groups, presumably by accident rather than design,…”

    Or quote Judy Currie on Oxburgh: The primary frustration with these investigations is that they are dancing around the principal issue that people care about: the IPCC and its implications for policy. Focusing only on CRU activities (which was the charge of the Oxbourgh panel) is of interest mainly to UEA and possibly the politics of UK research funding (it will be interesting to see if the U.S. DOE sends any more $$ to CRU). Given their selection of CRU research publications to investigate (see Bishop Hill), the Oxburgh investigation has little credibility in my opinion. However, I still think it unlikely that actual scientific malfeasance is present in any of these papers: there is no malfeasance associated with sloppy record keeping, making shaky assumptions, and using inappropriate statistical methods in a published scientific journal article.
    The corruptions of the IPCC process, and the question of corruption (or at least inappropriate torquing) of the actual science by the IPCC process, is the key issue. The assessment process should filter out erroneous papers and provide a broader assessment of uncertainty; instead, we have seen evidence of IPCC lead authors pushing their own research results and writing papers to support an established narrative. I don’t see much hope for improving the IPCC process under its current leadership.
    The historical temperature record and the paleoclimate record over the last millennium are important in many many aspects of climate research and in the communication of climate change to the public; both of these data sets are at the heart of the CRU email controversy. In my opinion, there needs to be a new independent effort to produce a global historical surface temperature dataset that is transparent and that includes expertise in statistics and computational science. Once “best” methods have been developed and assessed for assembling such a dataset including uncertainty estimates, a paleoclimate reconstruction should be attempted (regional, hemispheric, and possibly global) with the appropriate uncertainty estimates. The public (and some scientists) has lost confidence in the data sets produced by CRU, NASA, Penn State, etc. While such an independent effort may confirm the previous analyses, it is very likely that improvements will be made and more credible uncertainty estimates can be determined. And the possibility remains that there are significant problems with these datasets; this simply needs to be sorted out. Unfortunately, the who and how of actually sorting all this out is not obvious. Some efforts are underway in the blogosphere to examine the historical land surface data (e.g. such as available from GCHN), but the GCHN data set is apparently inadequate in terms of completeness.
    Sorting out the issues surrounding the historical and paleo surface temperature records should be paramount, in addition to tightening up and improving the assessment processes (particularly the IPCC).

    [me]Clearly statistical issues, IPCC errors, and how all this was handled calls for a full scientific investigation.
    ===================
    Thomas said…
    b) Fred Singer as a scientist: [me]Misses the point entirely.

    c) The infamous “Hockey Stick”.
    Actually, I’ve always considered it a red herring. We have numerous observations that point in the direction of rising global average temperatures. Personally, as someone who was born quite close to the Cryosphere and keeps an eye on what is going on over there, including what old people from that place have to report, I can say that the cultural memory I can directly tap into quite clearly indicates that there are major changes in that particular spot on the planet going on. Now, other people from very different places report similar things. Also, there are, for example, subtle changes in the migratory patterns of birds that indicate an interesting response to a changing climate. Then, we have Satellite data. All this is completely unrelated to whatever Mann may have published. Let us assume for the moment that “Mann’s Hockey Stick” (something I never considered that interesting, actually) were a result of, say, poor statistics – can you explain to me in what way that would then invalidate our satellite data? “Mann’s paper supports climate change – Mann’s paper is wrong – therefore, climate change is wrong.” That’s not sound logic.

    [me]You can try to imply it’s a red herring, but you fail to realise the significance of the hockey stick, which was the prime example given by the IPCC to convey complex science to the public. The hockey team models are the sole basis for the alarmism we’re beaten over the head with daily. The models (as demonstrated by Mcintyre & Mckitrick) are flawed by use of inappropriate statistical methods.

    Satellites don’t show us Co2 causes anything, the models tried to do that, but fail miserably.
    ===================================
    Thomas said….But let’s talk physics.
    [me]I’m not following you down multiple rabbit holes Thomas, it’s a waste of time, a strawman argument, because a) it’s not climate data b) has a trend inserted. It’s not as obvious a strawman as claiming a non posted statement was fraudulent, but it’s close. Oh you can claim innocence etc. but it won’t wash, at the very least it is grandstanding.
    If you want to talk about statistics keep it in the context it was raised, talk about the criticisms made by statisticians (I.e. don’t cherry pick some part of a comment when you know the context already), maybe you could show how there is, or is not a unit root, and the implications of that in the published data (links above) which, as I understand it, means the generated model trends are spurious because they did not account for the presence of a unit root. If you really want to help quell spurious arguments, a technical refutation of VS’s comments would be very useful for everyone on either side of the issue IMO.

