AGW Update: AGW on Ellesmere Island - 2 Million Years Ago

[Slim]

Yes. Solving the environmental problems of the planet seems to be a growing and profitable industry.

But, could you not simply attribute that to... well... capitalism???

[jbg]

no the reson you posted the article is you were trolling, you know the find on ellsmere has nothing to do with man but labeled it such anyways...

to claim there are only cyclical warmings/coolings is beyond stupid...

I am hardly a troll. I stay on these forums and am around to debate. I posted the Ellesmere forest story to show that there have been far warmer periods. You know that as well as I.

As far as debating relative intelligence I wouldn't go there if I were you.

[jbg]

See this is where you folks start to lose me... you're implying a massive conspiracy on a global scale amongst the scientific community (that's been going on for decades). You're implying that nearly every major scientific organisation around the globe is in on it.

How about a less pejorative term than "conspiracy"? Self-preservation instinct maybe?

[waldo]

no the reson you posted the article is you were trolling, you know the find on ellsmere has nothing to do with man but labeled it such anyways...

to claim there are only cyclical warmings/coolings is beyond stupid...

I am hardly a troll. I stay on these forums and am around to debate. I posted the Ellesmere forest story to show that there have been far warmer periods. You know that as well as I.

As far as debating relative intelligence I wouldn't go there if I were you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH46oIA6I2c

oh my!

[jbg]

oh my!

Very intelligent rebuttal; complete with nested quotes.

[wyly]

I am hardly a troll. I stay on these forums and am around to debate. I posted the Ellesmere forest story to show that there have been far warmer periods. You know that as well as I.

As far as debating relative intelligence I wouldn't go there if I were you.

it was troll post...cyclical warming/cooling events have no relevance you implied by stupidly labeling it an AGW event that cyclical events are the only cause of climate change...but if you knew better then it was a deliberate troll post...

so it was... A)stupid by design or B)you come by it naturally...you get to decide, pick one...

[jbg]

so it was... A)stupid by design or B)you come by it naturally...you get to decide, pick one...

Sarcasm maybe? Or are people who are mentally defective unable to detect sarcasm?

[Wild Bill]

Okay, I'm going to try and examine your reasoning here. You say that evidence presented by those trying to disprove AGW is usually dismissed as 'anecdotal' or 'not peer-reviewed', correct?

Your opinion is that those reasons are insufficient to legitimately dismiss the evidence, I gather?

Now I'm not a scientist, but I would say that if someone presented evidence that they claimed challenged a well-established and overwhelming accepted theory (such as AGW) and their evidence IS actually anecdotal that's a pretty damn big problem.

In the same vein, if a study comes out that challenges the main theory of AGW, and it isn't peer-reviewed, that's a pretty damn big problem too. From what I understand, if a study isn't peer-reviewed than it loses a lot of credibility (it may not be wrong per se, but it needs to stand up to a review before we can seriously consider it).

That seems to be how science works... you can't just say that your study doesn't have to be peer-reviewed in order to be legitimate.

You're nitpicking my model and not my point! I used anecdotal and peer review as only two examples. There are lots of other ways contrary evidence is discounted. The method really doesn't matter. And you seem to have entirely too much faith in the honesty and integrity of the peer review process as regards Global Warming, for reasons others have given much better than I.

Besides, the Universe doesn't give a damn about peer reviews! Flat Earth beliefs were no doubt peer reviewed, once upon a time! The Universe has her own Laws about how She works and she doesn't give a damn if a few scientists or even ALL scientists believe differently!

All peer review really does is give an expression of confidence in the peers involved. If the process is tainted by politics or economic blackmail then the scientific confidence is gone. It only has to be gone over one issue to be complete. Many defenders of things like "climategate" seem to feel if they can marginalize it to one or two incidents they can claim that in total the system is impartial. That's like saying that if you find 2 crooked judges on the Supreme Court you should still trust all Supreme Court judgements!

Whatever! As I said, it doesn't matter. Peer review was merely one example I gave, not my essential point.

