Doug McNeall on climate scicomm
Doug McNeall of the UK Met Office wrote an interesting sequence of tweets this morning starting from the perceived threat from Trump, then moving on to the strength of the climate sceptic position and how climate scientists should respond.
You can see the sequence of 20 tweets here as a storify. Below is the content of each tweet interspersed with a few comments from me and a few tweets from others. I have textified all the tweets so the whole thing doesn’t take up too much space.
1 So, they’re coming for the climate scientists.
Hmm, this refers to an OTT tweet from climate activist Brian Kahn describing an OTT article by Pat Michaels as ‘Orwellian’. What I would describe as Orwellian would be the way in which Roger Pielke and Judith Curry have been treated. What seems to have ‘triggered’ Doug and many others is Trump’s appointment of Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA.
2 This isn’t a surprise, and it’s started already. Here’s what we do about it.
It’s not clear to me exactly what has ‘started already’.
3 Understand the tactics. Climate skeptics have a great narrative. “Look at those evil, conspiring adjusting, greedy, greenie leftie idiots”
Well, a bit of an exaggeration and generalisation of the CliScep narrative, but OK, it’s a tweet. But Doug is right, climate scientists do need to understand the tactics of climate sceptics and the thinking behind it.
Bishop Hill: @dougmcneall You’re on a hiding to nothing until: 1. CS deals with bad apples in the profession 2, CS stops running dissenters out of town.
4 Climate science needs a better narrative than “we’re screwed”.
Again, Doug is right. It’s amazing how many people think that repeatedly claiming the end of the world is nigh is a good tactic.
5 Climate skeptics make people feel smart, informed and discoverers of truth. We need to do that more.
Warren Pearce: Very good point! (which we touched on in this review of climate comms)
6 Climate skeptics co-opt well known scientists. Galileo as a dissenter. That Feynman about bending over backwards to find the truth …
7 … They’ve nicked our best stuff!
Barry: 7) – the best stuff – is for everyone.. if everyone used it, no problems
8 Scientists have a strong culture: organised skepticism. Dissent and open discussion. Reliance on evidence. Transparency …
Matt Hall: IMO, by failing to understand our own humanity (bias, uncertainty, fallibility, etc) we open the door to hubris, which ppl see.
9 … Independent thinking. We should shout about these things. We should show the *people*, and the methods, and the stories.
Again, I agree with most of this. But the problem is, we see very little dissent, open discussion, or transparency among climate scientists. There is too much sticking to a party line and ‘circling the wagons’. For example, if it wasn’t for the climategate incident, we would probably never know that other climate scientists think of Mann’s work as crap.
Plazaeme: I’d say you already “shout” these things. “Showing” them is a different operation. You have to “do” them if you want to show it.
10 Explaining complex science well is necessary, but not a panacea. We can’t expect to just point at data.
11 Correcting obvious nonsense is OK, but I don’t think we should obsess over correcting every horribly wrongly written climate article …
12 … It repeats and can cement the skeptics’ message.
I think he is referring here to sceptical articles like the recent one by David Rose, rather than the Wadhams stuff in the Guardian.
Barry: 11) if sci corrected the nonsense cli alarmist MSM articles… there would be less sceptics!! @dougmcneall my argument for years.
13 We shouldn’t be focusing on slagging off individuals either, it just hardens people’s group identity and feelings of rejection.
This suggests he is saying that attacks on individual sceptics are unwise. Though it’s worth noting that many of the people most regularly and viciously attacked (Rose, Ridley, Curry) tend to be lukewarmers.
David Rose: Nor attacking people (ie me) for what they didn’t actually write.
14 We need to be out ahead of the skeptic messaging. We can predict what they say. We knew they would hype global cooling after a big ENSO.
Yes. I’ve often been struck by the inability of the ‘warmist’ side to think one step ahead, making things easy for the sceptical side.
Jaime: “Hype global cooling” = criticise warmist hype of short term El Nino warming by pointing out short term global cooling – according to Doug.
GWPF: so why hype ENSO warming spike if you know that the hype will be found out post El Nino?
15 We know they’ll come for code, emails, communications, tweets [hello! *waves*].
Hello Doug!
16 We need to be better at explaining what climate models are and why they are useful.
17 We need *personal* narratives of how and why science works. Why the things we find out are useful for everyone.
Hmm, I’m not convinced by the “personal narrative” idea.
18 I know it sounds corny but we need visible science heroes that are seen to fight hard for the scientific process, truth and integrity.
Steve McIntyre: @dougmcneall so where were you when various climate scientists refused data? did you speak out?
19 In that context I think it can be useful to demonstrate that science, while politically relevant, isn’t party political.
How could that be demonstrated? Unfortunately, academia, science, and particularly climate science, is party political and biased. You only have to look at the tweets of climate scientists around election times to see that. Or just look at how the whole climate story fits so amazingly well with left-wing views – industry bad, capitalism bad, The West bad, world government and regulation good, turn a blind eye to China, poor countries suffer, we have to give them money… a point that has been acknowledged by Mike Hulme.
Barry: 19) some scientist are very vocal, and very VERY political. They tar all scientists with their behavior.
20 These are not the only things we need to do, and others will have good ideas. Better ideas. For now, I’m done. What you got?
Victor Venema: I am open for advice how to better communicate science, but would need more concrete ideas to see if it is new and could work.
Brandon Shollenberger: The sad reality is the global warming movement has promoted junk work at the highest level and never sought to correct that.
Climate Scepticism 
One of the things they didn’t see coming #14, was a sceptic US leader, an implodng EU and a UK that needs to be more businesslike and less airy fairy. They should have started ‘communicating’ about 5 years ago at the latest. They’ve acted like they would always have the upper hand and treated the opposition as insignificant. Ha ha. Trump has chosen people who know where all the bodies are hidden. They should have dealt with them themselves rather than sniff and ask ‘what smell?’
LikeLiked by 3 people
Gaia I hate Twitter. The tree of knowledge reduced to wood chips. But this is fascinating. Thanks Paul for making it readable. If the 48% of remainers were angry at being beaten over Brexit, and the 51% (?) of Hillary fans boiling mad about Trump, imagine how the 97% feel! A couple of first thoughts:
Tweet 1: I didn’t think Pat Michaels’ article was over the top. It was a reaction to the Obama/EPA ruling that 0.1% extra CO2 is atmospheric pollution. And Michaels is probably right about the scale of the fight to come.
Tweet 2. What has ‘started already’ is la Nina and sceptics daring to comment on it. The next few months are likely to see a massive official smokescreen over this.
If everyone could give tweet numbers it will facilitate discussion. This looks like the opening shot from Big Science, and there’s so much to discuss.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Geoff, what prompted me to say OTT regarding the Pat Michaels piece was a few phrases like
“The academy is going to howl, and Washington’s science lobbies… are going to go berserk.
Fasten your seat belts, for we may be about to witness the scientific-cat fight of our time.”
Whether this fight will really happen remains to be seen.
LikeLike
Also on the subject of climate scicomm and persuasion, there’s another nice post by Scott Adams. He says
“The simple, visual persuasion favors the climate alarmists. They can point to rising seas, super hurricanes, and droughts. We can imagine all of that stuff and it scares us.”
“If you think many people believe in climate science predictions because of the science and the facts, you don’t know anything about human beings.”
“Prediction: By the end of Trump’s term it will be considered common knowledge that we need to be aggressive in green energy for a variety of reasons, but the public will not trust the climate model predictions. We’ll get to a greener world for reasons of economics and strategy. We’ll never really know if we solved climate change problems at the same time.”
He ends with an interesting visual persuasion tactic to try to sell his book… not a method I’ve seen used much by either side in the climate debate.
LikeLike
At least McNeill is asking the right questions. One must bear in mind that climate science is rife with competition to be the most visible and perhaps get a “communication” prize or other plum gigs in the media. Its perhaps impossible to prevent the inevitable misinformation and overselling, but climate science’s cerdiility would be improved if more of them actually tried. An example of good climate science is Schmidt’s post on the paleoclimate sensitivity estimate of ECS that was wrong. We need more even handed scientists.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Paul, the Obama adminstration relied on a Supreme Court adjudication of a case Mass vs EPA to find CO2 to be ‘dangerous’ and requiring regulation as a pollutant. This was then novel but as has been shown, it was simply Mr Obama’s style rule-by-regulation that skirts legislation (and thus the hard task of debate), and something he has since done several times over.
To overturn the ‘endangerment’ finding therefore becomes a regulatory battle, rather than a legislative one. Even if Trump nominates a conservative-leaning judge to take the late Scalia’s place, the fight will be in the courts and in the courts, it will expert vs expert, activist vs sceptic. Mann vs Steyn and Mann vs McIntyre, if you will. It will be a cat-fight.
LikeLike
Scott Adams is on the right track but he’s got a too positive view of green energy.
If I was Trump, I’d probably take visitations from people like Al Gore, not because they could persuade me but so that it couldn’t be said I hadn’t listened.
LikeLike
“18 I know it sounds corny but we need visible science heroes that are seen to fight hard for the scientific process, truth and integrity.”
It doesn’t sound corny to me, but it does sound extremely ambitious coming as it does from a culture that has still to make amends for the revelations provided by the Climategates, for self-serving scaremongering (e.g. Tim Flannery’s various melodramas), for politicking in and around the IPCC (e.g. the Madrid machinations in 1995), for lobbyists in government-funded positions getting carried away with themselves (e.g. Vicky Pope on temperature rises, or David Viner on snowfall), and for a ‘still to be counted’ number of periods of silence such as the one mentioned by Steve McIntyre ( as in, see above, ‘Steve McIntyre: @dougmcneall so where were you when various climate scientists refused data? did you speak out?’).
LikeLiked by 2 people
They need to do formal SWOT analysis as I see no new ideas just rehashed ideas floated in the past. One of the things they need to come to grips with is that there is a growing resistance against government establishment authoritarianism like we’re seeing with the movement in the USA against police. When climate is presented in an authoritarian establishment “Climate Cops Consensus” approach like the UN, they are doomed to fail. The fact that they try to censor, label, dismiss those outside their Fraternal Order of “Consensus Climate Cops”, hurts them more than they seem to be aware and only feeds the anti-establishment authoritarianism movement.
They need to consider divesting themselves from the UN/IPCC as a first step if they want any chance at convincing most people they are not going to continue to be “Climate Cops. Next come up with ideas that make it easy for people to choose, not force, CO2 reduction in a way that empowers the individual. For example, there is great potential for a personal wind power system set to retail at roughly $750.00 that can generate 3-5kW of power. Providing such an individual option eliminates the need to convince people about CO2 as they will voluntarily choose (free will) to buy the system that will pay itself off and save them money on electricity and reduce use of high CO2 power. Relying on government solutions has failed and it’s time to shift to a new paradigm of thinking. You need to first destroy the old failed government mandated paradigm.
The key to rapid behavior change is to empower individuals not impose government “Climate Cop” enforcement.
LikeLike
I should have added this link to my earlier comment: http://www.bishop-hill.net/discussion/post/2101561
It contains a somewhat haphazard collection of instances or moral and/or intellectual poverty in the CO2 Alarm culture, and begins with these words:
“In my view, the alarm over CO2 and climate has not been raised by outstanding scientists, nor led and promoted by particularly impressive individuals. The climategate revelations have revealed many of the backroom boys as having both poor intellects and poor ethics. As have the various hockey-stick fiascos. The videos ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and ‘No Pressure’ span the showmanship, sleight of hand, contempt for humanity, and gross irresponsibility of the publicists who have seen advantage in ‘the cause’.”
Doug McNeall has set himself and his colleagues a mighty great challenge in his point 18. I wish them every success with it should it be accepted – it would improve the discussion enormously if they can find such heroes to clean out the stables in the CO2 Alarm Cause.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Priceless conversation between theresphysics and GWPF after Doug’s tweet no. 14.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Apparently all it takes is one, Jamie:
LikeLike
“Whether this fight will really happen remains to be seen.”
Oh, it’ll happen all right.
The battle lines are being drawn right at this moment.
LikeLike
They were being drawn and contested as early as 1988, catweazle.
LikeLike
“They were being drawn and contested as early as 1988, catweazle.”
Indeed they were, Gates.
And even then, I was informing anyone who was interested that AGW was as big a load of old donkey droppings as Anthropogenic Global Cooling that was all the rage amongst Apocalyptic bedwetters like you in the 1960s and 1970s.
LikeLike
Is Gates the present in-house AGW troll?
LikeLiked by 2 people
“1 So, they’re coming for the climate scientists.”
Barry Woods gently reminds Twitter residents …. https://www.barackobama.com/climate-change-deniers/#/
LikeLike
I bet they haven’t figured out we are about to cherry pick the sea level drop taking place in 2016.
LikeLiked by 1 person
> Is Gates the present in-house AGW troll?
I suppose I am to you whatever name is you wish to call me, Shub. I’m not entirely sure how that’s supposed to elevate the conversation in these parts, but hey, say what you feel, man.
LikeLike
Poor Doug.
LikeLiked by 2 people
> And even then, I was informing anyone who was interested that AGW was as big a load of old donkey droppings as Anthropogenic Global Cooling that was all the rage amongst Apocalyptic bedwetters like you in the 1960s and 1970s.
I must confess, catweazle: in the early 1970s, the only thing preventing me from wetting the bed was my diapers.
As for now, I’d rather be seen as an apocalyptic bedwetter and wrong because — to be perfectly honest — the falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus crap you’re peddling makes a big load of old donkey droppings look like a single mouse turd by comparison.
But hey, let’s look on the bright side. At the rate things are (not) going, in the four decades or so the actuaries tell me I have left, I’d say there’s a better than even chance for the C you lot insist on prepending — against protest — to AGW to be unambiguously demonstrated. Then I get to be the one to wag my finger and say, “See, we ‘alarmists’ said this might not be such a good idea”, just before I croak and thus leave the rest of the world to deal with the unmitigated excesses of my generation.
What a happy day that would be!
LikeLike
I believe, even though I’m not an expert, an endangerment finding can be easily reversed by a new EPA chief. This is not a matter of law but of regulatory discretion.
LikeLiked by 2 people
too funny.. an academic joins in… not really helping Doug, is she.
Doug is not keen…
LikeLike
brandonrgates says: 09 Dec 16 at 9:54 pm
“Then I get to be the one to wag my finger and say, “See, we ‘alarmists’ said this might not be such a good idea”, just before I croak and thus leave the rest of the world to deal with the unmitigated excesses of my generation. What a happy day that would be!”
Such a statement would be deemed, “evidence of clinical what?”, by any competent psychiatrist ?
LikeLiked by 1 person
They are so into their warmunist beliefs that they cannot comprehend simple truths. Their predictions have failed (children won’t know snow, ice free Arctic, drowning islands,…). Their science is provably dodgy or worse in many aspects beyond hockey sticks. Their tactics are transparently stupid, for example hyping El Nino temps without mentioning El Nino, then going into a dither when David Rose points out the inevitable down side of the event.Their behavior is appalling in at least two ways: evidenced by Climategate, and evidenced by treatment of Pielke, Curry, Ridley, Bengsstom,…
No amount of twitter pleading, optics, or better comms can fix those fact basics.
