97 Comments

1. a Duoist:

One never sees in the reporting on global warming the following scientific facts:

1. Without global warming, all human life on this planet dies out.

2. Greenhouse gases are absolutely essential to produce global warming.

3. Greenhouse gases make up 2% of the earth’s atmosphere.

4. The major greenhouse gas is water vapor; carbon gases make up less than 1% of greenhouse gases, making carbon a fraction of a fraction of the atmosphere.

5. Ice cores and tree rings reveal that the planet long ago had periodically experienced global warming with temperatures far higher than today’s, when no humans walked upon the face of the Earth, or drove SUV’s, or had smokestack industries.

If humanity never created repeated far hotter global warmings in the past, what is the scientific proof that it is creating global warming now?

6. If sea ice melts from global warming, the oceans FALL. If land ice melts from global warming, the oceans will rise. Which has more ice? Greenland, or the Arctic Ocean?

7. Humanity thrives during periods of global warming and struggles to survive during periods of global cooling.

BTW – “Climate change” is not a ‘crisis.’ Climate changes every minute of every day everywhere on the planet. Change is a “crisis” only to people with a dark, pessimistic personal psychology, the frightened among us.

Nov 26, 2009 - 2:20 am 2. toad:

Ice bergs spotted of the coast of New Zealand. Mobs with tar and feathers spotted heading for Washington DC and the New York Times.
Meanwhile the Republican “leadership” seems to sitting on their thumbs and worrying about Palin, while all this comes out. Sheeesh.

Nov 26, 2009 - 2:38 am 3. Pascal (the derivative):

The masthead at my site begins In his “Provincial Papers,” Blaise Pascal Advanced the Age of Reason by ridiculing the corruption of the powerful. He was so infective that the manner in which he did it was adapted somewhat later by Voltaire for Candide. His protagonist asks questions of learned men and receives answers that don’t quite jive with facts and reason.

What he exposed was a racket. Those who needed a ruling to go their way would seek out learned men who would provide pages and pages of case law by men famous for their judgment based on the facts of some related case. But the wrinkle in that game was the decisions were selected for the way they were decided way back whenever, and that was all. That was all that was needed for the learned men to find for their client. They could then say “Saint XXX found this way, so therefore our client is found faultless.”

It had nothing to do with the case at hand, and everything to do with INVOKING THE NAME of MEN WITH CREDENTIALS.

The defendant was found to have acted probably (a word we almost never use in that way today). That was the actions that Pascal was holding up to public scorn. I’m not sure he was the first to label it as such, but it was and has forever now been labeled as “extrinsic probabalism.”

I spoke back on the CRU Hack thread where I praised John Donne’s other work wherein he defended the early works of such men of credentials. That was where the facts fit the case being tried. The distinction Pascal made was that such a finding of probable behavior could be called “intrinsic probablism.”

Ok, enough with the obscure language. What we have here folks is the same sort of battle.

The AGW fanatics constantly shout “peer review, peer reviewed.” What they are insisting is that it means nothing if the critics are not a member of the climate guild. That there is a catch-22 to gain entry to that guild, they don’t let on, but we all know it’s there. It’s like gang members challenging “where you from?” or a Chicago boss asking “who sent you?”

What everybody else has been saying is that THE FACTS DO NOT MATCH ANYTHING YOUR GUILD MEMBERS SAY.

And now we find deliberate falsifications. And their brazenness (Progress-of) gets ever more flagrant. Well, Duh. That’s all they ever had — the brazenness of each “expert” patting their fellow expert on the back. One lies, the next swears by it.

Pascal published anonymously. Good thing he did, for Louis XIV ordered the Provincial Letter pamphlets burned on sight. Can you imagine what he’d have done to the author?

I have little doubt what the AGW gangsters want to do to all of you. We are up against religious like fanatics. It will not matter how many facts we show to some followers, they are steeped in a culture that revolves around celebrities, and those mortals are their gods now. God help us.

———–
I’ve a question about modern France for Marie Claude, or anyone else familiar with what’s currently in the Palace at Versailles. It’s may be nothing, but the answer might suggest something. Volunteers?

Nov 26, 2009 - 3:20 am 4. Pascal (the derivative):

Oops. My previous reference to Donne was on the Odds Against Tomorrow thread, and not The CRU Hack thread. Sorry.

Just as Pascal advanced the Age of Reason, these new charlatans have stood reason on its head and would take us back, way back — the decrepit dream of the nihilists of the sinister wing.

Wretchard, now might be a good time to revisit those two threads you posted about “Post-Normal Science.” It truly is the “science” at work here, the “science” of the “Postmodernists.” There is no future with them, they so “gotta wipe this desire for modernity, the longing for latest and greatest of everything, to search to find out what we don’t know yet, out of human consciousness.”

Nov 26, 2009 - 3:47 am 5. blogstrop:

I smell a wratt.

Nov 26, 2009 - 3:55 am 6. Smoking Frog:

Wretchard, it’s true, as you say, that most of us take technical matters on faith, but very few of us who do this vociferously defend the mainstream position on them against critics. With AGW, it’s different.

Nov 26, 2009 - 5:05 am 7. Salt Lick:

Belmont’s commenters with whom I share other blog “homes” are probably sick of hearing me say this, but I worked in academia (as staff) with “scientists” for 20 years and none of the shenanigans at CRU or elsewhere surprises me.

Even knowledgeable outsiders can’t know the extent to which science is harnessed to a Leftist political agenda these days. Presidential economic adviser Larry Summers, formerly president of Harvard U — until he mused openly about gender differences — can explain.

There are bigger conspiracies occurring right now than ever before in history. “The Da Vinci Code?” Some smart person who can actually write (hint wretchard) needs to mix that formula with Ayn Rand’s themes. But I doubt Tom Hanks will appear in the movie.

Nov 26, 2009 - 5:39 am 8. Smoking Frog:

#1 a Duoist:

Some of what you say is correct, but:

Carbon gases are not less than 1% of greenhouse gases. They are about 5%, counting water vapor as a greenhouse gas. (It is one, but this is not what is usually meant by “greenhouse gas.”) Anyway, so what? No AGW skeptic scientist, except a very few extremely unusual ones, disputes the claim that, ceteris paribus, except water vapor, an increase of CO2 and/or methane would raise the surface temperature of the earth. Some of them dispute the claim of constant relative humidity, but the fact that carbon gases are only 5% of greenhouse gases has no bearing on this.

Tree ring proxies don’t take us back more than a few thousand years, at best. Besides, there is pretty good evidence that tree ring proxies do not reliably show the temperature, and based on this there is plenty of criticism by AGW skeptics, so it’s kind of funny for a skeptic to be using it against the believers.

The climate was warmer at times when humans did walk the face of the earth.

Even if there is more ocean ice than land ice, this can not support a claim that warming would not raise the sea level, since: Why has the sea level risen by hundreds of meters since the last ice age?

The term “global warming” does not refer to the total greenhouse effect (33 C.), so it is not true that without global warming all human life would die out.

Nov 26, 2009 - 5:58 am 9. More climate change shenanigans? « A Conservative Shemale:

[...] Belmont Club – The Climate Science Coalition performed a simple test. They downloaded the raw data and plotted it. To their astonishment, the numbers looked nothing like the official figures. The official graph apparently contained adjustments. Worst of all, it was the project of a scientist who had been at the CRU around which a data integrity scandal is now swirling. [...]

Nov 26, 2009 - 6:23 am 10. MTL:

Reproducibility is a fundamental requirement for publishing in a scientific journal. If they “adjusted” the data without explaining their adjustments in their original paper (you can’t re-explain your methods 10 years later), then that’s just the same as making up data. A high school science teacher would fail a student for doing similar shoddy work, and I can’t begin to express how angry I am at this breech of trust. The fact that these lies were sold in a way to scare the world’s economy into handing over the keys to growth is even scarier…

I worry that it’s too late though for the grown ups to take back the keys.

Nov 26, 2009 - 6:37 am 11. Ricardo:

Michael Chricton predicted all of this in 2004 with his prescient novel “State of Fear”.
It is all there, the bending of data, the fusion between ideologue scientists and government, etc.
Science, when mixed with politics, has gifted us with such gems as eugenics. The danger is that when the aura of “scientific” truth is bestowed on a popularly held prejudice, and then vested with the authority of government, terrible things happen.
Eugenics in the hands US government Alabama officials led to forced sterilization of thousands of blacks in the US and reached it’s logical apogee in the Nazi holocaust.
The key difference between real science and junk science is that real science is slow and methodical, junk science always comes with the oldest and cheapest hard sell “Act now…!!!”