That's another trick of the GW religion! Pick apart details of an example and ignore essential points.

You can't declare YOURSELF the winner in the middle of a debate and then afterwards refuse to revisit the arguments because "we've been there and done that!" That's not only absurd but incredibly arrogant!

[wyly]

And you seem to have entirely too much faith in the honesty and integrity of the peer review process as regards Global Warming, for reasons others have given much better than I.

go actually speak to someone who has gone through the peer review process, peer reviews are highly critical, cold blooded, unfriendly, and even viscious affairs...papers are examined microscopically for flaws in data and logic...these aren't friendly back patting sessions you make them out to be... Edited December 19, 2010 by wyly

[Wild Bill]

See this is where you folks start to lose me... you're implying a massive conspiracy on a global scale amongst the scientific community (that's been going on for decades). You're implying that nearly every major scientific organisation around the globe is in on it.

b ) An international conspiracy the likes of which the world has never seen before

You're misunderstanding what is meant by 'conspiracy'. No one is talking about a group of gnomes in Switzerland controlling the entire world. Perhaps you're trying to define such a conspiracy so that it would be easy to dismiss the premise like some 9/11 or moon-landing crap. That's hardly fair but typical of many GW supporters.

It's much simpler! An idea like GW becomes politically popular. Politicians feel that if they don't appear to be supporting the idea they might lose votes. Very quickly this affects funding for research organizations. These organizations rely VERY heavily on government funding!

Politicians as a rule are NOT scientific people! They also don't really give a damn if something is true or not. Many of them are also dumb enough to believe their own BS, like Al Gore. I don't think he is deliberately dishonest. He's just wrong!

What politicians DO care about is being re-elected! They want the guys in the white coats to be part of that process. Otherwise they have no compunctions about cutting off the funding.

That's all you need. No Illuminati mastermind, although Maurice Strong might be a likely candidate! Just a situation that tends towards a certain outcome.

Now before you tell me that most scientists have too much integrity to cow to such pressures, what would you do if your ability to feed your kids and keep a roof over their heads was put at risk? Hell, murders have been committed just over a professor getting tenure!

Many scientists HAVE bucked the trend! It would be interesting to know how many of them are free of monetary worries.

If you are having trouble buying into even the possibility of things happening as I've described, I invite you to google up "The Club of Rome". They were a group of "experts" who held a world wide panel to explore trends in energy, agriculture and material resources against population growth a few decades ago. Basically, they predicted that if we kept on the way we were we would all freeze, starve and die before the year 2000!

Politicians the world over, including our own Mr. Trudeau, bought in to their arguments and allowed them to influence government policy. They were dead wrong, of course but they caused the waste of HUGE sums of tax monies! That could have paid for a lot of hospitals or programs for cancer and AIDS.

There was no 'Illuminati' behind the Club of Rome either yet their influence at the time was enormous and global! With that sort of example as a precedent the idea of scientists supporting GW to keep their paychecks is not hard to believe at all.

Edited December 19, 2010 by Wild Bill

[wyly]

Sarcasm maybe? Or are people who are mentally defective unable to detect sarcasm?

aah so the answer is A) stupid by design... you knew that there are other causes of warming's and cooling's but deliberately choose to ignore that and insinuate that the ellesmere event was AGW in nature, so you were acting the part of forum troll...

jbg-

I am hardly a troll. I stay on these forums and am around to debate.

[waldo]

You're nitpicking my model and not my point! I used anecdotal and peer review as only two examples. There are lots of other ways contrary evidence is discounted. The method really doesn't matter. And you seem to have entirely too much faith in the honesty and integrity of the peer review process as regards Global Warming, for reasons others have given much better than I.

and you haven't a clue how the peer review process actually works... no reputable scientists hold the peer-review process up as infallible. Quite literally, hundreds of 'skeptical' papers get regularly published, year to year to year... and yet, you'll regularly get the uninformed trotting out this canard over peer-review. Methinks you're bordering on conspiratorial rantings - hey?

