Slashdot: Michael Mann Vindicated (Again) Over Climategate

[Predicto]

I find it rather odd that he has been a member since 2007, has over 1,000 posts, and seems completely unaware of Peter's background as a scientist. Are we sure he isn't just trolling?

Probably just new to the Tailgate.

I suspect he does his "scientific" posting on other, more amenable, forums, ones where you win an argument by making fun of Al Gore rather than actually discussing the science.

[Jumbo]

Skadden is more of a stadium poster, and my only hope is (taking his claimed matriculation at face value) that he adds mastering the starting of new threads to his learning so we don't have to nail him with a third NNT. :pfft:

But what larry said is one my favorite things about the stadium...how you can really wonder wtf someone is thinking in the tailgate but every now and then still find some common ground in the stadium.

But sometimes it's the other way around too.

[mossomo]

"Michael Mann... investigations have found similarly that claims of Mann's misconduct took his statements out of context... there was "some concern" over the statistical methods used, but that's not scandalous

Out of context - like omitting the Medieval Warming Period and instead showing a progressive rise in temperature like a hockey stick, instead of a spike in the temperature model that occurred between 900 - 1300.

[Larry]

Out of context - like omitting the Medieval Warming Period and instead showing a progressive rise in temperature like a hockey stick, instead of a spike in the temperature model that occurred between 900 - 1300.

Out of context - like you don't know what they were talking about?

Or like you didn't care?

[mistertim]

Good points by Larry, Predicto and even Jumbo (it is bound to happen sometimes, even if by accident ). In the past I've noticed the same phenomenon: agreeing with someone in the Stadium when in the Tailgate I really can't even follow what exactly they're trying to get across.

[PeterMP]

Out of context - like omitting the Medieval Warming Period and instead showing a progressive rise in temperature like a hockey stick, instead of a spike in the temperature model that occurred between 900 - 1300.

Have you ever seen a record published using proper statistics based on his data?

There are now quite a few paleoclimate reconstructions (done by different groups and using different proxies) and some of them show very little sign of a midevil warm period?

Here's another example:

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/01/27/207416/science-temperatures-atlantic-water-arctic-unprecedented-2000-years-linked-to-arctic-amplification-of-global-warming/

Here's a graph of the reconstructions done in 2008.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/09/progress-in-millennial-reconstructions/

And just for good measure, here's a very recent one done by people that aren't climate scientists, but are real statisticians using other people's data.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/08/a_new_hockey_stick_mcshane_and.php

(Note, the above graphs all use the "Nature trick" of giving data based on thermometers and not the relevant proxies over the last few decades.)

---------- Post added August-30th-2011 at 09:15 PM ----------

Nevertheless those articles showed something extremely important. Those warnings of an ice age were because the earth had been cooling for decades. Yet CO2 and other greenhouse gases were steadily on the rise.

Do current climate models take this into account? That there are forces in play that humans can't even come close to touching, so that we can have decades of cooling with CO2 still rising?

And what temperature do the models base their base data on? Meaning, what's the starting point? If it's the 20th century average then of course they're going to show warming. The majority of the 20th century was very cool. We barely recovered from the Dalton Minimum in the early 20th century before that cooling period from the '40s-'70s. I want to know how are our rates compare to post and pre Maunder Minimum.

And of course as we've seen with this hurricane, models are not fool proof. Even with an exponential amount of more data, our short term weather models are wrong all the time. And being wrong by just a little can change alot. Long term climate models certainly have a greater error rate.

Anyway, this debate = :beatdeadhorse:

Has anything new, on any side, been added in the past few years?

I'm going to try a different approach.

You are a metereologist, right? Presumably, you have some science background.

Do you really believe that essentially every scientists that studies climate has failed to consider that the warming we've seen over the last 100 years is the result of changes in solar output?

There is one thing that I guarantee you all the models are wrong. The question is how wrong they are and what happens when they become wrong.

However, even given that models can be wrong, if another hurricane strikes in 3 weeks the models say it is going to hit NYC hard, would you really suggest that NYers ignore the models and go one about their life normally w/o preparing any sort of way?

[Skins24]

And just for good measure, here's a very recent one done by people that aren't climate scientists, but are real statisticians using other people's data.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/08/a_new_hockey_stick_mcshane_and.php

Love the conclusion which is basically my whole point...

