Stern "I Got it Wrong on Climate Change - it's Far, Far Worse"
http://t.co/PvDWNr7h

Regards

-------------------------
Geoff Benn BSc (Hons) CEng MIET, Twitter: @GeoffBenn
Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains taken to bring it to light. George Washington.
skepticalscience.com: "getting skeptical about global warming skepticism"

I had read the link and that was why I asked. I first found it some time ago and have been anxiously waiting for the killer follow-up. O'Dwyer is obviously trying to give the impression thay you suggest but is it true or could it be that the problems he highlighted were all he could find?

In which case the samples really were not centred properly and the weighting given to certain samples were designed to give the "correct" warmist result and, in any case, those two papers MBH98 and MBH99 and the subsequent papers of others that "reproduced" the research really did rely on a very small number of trees - or was it just one, I can't remember.

Yes, they used more trees overall but only a very small number greatly influenced the result. I don't think anyone explained why they picked the trees they did either although they did deny cherry-picking. Now why would anyone think that?

The one substantive point O'Dwyer makes about the book is that MBH98 did not remove the Medieval Warming Period (MWP) as Montford stated. However, I think this could have been an editing problem because MBH99 did get rid of it. So although O'Dwyer is technically right because Montford put it in the wrong place in the book. Montford is still right to claim that Mann, Bradley and Hughes did erase the MWP with one of their Hockey Stick papers.

I don't expect SkS has this level of detail and anyway their job, like yours, is to give a biased view.

-------------------------
Richard Winstone MIET

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Irish orator, philosopher, & politician (1729 - 1797)

Geoff,
You seem to fail because of your reliability on a single 'green' website ie Sks.
I have already replied on the 'plant food' issue.

Challenge

Laughable, I don't want to put that to you, Geoff, but in decades I and many will find you to look a little silly.
As usual, Geoff, you still have difficulty explaining the issues in your own words. This wouldn't be a comfortable life in paid engineering employment.
In your own words please Geoff, many have requested such.

Regards

Dave

Edited: 30 January 2013 at 12:41 AM by HazelGroveWolf

Laugh away! Climate Change Deniers have a reputation that will go down in history, your grand children will be proud! I'm satisfied that with the motion as it was we still tipped the balance of the vote to almost 50% and in the process left plenty of main-stream peer-reviewed science along the way. Everyone now has the tools to side step mis-information

Regards

-------------------------
Geoff Benn BSc (Hons) CEng MIET, Twitter: @GeoffBenn
Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains taken to bring it to light. George Washington.
skepticalscience.com: "getting skeptical about global warming skepticism"

This thread has taken on an almost religious style where everyone argues about the minutest differences in dogma and ignores the huge area of common ground.

There are around 500 posts, Geoff has posted 190 times, almost all on this thread. A large number of these quote from the bible, skeptics.com.

Everyone posting, as far as I can see, agrees that the climate has changed, is changing and will continue to change.

I think everyone is in agreement that there are long term (10s of thousands of years) natural climate cycles that bring ice ages and we are currently on the rising slope of one of these before we enter the next ice age. The mechanisms are poorly understood but may be some form of constructive interference between variations in the earth's orbit and variations in solar output.

I also see a general agreement that we should reduce our consumption of natural resources although this will be difficult with the economic growth in the developing countries. Several posters are making significant efforts in this direction.

There appears to me to be two scenarios:

1) The IPCC is correct about man made CO2 causing temperature increases with melting of ice caps and sea level rises. Without major and I think unfeasible political change in the developing countries, including China, this is going to happen anyway. In this case rather than arguing about the details we should be looking at how to mitigate the consequences. The Dutch have managed to live successfully below sea level for a few centuries.

2) The climate changes are due to natural variations and are going to happen anyway. In this case we should be looking at how to manage the consequences.

In both cases the real answer is the same!

Best regards

Roger

Yet again Geoff Benn fails to demonstrate any understanding of the issues surrounding the Hockey-stick yet feels free to resort to using offensive language directed at those who do.

It is not the fossil-fuel industry that drives scepticism of climate science but sites such as RealClimate and SkS along with their followers such as Geoff.

Their failure to publicly acknowledge, or in Geoff's case even understand, the flawed nature of the Hockey-stick renders their opinion on other issues worthless and leads some people to, wrongly, ridicule the whole of climate science. They may be wrong to dismiss other areas of the science but it is the above mentioned sites that are providing the ammunition and not the fossil-fuel industry, that's just something these sites made up to evade discussion.

As pro-action climate scientist Hans von Storch said:
" ... Mann's study was apparently so interesting that it was accepted. A precarious fact. But it is even more precarious that the powerful people in charge of the IPCC turned the publication into an icon, the symbol of proof of anthropogenic climate change. That was not only stupid, but irresponsible. As a result of this elevation, the entire hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change is being unjustifiably questioned. ... "

Hans von Storch fell from grace since he not only publicly accepted the errors noted by McIntyre and McKitrick but found an additional error; Mann had failed to take the square root of the cosine of latitude when area weighting proxies prior to PCA. Strangely, Wahl and Amman made exactly the same error in their independent analysis.