And now Deplorables have noticed and voted. Bad behavior eventually has real consequences. Eventually starts 20 Jan 2017.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Tell us Gates, what are your plans to deal with the possibility of the Earth being swallowed whole by a giant intergalactic star goat – which is about as likely as your AGW doom scenario?
LikeLike
‘Earth being swallowed whole by a giant intergalactic star goat’
The swallowed whole, is fine; the other end can get a bit messy!
LikeLiked by 1 person
> Such a statement would be deemed, “evidence of clinical what?”, by any competent psychiatrist ?
I’m not a psychiatrist, Will, not even a competent one. Are you?
However, I believe the answer you’re looking for is sociopathic.
LikeLike
> Tell us Gates, what are your plans to deal with the possibility of the Earth being swallowed whole by a giant intergalactic star goat – which is about as likely as your AGW doom scenario?
Tell me catweazle, how did you compute the odds of “my” (undefined, no less!) AGW Doom Scenario?
Please be sure to not abuse any Modulz when you answer.
LikeLike
> They are so into their warmunist beliefs that they cannot comprehend simple truths. Their predictions have failed (children won’t know snow, ice free Arctic, drowning islands,…).
I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed by any stretch, Rud. But I can comprehend the simple truth that Arrhenius correctly predicted the direction of temperature in response to a rise in CO2 back in 1896. For another example, I also comprehend the simple truth that the observed stratospheric cooling was also predicted in advance of that happening.
I’m even non-idiotic enough to know that not everyone who believes in AGW is playing with an entirely full deck, so we do see alarming stories about snow-free winter, ice-free Arctic (year round) and drowning islands as if those things are supposed to happen tomorrow. Which IS ridiculous, but fortunately for my position, NOT SUPPORTED by the majority of scientists in the field. In the case of Peter Wadhams, well here, just read the Tweets:
Harsh no? Sounds almost like something … you yourself would write.
What *you* don’t *seem* to get is that your silly cherry-picking on “failed predictions” of *second-order* effects does not challenge in any way the primary mechanism behind the first-order responses to GHG radiative forcing.
Or perhaps you aren’t ideologically-blinkered AND intelligent enough to understand all this, but simply choose to play dumb for whatever reason(s).
Something else, perhaps? Enquiring minds would like to know.
LikeLike
brandonrgates says: 10 Dec 16 at 2:26 am
(> They are so into their warmunist beliefs that they cannot comprehend simple truths. Their predictions have failed (children won’t know snow, ice free Arctic, drowning islands,…).
“I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed by any stretch, Rud. But I can comprehend the simple truth that Arrhenius correctly predicted the direction of temperature in response to a rise in CO2 back in 1896.”
Fat Svante Arrhenius, (chemist), did his work on temperature effects on chemical reaction rates. At the time he knew nothing of electromagnetic radiation, but was interested in the Prevost’s ‘luminous aether’ and ‘igneous fluid’. Svante predicted nothing correctly at all.
“For another example, I also comprehend the simple truth that the observed stratospheric cooling was also predicted in advance of that happening.”
Increasing stratospheric CO2 concentration does increase spontaneous thermal EM exit flux from the stratosphere. Increasing tropospheric CO2 from 180ppmv to 2000ppmv changes surface EM exit flux not at all, nor does such affect surface temperature. Increased biomass from increased atmospheric CO2 may, or may not, affect surface temperature in either direction. In any case your Climate Clowns have neither a viable story nor evidence to support their spouted political fantasy.
“of *second-order* effects does not challenge in any way the primary mechanism behind the first-order responses to GHG radiative forcing.”
There is absolutely no physical evidence of your ‘GHG radiative forcing’. All is but fantasy on only Gavin’s platstation-64!
LikeLiked by 1 person
> Fat Svante Arrhenius, (chemist), did his work on temperature effects on chemical reaction rates.
Ok sure, Will. Had he been thin, you’d be more disposed to believe him. Good to know.
> At the time he knew nothing of electromagnetic radiation, but was interested in the Prevost’s ‘luminous aether’ and ‘igneous fluid’.
And Newton knew nothing whatsoever of quantum mechanics or relativistic effects, yet managed to set out the basic rules of classical mechanics well enough to more or less properly describe the motions of the planets around the *Sun*. Some inexplicable errors were found in his predictions, however, which became more clear once Einstein published.
By the way, did you know that even today, the Standard Model of physics is not able to account for gravitational force?
> Svante predicted nothing correctly at all.
Yes, I see how your arguments above might tend to lead one to that conclusion.
Not.
Pop quiz: Which of these Arrhenius predictions failed?
1) That industrial activity would lead to rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
2) That surface temperature would rise in response to higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
3) That higher CO2 and temperature would likely be beneficial to agriculture.
4) That fluctuating CO2 levels are the primary driver of the ice age cycles.
That last one isn’t exactly a prediction … but go with it.
> Increasing stratospheric CO2 concentration does increase spontaneous thermal EM exit flux from the stratosphere. Increasing tropospheric CO2 from 180ppmv to 2000ppmv changes surface EM exit flux not at all, nor does such affect surface temperature.
That you think both of those things can be simultaneously true positively boggles my mind.
> There is absolutely no physical evidence of your ‘GHG radiative forcing’. All is but fantasy on only Gavin’s platstation-64!
Well it must be true since you’ve declared it so!
Actually, no. Observational data collected during the Pong Era disagree with you:
All that flux that would have gone through that big fat chunk in the 15 micron band has to be doing something somewhere. ‘Tis a mystery!
LikeLike
Srsly?
You’re not open to that, you venemous liar. You blocked me for trying to advise you about how your communication sounds to sane people.
Here’s the only concrete idea you need to know, Victor:
Forget ‘communicating science better.’ Try communicating better science.
Of course, that requires having something to communicate.
Which comes under the category of Your Problem.
(Not literally yours, of course—you’re not a scientist.)
LikeLiked by 2 people
First they came for the climate scientists, and I did nothing, because they never did a thing for me.
Then they came for the Climate Commissioners, and I did nothing, because my popcorn was still in the microwave.
Then they came for the climate psychologists, and I did nothing, because what right did I have to Insert myself Illegitimately?
Then they came for the climate ethicists, climate anthropologists, climate negotiators, climate linguists, climate entrepreneurs and climate railway engineers, and I finally decided enough was enough. It was time to do something.
So I got a couple of homeboys with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers and joined in.
LikeLiked by 5 people
brandonrgates says: 10 Dec 16 at 4:44 am
Actually, no. Observational data collected during the Pong Era disagree with you:
WUWT cartoon!!
All that flux that would have gone through that big fat chunk in the 15 micron band has to be doing something somewhere. ‘Tis a mystery!”
If you would attempt to think, from that cartoon, all EM nadir exitance to space in the 14 to 15 micron band originates at or near the tropopause from atmospheric CO2 at that tropopause temperature. In that same band any surface exit flux is limited by the opposing ‘field strength’, radiance of atmospheric CO2 within 2 meters of the surface. Such has not changed since atmospheric CO2 levels reached 165ppmv. Your GHG nonsense is but a complete scam for political and/or financial gain. The actual Earth EM surface exit flux is less than 10% of that claimed by cartoonist Kevin Trenberth!
The atmospheric effect in any other waveband can also be easily explained, with no misunderstanding, and no intentional fraud upon the government and citizens of the USA!
LikeLiked by 1 person
The arrogant aren’t open for advice. Who does he think he’s kidding? Hah, ‘concrete ideas….new…..could work’. I’ll bet that was just wonderful in the mirror. Can I get an autograph?
===========================
LikeLiked by 4 people
BRG: — That you think both of those things can be simultaneously true positively boggles my mind.—
Do you think your mode of posting here will help to unboggle your mind? I don’t ask to defend WJ’s point (or his own MO). I ask because you seem to share something with Doug McN. Namely, that his interventions don’t seem as much engineered to produce a conclusion to scientific debates (which seem transparently to me at least to be cover for political debates, whether he realises it or not) as much as entrench positions within it.
If you want to understand the mind that boggles your own, there are better ways of going about it. And you’re in the right place, after all, to interrogate those mind-boggling minds. You could develop a perspective by being a little more generous in your interpretation of others not so frequently posting snark and sarc in advance of having considered the point; not presupposing so much about what you’ve read; and not expecting others to find what you believe to be as compelling as you find it.
Doug N’s theses seem to come late. Climate campaigners, variously, have been obsessed with strategy. One of which has been to exclude criticism and debate. I’ve pointed out elsewhere that, in contrast to other political tendencies, environmentalism never developed a culture of debate. To many of us, it seems that tendency has been established within scientific institutions, the ‘ethics’ of which ought to commit them not to treat debate as merely a strategic opportunity, but at face value, nullius in verba.
If your intention is not to unboggle your mind, what is it? It can’t be to convince people here.
Doug N’s motivations are no more plain to me than people’s words here are to you. I find him impatient, rude, and not welcoming of problems with his argument being pointed out to him. Now he seems to have merely embedded himself in the problem, believing that climate scepticism is a thing — like environmentalism is a thing — rather than a disagreement with an argument. He becomes obsessed with strategy — ‘Understand the tactics’, he says, when he would make more progress by understanding the argument.
LikeLiked by 3 people
There’s an elephant in the room, and I’m sick of all this tiptoeing around it.
Look, the climate establishment doesn’t *want* to communicate science better. It doesn’t *intend* to communicate science better. It doesn’t stand to *gain* from communicating science better.
The climate establishment owes its existence to dishonest communication. Had everyone explained the science properly from the start, there would be no climate alarm industry because the public would understand what scientists understand: that there is zero basis to care about any of this crap.
Doug McNeall makes this bizarre point:
Riiiight. Because that’s what they’ve been doing wrong. Just pointing at data.
Oh, if only they’d remembered to accompany their data-pointing with some kind of propaganda, everything would be OK. Alas, they were too busy pointing at data to make up fairy tales about what the data portended.
Wait, I thought climate scientists were just pointing at data? What’s this about “narrative”?
And where should I apply if I want a degree in the Narrative Sciences? It sounds like the ideal job. Beats work, at any rate.
LikeLiked by 4 people
What I don’t understand about climate scientists is exactly what they want to achieve.
Is it to convince everyone that AGW is a threat to the survival of the human race?
Is it to convince everyone alive today to “decarbonise” their lifestyle and their countries economies?
Is it to save the planet for those born in 50 years time, after most of us are dead?
If the answer to any of these is yes, than as scientists they have a moral duty to propose a plan of exactly how we are supposed to survive if we stop burning anything at all? All combustion produces CO2.
Otherwise we should not take them too seriously when they stray into public debate.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Clive, did you ever read the paper by Amelia Sharman based on her interviews with climate sceptics and scientists? (I took part, and I know of a few others that did too).
She noted the tendency of climate researchers to explain their longstanding motivation (i.e. prior to their careers) as ‘wanting to make the world a better place’. To which there are two important consequences… Everyone who did anything evil said it was necessary to make the world a better place. And when you’ve only got a hammer…
Another scientist I’ve spoken to (who is quoted above, coincidentally) told me that he just wanted to do science, and didn’t want to get involved with the debate and politics, but conceded that this was a contradiction in environmental sciences. I’ve made similar points to climate researchers (one of whom left research to become a full time climate campaigner) that political life is rough and ready, and that if you want to change the world, you have no right to expect not to be treated like a politician. Similarly, I’ve known researchers in other fields who believe that their good faith, and ‘wanting to make the world a better place’ should be taken for granted. They seem unmoved by the consequences of appointing oneself the doer of good in the world, whether the world likes it or not.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I’ve found the paper referred to.
Click to access Working-Paper-191-Sharman-and-Howarth1.pdf
Note: CS = climate scientist; SV = sceptical voice.
—-
Two themes further characterise this youthful aspiration: a “romantic fascination” for the environment and a “heroic desire” to do good. CSs have experienced a journey with an early realisation of scepticism on the issue: “climate wasn’t really a subject, then” (CS7), “people’s attitudes were, ‘Why are you looking at this? It’s not a serious topic for study.’ Now it’s much more mainstream” (CS11). However, sustained curiosity drives this romantic fascination: “I looked at the data that he showed me and I thought wow that is amazing” (CS3). For some, this passion originated later on after a few years in the field, as the original choice to work in climate change resulting from the need to be employed: “I was looking for a job at that time” (CS7), “I probably stumbled into the area (…) [after] finishing my PhD I needed a job” (CS4), “I didn’t believe that this was going to be my life long career” (CS8). What emerges from the majority of the CSs narratives is that they perceive themselves as having a “heroic desire” to “do something that felt more tangibly useful to society” (CS10) or to “[work] on a problem that was an important problem for society” (CS2). In making these statements and creating their personal narratives, the CSs were critically self-reflect on the value of their work to society as well as how this fits in the growing international context: “you are surrounded by world leading staff in an issue that was starting to gain global prominence; one couldn’t help become interested in it” (CS4).
—-
Full disclosure, Sharman says this about SVs:
—-
The dominant theme underlying SVs self-perception is that of the “crusader”. The actor disinterestedly and independently investigates scientific claims made about climate change and finds them either incorrect or, more commonly, corrupt and self-serving. This critical analysis carried out as an impartial adult is thus clearly distinct from the rationales underpinning CSs more youthful motivations. The SV is fighting to expose climate change as the “biggest scandal in modern science” (SV5). The ideal of disinterested investigation based on evidence, unrelated to “motivation like a thick brown envelope from the oil industry” (SV9) is critical to this self-perception, even when the actor acknowledges that their view on climate policies influences their view on climate science. Seven SVs disagreed that personal values influenced their opinion such as SV11 who argued that “none really” of his opinion was shaped by personal values or motivations as “why would I want to be difficult? …I’m not looking for trouble”. However others were more critically self-reflective: “I am more interested in things that suggest it’s less of a problem than we are led to believe. So in terms of what I look at and tend to be interested in it certainly affects it in a way” (SV6). SV8 has “come to the conclusion that almost everyone’s opinion is mainly driven by personal traits…personal values and traits are very important in understanding how people perceive problems and risks”. SV10 argues that “I don’t think anyone’s interested in climate science per se… No-one cares. Only people care when it comes to policy”.
—-
LikeLiked by 3 people
Ben
Yet they’re shocked when they get a couple of abusive emails a year. Even a dead rat on the doorstep is enough to constitute a campaign against their science, at least within their hyperbole-prone, drama-queen minds.
Perhaps climate scientists should be afforded the same level of armed protection as the average politician. (If the truth is so precious that she must be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies, are liars not so precious that they must be surrounded by a bodyguard of bodyguards?)
From the upcoming Part Two of my Compleat Historie:
2010
Climatologist Will Steffen merely tells Prime Minister Gillard to “Make tax hurt”—yet within hours, skeptics have somehow politicised his science.
