climategate

metalguy22

Re: climategate

This seems an appropriate Sunday commentary on man's lack of humility;

"Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said: "Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man. I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!" JOB 38:1-5

And how is it that one arrives at certainty in science? Tell us, surely you know!

There's no sarcasm quite like God's sarcasm.

niel

Re: climategate

this is my warning that if this thread continues down its political and religious road that this thread shall be locked. i have my opinions too, but they don't apply to this forum's purpose as laid out in the rules. we tolerate some excursions beyond these rules, but don't push it.

Windsun

Re: climategate

What Neil said.

We don't usually even allow such threads in this forum, but I let this one go because of it's direct impact on much of what we talk about here.

Any posts that do not stick to the thread topic - which includes any Left or Right, or any other politics not directly associated with Climategate - will be deleted with no explanation.

Windsun

Re: climategate

lorelec wrote: »

There is hardly anything scientific about the public "debate" over AGW, in my mind. I would suspect that none of us here is probably even qualified to seriously debate the topic. We're all armchair experts with the Internet by our side.

Marc

While probably true, I think the debate is about (or at least should be) some people not following strict scientific rules, and bending results to fit what they want. While probably none of us are qualified climatoligists, most of us are qualified to see that at least some of those experts have not been entirely honest in the debate.

Truth Squad

Re: climategate

Well, let me deal a wild card into this game. Let me tell you how some unscrupulous renewable energy manufacturers are using Global Warming---ok, be it whatever you want here, whether you believe it's true or not---hype to sell products that often don't work. This is an up-and-coming practice called "Greenwashing". Let me cite an example.

A certain renewable energy manufacturer decided to sell a new flagship product with the aid of a high profile marketing and advertising firm. This firm also helped a certain high profile fast food chain to gussy up their image. The firm pointed out that "people want to usually 'do the right thing'", which, in this case, meant helping to stop global warming and save the planet. So, they went with this approach primarily. Well, ok, but was the company "doing the right thing"? No. Was the product going to really make an impact? No. How can you sit there and sell a product by saying it'll help reduce greenhouse gases when you're overnighting parts almost daily? Jets burn a lot of fuel and move freight less efficiently than even trucks. There's that. There's also the fact that your product doesn't make an impact when it's simply not reliable and was rushed to market to stay within an executive timeline that didn't factor into account real world testing.

It also begs the question of how can a company claim to be trying to "stop global warming" when the management they hired had no renewable energy experience at all. They hired these execs solely with boosting sales in mind, not with building a functional, reliable product in mind. Sales was the sole target. And all the while, the spin factory continued with "stopping global warming" when, in fact, the product would probably never recover the energy that went into building it. Further to that, this company then got rid of the backbone employees who really built the company that the new execs walked into without any renewable energy experience at all. That's one reason why they committed blunder after blunder. They had no idea of what could or could not be done. And the people those execs brought in were just as clueless. The only important goal was sales. And how "green" is it to be importing from China? Manufacturing local saves fossil fuel and saves jobs.

This is not the first time this has happened. Back in the late 1960s-early 1970s, "natural food" became a hot item. The counterculture started food coops and the first natural food markets opened. The regular food manufacturers got alarmed, but they also saw a great opportunity. There were no standards for what constituted "natural food". So guess what? They started labeling their regular crap as "all natural" and this still goes on today. They learned that you could not only still sell the same unhealthy crap, but you could label it "all natural" and charge MORE money for it! This is when you saw the TV ads with this Native(?) woman doing the "Corn....my people call it maize..." to sell margerine and corn oil. And "all natural" potato chips with REAL sea salt (never mind it was regular salt, but since it was mined from an ancient seabed, they can call it "sea salt" and there were no standards saying yea or nay on that.) This is what's going on in small wind, in particular. There are NO standards to have to PROVE your product is what you say it is. Just like the "all natural" craze of the 1970s, the "Green" movement has been co-opted and usurped by slick marketing firms and the SAME corporations that sell oil and nuclear reactors.

