Message to Katherine Hayhoe
Barry Woods just alerted the rest of us to this gem
ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOibBy290cM
In which you can see a bunch of desperate individuals issue a Message to Trump from Climate Scientists. Let’s forget for a moment that two of them (Peter Gleick and Stephan Lewandowsky) are proven liars, and concentrate on the first messenger, Katherine Hayhoe, of Texan Tech University.
She begins with this familiar message:
In the United States today, the number one predictor of whether we think climate is changing and humans are responsible is not how much we know about the science. It is simply where we fall on the political spectrum.
Thanks Katherine for your admission that you believe in climate change because you vote Democrat, and not because you’re a climate scientist
You say on your blog:
Hi. I’m a climate scientist
I study this amazing planet we live on
I crunch the data that tells us it’s warming
I help people prepare for a changing climate
And I believe that together we can fix this
Well so do I
And not because I’ve studied this amazing planet we live on (well, not as much of it as you have)
Though I’ve looked at the data you’ve crunched that tells us it’s warming
And for thirty years I’ve watched the Mediterraean rising 3 millimetres a year from the window of our tumbledown seafront shack
And I’ve watched the council bulldozer piling up sand to protect us against the winter storms
And though I personally vote communist
I think: “thank goodness for our right-wing municipal council
Preparing for a changing climate by piling the sand up, three millimetres higher every year”
And I believe that together we can fix this.
In your Youtube message to Trump, you continue;
”But a thermometer isn’t Democrat or Republican. It doesn’t give us a different answer depending on how we vote.”
Oh doesn’t it now?
Thousands of thermometer readings from decades in the past have been adjusted under Obama. According to your own number one predictor of whether we think climate is changing and humans are responsible, why shouldn’t that continue under Trump?
Climate Scepticism 
Eh? A woman on there is concerned about Trump “compromising the satellites which help us see coming threats . . . .” Surely she doesn’t mean those used by RSS and UAH which show that 1998 was as warm as the ‘hottest year evah’, 2016? What kind of coming threat might that be? The threat that Trump might notice that there has been no net warming in the lower troposphere in 18 years and so decide for himself that the ‘threat’ of man-made global warming is not turning out to be anywhere near as ‘threatening’ as climate scientists have been telling us?
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I think you’re just being a bit sexist Geoff. She’s just as much a proven porkie pie merchant as the blokes. Not to mention her ideas that the magic guy in the sky will be cross with us for not letting the renewables/scientist guy tax us back to the stone age. It’s been said that the big money is now in the hands of the urban go getters who all support the Democrats. Well how about they pay for all these CO2 innovation changes? The answer is the their hands.
The rumour is that hackers are copying massive amounts of data to save it from Trump’s hench persons. It will be interesting to see if any of it makes it out into the wild. Now wouldn’t that be funny.
If I was Trump’s team, one of the first things I’d do is set the climate data free.
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She still claims on her blog that she is “trying to connect with the very people who most doubt her research“, something that is clearly not true, as we have discussed before. Your list of liars may be incomplete, as Tiny suggests.
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What a sorry group of people. This video gives us a salutary glimpse into the CO2 Scare Bandwagon, if not into the engine room, at least into the PR department.
Comments on the video on YouTube are being censored. Here is the one I placed yesterday: ‘The case for alarm about our impact on the climate is a remarkably weak one. It is, however, enough to scare some people, and to enrich some others.’ Alas it has disappeared.
I dare say the censor saw this as denialist, but of course it is not. It actually gets right to the heart of the debate we have not yet had by recognising we must have an impact, that it may not be enough to frighten us witless, that people are indeed frightened by it, and finally that some have done very well out of it.
Hayhoe seems the least bonkers of them, as a sort of cheerful pollyannic sunbeam – maybe just a few squillion quanta short of being a warming one. In fact, given her woeful track record, her upbeatiness is quite chilling. Here is one illustration of the many out there of her odd relationship with data, some of which she claims to ‘crunch’ for our own good: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/04/14/hayhoe-denies-the-science/
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They are a sorry bunch. It’s painful to watch, quite frankly, like a sub-species caught in an evolutionary cul-de-sac, blissfully unaware of their own lack of fitness to compete in an ever-changing world, bouncing around in their self-delusory bubble, trying to convince us that they represent the future. Please somebody accelerate the extinction process by draining their funds and put them (and us) out of our misery.
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Jaime. I disagree slightly. Those practising the dark arts of climate science were in fact perfectly adapted to their environment. An environment that they progressively adapted to suit themselves. Media, scientific credibility and monetary rewards succumbed to their onslaught. However, like other well adapted and superspecialized species, when the environment begins to change…..
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Geoff, I don’t see the point you are trying to make, in particular I don’t understand what you want to say by the last paragraph.
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Yes, exactly Alan, they WERE perfectly adapted to their environment. But they now lack the ability to adapt to rapid change. Ironic really: alarmists have been telling us exactly this about species supposedly unable to adapt to a rapidly changing climate. I feel that non-human species will be somewhat more successful in adapting to climate change than human alarmists will be, faced with the challenge of responding to rapid change in their own rather cosy environment.
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Len, I cannot see any ambiguity in Geoff’s final paragraph. In other words, the words seem to me to say what they mean. I am unable to find another way of interpreting them. None of the words is complicated, esoteric or recondite. There is no jargon, no cant. The sentences are short so there are few complicating clauses or riders. I suggest you get a grown-up to read it to you.
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Something called Motherboard has the story: Watch Climate Scientists’ Heartbreaking Pleas to President Trump.
It is “pretty heartbreaking”, with “despairing pleas”.
It includes one of the more paranoid quotes, from Kim Cobb:
“For me the nightmare scenario is that the incoming administration will cripple the data that lies at the heart of our research as climate scientists,”
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Paul, is it paranoid. People like Richard here and Lindzen recommend an 80-90% funding cut for climate science and we hear talk of changes to NASA or NOAA which runs climate programs. Put the two together and it is not hard to see data streams turning off.
MiaB, it makes no sense. It implies that there’s some connection between Obama and adjustment/homogenization. And that under Trump there will be a different connection. So it assumes that the scientific agency staff are under orders to make adjustments that favour a certain view of climate and that they can be ordered to alter those adjustments to favour Trump’s view. But the methods are documented and justified. You can’t change them without a scientific justification, which nobody, certainly not Trump or his deputies, can provide.
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Expect a lot more pearl clutching by the SJW snowflakes. You can learn a lot from the company kept. Katherine Hayhoe in the same whiny video as Gleick and Lewandowsky does not speak highly about her or her vaunted evangelical christian values. And some of the propaganda she has put out about her climate research is laughable. In 2011 she said texas drought was permanent because of climate change. 9 months later, no drought and floods. Her teaching materials predict up to 6-7C by 2100. That isn’t even in the ballpark
Because of the Ebell transition memo leak, Trump has ordered all EPA staff off social media and not to talk to news media. He just greenlighted Dakota Access and Keystone hours ago. McKibben is bawling all over the internet on 350.orgs behalf. And this is just day 2.
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The methods are documented and justified? You DO have a sense of humour!
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There’s literature describing the methods used by RSS, GISS and BEST for sure. UAH hasn’t documented its latest method, and I don’t know about HADCRUT. Can you point to anything serious that identifies better ways of adjusting for bias and homogenizing records? Does Trump/Putin or their deputies have a plan? If it is along the lines of “use the raw data”, that would be dumb: see how far you can get with that for satellite data (assuming you/they don’t want to discontinue those programs).
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I actually kinda like Ms. Hayhoe. Don’t agree with a lot of what she says, but she’s a) nicer and b) more logical in her exposition of the consensus doctrine than some of the people we all love to rag on. She’s nothing like Lew, Mann, Cook, ad nauseum. Not in attitude, not in content. And (pace all skeptics) I think she’s even right about a lot of what she says.
