If Richard’s North then I’m South but, still, he can’t “la[y] bare” the motivations of thousands of others any more than James Lovelock’s dictatorial fantasies lay bare those of the green movement.

Um, because one blogger uses racist language in his blog posts, that automatically demonstrates that all people who share his view on global warming are also secret racists?

By that rationale, all the students who went on the demonstrations in recent weeks are responsible for the violence perpetrated during those marches. But that would be a stupid point of view, wouldn’t it?

@2 – I agree, I cant see the link between a climate denier’s racist views and the mindset of climate deniers as a whole.

Myself im more of a climate change agnostic.

Richard North is about the most prominent deniers around, along with James Delinpole – not some random halfwit.

If others distance themselves from him, I’ll accept that they’re not all the same. But I highly doubt they will.

The Telegraph, Mail, Iain Dale, Guido, ConHome et all will all no doubt keep linking and applauding him.

Sunny,

Although Richard North has been instrumental in uncovering the lies about Himalayan glaciers and has publicised some of the other IPCC errors, he is hardly the most prominent sceptic. Have you heard of Steve McIntyre or Anthony Watts or even the Bishop Hill blog? All of these are far more important and read than Mr North.

Mr North has an unpleasant tone which means I do not read him if I can help it, even before it became clear he was a racist, which was not a surprise. I think this is a case of someone who hates much of the accepted order of things and is (in my opinion if not yours) right on one aspect, but generally wrong. Hardly unusual.

What BenSix said: all this shows is that North is a racist, not that all sceptics are motivated by racism.

Ironic to ascribe a charge of racism to all climate change sceptics/deniers/idiots just because of their views on climate change.

Richard North is clearly a racist but you’re pretty damn stupid to then assume anyone who holds a similar view on climate also holds his views on race.

Grow up and use your brain!

Fascinating how the tolls come on here to try to cover for their far right brownshirts..

One of their heroes is revealed as a racist, but don’t worry, nothing to see here move along.

The deniers are all cut from the same far right wing cloth. Racist, conservative, and defenders of the global elite.

And our little trolls march lock step with them.

Hmm, it’s like that argument that all right wingers are racist. Not that majorly shocking or different commenters and the usual meme really across society.

It’s a tough one this because unfortunately human beings by their conformist and predictable nature tend to fall into camps.

I am yet to meet a progressive individual who thinks climate change is a hoax….and when we think of progressives, one tends to-from what we see!-think of people who have/do mix with people of different ethnicities, for equality across the board and open minded-but I meet soo many (All?) right wingers who think climate change is a hoax…an excuse to take their hard earned money (hmm, how fairly did you earn that buddy?) and when we think of right wingers, one tends to see from evidence continously-racist, never friends with anyone of a diff minority BUT if they are the person is equally market obsessed, don’t have friends of different classes, thinks people are born unequal and socially conservative.

So I can see what Sunny made that somewhat flippant correlation to think that well ‘you support this guy and have the same values ultimately, so why wouldn’t you all be the same’?

It reminds of those Christians who go on gay blogs and say stuff like ‘not all christians are homophobic and some of us try really hard to stop this idea we’re all homophobes’ and the commenters quite rightly say, ‘well you obv aren’t trying hard enough or screaming hard enough’.

Which sounds about right here.

Call people out commenters if you really give a toss.

I’m a long-time reader of the EU Referendum blog and I didn’t until now – after a google search – realise that was racist language. I thought it was a neologism. Having skim-read the post I thought “Jungle bunnies” simply a humorous term to refer to green activists. On proper inspection, clearly it was not.

If you call a green activist a “jungle bunny” that would actually be funny – well, assuming that 99.9% of humanity, like me, has never heard of the term “jungle bunny” before and so don’t know it’s original racist use. Greens like jungles and they like to think they’re oh-so-innocent like a fluffy bunny so my joke was better.

I’m disappointed that racist language was used. On the forum North does not allow racist language. I can think of two white-supremacist type posters but they are frowned upon by everyone else. I don’t know whether North is actually racist as in “never hire a black person racist” but I suspect he simply doesn’t care what people think of him so he could easily have used that phrase as an anti-PC statement.

As a Christian I believe all races are equal before God. I’m a soul man. However, I am a race-realist – which doesn’t necessarily mean what you might assume either.

AFAIA from previous blog posts North is an atheist. I think he is very expert on a wide range of subjects and is right 90% of the time so I will still consider him worth reading.

@ 10

“If you call a green activist a “jungle bunny” that would actually be funny – well, assuming that 99.9% of humanity, like me, has never heard of the term “jungle bunny” before and so don’t know it’s original racist use. Greens like jungles and they like to think they’re oh-so-innocent like a fluffy bunny so my joke was better. ”

Sure. And those dudes waving the “God hates fags” signs are just members of Christians Against Cigarettes.

“I’m disappointed that racist language was used. On the forum North does not allow racist language. I can think of two white-supremacist type posters but they are frowned upon by everyone else. I don’t know whether North is actually racist as in “never hire a black person racist” but I suspect he simply doesn’t care what people think of him so he could easily have used that phrase as an anti-PC statement.”

Hang on. You’re saying he doesn’t allow racist language but deliberately uses racist epithets as “an anti-PC statement”? I’m not sure that quite follows, you know.

“As a Christian I believe all races are equal before God. I’m a soul man. However, I am a race-realist – which doesn’t necessarily mean what you might assume either.”

Fair enough if true. Care to expand on that?

For all that I disagree with anon and his camel-through-a-needle form of apologism for racists, I have to add that this article is a very weak smear indeed, Sunny. North may be racist, but that doesn’t make everyone who agrees with him racist too; no, not even if they continue to agree with him after finding out he has offensive views on a completely unrelated topic.

Enough of this guilt by association rubbish. This article should attack North and only North.

Sunny

If others distance themselves from him, I’ll accept that they’re not all the same. But I highly doubt they will.

Are the Spiked-online people tainted by this too?

@ 13

Come to think of it, I can’t recall every officially “distancing myself” from North, so I guess I must have become a Klansman behind my own back.

Hang on. You’re saying he doesn’t allow racist language but deliberately uses racist epithets as “an anti-PC statement”? I’m not sure that quite follows, you know.

His forum moderation policy is fairly libertarian in that he allows people to say what they think. However he does tend to edit a lot of the posts by one or two members I mentioned above.

He also doesn’t like 9/11 conspiracy kooks.

“As a Christian I believe all races are equal before God. I’m a soul man. However, I am a race-realist – which doesn’t necessarily mean what you might assume either.”

Fair enough if true. Care to expand on that?

Just because one group of people might be shown to have a higher IQ or someone can run faster that doesn’t make them superior. We are all equal before God.

BTW on the subject of IQ – race realism is obviously not just about IQ, but physiology, personality etc – if you want to annoy a white supremacist ask them why it is that East Asians, like Koreans, have higher IQs than ethic Germans.

(In case you still think race is a myth wikipedia “Lewontin’s fallacy”).

Are the Spiked-online people tainted by this too?

If they aren’t tainted by this, there’s an entire inventory of other stuff they’re tainted by (off the top of my head, cigarette money and denying Serbian war crimes, but I’m sure a quick Google would throw up others…)

@ 15 Anon

“His forum moderation policy is fairly libertarian in that he allows people to say what they think. However he does tend to edit a lot of the posts by one or two members I mentioned above.”

I’m all for hands-off moderation, but you still haven’t squared his anti-racist stance with his use of racial abuse.

“Just because one group of people might be shown to have a higher IQ or someone can run faster that doesn’t make them superior. We are all equal before God.”

OK, it’s a religious thing. I don’t know why that qualifies as “race realism” though. Or are you saying the “realism” bit means you think it’s possible for members of one race to score higher than another on certain metrics?

If the answer is “yes”, crucial follow-up question: do you mean they score higher on average or all of the time?

I try to reserve this word for worthy recipients: Richard North is *scum*.

It comes as no surprise that many deniers are, at least partially, driven by racism. The poorest on the planet (i.e. non-European, non-north American) are going to be the first and hardest hit. If you can view those people as inferior, then global warming is actually a welcome event – thin out the “jungle bunnies” and leave more resources for the “superior races”.

This vile person needs to be exposed at every opportunity.

> This idea that most global warming deniers oppose action because they want developing countries to become richer is frankly, crap.

This truth is blatant to anyone who wishes to see it. The only time these people become concerned about the welfare of people in Africa or Asia is when it might impact their own wallet.

Similarly, watch all the ‘environmentalists’ crawl out of the woodwork when some article describes bird or bat death from wind turbines. The same people are never to be seen when it’s coal mining or deep-sea oil drilling or uranium mining or tritium leaks from an ageing nuclear reactor or death from domestic cats or pollution from industrial pig farms.

One thing the rightwing have perfected is oblivious hypocrisy.

@5. Watchman:

> Although Richard North has been instrumental in uncovering the lies about Himalayan glaciers…

There were no “lies”. There was a well-publicised error that confused “2035″ with “2350″.

> … and has publicised some of the other IPCC errors, he is hardly the most prominent sceptic.

What errors? There are none. The findings of the IPCC AR4 WG1 are supported by ~97% of published climate scientists and every national science academy of every industrialised country on the planet.

> Have you heard of Steve McIntyre or Anthony Watts or even the Bishop Hill blog?

Yes. An ex-mining executive. A weatherman with a penchant for getting things badly wrong. And some idiot with a blog.

What’s your point?

18. BlueRock

“It comes as no surprise that many deniers are, at least partially, driven by racism.”

I normally agree with your posts on climate change, but it really is a big leap to imagine that North’s pathetic comments in any way reflect on deniers as a group. It’s a straw man by association: people who agree with his opinions on climate change can’t be assumed to agree with his opinions on “jungle bunnies”.

I don’t think deniers are driven by racism, even if industrialism generally hurts blacks and Asians more than Euro/American whites. I reckon you’re conflating the effect with the intent, in the same sort of way that American pro-lifers sometimes call abortion racist because black American women are more likely to seek one.

@ 19

“Similarly, watch all the ‘environmentalists’ crawl out of the woodwork when some article describes bird or bat death from wind turbines”

True dat. It’s reminisicent of all those people who happily eat battery chicken but suddenly become staunch defenders of animal welfare the moment halal slaughter is mentioned. Stalking horse.

@21. Chaise Guevara:

> I normally agree with your posts on climate change…

Flattery will get you almost everywhere!

> …but it really is a big leap to imagine that North’s pathetic comments in any way reflect on deniers as a group.

I have not said that. I said that “many deniers are, at least partially, driven by racism.” That is my experience – and I have been ‘debating’ deniers for ~5 years. They are very often a nasty bunch of people who will employ any tactic to distract from their own responsibility. E.g. one of the most common is that Africans are starving because they are too stupid to use modern agricultural techniques. E.g. 2 any flood outside of the USA is due to deforestation by stupid locals. I see these claims regularly.

No doubt there are some ‘nice’ people who deny global warming – but they seem, to me, to be few and far between. The majority of deniers are driven by self-interest which is often shored up by belief that ‘foreigners’ are inferior or deserving of their plight because they’ve made poor choices. My experience. YMMV.

Oh they’re all motivated by hatred… if it isn’t for “jungle bunnies” then it’s just hatred for lefties.

I’m yet to meet an intelligent global warming denier. And no, those idiots from Spiked Online don’t count either damon.

I’m yet to meet an intelligent global warming denier. And no, those idiots from Spiked Online don’t count either damon.