Nov 26, 2009 - 6:42 am 12. Marcus Aurelius:

MTL, Here is a piece I wrote on reporting experimental data: http://philippinecommentary.blogspot.com/2009/11/data-is-in.html.

With not the New Zealand controversy in mind, but with the CRU Hack revelations. You hit it exactly right — include or give access to all the data with you report and explain the reasoning to exclude or otherwise tinker with the data. Be open about it.

In the example I give it is quite easy to defend throwing out a measurement report of 170 cm for a 16.8 cm object, but it is more a trick to do so when the recorded report may be 8 cm (not hard to argue for exclusion but harder than assigning outlier status to 170 cm).

A lot of the reporting on this and apparently a lot of the research seems to be begging the question.

Nov 26, 2009 - 7:05 am 13. Jim Nicholas:

a Duoist @ #1

You state “If sea ice melts from global warming, the oceans FALL.”

Would Archimedes agree with you? Try it with a glass of water and ice cubes. The water level does not change at all as the ice melts.

Am I missing something?

Best wishes,

Jim

Nov 26, 2009 - 7:26 am 14. RWE:

Back in the early 90’s I read a book by a noted scientist about the real attitudes within the scientific community.

He had taken some satellite data and concluded that it showed that small comets massing about 100 tons of ice were impacting the Earth’s atmosphere. Everyone found this surprising and interesting, but his “mistake” was saying that the data showed that these impacts numbered about 50,000 a year.

Other scientists found this to be incredible, but worst of all, the new data threatened some careers. Assuming such impacts were normal, all the water on the Earth could be accounted for by the comets. One scientist opposed the theory because he had become world famous by showing how planets were fated to lose all their water. And if this was a phenomenon restricted to limited time periods, no one was prepared to explain how the comet data impacts analyses on the ozone holes and global warming.

His critics came up with argument after argument over why the data could not be right and he responded each time with answers as to why their criticisms were invalid. Data to be collected to disprove his conclusions were suggested, and each time he got the data and showed how it supported him. In one case another scientist wrote a report on how the additional data taken with his equipment showed the small comet concept to be invalid – and wrote the report before the data was collected.

That book made me realize that scientists are human. They are venal. They are arrogant. They want more money for less work. They wish to see their rivals discredited and defunded. They seek to become entrenched bureaucrats, protected from their actions by layers of regulations, political influence and conspiracies. They lie. My experience at the Pentagon merely reinforced all of these observations.

To quote Robert Conquest :”And an ever larger section of society is put through “higher’ education. One element of this is educated in scientific and other specialized disciplines, though often unaccompanied by much in the way of “education” proper. At any rate, the state is to some extent creating a nonproductive class and creating nonproductive work for them.”

Nov 26, 2009 - 7:31 am 15. Lifeofthemind:

Once upon a time the ideological circus pitched its tent, or their armies massed for battle, in the great capitals of Western Civilization. Those were London, Berlin, Paris, Milan and New York. The Bolshevik putsch in Petrograd and subsequent move to Moscow shifted the physical confrontation to Europe’s periphery. While the physical confrontation was largely on the margins of civilization, except spectacularly when the Nazis and Fascists took power in the very heart of Europe, the intellectual contest remained in the key upper middle class salons and universities of the West.

Those outside of these centers were largely sheltered. This was particularly true in the English speaking world. While the heritage of the Anglo-saxon Dominions was more feudal and Statist than the American model and concepts like Fabian Socialism were spread widely, the broad tolerant moderation of a culture that respected privacy in thought and property and expected high standards of probity from those respected as scholars, clergy and politicians generally held.

The Eurocentric view of the struggle was increasingly outdated as the left turned to anti-imperialist theory to spread their message. This successfully grafted itself onto anti-colonial movements so that the movement against a dominating Statist Center that had been ruled by an arbitrary aristocracy did not follow the American model but instead was co-opted to advance another dominating Statist model that while in theory more meritocratic was in truth ruled by an equally arbitrary, and often distant, elite. For those English speaking communities not swept up by the great ethnic based revolutionary movements of the 20th century, Canada, New Zealand, the English (not Afrikaans) minority in South Africa and most of America these intellectual disputes did nothing to shake their faith in institutions or elites. They were like the hobbits in sheltered backwaters.

Now we see that the anti-morality that produces situational ethics and views even scientific inquiry as ripe for manipulation to attain a political end has spread to the Antipodes. For a totalitarian ideologue this is a win-win situation. If the people of New Zealand swallow the lie then a new regime of control and exploitation is established. If they see the fraud and reject it though their faith in key institutions is wounded. Without that basic faith in the honesty and loyalty of scholars, clergy, politicians and other leaders of society individuals become isolated and rootless. Then they become ripe for mobilization by a totalitarian movement.

Nov 26, 2009 - 7:32 am 16. AJStrata:

As one of those rocket scientists types, I can say with confidence the global warming alarmists are not on our league.

You are correct, all these people have to do is prove why the took reasonably good data with huge uncertainties and claimed they could detect a 0.8°C rise when their data and processing is not even good to 1°C (try adding focus to a picture out of focus – never works, same problem).

What’s really interesting is when you compare the CRU plots for New Zealand with the New Zealand plots (http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11542). None of the 3 look the same.

Different planets or parallel universes???

Nov 26, 2009 - 7:52 am 17. MTL:

Marcus Aurelius-

Exactly- I think anyone who’s ever worked in a lab can attest to getting weird results, but the mantra of transparency and explaining your methods is a vital part of your results.

In medicine this happens all the time where someone publishes one article which shows a mortality benefit if therapy X is given, which convinces much of the medical community to perform therapy X. But then subsequent studies cannot replicate this mortality benefit, and the original results are sort of shrugged off as an aberration even though reported p values were less than 0.05. Take for example tight glycemic control in ICUs, which was thought to be beneficial, but after last year’s large study debunked the original article, most ICU staff agree that the originally reported mortality benefit was probably not actually there.

Science is not always crystal clear, even after the data have been gathered. And the problem is when the methods become politicized to such an extent that trillions of dollars depend on the results.

I’m trying to think of another area of research where so much money depends on the results, but I can’t. Other politicized areas of science depend on the applicability of the results, such as the stem cells as therapy for parkinsons, or the applicability of a working malaria vaccine. But climate science is trying to create the bogeyman- it would be like stem cell researchers having to make up the disease that they could try to cure.

Can anyone think of any other areas of science where so much money depends on convincing the public that their bogeyman exists?

Nov 26, 2009 - 7:58 am 18. sol vason:

looks like they had to waterboard the temperature data in order to make it support global warming. Nothing else worked.

Nov 26, 2009 - 8:02 am 19. Martin McPhillips:

Ricardo has it right about the late Michael Crichton’s novel, State of Fear. When I read it, I thought that Crichton was exaggerating to make for a good story, but it turns out that he captured the deceit and coercion with a remarkable accuracy. I see that now. It is as if he saw through the whole game with x-ray vision.

If the cooking of the New Zealand data is what it appears to be, it is a nutshell version of the greatest scandal of science of, well, who knows? What sort of scale is it to be measured against?

Nov 26, 2009 - 8:08 am 20. RWE:

MTL #17:

Well, there is the Ozone Hole conflabble and some people think that the whole HIV/AIDS business is a case of looking for a virus that is not the cause of the problem.

Nov 26, 2009 - 8:22 am 21. Josh:

Um, let’s frame this a little better, come up with an alternative phrase to “climate deniers”. How about we call them:

honest scientists

Nov 26, 2009 - 8:28 am 22. MTL:

RWE-

I see the connections with ozone, and that seems to have petered out. Besides stopping CFCs, are there any other reasons why this “end of the world” science has calmed down? Are there any parallels that could be used to steer climate science toward a similar twilight?

As far as the HIV/AIDS business, I am unaware of this branch of science as a scaremonger nefarious plot.

Nov 26, 2009 - 8:36 am 23. hdgreene:

Central Planners need to produce tanks, not toasters.

Back in the 1980’s I was talking to a college student who was getting pumped up on pseudo Marxist drivel (Marxism is all about “hiding the decline” inherent in socialism). The Cold War was still raging and he picked up some theories about the nature capitalism and what not. So I told him something about the nature of central planning.

Let us say you are a central planner and you order a large plant to make toasters. However, you wildly over estimate the demand for toaster (or the plant produces crap that no one buys). Pretty soon, you have warehouses full of toasters. Your failure is made visible. And what if you cut back toaster production? Well, toaster producers and toaster input producers and even warehouse storing managers will hate you.