*****
Climate science is a revealing choice of careers for someone who admits a desire to “make the world a better place.” It suggests knowledge that there is something wrong with the kind of place the world is, and that the problem with the world has something to do with its climate—yet this is a “fact” known only to an elite handful of people who’ve already dedicated years of active publishing to the issue. How did a high-school graduate find out?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Brad — Climate science is a revealing choice of careers for someone who admits a desire to “make the world a better place.” It suggests knowledge that there is something wrong with the kind of place the world is,
Right! It’s as if the world wasn’t made a better place by mass transportation, industrial agriculture, and cheap energy. In the doing-good-for-the-world stakes, the evil oil tycoon has arguably done far and away more than all of climate science to create: equality, understanding and relationship between people, massive reduction in poverty, etc etc.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Brad, you’re right in saying that climate science won’t gain from better communication because it’s fundamentally flawed but they don’t know that. Seriously Brad, these people give little indication they see much wrong with their work. They’ve got science dysmorphic disorder. Or maybe it’s us. Either way we look at the same stuff and see very different things. THEY CAN’T GRASP THAT. They think that others don’t see the evidence at all and so pin their hopes that if they present it in another way, everyone will suddenly see what they see. Heck, they’ve been insulting the opposition for decades and it’s only just occurring to them, it might not be a wise tactic.
I do wonder if they’re on the autism spectrum. Clever people but very limited in the areas they’re interested in so make massive gaffs when they need to expand beyond their focus. Climate science is huge, even before you get to what we do about it. It urgently needs people who can look at it holistically and critically (apart from us). I’ll slap myself later for using too many buzz words but you get my drift.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Tiny — I do wonder if they’re on the autism spectrum. Clever people but very limited in the areas they’re interested in so make massive gaffs when they need to expand beyond their focus.
We should be careful to ensure we’re not too focused on one thing, too… Twitter informs that TV historian Dan, son of TV news anchor Jon Snow, is crowd-funding yet another ‘progressive’ and anti-Brexit movement — presumably because the funding from Goldman Sachs has dried up, or wasn’t enough, or something, and they don’t know how else to make news and history. I don’t point it out to say that there is a direct parallel (though there probably is), but that the autism/cognitive dissonance you rightly perceive might be owed to something lacking (or blocking) through broader society, such that, its absence seems to produce this disposition.
My suggestion is that the institutions, not their populations, are autistic. Or at least, the institution seems to make people autistic.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ben
Reading your quotes from the Sharman and Howarth paper
Click to access Working-Paper-191-Sharman-and-Howarth1.pdf
tend to confirm something I’ve been thinking for a long time: that our psychological motivations are fundamentally similar on both sides.
I’m certainly aware that my initial motivation to explore the “something wrong with the science” was a desire to avoid exploring far more personal and painful “something wrongs.” The fact that it wasn’t so much “something wrong with the science“ in my case, but “something wrong with the thinking of right-on educated left-leaning Guardian readers like myself” changes little to the motivation. Psychologically, it was a flight from reality (or “risk avoidance,” which is the same thing, seen positively.)
But the difference that explains our irreconcilable positions is this: our “something wrongs” are focussed on some specific manifestation of the real world: climate science; deluded upstart data crunchers and geography teachers; socialism; the Green Blob. Their “something wrong” is the state of the planet, as measured in the reflectivity of a molecule at a certain wavelength. The biggest risk I’m taking psychologically is that I end up with no friends, voting UKIP. They’re risking the annihilation of their grandchildren’s generation.
On the enforcers’ side, the “something wrong’” encompasses the whole planet, and therefore the personal demon they are struggling against encompasses their whole selves. Every flight to a new Green Conference is a flight from their ideal, a step towards perdition.
I think I’m wasting my time; they think they’re destroying the planet. What is there to discuss?
LikeLiked by 2 people
TinyCO2,
I agree with you that in many cases,
> it’s fundamentally flawed but they don’t know that. Seriously Brad, these people give little indication they see much wrong with their work. They’ve got science dysmorphic disorder.
I don’t see much “wrong” with their work either, except when it overreaches and is inevitably atomized by scrutineers.
It’s just that their work—when it’s done honestly—doesn’t amount to anything. It doesn’t mean anything to anyone, and it wouldn’t make any sane person lose a wink of sleep.
And I think 90% of them stop there. They don’t take the logical step of quitting their jobs—they just continue making cruisy money, paying off their mortgages, keeping their noses clean morally, but not speaking out against those who are less moral.
It’s the other 10% who are prepared to take things further and spin the meaningless “results” of climate science into a terrifying narrative with enough cliffhangers to allow sequels ad nauseam.
The “honest” 90% owe their jobs to the lies told by the 10%.
This, by the way, explains why the good ones never, ever, ever, ever throw the bad ones “under the bus.” They cannot afford to disavow the Michael Menn, because the Michael Menn keep the rest of them employed.
And it explains why we need to keep debunking the bunk. The bunk is “bulked out” by an entire publishing industry of insipid, airy-fairy wiffle-waffle. That filler material, which takes up 90% or so of climate academia, probably isn’t fraudulent at all, except in the sense that it’s an obscene waste of intellectual resources—as the whole planet would know if not for the lies told be the other 10%.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Tiny, this is also very interesting, and it’s a view I’ve intermittently subcsribed to myself:
It’s like the dress incident, only a billion times worse because everyone assumes the other side is just pretending not to see the same colors they see, and it tears families and friendships apart.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Climate scientists make a big deal about this need to ‘communicate’ their science to the public, in particular those who are sceptical of the endless list of alarmist claims which seemingly emanate directly from that science. But it’s really not that complicated when you remove all the accumulated dross and boil it down to its essence. All they need do is:
1. Provide a list of the incontrovertible empirical observational evidence that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 have altered the climate.
2. Provide a list of the controvertible empirical observational evidence that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 have altered the climate.
3. Provide a list of the corroborative non-empirical scientific evidence that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 have altered the climate.
4. Explain how 1., 2., & 3. combine to allow scientists to declare that it’s “extremely likely” that all of the rise in global mean surface temperature since 1950 is due to human-induced climate change.
5. Explain how 1., 2., & 3. combine to allow scientists to pronounce what they consider to be the “very likely” result of continued CO2 emissions according to different representative pathways.
End of. Simples!
LikeLiked by 1 person
6. Explain how 1., 2., 3., 4. & 5. combine to make the slightest difference to anybody’s life.
7. Provide a catalog of the scientific evidence showing that 6. is “the greatest moral and economic challenge since Ceauşescu.”
8. As for 7., but Idi Amin.
9. As for 8,. but Mussolini.
10. As for 9., but Hitler.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Geoff,
You’re probably right about the rank and file believers. But the believalist leadership, or the part of it that understands both The Science and science per se, knows perfectly well that there’s zero evidence for planetary peril. They can’t possibly be unaware, since it’s a simple matter of scientific literacy. (Here I’m probably disagreeing with TinyCO2—the DressGate allegory does *not* apply to climate scientists, only to their groupies.)
The fact that there is zero scientific grounds for alarm explains why Teh Scientists privately express a longing to find such evidence. If they’d actually found some, they’d have to start taking the possibility seriously, and would soon lose their appetite for geocide. But they haven’t, ever, so it remains in the realm of adolescent, fantasy-based frisson. The closeness of apocalypse is the ultimate ecodisiac until (and only until) someone loses an eye.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Ben, this is a ripper of a summary of Sharman et al.
I’m with SV5.
That’s thinking backwards. One’s view on climate science should inform one’s view on climate policies, not the other way round.
Well, thank god Sherman and Howarth are here to tell us that if you don’t realize you’re bass-ackwards-thinking, it’s only because you haven’t been critical enough in your self-reflection. Condescend much?
SV6 is an admitted denier, in the psychopathological sense (yes, Victor, that means an “ostrich”). If this confession is admissible, he or she is behaving counter-skeptically. A proper skeptic is more interested in information that, if true, would change his or her position.
I guess it was inevitable that irrationally confirmation-addicted people like SV6 would exist “on our side,” but I find it slightly surprising (and depressing) that they’re active in the debate itself—not just unbelievers, but “voices” of unbelief.
SV8 would be in good company among both the Dan Kahans and the Ben Piles of the world, but he or she doesn’t speak for my internal experience.
Hmm. It depends what “per se” means, per se. If SV5 is right, it’s pretty hard not to “care about climate science.”
I think SV5 is right.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think you are all missing (or forgetting) a trick. The number of “scientists” doing basic research that substantiates or refines CAGW is tiny.
The vast majority of climate “scientists” know only the basic mantra and take the output of models as an established (= consensual) fact. They, accepting the mantra, investigate its implications in terms of its impact on weather, the biosphere (aka the tomatosphere), and human activities. They get research funding by incorporating the mantra into their submissions. Their outputs are evaluated in terms of how supportive to the mantra they have been. When the mantra is directly attacked by outsiders, this hoard of acolytes rise to its defence regardless of their lack of competency. A little mantra knowledge goes a long way.
Most “denier” attacks focus on the products of acolyte research rather than upon our poor understanding of the climate itself. If such attacks are successful (very rare) the mantra itself remains inviolate.
Entire research empires depend directly upon the acceptance of the mantra, whole industries rely upon it, and politician’s street (and club) cred is built upon it.
The mantra has a layered defence. Climategate showed how even a frontal assault could be deflected and smothered. Trump seems to be assembling for another campaign, but is he sufficiently skilled in trench warfare?
LikeLiked by 4 people
I’m glad I didn’t get picked out of the SVs for the Brad treatment. Closest was SV8, say Brad. But no banana.
What struck me was how different us SVs are. And it continues:
But you won’t find me agreeing with Kahan on much. SV8, meanwhile, returns to Brad’s team…
— The notion of belief stands in contrast to the desired pre-eminence of traditional scientific enquiry where “the arbiter of all the arguments is empirical evidence” (SV8).–
— SV8 took recourse in the idea that evidence would be the key arbiter, only wanting to be vocal “in a measured way [as] we’re not campaigners…at the end of the day arguments will win”.–
The best policy is to read properly. SV8:
Reading properly requires the reader to understand what is descriptive and what is prescriptive.
No personal traits, no person, no science.
LikeLike
Alan, military tips would be appreciated!
But I’m a bit confused by the dichotomy you seem to be positing between CAGW substantiators and impacts researchers. Surely catastrophicity is a question of impacts, not something any model can tell us about one way or the other.
Well, Miranda Kerr gave it a try one time, but nobody was gullible enough to pay attention to a model.
LikeLike
Ben,
Thanks. This paper is very interesting because is shows that at least several CS chose their career more because they wanted to save the world, than understand atmospheric physics. An example of a dismissal of skeptics viewpoint is
“People don’t like being told that their actions are killing people in other parts of the world”.
I myself began looking into climate science because I wanted to understand the physics. I discovered that climate sensitivity is about 1C which you can calculate with a bit of effort using HITRAN line by line radiative transfer and a standard atmosphere. Or you can simply use MODTRAN.
Everything else in climate science depends on assumptions built into GCMs and so called Earth System Models, which by their nature are rather uncertain. Nor are models likely to get more accurate in the future, for the simple reason that there is a cartel of groups who agree not to criticise each other’s model. Worse still is that 99% of climate scientists do not really know the fine details (or the bugs) that lay hidden in the million lines of Fortran. We also know they and aerosol forcing are fine tuned to match past temperature data.
So all we really have to go on is the measured global temperature data. But here again this data was protected from scrutiny before climategate. Now we have at least got access to the ‘processed’ station data. This does allows you to check global temperature results, and I would say that Hadcrut4 is probably OK, but GISS and BEST are not. They boost apparent warming through adopting automatic ‘correction’ algorithms. This has the effect of making the past cooler and the future slightly warmer. Another trick is to use kriging to interpolate new data into places where you know there is likely to be more warming such as the Arctic. One reason the Arctic is so fruitful for warming anomalies is that it is a hell of a lot easier to get from -50C to -51C than from +33C to +34C.
However the consensus message remains that unless we take drastic action now to curb emissions we are all doomed. We must assume the worse because otherwise temperatures could be up to 6C warmer by 2100.
One of the most ludicrous statements of AR5 was that we there is a maximum amount of carbon that can be admitted by man, and that we have already spent half the budget. This is to drill home the ‘keep it in the ground’ message. The ‘science’ basis for this is all hidden inside modles
This result assumes 1) Carbon sinks will saturate 2) No uncertainty on ECS 3) Ignores the well known logarithmic increase of CO2 forcing.
The fact that many climate scientists are driven by a ‘desire to save the world’, leads me to believe that the underlying modelling could itself well be suspect.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ben, good point—although expecting careful reading in the internet age bespeaks staggering naivete on someone’s part! Ahem!
(I’ve downloaded the paper and, yes, SV8’s full remarks are more nuanced than I gave him/her credit for.)
Also, I wasn’t lumping you in with Kahan generally. Just to avoid any possible confusion or offence, all I meant was that you have in common a focus on the priority of personal beliefs and values.
This is difficult to deny. And while you’re proving me wrong, you may as well stick it in further still and say: even the conscientious separation of personal values from assessment of Teh Evidence (as professed by seven of the SVs, and myself) is itself a personal value! D’oh
LikeLike
It’s hard to work out how young/old you are Brad, from your photo with the funny glasses, but hiding behind your membership of the first generation of Digital Natives doesn’t cut much ice with the 8 bit generation. You’ll be asking for climate data to be presented in XBox format soon. Or worse on an ‘app’.
LikeLiked by 2 people
It’s Doug McNeall who will find it hardest to stick to Doug McNeall’s edicts.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Doug was an academic consultant on the ambitious BBC attempt to explain Climate Change by Numbers, which was supposed to convince us of the validity of the science of man-made climate change by communicating that science clearly and unequivocally via three magical numbers. It was a valiant attempt but of course it failed ultimately, because the ‘evidence’ it assembled was unconvincing to moderately well informed sceptics and probably a little confusing to complete climate novices.
http://climatecontrarian.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/climate-change-by-numbers-response-pt-1.html
These tweets from Doug nearly 2 years on reflect his continuing desire to communicate complex climate science to the public, tinged with more than a hint of anxiety as regards uncertain future funding of that ‘complex’ climate science.
LikeLiked by 3 people
And this is the fig leaf…
—
Science is not now and never has been ‘under attack’ from climate deniers, sceptics, delayers, lukewarmers…
It has, however, been colonised by environmentalists and other political ideologues.
LikeLiked by 3 people
“. . . . thinking of how to defend the scientific process in the face of sustained attack.”
By whom? Not the semi-mythical climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, big oil/tobacco shills etc., all conveniently lumped together under the title of ‘science deniers’ by the likes of Lew and Oreskes.
Definitely not. These people, even if they can be said to exist in the sense that the ‘defenders of science’ imagine them to, play no part whatsoever in the scientific process. The integrity of that particular process is being eaten away from within, the victim of vested interests, the need for instant results, the requirement to maintain funding, the inexorable march towards increasingly politically-driven research, or even research dictated by ‘fashionable’ trends.
http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/believe-it-or-not-most-published-research-findings-are-probably-false
Fine if Doug is wanting to defend the scientific process from these attacks upon its integrity, but I suspect his concern is rather less genuinely targeted.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Brad.
“But I’m a bit confused by the dichotomy you seem to be positing between CAGW substantiators and impacts researchers”.
Without the “C” in “CAGW” there would be no interest. Climate science would be a backwater, so researchers into the climate (as opposed to researchers into what a changed climate would impact) have felt the need to ramp up the importance of their chosen field. Once the worst case scenarios were modelled, the impacts of CAGW could safely be handed over to the emerging scientific-social “science”-industrial complex. The emergent mantra was further enhanced by its “saving the world” accoutrement, which further bolstered its defences.
