The climate change denialists are a bit thin-skinned; they’ve also been exposed as a bit on the wacko side. The journal Frontiers in Psychology is about to retract a paper that found that denialists tend to have a cluster of weird beliefs (NASA faked the moon landings, the CIA was in charge of the assassination of political figures in the US, etc.) because the denialists screamed very loudly.
This outrage first arose in response to a paper, NASA faked the moon landing–Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science (pdf) which analyzed voluntary surveys submitted by readers of climate science blogs, in which the respondents freely admitted to having a collection of other beliefs, in addition to climate change denial. That paper found something else interesting, and was the primary correlation observed: a lot of denialists are libertarians. Are you surprised?
Rejection of climate science was strongly associated with endorsement of a laissez-faire view of unregulated free markets. This replicates previous work (e.g., Heath & Gifford, 2006) although the strength of association found here (r ~.80) exceeds that reported in any extant study. At least in part, this may reflect the use of SEM, which enables measurement of the associations between constructs free of measurement error (Fan, 2003).
A second variable that was associated with rejection of climate science as well as other scientific propositions was conspiracist ideation. Notably, this relationship emerged even though conspiracies that related to the queried scientific propositions (AIDS, climate change) did not contribute to the conspiracist construct. By implication, the role of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of science did not simply reflect “convenience” theories that provided specific alternative “explanations” for a scientific consensus. Instead, this finding suggests that a general propensity to endorse any of a number of conspiracy theories predisposes people to reject entirely unrelated scientific facts.
Oh, how they howled. Even libertarians seem to be embarrassed at being affiliated with libertarians, I guess. And conspiracy theorists, too? Why, the accusation itself is clearly evidence that there’s a conspiracy out to get them. They protested that because the respondents to the survey all found it through mainstream science blogs, all the responses were false flag operations put out by Big Climate.
What they didn’t realize was that they were generating more data to support the hypothesis. The authors of the first paper then wrote a second paper, the one that is now being retracted by the cowardly publisher, called Recursive Fury: Conspiracist Ideation in the Blogosphere in Response to Research on Conspiracist Ideation, in which they scanned public posts and comments on the first article, and analyzed the text for evidence of conspiracist tropes (it’s a nefarious scheme, they’re out to get us, it’s an organized movement to defeat us, etc.) and found that yes, conspiracist reasoning was quite common on climate change denial blogs.
They also rebutted some claims. The claim that the authors never bothered to contact the denialist blogs to host their survey was shot down pretty easily: they had the email, and further, they had replies from denialists who later claimed they never received any request to host the survey.
Initial attention of the blogosphere also focused on the method reported by LOG12, which stated: “Links were posted on 8 blogs (with a pro-science science stance but with a diverse audience); a further 5 “skeptic” (or “skeptic”-leaning) blogs were approached but none posted the link.” Speculation immediately focused on the identity of the 5 “skeptic” bloggers. Within short order, 25 “skeptical” bloggers had come publicly forward9 to state that they had not been approached by the researchers. Of those 25 public declarations, 5 were by individuals who were invited to post links to the study by LOG12 in 2010. Two of these bloggers had engaged in correspondence with the research assistant for further clarification.
Those emails were also revealed in a Freedom of Information Act request.
The squawking reached a new crescendo. Steve McIntyre wrote a strongly worded
formal letter
demanding that the defamatory
article be removed, and accusing the authors of malice. Further, they complained that analyzing the content of blog posts and comments, public, openly accessible work, was an ethics violation.
Ludicrous as those claims are, Frontiers in Psychology is apparently about to fold to them. For shame.
You know, my university had a meeting with our institutional lawyers yesterday — I was called in to attend the information session for some reason, like having a reputation as a trouble-maker or something — and I was impressed with their professionalism and their commitment to actually defending the faculty and staff of the university. I guess not every organization is lucky enough to have good lawyers of principle.
Oh, well. All I can say is that, thanks to the denialist ratfuckers, now everyone is going to be far more interested in reading the two papers by Lewandowsky and others. I recommend that you read Motivated rejection of science (pdf) and Recursive fury(pdf) now, or anytime — they’re archived on the web. You might also stash away a copy yourself. You make a denialist cry every time you make a copy, you know.
The first author on the papers, Stephan Lewandowsky, has a few comments.
The strategies employed in those attacks follow a common playbook, regardless of which scientific proposition is being denied and regardless of who the targeted scientists are: There is cyber-bullying and public abuse by “trolling” (which recent research has linked to sadism); there is harassment by vexatious freedom-of-information (FOI) requests; there are the complaints to academic institutions; legal threats; and perhaps most troubling, there is the intimidation of journal editors and publishers who are acting on manuscripts that are considered inconvenient.
Recursion at its finest!
If I wished to successfully conspire one of the first things I would do is attack conspiracy theorists.
Every conspiracy theory is, due to its circular nature, by definition, meta!
Is it possible to be a climate change denier without being a conspiracy theorist? You already have to believe that whoever’s been secretly not changing the climate has also been secretly arranging huge amounts of scientific findings supporting climate change. Faking the moon landings would probably be easier.
@pedz,
Ah, but the first thing I’d do is tell the conspiracy theorists all about it (with a few changed details). Hide it in plain sight and make sure any whistleblowers are immediately discreditable. “Oh, you think I did X? You probably think the moon landings were faked, too, right? Hahaha.”
To quote Roger Myers Jr, “Gentlemen, the screwballs have spoken.”
I guess a publication called “Frontiers in Psychology” might actually have a valid excise to retract the paper: the insanity of the denialists isn’t really on the “frontier,” it’s common knowledge and a part of mainstream public discourse. Yeah, that’s it…they had a reason, see…
Case in point, Dishonesty Institute fellow Jonathan Wells, who, in addition to being an evolution denier, is also a global warming denier and an HIV/AIDS denier.
I call bullshit! Right now the CIA are photoshopping the satellite images of Benghazi to hide the Malaysian airliner.
It’s been found before that belief in conspiracy stories is highly correlated with belief in other conspiracies (even mutually contradictory ones), so I’m not surprised by these findings. Also the idea that climate change denialists tend to be free market absolutists is not surprising. After all, if climate change were true, wouldn’t that be a most spectacular way to show the failure of the Invisible Hand to fix everything?
The tinfoil hat, it fits!!
He left one out. The death threats!!!
A lot of scientists, myself included have received death threats from one group or denialists or another. Quite often for biologists they are xian terrorist creationists.
The threats aren’t completely idle either. They will do whatever they can to whoever they can reach, even if they don’t flat out try to assassinate you. Two evolutionary biologists that I know of have been beaten up, one was knifed to death, and many more fired.
What’s the harm? Well, being killed by a robotic kook running off their brainstem is one of them. A lot of climate scientists have gotten so many death threats over so many years, they think it is normal.
There’s a phrase already used by skeptics which describes the findings of these papers: “crank magnetism.” If someone has cranky, weird, and/or pseudoscientific beliefs in one area, the odds are likely that they will also have cranky, weird, and/or pseudoscientific beliefs in some other seemingly unrelated field. Young Earth Creationism and homeopathy; UFO abductions and remote viewing; climate-change denial and NASA-faked-the-moon-landing.
As others have pointed out, once you go off the rails and accept that the world as it is differs very much from what the conventional, mainstream, scientific wisdom has it — then anything is possible. Crank beliefs attract each other because they often share a similar view of how reality works and what drives criticism. The normal checks and balances are gone and the Believer is swept up in a romantic drama where evil and maleficent forces have taken over the world with their lies and only a few brave and daring souls are capable of discerning the truth.
Please note that this description fits religion. Most spiritual views include some form of conspiracy thinking, where the natural world is only a cover for what is really going on and the goal of life is to figure out this great secret. And really — once you believe in the supernatural, with its Gods and miracles and ultimate battle between good and evil, then why wouldn’t it make sense that cancer can be cured by natural foods and the Pharmaceutical companies all know this and are trying to suppress it? It follows the basic spiritual template.
Here is a list of victims of xian creationists. Where there is hate speech, there is always hate violence. You don’t ever want to turn your back on these people.
One of the xian terrorist incidents near my house involved some guy getting into a shootout with the cops while on his way to bomb an environmentalist group.
@#9
No, Glenn Beck tells me it used a cloaking device.
jmac, the tinfoil manufacturers have been co-opted by the aliens running the CIA; you must switch to Aluminum immediately:
http://zapatopi.net/afdb/
And remember, SHINY SIDE OUT!
Denialism is usually part of a package deal.
Creationists are fundie xians, gay haters, women haters, rightwing extremists, authoritarians, democracy haters, gun lovers, education haters, climate denialists, slavery apologists, who hate environmentalists. And think jesus is coming back Real Soon to destroy the earth and kill 7 billion people
There are exceptions but not many. The fundie churches even have a group that promotes climate denialism based on their murky religious beliefs.
It would appear that the MRA brigade is also into denialism, and their tactics, especially the intimidation tactics, are totally congruent with the conspiracy theorists.
I find this not at all surprising, but I don’t see as much reason to gloat as others seem to.
Humans are not rational machines; we’re a bundle of heuristics, driving significantly by emotion, strongly given to systematize the world using narrative, and heavily prone to self-deception. Being human, we’re no different from then in this regard.
Libertarians, particularly, are a very heterogeneous group–but more or less by definition, one trait they have in common is a distrust of authority. I sympathize heavily with that trait: I supported Obama because I Hoped for some Change. He may be good on social issues, but he broke ALL of his promises to reverse Bush’s autocratic excesses. Every time I trust the powerful, it seems to turn out the same: yet again, their self-interest rules the day. Yet again, we get Animal Farm-like double-talk. Every one, so far, has been at best a turd sandwich (as opposed to a turd sandwich made with turd for bread).
But if your strongest trait is regarding X as untrustworthy, then it becomes very difficult to sift what X tells us and separate the wheat from the chaff. If your spouse is a liar, then… are they really working right now? Is this really a business trip? Is that person really a coworker? Do they really want this money to pay a bill? Did they really grow up in Indiana? Is that their real name?
The paper is good empirical science. As for interpretation, I’d say it mostly proves the self-evident point that if you firmly believe X is a liar, then you disbelieve X even when they’re telling the truth.
And like I said, I sympathize. I don’t trust politicians either. People on both ends of the political spectrum tend to trust them when they say what we want to hear (which is a separate phenomenon), but Libertarians distrust all politicians, the way we distrust Republicans. If a Republican really did have a genuinely beneficial policy idea, we’d probably have a hard time believing it didn’t have a poison pill hidden somewhere, for the benefit of his cronies. In practice, that usually turns out to be true. But right-wingers feel the same way about Democrats, and it turns out to be true pretty often as well. Similarly, imagine as a progressive how hard it would be for us to believe something claimed by Walmart, or the tobacco industry, even if it were true.
Well, I understand the journal editors were intimidated by a mob. We’ve all seen it countless times. It’s a way of life in science these days.
What reasons did they give though?
Claiming to be chicken and afraid of a mob of tinfoil hat wearers isn’t usually grounds to retract papers. I’d just resubmit it somewhere else if it was sound and defensible research.
The fact that they yanked the paper proves that it’s true.
Isn’t that how the standard trope goes? If it wasn’t true, they wouldn’t hide it?
There is corroborating data to their findings and we see it often.
Rightwing extremists, Gibbertarians, Tea Party/GOPers are far more likely to be fundie xians, creationists, misogynists, End Timers, Doomsday preppers, and climate denialists.
It’s that package deal again. AKA crank magnetism or polykookery.
Conspiracies, how the fuck do they work?
This is about people believing (due to conspiracy thinking) X is not telling the truth (which isn’t necessarily lying) even when they are, and how they also tend to engage in the same sort of conspiracy thinking with other people/groups Y and Z. So your interpretation of the study seems not to have anything do with the study. It just seems to be confused.
Do you trust scientists? Because scientists are the ones doing stuff like climate science, or their work is applied to do projects like the Moon landing. Not politicians. More confusion. Myself, I sympathize with being confused too. It happens a lot.
So, the Libertarian champions of absolute freeze peach at all times, up to and including demanding that people like blog owners offer them platforms at their own expense from which to promote their loony views, suddenly find their limit when it comes to free expression when they feel they are being mocked or derided, in this instance when an academic work points out how prone to conspiracy theories and confirmation bias they really are.
So as usual, the only free speech is to be their free speech. Hypocrisy, it seems, goes hand in hand with obsessive delusions and an unwillingness to follow the evidence if it leads in a direction you don’t like.
Money is passed around amidst all of this. Steve Milloy – the founder of JunkScience.com (he has no backgrounding science), which is one of the sites considered in the denial study – received 126,000$ in 2004 from Philip Morris (tobacco company) for 15 hours of work a week in which he promoted his “skeptical” perspective on the health effects of smoking. Two other organizations registered to his home address have also received sums of 10,000$ and 50,000$ from Exxon (all of this from “Heat”, by George Monbiot, and also covered by the Union of Concerned Scientists). And then there are the Republicans that have been bought by Exxon via Super Pacs. It’s amazing how a little bit of money, relative to Exxon’s amazing profit, can sow so much dissent and undermine science so effectively.
From the Recursive Fury paper:
*sigh* On the bright side…
What are they going to accomplish by retracting the paper? Do the seriously believe that all the harassment will end afterwards? Because it won’t. Plus this retraction will be pointed to by the truther crowd as an example of “corruption being vanquished.”
Consciousness Razor, #24:
Sorry! I left something out, that I thought was too obvious to mention, but which obviously(!) isn’t.
Namely, libertarians wouldn’t care one way or the other about climate change, if it weren’t tightly tied to the proposition that the solution is for government(s) to regulate carbon emissions. The truth of falsehood of climate change is not even on their radar: as soon as the subject is raised, they hear nothing but a call for government regulation of carbon emissions. They reject the science because, and only because, they distrust government to provide the solution. If government solutions were not on the table (let alone widely regarded as the only viable option), then they would be happy as clams accepting climate change as a premise and debating whether the answer were to go nuclear, to invent carbon sequestration methods, to improve combustion technology, etc.
The libertarians are drawing a straight line from government to climate science, which is easy to do if you focus on things like NSF funding, the UN convention on climate change, the Kyoto Protocol, etc., etc. They justify their distrust of the science by positing that the scientists are under undue influence of… wait for it!… government. They distrust government-funded science, not science per se. (Which, since practically all science is currently government-funded, means they get to selectively reject anything whose implications they can’t accept.)
Note that we would be equally skeptical (and are!) of research funded by the tobacco industry. Whether or not any of it is valid science, we dismiss all of it because we distrust the funder. Not because we distrust medical research, or science, or disbelieve doctors.
Never heard this one. I prefer ‘Warmist Thug’ to ‘Big Climate stooge’. Strutting down the street, chewing gum and menacingly smacking my palm with a rolled up IPCC report…
consciousness razor #24 wrote:
People who believe in alternative medicine and the paranormal don’t — and this fits in with the self-designated “Spiritual” group. They honestly believe that scientists either ignore or suppress good, clear, solid evidence for things like ESP or homeopathy because they can’t handle having to change their “world view.” And in my experience, there are few anti-science conspiracies they won’t get behind. The exception is anything tainted by association with conservatives.
raven #12 wrote:
An extreme example of what happens when people believe everything is on the line with a particular issue. (You would be missed, by the way.)
Do you trust scientists (funded by the tobacco industry)? Because scientists (funded by the tobacco industry) are the ones claiming health benefits of smoking, downplaying the cancer risk, etc. Not the tobacco industry.
Oh, wait. Your distrust of the tobacco industry prompts you to doubt the validity of science commissioned and funded by the tobacco industry? So… your distrust of big tobacco causes to you selectively reject some scientific research? I see. (And yes, I understand that most of that research is invalid, and its flaws have been documented. However, would you be inclined to trust any tobacco-funded research? I didn’t think so.)
Don’t worry! I sympathize: I can be a patronizing jerk at times myself.
Yep–an important point. It’s not just libertarians; we are all motivated reasoners to some extent. Libertarians reject some science because government. Socialists reject some science because capitalism. Christians reject some science because Satan. Spiritualists reject some science because crass materialism.
The common denominator is that there’s something we distrust/hate, we associate certain historical or scientific facts with that thing, and so we discount or reject it.
We do the same to claims made by Republicans, religious people, various corporate interests, etc. Hopefully, if we check our biases carefully, we reject it because it’s wrong, and not because we hate or distrust the source (or funder). But it’s pretty hard work, and it’s impossible to eliminate all taint of bias.
Oh yeah? Every libertarian I’ve come across puts absolute trust in their chosen authorities – generally one or more of Ron Paul, Friedman, Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard or Rand. These saints of the libertarian religion are beyond correction by mere mundane reality. And of course “The Market” itself, the mythical object of worship, is assigned all the properties of a stern but wise and righteous parent.
Be specific.
A Masked Avenger,
You are not going to bring up Lysenkoism or something like that, are you? Because that would be a stupid thing to do.
I saved my PDF copies, and will read them later. So far, I imagine most of it will be scientific confirmation of what I’ve already experienced anecdotally.
Though I might learn a bit more about the libertarian/conspiracy nut overlap. I’ve certainly had an increasing awareness of libertarian tropes being spouted by woos, particularly the idolators of quackery. They essentially want human experimentation deregulated so that customers are paying to be poorly self-monitored test subjects, presumably so that the invisible hand of the market can infallibly decide what treatments work. Oh, and also to let their quacks compete with Big Pharma who, for unexplained reasons, will not follow the quacks’ recklessness once the regulatory incentives to test drugs in proper clinical trials has been removed.
@Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls #18: The MRAs are conspiracy theorists – they believe feminism is a conspiracy against men, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s why they blame feminism for problems stemming from patriarchy (or other oppressive institutionalized social systems), including problems feminists are directly, publicly, and loudly confronting and combating.
They retracted the paper to announce its TRUTH!!1!1!!1! What better way to propagate the truth than to hide it, so all the conspiracy mongers can “find it” and show everyone how clever they are to have found the real truth all the elitist scientist are hiding in their ivory tower. …
If they could fall for that ploy…
I sent a short letter to the journal itself. I know it will do nothing, but I wanted to register my disappointment.
A new paper is waiting in the wings: Interaction of the Dunning-Kruger and Streisand Effects in a Population of Climate Change Deniers.
If they have good, reliable evidence, which is being interpreted as honestly and carefully as possible, then why not? The source of the funding itself is just a sideshow, which I don’t care about at all.
They also share an almost comical amount of ignorance and selfishness.
Nick Gotts, #33:
That’s a pretty major tangent from my point, and I’m going to resist being lured into it. I could have avoided your quibble by saying “government,” and should have. Apologies.
Libertarians also believe they have “authority” to kick you off their property. When I refer to their distrust of “authority,” it wasn’t an affirmation that every numbered definition under “authority” in Websters, represents something categorically rejected by libertarians.
But if that sort of thing amuses you, shall we get into an argument about whether “a-theism” is allowed to mean anything more than “lack of gods,” and whether the term legitimately does or does not imply an active denial of gods’ existence versus a mer lack of belief in same? And so on ad nauseam? Because you enjoy wanking with a copy of Websters open in your lap?
It’s no stretch of the imagination to predict that there are people from every political ideology who go anti-science. The real issue is how widespread science denialism is within the membership.
On tobacco science: The scientists funded by tobacco companies would have a conflict of interest to declare, but that by itself wouldn’t invalidate their work. You counteract COI-induced bias with peer review, independent replication, and so forth by the scientific community as a whole. Before they go through the ringer, it’s perfectly sensible to be suspicious that they might fudge the data. If the company’s research conflicts with a well-established scientific consensus, that’s more reason to be initially distrustful. If they have a history of doing bad science, it’s perfectly understandable to be dismissive in the outset. Doing the hard work of good science is how you get around that.
No, I had in mind specifically Marx’s assertion that the entire field of classical economics was nothing more than an apologia for capitalism, and that another’s reasoning is inherently suspect based upon his class interests.
But if you’d rather drop socialists from the list, I don’t care. It seems amazing how much my (I thought) innocuous point is being missed: humans are intrinsically motivated reasoners. Rationality is one of our capacities, but it’s hard. It takes a tremendous amount of work. We routinely gravitate toward flawed conclusions because of a number of heuristics operating in our heads, and one prominent one is that we tend to reject anything associated with a distrusted or hated other. That’s precisely why ad hominem and well-poisoning are so effective, and so easy to fall into.
Agreed. However, our biases as readers are also a powerful force, and if these hypothetical tobacco-funded researchers were to do some sterling work, they’d have the extra hurdle of convincing us that they haven’t in some way compromised their integrity. (Unless their conclusions seemed counter to the interests of big tobacco, or were something we were already inclined to believe, say.)
In general conversations, simply identifying the funder of the research is usually enough for everyone to dismiss it as pseudoscience. Consciousness Razor suggested that sie would only care about the quality of the research, and would weigh it in an unbiased fashion, and my hat’s off to hir: that’s not the norm.
So “classical economics” in Marx’s day was “science”? I admit, I am surprised by that.
Consciousness Razor, #47:
Is mathematics “science”? Economics was in its infancy, but it was a valid area of human inquiry, had produced useful knowledge, and was dismissed by Marx not for valid reasons but because it ran counter to his biases. Specifically, because he associates its practitioners with certain “class interests” he was opposing.
However, I rather wish people would not focus on the minutia like that. It was intended to illustrate a point. If the illustration is not the best, then I’ll cheerfully retract it, but the point remains. If the point is other than innocuous, I’m still unsure why, so I’m not getting why the amount of dispute going on here.
Is it because, instead of joining the general pig-pile, I’m noting that we’re all susceptible to the same type of invalid thinking? And that their invalid thinking is traceable to an error, yes, but to something other than “Hur hurr, thur soooo stoooopid!”?
You’re conflating bias based on preconceptions with pattern recognition based on past experience. Don’t do that.
I see a lot of libertarian bashing in this post about ‘social science’. This is what social scientist, Jonathan Haidt has to say about libertarians starting around 23:40 on Inquiring Minds Podcast #6:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/inquiring-minds-jonathan-haidt-tea-party
It’s an interesting question. I haven’t gone over the paper in any detail–I skimmed it when it first came out–but I think finer-grained research is needed. The paper lumps “conspiracy theories,” IIRC, without further categorizing them along any interesting dimensions such as who the conspirators are, etc. Most “conspiracy theories” are government conspiracies; others are the usual hodgepodge of rich and powerful like big tobacco, big pharma, big agra, the Catholic church, etc. Again IIRC, the paper seemed somewhat randomly to include mostly government conspiracy theories, which would tend to net libertarians, anti-government right-wingers, and folks with a persecution complex like fundamentalists.
It would be interesting to dig deeper and try to measure whether there are underlying patterns in the conspiracy theories themselves that bias them toward particular targets, on the one hand, and whether there are correlations with “trustingness” or other factors, on the other hand. I.e., are people equally prone to doubt true facts about a hated or distrusted other? Or are fundies, or libertarians, more prone to this? Is there a reason it’s tougher to come up with examples of liberal “conspiracy theories,” or were they simply underrepresented in the paper?
