global tepid

[Bill Sloman]

OK, tell me who these "same people" are.

"The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_Advancement_of_Sound_Science_Coalition

And show me the money.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Exxon_Mobil

Oh, that's right -- you actually don't have even the slightest
semblance of a fact to back up your vague accusations.

Pity about that.

Sounds like a fallacy to me.

The fallacy is all yours.

Yet you can't show how.

I just did.

You can't help but go for the guilt-by-association semantic tarbrush,
eh?

The guilt is perfectly real, and well-established.

It's cheap and desperate,

It might be if it were wrong. It isn't.

and more importantly when you can't cite the specifics chapter and verse people can smell the desperation.

Since I've cited specifics from the start, which you were too dim to
recognise, it's your desperation that's getting on the nose.

In fact, it's stupid for you to even do that when you should know
that the central question of CAGW is the sensitivity number. Everyone
with any skin in the game at all knows that, and that is so unambiguous
all you have to do is state a real in the range 0.5 to 6 in this
context and everyone knows precisely what is referenced.

But you don't. And the 0.5 to 6 is way too high these days

I'll post a short paragraph as a disqualifier:

        In 2007 the IPCC reported that scientists were more confident than
        ever that humans were changing the climate. Although onlya small
        fraction of the predicted warming had happened so far, effects were
        already becoming visible in some regions -- more deadly heat waves,
        stronger floods and droughts, heat-related changes in theranges and
        behavior of sensitive species.

Poppycock. Those types of claims are of exactly the ilk I am speaking.
Even were there effects based on warming of the climate, they don't
speak to the *cause* of the warming, which is the question.

There's no question about the cause of the warming. If you want to
repeal the laws of physics to open the field to other potential
causes, feel free to open negotiations with the deity of your choice,
but don't expect to be taken seriously before you've established
contact.

Catastrophic. Anthropogenic. Global. Warming. OK, I do deny the
catastrophe, as would any sane person who doesn't buy into a 3+ degree
sensitivity number.

By coincidence, since you don't appear to be remotely sane.

Your theory, by the way, seems to indicate that positive feedback
dominates the climate system. Even if you could convince me that we
understand the powerfully complex and chaotic climate system enough to
predict the action of doubling the concentration of a single trace
gas, you'd still have a hard time convincing me. Because I know one
thing -- if positive feedback could cause such a system to spin out of
control, the system would not be nearly so stable as it has been.
Positive feedback is very rare in nature, and for obvious reasons.

Sure. We've only had an alternation of ice ages and interglacials for
the last few million years. The positive feedback it takes to get the
tiny Milankovitch changes in insolation to flip the average global
temperature by about 4K are quite dramatic, and self-limiting, since
the ice cover in the Northern Hemisphere can 't get down to the
equator, and hasn't vanished entirely (yet).

It's an interesting story and we've only recently started to get a
grip on exactly what happened at the end of the most recent ice age.

<snipped more irrelevant garbage>

 

[[email protected]]

I think that is something going on in your mind, most people know that
the word denier refers to nylons.

Are your really asserting that a homograph has any meaning in this
discussion?

 

[1treePetrifiedForestLane]

there are two main problems that the confirmerists & denierists refuse
to acknowledge: a)
the continuous rise of teh two largest ice sheets,
since the first intl. bipolar year ('57-9), and b)
the matching lack of a rise in sealevel, viz Morner.

 

[1treePetrifiedForestLane]

that's OK;
no-one else in these fora is literate enough to bother
to see that there is no such a thing as "global" warming,
other than via passage through the lithosphere, anymore than
there are "holes" in the ozonosphere
(they are simply phenomena).

 

[benj]

Malarkey.
mr_antone

There you go again. The old proof by assertion. You've been caught using
cheap non-words again and all you do is deny it. I guess that makes you a
"denier"!

 

[Bill Sloman]

Surely you can pull a specific example from that. Just provide one.

I did - "The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition."

George Monbiot's Guardian article - effectively a chapter from his
book "Heat" if I've remembered the dates correctly - talks about
TASSC, and I threw in the SourceWatch detail to flesh out the picture.

Don't send me on a wild goose chase.

I gave you a specific organisation, and enough detail on that
organisation to make the point. You've failed to process the data.
Your reaction is that of a silly goose who doesn't know how to deal
with actual facts.

