That’s pretty much how it starts every winter now. The sentiment in the toon above is of a piece with Fox News tool Stuart Varney who offered this bit of genius to Fox’ easily duped viewers last week…
The laughably absurd notion that a boat getting stuck in the ice in Antarctica is somehow a sign of “global cooling”, as Varney actually argues, out loud, on television, is part of the now-annual “it’s cold in winter, so there is no global warming!” nonsense that I suspect we’ll be seeing much more of this week, thanks to the fact that it’s cold in a large swath of the U.S. suddenly. More on that extreme cold in parts of the U.S., and why it’s here — and not in the Arctic, where it belongs — in a moment.
But to help the scientifically-challenged (and, apparently, too many of my trollish Twitter followers) understand how ice in the Antarctic — where there is ice — is, in and of itself, a sign of nothing, Varney’s televised idiocy notwithstanding, here’s how one climate activist explained it in a Letter to the Editor at the Concord Monitor, in response to another LTE written by some dupe named Tom Sellew, who used the Monitor to forward the same, fact-free nonsense as Varney…
Researchers at NASA, UCLA, and the University of Colorado have uncovered an increase in the westerly winds surrounding Antarctica, which has the effect of expanding the outer edge of sea ice. Scientific studies have also determined why the winds have accelerated.
First, global warming has changed temperature differences between the poles and equator, creating stronger winds. Second, ozone absorbs sunlight, and with the human-induced hole in the ozone layer, there’s a colder stratosphere over the southern pole, affecting wind patterns, according to University of New Zealand experts.
As the atmosphere contains 4 percent more water vapor than 30 years ago, increased precipitation is another factor. Science is amazing when we seek to understand it.
SUSAN SHAMEL
Hillsboro
Why the Concord Monitor would run the initial letter in the first place, as absurdly fact-free as it is — the writer Sellew jokes about “polar bears…clawing their way up the hull of the ship” (pssst…there are no polar bears in Antarctica) — is a good question, and one that the Monitor should be asking itself, even as it should be recoiling with shame for having done so. While many of my stoogeish Twitter followers don’t appear to know the difference between the Arctic and the Antarctic, the Monitor certainly should, and they should be striving to educate and inform their readers, not confuse them with verifiable nonsense like that found in Sellew’s initial letter.
As to the extraordinary cold beginning to blast a large portion of the Midwest this week in the U.S. (accompanied by unusual warmth in places like Alaska and down here in Southern California at the same time), that is another troubling example of the same record-breaking and extreme weather patterns which climate scientists have long predicted would be the result of global climate change. In this case, the cause is a polar vortex blast — bringing the Arctic air, which usually stays up in the Arctic, down to parts of the Midwest — as the jet stream dips, actually moves, much farther south than usual.
A polar vortex is like a hurricane of cold air which (usually) swirls only above the Artic. Here’s a short and sweet explainer from Business Insider on Sunday on what a polar vortex is and how the unusual displacement of this one could very well be a result of global (or, in this case, Arctic) warming…
The spinning winds typically trap this cold air in the Arctic. But the problem comes when the polar vortex weakens or splits apart, essentially flinging these cold wind patterns out of the Arctic and into our backyards. NOAA scientists have suggested that warming temperatures in the Arctic may be responsible for the weakening of the polar vortex. When the vortex weakens, it’s more likely to break apart and become a factor in our winter weather.
A 2009 vortex breakdown drove temperatures in parts of the Midwest down to -22F. Here’s a NASA illustration of the polar vortex (left) and it splitting in two (right):
It won’t just feel like Arctic temperatures in parts of the country this week – the weather system is actually Arctic air invading from the north.
The two graphics above, courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory, show the polar vortex as it broke down and split apart from January to February 2009. Below is a graphic of the polar vortex breaking down and moving south as we’re seeing it (and feeling it!) this weekend…
ScienceBlog’s Greg Laden (via Peter Sinclair’s Crock of the Week) explains the above graphic this way:
So, those are the facts. Nonetheless, brace yourself this week both for the cold and for a fresh blast of Climate Change Denialism from the folks who have a corporate/fossil-fueled interest in making sure that you don’t have such facts, or from those who are either dumb enough or incurious enough to buy into the denialist bullshit and pass it along.
