Monday, January 02, 2006

Losers…..


Essex and McKitrick can’t even win a game of Global Climate Sceptic Bingo. To be fair, I only played with the “briefing” for Taken By Storm. Ms. Rabett has gifted me with a copy of the real thing….. a bunny needs a hobby. Who knows, maybe we will have a winner some day
But before we start, let me quote them on something new which will be of interest to those who engaged in the recent butterfly effect wars: It’s the housefly effect guys: (I've tried to include one link to each of the blog forts that were firing on each other, but the real knife work is in the comments and I am not exactly a disinterested party) Quoting from E&M Page 12 Last Paragraph: “Or to put it another way, if you were looking to explain “global warming” in the 1990s, would you think to study the activity of a housefly in the 1950s? Of course not. In classical physical theory small things typically cause small changes. In a chaotic system small things can cause big changes, and their effects can operate over long quiet intervals in which nothing appears to happen. The chaos revolution has meant the end of simple notions of predictability and change in deterministic systems.”

And since houseflies have large effects, large effects are meaningless: Page 13 First Paragraph “We cannot even be sure that “effects” have causes, when we are talking about chaotic systems…. It is just the nature of the system. You might go looking for a cause, and find some very plausible candidates. But nothing caused the jump.”
For why this is a more sophisticated version of weather is climate, take a look at the various links above. The short version is that the housefly might effect whether it rains on Joe Btfsplk or Daisy Mae, but it will rain somewhere in Dogpatch.
To quote Rasmus on Real Climate..."the most important information needed for such a weather forecast is the atmospheric initial conditions, a description of what the atmosphere and the SST look like when the weather model starts computing the weather evolution. If we want to make predictions over longer periods, such as the subsequent months, then the effects of boundary conditions become more important than the atmospheric initial conditions (due to internal chaos and the lack of predictability from the initial state)."
Anyhow, the proposal is in, the holidays are over and the devil is finding work for idle paws. If you want to read some more page down a bit (Blogger is doing something I don't understand with the html and leaving a big space between the text and the BINGO board). Thanks to Tim Lambert for allowing the use of his playground.



























In the 70s scientists were predicting an ice age #There is no
such thing as global average temperature [2].
#
Scientists only say that global warming exists so they can get grants #The IPCC
summary for policy makers does not reflect the body of the report [6]. #
Belief in global warming is a religionFred Singer
cited #
Ice cores show that warming precedes increases in CO2 #Science
doesn’t work by consensus [5]. #
17,000 scientists signed a petition saying global warming isn’t happening #>Satellites show no warming #>Michael Crichton cited #Climate
modeling isn’t scientific [3]. #
Urban Heat Islands contaminate the surface record #We can’t
predict the weather a week in advance. How can we do it
100 years in advance? [1]. #
Water vapour
is 98% of the greenhouse effect [4]. #
The “Hockey Stick” is broken. #

[1] Page 2 Paragraph 1 “No one expects computer models of the weather to be that certain. Yet people have come to believe that computer models of climate should be so certain that a discrepancy between prediction and reality for a small region of the planet is a worldwide news event”

[2] Page 2 Paragraph 2 "The familiar concepts upon which the climate change discussion have been built: ideas like “global temperature,” the “greenhouse effect” and “radiative forcing” have little or no physical basis.”

[3] Page 2 Paragraph 2 “We are confronted not just with uncertainty, but with nescience: that old Latin word meaning “not to know.” As to the future behaviour of climate, we are not merely uncertain, we are nescient.”

Page 2 Paragraph 3, 4 “Not only are there new results and open secrets that have not been assimilated into the popular and scientific discourse but they make the notion of certainty on climate a laughable claim. But let’s first begin with a basic observation, not about the strangeness of climate but about the strangeness of the climate change discussion.”

[4] Not quite far enough. Page 6 Paragraph 1 , “Moreover, in the popular discussion of the “greenhouse effect” so-called, the most important “greenhouse” gas gets forgotten: namely water vapour. People focus incessantly on CO2 yet good old H2O, the one truly important infrared-absorbing gas, is almost always forgotten! But water is not only the most important greenhouse gas, it is, unlike all the rest, deeply embroiled in the whole fluid dynamics problem. So leaving it off the list helps leave the turbulence problem out of the discussion, which strips away all the fundamental uncertainty.

[5] Even better denial that a consensus exists Page 21 Paragraph 2 “The politics are too hot, the battles are too painful, and the dead hand of Official Science lurks in the background, ready to turn honest uncertainty into fictitious consensus, thereby stigmatizing holders of legitimate points of view as outsiders and skeptics, regardless of the merits of their position.”

Page 20 Paragraph 7 “That the climate is full of surprises is not the message of the IPCC Summaries. It is there in the Reports themselves if you know where to look. But the Summaries are the work of Official Science, and the aim there was to orchestrate a consensus. In reality there is no certainty to be had on this issue. Not yet, and perhaps not for a long time to come. And it is hard to have consensus amidst fundamental uncertainty and nescience.”

[6] Page 23 Paragraph 2 “Or maybe the IPCC has been assuming all this time that people don’t actually read and understand the reports, instead they just look through the executive summary for an authoritative decree, rendered ex cathedra by the climate pontificate. Certainly some politicians talk this way. If that’s the case then a heads-tails model will only seem like a platform for heresy. The alternative is, admittedly, rather comforting. A solemn pronouncement of infallible doctrine arrives from the Papal see on finest parchment, sealed with red wax. But if you are up on your ecclesiological jargon, you will know that such a document is called a “bull”, so be careful about carrying the analogy over to the Summary for Policy Makers.

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