I’m not sure what that means. Whether that absolves them of the ”natural” relationsip between being a ”denier” and racism that BlueRock has so graphically pionted out.
I think a more important issue is though, when you become so obsessed with ”activism” and ”flash mobs” disrupting airports and turning up on MP’s doorsteps early in the morning doing a stunt, that you can’t see the woods for the trees and see that some of this ”activism” is crap. As none of it is going to save The Maldives, and is more about hanging on to one’s hacktivist youth and being a somebody and not a nobody.

hmmm….it looks more to me like Richard North has mixed up “jungle bunny” with the more ubiquitous “tree hugger”.

As for global warming….well it might be, but human produced C02 isn’t likely to be the main cause. It’s a terrible absorber of IR radiation, and even Arrhenius’ equations suggest that a doubling of the atmospheric C02 concentration would only affect the Earth’s temperature by approx 1.5C. What it is though, is plant food, what we breathe out, and an easy target for green activists as it is also the byproduct of burning hydrocarbons.

Of course, we hear little about the most important greenhouse gas out there….which is of course water. It’s a great absorber of IR radiation and it’s in the atmosphere in massive quantities.

It’s just very hard for greens to argue that we should tax rain.

I love also the fact that people think it’s easy to even measure global temperatures. The distribution of measurement sites is always changing, their surroundings are changing and even the thermometers they use are changing….and then HadCrut won’t let people see the algorythm they use to normalise data (why??). It’s difficult enough to get two thermometers to read the same temperature in lab conditions (try this at home in some boiling water if you don’t believe me).

So when AGW types start telling me that we are all going to burn to a crisp because the world has warmed up by 0.55C in the last 20 years or so, forgive me if I take what hyperbolic eco warriors say with a pinch of salt. That kind of change is within the error function for just the measurements, within normal variations of temperatures and could easily be caused on contributed to by many other factors.

Cue Sunny doing his usual and totally avoiding arguing any point or offering any evidence….instead i’ll probably just be insulted and labelled a “denier” (even though in my very first sentence on the subject I said it might be occuring, just that C02 is unlikely to be as significant as greens claim). might as well call me a racist as well while you’re at it Sunny – get it all out of your system.

((Tyler isn’t a climate scientist, but did spend 5 years doing various physics degrees, so does have some inkling of what he is talking about))

Richard North’s writings on climate and defence are well-argued and always worth a read, though I really don’t like his language in this particular instance – especially when there’s already a perfectly good African word for the people he’s talking about in your quote – the WaBenzi.

But what is the connection between his views on climate change and his language?

@26. Tyler:

> ((Tyler isn’t a climate scientist, but did spend 5 years doing various physics degrees, so does have some inkling of what he is talking about))

Sadly, no amount of “doing various physics degrees” inoculates people from Dunning Kruger effect.

Anthropogenic climate change is as good as fact. There is no credible doubt that human activity – burning fossil fuels, deforestation, etc. – is dangerously heating the planet.

@ Bluerock

*sigh*

Please read what I’ve said. it’s difficult enough just to measure temperature, let alone prove the world is significantly warming and why it is doing so. it doesn’t help that the only temperature series used is HadCrut, and they won’t let outside scientists look at their data, model and normalisation algorithms. The earth has been much warmer and colder over its history, pre industrial man. We don’t have full or accurate temperature records going back any length of time, and many of the projections for global warming are run on supercomputer models where the results are extremely dependent on the inputs. These models are by definition divergent (e.g. using an input that C02 levels keep increasing) and so always tend to extreme answers one way or the other – remember iin the 70s and early 80s scientists thought we were heading for another ice age and global cooling was the danger.

Scientists rely on funding and it tends to stop when you come to disprove something. Scientists aren’t exactly apolitical either. The CRU leaks don’t exactly cover them in glory as to their motivations.

AGW is in vogue at the moment, and makes industry an easy target for governments looking for more tax revenue on one side and green activists on the other. It CANNOT be proved with any degree of certainty, and meanwhile funding is diverted to AGW from what I would describe as much more serious threats to the environment and ecosystems.

As an addendum;

Good science has to be reproducable.

HadCrut doesn’t release all it’s data, and doesn’t tell us how it uses its data to get to it’s conclusions. That immediately fillls me with suspicion. If there is nothing to hide, why hide it?

@29. Tyler:

> *sigh*

*sigh* indeed. Yet another internet expert who believes he knows more about climate than the planet’s climate scientists.

> it’s difficult enough just to measure temperature, let alone prove the world is significantly warming…

No, it’s very easy to determine that the planet is heating. All of our satellites and thermometers are telling us the same thing – along with thousands of natural proxies, e.g. growing seasons, bird migration, blooming of flowers, migration and spawning of fish, dates of mountain snow melt, peak flow of glacier-fed streams and disappearing ice sheets and glaciers. All of it points to one conclusion: the planet is heating up.

> …and why it is doing so.

For someone who claims to have spent “5 years doing various physics degrees”, you are woefully ignorant about some very basic physics. Here’s a starter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas and some history: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

> …it doesn’t help that the only temperature series used is HadCrut…

The only explanations I can think of for that claim is that you are an idiot or a liar. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

> …they won’t let outside scientists look at their data, model and normalisation algorithms.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

> The earth has been much warmer and colder over its history, pre industrial man.

That particular piece of nonsense is taken care of here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm

The rest of your zombie denier arguments are addressed here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

> It CANNOT be proved with any degree of certainty…

There are no *proofs* in science. There are hypotheses, evidence and theories. Surprising that someone who spent “5 years doing various physics degrees” should not know that.

> HadCrut doesn’t release all it’s data

You seem confused. HadCRUT is a data set: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HadCRUT

Maybe you’re confused with CRU who produce HadCRUT? They release all the data that they can – http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/ – but some data they use comes from third parties which they are not legally allowed to release. You can go to those third parties and request the data.

> …doesn’t tell us how it uses its data to get to it’s conclusions.

The fact that *you* don’t understand the science is not the fault of anyone but yourself. Perhaps the “5 years doing various physics degrees” was not enough?

@ 23 Bluerock

“I have not said that. I said that “many deniers are, at least partially, driven by racism.” That is my experience – and I have been ‘debating’ deniers for ~5 years. They are very often a nasty bunch of people who will employ any tactic to distract from their own responsibility. E.g. one of the most common is that Africans are starving because they are too stupid to use modern agricultural techniques. E.g. 2 any flood outside of the USA is due to deforestation by stupid locals. I see these claims regularly.

No doubt there are some ‘nice’ people who deny global warming – but they seem, to me, to be few and far between. The majority of deniers are driven by self-interest which is often shored up by belief that ‘foreigners’ are inferior or deserving of their plight because they’ve made poor choices. My experience. YMMV”

It does vary. I agree with everything here other than the idea that it’s due to the idea that foreigners are inferior. I know the “they brought it on themselves” argument is employed (often suspiciously close to the “we must save Africa from the evils of hydropower!” argument), but I think that has more to do with blaming a country for its actions, like we might blame the US or UK for the Iraq War without condemning every citizen of those countries as a a warmongerer. In the case of third world countries, the blame is less fair, of course.

I’m not saying that there won’t be racist deniers, and obviously occasionally individuals will allow those two ideals to rub off on each other. I just don’t think there’s a causal correlation there (although there may be some non-causal correlation as they’re both associated with the right).

@32. Chaise Guevara:

I tried but couldn’t find anything to disagree with! I’ll just clarify.

I’m not saying that a substantial percentage of deniers are the overt ‘BNP-nigger-Paki’ variety or that it is causal, but many are ‘polite racists’ – the ‘Daily Mail-lazy-stupid-dishonest-foreigners’ variety. A large part of denial is shifting blame. If you can somehow blame Africans for the fact the rains did not come and their crops failed – e.g. “they’re too lazy / stupid to use modern farming techniques” – then you won’t feel bad about the fact the Jag parked outside is the (partial) cause for suffering and death of others.

As you point out, there is a very strong connection to the rightwing. They’ve got entitlement through birthright down to a fine art, along with the hysterical anger that someone wants to take money out of their wallets – money that is partially earned from the exploitation of poor people thousands of miles away. :/

And back to Richard ‘Jungle Bunny’ North – he’s just made the mistake of letting the mask slip and has now given up any pretence of being a decent person. It’s excellent – another prominent denier erodes the denier cause by association.

@ Bluerock

Ah yes, the argument that right wing = AGW denier = racist. The one always follows the other.

I suppose lefties are all wonderful peace loving defenders of the earth and their fellow man.

Do grow up. Or at least develope an argument which is based a little more in real life than some socialist hyperbole.

Oh, and by the way….the BNP are a socialist, left wing party who gain most of their support from white working class voters who used to vote Labour.

32 Blue Rock

Whilst I actually agree with the general drift of much of the above, I find it rather instructive that you seem to react very differently here, WRT your subjective feeling about the correlation between climate change deniers and Daily Mail reading Colonel Blimp sorts, than on the other thread where you totally “went off on one” when people pointed out that elements of Green Party policy were anti-scientific.

Bluerock,

@5. Watchman:

There were no “lies”. There was a well-publicised error that confused “2035? with “2350?.

Well yes. But since it was publicised before publication and not corrected, and since the IPCC’s official spokesperson denied there was an error, and claimed this was a peer-reviewed fact (when if he had checked the reference it would be clear that the source was not), I think we are safe to say that someone had an interest in maintaining an untruth – which I would call a lie. You can call it incompetence or stupidity if you want, but either way, Mr North was correct to highlight quite a major error in the IPCC.

> … and has publicised some of the other IPCC errors, he is hardly the most prominent sceptic.

What errors? There are none. The findings of the IPCC AR4 WG1 are supported by ~97% of published climate scientists and every national science academy of every industrialised country on the planet.

Sorry Bluerock, but that is religious dogma. If any body of scientists produces a volume that large, it will have errors, and these have been pointed out. But as for you this is a religious text (despite the fact that as I remember you haven’t read it – you didn’t seem to realise there were confidence intervals in the conclusions for example), I can’t see a point in debating this.

> Have you heard of Steve McIntyre or Anthony Watts or even the Bishop Hill blog?

What’s your point?

Well my point was actually that they were more popular and important figures in the sceptical internet. I could add others, including climate scientists, but I’m sure you have your stock responses.

Still, Mr McIntyre might be an ex-mining engineer (was he an executive) but he was also, and this may upset you, asked to be a reviewer for the IPCC due to his expertise in paleoclimatology and temprature reconstructions. Because, unlike you, real scientists recognise expertise is something that is not indicated by job titles or qualifications, but by what you know and can do.

And Mr Watts runs the most popular climate-related blog on the internet, so does it matter what his background is. He and your favoured source Dr Romm do seem to delight in pointing out each others’ mistakes I’ll admit, but it might be worth remembering that Mr Watts has invited Dr Romm to guest post on Mr Watt’s blog in order to put the other side of the story, whilst Dr Romm edits comments to ensure that there are no ‘deniers’ even therein to challenge his received version of the truth. Anyway, you know that weathermen are generally trained in a subject called meterology, which involves studying the weather, which is a subset of the climate. So Mr Watts may well know something about the subject due to his training.

As for describing Bishop Hill as “some idiot with a blog”, has your reading not taught you the correct response, and did you not feel able to go and check yourself to find what was wrong with the blog (answer, a slight triumphalist feeling of late…). To help you, he’s an accountant who is very good at translating technical discussions involving numbers into something you or I could understand; so you can now simply dismiss him as an accountant without considering whether what he writes is accurate or not.

