Michael Callen was referring to one specific post where you managed to contain your usual blustering arrogance and incivility. Don’t sprain your arm patting yourself on the back.
Now where’s that raw temperature data showing little to no global warming for the last 10 years you claimed to have? Should we assume that was your usual empty bluster too?
Why would anyone think so?
I don’t think that’s true. Where did you get that information?
Which ones are you capable of? Are those really the only alternatives? I’m going with being competent to read the IPCC report, which ought to do.
First, I was speaking of average global surface temperature, not troposphere temperature, etc.
However, I should not have said “during the past ten years.” Originally I was going to write “over the past 20 years, overall,” which would have been better, but still not accurate. What I was referring to was the “hiatus” (which means in this context not an absolute leveling of temperature, but a marked slowdown in the rate of increase) between about 1998 and 2012. The existence of the hiatus (understood the qualified way I stated) was granted by most of the pro-AGW people, and they sought to explain it, because they had not predicted such a long period of very slow increase. There are any number of articles by AGW proponents that acknowledge the reality of the hiatus, for example in Nature Geoscience volume7 (2014).
In any case, my argument does not depend on whether the earth is warming or not. AGW’s claim is not “that the earth is warming”; it’s claim is “that the overwhelming majority of earth’s warming is caused by CO2 that is largely of human origin.” In other words, it is a claim not about temperature data but about causality. And nothing I have read convinces me that the experts have a really firm handle on causality. They tend to explain any and all discrepancies between real temperature data and their predictions by a series of complex just-so stories about El Nino, etc., i.e., by appealing to things they never talked about when they made their original predictions. There is too much ad hoc patchwork, after the fact – always a sign of an immature science that hasn’t yet got a firm grasp on the causes.
And just to make my position perfectly clear, I’m in favor of gradually reducing fossil fuel emissions anyway, for reasons having nothing to do with AGW. So I have no political motivation to oppose those who push AGW. So my doubts are purely theoretical.
On the other hand, those who pushed for the Kyoto Accord were clearly motivated by politics more than science; that Accord allowed exemptions to some of the worst CO2 polluting nations, and those exemptions had nothing to do with the science of global warming and everything to do with anti-Western global politics.
See my self-correction above.
Let’s not get into US politicians and their motives, OK?
You’d still be dead wrong. You made a really dumb claim based on your ignorance, now you’re tap dancing and squirming to try and save face. Pathetic but usual.
More arrogant ignorance.
Observational determination of surface radiative forcing by CO 2 from 2000 to 2010
A layman’s write-up of the 2015 Nature paper
First Direct Observation of Carbon Dioxide’s Increasing Greenhouse Effect at the Earth’s Surface
Scientists have observed an increase in carbon dioxide’s greenhouse effect at the Earth’s surface for the first time. The researchers, led by scientists from the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), measured atmospheric carbon dioxide’s increasing capacity to absorb thermal radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface over an eleven-year period at two locations in North America. They attributed this upward trend to rising CO2 levels from fossil fuel emissions.
The influence of atmospheric CO2 on the balance between incoming energy from the Sun and outgoing heat from the Earth (also called the planet’s energy balance) is well established. But this effect has not been experimentally confirmed outside the laboratory until now. The research is reported Wednesday, Feb. 25, in the advance online publication of the journal Nature.
You really need to research first before making up these false claims.
No, because I also adjusted the year range. And then I cited one Nature Geoscience article in which an AGW proponent admitted the existence of the hiatus (even if he thought he could explain it), and I found dozens more places on the internet where pro-AGW folks admitted to the existence of the hiatus (though of course always protesting that though it was real, it didn’t undermine their theory).
That’s exactly how the efforts to explain the hiatus appear to me, and to many others. Anyone who really had a handle on the causes of global warming might have failed to predict a little kink in one year, or two, or three – but fourteen? Nope. I don’t buy it. Their science wasn’t good enough to predict a significant slowdown. They should be man enough to admit it.
I don’t fault them for that – the climate system is very complicated. The only thing I fault them for is swaggering overconfidence in their models (“The science is IN!”), and then desperate scrambling afterwards to say their models weren’t really defective, but it was El Nino’s fault, or the fault of anything other than their own lack of understanding of the complex network of causes of global climate. And I don’t care to put the future of global policy in the hands of people who practice such an inexact science as that.
You mean you got caught in a big porkie and tried to squirm out of it after the fact. Just like you do with your nonsense ID-Creation claims. 
Yawn. Bye, Tim.
Bye Eddie. Don’t poke out anyone’s eye with that Pinocchio nose. 
For the record, there wasn’t a “hiatus” in AGW between 1998-2014 as the science deniers claim. There was an overall lessening in the rate of increase over that cherry-picked range but the long term average continued to climb. Such a phenomenon is well known in data trends and is called regression toward the mean. You can see the actual trend here
Looks like the AGW denier is using this strategy:
More ad hominems, I see, in this thread. But I want to question, again, the un-nuanced metanarratives, in this case that one side of the story (of walrus numbers, for goodness’ sake!) is skewed by big oil money. Now it’s quite possible - but subject to detailed analysis, not shotgun accusations.