    * Our civilization-induced CO2 output is large enough to markedly alter atmospheric concentrations over time spans of ~100 years.” just what is human induced Co2 level per year as a % of atmosphere, and how does it compare to say a volcano eruption? (I’m genuinely interested, no-one ever seems to quantify this)………….
    [you]…………..So, the question: “is it us who change the carbon content of the atmosphere?” quite clearly can be answered with: yes it is.

    Changing the carbon content of atmosphere is not in debate, it wasn’t the question either, the question was about comparisons of levels with Man & volcanoes to quantify the issue. I’ll follow you down this rabbit hole for a moment, because the levels in ice cores are in dispute (as posted above where Pete R quoted the scientist who published the original data saying it can’t be relied upon as ice core Co2 composition changes over time, and the changes are un-quantifiable).

    “Research by a Freiburg, Germany professor, Ernst-Georg Beck of the Merian-Schule, shows that the IPCC construed and concocted the pre-1957 CO2 record from measurements on recently drilled ice cores, ignoring more than 90,000 direct measurements by chemical methods from 1857 to 1957.” pretty graph here too… https://www.larouchepac.com/material/2007/02/23/fraud-global-warming-true-c02-record-buried-under-gore.html

    But the thing I want to point out is about your posted Co2 Graph – which speaks directly to the original post- it is two discordant Co2 series spliced together, some might say it’s a fraudulent graph, you say it’s “ an extremely exceptional situation” I’ll settle for very misleading, because it is not scientifically valid. Compare it to the linked Co2 graph from direct chemical measurements, is it still “an extremely exceptional situation”? No!
    As I understand volcanism, the combined (estimated obviously) Co2 addition per year would double todays Co2 in 1200 years. Since I keep reading AGW propaganda saying Co2 would hang about for at least 1000 years, and volcanoes have been at it for millennia, I have to wonder where it all went! (can’t find a link for that 1200 year thing but I will if you dispute it)
    ========================
    Thomas said: This is basically a question of spectroscopy…..
    Unfortunately, the physics is indeed a bit involved. But suppose the idea that CO2 has a noticeable impact on average global temperatures /were/ bogus (note that even Lindzen would agree with pretty much all other physicists that the bare effect of CO2 doubling [sans all feedbacks] would be somewhere between 1 K and 5 K of warming) – wouldn’t we then have a serious problem explaining the Azolla Event?

    “Sans all Feedbacks” Exactly! 1K – 5K it’s all theoretical because it ignores feedbacks! I think we can condense the whole debate here:-
    “Although clouds must be included in climate studies, they are difficult to describe mathematically in climate models. A wide variety of cloud properties must be taken into account: shapes, sizes, vertical and horizontal locations, lifetimes, numbers of liquid droplets of different sizes, numbers of ice crystals of different shapes and sizes, and more. The way clouds absorb, scatter, and emit radiation is influenced by each of these properties. The effects of clouds on climate are so complicated that the leading climate models give conflicting answers regarding their impact of climate. There is even uncertainty as to whether the changes in cloud properties will amplify or diminish any surface warming that may be caused by increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases. In fact, the present uncertainty in treating the radiative effect of clouds in climate models is larger than the entire radiative consequences expected from a doubling of carbon dioxide.”
    https://www-misr.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/introduction/goals3.html

    Taking this…”In fact, the present uncertainty in treating the radiative effect of clouds in climate models is larger than the entire radiative consequences expected from a doubling of carbon dioxide.”
    How can we tell Co2 will cause any net warming at all?
    What is to stop (for one example) major bands of cloud moving nearer the equator as the Sun (or Co2 for arguments sake) increases net energy into the Earths systems, and therefore decrease the energy from the Sun received at the tropics and effectively act as a thermostat? Is it not already demonstrated that when these cloud bands move more equatorial there is a cooling effect and opposite when they move poleward? Is it not logical to recognise these effects? More energy in = more clouds = more energy blocking = less energy in the system = cooling = less cloud = less sun blocking at the equator= more energy in = more clouds etc. etc. I.e. The Null hypothesis.