For the record, for those who may not have noticed, as Peter Moskowitz at Aljazeera America helpfully summarized today: “The past year only made it into the top ten of the hottest years on record, but November broke all records for that month, and 2012 was the hottest year ever recorded in the U.S.”
Other than that, Mr. Varney, yeah, it’s “global cooling”. Nice to see that you believe your viewers are too stupid to learn any better. Sadly, they probably are.
I wrote to the editors of my local rag once asking them why they insisting on printing verifiable nonsense in their LTE’s, my main argument being that it took three paragraphs of evidence to undo/expose each sentence of untruth, and that that ratio inevitably tipped the balance of things towards the untruth, especially considering that their 300 word limit constitutes neither a shovel nor waders deep enough.
Their response was, unimpressively, that it was up to the public to make up their minds on the validity of the LTE content.
Some basically, in order to promote a “balance” of public opinion, they provide a forum for liars. America, what a country.
The cause of the warming, the end of it, and why temperatures are headed down are no longer a mystery.
Curiosity resulted in the discovery of the two primary drivers of average global temperatures that explain the reported measurements since before 1900 with 90% accuracy and credible estimates back to 1610. CO2 is not one of them. http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com/
Brad,
Thank you for your unflagging patience and sheer grunt work required to deconstruct the global climate change disinformation and rebuild with actual information based on science.
Dan Pangburn said @ 2:
Dan, you do realize that linking to an article you wrote at your own blog (apparently the only article at the blog) is not particularly convincing, right?
The response to your work as a mechanical engineer, not a climate scientist, is adequately responded to (excoriated, in fact) in this post, it seems.
Beyond that, why have no scientific journals deemed your studies worthy of peer-review or publication? Is it because they are not interested in “freedom and prosperity”, as you claim to be, and they, unlike you, wish to put that “freedom and prosperity at risk”, as you charge? Serious question.
Dan Pangburn @ 2:
In addition to the link I offered above, it looks like your work, links to which you seem to place all over the web, have been further eviscerated in articles like this one. So, again, I’d ask why you don’t offer your articles for peer-review and publication at science journals? Or, if you have, why they don’t appear to have been published there?
For that matter, I wonder why it doesn’t seem as though your articles have even been published by many of the high-profile denialist websites out there who are always looking for any reason to inject imaginary doubt into the “debate”? Surely they’d bite at your theories, no?
People like Dan Pangburn keep spouting the same old discredited nonsense about there’s no warming, it’s getting cooler, blah, blah, blah dee blah.
Meanwhile, reality keeps saying stuff like– http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/12/23-4 –about the records smashing heat experienced in Australia in 2013.
Don’t know how Dan’s and reality’s paths keep missing each other so badly.
Lemme try that link again–
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/12/23-4
Properly considered, colder winters prove that the earth is getting warmer. I think I’ve got it now.
Hey Brad, is Pachauri a scientist?
Traducteur–Nope, you still don’t have it. Keep at it though. It’s not that hard.
Brad – A plethora of reference sub-links document my relentless pursuit of the truth.
The ‘name’ journals, Nature, etc. are hopelessly biased on articles regarding climate. Biased peer review is de facto censoring. They would need to admit that they have been wrong about AGW for many years.
My stuff has been peer reviewed by MY peers and anyone on the planet that chooses to. The graphs are compelling. No one has yet pointed out a technological error.
There are a lot more papers submitted for publication than actually get published. I have found no one else who has discovered the startlingly excellent connection between average global temperature and the time-integral of sunspot numbers. (This comes close for post 1850 stuff: http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/01/blog-post_23.html ) Thus the immediate impulse of journal editors is to discount the work, although the usual answer is ‘not enough space’. Besides that, some journals charge a fee to publish a paper and I am unfunded.