But Eddie’s point about government and NGO big money needs to be supplemented by simple questions about who stands to gain in business from climate change. I happened to see just yesterday a piece about the vitual slavery of cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I have friends who know it to be one of the poorest and most violent countries in the world.
DRC produces 2/3 of the world’s cobalt, and batteries are so big that the price has quadrupled in a few years. By far the biggest player is Glencore, who have monopolies as well on zinc, copper and grain, and is the world’s 10th largest company (all this is from the Wikipedia article). That’s level pegging with the oil giants, but in a period of 2 decades of climate change fear, rather than the 100+ years oil has been big. Wiki says its history, from its start in the 1990s, is like a “spy novel.” Their publicity is very big on sustainability and all things green.
But how come Congo remains dirt poor, when you’d think it should be booming like an Arab state? Downstream, cobalt and lithium and so on are generating enough money for certain entrepreneurs to send their cars into space.
This is all this morning’s research for me, but first impressions are that if firms like Glencoe are as dirty as Wikipedia says, they’d be idiots not to be promoting worst-case scenarios for climate change.
I don’t say they are, but I do say that scientifically-minded ought to be suspicious, or trusting, of capitalists on both sides of the question.
Full Disclosure: I don’t have shares in oil companies, and my son-in-law owns a Tesla. And I feel anxious about the heavy-metal mountain to which I’m contributing through all those used Duracells I’m producing, but which nobody else really seems concerned about.
And for the record, I already said exactly that, when I first used the “hiatus” (putting it in quotation marks) above.
And for the record, it isn’t only global warming skeptics who use the term “hiatus” with reference to this period; it is often found in pro-AGW writings as well.
So your “corrections” are partly redundant, and partly erroneous. But what else is new?
This is one thing that worries me about EVs…
The mantra for the climate change initiative is “sustenability”… and i just cant figure out how lithium-ion batteries are “sustainable” in the environment. And EVs are not carbon neutral unless electricity itself is generated using renewable energy.
There is technology available to create fuel by fixing atmospheric CO2. If the energy used in these plants are from renewable sources, then this fuel will also be carbon neutral. Yet there is no drive to promote the same.
An industrial chemist who comments on my blog, and knows all there is to know about fossil fuels, points out that we could have reduced Carbon emissions by 40% by now, if money and political effort had been spent simply on replacing dirty obsolete fossil fuel power stations with state-of-the-art ones.
That would have given a significant breathing space for developing alternative technologies in a measured way. Instead, we seem to be replacing the technologies whose problems we do understand with those we don’t (Biofuels - were in, now out. Diesel vehicles - were in, now out. Atomic power - in, out, in, out…) I’ve written before (but not at Peaceful Science) how mobile-phone and battery recycling poses the biggest problem for many urban waste recyclers - and the problem is growing exponentially. Is Lithium and Cobalt waste safer than CO2? Probably safer, for us, because we’ll export all the waste to the kind of poor countries that mined the stuff in the first place, and which already take our plastic. They lack an Al Gore to speak for them, sadly.
And hey, you guys - did you know that the Internet produces 300m tonnes of CO2 annually, which is half that produced by fossil fuels in the UK? Are we happy to reduce our online activity to what will save the planet? Or have we vested interests of our own?
As far as I can tell, Glencoe has funded no “research” or propaganda about AGW, while oil companies have. Isn’t that the relevant point?
The largest portion of funding for climate change research comes form Governments led by the US Government.
If the “crisis” does not exist, then the funding would.dry up and experts would loose remuneration, jobs and positions as advisors to powerful people in the Government.
So if Oil funding brings a conflict of interest, then government funding also brings about a conflict of interest by the simple fact that Scientists working in the field would loose a lot in financial terms/importance to government policy if AGW is not such a big crisis in the making.
Sorry, but that made no sense. You claim that the scientists who receive government funding are controlling the government’s funding policy? That they’re generating an artificial crisis for their own profit? That’s insulting, and I don’t think you could back it up at all.
I am not claiming that they are generating an artificial crisis. Just acknowledging the fact that their funding, jobs etc depend on there being a crisis.
It’s common sense that government’s wouldn’t fund the research to the extent they do unless there was a crisis. This can be established just by checking how much government funding has increased post 1990’s when AGW was first proposed as an impending calamity.
If Scientists increasingly found that global warming is not due to human actions (and so cannot be controlled by reducing green house gasses), they would face a real conflict of interest.
Of course you aren’t. You are making no claims at all and had no purpose in saying any of the things you said.
And in fact there is a crisis. No need to resort to conspiracy theories: there actually is a problem, and we need to deal with it.
We will know… I don’t think the world governments will meet the targets for 2030(atleast at the rates they are going)… but since the warming aspect is true, things will get more difficult and governments will become serious.
Which means that they will bring greenhouse gasses into control at some point in the near future.
The problem will be if the warming is not mainly caused by greenhouse gasses.
In that case, the Scientists will have to answer for a lot.