Now, let’s look at centrally planned tank production. The production of tanks requires a lot of resources and keeps a lot people busy right back to steelworkers and coalminers. So right away, you got a lot of influential people on your side. Also, nobody knows how many tanks are needed, so how can you produce too many of them? Plus, there’s a virtuous cycle: the more tanks you produce, the more your “enemies” will produce so right away you need more tanks. And even if the tanks are not of the quality desired, there is another powerful interest group that makes a living fixing them. And if people complain, remember you got tanks. With Tanks, you don’t need thanks. If you control the Tanks, you control the spanks.

So if you have the soul of a Central Planner you are going to be attracted to the production of tanks, rather than toasters. Tanks are big scale endeavors that are uneconomic but with powerful interests attached to their continued (and expanding) use. The production of tanks requires the reordering of society and the imposition (and policing) of a complex regulatory state.

Solar and wind power are promoted precisely because they are uneconomic. Without a “reordering of Society” there will be no widespread adaption — at least until they become competitive. The fact that they may become competitive in the future argues for premature adoption, since progress towards practicality can then be halted (the interests groups in place will need these forms of production to be uneconomic because that — plus regulation — will prevent the competition from developing that will be their death).

Nuclear power is opposed, not because it is dangerous, but because it is too close to being economical. So the goal is to keep it uneconomic and scary.

Now take a look at fusion research. If you pledge your fusion reactor will cost tens of billions to build and never produce useful energy, you get the money from world governments. If your project will cost 20 million to prove and promises to cheaply and safely power villages and hamlets, you have to rely on pay-pal.

What is really scary about solar and wind — and other forms of alternative energy — is that, given another twenty years of economic freedom, they may become the toasters that undermine central planning. That is the real reason for Climate panic. It is not the earth’s climate that free enterprise and entrepreneurship is assaulting. It is the regulatory one. This is not change they believe in. It is change they believe they can–and must–stop.

By the way, this also applies to health care reform. The health care industry is deliberately made inefficient so the attached interests become dependent on the political “planning” class for their continued “living.”

And remember: if you control the tanks, you control the spanks.

Nov 26, 2009 - 8:38 am 24. rab:

Jim Nicholas-

When water freezes it expands in volume. Likewise, when ice melts it contracts.

Nov 26, 2009 - 8:42 am 25. Josh:

Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy correctly observes that most of us take technical matters on faith. Few of us understand rocket science or the theory of relativity. But if someone we trusts says “it’s OK” then we accept the arcane theory as true. When our doctor says swallow this tablet of 2-ethanoyloxybenzoic acid we do. We drink aspirin even though we don’t know why it works.

Well, heck. I don’t take nuthin on “faith”. I take aspirin, even not knowing how it works in terms of method of action, because there is a huge experiential base of data on how it works in terms of safety and results. Not to mention Googling everything I get from the pharmacy. One thing about hospitals I hate is that stuff happens too fast to check. I “trust” nothing, I am very fatalistic about what happens in hospitals. The error rate is sky-high, the basic science is dubious in way too many cases. “Trust” but verify, I guess, as some guy said.

But I suppose that does make me a rare bird. I don’t have a college degree in a hard science, but in computer science. I have my high school science classes, and reading of science mags like Scientific American (especially back when it had more content). But I have to say, I’ve spent time on some other political sites, with politically well-informed and sophisticated posters, and when scientific issues come up – the degree of basic knowledge is veeeeery low, not one in ten posters seems to recall even junior-high general science levels of knowledge.

Scary.

And yes, I’ve worked in and around the real deal scientists, and also read a great deal about the history of science and philosophy of science, and even at best, it’s a long way from anything you want to “trust”, absent long empirical records of whatever you’re interested in.

–

Yes, I know the “some guy” was President Reagan.

Nov 26, 2009 - 8:49 am 26. Gordon:

#24–correct, especially if you substitute sea water and fresh water ice cubes.

Nov 26, 2009 - 9:00 am 27. Marcus Aurelius:

Josh,

Have you reviewed the studies that lead everyone to conclude aspirin is safe?

At some point an act of faith is involved — otherwise we as a society would not advance as we’ld be too busy proving to ourselves what our predecessors have learned.

Nov 26, 2009 - 9:21 am 28. Tom Holsinger:

Richard,

It’s much worse than that. The reputation of “big science” in general is st stake. Failure by the scientific profession as a whole to publically and decisively repudiate this fraud will result in them losing credibility with the elected officials they seek funding from.

This is not a fight which can be avoided, and the fact that major political factions support & collude with this fraud won’t change the outcome. Either Big Science cleans its own house or the government side of its budget will become just another boondoggle, with funding decisions being based on political clout rather than scientific merit.

Who would take the word of a scientist about the merits of the projects he is pushing if he won’t criticize obvious scientific fraud? Why should politicians trust him not to let funds trusted to him be used for purposes unrelated to scientific merit?

And, if the scientific merit of a given project really cannot be ascertained because the experts on the subject can’t be trusted to act against fraudulent misuse of the funds, why shoulddn’t the politicians who appropriate the money do so based on the prospects that the funding will benefit their power and prospects of remaining in office?

IMO the scientific profession will fail this test, and thereby justifiably make their budgets mere political footballs.

The era of major rapid increases in scientific knowledge may be ending, with all that implies.

Nov 26, 2009 - 9:24 am 29. RWE:

MTL #22:

I don’t think the Ozone Hole flap has died down – it’s just that it is “done.” And there is not enough money to be made off of it any more. CFC use has been restricted (but in terms of refrigeration, only for cars, curiously enough) and people are making money off of selling the replacement refrigerants. And by the way, in a manner analogous to the AGW relevations, a scientist pointed out that his actual measurement data showed NO increase in UV under the holes – or rather just as much decrease as increase with the rest of the reporting stations unaffected. But they acted quickly and cut his funding.

As for HIV, recall when they said that it would not be confined to specific groups who engage in certain behaviors but was breaking out into the general population? You don’t hear that any more – and there has even been a formal admission that such an advertising campaign actually detracted from focusing on the real people at risk. And then there was the reclassification of certain other diseases as HIV, thus making the “problem” larger. But aside from that, it has been pointed out that if you believe that HIV causes AIDS then you have to toss out most of what is known about infectious diseases.

I recommend the book “Kicking the Sacred Cow” about these and other scientific delusions.

Nov 26, 2009 - 9:35 am 30. RWE:

Marcus #27:

My brother, a pharmacist, has confirmed to me that it is well known within that community that if aspirin had been invented today it would not get FDA approval because of too many adverse side effects.

Nov 26, 2009 - 9:39 am 31. Marcus Aurelius:

#30 RWE,

ROFLMAO!

Yeah I’ve heard that too from others. I’m glad that is NOT the case as I seldom go anywhere I may be spending the night w/o my big bottle of cheap aspirin. Every place I frequently spend nights has its own big bottle of cheap aspirin — and even then I always have a backup supply!

Nov 26, 2009 - 10:01 am 32. Sergey:

#* to Smoking Frog:
“Why has the sea level risen by hundreds of meters since the last ice age?”
Because during last ice age, just as during every other ice age, there were huge ice sheets on the land, up to 2 miles thick. Now all land glaciers except Antarctica and Greenland contain less 1% of total ice, so even their complete melting will not bring about measurable rise of sea level. Antarctica ice sheet is huge and contains about 90% of all ice, but it never melted during last million years, even when temperature was much higher than now. Even partial melting of Greenland will not result in significant sea level rise and will took about 800 years. Current sea level is the highest water mark in geologic history.

Nov 26, 2009 - 10:07 am 33. SpeakEasy:

Re: Michael Crichton and “State of Fear,” isn’t it odd with his past record of having his books produced into TV or movies that this is one of the few to be ignored? I mean, with climate change being on the forefront of the news for so long? Too many questions to be addressed? And now the appearance he was correct all along. Hmmmm.

Nov 26, 2009 - 10:11 am 34. Josh:

#27 Marcus Aurelius: Actually, yes, I can expound at some length about what is known about aspirin, as it relates to some medical conditions I have and I’ve read quite a bit as a layman. As RWE says, if they had to get it approved today, who knows. Any effective drug is going to have some deleterious side effects, scissors are dangerous, dynamite improperly used can be very damaging, chain saws – don’t even get me started.

But we get a lot of acetyl salicylic acid in fresh foods, it’s not like the compound is unknown to us naturally.

So, is it better or worse than the COX-2 inhibitors that the FDA has pulled and are now in the courts? Unclear.

The entire biochemistry of cytokines and leukotrines and prostaglandins and immune system(s) generally, is still extremely obscure, extremely complicated, and varies tremendously between individuals – this is a strength of a species, to have this diversity, but it’s a nightmare for drug companies.

Um, what was the question? What we take on faith. Well, what is a “proof” in science? Remember Michael Valentine, in Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land”? A proof even in the most orthodox of science is best looked at as a very narrow thing, because change even the least detail, and it may fall apart. I’ve been reading Ludwig Wittgenstein on mathematical proofs, in RFM and LFM, and PI. I agree with much that he says, but if a proof is that narrow, how do we *ever* use it to generalize?