Average global temperature is more correctly understood as a problem in the thermodynamics of radiation heat transfer, and a fairly simple one at that (or at least simple for a Mechanical Engineer like me with 9 units of post graduate thermodynamics). Climate Scientists are the wrong folks to try to solve a heat transfer problem. Along with other mistakes, they get mired in the minutia of weather.
Dan–Your hubris is showing.
Traducteur said foolishly @ 8:
So, ya didn’t read the article you’re commenting on, eh? Impressive! Happy to know you can be completely ignored. Thanks!
Davey Crocket asked rhetorically @ 9:
Presuming you mean Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the IPCC, you can find out much of whatever you’d like to know about him from his Wikipedia page.
Dan Pangburn @ 11:
Ah. Got it! The scientific journals are all biased towards science that ONLY they approve of and peer review is censorship. (We’ll set aside the fact that denialists like Koch Brothers-funded Richard Muller didn’t have similar probs, for some reason.)
But, then why haven’t any of the big climate change denialist sites published your works? You’d think they’d be delighted to do so. Or the fossil-fuel companies who, one would think, would be thrilled to pay you a pretty penny for these discoveries?!
Brad #14. Thanks for the link! Looks like he is not a scientist.
Brad #14. On further study…he’s an engineer!!
Keep going, Davy! I think you’re really on to nothing this time!!
What Lasagna said.
Once upon a time the Earth was flat, causing the stars and planets to orbit around it, because it was the center of the universe.
Then the Earth was changed into a globe by librul scientists.
So, all those stars and planets went to orbit stars like our Sun instead.
Ever since the Earth became no longer flat, rather becoming a globe orbiting the Sun, there has been both summer and winter at the same time.
As we speak it has been threating 122 deg. F. (50 deg. C) in Australia, even as it is cold in the flat earth in the Midwest where deniers are freezing right now.
Libruls make it difficult to get it when it is summer near Antartica and winter in Kansas.
The science in the issue of global warming, if there is any science there at all, has been long ago overtaken by political activism.
There has been no warming in 17 years, in spite of co2 emissions. There has been no increase in the intensity of anything, neither has there been coastal flooding. The winter US is having now is about the same as the winter it had ~20 years ago when I lived in Chicago. I remember it all too well.
Political activism, mostly left wing in this case, is trying to use institutions of science as a cheap prop for their politics. I am sorry to say, as a person trained in sciences and thus with some emotional attachment to the idea of it, that scientific institutions have gone along for the ride. All of science will pay a very steep price for this ,as public incredulity is increasing. More you shout now, steeper the fall will be.
Claims of modelers are not just wrong. They represent professional malpractice. The rule of numerical modeling 101 is: though shalt not extrapolate from your data domain, unless though is absolutely certain of your underlying physical model. Global Warming alarm is based on 80 years extrapolation from ~20 years of data, even though we know for a fact that all models have a severe numerical instability built into them on purpose, otherwise known as climate sensitivity. To repeat: it is not just wrong, it is gross malpractice.
And now, past claims of danger in a distant future as a basis of action have been overtaken by shilling over every weather event. It is disgusting and utter perversion of science.
MF @21,
“Pure”, “unadulterated” bunk (a.k.a. political activism).
MF @21–More like there has been no recognition of scientific(and observable) reality by the hordes of climate zombies like yourself.
Hundred(1000?) year weather events–Katrina, Sandy, Vermont flooding, Boulder flooding, Australia boiling, Oklahoma blowing away, plus never before seen events like Arctic and glacier melting are now all common occurrences.
You apparently think this is all just business as usual. I guess it is, if you were born yesterday.
The CO2 level continues to go up while the average global temperature (AGT) doesn’t. Apparently, the separation between the rising CO2 level and not-rising AGT will need to get even wider for the AGW mistake to become evident to the deniers of natural climate change.
