Thursday, August 2, 2012

Another inconvenient truth

The earth is resilient.  Who knew?

UpdateMust see video: for everything known to date about CO2 and climate check out Professor Murry Salby's presentation to the Sydney Institute [via the comments at the above link]

Professor Salby's conclusion:  CO2 does not drive climate, climate drives CO2, independent of human emissions.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

A presentation by one lone scientist to a privately-funded conservative current affairs forum is your example of compelling scientific research? How about a hint of intellectual honesty?

Here is a start for you: On Salby's retarded , and not even original, conclusion

You might have, at one point, applied rigorous scientific thinking to something in your life, but you are simply pretending now in service of your ideology. You lost Richard Muller recently, who used Koch money to do honest research and concluded drastically against you.

Stop lying to yourself and others. Liar. You're not even doing it for money, so it's doubly pathetic.

JR said...

Heh:) You true believers are certainly an excitable (not to mention rude) lot aren't you?

Re your link to the Deltoid blog: here's what was said by one very credible observer around the time of Salby's presentation:

"I’m pretty sure Australian bloggers John Cook at Skeptical Science and Tim Lambert at Deltoid are having conniption fits right about now. And, I’m betting that soon, the usual smears of “denier” will be applied to Dr. Salby by those two clowns, followed by the other usual suspects."

Anon1152 said...

May I ask what you think of Richard Mueller's recent "conversion"?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html

JR said...

Anon1152,
Sure. I've been somewhat skeptical of Muller's skepticism.
Somebody, I can't recall who (probably Anthony Watts), back when Muller's BEST project was being announced, referred to him as a SINO (skeptic in name only).

Anon1152 said...

It's not possible that he took a careful and comprehensive look at the data?

Would anything convince you that global warming is real and a problem?

JR said...

Sure it's possible but the question is: How careful and comprehensive was he? There are major criticisms of his work, many of which are outlined at Anthony Watts' blog. For example BEST papers failed to pass the peer review process and he doesn't seem to have taken into account the poor quality of Earth surface temperature instrument sitings.

Yes, of course I could be convinced. I'm a skeptic not a "denier". Only a complete fool (or psychopath) could stand by and blithely deny or ignore an obvious threat to human survival (I suspect some of the more extreme environmentalist would happily do so). In fact, I'm quite sure that global warming is real. Warming warming took place during the Medieval Warm Period. It's been warming since the end of the last glaciation and the more recent Little Ice Age. But I remain very skeptical of claims that the human contribution relative to natural processes is a real threat. It's a small and noisy signal and there are large gaps in our knowledge of how the climate system works.

Now, is there anything that would convince you that AGW is not a problem?

Anon1152 said...

1.
A quote from the NYTimes article by Muller that I posted above suggests that he did take instrument sites into account (when he talks about looking at only Rural stations, to avoid the Urban Heat Island Effect:

"Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions."

*

2. What would convince me that AGW is not a problem? Good question. I admit, if the majority of climate scientists were so convinced, I would feel better about the whole thing. I've come to trust them. When I take the time to look into disputed claims the "alarmists" seem to be right. Perhaps this is because the "skeptic" that I have most often looked at is Christopher Monckton. Perhaps if I had started paying attention to Lindzen things would appear different.

Based on what I've seen, we shouldn't be arguing over whether or not AGW is a problem. We should be arguing over the solutions. The "skeptic" camp seems more worried about scary authoritarian "solutions" to the problem. And it seems as if that is driving their skepticism.

JR said...

The climate system is highly complex and poorly understood. I believe that this is what fuels the scientific debate (which is far from "settled"). The political debate (acrimony) is another matter.

Also, the uncertainties associated with what we claim to know about climate are large, far too large to waste multi-$trillions chasing "solutions" and wrecking the global economy.