Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

[Mr. Oragahn]

http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/view ... f=9&t=1318

As for the continued and dangerous warming effect, Al Gore, for instance, claims the northern ice cap will be completely gone (though he changed this days later to 'mostly gone save for winter waterway freezes') in 5-7 years.

The amount of permanently frozen sea ice has dropped sharply. Much more of it is seasonal than ten years ago, as seen here. That's a very recent and very dramatic shift. Winter ice levels haven't changed much, which is why Al Gore correcting his statement was probably a very good move on his part.

Winter freezing always brought the amount of ice back to roughly the same area values, year after year. The difference is in summer and up to October.
I've been trying to get access to the maps for 2008 and 2009. The archive, despite pretending covering years from 1979 to "present", stops at 2007. There's a file on this page that covers 2008 apparently, but it's one of those silly extensions you need very special tools to read. All we can get is the graphs on the first page, like this one, which shows things getting better around June-September 2008, compared to 2007.

But instead of simple falsification of predictions, you lay out a very specific and artificial criteria of what can falsify global warming:

The hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming is the most general hypothesis being examined. A diversity of models exist supporting this claim, but they don't all agree with each other in terms of specific predictions. An inaccurate specific prediction does not test the general hypothesis, although it does test the specific models being used. The general hypothesis is more difficult to falsify, but quite clearly not impossible.

I think you could probably find a diversity of models for anything related to solar irradiance as well. In reality, there are really big general claims. One, CO2 explains the problem. The other, against AGW, is based on solar irradiance, and leaves room to other elements.

Given that AGW argues we're putting in 3% above normal CO2 (thus 3% of less than 0.04% of the atmosphere), then this is a unique phrasing also.

Nonetheless, I concur that between deforestation and fossil fuel burning, we do allow higher than "normal" CO2 in the atmosphere. On the other hand, given evidence of widespread ancient wildfire cycles and so on (repeated soot (aerosol) and CO2 events), I think there are still a lot of questions in regards to what is "normal", and the concept of carbon sinks being overwhelmed by a mere couple of extra percent output is very odd.

Except it's what we're seeing in the carbon data. Annual average CO2 levels have increased literally every single year on the Mauna Loa record - and done so, moreover, at a rate less than that of the excess human output.

What do you mean exactly with the last bit of your sentence?

The evidence says that the entire rest of the system is a net sink over this span - and that the CO2 levels are increasing anyway, meaning that yes, we are "overwhelming" the natural carbon sinks.

I'm not getting what you mean by "net sink" here.

A Telegraph blogger relayed this.

Someone mentioned that Russia is a major oil exporter, and the IEA is a "market-oriented" think tank over there (think Cato Institute - the two are associated), but not adjusting for urban heat island effects correctly is one of the things that can throw a monkey wrench in whether or not we see warming actually taking place.

Funnily, it's been easily proved that major oil companies have been on the AGW side. Al Gore himself is a man with many ties in such business. At first glance, you'd expect them to say that oil consumption doesn't pollute so much, so they'll keep people consuming just as much oil.
But that's a short termed vision.

My opinion is that these guys know that the world is going to move towards other means of power production anyway.
So what they are doing is that as they diversify their revenues, they'll amass a lot from financial markets they have already invested considerable amounts of cash into, such as the CO2 market estimated at several trillions dollars. Other powerful financial groups did the same, so they will not let anyone put a lid on the well, that's pretty certain.
At the same time, the lowly consumer and other small and medium companies will be pressured by the rise of fuel/plastic costs, an after effect of greater taxation. The usual club, from BP to Exxon, Shell and Total-Fina-Elf etc., would obviously not cap their prices and assume the greater taxation. That would be very naïve. They'll pull prices up, since all of us won't have the choice but pay to keep going on with our societal and economical model.
Hell, being in control of the input of oil in any given country, and thus at the source of the "pollution", they'll be in one of the best spots to influence the price of CO2 derivatives, from which they'll make billions.

As outlandish as it is, it's a win-win situation for them, and a lose-lose-lose-lose-again situation for us.

Now, not all groups are in the same basket, and some may be lagging behind. If the Russian oil company is not as privy about key data about stock as would be US/UK/EU companies with good ties to Wall Street/City, it could be understandable why they'd try their best to even the field and not being eaten alive. Notably because if they don't make as much money as the others, they won't be able to "fix" the prices as much as they'd like to.
That, and Russian capitalists.