Sunny,

Oh they’re all motivated by hatred… if it isn’t for “jungle bunnies” then it’s just hatred for lefties.

I’m yet to meet an intelligent global warming denier. And no, those idiots from Spiked Online don’t count either damon.

Nothing like discrimination and general assumptions is there. I suppose you could be accurate if by denier you mean someone who denies the world may be (or may have been) getting warmer of late. But if, as is likely, you mean someone like me who has the brains to go and read the science, read the criticisms and form our own opinions rather than follow lies like there is a consensus (there were consensuses that the sun was the centre of the universe, that fire was actually an element and that time was linear in the past – since these were consensuses we should presumably still follow them?), then that is pathetic.

And I don’t hate lefties: one of my cousins is left-handed for example (to be fair, I never played cricket to a good enough level that left-handed bowlers would be a specific problem, but that might explain some people’s problems with lefties (insert boxing reference in here if you prefer)). If you mean left-wingers (insert football reference…) then I don’t hate them either; I hate ignorance and intolerrance though, and your comment there seems to display this in spades.

@34. Tyler:

> Ah yes, the argument that right wing = AGW denier = racist. The one always follows the other.

Always? I’ve told you a thousand times to not exaggerate.

> I suppose lefties are all wonderful peace loving defenders of the earth and their fellow man.

I suppose you love whacking strawmen?

> Do grow up.

One day I hope to be as mature and learned as you. Or not.

> Or at least develope an argument which is based a little more in real life than some socialist hyperbole.

Did you miss all the credible cites I spoon fed you? Maybe scroll up and do some reeding and lurning.

> …the BNP are a socialist, left wing party

Left wing?! You’re as clueless about the political taxonomy of the BNP as you are everything else you hold forth on.

Again,will someone actually signpost us to a climate change denier that isn’t white, male, sigh, right wing?

Maybe then your climate change denier arguments will be listened to by the left and maybe, we will finally see a shift in thinking and the argument will become less about ideological politics but the world we are living in.

@ Bluerock

Yeah, I’ve been in those situations but it’s been fighting for social mobility. I was trying to tell a group of well meaning do gooders in my v v middle class town-they started Transition, UN forum etc-that we had a serious problem on our door step with the state of the council estates in this v rich town. What were we going to do about it? (Keep in mind the same bunch were able to hold our town CEO accountable for wrong doing…publicly..loudly)

And they looked like me like I had two heads. Smiled and then slowly tried to bring the topic back to litter in the area, climate change issues and international rights in a country far, far away.

It’s all about agendas and the key is how do you make someone understand that this will also affect them?

On a similar topic a friend of mine who works for the gov on climate change could not understand why money is been put towards this when communities in London, can’t feed themselves. She was just as bad because she also had her agenda.

@36. Galen10:

> …I find it rather instructive that you seem to react very differently here, WRT your subjective feeling about the correlation between climate change deniers and Daily Mail reading Colonel Blimp sorts, than on the other thread where you totally “went off on one” when people pointed out that elements of Green Party policy were anti-scientific.

You’re referring to that time that you could not form a coherent, evidence-based argument to support the assertion that the Green Party are “anti-science” and spat the dummy out when I insisted you produce some evidence?

It was very instructive. I hope you learned something from it.

@37. Watchman:

Tedious denier dreck.

Every national science academy of every major industrialised country on the planet confirms recent climate change is due to human activity. Near-100% of climate scientists confirm the same. These things are fact. And that near-total consensus is a result of the science which is totally compelling.

* American Physical Society: “Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. … The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.” http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/07_1.cfm

Bluerock,

So your rely on what you are told, not analysing the evidence. Brilliant.

And I note that you still haven’t had the manners to check if I deny global warming. Strangely enough I don’t: I think it is less serious than made out but that mankind does contribute (I’d suggest loss of biomass might be as big a problem for CO2 as emissions myself) although the dominant signal is still natural trends. Wierdly, that means I am actually in a consensus position rather than a denier one, although I still don’t see a consensus and would not trust one if it existed.

What I disagree with is the stupid restrictive measures suggested be people like you, who don’t understand what certainity and probability mean, who believe the scare stories and who think an Inconvinient Truth is accurate. You try to label me a denier when I disagree with you, but not with the general consensus of science, but rather the details. Impressively arrogant, but not very accurate. And very impolite of course.

@ Bluerock

Tedious AGW dogma. You are a “believer”, yet you have no evidence. it’s no different to believing in God – he/she may exist buut there is no definitive proof.

You don’t know, because no-one does, because the two places which do the bulk of all temperature/C02 modelling (Hadley and CRU) won’t release their data and the models they use.

Therefore, as a scientist, it is is simply not transparent. If it’s not transparent, the best credence I can give it is “maybe” If they released the data to the world in general and people could sit and reproduce their results, and they were proved right, I’d happily change my mind. At the same time there is enough evidence to suggest that other factors are in play, if not more important. I’ve seen a few studies which show more of a correlation between global temperatures and the incidence of sunspots than atmospheric C02 concentrations.

Given also how weak some of the excuses why the CRU can’t release their data are (whoever heard of a scientist losing his data – i mean come on….), how C02 is plant food, how global temperatures have varied a lot more over time than since man’s industrial age (where they’ve been remarkably constant), how scientists have got it wrong before very recently (global cooling anyone?), how green taxes are going to make people poorer, and how the whole AGW dogma is taking the focus away from much more important environmental and ecological issues, forgive me if I don’t worry about global warming much at all. There are far more imporant issues out there.

But then, you don’t actually *know* anything about the subject, do you? You just believe……

40

The chances of anyone learning anything from you are about as remote as the chances that climate change deniers are correct.

You still haven’t managed to answer simple points put to you on the other thread, so there is little hope of you proving yourself any different on here I fear.

True dat. It’s reminisicent of all those people who happily eat battery chicken but suddenly become staunch defenders of animal welfare the moment halal slaughter is mentioned. Stalking horse.

And, of course, vice versa.

@43. Watchman

> So your rely on what you are told, not analysing the evidence. Brilliant.

Nope. I’ve read the science as well. Totally compelling.

I’ve also read the deniers’ arguments. Total shite.

@ 45

By “vice versa” do you mean observant, meat-eating Muslims against battery farming? If so, I don’t think that’s hypocritical in the same way, because I don’t consider halal slaughter to be anything like as cruel as battery food production. If they were equal actions then I’d agree with you.

@44. Tyler

> You are a “believer”…

Nope. I *accept* the science – partially because ~all the planet’s experts say the same thing and partially because I have read and understood the basics of it.

> …yet you have no evidence.

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html

Refute that and you can collect your Nobel Prize, world fame and untold riches. Or you can carry on ranting nonsense in comment boxes on the internet. Whichever you think works better.

@ Bluerock

Just read the APS piece you link to.

“The observational data indicate a global surface warming of 0.74 °C (+/- 0.18 °C) since the late 19th century.”

Which is a nice way of saying they can only suggest a confidence interval in their data of only just over 50%.

Which means you may as well flip a coin.

((They also happily lump all other so called greehouse gasses in with C02 as C02 equivalents….which it looks like the uninformed green lobby have jumped on big style. They also mention that water vapour has probably the biggest effect.))

@ 32

“A large part of denial is shifting blame. If you can somehow blame Africans for the fact the rains did not come and their crops failed – e.g. “they’re too lazy / stupid to use modern farming techniques” – then you won’t feel bad about the fact the Jag parked outside is the (partial) cause for suffering and death of others.

As you point out, there is a very strong connection to the rightwing. They’ve got entitlement through birthright down to a fine art, along with the hysterical anger that someone wants to take money out of their wallets – money that is partially earned from the exploitation of poor people thousands of miles away. :/”

Sure, but again that’s non-causal: casual racism and callousness don’t cause one another, they’re both products of the same cause (to whit: being an arsehole).

“And back to Richard ‘Jungle Bunny’ North – he’s just made the mistake of letting the mask slip and has now given up any pretence of being a decent person. It’s excellent – another prominent denier erodes the denier cause by association.”

I don’t like the cause, and I’m ambivalent on the use of propaganda to fight propaganda, but I certainly don’t think this is the ideal way for it to be eroded. Hence my dissatisfaction with the article above.

@45. Galen10

The other thing I learnt from the thread where you failed to produce any evidence for your claims is that you’re a dishonest and petulant pissant.

@50. Tyler

So, you decided to go for “carry on ranting nonsense in comment boxes on the internet.”

It’s fair enough, refuting ~200 years of accumulated science is hard, tedious work.

51

I think everyone on the other thread (and now on this one) learnt all they need to know about your personality and blinkered view of the world and what actually constitutes debate.

You were provided with 2 simple pieces of evidence on the other thread by m4e, and one by me; the fact that you avoid answering them doesn’t mean they aren’t evidence.

Bluerock,

Nope. I’ve read the science as well. Totally compelling.

I’ve also read the deniers’ arguments. Total shite.

Wierdly, I had different interpretations. So lets just say neither position is totally convincing. Or are you claiming you are better qualified to interpret the science than me? After all, people like Mr North like to claim that those who believe in man-made global warming think themselves better than the rest and are not prepared to listen to the people as a whole (one of the reasons I gave up reading him actually – it was beginning to sound like a conspiracy theory), but he couldn’t be right could he?

@51. Chaise Guevara

> …I’m ambivalent on the use of propaganda to fight propaganda…

Is it ‘propaganda’ to point out that so many deniers demonstrate some very unpleasant character traits? We’ve got openly racist Richard North. Clearly unhinged and dishonest Lord ‘Hitler Youth’ Monckton. Sneaky and dishonest Anthony Watts – see his attempted take-down of greenman3610′s YouTube video on Watts with a bogus charge of copyright infringement – which Watts then claimed he was doing to protect greenman3610! And also see Watts’ very creepy tactic of investigating greenman3610′s family: http://climateprogress.org/2009/08/02/anthony-watts-wattsupwiththat-inanity-defense-censor-peter-sinclair-video/ + http://climatecrocks.com/2010/11/23/watts-stung-by-climate-crock-again/

> …but I certainly don’t think this is the ideal way for it to be eroded.

I think we should use any and every means available to discredit the deniers – provided, of course, that it is honest and legal. The Climate Realists™ do not need to stoop to the level of the deniers – we’ve got truth and science on our side.

> Hence my dissatisfaction with the article above.

I do see your point but still think it is reasonable to point out there is an undercurrent of jingoism / racism amongst the denier mob.

@54. Galen10

> …the fact that you avoid answering them doesn’t mean they aren’t evidence.

Repeating your lies does not improve them. It is there in black and white that I responded to *every* argument put to me: http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/12/12/even-worse-polling-news-for-libdems-today/#comments + http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/12/13/could-labour-exploit-the-coalitions-dangerous-phase/#comment-213204

And instead of whining about me, why don’t you try adding something useful to this thread? Or just shut the fuck up, you tedious pissant. Whichever works best for you.

47 – no, more people (like me, now I come to think about it) who run a mile from battery farming but struggle to get nearly as worked up about halal even though it is an entirely preventable cruelty.

@55. Watchman

> Wierdly, I had different interpretations.

Weirdly, you didn’t find it weird that you reached a different conclusion to the planet’s experts.

This can most likely be explained by Dunning Kruger effect, delusion and good old-fashioned idiocy.

“Wierdly, I had different interpretations. So lets just say neither position is totally convincing.”