[Wild Bill]

go actually speak to someone who has gone through the peer review process, peer reviews are highly critical, cold blooded, unfriendly, and even viscious affairs...papers are examined microscopically for flaws in data and logic...these aren't friendly back patting sessions you make them out to be...

So? What does that have to do with the INTEGRITY of the process? If there is an agenda to not accept something that challenges GW for fear of losing funding then a review would look no different from the way you described.

[Wild Bill]

and you haven't a clue how the peer review process actually works... no reputable scientists hold the peer-review process up as infallible. Quite literally, hundreds of 'skeptical' papers get regularly published, year to year to year... and yet, you'll regularly get the uninformed trotting out this canard over peer-review. Methinks you're bordering on conspiratorial rantings - hey?

This is exactly what I mean by "picking apart a model and not the point." I just mentioned peer review as one of the ways that evidence or argument can be dismissed and suddenly the validity of peer review becomes the entire argument!

The original point becomes forgotten. Conveniently, perhaps.

[waldo]

go actually speak to someone who has gone through the peer review process, peer reviews are highly critical, cold blooded, unfriendly, and even viscious affairs...papers are examined microscopically for flaws in data and logic...these aren't friendly back patting sessions you make them out to be...

So? What does that have to do with the INTEGRITY of the process? If there is an agenda to not accept something that challenges GW for fear of losing funding then a review would look no different from the way you described.

well done Wild Bill! You managed to hit both of my entries added earlier to the new 'GW Fallacies' thread...

whaaa! TrueMetis... a most excellent thread!

- deniers claim the peer review process is corrupted... (of course, when you highlight the fact that hundreds of 'skeptical' papers get regularly published... deniers hold fast to claiming the peer review process is still corrupted. Apparently it has something to do with the fact that none/few of the 'skeptical' papers can stand the test of an extended peer-response - go figure!

- deniers claim the science is "cooked" by scientists working to sustain funding... (of course, when you ask for substantiation to such a broad conspiratorial claim, you'll hear crickets back).

[Slim]

You're nitpicking my model and not my point! I used anecdotal and peer review as only two examples. There are lots of other ways contrary evidence is discounted. The method really doesn't matter.

I disagree. Contrary evidence needs to stand up to criticism and review. Otherwise you could make up ANY argument you wanted, no matter how outlandish or baseless.

And you seem to have entirely too much faith in the honesty and integrity of the peer review process as regards Global Warming, for reasons others have given much better than I.

Do you have a better solution to vetting scientific findings? Because peer-review sounds like the best way (albeit ponderous) to do it.

You can't declare YOURSELF the winner in the middle of a debate and then afterwards refuse to revisit the arguments because "we've been there and done that!" That's not only absurd but incredibly arrogant!

Well... I hate to sound rude... but (to borrow your Flat-Earth reference) if I was to argue with someone that the earth was, in fact, round and they refused to accept it... it doesn't matter that I didn't convince them. Didn't make the earth any flatter, just proved they were stubborn.

In the same way, if people keep referencing the global cooling myth from a few years back... yeah we can dismiss it, because it doesn't do anything to disprove AGW. It doesn't make the earth any flatter.

It's much simpler! An idea like GW becomes politically popular. Politicians feel that if they don't appear to be supporting the idea they might lose votes. Very quickly this affects funding for research organizations. These organizations rely VERY heavily on government funding!

This is a pretty strong accusation, and I would like some proof to support it. I can't just take you on your word that the reason we have an AGW theory is because it's 'politically popular'.

Even that premise is flawed. 'Politically popular'? Seems there would be a lot more push from, well, EVERY industry to suppress AGW theory. Lobbyists for industry hardly want more regulation and control on pollution/emissions.

And please, no more 'GW-religion' tripe, please. I hardly consider myself a AGW crusader. I'm just trying to follow this issue logically, 'cause it sounds like it's going to affect myself and my kids a lot.

