Friday, February 12, 2010

Blogrolling


Eli has been reworking his blogroll. Unlike Belette's collection of eternally dead links, the bunny tries to keep semi up to date. Suggestions are always welcome, but he realized today that an important one was missing, Rick Piltz's Climate Science Watch. Rick is on fire with a super snarky evaluation of the current unpleasantness in DC which starts
Obama announces that he wants to get the snow plowed, but that he wants bipartisan consensus and compromise instead of unilateral action, and that instead of him pushing a particular snow-plowing policy, he wants Congress to work out the details. The Republicans, seeing that Obama is for cleaning up the snow, decide that they must be against it.
Piltz has interviews with Michael McCracken and Chris Fields on the IPCC but do read do read this one, Richard Sommerville's take on denialism. Eli will repost two of them
3. Our climate predictions are coming true. Many observed climate changes, like rising sea level, are occurring at the high end of the predicted changes. Some changes, like melting sea ice, are happening faster than the anticipated worst case. Unless mankind takes strong steps to halt and reverse the rapid global increase of fossil fuel use and the other activities that cause climate change, and does so in a very few years, severe climate change is inevitable. Urgent action is needed if global warming is to be limited to moderate levels.

5. Science has its own high standards. It does not work by unqualified people making claims on television or the Internet. It works by scientists doing research and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals. Other scientists examine the research and repeat it and extend it. Valid results are confirmed, and wrong ones are exposed and abandoned. Science is self-correcting. People who are not experts, who are not trained and experienced in this field, who do not do research and publish it following standard scientific practice, are not doing science. When they claim that they are the real experts, they are just plain wrong.
Whatever.

12 comments:

  1. You've now got Climate Science Watch in the list twice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Truth about science13/2/10 7:10 AM

    "People who are not experts, who are not trained and experienced in this field, who do not do research and publish it following standard scientific practice, are not doing science."

    But... but...
    Galileo! Einstein! Watts!

    ReplyDelete
  3. When they claim that they are the real experts, they are just plain wrong.

    True enough, but unfortunately (if this is any indication) what they are doing is far from a watts of time.

    Horatio would note that the American public view [scientific] "experts" just like they view magicians.

    The show is everything.

    If you can pull a rabbit out of a hat on cue (or stuff a rabett back in -- where he belongs), that's all most people care about.

    They don't care if there was a trick involved.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This is what Prof Jones said, and I quote him verbatim:
    __________________________
    Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).
    I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.
    So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

    __________________________

    So you sily people WTF was all the fuss about? Nothing to see here, stop having hysterics, move on. This is the capo di tutti capi talking.

    ReplyDelete
  5. There's nothing new or controversial about Jones statement. All the trumpeting about this statement merely demonstrates ignorance of the climate record and what science says about it.

    Y'all have a lot of catching up to do.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous asks:"So you sily people WTF was all the fuss about?"

    Attribution allows us to say why temperature rose in certain time periods, and why it will rise in the future.

    http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/

    See the green line? Up, up and away! See the 1910-1940 - no volcanic activity, compared to previous and subsequent years.

    WTF is the fuss is that some people can read graphs, the other side is gullible fools who fall for selectively presented "quotations" such as you presented.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Wait a minute, so anonymous is complaining about there being similar warming rates during 3 periods of warming in the last 150 years or so? The small problem being that the last two lots of warming were mostly down to solar influence, whereas there has been so such influence operating the last 30 years...

    ReplyDelete
  8. Little Mouse is a regular reader of Climate Science Watch.

    That link rot is a nasty, never ending problem.

    ReplyDelete
  9. cce has got his excellent on-line "book," The Global Warming Debate, back up, but in a new place: http://laymans-guide.com/.

    It is the first site I point to, for people who are asking questions scattershot or who have a large range of misconceptions. Definitely at a layman's level, short enough and divided into bite-sized pieces. Nicely narrative rather than pedantic. Both an HTML version you can read, and a narrated slides version you can watch and hear.

    But almost all the references are live links to more detailed material, including peer-reviewed material.

    ReplyDelete
  10. OK folks, it is not warming, and there is nothing remarkable about the climate over the last 20 years. And it has warmed and cooled about as it is now for the last 2,000 years. And one of the leading capos of the movement now says as much.

    So why am I suddenly supposed to be so worried and spend trillions to reverse this non-existent warming and the non-existent catastrophes it is going to cause?

    Get out of denial, folks. Its over.

    ReplyDelete
  11. In case there was any (rational) doubt, here are the decadal averages from the GISTEMP global temperature anomaly product:
    1880s -0.25
    1890s -0.26
    1900s -0.27
    1910s -0.28
    1920s -0.16
    1930s -0.03
    1940s +0.04
    1950s -0.02
    1960s -0.01
    1970s +0.00
    1980s +0.18
    1990s +0.32
    2000s +0.51
    thanks to BPL. As you can easily see, it is becming rather too warm, too fast for the last 30 years. [Or more, if you prefer to grow a longer fur coat.]

    ReplyDelete

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