I’m not a Christian, but I really think we should not even bring that up–I get angry when the Alarmists do that about skeptic scientists.
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Hey, she mentioned it first. Just because someone is nice, doesn’t mean they can’t manipulate with the best of them.
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Climate change activists want to tar us all with the same brush–we’re deniers, no matter what we believe.
We don’t have to operate the same way. Hayhoe is not like John Cook. Zeke Hausfather is not like Joe Romm.
Our position is stronger–we can afford to behave better than our opponents.
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Alan, Jaime
On the question of whether climate alarmists are a threatened species, what we need is a top ecologist to examine their entire habitat.
At the bottom of the food chain, the European Union and Foundations of Dead Billionaires can be expected to keep serving up the krill. In the middle levels there’s likely to be a bit of a squeeze on resources though. DEFRA laid off a lot of staff under Cameron’s austerity plan, and it’s hard to see much room for expansion in the market for green consultants, think tanks and environmental officers. Spare a thought for all those bright young things who got hired to advise the CEO on reducing the company’s carbon footprint and found themselves policing the coffee machine, making sure the plastic cups went in the right slot. Word will get back to the universities that a degree in environmental studies is not the key to a bright green career future that it once seemed. Professors of environmental ethics may have to retrain as geography teachers – a perfectly respectable profession.
Academics on the fringe will probably fare better. Experts in the psychology of denialism are already repositioning themselves as alternative truth experts. Here
http://theconversation.com/scientists-have-a-word-for-studying-the-post-truth-world-agnotology-71542
you can see how a couple of lecturers in management studies, having been retooled into sustainable development, are now branching out into the philosophical stratosphere as agnotologists. We’ve been warned we’ll have to change careers every decade or so, and climate alarmists are showing the way.
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Geoff. As you might have guessed I don’t agree that environmental science is a doomed activity and an environmental science degree worthless. Environmental science is not equivalent to climate science. We have a need for graduates who are able to engage with engineers about environmental matters, but also are aware of economic and/or political constraints. I am aware that many university departments do not produce such graduates, but the best ones do.
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Alan Kendall
Thanks for the correction. I agree that there are plenty of useful things that can be studied under the heading of “the environment” or ecology or conservation, or even climate science – why not?
Conservative politicians are always looking for examples of “useless” public expenditure to attack, and obscure corners of science are one of their favourite targets. As long as I can remember, any conservative politician could always be sure of media coverage by ridiculing a government subsidy for the study of the sex life of snails or whatever, and so you can understand scientists being tempted to try and find a link between the sex life of snails and saving the planet. Here’s a good example:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-make-birds-drab-u-turn-evolution-study-wildlife-global-warming-environment-nature-a7543836.html
Climate Change is making birds uglier, apparently. Specifically, it’s reducing the size of the bald patch on the collared flycatcher, and, as everyone knows, a big bald patch is “the sign of a good mate and a ferocious rival.” Has anyone told Michael Mann, I wonder?
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Len: “Can you point to anything serious that identifies better ways of adjusting for bias and homogenizing records? ”
I would suggest in the first place not relying on adjusted and homegenised data to make a case. Wait until we have reliable and accurate records over a reasonable period of time, that are comprehensive in geographical coverage, and don’t need to be homogenised or adjusted, since they’ve been carefully sited and temperatures measured by them on a consistent basis. Then, and only then, we would have a good idea, with as much certainty as possible, what we are talking about.
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Alan Kendall says: 25 Jan 17 at 7:38 am
“Geoff. As you might have guessed I don’t agree that environmental science is a doomed activity and an environmental science degree worthless. Environmental science is not equivalent to climate science. We have a need for graduates who are able to engage with engineers about environmental matters, but also are aware of economic and/or political constraints. I am aware that many university departments do not produce such graduates, but the best ones do.”
It is the environmental science “degree” that is worthless! If some ‘student’ is brainwashed into only (remembering) some correct answer for the mid-term or final exam! There is no learning! The technical cannot survive with such social Bull Shit! The two endeavors are completely disjoint an must remain so! Engineers are taught to think and reject political BS. You Alan Kendall, seem only to enjoy some ‘status’ and the hell with poor students!
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As I understand it, Len, you believe in Hayhoe’s moronic dictum that the way you vote is an indicator of what you believe about CAGW. The fact that you can believe that shows that you are capable of believing anything. The fact remains that temperature data is constantly being adjusted and will continue to be adjusted because it is not fit for the purpose it is being used for. If you seriously wanted to create a meaningful global temperature index, you would not do it by arbitrarily selecting and de-selecting measurements taken mostly in highly populated areas of the Western world. If you don’t keep the components of the index reasonably constant – eg FTSE, S&P, RPI – then how do you know what you are measuring, especially if you then pass it through a series of adjustments. As I understand it, US temperatures are adjusted for TOBS but no other data is. And the TOBS adjustment is a number pulled out of the air.
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Mark:
“I would suggest in the first place not relying on adjusted and homegenised data to make a case. “
So I take it that you’ve never indulged in that sceptic favourite obsession with the “pause”.
MiaB, Hayhoe’s ‘dictum’ is a recognition of a correlation. It is difficult to see how a correlation can be ‘moronic’ – maybe it takes a moron to know one. As for the components of the FTSE being constant, compare the index components now with those of 10, 20, 40 years ago and see if your idea has any merit (hint: it doesn’t).
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Will. Such prejudice! I can think immediately of 7 ejvironmental science students who worked with me at UEA and became petroleum geologists (one who went on to become an expert in offshore drilling platform remote system management). All our students undertook a rigorous year-long programme of basic/applied mathematics, statistics, basic politics and economics and I would compare them favourably with students from any science department in the country. You cannot be employed as an oceanographer, meteorologist, geophysicist, hydrographer and many other professionals without an excellent grounding inscience and mathematics, and during my 20+ years there we produced hundreds. We gave them the opportunity to acquire this grounding.
I think you might be confusing Environmental Studies with Environmental Science degree programmes. UEA’s envoronmental science programme was recognized as world class and some of the best US universities wanted to exchange students with us.
Promotional material now over
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Killer blow, Len. Obviously the components of indices can change over time. Since you are an expert on FTSE – let’s say the FTSE 100, to be specific – it aims to track the performance of the 100 companies with the highest market capitalizations on the LSE. Therefore it will change as companies merge, downsize, grow or get split up. It is measuring a consistent thing.
The global temperature indices are not measuring anything really. Thermometers come and go, change technology, change location, Phil decides to cancel a number of thermometers in Canada and include a number of records newly arrived from Siberia, etc etc. But in essence there is no such thing as a global temperature. Then they make adjustments to make it “closer” to this thing that does not exist. Then they invent numbers for areas that thermometers do not cover, such as the Arctic. What is the point? Since all they want to do is show a trend, why not simply use a constant set of unadjusted data? What benefit arises from these constant changes and adjustments? The concept of accuracy for a metric that no one can determine in any other way is just crazy.
In fact, it is bizarre that so much attention is paid to this metric. As a measure it is totally useless. Why do we need 3 or 4 indices for the same thing? What actually matters is what is happening in specific areas. CET, for example, shows that not very much has happened to temperatures in the UK since the 18thc. – 0’7c since the 1730s. Am I worried? No. In fact the temperature seems to have been falling recently.
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and as for Hayhoe’s correlation…I imagine that came from the same orifice as so much of AGW “science”
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MIAB, bizarre to you and me maybe, but not to the campaigners. The artefact of a global mean temperature was vital for the cause of CO2 Alarmism in the early years of it, although in recent decades the unhelpfully unscary behaviour of said artefact, despite all the seemingly desperate adjustments, has supported a wider search for things to scare us with. Hurricanes, melting glaciers, storminess in general and ‘extreme events’ in particular, plus bad things like floods and droughts and sea water turning into battery juice, have all been roped in to help, and much more besides. But the more ground truth people examine, the less they find to be scared about with regard to the extra CO2. It really doesn’t seem to matter much at all, apart from giving plants a boost. Just like the world’s most distinguished, imho, atmospheric physicist alive today, Richard Lindzen, has long advised us as being worth considering as a realistic prospect.