This isn’t the place to get into it, but like so many things, when you look at science right up close, amazing the warts and faults and hidden difficulties you find.

Nov 26, 2009 - 10:15 am 35. toad:

Look the sea level is rising see the progression of the tide marks!

Sorry old boy but in this area the land has been subsiding due to plate tectonics. On the other side of the continent it looks like the sea level is dropping as the land rises as the opposing plate goes under it. You need to contribute to my fund to put a big threaded fastners into the middle of the plates to stop all of this movement, just give 5, 10, 15, or 20 thousand dollars. Make the checks out to the SCRU institute which I head.

Nov 26, 2009 - 10:19 am 36. RWE:

Sergey #32:

I live on the east coast of Florida, and I understand that at one time, during an ice age, the shoreline was 50 miles further east than it is now.

And I was born and raised in Columbia SC, on the “fall line” which defines the location of a previous seacoast, 100 miles further west than it is now.

A one or two inch rise in sea level, even if true, seems so trivial in light of changes of that magnitude.

Nov 26, 2009 - 10:20 am 37. rhhardin:

Curiosity is the engine of science.

Peer review is a process to put curiosity to productive ends; or to thwart it.

Nov 26, 2009 - 10:58 am 38. programmer:

In case no one has seen this yet:

Hide the decline

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Nov 26, 2009 - 10:59 am 39. Marie Claude:

Pascal, I’m not sure of understanding what you want me to say, though if you ment that the modern France, is just reacting like during Louis XIV’s times, in some ways it still happens, especially when “elites” (of whatever party) are on trial ! Escuses are easyly found

I’ll check tomorrow,

cuz, I have to leave my favorite harbour for my habitual “home”, where my man will prepeare a dish called “Cataplana” with piece of fishs and shells, white wine, garlics, oignons, red and green peppers… I tried to taste a few sort of portugese wines, but they fail to please my stomach, too acid, and too charged with alcool. Now I’m longing for french’s and food too !

uh, sorry, still a post card, couldn’t find some ways of intervening on topics that aren’t of our specific concern

Nov 26, 2009 - 11:02 am 40. trangbang68:

O/T I’m no scientist so the only temperature I’ll comment on is the turkey is cooking in the roaster, the cranberry sauce is cooling , the oven awaits yams,squash, etc. The family atmosphere will be warm with 3 of 4 kids, old friends and good conversation. The world will be cool tomorrow if Auburn upsets Alabama in the Iron Bowl.
Happy Thanksgiving to the Belmont Club commentariat (is that a word?) and our learned host. Only in America do Harvard grads hopnob with carpenters, farmers, cowboys and erstwhile soldiers of fortune. Let’s thank the Lord for His providence and pray for the resolve to beat back the Barbarians at the gate.

Nov 26, 2009 - 11:03 am 41. Langley:

The counter from NZ:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/new_zealand_climate_science_co.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink

I don’t know who to trust.

BTW – I just gave a talk on the bad science done in the name of AGW at the university I work for.

Rough room.

It was like being Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost trying to explain that he was the good guy.

Nov 26, 2009 - 11:04 am 42. Marie Claude:

Pascal, my post was swallowed, I have no more time to repost it tonight, May-be our host has it in his secret drawers, and will be kind to show it !

Nov 26, 2009 - 11:07 am 43. PA Cat:

if aspirin had been invented today it would not get FDA approval because of too many adverse side effects

Maybe that’s why it’s the drug of choice of Chicago machine politics (when convenient overdoses need to be arranged).

Nov 26, 2009 - 11:08 am 44. Langley:

W and Marie Claude,

There may be a teck problem with the blog.
I keep getting offered the oportunity to edit other’s postings.

Nov 26, 2009 - 11:13 am 45. Captain Ramen:

I’m talking to several AGW true believers who are otherwise my friends.. they refuse to see these emails for what they are. I think I know what Galileo felt like when he begged his adversaries to look through his telescope.

The sad irony is that these emails don’t disprove AGW anymore than Jovian moons disprove the existence of God. It is the hysterical overreaction by the entrenched that pushes people into disbelief.

Nov 26, 2009 - 11:17 am 46. Walt:

trangbang68/40

Same here. Thanksgiving is family, and good food and good talk, memories re-lived, stories told and re-told. Thanksgiving is a day of reflecting on the wonder of being American, of living in the greatest country that ever was. Thanksgiving is football and crisp Fall weather, golden leaves and the hint of the snow to come. But most of all, Thanksgiving is family. We of the Belmont Club are family, and I and mine wish eveyone here a very Happy Thanksgiving.

Drinks before dinner, then turkey and pie
Pumpkin and apple and mince
Cranberries, stuffing piled up to the sky
Enough to make hungry men wince
And there’s the good China and wine of your choice
As full heaping platters pass ‘round
With silverware clinking their soft silver voice
Competing with murmuring sound
Of diners exclaiming delight as they placed
Firm white meat in neat piles on plates
All realize the large ringing truth to be faced
That dinner won’t come to who waits
Then come the potatoes, both candied and mashed
With peas and rich gravy to boot
And when it was over the menfolk all crashed
Watching football but too stuffed to root
The ladies repaired to the kitchen to clean
Piled dishes in racks to be washed
The silver and glasses then filled the machine
While men lay around nicely sloshed
With talk about next year, and what a fine meal
And whose house they’d all gather ‘bout
The ladies then cried Oh hell no, that’s no deal
‘Cause next year you’re taking us out

Nov 26, 2009 - 11:21 am 47. Rock:

Why does the global warming debate heat up every year when the brass monkey is up to his gonads in ice and snow?

Nov 26, 2009 - 11:37 am 48. Pascal (the derivative):

Marie Claude, I had visited Versailles two years ago. Parallel to its more famous Hall of Mirrors is its Hall of Champions. The Hall of Champions contains busts of France’s famous men.

What I found surprising was that despite Blaise Pascal greatness, I did not find his bust on display with all the rest. There was even a bust of Antoine Arnauld, the Catholic monk, mathematician and friend of Pascal, whose persecution by the Jesuits inspired Pascal’s satirical series of pamphlets. It is a fact that Arnauld later became reconciled with Louis and was accepted at his court. While it is possible that Pascal’s bust was out for cleaning or repair when I made my visit, it struck me as quite likely Louis did not include him, and none of the later governments ever chose to allow it.

If, as you say in a broader sense that “modern France, is just reacting like during Louis XIV’s times,” then, yes, they would still resent a man who individually managed to rain ridicule down on the heads of so many men of consequence.

Then it would not matter that Pascal brought us so many discoveries that made advancement possible.

• Like insurance (from organizing sampling into rigorous probability theory).

• Like the brakes on our vehicles and other pressure related devices (Pascal’s Principle).

• Like proving the vacuum while enduring the added burden of public ridicule from his former mentor, Descartes.

For a whole host of solid science (even before we look at his more philosophical works which there are and have been many grateful admirers) for which people who have thrived under modernity can be grateful, he most certainly should be in France’s Hall of Champions — unless French elites, as the class most likely to be governing the displays at Versailles — still harbor a grudge.

[Does anyone know why blockquoted fonts sometimes get larger than the rest of the text? I can't seem to keep it one size in this post.]

Nov 26, 2009 - 11:47 am 49. gadfly:

Wretchard writes:

All Dr Salinger has to do is show, with crushing scientific rigor, why the figures were adjusted. All Dr. Phil Jones has to do is demonstrate, with mathematical precision, why his carbon models can predict say, next year’s temperature. Because he could, if he had the science behind him. They could, if they had the data behind them.

David Wratt is attempting to do just that sort of proof with his latest release of data involving adjustments to the Wellington, (but certainly not all) New Zealand temperature readings from three stations. TBR.cc has the NIWA explanations here, complete with charts.

The TBR author, iwishart, points out that the NIWA adjustments, using data from a different collection point 15km away and in a different climate zone may not be valid. Further, Wratt refuses to reveal data from other NZ sites for scientific review.

Peer review, indeed!

Nov 26, 2009 - 11:52 am 50. Habu:

My apologies to the contributor who first mentioned this, I know Josh followed up on it…

“Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy correctly observes that most of us take technical matters on faith. Few of us understand rocket science or the theory of relativity. But if someone we trust says “it’s OK” then we accept……”

I tell ya it made me laugh because of a number of reasons. I guess the first reason is one that always resonates in my brain; that being that the average IQ out on the street is around 98. That group, each with a vote, couldn’t do long division with a calculator much less with a pencil and paper. And following some of our more non scientific but rather philosophical discussions, well I’m confident we lose out every time to reruns of Gilligan’s Island.