I suspect that there’s a base level of distrust for “other” in most people, and that there’s a baseline tendency to reject true information coming from a distrusted “other.” But I suspect that in some quantifiable way fundamentalism inculcates distrust, by othering almost everyone, and I suspect that on the other hand libertarianism attracts people who already have significant levels of distrust, namely toward those perceived as figures of coercive authority (i.e., not any old authority, but the kind of authority than can spank or shoot you). Since I’m speculating rampantly here, I’d also suspect that our highly polarized political system results in much more Democrats believing in Republican conspiracies, and vice versa, than would be the case in say Sweden.
Economics is science because equations. If the predictions fail then more equations.
I just made a denialist cry. Twice.
Or is that two denialists once?
*shrug*
I’m going to go home and make some more of them cry. This is fun! And funny. I love science.
Azkyroth:
Hm. Thanks for that. I’ll have to ponder, because I’m not sure they can be cleanly separated. Why am I biased against politicians? I’d call it pattern recognition based on watching the last six or so Presidents betray their bases, violate campaign promises, etc. But… I can think of other reasons for having such a bias, which are more personal.
I think most people would defend their biases as pattern recognition.
But I’ll grant that some of the people we’re biased against, eminently deserve our bias. I’m pretty biased against Nazis or the KKK, and I think they eminently deserve it. “Bias” by itself doesn’t tell us whether the bias is justified or not.
The problem is, we all believe our biases are justified. And we can all point to something that we personally, at least, see as convincing support for our biases. But some of the support is valid, and some of the biases are justified. But we think that about all our biases. And so on…
@31:
While research funded by tobacco money does have a conflict of interest, Steve Milloy wasn’t hired to conduct research (he has a Masters in biostatistics). In fact, the research on second hand smoke he was “debunking” was funded by tobacco money. Brown and Williamson, if I recall correctly. Unfortunately for them, the scientists they funded did actual science (like what happened in the BEST study). What Milloy was hired to do was lie about it. In fact, lying about research for money is pretty much Steve Milloy’s thing. He then publishes his “findings” in some CATO organ so Jon Stossel and Penn Jillette can go on TV and report how the link between smoking and cancer (or global warming) is all liberal “junk science”.
@50
so there is a consensus among social scientists that libertarians are measured to be “the smartest people out there, the most rational, clear thinking” ?
or what? what are you asking me to believe? and on what evidence?
Yeah, we’re all conspiring to make sure you don’t articulate your point clearly at all….
But seriously, I don’t think anyone has disagreed. So who or what do you think you’re countering?
And while we’re concerned with making sure everyone understands how this works, let’s not neglect to mention that some people are apparently more susceptible than others. And much of the time, this sort of behavior isn’t the result of some identifiable conscious decision they’ve made. It isn’t willful ignorance or stupidity or malice or anything else.
But, there’s not much equivalence between (for example) climate-change denialists and Marx’s denial of certain features of economics. Indeed, simply recognizing class interests (and consequently, bias) isn’t “invalid” by any stretch of the imagination, so it wouldn’t be that but dismissal of real data (which everyone then typically lacked) which would suggest motivated reasoning. So yeah, your poor examples do substantively matter, because it isn’t just being motivated somehow which is a problem or which renders conclusions invalid or which makes someone a denialist.
Are you reading the same thread as I am?
what I like the most about this is as many if not most really knew cranks are very much the same people regardless of the particular subject under discussion at the time.
Someone actually took the time and effort to do the study to see if it was actually true.
Common knowledge is not enough science can ask hard questions without fear of the answer.
a publisher would get nervous about generating a controversy that might impact major conservative party policies and might even withdraw an article is not very surprising a little sad though.
uncle frogy
I’m not a Libertarian, and I distrust all politicians, too! And with good reason, I believe.
That’s always a good idea. Judge them by their actions, not by their promises. Trust, like respect, must be earned. It’s not something you give away to anyone who manages to win an election.
That’s NEVER a good idea.
Poor proofreading skills. It’s NASA’s fault.
The general trend seems to be:
Libertarians/Conservatives are Climate Change denialists because they think it’s a gov’t conspiracy to control the economy.
Liberals use “alt-medicine” and eat “natural” foods because they think artificial ingredients/GM food is a corporate conspiracy to keep us sick, so “western” medicine can make even more money off of us.
Everybody has blind spots and biases. It’s the people who think “I’m a rationalist, so everything I say must be rational” that worry me.
Indeed. I have no time for people that cannot criticize people they voted for, or maybe otherwise agree with. When I vote I do not pick a side and stick with it. I wish more people would hold their politicians feet to the fire but to many it seems that if their side wins, they can do no wrong.
It really is a fascinating topic, how myths are created and maintained, why they appeal to us. Is there a spectrum of myths from harmless, benign to toxic and dangerous? Is there a line we can draw at some cut off point, definitions that clearly describe different types of myths and their dangers? Not just fascinating of course but fairly urgent that we find or discuss answers to these questions. Northrop Frye in The Great Code talks about how people have to constantly spin off smaller myths in responses to challenges to their great central myths. This would explain why Libertarians have to constantly produce conspiracy theories to defend their core myth of libertarianism. For them AGW must be reflexively denied simply because it isn’t something that libertarianism can address in a rational way. Libertarianism has no answer to pollution therefore pollution either doesn’t exist or isn’t an issue.
One funny thing that I’ve found is that, when addressing denialists, if you ask them if their motivation for denialism is libertarianism, and start to question libertarianism, they tend to clam up pretty quick.
Masked Avenger @51 and above: I don’t find the facile claims of symmetry here convincing. What justifies the libertarian ‘because government’ mistrust of science, and how does that compare with ‘because tobacco funding’? What interest would governments have in funding something like the IPCC when the national economies of many are so entwined with fossil fuel interests? Accusing the IPCC of some kind of conspiracy against fossil fuels is pure ‘blue sky’ conspiracy thinking, not a suspicion grounded in a common-sense understanding of motives (like those of scientists recruited by the tobacco industry to undermine the evidence showing how harmful tobacco smoke is). Given the lack of any actual case for suspecting a conspiracy, motivated reasoning is by far the best explanation of why so many libertarians reject climate change (after all, collective action is required to protect a stable climate: it’s a shared commons– the very thing whose existence is rejected outright by the radical, self-indulgent religion of free-market individualism).
QFT, QFT, QFT!!!
Well, imagine me thinking that “authority” is not limited to government (oddly enough, belief that it is, is central to libertarianism), and that the accurate use of language is important! I am properly rebuked for my failure to comprehend the wisdom of the Masked Avenger.
Terminal stage of decadence. Our civilization is so mistrusted by a large part of its members that they are willing to uncritically believe literally anything contrary to its institutions.
mbrysonb, #64:
No claim of symmetry was made. No tu quoque was attempted. No moral equivalency was offered. If you think otherwise, then my point was either poorly articulated, or missed. (I’m afraid I lean toward “missed.” It was a simple point, and expressed fairly clearly.)
What I said was that libertarians, fundies, etc., buying into conspiracy theories, seems consistent with things we already know about human cognition. The research we’re talking about seems to bear this out, but (again, IIRC) doesn’t discuss mechanism, among other things.
I’ve proposed that libertarians are susceptible to these conspiracy theories is that most of them directly implicate government, and the rest are perceived as supporting calls for increased government power or intervention. Their bias is to believe those that discredit government, and reject those that either validate government or support some government power or action.
I’ve also observed that all humans have similar cognition, and that there are specific examples of similar thought processes in every human’s experience. Disbelieving innocuous statements by people we distrust, for example. Or believing in conspiracies by big business, the church, or right wingers, by those of us on the progressive side. These examples exist because they’re a natural product of the way humans work.
What I have not claimed is that all humans are equally prone to this phenomenon. For example, we would expect a rational person to fall for it much less than someone who is either credulous, or hyper-skeptical. I noted, though, that rationality is hard work: we are using brains that are not rational machines, and attempting to force them to function in that way. It involves constantly correcting for bias, logical fallacies, flawed heuristics, etc. But those of us who make that effort are going to be much less credulous than someone who tends either to believe or to disbelieve everything they hear.
You’ve claimed that I made a “facile claim of symmetry.” I haven’t. What’s interesting about your claim, is that it illustrates what I’ve just said. I don’t know why you made that claim; it extrapolates from my words something I never said, nor would say, because I don’t believe it. So why do you imagine me to have said something which I never said and don’t believe?
My guess is that you suspect I’m a libertarian, trying to defend other libertarians with a veiled tu quoque. Having decided that I’m one of them thur libertarians (I’m not), your bias to reject my statements kicked in. Which led you to adopt the theory that I’m a one-man conspirator trying to foozle you with invalid arguments. You reject a pretty innocuous statement, because it came from a suspected libertarian. Hmm.
That’s much smaller, and much more subtle, than some mouth-breathing libertarian claiming that Bush blew up Tower 7. But the same basic cognitive process underlies both.
Quite a few of the alt med types, anti-vaxxers, and anti-medicine types are rightwing nuts. Alt Med and quackery spans the political spectrum. Some of the worst are fundie xians. Faith healers. They reject all western medicine and die like flies.
We just found one of yours.
You dont have to worry. About us thinking you are a rationalist anyway. You’ve already outed yourself as a non-rationalist.
I know enough about the CIA’s work in control of society not to trust them – but I’m not much of a libertarian except when it comes to social policy (cannabis legal, gays free to do as they please, legal pornography, freedom of speech and hate speech).
I would recommend the following books regarding the nature of psychological control:
A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror
The Lucifer Effect
Silent Warfare: Understanding the Art of Intelligence
The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism
The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television
The Final Quest
I’m sure there’s many others that could be added to this list. There’s plenty of reasons to be just as skeptical of our media complex and government as there is to be skeptical of religion.
and
Fundie xians are more likely to be global warming deniers. This is data from surveys.
Gregory Greenwood@25:
I believe that’s the basis of their next
conspiracyresearch paper.Nick Gotts, #67:
You don’t need to teach me to such eggs. My PhD is in mathematics: I do rigor. My undergrad minor was in linguistics, on the other hand: I understand that language is incapable of the extreme precision demanded by pedants wasting their time on dictionary wankery to derail discussions.
If there were a hell, then the one it amuses me to picture you in is the one where imps repeatedly taunt you with whether you’re an a-theist, or an anti-theist, or whether a feminist can in fact be an egalitarian, since feminist clearly implies an elevation of the feminine, and oh, whether sexual selection can really be considered “natural” selection, or whether “common descent” is a reasonable synonym for “universal common descent,” since special creationists believe in “common descent” within each kind. While Fred Phelps wallops your heinie with an Oxford dictionary.
and
One of the main drivers of anti-vax hysteria has been…the fundie xians.
I’m not entirely sure why. Could just be general hatred of everything that happened since the Dark Ages ended.
This is to the point where there have been serious outbreaks of diseases that were once all but dead. Measles will kill 2 or 3 out of a thousand kids that get it. Here on the west coast we’ve been having sporadic outbreaks of Pertussis (whooping cough) for years and several infants have died from it.
Bit of an exaggeration. Lots of fundies who go for faith healing, also use the health-care system. A subset reject certain interventions only, like JWs and transfusions. A very small subset, like Christian Scientists, reject all medical interventions, and even they don’t “die like flies,” because that just ain’t how it works: for all of evolutionary history, critters have a pretty good probability of living to adulthood and procreating.
I can’t find peer-reviewed studies of mortality rates among Christian Scientists, but I did find an offhand reference to such a study done in the forties, which claimed a mortality rate roughly 4-5x higher than the general population. That’s lower than the consensus estimate for child mortality in the middle ages, which seems to be around 30%. And even though that is deplorable, even 30% isn’t “dying like flies,” and the smart money still bets on surviving to adulthood.
Sorry, your statement is true enough in spirit. I didn’t mean to over-analyze it. My pedantry was tripped, which led me to wonder what the actual mortality rates were, which led me to try and find out, which led me to want to share…
The conservative/libertarian denial of climate science is a bit more complicated than, “If government regulation is required to solve a problem, then there must be no problem”. There are also powerful cultural affinities and resentments at work, such as sympathy toward incumbent industries and their owners, and disdain those damned hippies in the environmental movement (most poignantly in their childish contempt for all things Al Gore). In fact, I’d guess these cultural biases are primary, and the government-hating and conspiracy mongering are probably secondary manifestations. Though the latter form a feedback loop that renders them impervious to evidence.
Fundie (Evangelical) Declaration on Global Warming:
Says it all.
Global warming isn’t occurring because god is in charge and will save us unless he kills us all at the Apocalypse. I’m sure these are also creationists, Republican Tea Partiers, and many of them will be anti-vaxxers.
Mortality rate of children is around 25% in hard core faith healing communities.
This is huge compared to the general population.
I’ve found one family that has lost 5 people, 3 kids and 2 adults to what would be trivial conditions with modern medicine.
You really think having 4 kids and knowing that statistically 1 will die for no real reason isn’t a big deal. Truly amazing and not in a good way.
@70 Raven,
I am wrong, and you’re correct. The alt-med = liberal myth is a common misconception that I’ve haven’t managed to shake despite reading about it being debunked. However, liberals who use alt-med and reject industrial farming generally blame a profit-driven, corporate conspiracy; while conservatives (as you pointed out) gravitate to faith healers, thereby rejecting medicine as a secular, “anti-god” conspiracy. I’m unaware of any right-wing justifications for rejecting industrial farming, but it’s probably along the lines of “playing god”, at least for GM food. People generally blame who they don’t trust to begin with, so they take different paths to the same destination. Although, I don’t know the types of alt-med used across the political spectrum, or even if that sort of data has even been collected. That would be interesting to see. However, in my experience, most of the right-wing arguments against vaccines (from those who don’t reject medicine altogether) seem to be rejecting government mandates as an usurping of parental rights, which is more of a libertarian position than a religious one. Of course there’s the “vaccines are actually mind control devices” crowd, but you can’t account for crazy.
Yes, I am not a perfect rationalist. Perhaps one day I shall shed my human form to be as perfect and free as bias as you. Until then, I will recognize that I have biases and that I will shed some of them faster than others. I hope you will be patient with me.
Raven, #79:
Can you paste the quote where I said that a 25% mortality rate “isn’t a big deal”? I’m having trouble finding it, and certainly can’t remember having said any such thing.
Oh, wait. Maybe that’s because I never said any such thing. Yes, that would certainly seem to explain it.
I do remember stating specifically that a 30% mortality rate, as in the Middle ages, was horrific. The exact word I used was “deplorable,” which I now think wasn’t the best adjective to express how strongly I feel about that. But even “deplorable,” deplorable an adjective choice as it may be, is a far cry from “no big deal.”
I also remember suggesting that a 30% mortality rate doesn’t fit the description, “dropping like flies.” What I don’t see is how that can be interpreted to mean, “isn’t a big deal.”
In any case, “dropping like flies” doesn’t have a rigorous definition, so my statement was certainly debatable. And in the same post, I already apologized for the whole exercise in pedantry. So more than enough said on that point.
But thanks ever so much for gratuitously painting me as a vicarious baby killer. I hope that was as enjoyable for you as it was for me. *spits*
Area Man, #77:
It would be hard to decide that question without more study, I think. Your example was kind of unfortunate, because Al Gore is a perfect illustration of the problem: are you suggesting that libertarians hate him because he’s such a dirty hippie? Or because, as Vice President and an influential politician, he has the potential to enact an agenda that increases government exercise of power?
Do libertarians, in fact, hate hippies? I’d agree that right-wingers do, but there seems to be some tendency around here to confuse the two. Libertarians have made common cause in the past with both left and right, more recently right, and right-wingers have used libertarian rhetoric to their advantage since Reagan’s notable success with it, but the two are not the same.
My own libertarian phase was part of my recovery from my right-winger phase, so prior versions of me are a reasonable match for the demographic you’re picturing. The right-wing fundie me did indeed hate hippies, because they smoked the jay and fornicated a lot. The later libertarian me did dislike Al Gore, but not because he was a “hippie.” He didn’t have much hippie cred that I could see; he claimed to be a former flower-child, but I saw him as a corrupt politician on the take, advocating carbon credits while owning, coincidentally, a company that sells carbon credits.
Also, the libertarians I then rubbed shoulders with had nothing whatsoever against hippies; in fact many were more or less. They were predominantly atheist sexual libertines. Since I was still on the fringes of fundiehood, I found myself on the losing side of many debates whether it’s possible for any theist to be a true libertarian. It boiled down to this: fundie-libertarian me deplored fornication and gay sex, but was ready to defend to the death your right to engage in it unmolested. The majority held that morally judging others violates libertarian principles even if one exhibits perfect tolerance.
Yeah, it’s a tangle. Fundie-me hated liberals and hippies because they fornicate, which spilled over into hatred of other, innocuous trappings of liberalism and hippiedom. Libertarian me hated liberals and politicians because they forcibly impose their will on others, which again biased me against even innocuous manifestations of liberalism or politics. (Now I’m a moderate/progressive with distinct hippie tendencies, to the endless bemusement of people who knew me before.)
So is the anti-government bias a product of culture? Or vice versa? Or is it a true chicken-and-egg question? Can’t say. I suspect the bias precedes the culture, though. In my experience libertarians are made not born–and that was certainly my case. They don’t really experience the culture until they become libertarians, which they’re led to do by various shades of anti-authoritarian streak. From “small government conservatives” like former me, screwed over by GW “humble foreign policy / no nation-building” Bush, to college stoners who just don’t like rules.
I’m curious if anyone can refer me to personality studies done of people who identify as MRAs, libertarians, climate change denialists, etc. These odd belief systems clearly cluster together, and I wonder why. I do agree it has something to do with the person’s relationship to authority. From what I observe in the “manosphere,” most of these people distrust authority, yet at the same time long for it, which makes them guru-magnets. They often strike me as people who have gotten stuck in some phase of adolescent development.
Wow. Do a search/replace with “denialist” and “creationist” and you gain a clear idea of the mindset you’re dealing with (these whiners even share a similar relationship with the Streisand Effect). I guess even some “skeptics” have core beliefs that they will always prioritise over empirical facts.
No, actually, simple observation is quite adequate here. If climate denialists cared only about government regulation, that’s all they’d talk about. They wouldn’t put so much effort into expressing their hatred for the academic establishment, the environmental movement, the UN, etc. The same kinds of things they freaked out about in the ’60s and never got over.
It doesn’t matter. The fact that so many climate denialists think their personal animus toward an individual has bearing on a scientific issue indicates irrational motives that go beyond some principled objection to government regulation. It’s personal for them.
I wasn’t limiting my comment just to libertarians, which you might have noticed if you had read a bit more carefully. And it doesn’t make sense to speak of libertarians as a homogenous group anyway; they exist on a spectrum that at one end is indistinguishable from standard conservatism. Among climate denialists, only a tiny fraction are what you might think of as consistent, principled libertarians (as opposed to plutocratic Republicans who smoke pot, or neo-Confederate Paulistas, or Tea Partiers who want the government’s hands of their Medicare, etc.). And they’re probably not the ones who adhere to multiple conspiracy theories. The rest are motivated by a variety of issues that cannot be reduced to mere dislike of government regulation.
Myanna Lahsen published a paper in 2008 on why three prominent physicists were opposing the science of climate change. It’s worth reading to see how and why intelligent, educated people deceive themselves.
I will at this point plug Merchants of Doubt for an interesting take on where Conspiracy Theories and (for want of a better word) genuine conspiracies intersect. They’re very often smaller and more personal that are generally recognised. I suppose some differences are:
a) having concrete, limited actors performing concrete, limited roles (as opposed to “they’re everywhere, they’ve got a finger in every pie, they’re doing everything you can imagine… and more.”)
b) ascribing rational motives to your actors (i.e. internal rationality)
c) not putting yourself and your personal beliefs at the centre of said actions and motives
@57
I am not trying to imply any consensus. In Mooney’s podcast, his guest, Jonathan Haidt, claims to have a large data set on libertarians and has found them to be the smartest and most rational group. Haidt has observed that the social sciences are made up overwhelmingly of liberals and this affects their results. He says he has shifted from liberal to centrist and has become something of an outlier.
From following Chris Mooney’s blogs and podcasts on the social sciences, I agree with Haidt that the leftward orientation of the researchers skews the results, although I don’t want to say that they’re completely without merit. I don’t think Mooney was expecting Haidt’s assesment of libertarians and I found it somewhat amusing.
@Canman
Libertarians were also found to have the biggest penises too right?
I find your inability to link what Haidt said with the idea of conspiracy tropes topic amusing.
Pattern recognition. We get a lot of shallow “both sides blah blah blah” rhetoric here.
Am I the only one wondering whether the present tense was an accident? O.o
I only skimmed a bit of the first paper and started reading the second a little more closely.
The phrase ‘ducking into the punch’ keeps popping into my head….
I can’t for the life of me imagine how THOSE results could be biased…
Whatever is the smartest and most rational group, I’m sure I am in it.
Objectively™.
I’d be interested to look at the data set, the sampling methods, the instruments used, etc.I remember an old The Economist headline crowing that Liberals were economically illiterate… based on a series of binary questions about economic issues with complex political and social ramifications. Certainly not saying that’s the case here, just that the headline isn’t always the study…
Ah, I remember that one. To the researcher’s enormous credit, he repeated his study with libertarians and conservatives and found them just as illiterate.
Which I think backs up your point.
….credit? Why did he separate them in the first place?
Is there a version of th FOI batch of emails that is searchable with good ol’ ctrl-f? That damn pdf appears to be a collection of scans, rather than text converted to pdf.
Or maybe I’m just being more technologically inept than usual today.
Because he was using a preexisting survey for which the questions were useful for the original determination. When people raised the obvious objection, he and his research partner conducted a new survey that would test questions for which right-leaning people might have the wrong ideas.
And maybe it’s just me, but I think that people who admit that they were wrong, especially when it involves academic work upon which one’s reputation can hinge, deserve credit for owning up to it. The fact that they were biased in their original mistake is neither here nor there — or perhaps, bonus points for becoming self-aware of the initial bias.
Thankfully, I am without bias and thus my own interpretation of this cannot be in error.
I have a cousin who is a prominent libertarian writer. When I engage him on the topic of climate change, he always raises the question of falsifiability. In other words, what experimental outcome would be evidence that the AGW hypothesis is flawed? He then goes on to point out the failure of climate models to predict past climate outcomes as well as recent climate outcomes. Along those same lines Christy an IPCC member a longtime AGW skeptic points out some examples of failed modeling predictions here:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303945704579391611041331266
After I read this piece I looked forward to reading some thoughtful rebuttals from climate scientist in the comment section, but all there was were pages and pages of people calling each other names with none of the criticisms leveled at the actual scientific content of Christy and McNider’s claims. It was as if nobody commenting had bothered to read the article.
I recently read a piece by Michael Mann (of Hockey Stick fame) in Scientific American with eager anticipation that Mann would lay out an iron clad case why skeptics like Christy and McNider were wrong. Mann’s article wasn’t terribly convincing. It was filled with lots of “weasel words” which seemed to lend credence to the idea that no matter what the climate actually does compared to climate model predicts, AGW proponents will have an excuse for it.
Then there is Judith Curry from Georgia Tech who after spending time engaging with the skeptics seems to have been swayed (at least a little). She certainly doesn’t have nice things to say about Michael Mann.