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In response to Len, I said: “I would suggest in the first place not relying on adjusted and homegenised data to make a case.”
To which Len said:
“So I take it that you’ve never indulged in that sceptic favourite obsession with the “pause”.”
This fails to meet my point, being a side-step. And it also seems fair in response to ask Len if he denies or accepts the “pause”.
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Mark lots of people have tried to ‘disprove’ warming by using unadjusted temperatures. You can do it yourself in an afternoon. You’ll get a rising trend. Throwing away all the data because it has biases and inhomogeneities is on a par for stupidity with MiaB/Johns saying there is no such thing as global temperature or that it means nothing. The twin memes of “global temperature has no meaning” and “global warming has paused because some global temperature graphs look a bit flatter at the end” is one of the hallmark contradictions of “sceptical” thought that should make anyone sit and smell the intellectual fraud in scepticism.
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The problem is not adjusting the temperatures, it’s when you’re still adjusting them decades after the event. How about posting a link where they justify all the adjustments?
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OK Len, what is your definition of global temperature? What does it mean? How can it be measured? What checks are there?
For the FTSE 100, anyone can replicate the results. For global temperature we have at least 4 methods which give different results. None of which corresponds to anybody’s experience of the weather. It is just bullshit.
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Len, do you or do you not accept that, for a period of approximately 18 years, global mean surface and lower troposphere temperature has ‘paused’/slowed dramatically/failed to increase at anywhere near the rate predicted by global circulation models? Answer that and then we can begin to address the issue of “intellectual fraud”.
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Alan Kendall
When I was at UEA, I studied Environmental Sciences (plural). That included geophysics, geochemistry, hydrology and sedimentology. I am very happy with my UEA BSc. My time there was the best of my life, and I managed to build a career on its strength.
In your time there you have overseen the transformation of the School of Environmental Sciences from reputable to a joke, the object of derision. You seem to have problems differentiating plural from singular. Is this part of a plan or a grammar issue?
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Mr. Martinez, did you just call James Hansen an intellectual fraud?
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Seth. I am pleased you are pround of your UEA Environmental Sciences degree and are willing to say so. You say that I oversaw a transformation of the school into a joke. This do not recognize, what did I personally do that in your mind caused it to be a joke? The only major acts I was largely responsible for in changing the degree programme was the creation of an environmental earth sciences degree (to attract more geology students) and a degree programme linking Overseas Development and Environmental Sciences. I don’t believe they damaged the School’s reputation.
Do you mean that the School’s reputation has been damaged because of Climategate? How am to blame? I wasn’t responsible for the email release, and the humour associated with me from the second email release came from the comments of CRU criticizing my lectures on climate science. Would you have had me not open students’ minds to alternatives?
Does it really matter that I, in error, typed “science” rather than the plural? I always thought it a UEA affectation rather than a reality, but that’s just an opinion.
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MARK HODGSON (25 Jan 17 at 8:49 am) says:
And MAN IN A BARREL (25 Jan 17 at 5:35 pm) mentions the Central England Temperature record. I believe there were also continuous records from the 18th century in Northern Ireland, Prague, Paris and no doubt elsewhere. Presumably they were made for scientific reasons and are therefore more reliable than those made at airfields, fire stations etc for day to day weather reports.
Does anyone have a list of such records, and has anyone ever analysed them to see how they compare with the accepted longterm record with its comprehensive geographical coverage and zero scientific reliability?
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Geoff
I believe you are correct about the extended temperature records you mention, but I am not sure how reliable they are, in the strict sense I suggested in my response to Len. Thermometers used may have changed over time, as might have the precise locations. Even if thermometers and locations remain unchanged, UHI might be an issue with some of them. All these are issues which might suggest adjustments would be necessary to ensure we are comparing like with like. But I don’t know for sure, and an assessment of said records for these purposes does sound like a good idea.
Len hasn’t said whether he accepts or denies the “pause” presumably because it causes him a logical problem. If he denies it, then he accepts that it has been adjusted and homogenised away, since enough serious alarmist scientists accepted it at the time to feel the need to write apparently serious scientific papers explaining it away, before it magically disappeared. If he accepts it, then his use of “that sceptic favourite obsession with the “pause””, with “pause” in inverted commas starts to look silly. Either way he’s onto a loser, in my opinion, in terms of the argument he advances on this thread.
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Mark/Jaime, here’s HADCRUT4 (which omits the Arctic): http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/mean:12
You can change it to show GISS is you prefer. Tell me exactly where you discern the existence of a “pause” and in exactly what there was a “pause” and I’ll tell you what I think of it.
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Mr. Martinez, are you saying that James Hansen is an intellectual fraud?
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Oh Len! You have no qualifications in climate science nor statistics, as you have been at pains to tell us many times. Shoudn’t you just accept the conclusions of the latest IPCC report, which included an extensive discussion on the reasons for the pause/hiatus etc? I believe it referenced 56 academic papers on the subject but I am speaking from memory so may well be quoting an inaccurate number.
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It was even accepted over at the Credulous science website, but after accepting the pause every author has to indulge in a lot of fin-flapping to explain that there is no real pause. It is hilarious.
https://skepticalscience.com/climate-hiatus-doesnt-take-heat-off-global-warming.html
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Len, you’re still side-stepping. Pause or no pause? There used to be a pause. Now apparently there isn’t. Is that because the previous records were wrong, or are the adjusted and homogenised records wrong? How do we decide who to believe?
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I went off the saintly Mizz Hayhoe a few years ago – when I found out she was knowingly exploiting the rantings of a sad & disturbed individual to create a big media “climate scientist’s death threat” storm.
If anyone’s interested – here’s a link to posts I made on her at BH & ATTP.
Needless to say, it went down like a fart in the proverbial submarine at the latter – where Katherine is regarded as Mother Theresa with a Hockey Stick.
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/years-of-living-dangerously/#comment-19392
(Some of the old links may be defunct now – but it’s all true)
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These self appointed representatives of “science” make me think of this quote:
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Mark H, cut Len some slack… He needs to ask climate control what the latest agreed position on hadcrut is.
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Mark, just say where the pause is and I’ll tell you what I think of it. Jaime says it is 18 years which puts its start at the top of the last big El Nino. That is clearly a bullshit way to measure anything, but maybe you have a different idea of what the pause is, so say what it is. If you do think there is a pause and it means something, reconcile that with measures of global temperature meaning nothing. If you cannot do that your position is intellectually empty; you must see that, surely?
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Alan Kendall says: 25 Jan 17 at 4:51 pm
“Will. Such prejudice! I can think immediately of 7 ejvironmental science students who worked with me at UEA and became petroleum geologists (one who went on to become an expert in offshore drilling platform remote system management). All our students undertook a rigorous year-long programme of basic/applied mathematics, statistics, basic politics and economics and I would compare them favourably with students from any science department in the country. You cannot be employed as an oceanographer, meteorologist, geophysicist, hydrographer and many other professionals without an excellent grounding in science and mathematics, …”
It is the deliberate corruption of western university scientific method by the UN\Marxist|\Soylents, that is unacceptable. The individual “sciences” and their degrees are fine. Meteorology was never a ‘science’. A training to become skilled at identifying what remains deterministic about weather. This is also fine; except for the arrogant academics that claim knowledge of the ‘why’ of weather. It is the pronoun ‘environmental’ that insists on psudo-science, just like the pronouns ‘social’ and ‘political’; anything goes as long as some of the population and their elected ‘elites’ accept the rhetoric! No proof is required. I reiterate: (WJ:’
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It is the
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Will. You ignore the need for people versed in many areas of science because environmental problems are complex. UEA Environmental Science students came in two varieties – those with an already formed interest in the environment and those (c 50%) who did not wish to specialize (or more positively did not want to give up one of their A-level sciences). The choice of modules was wide enough that a student could pass through the degree programme with almost (85% perhaps) a specialist degree. Do you think our students could successfully compete with graduates of geology departments for much prized petroleum geologist positions, if it were not otherwise?