    The Null hypothesis would also put us squarely back in the time frame for another ice age, since Oceans and temperatures rise before the ice ages begin, how can we be so sure this is not the prelude to an impending iceage?
    ====================================

    Then,
    [you] The CAGW Theory stands on a lack of evidence for anything other than Co2 causing temps to increase, yet we can’t even quantify water vapour. We have a very limited understanding of ocean current oscillations, and how the Sun transfers its energy etc. I wonder how relevant “iridescence” is as a total measure all on its own, I wonder about the full spectrum, and how magnetic fields effect our planet (specially considering the weirdness going on with Earth’s magnetic field atm), I wonder about “cosmic particles” effect during low (or high for that matter) Earth field intensity, I wonder about something new every time I look deeper into climate science. I see one small sunspot and learn the magnetic loop of ejected plasma is many times the size of the Earth, and think there just has to be more going on than iridescence is measuring.

    (thanks for the links) I won’t Re-post another one of your dodgy analogies, what strikes me is your failure to even contemplate any other source of energy besides Co2, especially in the face of dramatic lack of evidence, and then to dismiss cloud feedback as net positive again with a complete lack of evidence.

    Thomas said: But back to CO2 – let me summarize the important points – those we can be quite certain about:
    1. We /are/ at the moment conducting a massive geophysical experiment that seems to be quite unlike anything the planet has seen for perhaps millions of years. [me] a small experiment, adding a few parts per million Co2, the larger experiment is de-forestation (and all the other things we need permaculture and environmental activists who are currently sidetracked by AGW for) IMO.
    2. We do have satellite data that indicate global temperatures rising faster than 0.1 K/decade and are independent(!) of data taken using thermometers at weather stations. [me] Do you want to claim evidence of impending environmental catastrophe on a 30 year trend? Please show how/why this is a) a catastrophy b) evidentially caused by Co2 c) unlike the MWP d) unprecedented e) beyond the capacity of the system to handle, as it did much higher levels of Co2 in the geologic past.
    3. We have numerous other – mutually independent – clues that indicate global warming – such as changes in the cryosphere. [me] Cause and effect, this says nothing about cause. I presume these same clues were present during the MWP which all seems part of a natural cycle to me, do I need to post a picture of an ice free N. Pole to demonstrate this is not unprecedented?
    4. Spectroscopically, we know that CO2 has an IR absorption band just in a place where water vapour would leave radiation through. [me] We also know Co2 has a logarithmic absorption curve, so the more we add, the less effect it has. We also know Co2 cannot add energy to the system that is not already there. And we know from the second law of thermodynamics that any energy trapped by Co2 cannot possibly be radiated back down to earth.
    [me]5. From the late 50’s the sun has been at it’s most active than for more than 11500 years. Might this have caused the current warming? https://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/ThesunNOAA.jpg
    =====================
    [you]Note furthermore that there are indeed paleontological indications that a quite massive reduction of atmospheric CO2 concentrations has led to substantial cooling.[me] Opps cart before the horse there Thomas, Co2 lags temp in most cases (presume you’re talking vostock https://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/299/5613/1728 ) by 800 yrs, temp rises then Co2 rises, temps decline then co2 declines. This makes the CAGW argument convoluted IMO.
    [you]There are a few further sociological issues here that are not really related to the physics, but perhaps still worth knowing about. (snipped) [me] Interesting stuff, for the origins I tend to go more with the timing of alarmist propaganda starting in the late 70’s once the ice age crowd/eugenicists realised it wouldn’t work for their agenda. There’s an essay I read around somewhere about a 70’s environmental conference held by the eugenics movement in the states which is quite revealing, the idea of propagandising global warming was talked about a lot as a mechanism to further their eugenics agenda, there was a program for the event pictured, I’ll find the link if you’re interested.

    Thomas your last post reads like pure grandstanding, you knew the context of the quote, and you know he probably meant “no statistically valid warming” as Phil Jones said to the gov enquiry. This type of thing really puts people off bothering to converse IMO, but then that’s probably the whole point is it not?
    I honestly doubt you are genuinely interested in these posts (besides the fun you seem to get grandstanding), if you were, you might raise these same arguments on WUWT et al where I guarantee you’ll find a much better able audience to converse with. IMO it is only by joining in the debate with sceptic & alarmist scientists together that we all learn, some scientists have joined in from both sides on WUWT, which has been well received, and should be encouraged IMO. Thanks for the education anyway, not in anything to do with climate, just the high school debating tactics you revealed.

    What’s with the name thing too, did I miss something, are you pretending to be someone else or something?

  36. Finally, I’ll try to help you by suggesting that for the moment you should be able to help yourself by simply trying to focus on just one thing, that comment I made on 11th April @ 7:16 am. Please let me know if that was too verbose or misleading for you.

