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Moderated Global Warming Discussion

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Kuko 4000 said:
Have you guys talked about Matt Ridley yet? Here's his view on climate change, the relevant part starts at around 39:17:

http://fora.tv/2011/03/22/Matt_Ridley_Deep_Optimism

I haven't followed the discussion that closely, but I have to say I was surprised about his comments. And then there's this:

http://reason.com/blog/2011/11/04/matt-ridleys-rousing-defense-of-climate
Click to expand...


In case this hasn't been discussed before, here's a closer look to his position by Skeptical Science:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Ridleyriddle1.html
 
Kuko 4000 said:
Have you guys talked about Matt Ridley yet? Here's his view on climate change, the relevant part starts at around 39:17:

http://fora.tv/2011/03/22/Matt_Ridley_Deep_Optimism

I haven't followed the discussion that closely, but I have to say I was surprised about his comments. And then there's this:

http://reason.com/blog/2011/11/04/matt-ridleys-rousing-defense-of-climate
Click to expand...

What would you like to see discussed? It seems he simply hasn't looked into the issue seriously, and seems to honestly say that he doesn't know the facts and apparently isn't terribly interested in performing a proper investigation and assessment of AGW issues. He relates the issue to some other issues that he has taken a previous position on and believes that it must be similar to those, which is his own measure of confirmational bias asserting itself. Seems like an interesting fellow with a lot of interesting ideas, but a lot more opinions than carefully considered analyses and researches.
 
Kuko 4000 said:
Have you guys talked about Matt Ridley yet?
Click to expand...


http://www.skepticalscience.com/Ridleyriddle1.html

"By the low standards of the contrarian genre, the climate change section of The Rational Optimist is not that bad; Ridley refers to “the undoubted challenge of global warming by carbon dioxide”. There’s no outright denial of the basic science, even though he raises the familiar—and debunked—talking points of thriving polar bears, broken hockey sticks, and previous predictions in the 1970s of an imminent ice age. Most of Ridley’s discussion on climate seeks to downplay both the magnitude and likelihood of the negative consequences—he’s an avowed "lukewarmer"—while highlighting supposed benefits of climate change, such as longer growing seasons and CO2 fertilization. For anyone who has read any Bjørn Lomborg, this will be familiar territory."

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

"Matt Ridley is a science writer and AGW denier on the Academic Advisory Council of the denialist Global Warming Policy Foundation."

Look at the Global Warming Policy Foundation temperature graph in blue on the left compared to the GISS graph.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation

Some discussion at Richard Dawkin's site
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/643807-thank-you-matt-ridley/comments?page=1
 
Kuko 4000 said:
Have you guys talked about Matt Ridley yet? Here's his view on climate change, the relevant part starts at around 39:17:

http://fora.tv/2011/03/22/Matt_Ridley_Deep_Optimism

I haven't followed the discussion that closely, but I have to say I was surprised about his comments.
Click to expand...

Probably because it's just the same old denial of established scientific data that we see from other denialists.

There's nothing new being presented here. It's arguments from incredulity, cherry picking of sources and apparent inability to understand that science advances.

Kuko 4000 said:
And then there's this:

http://reason.com/blog/2011/11/04/matt-ridleys-rousing-defense-of-climate
Click to expand...

This blogpost starts off with assuming a lie to be true: the debunking of the hockey stick by McIntyre and McKitrcik, which never happened. The hockey stick has in fact been verified by several other researchers since its inception in 1998.

Basically, these two links just represent more noise in the denialosphere.
 
Kuko 4000 said:
Have you guys talked about Matt Ridley yet? Here's his view on climate change, the relevant part starts at around 39:17:

http://fora.tv/2011/03/22/Matt_Ridley_Deep_Optimism

I haven't followed the discussion that closely, but I have to say I was surprised about his comments. And then there's this:

http://reason.com/blog/2011/11/04/matt-ridleys-rousing-defense-of-climate
Click to expand...

More of the same woo-woo stuff climate deniers have been peddling for years.

For example:

I was not always such a ‘lukewarmer’. In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I first saw it at a con- ference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine.

Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick.
Click to expand...

In the real world it’s McIntyre and McKitrick who have been utterly debunked. The only part of their work that survived peer review amounts to a minor quibble in statistical technique that has no barring whatsoever on the outcome of the paper and a dozen or more subsequent papers with much higher certainty levels have confirmed the results of the original paper and even extended them farther back in time than the original.

If you use invented facts you can come to whatever conclusion you desire, and the guy is using facts that are entirely invented for political consumption.
 
lomiller said:
In the real world it’s McIntyre and McKitrick who have been utterly debunked.
Click to expand...