Of those on this site I’m sure the IQ is much higher for each of us has, I am sure, mastered long division on a calculator, but take us too far into the truly scientific and we turned to the Discovery Channel.

So it is little wonder so much gets by the public in the form of pseudo science. By the time a conservative scientist debunks the myth, the myth has become a proof and therefore, as in geometry, irrefutable.

This year for the first time the USA did not send a team of “bright” young’uns to the World Competitions for Young’uns brainpower. We knew we would stumble out of the gate. Take mud all around the track and finally collapse at the 5/8th pole, mercifully being put down on the track behind a shroud (made in China) and loaded onto a eco-proper body hauler.

We then pay a pot smoking kid with a two foot long police record tens of millions of dollars in bonus signing money…….to play football.

Nov 26, 2009 - 12:19 pm 51. Josh:

Captain Ramen @ 45: Galileo had it easy, it’s not that the church fathers didn’t believe him, it’s just that by policy they required him to shut up about it until they could somehow adjust dogma or something – and he wouldn’t. It’s more like a player berating an official for an obviously bad call and picking up a technical. Everyone knows the player is right but at the moment it’s in his interest to – shut up.

Eventually, sure, enough good telescopes were made that the truth was simply too obvious for anyone to care what the church said about things or not. You might say, per this thread, that “faith” failed.

For AGW, the average joe can’t go out and core some bristlecones and measure the rings, so the process of what is obvious is shifted to simply watching current weather trends. Which all seem to be going one way, and it’s not the AGW way.

The truth, will out.

Nov 26, 2009 - 12:30 pm 52. Captain Ramen:

@48,

I think it is because you are putting carriage returns inside your blockquote. The software is converting them into <p />, only in between the open and close of the blockquote. I recommend using a separate blockquote for each bullet point.

@49,

This kind of thing must be very difficult to reconstruct after the fact, much like a guy documenting his code (with no test coverage) 6 months after he finished and moved on to something else.

After reviewing the methodology they used to make corrections, it is clear that climate science is just in its infancy. Making trillion dollar decisions on something so flimsy is foolhardy at best.

Nov 26, 2009 - 12:37 pm 53. toad:

Habu #50: As an indicator of IQ in the Obama Crowd.

http://curmudgeonlyskeptical.blogspot.com/2009/11/obama-motors.html

I put it to you that this is a demonstration of IQs lower than 90 and the man in the street probably has them beat.

Nov 26, 2009 - 12:37 pm 54. Sergey:

First, they need to hide the decline of temperature. Then, they need to hide the decline of scientific integrity in CRU. After that they would need to hide the decline of public trust to science. What decline they would need to hide next? May be, decline of political support of the whole Green agenda? It is like a snowball, the further it rolls, the bigger it becomes.

Nov 26, 2009 - 12:40 pm 55. Josh:

toad @ 50: I repeat this as often as possible, the worst thing I ever heard from 0bambus during the campaign was a line that was a regular part of his spiel about green cars along the lines of your article, “We just tell our great scientists what we want, and they make it happen.”

I guess that’s also 0bambus’ understanding of economics, health care, etc.

And so Sergey, they don’t want to hide a decline in public trust of science, they want to encourage that decline. Politics trumps all doncha know.

Nov 26, 2009 - 12:50 pm 56. Roy Lofquist:

Galileo Galilei – first victim of peer review?

Nov 26, 2009 - 12:56 pm 57. Pascal (the derivative):

Habu #50:
The idiocy we find ourselves saturated in has a great deal to do with this culture of celebrity that has grown up around us. IQ clearly may be improved or destroyed, I don’t care what the “experts” have claimed. Destroy inquiry in young minds, and you lower IQ, QED. You can’t answer IQ test questions if you can’t read, and you learn to not care when one has been scolded for noticing things, like inconsistencies in “expert” assertions. LOL

When our cultural exhibitors show interest in people simply famous for being famous, it encourages sickness in a society.

As it mounts over a long time, it is not unlike highway rubber-neckers at major accidents in the short time. We’re stuck in traffic on the other side of the highway because everybody ahead of you slowed to gape as they passed. There is a tendency built into each of us to follow the herd. Unless we enforce discipline UPON OURSELVES, we don’t set a good example, and that’s about all influence many of us dare do if we do it.

When we all start to act interested in celebrity, it is difficult to get any meaningful answer to what should be the most obvious question: “WHY?”

Our Sinister media isn’t interested in good examples, let alone presenting them to the public. Notoriety long ago trumped notability. Destruction is so much easier than building, and media is more apt to give you more air time for being destructive, so why build when you can destroy and become famous, eh Bill Ayers?

It’s gotten so bad that notable is almost never used anymore. Everybody in media almost always only uses notorious for both good and bad actors of fame.

Mock them folks. Mock these notorious bastards who have been elevated to fame because they provide nothing but fodder (crisis after crisis that won’t be wasted by the power hungry) for those who would put chains on you and your posterity.

Here is a great mockery of Michael Mann. Enjoy. Post more as you find ‘em.

Nov 26, 2009 - 12:58 pm 58. Pascal:

Roy, Galileo was the most famous, but not the first.

Try this for Galileo’s predecessor who was burned at the stake for much the same topic (although he also was an admitted pantheist (and some say atheist)): Giordano Bruno

Nov 26, 2009 - 1:15 pm 59. Rurik:

20 RWE & 22 MTL

For more details about the HIV/AIDS controversy, you should search Dr. Peter Duesberg, the prime champion of the theory that AIDS is caused by the effects of “lifestyle” with the HIV virus an irrelevance. Michael Fumento is a scientific journalist who was one of the early and outspoken challengers of the then-popular doctrine that everyone was equally at risk of AIDS, not just druggies and passive sodomists.

Nov 26, 2009 - 2:21 pm 60. RWE:

Rurik #59: Yes, I have Prof Duesberg’s book “Inventing the AIDS Virus” right here. Perhaps you are familiar with it? It is 722 pages long. While perhaps it does not offer total and complete evidence that HIV does not cause AIDS, it does present a pretty convincing case that the very definition of AIDS was manipulated by the scientific bureaucracy to their advantage.

Sergey #54: That’s a good one! A new definition of “decline.” Worthy of Rush or Glenn! Well, in the unlikely event that the perpetrators of the AGW hoax are drummed out of the scientific community, they can always get a job doing popularity polls for Obama.

I once wrote an SF story about the time when it all busts” AGW, Ozone depletion and all the various scams come unzipped at once and scientists begin to resort to scams such as the Bigfoot, UFOs, and Face On Mars type to get funded.

Habu #50: Gilligan’s Island is on? What channel? Is it a Thanksgiving Day marathon, I hope?

Nov 26, 2009 - 3:13 pm 61. ic:

57. Pascal (the derivative):
When our cultural exhibitors show interest in people simply famous for being famous, it encourages sickness in a society.

Do you mean the sickness manifested in electing a president whose only accomplisment was reading the teleprompter eloquently?

Nov 26, 2009 - 4:02 pm 62. Mongoose:

Josh, Galileo really more ran afoul of Italian politics and power struggles than anything else, he just made to many enemies in the wrong places, and made them for a number of reasons, some having abos=ltely nothing to do with nascent “science”.

This business about Galileo is way overdone and amounts to Anti-Catholic propaganda thrown out by enemies of the Church.

Nov 26, 2009 - 4:06 pm 63. Pascal (the derivative):

IC? Yes, symptomatic. You do see, ic.

I’m off to TG dinner. Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I gave W thanks for this place too. I suspect many of you have done so too. Learning to show gratitude is a great blessing.

Nov 26, 2009 - 4:26 pm 64. Simone BC:

hdgreene/23, thank you. I hadn’t thought of the dynamics of central planning that way before.

For an overview of the practices and issues in *real* computational science and engineering (as opposed to the shoddy warmist efforts), in this case in the area of US nuclear weapons simulation, may I suggest reading this assessment:
http://www.hpcmo.hpc.mil/Htdocs/HPCMO_Staff/doug_post/papers/LessonLearnedFromASCI.pdf

Better physics and better models, software engineering best practices, validation and verification.
What a relief!

Happy Thanksgiving!
Thank you Wretchard for Belmont Club.

Nov 26, 2009 - 4:55 pm 65. E. Nigma:

Actually, there is a marathon on “Spike” TV of the ‘Band of Brothers’ series, which I was watching until my kids wanted to watch a meaningless football game.

Watching the part about the 101st in Bastogne reminds me that we all have a lot to be thankful for today.