    Okay, I’ll bite, Pete. Yes, the comment was a great example of “proof by verbosity”, in which you supplied ample misinformation. I’ll respond to each point made, which should make for a long post, but that’s the nature of this tactic, isn’t it? You make claims that I must then disprove, causing me to spend greater amounts of time on the endeavor than you. Whatever. Here we go:

    my understanding is that if we can believe the figures, mean atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen from about 315ppm in 1950 to something like 385ppm now

    I’m not sure why you start at 1950, when the beginning of human emissions was much earlier. (See: Industrial Revolution) As Thomas later stated, we are now at about 36% more than pre-Industrial levels.

    I’d hardly call this dramatic, considering that plants thrive in 1000ppm atmospheres and humans experience about that order or higher in their offices, homes and other enclosed spaces.

    This is a red herring. The AGW argument is not that high levels of CO2 will be DIRECTLY detrimental to plants or humans, but rather that higher concentrations will result in higher temps, which will have detrimental effects. Plants may thrive in 1000ppm of CO2 in a conditioned environment, but atmospheric levels that high would likely result in widespread drought in already vulnerable areas around the globe, which would be detrimental to said plants.

    but the claim that the levels in air recovered from ice cores is representative of that in the atmosphere in 1832 has not been validated. As Jaworowski has said repeatedly, there are many processes that can change the composition of that “trapped” air and he supports Beck’s claims about fluctuating levels of atmospheric CO2 during the past 180 years.

    First, I would also add that ice cores also tell us that CO2 concentrations are now higher than at any time in the past 650,000 years or more.

    Secondly, Jaworowski has been thoroughly refuted in the scientific literature:

    https://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/03/eli-can-retire-1.html

    (several papers cited in link)

    and I understand that the annual contribution to emissions into the atmosphere from our use of fossil fuels is about 3% of the total emissions – again, hardly dramatic.

    And you have provided yet another red herring, which contains only part of the story. This argument ignores the natural carbon sink, which negates the natural emissions, and even some anthropogenic. We are emitting CO2 at such a rate than the natural carbon sinks cannot keep up (See: Ocean Acidification). I recommend you Google the term “Carbon Cycle”.

    but the ice core records show that CO2 concentrations follow temperature rise, by as much as hundreds of years

    First, I find it interesting that, in the same comment, you have claimed that ice core records are unreliable, and then also made a claim that is based on those very ice core records. Are they thrustworthy or not?

    Secondly, the phenomenon that you have described occurred at the end of an ice age, in which the frigid oceans were storing much larger quantities of CO2 (as they have a greater capacity to do in this colder state). Then, changes in the planet’s orbit and rotation (See: Milankovitch Cycles) caused an increase in temps, which warmed the oceans, resulting in an outgassing of CO2 into the atmosphere. Rest assured, this is not the situation in which we find ourselves today.

    In a side not, I am actually amazed that anyone still uses this argument. It is a scientifically proven fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which traps heat. Is is widely accepted that without the greenhouse effect, our planet would be much colder. So, how then does the fact that, during the transition out of a glacial period, CO2 acted as a feedback negate the fact that once it is in the atmosphere, it acts as a forcing, since it traps heat and has a long atmospheric lifetime? Answer: It doesn’t.

    We do not know that burning fossil fuels has any catastrophic global effects

    I guess that depends on your definition of “catastrophic”. Would you agree that this would have a “mostly negative” effect on the planet?

    The wording of your last argument made me wonder about your perception of our argument. Could you state, as clear and concise as possible, what you perceive our argument to be?

    Thanks.

  37. Hello Pete,

    I fully agree with you that we should see that we get the discussion down to a reasonable volume again. So, let us do this step by step. So – what are the key problems?

    You call for a “full scientific investigation”. At first, that sounds like a very good idea everybody would easily agree on. The catch is, however, who are the scientists that then should look into this? Evidently, you seem to consider frauds like Ernst-Georg Beck who have been caught fabricating data to be among those “scientists”. I take it you don’t speak German, otherwise you would realize how ridiculous a title such as this one sounds: “Freiburg, Germany professor, Ernst-Georg Beck of the Merian-Schule”. He’s a schoolteacher. And one that freely invents data to support his claims.

    We won’t make any progress on this until we first agree on standards of scientific integrity. How should one ever have any sort of productive discussion about science-related things if one party insists on considering the products of fraudulent pseudoscientists to stand on the same level as the work of real scientists? One may just as well discuss relativity with one of those self-proclaimed geniuses who “disproved Einstein”.

  38. Cheers Thomas.
    I don’t know weather I’d have recommended the German chap to do a full scientific investigation (lol)! It would have to be transparent for a start, outside the IPCC influence, and made up from scientists, statistical experts etc. from across the divide, discounting anyone involved in “climategate” or other possible professional bias, I was going to say “independent scientists” but realise that’s probably not possible.