56

It’s only there in your head… you always “say” you’ve answered, but the screeds of tedious drivel you spout never amounts to more than your opinion badged as fact. You asked for evidence that the Green Party policies were anti-science. Support for alternative medicine is anti-scientific, QED. Even someone as mentally challenged as you should be able to see that.

You haven’t answered margin4error’s points yet either.

@61. Galen10

You’ve already conclusively proven that you are a liar. No need to labour the point.

61

Yeah, yeah…keep telling yourself that. In the meantime answer the points put to you, especially the one you keep avoiding: is alternative medicine anti-scientific or not? It’s not difficult, even for a troll like you surely?

@63. Galen10

Provide evidence that any Green Party policies are “anti-scientific”. Cite the policy number and quote the exact text. Go.

Tyler

I think BlueRock’s challenge stands.

If you can refute all the science reviewed by the IPCC, by all means publish your works in a peer reviewed journal and claim your global fame, adulation and riches.

As well as untold thanks for putting our minds at ease.

Until then, stop making a fool out of yourself.

“His forum moderation policy is fairly libertarian in that he allows people to say what they think. However he does tend to edit a lot of the posts by one or two members I mentioned above.”

I’m all for hands-off moderation, but you still haven’t squared his anti-racist stance with his use of racial abuse.

I’m not claiming he has an anti-racist stance or that he has not one.

All we can know is he tends to edit the most racist posts and language from a couple of posters on the forum, and he also used this “hot-button” phrase with racist origin in a blog post.

That’s all I know.

That said one principle I have is that racists tend to be open and boast about their racism so one way to work out if someone is racist is to ask them.

OK, it’s a religious thing. I don’t know why that qualifies as “race realism” though. Or are you saying the “realism” bit means you think it’s possible for members of one race to score higher than another on certain metrics?

If the answer is “yes”, crucial follow-up question: do you mean they score higher on average or all of the time?

Do you really think someone who could have found this blog would think that every member of one group of people would score higher on IQ tests than another all of the time? If you had just a tiny bit of acquaintance with the literature you would know the answer.

Stop patronising, learn the subject and come back to me.

63 blue rock

I’ve already done so on the other thread: you ignored it then, and are keen to do so now because you don’t want to face the truth.

You haven’t answered this issue any more than the 2 posed by m4e.

@67. Galen10

> I’ve already done so on the other thread:

You do realise everyone can see your comments and see that you have not? Are you a liar or a moron?

Ben M,

If you can refute all the science reviewed by the IPCC, by all means publish your works in a peer reviewed journal and claim your global fame, adulation and riches.

Perhaps it would be better to point out that the IPCC ARs are not peer-reviewed (they are edited but editors are subservient to the lead editors (writers)), and that they draw on selected papers. It should be comprehensive, but fails to do so because it is almost impossible to achieve this in any field where research is ongoing).

Furthermore, the point is not refuting all the science – most of what is in the IPCC is currently uncontroversial, it is only a few papers which cause problems (most notably those in paeloclimatology, where several key papers have in fact had published refutations). You are falling into the Bluerock trap of assuming that there is a right and wrong answer to all of this, when in fact there are many answers (and many models) and as yet not enough data to establish which (if any) are true or false. Basically, people like Al Gore want us to act dramatically on evidence which is not that secure, and which is only one possible interpretation of the evidence.

The famous Hockey Stick is the best example here – produced by a statistical model that always produced a hockey stick when numbers were pumped into it. This seems to have been a genuine error, but it is alarming people try and defend it still. Errors happen, the climate is not fully understood (it is interesting how the Artic Oscilliation was generally ignored it models till last year for example), models are found to fail (none actually have been found to be accurate yet!), so why be so sure?

Bluerock,

Weirdly, you didn’t find it weird that you reached a different conclusion to the planet’s experts.

This can most likely be explained by Dunning Kruger effect, delusion and good old-fashioned idiocy.

Ah the resort to expertise and to the ad hominem in one post. Excellent work my friend.

So you think that good science is to agree with everything you read and not question it, and that anything else is delusional and idiotic? I think you’d do really well in academia…

67

You really are an annoying little troll aren’t you? The quote is a direct one from the green party, backtracking from their earlier even more ridiculous whole hearted endorsement of alternative medicine. None of this is new, it’s widely reported and available to anyone who cares to look it up.

Rather than sit around throwing rocks and puerile insults around, how about actually playing the ball rather than the man?

@70. Watchman

> Ah the resort to expertise and to the ad hominem in one post. Excellent work my friend.

Another unifying quality of you deniers is your constant misuse of ‘ad hominem’.

“One of the most widely misused terms on the Net is “ad hominem”. It is most often introduced into a discussion by certain delicate types, delicate of personality and mind, whenever their opponents resort to a bit of sarcasm. As soon as the suspicion of an insult appears, they summon the angels of ad hominem to smite down their foes, before ascending to argument heaven in a blaze of sanctimonious glory. They may not have much up top, but by God, they don’t need it when they’ve got ad hominem on their side. It’s the secret weapon that delivers them from any argument unscathed.

In reality, ad hominem is unrelated to sarcasm or personal abuse. …” – http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html

@71. Galen10

> You really are an annoying little troll aren’t you?

.
.
.

> Rather than sit around throwing rocks and puerile insults around, how about actually playing the ball rather than the man?

lol. Not only are you a liar, you are a hypocrite. Quelle surprise!

P.S. When you find some *evidence* that the Green Party is “anti-science”, be sure to share it with us.

Bluerock,

I think calling me delusional and idiotic simply because I disagree with your assertion that science is settled and all the experts agree (and note I have pointed out problems in this which you have failed to notice) is actually an attack on the man, not the topic of discussion. And as ad hominem means at/to the man, I am pretty confident I have used in correctly.

And lo and behold, checking your source, we find the following:

A: “All rodents are mammals, but a weasel isn’t a rodent, so it can’t be a mammal.”
B: “Well, you’ve never had a good grasp of logic, so this can’t be true.”
B’s argument here is ad hominem. He concludes that A is wrong not by addressing A’s argument, but by appealing to the negative image of A the person.

This makes the point that rather than addressing an argument addressing the person making the argument in a negative light is an ad hominem attack. Oddly, this seems to be what you did to me. Rather than address my point that maybe people can have different opinions, you opined that my failure to agree with you was because I am delusional and idiotic.

Still, on this evidence it is not an ad hominem attack to suggest you do not read your sources that well. Which perhaps should not surprise me, but does disappoint me.

@74. Watchman

The other constant is that no matter how many times it is explained to deniers, they still do not understand why it is not ‘ad hominem’.

It is not ad hominem to speculate on why you think you know better than the planet’s climate science community. My speculation that you suffer Dunning Kruger or are an idiot is not part of an *argument*. It’s already established that you believe you know better than the scientists.

If I said you were wrong about climate change because you were a greedy rightwinger, that would be ad hominem.

Understand? I doubt it….

Anyway, the science is totally compelling. It is as good as fact. Those who deny it are left with few excuses: wilful ignorance, idiocy or dishonesty.

Why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization”

Note how quickly the deniers retreat behind the barricade of victimhood.

@76. BenM

> Note how quickly the deniers retreat behind the barricade of victimhood.

They fucking LOVE it in there! It’s warm and cosy and keeps away the big meanies on the internet who make them feel silly and *wrong*.

If I had a quid for every time they’ve whipped out their “ad hominem!!1!”, I’d be able buy all the houses around Richard North and give them to our Asian and African descent countrymen.

This might interest some people

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/to-classify-humanity-is-not-that-hard/

Courtesy of Pharyngula: http://darryl-cunningham.blogspot.com/2010/12/climate-change.html – good exposition – right up there with his previous one about the MMR stuff.

BlueRock, RE: greens. I’ll restrict my comments to noting that in 68-on-the-other-thread you agreed that describing the green party as anti-science is justified if you disagree with their assessment of the ethics of xenotransplanation or animal research.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16756568 makes a decent – if unrepresentative – read. I do wish I still had access to all my journals – http://www.springerlink.com/content/fjvngapf63hvg698/ would be far more informative.

The judgement of the ethical position is necessarily not a scientific question, so asking for evidence in the scientific sense is an unreasonable demand. Suffice it to say that a significant group of people would justifiably describe the green party as anti-science. And a significant group of people would justifiably describe them as not anti-science. Until we can answer the ethical question objectively (seems unlikely), the two groups will not agree.

IPCC AR4 uses other sources and isn’t peer reviewed directly. As has been reported widely some of the papers it refers to are not properly peer reviewed.

HadCrut is a data series created at CRU and Hadley. NASA uses that data, as Bluerock points out. However that data series in its entirety and the algo that is used to normalise the data IS NOT available publicly. You can only get hold of normalised, processed data. Which is pretty useless unless you know how it was modified to give the results NASA published in 2007.

Bluerock – please explain how you are so certain these climate scientists are correct, when it was the SAME PEOPLE who were so worried about global cooling in the 80s.

You make some assumption that all climate scientists are trained in that way – two of my friends from Uni both work in the field. One was trained as a cellular biologist, the other an anthopologist. Both are hard left greenpeace members. I wonder if there will be a particular slant to their research, or if it will be totally unbiased? I’m not saying this is the rule, but climate science especially tends to attract activists more than other sciences do by its very nature.

Tyler, ‘cooling consensus’ fazllacy is debunked here: http://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm

It’s a decent site, and well worth reading if you want to avoid relying on arguments that are patently false.

e.g. we can now become more informed about the hockey-stick: http://skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm

And anyone who doesn’t already know can learn how the CRU were vindicated post-climategate: http://skepticalscience.com/Climategate-CRU-emails-hacked.htm

Handy index: http://skepticalscience.com/argument.php

Simply, there are *too many*

ahem. *too many* converging lines of evidence arguing for AGW, and I haven’t seen an argument against AGW that hasn’t been debunked somewhere, by someone who knows more than myself and the arguer combined.

Hence, I am convinced.

As for HadCrut – the PDF linked from http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/explains the methodology. the raw data from 4000 different stations is, asa BlueRock mentioned earlier, *simply not theirs to publish*. It belongs to each individual weather station, which owns copyright. Convenient as it would be for it all to be in one place, that’s the situation.

You can for the data ffom each station yourself, though. If enough people do that, perhaps the stations will get together and create a raw dataset anyone can get without too much trouble.

Seems these points apply equally to watchman as well.

Nick,

John Cook/climatescience.org are well known to be very much in the AGW camp. It’s certainly not the unbiased site it purports to be.

The main problem with HadCrut is the actual algo they use to take the temperature data (which surely, if they have it from the weather stations should be available to other people, even at cost? It’s not exactly military secrets we’re taking about here is it?). It simply hasn’t been released, so we have only a basic idea of how data has been normalized.

Given that weather stations have migrated towards the (warmer) equator over the years (I guess scientists don’t much like living in Siberia), and given also how a lot of weather stations surroundings have changed through urbanisation, it is *very* important to the results to see how the data was managed. That is what is missing…

((by the way I couldn’t get your link to the Met office pdf to work))

There are other factors in play as well. In the 50s the type of thermometer used in many weather stations was changed to a more durable type. Except that type redas temperatures slightly higher (0.5C or so). It should and has been normalised in (most of) the data….yet in some datasets this has been overlooked. Surely a mistake, but this is why being able to go into ALL the data and seeing if the results are reproducable is so important.

There’s a lot of money at stake, that’s for sure.