Indeed, but since McIntyre is one of only a few towering presences in the denier cult (the others being Watts, Monckton, Singer, Lindzen and Morano) the broken hockey-stick will always be part of its credo. Any cult accretes unquestioned truths over time, and this is one of denialism's earliest.

... a dozen or more subsequent papers with much higher certainty levels have confirmed the results of the original paper and even extended them farther back in time than the original.
Click to expand...

I have actually seen it claimed that all of these were only allowed to use Mann's data from the 90's. In all seriousness. It seems that some deniers are still living in that era except when they emerge briefly to claim there's been no warming this century.

Ridley has clearly obtained a superficial and one-sided view of AGW from the self-referential denier world, which appeals to his view of himself as an iconclast and free-thinker. He took the same attitude and level of understanding of banking to Northern Rock, which, of course, failed spectacularly (he believed in the new paradigm economy, and laughed at the well-known fact that lending long and borrowing short is a quick road to bankruptcy). The same attitude led him to champion evolution, an iconoclastic position in the US.

He is what we Brits sometimes refer to as "self-basting". We have a whole government of them these days :(. Like Ridley, they're English public-school boys but their hearts are in the US neo-con Right.
 
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120209100544.htm

One unexpected study result from GRACE was that the estimated ice loss from high Asian mountain ranges like the Himalaya, the Pamir and the Tien Shan was only about 4 billion tons of ice annually. Some previous ground-based estimates of ice loss in these high Asian mountains have ranged up to 50 billion tons annually.
Click to expand...

McIntyre has yet to pick up on this; from a perusal of his front page he's still obsessing about stolen emails and FoI requests (the FoI idea was his second great triumph). Actual climate science doesn't feature at all.

(I've given up waiting for the Select Eight McIntyre articles to be presented. If this one comes up on his front page I'll work it over :).)

It seems that increased precipitation (due to AGW) is building ice high-up - and there's a lot of high-up in the Himalayas, Pamirs and Tien Shan - about as quickly as ice is melting from the bottom up (due to AGW). Previous estimates of volume-loss there were based on very few high-up observations, which is hardly surprising. Those are not day-trip places. These are where Yetis hide. Now we have GRACE..

What this demonstrates is that it isn't black carbon (from the infamous Asian Brown Cloud) which is causing glacial retreat in the Himalayas. I don't expect that to be the denier take on it, though; another triumph of the denier cult was showing that the IPCC AR4 was riddled with a mistake about Himalayan glaciers, and we're likely to see that re-visited. Probably during this year's Arctic summer.
 
What should we call this now? Heartland-Gate?

Internal Heartland Institute Documents Unmask the Climate Denial Machine

-Forbes and other business press are favored outlets for Heartland’s dissemination of climate denial messages, and the group is worried about maintaining that exclusive space. They note in particular the work of Dr. Peter Gleick:

“Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.” (emphasis added)
Click to expand...

"Reliably anti-climate" indeed.
 
bobdroege7 said:
The Heartland Institute is allegedly running afoul of its non-profit status by acting as a lobbying organization.

http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland...documents-unmask-heart-climate-denial-machine
Click to expand...

That's pretty hot stuff it seems... some excerpts from the 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy not highlighted in the blog entry, bolds mine:

"We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain - two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science."​

"At present we sponsor the NIPCC to undermine the official United Nation's IPCC reports and paid a team of writers $388,000 in 2011 to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered."​

...reading a bit more about the subject on the web, it seems Heartland is now denying the authenticity of the above memo, but i'm not too convinced about that...
 
Puppycow said:
What should we call this now? Heartland-Gate?

Internal Heartland Institute Documents Unmask the Climate Denial Machine
Click to expand...

From Puppucows' link http://littlegreenfootballs.com/art...e_Documents_Unmask_the_Climate_Denial_Machine

"Heartland Institute’s global warming denial machine is chiefly – and perhaps entirely – funded by one Anonymous donor:

Our climate work is attractive to funders, especially our key Anonymous Donor (whose contribution dropped from $1,664,150 in 2010 to $979,000 in 2011 - about 20% of our total 2011 revenue). He has promised an increase in 2012…”

-Confirmation of exact amounts flowing to certain key climate contrarians.

“funding for high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist AGW message. At the moment, this funding goes primarily to Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month), and a number of other individuals,"

I wonder what it would cost to pay a denier to post to a forum like this one?

I would imagine that it would not cost a lot if the denier wasn't required to thoroghly understand the climate science and was not expected to counter the specifics of climate science with meaningful responses supported with evidence. All the job would require was to create posts that attempt to cast doubt about the science and if anyone asks for evidence just ignore them and post another word salad smoke screen.