    After digesting the spurious/Co2/vostock thing Pete R posted, which I’d not seen before, I went off in search of an alternative, thought I’d start with -what did we know before vostock – without checking on that guys credibility, I’ll have to read up on him. (anyone have a link to his debunking?)

    So for now, for all intents and purposes, are we left with only an inconclusive discordant historical Co2 graph, or is there something else? you hinted at paleontological indications?

    FTR I only started reading climate blogs again about a year ago. I was big into weather forecasting from around 1991, I was a weekly visitor to the MET office for data etc. until about 2000 when I moved. I posted in various weather newsgroups from 2000 until about 02 from a luke warm position having accepted the science on face value. I changed my opinion when I researched the correlation to sun cycles (and how I wish I’d kept those original links!) and the dodgy political shenanigans of the time. It all started to get a bit hectic with the AGW arguments, by which time I’d discovered Peak Oil, which as I’ve said, I think negates any action on Co2 even if I’m wrong on AGW, so I stuck to the PO blogs instead.

    This might raise a smile, I used to say if Piers Corbyn had the backing and charisma of Al Gore, sounded half as smooth, and had a hair cut, we wouldn’t be in this position! Which is a probably polite way of saying he comes across as a nutter, but I like his method :)

  39. Pete, thanks for that excellent post of yours. You have far more patience than I do.

    Reasic, picking up on a few of the points you make in your latest comment:-

    1) On atmospheric CO2 concentrations QUOTE: .. I’m not sure why you start at 1950, .. UNQUOTE. Didn’t you bother to look at my reference in Note 1 of my comment of 11th April @ 7:16 am? Have another look, consider the source and take into consideration the graph of CO2 v time in Note 2 of my comment of 8th April @ 8:40 am. A small application of deductive powers should provide the answer. (BTW, the link in that Note 2 may take you to a page that also requires a little effort on your part before arriving at the desired cached article “Questioning the CO2 Ice Hockey Stick”).

    2) On 1000ppm CO2 QUOTE: This is a red herring. The AGW argument is .. that higher concentrations will result in higher temps, which will have detrimental effects. .. atmospheric levels that high would likely result in widespread drought in already vulnerable areas around the globe, which would be detrimental to said plants UNQUOTE. The red herring is the IPCC speculation (based upon flawed computer models) that 1000ppm “will have detrimental effects. .. widespread drought .. ”.

    3) On the validity of those reconstructed ancient atmospheric CO2 concentrations QUOTE: Jaworowski has been thoroughly refuted in the scientific literature: UNQUOTE.
    If by “refute” you mean “challenge” then Jaworowski’s argument that several processes QUOTE: .. which all cause fractionation of air components .. UNQUOTE are able to distort the composition of “trapped” air has been refuted. If you mean the more commonly understood “to disprove” then you need to link to where this has been done. The blog of “Eli Rabett” (understood to be Joshua Halpern) to which you link does not disprove Jaworowski’s argument but simply rejects it. This is a subject that I have been researching and debating for a while, including on Eli’s, Chris Colose’s, Senator Fielding’s and other blogs. This is a topic on which I can find little research by scientists involved in trying to get a proper understanding of global climate processes and drivers. In his 2007 paper Jaworowski made reference to the 2006 paper “Analyses of CO2 and other atmospheric gases.” by Hurd. This paper is also referenced by Bob Carter in his 2007 paper “The Myths of Human-caused dangerous climate change” (Note 1) which says QUOTE: Average atmospheric values over the past few hundred thousand years are inferred from ice cores to have been about 180ppm during glacials and 280ppm during inter-glacials. .. Hurd .. Jaworowski .. and others have argued that these .. are .. 30 – 50% lower than the original atmospheric values .. ”. Fractionation processes are discussed in the Wapedia “Wiki: Ice Core” page (Note 2). Also, I recall reading a paper (Severinghouse & Battle.?) that reported on the use of differential fractionation of O2 isotopes for determining temperature changes. As Bender et al. said n “Gases in Ice Cores” QUOTE: Differential diffusivity is a first-order effect that must be taken into account when interpreting data on the concentration and isotopic composition of gases in firn air and ice cores UNQUOTE.

    I think that’s enough to keep you out of mischief for now.

    Terry (or is it Thomas) Fischbacher, do I have to spell everything out for you? Who is Phil Ridley? (does that help?)