Saw this quote, which seems like an appropriate response to the simpletons that think right-wing propaganda is more reliable than science:
“If you think snow disproves global warming, I’m going to assume you think jumping disproves gravity.” — Grand Old Parody
Dan–I think you’ll find that once the coriopsis standard is applied to your hyperbolic intercession at regular subclavicle interludes the non-extension of the oven mittens becomes moot. I’m not a mechanical engineer but I’m pretty sure that’s right cuz I say so.
David @ 26,
Hee hee hee! 😀
Brad,
My comment about your unflagging patience didn’t take into account the sheer volume of gobbledy-gook that is appearing! (If your patience gets tried a bit on this thread, I completely understand!)
As the comments dissolve into drivel, perhaps they will self-destruct.
It’s time to bring out the real science that will discredit Dan and his anti-science AGW denying propaganda:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-temperature-correlation-intermediate.htm
What I remember hearing 20-30 years ago is that global warming was likely to bring us increasingly weird weather events. The reminders of that prediction have been increasing, and tragically so, since I first heard it. I don’t know how old Dan Pangburn is or what planet he’s living on. But these are the reports I keep finding that mirror exactly what I’m personally experiencing on the one I live on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K2s2EjsXJI
There’s a difference between saying “Climate Change Denialism” and “Global Warming Denialism”. I’m not a “pusher” of “global warming”, but have repeatedly said that people should speak of climate change, instead.
Climate change doesn’t mean warming or cooling. It can mean one or the other, a combination of both, or neither. It can mean very variable warming or cooling, warming or cooling very much in some regions while very little in other regions. It might mean neither. F.e., say a region of the Earth is getting a lot more rain or a lot more drought than normal, all while not experiencing any really measurable changes in temperature. Say this goes on for some years. People could then say that the region is going through or receiving some “climate change”.
It’s a more flexible appellation, say. Global Warming means warming worldwide, if we take or treat “global” literally, for global is the whole Earth on this planet. Even some scientists have said that global warming isn’t happening this way, i.e., globally, that is, not significantly rising everywhere.
People will be less prone to argue with one another by using “climate change”, for we’re experiencing climate changes. There’s also nothing new at all about that. Climate changes are normal for this planet. It’s an easier term for everyone to be able to agree with.
Not everyone will have the same view about warming, either. Whereas winters have been usually warmer and shorter in Quebec, Canada, than they were back in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as 1980s, and people aren’t going to be displeased about this here, people in other parts of the world may be receiving too much warming, with it causing more rains and floods, f.e.
Anyway, I’ve been preferring to say “climate change” rather than “global warming” pretty much since first learning of the “global warming” panic years ago.
Real climate change is fueled by real overall global warming. Saying “global warming” is important cuz it’s accurate and points the finger at the primary culprits–us.
Kevin @ 26
Thank you for posting this. I have a hard time treating climate science as a hard science, or perhaps a “fundamental” science where cause and effect are directly measurable, or at least where we can conclude with absolute certainty that a given effect is the result of a specific cause (or to what degree each of the causes is contributing to the effect).
Though lab experiments can correlate CO2 with increased warming in a controlled environment there is so much going on in the real world that the absolute assurance with which Brad and others speak on this topic is disconcerting. Yes there are a bunch of morons on Fox News, not really news there. Yes people spout ridiculous talking points, nothing too interesting there either. But even if everything Brad (and the non-corrupted scientists out there that he supports) says is 100% true, not enough people care. Ultimately, no one wants to really give up their present quality of life. And the people who are willing to go balls out, you probably wouldn’t enjoy living with (anyone here enjoy eating raw food, living in a five bedroom coop/commune with 30 hygienically challenged people, riding bikes everywhere all the time rain or snow, use a natural septic system?) I’ve done it! I don’t want to do it again. Hell, who here has a garden to actually produce the majority of the food they eat? Who here is off the grid with solar panels? Offsetting your carbon footprint for that flight you took is just yuppie bullshit that will have no measurable effect in our lifetimes.
So maybe we deserve our fate.