In the 1980s, we had the "health craze" with gyms and jogging becoming popular. The food companies switched gears again and all they had to do was slap the word "Healthy" on to the SAME old TV dinner, and they could get twice the price for it. Or they could make claims of something being "heart healthy" with absolutely no accountability and no proof. I could have sold a salt lick as heart-healthy back then. Once again, this marketing co-opting is going on as we speak in the "Green energy" movement. See, the companies involved don't actually want to stop selling oil or nuclear reactors. And they certainly don't want to stop their absolutely wasteful business practices (like "Just-In-Time" parts ordering that darn near relies on overnight shipping and pretty much disallows any real QC inspection of incoming parts.) Just like the food manufacturers who didn't really want to sell healthy food when it was easier to sell you the NAME.

Global Warming has given these companies and their ad firms the biggest selling gimmick in history. Companies couldn't even sell fallout shelters at the height of the Cold War to the extent that companies are able to cash in on "Green" today. They also sell a lot of guilt, by trying to make people feel like they need to DO something. The same thing goes for the way they sell Christmas---if you don't buy a bunch of crap for people at Christmas, then you're a Scrooge. The thing is, these companies use Global Warming as their selling point, but the company execs don't actually believe in it. Think about that. If you were sailing on the ship YOUR company's lifeboats were going to be on, wouldn't you make sure those lifeboats WORKED?

Here's the take-away lesson. Renewable energy needs to work as if Global Warming never entered into the discussion at all. The oil will run out anyway eventually. We need to find other sources of energy anyway. We can't afford to keep manufacturing shoddy crap and using marketing to sell it. We need to build reliable, quality products that people will buy based on the reputation of quality, and not because the manufacturer is playing Chicken Little with a marketing firm. There are entirely too many scamsters coming into this like it's 1849 California and they're going to get rich quick. And they're getting into it because the talk about Global Warming scares people and these companies prey on their fears. Or their guilt. Or both. They see they can go around and slicker people into buying some rinky-dink attic fan as a "roof mount wind turbine" for three grand and people will probably buy it. These companies need to be held accountable. People need to stop assuming something is "green" just because the company says it is. People need to realize the only "green" certain renewable energy manufacturers care about is money.

AntronX

Re: climategate

Oh, we're deleting posts now. Very nice...

BB.

Re: climategate

Just the owner of the forum letting us (me included) to limit the discussion of Climate change to the details of the science and not at the people around the edges (as I read it anyway).

-Bill

AntronX

Re: climategate

Well, I am glad the thread is not locked.
Here are series of posts from some CRU guys: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/cru-hack-more-context/ It's nice that they respond to critisism right there in the comments.

bryanl

Re: climategate

This particular issue has a lot in common with others in terms of an appropriate skepticism and a responsibility for integrity.

First is to consider a dissonance that some have noted. The global warming is asserted to be in fractions of a degree per decade or even century yet that is a very small fraction of what we see from day to day much less from season to season. Despite that, assertions are made that this small change is causing massive, wide scale, and significant effects even in the short term. And, further, there is an effort to expend significant resources to ameliorate such effects. An appropriate skepticism seeks a support connecting these things commensurate with their scale and importance.

A second item to note is that formal measures of weather data really only go back as far as the ag-sci revolution (late nineteenth century) so there is not much history of global weather measurement of established quality. In addition, the precision of those measures is nowhere close to the fractional degrees being cited for climate change. Even today, when precision has been increased, the accuracy of the measure is still questionable. On top of this direct measure conflict are the many problems of statistical aggregation of measures to achieve some sort of global indicator.

Then there is the behavior evident in discussions which has analogies to sales efforts. Even in this thread we can see such logical fallacies as guilt by association, proof by authority, ad hominem, misdirection, and more. The very fact that there is such heated argument that often goes into such dubious territory should be sufficient to raise serious concerns about whether or not the argument is properly based.