    1) see https://www.docstoc.com/docs/275416/The-Myth-of-Dangerous-Human-Caused-Climate-Change/
    2) see https://wapedia.mobi/en/Ice_core

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

  40. Pete, among those many interesting points that you raised (none of which I have reason to dispute) I only wish to comment on you r closing sentence QUOTE: What’s with the name thing too, did I miss something, are you pretending to be someone else or something? UNQUOTE. I did a further search on Thomas Fischbacher and came across “Chapter 1 Transcript of a Permaculture Design Course by B. Mollison (1.0-4) First Introduction (Thomas Fischbacher) [email protected]” (Note 1).

    I can only find one Thomas Fischbacher at Southampton University to have to conclude, unless informed otherwise, that the Thomas here is the same as the Thomas there. Come on Terry (sorry Thomas) Fischbacher, are you a lecturer at Southampton University? Why be shy about it when you should be proud of who you are. You don’t want to appear to be a coward do you?

    Talking about cowards, I have just posted a comment on wattsupwiththat (Note 1) about the cowardice of people like “Tamino” (Grant Foster) who hide behind false names. I tried to post it on Grant Foster’s blog a couple of times but he removed them as soon as he saw them. Thanks to the time difference they do stay there for a few hours, so I’ve now posted a link on his blog to the wattsupwiththat thread. Have a look at it and the links given so that you understand the context.

    NOTES:
    1) see https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/17/which-nasa-data-to-believe/#comment-373583

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

  41. Hello Pete,

    isn’t this thread in our little discussion quite enlightening – let me summarize the important stages we’ve gone through:

    [you] “The infamous Hockey stick graph is two discordant temperature
    series spliced together, but that’s OK?”

    [me] We agree that the important question here is whether global
    temperatures are actually changing fast. And we have
    strong evidence for this that is independent of Mann’s analysis.
    In particular, we have IR satellite data.

    [you] Ok, you provided a graph. But climate is a chaotic system, and
    “I wonder how valid any statistical trend is in a chaotic system.”

    [me] [Detailed example that talking about statistical trends in
    chaotic systems certainly does DO make sense]

    [you – let me quote this verbatim] “it’s a waste of time, a strawman
    argument, because a) it’s not climate data b) has a trend
    inserted. It’s not as obvious a strawman as claiming a non posted
    statement was fraudulent, but it’s close. Oh you can claim innocence
    etc. but it won’t wash, at the very least it is grandstanding.”

    — Isn’t that quite interesting? You make a bullshit comment about statistics and chaotic systems, I show that you are clearly very wrong about this, and you come up with such a lame response. You clearly /have/ been caught talking utter nonsense about statistics and chaotic systems.

    But it continues:

    [you] Let me pull that crackpot out of my hat who claims that
    average atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been as high
    as 470 ppm just a few decades ago… And let’s talk about
    Mann’s Hockey stick instead.

    So, why should readers of this discussion at that point /not/ question your sanity?

  42. Seems something fried subsequent comments.

    Maybe the server farted, increasing GHG emissions past a tipping point! ( :-p sorry craig, you’re obviously busy on it)

    Thomas after some research, it seems your comments regarding the German biology professor were less than candid. If you think that diatribe reflects the comments in this thread, it is your objectivity the reader must question.

    Have you considered this?
    https://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/11/gavin_schmidt_on_the_acquittal.html#more

  43. We seem to have lost a few of the comments since this thread went down yesterday so I’ll repost mne.

    Reasic/Thomas, now that you‘ve had time to consider more carefully what I posted previously perhaps you’d like to have a look at AppinSys’s “Hansen’s Global Temperature” (Note 1). After considering the temperature graphs resulting from those statistically manipulated raw data measurements have a look into that last item about funds.

    In checking up on AppinSys I stumbled across some interesting information, including some covering Sunspot Cycle 24 as predicted by NASA since 2006 (Note 2).

    QUOTE: 2006 Dec 21: Solar cycle 24, due to peak in 2010 or 2011 “looks like its going to be one of the most intense cycles since record-keeping began almost 400 years ago UNQUOTE.
    QUOTE: 2007 Dec 14: .. Many forecasters believe Solar Cycle 24 will be big and intense. Peaking in 2011 or 2012. UNQUOTE.
    QUOTE: 2009 Jan 5: .. The solar cycle 24 predicted sunspot maximum has been reduced .. UNQUOTE.
    QUOTE: 2009 Apr 1 ..: Predictions of solar cycle 24 amplitude vary widely from 40 to 185 …UNQUOTE.
    QUOTE: 2009 May 29: .. Solar Cycle 24 will peak .. May 2013 with a below-average number of sunspots. .. 90, the lowest of any cycle since 1928 UNQUOTE.