Nothing's black and white anyway.

There's a nice graph here looking at the different subsets. I found this article explains what the graph means a little better.

First of all, I'd really wish some address my post, notably the wikipedia graph you used as pro-AGW evidence, while its stagnation and decrease of temperature after 1943~44, despite the growing industrialization, with the peak of 43-44 that is only matched again in ~1979, as you can see on this enhancement:



Notice how, for the bracketed era ('43->'79, between the two vertical green lines), the model based on greenhouse gases completely fails to explain the observed data, while solar irradiance and ozone work much better.
Also, I put yellow dots which highlight key values in solar irradiance. Notice how the rise of temperature also appears to mimic, more or less, the rough evolution of solar irradiance.

It is possible that greenhouse gases add a bit to this, maybe enhancing the effect a little, but they're far from being the main source of temperature rise.
From the evidence of this graph alone, we see that solar irradiance and ozone is followed, on the average and with a bit of lag sometimes, by the temp rise.

This being pointed out, I can take a look at the part of your message I quoted, and see what the links say.

First, Richard Lawson's greenblog. 11th on UK green blogs, let's see...

The red line shows readings from the smaller set of 121 stations, and the blue line is for the larger set of 476 stations.

They agree very well since 1950. Before that, the red smaller set, the ones chosen by the data collectors, show colder temps. It is true that the pruned readings from 1990 on are fractionally warmer than the full set, but the difference is not significant, as both lines are cooler than the best estimate grey line.

It is odd that the selected by the WMO is more cold in the 1880s, going beyond the grey line of total uncertainty.

Odd?
What the red line "reveals" is a constant increase of the temperature, while the blue line shows that despite the industrialization of the era I talked about just above, we have low temperatures in 1974 that come as colder than the peaks of 1870 and 1907.
So is it that odd? Well, I don't know, but one thing that is sure is that the data chosen by the WMO certainly makes it look like that before the industrialization, Earth was colder, and we never experienced a winter as cold as of 1870, which rather conveniently supports AGW.
While the blue line raises the same point I raised in my former post, and the mysterious 40s-70s era.

As for this Deltoid article, please notice the subtle ad-hominem:

The latest story exciting the denialosphere is being put about by novelist James Delingpole and is based on an analysis (translated here) by a right-wing Russian think tank.

I'm getting a little bit nervous when defenders of a given theory start abusing the words "deniers" and "right-wing". Lambert is certainly not alone here, but I can't help laughing at the idea that somehow the fact that the IEA may be more right-wing than left-wing has any relevance, especially when considering how AGW is largely pushed, on the financial and political front, by the USA, a country which when seen from outside, has very little leftist about it at all, even from the "Democrats".
I'd also point out that Sarkozy, who's working with Brown in order to put into place an EU global monitoring policy that would work in curbing CO2 emissions, is very well right-wing-liberal, with strong ties to US neocons, and didn't hesitate to arrange his political campaign as to harvest voices from the extreme right wing. On that note, I'd also like to know what the hell Blair and Brown have to do with anything truly left, aside from their social democracy.

But let's just deny this.

Delingpole quotes from a news story:

On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country's territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

Delingpole adds:

What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.

Which, amusingly, could appear to be a legit claim, when considering the other scandal (again) about Ben Sanders, and how he modified the IPCC report to remove all the parts from the UN scientists who were saying that there was no way to link for certainty climate change to the release of CO2 by human activities.

The problem here is the IEA report does not support the claims made in the news story. I've reproduced the final graph from the report below. The red curve is the temperature trend using the 121 Russian stations that CRU has released data for, while the blue hockey stick is from a larger set of 476 stations. I've put them on top of the CRU temperatures for northern extratropics. The red and blue curves agree very well in the period after 1950, thus confirming the CRU temperatures. Well done, IEA!


The red and blue curves do diverge in the 19th century, but the one that provides more support for anthropogenic global warming is the blue hockey stick.

Obviously not.
Which curve shows, as a whole, an averaged increase of temperature mirroring the increasing industrial activities of man? The red one.
Which one shows that for 1940s-70s, we got temperatures colder than in 1870 and 1907, which really puts AGW's logic at odds over key eras? The blue one.