Nov 26, 2009 - 5:17 pm 66. The Wobbly Guy:

Hey, good to see more HIV/AIDS skeptics around here! Anyway, to make a long story short, just try to find electron microscope photos of pure HIV virii that were collected according to procedures stated in Koch’s postulates, and using separation protocols specifically designed for retroviruses.

Such photos, of exceptional quality, exist for other retrovirii, but not for HIV. I wonder why…

Nov 26, 2009 - 5:35 pm 67. Rurik:

60. RWE,

Since it is not my specialty, I prefer to keep my opinions tenuous when I do not really know the subject, and 722 pages is an excuse for not having read Prof. Duesberg’s book. But I have read several articles by, and about him, and I consider his theory quite plausible. Fumento’s argument would seem tacitly validated by the fact that no one yet known to have caught AIDS from a doorknob or toilet seat, and the warnings have abated. Though Duesberg’s and Fumento’s arguments are different, I believe they are not really incompatibile. In any case, HIV theoreticians certainly seem to be in the running for the next award of the Trofim Lysenko Prize.

Nov 26, 2009 - 6:08 pm 68. Jim Nicholas:

RWE @ 20 and MTL @22

Initially I thought that far too much money was being spent on AIDS research vs spending on other medical problems affecting far more persons. However, as I have seen how broadly applicable the discoveries AIDS research have been to many other areas of medicine, I have become persuaded that we have gotten our money’s worth from that invested in AIDS research.

rab @ 24 and Gordon @ 26.

It seems me that melted ice would exactly fill the volume of water that the ice had displaced, assuming that the water were freshwater. (Archimedes: the weight of water displaced by a floating object is equal to the weight of the floating object.) If the water on which the ice were floating were salt-water (and therefore more dense), the ice would displace a smaller volume of the salt-water than it would of fresh water; and so the volume of the melted ice (because even ocean ice is mainly freshwater) would be larger than the volume of the displaced salt-water. Thus, the effect of floating ice melting in salt water would be to raise slightly the level of the ocean.

Since I doubt much of the AGW ’science’ and argue against its ‘facts’ and conclusions, I want us to have our own science right as we argue against theirs (to be better scientists than they are), even if the facts do not always support our doubts. I think there are more than enough facts to claim that the science is not ’settled’.

Best wishes,

Jim

Nov 26, 2009 - 6:36 pm 69. CPT. Charles:

Perhaps, just perhaps, we have the first fall-out of the CRU scandal:

http://2su.de/6AY

When you have politicians resigning rather than casting a vote…

There ‘might’ be a problem.

Here’s a pull quote from the attached article:

|||||||

A special meeting of Liberal senators is now under way.

The Opposition’s spokeswoman for early childhood and women, Ms Mirabella, says she also cannot support the scheme.

She says she decided to resign after the party room meeting on the ETS legislation “left a bitter taste in my mouth”.

“It’s not a decision that you take lightly,” she told Sky News.

But Ms Mirabella denies the mass resignations essentially amount to a desertion of Mr Turnbull.

“It’s not a matter of desertion. It’s a matter of not being able to vote for bills that are so bad under any measurement,” she said.

And she conceded she has never witnessed such extraordinary scenes during her time in Parliament.

“Quite frankly I hope not to experience another week like this,” she said.

|||||||

As for myself, I’m hoping for many, many more.

Nov 26, 2009 - 6:43 pm 70. toad:

Well from the number of fins starting to be seen sticking up in the water, I expect the AGW crowd to start lawyering up fairly soon.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100018003/climategate-five-aussie-mps-lead-the-way-by-resigning-in-disgust-over-carbon-tax/

Nov 26, 2009 - 6:52 pm 71. CPT. Charles:

#70

Maybe.

I’m thinking they have enough ‘friends’ in the bureaucracy to handle that end.

My take: when a rat would rather leap over the side instead of gnawing away at the fat sack of grain . . .

You know something dire is going down.

Nov 26, 2009 - 7:24 pm 72. RWE:

Jim Nicolas #68:

I do not doubt that much of the research into AIDS was of value, given that it had to better understand the immune system.

But I doubt that much of the advertising campaign on AIDS was of much real use, since it seemed to focus on civil rights rather than health. And those at most risk seemed to be either defiant about the dangers of their lifestyles or incapable of comprehending or caring about the messsage. And I really doubt that spending millions of dollars on drugs designed to destroy people’s immune systems was a good idea.

Nov 26, 2009 - 8:05 pm 73. Rock:

Now this:

Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren involved in unwinding “Climategate” scandal

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17183

This is getting more interesting as time goes by.

Nov 26, 2009 - 8:06 pm 74. herb:

Trangbang68 @ 40. Warmer here in the event.

WAR EAGLE!

On a more personal note:

Welcome home, brother.

And in the more important part of your comment, Amen and amen.

Nov 26, 2009 - 8:14 pm 75. Tcobb:

#17 MTL writes:
I’m trying to think of another area of research where so much money depends on the results, but I can’t. Other politicized areas of science depend on the applicability of the results, such as the stem cells as therapy for parkinsons, or the applicability of a working malaria vaccine. But climate science is trying to create the bogeyman- it would be like stem cell researchers having to make up the disease that they could try to cure.

Can anyone think of any other areas of science where so much money depends on convincing the public that their bogeyman exists?

I think its intrinsic in the nature of climatology. Consider if you will how many positions for climatologists would exist if the consensus was that the climate was stable and was not changing, only going through normal fluctuations? Nowhere near the quantity there are now I wager, nor would they be getting massive grants.

Contrast this with say physics or organic chemistry for example. Finding evidence of a climatic bogeyman is really the only kind of rent seeking behavior they can indulge in.

Nov 26, 2009 - 8:18 pm 76. JJRedfan:

“Pay no attention to that man behind…”

What a bunch of slime. These people give child pornographers hope that they won’t always be the most detested crablice on the planet.

Nov 26, 2009 - 8:51 pm 77. herb:

I want to note Fumento’s “The Myth of Heterosexual Aids” It was true then and now.

As a Professional Engineer I will state that I am deeply offended both personally and professionally by the unethical and immoral conduct displayed in these emails. This is conduct that is not unlike the low-lifes that Wretchard refers to in another context. These are the same scum who hold their manhoods so cheap that they claim the status of veteran, not having served. It is a sparkling indictment that this sort of thing goes unpunished and unaccounted. These people should be relegated to counting chickens in a North Georgia chicken plant (subject to strict audit procedures) I cannot say how damaging this sort of thing is.

Somebody upthread said we have people who cant do long division without a calculator. Its worse than that. They cant even understand the numbers. Its a population immersed in Innumeracy A suspected risk of a single cancer in a million subjects is horrifying and cause for great panic and Congressional Hearings. A rash from a salve that cures leprosy is a trigger for a recall and lawyers advertising on the TV.

This affair is a direct assault on (and insult to) the credibility of the technical community. We are sighted and the people with the BachArts’ (LOTM and others here excepted) dont have the tools to deal with the society we have created.

The lawyers have created themselves into a Mandarin class that controls the great valves of out society, but lack the tools to understand the flows on which they operate.

This is a technical society. It is said that “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King.” If we lose the basic fundamentals of the necessary literacy to cope with the management of it we are either doomed or too dependent on a shrinking number of engineers to run it. As an Engineer, I ought to welcome the coming demand for my services, I dont.

Nov 26, 2009 - 9:04 pm 78. JJRedfan:

Oh, yeah, and AIDS is caused by AGW, too.

It’s in the data, man… Just have to present it properly.

Nov 26, 2009 - 9:07 pm 79. presbypoet:

Some details about why we are in a period of ice ages.

It starts about 40 million years ago when India hit Asia, and Antarctica moved over the south pole, an isolated continent. Open ocean to the north of Antarctica, caused air to move in a continuous band around the globe. This kept cold air over Antarctica from mixing with warmer air closer to the equator. This allowed a gradual buildup of ice, as snow fell faster in winter than it melted in summer.

Finally after millions of years, the entire continent was a massive ice sheet. This was still an isolated area of ice, the oceans were warmer than today, and the rest of the world too warm for ice to form, but it was a critical tipping point. Ice continued to build up, but now it produced icebergs on the ocean. Slowly this ice cooled the oceans. (Think ice cubes in a drink.)Heavier denser cold water sank, and started to cool the abyss. All this takes an enormous amount of time. Over time, the temperature of the deep ocean water dropped by 20 to 30 degrees (F) . So today, most of the ocean is very cold, just the upper levels warmed by the sun.

The amount of cooling needed to drop the temperature of the oceans by that much shows that for the past 50 million years the trend is toward cooler, a lot cooler. Finally three to two million years ago, the earth had cooled enough. Snow started to stay frozen the whole year, and rapidly continental glaciers started to build up in the Northern Hemisphere. Since then on a roughly 100,000 year cycle there have been about 90,000 years of ice and 10,000 years when the ice retreated to Greenland and Antarctica.