In any case, if we are really worried about global warming lets focus on preparation for the inevitable at least as much as we do on prevention of the inevitable, as it seems to be a more rational approach. China doesn’t give a crap about global warming, they are literally poisoning whole cities there with industrial pollution.
Fossil fuels aren’t going anywhere without a truly disruptive technology taking its place. It won’t happen through our politicians, but by people actually adopting something that is way better than fossil fuels. Taxing the shit out of the use of fossil fuels maybe a noble cause in the long run, but it also isn’t going to happen anywhere that matters right now. Europe isn’t exactly the industrial powerhouse it once was, and petrol is already heavily taxed in many places. The US has lots of cars and coal plants and I am all for making these more efficient, but I don’t think taxing consumers (which is what always happens since industry will always pass the costs onto the consumer) will have the desired effect in the time frame contemplated by the consensus.
For the people who never rose above the level of concrete thinking and therefore must have everything interpreted literally, perhaps we can refer to “global warming” or “climate change” as the “extreme weather era” — EWE — or something like that since it seems that the concept is otherwise too abstract for them.
MF @ 21 foolishly said:
Wrong. But thanks for playing Pass-On-The-ExxonMobile-Propaganda-in-Web-Comments-Game!
Okay. Got any, ya know, evidence for that? “As a person trained in sciences” and all, surely you wouldn’t forward a theory without actual independently verifiable support for it, right?
Again. Evidence, any, would be swell.
Again. Really? No evidence? Even “as a person trained in sciences”?
Ah. I see. So you haven’t even bothered to read the actual existing science before making claims about it. Not very sciency of you!
Speaking of “perversions of science”, tell us about your background in climate science. Would love to hear about it! (Also, actual scientists have little fear of putting their real names to their scientific opinions. I’m not a scientist, but I do that anyway. Please feel free to do same. It might be slightly more impressive than your pseudonymous, evidence-free claims. Thanks!)
The unpublished mechanical engineer Dan Pangburn says stuff like this @ 24:
But then I see actual science like this (click for sourcing):
Weird.
Please note: I used a chart here that also includes sunspot data on it, since you’re a sunspot guy who believes that global warming, what little you say there is, is actually due to sunspots (as I understand your unpublished, un-peer-reviewed personal studies.)
Lora @ 28 said:
It’s been “tried” for 10 years. Some day I’ll get used to it 😉
#WarOnGobbledyGook
Kevin Schmidt said @ 29:
Thank you, Kevin. Normally we frown on posting complete articles here from elsewhere. But given that you linked to it, and given that clicking on a link might be too much to ask of some folks who don’t actually care about the science, I’ll overlook that small point this time around.
(Making them read it, of course, is a whole separate issue. Good luck with that!)
Mike Corbeil said @ 31:
Well, that’s debatable. But either way, yes, according to the science, and the scientists, the globe is warming. You may use the term with the same 95% confidence that 97% of the world’s climate scientists use it.
Mike @ #31 —
You may feel that the term ‘climate change’ is preferable for whatever your purposes are, but do understand that the terms ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ have always had specific scientific meaning:
That distinction includes changes to the global climate system like ocean acidification.
People will continue to argue about it regardless of which term actual scientists (who actually know what they are talking about and have the training and field research to prove it) use.
Based on what you’ve posted here, I suggest spending some time perusing SkepticalScience.com — a good basic overview with links to the primary literature — and see how your understanding compares to what the scientific evidence actually indicates.
SH said @ 33:
It’s not me speaking, per se. It’s the science and scientists on whom I’m reporting. They (almost all of them) have the “absolute assurance”. If their science or opinion changes, of course, I’m happy to look at and report that as well.
Okay, I was with ya, until you just now fell into the talking points game. (Not saying you are using talking points, but you’re passing on the BS talking points from others.) Nobody has to do anything of the sort to deal with problem of GW — though they might if something isn’t done soon about it.