    What did I hear someone thinking – “didn’t global mean temperature dip significantly in 1928?”

    Talking about global mean temperatures reminds me that I did say early on (13th April @ 10:14 pm) QUOTE: Of course, we must not overlook the fact that those temperature measurements and the statistical manipulations that they have been subjected to remain highly suspect UNQUOTE. Steve McIntyre (Climate Audit – Note 3) and Anthony Watts (Surfacestations – Note 4) have some words to say about that which include some pointed comments about Josh Halpern (Eli Rabett – to whom Reasic confidently linked on 21st April 21 @ 1:04 am). Eli responds trivially on a couple of occasions but notice that no matter how often he is linked with Joshua Halpern on any blog he never denies that they are one and the same. Halpern has also been linked directly with Eli but again I am not aware of any denial from him. Why on earth do people hide behind false names – it makes life so complicated.

    On 21st April @ 12:36 am Pete mentoned funding and it’s also mentioned on McIntyre’s thread. I think it worth repeating the full QUOTE: mccall Posted Jun 9, 2007 at 12:34 PM Dr Halpern = Mr Rabett ? This can’t be!
    Josh Halpern posts sometimes quote the Rabett blog (his own?) to support Halpern arguments in:
    https://energy.edu.pl/oil-362-0-asc-135.html
    Besides, Dr Halpern is “also the Co-Director of the NASA Faculty Fellowship Program at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD in odd numbered years. This program supports about 30 faculty each year to do summer research at Goddard,” according to https://www.chem.howard.edu/~jhalpern/. If the above link is still down — check googles cached version instead. This would indicate that he is or has been in the past, payed by NASA Goddard, and quite possibly has met/worked with prominent members of the team? Team member; team wannabe; team cheerleader; or just plain coincidence .. UNQUOTE.

    I guess that the comment by QUOTE: Gary, Posted Jun 5, 2007 at 10:03 AM Is this and other mocking of Anthony’s efforts a case of psychological projection? .. UNQUOTE will be of particular interest to Thomas.

    On 21st April @ 1:04 am Reasic suggested that QUOTE: Jaworowski has been thoroughly refuted in the scientific literature: https://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/03/eli-can-retire-1.html (several papers cited in link) UNQUOTE. Here is a relevant comment that I made on Chris Colose’s “Richard Alley at AGU” thread (Note 5) QUOTE: Oeschger’s 1995 criticism of Jaworowski’s 1994 paper appears to me to have been simply defending his own faith in the ice core re-constructions instead of validating them. The paper that I was referring to was in 2007 and Oeschger wasn’t around then to comment. I refer you to “CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time” Page 41 “The Truth About Ice Cores” final paragraph. If anyone is able to give me links to the papers mentioned there then I’d appreciate it. UNQUOTE

    I’m sure we’ll have some words of wisdom from the experts here.

    NOTES: NB: so that the links appear OK I have removed the https://www from the first two and the https:// from the rest
    1) see .appinsys.com/globalwarming/Hansen_GlobalTemp.htm
    2) see .appinsys.com/NASASolar.htm
    3) see climateaudit.org/2007/06/05/eli-rabetts-bait-and-switch/
    4) see surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm
    5) see chriscolose.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/richard-alley-at-agu-2009-the-biggest-control-knob/

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

    PS:

    Pete, on this business of anonymity, the only time that I really feel it necessary to know more about the individual I am debating with is when an opinion is expressed which differs from my own. I then like to try to understand why the other person is persuaded in a different direction to myself. I have a reasonable understanding of how I form my opinions because I know myself reasonably well. Without knowing anything about the other person I find it difficult to understand why that person has formed that contrary opinion.

    Let me try to clarify by giving an example. Many who believe in an super-power having an interest in what goes on in the universe also are of the opinion that prayer can invoke an external influence on events. I do not believe in such a superpower therefore my opinion is that no matter how much praying is indulged in there can be no consequent external influence on events. I am not sceptical about that other opinion, I reject it. I can understand why the other has such an opinion – because of that chosen belief, but that belief has no significant impact upon my life so I do not need to probe further.

    When someone tells me that because of our use of fossil fuels the world is heating up at a faster rate now than has been experienced during the past 100,000 years and we are heading for global catastrophe this is different to my opinion. I do not reject that opinion but am highly sceptical of it. If that other opinion is correct then it does have significant impact upon my life. Under these circumstances I try to find out why that opinion is held and knowing more about the other person is made much easier if an Internet search can be made, but this requires that person’s name. Does this help? – or have I simply confused things even more?