After reading a couple of Nicolas Taleb books I am beginning to wonder if climate modeling and modeling is on par with economic modeling and prediction. Of course, Taleb’s position seems unique for somebody with libertarian leanings. He turns the tables on the AGW skeptics and asks them to prove that all that extra CO2 we are dumping into the atmosphere isn’t going F%^k things up.
\BCT
I think it might be the we-consulted-our-lawyers and that’s as much as we’re willing to spend on a possible defamation suit approach.
Remember they’re a psychology journal. They’re not accustomed to the vitriol that people who deal with climatology take for granted as part of the territory. And they might have looked at McIntyre’s history of siccing his commenters onto organisations with a blizzard of dozens/ hundreds of emails intended to make life difficult for the people who have to respond.
Good round up at desmogblog. http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/03/20/science-journal-retracts-paper-showing-how-climate-change-sceptics-were-conspiracy-theorists-after-sceptics-shout
Oh for fuck’s fucking sake, consult an introductory thermodynamics text.
(Okay, I lied; you’d also need an introductory heat transfer text.)
Can’t be. Economics modelling is based on statistics. Climate modelling is based on physics equations. Lots and lots of physics equations. From Milankovitch cycles to the Stefan-Boltzmann law and every other major and minor physical relationship you might think of in between and beyond.
I remember being taken aback at one person describing the process. You feed in the equations and the geography and nothing else, no starting conditions specified at all, then you hit the Go button. Before very long you’ve got a monsoon season, hurricanes and all the other seasonal features in the places you’d expect. The thing that brought an amazed smile to my face was that the system produces the ENSO irregular seasonal fluctuations without any prompting at all.
Of course, most modelling does specify certain start conditions to test various ideas, Snowball Earth or the continents in different places – or interferes in the process with many or few volcanic eruptions, changes in gas concentrations or sun cycles or dust clouds travelling various distances and every other thing you can think of.
Skeptical Science just put out a piece on a climate projection I’d not seen before. Once again, it’s accurate. This time from 1972. http://www.skepticalscience.com/lessons-from-past-climate-predictions-sawyer-1972.html
Your link to WSJ requires a subscription I don’t have – but I’ll make one comment on model projections. The ones that matter understate the speed of changes associated with atmospheric temperature increases. Arctic sea ice and glaciers are declining about 30-50 years ahead of the projections of only 10 years ago. Same thing goes for weather extremes increasing. And the recent speed up in the loss of ice from the major ice sheets is downright alarming. (I took little notice of the paper on the NE Greenland ice loss increasing – until some helpful souls pointed out that this area had been considered to be stable and had therefore been excluded from all the common projections of sea level rise.) My own suspicion about the lack of success based on atmospheric temperatures is the problems the modellers have with marrying the ocean models with the atmospheric models – but nobody’s going to listen to me, nobody should listen to me, because I have no useful suggestions to offer to deal with the issue.
Judith Curry’s nose was put out of joint in the late 90s when Mann – who was then a new kid on the block – got assigned as a lead writer for the IPCC report. I don’t know why. She was never a climatologist with a physics/maths background like many of the leaders in the field, including Mann. She was a geographer/ meteorologist with a special expertise in hurricanes, not in radiative physics or paleoclimate/geology or astronomy like say Richard Alley or James Hansen. And she’s certainly not in the same rank of meteorologists like Kevin Trenberth or the denialist Richard Lindzen.
Re: BCT @#100
“I have a cousin who is a prominent libertarian writer. When I engage him on the topic of climate change, he always raises the question of falsifiability. In other words, what experimental outcome would be evidence that the AGW hypothesis is flawed?”
It’s similar to the rabbit in the Burgess shale example in evolution. The planet is warming. All that needs to be shown is another source of warming besides CO2 rise. There isn’t one. Then show another source of CO2 besides human contribution and there isn’t one of those either.
To be sure the opposition has tried to show these things; from saying warming isn’t happening at all, to it’s Natural, Man, to the CO2 isn’t human etc etc And they’re all incorrect.
The focus on modelling they do now is really a furphy. Since there is some variability in the predictions it’s just the last stick in the bundle for beating climate science with that hasn’t yet been broken.. Yet.
Some would probably say by even using two prongs fr the AGW argument up there I’m performing some logical fallacy. If it can’t be boiled down to one then you’re violating Popper or Kuhn or whoever they think runs science.
Perhaps I am doing a bad job of it. I’m not sure. But as a partial aside that is an interesting Libertarian obsession: that everything can and should be able to be expressed as simply as possible; be it laws, legal and otherwise, ethics, societal rules etc. They’re all of a piece. Everything should be able to be expressed axiomatically and grow from that. If it’s complicated, situational, has one too many rule proving exceptions etc, it’s automatically bad. So with AGW they’re often criticising it from a position of the system it is attempting to describe being too complex to be simply expressed, there for any theory is likely wrong and no action should be taken (economics gets a pass because I guess they’re happy with the simple basic principles). Wildly speculative psychologising there.
It’s not a bad idea to keep this stuff of simple logic in mind of course. At the same time, I used to think that everything had to be boiled down like that once. I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older that complexity is quite do-able and probably unavoidable to some degree.
Muz @107
Austrian School economists don’t model. Their economics are intuitive and axiomatic. So most libertarians prefer the Austrian School over neoclassical or Keynesian economics because the Austrians are simplistic.
Sorry, that should be Muz @105.
One could imagine scenarios that would falsify the anthropogenic aspect of global warming — if, conjecturally, the 13C:12C isotopic ratio had remained constant while the level of atmospheric CO2 increased, that would more likely be a strong sign of a natural phenomenon at work involving carbon exchange within the ecosystem. (Unfortunately, the measured observations now extending over decades are almost the direct opposite, as the isotopic ratio is a direct indicator that the increase in CO2 is anthropogenic.)
Your Libertarian cousin is, sad to say, extremely dumb. AGW is trivially easy to falsify. It is measured with thermometers among other instruments. If the global temperature wasn’t going up, it would be falsified!!! Cthulhu, a grade school kid could figure this out.
This is false. A lie. The models aren’t perfect because no one is perfect but god and we aren’t sure about him either.
They are based many times on past climate so they retro-predict it well and have generally been good at predicting what we are seeing now.
It’s also a red herring. AGW doesn’t just depend on computer models. Those thermometers for one and things like measuring sea level rises. I’m sure your brilliant Libertarian cousin is equally clueless about what a ruler is and how it works too.
You might be right.
OTOH, SLAPP suits are nuisance suits and loser pays court costs and your attorney. I’ve been threatened with SLAPP suits so many times that I’ve long ago lost count. I just tell them to file the lawsuits and let’s go to court.
The climate scientists weren’t accustomed to denialists and kook terror either. Neither was I. It takes a long time to get used to it and money and time for security systems.
The police and FBI help. Death threats are felonies and there are a lot of people doing long sentences in prison for them.
@mildlymagnificent 104:
@ Raven 109
He would surely invoke “the pause” and the failure of IPCC climate predictions to have enveloped it as evidence that the AGW hypothesis is false and the failure of AGW proponents to acknowledge this failure as evidence that they will have an excuse no matter what, hence unfalsifiability
Billy Clyde Tuggle – you seem to have an almost uncannily specific and articulate knowledge of “your libertarian cousin’s” views on AGW…
More lies in other words. The earth’s atmosphere is still warming up, just not as fast as some models predicted. A fact discovered by climate scientists who don’t fail to acknowledge it but in fact pointed it out. We don’t know why but are looking at it. It seems the extra heat is going into the mid ocean.
Do though instruct your cousin on what a thermometer and ruler are and how to use them. It comes in useful after you graduate from grade school.
BTW, drop the literary device of your fake Gibbertarian cousin. You aren’t fooking anyone. You are an AGW denialist.
You are also boring. Just repeating the same old AGW denialist lies we’ve heard dozens of times. If anyone wants a chew toy, BCT is it. I’ve got a weekend ahead of me and it doesn’t involve sitting in front of a computer dealing with a kook.
in other words, he’d spout bullshit. Slower periods of warming are predicted by climate models, and are hardly surprising given the many shorter-term climate cycles (ENSO, solar output cycles, etc.)
OK. I had a quick look at McNider and Christy’s piece. It was only then that I realised that the Mann piece wasn’t a specific rebuttal. He doesn’t have the time for this nonsense. Nobody bothers me and I don’t need armed guards so I’m happy to make a couple of observations.
1. Where on earth do they get the data for those graphs.
a) “An average of ?02 model runs” (I can’t read what’s written) When, how, where were these model runs performed and what forcing scenarios were they based on? What other runs were performed and why are these the preferred results?
(This is a really important question unfortunately because so many people have criticised papers, presentations and IPCC reports by cherry picking the highest forcing graph which, logically, shows the highest temperature result and compared it to recorded temperatures without any reference to the fact that the forcings applying during that period most closely matched a different projection within the set of model runs.)
b) “Average of four balloon datasets.” I’m pretty sure there are more than four of these. How were these selected and why are they the best for this purpose?
c) “Average of two satellite datasets.” This one at least is easy. That would be RSS and UAH. Unfortunately they don’t mention the drawbacks of these – mainly that they’re not surface temperatures being calculated here (15 to 20 kms above the surface) and that satellite data covers a lot shorter period than the surface temperatures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAH_satellite_temperature_dataset
Glaring omissions from the graphic as presented are the ocean heat content data (dataset reliable for only a few decades) and the sea level rise data (tide gauge records are older than most temperature datasets).
d) Why on earth are they using these unreferenced datasets/graphs when there are heaps and heaps of standard datasets and graphic presentations available. Plebs like me can use all the data available at a simplified site like this.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot
Despite being for non-professionals at least the resulting graphic tells you exactly which datasets have been used.
2.
That’s one of the core things we do know most about. The physics is pretty simple.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing .
(If you’re not familiar with the field, remember that “forcing” refers only to long-lived greenhouse gases, so water vapour is not included because it condenses out of the atmosphere.) Arrhenius worked it out in pen and ink over a hundred years ago – and he was pretty well right on the money despite the lack of computers.
Richard Alley’s AGU “Biggest Control Knob” presentation from a few years ago is a nice introduction.
http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml
If you haven’t the time for that, you can watch 800,000 years of temperature and CO2 variations in 3 minutes here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA7tfz3k_9A
(I recommend full screen so you can keep an eye on the map which tells you where each measurement comes from. The first 15 seconds seem irretrievably blurry, but the rest of it is OK.)
and in any case, “it’s warming more slowly” is a trolltastic argument against warming.
The thing with falsification is that the more well-tested and well-established a hypothesis, the trickier it gets to think of a single something that would actually count as a falsification. Which, to clueless creationists and deniers, looks as if an idea is unfalsifiable.
So for example that rabbit in the Burgess shale would confuse the living fuck out of scientists, but realistically finding one such bunny wouldn’t make all the biologists immediately go “well fuck, guess we got it all 100% wrong before, let’s throw out the ToE and never speak of it again”; instead, most of the science around it would be about figuring out how such an anomaly could have been produced; then whether some hypotheses about geology or taphonomy had to be revised; and only then, and only after such finds started mounting, would they figure that something was seriously not right with the ToE and try to find something better.
And that would still only refute the theory of evolution, not evolution per se, since that’s kinda an observable fact; which could only be “refuted” if for some reason it one day stopped.
Same with climate change. The theories/models are on fairly solid ground, so it would take a lot of evidence that could not be accommodated by them to disprove them at this point… and the observable fact of climate change could only be disproven if it actually stopped for a significant period of time and thus presented a new, temperature-stable trend (which 15 years of slowed warming is not).
of hey, html fail.
Actually, radiative physics is pretty easy to falsify. Just show that CO2 lasers don’t work the way they’re claimed to.
And/or do the same for “heat seeking” missiles – one of my favourite old-timey physicist/climatologists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Plass
And for anyone who does have problems following all this “the models have failed stuff”, my favourite statistician has just done another post on Hansen’s 1988 projections.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/hansens-1988-predictions/
well here’s the thing: if someone actually managed to falsify CO2 radiative forcing (because alternative universe), but the measurable termperature trend was still what it is… that would mess with SO many models, but climate change would still be a thing.
That’s sort of what I meant: at this point there’s so many different strands to this, you’d have to refute a lot of the different lines of evidence before you could refute climate change. Basically, it’s not a chain where a single weak link can break the whole chain; it’s a rope and will hold even if a few strands fail.
The biggest hurdle if anyone did come up with something radical like changing the forcing per doubling of CO2, from 3.7 W per sq m down to 1.6 or some other ridiculous number is how to explain everything else that would follow from that.
You’d have to find some other mechanism/s to explain ice ages (and how we get out of them) as well as the measured increases in temperatures, ice melt and extreme weather currently. The whole paleo record would be thrown into confusion along with half a dozen non-climate related disciplines.
oh, and “show that CO2 lasers don’t work the way they’re claimed to” would actually be pretty tricky, too. A single experiment that failed to give the results expected given our current knowledge of forcing wouldn’t falsify it any more than a single misplaced fossil would falsify taphonomic theories. You’d have to make it repeatable and exclude all possible reasons compatible with current knowledge before you could say that current knowledge is wrong and physical forcing has been falsified.
Basically, not easy to falsify something that explains a lot of observations and is quite predictive.
FIFM. and I think I’ll cake this as a clue that I need more coffee.
mmm coffee cake…
I wonder if I have enough eggs…
AMA:
You are over-reaching, I’m afraid. My point was pretty simple: there are asymmetries between the idle conspiracy theories of denialists and the well-grounded evidence of real conspiracies by tobacco companies and fossil fuel interests. I aimed it at you because you spent so much time developing parallels without even hinting at asymmetries was suspicious to me: it fit my search image for a pernicious kind of relativism, not uncommon on climate change threads…Your notion that I tagged you as a libertarian and criticized you because of that is just one more (unsupported) insistence on the symmetry, which you’ve already over-emphasized.
@56
Thanks for the correction and clarification on Milloy – I was mistaken in stating that he doesn’t have a scientific background. I was unaware of the Brown and Williamson study that Milloy was hired to “debunk”. It seems that Milloy’s main source of income has been The Advancement for Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) – a highly successful astroturfing operation.
@105:
Right. They claim it’s unfalsifiable but they spend all this effort trying to falsify it. They clearly don’t believe it’s unfalsifiable, they’re just frustrated that none of their arguments work.
@118:
The funny thing is, I believe that philosophers of science discarded the idea of “falsification” as a demarcation criterion a long time ago.
Falsification was Popper’s way to try to get around the problem of induction, the fact that it’s impossible to prove any hypothesis to be absolutely true through empirical evidence. But it turns out that falsification runs into the exact same problem — you can no more prove a hypothesis absolutely false than you can prove one true. So, it turns out that probabilistic induction is how things go — evidence weighs for or against a hypothesis either increasing or decreasing our confidence in it, and we eventually reach the point where we just call it true or false because the evidence is overwhelming.
But that hasn’t stopped various crackpots from invoking Popper to tell the world’s scientists what is or isn’t science. It’s like the tax protestor method of doing science — you just find that one magic clause or ritual and everything comes crashing down.
Area Man:
You’re right about falsification– Popper sometimes seemed to acknowledge this by emphasizing falsification as simply characterizing how the game of science should be played, rather than insisting that scientific method leads to reliable conclusions (what’s more troubling — as Lakatos and others noted– this view of science provides no justification for relying on scientific ‘conclusions’ in practical reasoning). I’m not such a fan of probabilistic induction, though– we need priors to get anywhere with that, and there doesn’t seem to be a good way to ground them. Not that we can’t use probabilities, but we can’t use them as the starting point for a general account of scientific evidence…
When it comes to well-established science, we rely on it to guide what probabilities we assign (basic thermodynamics, radiation physics etc. make the importance of CO2 and other GHGs to climate obvious: we adopt a prior in which these phenomena have a prior of 1, after which models and paleoclimate studies and careful observations reinforce and add detail, making the probability that continued emissions pose a grave danger very high indeed…).
Such a big surprise that the folks who read The Bell Curve and conclude that melatonin levels directly effect IQ, and accuse rational people of “rejecting the data”, are up in arms and using every dishonest tactic they muster to discredit and silence a study that puts them on the kook end of another bell curve. So much for the liberty part of libertarianism, its kookayrianusm!
My approach is that it’s more like someone who can’t tell the difference in strategies between building a house of cards and assembling a jigsaw.
The house of cards is always in danger of collapse, both while you’re building it and once it’s done. Jigsaws not so much. It doesn’t make any difference to the final picture if you spent half the time with a couple of corner pieces in the wrong place or that it took you ages to finish the red sailboat in the centre foreground because a couple of the necessary pieces had mistakenly been included in the car/shrubbery/cow over in the upper right corner background.
The house of cards suffers a mistake or an accident. The whole thing crashes down. Discover a couple of missing or misplaced jigsaw pieces. The puzzler heaves a huge sigh of combined relief and frustration – So that’s how it fits.
The science denialists are always looking for the killer move to blow down or knock down or dislodge a keystone piece in a house of cards. Science practitioners keep right on assembling their puzzle (probably edgeless and doublesided to make things interesting) and are always satisfied when they identify a reversed or misplaced piece because the picture gets clearer every time they do. (It still would look near complete, recognisable but not perfect, even if a nefarious puzzle hater had hidden a few pieces behind the couch to frustrate the project.)
So there’s no basis for a coherent discussion between the two groups because they’re not even looking at the same activity.
@ Celtic_Evolution 113
If you are implying that they are my own views, I assure you they are not. I really do have a libertarian cousin of some prominence. We are facebook friends and from time to time when he posts something that attacks the AGW hypothesis, I try to post my best counter arguments, but I am an electrical engineer (not much more than a glorified RF technician), not a scientist, so I admittedly am out of my league on the subject. All his other FB friends are sympathetic to his views, so I am a lone voice of dissent when I engage with him.
\BCT
Agnotology. I just learned this word. It means culturally constructed ignorance and goes nicely with the Dunning-Kruger effect. “Fava beans and a nice Chianti” also too.
Billy Clyde Tuggle,
I think you are failing to appreciate the situation with respect to climate science. First, you have to look at ALL the evidence–not just surface temperature. Second, even when comparing climate model scenarios (not predictions!) to surface temperatures, you have to make sure the comparisons are meaningful. Christy’s graph is not just incorrect–it’s disingenuous.
CO2 is not the only determinant of climate. El Nino/La Nina is very important, as are insolation and volcanism. Back in 2011, Foster and Rahmstorf showed that if you account for changes, greenhouse driven warming continues apace with the last 3 decades. If you are interested in intelligent treatments of the subject, may I suggest Tamino’s Open Mind blog and Skeptical Science blogs.
First, however, you need to understand what climate models are meant to do.
@ mildlymagnificent 116
Thank you for this link,MM. I watched the video from start to finish this afternoon. It was very helpful as was the other information you provided. I feel slightly less ignorant and a little better equipped to engage with my cousin.
\BCT
PZ Myers characterizes those who are skeptical of the consensus of catastrophism propagated by the IPCC as “denialist ratfuckers”.
PZ’s previous comments on nature vs. nurture: “Developmental plasticity is all.”
You truly are a swelling disappointment PZ.
Here are a couple “denialist ratfuckers”:
>Richard Lindzen – Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Commentary on IPCC, GCMs, etc. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/08/lindzen-understanding-the-ipcc-ar5-climate-assessment/
>Judith Curry – Georgia Institute of Technology; US Congress testimony http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=07472bb4-3eeb-42da-a49d-964165860275
And these are authoritative folks since they agree with your stupidity? What is their real speciality? Not making your case. Typical.
Area Man, #85:
I was sick all weekend, but I did want to show the courtesy of a reply.
You could, of course, be right. I think that there’s something you’re not taking into account, though: climate denialists–at least, the libertarian ones I was talking about–are unaware of their own motivations here[*]. In this case, libertarians will retcon motivations that preserve their self-image as rational people. They believe themselves rational, and will rationalize accordingly. Saying, “I reject this science because I dislike the policy implications,” would be a confession that they’re willing to reject reality and substitute their own. So instead they say, “This science is flawed.”
There’s a subset of creationists who work the same way, BTW. Only a minority are the sort of hard-core fideists who would openly reject reality in favor of their storybook. Many, perhaps most, believe that their faith is a confidence supported by evidence–that they are rational people who make a leap of faith, but whose “faith” would not stretch to include demonstrable falsehoods. And so they do not tell themselves, “I believe my interpretation of Genesis, regardless of any facts!” Instead they tell themselves that Genesis is consistent with the facts, and anyone who says otherwise is lying. It’s a flimsy fig-leaf, but absolutely necessary to their self-image.
I can tell you, as a recovered fundie, right-winger, and libertarian, that I “rejected evolution because it was bad science.” As an educated mathematician, I rationalized this fairly cleverly: ignore most of the evidence; and attack a strawman using mathematics. So for example I’d have gleefully given you probabilities of random DNA sequences giving you valid protein encodings, or quoted Haldane’s Dilemma, etc. Good, solid reasoning attacking suitably-chosen straw men. Enough to protect my self-image of intellectual honesty, with the fallback position of saying, “Hey, honest mistake!” if my strawman should be exposed.
Similarly, I “rejected global warming because it was bad science.” I attacked climate models because the relevant equations are chaotic–tiny adjustments in the initial conditions can make the difference between Waterworld and Eden. The objection is at least partly valid, BTW: the relevant equations ARE chaotic, and when I accepted AGW, it was NOT on the strength of deciding to trust these simulations.
It was only at a certain point in my recovery that I was able to acknowledge the motivations behind my reasoning. I rejected evolution because it undermined my belief in the Bible. I rejected AGW because I was unwilling to accept the seemingly obvious conclusion that government regulation was the only remedy. And I dimly recognized this all along, but could not admit it to myself until I had nearly left the fundie/libertarian orbit. (Then it became part of a feedback look in which admitting it accelerated my escape from the orbit.)
[*] People are often unaware of their own motivations; that’s why therapy is a thing. We even know some of the mechanisms of self-deception. For example, there was a dramatic experiment in which subjects were asked to make a choice (naturally, “Which is the prettiest girl?” Sigh.) and then asked to explain their choice. Except that the experimenter would show them the picture they didn’t choose. About 75% of the time, they failed to realize that they chose the other picture. Instead, they invented a motivation on the spot. In one particularly interesting instance, a man chose the brunette, and was asked why he picked the blonde. He replied, “Because I prefer blondes.” IIRC, future iterations demonstrated that he had not only retconned a preference for blondes, but going forward he began showing an actual preference for blondes.
Jadehawk:
Raven:
Jadehawk’s comment is exactly right. It avoids a trap that Raven’s comment falls into–and I’m afraid this comment, Raven, is an unfortunate combination of condescending and incorrect. A thermometer can only prove climate change. Anthropogeneity is the critical bit, and a thermometer won’t demonstrate that. Considerably more work is needed to prove that climate change is anthropogenic.
To get there, it’s necessary to finger CO2 as the culprit, and to correlate that with human-produced CO2 emissions, etc. Which, needless to say, a grade-school kid could not figure out.
(I sympathize, Raven: I’ve dealt with people who are so wrong, that I’m tempted to dismiss them with halfhearted rebuttals. Often as not, I end up thoroughly pissed off, because my rebuttal contains stupid errors, and the idiot picks up on them and makes a monkey of me. Being made to look like an idiot, BY an idiot, when I’m actually the one in the right, is the most infuriating experience I can possibly endure.)