While all of those things may have positive effects on carbon footprints and growth in GW, there are other ways — many ways — that don’t require the same kind of “sacrifice” (if that’s how you may regard those things.) One, very tiny, example: changing the energy efficiency requirement on lightbulbs has had a sea change on the industry, creating lightbulbs that, instead of lasting a year, now last 20 or 30 years, for a fraction of the cost of energy. And that’s with the new requirements only being phased in now after being legislated less than 10 years ago. Now that someone gives a shit about such things (thanks to government legislation) the industry and the technology have zoomed after, essentially, not changing for about 100 years.
Also, note how Republicans fought against CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) Standards on cars for years. A new standard was finally passed, and before it’s even in effect, cars are already getting 30 and 40 miles a gallon, while electric cars are getting more than 100mpg.
It’s not the “way” we lack, it’s the “will”. And that’s where government is important. Govt takes on problems that are too difficult or too large for individuals. That’s why Govt is needed to take on GW. The trajectory won’t won’t change without them.
Well, I might agree with that part 😉
Ah, fatalism. We can’t fix the problem, so let’s just do nothing other than hunker down and try to survive it as long as possible. Weren’t you the guy who didn’t like living with smelly people in a compound? You can give up and hunker down and live a life of hopelessnes if you like. I’d prefer to be proactive.
More talking points. Second part of sentence is correct, first part isn’t. If we did half as much in green tech as they have done over the last 10 years, we’d have this problem licked by now. And, yes, they do participate in international climate treaties, and yes, they have shown themselves willing to take action when we do.
I disagree. And if done properly, a revenue-neutral carbon tax would pass all such taxes back to the consumer (under the premise that corporations will raise their prices to pay the taxes.) Of course it can be done and of course it can make a difference, just as has been the case anytime we’ve tried similar plans to keep corporations from polluting.
BTW, they always said the same thing in the past about those taxes as you’ve just said about a tax on carbon. They were always wrong. Every time.
Thanks for your response Brad @41.
I actually agree with mandating increased efficiency where it is possible, as with the light bulbs (though we should be encouraging use of LED lighting not the toxic mercury filled CFLs – imagine one of those breaking next to a baby, yikes!).
The antiquated CAFE standard is an absolute tragedy that seems never ending, and to me is the most damning argument for mandating increased efficiency – when the technology exists to do so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avion_%28car%29
When industry stops innovating it is a problem that government has a place in solving by promoting relevant research or education. When industry actively suppresses game changing tech, the government should step in and force industry’s hand. Why is it a public health issue to smoke in public establishments but cars that get 15mpg isn’t one, especially when there are clear and economical alternatives (e-cigs weren’t even around in the 1990’s in California!) It makes no sense.
As for China, I will believe it when I see it. It may be willing to sign agreements, but I don’t see the CCP eroding the country’s economic dominance any time soon by raising the cost of production. And if they are ahead in green tech, then they should implement it, not wait for the corrupt US government to make significant changes.
I am not fatalistic, I simply don’t think arguing the merits scientific theories will ever lead to tangible results, and it doesn’t seem like people will change tack any time soon. Plus, the changes I mentioned are not only good for climate change, but good for the overall well-being and health, both mental and physical, of humanity. Everyone should have a garden and produce as much electricity off the grid as they can, if they have the means to do so. I don’t understand why you think a garden and solar panels = commune.
Society is strongest when the most amount of people are self-sufficient, instead of being dependent upon a centralized system which, by its very nature of centralized hierarchical control, will devolve to be destructive to the environment and health as industry grows vast, cuts out innovation, corrupts the government and writes laws to benefit it over the people. This is much more easily proved than man-made global warming. Just look around you, or read the archives of your own site. Further, while I believe the government can do a massive amount of good, it also has done the most amount of lasting harm to the environment and health humanity, so it should not be the only place to focus on change. (Nuclear weapons testing, depleted uranium bunker-busting bombs, for example).
Because the potential to improve our world is there, I agree that part of any strategy to evolve into a more harmonious and healthy world should involve significant government efforts.
Obviously we have the tech today to shift away from fossil fuels, the problem is that the tech isn’t sufficiently cost-effective to allow for mass adoption by individuals.