We have already had 10,000 years without ice, the cycle says the ice is coming. Since this cycle is based on things like the shape of the earth’s orbit, its angle to the sun, whether winter in the Northern Hemisphere is in January when the earth is closest to the sun, or July when the earth is farthest, any input from man would have to be very great to break this cycle.

Remember this cycle started when oceans were warmer, there was more CO2. The planet got cooler despite this. As long as Antarctica stays over the South Pole, it isn’t going to change. Thinking our raising CO2 levels will over-ride a planet determined to get cooler, is based on ignorance not science.

There still is a lot we don’t know. It is dangerous to make major decisions without knowing what you are doing.

Nov 26, 2009 - 9:08 pm 80. trangbang68:

Herb, Thank you. Are you at Auburn? I became a fan during 17 years in Huntsville and am hoping for an upset. I don’t hate the Tide, but don’t much care for their fans. About as arrogant a bunch of ignorant ill-informed Rednecks as one can find.

Nov 26, 2009 - 10:59 pm 81. Smoking Frog:

#32 Sergey

No doubt, my question why the sea level has risen by hundreds of meters since the ice age was misleading. I chose it not to mislead but to avoid getting into something complex where I was unsure. But I am far from persuaded that “no sea level rise” follows from “more ocean ice than land ice.” For one thing, maximum density is at +4 C. (as opposed to a temperature infinitesimally close to zero). For another thing, there’s thermal expansion at temperatures further above zero, and this would have nothing to do with any question of ice. Remember, we’re not talking about much of a sea level rise (unless we’re Al Gore). Do you say that the claim that the level has been rising at 3.2 mm/year in recent decades is false? That’s not something a person could accept “just like that.”

Going back to the ice age question, land ice very likely was of greater volume than ocean ice, during the ice age, but this by itself doesn’t tell us much. Logically, without knowing the ratio, it could have been of smaller volume than the ocean ice and still created a large sea level rise when it melted. Regardless of the answer to that, it has no bearing on what happens now – which is why I shouldn’t have used the question.

Nov 27, 2009 - 5:06 am 82. buddy larsen:

JJR/76; they are no longer detestable crablice –not since industry defender David Ogden was appointed Deputy Attorney General in your government.

Nov 27, 2009 - 8:10 am 83. Josh:

presbypoet @ 79: is that what they teach in schools?

Because it seems wrong to me.

If it is somehow a new thing that the pole is covered by a landmass that holds isolated, cold ice, then that portion of the globe radiates less into space than it might, which should overall WARM the rest of the world.

But, the poles are poles, whatever they are covered with, and will always RECEIVE less radiation and be colder than other parts of the planet, so the idea that there is ANY special effect from the current Antarctic configuration, seems rather weak to me.

But in short, if there is ANY effect, it should be to “store the cold”, warming the planet, rather than “generating more cold” and cooling the planet. Or so it seems to me after a good eleven seconds of analysis.

Nov 27, 2009 - 9:15 am 84. Neo:

Meanwhile back at the White House we find out that

Barack Obama’s radical socialist climate czar Carol Browner on Wednesday rejected claims that e-mails stolen from a British university show climate scientists trumped up global warming numbers, saying she considers the science settled.

.. but in one of those “shades of Haliburton” moments, we find out that she …

was a board member of one of the leading carbon offset trading companies, APX.

Nov 27, 2009 - 10:26 am 85. Instapundit » Blog Archive » FRANK TIPLER: Climategate: The Skeptical Scientist’s View. “What keeps scientists honest is know…:

[...] FRANK TIPLER: Climategate: The Skeptical Scientist’s View. “What keeps scientists honest is knowing our colleagues are looking over our shoulders. A theory with hidden data is never to be believed. . . . The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected — that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up. That is, not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data upon which these models are built are also unreliable.” Plus, more from Richard Fernandez. [...]

Nov 27, 2009 - 11:08 am 86. Lou Shumaker:

Speaking of cooking the data, are you going to discuss the response to the CSC charges, or are you going to bury that too?

http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-sceptics-lie-about-temp-records-try-to-smear-top-scientist/

Here is their explanation, in short: several times during that span of temperatures, the station that recorded temps was moved, usually to a higher ground. Because temps at higher altitudes are lower than at sea level, they calculated the difference and added it in the appropriate places.

This is not considered a fudge factor in order to make the temps conform to theory: this is an adjustment made because temps were recorded at different altitudes.

Now, I’m not vouching for the science behind it, but it seems to be a valid response worth investigating. The question is: are you going to investigate it and write about it, or shake your pitchforks higher and scream louder?

I know what scientists are supposed to do.

Nov 27, 2009 - 11:27 am 87. Marie Claude:

Pascal, I have no idea why our great Pascal doesn’t figure among the greatest personnalities that added to our patrimoine, though if we try to reposition him in his historical era, then there was a kind of jansenist cabal that dominated the court, through Mme de Maintenon, the putative wife of Louis. These “bigots” were so powerful that even Louis revoked the “Edit de Nantes” from Henri IV, which settled peace among catholics and protestants, also Voltaire did fight every bit of official religious power in his polemics.

Now, I am not an expert of Pascal, we did study a bit of his texts in high school, but the teacher was so religious bigoted that she failed to inerest us to his works, hmm we were more in an atheist movance, even our teacher of philosophy didn’t approach him, he was a communist.

Later, I didn’t feel the need to reread Pascal too, may-be cuz of these “bad” school souvenirs, also becuz my interests were elsewhere, more artistic orientated !

Now, with persons like you, I get some new interests into Pascal !

Nov 27, 2009 - 11:36 am 88. buddy larsen:

Neo/84; No sense in letting the crisis of Carol Browner’s character and trustworthiness go to waste, let’s be efficient and add the other big czar in Obama’s circus:

Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal. In fact, according to files released by a CEU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms “a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people”.

By Dr. Tim Ball and Judi McLeod in the Canada Free Press

(read it, and feel your skin crawl at the smarmy supercilious nastiness and cowardly double talk in this powerful czar’s –Mr. “Let’s Sneak Sterilants into the Drinking Water!” –campaign to ruin certain specific honest scientists, while appearing to be only having a bit o fun ”entertaining” [his word] his email list)

***
LS/86; to your question, me, i’m just gonna shake my pitchfork higher. You’re gonna have to do a LOT better than that.

Nov 27, 2009 - 11:41 am 89. Pascal (the derivative):

Thank you Marie Claude. I’m delighted I’ve sparked your interests in a man so great.

As you learn more of him, I’d like to know if, indeed, his bust is not in the Hall of Champions. As I said above, it could have been out for cleaning or repair, or I simply missed it. There are a great many busts, and I could have missed it even though I searched for him. My not speaking French well made it hard for me to inquire properly.

Then, should you find he is not there, has never been there, or was removed from there, I think it would be very informative to hear from a personage in charge what reason is given for his exclusion.

Merci beaucoup.

Nov 27, 2009 - 1:38 pm 90. geoffgo:

Speaking of ice cubes…my earliest intro to earth science – Aug, 1978 – returning stateside from Oz, booked for 3 weeks into Club Med (original version – clothing optional, except during meals) on Bora Bora, Tahiti. Then 30 some years younger, single and very physically fit. Now, not so much.

It was my first French experience; total immersion. The staffers tried not to speak English, even though all spoke it well enough, and even though all the 650 islanders did too. 3-bedroom condo w/electricity, facing west, built right over the water = $24K. Telephone – spotty. I thought about it. Paper matches don’t strike, it’s too humid.

On ClubMed grounds, no money changed hands, just pop-beads in exchange for hard liquor…starts out as a $20 necklace, then reduces to a bracelet, ending as a ring worth about 2 scotches – rehung about every other day.

As happens there was a convention (junket) of 25 “earth” scientists (avec fille / mistress) booked at that same time. Since this Club was so small (60 guests are called GMs – gentle members, 35 staff called gentle organizers, or GOs), it was difficult not to rub shoulders with’em everywhere, doing everything: drinking, reef diving, drinking, snorkling, drinking, volleyball, drinking, touring and drinking; especially thriceaday at mealtimes.

Over every meal, they’d discuss/argue about obscure/archane stuff like hydrology, atmospherics, salinity, etc. Meantime, all of their womenfolk and I were bored. Ha! Not being well-versed in any of those subjects and to change it so the other half of us could parley periodically, I asked what was the objective of their seminar. They said it was to better understand the global environment, so as to be able to control it. What? You mean like the weather? As an engineer type, it just spilled out “well you’re wasting your time and your sponsors’ money.” Mais non! Sir you are a skeptic?