It was because of mistaken views about the supposed lack of quality of environmental science degrees that UEA took the step of identifying specialist routes through the degree course, labelling them with different degree names.
A few years ago I was doing consultancy work for a geological engineering company and one of the principles told me of his difficulty of recruiting geology graduates from a highly regarded university. He was appalled at their lack of basic knowledge – even to identifying common rock types. When I returned to UEA I tested some of our students. Guess how they performed?
Your view of many environmental science departments and their degrees is definitely wrong. All degree programmesin the UK are reviewed by external examiners. UEA deliberately chose examiners from specialist science departments (up to six of them to reflect our inner diversity). They always suggested possible improvements, but almost all examiners, over more than 20 years, were highly complementary commonly commenting that our best students compared favourably with their best.
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Len
I asked first. The fact that you won’t/can’t answer my question tells me everything I need to know about your position and beliefs. I’ve explained why you can’t/won’t answer, and you haven’t met the point. I’m happy to leave it there and move on.
But for the record, a pause that lasts from one big El Nino to the next big one looks like a pause to me, with apples being compared to apples. If there was no pause, why all those “scientific” studies explaining the pause (until the pause was disappeared)?
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Alan Kendall says: 27 Jan 17 at 8:08 am
“Will. You ignore the need for people versed in many areas of science because environmental problems are complex.”
Alan,
I do not want to pick on you. I have read up! A fine geologist, and great mentor! Well respected by students more interested in learning than in graduating. My point is the woeful degradation in all hard sciences since the mid 1960s. Today ‘adjunct physics professors’ in the US actually teach that thermal radiant flux is proportional to the fourth power of emitting surface temperature, without any limitation by opposing electromagnetic radiance! This is the two stream approach which is truly bonkers. These folk have no education or experience in electromagnetic field theory. They try to teach such as some sort of thermodynamics, but EMR requires no mass, no matter whatsoever, for power transfer between locations of surfaces. It took me 10 years to appreciate the depth of Maxwell’s equations in both quaternion and vector algebra form. Guess which form expresses Lorentz invariance directly.
“UEA Environmental Science students came in two varieties – those with an already formed interest in the environment and those (c 50%) who did not wish to specialize (or more positively did not want to give up one of their A-level sciences). The choice of modules was wide enough that a student could pass through the degree programme with almost (85% perhaps) a specialist degree. Do you think our students could successfully compete with graduates of geology departments for much prized petroleum geologist positions, if it were not otherwise?”
You do a fine writing on defending your own skills and accomplishments. Even in college I had instructors sent, with pay, back from industry for a PhD and to learn how to mentor. With my respect to you, please accept a different POV on why western academia is now in such sad shape. Post CAGW science may still not recover!
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“She [Hayhoe] begins with this familiar message:
In the United States today, the number one predictor of whether we think climate is changing and humans are responsible is not how much we know about the science. It is simply where we fall on the political spectrum.”
She can’t see beyond the end of her nose. There are also people like me who do have a science background, but actually changed who we vote for because of the terrible way that science has been corrupted by global-warming alarmists with a pre-existing political agenda.
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Len, I did not say that the Pause was 18 years long; I said approximately 18 years and did not specify a start or end point, nor did I specify a particular dataset. Your illustration that there is supposedly no Pause using a 12 month Hadcrut 4 running mean is a poor show quite frankly.
Here is Hadcrut 4 actual data compared with the two satellite datasets. Clearly, there is slightly more of a warming trend post 1998 in the surface dataset than there is in either of the two satellite datasets, but please point to where there is no significant deceleration in warming for a period in excess of 15 years. You can’t. Only if you reference the ‘pause busted’ NASA and NOAA data can you illustrate that warming has continued apace in the 21st Century.
The Pause is real, it is not a statistical artifact or a result of cherry-picking start and end dates; it is a real physical phenomenon with a physical cause. The fact is, after the super El Nino of 1997/98, global mean temperatures plateaued, or slowed down significantly, interrupted only by the significant warming associated with the super El Nino of 2014/16. If global temperatures continue to decline, as they have been doing recently, then the Pause will re-establish itself and climate scientists will be forced to explain how global mean surface temperature has failed to increase for a period in excess of 2 decades despite rapidly rising GHG emissions.
http://woodfortrees.org/graph/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/to:2017/plot/rss/from:1970/to:2017/plot/uah6/from:1970/to:2017
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Will you’ve changed the point of your attack. I was defending the science within environmental science programmes, now you’re discussing a decline in standards in science teaching within university science departments in general. I both agree and disagree with you.
First the agreement. I certainly agree with my geological engineering friend – the lack of basic knowledge of graduating geology students is staggering.
Now the disagreement. University degrees should not be vocational qualifications. At their best, degree programmes should be opportunities to learn how to learn. The best students want to argue, the poor ones just want to learn the facts that will get them through their exams. I ended up not worrying about the syllabus, my job was to enthuse so that the better students craved to know more. I enjoyed this type of teaching immensely. Poorer students didn’t like it at all.
Why have science degree programmes changed? My explanations (there are probably others) are that every science over the past half century has expanded so much that even the basics take more than 3years to impart. Even more importantly in the UK, the proportion of school leavers going to university has increased from just over 5% to just under 50% affecting the calibre of those being taught and those doing the teaching. The concentration on research as nearly the sole measure of academic performance hadn’t helped matters either.
Thank you for your kind words.
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Alan Kendall says: 27 Jan 17 at 11:51 am
“Will you’ve changed the point of your attack.”
Sorry Alan, no change, only my nature for any discussion! Only survivors need to discuss!
“First the agreement. I certainly agree with my geological engineering friend – the lack of basic knowledge of graduating geology students is staggering.”
That was my point. Sorry I did not express such correctly!
“Now the disagreement. University degrees should not be vocational qualifications. At their best, degree programmes should be opportunities to learn how to learn. The best students want to argue, the poor ones just want to learn the facts that will get them through their exams. I ended up not worrying about the syllabus, my job was to enthuse so that the better students craved to know more. I enjoyed this type of teaching immensely. Poorer students didn’t like it at all.”
Ah! discussion! Vast world-wide need for skilled journeymen to produce what is needed (with no backtalk). The vocational!! You idealize your phrase ‘University degree’, such is but nonsense. Desire to learn is present at three years of age. Perhaps some forcing of communicating skills is desirable then (I want to be hugged). They our most precious resource!! Are we violently agreeing yet?
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Will of course we are agreeing (but also disagreeing). Independent learning is definitely acquired at university level (or by on-the-job experienc or training). Undergraduates face their strongest challenge in their first year. Then they have to translate from being taught by teachers into more independent learners and are given the time and space to do so. This is why contact hours are so low at universities, and also why so many students drop out in their first year.
I shall ignore your other deliberate attempts at provocation because I suspect that if we spent time together over a pint (for a start anyway) we would find more in common, especially bemoaning the changes since the “good old days” when we were taught.
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Mark, if you are measuring from the 98 EN to the 16 EN then there clearly was no ‘pause’. That you and Jaime don’t agree on the location of your ‘pause’ shows its true nature.
Jaime, you say that ”after the super El Nino of 1997/98, global mean temperatures plateaued, or slowed down significantly…”, but they clearly did not. Temps in, 99 and 2000 were at the level of those in the early 90s.