Thus, it most likely requires the government to undertake massive policy initiatives that will be highly disruptive to entrenched powerful interests. This could take the form of taxation, for example, to make regular cars as expensive as electric cars are; subsidies, to make electric cars as cheap as a standard lower-end model; and / or massive direct investment in new infrastructure and research. (Some might argue that lowering regulatory hurdles to the entrance of new tech is another way, but I won’t get into this here.) But of course they government is corrupt and Americans are docile sheep these days, so it is not likely the politicians will screw over their masters help the people they technically are supposed to serve.
I don’t have very accurate figures, but the trillions spent on Iraq and Afghanistan (and whatever black ops are constantly going on) could have gone a long way to powering every house in the country with solar power. From wikipedia, I found that a 280MW solar array in the Mojave Desert is estimated to cost 1.6 billion to build. 1MW can power around 150 homes for a year. So this one plant will be able to power around 42000 (lets say 30000 houses to account for losses in transmission). There are upwards of 150 million homes in the US. So you would need around 5000 of these Mojave plants to power all the houses in the US. The numbers are obviously very sketchy but with this rough estimate, it would cost about 8 trillion to build enough solar arrays to power all the homes in the US, exclusive of transmission infrastructure and maintenance costs.
In a previous post here, you pointed out many green investments made by the USG. And yet, where’s the beef? The whole global warming debate is a distraction, it is a moot point. We don’t need global warming to justify spending less than half of what we have spent on wars and banker bailouts in the last ten years on investment in updating our energy infrastructure.
It just takes a sane and not totally corrupt government. I don’t want this government to have another excuse to tax, especially not as a tool of social engineering (i.e. dictating the behavior of the population). Taxation should not be the primary tool to effect policy change because it turns people into criminals who don’t agree with the policy and refuse to participate, rather than encouraging people to be partners in evolving our society through policies that obviously directly benefit them. However if a tax is required instead of just having the Fed monetize the debt as it so loves to do, then 100% should go towards a massive updating of our energy infrastructure.
People don’t generally think about paying more now to benefit their far off descendents, but they would love to have cleaner air in their communities, cheaper electricity costs, quieter, cleaner and safer cars that are actually practical for all their needs, and they want to see these things happen in a few years, not decades. (Well except for people who like really loud big vehicles, but that as well could be provided through technology advances without the need for gas guzzling.) We have to deal with people as they are, not as a cancer that we need to force into compliance.
While we are arguing about what scientists say, who is a shill or a dupe, we could be asking why we spend trillions on wars and not on transitioning from dirty power to much cleaner solar power. We can discuss why there isn’t a distributed network of fast solar charging stations allowing people to drive their electric vehicles dependably across the nation. Maybe discuss why we don’t invest in flying cars rather than build more and more toxic roads which must be endlessly maintained at incredible expense. (Not a pipe dream to my extreme joy! http://www.terrafugia.com/ )
Instead we get privatization of a vast swathe of utilities, war, war and more war, and a silly debate about something that scientists will never be able to conclusively prove at this time because we don’t have direct measurements of what was going on with the climate over thousands of years (only indirect measurements that may or may not give us a 100% accurate picture, plugged into potentially flawed computer modeling software.)
It is too easy to muddle this debate, and you and everyone else who is passionate about it is falling into this trap. It doesn’t matter how proactive you are if you are wasting your energy by making poor strategic choices. Brad, you have an excellent platform here and elsewhere, you are an incredible writer, you have a very incisive mind that cuts through the bullshit, you are morally grounded and care about people, and you obviously have the energy and (some of) the patience to have an impact on people’s thinking.
It seems clear to me that death can be converted to life by funding life saving infrastructure and technology over the war machine. This is a much easier debate to win and the results will ultimately be what the climate change activists are fighting for in the first place.