Normally the military advice is to strike at the heart of your opponent. Some years ago there was a promising development in which some prominent physicists started to examine and strongly criticize the underpinnings of the basic science. Unfortunately this was a piecemeal effort and seems to have subsided. The solar physicists (one of whom I count as a friend) mostly exist in splendid isolation, ignoring the climate physicist upstarts.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Doug McNeall’s full of shit:
No he’s not. As Ben points out, to state the obvious, “the scientific process” has never been at any risk from deniers, debaters or delayers. The ONLY damage that’s been done to it in living memory is by Oreskes and her epigones, who’ve waged a concerted campaign to dumb down scientific reasoning to a level so low, it even insults the intelligence of climate scientists.
It would take McNeall all of five minutes to work this out if he wanted to.
LikeLike
Alan, yep, I agree with (and have made) your “backwater” point*—see upthread—I’m just having trouble isolating the exact insertion point of the “C” into the narrative. It seems to have been bootstrapped into existence, because no [pseudo] Evidence™ could exist for it without the climate-hyphenated impacts-science complex, yet (as you say) nobody in their right mind would have funded such a mass academic wank unless they were already convinced AGW was C. Which came first, the louse or the egg?
*To quote my Compleat Historie of the Past,
1988: The Science Awakens
The global warming movement is born when a scientist and his politician friend sneak into a government building and set the thermostat to a balance between truth and effectiveness. The following day Dr James Hansen urges sweaty lawmakers to act on the 170-year-old process of “global warming,” calling any delay “criminal.”
Within a year, climatology—an academic backwater where data comes to die—will become the sexiest discipline ever. The field also goes by the name climate science, leading to speculation that it was once one of the sciences.
…
Bewildered academics are now dragged, kicking and screaming, into the political spotlight. In time they will learn to suffer celebrity in silence.
LikeLiked by 2 people
As Brad rightly mentions, an additional line of attack on the scientific processes arises via left wing fanatics’ invention of a far more inclusive and socially just ‘post-colonial’ science whose purpose is to challenge the egregious and politically incorrect focus upon empiricism and hard data which the old colonial-based science promoted.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Brad”climatology—an academic backwater where data comes to die—will become the sexiest discipline ever.”
1. I don’t believe climatology really existed other than as a descriptive discipline. CRU was truly innovative when it was founded (and fulfilled UEA’s motto “Do Different” ). It certainly fulfilled its promise to do science differently.
2. Data didn’t come to die, it came to be reenergized and moulded to fit a predetermined destiny. Centuries of historical study were cast aside with distain. Cod physics reigned supreme.
3. Climategate demonstrated that there was no discipline, and (as far as I’m aware) no sex whatsoever.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Brad — Doug McNeall’s full of shit:—
It’s a trick pulled by many others, too. Gavin Schmidt in particular, who ought to know better. Chris Mooney was another, but who simply couldn’t help himself. The trick is to pretend that criticism of increasingly intransigent institutional Science is an attack on the scientific method. In that sense, there is a war on ‘Science’ — to the extent that its institutions have been colonised — but not on the scientific method. If it were otherwise, there would be no emphasis on science at all from ‘deniers’. Even the far reaches of alt-physics is still emphasis on science, even if it’s wrong. To crudely parallel alt-physics at worst with another debate: ID is a concession to science, not an antiscience rebuttal of evolution.
The irony of it is precisely as you point out; those who scream most loudly about ‘attacks on science’ are those most responsible for squandering its authority on political campaigns. It risks turning everyone into a HIV-AIDS denying, anti-vax, anti-GM, Moon-landing-hoax-believing nutter, with good cause. If it wants the authority, it is for science to police itself, and to suffer hostile criticism and challenge from without its ranks. If it cannot do those simple things, why should it have any? It cannot trade on merely its cultural legacy — having helped to transform modern life for the better — forever. Especially so since its current emphasis — determined by political agendas, in fact — seems to be on rolling back on the developments it can take credit for.
McNeall can enumerate the tactics and counter-strategies until he’s blue in the face. He will not make any progress until he looks in the mirror.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Alan,
Why should I make my history available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?
LikeLiked by 2 people
So basically what Ben’s saying is that science, which has retreated into an infantile safe space in recent decades, needs to grow up, man up, take hard knocks on the nose and start wearing big boys’ pants again. Can’t say I disagree with that.
Therein lies another problem. Many scientists would disagree with that, not merely because they object to the conclusion that science has somehow become ‘soft’ and developed a hypoallergenic response to criticism, but also because the metaphors used are overtly ‘sexist’!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Brad. I must admit with great shame that I have not made your history available to myself. However, having lived through much of this history cheek by jowl, as it were, I find other people’s histories somewhat divergent. I prefer to rely upon my fast-failing memory of CRU and its denizens. As to finding something wrong with your history, I wouldn’t trifle with the ephemeral. Separating the serious from the “humorous” also is a difficult task on an empty stomach.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Brad Keyes: So I got a couple of homeboys with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers and joined in.”
Quote of the decade!
Save some for me!
PLEASE!!!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks Catweazle—but it’s been around since Medieval times, when Man first got Medieval on his fellow Man’s ass! Of course, I was just being tongue-in-cheek; Alan’s cheek-to-jowl familiarity with history overrides my ass. Oops, wrong thread. I’ll butt out now.
LikeLike
“Half of the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.”
Cuts both ways, of course….
LikeLike
Brad. Sorry, came over too aggressive. Have since read part 1 of your history and smiled a lot. My only critique -it does omit consideration of the early CRU experience, under Lamb, when climate science was seeking a role. Its funding by the US, then and later, deserves further scrutiny and doubtless is a barrel of laughs (and before my cheek-by-jowlness).
LikeLike
> Do you think your mode of posting here will help to unboggle your mind?
What I think, Ben, is that no matter what “mode” I engage here, so long as I persist making arguments with which you disagree I will be wrong in your eyes by default.
I don’t come to CliScep or other contrarian blogs to unboggle my mind. For that, I go to literature. One utility I do obtain from talking to those with whom literature does not agree is that they often raise questions which I had not myself considered. I then go to literature and attempt to answer them for myself from what I find there. Sometimes I share what I find, sometimes not.
LikeLike
> All combustion produces CO2.
Indeed, Clive. It’s also true that combustion is not the only means of releasing energy to do useful work.
> Otherwise we should not take them too seriously when they stray into public debate.
I would say that those who propose humanity cannot thrive without burning sequestered carbon shouldn’t be taken too seriously when they stray into public “debate”. There’s a finite amount of the stuff available for our species to use, and we’re using it up several orders of magnitude faster than it formed to begin with.
Put that in your moral duties pipe and smoke it.
LikeLike
—… so long as I persist making arguments with which you disagree I will be wrong in your eyes by default.—
Well, if you were to persist making arguments with which I disagree, then you will be wrong ‘in my eyes’ and I could say so with no fault on my behalf. So, unless there’s a typo in your comment, I’m not sure what you’re driving at.
What would reflect badly on me would be if I secretly agreed with your arguments but said you were wrong, regardless. But you would need a mind probe to establish that what I said was not so, if I hadn’t contradicted myself.
Here’s another curious thing…
— One utility I do obtain from talking to those with whom literature does not agree is that they often raise questions which I had not myself considered. I then go to literature and attempt to answer them for myself from what I find there. —
Why would you go to the literature to find answers to what you already knew the literature disagrees with?
The logic of your account of your MO seems to be lacking…
— I don’t come to CliScep or other contrarian blogs to unboggle my mind.—
Indeed, it seems your mind boggled itself before it got here. What confounds you, I suggest, is that you seem to presuppose the wrongness of those you ‘engage’. You appear to divide the debate into people who agree and disagree with the ‘literature’ before you’ve really established their position with respect to (which?) ‘literature’. This is the symptom of the climate debate, I’ve argued here and elsewhere at length: binary, opposing categories — scientists vs deniers — precede the debate. Ditto, the politics precedes the science. You’re not alone.
If you really come here and to other ‘contrarian’ blogs merely in the spirit of finding questions the answer to which you did not yet have, you would not exclaim your own mind’s boggledness: it would be precisely what you wanted… a result… now off to the literature to compare, or at least ask for clarity, to establish the question. You detect a contradiction in a comment here — and it may indeed be a contradiction. But you don’t seem to present it in the manner in we’d expect such a Scholastic defence of Orthodoxy, but in very much the tone of a bitter pissing contest, the point of which is not obvious, nor in the least engaging. Indeed, it is disruptive.
You say you don’t want to unboggle your mind, yet you tell us that your mind is boggled. And your comments, their volume, and their meandering from the topic do seem to reflect frustration, reflecting considerable emotional investment. Must your search for questions you’re not yet exposed to be so long-winded? Must your mission dominate discussion here? Must your inquisition and sharing of the wisdom you discover in the ‘literature’ be so hostile? Must your desire for questions make you wander so far from the topic at hand? Maybe your search isn’t made in quite such good faith as you claim.
LikeLike
Brandon says:
“I would say that those who propose humanity cannot thrive without burning sequestered carbon shouldn’t be taken too seriously when they stray into public “debate”.”
It’s a matter of timescale, which should be obvious to anybody who strays into the public debate. Obviously, at some point in our future, we may well possess the technology to sustain populations of billions on earth without crudely burning up stuff. Despite the ludicrous assurances of greenies however, we don’t possess that technology now in any viable economic or engineering form. So, if we want to maintain our own lifestyles, if we want to ensure that the Third World progresses out of widespread poverty, if we want to ensure that vulnerable people in our country do not freeze to death in winter because they cannot afford to pay the going rate for ‘clean green’ energy, then we have to keep burning stuff for a while yet, despite the supposed ‘climate risks’
If we do decide to decarbonise western industries and infrastructure tomorrow and the rest of the world next week, lots of people will die as a direct consequence.
Put that in your moral duties pipe and smoke it.
LikeLiked by 3 people
> If you would attempt to think, from that cartoon, all EM nadir exitance to space in the 14 to 15 micron band originates at or near the tropopause from atmospheric CO2 at that tropopause temperature.
… I would be ignorant of what scientists working in this field say actually happens, and would be in need of further education, wouldn’t I, Will.
My understanding (which is neither perfect nor exhaustive) is that they say photons in that band (or any band, for that matter) pop out over a range of altitudes. However, all the EM sensor can record is wavelength-specific intensity. Everything which follows are calculations converting that data into brightness temperature as a function of radiance. That brightness temperature *can* be mapped to altitude in the troposphere, but doing so is not meant to imply that ALL photons in a given waveband are emitted from that “exact” altitude.
If you really think otherwise, you would do well to show me a primary literature or texbook citation which says such a silly thing. And no, that doesn’t mean quoting me the first year texts which approach this problem from the conceptual blackbody or greybody simplifications they go through before delving into required further complexity.
> In that same band any surface exit flux is limited by the opposing ‘field strength’, radiance of atmospheric CO2 within 2 meters of the surface.
Ok, all else remaining equal, what do you say happens to that opposing field strength when the number of absorbers/emitters in the 15 micron band varies?
When you answer, take care that it is consistent with what you said above about what occurs in the stratosphere for a similar variation.
LikeLike
The title: “Doug McNeall on climate scicomm”
BRG: “Ok, all else remaining equal, what do you say happens to that opposing field strength when the number of absorbers/emitters in the 15 micron band varies?”
Climate debates descend to ‘science’. This is a two-way street, of course — I don’t blame BRG for it entirely.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Brandon, apart from your accepting the chemical falsehood that all combustion produces carbon dioxide, why should humanity voluntarily give up the most versatile, energy dense, and useful energy sources on the planet all because of an unproven and unlikely hypothesis? Why should we imperil our economies and all they have endowed us with? Why should we insist others less fortunate than us never achieve our high standards of living by denying them access to sequestered carbon fuels?
I should also remind you that your steak Dianne (or nut cutlet) also is sequestered carbon that your body treats as a fuel and ends up as that dreadful endangerment carbon dioxide.
I would in the past (before I kicked the horrid habit) have enjoyed combusting even more combustible carbon in my moral pipe.
LikeLike
> So, unless there’s a typo in your comment, I’m not sure what you’re driving at.
That I’m not easily moved to behave differently in the face of “tone policing” or other “suggestions” along the lines of “Hey Gates, if you only talked to ‘us’ in some other manner, we might actually listen to you.”
You are ultimately responsible for what you choose to accept or reject as a valid argument or belief, Ben. Not me, nor anyone else. You, and you alone are in control of your own brain and what you choose to do with it.
> Why would you go to the literature to find answers to what you already knew the literature disagrees with?
I repeat with my own emphasis to highlight the clause which you glossed over: One utility I do obtain from talking to those with whom literature does not agree is that they often raise questions which I had not myself considered. I then go to literature and attempt to answer them for myself from what I find there.
“with whom literature does not agree” is the *general* case, “questions which I had not myself considered” is the *specific* case.
I don’t claim 100% knowledge of what is written in literature. I don’t even claim perfect understanding of what I’ve read.
> Indeed, it seems your mind boggled itself before it got here. What confounds you, I suggest, is that you seem to presuppose the wrongness of those you ‘engage’.
Being human, obviously I do that. I can even point to specific examples of me doing it in my lengthy conversation with M2 in this comment thread.
What remains to be seen is whether I’ve misjudged Will’s statements about what happens when CO2 mixing ratio increases in that 2m layer of atmosphere just above the surface. Getting there requires discussing the *specifics* of that argument, and need not entail the distractions of sweeping statements about my psychology.
I’m NOT the atmosphere. How my brain works has no effect on what it really does. Do you really think otherwise?
I presume the answer to that question is, “No”.
LikeLike
> It’s a matter of timescale, which should be obvious to anybody who strays into the public debate.
And it is bleedin’ obvious to me as well, having often strayed into the public debate, Jaime.
> Obviously, at some point in our future, we may well possess the technology to sustain populations of billions on earth without crudely burning up stuff.
I argue that we already have that technology today: nuclear fission. Not to mention solar, wind and geothermal power. There are pros and cons to each, considering both political and economic factors. The question is one of collective will to *decide* when where and how to deploy those things, and how much time and money it will require to do it, what the rates of return on the capital investment will be, the effects on the broad economy, etc.
Do you know with *certainty* the answers to those questions of timing and finance? I don’t. How could I? How could *anybody*?
> If we do decide to decarbonise western industries and infrastructure tomorrow and the rest of the world next week, lots of people will die as a direct consequence.
That IS obvious, because the only way to decarbonize that quickly is to stop burning fossil fuels altogether and get by on presently installed non-emitting generation. Which would be utterly and stupidly self-defeating.
> Put that in your moral duties pipe and smoke it.
I have, several times, long before I washed up on this particular shore. Now how about you put that strawman you’ve just built in your pipe and smoke it? We *might* then be able to have an intelligent conversation about my *actual* position, not the imaginary one you’ve created on my behalf for the express purpose of pointing out how ridiculous it is.
LikeLike
brandongates: ‘…they often raise questions which I had not myself considered. I then go to literature and attempt to answer them for myself from what I find there.’
Here’s one for you. Why does the anthropological/psychological literature of the ‘climate debate’ (Sharman & Howarth, the Nick Pidgeon group, sometimes Lewandowsky) treat ‘climate scientists’ and ‘climate sceptics’ as equivalents – as two sides of the same coin? Surely the more logical equivalence is between ‘climate sceptics’ and ‘climate boosters’ or whatever you want to call them – the bloggers and activists who, like the ‘sceptics’, aren’t professional climate change scientists but spend a lot of time banging on about the science of climate change and what it means for how we should live our lives.