You did not. You posted a steaming pile of links.

The data is there, but you are too dim, or too dedicated to your
demented point of view, to be able to process it.

Repeated assertion is not a winning tactic, either.

As you might have worked out by now, if you had a functioning brain.

Huh? We don't even know the sign for sure.

You can't even identify the dimensions - units - of the sensitivity
you are pontificating about, and yet you think you can make credible
claims about the current level of scientific knowledge about whatever
it is you think you are talking about.

Best estimates seem
to be 1-2, but they are simply estimates and no one can
characterize our chaotic climate system well enough to even
achieve statisical likelihood of their estimate.

Weather is chaotic. Climate isn't. We've been pointing this out to
John Larkin here for years. We've even pointed out that this
particular insight goes back to John von Neumann, not much after the
crucial computer modelling fiasco that drew everybody's attention to
the fact that weather is chaotic. John Larkin's yet to take it on
board, and you don't promise to be a quick study either.

<snipped the rest of your incompetent pretensions>

 

[Bill Sloman]

there are two main problems that the confirmerists & denierists refuse
to acknowledge: a)
the continuous rise of teh two largest ice sheets,
since the first intl. bipolar year ('57-9), and b)
the matching lack of a rise in sealevel, viz Morner.

It's not a problem. The top of the ice sheet is fresh snow, which
contains a lot of air. Local warming puts more water vapour in the air
over the oceans, which means more snow falling on the ice sheets.

The ice sheets become more voluminous, but not more massive - the
GRACE satellites are measuring the mass of the ice sheets, and they
are all shrinking. The consequent corresponding rise in sea level is
fairly small, and not inconsistent with what we are measuring.

Sea level rise probably won't become a problem until the ice starts
sliding off into the ocean rather faster than it's doing at the
moment. When the Laurentian ice sheet (over most of Canada) slid off
into the North Atlantic at the end of the last ice age, it did so in
big chunks, which apparently turned off the Gulf Stream twice. This is
one of the interesting possible consequences of further anthropogenic
global warming, but one which is not easy to model or predict.

 

[Bill Sloman]

Is this dumb or what?

http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Weather-warnings-become-reality...

apparently AGW waited intil 2012 to hit us all at once. Imagine a US city
hitting 95 degrees in the summer! Outrageous!

It's standard newspaper over-dramatisation, nothing more. English
language science journalism is rubbish - the journalists who do it see
it as one step up from covering the local flower shows, and a stepping
stone on the way to covering local politics, and haven't got a clue
about the science they purport to report.

Dutch science journalism was much better. They still make occasional
mistakes, but they were rare enough that when I found one I'd point it
out to my wife.

 

[Bill Sloman]

Then state the hypothesis in equation form with all the relevant
variables of your choice and show how it predicts and accurately
describes the current state.

It's been done. IIRR you can download the suite of software that lets
you run it on your computer. You've got to register, and it takes
about ten days before they'll get around to recognising your
registration and letting you download the software (which is why I
never bothered).

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/hitran/

People have been doing it for a while now.

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19650017692_1965017692.pdf

Your argument is a big fail. First of all, it IS blocked.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_Transmission.png>

The only band that contributes to the greenhouse effect is the 14-20
micrometer band, and it IS saturated.

At ground level. Which means that the IR radiation is still moving up
the atmosphere, but in small steps, and the energy is being
redistributed across the spectrum as the atmosphere gets cooler as you
go up, until you get to the effective radiating altitude.

It's only direct radiation to the rest of the universe that is blocked
- at ground level. Radiation is still one of the mechanisms of energy
transfer that gets the energy up to the various effective radiating
altitudes.

The fact that you don't seem to have heard of the effective radiating
altitude, and have completely failed to understand it's significance
when the concept was explained to you does make you something of a
dunce. Most of the climate experts made the same mistake before about
1960, but the penny dropped back then, so you'd be fifty years behind
the times.

WTF?! Dude, the greenhouse effect is about blocking the IR bands in the
EARTH's black body curve, not the suns! Blocking incoming radiation in
the SUN's black body curve causes COOLING.

Right. But since most of the energy input from the sun comes in at
shorter wavelengths than CO2 absorbs, changes in CO2 level in the
atmosphere don't have much - if any effect - on the energy absorbed,
while the CO2 spectrum sits rather more centrally in the range of
wavelengths emitted.