But both of you still need to reconcile you adherence to a pause with rejection of global mean temp as meaningless or an artifact.
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Mr. Martinez, do you want a list of consensus scientists and institutions that have formally acknowledged the pause? The list of scientists does start with James Hansen and the list of institutions does include the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
There are current attempts to airbrush the pause out of history, much in the same way Stalin’s enemies were airbrushed out of photographs. But until Amnesiums becomes a mandatory prescription, those of us who have followed the climate conversation with any degree of regularity will gently remind those intent on rewriting history that august people and institutions had a different opinion as recently as last year.
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Len
I think you misunderstand me – perhaps I haven’t explained myself well. I’m not hung up on the pause, as I accept that the world is probably warming, and that human-made CO2 is probably in part responsible for that. However, I find hugely amusing the efforts of the alarmists first of all to explain away the pause which they first acknowledged existed, then to change tack and to airbrush it out of history. They are the ones with the problem, not me.
My main problems with climate alarmism are, first, the obsession with deciding that we need to be alarmed (personally the prospect of a new Ice Age alarms me far more than a degree or two of warming); and second the policy prescriptions which stem from the alarmism, often self-defeating in their own terms increasing, not reducing CO2 emissions (Drax and its wood pellets, NI RHI etc), plunging millions into fuel poverty, exporting manufacturing jobs from western society to other economies with less stringent environmental standards, and damning us to unreliable and unpredictable energy. Meanwhile, those who force this madness on us never bother changing their own behaviour by and large – indeed upwards of 25,000 a year are happy to jet off to exotic and/or desirable holiday locations, mostly at the taxpayers’ expense, massively increasing their personal CO2 footprints in the process.
We’re all only human, and most of us have many human failings, myself included, I freely acknowledge. But for me greed and hypocrisy are two of my greatest dislikes in the pantheon of human failings, and climate alarmism scores highly in both undesirable traits. Nothing personal, you understand!
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Thomas, perhaps you can help us out with a definition of the ‘pause’. Mark measures it from El Nino peak to peak and Jaime says it is post 98 EN ignoring the fact that immediately after that EN temps dropped to early-90’s levels. You seem to be up on scientific opinion – what is the scientific consensus view of the ‘pause’, when it started and how long it lasted?
Mark, on airbrushing, has Hadcrut4 airbrushed anything out? And remember that H4 omits the Arctic – the fastest warming area so maybe isn’t the best measure.
Jaime, are you expecting the next few years to decline to early-90’s levels as they did after the 98 EN?
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Len
I admire your skill in not answering questions and then becoming the questioner yourself.
You’ve also ignored my main point, which is the thrust of my argument, given that I’ve already said I’m not that hung up on the pause.
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If you go to Box 9.2 in chapter 9 of the Wg1 section of this report published by the IPCC (page 769),
http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/mindex.shtml
You will see that the authors discuss a “hiatus” in the temperature trend between 1998 and 2012.
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Mr. Martinez, I’m happy to accept the definitions of the ‘ decade of stalled temperatures’ used by James Hansen and the term ‘hiatus’ used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Are you?
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Len, I’m not talking about the temporary effect of La Nina following on from the 1997/98 El Nino, I’m talking about the steady state level achieved after ENSO, which saw GMST being elevated by approximately 0.2C compared to what it was pre ENSO, whereupon GMST entered the Pause, seeing no further significant increases. What we have at present is a weak La Nina, but temperatures still dropping significantly. The following few years will reveal how GMST is behaving post ENSO 2014-17. It just is not possible at present to say whether the globe will cool in coming years, whether the Pause will re-establish itself, whether we will see an aggregate rise in GMST followed by another Pause or indeed if warming will accelerate rapidly as it did 1985-1998.
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Thomas, thanks for your offer of a 10 year hiatus to complement Jaime’s 18 year pause and Mark’s El Nino peak-to-peak pause. Jaime has of course shortened his pause to 15 years now to match MiaB’s offer of a 15 hiatus from the ARG WG1. This is quite a bargaining process and you might some time reach a consensus on what you all mean by a ‘pause’. MiaB earlier threw into the mix that the pause was a pause in ‘something’ that he says doesn’t mean anything and John the statistician added to that by calling the ‘something’ an artifact, whereas the rest of you seem to find the pause to be very meaningful. Very entertaining!
Jaime, you accept that the 98 EN caused a peak in temperature and that post 98 the temperature dropped because of La Nina. So you seem to accept that “things happen”. Do you also accept that from 2000 onward things continued to happen: Ninos and Ninas, volcanoes, changes in solar insolation? IPCC AR5, offered by MiaB, says they did. Or did we just get a ‘pause’, where nothing happened? Take out the things that happened and you get a continuing trend.
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Mr. Martinez, I’m not sure why you’re asking me to either defend or explain the pronouncements of the climate establishment, comments that were made at various times during the pause. Out in the real world, most people who don’t have a stake in the politics of climate change were able to see it and equally able to compare it to similar pauses occurring in the 20th Century.
One of my claims to very, very minor fame is that I may have been the first to correlate the pause in temperature rises with the large volume of CO2 emissions occurring at the same time. I wrote then and I’ll repeat now that the ‘Pause’ as discussed is not in any way an argument against climate change or human contributions to it. Taken with skyrocketing emissions, however, it is a powerful argument against assumptions of high atmospheric sensitivity.
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Yep, the debate is about the magnitude of climate sensitivity and the pause, however defined or explained away, isn’t helping the alarmist chorus. An honest admission rather than endless nit-picking would be extremely welcome – and extremely unexpected. Yet another way that money talks in climate – in a very boring direction.
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Len, your attempts to wriggle out of answering whether or not you accept that a pause, or slowdown exists in global mean surface temperature, from APPROXIMATELY 1998 to present, by engaging in increasingly bizarre hyperbole, deserves no more airtime.
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Thomas, I asked for nothing from you, but just put your 10 years in context. On your being the first to do whatever, it might be because nobody else cared. The change in atmospheric CO2 from 2000 to 2016 was about 10%. Sensitivity is discussed in terms of a doubling in CO2, for example 2C per doubling (i.e. 2C for a 100% change vs the 10% we have seen), so how much of a change in surface temperature are you expecting to see for the sensitivity you suppose exists? GISS has about 0.35C from 98 El Nino peak to 2016 El Nino peak; Hadcrut4 has about 0.4C for the same. There’s no rigor in using those numbers as trend rates – trends for each will be smaller than that. But maybe you get the picture – nobody cares about calculating the projected rise from your “large volume of CO2 emissions occurring” over such a short period.
Jaime, I accept that in some graphs the monthly or yearly wiggles don’t follow a straight line. Call that a pause if you will. But I don’t accept that this is a pause in warming.
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Then you are better informed than all the climate bods at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, who in July 2013 stated:
“Global mean surface temperatures rose rapidly from the 1970s, but have been relatively flat over the most recent 15 years to 2013.”
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/recent-pause-in-warming
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So Len, how meaningful is a statistic that can be interpreted in so many different ways? If you think it is meaningful then you have to explain how it fluctuates with respect to CO2 emissions. And if some versions of this statistic show a hiatus or pause while others show some kind of rising trend, then you should not expect people to be convinced that it is a meaningful statistic, nor that a meaningful relationship has been discovered between temperature and CO2. Has your brain exploded yet from all this crap science?
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Len, I would also be interested to know how much faith you put in the IPCC reports. You appear not to accept them. Is that true?
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Umm, Mr. Martinez, about a third of humanity’s CO2 emissions occurred during the Pause. Temperatures did not budge.
That so little of this incredible total of emissions was left hanging in the atmosphere is another argument against high sensitivity. Vegetation around the world celebrated in whatever manner vegetation celebrates. Oh, yes–by being fruitful and multiplying.