From some here, it appears that 'climate scientist' has been elevated to the old 'rocket scientist' plaint as in dealing with issues too complicated for the everyday joe. The problem there is that it is the job of a scientist to educate (else his study will have no heritage). We live in an amazing era where individuals can accumulate massive amounts of data and do significant analysis as an avocational effort. A scientist with his heart and values set towards learning and understanding will not be secretive about either his measures nor his analysis. He wants the criticism of his peers and the burden of educating the amateurs as the rewards from such efforts are why he is a scientist.

What is the message for us? One is that we need to be careful about were we set our skepticism. We cannot dismiss the questions of others just because - we need to learn from them about our own understanding and views and their strengths and weaknesses. We need to be careful of measures to make sure they match consequences and are properly understood in terms of how we plan to use them. We also need to look at how we rationalize and describe our decisions to make sure we have integrity in our intellectual process and know where reason ends and emotion begins.

Many of the technical issues in these forums are about somebody seeking a definitive answer for a question that has much ambiguity. Fortunately, the issues here are usually just a matter of a few hundred bucks rather than the few trillion being worried over in the climate science brouhaha.

westbranch

Re: climategate

at last a spoof on the topic, its a hoot8)

[I am sorry, but some kinds of youtube humor will tank this thread. -Bill B.]

enjoy
Eric

mike95490

Re: climategate

Found the old link I had, to the fellow who audits the weather station sites, as to proper location of the instruments.
Bottom of the home page: http://www.surfacestations.org/ are 2 photos, showing how the weather gets warmer.

westbranch

Re: climategate

It gets worse... now spreading to the carbon credits schemes being manipulated by insiders...

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/21/pacharuris-carbon-choo-choo-off-the-rails/#more-14378

Eric

vcallaway

Re: climategate

Don't forget it was the same derivatives market that helped tank the economy.

Somehow this will be different.

On a similar note. Am I the only one that sees the irony in the POTUS going to Copenhagen to talk about global warming, only to get hit by a record cold. Then returning home to record snowfall?

Maybe there is a clue there somewhere.

BB.

Re: climategate

Just type Carbon Credit Fraud in Google News (or the search engine of your choice):

CBC Canada:

Fraud within Europe's carbon credit trading system has cost taxpayers more than $7 billion in the last 18 months, European police said Friday.

Officials at Europol, the body in charge of co-ordinating police forces inside the European Union, say fraudulent activity on the EU's Emission Trading System was first suspected in late 2008 when police noticed the volume of trades in certain countries would mysteriously spike.

"It is estimated that in some countries, up to 90 per cent of the whole market volume was caused by fraudulent activities," Europol said.
Since late 2008, the total value of fraudulent activity is believed to be in excess of five billion euros ($7.7 billion Cdn) from bogus trades in European unit allowances, or EUAs, the credits that companies in some countries buy to offset their greenhouse gas output.

The above appears to be the result of extensive VAT fraud too (more details in this following article--it appears).

The European police agency Europol has today revealed that the fraudulent trade in carbon credits that affected a number of countries over the past few months is far more widespread than previously thought and could have cost EU taxpayers up to €5bn in lost revenue over the past 18 months.

The agency said in a statement that it believed that in some countries up to 90 per cent of the trading of EU emissions allowances (EUAs) was subject to fraudulent activity.

EUA's which are traded under the EU emission trading scheme have been involved in so-called carousel fraud whereby fraudsters sell carbon credits and collect the accompanying VAT, but then disappear before the money is handed over to the tax man.

Europol said that suspicions of carousel fraud, so named because the fraudster can often buy back credits and then repeat the practice several times over, first arose in late 2008.

Market volumes then peaked in the summer, at which point France, the Netherlands and the UK changed their VAT rules to crack down on the practice. Europol said that after the reforms the market volume in each country fell by up to 90 per cent, indicating that the problem was extremely widespread.

Spain and Denmark have subsequently introduced similar rules that ensure VAT is collected from the purchaser, rather than the organisation buying the credits.