I know Bradblog has a strong anti-war stance and has written much on the topic. This is awesome. I am just astounded that the global warming topic seems to spark a much more passionate and sustained debate than the topic of war. Although, maybe war=bad is so obvious that it doesn’t merit any debate. Nonetheless, if global warming activists and scientists changed the focus to war costs vs. costs of improving infrastructure and kept banging out this message over and over again, rather than discussing the finer points of arctic vortexes and hockey sticks, something might actually change besides the climate.
Brad 36 – Nice chart. Don’t you wonder why the temperature anomaly trace goes up and down while the CO2 trace goes steadily, progressively up? I show why at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com/ . Change to the CO2 level has no significant influence but two other things do. And they go up and down with their sum being an excellent match to reported measurements.
Now the yellow trace. It looks very much like a trace of average sunspot numbers (which I have done for other purposes). That is what most (if not all) others have looked at and it obviously does not work. What does work is the time-INTEGRAL of sunspot numbers. (That is like a running total if you are more comfortable with accounting terminology.) The integral takes into account both duration and magnitude. The yellow trace only accounts for magnitude.
It is a bit more complicated because it’s actually the integral of the difference between the average daily sunspot number in a particular year and the average for a lot of years (which turns out to be 34). The equation might say it better.
You are correct I have not ‘published’ unless you count an opinion piece in v. 21, No. 8, 2010 p. 999-1004 Energy & Environment titled ‘Climate prediction based on past measurements’. The equation has been refined since then and the resulting numbers are slightly different but the conclusion is the same and the rationale might be easier to follow there.
Dan Pangburn said @ 43:
Not really. It’s been explained to my scientists as a) natural variability and b) sun cycles, as I recall. I appreciate that you believe they are wrong, and that you are right. And, for all I know (not being a scientist either) you could be! That’s what I continue to ask you why your work is not peer-reviewed and published. I don’t have the expertise, personally, since I’m not a climate scientist, to offer an authoritative review of your work.
All I can do is wonder why nobody else has, apparently, even bothered.
Brad 44 – I am a licensed Mechanical Engineer and have been researching GW for about 7 years now. I started out believing, like nearly everyone else, that GW was happening and human activity (CO2) was the cause. Early on, my findings showed that CO2 was not the cause of GW and a paper was made public at http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/pangburn.html describing the evidence that led to that conclusion. But I had no clue to what caused GW. About a year later, I discovered the cause of GW which fit reported measurements since before 1900 with R2 of 0.88. Since then, refinement has changed the look of the equation, increased R2 to over 0.9, and corroborated that the influence of CO2 is insignificant.
There is the trend that is calculated using the sunspot number time integral & a proxy factor, the average of all ocean cycles with an amplitude of approximately ± 0.18 K which oscillates above and below the trend and a measurement random uncertainty with standard deviation of about 0.09 K with respect to the sum of the trend and ocean cycles. The derived equation has a coefficient of determination (R2) with respect to reported temperature measurements of over 0.9 and calculates credible average global temperatures all the way back to the beginning of regular recording of sunspot numbers (1610).
All of the source data and methodology are available at the agwunveiled link and sub-links for anyone who wishes to check my work.
I can be contacted through the email link at the site.
Yes, Dan. I know what you are. You are not a climate scientist. Nonetheless, if you’ve “solved” global warming, by discovering it’s not CO2, I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to have your theory tested in a peer-review. Unless, of course, you don’t want to have your theory tested in a peer-review.
Posting your beliefs on a website is not the same as being published in a peer-reviewed journal. But good luck with your quest.
“Posting your beliefs on a website is not the same as being published in a peer-reviewed journal”
Is there a point in suggesting that ideas flying in the face of a chorus pushing a ‘consensus’ ( without actually defining a mechanism aside from ways of pushing a model to simulate acceptable results ) should be submitted for ‘peer review’ to those adamantly saying that the question is resolved ? I can in fact recall Talking Points on ‘How to Talk to a Climate Denier’. That is a lie from the title forward, from the Logical Fallacy of Poisoning the Well Argumentation….a clear violation of Scientific Method before discussion even commences.