I would echo Man In A Barrel’s question–do you accept the considered opinion of the IPCC on this issue?
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Len won’t answer your questions – they’re too difficult. He doesn’t answer mine, either.
He may ask you some more questions, though.
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Len. Riddle me this – when is a pause not a pause? Why is CO2 so fickle, its effects omnipresent but recently in hiding?
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Mr. Martinez does seem to vacate the premises at inconvenient times during discussions, doesn’t he?
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Jaime, interesting links. I don’t see why they would start in 1998. maybe they were asked by parliament to explain the ‘pause’.
Alan, when it starts in 1998.
MiaB, yes GMST is meaningful, as long as you don’t start analyzing the wiggles and instead concentrate on the trends. IPCC docs are great, but analyzing a period that starts in 1998 (your ref to box 9.2) doesn’t make sense to me.
Thomas, your figure of 30% of all time emissions (if true) is irrelevant. Maybe you think 30% is BIG so it should have a BIG effect, even though the actual rise in atmospheric CO2 caused by those emissions has been only 10%. Or maybe you think that if that 10% rise had been the result of 50% or even 90% of all time emissions over the period it would have an even bigger effect even though the actual rise in atmospheric CO2 stayed at only 10%. I think you are misunderstanding somewhat.
Mark, in discussing your main concern you mention concern over a new ice age. That suggests a lack of perspective. I share your distaste for some of the measures that are put in place to combat climate change, but I don’t see that as a reason to doubt CC itself; that would be getting things backwards. As for manufacturing moving to countries that lack our environmental standards, that pre-dated action on CC; I personally like having clean-ish air, water, rivers, beaches and protected wildlife etc. We could fix the advantage we give to polluters by imposing taxes on pollution during production irrespective of location.
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Mr. Martinez, I do not do well at eyeballing charts, but it appears to me that the rise in CO2 concentrations between 1998 and 2014 (when the pause either ended or paused itself) was about the same as the rise between 1976 and 1998. During that period it was commonly written that it was current emissions contributing to the fast temperature rises. When concentrations rose an equivalent amount during a much shorter period, there were no (okay, very slight) temperature rises.
Again, however, your opinion of what I write, while entertaining, is not the subject of our discussion. I and others have asked if you agree with James Hansen and the IPCC when they write about the pause.
You said upthread that those agreeing with the idea of the pause were intellectual frauds. James Hansen and the IPCC agree with the idea of the pause. Do you therefore think that James Hansen and the IPCC are intellectual frauds?
The world wonders…
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So a relationship between temperature change and CO2 that is so tenuous that it defies mathematical description is good enough? We know that the log formula bullshit is no more than an approximation – there is no physical foundation for it. How many other log relationships are there in physics? If there are any, you can be sure that the dynamics have been worked out and proven experimentally. Not so for climate “science”. But, worse, if the log formula is not even a good or reasonable or even semi-literate relationship, why should we take climate “science” at its word? Its word is worthless.
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Thomas, don’t put words in my mouth. I said: “The twin memes of “global temperature has no meaning” and “global warming has paused because some global temperature graphs look a bit flatter at the end” is one of the hallmark contradictions of “sceptical” thought that should make anyone sit and smell the intellectual fraud in scepticism.”, not that “that those agreeing with the idea of the pause were intellectual frauds”. See the “twin memes” there?
As for your 1976-98, I reject the idea of dividing the history at 1998, but accepting that you do, you might as well talk of 1987-1997 as a “decade of stalled temperatures” for all it means now.
“During that period it was commonly written that it was current emissions contributing to the fast temperature rises. When concentrations rose an equivalent amount during a much shorter period, there were no (okay, very slight) temperature rises.”
Is that so? By whom? But ‘contributing’ has to be correct anyway. By the way, have you ever heard of heat capacity?
I suspect your problem is exactly “eyeballing charts” and thinking that the process tells you something.
MiaB, do you have good reason, beyond prejudice, to doubt the log formula?
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Len says: “I share your distaste for some of the measures that are put in place to combat climate change, but I don’t see that as a reason to doubt CC itself; that would be getting things backwards. As for manufacturing moving to countries that lack our environmental standards, that pre-dated action on CC; I personally like having clean-ish air, water, rivers, beaches and protected wildlife etc.”
Thanks for playing – we’re getting somewhere. You have put words into my mouth, of course. I explicitly said that I don’t doubt climate change; that my issue with the alarmism is that I don’t think there’s anything to be alarmed about; and that I hate the greed and hypocrisy associated with so-called climate change mitigation, much of which makes matters worse, even in the alarmists’ own terms. That’s not the same as doubting climate change.
Just because manufacturing started moving elsewhere before the climate change alarm, doesn’t mean that it hasn’t got worse since then, in large part due to the higher costs western manufacturers now have to pay for electricity.
I also like having clean-ish air and the other things you mention in your list. Those are the things that we old-fashioned environmentalists support. It’s a pity, then, that CO2 alarmism led governments to offer tax incentives for diesels, which we are now told are horrendously polluting; that much of Indonesia has been for much of the last decade under a pall of smog while jungles are burned to make space for palm oil production; and that US forests are being cleared to produce wood pellets to be transported across the Atlantic and burned at Drax, where, thanks to the madness of the EU, they are deemed not to release CO2 and therefore to qualify for subsidies.
Insanity is the word for it – “distaste”, while a step in the right direction, doesn’t really cut it.
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Ah, Mr. Martinez, I see. Does the relative scarcity of people who actually say, believe or advocate those two different views simultaneously bother you? Could you trot out a Patient Zero for this phenomenon?
I do note that you are steadfastly refusing to answer my question, repeated here: Do you think that James Hansen and the IPCC are intellectual frauds for acknowledging the pause? Here’s a bonus question (and thanks for playing our game): Do you accept or reject their specific statements on the issue?
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I don’t see the point of arguing with Len, but if others want to, that’s fine by me. I read comments by Alan Kendall, Thomas Fuller, Mark Hodgson and others with interest.
What struck me about the video which Barry Woods pointed out was that proper scientists like Hayhoe were allowing their names to be associated with those of a confessed liar like Gleick and an unconfessed liar like Lewandowsky who has publicly supported Gleick.
Each of us here at Cliscep has their own personal policy on intervention in threads and eventual moderation and censorship. Mine is for the freeest possible expression, roughly in line with the US constitution (though I have nothing to do with the USA, which I’ve never visited, and from which I would probably be banned because of past political activity) so this thread can continue for ever, as far as I’m concerned.
On my next post here I will be exercising the strictest censorship, for reasons which I explain in the post. I’ve had comments censored at Climate Audit, Jo Nova’s, and at our own Ben Pile’s Climate Resistance, and I hold no grudge. I ask others to be similarly benevolent.
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We’ve established on this thread that Len believes the pause is a meme which reveals the intellectual fraud of scepticism. We’ve established that he does not accept that a pause exists or existed, despite documented evidence of a general acceptance of a pause in the scientific literature and at the IPCC and Met Office no less. Thus we have established that it is highly unlikely that adherence to the notion of a pause among sceptics is, as Len argues, intellectual fraud or a ‘meme. It’s been a rather long and tedious process to essentially reveal that Len is probably more guilty of intellectual fraud than we sceptics are. Was it worth it? I’m not sure.
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Len Martinez says: 30 Jan 17 at 6:57 pm
“MiaB, do you have good reason, beyond prejudice, to doubt the log formula?”
The log formula is correct for the attenuation of “amplitude modulation”, of 14-16 micron thermal infra-red flux, never the flux itself. That is all that was ever verified. Guano Hansen and NASA-giss well knew that prior to 1980! I was there! Hansen was the chief instigator of the CO2 SCAM.
