The merely interfere with the truly important

the merely urgent interfere with the truly important

It was inevitable, I guess. A stress reaction on a non-problem. Here it is, http://www.odpm.gov.uk/stellent/groups/odpm_planning/documents/page/odpm_plan_032088.pdf [Broken], isued by the Deputy Prime Minister of the UK.

I think I missed it but evidently....

Well here it seems to be then:

So there it is, the unrefutable evidence, the hockeystick of Mann et al (MBH99).

Anyone ready to draw swords?

 

Hey, there are a few bom shells to follow. Perhaps read Rich Mullers balanced comments of last year about the problems of the Hockeystick.

do not let the merely urgent interfere with the truly important

And what is the truly important?

But please read the whole article, fireworks ahead.

 

Holdit, not so fast. Do not let the merely urgent interfere with the truly important. And remember,

When a conclusion is attractive, we are tempted to lower our standards.

Perhaps it's better to do some philosophizing before entering the battle of the hockeystick (and the war is hot).

What is an attractive conclusion? We have to sort something like that out beforehand. After all we do start investigation with an expectation. We have an idea and we look for proof. But if we do, we bias ourselfs, tending to raise the standards of acceptance for anything that counters our bias while lowering it for anything that confirms it.

Why would we bias in favour of global warming and why against it:

Global warming:
- costs money
- destroy nature
- gives us a chance to promote nuclear power
- if I warn against it I get more funding for my explorations
- if I fight hard against it, everybody accepts me as a social person and I can continue establishing my leadership
- if I against it I'm a crook
- if I accept it I won't stick out to have my head chopped off.

Yes Rich Muller also believes in Global warming. I do too but there is large difference between: act-immediately-and-pay-or-fry-tomorrow and a tiny irrelevant increase of temperatures, more than compensated with increasing biomass.

So why not drop all bias and have a neutral look into the physics of greenhouse gas like in this thread.

I also recommend this thread.

 

Now before analysing the hockeystick. Let's try and identify bias in the reasoning of pro and cons of global warming.

Let me recap first.

After reviewing that one it should be clear that the direct greenhouse effect of carbon gasses (CO2, CH4) is only logarithmic proportional to the concentration and large increases in concentrations due to burning of fossil fuel for instance, has only minimum effect on the direct greenhouse gas effect.

And again this is not a biased opinion, this is common knowledge in climate science. The bias starts with the assumption that possible positive feedback factors may be outperforming the negative feedback factors.

Positive feedback: higher temperature melts more ice, this means less reflection of sunlight and more heat is retained. More heat also causes higher sea surface temperatures which causes less CO2 to be absorbed and a higher water vapour content in the air. More CO2 and more water vapour is more greenhouse gas effect etc etc.

Negative feedback is: more heat causes more water vapour, this is causing more cloud formation. This causes more direct sunlight to be reflected and hence the Earth cools again.

Why would we assume that the positive feedback outweights the negative? Because we think to see it in other cases, like Planet Venus, the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum and the recent Pleistocene ice ages. The common denominator is that whenever the CO2 is high, the temperature is high.

And when a conclusion is attractive, we are tempted to lower our standards. Consequently, we endorse those conclusions unquestioned and it may not be wise to review it more detailed.

However the common fallacy here could be Post hoc ergo propter hoc. And of course, detailed study of these three cases reveals that the temperature - CO2 relationship is not unambigious at all.

Furthermore, study has been done to the direct feedback factors. Here is an excellent overview of the truly important:

Now I think that we are looking here at unbiased science. But the mere term "think" suggests that I'm biased.

Anyway, the IPCC scientific basis does not refer to those studies. One may wonder if those are rejected because it is assumed to be wrong?

When a conclusion is not attractive, we are tempted to raise our standards (of acceptance).

Now I challenge anyone to show that the bias on the Pro Global Warming side is only imaginary and/or that there is standards lowering at the "skeptic" side.

Next time hockeysticks (I think).

 

I wonder why it's so silent here. Don't like monologues. Does all of this make some sense?

Anyway, let's try and look at the idea of the hockeystick.
We want to prove "global warming"
If carbon dioxide has such a strong influence on climate we should investigate the last dozens of centuries or so. Before 1850 the CO2 level was pretty steady, about 280ppm, then the "anthropogenic" rise began. Consequently, we can predict that the global temperature in the same era was pretty steady too, before 1850 and after that, the global warming began, proportional to the rise in CO2.

And sure enough, there it is, the http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Temperature_record_of_the_past_1000_years [Broken]. A great joy for the global warmers, can you want more proof? When a conclusion is attractive, we tend to lower our standards.

It's also a nightmare for the "skeptics". Well that's how bias works of course. And when a conclusion is not attractive, we raise our standards of acceptance.

So for instance, what happened to the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA)? Were they real? (Skeptics) or imaginairy? (Global warmists).

If the MWP was warmer than today and the LIA much colder than today then the MBH99 Hockeystick is false and temperature variation is mostly natural, not nearly depending on the concentration of Greenhouse gasses.

So the efforts of the skeptics concentrated on falsifying the hockeystick. Two directions can be followed, independent evidence of both a global MWP and LIA and finding the mistakes of the Hockeystick.

(to be continued)

As in intermezzo, the current http://home.wanadoo.nl/bijkerk/GW-trend.jpg [Broken] up to September 2004 has decreased to 0.00001 degree per month or 0.012 degrees per century.