I’ve always been a bit baffled by that. Perhaps you could visit the literature and report back.
(This dodgy sceptic/scientist equivalence is ubiquitous at booster blogs. I’m sure all these academic anthropologists/psychologists haven’t grabbed it from such blogs without pausing for thought. Probably.)
LikeLike
“There’s a finite amount of the stuff available for our species to use”
Heh, you’re not only a CAGW man, you’re a ‘Peak Oiler’ too. I thought they’d all died out.
Merely counting known reserves of ‘conventional’ fossil fuels there are sufficient for centuries – some say millennia. Old oil fields are being re-analysed by running toe old seismographic tapes through modern computer analysis software and revealing far greater reserves than were originally suspected, and in conjunction with modern steerable drilling technology these reserves are now available.
Then there are the ‘unconventional’ reserves, which are orders of magnitude larger than the ‘conventional’ reserves.
These include but are not limited to methane clathrates on the sea bed, a Japanese pilot study has proved the feasibility of extracting this resource, and preparations are ongoing for a full industrial operation. The quantities of methane clathrates on the ocean bed are effectively unimaginable, thousands of years’ worth.
There is in-situ coal gasification, geological investigation reveals that this technique can be applied to trillions of tons of coal in the North Sea off the North-East coast of the British Isles and a similar quantity of the south-West coast of Wales. Again, on a global scale, an unimaginable quantity of available energy.
We have barely scratched the surface of the energy available through hydraulic fracture, there are many decades’ worth of gas and oil in the US, and a huge amount in the UK. Now there is a new extraction technique to harvest a substance known as kerogen – interestingly, first extracted in Scotland in the 19th century when Scotland was the World’s largest exporter of petrochemicals, the light oil from which seriously reduced the profitability of the whaling industry and went a good way to preventing the extermination of whales.
The new kerogen extraction method utilises the same steerable drilling technology as hydraulic fracture, but uses a microwave heating technique to extract the kerogen, thus not requiring the injection of vast quantities of water and is expected to be cheaper and more convenient than hydraulic fracture. The Green River field alone appears to contain enough reserves to keep the USA going for over a century.
So all in all, there are vast quantities of fossil reserves available, far more than are necessary to keep us going until we create a genuinely cheaper and more convenient source of energy than fossil fuels.
As an aside, why is it that the likes of you are so generally oblivious of the incredible ingenuity of the human race and appear to regard every minor obstacle to our progress as some sort of insuperable, catastrophic barrier to our further progress? You don’t appear entirely unintelligent, so why do you deny our history of overcoming every problem that has beset us, and so desperately undervalue the massive progress that the human race has made on every front since we discovered the versatility of fossil fuels – appearing in fact to regard them as a curse rather than a blessing?
As an engineer (you know, one of those uncouth individuals with dirt under their fingernails who are in fact responsible for the actual physical implementation of every human invention from the wheel to the Mars rover and who I doubt you as an “intellectual” would bother to piss on if we were on fire) I find your attitude perplexing in the extreme.
LikeLike
> apart from your accepting the chemical falsehood that all combustion produces carbon dioxide […]
Where exactly did I do that, Alan? I burned my share of steel wool, magnesium strips and hydrogen gas in various high school science labs. I didn’t for one instant think that CO2 was a reaction product of those exothermic oxidations. I’m also sufficiently educated in chemistry to know that oxygen isn’t the only agent capable of driving a combustive oxidation reaction. Frex, the halogens are very very greedy electron snatchers.
> why should humanity voluntarily give up the most versatile, energy dense, and useful energy sources on the planet all because of an unproven and unlikely hypothesis?
Why should humanity listen to your unsubstantiated and subjective *opinion* that AGW is “unproven” and “unlikely”? Or artificially limit itself to decarbonization *solely* in consideration of the *potential* AND *uncertain* hazards and risks of sustained emissions?
For me, one of those OTHER considerations is that we’re gonna run out of the stuff eventually. Another one is that combustion particulates aren’t exactly good for human health. Another consideration is reduction of foreign entanglements in competition for increasingly demanded and increasingly scarce resources.
I’ve been thinking along these lines ever since the oil crises of the 1970s … well before Gorebull Warming was a Thing.
> I should also remind you that your steak Dianne (or nut cutlet) also is sequestered carbon that your body treats as a fuel and ends up as that dreadful endangerment carbon dioxide.
Yes of course it is sequestered carbon. But if that tasty cow is eating biomass grown and processed without de-sequestering any fossilized carbon, then the whole cycle is near enough to carbon neutrality for me to not fret about.
LikeLike
> Heh, you’re not only a CAGW man, you’re a ‘Peak Oiler’ too. I thought they’d all died out.
Heh, you’re someone who likes to toss labels around without bothering to define them, or ask questions to see if they actually apply, catweazel. I didn’t think they’d all died out, there are several of the same type on this thread alone.
What I’m NOT is a deluded Cornucopian who thinks that we’re not exhausting fossil reserves faster than their natural replacement rate. Soooo … we’re gonna run out.
When? I don’t know. The other thing I don’t know is how long it will take to transition to non-fossil sources of energy.
> Merely counting known reserves of ‘conventional’ fossil fuels there are sufficient for centuries – some say millennia.
That includes coal and gas I’m guessing. Who are these “some” people, and where are they talking about millennia?
> These include but are not limited to methane clathrates on the sea bed, a Japanese pilot study has proved the feasibility of extracting this resource, and preparations are ongoing for a full industrial operation.
And you think scraping methane ice off the seabed in bulk is more feasible than solar and wind … why? Intermittence? Ok, nuclear power? Hydro? Geothermal?
Does it occur to you that the reason we’re not already doing that is because, oh, I don’t know, wind, solar, hydro and nuclear are [drumroll] PRESENTLY MORE FEASIBLE????
Oh … my aching sides.
LikeLike
> As an aside, why is it that the likes of you are so generally oblivious of the incredible ingenuity of the human race and appear to regard every minor obstacle to our progress as some sort of insuperable, catastrophic barrier to our further progress?
ROFL catweazel!
> As an engineer (you know, one of those uncouth individuals with dirt under their fingernails who are in fact responsible for the actual physical implementation of every human invention from the wheel to the Mars rover and who I doubt you as an “intellectual” would bother to piss on if we were on fire) I find your attitude perplexing in the extreme.
Yes, it really stymies me that *some* (but far and away not all) of you engineering types simply cannot fathom a way to get non-carbon energy technologies to work without sending the entire planet back to the stone age.
Talk about tripping over minor obstacles as some sort of of insuperable, catastrophic barrier to our further progress.
Oy vey, you’re a laugh a minute.
LikeLike
BRG: — That I’m not easily moved to behave differently in the face of “tone policing” or other “suggestions” along the lines of “Hey Gates, if you only talked to ‘us’ in some other manner, we might actually listen to you.” —
Is ‘tone policing’ something you experience often? I would guess that it is. But if it were just tone at issue, perhaps it would be tolerable. It’s also volume, and other things.
If you care to see the top of the page you’ll find the subject is Doug McNeall, who has laid out a series of things counterposed to climate scepticism need to absorb to defeat us. Underneath DM’s points that are comments from Paul, and then it gets discussed by others. Your tone, indeed, your MO, as with other Consensus Enforcers, would thus seem to be very much the topic. You’re an object lesson. You should heed Doug’s words: he’s one of the authors of ‘The Literature’.
— You, and you alone are in control of your own brain and what you choose to do with it.—
Indeed, and you are in control of what you post here. I’m explaining to you how it reflects badly on you. You can choose to ignore it, and see if that better serves your stated objectives, but that carries the consequence, doesn’t it, of toxifying the discussion. Perhaps that is of no consequence to a pseudonym. But it’s surely of consequence to your cause. Which we must again question: why would you post in such an antagonistic way? Why spend so much of your time here, and elsewhere, causing so much acrimony? Troll ‘Lulz’? Or does your invective help save the planet?
— “with whom literature does not agree” is the *general* case, “questions which I had not myself considered” is the *specific* case. —
You weren’t talking about the specific case; you were explaining your intentions here on this site, not in any *particular* ‘engagement’.
—What remains to be seen is whether I’ve misjudged Will’s statements about what happens when CO2 mixing ratio increases in that 2m layer of atmosphere just above the surface.—
An odd point, for a conversation the topic of which was the proposition that individuals whose tendency is hostility, obtuseness and intransigence can nonetheless be reasoned with. I said not. I think the cliffhanger bears my point out. The suspense is not killing anybody.
— Getting there requires discussing the *specifics* of that argument, and need not entail the distractions of sweeping statements about my psychology. —
I am not the slightest interested in your psychology. What I can see is yet another disruptive player, who seems not content for there to be a conversation on the Internet left untouched by his tendency’s boring deviations. The pathology of which is about as interesting as its product. We don’t need to know what drives the pub bore, or the prick at the party; we just need him to move on. When he refuses either to budge or to change his behaviour, we can be all the more sure that he is as we called him.
LikeLiked by 1 person
—Oy vey, you’re a laugh a minute. —
And you seem to want to spend all your minutes here.
LikeLike
> Is ‘tone policing’ something you experience often? I would guess that it is.
You would guess correctly, Ben. Typically by special snowflakes who have not figured out the folly of hurling brickbats from glazed shelters.
> You should heed Doug’s words: he’s one of the authors of ‘The Literature’.
Negative. In this context, I read primary literature to better understand how physical reality works, not for marching orders on how to deal with fellow human beings.
> Indeed, and you are in control of what you post here. I’m explaining to you how it reflects badly on you.
And I call BS because your views on climate science were set long before I got here. You think it’s a fraud, farce and utterly false. Therefore your silly attempts to maneuver me into some sort of docile and polite behaviour as beneficial to my own reputation management REEKS of disingenuity.
More than that, look at the question your argument raises. What kind of soft-headed muddled-up nitwit actually thinks that knowledge can be obtained without appealing to theory and evidence, but instead to the “tone” of random people on the Internet discussing their own views of reality?
Do you *really* want to go there, Ben?
LikeLike
“Does it occur to you that the reason we’re not already doing that is because, oh, I don’t know, wind, solar, hydro and nuclear are [drumroll] PRESENTLY MORE FEASIBLE????”
No it doesn’t, because they clearly aren’t.
Obviously it hasn’t occurred to you, but the reason we are not YET utilising all those brand new extraction techniques I mentioned is that they are all new technologies, just like shale was before it came on stream big time and dealt the final death blow to the ‘Peak Oil’ whiners, and the prices are going to drop like a brick down a well, just as they have done with shale products as the technology matured. And I assure you, notwithstanding how much you bedwetters hoot and screech and impotently wave your little arms and stamp your tiny feet, WE ARE GOING TO EXTRACT AND BURN THAT LOVELY FOSSIL FUEL. All the technologies I mentioned are either being piloted or – in the case of methane clathrates – beyond that and preparing for industrial production right now. Because cheap, reliable energy is a necessity for our civilisation, and the “unreliables” are clearly a blind alley.
And I also assure you, IT WILL NOT CAUSE US TO REVERT TO THE STONE AGE.
As to: “Yes, it really stymies me that *some* (but far and away not all) of you engineering types simply cannot fathom a way to get non-carbon energy technologies to work without sending the entire planet back to the stone age.”, clearly you didn’t bother to read this bit: “far more than are necessary to keep us going until we create a genuinely cheaper and more convenient source of energy than fossil fuels”.
“Oy vey, you’re a laugh a minute.”
No Gates, that’s you, you sneering, scientifically illiterate, scared, patronising, condescending little pseudo-intellectual SJW snowflake.
Tell us, don’t you ever get tired of sleeping on a rubber sheet?
The times they are a’changing, Gates. You lot had a chance, you were too overcome with your self-important, self-congratulatory BS to make a go of it. Now we Deplorables are back, so suck it up, buttercup.
LikeLike
> Here’s one for you. Why does the anthropological/psychological literature of the ‘climate debate’ (Sharman & Howarth, the Nick Pidgeon group, sometimes Lewandowsky) treat ‘climate scientists’ and ‘climate sceptics’ as equivalents – as two sides of the same coin?
Dunno, Vinny. I don’t read that sort of literature on a regular basis. The physical science is my main interest.
That said, anthropology and psychology do interest me, but I prefer to read about it *outside* the context of the Global Warming debate since researcher bias in soft sciences is bad enough without adding the additional potential biases of a highly contentious policy debate on top of it.
LikeLike
BRG,
“I argue that we already have that technology today: nuclear fission. Not to mention solar, wind and geothermal power.”
There’s not enough uranium to power the entire planet with zero carbon energy for more than 5o years or so, perhaps even less, quite apart from the political infeasibility of constructing nuclear reactors across the planet. Thorium reactors are a more promising alternative but the technology is in its infancy. Still the problem of the storage of very large amounts of radioactive waste materials though.
Wind and solar? To keep the lights on and power industry, transport and domestic demand right across the globe? That was what I meant when I said “despite the ludicrous assurances of greenies”. It’s nuts, and always will be. So you see we don’t currently have the technology available to rapidly decarbonise energy production globally, and that is what this is all about – zero carbon energy in 20 or 30 years.
You basically conceded the rest of my points and then bizarrely proceeded to accuse me of constructing a strawman argument, presumably because you conceded those points! But it wasn’t a strawman. It was you, was it not, who said:
“I would say that those who propose humanity cannot thrive without burning sequestered carbon shouldn’t be taken too seriously when they stray into public “debate”.
This naturally implies that you consider a decarbonised global economy to be feasible soon, not in many years time, and that those arguing against it should not be taken seriously. So my response to your comment was relevant and to the point and not a strawman, i.e. you built an actual strawman by inventing an imaginary strawman supposedly constructed by me! Give it up Brandon, if you can’t debate honestly.
LikeLike
BRG —Typically by special snowflakes who have not figured out the folly of hurling brickbats from glazed shelters.—
— I read primary literature to better understand how physical reality works, not for marching orders on how to deal with fellow human beings. —
Really? You seem awfully upset that your efforts to ‘better understand how physical reality works’ and to communicate it are frustrated. I’m only trying to explain to you how you might be more effective. As Doug points out, it may be a battle that you’re losing, if you haven’t already lost.
— And I call BS because your views on climate science were set long before I got here. You think it’s a fraud, farce and utterly false. —
Curious. I don’t remember ever saying any of those things. You can check if you want: all my writing is at http://www.climate-resistance.org .
All you’ve done is made my point for me: you presuppose what other people’s arguments are before you’ve even read what they have to say.
— What kind of soft-headed muddled-up nitwit actually thinks that knowledge can be obtained without appealing to theory and evidence, but instead to the “tone” of random people on the Internet discussing their own views of reality? —
I don’t eschew theory and evidence; I say your tone — amongst other of your traits — precludes a meaningful discussion. It is disruptive of other conversations, and it gets in the way of your own stated objectives (though we have no reason to believe that your stated objectives are what you really intend). I’ve had — as have people here had — plenty of productive discussions with people I disagree with, on and offline. It only seems to be a certain type of Consensus Enforcer that renders impossible conversations across differences of perspective. They seem very keen, for instance, to tell me that I deny science. But they seem unable to tell me which science I have denied. That’s ‘interesting’, isn’t it. It speaks to a phenomenon: an irrational internalisation of complex, technical, abstract debate, but given a superficial object: ‘science’, that turns out to be hollow. Or it might just speak to the fact of a bunch of bored blowhards trolling the web.