    On the matter of the validity of the claimed “Gold Standard” (or is it “fools gold”) for reconstructing ancient atmospheric CO2 concentrations, I am of the opinion that the processes described by Jaworowski, Hurd, etc. have not been properly researched. I have E-mailed two experts in ice core structure, Dr. Johannes Freitag and Dr. Sepp Kipfstuhl (Alfred Wegener Institut, Bremerhaven) for information on latest research. This comment from a 2009 paper “Subgrain boundaries and related microstructural features in EDML (Antarctica) deep ice core “ by Kipfstuhl, et el. is very interesting (Note 1) QUOTE: The data do not support the classical view of a change of dominating recrystallization regimes with depth. Three major types of subgrain boundaries, reflecting high mechanical anisotropy, are specified in combination with crystal-orientation analysis. UNQUOTE.

    Dr. Freitag gave a Power Pont presentation at the Firn Workshop, Dartmouth College, March 10-11, 2008 which included a picture “Direct Observation of Air Trapping” which perfectly illustrates my area of interest – as those pockets close under pressure (deeper) what preferential fractionation effects come into play?

    I support your comment about merging proxies and real measurements that QUOTE: .. the two should clearly not be spliced together UNQUOTE, especially when an arbitrary time-scale adjustment has to be made to achieve a seamless “hockey stick” curve, as pointed out by Jaworowski. The same trick was pulled with the temperature “hockey stick” by merging tree-ring proxies with statistically manipulated temperature measurements.

    Our resident psychologist appears to have been trying to put words into your mouth. I’ve checked the thread for the words QUOTE: Let me pull that crackpot out of my hat who claims that average atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been as high as 470 ppm just a few decades ago… UNQUOTE. I can’t find that you‘ve used “pull” or “crackpot” or “hat” or “470” anywhere. What have I missed here? If nothing then QUOTE: So, why should readers of this discussion at that point /not/ question .. UNQUOTE his objectivity?

    NOTES:
    1) see https://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/handle/2115/40199

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

  44. Her’s another missng one.

    Thomas, I sure did check those links and still no “crackpot” or “pull” or “470”. I do admit that I missed a few “hat”s but they were only “that”s.

    On that basis I modify my earlier comment and say simply of QUOTE: .. our resident psychologist So, why should readers of this discussion at that point /not/ question .. his objectivity? UNQUOTE.

    Many of us have the serious problem that we think we are cleverer than we really are. It’s so easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we are experts in human psychology?

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

    PS:
    Thomas, I investigated Ernst-Georg Beck a couple of years ago and made reference to him in my article “POLITICIZATION OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND CO2” (Note 1). Have you read his paper “180 YEARS OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 GAS ANALYSIS BY CHEMICAL METHODS” (Note 2)? It has much more detail and far better graphs than the one you linked to on 23rd April @ 6:27 pm. Have a read of it – you may learn something (as long as you keep an open mind). Although his paper and conclusions have been challenged do you consider that to justify calling him a “crackpot”. Although that sort of language is common in the schoolyard I doubt if many would consider that to be a comment worthy of a professional person.

    Why don’t you stop wasting your time and mine playing silly games. I look forward to hearing something constructive from you for a change – it may help to move the debate along.

    NOTES: NB. https:// removed from 1) and https://www. from 2).
    1) see nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=374&Itemid=1
    2) see friendsofscience.org/assets/files/documents/CO2%20Gas%20Analysis-Ernst-Georg%20Beck.pdf

    Best regards, Pete Ridley

  45. Hello Pete Ridley,

    so, to sum this issue up, you expect people to believe that:

    (1) global average atmospheric CO2 concentrations have in quite recent history gone down by more than 25% in less than 5 years (and we don’t now where these more than 400 grams of carbon per square meter of Earth’s surface would have gone to – if this had gone into biological growth, say, that would roughly be in the ballpark of a doubling of photosynthetic productivity with full sequestration during those years that would have gone unnoticed), but

    (2) quite miraculously, these extreme fluctuations seem to *just* have stopped once we started to do spectroscopic precision measurements,

    (3) because a German biology schoolteacher who does “science” pretty much the way Eric von Daeniken does archeology says so?

    Erm. That’s “interesting”…

  46. Thomas (Fischbacher), you really should try harder by justifying why you believe that people have said things that they haven’t. You tried putting words into my mouth and did the same with the other Pete. May I suggest that you make yourself clearer by supporting what you claim with some evidence. If you do that we may be able to move the debate along, otherwise you just keep dragging it around in circles.

    Of course, being a psychologist that may be your intention.

    Best regards, Pete Ridley.

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