I received a not answer from the journal in regards to my message asking about the paper:
It seems to me that retractions really should be open and the actual reasons need to be given.
Compare this to AJG’s retraction of Wakefield’s paper: http://www.nature.com/ajg/journal/v105/n5/full/ajg2010149a.html
AMA: I’m sympathetic with the urge to caution the reasonable about dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s. But you’re off-base on Raven’s point. AGW does indeed require the human element, but at heart it’s a conjunction, and could be falsified quite directly by temperature data showing no warming. (After all, that’s exactly what many deniers are partying about right now, having leaped, by an all-too characteristic leap of faith, to the conclusion that warming must have stopped since some of the standard measures seemed to show a reduced trend.)
mbrysonb, you’re right, and I’m wrong: raven is correct that falsifying warming would falsify AGW, and that a kid could produce that particular falsification. So my post is a good illustration of my own point.
Apologies, raven. And thanks to mbrysonb for setting me straight.
Sorry, but a anybody who listens to those who publish in the peer reviewed scientific literature, versus those who believe anything anything said at a denialist web site with no peer review, could figure out if they understand the “trustworthyness” factor. Which is where the peer reviewed scientific literature wins hands down essentially every time….
I’m a skeptic. I lean towards free markets, and small government, and readily admit this biases me towards being more skeptical. It’s normal. I can also imagine the ecologically minded to be biased against any measurable change to the environment by people. That too is normal.
I can also imagine conspiracy minded people being attracted to one or the other side of the climate debate. It’s hard to prove anything about climate. World-wide temperatures not cooperating with the models over the last 12 – 17 years is an example of that. And there are agendas on both sides. AGW fits well into a narrative of increased government, and there are indications that liberals/progressives embrace AGW significantly more than any other group, including independents.
It would not surprise me at all to discover that conspiracy minded folks are attracted to AGW finding conspiracies on either side. As an example, Rosie O’Donell is a big believer in 9/11 as an inside job, and also a big AGW believer.
What some skeptics object to is the one sided nature of Lewandowsky’s study, and also the “guilt by association,” way in which the results were reported.
Ah, there’s your problem. Climate requires a 30 year baseline, as you would know if you weren’t reading denialist fuckwittery. Also, have the denialists point to the peer reviewed scientific literature to back their claims for 30+ year trends. Accept nothing less than 30 years.
Nerd of Redhead sez:
Climate requires a 30 year baseline
I’m talking about models. You are talking about something else.
This is one of the reasons people can’t have a simple dialogue on this subject. You should look, aim, then shoot.
And so am I. You should not presume the people you are talking to know nothing about the subject. The models are for climate, not weather. They don’t say in 2014 the Chiwaukeed area will have a far colder than normal winter. They just show that having a colder than normal winter sometime is likely. As the old adage say, climate is what we expect, weather is what we get. And anything less than 30 years is weather, not climate.
You said “Climate.” Models are not “Climate.” If the pause continues to twenty years, it is widely acknowledged their will be something seriously wrong with the models. It doesn’t invalidate the theory of AGW, only the ability of models, which are representation of human understanding of climate systems.
That’s why there are so many new theories about what happened to the heat. Some think it is natural variability, such as Judith Curry. Trenberth thinks its in the deep oceans, and that isn’t modeled. Others think it’s on account of global dimming from Chinese coal plants, or even volcanoes.
The fact is the pause is not reproduced in the models, which are now at the 2% confidence level. If the pause continues for twenty years, there models will be invalidated as being able to predict climate as they were envisioned.
Meanwhile, if it makes you feel any better, I, like you, think Climate is a very complex system, and thirty years or more is required to get a read on it. AGW, though, is not climate, and according to the models affects temperature quite quickly.
The models model climate, not weather.
AGW is oberservation of world-rise temperture rise over the last century. The data is impressive. Note my link to evidence, and the lack of links in your denialism.
Oh, this is gonna be good.
Anyone still debating whether human GHG emissions have contributed to warming over the last century is a moron.
Anyone who believes definitively on the basis of “risk” and GCMs that governments must incur great costs in the short- to mid-term (next 50 years) to avert catastrophic impacts on the climate system and human welfare is also deficient.
See Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen, and Vaclav Smil for some stable reasoning about this policy issue.
Ed:
Yes, because conservative ideology just pairs sooooo nicely with Skepticism!
It’s hard to “prove” anything in science. That’s no excuse to ignore scientific facts and pretend that everything boils down to Opinion.
Citation needed.
Yeah, BOTH SIDES! Ever hear of false equivalence? Conflicts of interest aren’t evenly distributed between the “two sides”.
Way to prove the Conspiracy Theorist point, fuckwad.
Crocodile tears.
torwolf
Which is fascinating, because you mention Judith Curry. Your fellow Both Sider above also mentions her, citing that she attributes global warming to natural variation i.e. she denies the above statement. Is Eddy wrong or are you sloppy? Either answer satisfies me.
Citation needed, fuckwit.
Again, you are one of those clueless fucks who just thinks something is inherently more likely to be correct if it is somewhere in between the two majority viewpoints. It isn’t. The truth isn’t Somewhere In Between in the creationism v. evolution debate, and there are plenty of reasons to think the same is true of the global warming debate. Largely nothing but right-wing, corporatists denying reality in the name of Capitalism, Bible Thumpers who think climate change is unpossible because Jeebus, and a bunch of pseudointellectual libertarian moneychasers. And on the other side are scientists. Big fucking debate.
Anyway: Look up argument from authority and understand WHY it is a fallacy.
anteprepro:
If Eddy said that Judith Curry does not attribute any of the observed warming to anthropogenic emissions, he is wrong. It is implicit in her climate modeling and writings (e.g. http://judithcurry.com/2014/01/23/the-logic-of-the-ipccs-attribution-statement/#more-14408). You would have to be a moron to not attribute some fraction of the observed warming to the large amounts of GHG that have been released over the observation period.
The question that has always been debated by scientists (based on GCMs, empirical data, and reason) is what percentage can be attributed to anthropogenic GHG emissions. You understand that right?
You write “Citation needed, fuckwit.” after a statement I made that is based on reason and opinion. If you are one of the aspergers cases on this blog who attributes no meaning to logic and reasoning, then why don’t you stop concerning yourself with complex systems all together?
Curry, Lindzen, and Smil are all scientists. You are clearly not thinking straight. Your anger and allusions to “right-wing corporatists”, “Bible Thumpers”, etc. serve to discredit you, both intellectually and intrinsically.
Take a chill pill dumb dumb.
Second, you are angry.
Third, you are weird (“Crocodile tears”??, get a life loser).
torwolf
watch your step
torwolf
1. Don’t use Asperger’s as an insult.
2. If your statement is based on logic, then show your work . Put up or shut up. Dollars to donuts, you rely on the same fucked up logic and denial of evidence that every denialist relies on in order to come up with pathetic excuses for why we shouldn’t be concerned about what the science says.
And I already said that they are middle of the road. They are not the people that this paper is based on. And, as I already alluded to, three scientists against the consensus proves jackshit.
I would say your utter idiocy discredits you, but you have no credit to lose.
If you ain’t angry, you ain’t paying attention.
Probably smells bad too.
Brilliant.
“Show your work” writes anteprepro.
-It is unknown what percentage of observed warming is attributable to anthropogenic GHGs
-The IPCC has concluded, based on GCMs, paleoclimatic proxies, direct measurements, and consensus judgment, that most observed warming (51-95%) has been forced by anthropogenic GHGs
-This attribution statement is based on the judgments of IPCC climate scientists.
-I say there is good reason to agree with this statement.
-Climate scientists go further by stating that we must reduce CO2eq concentration to 450 ppm (or something close to that) by a near-term date.
-This is based on the judgment call that this concentration will result in net negative impacts on humanity.
-I and many others say that the earth system is far too complex for one to reliably model the impact of a given concentration of CO2eq on regional biophysical attributes (e.g. hydrology, forests) and especially human welfare
-Human modeling efforts have a poor track record (including GCMs – the majority over-predicted mean surface temperature between ~2000 to present by a factor of 2)
-Governments supporting large-scale deployment of renewable energy at a cost that is >25% that of conventional sources
-This will always be the case: renewable energy has power density <30 W/m2, compared to 1,000-10,000 W/m2 for fossil fuels (see Smil)
-Investment in large-scale renewable energy projects is threatening sustainability of forest sector (wood pellets being shipped en masse to coal power plants in the EU) and is leading to public backlash over electricity rate increases in Germany, Spain, and Canada
-The future pay-off for these negative environmental and economic impacts is highly uncertain – we cannot say with any certainty that the sacrifices we make today will mitigate catastrophic global warming (especially given paths of India and China, i.e. coal expansion)
-Therefore, given the externalities that result when renewable energy is pushed too fast in the name of climate change, this is not a rational course of action.
If this is "the same fucked up logic and denial of evidence that every denialist relies on in order to come up with pathetic excuses for why we shouldn’t be concerned about what the science says", you are neurotic and lost, dude.
So basically “Nuh uh”. Climate scientists have a model, and you just flat out dismiss it. Predictions regarding ocean level, salinity, ecological damage, extreme weather patterns, etc. and the harm that will cause to humans? Nope, Earf is complicated! Yes, that is the same denial of evidence as every denialist. Sorry to break it to you.
And, as always, the money angle. Because the question of whether or not “catastrophic” AGW is true always comes down to whether or not we can afford doing anything about it. Great work, genius.
I don’t flat out dismiss it, I base my trade-off decision on careful reasoning.
I’m all for reducing fossil fuels and increasing renewable energy, only gradually and sustainably.
You use polarizing language, characterizing the issue as black/white (“…always comes down to whether or not we can afford doing anything about it.”). The problem is that even if we pay trillions a year, we don’t know whether anything positive will happen. Models parameterized with equations and coefficients based on assumptions and without any ability to incorporate variation in solar activity and major natural events (volcanism) is one of many ingredients in the decision-making process. Do you acknowledge that dumb dumb?
Citation fucking needed. Actually, we know GHG’s are increasing, and as expected the atmospheric data with respect to troposphere/stratosphere is right on predictions.
Where the fuck is your citation to the peer reviewed scientific literature? No citation, your claim is dismissed as denialism.
And what if you’re too late, and Florida becomes a reef?
Nerd of Redhead:
You are a hideous wretch of a human being. It’s all implied in your blogging behavior. Miserable wretch.
If you’re too lazy to keep up with the news don’t comment on the issues. Anyone who takes this issue seriously is aware that the GCMs lack of congruence with the last ~15 years of earth temperature records.
Readers would have to be clinically retarded to give weight to your constant calls for citations.
Type “GCM mean surface temperature pause” into a search engine and stick a fork into an electrical socket.
That remains to be seen. Also it should give you pause that your “careful reasoning” is at odds with the majority of scientists who are experts on the issue. Considering that you thump your chest about a whopping three scientists agreeing with you? It comes off as horribly hypocritical.
And I assume that you and your “careful reasoning” are also the arbiters of what counts as “gradual” and “sustainable”, right?
Because fuck what the scientists say, you and a hand-selected minority of people that agree with you are the REAL experts.
Yes, what if?
What if the state of California is swallowed up into the Pacific sometime in the next 250 years (very plausible, but no citation for you, you should have heard by now).
By your reasoning, we must mass evacuate all Californians because the potential benefits of not removing human populations from the peninsula (avoidance of human suffering and death) outweigh the enormous costs.
Think more.
anteprepro:
The arbiters of what counts as gradual and sustainable or the voting public. If you type Germany Spain and Ontario along with renewable energy policy into a search engine, you will find that they have all cut their subsidies for renewable energy back because of costs and in the case of Germany, increases in coal power generation (renewables couldn’t meet peak demand).
Climate scientists are mathematically-savvy physicists, not economists nor political scientists, etc.
Gee, look at the sea-level change records versus predictions fuckwitted liar and bullshitter. You want to be believed, you either cite your sources, or shut the fuck up like any liar and bullshitter should do in the presence of those who know what they are talking about.
Ah, you are politically against doing something to help your grandchildren. And here I thought the idea was to make sure each generation did better. Must be a liberturd.
To Nerd of Redhead:
Yes, what if?
What if the state of California is swallowed up into the Pacific sometime in the next 250 years (very plausible, but no citation for you, you should have heard by now).
By your reasoning, we must mass evacuate all Californians because the potential benefits of not removing human populations from the peninsula (avoidance of human suffering and death) outweigh the enormous costs.
Think more.
Your idiocy is showing.
Ditto, with less sloganeering from somebody afraid to make changes.
Even Wiki disagress with your “slow” attitude:
Care to find room for those refugees? Your living room perhaps?
Yes, I do care to find room for these refugees. Adaptation vs. mitigation. Adaptation strategies have high chance of paying off (require re-location), mitigation strategies do not (require consistent support by voting public, require international cooperation (including from India and China, who are currently not, as far as cutting back coal is concerned), and require a global climate system that will stabilize once CO2 emissions have been stabilized (it could very well continue moving in the same direction – the earth’s climate doesn’t have a knack for sitting still)
Nerd of Redhead:
What if the state of California is swallowed up into the Pacific sometime in the next 250 years (very plausible, but no citation for you, you should have heard by now)?
By your reasoning, we must mass evacuate all Californians because the potential benefits of not removing human populations from the peninsula (avoidance of human suffering and death) outweigh the enormous costs.
No?
antepreppo states:
That’s not what I said. I said she attributes the pause to natural variability, and she does.
IPCC AR-4 predicted .2 degrees C per decade, and so world would be .3 degrees C to comply.
Judith Curry: Under conditions of anthropogenic greenhouse forcing:
•Only 2% of climate model simulations produce trends within the observational uncertainty
Modeled pauses longer than 15 years are rare; the probability of a modeled pause exceeding 20 yrs is vanishing small
A commentary in Nature: But none of the climate simulations carried out for the IPCC produced this particular hiatus at this particular time. That has led sceptics — and some scientists — to the controversial conclusion that the models might be overestimating the effect of greenhouse gases,
To Nerd:
Most believe AGW effects start around 1950, not over the last century.
Someone here claimed we need to reduce CO2 concentrations to below 450 ppm. CO2 concentrations are below 450 ppm.
There are a few people arguing that the anthropogenic contribution to warming is more than 100%. Because the climate should be – very slowly, very gradually – cooling due to Milankovitch cycle effects. As it is now, we’ve very likely completely eliminated the anticipated next cold event because of the persistence of CO2 in the atmosphere and its warming effects.
There’s a nice description in this video. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, just look at the section from 29 to 35 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM&hd=1
Actually, the counter-intuitive result is that because of the pause, the IPCC increased it’s certainty of attribution. Since almost everyone agrees there is some forcing effect by CO2 and other greenhouse gases, the slower the globe warms, the more certain what warming there is is on account of anthropogenic effects.
If the planet cools as you suggest, there will be people claiming AGW is > 100% of warming. Also of note is that according to AR-4, AGW should have contributed about 1 degree “C” of warming since 1950. IF the models are correct (I doubt them), planet earth would be nearing little ice age temperatures without the AGW.
Except the globe is warming faster than predicted. Yawn, no real evidence that you are right, just typical denialist drivel. The Arctic wasn’t supposed to melt as fast as it did by the models. The models are lower than reality. Nothing you have said makes sense.
Denialists, keep in mind carbon dioxide isn’t the only GHG. Methane is a much stonger GHG per Wiki:
All that fracking is leaking methane.
It’s funny how denialists think they’re better experts in climatology than the actual climatologists are.
carlie:
Well, see, the climatologists have a vested interest in making sure that Americans think there may be a problem with the climate so that billions of dollars will be spent studying the climate and they can get the huge massive salaries and free travel and fancy laboratory (complete with beakers full of glowing green goo) and a nice Porsche to toodle around in so they have to lie to keep on the gravy train in their ivory tower of privilege.. Whereas the climate deniers, the ones who insist that there is no climate change, or if there is, it’ll be good, or, even if it is bad it ain’t our fault, have no axe to grind. They are just poor innocent oil magnates barely squeaking by and are putting up what little extra money they have to protect the poor consumers from having to actually pay for all the costs associated with fossil fuels so only people like the Koch brothers, good middle class Americans, can see what is really happening. See? Climatologist = vested interest. Koch brothers =/= vested interest.
Nerd claims:
Except the globe is warming faster than predicted.
1) who predicted.
2) When did they predict it.
Now, don’t go pulling out the AR-5 report, which wasn’t a prediction since they adjusted temperatures downward after the fact.
Ed, not seeing the real evidence to make me trust you, a denialist, and not the hard working scientists publishing in the peer reviewed scientific literature, who are constantly refining their models to take into account an ever increasing number of things that do effect climate, and from my perspective, getting close to accurate. Get the picture? Either put up or shut the fuck up.
It is beneath Nerd to back up his claims.
Someone asks for citations to a fact I claim, I usually take the time to provide them, for instance see above.
But Nerd feels no need to support absurd claims. That’s fine too: a lot of people on the alarmist side are just the way Nerd is, so self righteous.
You’ve got some climate scientists asking others to delete emails so they can’t be seen. You have others grafting two different data sets together to make the science look more real than it is. You have others deleting data, and still others like Lewandowsky shooting off at the mouth and accusing individuals of various psychological disorders.
You have that buffoon, Al Gore, out there claiming there will be 10 million climate refugees by 2010 (wait, where are they), along with all that other old testament claptrap, all the while making millions from the alarmist industry, the IPCC over-projecting warming, the world spending a billion dollars a day on “Global Warming,” but it’s OK.
Keep on believin, Nerd. Do not question. It is you who is being played the fool.
Gee, I present evidence, you present claims and already refuted denialist crap.
Who says I believe what Al Gore says or consider him anything other than a retired politician. Your attitude is one of a denialist. No evidence, therefore you must us sarcasm and attitude for an argument, rather than backing up your claims. The scientific literature is found places like this. Which you are unfamiliar with.
Ed Barbar:
Don’t waste your energy trying to have a civil, honest conversation with Nerd of Redhead without constant claims for evidence. Nerd is not capable of appreciating or deliberately ignoring the fact that all of our conclusions (including Nerds) are buttressed by some form of reasoning because empirical evidence for many of the dimensions of this debate are simply lacking. Following everybody’s writings with “where is the evidence fuckwit” is a remarkably amateur debate tactic.
As I wrote to Nerd of Redhead before:
You are a hideous wretch of a human being. It’s all implied in your blogging behavior. Miserable wretch.
Let’s stop wasting our time with this dumb dumb. There are far more intelligent debates to be had in the blogosphere.
torwolf
Weren’t you banned?
Who the fuck cares what a pseudoskeptical denialist thinks? Your behavior is wretched. Lying for political purposes, and ignoring good, solid science that tells you, you need to make some changes for the future of humankind. Morally bankrupt comes to mind.
Obviously you and Ed were trolling.
chigau:
Was that a rhetorical question? As a monitor, you should know whether I was banned or not. Was I banned? Why was I banned?
Also, as a monitor, how are you not detecting violations of blogging rules in Nerd of Redhead’s comments?
Gee, this a rude blog. Nothing has to be polite to those like you, who lie and bullshit for political reasons. We call a spade a spade. If don’t like being called a liar, you can always quit lying about AGW being in doubt, or that the models aren’t working. Some work very well. Note the ocean level model versus satellite and actual data at the highest extrapolations I linked to above. Match very nicely.
torwolf
Why would my being a monitor let me know who was banned?
Didn’t you read the commenting rules?
If you think Nerd is violating some rules, use the link in the side panel.
From PZ’s Commenting Rules:
II. You may be banned from a comment thread if:
1. You cannot control your posting habits, and are dominating the discussion.
2. Your comments are repetitive, especially if you repeat arguments that have already been addressed.
3. You demonstrate that you are unwilling to have read previous comments or the opening post.
Nerd’s comments are repetitive
Nerd has demonstrated that it is unwilling to read previous comments
Example 1: I have asked Nerd twice now to respond to this:
It is perfectly relevant to the discussion but he/she chooses to ignore it because answering it jeopardizes his/her absolutist position.
Nerd has not.
Example 2: In its latest post, Nerd of Redhead stated that I “can quit lying about AGW being in doubt, or that the models aren’t working.”
I have never stated that AGW is in doubt (e.g. I wrote in a previous comment: “Anyone still debating whether human GHG emissions have contributed to warming over the last century is a moron.”)
I have never stated that the models aren’t working, only that they are imperfect.
Notify PZ of these infractions, editor chigau, I am sure he will be concerned (as an honest, forthright champion of science and reason..).
Find example 1 here:
“What if the state of California is swallowed up into the Pacific sometime in the next 250 years (very plausible, but no citation for you, you should have heard by now)?
By your reasoning, we must mass evacuate all Californians because the potential benefits of not removing human populations from the peninsula (avoidance of human suffering and death) outweigh the enormous costs.”
So Nerd is repetitive….and doesn’t answer the same question you posted multiple times…..
Oooooookay then.
(You obviously don’t understand how high of a threshold PZ has for repetition and “not reading”. Contrary to the vies of his detractors, PZ doesn’t ban too often)
And hence should be ignored for political reasons, typical of a set of denialist fools. If your politics aligned, you wouldn’t need to invent and overstate the imperfections in the models. That has been your problem. You overstate your case, and your rhetorical fuckwittery doesn’t need to be addressed. It is there for all to see you are making an ass of yourself.
For all to see, Nerd of Redhead. For all to see.
torwolf
I am not an “editor”.
Go to the side-bar, click on Contact a Monitor, send your message. PZ reads those messages.
Why should Nerd, or anyone, answer that question? It presumes equivalence where there is none–predicting an individual earthquake is nothing like predicting the effects of climate change, and adaptation/mitigation strategies have many positive externalities, unlike evacuating all of California. It’s clearly a dishonest “gotcha.” Long story short: no, we shouldn’t evacuate CA, but climate change mitigation/adaptation strategies are more comparable to enforcing stringent building and zoning codes that anticipate future earthquakes.
But, you know, nice job making denialists look like foolish liars who think that other people are as gullible as they are.
torwolf
Your question doesn’t become any less stupid the more you post it. The ocean is not going to swallow California, ever, and no scientists are predicting that it will. Many Californians living hard by the coast will be negatively affected by sea level rise caused by global warming, but even the most catastrophic predictions don’t include a coastline at the Rockies anytime in the foreseeable future. I recommend you get more of your information from science journals and less from airport thrillers and disaster movies.
Sorry, late to the party. I’m confused where this came from:
There is a difference between sometime “in the next 250 years” & “over the course of the next 250 years”. I’m not familiar with any models claiming all of California will roll into the Pacific one day in a fit of climate change-inspired storm flooding.
However, some heavily-populated parts of California will be at ever increasing risk for being underwater. And thus it would be reasonable for local planners to restrict development on beachfront property, institute additional measures to control storm surge, flooding, drought, etc. Larger emergency funds to repair damages from weather would be well advised also. Taking a step back, it would be better for the state & national governments to plan this way also–they will be called upon for help as soon as the first whiff of real trouble materializes. If we “know” that San Diego or Los Angeles are at risk for this same kind of thing, it is responsible to start planning for it now. That way when the populace living there does need help, it will be less a surprise and shock.