LOL! You don't even know how the greenhouse effect works!!

Wrong. The mis-perception is entirely yours, and it's a pretty comical
one.

That is just too damned funny!

And you are the butt of the joke.

 

[[email protected]]

Or that he has a fetish for wearing nylons?

Slowman's nylons.

 

[Bill Sloman]

I'm not your student. Don't give me sources and expect me to chase
them,

The George Monbiot piece is a straightforward newspaper article,
printed in the Guardian newspaper. It's tolerably long as newspaper
articles go - the Guardian is an up-market UK newspaper which can
expect it's readers to have an adult attention span. All you had to do
was clikc on the web-site and read it - there was no chasing involved.

assuming you are some sort of deity whose perspicacity
I should worship.

George Monbiot may be an adequate approximation to the kind of deity.
There are a few other investigative journalists around who deserve
similar respect.

You need to bring out something, describe it in your own words so I know you understand it, then wait for a
response. It's called conversation.

It would be, if there was any chance that you could understand
anything technical enough to be interesting, let alone form and
opinion on whether I understood it.

Make *what* point?

That some of the people busy denying the reality and/or importance of
anthropogenic global warming were busy denying the reality and
importance of the health dangers of cigarette smoking some twenty
years ago.

You won't state one.

I had thought that the point was obvious. I seem to have over-
estimated your intelligence, or perhaps your willingness to understand
any point of view that differs from your own.

All you'll do is make vague accusations and expect me to chase your references.

There's nothing vague about my accusations about the denialist
propaganda machine, and the "chasing" you are objecting to was
clicking on a web-site and reading a newspaper article.

Again, I am not your student. And now I am not going to be your
interlocutor, either, because I am sick of your behavior.

You aren't exactly promising student material, and even less
promising as interlocutor material, since you are treating this forum
as a soap box rather than an area of debate.

More ad-hominem, ho-hum.

You are claiming to be human? A hominid perhaps, but well short of
sapient.

What do you mean, "can't identify the units". Those are your words.
I assume that you know what we are talking about here.

I know what I'm talking about. I've got no evidence that you do, and
your unwillingness to run the risk of specifying what your
"sensitivity" parameter means in terms of SI units isn't making me any
less sceptical.

Climate is a result of chaotic forcings.

The forcing aren't chaotic. The atmosphere churns around ore or less
randomly, as do the individual molecules that compose the atmosphere,
but that doesn't make climate chaotic.

Given the perspective of millenia, one might say climate is not chaotic.

Farmers have a shorter attention span, and they don't find it chaotic
in any meaningful way.

But from the
perspective of 160 years of temperature data, and speaking in tenths
of a degree, it is not a system that is immune to the effects of chaos.

It's not immune to the effects of the North Atlantic multidecadal
oscillation and the El Nino/La Nina alternation, and we don't know
enough about them (and similar stuff that may be going on in less
obvious patches of ocean) to yet say whether they are chaotic or
merely complicated

Can you characterize all of the forcings in the climate system? Until
a couple of years ago, every climate model represented cloud cover in
an extremely simplistic fashion.

Cloud cover isn't a forcing, it's just part of the system being
modelled.

Clouds aren't simple, and there is
evidence that solar effects may be amplified by clouds.

Lindzen had ideas about this, but they were exploded at least a decade
ago.

When you can't characterize a system completely, and it is subject to many and
varied forcings, the result is chaos on the decadal scales we are
speaking of.

Identify what you imagine "forcings" to be. It won't make you look
anything less like an idiot, but it will probably give us a good
laugh.
Meanwhile, claiming that a system that you don't understand is chaotic
is yet more evidence that you haven't a clue.

<snipped the rest of the empty rhetoric>

 

[Bill Sloman]

   It's all he's done for over a decade.  That, and live on welfare
while whining that no one will hire old fools like him.

I got unemployment benefit in the Netherlands from 2003 to 2007. It
might have been welfare in the US, but in the Netherlands it was
funded out of contributions collected from people who were in work as
a sort of collective insurance policy. It probably paid my living
expenses but we lived on my wife's much larger income, and still saved
a significant proportion of that.