[TimG]

and you haven't a clue how the peer review process actually works... no reputable scientists hold the peer-review process up as infallible. Quite literally, hundreds of 'skeptical' papers get regularly published, year to year to year

This is a new talking point. What happened to Oreskes' claim that not one paper rejected the consensus position on AGW? I suspect you are changing your tune because climategate has shown people that they cannot assume that peer reveiw is an impartial arbiter of 'truth' and that the personal biases of leading scientists do affect was is accepted and what is rejected.

As for the bias here is another example:

http://climateaudit.org/2010/12/15/mckitrick-and-nierenberg-2010-rebuts-another-team-article/

In this case, a CAGW scientist submitted a paper that rebutted a skeptical paper yet the authors were never asked to comment on the "rebuttal". Yet when the skeptics submitted a response the editor allowed the CAGW scientist to review their submission which was ultimately rejected by the journal. It is a patheric double standard that makes it much harder for skeptical papers to get published.

[TimG]

Do you have a better solution to vetting scientific findings? Because peer-review sounds like the best way (albeit ponderous) to do it.

As a first cut peer review serves a purpose. The mistake that people make is to assume that it is all that is required when using science to make decisions that have large economic implications. Both medicine and engineering have processes in place impose much higher standards on scientists working in the field. Climate science needs to be held to similar standards. The 'this is the way we have always don't it' whingeing from climate scientists has to end. Edited December 19, 2010 by TimG

[eyeball]

Basically, we can't really take a weather event happening right now and say "A-ha! Global warming strikes again!"

But we could in a decade or two say, "A-ha! Those increasingly longer and harsher droughts across the globe are most likely a direct result of global warming!"

It seems to me we've been doing the latter for at least a decade or two already but...oh well...maybe in another decade or two it'll start sinking in.

I agree the world-wide research-funding conspiracy notion is about as ridiculous as it gets. That said if they've been able to get away with it for this long without a single person getting caught or without allowing a single whistle blower to blow the lid off the conspiracy. These conspirators must be incredibly intelligent capable people which sounds like the sort of people that should probably be running the world.

[Saipan]

But we could in a decade or two say, "A-ha! Those increasingly longer and harsher droughts across the globe are most likely a direct result of global warming!"

Which would be a great error. Increasingly longer and harsher droughts across the globe happen during the Ice Age.

[TimG]

It seems to me we've been doing the latter for at least a decade or two already but...oh well...maybe in another decade or two it'll start sinking in.

Actually the research shows that there is zero evidence of an increase in droughts over the last century.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2010/02/24/update-on-global-drought-patterns-ipcc-take-note/

I expect the CAGW doom mongers to ignore this study as they do for all studies that go against their belief system.

I agree the world-wide research-funding conspiracy notion is about as ridiculous as it gets.

What is rediculous are the number of people who think that skeptics are claiming there is an organized conspiracy. What we have is bias. Bias that marginalizes research that does not produce the desired results while amplifying research that does.

We see the same thing in drug research where there literature is biased because only studies that show good results get published. This problem has only recently been addressed by government regulators. We need a similar policy for climate research.

Edited December 19, 2010 by TimG

[waldo]

and you haven't a clue how the peer review process actually works... no reputable scientists hold the peer-review process up as infallible. Quite literally, hundreds of 'skeptical' papers get regularly published, year to year to year... and yet, you'll regularly get the uninformed trotting out this canard over peer-review. Methinks you're bordering on conspiratorial rantings - hey?

This is a new talking point. What happened to Oreskes' claim that not one paper rejected the consensus position on AGW? I suspect you are changing your tune because climategate has shown people that they cannot assume that peer reveiw is an impartial arbiter of 'truth' and that the personal biases of leading scientists do affect was is accepted and what is rejected.

hey now! You’re back… do you think you’ve been gone long enough for the outstanding posts waiting for you to respond will have been forgotten and/or dropped through the ether?

not familiar with the Oreskes quote you reference... put it up and provide context for discussion.

the couple of Hackergate fabrications and distortions concerning peer-review have been addressed, at length, in previous MLW threads... of course, you know this! Nothing to see here - move along now!