You might find a person that might benefit from learning to debate, or that had a vested interest in the fossil fuel industry that would do it for lets say $30 a day ($160 per week). Even posting six days a week that would only cost $9,000 for a year (50 weeks). Let's say that you pay them $10,000 a year (tax free?) and have them summarize the talking points that muddy the waters the best so that other denialists on the payroll can do the same. When people read the same nonsense in many places they start to believe it.

One must admit that the denial machine has been effective over that last few years. It is amazing how many cloned denier websites that there are now and the web sites are not expensive to build either.

As others have stated it will be interesting to see where we are in 5 years or so when the solar energy is on the upswing, the Arctic has much more open water and another large El-Nino happens.

We are currently above the 1998 ENSO spike in temperature that wiped out many of the reefs around the world so the next strong El-Nino may be catastrophic for many reefs and reef fish populations.
 
Warmer1 said:
From Puppucows' link http://littlegreenfootballs.com/art...e_Documents_Unmask_the_Climate_Denial_Machine

"Heartland Institute’s global warming denial machine is chiefly – and perhaps entirely – funded by one Anonymous donor:

Our climate work is attractive to funders, especially our key Anonymous Donor (whose contribution dropped from $1,664,150 in 2010 to $979,000 in 2011 - about 20% of our total 2011 revenue). He has promised an increase in 2012…”

-Confirmation of exact amounts flowing to certain key climate contrarians.

“funding for high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist AGW message. At the moment, this funding goes primarily to Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month), and a number of other individuals,"

I wonder what it would cost to pay a denier to post to a forum like this one?
Click to expand...

Given the level and measure of contrarian confuddlement we've witnessed here so far, evidently not enough to hire competent opposition. Of course, hard core conservatism doesn't tend to be very good at business management, so it may simply be an issue of paying way too much for way too little value in return.

These numbers are interesting for their implication of why these pundits are regularly producing contrarian campaigns.
 
I'm not sure this revelation is going to alter the debate much. After all, we basically already knew this stuff. Sure, it's nice to have hard evidence of it, but we're dealing with deniers here. All they have to do is deny that the documents are real, as they've already done.

Knowing in advance that the anti-science crowd are specifically targetting school children allows them to be countered, but other than that, I don't see much new here.

I'm also a bit concerned about publishing what amounts to stolen documents. It harkens back to "climategate".
 
r-j said:
Where does it say that?
Click to expand...

One has to apply a little reasoning. If the Asian Brown Cloud was responsible for Himalayan glacial ice-loss (as has been occasionally postulated) then it would apply at both high and low altitudes. What's actually happening is glacial retreat at lower altitudes and glacial ice-volume increase at high levels - which is, of course, what would be expected with regional warming.
 
Regarding the GRACE ice-mass report, this has, as I expected, made an appearance in the denier world.


Does Fox News Believe Himalayas are Located at Earth’s Poles?
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/02/17/427706/fox-news-himalayas-earths-poles/

I expect to hear more of this as the Arctic melt season gets underway. Deniers feel the need to say something during that (their least favourite) season, and Antarctic sea-ice simply isn't working for them any more. Another short-term expedient played out.

Since I'm in prediction mode :

"No recent warming" will remain prominent for some years yet, with all graphs presented ending in 2011 and many in 2009.

Mann will be accused of forging the Heatland (sic) documents.

McIntyre will make an FoI request (nay, demand) for any and all emails Mann may have ever sent or received which contain the words "Heartland" or "Institute".

Refusal of the above-mentioned FoI request will be taken as proof that Mann did indeed forge the Heatland Institute documents.
 
uke2se said:
I'm not sure this revelation is going to alter the debate much. After all, we basically already knew this stuff. Sure, it's nice to have hard evidence of it, but we're dealing with deniers here. All they have to do is deny that the documents are real, as they've already done.
Click to expand...

Much of the data has, in fact, been confirmed either by HI or by those mentioned. They really don't seem to have been prepared for this, and let things slip. Trakar make a good point about how inept these old conservative white guys really are. Their first reaction was outrage at this being done to them.


Knowing in advance that the anti-science crowd are specifically targetting school children allows them to be countered, but other than that, I don't see much new here.
Click to expand...

This will actually make it difficult for HI to proceed with the school curriculum project at all.

I'm also a bit concerned about publishing what amounts to stolen documents. It harkens back to "climategate".
Click to expand...

True. A great distraction from doing their real jobs. Poetic, isn't it? The deniers are going to be harrassed in just the way they've harrassed scientists, and by people who are better at it. This is what you get when you choose to play dirty - an initial advantage followed by a whole new game, which you'd better be ready for.

I suggest we not make much of it here. There'll be plenty of it to savour elsewhere :).
 
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