Let’s be honest: Climate change aside, California is at risk for some tremendous earthquakes in the next hundred years. One way or the other, there is a high probability that disaster prevention & relief will be needed in coastal California. The better we plan for it now, the less it will cost later. Sure, someone stands to profit from disaster preparations. But sure as shooting, there will be many more financial vultures picking through the rubble post-disaster.
“Well, see, the climatologists have a vested interest”
See: climategate
Thanks for the advice Dalilama.
SallyStrange:
In comment #162 Nerd of Redhead wrote:
“And what if you’re too late, and Florida becomes a reef?” as justification for drastic near-term policy goals.
To counter that question with one of equal polarity, I wrote in comment #165:
“What if the state of California is swallowed up into the Pacific sometime in the next 250 years (very plausible, but no citation for you, you should have heard by now)?
By your reasoning, we must mass evacuate all Californians because the potential benefits of not removing human populations from the peninsula (avoidance of human suffering and death) outweigh the enormous costs.”
I wrote this to show that his reasoning (that drastic mitigatory actions ought to be taken now on the basis that such actions have a high likelihood of resulting in net benefits vs. a more gradual action scenario) was not bulletproof.
SallyStrange, I can see how my repeated request for Nerd to respond to that comment could be viewed as a dishonest gotcha. However, if you look at the context of my requests, you may come to a different conclusion (i.e. that I am merely trying to demonstrate that taking an absolutist stance on the need for drastic mitigation action is unjustified).
You wrote: “But, you know, nice job making denialists look like foolish liars who think that other people are as gullible as they are.”
I will leave it at that.
What about climategate?
alwayscurious:
I agree with everything you said.
Your comments fall perfectly in line with a gradualist approach to policy, including climate policy.
You mean that nontroversy manufactured by denialists that, despite it being nothing but a quotemine that worked the conspiracy theorists into a lather, got play in the Librul Media? That one? Are you actually citing that as an example proving that your hare-brained conspiracy theorizing is right? If so, hilarious. You clowns really never do change.
Oh, you mean the stolen e-mails that showed nothing but science happening, unless quotemined by liars and bullshitters?
Sea level is rising, as I evidenced above, and Florida is flat barely above sea level. I proposed nor agreed with any policy, other than not ignoring the potential problem. You want to ignore all problems for political reasons, which I read as you don’t want your tax money being spent on preparing for what is happening.
And these expenses may raise the already-high cost of living in California, which in turn will motivate people to live elsewhere or bear some of the increased risk for choosing to live & work where they do.
I don’t see the need for a vast evacuation in light of climate change: planning will reduce the climate-change–>increasing ocean levels–>increasing damage/uninhabitability to vulnerable lowlands chain. If people do evacuate en mass, it’ll be as the result of a big disaster and they simply won’t all return after it’s over. (See New Orleans population) (See typical human behavior)
Just as corporatists who claim that anthropogenic global warming is not occurring, climate modellers – mathematicians and physicists who earn income and status by modelling the earth’s climate and linking model outcomes to policy and human well-being – have incentive (in the form of income and status) to demonstrate or argue that their efforts have applied significance.
Acknowledge this, you must.
Awww, isn’t that precious. First torwolf ironically requesting a thread ban on nerd for repetition. And now torwolf’s pretending to be a mild-mannered, reasonable human being. For those just popping in, a refresher on torwolf’s contributions so far:
I think we should all take torwolf’s advice from that last bit, honestly. But then, we all tend to be all too willing to waste our times in unintelligent debates with people like torwolf. Morbid entertainment.
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
torwolf:
My #180 was a fucking joke.
Florida has entirely different problems than California and they are much more urgent. Comparing the problems those two face is like comparing oranges & grapes.
Nerd:
I am not willing to pay 25-30% more for my energy by subsidizing renewables and associated infrastructure so that 10% of my jurisdictions energy supply can be met with carbon-free energy. That is what it would take in developed nations/regions with high population densities and without access to large damned waterways.
False equivalence as usual. Evidence that the amount of conflict of interest that we KNOW factors into the denialism is comparable to the level of conflict of interest on the other side, or STFU.
(You do realize that this argument is equally valid against ALL science right? And that it is bullshit, because science rewards good and well-based innovations, and doesn’t necessarily reward blindly abiding by the status quo nearly as much?)
Ogvorbis… I was not responding to you…
I must acknowledge nothing, presented by someone with their head up their ass, ignoring reality.
torwolf
And of course, whining about the money. Always with the whining about the money.
Fuck off, you selfish twit.
Who gives a shit what you are willing to pay? You are one insignificant data point. If you use up all the energy now, there is none left for future generations. Unless you have the secret to controlled fusion in your back pocket…
torwolf:
Didn’t say you were. I was just noting that I made at ridiculous and obvious joke. And then you made exactly the same point. Without joking.
anteprepro:
As PZ notes in his commenting rules:
“This is a rude blog. Expect rough handling.
Justice is more important than civility. But aspire to be charitable at first.”
If you review the sequence of comments, including those of anteprepro and Nerd of Redhead, you will see that rude comments were made by all.
anteprepro, your compilation of my rude comments only hold water when taken out of the context of what you and Nerd had written.
You are cheap and dishonest.
Have you seen the price of gas recently? Or heating fuel? You already are paying more. Why? Because we have already run out of $10 a barrel oil. We have run out of $50 a barrel oil. Eventually, we will run out of $1,000 a barrel oil. Doesn’t it make sense to subsidize renewable energy so that, when we do run out of $1,000 a barrel oil, there will be an alternative? Or multiple alternatives?
First: I’m afraid “rude” doesn’t include ableist insults and commands for someone to go kill themself (“stick a fork in an electric socket”).
Second: As far as I can tell, your current false veneer of politeness is only to help sneak under the radar of the new entrants into the thread.
Third: The examples of your “rudeness” are also tellingly and entertainingly inept.
Ogvorbis.
We did not make the same point.
You wrote that climate scientists are biased and that “denialists” are not. You say that this was a joke. I take this to mean that in fact it is the other way around (“denialists” are biased, climate scientists are not).
I wrote that both are biased. You are correct: I am not joking.
I am also correct in stating that you suck.
torwolf
I see the libertarian has no faintest idea how much their current energy supplies are subsidized. Do you genuinely think coal and nuclear plants pay their own way?
torwolf
And you are a fuckwit, because scientists have nowhere near the level of conflict of interest on this issue as corporations. Both theoretically and observed.
Why, dear torwolf, is it that climate change denialism correlates so well with free market worship? Why do you think that is, torwolf?
Yes anteprepro, “whining about the money”.
I need food and shelter and I would prefer to enjoy the finer things in life at least once a week and I need to save so that I can enjoy my later years.
You are completely out of touch with reality by labelling those who incorporate costs into their reasoning and decision-making as “selfish”, as the vast majority of people in this world existing in economies where money is exchanged for goods and services don’t have enough to feed their children.
You remind me of myself… when I was 15 years old.
Did you read about the 3 post limit? And that you are well past said limit. And were past that before the kid gloves came off? There is no need to be charitable at this point. Your deceptions and unevidenced claims are there for all to see. Faux politeness is the way those who know they are engaging in deception have to hide behind. They believe in “freeze peach”, where their opinions are respected, oohed, and ahhed over, and accepted without complaint. Whereas this blog works with free speech, which means anything you say can and probably will be criticized, and when refuted, your honesty and integrity or lack thereof will show depending on how you react to your deceptions being exposed.
Ooh, selfish morally bankrupt person isn’t selfish in their mind. News at eleven.
anteprepro:
You wrote:
“First: I’m afraid “rude” doesn’t include ableist insults and commands for someone to go kill themself (“stick a fork in an electric socket”).”
Suggesting on a blog (particularly this one) that someone go stick a fork in an electrical outlet is not a command for that human being to go kill his/herself. Please. At most, a mild shock to the senses.
torwolf:
You are correct. Denialists are biased towards the economic well-being of those funding the think-tanks — mostly oil money. Scientists are biased towards following the evidence wherever it leads. And changing hypotheoses as more evidence is found. And being honest.
torwolf is gonna pay more for his energy regardless of what happens. But he’s willing to let millions die and suffer needlessly because he’s not willing or able to think through the implications of the science.
You are a fucking idiot still, torwolf. The point isn’t your personal money management: It is that you are completely unwilling to look at long-term benefits in exchange for short term, personal costs. You are whining about how your own wallet will suffer without concern for how much good that extra money will do. Not just for future you, but for everyone around you. You are a fucking myopic, selfish little shit just like every other obstructionist fucker who tries to do everything they can prevent from doing anything about the environment and climate.
And yes, people are starving still in the world. And? Am I proposing that we shouldn’t do anything about that either? Because I fully want that to stop being an issue as well. And I support measures that will give more funds to the government to provide the infrastructure to at least mitigate that in our country. Guess which brand of obstructionist fuckers are opposed to that as well, you disingenuous shitweasel?
And the ableist insults, torwolf?
Yeah, sure. Go fuck yourself.
This is a disingenuous argument:
Governments instituted fire code & fire departments because of people dying in fires. Yes it’s frustrating to be told something isn’t “up to code” and have to pay extra for the fix and pay for continuous additional protection. But historically we have tried the alternative, and it killed/crippled lots of people. Overall it doesn’t cost much because of the savings we’ve reaped. The things that actually cost governments money (provide poor returns) aren’t typically the things that small government yahoos actually talk about cutting.
Yep, mathematicians, statisticians, and scientists of all stripes want significance–statistical significance. And statistical significance is mostly meaningless unless the observed significance DOES something. Outcomes that are not significant are probably not outcomes worth fussing over. And how is this bad exactly? The exact identity of the outcome “doesn’t matter” as long as the processes that generated it are proper.
anteprepro:
If you look closely, you will see that many of the renewable energy policies and projects being implemented under the rationale of climate change mitigation are “free market”. Coal power plants are being converted to burn biomass, imported from regions without sustainable forestry practices. Forests are being converted into energy plantations to produce bio-ethanol and bio-diesel so that national targets for <5% renewable fuel content can be reached. Solar PV markets are mainly supplied by Chinese state-owned corporations that exploit domestic labour for profit. (sorry no citations for these, just type keywords into a search engine if you don't believe me).
People who say that policy actions should assess the trade-offs and realities of renewable energy (low power density) are not fuckwit denialists. You should be giving them more credit than that.
And for all those wondering why I wrote to Nerd "stick a fork in an electrical socket", please review his/her comments from the top. I find it remarkable that he/she is virtually unchecked by this community.
Nerd claims:
Oh, you mean the stolen e-mails that showed nothing but science happening, unless quotemined by liars and bullshitters?
Not so. There was a lot of stuff in the emails that were problematic. Phil Jones violated FOIA laws, for instance, but the statute of limitations had transpired on that violation. Trying to hide data was also shown. Also, there is a whole series where climate scientists discuss how to prevent publication of so called “Denialist” publications, including boycotting a journal that had published a “questionable” study. Now, I put questionable in quotations because I didn’t read the study, and have no way of knowing whether it was indeed questionable. However, it bothers me that scientists would conspire to stop skeptical publishing. In my view, the right response is to demonstrate how the study was wrong: not use strong arm tactics.
While Mike’s “Nature Trick” was absolved of knowable wrong-doing, I for one think it’s still in the uncertain area. Certainly, Mann spliced the instrumental record onto his reconstruction and back-cast. I read that the 2nd order derivative was smooth around the join, which strongly implies it was made to look continuous. Real Scientists are concerned about the presentation of this data. Whether all this business is intentional, I won’t speculate. Let’s say I’m skeptical about the intentions.
I believe in science too Ogvorbis. But you are naive in believing that scientists do not have bias, especially when it comes to making policy recommendations/conclusions based largely on incomplete information. There is nothing scientific about a conclusion like the strange one above points out that, for instance, “millions (will) die and suffer needlessly because (people are) not willing or able to think through the implications of the science.”
alwayscurious:
I may be reading you wrong, but are you implying that the conclusions of the IPCC are based solely on statistical significance of their climate models?
torwolf:
Yes, which is one of the money things that illustrate how right-wingers are such utter hypocrites on the issue.
Torwolf now justifying commands for Nerd to go kill himself with “he had it comin'”. Keep digging, fucker.
That’s a strawman.
Not As Biased As Corooratists =/= Not Biased.
Just like:
Biased =/= As Biased as Corporatists
This is the person who apparently out-experts the experts, ladies and gentlemen! Give torwolf a hand!
Yawn, conspiracy theorists showing their true colors, lying, bullshitting and presenting absolutely no evidence to back up their assertions. Which are treated skeptically, as they should be.
alwaysCurious claims:
In case the system doesn’t do it automatically. Sorry about not closing the blockquote.
See, right there is a major problem. You believe in science. Science is not a belief system. Science is gathering information, information which can be seen and judged by others, and then trying to figure out what it means. I accept that science provides the tools to understand the natural world.
And science is self-correcting. Every scientist wants to make a name for him- or herself. Which means that every publication, including the publications showing how and why the earth is warming, is immediately gone over with a fine-tooth comb as other scientists look for errors. And sometimes they find errors and write rebuttal papers. Which are then subjected to the same scrutiny. This is done through peer-reviewed publications and post-publication reviews. There is no conspiracy to create the idea of global warming. As was shown with Piltdown man, Niobrara man, cold fusion, and lots of other mistakes and hoaxes, reality will win out. So I trust in the conclusions of scientists studying the climate and publishing their papers.
I do not trust the papers coming out of The Heartland Institute and other think tanks financed by Exxon/Mobile, and BP, and the Koch brothers. Not because of the funding (though the funding alone is enough to make me suspicious (just as I was suspicious of all of those studies telling us how garlic was a wonder drug which came out of a garlic industry-financed study)), but because their papers are not presented to peer-review publications, are not presented at conferences, are not subjected to the brutal and uncompromising review, study and rebuttal of real scientific papers.
And yes, if we, politically, ignore the implications of global warming, millions will die. Bangladesh will virtually disappear. So will hundreds of islands — populated islands. Florida will shrink, possibly becoming, yet again, a shallow-water carbonate platform. Were we to act on what we know now, profits for some companies (mostly energy companies) would suffer. If we do not act on what we know now, millions will die and most of the largest cities in the world will suffer periodic or permanent flooding. Your concern for corporate profits is noted.
anteprepro:
To repeat myself:
“Suggesting on a blog (particularly this one) that someone go stick a fork in an electrical outlet is not a command for that human being to go kill his/herself. Please. At most, a mild shock to the senses.”
It is a joke. And you can do the same, you miserable wretch. There is no reasoning with you.
How is stating that scientists have bias a strawman? It is a factual statement. There is no empirical evidence that GHG emissions of 450 ppm will result in catastrophic impacts on hydrology and humanity. That is also a factual statement.
The outcomes and quantified uncertainties of a model, based on a mixture of informed assumptions, direct measurements, paleoclimatic proxies, and omitted variables known to effect the earth’s climate system (the sun, clouds), are to be interpreted skeptically.
torwolf:
We get that. You intended it as a joke. Your intent does not matter.
“Just joking” isn’t a defense. I know it was a joke. It is not an acceptable one. House rules, not mine.
Because no one is stating otherwise, you fucking illiterate. The AMOUNT of bias matters. There is no reason to believe that scientists are unbiased. But there is no reason to think that they come anywhere near the amount of bias that denialists display either. There is no reason to think that their collective bias should have a significant impact on how trustworthy their conclusions are. Because, again, they are incentivized to innovate, not submit to authority and tradition. Just as we can trust that there is no Darwinist conspiracy because of that sweet, sweet evolutionary biology tenure and grant money, the same trust applies here. Unless evidence is given otherwise.
Ogvorbis,
When one says that they “believe in science” it can be interpreted as being synonymous with saying that they “endorse the approach science takes to understanding the world.” Are you really so simple minded? You waste everyone’s time.
Again, you are naive to believe that the peer-review process results in truth-seeking behavior. Have you ever heard of the phrase “publish or perish”. It is used to describe the mentality that one must have to survive in academia, where one must publish as frequently as possible to gain job security and continued funding.
As is anything you claim, assert, provide no evidence for, or pompously attempt to twist reality.
I just love how Ed and Torwolf prove the points in the OP so well. You two are a fine example of arrogant and duplicitous folks attempting to intimidate us with your bullshit. Yawn, been there, done that, you are still and will always be subjected to extreme skepticism, as you should be.
Ogvorbis asserts:
Science is not a belief system.
Not to quibble, science is the best thing we have going, but most certainly it is a belief system. As an example, you have to believe what you observe. We could be living in the Matrix, you know. I don’t think it’s particularly likely, but there you have it.
Regarding peer review, did you read the Wegman paper? It turns out a lot of the paleo studies came from a very small team of scientists. When someone who was not part of the team came along, he found issues with the study. There are still issues surrounding the data.
Also, were you aware 30,000 people in Great Britain died of cold last year? I wonder how many of those you can attribute to expensive energy, and of those on account of Britain’s reaction to global warming.
There is a chance you are wrong about global warming. My personal view is that there was an “Aha” moment, CO2 and feedbacks can increase temperatures. From this, premature conclusions were made, when in fact climate is looking much more complex than the simple view. Certainly, the hiatus has many looking for an explanation. So if you are wrong, then how are you going to feel? Are you going to feel cruel for needlessly increasing the costs of energy, leading to death for some?
If you are wrong, I hope you feel really bad, because these deaths are happening now, not in some possible future. If you and others are right, I’ll be eating some humble pie. It just doesn’t seem all that likely to me at this point.
Meanwhile, Al Gore doesn’t seem too concerned about increased sea levels, having bought homes near sea level in San Francisco and Florida.
You think that looking at evidence that shows that disruption in food production, massive displacement of populations, to name the most obvious possible consequences of unchecked climate change, and concluding that this will likely lead to needless suffering and death has nothing to do with science, huh?
Interesting.
Indeed. So, let’s just wait until we hit 450 to figure that one out. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, right. That.
torwolf:
Ah. Publishing papers is part of their job so they must all be lying.
But the people at The Heartland Institute publish papers (not reviewed papers, but the do shove it out there) as part of their job, but, because it is not peer-reviewed, we can trust it?
anteprepro:
You must know by now that we are not debating AGW. I’m on board: we are most likely causing 50-95% of the observed warming. What we are debating is the IPCC consensus that humanity must stabilize the earth’s CO2eq concentration at ~450 ppm to avert catastrophic climate change.
You are equating the verifiable scientific evidence supporting modern evolutionary theory with the verifiable scientific evidence supporting the claim that climate change will be catastrophic if we do not stabilize the earth’s CO2eq concentration at ~450 ppm, or better yet, that mitigatory actions taken by any nation or group of nations will serve to stabilize CO2eq and actually stabilize the earth’s climate, which is of course driven by many other factors, many of which are not modelled by the IPCC.
Consider the points of evidence supporting evolutionary theory. Now compare them with the points of evidence supporting the catastrophic CO2eq threshold that has been determined based on the incomplete models and judgments of a group of climate modellers or related popular national policy conclusions.
Not a good comparison, how do you not agree?
Ogvorbis, stop mischaracterizing my views. To urge caution when interpreting the conclusions of recommendations of scientists is not the same as calling them all liars.
Your mind is unhealthy and you are indeed still failing at being human. Get some counselling. You are miserable.
torwolf
Last year?
chigau:
Do you have nothing intelligent to contribute to this conversation? I at least supplement my insults with reasoned arguments.
Sorry, until you show something the equivalent of the babble, that we accept without evidence, then science is a reality or evidence based system of gaining knowledge. Now, where is the belief when you have evidenced conclusions? That is where you lying is exposed.
You have nothing intelligent to contribute. Nothing but liberturd slogans, and denialist presuppositional fuckwittery, none of which is intelligent or evidence based.
Ed:
Which is how science works.
Yes, in some areas the weather was colder than average. It was that way in the Northeast United States. However, in the American Southwest, it was the warmest winter on record. And Australia had one of the hottest summers on record. When someone refers to global warming, or global climate change, they refer to the globe. The world. Weather is not climate.
Energy prices have nothing to do with global warming. We have run out of $10 per barrel oil. We have run out of $50 per barrel oil. We are running out of $100 per barrel oil. And, someday soon, we will run out of $1,000 per barrel oil. More people trying to buy something that is a fixed commodity leads to inflation. Duh.
Al Gore has nothing to do with the reality of global warming.
Go fuck yourself, torwolf.
I think we should propose something like a Gore’s Law when it comes to these discussions. When an AGW denier cites or denigrates Al Gore, as if he’s anything but a messenger, it’s proof that they’ve lost the fucking debate.
Definitely. I’ve never seen Gore’s movie even. But all the denialists claim I have and believe it without questioning it. I have other sources than a politician available.
For CO2, electric generation is the big producer, not gas.
Meanwhile, the whole “peak oil” thing has been going on for such a long time, as long as I can remember.
I trust Wikipedia more than I trust you: go read up on shale oil in the US, before making such ridiculous claims. There are trillions of barrels of recoverable shale oi. Estimated cost per barrel by Rand, < $50.00 after real production is going.
Since no link was supplied, another unevidenced assertion to be skeptical about. Tsk, so typical of those who never learned how to use evidence….
I have noticed the deniers are all over Al Gore. To me, and to most people, he’s notable for being the loser in the Supreme Court mandated election of 2000. It’s like the way the homophobes keep trotting out NAMBLA, an organization I wouldn’t have heard of except for the religious right. AGW deniers have Gore, homophobes have NAMBLA, normal people have reality. It all depends on what’s important to a particular individual.
2013 was the fourth warmest year on record, per global average….
If this comment was made in response solely to Obvorbis’ ‘nym without prior knowledge of his history from multiple postings on previous threads, then I urge you to apologize immediately and go read those old threads.
If this comment was made with full knowledge of that history? Then fuck you.
Along with Hansen, who turned off the AC at during a congressional hearing on AGW, this is your poster boy. The man’s made millions because of alarmists. What’s this go to do with his congressional run.
Meanwhile, I see a lot of excuses on believer’s part. Climate-gate showed nothing. Peer review is good (except Paleo wasn’t really peer-reviewed, and all the Paleo reconstructions are, in my estimation, suspect because they feed off each other in data and methodology). The Hiatus is a real problem. If it’s natural variability, perhaps natural variability caused the run up that caused the big scare in the 1990s. If the heat transports operate better, AKA Trenberth, perhaps excess heat will be absorbed by the oceans, which have a specific heat content on order of hundreds of thousands of times larger than the atmosphere. Is it volcanoes, according to Mann? Or global dimming from, now get this, Chinese coal burning? Who knows.
No one knows. Maybe all of these are wrong, and the actual problem is that the feedback loop is messed up. The 2X multiplier on CO2 from excess H20 is wrong: there is no multiplier, and yes, things will warm up, but not catastrophically.
Isn’t that the best result?
Nerd of a Redhead, #144:
Just to be clear, hope you’re not mistaking me for a climate-change denier. I hesitate to post here, because shortly after #144 a couple denialist twits started blowing up the comments. But to be clear, I’m not one of them.
The part I quibbled with was not its truth, but whether a school child could establish it for himself or herself. Adults are doing peer-reviewed research on this; school kids could not take their job. It’s a minor quibble, as I acknowledged later in the thread. And in any case, I copped to misunderstanding your original statement anyway.
Only in the mind of denialist fools.