The red curve shows warming in the 19th century before there were significant CO2 emissions, so it weakens the case that global warming is man-made.

Industrial Revolution in UK, pioneer.

If CRU (not HAdley as claimed in the Russian news story) have "tampered" with the data, it would seem that they must have been trying to make a case against AGW.

Quite not, as CRU has been caught the hand in the jar, thanks to the hack.
That's what I call denial of the highest order.

The IEA analysis is, in any case, misguided. CRU has not released all the station data they use, so the red curve is not the CRU temperature trend for Russia at all.

So what is?
Let's remember that just a couple of lines above, he said "the red curve is the temperature trend using the 121 Russian stations that CRU has released data for..."

If you want that, all you have to do is download the gridded data and average all the grid cells in Russia. You have to wonder why the IEA did not do this.

Considering the hassle it is to extract anything from a nc file without having the proper tools built on your PC, it would have been welcome to output the data in a more friendly readable format.

Since Russia is a pretty fair chunk of the land north of 30 degrees north, the CRU graph above is a rough approximation of the what the CRUTEM3 trends for Russia is, and you can see that it looks like the blue curve and not the red one.

If we're supposed to look at the grey stuff, you really need to blink fast to pretend that the blue curve is closer to the CRU estimation curve than the red one.
The closer to our century you get, the more you have those long odd drops, where the estimation falls below the red line, and even dips when both lines form a peak. Finally, when both curves agree, the estimation still manages to always be superior to both.
Basically, the only moment the estimation really seemed to have more to do with blue than red, was before 1900, which means when everything was less certain.
The more certain things were, the more the estimation got borked or got closer to the red curve.

Does this Lambert guy even actually pay attention to what he posts, or something?...

It's nice timing on his part, but really a side-show compared to the actual 'climategate' incident. The fellow making this claim is a political hack, basically - no more a working climate scientist than Al Gore or Bill O'Reilly.

He's not from the IEA as far as I'm concerned, right? So that a messenger from CNN or Fox News gets the stuff wrong isn't surprising; they can't even pinpoint major European cities and borders correctly.
I'm amazed that so many people still tune into such channels.

Finally, regarding the IEA's affair, there's still this translation of the IEA's original Russian document. Pages 15, 18, 20 & 21 are of interest. Page 20 features the same graph you linked to, so unless I missed something, I don't see what the IEA missed out here.

EDIT: forgot to finish some sentences.
EDIT2: Take a look at this:

Holocene Fluctuations in Arctic Sea-Ice Cover Reference
McKay, J.L., de Vernal, A., Hillaire-Marcel, C., Not, C., Polyak, L. and Darby, D. 2008. Holocene fluctuations in Arctic sea-ice cover: dinocyst-based reconstructions for the eastern Chuckchi Sea. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 45: 1377-1397.

Background
Writing about the Arctic Ocean, the authors say that over the past thirty years "there has been a rapid decline in the extent and thickness of sea-ice in summer and more recently in winter as well," but they state there is "debate on the relative influence of natural versus anthropogenic forcing on these recent changes." Hence, they decided "to investigate the natural variability of sea-ice cover in the western Arctic during the Holocene and thus provide a baseline to which recent changes can be compared," in order to help resolve the issue.

What was done
McKay et al. analyzed sediment cores obtained from a site on the Alaskan margin in the eastern Chukchi Sea for their "geochemical (organic carbon, δ13Corg, Corg/N, and CaCO3) and palynological (dinocyst, pollen, and spores) content to document oceanographic changes during the Holocene," while "the chronology of the cores was established from 210Pb dating of near-surface sediments and 14C dating of bivalve shells."

What was learned
Since the early Holocene, according to the findings of the six scientists, sea-ice cover in the eastern Chuckchi Sea appears to have exhibited a general decreasing trend, in contrast to the eastern Arctic, where sea-ice cover was substantially reduced during the early to mid-Holocene and has increased over the last 3000 years. Superimposed on both of these long-term changes, however, are what they describe as "millennial-scale variations that appear to be quasi-cyclic." And they write that "it is important to note that the amplitude of these millennial-scale changes in sea-surface conditions far exceed [our italics] those observed at the end of the 20th century."