I don't whine about the Dutch attitude to hiring elderly workers. I
don't think much of it - like everybody else who comments on it, I
think it is stupid, and I certainly found it inconvenient, but it's
their country and they are free to screw it up any way they like.

Most people on SED have him kill filed.

Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson is the only regular poster who
admits to it, and he kill-files everybody who shows him up as the
ignorant red-neck that he is.

He also uses multiple email addresses which will get around some filters.

Really? As far as I know it's been something like nine years since I
intentionally posted as anything other than [email protected].

 

[P E Schoen]

"Bill Sloman" wrote in message

On 23 Dec, 12:57, "Michael A. Terrell" <[email protected]>
wrote:

Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson is the only regular poster who
admits to it, and he kill-files everybody who shows him up as the
ignorant red-neck that he is.

Really? As far as I know it's been something like nine years since I
intentionally posted as anything other than [email protected].

It seems that Michael Terrell has become increasingly deluded lately, as
evidenced by these two off-hand statements of obvious fiction presented as
fact. Perhaps he believes this, which seriously undermines his credibility
in general. A similar malady seems to have afflicted Jim Thompson lately as
well.

As I have heard others say, these are examples of people "typing themselves
smart", or trying to build their own version of reality and "truth" by sheer
volume of words, or childish accusations, threats, and obscenities. It seems
to be a desperate attempt to derail an otherwise rational and polite
discussion, when their POV has become seriously and effectively challenged
and refuted.

It is interesting and educational to debate issues here other than
electronics, and I respect and appreciate alternate opinions and factual or
at least rational ideas and information. But it still amazes me how people
with obvious technical and scientific backgrounds can continue to argue on
the basis of emotion and wishful thinking, or even hatred and rejection of
anything which might infringe upon their limited and selfish beliefs.

Paul

 

[matt_sykes]

http://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/...

It's not the only information available about what's going on, but it
does set this latest round of big business trashing inconvenient
scientific evidence in it's historical context.

You've been suckered by a well-financed public relations campaign
directed by the same people who earlier told you that smoking wasn't
actually all that bad for your health


Religions have gospels. Science just has evidence, and not-yet-
falsified interpretations of that evidence. If you were sensitive to
the scientific content of the propositions that you seem to be
objecting to, you'd identify - and quantity - the variable that was
going to create the 3+ K variation. As a clue, it's usually a doubling
of the atmospheric CO2 level from the pre-industrial 270ppm.

Your enthusiasm for typing out phrases that you clearly don't
understand puts you squarely in the "gospel-pushing" camp.

<snipped more rubbish>

"you'd identify - and quantity - the variable that was
going to create the 3+ K variation. As a clue, it's usually a
doubling
of the atmospheric CO2 level from the pre-industrial 270ppm"

You are completely wrong. CO2 itself will give about 1 to 1.2C for a
doubling. THe additional warming comes from WV according to the IPCC,
which thay suppose is a positive feedback.

Given that rain is a massive negative feedback their stance is highly
suspect.


So, please apraise yourself of the actualy science, it is crucial
because if WV is not a positive feedback CO2 will be beneficial to the
planet. That IS scientific fact.

 

[Bill Sloman]

that's OK;
no-one else in these fora is literate enough to bother
to see that there is no such a thing as "global" warming,
other than via passage through the lithosphere, anymore than
there are "holes" in the ozonosphere
(they are simply phenomena).

You've already told us that you are a 12-year-old. Don't bother
reminding us again.

 

[Bill Sloman]

Sure they do. It is Occams Razor; if there was a simple explanation,
you wouldn't need to use such things.

Sadly,there isn't a simple explanation, or at least not one that's
simple enough for you to grasp. Einstein did say that God was subtle,
though not malicious.

Understand and *accept*? Is this a religious issue?

No. It does take a certain amount of education, but no indoctrination.

So? Of course they spend money lobbying.

The interesting feature of the process is that they don't spend the
money directly but spread it around the people who generate the
denialist propaganda. The Competitive Enterprise Institute is one of
them, which does have a history of lying about the health effects of
tobacco back in the 1990s.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Exxon_Mobil

Everyone does. I'll tell you
that the PR budget of the Sierra Club and the UCS puts it to shame,
though. There is money everywhere.