The best result will be the one that happens, and your inane idiocy won’t change the facts. You have nothing cogent to offer. Your feeble attempts to sow confusion aren’t working, as AGW has been posted here ever since SciBlog days, with the denialists losing each and every time, and gaining no converts due to their extreme idiocy.
No sale.
Let me introduce you to the Ad Hominem fallacy.
Oh, and I conclude, not believe, AGW is happening, just like with any scientific endeavor.
You’re not the first person to notice this Swampfoot, and you won’t be the last. The tendency to attack Gore as though that means anything reminds me of creationists who attack Darwin or Theists who attack Dawkins, as though Evolution an Atheism were set up like religions and if you topple the “Pope” you somehow topple the ideas. You know for someone who claims to understand and like science, Ed seems to indulge in very religious thinking
You’ll also find out how dirty it is, and how the difficulty and expense in extracting and refining it is another part of the peak oil argument.
Gosh, what if climate change isn’t as pressing an issue as the deniers say it is, and we wean ourselves off of fossil fuels and create a cleaner and more sustainable society for nuthin’?
Then it’s still a pretty lazy and hacky ad hominem.
2013 was the fourth warmest year on record, per global average….
And how long have records been kept? Why do you feel this is so important?
To me what’s important are the effects of warming, not meaningless stats such as these.
Someone thinks Bangledesh will be under-water: now that, if true, is a meaningful stat. Note, I bring this up only due to the silly stat above. It’s like “I woke up this morning, and I felt worse than I’ve ever felt.” No problem if you feel OK twenty minutes later, and you had a bad night’s sleep.
I know how “dirty” it is with today’s technology, mostly on particulate matter. That wasn’t the point. The point was the twin inaccurate statements about oil extraction costs and running out of reserves. Both are wrong.
I was not referencing any particular conclusions or reports. Scientists don’t tend to publish data if they don’t find anything significant. Significance can come in multiple forms, but statistical significance is often the minimum.
Let me introduce you to the Ad Hominem fallacy.
Oh the irony. Isn’t that what this entire post is about? Linking skeptics with conspiracy theorists? No causation, simple association.
It is evidence.
Which you deny. The effects are being seen and some of those effects are consistent with the better models.
Nope, it isn’t a stat. You have no idea of data and evidence, that is obvious to any observer, much less those trained in science. The models indicate sea level rising as the glaciers and ice caps melt. We see evidence of those happening with the opening of the Arctic ocean a year or two ago, and the glaciers in Alaska have been receding are and are also evidence. There are indications that the Greenland ice sheet is warming and melting. All evidence consistent with AGW.
You aren’t a true skeptic, believing in evidence, but you are a True Believer™ that AGW is wrong. No evidence to back up your assertions and belief. Nothing but attitude, ridicule, arrogance, bullying, intimidation, and other forms of harassment.
Why aren’t you publishing in the peer reviewed scientific literature? That’s because you know you don’t have the evidence….
The tendency to attack Gore as though that means anything reminds me of creationists who attack Darwin or Theists who attack Dawkins, as though Evolution an Atheism were set up like religions and if you topple the “Pope” you somehow topple the ideas. You know for someone who claims to understand and like science, Ed seems to indulge in very religious thinking
Remember, we don’t want ad-hominems here. Up your game. You are as guilty of the supposed original crime of guilt by association.
Which, as I just pointed out, is what this entire thread is about. Guilt by association. If you re-read comment 145, that was the point.
Let me introduce you to another term: Hypocrisy.
@242 Ed
So California made a choice that you don’t like because it requires spending money now rather than later. The United States as a whole has been very reluctant to do anything to improve its carbon footprint despite international pressure. So to expand your example, it’s more like banning wood burning stoves in a small city block while the entire city continues with wood burning stoves…meanwhile the rest of the state has agreed to replacing their stoves as much as possible.
Ed Barbar @271
I see the AGW denialist doesn’t even know that in 2000 Gore was not running for Congress but was running for President. It shows the level of knowledge of most climate change denialists.
Climategate (I detest the -gate neologism) showed that some denialists where not above breaking the law in hope of finding something which could support their hatred of reality. As usual, the denialists got a whole lot of nothing for their efforts.
Here we see the same Argument from Incredulity that creationists use to try to “falsify” evolution. Climate denialism is on the same intellectual level as believing in a 6000 year old GODDIDIT Earth.
And if you wish really really really hard, Santa Claus will bring you a pony for Christmas. But don’t start building a stable quite yet.
You must be right, chigau–he’s 16 years old.
LOL. It’s not meaningless. What it means is what it says: 2013 is in the top 4 hottest years on record. 12 of the 13 hottest years on record occurred since 2000. Since 1980, every decade has been hotter than the last.
You disdain the fact and claim to care about its consequences. The lie is rendered unconvincing by the inherent contradiction.
If you have specific objections to the record-keeping or temperature reconstructions that gave rise to those “meaningless stats” then by all means present them. But don’t be surprised if claiming they’re meaningless just gets you laughed out of the room.
Wow. Yeah, I bet Al Gore of all people is betting on not doing anything about climate change, and I bet he also intends to live for another eleventy years. Either that or he’s stupid enough to believe it’ll happen overnight like it’s a fucking flash flood, so he really is betraying his own deepest, darkest, super-secret feelings that he really isn’t too concerned about it. Makes sense to me.
That’s you claiming to be scientific, but really being preuppositional. You aren’t scientific. You can’t pretend to be scientist when you are dealing with real scientists. They just smile at your bravado and ignorance.
Funnily enough, I came to the conclusion that climate change is an urgent problem without ever seeing Al Gore’s film.
I see the AGW denialist doesn’t even know that in 2000 Gore was not running for Congress but was running for President.
Sorry, I do that a lot on small points that aren’t germain to the entire reasoning. Yes, president! Not congress. I admit my errors, so no need to read into it more than that.
Climategate (I detest the -gate neologism) showed that some denialists where not above breaking the law
It did not show that. It showed only that one individual was willing to violate the law. That there was more than one person is speculation. My speculation is that the individual was so upset with the shenanigans going on, that he broke the law. And, it is widely suspected this person was an insider, and probably had even more information than was released. Now, if true, who is the fool?
And if you wish really really really hard, Santa Claus will bring you a pony for Christmas. But don’t start building a stable quite yet.
I’m an atheist, so sorry, you are off your smug mark.
Well, lots of evidence for THAT.
Nerd sez:
Look, until you can back up your claim that temps are higher than predicted (and from a reliable source, with a data, and reference), I’m done responding to you. There isn’t any point.
So what, is my question. In the last (100 years?) of globally recorded temperatures, one of them has to be the fourth hottest. My point is what are the consequences. I know of no consequences.
I’m supposed to be impressed that you’re an atheist? Wowzers, you really are wishing hard for that pony.
Premise 1: The peak oil thing has been going on as long as you remember.
Premise 2: You’re obviously not a scientist.
Premise 3: Peak oil theory didn’t get much mainstream media attention until the late 80s to mid 90s.
Conclusion: you’re actually probably in your early 20s. And I won’t insult teenagers by claiming that your brand of self-absorbed idiocy is endemic to them.
The fact that all of the top ten years for record-breaking heat have occurred in the past 20 years suggests that there is a warming trend. If there were no warming trend, we’d expect to see record-breaking years for heat and cold scattered randomly throughout the record.
Next question?
alwayscurious:
I didn’t say that. What I said is that even assuming AGW in its worst form, CA’s efforts will not benefit Californians. To make a dent in CO2 concentrations, you need the whole world to sign up.
Let’s go further, and assume the world will move to non-CO2 producing electric generation methods. Explain how spending money now will stop CA from spending money later. Explain how this is in the interests of Californians.
Last I checked, California is part of whole world.
Are you one of those people who say that “our votes don’t count” because lots of people vote? I actually hope so, because I don’t want people like you voting against everyone’s best interests … and, I guess, against reality itself.
Wiki says CA is the 12th largest economy in the world in 2012.
But let’s make this about all the brown foreigners somewhere else….
Of course, saying that the last 20 years of the record are warmer than the previous 80 is a so what statement to me, but how much do you believe?
I want to know what you personally are willing to do about this. Give up your car? Stop heating your home? Not have children? Let’s have it.
Typical asshole who thinks carbon dioxide is the only AGW gas, and that there aren’t any other benefits from alternatives to fossil fuels. Not making your case True Believer™. Nothing but more bullshit from a bullshit artist.
No, lets have you fading into the bandwidth like the other AGW denialist losers, especially those claiming political problems. Who have no solution other than don’t do anything. Which is why nobody is paying any attention to your whining, posturing, and your bullshit fuckwittery.
My my, a lukewarmer and a full blown denialist. First to the points of the denialist.
You say temperatures have been flat for 12 or 17 years. Have you ever wondered why the start years are always 1997-8 or 2002. Those were big El Nino years, and so much warmer than the norm. And the last decade has seen more La Nina years–cooler than the norm. Start from an abnormally warm year and end in a series of cold ones and what have you shown? Only that a cooler than normal year now is as warm as a very, very warm year a decade and a half ago. Others have shown this in a lot more detail. Foster and Rahmstorf looked at ENSO (El Nino vs. La Nina), volcanism and solar activity since 1979 (to include the satellite datasets) and found that if you correct for the effects of these three known important forcings, then warming due to greenhouse gasses continues apace. This is seen in all datasets. Moreover, several recent papers have shown much more rapid warming of the deep oceans due to wind-driven mixing in the equatorial Pacific (this is related to La Nina). And Cowtan and Way just showed that the poles have been warming much faster during this period, a fact that partially explains why 2007 and 2012 showed record decline of sea ice. The models work. They work amazingly well. And if they did not, it would not negate the fact that it is undeniably warming, that ice is melting, that the weather is changing destructively (drought, floods, etc.). All it would mean is that we are flying blind into the catastrophe we are creating.
A question, Ed: You say you believe in the free market. OK. So why not accept the science and propose free market solutions to climate change? Do you really think the free market is so weak that it has to be protected from the truth of anthropogenic climate change?
Now to Torwolf: Lindzen and Aunt Judy? Really? Lindzen hasn’t even published a real science paper in a decade. His effort with Choi was an embarrassment. I don’t even consider him a scientist since I caught him lying like a rug to an audience of nonscientists (the trope that Mars is warming too…).
And Aunt Judy? Good grief. I can’t even read the crap she writes. Aunt Judy exhibits no understanding of global climate. None. I’ve never come away from anything she’s written and said, “I understand that better.” Aunt Judy is like Ed–she projects her own ignorance onto the real scientists around her.
Me, I’ll go with the scientists who are still publishing and trying to figure out how the climate actually works–and over 97% of them say we are warming the climate and that it is a threat.
Ed: “Of course, saying that the last 20 years of the record are warmer than the previous 80 is a so what statement to me, but how much do you believe?”
Spoken like a man who has never learned any math.
Oh, I love how predictable you are. Evidence is against you? Change the subject and try to set up an ad hominem attack.
Quibbling over mitigation strategies when your real objection is that you think scientists are lying or mistaken about the negative consequences of unchecked climate change? Typical denialist: they tend to switch back and forth between mutually contradictory points depending on the direction of the conversation. Sometimes climate change isn’t happening, and sometimes it is but it isn’t humans’ fault, and sometimes it is but it won’t be a problem. Which scenario they favor depends on who they’re talking to. If there were actual science behind their objections, I’d expect to see far more consistency in the objections they raise.
As for CA: increasing public transit, switching from fossil fuel to renewable energy, retrofitting housing stock and industrial facilities for energy efficiency, etc., all sound like positives. Spending money can be… wait for it… a good thing, provided the money is spent on something that returns dividends. It’s money that would be well spent regardless.
What freemarketeers like Ed ignore is that whoever comes up with a solution to this problem is going to make an ocean super freighter full of money selling it to the rest of the world. CA may do very well out of this. And Ed will just complain that they are hypocrites.
What a ridiculously dishonest and invalid juxtaposition we have here.
As if the only two choices are status quo as it is and back to the stone age apocalyptic giving up of all modern conveniences.
Ed Barbar:
Stop trying to reason with these people.
You wrote:
“What I said is that even assuming AGW in its worst form, CA’s efforts will not benefit Californians. To make a dent in CO2 concentrations, you need the whole world to sign up.”
In response, consciousness razor wrote:
“Last I checked, California is part of whole world.”
Everyone take a second to let this reply sink in, and consider – if it is not already obvious to you – what is meant by “To make a dent in CO2 concentrations, you need the whole world to sign up.” Consider Chinese coal power capacity growth over the last decade: http://www.netl.doe.gov/File%20Library/Research/Coal/Reference%20Shelf/ncp.pdf
SallyStrange wrote:
“The lie is rendered unconvincing by the inherent contradiction.”
This merely shows that SallyStrange is still learning how to form proper sentences.
She is willing to characterize someone’s noting of the fact the temperature records have only been kept reliably, using “modern” instrumentation for a matter of decades, not centuries (the scale of climatic dynamics) as a “lie”.
Very dumb.
SallyStrange is a dumb dumb.
Ed Barbar:
One thing – speaking about peak oil as though it isn’t going to occur is not wise. We can all agree that it will run out eventually and that humanity has to start making strategic investments in renewables (and nuclear for some of those here who have though about and understand the nature of electricity generation and distribution). I say “strategic” to mean investments that do support alternative economic systems that are based on the biophysical limits of renewables.
Oh, I love how predictable you are. Evidence is against you? Change the subject and try to set up an ad hominem attack.
Are you one of the proprietors of the web site? If so, I’m waiting for an answer to your hypocrisy, of posting an ad hominem study, and adding your smug umbrage about ad hominem attacks. Don’t worry, your group think cluck clucks are all in line, unable, or unwilling to understand simple reasoning.
You have no reasoning, just fear. You make no evidenced points, and do a lot of handwaving to say that scientists, who are much, much smarter than you ( they aren’t liberturds), don’t know what they are doing, or the limits of what they do.
All you have is bombast, ego, bad attitude, rhetorical fuckwittery, and other forms of harassment. You have no arguments, but you think you do.
Who gives a shit what you say. You aren’t making any solid arguments either. Attitude and other fuckwittery is your forte. Anything but real evidenced scientific arguments.
I’m not changing my position, I’m saying “Let’s assume you are right, how does it make sense.” It doesn’t make sense. Come on, make it make sense. What’s the world you live in that makes sense?
Don’t duck and cover with insults, let’s have it. So far, it’s “public transportation.” What’s this retrofitting industry for energy efficiency? The result of expensive energy is exporting manufacturing to China, which is less energy efficient. You do know that despite all the mitigation efforts of Britain, they are producing more CO2 when adjusted for the increased CO2 from exported manufacturing?
Offer a sound economic model. At present, you seem like the token female voice in a bunch juvenile rantings about “If only.”
Ed Barbar:
One thing – speaking about peak oil as though it isn’t going to occur is not wise.
Nuclear does not solve the peak oil problem. Oil has the advantage that you can put it in a car, a boat, a plane, and it doesn’t weigh much and you can convert it into doing something. I have faith that someday some other technology will be able to do the same thing: fuel cells maybe, batteries less likely, hydrogen and methane are too small, but who knows. Technology is a wonderful thing.
I’m not worried at all about using up the vast stores of oil we have right here in the US, except for the luddites on this website and their ilk. Something new will come along, and it will be great, just like 100 years ago the auto was great.
a_ray…
You wrote:
“And Aunt Judy? Good grief. I can’t even read the crap she writes. Aunt Judy exhibits no understanding of global climate. None. I’ve never come away from anything she’s written and said, “I understand that better.” Aunt Judy is like Ed–she projects her own ignorance onto the real scientists around her.”
“Aunt Judy exhibits no understanding of global climate” – a_ray…
Judith Curry has a PhD in climatology and holds a chair at the School of Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles related to the climate.
You discredit yourself in writing something so fantastical.
Judith Curry is one of the few climate scientists in this world who is willing to acknowledge that climate models – like all macro-models that attempt to encompass the myriad of interdependent variables that influence complex systems – are imperfect. The more one increases the temporal and spatial scale of the model, the lower the accuracy. In the case of climate models, they are filled with assumptions and proxies that have not been “scientifically” validated, if you take “scientific” to imply “derived from direct observation and quantification”.
It is hubristic to believe 100% in climate models and irresponsible to develop policies anchored in them. AGW is occurring. Will it destroy the planet if we do not take action? That is a completely different matter. As a precaution, should we take action? Sure. To what degree? That is the ultimate question, one that government’s, environmental NGOs, and the majority of funded scientists have answered “to a very high degree”. Governments have implemented carbon trading schemes, direct subsidies for large-scale renewable energy, biofuel blending policies, etc., all at great cost to their citizens. And for what? China and India continue to expand coal and the share of renewable energy in total primary energy supply is still less than 10%.
This is what it means to reason.
And to believe in the doom of the planet with continued fossil fuel use (fossil fuels that fuel >75% of our energy needs, including the electrical energy needed to maintain this thread) without drastic action, investment, and sacrifice in the short-term is what I argue to represent the problem with the autistic scientism that has come to dominate the realm of public policy. As long as the issue is quantitized and incorporated into a model, the supporters of the outcomes of the model can capture the ears of the masses. Kind of like what happened with free trade economics.
Disappointing.
I considered it, and now have reconsidered it … and I still don’t see a point anywhere. What do you think was meant by that? Does it only work if the whole world does it simultaneously? Or do you not believe California is part of the whole world?
That is a different matter. Destroying the planet requires things like Death Stars and shit. I bet AGW won’t cause that. So you’re probably right.
Fuck you, for insulting autistic people, asshole.
Ed Barbar:
Your “faith” in an energy miracle is careless. You have to at least come up with a plausible technology.
The only current potential technology that you give credit to is fuel cells – those require electricity to produce the hydrogen through hydrolysis. As I said, in the most optimistic case, nuclear fission with fuel recycling will be a possible major electron provider in the future. But even this approach has material limits.
There is no indication, after decades of research and trillions of research dollars, that nuclear fusion (the only other major potential future energy provider) is going to become operational.
“Technology is a wonderful thing.”, you wrote. Yes, it is. And as you know it has been based almost entirely on fossil energy since the dawn of the industrial revolution. It is what gives us the food we eat, the computers we type on, and the civilization and education we benefit from, among other things. To assume that a replacement for fossil fuels will be found without giving any suggestions and alluding to stupid phrases like that is pretty dumb, I have to say.
And here I thought you were the one other commenter in this shitty web niche that was capable of being reasonable about this issue.
With China and India combined pushing out 2X to 3X CO2 by 2050 compared to Europe and the US combined, I would say to make a dent you have to get others involved.
Here is a great video from Richard S. Muller:
Refute this first
Incorporate it into your thinking, and then spout out about how “public transportation” is going to solve the issues (if you believe, I don’t).
I thought you didn’t like models that predict the future. And here you think something is going to happen. What if it doesn’t? What are you going to do to help your great grandchildren?
Who gives a shit compared to a peer reviewed scientific paper…
Sure. They should be. How exactly do you think that’s supposed to be an argument against Californians (or whoever) doing it too?
You be reasonable by this criteria:
1) Why did you originally post here?
2) How is that going? (not well, nobody gives a shit about your thoughts)
3) If not well, why the fuck are you still here?
It is important to recognize the cognitive limits of those with autism if autistics are indeed influencing decision-making processes that affect us all. If you consider psychology a science, then you should pay attention to what has been learned about the limits of the autistic mind and its prevalence in academia (see reference below).
Baron-Cohen et al. 2001 – The Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ): Evidence from Asperger Syndrome/High-Functioning Autism, Males and Females, Scientists and Mathematicians
Dapretto et al. 2005 – Understanding emotions in others: mirror neuron dysfunction in children with autism spectrum disorders. Nature Neuroscience 9: 28-30
@Ed Barbar, #311
1. You can be named “Sally” without being female
2. You can be named “a_ray_in_dilbert_space”, “nerd of redhead”, “consciousness razor”, or any other name without being male
3. Even if all the writings were in fact rantings rantings how would that make them “juvenile”. Young is not a synonym for “I think you’re wrong.”
4. Even if all the writings were dependent on unproven premises (“if only…”), how would that be relevant? Does your writing here depend only on premises you have proven in this thread?
5. For thinking the age or sex or gender of any commenter is at all relevant to the conversation,
Fuck you.
“cognitive limits”?!
So, high functioning autistics are inferior to the neurotypicals who don’t have such “limits”?
Fuck you, torwolf.
Have you apologized to Ogvorbis yet?
Yes, Crip Dyke,
How dare anyone think that age plays any role at all in the knowledge and wisdom of a commenter.
What a display of disgusting inhumanity by our twofer here….
One thing I’ve noticed about libertarians like torwolf and Ed is their indifference to anyone who isn’t them or thinks like them. AGW? No big deal, or if it is, it’s only a problem for Bangladeshis and brown people like that. Libertarians don’t want to do shit about AGW other than pretend it isn’t happening.
Relative to the direct ability to the judge the comment itself? (Which is open to direct assessment, being you know, right there on the page)?
It doesn’t.
And you sound precisely like a sexist.
What I keep finding amusing is that they try like hell to disprove AGW, but they can’t, since they don’t understand evidence. I recall one (AG) who, like creobots/IDiots, had a bad habit of quotemining papers, making it an argument from authority (which makes sense to a liberturd, after all they are the authority), but A-Ray would consistently show the whole paper refuted the quotemine. These two duffuses remind me of that level of incompetence.
I note that neither you nor Ed Barbar have mustered anything resembling specific objections to the methodology used to generate numbers regarding record heat/cold.
So, sexism and ableism in addition to the usual destructive fatalism of the AGW status quo fan.
Butbutbut where’s that money gonna come from? We just don’t have it. Anywhere. It’s not here, and it’s not there. No, don’t look over there, it’s not there either. No money anywhere, nope.
Yes, I know that you weren’t actively pretending to think that climate change is an urgent problem there. I was just noting that it’s reminiscent of other denialist tactics. Not identical to. Either way, if your thesis is that the science doesn’t support taking action right now, then how does arguing over the best way to take action help your case? It’s inconsistent and less than convincing. I am convinced that climate change is an urgent problem that needs tackling. I don’t know what the best methods for doing that are going to be. Most of the ones I’ve seen, though, don’t appear to have the negative economic impacts you claim they will. I listed a few. Are you capable of sticking to one topic for an extended period of time? If so, then consider that the proper way to rebut my point would be to either explain how the methods I identified would be economically harmful, or point to other popular methods that you think would be harmful.
Insulting you is amusement, not a cover.
You really want to know? Off the top of my head, in no particular order, with no regard to political feasability:
-Most important thing: new economic system that doesn’t treat the physical world as an externality to be swept under the rug. Some sort of ecological economics.
-smart grid
-micro power plants everywhere–wind, biomass, passive and PV solar, hydro, etc.