What it means
Since the change in sea-ice cover observed at the end of the 20th century (which climate alarmists claim to be unnatural) was far exceeded by changes observed multiple times over the past several thousand years of relatively stable atmospheric CO2 concentrations (when values never strayed much below 250 ppm or much above 275 ppm), there is no compelling reason to believe that the increase in the air's CO2 content that has occurred since the start of the Industrial Revolution has had anything at all to do with the declining sea-ice cover of the recent past; for at a current concentration of 385 ppm, the recent rise in the air's CO2 content should have led to a decrease in sea-ice cover that far exceeds what has occurred multiple times in the past without any significant change in CO2.
Reviewed 12 August 2009

[Mith]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125883405294859215.html

Hackers have obtained e-mails and other documents showing that prominent supporters of the manmade global warming hypothesis in the scientific community are engaged in a concerted effort to shut opponents out of the scientific literature, with statements such as how they "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Also noteworthy are details of efforts to hide and delete pertinent information (e.g. e-mails, research station information, et cetera) to keep it out of the hands of those (in or out of the scientific community) who do not adhere to man-made warming claims.

To borrow from Craig Ferguson . . . Remind you of anyone?

Some of the more damning things here.

Um...

http://www.true-equality.net/archive/20 ... thing.aspx

Watch the video. These scientists are being taken out of context by people who don't understand what they're saying and hence we've given an inaccurate view of what's going on.

[2046]

Your video guy is a deceptive little twit.

Have some people (that psychotic freak Alex Jones comes to mind) misunderstood such statements as the 1999 "hide the decline" and taken it more broadly than it was meant? Yes. But such misunderstandings are not my position, nor is that the position of most folks who know what's going on. Otherwise the term "Briffa" would never appear in ClimateGate discussions . . . except it does, a lot.

The problem is that how it really was meant is still just as damning. Your video guy just sort of glosses over the tree ring issue, basically saying "it wasn't decline of global temps like that other Youtube guy says, so ha!" But that's basically a straw man and smokescreen.

The issue with "hide the decline" is that despite careful selection of which trees should be used, they still ended up with a temp decline for 1960 onward, contrary to their instrument records, and in the IPCC meetings it was discussed that this decline was a problem that muddled the message they were trying to send to those in power.

Think about all of that.

1. If you're going to use tree ring cores, you probably shouldn't cherry-pick a handful of them in the first place.

2. If something you're using as a temperature proxy breaks down for the entire last half-century and you don't know why, you might need an explanation for that. This is akin to using a cracked home thermometer as a precise instrument for your record-keeping, then comparing it to a super-advanced thermometer which shows it's been wrong for the past six months. Unless you know a reason why it might've stopped being correct six months ago, do you really think you should be trusting the older data?

3. Why is the UN's IPCC producing pressure to hide inconvenient truths from decision-makers?

4. Did they ever think to check the instrument records of the nearby area whose raw data they massage so thoroughly and which are all too often based on poor temperature reading sites for which adequate correction is not given?

And that's just for starters. For instance, Briffa data, like so much of the CRU temp data, gets severely manipulated in certain pieces of code, to the tune of 2.5 degrees C in more recent years.

So yeah, saying "oh lol you dummy hide the decline is about tree rings not global temps lol" is actually shooting themselves in the foot, because it exposes the whole mass of other problems which are the crux of the debate.

So no, I wouldn't pay too much mind to that video guy of yours, because he clearly does not relate the issues at hand. From the look of things, either he's ignorant completely or else he's simply trying to hide the decline.

[Mith]

snip.

Out of curosity, do you know who is investigating this?

Anyway, I've really got a bit of a headache now, but from what I can get from your post, they're still wrong and so was their method. I personally stay clear of this stuff since geology isn't my strong suit, but you've obviously got a good handle on the argument and I apologize if this seemed insulting, you don't usually snap like that at a source.

In any case, as I'm not really qualified to argue the subject, I guess I'll concede that point.

EDIT: God I am such an idiot, I utterly ignored your quote about them trying to re-define scientific literature. What was the entire quote or the specific email for that?

[2046]

Out of curosity, do you know who is investigating this?

I haven't heard of any new revelations from the e-mails and coding lately, though people are still talking about it online and comparing details. There was some reference recently to the CRU claiming that a particular piece of code relating to yet another way that tree ring data was molested wasn't used in live models, IIRC. But since they don't share their code or input data there's no way for anyone to confirm that . . . their live models might as well be drawn from a black hat.