But few of them are as secretive about it as Exxon-Mobile, have been
enjoined to stop that particular sort of lobbying, have promised to do
so, and have kept on doing it in spite of their promise.
The SourceWatch page is informative, though it may make unreasonable
demands on your very limited attention span.

Having trouble getting funding?

Who is supposed to be having trouble getting funding? And what would
that have to do with point at issue? There is no climate change "gravy
train".

Yet you can't describe how.

Try to finish your sentences.

So now you aren't claiming catastrophe? Then what do we have to
worry about? We adapt quite nicely to changing conditions. There
are positive aspects to warming, too.

Not catastrophe, just progressively increasing difficulties. One of
the adaptions we may have to make is giving up on agriculture - we've
spent the last ten thousand years selectively breeding our food crops
to do well in the more or less stable climate we've enjoyed for most
of this interglacial. Change the climate and they won't be well
adapted any more.

<snipped the usual twaddle>

 

[Bill Sloman]

How's Greenland doing? Is all that ice turning into a
gigantic bucket of fresh water that will suddenly break lose
and pour into the Atlantic swamping the thermo-haline flow?

Here's the most recent report that I know about.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/26/greenland-ice-sheet-borrowed-time

250 billion tons of ice per year is a tolerably gigantic bucket of
fresh water, but if the Greenland ice sheet is kind enough to melt in
place, rather than sliding off into the ocean as large chunks, as the
Laurentian ice sheet did at the end of the most recent ice age, the
Gulf Stream is unlikely to be much affected. The Gulf Stream has
slowed down a bit in recent decades, but nothing to get excited about.

The more interesting question about this year's extensive surface
melting is what it's going at the interface between the bottom of the
ice-cap and the rock underneath, Liquid water acts as a lubricant, and
can speed up glacier flow.

 

[Bill Sloman]

"you'd identify - and quantity - the variable that was
 going to create the 3+ K variation. As a clue, it's usually a
doubling
 of the atmospheric CO2 level from the pre-industrial 270ppm"

You are completely wrong.   CO2 itself will give about 1 to 1.2C for a
doubling.  The additional warming comes from WV according to the IPCC,
which they suppose is a positive feedback.

Water vapour levels in the atmosphere are pretty much purely dependent
on the ocean surface temperatures. The extra warming that you get from
the extra CO2 in the atmosphere adds more H2O, which provides some
additional warming, and that's always figured into the sensitivity.
Water vapour levels equilibrate within a about three weeks, so it
makes sense to treat it as a dependent variable.

Given that rain is a massive negative feedback their stance is highly
suspect.

And why would you think that rain was a massive negative feedback?
Nobody who knows anything about the subject does.

So, please apraise yourself of the actual science, it is crucial
because if WV is not a positive feedback CO2 will be beneficial to the
planet.   That IS scientific fact.

I'm well aware that H20 vapour is a greenhouse gas, and have already
mentioned the fact in this thread. The fact that water vapour adds a
positive feedback is one of those little wrinkles that was needed to
get enough positive feedback to make the Milankovitch explanation of
the ice ages work. Your idea of a "scientific fact" doesn't have much
relationship to reality.

 

[Bill Sloman]

   'Ugliest Queen ever!!!' ;-)

Mike Terrell's incontinence pads might give him an unfair advantage in
any such competition.

 

[Bill Sloman]

Mr. Langan has nailed it. As long as the federal government funds studies
on CO2 caused global warming, there will be people with degrees who will
be willing to take that money and produce a pack of lies.

As evidenced by the existence of the denialist propaganda machine.
You've got one thing wrong though - Mickey Langan hasn't nailed
anything, except perhaps any reputation he might have had for being
able think straight.

Which is why these AGW frauds have gotten so far without even having a
hypothesis to test!

The anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is that CO2 is a
greenhouse gas, our burning significant amounts of fossil carbon for
fuel is putting more of that greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, thus
is making the average surface temperature of the earth higher, and
that if we keep on doing it, it's going to make the surface
temperatures even higher.

It's a perfectly testable hypothesis, and has additional implications
that we can test against the geological record. So far the hypothesis
has passed all every test.

If you don't know enough to realise this, you really should do a bit
more reading.

Since the only AGW frauds around are actually the people working for
the denialist propaganda machine, you may in fact be right, but not in
the way you seem to have had in what passes for your mind.