-public transport, as previously mentioned
-increased efficiency in both manufacturing, distribution, and consumption (taking the form of decentralized scaled-down manufacturing facilities)
-no more commercial airlines (world travel by boat, it will be fun!*)
-no more “global economy,” the artificially low price of oil will no longer justify moving manufacturing overseas to exploit lax environmental and labor laws
-political boundaries that correspond to watersheds & other ecological
-retrofitting of existing housing stock
-retrofitting of existing industrial infrastructure
-complete overhaul of agriculture; no more decoupling consumption from production, no more waste of valuable topsoils
Now. your thesis was that these things would have a negative economic impact on a given state or country’s economy. I agree, it would: “economic impact” as currently defined does not measure how well a society meets its member’s needs, but simply how much raw economic activity goes on. Given that our current economic system, which calls for constant growth (in violation of the laws of physics), is part of the reason we’re heading down such a disastrous path, I reject “negative economic impacts” as a compelling reason to avoid doing these things, but I also think that investing in them wouldn’t have the terrible impact you claim.
Feel free to contest that using facts and critical reasoning.
I left out a word:
was the intended phrase.
I was unclear, I realized. To clarify: most of the actions I mentioned there that I would deem politically feasible would not have the terrible economic impact that Ed Barbar claims they would. The ones that are politically unfeasible, like basically throttling global trade back to a bare minimum, definitely would. But that’s why I think it’s important to point out that “negative economic impacts” isn’t a deal-killer for me at all because I fundamentally disagree with the premises of our current economic system.
And then there’s the overarching point, which is that “you don’t have a solution” is not a valid counterargument to “this is a problem.”
5. For thinking the age or sex or gender of any commenter is at all relevant to the conversation,
When she thought I was 16, you weren’t jumping in to defend me. Sexist. Hypocrite.
Troll. Idiot
Who gives a shit about your hyperbole? I don’t. Either show us AGW isn’t happening, or shut the fuck up. Like any rational liberturd* who realizes they are in over their
heads[pinkie toes].*Sorry about the oxymoron….
What-the-everlasting-fuck “hiatus” are these nimrods talking about? Where I live each summer for the past 15 or 20 years has been an even more murderous heat wave than the one before. I barely survived last summer; if it’s any worse this year, I won’t live through it.
There is no hiatus. There was an extremely hot, record-breaking year, either in 1998 or 2005 or 2006 (I can’t remember which one specifically and I think it changes based on what year it is, who you’re talking to, and whether you’re discussing arctic sea ice or global air temperature average). Since the following years didn’t break that particular year’s record, they claim there’s a “pause” or a “hiatus.” Cherry-picking at its most obvious.
Aww, diddums. You are really young, aren’t you? Don’t feel bad–not about being young anyway. Plenty of teenagers manage to not be willfully deluded selfish bigots. And you have plenty of time to work on being a better person–it’ll be the next generation that really has to cope with your foolishness.
Ed Barbar:
People who are 16 don’t require an automatic defense, why would they?* A defense would be needed if a 16 year old was being jumped on for simply being 16. People not defending the utter shit you have littered all over the place doesn’t make anyone sexist or hypocritical.
*We have regular members of the commentariat who are younger than that. They do just fine here, unlike yourself.
Let’s not forget that his age only became relevant because he attempted to insult another commenter by saying, “You remind me of myself… when I was 15.”
Ed,
You want to know if you can trust models? Try the 1990 report:
https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_II/ipcc_far_wg_II_full_report.pdf
Let’s see what we can find with 30 minutes of looking:
CO2 concentration rise to 420ppm by 2025 and 560ppm by 2050
—In 1990 we were at 354ppm and we’ve been steadily rising to 396ppm presently {Mauna Loa} Right on track by my eyeballs.
Global mean temperatures: the two working groups ended up with different models due to parameters they had chosen: WG1: 1C by 2025, 3C by 2100; WG2: 1.5C by 2025, 4.5C by 2050
–Based on NASA temperature reports (Global Temperature meteorological stations). We’ve ~0.40C above 1990 levels. So looks like WG1 will probably hit the mark if current trends continue.
Sea level Rise, also varied by working group: WG1: 20cm by 2025, 65cm by 2100; WG2: 300-500cm by 2050; 1000cm by 2100.
–eyeballing the Wikipedia graph (CSIRO), it looks like we’ve gained 2″ (5 cm) since 1990. CSIRO show it to be steadily rising ~3.2 mm/yr. So WG1 is probably going to be closer to right again.
Global Ocean Temperatures: increase of 0.2-2.5C by 2100.
–is highly variable, but rising on average. Presently up about 0.20C above 1990 levels.
It looks like IPCC did darn well in 1990 with these predictions. The big miss appears to be with Working Group 2’s projections. Why all the continuous angst about models? Ed, you keep making comments like a wounded animal oppressed by a predatory government. But the all the rest of us want is a better future–somehow that costs money & requires work. Maybe that is what is truly too scary for you?
This is why it’s good practice to quote the ‘nym and number as well as the comment.
My #256 suggested that torwolf was 16 years old. Not the other dipshit.
Sorry, chigau, you’re right. I will do that.
Torwolf: “Judith Curry is one of the few climate scientists in this world who is willing to acknowledge that climate models – like all macro-models that attempt to encompass the myriad of interdependent variables that influence complex systems – are imperfect.”
Congratulations. That is the stupidest thing I’ve read on the Internet this week. You beat out some stiff competition. Sweetie, you really need to understand what scientific modelling is. You’re embarrassing yourself. Judy has had nothing insightful to say on the situation with Earth’s climate. She has not advanced understanding one iota. Here’s a clue, Punkin: A PhD doesn’t guarantee you are smart or insightful. Judy is neither. Roy Spencer OTOH, is at least intelligent. Were he not a fundy xtian, he might actually make a contribution. Again, the publications tell the tale. The denialist side has bupkes.
a_ray…
I meant “acknowledge that climate models … are imperfect” in the larger policy context in which we were arguing, specifically, how can one jump to the conclusion that major investments must be made in the short term to avert catastrophic climate change. She takes a different conclusion: that drastic investments made by a given nation or group of nations on the basis of averting catastrophic climate change are not justified because macro-models do not accurately predict future states of the world. A higher mean surface temperature will benefit many regions of the world – how do you trade-off this against those regions of the world that will be negatively affected. And so on.
You are a complete douche for taking that sentence out of the multi-paragraph context in which it was written.
Anyone fooled by you is a fool like you.
So says an abject fool without scientific evidence. Unlike A-Ray, who knows what the fuck he is talking about, unlike you with nothing but non-sequitur slogans and misdirection.
Torwolf, Oh, golly, you guys hate it when people make you look stupid by {Waaaaaaaaah!!!} quoting you.
Ever hear of George Box. He’s the statistician who said, “All models are wrong; some models are useful.” In actuality, climate models have been extremely useful. The thing you have to understand–and you clearly don’t–is that climate models do not make predictions. They extrapolate scenarios. CO2 is only one of many climate forcings. If those other forcings change, the climate model output will be incorrect. That does in any way indicate that the portion that deals with CO2 forcing is incorrect, only that the assumptions of the scenario were wrong. Moreover, there is also a lot of internal variability in the climate. As a result, you cannot simply look at a single output and make any judgment. If you correct the wrong assumptions and run the climate simulations again, you get much better agreement. You can even see this with much simpler models, like that run by Foster and Rahmstorf for their 2011 paper–correct for changes in ENSO, insolation and volcanic aerosols and voila, there is as much warming due to greenhouse gasses in the past 16 years as there was in the previous 16 years.
Another quote for you: “The purpose of computing is not numbers, but understanding.”–Richard Hamming
The way we use the models is by looking at the trends that occur and are robust. When you do this, you see the models predicting which areas tip into drought (e.g. the western US, Australia…), which will have an issue with floods (much of the world, really, since precipitation in warmer world is more intense and episodic”, where ice will melt (they actually underpredict this quite a bit, but they get the areas right), and so on. This is precisely what we need for formulating mitigation policies.
Is the problem complex. You bet. Most problems we face in science are. Your heroine, Aunt Judy, sees the complexity of the problem and throws up her hands. That is an unscientific response. Real scientists find ways to deal with the complexity.
Now some questions–you say the models are worthless. OK, if so, then on what do you base your contention that some regions of the world will benefit from warming? You also say you do not dispute that warming is occurring. Since it is occurring, and we know that it could have severe, even catastrophic effects, in the absence of model output we rely on, doesn’t that make it all the more essential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions–precautionary principle and all? Why do you assume that uncertainties in the model will always accrue to your benefit. Most of the areas where we have known disagreements actually show the effects are more severe than the models predict.
Modeling–how does it work anyway?
a_ray_in_dilbert_space:
*applause*
A great smackdown, and also educational.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space:
You are getting desperate. I can say this on the basis of a few factual errors and false re-definitions that you wrote in post #351:
1) a_ray_in_dilbert_space wrote: “The thing you have to understand–and you clearly don’t–is that climate models do not make predictions. They extrapolate scenarios.”
The IPCC projects future changes in climate (https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html)
From a dictionary…
To project: to estimate or forecast (something) on the basis of present trends.
“spending was projected at $72 million”
synonyms: forecast, predict, expect, estimate, calculate, reckon
2) a_ray_in_dilbert_space wrote:
“Aunt Judy, sees the complexity of the problem and throws up her hands. That is an unscientific response. Real scientists find ways to deal with the complexity.”
and also in a previous post:
“Aunt Judy exhibits no understanding of global climate. None. I’ve never come away from anything she’s written and said, “I understand that better.” Aunt Judy is like Ed–she projects her own ignorance onto the real scientists around her.”
Judging from these comments, it seems that you are not willing to actually consider what she is saying (summarized in comments #313 and #339) because she does not agree with the consensus view that drastic mitigation action is required to avert catastrophic climate change.
See for example Curry 2011. Reasoning about climate uncertainty. Climatic Change 108(4). if you are willing to consider the possibility that some of the more gloomy conclusions that the incomplete quantitative modelling process that you most eloquently described above by no means provides justification for massive investments in renewable energy infrastructure within the capitalist world order.
So torwolf is now using the classic argument from dictionary. And still apparently doesn’t understand the problems with an argument from authority. Good work, super genius.
Blowhard Torwolf:
No, that is you cupcake. You spew fuckwittery, and nobody is biting on your idiocy. We have argued this for years. The science is solid.
Inane word salad from a political hack unwilling to acknowledge they may have to change how they live. No sale, since you offer nothing.
Nerd of Redhead, Here’s an offering, you unloved tard:
Degrow – support investment in local economies and energy distribution systems. That is not what’s going on in the renewable energy and green economy world of large-scale biopower production and carbon trading.
torwolf,
Sigh! OK, I’ll give you the benefit of not being a native English speaker, but projection=!=prediction. Projection presumes that all contributors will remain unchanged. It cannot be compared to data when those contributors did not remain the same.
All Aunt Judy is saying is, “Oh, it’s all too complicated!” Prove me wrong. What prediction has she made? Scientists deal in understanding–what has Judy ever made clearer? She can’t even speak without prevaricating. I’ve read the article you cite–it doesn’t even read like a scientific paper! What is more it undermines its own case–most of the citations criticizing the IPCC actually complain the IPCC underestimates risk!!
What is more, her ideas on scientific ignorance are rubbish! Unless she is positing some forcing that is completely unknown–and again, that ain’t science–we actually have a good idea of what the forcings are and of their uncertainties. CO2 forcing is quite well known. The main uncertainties are aerosols and clouds. She mentions none of these, precisely because she knows they don’t support her case! Did you look at the references–several are not even peer-reviewed, and half are from philosophy journals, not climate or geoscience. That essay–I won’t even diegn to call it a paper–is insulting to scientists! I could go on, but your favorite paper has already been eviscerated here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Mythic-reasoning-uncertainty.html
Oh, and Punkin, I just taught a class on statistical modeling. I’m fresh on this stuff.
Oh, and Torwolf, I notice you ignore my direct questions to you. That doesn’t look like a willingness to move the debate forward. On what do you base your statements that climate change won’t be so bad if you don’t trust models?
a_ray_in_dilbert_space:
You wrote: “OK, I’ll give you the benefit of not being a native English speaker, but projection=!=prediction. Projection presumes that all contributors will remain unchanged. It cannot be compared to data when those contributors did not remain the same.”
I honestly don’t understand what you mean by this. “To project future states of a complex system” can be taken as being synonymous with “to predict future states of a complex system”. Debating semantics is lame. So is criticizing another on the basis of semantics… as some cheap seque to your redundant “how models work lesson” in comment #351
You wrote: “What prediction has she made?” and followed that with the statement that scientists deal with understanding. This is what some call scientism: in the context of this thread, the belief that results from incomplete quantitative modelling of complex systems are to be used as the basis for policy. Dr. Curry is saying that it is hubristic and naive (but never using that language) to think this way, on the basis that the models are incomplete and are parameterized with variables derived from paleoclimatic proxies and direct measurements, many of which have been on-going for no more than a couple decades.
You should be very proud that you just taught a class in statistical modelling. You should tell more people about this, child.
a_ray_…
“On what do you base your statements that climate change won’t be so bad if you don’t trust models?”
I don’t know how to respond to this poorly-phrased question. Where do I begin? I suppose my previous description of the logic that I am using to come to the conclusion that drastic policy actions are unwise would suffice. It’s in point form. Comment #158.
I notice that torwolf is STILL using ableist insults.
I notice that you’re a coward for accusing me of being ableist for reasoning about the implications of the limitations of different types of human minds (neurotypical, autistic, autistic spectrum, etc.) on the policies and resource allocation decisions that affect humanity.
Sorry, I missed this before.
# 251 Ed Barbar
“Found” issues with the study? Created issues with the study more like.
The man who claimed that hockey sticks emerge from random runs of data – fails to mention that his computer code for collecting and inspecting those “random runs” has a nifty little line in it to extract the most hockey stick shaped items. And Wegman reproduced that without any comment – which would indicate that he’d not even read it, let alone understood it.
http://deepclimate.org/2010/11/16/replication-and-due-diligence-wegman-style/
For those who like a good forensic deconstruction of a godawful paper, this is terrific.
Oh my! Look at torwolf’s nuanced and philosophical stance in defense of calling people “tard”!
Go fuck yourself, you disingenuous little shit.
Six months ago?
Sorry fuckwit, either the science is wrong, which you can’t prove with scientific evidence, or you accept the conclusions thereof if you are a rational person. But you are an idiotology based fuckwit.
Yes, there are indications in the models of what is happening to planet Earth, and they can make extrapolations bases on certain presupmtions to give recommendations for humanity. One can’t stick one head in the sand as you are attempting to do, and expect nothing bad to occur over a couple of hundred years. It doesn’t hurt to look at and explore with tax dollars certain options now.
anteprepro:
You haven’t yet commented on, or poked holes in, my “nuanced and philosophical stance”.
Nerd of Redhead:
We agree!
I wrote:
“Degrow – support investment in local economies and energy distribution systems. That is not what’s going on in the renewable energy and green economy world of large-scale biopower production and carbon trading.”
You wrote:
“It doesn’t hurt to look at and explore with tax dollars certain options now.”
The problem here is that rather than acknowledge that I had written this previously, in direct response to you, you instead wrote this as though you were educating me – as though the stance that we should be investing in certain options now was lost to me.
This is what it means to be disingenuous, or at the very least, cognitively limited.
You haven’t yet commented on how it justifies calling people “retarded”, you fucking shitweasel. You’re lucky you are camping out in a necrothread. I’m sure PZ would’ve warned you about the banhammer if you were pulling this shit in plain sight.
I really don’t think that using blockquotes is all that difficult.
Is it a pouty “You’re not the boss of me.” thing?
Again, you are such an obvious coward for focusing on insults that I’ve hurled throughout this 370+ comment thread rather than the substance of my arguments related to climate policy and resource allocation.
Here are some of your insults:
fuckwat, fuckwit, fuck off, fucking idiot
I take great offence to these insults (sarcasm).
I use the word “retarded” in the same sense that the dictionary uses it: less advanced mental development for one’s age. Of course, I do not know that ages of any of these commenters, I use the term comically. If I have deeply insulted all of the people out there in this world who have a less advanced mental development for their age, I am truly sorry.
Again, you are a coward for focusing on insults over content. That is more unequivocal than AGW. (100% certainty compared to 50-95% certainty).
OK, we’ll try again:
Projection–extrapolation into the future assuming all contributing factors remain the same.
Prediction–a realistic output of a model that can be compared meaningfully with actual data.
They are NOT the same thing. I can look at my retirement savings that made >20% return and PROJECT that I will be able to retire in 2 years. I would be a fool to PREDICT that.
Ooh! Scientism! You sure you don’t work for the Discovery Institute? What Aunt Judy and you are ignoring is that there are some things we know with high confidence–and one of them is that CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas. It will warm the planet. And we are already seeing consequences even with the modest warming to date: 1)the amount of Earth’s surface in severe drought has increased by 27%, 2)Climate related damages have increased dramatically, while there has been no commensurate increase in geologically related damages (a control). Hell, Australia had to come up with another color for its temperature maps!
So you and Judy can yell all you want that climate is all just too complex to understand. Meanwhile the actual scientists will just keep developing ways to understand it, as they’ve done all along. And given that you and Judy contribute nothing to understanding, why should we listen to what you have to say?
Again, utter hypocrisy from the fuckwit who was trying to rules lawyer a thread ban on Nerd not too long ago. We’ve dealt with the substance of your bullshit, torwolf. But slurs, ableist ones being among them, are a bannable offense. It says so in the very Commenting Rules you gleefully cited earlier in this very thread. And yet more argument from dictionary! “Retard” is very commonly used as an insult entirely because it associates the person in question with the mentally disabled. It is most certainly a slur, and it is not tolerated around here. That is the relevance, and your stubborn inability to back down on that front is fucking par for the course. Arrogant and ignorant all the way down.
Er, yeah. That’s the problem, dipshit.
Only in your delusional mind. I am skeptical of everything you say, and every person your claim to back your case. As they don’t.
Fuckwit is perfectly fine insult. You don’t think, you sloganeer. Which is why I don’t believe a word you say.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space:
You are arguing semantics with me. Replace “project” with “predict” in any sentence and the same message will be delivered.
Judith Curry contributes understanding to climate dynamics and weather forecasting as an atmospheric modeller.
Judith Curry contributes reason to debates about what humanity should do given the possibility that the earth’s climate will change in a way that results in net negative effects. Should western governments make major investments in large-scale renewable energy infrastructure in the hopes that CO2eq stabilization will stop climate change, even with the other forcing mechanisms (sun, water cycle) and even given the political uncertainty surrounding the commitments China and India will make? Given the uncertainties, should governments instead focus on adaptation measures, re-locating populations to areas that will resist climate-related disturbances and encouraging in smaller-scale economic and energy systems?
This is all Judith Curry is doing. The belief that we all have a great chance of being doomed if we do not take drastic action now – a belief propagated by the likes of Al Gore and initialized by IPCC GCM projections – should be seriously questioned given the uncertainty surrounding the near-term and long-term economic and environmental effects of policies based on this belief.
anteprepro:
Again, you’re not addressing the substance of my arguments and instead alluding to an insult I regretfully used earlier in the thread.
I did not mean to insult the mentally disabled and I will be sure to never use that term again in the presence of sensitives like you who are incapable of seeing the irony and benignity of on-the-fly insults.
Now address the substance of my arguments.
Torwolf,
I’m sorry, I see no logic in your comment #158. All I see are a bunch of assertions with no supporting evidence. If you are going to reject anthropogenic ghgs as the source of the warming, then what is your candidate mechanism for supplying enough energy to warm an entire fricking planet? In actuality, because there are known cooling forcings (decreasing solar output since 1950, aerosols from China, etc.) anthropogenic forcing could be >100% of the warming observed.
You keep coming back to, “Oh, it’s all too complex”–and yet scientists are advancing understanding. They have shown with high confidence that warming will increase drought, severe weather, flooding of coastline… We can see these effects happening NOW. Meanwhile, Aunt Judy’s predictions…oh, wait, she hasn’t made any.
Torwolf, the name of the game is science. It isn’t a game for cowards. You have to put your cojones on the line and commit to a prediction–not obfuscate and prevaricate like Aunt Judy.
3 months.
Citation needed. Your word alone is dismissed.
Since your argument is AGW, WAAHHHH, there is nothing to address.
Torwolf: “Judith Curry contributes understanding to climate dynamics and weather forecasting as an atmospheric modeller. ”
Then it shouldn’t be too hard for you to cite the paper. And please, don’t cite the Stadium wave paper–that was crap.
As to the other stuff… Wow. Have you ever even read a book on risk management? Because the approach you and Judy are taking doesn’t even make sense. Both of you admit we are warming the planet. You admit–or at least, you have not seriously disputed–that there will be adverse consequences to this action. Hell, we can see these adverse consequences unfolding now. That is sufficient to establish anthropogenic warming as a credible threat. And what is the first thing you must do with a credible threat? Bound the risk. That is the step you lukewarmers ignore. Why? Because you cannot bound the risk. And what is the only viable approach if you cannot bound the risk? Threat avoidance. You don’t get to simply ASSUME that all uncertainties line up on your side–particularly when I can show you studies that say you are wrong (e.g. those by Dai et al. on changes in the Palmer Drought Severity Index, the Munich Re study on climate related losses, etc.).
You lukewarmers are no less denialists than the idiots that deny the greenhouse effect. You merely choose to accept the basic physics, but ignore its undeniable consequences.
Oh really?
1. Which regions?
2. What would the benefits be?
3. What are you basing these assessments on?
And what areas now arable will become desert/semi-desert?
Ogvorbis:
Then the hockey stick is not science, because it most certainly did not work that way. Only after years of delays, denials, etc., where the errors in Mann ’98 finally “admitted” to. The data issues are ongoing.
alwayscurious
See how little you know? Perhaps you think the US is the largest CO2 emitter. You would be wrong. Perhaps you think China and India are not exponentially increasing their CO2 emissions. You would be wrong. Perhaps you think the Kyoto accord will sort it all out. You would be wrong. I posted a link to Richard Muller discussing this and other issues. It’s 45 minutes long. If, as you claim, you are curious, listen to it, and you will know the actuality, and not what someone is telling you to think.
Al Dente
Ad Hominem, with no value, Al Dente. Come on. Stop being a me too cluck cluck.
sweetness and light sez:
That’s not my thesis. I think we do need to take action, and action that is consonant with other imperatives:
1) Understand global dimming right away in the case it is needed to reduce temperatures from CAGW.
2) Investigate future technologies, such as Thorium based nuclear.
3) Stop wasting money on batteries and biofuels. Biofuels are probably killing people by raising food prices, for one, and for two they arguably produce more CO2 than straight oil use anyway. Reinvest these dollars elsewhere.
4) Follow up on the recent study that indicated MWP Atlantic and Pacific ocean temperatures were .68 degrees “C” warmer than today. If true, we have centuries to sort out this problem.
Stop wasting money on stupid feel good technologies, like battery powered cars, electric choo choo trains, energy storage, solar (I’m about to pull the trigger on a $30K on locally generated solar because of CA retards), etc., and put it where it will count: new energy technologies that are not CO2 producing.
Look up Barbara Boxer’s panel on climate change. I’ve listened to a number of them. Warmists are asking for enormous sums of US money to reduce the already declining footprint of US CO2 emissions (thanks to fracking and the recession). But, it won’t help even if you believe. US CO2 pales in comparison to Chinese outputs, and Indian outputs by 2050. Nothing is going to stop that train. Nothing except cheap electric generation that doesn’t produce CO2, and it isn’t solar, and it isn’t wind.
OK, you don’t care about truth, but are more interested in junk. I am curious, though. Are you post-menopausal? hanging around the kiddies, looking for some lovin?