In spite of that, I was invited to attend the main speaker’s schpiel. Get this. He’s a French PhD in oceanography, lives on the big island Tahiti and he’s got a Tahitian wife 20 years his junior, straight out of any Bounty film. Pick any one, all the way back to Laughton. They are truly exotic. This guy’s a Cousteau wannabe.

Now, everybody is listening while wearing nothing but a pareo and partaking of the unlimited cheap french wine, and the local Tahitian beer, Hinano. Yum. There are no screens, or windows, or doors. Thatched roofs. (Even for unisex lavatory enclosures, curtains suffice.) Very open and airy lifestyle.

Anyway, his project was about wrapping icebergs (broken away from the Antartic shelf) in BIG plastic baggies, and then towing them to – wait for it – the parched Middle East. 10s of Millions of tons each. I mean they’re fresh water and free, right? And they were already tracked by US satellites.

The speaker had precise estimates for most of the questions, like how much will melt on the way? Approximately 17.4569% will melt. Approx. that much huh, no matter the conditions on route? Also, these baggies would be constructed using the new (yet to be “produced”) solar cell technology to power electric OCEAN-GOING tugs. 8 of’em per 5,000 cubic-acre berg, 175 footers. To be built. Got me recalling what I’d read about the “roaring 40s” and towing large objects in heavy seas and weather forecasting and all. State funded scientists setting out to exploit the largest icecubes?

This guy had the cost to build enormous ice-crushers on oil-platform-like structures offshore down pat, plus the labor costs for 24/7/365 operation all calculated out. His handout was 60 double-sided pages of color charts and graphs and typeset verbiage. All this before Wordperfect or Visicals or even PCs.

I wish I’d kept my copy. The gilt-engraved leather cover was beautifully tooled and the images, oh my. Much nicer than the handouts I had just used to close on $15 million worth of mainframe sales to the Aussie airlines and gov’t.

The presentation itself was hilarious and although they all seemed seriously interested, I just burst out laughing when one of the learned assemblage asked: “What effect will zees iceberg’s temperature have on zee locale ecologie, and what will zee fishes do?” From the back came: “Bernard, zee fish will swim around.”

Might still be as amusing as it seemed back then, if things hadn’t changed so much. The irony is that the idylic paradise I so fondly remember and describe was completely destroyed by one of those yet-to-be-controlled pacific typhoons (IIRC in 82′) that sent 40′ waves surging across the lagoon, wiping out all the civilized part of paradise on the western shore. Including all those condos. Four Seasons Hotels has since anchored a new paradise, but now over on the lee side.

Happy Holidays to all.

Nov 27, 2009 - 1:41 pm 91. John "birther" Samford:

#32 sergy is correct;

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/

In light of the Hadley CRU expose, you need to take those numbers with a grain of salt. Your mileage (sea level) may vary.
I once did the rough calculation ( volume of Greenland and Antarctic ice masses divided by area of the planet’s surface times the percentage of that surface that is liquid ) and got .8 meters. That is quite a bit of difference from 80 meters. So do the math yourself. I could have made a mistake by adding or dropping a couple of decimals or the AGW crowd could have fudged the number to acquire more funding. Do the math and take your pick.

This source uses 24 million cubic Km’s as the volume of all glaciers;
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/

USGN uses 32 million. So there is a large variation right there.

Taken together, this is another clue that the AGW thingie is bogus. Junk science if you will. Both numbers come from AGW tools, so it seems they have other agendas beside science. Otherwise they would have cooperated.

Nov 27, 2009 - 2:17 pm 92. Don Rodrigo:

AGW appears to be the culmination of decades of turning relatively modest concerns into full-blown crises. In every case the pattern involved finding some genuine health or environmental issues that affected limited populations under limited circumstances, but then magnifying those concerns and the reputed problems well beyond the reality. From asbestos to breast implants to CFC/Ozone depletion, to microwave and powerline transmission-related “ills,” to Radon and landfills, Love Canal and “bad-for-you” food (including the saturated fat scandal that is a model for the ‘cascading’ effect of so-called ’scientific consensus’) you name it; in each and every case they were turned into government and lawyer-fattening “crises.” Oh, and I forgot to include Satanic child-molestation rings, and mass kidnappings of America’s children by legions of complete strangers. “Vaccinations cause autism” anyone?

A lot of this stuff just defies logic immediately on the face of it. One of my favorites are those people who are in their 80’s who claim that they got cancer recently from asbestos exposure in WWII.

AGW is the mother of all such scams, and the inevitable result of the politicizing of everything.

Nov 27, 2009 - 3:17 pm 93. Ric Locke:

Don Rodrigo,

Our ancestors sat around the campfire and told stories about elves and fairies, ghosties, ghoulies, and things tha’ gae bump i’ th’ night.

We sit around tables in bars telling stories about global warming, nuclear power disasters, and kids getting ADHD from their vaccinations. The only thing that’s really changed is the specifics.

Regards,
Ric

Nov 27, 2009 - 4:52 pm 94. Karen Yvonne:

Mongoose #62: Josh, Galileo really more ran afoul of Italian politics and power struggles than anything else…

Yes, Mongoose, agree totally. The story of Galileo’s run-in with the Church is way overblown but is just too good a fit with postmodern belief of the Church as the enemy of science.

The classic Ptolemaic concept of a geocentric universe was accepted by many educated people of Galileo’s day, not because of Christian dogma, but because it seemed to be reasonably true according to the evidence they had at that time. Even so, there were some in the Church even then who favored Copernicus’s heliocentrism.

When Galileo was reported to the Inquisition (probably by an academic rival), Cardinal Bellarmine proposed that, as the evidence was inconclusive, Galileo should refrain from publicly promoting heliocentrism, to which Galileo agreed. But several years later, after Cardinal Barberini, who was considered a scientific progressive, was named Pope Urban VIII, Galileo apparently supposed it was okay to renege on his agreement with Bellarmine and published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. And maybe it would’ve been okay if not for the fact that this “dialogue” was between himself and a pope named “Simplicio,” which in Italian means “simpleton.” In addition to embarrassing the Pope and insulting the Church, Galileo’s Dialogue went beyond discussing scientific issues to asserting that the Bible was allegorical and required reinterpretation. It seems that Galileo enjoyed provoking the authorities or at least had little fear of them. He was, after all, famous in his own time and widely admired. His lack of fear seems to have been justified too because, after his trial, he was sentenced to house arrest for a period of five months at the palace of the archbishop of Siena. Some persecution. Alfred North Whitehead, in his Science and the Modern World, summed it up thusly: “…the worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.”

Galileo was never charged with heresy. Although today there’s no such thing as a formal charge of heresy, there might as well be, with “climate-change deniers” treated as heretics.

Nov 28, 2009 - 3:13 am 95. Marie Claude:

geoffgo,

your narration is very funny

Well, our “oceanographes” are the persons that care the most for the planet pollution, and often do a useful work, they are not like the “greenies” mythomanes

Pascal, I shall investigate about the subject at the end of next week, when I’ll back to France, if you still come over the next days, I’ll share what I’ll find out

Nov 28, 2009 - 6:58 am 96. Sergey:

#82 Smocking Frog:
You are right that 4C is the maximum density point. It is rather close to the average ocean bulk temperature. And yes, most of the last decades sea level rise comes from thermal expansion of this water. But this source is rather limited because of huge thermal inertia of the ocean and its huge heat capacity. It will take centuries to warm the ocean even to 1 degree, especially because it responds to increased insolation not by warming but by enchanced evaporation. The system of thermohaline ocean currents works as a heat pump, cooling the ocean and warming the atmosphere. It is adjustable and self-regulating. That is why ocean is 13 degrees cooler than atmosphere, and was so for millenia. And several inches deep ocean does not warms up even slightly, as ARGUS experiment established.

Nov 28, 2009 - 8:02 am 97. buddy larsen:

Lancet, the formerly highly respected medical journal, apparently felt no shame whatsoever from its previous total bogus-science outing (the science of statistical sampling was the victim in Lancet’s Iraq war casualties report, which came out juuuust before the 2004 election).

(h/t Maggie’s Farm)

***

BTW, as i sit here watching the FoxBizNews lineup of Saturday morning business shows, the Climategate eruption is coming up over and over, and it appears the minimizers are planning to use the term “peer-reviewed” as their last-ditch debate-ender.

Too bad the other guests mostly haven’t seen the evidence that we blog-readers are seeing –of long-term wide-spread ”peer review” rigging, influencing, bribing, intimidating, and other employments of the the usual tools (excepting –so far –Torquemada’s ingenious toolkit) of installation of deterministic orthodoxy.

Nov 28, 2009 - 9:35 am

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