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Thomas, I referred to scepticism (implying climate scepticism) not sceptics, though I image there are individuals who hold both views (and there are plenty who are happy to do so implicitly). IPCC and Hansen clearly do not and hence, by my definition that you seem to understand, are not intellectual frauds, to answer your tedious question.
Mark, show me a company that moved to China from the US (which has cheap electricity) even in part because of electricity prices.
Jaime, no you haven’t. You have just established a way of coping with your “the pause started in 1998”-type ideas that you know must be false.
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Len
I can’t help wondering if you do it on purpose. You ignore the telling points I make in my last paragraph, and focus on one point, twisting it in the process. Western manufacturing (steel-making especially) has been badly damaged by higher electricity prices, and many plants have closed. China has stepped in to the gap. You don’t have to be able to be able to point to company X moving its manufacturing to China to prove the point. However, just carry out a simple internet search to find out where mainstream (especially German) brands of things like washing machines and other electrical white goods are made, and you’ll find that one heck of a lot of things that used to be made in Germany and elsewhere in Europe are now manufactured (under said European brand name) in China. They then of course have to be transported half-way round the world to western markets. How very green!
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Mark I didn’t address the “telling points” you refer to because I agree with them. Steel making has been undercut by cheap Chinese steel dumped on world markets at below cost. Economists would say that is good for everyone apart from steelmakers, though most of us would say it is bad. None of that has much to do with electricity prices and neither has the export of manufacturing to Asia. By and large, labour costs are by far the greater concern.
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Len, we have, but you can carry on providing additional confirmation as you wish, and others on here can continue to entertain your bizarre arguments.
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Mr. Martinez, do you agree or disagree with what James Hansen and the IPCC said about the Pause?
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Thomas, you are like a dog with a bone. I haven’t read all that each has said about the pause, so I can’t really say. I’m sure that what both have said is more nuanced than you will either recognize or acknowledge, so I’d put the question back on you: if you think their opinions are so important, why do you not accept what they say?
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So there was a pause
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Umm, Mr. Martinez, I do. Hansen said that temperatures had been flat for a decade. The IPCC said that there was a hiatus, most likely due to natural variability. I agree with both.
If you answered questions when they were put, there would be no dogs or bones…
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Len
Thank you for your honesty. I’ve made my point and am happy to leave it there, even if you’ve qualified your agreement, and still not commented on the other (rather more serious) points I made about cutting down forests, jungles etc and tax incentives for diesels (which are in themselves only a short part of a long list of eco-madnesses).
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Thomas, I don’t know exactly where Hansen’s 10 years starts but it is clear that you can construct a 10 year period this century with zero slope. In the same way as you can starting in 1987. Big deal. For the IPCC, box 9.2 of AR5 ch9 (MiaB’s reference) says (trimmed):
“Evaluation of Climate Models Chapter 9
Box 9.2 | Climate Models and the Hiatus in Global Mean Surface Warming of the Past 15 Years
The observed global mean surface temperature (GMST) has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years (…). Depending on the observational data set, the GMST trend over 1998–2012 is estimated to be around one-third to one-half of the trend over 1951–2012 (…). For example, in HadCRUT4 the trend is 0.04ºC per decade over 1998–2012, compared to 0.11ºC per decade over 1951–2012. The reduction in observed GMST trend is most marked in Northern Hemisphere winter (…). Even with this “hiatus” in GMST trend, the decade of the 2000s has been the warmest in the instrumental record of GMST (…). Nevertheless, the occurrence of the hiatus in GMST trend during the past 15 years raises the two related questions of what has caused it and whether climate models are able to reproduce it. “
This is the “hiatus” (in quotes) they are discussing that you say you agree with, I take it. Of the bold part (my bold), the first is true: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1951/to:2013/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/to:2013/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1951/to:2013/mean:12
while the second is clearly false: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1951/to:2013/trend/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1998/to:2013/trend/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1951/to:2013/mean:12
But you agree with it anyway.
Maybe for good reasons like this, the AR5 SPM doesn’t mention a pause or hiatus, so it is clearly not thought important by IPCC.
Mark, FFS I agree with you. But I’m not with you if you want to abolish the EPA and build filthy coal fired stations, etc.
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BTW, updating the first plot to the present you get this: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1951/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1951/mean:1
The trend since 1998 is now greater than the earlier trend. This just shows how stupid picking a date by your preferred method of “eyeballing” the graph is.
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Tis’ amazing (and sad) how grown men (and women) can argue so spiritedly about fictitious global temperature figures that no one has ever measured, come from the bowels of homogenization fanresy, and which change over time (getting colder or warmer as doctrine dictates).
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Len, thank you again; I’ve enjoyed our discussion. I conclude, I hope not erroneously, that the main difference between us is of emphasis, not of serious substance. And by the way, I’m not for abolishing the EPA or building lots of coal-fired stations, because of real pollution; though in view of the constraints on our generating capacity, I wouldn’t rush to close any down just yet. And I do think that burning dead trees (coal) makes more sense than chopping down live trees and burning them (wood pellets etc).
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Tom, hi! it’s great to run into you. This is a great site perhaps the host will let me hang out some.
I note the climate true believer now calling Mann, Hansen. the IPCC and others all liars about the pause.
Amazing. The true believer mantra seems to boil down to, “Give me doom or give me nothing!”.
Hayhoe, for me, is one of the most insipid of the climate hype promoters: She wraps her climate doom not only in a veneer of sciencey scary words, but also taps into some rather weak biblical theology that she obviously uses to manipulate the sincere-but-naive Christian into paying for one of her books or inviting her to their church to preach the climate gospel. Traditional biblical teaching looks extremely poorly on those who distort or monetize the message of the gospel. Prof. Hayhoe does that in spades, when she is not committing logical fallacies about believing in her climate apocalypse.
Keep up the good work!
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Hiya Hunter! I knew you’d find your way here–you’ll see a lot of old friends and make some new ones here.
Now don’t you start on Ms. Hayhoe too! I’ve just spent this whole thread sticking up for her. Who would you rather be next to in a pub–her or Joe Romm?
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Hunter’s description of Hayhoe is one I can certainly recognise.
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Tom,
Dealing with the Hayhoe’s of the world socially is easier than the Rommbots. She is cynical and would likely have good manners in a bar. Romm it seems actually believes his bombast and would probably make an unpleasant scene. Both are kooks, however.
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hunter says: 03 Feb 17 at 3:07 pm
“Tom,
Dealing with the Hayhoe’s of the world socially is easier than the Rommbots. She is cynical and would likely have good manners in a bar. Romm it seems actually believes his bombast and would probably make an unpleasant scene. Both are kooks, however.”
Giggle! 🙂
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Tom, that you think there are a *lot* of old friends here kind of shows how few of you (sceptics plus whatever you call yourself) there are. And that Hunter thinks that disagreeing about whether or not there was a pause is the same as accusing people of lying, shows that he has no idea of scientific debate. He should fit in well here. That Hunter has to invoke Mann and Hansen in support of there being a ‘pause’ is truly ironic.
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I don’t know about Mann, but Hansen certainly said there was a pause.
It seems to bother you that skeptics have friends at all. I’m not a skeptic so I don’t know for sure, but I doubt if their social interactions are that much different from anybody else’s. Unless you buy into that geezers in garages stuff that your own (friends? acquaintances?) like to put out.
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Any additional messages for Dr Hayhoe? By a strange sequence of events I’m now going to hear her talk in Bristol tomorrow about the US national climate assessment version 4, known to its friends as NCA4. That last link’s to Judith Curry, who’s not so impressed. I’ve told Judy I will read that critique, as well as some recent stuff by Hayhoe, before setting foot in the Peel Lecture Theatre at 4pm.