You are less informed than I thought. You know the Met office?
Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released.
alwayscurious: glad you actually looked at the claims and data, however:
So what? Sea level has been rising for a long time at about the same rate. Meanwhile, throw out twenty predictions, and one is bound to be close.
You do mean .06 degrees “C” since 1990 or so, as compared to .65 degrees warmer during the MWP:
Observed increases in ocean heat content (OHC) and temperature are robust indicators of global warming during the past several decades. We used high-resolution proxy records from sediment cores to extend these observations in the Pacific 10,000 years beyond the instrumental record. We show that water masses linked to North Pacific and Antarctic intermediate waters were warmer by 2.1 ± 0.4°C and 1.5 ± 0.4°C, respectively, during the middle Holocene Thermal Maximum than over the past century. Both water masses were ~0.9°C warmer during the Medieval Warm period than during the Little Ice Age and ~0.65° warmer than in recent decades. Although documented changes in global surface temperatures during the Holocene and Common era are relatively small, the concomitant changes in OHC are large.
Now in honesty, skeptics call into question this study as the rate of import of these proxies is not enough to state equilibrium was reached, but it’s an interesting study and the conclusions need to be validated or invalidated.
Idiot claims:
No, idiot, this isn’t right. If you have something actually useful to say about this, go to climateaudit.org. I’m sure, unlike some, Steve McIntyre will be quite interested to hear what mathematicians around the world have validated, and how you, with your great understanding, have dis-proven.
Kiddies, all I have to say is this. Keep your minds open. With > $1B being spent per day on global warming, it’s a lot of money, money that someday you will be paying.
Ed Barbar,
Contact the denialist mothership immediately to update your talking points.
M&M is indeed a 100:1 cherrypick:
http://deepclimate.org/2010/11/16/replication-and-due-diligence-wegman-style/
What is more, M&M were fully aware of what they were doing–it’s in the code.
Current temperatures are far above GLOBAL temperatures during the MWP, and since it is global warming we are worried about, that is the relevant metric.
As to the so-called hiatus, Cowtan and Way have shown that over half the discrepancy is due to much of the heat being transported to the poles. Increased warming in the deep oceans accounts for the rest.
As to your solutions, I thought freemarketeers were about letting the market decide winners. The market ain’t building any new nuke plants these days. They are building renewable energy at a prodigious rate. This is private money, not gummint money.
You really don’t pay much attention to recent news, do you?
Post-menopausal women may be a key to humans’ evolutionary success. Show some respect, whippersnapper.
Funny how the denialists are also always bigots. I guess if you’re going to go for one kooky unevidenced belief system, why not go for two or three?
Less informed than you thought apparently still entails being better informed than you. The link goes to the Daily Mail which has a graph showing exactly what I described: a slice of temperature data from between 1997 and 2012. There are no links to any peer-reviewed studies in the article. There are, of course, quotes for Judith Curry. Here is the real deal, with non-cherry-picked graphs: http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-scientists-esld.html
2012, by the way, was the year in which arctic sea ice loss shattered all previous records.
I just realized that my #386 brought us right back to the original topic.
And I accidentally put the wrong link into #387. Hey, I haven’t had my coffee yet, okay? http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-not-slowing-its-speeding-up.html
The other link goes to an article about how unethical denialists like our friends here are actually causing scientists to publicly underestimate the potential bad outcomes of climate change.
What a disgusting piece of misogyny is this?
It may benefit a lot of them through the process of decimating the local human population, and reducing the human burden on the environment there.
The last two global “hothouse” periods were the end Eocene and the end Cretaceous. Earth was indeed a verdant, water-logged paradise in both instances. But there were no humans around during either of those times, and both were preceded by a mass extinction as the climate shifted from temperate to warm.
Whether it is creationists, libertarians, AGW-denialists, or some fetid combination of all three, it never seems to fail.
Within 3 posts these trolls reveal themselves not only to be kooks, but disgustingly immoral and inhuman creatures as well.
You can always trust the ignorant denialists to be condescending assholes.
Torwolf, for that “retarded” comment, and Ed Barbar, for “post-menopausal”–you are both being warned. Pull any more of that crap and your lying asses will be banned.
Although I should ban you both for extraordinary stupidity and dishonesty, I tend to let you goons hang yourselves with your own words. Which you are doing admirably.
Good work, horde. I notice that our lying denialists here like to cite the Daily Mail, while you bounce back with links to the full data. Barbar and Torwolf are lying there in tattered shreds, playing the Black Knight.
You mean that investing in renewable energy might disrupt our glorious capitalist utopia? Say it ain’t so!
First, Ed Barbar your misogynistic pedo-baiting is as disgusting as anything I’ve ever seen around here.
Second, torwolf, when you said:
You show the characteristic idiocy of so many climate deniers. AGW won’t destroy the world. What it will do is **alter habitats**. The plant life suitable to the current habitat will not be suitable to the new. It will die off, which will lead to massive animal die-offs. Human farmers skilled at growing certain crops will find them failing – with resulting starvation and/or expensive food aid (since the relative scarcity of crops will increase the price). It will take decades for humans to fully transition to crops suitable to the new environmental conditions – not least because the final conditions will not be the same as the transition conditions. Natural habitat will take much longer to recover, with resulting forage and hunting productivities plummeting for as long as thousands of years. In the meantime, the billions suffering food insecurity, water insecurity, and habitat devastation aren’t going to calmly lay down and die. The fricking US Pentagon IDs AGW as causing conflict over the long term sufficient to be a threat to US national security and integrity. At a minimum there will be massive internal migration and new immigration. At maximum the US will decide it can’t handle or doesn’t want the immigration and goes to war with multiple populations. THIS – the reasonably foreseeable threat to national security and integrity and not deluded tree-hugging is motivating the new emphasis on energy tech from DARPA specifically and the Pentagon generally.
Eventually more of the earth might support large-biomass ecosystems, but
1) saying that will “benefit many regions of the world” is ridiculous. The Gobi is neither better off or worse off as a desert. It is what it is.
2) the implied “it will benefit **the people** of many regions of the world” is just wrong. And so wrong as to impugn either your competence or your honesty or both.
I do you the favor of not questioning your competence to make your points.
huh. almost as if precious snowflake here hasn’t read the comments already explaining that this is not actually true.
“reality has a well-known liberal bias” :-p
huh. almost as if precious snowflake here hasn’t read the comments already explaining that there is no pause, merely a slowing of surface temperature rise (meanwhile, heat absorption continues as predicted, or faster)
the actual fact is that slowdowns such as this are reproduced in models, but only the ones with the random-ish elements popping up right now have that slowdown right now; other models have it at other times; as has already been explained.
“most” what? Cuz you can’t possibly be referring to climate scientists.
Because of course. It wouldn’t be a real denialist argument without the obligatory “buuut AAAAALLL GOOOOOREEEEEEE”. Aside from that, environmental refugees from issues that are affected by climate change exists, but just like it’s BS to try to pin a particular storm and a particular drought (and their relative strengths) directly to AGW, it’s a bit tricky to pinpoint which tropical cyclone/drought/disease refugees are climate refugees.
lol.
“conspire”; or, you know, privately vent their frustrations. Same thing, amirite? And it’s not like the publication of that paper wasn’t a huge scandal that had a bunch of editors resigning in protest, because it was such shitty work. nosirree.
because of course. So uncertain and shady, to publish something in Nature about replacing increasingly non-useful proxies with real temperatures. No bias here at all. lol.
also, were you aware of austerity measures that have been leaving poor people without the resources necessary to heat their homes? Not to mention, extremely cold episodes both here (see: “polar vortex”) and in Europe will lead to even more such deaths, and those would be caused by AGW.
LOL. “shenanigans”, meaning nothing unethical at all. wow yeah, such a brave whistleblower.
and if you’ve ever listened to the arguments made by developing countries, they’ve been saying since forever that the developed countries should help them leapfrog “dirty” tech and should be the ones to lead in CO2 reductions since they are the most developed and thus would be best situated to do that. Given that the developed nations got developed on the backs of the developing world, that sounds entirely fair; and it absolutely means your precious California has to be part of the 1st wave of reducers.
which for India is obviously thorium reactors; which they’ve been trying to get anyone to help them get off the ground. But hey, let’s not do anything because they’re not doing anything and consequently fuck up the planet for humans because Tragedies of the Commons are not really tragedies…
HAHAHAHAHA a dailyfail link HAHAHAHAHAHA. Anyway: http://www.livescience.com/24006-did-global-warming-stop-1997.html
(I’m not dealing with torfail. I’ve decided there’s a level of derp that’s too derpy for me to bother with anymore, and that’s about three levels below that)
am I surprised the dude with libertarian tendencies also turns out to have sexist tendencies?
not in the slightest
If only they could emulate the Black Knight more, and stay put, shouting “come back and fight you coward!” as we walk away, rather than seeking this forum and continuing to pester us….
You know, I just discovered that in that mass of distortions, Ed Barbar also threw out the “retard” slur.
Bye, Barbar. We don’t like your kind around here.
Awww, there goes the chewtoy.
BTW, you can blame Reuters for allowing the hiatus meme to escape from right wing kookery such as the Drudge report and propagate in mainstream media: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/04/16/reuters-climate-change-drudge-bait/193645
Phooey. I was having fun with Barbar. Hopefully torwolf will be able to restrain his bigotry and perhaps explains what evidence he’s basing his assertion that climate change will “benefit many regions of the world.”
I have posted this article, and the DeSmogBlog associated article http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/03/20/science-journal-retracts-paper-showing-how-climate-change-sceptics-were-conspiracy-theorists-after-sceptics-shout at
http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/82423-libertarians-are-whiners-and-sadists/
and
http://www.thescienceforum.com/behavior-psychology/
The latter has moved the thread like they can hide the Pharyngula and DeSmogBlog articles or they’ll go away or something.
It would be nice to see Pharyngula members convince them differently.
Jeez, I was too laconic; sorry Pharyngulites. I was kicked off within an hour of posting it on both sites.
Both sites claim to be “science oriented.” Meanwhile they’re kicking people who talk about science they don’t like off their sites, and squatting on “science” names and denying science. We need to start getting rid of these assholes.
The longer this goes the better it gets, Pharyngulites. Four sites have banned me for posting a link to this very article right here.
I guess I’ve been hanging with bad actors. Welcome me in, help me feel the love, and help me feel better after I tested the whininess and petulance of the Libertardian Party. Please.
Da Schneib
For fuck’s fucking sake.
Not one of them took an hour to ban me. It’s transparent as all hell. Seriously. Go look for yourself.
anteprepro, when I stop hearing “demorat” jokes and cracks about the “democrat party” I’ll consider other terms than “Teapublican” and “Libertardian.” Until then don’t whine about what you dish out.
Da Schneib
It’s Pharyngula thing.
We don’t use mental illness or disability as an insult, here.
On Pharyngula.
This blog.
Where you are commenting.
Liberturd is acceptable.
Chigau,
That is an honorable thing and I will do my best to remember it.
Thank you for tolerance of a n00b.
Meanwhile, I repeat that this seems to be a really effective way of tagging standard harassment techniques as Libertarian Party behavior. It’s definitely part of a pattern of behavior. The key of course is that it’s anti-science and in the end cannot stand against the scientific method since it is required eventually to deny reality.
So this place had a reputation for doing something.
I guess that was all a long time ago.
Stop whingeing.
We’re busy elsewhere.
Good luck with that.
All bark no bite, like usual.
So are you one of the Liberturdians working undercover?
Da Schneib
Have you noticed that this thread is over a week old, and that a dozen or so new posts have since been made to the main blog? Have you noticed the little thing on the side of the screen that says ‘Recent Posts’? Has it occurred to you that the discussion here, about this topic, is over and we’ve moved on to new pastures? Has it occurred to you that you’re a complete idiot? Inquiring minds want to know.
The Horde ain’t your personal army.
Whatever.
You’re willing to cede the “science.”whatever sites and let them go on pretending to be “scientific.”
You have no interest what people are learning from sites that lie and pretend to be “science” sites.
That’s fine, I’ve been ahead of the curve before now. I’ll wait.
But Pharyngula loses cred. You look lazy, whiny, and uninterested in actually doing anything about what you see is wrong.
Have fun beating up on idiot creationists while you ignore the real problem: Liberturdians in control of the ”
science.” domains while you play caveman on the stupids.
Da Schneib
Bless your heart.
Da Scheib: Shut the fuck up. Stop trying to tell everyone else what they must talk about. Your whining is about to get you banned.
So I shouldn’t post links to your material on other sites, and then report on the results?
PZ, I thought better of you.
ohno, PZ
Da Schneib thought better of you.
How can you go on?
Thanks chigau. I try.
I’m not as good as PZ at asking nasty questions, but I try.
Not telling anyone anything. Just commenting on the fact you seem a bit…
Well, I’m not looking to be insulting.
Let’s say “retiring.”
Are you becoming commercial?
I mean, you brought this article up. Is it now somehow not OK to point out that you don’t appear to be doing anything about it, despite its apparent effectiveness in revealing sites that are dedicated to getting people whose opinions they don’t like kicked off the Internet?
Are you so mesmerized you are about to kick me off for pointing that out?
Really?
For proving your own article correct?
Really? Really?
I think about a hundred people should go to these sites and post this article and the longer one on DeSmogBlog.
I think they might start getting a bit better impression of who’s really on the internet and stop thinking of us as…
…retiring.
Really.
My bad, it’s another Pharyngula thing.
“Bless your heart” on Pharyngula is more or less equivalent to “fuck off”.
Sorry.
Have a nice day.
(GOTO “Bless your heart”)
Da Schneib:
You don’t seem to be terribly bright. You need to stop posting about what you think the commentariat should do. We aren’t your personal servants.
Maybe you want to come discuss this on DeSmogBlog.
I’m really surprised to be receiving threats from PZ Meyers. It’s obvious you’re not who you claim to be.
I think if the commentariat on this site is who they claim to be they’d be flowing to the problem instead of arguing about it.
This isn’t even in question; I’m merely saying a comment on this site is not merely correct, but worth acting on, and you’re pretending that’s some sort of problem.
I’m going to let you think on this a while.
Are you or are you not going to do something obvious about something you claim to be against?
I think you weren’t paying attention which is excusable.
Now you’re fighting against paying attention which is execrable.
Da Schneib
You have become completely incoherent.
You should stop now.
You can actually do something this time.
PZ is against it.
That was not what I expected at all, at all. I am disappointed.
Ummm, so I should totally ignore the fact that linking this article on sites that claim to be “science” sites results in getting banned?
Really?
So Chigau doesn’t support PZ.
OK.
I’m still tripping out on the idea of being kicked off by PZ for supporting an article PZ wrote.
This is apparently unacceptable on this site.
What am I supposed to do, revile you so I don’t get kicked off?
Sorry, I don’t know what to do.
I ask merely sanity: please don’t kick me off for agreeing with you, PZ, and providing evidence to prove what you say.
Just sanity.
Yeah.
Just threats.
Whatever.
Da Schneib
Don’t know what to do?
Try STOPPING.
You know the worst thing?
PZ came to prominence by raising a fuss.
Now he wants to ban me for raising one, not only that but one that bolsters his own views and is true by his own research, because it looks inconvenient.
I am astonished. I will not characterize other opinions because it would be insulting.
chigau I believe in the truth and will not stop until it is acknowledged.
I have used the article we are commenting on here to prove that supposed “science” sites are misrepresenting, hiding, deliberately obfuscating, and denying real science.
I have posted truthful links to this article, and truthful quotes of its contents, and truthful accounts of its provenance, and been kicked off these sites within an hour of doing so in each of four cases.
These sites are obviously anti-science.
Yet when I announce this on this site, I am threatened by PZ Myers with being banned for telling the truth.
It is time for this to stop. If you want STOPPING.
You either have the courage to support what you say or not.
Your action will demonstrate one or the other.
Da Schneib
The banning threat was NOT for telling the truth,
It was for being a tedious, selfish, obnoxious whiner.
Yeah, I figured.
PuKAWK puk puk puk puk.
So, Chigau, you claim this PZ article is a lie?
Just want to get that straight.
PZ, just want to make sure you’re clear on the fact you’re kicking me off for saying this Chigau character says you’re lying.
So basically you’re kicking me off for saying YOU, PZ MEYERS, are NOT LYING.
So we’re clear.
What?
I wonder how many people you have allowed this “Chigau” character to harass here on your site?
I changed my mind.
Did you read this article, and then review your actions?
Not?
Oh my.
I suggest you review your actions immediately with regard to the article we’re discussing here.
It’s…
incredibly…
errr, insincere.
“I changed my mind.”
Just wow. I mean umwut? Seriously.
You say you wanted to fxxk the what, now?
Chigau, you claim that threats are a proper response to free speech, and that insults and threats are “free speech.”
You know nothing of “free speech.”
Free speech is not lies.
Free speech is not threats.
Free speech is not insults.
Your disrespect of free speech reveals your ideology, which is anti-freedom and anti-free-speech.
I hope PZ is better than this but my prior experience makes me only somewhat hopeful.
If this DS fellow does get banned, at least we can henceforth use him as an abject example the next time some troll goes around claiming that PZ bans those who don’t agree with him.
“Remember that Da Scneib fellow? He agreed with everything PZ said, but he was obnoxious, broke the rules, and persisted even after being warned, and he was banned too!”
So far this site has proven PZ’s article correct.
I am, seriously, shocked. The Liberturdians are, in fact, every where. Even PZ lets them in and allows them to ban people.
Mindblowing.
Agreeing with PZ is bannable.
On the article that talks about Liberturdians getting people banned for bullshit.
This is laughable.
Has anyone considered PZ might be finding out who the Liberturdian infiltrators are?
:D
Schneib turns the lights on
DS, your claim that chigau is harassing you is ridiculous. There’s an open thread where you can try to get people interested in your internet activism. It’s called Thunderdome. Look it up (and taking note of the Commenting Rules might be helpful, too). Try squawking in there.
I’m sorry but having been harassed on this thread I intend to find out if reality is welcome on this site.
It doesn’t seem very “ridiculous” when it looks like it’s supporting science denial, on a site that pretends to be against science denial.
Feel free to provide a more convincing argument perhaps from a more convincing source.
BTW, “Da Schneib” is my nickname, you may call me “Schneib” without insult. Please feel free to do so. I will not take offense and it’s easier to type.
Da Dweeb or whatever the fuck you call yourself @469
Reality is welcome on this site. Endless whining is not. Try to figure out the difference.
But understand that we are, IMNVHO, ignoring reality and allowing deniers to claim anti-archaeological, anti-paleontological, anti-reality claims that should be clearly delineated from the anti-science Liberturdians’ claims against reality and climate and genetics.
“Reality” apparently is distinguished from articles that prove people like you think lies and insulting anti-reality claims are “evidence.”
The article we are commenting on proves it; you are attempting to ignore that. It’s unbelievably transparent.
PZ, are you gonna show up and defend your article?
Comment by Da Schneib blocked. [unhush][show comment]
A vast improvement.
OK. Nobody read it.
I guess I know about PZ now.
Go kiss the Snyders’ asses. I’ll remember you did.
If they’re not for you, they’re against you, is that your argument? You might want to investigate a fallacy called the false dilemma. But keep posting away with your somewhat conspiracy-tinged ravings, I’m sure that will help </sarcasm>
Seeing as how you can’t seem to do it yourself Da Schneib, I’ll post the commenting rules for you:
Bolding mine in what I suspect is a vain attempt to point out why DS is in danger of some form of banning. Note that none of those rules involve agreeing or disagreeing with PZ.
I think the best way to go would be just to ignore him and let him babble to himself.
I. 1. I stopped using “Libertardian” because it is deemed inappropriate.
II. I have in fact supported the Opening Post. This has been repeatedly ignored.
III. I do not promise to get along with people who violate rules I, II, IV, and C.
IV. I believe PZ has misinterpreted, and been led to do so, by Liberturdians.
V. I gave rough handling back. Apparently you expect to abuse and not be abused back.
Apparently making reasonable arguments here is a bannable offense.
Having been banned for posting links to this article, I expect this is because you are cowards.
You don’t have the balls to support your article when links to it are posted elsewhere.
I stood up for you and was counted and this is how you treat me.
Sorry but you suck.
I think the most amazing thing is to be kicked off because PZ is scared.
DS
This might help. No need to thank me.
Direct, plain, and simple: I stood up for PZ and PZ didn’t stand up for me.
We’re done here.
I think the worst part is that PZ banned me for being too liberal, too scientific, and too atheist, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
FTBulllies stole my ham sandwich!
Ron Paul 2012.
Derp Schneib:
I suspect you’re just a slymepitter who’s smearing shit all over the walls, begging to be martyred into banishment. After you get your wish, you’ll crawl back to the pit, proclaiming, “see??? PZ bans even people who profess to agree with him!!!”
You’re so transparent it’s boring.
I can smell the ones who think they’re better than everyone else.
So I’m supposed to bow to the insufferable PZ, that right? And if not I get kicked off, that right? PZ’s afraid of everyone who might not agree?
That’s obviously totally free speech, totally fair, and completely dedicated to truth and justice.
How white of you.
Unbelievable.
They ban you for embarrassing them.
How…
…white.
Bring it.
Or admit you might need to talk some.
Have you no shame?
Emoprogs suck.
The stench of oppression reeks in the air. It smells like biscuits and gravy.
You Libertarians! You blew it all up!
Can’t you just let me be? Can’t you just leave me alone? Can’t you just let me live in peace?
You can save 15 minutes on your car insurance by switching to Geico.
Oh the Agony! The unbearable fate of being castigated by your friends! The Betrayal! Woe, woe is me!
I will not worship the Almighty PZed! I worship no man, ye Cult of the Pharyngula! No Ia or fhtagn for you!
Why do you ban me so? Where is my Internet First Amendment? WHAT HAVE YOU WROUGHT, INTERWEBS!!!? WHHHHHHY!?
I enjoy puppies.
What amazes me is the people who post on this thread and appear totally insensible to the implications of what they have to say, with regard to personal freedom, and freedom of speech, and incapable of differentiating between free speech and insult, threat, lies, and tricks like screaming fire in a crowded theater.
These people are children and need to be suppressed. Their misunderstandings cannot be allowed to threaten adults.
How dare you silence me Pharyngula. HOW DARE YOU.
Do you wanna fight, internet? Let’s go. Put up your dukes.
I AM THE DELUGE OF BLOOD AND BONES. NONE CAN STOP ME.
Why are you stopping me from being reasonable and agreeing with you and stuff?
Hey, guys, wanna see a screenplay I wrote? PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!!
Free speech is not threats, harassment, insults, or lies.
It’s time to stop pretending.
Monitor Note:
You may be banned from a comment thread if:
You cannot control your posting habits, and are dominating the discussion.
Da Schneib, you have made sixty-six out of the last hundred comments on this thread. I suggest you stop, now.
Sorry but you look like another excuse to me.
I’ll be sad, but not devastated, if it turns out you pretend your rules prevent free speech. I’ll just write you up and move on.
I posted your thread, and your article, on other forums, and got kicked off. I thought this was a good thing for you. If you intend to kick people off for spreading the truth you post, then I am unsure what to say. I think there’s something wrong and you are part of it.
I find this rather surreal.