LikeLike
> No it doesn’t, because they clearly aren’t.
How much power is being generated by “conventional” fossil fuels?
How much power is being generated by nuclear power and renewables like wind, solar and hydro?
How much power is being generated by methane clathrates?
Which of the above technologies are seeing the most rapid growth?
These are maths questions. There really should be no catweazling away from them.
LikeLike
> I’m only trying to explain to you how you might be more effective.
*Why* would you want to do that, Ben? Not because I’m such an apparently nice guy.
> I don’t remember ever saying any of those things.
Fair enough. To help me (and any interested others) have a better idea what you really think, perhaps you could answer a few questions:
1) Surface temperature record. Credible or not? Do you consider the adjustments politically motivated, or within bounds of necessity to obtain a reliable record? Something else? Do you feel that the adjustments are adequately documented?
2) Greenhouse effect. Do you think it’s real or not? Do you accept the canonical estimate that without *any* greenhouse gasses (inc. water vapour) in the atmosphere that the planet surface would be approximately 30 K cooler on average?
3) What is your opinion of the AR5 attribution statement?
4) What are your thoughts on the utility of climate models?
5) What are your thoughts on using climate models in conjunction with economic models to estimate the external costs of burning fossil fuels? To calculate the “social cost of carbon”?
> All you’ve done is made my point for me: you presuppose what other people’s arguments are before you’ve even read what they have to say.
Who doesn’t do that? I’ve told you once already that I can point to specific instances where I did that in my recent conversation with M2. You’re telling me something that is not only a fundamental human behaviour, but something I openly self-recognize.
> I don’t eschew theory and evidence; I say your tone — amongst other of your traits — precludes a meaningful discussion.
What else can I say but this: grow thicker skin, or modulate your own “tone” with me and see how I respond. I could care less which you choose because your “tone” has f*ckall of a bearing on the veracity of your arguments, or lack thereof.
As well: if my psychology and personality quirks are the most important thing you can think of to talk about with me, you give me far too much credit for my place in the grand scheme of things.
Cheers.
LikeLike
BRG — *Why* would you want to do that, Ben?
Because I want this site to be productive, and to produce interesting exchanges — joint ideas under construction, as it says at the top. Exchanges of the kind you, and some of your associates, are bringing here can be found at almost every other blog.
— To help me (and any interested others) have a better idea what you really think, perhaps you could answer a few questions: —
No thanks, BRG. The subject here is Doug McNeall’s intervention, and, since you put yourself up, how your MO reflects the same problems he suffers from. People who want to know what I think, and where I’m coming from can read my blog, as was linked to, and my comments and post here. There is plenty to read, and I’ll not be shoved into your preferred coordinates, thanks.
— What else can I say but this: grow thicker skin, or modulate your own “tone” with me and see how I respond. I could care less which you choose because your “tone” has f*ckall of a bearing on the veracity of your arguments, or lack thereof. —
It’s not my tone, nor my demenour which is under question here — it is yours, which reflects the predominant attitude of the climate debate. A debate, not coincidentally, you are losing control of. The thickest skin in the world won’t prevent the torrent of comments from you dominating and deviating the discussions here, just as earlier Consensus Enforcer’s contributions here outnumbered many of the contributions from authors, within weeks, and on every other blog on the subject. Consensus Enforcers are prolific, but activity != intelligence.
— if my psychology and personality quirks are the most important thing you can think of to talk about with me, you give me far too much credit for my place in the grand scheme of things. —
I don’t credit you with much more than simple trolling, and I don’t have any interest in talking to you, or in your psychology, as I said. It’s others that I would rather discuss things with, but which you, as other Consensus Enforcers here, and on other blogs, prevent.
LikeLiked by 1 person
> There’s not enough uranium to power the entire planet with zero carbon energy for more than 5o years or so, perhaps even less […]
According to whom, Jaime? Is that known reserves only?
> […] quite apart from the political infeasibility of constructing nuclear reactors across the planet.
I myself wouldn’t be comfortable switching the entirety of Africa over to nukes anytime in the near future. Here in the States, thanks to Greenpeace et al., it’s ridiculously difficult to get a new plant built, but it can be done.
> Thorium reactors are a more promising alternative but the technology is in its infancy. Still the problem of the storage of very large amounts of radioactive waste materials though.
That appears to me to be more of a political problem than a technological one, at least here in the States. As catweazle thought to lecture me on recently … engineers are pretty clever people, and technology … advances.
Look around you. So much of what you see would have been considered impossible by someone living a century ago, beginning with the device you’re using to communicate with me right now. Rocket ships to low-earth orbit? Fantasies of science fiction writers. Men actually walking on the Moon? Someone’s been reading too much Jules Verne.
> Wind and solar? To keep the lights on and power industry, transport and domestic demand right across the globe? That was what I meant when I said “despite the ludicrous assurances of greenies”. It’s nuts, and always will be.
Basically what you’re saying is that when we run out of easy to burn carbon fuels, we’re screwed.
Well guess what. I find your lack of faith in human ingenuity disturbing.
> This naturally implies that you consider a decarbonised global economy to be feasible soon, not in many years time […]
I deliberately did NOT put a timeframe on it, and *explicitly* said I do not know how much time it will take. Do you have a reading comprehension problem or something, or did you simply miss it? Something else?
> Give it up Brandon, if you can’t debate honestly.
How about you go back upthread and point to where I said anything remotely close to “a decarbonised global economy [is] feasible soon”, and then … maybe … I’ll listen to your lecture about how to have an honest debate.
LikeLike
> Because I want this site to be productive, and to produce interesting exchanges — joint ideas under construction, as it says at the top.
Ah, ok. So all that stuff about *me* being more effective was … not really about that, Ben? As if that wasn’t already abundantly clear to me.
Anywho. I’d say you’ve already obtained your goal. I’ve had many interesting exchanges with people on this blog since its inception. Most of those have not been with you.
Do with that feedback what you will.
> — To help me (and any interested others) have a better idea what you really think, perhaps you could answer a few questions: —
> No thanks, BRG.
Well then don’t be surprised if I keep on inferring things about what you really think from the things you don’t say and/or refuse to answer directly when asked. Evasion tends to look suspicious, don’t you think? Yes, I’m pretty sure you do.
> It’s not my tone, nor my demenour which is under question here — it is yours, which reflects the predominant attitude of the climate debate.
I retain my right as a sovereign human being to be interested in my own topics, ask my own questions, and not have them dictated to me by others. Surely someone who claims to be sceptical such as yourself wouldn’t disagree with that attitude. I mean, what is being an anti-Consensus Enforcer about if it isn’t standing on the principle of independent thinking?
> A debate, not coincidentally, you are losing control of.
ROFL! Again, you give me FAR too much importance in the context of the AGW “debate”. I’m a nobody with no direct influence on ANY of it.
LikeLike
BRG — Ah, ok. So all that stuff about *me* being more effective was … not really about that, Ben? —
On the contrary. If you could muster basic communication skills, it would be a win-win. It should be obvious to anyone with basic communication skills. But the point isn’t really to ‘win’ as much as disrupt, is it?
Well then don’t be surprised if I keep on inferring things about what you really think
I know a deviation when I see it. ‘What do you think about X’ is the inversion of ‘oh look — a squirrel’, isn’t it. Ask me about Qs 1-5 in discussions that pertain to Qs 1-5.
— I retain my right as a sovereign human being to be interested in my own topics, ask my own questions, and not have them dictated to me by others. —
I’m not sure I understand any conception of the ‘sovereign human being’ extends to being a prick at parties, a pub bore, or a renegade Consensus Enforcer. It’s not your blog. Moreover, I don’t know of any formulation of the ‘sovereign human being’ that would preclude one from saying to another, ‘you’re being a prick’ at a party, or ‘shut up, you’re the pub bore’.
—I mean, what is being an anti-Consensus Enforcer about if it isn’t standing on the principle of independent thinking? —
You’re not an independent thinker. And it seems to me that your against independent thinking and discussion — hence you aim to disrupt it, that being the Consensus Enforcer’s mission.
—Again, you give me FAR too much importance in the context of the AGW “debate”. —
In English, the second person singular and second person plural are the same: you and you. As I explained, I don’t think you (singular) are much more than a troll.
LikeLike
brandonrgates says: 10 Dec 16 at 7:28 pm
“I don’t come to CliScep or other contrarian blogs to unboggle my mind. For that, I go to literature. One utility I do obtain from talking to those with whom literature does not agree is that they often raise questions which I had not myself considered. I then go to literature and attempt to answer them for myself from what I find there. Sometimes I share what I find, sometimes not.”
Just what ‘literature’ do you use to answer questions? Why should ‘literature’ provide any answers at all? All such can only have ‘opinion’ of others, likely less skilled in any subject than yourself.” Any answers can come only from your own personal effort. What effort at learning have you ever demonstrated?
Where specifically in my posts here of 10 Dec 16 a 3:51 am and 10 Dec 16 a 5:51 am do you find any technical error? Have you even considered what I wrote? You seem to attack anything that does not agree with the obscene opinion of Ken Rice!
brandonrgates says: 10 Dec 16 at 9:07 pm
wj(> If you would attempt to think, from that cartoon, all EM nadir exitance to space in the 14 to 15 micron band originates at or near the tropopause from atmospheric CO2 at that tropopause temperature.)
“… I would be ignorant of what scientists working in this field say actually happens, and would be in need of further education, wouldn’t I, Will.”
Can you name even on individual in the field of meteorology (this field) that has any education or experience in electromagnetic field theory or thermal electromagnetic flux propagation through this Earth’s atmosphere?
“My understanding (which is neither perfect nor exhaustive) is that they say photons in that band (or any band, for that matter) pop out over a range of altitudes.”
Do you have any possible definition or description of what you may mean by your use of the word “photon”, that pop out over a range of altitudes? Technically a ‘photon’ is but a conceptual gauge boson that mediates the distribution of EM quanta between absorption, reflection, and transmission at any point in spacetime.
“However, all the EM sensor can record is wavelength-specific intensity. Everything which follows are calculations converting that data into brightness temperature as a function of radiance.”
And the meaning of ‘brightness temperature’ is what? Such is an implied temperature of just what?
“That brightness temperature *can* be mapped to altitude in the troposphere, but doing so is not meant to imply that ALL photons in a given waveband are emitted from that “exact” altitude.”
Indeed!— Note I used “at or near the the tropopause” a region of the atmosphere with an ‘optical thickness’ of 3-4, in that band, all at the same temperature, giving a single temperature emissivity greater than 97%. In that CO2 emission band the tropopause is the surface\volume from which such spontaneous thermal EM exitance to space originates.
“If you really think otherwise, you would do well to show me a primary literature or textbook citation which says such a silly thing.”
Why would such be written and so published! Such would take years of careful measurement to even begin to understand! The military of all the major forces on this Earth understand this very well and why they do not try to access\observe surface targets from space in the 14-15 micron band from space!!
wj(> In that same band any surface exit flux is limited by the opposing ‘field strength’, radiance of atmospheric CO2 within 2 meters of the surface.)
“Ok, all else remaining equal, what do you say happens to that opposing field strength when the number of absorbers/emitters in the 15 micron band varies?”
In that 14-15 micron band at the surface and 340ppmv CO2 an ‘optical depth’ (37% transmissivity), is measured to be approximately 70 cm. Such OD increases to about 700 meters at pressure of 20 kPA.
“When you answer, take care that it is consistent with what you said above about what occurs in the stratosphere for a similar variation.”
The whole 40 km of stratosphere attenuates flux amplitude modulation in the 14-15 micron band by less than 9%! This does not mean that stratospheric CO2 molecules cannot dispatch excess stratospheric entropy to space via spontaneous EM exitance at whatever wavelengths available.
LikeLike
What a treasure trove of nonsense. How many bad ideas do these people have? Are they really so isolated from reality as those tweets make out? 4 random answers to his “points”, “ideas” or whatever.
Climate skeptics make people feel smart, informed and discoverers of truth. We need to do that more.
— How will they do that when they don’t allow their believers to think for themselves?
We shouldn’t be focusing on slagging off individuals either, it just hardens people’s group identity and feelings of rejection.
— I don’t feel rejected. I’m not even right wing, so no group identity here either. Catastrophists focus on doom provokes pessimism leading to despair. Especially since their “climate solutions” are so bad. I feel sold out, not rejected.
We knew they would hype global cooling after a big ENSO.
— Before that catastrophists hyped global warming. For 30 years.
We need to be better at explaining what climate models are and why they are useful.
— That’s the last thing you need. Climate models are the alarmists’ weakest argument. Every time they say “climate model” I say “you’re not a proper scientist are you”? Not when you elevate your models above the data and evidence.
LikeLike
> I know a deviation when I see it.
Funny. I know confusion between objective and subjective when I see it as well, Ben.
> As I explained, I don’t think you (singular) are much more than a troll.
Number one rule of Trolls on the Innern00bs is TO NOT FEED THEM. Yet, here you are shoveling crap at me as fast as your fingers can type it.
There’s an alternative “definition” of Troll: someone who makes *on topic* but inconvenient arguments which cannot be easily refuted. So people take the easy out and resort to the ad hom by making vague and sweeping assertions about the alleged “Troll’s” psychology, personality, communication skills. Maybe they apply labels such as “renegade Consensus Enforcer” — which tickles me giddy … how can I be Enforcing a *Consensus* and be a renegade?! — or other pejoratives like “bed-wetter”, “warmunist”, “alarmist” etc.
The interesting thing about this behaviour when people do it? They come off looking like the very thing about which they’re complaining: boorish pricks who would bore your arse to tears over every last glorious pint of bitter in the pub if you’d let them.
***
Perhaps the most amusing thing for me about this episode with you is … I probably agree with you about odious behaviour of Consensus Enforcers more than you imagine. You’re just so busy falling all over yourself in an attempt to paint me out as one that I’m rather disinclined to find something upon which we might agree upon concerning that topic.
But here, I’ll throw you a bone. How Unc. Lew’s papers are used as polemics to tar *everyone* as a conspiracy idealist or a crank-magnetized wingnut who dares claim to be a climate sceptic. It’s stupidly wrong behaviour, not just because it’s bad PR but because I don’t think it’s right to apply those kind of stereotypes to an entire class of people.
LikeLike
brandonrgates says: 10 Dec 16 at 9:35 pm
“What remains to be seen is whether I’ve misjudged Will’s statements about what happens when CO2 mixing ratio increases in that 2m layer of atmosphere just above the surface. Getting there requires discussing the *specifics* of that argument, and need not entail the distractions of sweeping statements about my psychology.”
When the surface optical depth (OD) is but 70 cm with no measurable radiance variance, the doubling of atmospheric CO2 to 700ppmv would reduce that OD to 55 cm, still with no measurable radiance variance; indeed the whole exercise is ‘what is wrong with his psychology’?
“I’m NOT the atmosphere. How my brain works has no effect on what it really does. Do you really think otherwise? I presume the answer to that question is, “No”.”