-Bill

vcallaway

Re: climategate

I love how they are upset they are not getting paid a tax on an imaginary item.

AntronX

Re: climategate

Ok, getting back to the topic. Here is James Hansen, the guy behind climate modeling and pretty much the most important climate scientist in the world. Here is a video of him speaking against cap and trade and being glad Copenhagen has failed. He also talks about "climategate" (skip to 48:00 minute mark), special interests in Washington and pretty much what's up with today's global warming debate.

Cariboocoot

Re: climategate

Buying and selling pollution doesn't make it go away.

Setting reduction goals without any viable plan of action doesn't make it go away.

Whether you believe in climate change (short term effects) and/or global warming (long term effects) or not you have to agree that pollution is bad and so is wasting energy.

Waiting until you get the whole world to agree on whether or not there is a problem is foolish. If there is, then it will be too late to solve. But if sensible, practical action is taken then there's no harm done either way.

I know; preaching to the choir.

Of course we're going to need something like a space elevator (or several) built at the poles to pump the excess heat on Earth out into space even if we do get the insulative greenhouse gases under control.

And if you don't see how greenhouse gases can cause trouble, take a photography course; the principal is the same as with photographic filters. They allow visible light through, which sources energy that eventually becomes infrared which can not pass through the same gases and radiate into space.

BB.

Re: climategate

There is one big difference between IR filters for a camera/stage lights and CO2.

Filters tend to intercept short wave IR, capture it in a solid surface (which prevents convection from the hot to cold side, and re-radiate at a much longer IR wave length (capture heat from a hot filament, re-radiate at 100-200 degrees F.

CO2 is capturing very long wave IR that is first radiated at 70F (or what ever the earth temperature is at that point) and imediately re-radiates again at 70F (air temperature) in a 360 degree sphere--which then heats up more CO2 and other gases, which again immediately re-radiate. There is no appreciable storage of energy and no blocking of convective air flow / heat exchange as there is not solid interface. So--the actual issue of how much heat lag / insulative / directional effect / overall change in IR heat transfer CO2 has is still unknown on a scale of the earth's atmosphere (from the little I have read). It appears that whatever the gas is (CO2, Hydrogen, Methane, etc.) has less of an effect of surface warming vs just the absolute pressure at the surface (when looking at different planets in our solar system).

Green Houses "heat" in the same way as the filters--blocking convective airflow and mixing with wind which moves heat. The IR profile of the glass (or other materials) appears to have little (if any) effect.

-Bill

bryanl

Re: climategate

There is a 'space elevator' that moves heat from the surface to the upper reaches of the atmosphere where it can be dissipated. It is self regulating one, too. It is the daily thunderstorm cycle in the tropics.

Simplistic models for complex systems do not make a good basis for effective planning. CO2 is a minor 'greenhouse' gas compared to water vapor and a recent paper suggests that CFC's may have more to do with recent warming than either. The fact is we just don't know enough to be able to reliably explain what we can see much less anticipate what hasn't happened yet.

westbranch

Re: climategate

Bryanl , I almost forgot about those little devils, the CFC's, and their link to the holes in the Ozone layer... thanks for adding them back to the pot.

I might also add to your closing sentence:

'The fact is we just don't know enough to be able to reliably explain what we can see much less anticipate what hasn't happened yet..'

that we also can't predict what to do to slow or reverse the current trends as we are just guessing at what is causing the trend in the first place. Pure Hypothesis...

I might add that I spent 10 years or so working with various Forest Ecosystem 'models' and a prof once told us that
" if you get the answer you thought you should get from a model/models , you better go through your assumptions, the data and the model/s VERY carefully as you most likely have something wrong!" The danger is believing you know what you are doing is spot on... a 100 W panel gives us 100 Watts, right?

He was warning us that the model is only an approximation of natural systems and not REAL, we just don't have the knowledge to cover everything going on so we use proxies.

HTH
Eric