The Associated Press did compose a report on ClimateGate. They put half as many people on this as they had on the Sarah Palin autobiography, and naturally (given that it's the AP) they claim to have found nothing naughty.

I apologize if this seemed insulting, you don't usually snap like that at a source.

I'm sorry, didn't think I was snapping, and I certainly hope that you didn't feel like I was snapping at you at all (which you don't seem to think from the above, but still).

In any case, as I'm not really qualified to argue the subject,

Their suggestion that these so-called scientists must be believed unquestioningly (even when other climate scientists disagree but are shut out of peer review) is trash. When clear BS is present, it requires no special qualifications to have the authority to call it as it is.

I utterly ignored your quote about them trying to re-define scientific literature. What was the entire quote or the specific email for that?

Pressure journal publishers to remove those who allow contrary views to be published:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails. ... 190249.txt
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails. ... 388489.txt

CRU guys with the IPCC intending to block any reference in the IPCC to contrary peer-reviewed literature: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !"
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails. ... 318616.txt

There's lots more where that came from.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Wire's Clive "AGW-fan" Thompson thinks rejecting AGW is right-wing (KKK) / creationism-style ignorance:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/mag ... t_thompson

Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge
Is global warming caused by humans? Is Barack Obama a Christian? Is evolution a well-supported theory?

You might think these questions have been incontrovertibly answered in the affirmative, proven by settled facts. But for a lot of Americans, they haven't. Among Republicans, belief in anthropogenic global warming declined from 52 percent to 42 percent between 2003 and 2008. Just days before the election, nearly a quarter of respondents in one Texas poll were convinced that Obama is a Muslim. And the proportion of Americans who believe God did not guide evolution? It's 14 percent today, a two-point decline since the '90s, according to Gallup.

What's going on? Normally, we expect society to progress, amassing deeper scientific understanding and basic facts every year. Knowledge only increases, right?

Robert Proctor doesn't think so. A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.

He has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is "the study of culturally constructed ignorance."

As Proctor argues, when society doesn't know something, it's often because special interests work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he's a Muslim; church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it did before.

"People always assume that if someone doesn't know something, it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't yet figured it out," Proctor says. "But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not."

After years of celebrating the information revolution, we need to focus on the countervailing force: The disinformation revolution. The ur-example of what Proctor calls an agnotological campaign is the funding of bogus studies by cigarette companies trying to link lung cancer to baldness, viruses—anything but their product.

Think of the world of software today: Tech firms regularly sue geeks who reverse-engineer their code to look for flaws. They want their customers to be ignorant of how their apps work.

Even the financial meltdown was driven by ignorance. Credit-default swaps were designed not merely to dilute risk but to dilute knowledge; after they'd changed hands and been serially securitized, no one knew what they were worth.

Maybe the Internet itself has inherently agnotological side effects. People graze all day on information tailored to their existing worldview. And when bloggers or talking heads actually engage in debate, it often consists of pelting one another with mutually contradictory studies they've Googled: "Greenland's ice shield is melting 10 years ahead of schedule!" vs. "The sun is cooling down and Earth is getting colder!"

As Farhad Manjoo notes in True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, if we argue about what a fact means, we're having a debate. If we argue about what the facts are, it's agnotological Armageddon, where reality dies screaming.

Can we fight off these attempts to foster ignorance? Despite his fears about the Internet's combative culture, Proctor is optimistic. During last year's election, campaign-trail lies were quickly exposed via YouTube and transcripts. The Web makes secrets harder to keep.

We need to fashion information tools that are designed to combat agnotological rot. Like Wikipedia: It encourages users to build real knowledge through consensus, and the result manages to (mostly) satisfy even people who hate each other's guts. Because the most important thing these days might just be knowing what we know.

How cute.
Oh and Wikipedia, real knowledge? It's only good for what we may safely deem basic knowledge, eventually sufficiently peer-reviewed (and even there, there's a lot that's left to argue, especially when you consider the HIV/AIDS topic).

[Mr. Oragahn]

Here's a very interesting post from a website I already cited in the past:
BREAKING: New paper makes a hockey sticky wicket of Mann et al 98/99/08... reconstructing historical temperatures may not prove so reliable after all... be sure not to miss that!