In the Annals of Applied Statistics, McShane and Wyner (2010) wrote:

" ... the long flat handle of the hockey stick is best understood to be a feature of regression and less a reflection of our knowledge of the truth ... "

Fellow climate scientist Keith Briffa wrote:

" ... He is just as capable of regressing these data again any other "target" series , such as the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbage he has produced over the last few years , and ... (better say no more) Keith" ... "

Or as co-author Ray Bradley said:

" ... You just shouldn't grab anything that's in print and just use it 'cos it's there - that
just perpetuates rubbish. ... "

Although Bradley was referring to a later choice of 'proxy' it gives an indication of the lack of care taken in selecting proxies, if it looks like a hockey-stick it goes in the mix - nothing else matters. Mann even used the Tiljander sediment proxy when it is known that the hockey-stick shape is due to building work in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The shape of the Hockey-stick was primarily due to the inclusion of a strip-bark bristlecone chronology that was never intended to be a temperature proxy. These are trees that have suffered physical damage and no sensible person would consider them a reliable proxy for historic temperatures.

So Geoff's support for the Hockey-stick is misplaced. Sceptics know he is wrong and tell him and many climate scientists know he is wrong but won't say so in public.

Roger,

You are correct that ultimately mitigation is the only viable option although the desire to downplay natural variations has led to many recent problems such as building on flood plains.

Roger, you are quite right. Also, it is not uncommon for the "opposing sides" to not listen to each other and so they assume that their opponents beliefs are something other than what they are.

I have tried to explain my standpoint in this thread but the best example I found was posted on the "wrong site" so was apparently not worth reading. However, I will try again. This appeared today and is an excellent description of what I would consider to be the main points of the debate. Excerpt below:

Common ground amongst DAGW [Dangerous Anthropogenic Global Warming] protagonists

Though you wouldn't know it from the antagonistic nature of public discussions about global warming, a large measure of scientific agreement and shared interpretation exists amongst nearly all scientists who consider the issue. The common ground, much of which was traversed by Dr. Hayhoe in her article, includes:

· that climate has always changed and always will,

· that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and warms the lower atmosphere,

· that human emissions are accumulating in the atmosphere,

· that a global warming of around 0.5 oC occurred in the 20th century, but

· that global warming has ceased over the last 15 years.


The article is by Professor Bob Carter who claims he "has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers on palaeo-environmental and palaeo-climatic topics ..."

I would really appreciate comments or details of any opposing viewpoint.

-------------------------
Richard Winstone MIET

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Irish orator, philosopher, & politician (1729 - 1797)

Please allow me to help.

Are you claiming that the process which you think should be causing warming is still happening but that no warming is resulting because natural events are swamping it?

-------------------------
Richard Winstone MIET

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Irish orator, philosopher, & politician (1729 - 1797)

I'm likely to let my eldest son loose on a university in the autumn studying geography, despite government programming even he sees the folly. His other 'A' level subjects include maths and physics.
Please stop the 'denier' crap and in your own words explain the maths/physics of climate prediction. Note my last word.

Regards

Dave

Edited: 01 February 2013 at 12:26 AM by HazelGroveWolf

If you like psychology you should look at Psychological Projection in the context of Climate Change.

By the way, have you defined what you mean by a Climate Denier anywhere?

I suspect a person you call a climate denier neither denies climate nor climate change.

-------------------------
Richard Winstone MIET

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Irish orator, philosopher, & politician (1729 - 1797)

Are you suggesting that the consensus is to read WUWT and not SkS?

-------------------------
Richard Winstone MIET

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Irish orator, philosopher, & politician (1729 - 1797)

Please feel free to quote from elsewhere. We won't mind.

-------------------------
Richard Winstone MIET

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Irish orator, philosopher, & politician (1729 - 1797)

A vote is politics; this should be about science.

The post title is: "Is climate change a man-made phenomenon?"

As climate change happened before (and after) humans arrived then the answer has to be: "No".

If we destroy the west's industrial base trying to fix a non-existant problem then your grand children will not be proud but poor - with the commensurate levels of poverty, disease, life expectancy etc.

If we try some foolhardy geoengineering to fix this non-existant problem then the Law of Unintended Consequences could eradicate many species not just ours.

-------------------------
Richard Winstone MIET

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Irish orator, philosopher, & politician (1729 - 1797)

The two favourite warmist mantras are:

The science is settled.

It's worse than we thought.

What is the definition of an oxymoron, again?

Surely, if it is settled then, by definition, it has to be exactly as bad as we thought and no worse?

-------------------------
Richard Winstone MIET

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Irish orator, philosopher, & politician (1729 - 1797)

richwin,

I like the oxymoron remark.

'It's worse than we thought' sells more papers. Hans von Storch noted this when commenting on why a certain error laden paper was published:

Although there is a slight irony that the poll was probably biased by some heavy canvassing by one side.

http://www.navitron.org.uk/for...dex.php?topic=19079.0

A little sad, but highly amusing!

Thats an interesting link which led me to this one:-
http://www.navitron.org.uk/for...hp/topic,19192.0.html
which is about ''CLIMATE CHANGE IS SIMPLE''
Lots of interesting posts and comments about deniers there !

Also glad to see that our own vote is now 95 Agree vs 94 Disagree
.....but the number who have participated is still abysmal!

Regards to all......Clive

-------------------------
clivebrown

I had come across the first link above and I think I recognised one of my points being "dissed" in the thread. I did consider joining in - briefly. They did not seem very interested in convincing anyone about the science, just about increasing the number of votes for "their side".

The second link I had not discovered, though. There are some very contentious comments in there. I am always amused about the assumption that Big Oil is behind what they would call the denier movement because it will adversely affect oil sales.

Big Oil must be laughing up its trunk. If oil prices increase it will be fairly easy for them to maintain turnover and profitability while selling less product because of lower overheads (fewer tankers, refineries, staff etc). Also, the existing stocks will last longer. What is not to like?

-------------------------
Richard Winstone MIET

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Irish orator, philosopher, & politician (1729 - 1797)

Edited: 02 February 2013 at 12:19 AM by richwin