First needs establishment of the some alleged ‘brain’! From your posts here, you appear as some Internet BOT with agenda. Does the concept of ‘atmosphere’ have any relevance to your mechanizations?
LikeLike
brandonrgates says: 11 Dec 16 at 3:01 am
“But here, I’ll throw you a bone. How Unc. Lew’s papers are used as polemics to tar *everyone* as a conspiracy idealist or a crank-magnetized wingnut who dares claim to be a climate sceptic. It’s stupidly wrong behaviour, not just because it’s bad PR but because I don’t think it’s right to apply those kind of stereotypes to an entire class of people.”
brandonrgates, It is you, not others, that promote “an entire class of people.”, How obscene!
LikeLike
> When the surface optical depth (OD) is but 70 cm with no measurable radiance variance, the doubling of atmospheric CO2 to 700ppmv would reduce that OD to 55 cm, still with no measurable radiance variance; indeed the whole exercise is ‘what is wrong with his psychology’?
Oh come off it, Will. All else being equal making the path length shorter means you get the same amount of energy being absorbed in a smaller volume. Which is going to cause temperature to rise. Which means radiative flux will increase.
LikeLike
brandonrgates says: 11 Dec 16 at 4:45 am
wj (> When the surface optical depth (OD) is but 70 cm with no measurable radiance variance, the doubling of atmospheric CO2 to 700ppmv would reduce that OD to 55 cm, still with no measurable radiance variance; indeed the whole exercise is ‘what is wrong with his psychology’?”)
“Oh come off it, Will. All else being equal making the path length shorter means you get the same amount of energy being absorbed in a smaller volume. Which is going to cause temperature to rise. Which means radiative flux will increase.”
What total insane BS!! There is no radiative absorption whatsoever, as there is only a reduction in emitted flux from the body with higher radiance, due to any opposing radiance at any frequency! …brandonrgates you again demonstrate that you refuse to learn, or even consider any of the known physical science of EM field theory, and thermal EM flux transfer between isolated masses. This is with or without some intervening dispersive mass such as an atmosphere. You simply insist that the physical must only be inside Gavin’s Playstation-64!!
LikeLike
> What total insane BS!! There is no radiative absorption whatsoever […]
Wherein you rewrite physics which is on the order of a century old, Will. Here, go argue with Einstein, Planck and Boltzmann.
The good part begins around hereish: §2. Quantum Theory and Radiation
Good night, and good luck.
LikeLike
brandonrgates says: 11 Dec 16 at 6:01 am
wj(> What total insane BS!! There is no radiative absorption whatsoever […]”)
“Wherein you rewrite physics which is on the order of a century old, Will. Here, go argue with Einstein, Planck and Boltzmann. The good part begins around hereish: §2. Quantum Theory and Radiation. Good night, and good luck.”
Indeed!! So much for insane fantasy\theory!! Please describe any evidence whatsoever of spontaneous thermal flux emission that is not completely limited in magnitude of such emission, by that opposing radiance (field strength), the second term within correct mathematical parenthesis of the renowned Stefan- Boltzmann equation. You can claim opposing thermal radiative flux all you want. You can never demonstrate that such two way flux is ever created! You fail!!!
LikeLike
> You can claim opposing thermal radiative flux all you want. You can never demonstrate that such two way flux is ever created!
Go get one of these, Will. Point it any direction you like. Report back when finished.
LikeLike
brandonrgates says: 11 Dec 16 at 7:35 am
wj(> You can claim opposing thermal radiative flux all you want. You can never demonstrate that such two way flux is ever created!)
“Go get one of these, Will. Point it any direction you like. Report back when finished.”
I used to make those things! TI, Flir systems, Honeywell, Singer, Raytheon.
The childish idiot persists in his idiocy! Just what is the difference in ‘radiance’ a potential for power transfer, — and some actual thermal EM power transfer, between surfaces? What are the differences in measurement techniques? What are the difficulties? Have you ever tried to measure anything? Just what in your Mommy’s basement have you ever tried to measure?
LikeLike
> I used to make those things!
Great, Will. Then you should know that things like, oh, the atmosphere radiate EM omnidirectionally as a function of the fourth power of their temperature. Which means it’s going to be constantly beaming EM sideways, upward toward outer space and … downward toward the surface.
Which makes this argument of yours …
… physically impossible. The ONLY way for it to be true would be if either the atmosphere or surface had no temperature, both physical impossibilities in and of themselves.
No need for measurements to establish this point because these are fundamental laws of the known physical universe.
> The childish idiot persists in his idiocy!
I know, it’s terrible. I really should stop reading first year undergraduate physics.
***
Nice “tone”, by the way. When I grow up, I want to be just as polite, considered and erudite as you are.
LikeLike
@BRANDONRGATES
Here is the effective emission height for IR photons in the 16 micron CO2 band. Effective height in this context is defined as the height above which >50% of photons emitted by CO2 molecules pass directly out to space. Note that the central line is way up in the stratosphere which produces an interesting effect. This line actually causes a cooling effect on the troposphere as CO2 increases. The reason for this is that temperature rises with height in the stratosphere so emission actually increases. You can see that perfectly in your Nimbus IR spectrum.
Unfortunately for the rest of nature, hominoids discovered how to make fire about a million years ago. We have become the dominant species for this reason and have caused huge environmental damage as a result. There is not much hope of stopping people burning things. Modern society should concentrate on developing nuclear energy for electricity production, and stop wasting money and resources on 17th century renewable energy technology.
LikeLike
BRG — There’s an alternative “definition” of Troll: someone who makes *on topic* but inconvenient arguments which cannot be easily refuted. —
Well that is easily refuted. If your comments were on topic — and weren’t so wildly off-topic — it would be harder to say that the inconvenience was caused by the question. Ditto, for ‘do not feed the troll’ — you post comments in such volume, no matter what you are fed.
— So people take the easy out and resort to the ad hom by making vague and sweeping assertions about the alleged “Troll’s” psychology, personality, communication skills. —
I’ve not commented on your psychology. I’ve pointed out to you exactly, not vaguely, what the issue with your MO here is. You’ve chosen to ignore it. I’ve asked you what your motivation is, and why you can adjust your manner. Your answer: nobody tells me what to do, I play by my own rules.
This gives us the opportunity to discuss you, as a phenomenon, similar to that which occurs at every point on the web where there is a risk that discussion about the climate might open up and be productive.
—‘how can I be Enforcing a *Consensus* and be a renegade?! —
‘Renegade’ in the senses of not/no longer being part of an official body, and departing from social conventions. Perhaps a better word would have been vigilante. Vigilantes seemingly uphold the law, but are not part of law and act outside it. I’ve pointed out, ditto, that Consensus Enforcers, in their enforcement, depart from the consensus, the point being obedience and deference to authority, not observance.
— The interesting thing about this behaviour when people do it? They come off looking like the very thing about which they’re complaining: boorish pricks who would bore your arse to tears over every last glorious pint of bitter in the pub if you’d let them. —
Well, then, if you’re not enjoying it, leave or change your MO.
— Perhaps the most amusing thing for me about this episode with you is … I probably agree with you about odious behaviour of Consensus Enforcers more than you imagine. —
And yet you chose to change the topic, to pick a fight on physics/chemistry. You’ve chosen to dominate two discussions here. I don’t need to imagine anything about it; you’ve had the opportunity to discuss Consensus Enforcement — and the shame of psychopathologising political opponents — in the other thread. You chose instead to change the subject. If you really agreed with me about Enforcers, being chums with them nonetheless, you’d be in a position to shed some light. But you wanted to talk about Svente, instead. Anything but the subject at hand.
However, I’ll take your word for it. Would you like me to start a thread on climate science, in which you could argue with others here who seem also to want to discuss the finer points of physics? Quid pro quo: I’ll do this, starting with my answers to your questions, above, on the condition you agree that you won’t derail other threads here past, present, or future.
Deal?
LikeLiked by 1 person
On the subject of science communications, some here might appreciate a new direction taken by some at CBC. 22 Minutes is a comedy news program at CBC, and their video is inspiring. There are also some reports about PM Trudeau’s climate politics.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/canada-announces-new-climate-change-goal-increase-meetings-by-88-by-the-year-2019/
LikeLiked by 2 people
> And yet you chose to change the topic, to pick a fight on physics/chemistry.
Sorry Ben, catweazle666 threw down that gauntlet when he wrote to me: “Tell us Gates, what are your plans to deal with the possibility of the Earth being swallowed whole by a giant intergalactic star goat – which is about as likely as your AGW doom scenario?”
Followed by Rud Istvan when he wrote to the general audience: “They are so into their warmunist beliefs that they cannot comprehend simple truths. Their predictions have failed (children won’t know snow, ice free Arctic, drowning islands,…).”
> Would you like me to start a thread on climate science, in which you could argue with others here who seem also to want to discuss the finer points of physics? Quid pro quo: I’ll do this, starting with my answers to your questions, above, on the condition you agree that you won’t derail other threads here past, present, or future.
The reason I appear to be “dominating” this thread is because so many of your regulars responded to my few initial and short *on topic* posts in this thread. You rightly recognize that they’re not disinterested in discussing physics/chemistry, so, a separate thread devoted to that does make sense to me.
However, I’m not going to agree to a quid pro quo which constrains me from responding to what *other* people have introduced into the discussion.
Why?
That feels like debate suppression to me. Your blog, your rules of course, but I’m just sayin’.
LikeLike
I saw Ken Rice’s as usual vague thoughts on this and it just reinforced again what I think is the real problem for these guys. They are viewed as quite political based in many cases on ample evidence, in Rice’s case he tries to hide the history of his anonymous blogging on politics for example. For others like Mann, he has written books making his political motivations clear.
Those who are the most motivated to “communicate” are like the Skeptical Science crew also the most political and emotional in their response to disagreements. The problem here is the same as in science generally with the replication crisis. There is natural selection in climate communication, with the most shameless and political and angry surviving and the more careful and scientific and gentlemanly being squeezed out. I have always felt that a better job of self-policing by climate scientists would go a long way. That’s hard when you have in your ranks Mann and other bad actors.
LikeLiked by 2 people
> If you really agreed with me about Enforcers, being chums with them nonetheless, you’d be in a position to shed some light.
Chums, Ben? Here’s a not-so-random list of people:
John Cook
Dana Nuccitelli
George Monbiot
Naomi Oreskes
Jon Krosnick
Stephan Lewandowsky
I’ve never breathed a word online or face to face with any of them, with the exception of Nuccitelli:
Dana didn’t respond, however a few otters on my “side” offered some supportive remarks.
John Hartz appears in that thread, so speaking of, I’ve commented at him several times. This one is particularly memorable for me:
Then further down in the middle of a logorrhean rant to Willard I set the hook:
He thanked me for my concerns: You’re welcome.
Then:
That’s when I got pissed off:
Eli Rabett and I had an illuminating discussion on the finer differences between “counting coup” and “trash talking”. Anders said something about there being a “time and place” for things, i.e, THE TOPIC is Richard Tol, not John Hartz.
I thought it was a rather good row myself. In retrospect, I might have done well to not have backed off so quickly. I doubt very much you’d disagree with me.
***
I don’t like spending much time in my own “echo chamber”, and I don’t. I’ve spent the vast majority of my 3+ year avocation as an online AGW hawk going into “harm’s way”. It started on William Briggs’ blog. Then I did a stint at Anthony Watts’ joint. For a few weeks I did some time at Lucia Liljegren’s Blackboard. Most recently it’s been Judith Curry’s place, with a few forays into this forum.
When I do dip into “friendly territory”, I do no small amount of venting my spleen about the crap I read on contrarian blogs, both in the main articles and in the comment sections. Or as Teh Rabett would say, “talk trash”. However, reaffirming my own biases and prejudices gets old quickly. The few examples of pushback I list above are NOT isolated incidents. It just isn’t in my nature to NOT call out things about which I disagree.
So I reject the notion that any light I can shed is due to my chumminess with people you call “Consensus Enforcers”. If I have any real insight at all (and I have serious doubts about that), I’d chalk it more up to me being both intensely cynical AND sceptical … because that is how I was raised to view the world. Not just parts of it, *all* of it.
You suggested I read your Climate Resistance blog, yes? I have been. This post jumped out at me (my emphasis):
Teh Goggle doesn’t return a hit on that quote attributable to anyone, and I was unsuccessful suggesting variations on the theme. Doesn’t matter, the words stand on their own, and they stand well.
“Consensus Enforcer” is a label, same as “Climate Denier” is. Just as I was WRONG to presume by your associations that you think AGW is “a fraud, farce and utterly false”, my own “chums” are not the full extent of me, what I think about the AGW debate, or even remotely close to the sum total of how I think about my *whole* person.
My main contention here is: it seems sufficient that I believe the consensus view that global warming is happening, and that we are mostly responsible for it since the mid-20th century for that label to be applied to me. Tone trolling me on top of that is just the icing on the cake.
You might do well to look at what your fans here say about my *person* when I attack their “off topic” *arguments* … and note that I almost always do it *without* using convenient labels or other forms of loaded rhetoric. Further note that I use specific examples (as I have done above) and quote people directly … so that there is NO question about that which I am critiquing.
And yeah, lest there be any dispute … that previous paragraph is me concern trolling my arse off.
Cheers.
LikeLike
Boring Random Gossip
LikeLiked by 2 people
British Racing Green, Jamie.
P.S.: What a lovely illustration of my central point. Thank you for obliging.
LikeLike
You guys are being too hard on Brandon. There is an opportunity for dialogue with him I think.
LikeLike
There is an opportunity for dialogue with him I think.
He has turned down the opportunity.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Brandon, you really need to step back from this whole climate thing before your health is irredeemably damaged. You can’t take the weight of the whole world on your shoulders without eventually being crushed both physically and mentally and, I fear, that that process is happening to you now or, at least, is pretty darned close.
Over the years, I’ve seen many highly intelligent and focussed individuals being brought to their knees thro’ an almost obsessive pursuit of interests close to their hearts and I fear that you may well fall into this situation. I’m not trying to score any points or attack you with this advice but I’ve read and enjoyed your posts for a number of years now and really do feel that you have to take a break for a few months at least to recharge your batteries.
I don’t think it will be easy for you to do this but taking time out for reflection on other life priorities is never wasted time and the world will still be there if and when you decide to rejoin the fray.
Please accept this post in the spirit in which it was intended.
LikeLiked by 3 people
> He has turned down the opportunity.
News to me, Ben. Even if I didn’t recall writing it, my words are in plain black and white upthread to assist my own recollection:
Did you miss that, or did you just ignore it? Something else?
LikeLike
> I’m not trying to score any points or attack you with this advice but I’ve read and enjoyed your posts for a number of years now and really do feel that you have to take a break for a few months at least to recharge your batteries.
Compliments such as that typically motivate me to keep going … for whatever it’s worth outside of my own personal interests, that is.
> Please accept this post in the spirit in which it was intended.
Done, Roy, thank you. I have taken breaks, and the *needed* rest and recharging happens. One of these days I’ll give it up for good, just not today. 🙂
LikeLike
brandonrgates says: 11 Dec 16 at 9:24 am
> I used to make those things!
“Great, Will. Then you should know that things like, oh, the atmosphere radiate EM omnidirectionally as a function of the fourth power of their temperature. Which means it’s going to be constantly beaming EM sideways, upward toward outer space and … downward toward the surface.”