don't hesitate to mention any smoking gun skeptic/denier papers that are flailing out there... unable to get published. No wait... any papers, not just the next silver bullets! (we can even exclude E&E from the journal list, if you prefer - (/snarc)

As for the bias here is another example:

http://climateaudit.org/2010/12/15/mckitrick-and-nierenberg-2010-rebuts-another-team-article/

In this case, a CAGW scientist submitted a paper that rebutted a skeptical paper yet the authors were never asked to comment on the "rebuttal".

setting aside you can't trust anything the shyster McIntyre says or prints, since when does a scientist need "an ask" to submit a response?

Yet when the skeptics submitted a response the editor allowed the CAGW scientist to review their submission which was ultimately rejected by the journal. It is a patheric double standard that makes it much harder for skeptical papers to get published.

nonsense... this is nothing more than McKitrick sour grapes. Everything was above board - the journal editor sought and received McKitrick’s willingness to liaise with GS (which came at the request of the independent reviewers)… McKitrick most certainly could have refused. As the journal editor reinforces, GS was not one of the designated reviewers… no matter how hard McKitrick tries to impress the counter point. This is nothing more than a whining display of sour grapes on McKitrick’s part (and, of course, pumped up by his tag-team buddy, McIntyre). McKitrick simply can’t accept his paper was rejected by 3 independent reviewers.

in any case, well done! You’ve managed to highlight the successful workings of the peer review process. McKitrick’s comment gets rejected, an everyday commonplace occurrence, and McKitrick follows the available path taken by those rejected… he peddled his paper to other journals (of like or lesser repute)… and he got it published. Score one for the peer review process! Of course, the onus is now on GS to decide if he personally feels the McKitrick paper is worthy of a response… as is the same onus on any other scientist(s) to choose to address the McKitrick paper – or not. It’s how the process works… it’s how science advances in addressing challenges to existing science or the introduction of new findings.

[jbg]

peer reviews are highly critical, cold blooded, unfriendly, and even viscious vicious affairs ...

Fixed it. Edited December 20, 2010 by jbg

[waldo]

It seems to me we've been doing the latter for at least a decade or two already but...oh well...maybe in another decade or two it'll start sinking in.

Actually the research shows that there is zero evidence of an increase in droughts over the last century.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2010/02/24/update-on-global-drought-patterns-ipcc-take-note/

I expect the CAGW doom mongers to ignore this study as they do for all studies that go against their belief system.

bloody hell! Zero evidence... and you trot out the same thing you did last time! Here, refresh your memory... or at least acknowledge you purposely refuse to accept anything that refutes your baseless claims... or at least accept that you can't be bothered to read!!!

re: your claim concerning droughts... I believe we took care of that - hey? I believe you said something about zero evidence!

Yes like the "net benefit" Russia is getting in decreased wheat crop yields.

If they are in fact decreasing the suggestion that this can be linked to a 0.5 degC increase in average temps is absurd. The tendency to claim a link between pretty much anything bad and GW even when there is no rational reason to do is one of the reasons why AGW alarmism is just another religion.

It actually caused by the more extreme heat waves, which is caused by the increased water in the atmosphere screwing up the hydrological cycle, which is caused by a 0.5 increase in average global temp. It also causing droughts in Russia. In Russia the average temperature change is much higher than the global average. At about 1.19, (link) but hey rather than listening to climate scientists and agricultural scientists about the effect climate change is having on crop yields I should listen to you.

The "noise" in the system far exceeds .5 degC. Attributing any effects to this rise is an exercise in voodoo.