“European legislators in Brussels have discovered that the strategy they devised to combat climate change is helping subsidize the economy of their, and America’s, major global competitor — China. European companies have been overpaying Chinese companies more than 70 times the cost to eliminate a potent greenhouse gas — triflouromethane, or hfc 23, a byproduct of manufacturing a refrigerant that has been banned in developed countries and is being phased out in developing ones.”

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/perverse_co2_payments_send_flood_of_money_to_china_/2350/

By the way, just skimming climatescience.org I can see a few obvious errors;

They talk about the C02 feedback effect. The idea behind this is that warmer air can hold more water, and good old H2O is the best greenhouse gas out there. Because of this extra CO2 in the atmosphere causes a feedkac effect on global temperatures. This has unfortunately been disproved – the effect is negligable (and in some tests actually shown to be a negative feedback).

The equations used to predict global heating are from the Arrhenius equation, which basically suggests a doubling of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere with increase temperatures by about 1.5C. The 3C various sources come out with rely on this feeback effect.

Even climatescience.org has temperatures rising by 0.75C since 1880, with a error of +/-0.18C. Weather stations are only accurate to about +/-0.5C, and even with the combined error (which is lower thanks to the power of statistics) you still get a confidence interval of only roughly 50%.

Not that calling the atmosphere a greenhouse is a good metaphor in any way – a real greenhouse works by preventing convection…….

@Tyler #86:

“They talk about the C02 feedback effect. The idea behind this is that warmer air can hold more water, and good old H2O is the best greenhouse gas out there. Because of this extra CO2 in the atmosphere causes a feedkac effect on global temperatures. This has unfortunately been disproved – the effect is negligable (and in some tests actually shown to be a negative feedback). ”

I’m interested to hear this – perhaps you could refer me to the peer-reviewed paper that “disproves” this and shows the feedback effect is negligible?

@Tyler #86:

You might want to review this page and the papers from which it is drawn:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing/

@ Robin

Don’t have a direct link to hand, but I do know there is a link somewhere on the wikipedia “greenhouse gas” page. If i get time i’ll try and search for the papers for you, but there have been a number since the mid 90s on.

Off hand I believe its something to do with the various layers of the atmosphere and the net infra-red opacity of the atmosphere….

continuing above before i hit post by accident

….climate models assume humidity is constant through the atmosphere, which is demonstrably false. Satellites are used to measure surface temps, and then this temperature is plugged into an equation to generate a level of humidity. This humidty is assumed constant across the atmosphere and is then plugged into the models for C02/H20 feeback…..thus overstating the case. There was an Australian paper about it a year or two ago I read, and for the life of me can’t remember the author.

Bluerock,

Hint: I am no more likely to accept Joe Romm’s climateprogress as a source than you are Anthony Watt’s Wattsupwiththat. Dr Romm is not exactly above twisting facts and denying others the chance to post alternative opinions.

@74. Watchman

It is not ad hominem to speculate on why you think you know better than the planet’s climate science community. My speculation that you suffer Dunning Kruger or are an idiot is not part of an *argument*. It’s already established that you believe you know better than the scientists.

Actually, by the source you were citing to prove your point, I think it is, but still, it would hardly be a surprise for you to ignore what the evidence says would it? You have failed to address any definite point put to you in this thread, or any other, that I can see, relying instead on ‘consensus’ (you do know that was made up by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an enviromentalis pressure group don’t you?) and deciding that you are fit to judge my mental state, something that is clearly impossible for even a trained psychiatrist without set tests and, generally, me being present. But then again, you believe science is what you want it to be, not something that has to be done according to strict guidelines.

As it happens, I do not suffer from Dunning Kruger – and since I have had brushes with mental illness in the past (depression since you ask) I am quite insulted that you think this is a suitable way to conduct an argument. I do not doubt you are sane, despite your consistent failure to address arguments. I simply think you have a belief system that you cannot or will not doubt.

If I said you were wrong about climate change because you were a greedy rightwinger, that would be ad hominem.

Well possibly not actually, as that would be suggesting that my political views, rather than me personally, influenced my argument. But if you can’t see why someone’s mental state and intellect are personal whilst their political views are not, then I can see why you have a problem understanding the concept of ad hominem.

Anyway, the science is totally compelling. It is as good as fact. Those who deny it are left with few excuses: wilful ignorance, idiocy or dishonesty.

Well, I prefer my science to be factual, not ‘as good as fact’. I do not actually find it all that compelling though – much of it is sound (which is what I would suggest looking for in science – not something that grabs your attention!) enough, but there are flaws.

Incidentally, the main problem with climate science is not their findings, but rather their attitude towards challenges to these, which is distinctly unscientific (after the recent statistical debate, I might also say that climate science needs to hone its use of statistics…). I do not necessarily doubt much of the science was ‘correct’ at the time, but quite a lot has subsequently been tested and not fully replicated – which means it is not ‘compelling’ in any scientific way.

Tyler/84,

Working link to the PDF (stupid phone keyboard): http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/HadCRUT3_accepted.pdf – this is the methodology by which they tweak the raw data to produce the published dataset

Like I said, they don’t own the raw data – it’s not theirs – so they can’t publish it in one big group. This is in their FAQ, so they probably get it a lot: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/#faq

There is nothing – nothing at all – stopping you from asking the 4,000 independent weather stations for their data, as I already said. I see no reason why they wouldn’t give it to you, and I’m sure the CRU will give you a list of the weather stations they get the data from if you ask them. They might even have published it already.

As for skepticalscience.com I don’t really care if the site has an ‘AGW bias’ or not. The overall bias of the site doesn’t affect the arguments, which stand and fall on their own merits.

Example: Watchman says, hockey stick is inaccurate, artefact of the modelling process, debunked ages ago, old news, why are AGW-proselytisers still using it?

They say, ’98 paper was contested in ’03 on those grounds. Another paper in ’07 concluded that the hockey-stick wasn’t a modelling artefact, the conclusions are actually fine, and the hockey-stick is corroborated in a number of independent data-sets, done by different people, with a variety of methodologies.

The argument stands or falls on the strength of the science, not the ‘AGE bias’ of the site. From my point of view, it looks like Watchman stopped reading the journals in 2003 (or perhaps, the people he got this argument from stopped reading the journals in ’03, or even, were aware of, but didn’t want to talk about, the ’07 paper).

Now, if the the ’07 study, and the borehole temperature study, and the stalagamite temperature study, and the glacier temperature study (all referenced, all respectable peer-reviewed science) have all been debunked, watchman’s point stands victorious. However, they haven’t been as far as I know. Perhaps you or him (it’s his claim, after all) can provide links to these debunkings?

Without evidence to the contrary, I’m happy to accept the science – which says that the hockey-stick is fine.

Same with your claim that these scientists were saying cooling was the danger back in the ’70s, so we shouldn’t listen to them now because they were wrong before and will be wrong this time too.

They did a literature study showing that papers suggesting a cooling effect in the ’70s were outnumbered by papers suggesting a warming effect, by six to one.

Regardless of the ‘AGW bias’ of the site, to contend the point, you should do a literature review of your own (or link to one that was done by someone else) and see if that is actually the case. “It’s not true because the site has an AGW bias” is simply not a credible argument.

I have great respect for a position of default skepticism – I use it in a lot of areas of life. But a defining feature of rational skepticism is that your arguments need to be good. If you don’t accept the hockey-stick, based on an argument that has been disproved, then you need to switch to ambivalence or accept the status quo (if you can’t be arsed to look critically at the disproving argument), or investigate the disproving argument and either become convinced, or reject the argument’s conclusions based on a feature of the work.

Holding onto the position based on the disproved argument is simply not how rational skepticism works. And it weakens your position significantly – why should I listen to you if you’re putting forward a position containing substantial numbers of disproven arguments?

It’s this regurgitating of old arguments that has led me in the past (and others, in the past and present) to compare AGW-deniers with creationists.

If your denial is rational, it will not rest on old, discredited arguments. And you will not reject the science behind that discrediting simply due to the ‘AGW bias’ of the messenger.

@Tyler #90:

“…climate models assume humidity is constant through the atmosphere, which is demonstrably false…”

It is indeed, but they don’t – see the Realclimate article I referred you to. A result (not an assumption) of running GCMs is that the atmosphere tends to a constant *relative* humidity, which isn’t the same thing.

Since an increase in air temperature increases the amount of water vapour that will be held in the atmospehere without raining out, why would the feedback effect not operate. The observations after Pinatubo show that the variations in H2O with changes in air temperature not only are pretty significant, but are pretty well-modelled in the GCMs.

@ Nick

I think it is how the homogenisation adjustment error is produced where people are somewhat skeptical from the 05 paper, and this is what came out in the CRU leaks.

The problem with the hockey stick diagrams was taking one series and then morphing it into another – the most famous example is tree ring data then moderm temperature records. Mann’s “trick”. Also involved chopping some time periods out. Regardless, I don’t think even the IPCC seriouslytout hockey stick diagrams any more….

Some sites out there *do* have a distinct warming bias, and present one-sided views of the arguments, even if well constructed. Climatescience.org is one of the better general sites but even there it’s fairly easy to spot some flaws in some of their arguments. Climateprogress is a bit of a joke though. You can’t have it both ways though – that warmist sites are all gospel and denier sites are all wrong.

Personally, I AM fairly ambivolent about AGW. As i said much earlier on up the thread, it could be happening.

What I DO MASSIVELY object to is the idea of the Bluerock’s and Sunny’s of the world treating what is very much an unproven and hotly disputed theory and taking it as the Gospel truth, then shoving it down my throat and telling me how I should live my life because of it. I also object to how AGW is seen as the holy grail of environmentalism. it my mind it’s a red herring in comparison to the many more important environmental and ecological issues out there. As such, I have no problems sticking my hand up and disputing AGW.

Nick,

If we are playing the latest paper game, there is a 2010 paper proving that stastically the hockey stick is not significant, the rejoinder of which to some of the Hockey Stick paper’s response which also points out the methodology of the 2007 paper (which shared the flaws of the original in its choice of proxies anyway) and the 2008 paper (which you missed, but which also sought to reestablish the Hockey Stick) is not replicatable with the information provided, and has errors of understanding in the statistics.

This is to ignore the slightly more fundamental problem not addressed in any of the papers that the Hockey Stick is built (no longer entirely, but still substantially) on a record that up to 1960 is based on tree rings, but after that, when the tree ring data turns downwards is based on temprature records (the ‘hide the decline’/'trick’), so it is not actually a proxy for the recent period.

It also includes strip-bark Greybark samples, which produce hockey sticks due to the damage to the tree causing growth (and which have not been replicated by later studies). The 2008 paper also contained inverted data from a lake in Finland where the original publication stated that the modern period data was contaminated and could not give reliable results.

No paper has been released solving (or even addressing) these problems. Instead they have relied on statistical methods that it now turns out are not as significant as originally thought.

While we’re at it –

“Even climatescience.org has temperatures rising by 0.75C since 1880, with a error of +/-0.18C. Weather stations are only accurate to about +/-0.5C, and even with the combined error (which is lower thanks to the power of statistics) you still get a confidence interval of only roughly 50%”

is a bit misleading. The individual absolute temperature measurements are only accurate to a certain degree (I’ve no idea if it’s actually 0.5′C or not); the figure quoted is a 0.75′C *increase* (different thing), +/-0.18′C *to a 95% (probably) confidence interval.