I was helped by what Tom Fuller wrote on this thread, by the way, as I thought through the implications of Hayhoe’s Christian faith. I think back to John Houghton (also an evangelical Christian) testifying to Nigel Lawson’s Economic Affairs Committee on climate in the House of Lords way back, before the foundation of the GWPF, followed by Richard Lindzen (or the other way round). How come I found the Jewish scientist so much more convincing? Anyway, any suggestions will be read, if anyone sees this. It’s only an hour, so ‘dialogue’ (a big Hayhoe word) will surely be limited. But a chance for me to learn more.
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Good luck!
Ask her how she reconciles the grand apocalyptic position she promoted despite the paucity of actual destruction.
Why she claims to seek dialog based on one side staying silent.
How she reconciles rejecting scientific method in favor of faith, and how she selects which science to reject.
What lessons does she see in the last huge science obsession, eugenics, with climate consensus?
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Hunter: I’d like to say I intend to ask all those questions but as a Christian, I mustn’t lie and as a realist, I feel sure I’ll only get one shot. Or less than one.
But as I was thinking about it earlier the Eugenics history did come to my mind also.
Thanks for all of this. I’ll let it percolate and decide at the last moment if there’s any opportunity at all.
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I heard the talk, which finished at 4:59 pm, leaving one minute for questions. Officially. There were in fact three questions but I didn’t try. During drinks and nibbles afterwards I did talk to Dr Hayhoe. She explained to me exactly why she’d blocked me on Twitter yesterday after I’d decided to go. I was shocked by the block at the time. I didn’t ask her about it aggressively, only mentioning it after telling her that I thought two of her answers at the end were good. (I may write that part up. I learned a fair amount from the whole thing but feel the need to process the whole. The gravity and aeroplane analogies were there and no more convincing than before. But she’s an accomplished presenter.)
The reasons Katharine gave for blocking me turned into a rather deep criticism of me as a Christian. Which I also need to process. It was a very gentle joke that she’d taken quite the wrong way. And that was it. But I was glad I’d gone. There’s always more to try to understand.
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RICHARD
Please do write it up. This business of dividing us up and delivering a different message for each group (one message for the Christians, one for the conservatives, etc.) is deeply disturbing. Blocking people on Twitter – isn’t that rather – Philistine?
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Geoff, the talk was at the Cabot Institute and was geared for that audience. Earlier in the week, Hayhoe had addressed Christians in Science in London, an outfit I’ve sometimes attended – hearing John Polkinghorne talk about the Five Arrows of Time being a memorable example. I have no problem with Hayhoe or Polkinghorne addressing different audiences, but I have lots of problems with the overconfidence of what I heard today and read in preparation. I also have no problem with Hayhoe talking to me, as a Christian, in a way she wouldn’t to an atheist or Hindu. The problem there was that she’d taken something I’d written in a tweet and misunderstood it. Volume 2 of NCA4, on impacts, which has recently been completed under her supervision, is 1600 pages long. On its release US politico Rick Santorum criticised the scientists involved, saying they’d exaggerated the findings out of a desire to make money. But they’d all worked for free, she said – and worked very hard. She said NCA4 has now in effect replaced IPCC AR5 as the most comprehensive, fair review of the global science and impacts – this was an idea I’d not heard before and was worth attending to learn. (Not learned as fact but as confident statement of what seemed likely to be widely-held opinion.) The wonderful Dr Curry has managed to read Volume 1 twice, but not Volume 2, leading to the first of a hoped-for series in January on a document that came out as draft early in 2017. Judy has made it clear she found it far worse than AR5 on the overconfidence front. But she’s not been able to add to the first instalment. I feel for her. It’s overwhelming and galling. But Hayhoe is impressive in certain ways that others aren’t. I need to think about it. You may just have had the write-up.
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Free my arse.
The US fear mongering quotes Steyer’s climate fear factory wholesale.
Her work, on all fronts frankly, seems marked by disengenuous meanders and word games.
Since decade after decade, deadline of doom after deadline of doom, with nothing special happening, it is clear that the consensus is wrong.
Yet here they are, sanctimonious, self righteous, and well paid.
You are blessed to have the patience and charity to tolerate this in good faith.
Tip on the “free”…how many grants, fellowships, paid symposia, sweet travel/speaking fellowships do these climate aparatchicks get.
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Hunter: That was a report of what Hayhoe said, not a value judgment. But I think Santorum could have done better. And Hayhoe’s tone even in putting him right was good – better than any consensus speaker I’ve heard. (1000% better than Michael Mann in the same city in 2014, for a start. I told Hayhoe that Mann’s was the worst talk I’d ever heard about any subject anywhere. And that related directly to her best answer. But I still want to think more about it before opening up on that.)
The White House response to Vol 2 mentioned sensitivity and uncertainty and looked pretty good by comparison. It was only on the screen for a short moment though. The Red Team idea was, not surprisingly, not as popular with Hayhoe or most of the crowd as with Drs Curry, Happer and co. Etc, etc.
Thanks for your input and encouragement, my friend. I went to learn and learn I did.
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Hayhoe was interviewed on Public Television about the time the report was issued. My memory of exactly what she said is defective but she did reference the notion that 97% of scientists supported the notion that we are threatened by anthropogenic climate change.
Maybe this is unreliable without her precise words, but I thought at the time she didn’t understand how meaningless the Cook study actually was, or the earlier Stanford study which I think also arrived at 97%.
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I should add that the discussion was along the lines of what could be done to convert the doubters. And the answer was along the lines that . guidance of 97% of the scientists surveyed should be respected.
Again, my words not hers.
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Thanks John. I don’t doubt that the 97% was mentioned. People have also been sharing notes today on the blocktastic communication skills involved.
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Doesn’t “fight against climate change” suggest a less than thoughtful understanding.
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Indeed. That was one of the tweets I saw Hayhoe had herself retweeted before she blocked me later in the day. (I only looked at her account to check if she had already blocked me as she had Rupert Darwall!) It was this one from the morning that made me decide to go:
I had no idea she was in the UK until a few moments before that. Which does all seem mildly ironic now, having been accused by her of an “ad hominem attack” the moment I mentioned my name. (I still think that’s a ridiculous claim. But I don’t doubt that Hayhoe’s had some genuinely nasty criticism since she moved from astrophysics to climate so I remain in forgiving mood on that.)
Here are a couple of other observations about the talk. Another thing learned and one that I wonder if the speaker really has.
After Volume 2 of NCA4 was released on 23rd November 2018 there was another major report from the globalchange.gov (which Hayhoe joined for version 2 of NCA, which came out in 2009), as shown in the right-hand column of their NCA4 page: the Second State of the
Carbon Cycle Report. I don’t know how many pages SOCCR2 is but Hayhoe clearly considered the combination of all three volumes a vital statement of ‘the truth’ as it has been revealed to the diligent, unpaid climate experts. She didn’t mention the criticism about overconfidence from the likes of Dr Curry, preferring to take aim at the likes of Santorum. These three were it, taking over from IPPC AR5 as the definitive accounts of climate science and impacts. I hadn’t heard of SOCCR2. I’m not volunteering to do an in-depth review.
The other very interesting segment was about how climate change was barely mentioned in the primaries (of both parties, I think KH said) and the debates leading up to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. (Again, I gave her good marks in not playing to the gallery in making a snide remark about the current occupant of the White House. Much more self-control than I’ve seen in other consensus persuaders.) Hayhoe is clearly very encouraged by perceived changes since then. But how deep have those changes gone? The Australian election may well show that the Left was right not to emphasize climate change in the run-up to November 2016. Hayhoe’s twitter feed has nothing so far on the loss of the “unlosable election” down under. The GWPF, ever so surprisingly, does:
The articles there look pretty devastating. But I cannot concentrate much more on climate for a while. I’m genuinely grateful for Katharine Hayhoe for educating me in the short time I’ve had this week.
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