 

Sure, Phobos

This could have been the global temperature in the last two millenia according to Rich Muller. This is from a very recent publication.

The mainstay of the arguments against the MWP & LIA are that it were local events concentrated in the North Atlantic area and that the timing was not synchronous. When it is was warm in one location it was supposed to be compensated with cooling in other areas. More about that later.

 

Anyway, the approach of finding http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/136.pdf [Broken] of both a global MWP and LIA was conducted by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas

http://www.forestcouncil.org/tims_picks/view.php?id=508 [Broken]

Those allegations make me outrageous. This is how science gets killed. You can refute their work by showing that they are wrong and that they falsely wrongly quoted / interpreted their references. But to the general public it is clear. Soon and Baliunas are corrupt crooks and hence they are wrong.

 

Okay It would be a very interesting case to investigate and compare the acceptance standards of pro- and con- papers by the pro's and con's.

And there are a few more fireworks papers by the Dave's also know als M&M or David McKittrick and David McVea, equally ignorant villains or shrewd scientist, depending on bias and subsequent standards-manipulation.

We can also have a look into a dozen or more studies about temperatures in the last millenium. But I'm a little preoccupied at the moment, back soon, Promise.

 

Well, the current discussion contains atmopspheric science, 3environmental science, climatology, paleo climatology, oceanography, dendrochronology, glaciology and probably a couple more each of those has its own litterature.

Of course you could try http://www.sciencemag.org or http://www.nature.com or http://www.agu.org and especially recommendent: http://www.sciencedirect.com/ but you may find those difficult and expensive.

the superior tool to find all that material for free is http://www.google.com You'll be surpised.

For instance browse for "medieval warm ". and find:

http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/vikings_during_mwp.html
http://www.agu.org/revgeophys/mayews01/node5.html

but also as nr3:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000406.html

(We'll discuss adapting standards later again)


But then of course, the sources may not be trustworthy so check the references. In case of the Medieval Warm Period you will indeed see some justification in the variable period of that particular phenomon as I mentioned earlier, answering to Phobos.

Generally the MWP is defined as from the mid 900's to anywhere between 1350 and 1450. However Soon & Baliunas define it between about 1000-1300. But there is also sincere evidence of a short warm period around the mid 1500's and the year 1540 for instance is a serious candidate for being the year with the warmest summer in the last millenium.

http://healthinfo.cedars-sinai.edu/healthnews/reuters/20040218elin007.htm
http://www.crumbtrail.org/mt/archives/000412.html

 

And it can't hurt to check those sources regularely to find:

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041025/full/041025-15.html

 

Now again try for instance http://www.sciencedirect.com and type in the "quick search box" - "medieval warm" including parentheses and click "go" to find 51 articles concerning the MWP.

Click on "abstract" (full text costs pecunia) of the first article and there we are:

Despite the weakening last sentence, this certainly does not support the Hockeystick of Mann et al.

It's so easy to do your homework this way.

 

Now, if you try the fifty other hits of that query you will find that many of those articles suggest some form of local or global Medieval Warming. You could also have done that with http://www.sciencemag.org/ but you'd need a (free) subscribtion first. Then hit "Search science magazin" and put in into the first author box "storch" this time. Next click on the abstract again and this is the result:

I don't know, but objectively speaking (with numerous peer reviewed articles) it's starting to look pretty bad for the hockeystick. This makes the research case for variable acceptance standards pretty interesting let alone the justification of the Brittish government to preach global warming.

Whatsay?

 

Now let's assume that this was it.

The broad outline was:

A- Hey, the world may be in danger, due to global warming caused by antropogenic production of greenhouse gasses.

B - Okay that's bad, let's investigate how bad it really is.

A - I found a hockeystick somewhere, saying that it's really bad.

B - Okay I found several independ pieces of evidence in multiple disciplines that suggest that the current warming can be attributed to a lot of other factors, whilst the anthropogenic contribution seems to be minor, if at all. Besides that, your hockeystick seems to be doubtfull.

Now what would you expect to be the reaction of A?

1 - Wheeew, that's great, close call but we're off the hook
2 - Are you very very sure that your independent evidence is superior to my hockeystick?
3 - Can't be, my hockeystick is right of course and since you are a crook, you're wrong. We have consensus here that the world shall fry and we have made models, working according to the garbage-in-garbage-out principle, which prove that we are right.

Guess what happened to M&M?

 

Splendid, thanks pebrew.

Why I act so cynical? It's not me BTW. I mostly try to stay strickly neutral but that didn't work. Since this is attempt nr X+ to explain why global warming is a hoax and nobody has moved an inch. But I do see the terrible allegations against anybody who turns against the main stream. I thought I should mirror that for a change.

Mirroring for instance:

What is the scientific method of reasoning here, do you need to be a climatologist to review the literature and jot down the yes and no's? why would they alter their standards?

Which suggests that the cases in the past are all done deals. Nothing is further from the truth. We have worked on the PETM, I don't know if you have seen my alternative Venus hypothesis. I just finished a detailed geological study and believe I see a strong melting it all into one clean mechanism.

In the adjacent mammoth thread I will show that the ice ages are more and more mysterious and that we should start all over, explaining them.

Anyway:

Now there is the really scary part. What is the psychology behind the thing? This is human nature that as also been responsible for the Russian revolution, WW I and WW II and some other cataclysms. You have to believe in a good cause, no matter how wrong it is, but it is that what the leader preaches you, that's for one.