Which means you can be 95% certain that the real figure is somewhere between 0.57′C and 0.93′C. Assuming you’ve not made any errors in your stats, of course. I don’t know why you think that is bad. I call it a serious result, given the nature of the data they’re dealing with and the inherent hardness of the question.

95 – [citation needed]

Ta.

@ Robin

Try Paltridge 2009(?).

Your realclimate link uses a constant humidity throughout the atmosphere I’m afriad. The author even admits this is a poor assumption. That article mostly deals with how long water stays in the atmosphere and absorption/radiation properties.

Nick,

Sorry – sloppy of me. The 2010 reference, the response and the rejoinder, along with plentiful other debate is in the Annals of Applied Statistics 4: prepublished at http://www.imstat.org/aoas/next_issue.html (this will presumably change when it becomes the current issue though…).

It is worth reading the whole lot before making any judgements about anything, if you can get your head round the statistical issues.

94

“What I DO MASSIVELY object to is the idea of the Bluerock’s and Sunny’s of the world treating what is very much an unproven and hotly disputed theory and taking it as the Gospel truth, ……….”

I think those who don’t believe in AGW (or at least who don’t see it as being as serious as most of the scientific community think) often end up sounding like creationists or proponents of Intelligent Design in evolution. The overwhelming balance of evidence supports AGW. Of course there are doubts, but even if the science is subsequently proven wrong, or to have overestimated the human influence, surely there is still good reason for us to take measures not to make things worse?

It’s not good waiting decades to find catastrophe looming, and looking back to see that we missed an opportunity to do something to avoid the situation. I’d agree that there are other important environmental and ecological issues out there, but trying to persuade people that AGW is a red herring is just pissing in the wind.

@Tyler #98:

“Your realclimate link uses a constant humidity throughout the atmosphere I’m afriad.”

Perhaps you can show me where? I can’t see it.

Did you read Soden (2002)? It’s available in full text at the link from the Realclimate page, although you have to browse to it – I used Soden’s name.

“Try Paltridge 2009″

Do you have a full-text version available? I understand that it claims that tropospheric specific humidity declined between 1973 and 2007. It is however the only reanalysis of 5 reviewed by Dessler & Davis that produces the result; it is also the only one that relies exclusively upon data from balloon radiosondes, which apparently have well-documented problems, that Paltridge et al themselves point out…

The data they rely on doesn’t show the increase in humidity accompanying the 1998 El Nino that is not only predicted by theory but was directly measured at the time – the other reanalysyes do show that moistening.

The abstract of Dessler & Davis (2010) considering the Paltridge paper is here:

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2010JD014192.shtml

Essentially, to accept Paltridge while rejecting Soden and other papers is unwise – the basic data is flawed, and the outcome inconsistent with both other studies directly on topic and known science. As others have said:

“To claim that humidity is decreasing requires you ignore a multitude of independent reanalyses, including newer ones with improved algorithms, that all show increasing humidity. It requires you accept a flawed reanalysis that even its own authors express caution about. It fails to explain how we can have short-term positive feedback and long-term negative feedback (indeed there is no known mechanism that can explain it). In short, to insist that humidity is decreasing is to neglect the full body of evidence.”

@ Robin

Unfortunately I don’t have a full text of Paltridge. I’m sure it’s available somewhere though. There are other similar studies though, with similar results. All in the last few years. I’m sure a google search can turn some things up.

Do have a gander at wikipedia on water vapour though, as I’m sure there are links there, and wiki also says that the net effect of water vapour is neutral. I can’t get into wiki from work here, but if memory serves….

When all is said and done though, my position remains the same – I don’t uunconditionally believe in AGW. Thats not to say I reject it totally either, but my objection is with those who use it like a battering ram, and fail to acknowledge there are some real and definite problems with the theory.

Till then, I’m going to head off on holiday, where I’m going to enjoy driving my sportscar, and won’t even feel guilty about it given that the “green” alternative, the prius, is jsut as polluting and uses horribly toxic batteries. Nothing is black and white – it’s all shades of grey.

99 – thanks very much. I was indeed unaware of this particular paper. A cursory reading (it really did take that long!) completed, I must now sit back and gently digest it. I’m only just good enough at statistics to know that I’m pitifully bad at them . Most of it is well above my level.

What I did take away is that the central point of the paper is that climatologists are seriously underestimating uncertainty in the proxy measures of temperature, particularly as you go back in time. Much more convincing than the previous version of the statement (hockey-stick-is-wrong vs. tail-of-hockey-stick-is-more-uncertain-than-we-thought-so-it-might-not-be-a-hockey-stick-after-all).

Fortunately, given the lack of global conspiracy in climatology, we can now go => disputed => gather more data (so reducing uncertainty) => new answer, and I shall be watching it with interest.

Meanwhile, of course, the consensus doesn’t change – not least due to all the other lines of evidence that aren’t proxy models of temperature.

@Tyler #102:

“Unfortunately I don’t have a full text of Paltridge. I’m sure it’s available somewhere though. There are other similar studies though, with similar results. All in the last few years. I’m sure a google search can turn some things up.”

The similar studies to Paltridge do *not* have similar results – that is the point of the Dessler and Davis paper. Paltridge is the outlier, and is based on demonstrably flawed data – as the authors themselves to some extent recognise.

“Do have a gander at wikipedia on water vapour though, as I’m sure there are links there, and wiki also says that the net effect of water vapour is neutral. I can’t get into wiki from work here, but if memory serves….”

Nuh-huh. Water vapour is *not* neutral; even the denialists get that one right. The usual denialist argument is that wate vapour is the only relevant greenhouse gas, because of its massive contribution to the greenhouse effect. Where they get it wrong is in claiming that it is a forcing, never explaining how the water vapour content of the atmosphere increases without an increase in temperature.

@79. Nick

> RE: greens. I’ll restrict my comments to noting that in 68-on-the-other-thread you agreed that describing the green party as anti-science is justified if you disagree with their assessment of the ethics of xenotransplanation or animal research.

You are providing further evidence to me that you are not arguing in good faith and are being intentionally dishonest. I clearly did not say what you are attributing to me. Here is what I said – http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/12/12/even-worse-polling-news-for-libdems-today/#comment-212921 :

* *You* do not get to define the Green Party as “anti-science” simply because you think it’s hunky dory to cut up sentient beings for human benefit.

* The Green Party are not “anti-science” – it’s just that some people use that label in place of “I have no ethical or moral problems with barbarity visited on sentient animals if it benefits me.”

You have failed repeatedly to provide a shred of evidence that the Green Party are “anti-science” – you simply keep judging your personal standard for ethics, morals and precautionary principle against anyone who disagrees and labelling them “anti-science”.

You have provided evidence that you are dishonest. Shame on you.

Nick,

I would point out the current consensus is built on models which have not predicted the stop in temprature rises (other than in GISS…) and is strongly predicated on the idea that the current warming is unusual, which appears less certain than ever.

I do not doubt there is a fair degree of consensus, but since the CRU emails came out and people saw how far some of that consensus was the result of academic politics and not pure science, the consensus has shifted towards questioning things more. Hopefully we can sit back and watch something less rooted in the careers of a few individuals and more in good science (and statistics) including allowing opposing voices to speak develop. I think the Annals of Applied Statistics, in gathering together a number of different voices on climate and statistics to respond to the paper, show that there is plentiful space for coherent debate.

As with Galen10, it is a pleasure exchanging views with someone who understands there is more to science (and presumably to the political implications) than fixed positions and outright respect for authority.

Bluerock at 105,

Isn’t Nick on your side of the argument? Just because he seems to disagree with you on something does not make him dishonest. Perhaps allowing that there are other viewpoints than your own in the world would be good for you.

@80. Tyler

> IPCC AR4 uses other sources and isn’t peer reviewed directly.

WG1 – the core science – is derived entirely from peer-reviewed papers. However, if it is as weak as you keep insinuating, it should be trivially easy to debunk. So, why don’t you do it?

Could it be that you simply cannot? Could it be that you really don’t have a clue about the science? You just have a set script of zombie denier talking points that you regurgitate ad nauseum in the face of constant rebuttals?

The unfortunate thing for you deniers is that if anyone pays attention to you for more than a few threads in any forum, your pattern of dishonesty and idiocy becomes very apparent.

Monbiot just wrote a very good piece that documents what many of us have recognised for some time – the coordinated astroturfing and trolling by rightwingers in left / liberal / environment forums. The right cannot win the argument with facts and science, so they attempt to spoil rational discourse.

@84. Tyler

> John Cook/climatescience.org are well known to be very much in the AGW camp.

Otherwise known as the ‘scientifically literate camp’.

> It’s certainly not the unbiased site it purports to be.

It is biased: biased in favour of science, evidence and reality.

Your weasely rhetoric and evidence-free insinuations are tedious and transparent. You need a new script.

@91. Watchman

> Dr Romm is not exactly above twisting facts and denying others the chance to post alternative opinions.

Which facts has he “twisted”? Provide credible cites to prove your claim.

He certainly does prevent a certain demographic from posting comments on his blog. He moderates out the zombie denier talking points that spoil so many other forums. He bans people who arrive only to troll and abuse him or others. His moderation policy makes the comments section a haven of rational, science-based discussion.

The rest of your screed is just more evidence-free, science-free, self-important rhetoric. You write a lot, but you say nothing.

@Watchman #106:

“I would point out the current consensus is built on models which have not predicted the stop in temprature rises (other than in GISS…)”

Which “stop in temperature rises”?

@107. Watchman

> Isn’t Nick on your side of the argument? Just because he seems to disagree with you on something does not make him dishonest. Perhaps allowing that there are other viewpoints than your own in the world would be good for you.

This is a great example of the dishonesty of the rightwing trolls – I cannot believe anyone could be so stupid to misunderstand that Nick completely misrepresented what I had previously wrote and therefore I am justified in accusing him of dishonesty.

Therefore, Watchman is pretending to have misunderstood in order to troll someone he perceives as a threat. If he can get me to react angrily, he can then distract the conversation further by whipping out his “ad hominem!!1!” tactic. If he can make me really angry he’s hoping I will give up on the conversation and then he has ‘won’.

Someone on the Guardian left a comment on Monbiot’s excellent analysis on astroturfing that points out some of the tactics commonly used by the deniers. It’s not exhaustive, but it’s a good starter:

~~~
Well we needn’t ask what’s in the contrarian manual as we already know.

Point 1: If the warmist claims you are an astroturfer – Accuse them of paranoia or conspiracy theories.

Point 1b: Alernatively, if your astroturfer status is in danger of being exposed, accuse the warmists of being paid shills. Remember, always accuse them of what you are doing. It doesn’t matter how silly these false accusations are, it ties them up having to explain what you are doing.

Point 2: If a new scientific paper is published on climate change – Just dismiss it as alarmist nonsense.

Point 3: If a warmist provides a scientific paper that contradicts what you say – Just dismiss it as alarmist nonsense.

Point 4: It helps to take the moral highground. Constantly accuse the warmists of personal abuse. The more personal abuse you have been using the more this hypocrisy annoys them.

Point 5: Just get a list of scientific papers vaguely on the subject. Keep claiming they come to conclusions they don’t. There’s no need to worry, because if you have a long list of papers, you can keep posting a new reference, before the warmists have had the chance to read the last one.

Point 6: Make full use of every known logical fallacy, especially the straw man fallacy. Always misquote and misrepresent the warmists. It annoys them and takes them longer to respond.

Point 7: Remember accusations are good. Useful perjorative terms include; eco-fascists, alarmists, marxist – but just remember that in England a liberal does not mean what it does in the US. Strangely in England it is a member of a right wing government.

Point 8: Repeatedly accuse the warmists of wanting to suppress free speech. Accuse them of wanting to hunt down and torture those who speak the truth about the AGW scam. Yes its all lies, but it annoys them.

Finally, remember to always give the impression that AGW is a discredited theory, say it is so yesterday, and keep saying that climategate proved it was all a scam (yes, these are all lies, but it annoys the warmists when you keep lying, and they keep having to explain why you are lying – just develop a thick skin).
~~~

Bluerock,

@91. Watchman

Dr Romm is not exactly above twisting facts and denying others the chance to post alternative opinions.