Droughts go in cycles - i.e. over a course of century different areas of the globe will go through cycles of drought. There is zero evidence of any change to the duration, size or severity of droughts over the last 100 years. http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2010/02/24/update-on-global-drought-patterns-ipcc-take-note/

Try this:

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008JCLI2722.1

standard TimG parroting response from his linked denier blog site… nothing more than a complete distortion of that Sheffield paper – a paper focused on variability… not trends. You simply need to look at past work/papers involving the same scientist – Sheffield, to easily ascertain the absolute distortion/fabrication from TimG and his linked denier blog:

- a most recent paper from Sheffield et al:

Global Drought and Agricultural Water Productivity Monitoring: Transitioning Towards Application Scales

Drought is likely to increase in a global warming climate (Burke et al., 2006; Sheffield and Wood 2008)

- another paper from Sheffield et al:

Projected changes in drought occurrence under future global warming from multi-model, multi-scenario, IPCC AR4 simulations

Recent and potential future increases in global temperatures are likely to be associated with impacts on the hydrologic cycle, including changes to precipitation and increases in extreme events such as droughts.

- another paper from Sheffield et al:

Global Trends and Variability in Soil Moisture and Drought Characteristics, 1950–2000, from Observation-Driven Simulations of the Terrestrial Hydrologic Cycle

Within the long-term trends there are considerable interannual and decadal variations in soil moisture and drought characteristics for most regions, which impact the robustness of the trends. Analysis of detrended and smoothed soil moisture time series reveals that the leading modes of variability are associated with sea surface temperatures, primarily in the equatorial Pacific and secondarily in the North Atlantic. Despite the overall wetting trend there is a switch since the 1970s to a drying trend, globally and in many regions, especially in high northern latitudes. This is shown to be caused, in part, by concurrent increasing temperatures. Although drought is driven primarily by variability in precipitation, projected continuation of temperature increases during the twenty-first century indicate the potential for enhanced drought occurrence.

of course, there’s no shortage of work/papers from multitudes of other scientists; examples:

-

A Global Dataset of Palmer Drought Severity Index for 1870–2002: Relationship with Soil Moisture and Effects of Surface Warming

– NCAR (Aiguo Dai, Kevin E. Trenberth, AND Taotao Qian)

These results provide observational evidence for the increasing risk of droughts as anthropogenic global warming progresses and produces both increased temperatures and increased drying.

-

Detection of human influence on twentieth-century precipitation trends

(Zhang et al)

Here we compare observed changes in land precipitation during the twentieth century averaged over latitudinal bands with changes simulated by fourteen climate models. We show that anthropogenic forcing has had a detectable influence on observed changes in average precipitation within latitudinal bands, and that these changes cannot be explained by internal climate variability or natural forcing. We estimate that anthropogenic forcing contributed significantly to observed increases in precipitation in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, drying in the Northern Hemisphere subtropics and tropics, and moistening in the Southern Hemisphere subtropics and deep tropics. The observed changes, which are larger than estimated from model simulations, may have already had significant effects on ecosystems, agriculture and human health in regions that are sensitive to changes in precipitation, such as the Sahel

=> i.e. decreases in mean precipitation over land in some latitude bands… attributed to AGW climate change

etc., etc., etc…… quite literally, I could easily throw up linked reference to a dozen+ papers… and it wouldn’t matter to the TimGs of the world. The AGW caused intensification of the global hydrological cycle is clearly showing increases in precipitation extremes… both increases in very heavy precipitation in wet areas and increases in drought in dry areas. But don't let that stop the TimGs beaking-off about "zero evidence".

The "noise" in the system far exceeds .5 degC. Attributing any effects to this rise is an exercise in voodoo.

Droughts go in cycles - i.e. over a course of century different areas of the globe will go through cycles of drought. There is zero evidence of any change to the duration, size or severity of droughts over the last 100 years.

[waldo]

go actually speak to someone who has gone through the peer review process, peer reviews are highly critical, cold blooded, unfriendly, and even viscious affairs...papers are examined microscopically for flaws in data and logic...these aren't friendly back patting sessions you make them out to be...

peer reviews are highly critical, cold blooded, unfriendly, and even viscious affairs vicious...

Fixed it.

whaaa! In your lawyerly pursuit, what's your fee for spelling adjudication? (I note you threw in a free translation with shifted wording... although I believe your translation services require your own spelling adjudication - hey... "affaires vicieuses")