Please indicate any experiment\measurement that demonstrates such outward thermal EM flux, not radiance that is not strictly limited by any opposing radiance and even reversing in direction (absorption) when the opposing radiance is greater.
dpy6629 says: 11 Dec 16 at 11:37 pm
“You guys are being too hard on Brandon. There is an opportunity for dialogue with him I think.”
Dialogue would be fine. How do you do that with someone that believes ‘science’ is what is written in some book, rather than a process of learning about conflicting conjecture and takeing on the painful effort of falsification of the ones that can be falsified?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Clive Best says: 11 Dec 16 at 9:56 am
‘@BRANDONRGATES
Here is the effective emission height for IR photons in the 16 micron CO2 band. Effective height in this context is defined as the height above which >50% of photons emitted by CO2 molecules pass directly out to space. Note that the central line is way up in the stratosphere which produces an interesting effect. This line actually causes a cooling effect on the troposphere as CO2 increases. ”
Clive,
Your graph, from UCAR is misleading, for forgiving folk. But another scam for any that have measured.
Each stratospheric CO2 molecule has higher temperature (power) than those in the tropopause, so each molecule generates more exit flux. There are far fewer CO2 molecules in the whole 40km stratosphere than there are in 2 km of tropopause. For yourself try to determine the source and altitude where most of the CO2 exit flux is generated. Carefully looking at that graph you can observe the intended deceit!
LikeLike
My question for the sceptics is this:
Try to put yourself in Doug’s shoes. What should he do? It’s all very well to say he should call out some of the climate alarmists and dubious science, as suggested by Jonathan Jones-
But what would that achieve? A small number of informed sceptics would then have a slightly higher opinion of Doug McNeall. But the newspapers would continue to celebrate Mann, quoting him extensively on the climate crisis due to hit us in 2036, and the evil oil-funded deniers and their war on science. And even if, say, Mann, was completely discredited, there would be a queue of eager self-publicists from the climate science community to take his place in the limelight, competing with each other over who could make the most alarmist prediction and therefore appear most prominently in the Guardian.
As I see it, this is the fundamental dilemma that serious climate scientists face, and it’s not clear to me that they can do anything about it.
LikeLike
Following up on Paul Matthews comment, there is something of a case study now available from New Zealand which shows some of the difficulties of doing ‘anything about it’.
A couple of professors straight out of the Gore Academy(or was it central-casting-for-climate-activists-in-academia?), put together a set of vivid, garish Powerpoint slides designed to scare folks about climate, and went on a road trip to 11 towns in New Zealand. Just trying to make a living, I guess, by keeping up the agitation so that the grants will keep on flowing, but troubling nevertheless. They did their trip under the rubric of New Zealand’s Royal Society – the name and logo appears on their first slide for example.
Troubled Fellows of that society, and and several members and non-members submitted a complaint for they saw the slides as violating some of the society’s Code of Ethics. They have recently received a reply, and they describe said reply as a whitewash, and it does indeed look pretty feeble. Here is an extract from a blog post at The Climate Conversation (link given below):
“In July 2016, Professor Tim Naish and Professor James Renwick embarked on a whistle-stop tour of 11 towns and cities giving a public slide presentation they called Ten by Ten: Climate Change (“Ten things you didn’t know about climate change”). Senior scientists with the NZ Climate Science Coalition raised concerns about the accuracy of the material being presented and on 26 August, before the tour was over, they lodged a complaint (pdf, 2 MB) with the Royal Society of New Zealand.”
The slide set is here: http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/media/2016/05/Ten-by-Ten-climate-change-presentation-James-Renwick-Tim-Naish-2016.pdf
The complaint about it is here: http://www.climateconversation.org.nz/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rsnz-ethics-complaint-final.pdf
An article criticising the reply is here: http://www.climateconversation.org.nz/2016/12/royal-society-whitewashes-climate-complaint/
LikeLike
WILL JANOSCHKA,
No it’s my graph. I calculated it from scratch using the absorption cross-sections for each vibrational line of CO2. It just assumes a temperature gradient in the atmosphere and barometric pressure. Of course you have to write software to do it.
My point is that sceptics should not bother to argue against basic physics like the GHE. Instead we should concentrate in exposing the exaggeration of AGW by climate evangelists and the political posturing of CS.
LikeLiked by 2 people
no sceptics here argue against GHE.. very very few do.
LikeLike
Paul – I answered that question on Twitter… The Met Office, The RS, the scientific advisors, should call out alarmist headlines in the media.. MetOfficeNews blog jumps at David Rose / Delingpole (then actually agrees that they agree with factual point) but every bit of alarmist nonsense gets a free pass.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The way I read Doug’s tweets, I don’t think he cares much about climate science as he does about its image in public. He sees the climate skeptics appear to successfully project themselves as Galileo, as outsiders fighting the establishment, as renegades against an established order. He wants climate scientists to be seen this way, to occupy this role. Almost all scientists see themselves as fighting against something – friendly advice to go into a different career perhaps, and almost certainly as rebels hacking away against the established consensus or prevailing theory in their little corner in science. Doug is puzzled why scientist being the valiant fighters they are, cannot occupy a corresponding heroic public stance for outward consumption.
But the answer is simply obvious and known from our own lives. If you want the career security and comfort of belonging to a community (of scientists), you don’t get to play hero. In climate science, especially, the members have been robbed of this axis of freedom. If you pose questions wanting to quantify and characterize the role of CO2, for example, it is likely you’ll receive funny looks and glares from your dept head. Everyone soon learns to pay homage to meaningless totems like the ‘97% consensus’ even though it was put together by a cartoonist hack. The benefits you gain by ceding moral ground in the larger questions in your discipline are real – you get ‘full freedom’ and resources to pursue your specific smaller questions, company to keep at conferences, and a fully salary to bring home.
To my knowledge almost all climate skeptics, even the most insignificant, have paid and continue to pay a price to be a climate skeptic. Within organized science, the possibility to do the same exists: you can pick to be a skeptic and a gadfly but you will never build a career on its basis, you will never win grants and importantly, you not even guaranteed success (of say, overturning an established theory) just because you adopted the posture of a skeptic.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Climate scientists should be calling out bad science and alarmist claims in the media from both AGW advocates and their sceptical opponents. But the wind is blowing definitely in the direction of enlisting an army of climate scientists to confront only sceptic “bullshit”.
“People who argue that climate change is not happening or that the scientific case for it is overstated – climate deniers – should probably start preparing for a more robust response from scientists themselves.
UK scientist Philip Williamson is urging his colleagues to challenge online lies and inaccuracies, to counter the climate deniers by objective statements of fact and to use the collective power of the Internet to improve what information reaches users.
The rising tide of populism threatens the future of evidence-based governance.
He suggests that the global scientific community should harness the collective power and reach of the Internet to counter climate deniers.”
Admittedly, this is just one scientist’s opinion who got into a spat about ocean acidification with James Delingpole. But AGWers are sharing the article on Twitter.
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/12/12/climate-scientists-called-to-fight-back-against-bullshit/
LikeLiked by 1 person
Have you read Williamson’s original blogpost attempting to critique Delingpole’s article? He simply agree with him or has only minor points of difference for the most part. A lot of times a scientist, often obscure at that point in time, will write a weak, pathetic article in response to a well-known skeptic. This will simply be pumped up and amplified in activist circles with such adjectives as ‘totally destroyed,’ ‘eviscerated,’ ‘debunked’ and the scientist gets a mid-career boost. John Abraham’s ‘scicomm’ was almost entirely built up in this fashion. Also ATTP Ken Rice etc, etc.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Shub, I think it is this that you mean,Take the time and effort to correct misinformation, in Nature?
There’s a lot of ranting about deniers and bullshit, and whining about his complaint, but not much substance.
LikeLiked by 1 person
John Shade, that ‘ethics’ complaint against Naish and Renwick was rather thin gruel, don’t you think?
LikeLike
> My question for the sceptics is this: Try to put yourself in Doug’s shoes. What should he do?
I appreciate this question, and your other considered remarks, Paul M. Though you may not consider me an AGW-sceptic, I hope you don’t mind me responding to your questions and points.
> It’s all very well to say he should call out some of the climate alarmists and dubious science, as suggested by Jonathan Jones-
I would say that anyone’s duty to society is to be honest about that which they see as dubious or false, particularly when they have specific knowledge/expertise to speak to them with credible authority.
> But what would that achieve? A small number of informed sceptics would then have a slightly higher opinion of Doug McNeall.
Agreed.
> But the newspapers would continue to celebrate Mann, quoting him extensively on the climate crisis due to hit us in 2036, and the evil oil-funded deniers and their war on science.
If it were only McNeall, you’re almost certainly correct. I would hope however that if most scientists reversed their present views on the Hokey Schtick, and/or the *perceived* threat of AGW, that the news media would follow suit.
> And even if, say, Mann, was completely discredited, there would be a queue of eager self-publicists from the climate science community to take his place in the limelight, competing with each other over who could make the most alarmist prediction and therefore appear most prominently in the Guardian.
It’s *arguable* such competition already exists despite the general scientific community having not disavowed any and all of Mann’s works.
> As I see it, this is the fundamental dilemma that serious climate scientists face, and it’s not clear to me that they can do anything about it.
Could be. Not being an “insider” by any stretch of the imagination, it’s difficult for me to tell.
One part of this dilemma might be the question of what constitutes a “serious climate scientist”. Rather than guess at your meaning (and I have my “guesses”) I’ll instead ask for your definition. At the same time, I’ll provide my own: anyone who is or has been an active researcher in the field. This would include “non-consensus”, “non-alarmist” active researchers like Spencer and Christy, and to a lesser extent Pielke, Sr. and Lindzen.
It could even extend to Nic Lewis and Judith Curry (and more Curry) since both publish from time to time, but who in my mind function more as communicators and advocates against “alarmism” in much the same way as Jim Hansen (a very serious climate scientist in my book) serves as an emeritus alarm-sounder and activist for urgent mitigation action.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Brg, it could be as easy as dissociating clisci from people subjected to the Setengeti strategy. It could be dissociating clisci from world-weary rabbits in ivory towers. It could be about admitting that economic growth can help people. Alarmists cover a broad range of stupidity.
LikeLiked by 1 person
> it could be as easy as dissociating clisci from people subjected to the Setengeti strategy. It could be dissociating clisci from world-weary rabbits in ivory towers.
This goes back to upthread discussions about the “tone” of the “debate”, something about which I’m just not that interested, MiB. Suffice it to say that I think everyone on all sides would do well to:
1) “Tone” it down.
2) Grow thicker skin and not make the “debate” about “tone” because …
3) … the planet could give two craps about what we say about it, or how we talk about it with each other.
> It could be about admitting that economic growth can help people.
That shouldn’t be too difficult. I recognize that already, no reluctant “admission” necessary.
> Alarmists cover a broad range of stupidity.
As do anti-alarmists.
LikeLike
Shub — Have you read Williamson’s original blogpost attempting to critique Delingpole’s article? He simply agree with him or has only minor points of difference for the most part.—
Williamson is shocking. I suggest a thorough read of it, because it really puts to bed any notion that one needs to accomplish much to be a scientist with a *fat* research budget. I also read through the few papers he cites, too. They do not support his argument as often as they contradict it, leaving what remains depending on opinion and authority. It confirms precisely what JD said in fact. If I were in any position to defend climate science from Breitbart, I would have cautioned Williamson against making the IPSO complaint, and that he not drawn any more attention to himself. Luckily, I am the last person he would take advice from. Long may he continue. He’s an asset.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Paul Matthews,
I’m not naive enough to believe that Doug speaking the truth about Mann would in and of itself achieve anything much. Doug should say it because saying it is the right thing to do. It is the job of scientists of integrity to expose pathological science, and it is especially the job of scientists in closely related fields. He should not be leaving this to random passing NMR spectroscopists who have better things to do.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Shub, do you mean this?
https://www.mba.ac.uk/marinebiologist/comments-on-ocean-acidification-yet-another-wobbly-pillar-of-climate-alarmism-by-james-delingpole/
It doesn’t look very impressive as a scientific rebuttal, not that I’m really that familiar with the arguments for and against taking ‘ocean acidification’ seriously.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Clive Best says: 12 Dec 16 at 12:48 pm
“WILL JANOSCHKA, No it’s my graph. I calculated it from scratch using the absorption cross-sections for each vibrational line of CO2. It just assumes a temperature gradient in the atmosphere and barometric pressure. Of course you have to write software to do it.”
Clive,
Thank you for the clarification! Sorry ’bout seeing similar from NCAR, apologies! Your graph seems to be based on using the HiTran database to calculate the attenuation of spectral EM flux, lotsa work.
That database cannot do that, and was never intended to do that. There is no way to distinguish thermal EM flux proceeding ‘through’ an absorptive gas constituent from that thermal EM flux originating ‘from’ that same absorptive gas constituent at its own temperature!
It was back in the 1970s that such was recognized. For field verification and correction of that database, some amplitude modulation of the ‘source’ was always used to distinguish ‘source’ from intervening ‘junk’. The dispersion of the ‘flux amplitude modulation’ consisted of both a low pass filter effect never changing atmospheric sensible heat (absorption of flux), and also the scattering effect from ‘mass in the atmosphere’. This approach was, and still is, fully compliant with the military effort to ‘determine atmospheric limits to “seeing” either temporal or spatial modulation’, over yonder. It has nothing to do with “flux”, the DC component of information transfer, which may well be zero as exemplified by ‘double sideband suppressed carrier communication’
“My point is that sceptics should not bother to argue against basic physics like the GHE. Instead we should concentrate in exposing the exaggeration of AGW by climate evangelists and the political posturing of CS.”
I agree with ignoring a basic fantasy diversion such as GHE. What needs to be exposed is the intentional criminal FRAUD, generated by ‘few politically connected individuals’ at the public forum of NASA GISS!! At that time they were all well warned “not to do that”, by all that worked so hard learning a bit of useful science!
LikeLike
Jaime, that’s the one I was referring to. Williamson’s clearly triggered UEA getting total plastered by Dellers at the PCC he wants to drag him to IPSO hoping he’ll score a comeback.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I would like to apologise to would-be modern-day Martin Niemöllers for any dethpicability that resulted from my Pulp Fiction allusions in this thread.
LikeLiked by 2 people
First they came for the climate apologists, and I did not speak out….
Because I had nothing to apologize for.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Looks like your ‘Pulp Fiction allusions’ rattled their cages, Brad.
Put me down as gross too. In spades (or if we’re talking Tarantino, shouldn’t that be – er….well, you know!)
LikeLiked by 2 people
PS As I post this, I’m watching ‘Jackie Brown’. Just shit hot!
LikeLike
His tweets are a bit silly. He basically says climate scientists must engage with the public more. Forgetting why he doesn’t engage. Catastrophe scenarios are thin gruel. Easily debunked with a few tasty skeptic points.
LikeLiked by 1 person
catweazle666 says: 17 Dec 16 at 12:29 am
“Looks like your ‘Pulp Fiction allusions’ rattled their cages, Brad.
Put me down as gross too. In spades (or if we’re talking Tarantino, shouldn’t that be – er….well, you know!)”
Whatever tickles your clitoris!! I know Brad (naughty, naughty)!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I forgot how to spell ‘fancy’!
LikeLiked by 1 person