He certainly does prevent a certain demographic from posting comments on his blog. He moderates out the zombie denier talking points that spoil so many other forums. He bans people who arrive only to troll and abuse him or others. His moderation policy makes the comments section a haven of rational, science-based discussion.

I refer you to his treatment of McShane and Wyrner (2010). Has he mentioned the implications of this paper for our understanding of historical climates. No. Has he claimed the paper is rubbish. Yes. Odd really, since it was judged worth publishing by a statistics journal, that Dr Romm knows so much more.

Anyway, I think your point of view is nicely put by claiming that moderating out people who might have a different point of view (however tempting) “makes the comments section a haven of rational, science-based discussion”. Glad to see you do not use the word scientific there, since basing your discussion on science is hardly the same as doing science. If you base your discussion on science, you can chose which bits you accept and which you ignore, and cut out dissenting voices. Just like creationalis who select bits of science to suit them and then refuse to listen when people point out inconvenient truths, because they are convinced they have the only inconvenient truth which everyone else must accept.

The rest of your screed is just more evidence-free, science-free, self-important rhetoric. You write a lot, but you say nothing.

Well, if explaining why you cannot diagnose psychological conditions over the internet, why science has to be based on facts and why science requires considering challenges to your results is ‘science-free’, I plead guilty (and guilty to writing a lot anyway). But I am not sure you read what I wrote properly, since I would say that what I wrote is actually quite relevant to science.

I suppose you could mean science as in ‘what Bluerock believes’, but that is a rather limited view of science (we’re back to the creationist comparison again aren’t we?). I prefer a view of science as actually practised.

I would suggest you either start thinking before posting and stop typing such badly-chosen phrases and unsupported attacks (to accuse me of misunderstanding ad hominem when all I had to do was check your source to support my argument was not so much lazy as spectacularly weak for example). Gather the science and be prepared to debate – as with Galen10, Nick or Robin Levett (or Tyler and me on the other side) or consider this – if faced with your stubborn belief and refusual to address points or evidence (as witnessed by both Galen 10 and Nick’s comments) and my reference to scientific practice, actual evidence and to the fact I read both sides of the debate, who do you think is more likely to persuade people? It is not enough to simply restate your belief – you have to be prepared to defend it, or people like me will win out because we seem more reasonable, less bigotted, less fanatical. There are those who can defend the position that man-made global warming (or climate change, or climate disruption) happens. You don’t seem able to do that from your posts here, which is a pity. Surely your undoubted fervour and claimed knowledge should be able to put together arguments, not assertions; should be able to be convincing, not insulting. It is, at the moment, too easy for me to compare you to a creationist (to turn around one of Dr Romm’s favourite insults) and to show a lack of understanding of scientific method. A bit of actual use of science (that you have read, not had explained to you by Dr Romm’s website) would be all that was needed to avoid that.

@ Watchman

Isn’t Nick on your side of the argument?

I think you’ll find that Bluerock is not really interested in discussion or argument. His belief in AGW is not based on evidence but on it filling a spiritual need within him.

You might as well try to debate Christianity with Paul in Damascus.

@106. Watchman

> I would point out the current consensus is built on models which have not predicted the stop in temprature rises (other than in GISS…) and is strongly predicated on the idea that the current warming is unusual, which appears less certain than ever.

So many lies in so few words!

1. The consensus is not built on models. It is built on ~200 years of accumulated science, including some very basic physics. The evidence for the planet heating comes from thousands of datasets – direct and proxy. CO2 is ~40% higher than pre-industrial from burning fossil fuels (absolutely certain because of isotope signature). Global warming is *fact*.

2. There has been no “stop in temprature rises” – 2010 is predicted to be the hottest on record. CRU might put it at 2nd or 3rd hottest – but CRU does not include Arctic data… which is where most of the warming is taking place.

3. The degree of certainty that current warming is unusual is higher than ever. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

It’s not that you make mistakes, or that the mistakes are so egregious – it’s the pattern of mistakes and the repetition of them that makes it clear you are a liar. You are not here for rational, honest debate. You are here to spoil.

Bluerock at 112,

So when has anyone debating with you on this site used any of what appears to be a particularly stupid and unscientific list of tactics (albeit ones that seem at a similiar level to repeatedly stating that all scientists agree in terms of intellectual maturity).

Actually my reference to an ad hominem attack was a reaction to being called delusional and idiotic and accused of having a psychological condition, but as it was not on the list of apparent denier techniques anyway…

And I don’t consider someone on the internet going silent as winning, since it might be they have a life of their own outside of this virtual environment. I have to go to mine shortly, but that doesn’t mean I’ve won or lost (actually, since I get to see my wife, I’ve won – but that’s just in my life not this debate).

@113. Watchman

I see no evidence, no credible cites – just more tedious rhetoric.

@114. pagar

Troll harder!

~~~

@116. Watchman

What’s your point? Why do you keep ducking every challenge to substantiate your claims with evidence? Why do you ignore every substantive argument and cite that is put in front of you?

Do you know what ‘personal integrity’ means? Clue: it does not mean “a weakness displayed by loser lefties”.

I can only wonder and pity you for the way you have turned out….

Bluerock,

Thanks for your pity, but it is not required (I’ll take the wonder – I have an ego to stoke ). Anyway, since you mentioned it, I thought I might engage in a little point about scientific measurements:

2. There has been no “stop in temprature rises” – 2010 is predicted to be the hottest on record. CRU might put it at 2nd or 3rd hottest – but CRU does not include Arctic data… which is where most of the warming is taking place.

Neither does GISS, which uses basically the same dataset as CRU for the artic region. The single difference is GISS is happier to assume tempratures from neighbouring grid cells can be ‘smeared’ across empty cells, so therefore provides purely imaginary tempratures for the Artic (and for much of Africa, and the Southern Ocean). In other words, GISS interpolates data where none exists to a far greater degree than HadCRUT, which is fair enough, but since the exact areas where most of the warming is taking place are those where the data is interpolated this suggests that this might be a relic of the system not the climate. After all, the actual temperature measurements from within the artic circle are not actually getting warmer at the rate GISS says they should be doing.

And please stop assuming others are liers simply because you do not agree with them. It’s bad manners, and frustrating for those of us who are actually into debating things. As happened with Nick above, if you ask me to substantiate something, I will go and find my source for it, but most of what I say is actually common knowledge (i.e. it can easily be found by googling – albeit you may get some idiot pages as well). May not happen instaneously of course – as I said, I’ve got a life to go to.

pagar,

I think you’ll find that Bluerock is not really interested in discussion or argument. His belief in AGW is not based on evidence but on it filling a spiritual need within him.

You might as well try to debate Christianity with Paul in Damascus.

I do wonder the same, but I’d probably have debated with Paul as well. I’m a sucker for a pointless argument…

Anyway, occasionally you can convert someone to your religion (reasoned scepticism and liberalism not being the catchiest title for a religion but still) and that is always fun.

I would /love/ to have a debate with Paul at Damascus. Get this whole Christianity thing nipped in the bud.

BlueRock – it’s not my fault that you contradicted yourself. In 68-on-the-other-thread you also said:

> …“the greens are too anti-science for me” is an entirely valid comment for me to have made…

Perfectly acceptable – it is your opinion based on moral and ethical judgements on how we treat animals, environment and other people.

Which you directly contradicted in 94-on-the-other-thread. I still don’t understand the basis for you agreeing with ^that^ point, and not the point that was right after it – you never explained it, you see. You also didn’t explain why you contradicted that quote in 94-on-the-other-thread.

Now let me do this again. Greens are anti-science to everyone who holds a view that cutting up animals is acceptable. That includes me, and probably about half the country. It does not include you, evidently.

Now, if you seriously think I’m misrepresenting you (although I can’t see how), we’re not going to come to an agreement on it. So the only way you’re going to be able to try to stop it is via a complaint of some kind. Trot off and get a neutral third party to judge – you’ll be pleased to know that libel laws are strongly in the complainants favour in this country.

However, this is not the other thread, it is this thread. They are threads for a reason. Shall we try to stick to the correct thread on this thread?

@Watchman #119:

I say again – what stop in temperature rises?

@119. Watchman

> Neither does GISS, which uses basically the same dataset as CRU for the artic region.

Another example of how trivially easy it is to prove you’ve made another ‘mistake’: http://climateprogress.org/2009/11/30/climategate-hadley-cru-climate-data/

That’s all you produce: a constant stream of ‘mistakes’ that all deny or down-play the reality of global warming. I say you’re a liar.

Bluerock,

You can’t be serious about this – you have to be an actual denier trying to discredit your supposed cause! It’s the only possible explanation for what you have just done. In which case, I wish to appologise to all the genuine supporters of the man-made global warming thesis out there for acting as a stooge to this guy, who has to be the ballsiest troll I have ever met (if you can ‘meet’ on the internet).

The article you cite to disprove me, in turn cites (without challenging) the New Scientist which says “The UK’s Hadley Centre record simply excludes this area, whereas the NASA version[*] assumes its surface temperature is the same as that of the nearest land-based stations.” Now if you check, that’s exactly what I said – that HadCRUT does not cover the artic, whilst GISS smears (that’s apparently a technical term?) temperatures over the artic from nearby stations.

Dr Romm states, with no evidence that I can see, that it is likely that the Artic is warming faster than GISS suggests, but both his and my (opposite) contentions depend on the fact that there is no actual temperature record for the artic, so anything that happens in the models in conjecture from what happens elsewhere. Which is why I said I prefer HadCRUT which does not smear its results to anything like the same degree and therefore has more base in reality. Yes it ignores the Artic, but then again it does so because there is no data. And this in itself should surely give us pause when we consider how complete global temperature records, one of the key tools for analysing climate, really are – climate science is still in relative infancy remember, and when even fundamental records are somewhat incomplete, the level of certainty that Bluerock (or Dr Romm) seems to display seems inappropriate to me.

*Please note even Dr Romm is fully aware that NASA use a version of the same dataset as the Hadley Centre (Met Office) – another of my points above you seem to think you have disproved.

@121. Nick

You keep going round in circles and you are quote-mining and ignoring context.

> BlueRock – it’s not my fault that you contradicted yourself.

I have not contradicted myself anywhere. It may be that you really cannot grasp the difference between “you’re entitled to your opinion” and “your opinion is unassailable fact”.

You can call anyone or anything “anti-science” if you want – it does not make it unqualified fact.

You have not provided any evidence that the Green Party is “anti-science” – you have just made a value judgement based on morals and ethics and arbitrarily declared the Green Party “anti-science” because you think it’s fine to “glue primates heads to posts, saw off the top of their skulls, then poke around while providing stimuli to them.”

By Green Party standards, you have a low bar for morals and ethics. You need to look at your standards – not try to accuse others of being “anti-science” because they wish to protect sentient beings – or because some of us want the precautionary principle moved further towards benefiting people and the environment instead of corporate profits.

The Green Party are not “anti-science” – not even when someone as important as you labels them it.

Robin Levett @122,

Please see my previous post (and Bluerock’s, somewhat unexpectedly) on why I distrust GISS, the only global temperature measure that is still rising. All the others have stalled at some point between 1999 and 2005 (albeit most did have 2009 as a hot year – only GISS had it as the hottest though), and although the hiatus/slight drop is not enough to say the steady rise in the temperature model over the last 40 years or so has stopped (long-term trends and short-term trends are not the same) it is equally viable to suggest a peak in temperature (these are quite common if you look at the unsmoothed record) has been reached – the short-term trend supports either contention (or even, although I don’t believe this) the idea that temperatures are falling.

So it is basically an issue of which sources do you trust, and how do you interpret them I suppose. Just blindly following the one source that shows the pattern that supports your political/religious outlook (a la Bluerock, if he or she is for real) is not necessarily the smartest option.

@124. Watchman:

> …Dr Romm is fully aware that NASA use a version of the same dataset as the Hadley Centre (Met Office)…

From the link I just gave: “…the vital climate data that the Hadley Center and CRU are withholding from the public is the warming taking place in the Arctic … And that missing data is why NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies data are almost certainly superior to CRU’s data “developed in conjunction with Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office.”"

* “…analysis released today has shown the global temperature rise calculated by the Met Office’s HadCRUT record is at the lower end of likely warming. … analysis shows that in data-sparse regions such as Russia, Africa and Canada, warming over land is more extreme than in regions sampled by HadCRUT.” http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20091218b.html

* “…the data from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) – have incomplete coverage, with large gaps in the Arctic where other data suggest the greatest increases in temperature.” http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/mind-the-gap/

So, once again we see you for what you are: bald-faced liar or unimaginable moron. Which is it?

@126. Watchman

> All the others have stalled at some point between 1999 and 2005…

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Satellite_Temperatures.png

* http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/global_cooling.html

Liar or moron? I see no other choices for you.

Bluerock,

Your first link is to the ECMRF figures, which use all available figures, but therefore use one-off measurements (e.g. weather baloons over the artic – which by their very nature are unlikely to fly into the centre of cold high pressure areas) rather than comparing the temperature (anamoly) at the same site year on year (which isn’t foolproof, since surrounding conditions can change, but is a hell of a lot better). This is not comparing like-with-like, and indeed is likely to be influenced by the greater use of planes and of automatic water temperature gauges on the intakes in ships (both warmer than baloons or external sensors on ships), a bias HadCRUT does not have. Note also the press release admits another contemporary analysis (that of the Russian IEA) actually found the HadCRUT figures to be about right.

Also, ECMRF does not show long-term trends, being only a ten-year sample. We are regularly told by climatologists that you need a thirty-year sample for figures to be usable (I believe so that most of the short term climate processes such as El Nino or the Atlantic Oscilliation are accounted for).

Also confused as to how the Climateprogress post you refer us to (I take it if I start to link you to climateaudit or wattsupwiththat you will do the courtsey of reading them as I am reading Dr Romm’s postings?) supports your point that I am wrong about the lack of coverage of the Artic in GISTEMP (sorry – I’ve been calling this GISS, but that is the organisation that produces it!). The quote you give is another one which shows the lack of coverage, and the post itself is concerned with trying to substantiate the idea that GISTEMP is correct in its analysis of high temperature rises hereabouts.

Note that Dr Romm is commendably open about the fact that although he believes that there are high temperatures in the Artic (although the independent variable he cites to support this, ice extent, can also be affected by wind patterns), there are problems with the tie in with the models, and that there was a similiar period of artic melt in the 1930s and 40s. But I assume this display of good scientific practice passed you by and you decided this was simply proof of your point rather than an attempt to put forward a hypothesis, allowing for problems?

To be fair, these are much better links than your last attempt, although I notice a worrying dependence on Dr Romm’s writings.

Bluerock @ 128,

Oh God – just when you were doing so well…

You do know that on those graphs the jaggedy up and down lines show the actual annual temperatures, which are rather random, but which are not visibly trending upwards (since about 2000 on the first link and 2003-5 (difficult to see because it covers such a large period on the second link).

The lines you seem to be looking at are trend lines, which cover the entire period of the graph (well, not the whole graph for the first link, seemingly starting with the third record) and can not be used for anything other than stating the trend for that period. For shorter periods you have to recalculate the trend.

So if you are going to accuse me of lying or being a moron and yet you cannot tell the difference between a trend line and the underlying temperature record, you are painting yourself in a very poor light in this debate. If I am a moron (I am not lying anyway, so in your terms I must be a moron…) yet I can understand relatively simple graphs like that, what does that make you? I’d suggest leaving off the personal insults and perhaps learning key points like what those pretty lines on the graphs actually mean.

@129. Watchman

Not interested in your evidence-free rambling – we’ve already demonstrated you have no credibility.

Bluerock,

Evidence-free? Then what was that stuff you linked to, which I was discussing? It’s hard work debating with a fanatic you know. It seems to you everything is either evidence (if you are using it) or evidence free (if I am discussing the same thing). Odd, but if that is how you want to define the world so be it. I would say it is not very scientific though, which is strange for a man or woman who claims to be informed by a scientific consensus.

And I fail to see the bit where you showed I have no credibility. Was it where you diagnosed me over the internet as mentally ill because I disagreed with you? Was it where you managed (twice) to produce evidence which actually backed up exactly the point I had made and which you were trying to disprove? Was it where you showed me some graphs which I had to interpret properly for you?

@132. Watchman

The fact the you cannot differentiate between your evidence-free, factually wrong rambling and science explains much.

You have been proven wrong again and again. Liar or moron – I can see no alternatives.

Bluerock,

I think indeed my failure to distinguish between science and my postings explains a lot. It explains, for a start, you do not know much about the science you pretend to espouse (how could you make that mistake with the graphs – it was embarassing to have to point it out! I thought I was debating with someone with some scientific literacy for God’s sake) and rather see science as being what you believe. This may explain your dispute with Nick – as with me, Nick will see science as being a system of investigation according to certain accepted (but changeable – the atomic weight of several common molecules is being revised for example) rules, whereas you see science as being whatever matches your beliefs, because you are convinced these are science-based in the first place.

As to believing that anyone opposing your point of view has to be a liar or a moron, I don’t know what to say. It beggers belief really. Do you really think that is how science works – by setting down immutable truths and not letting them be challenged by denegrating those who would personally? Or maybe you are just so simple as to assume that you win debates by insulting the other party – but then again, you write too well to be an eight-year old…

@134. Watchman

> As to believing that anyone opposing your point of view has to be a liar or a moron, I don’t know what to say.

And is that why I reached my conclusion? Because your “point of view” differs? No, it’s because you have been proven factually wrong so many times and in such a pattern that it is impossible to imagine any other explanation: you are a liar or a moron.

Keep going. Let’s see how long you can string out your indignant and baffled innocence act while the evidence against you keeps stacking higher.

Bluerock,

I would love to see said evidence. Because all you have presented so far has been, to put it mildly, inconclusive.

Proven factually wrong on science by someone who can’t even tell the difference between temperatures and a trend line. Wow, am I ashamed…

@136. Watchman

You have been spoon fed copious evidence. The fact that you suggest you have not again marks you out as liar or moron.

Similarly, anyone of average intelligence can type words in to Google and find mountains of science that explains global warming. You, seemingly, are incapable. Why is that? Is it beyond your intellect or are you lying?

Cheer up, poppet, and square 68 against 94.

Bluerock,

To the general relief of the site no doubt, I’m giving up on this. You seem to fail to realise that your habit of stating something is no does not make it so, and that your conviction does not on its own make things truthful.

I think you need to consider how you have come across in this thread though. You have insulted, hectored and bullied, you have appealed to authority and you have rarely actually debated (I offered to find evidence for any point you wanted remember – but you never asked for that evidence). Furthermore, your confidence in your arguments means your choice of evidence has either been lazy or misguided (or possibly the evidence for your position is a lot worse than I thought). At no point has any of your attempts to disprove me been anywhere near successful that I can see – the best was probably the ECMRF reference, but I explained why that is unsatisfactory as evidence in relation to a fixed measurement, and hence why I discounted it.

I have been (relatively) patient with your weak debating and constant recourse to insults, but ultimately I think I will leave this thread to you. Feel free to consider this a case of you vanquishing a dastardly ‘denier’, but if anyone still cares to read this far I do not doubt they will suspect you (and more worrying for you perhaps, your case) have little solid scientific ground on which to stand. I cannot say what they will think about my position, but I hope people can see I address the arguments using the evidence.

Above all, I am glad that this debate ended in you throwing insults and me being reasonable – for this perhaps shows the relative strength of our arguments. For anyone neutral who has bravely read this far (sorry), in all fairness it would be a bad idea to take Bluerock to be an example of what those who believe in man-made climate change really are like, for he is clearly an extremist in this matter. There are valid arguments to be made, although those I have seen have not convinced me yet, but there are much better people to make them.

Aww, Nick – that’s a weak comeback… even by the lowly standards you’ve already displayed.

Pro tip: when in a hole, stop digging.

@139. Watchman

Do you understand what ‘evidence’ means? How about ‘science’? How about ‘credible sources’?

As much as you try to make yourself out as a victim because people expose your serial ‘errors’ and insist that you provide evidence for your claims, the reality is there for all to see: liar or moron.

To the general relief of the site no doubt, I’m giving up on this.

I did try to warn you!!!

He did the same to me on another thread, though your patience has greatly exceeded mine.

Ultimately, it is impossible to reason with the wilfully unreasonable and the attempt to do so is rarely illuminating, I’m afraid.

@142. pagar

> He did the same to me on another thread…

Argued you in to a corner and insisted on credible evidence for your claims? Yes, I did.

P.S. Troll harder!

@Watchman #119, 126 &130:

“Neither does GISS, which uses basically the same dataset as CRU for the artic region. The single difference is GISS is happier to assume tempratures from neighbouring grid cells can be ‘smeared’ across empty cells, so therefore provides purely imaginary tempratures for the Artic (and for much of Africa, and the Southern Ocean). In other words, GISS interpolates data where none exists to a far greater degree than HadCRUT, which is fair enough, but since the exact areas where most of the warming is taking place are those where the data is interpolated this suggests that this might be a relic of the system not the climate. After all, the actual temperature measurements from within the artic circle are not actually getting warmer at the rate GISS says they should be doing.”

Could you produce a reference/references for any of this that is consistent with the recent record lows for Arctic sea-ice extent?

“Please see my previous post (and Bluerock’s, somewhat unexpectedly) on why I distrust GISS, the only global temperature measure that is still rising. All the others have stalled at some point between 1999 and 2005 (albeit most did have 2009 as a hot year – only GISS had it as the hottest though), and although the hiatus/slight drop is not enough to say the steady rise in the temperature model over the last 40 years or so has stopped (long-term trends and short-term trends are not the same) it is equally viable to suggest a peak in temperature (these are quite common if you look at the unsmoothed record) has been reached – the short-term trend supports either contention (or even, although I don’t believe this) the idea that temperatures are falling.”

&

“The lines you seem to be looking at are trend lines, which cover the entire period of the graph (well, not the whole graph for the first link, seemingly starting with the third record) and can not be used for anything other than stating the trend for that period. For shorter periods you have to recalculate the trend.”

Indeed; what significance do trends over your chosen shorter period(s) have?