Our main contribution is our efforts to seriously grapple with the uncertainty involved in paleoclimatological reconstructions. Regression of high dimensional time series is always a complex problem with many traps. In our case, the particular challenges include (i) a short sequence of training data, (ii) more predictors than observations, (iii) a very weak signal, and (iv) response and predictor variables which are both strongly autocorrelated. The final point is particularly troublesome: since the data is not easily modeled by a simple autoregressive process it follows that the number of truly independent observations (i.e., the effective sample size) may be just too small for accurate reconstruction.

Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxybased reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models. We have shown that time dependence in the temperature series is sufficiently strong to permit complex sequences of random numbers to forecast out-of-sample reasonably well fairly frequently (see, for example, Figure 9). Furthermore, even proxy based models with approximately the same amount of reconstructive skill (Figures 11,12, and 13), produce strikingly dissimilar historical backcasts: some of these look like hockey sticks but most do not (Figure 14).

Natural climate variability is not well understood and is probably quite large. It is not clear that the proxies currently used to predict temperature are even predictive of it at the scale of several decades let alone over many centuries. Nonetheless, paleoclimatoligical reconstructions constitute only one source of evidence in the AGW debate.

Our work stands entirely on the shoulders of those environmental scientists who labored untold years to assemble the vast network of natural proxies. Although we assume the reliability of their data for our purposes here, there still remains a considerable number of outstanding questions

that can only be answered with a free and open inquiry and a great deal of replication.

I'm going to try a different approach.

You are a metereologist, right? Presumably, you have some science background.

Do you really believe that essentially every scientists that studies climate has failed to consider that the warming we've seen over the last 100 years is the result of changes in solar output?

Since it is unquestioningly the biggest factor in our climate change, I would hope the consider it!

The question is the human contribution and how much are they overestimating the human contribution to be. (And until I see actual data instead of conjecture showing otherwise, I'll stick with it being "overestimating" )

There is one thing that I guarantee you all the models are wrong. The question is how wrong they are and what happens when they become wrong.

However, even given that models can be wrong, if another hurricane strikes in 3 weeks the models say it is going to hit NYC hard, would you really suggest that NYers ignore the models and go one about their life normally w/o preparing any sort of way?

With the weather, no. Climate is different however.

Say models predict temps will warm 2 degrees in the next 100 years and you start preparing. But, the next solar minimum is stronger than anything predicted (we know the sun has it's cycles but we can NOT predict the strength of those cycles) and we see a 2 degree drop in temps for the next 100 years. You will have prepared for the wrong thing!

Fortunately for us, climate is long term. We will have amble time to prepare for either scenario.

[alexey]

Fortunately for us, climate is long term. We will have amble time to prepare for either scenario.

Is this statement consistent with IPCC's scenarios, or just your scenarios?

[btfoom]

I find it rather odd that he has been a member since 2007, has over 1,000 posts, and seems completely unaware of Peter's background as a scientist. Are we sure he isn't just trolling?

Why do you find it odd? There are other posters, here on this forum, who are also scientists (and even who have worked directly with NOAA an NASA), FYI.

Also, here are a few links that show that the 'consensus' isn't really all that is cracked up to be (though, I know the folks who believe in AGW are akin to a religion (dare I say cult?)):

http://pubsecrets.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/another-bad-day-for-the-church-of-global-warming/

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/past-alarmism-and-the-future-of-manmade-global-warming/?singlepage=true

http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/GLOBAL_SCAM.pdf

But, hey, I'm sure there are plenty of folks here who work with science data on a daily basis who will show that these are wrong !!

---------- Post added August-30th-2011 at 10:51 PM ----------

Skadden is more of a stadium poster, and my only hope is (taking his claimed matriculation at face value) that he adds mastering the starting of new threads to his learning so we don't have to nail him with a third NNT. :pfft:

But what larry said is one my favorite things about the stadium...how you can really wonder wtf someone is thinking in the tailgate but every now and then still find some common ground in the stadium.

But sometimes it's the other way around too.

In the Stadium, the posts are about the Redskins. Overall, there seem to be two different types of posters there - those who are basically positive about the Skins and those who are basically negative about the Skins. There is no rhyme, reason, or political affiliation to either point of view. IMHO, it is more about a general life view.

In the Tailgate, there are all kinds of political views, some that seem to be 'way out there'. IMHO, I may or may not agree with that point of view, but I can understand how folks come to believe what they want to believe, based mainly on world experiences and their parent's POV.

[PeterMP]

Love the conclusion which is basically my whole point...

You missed this point:

"Using our model, we calculate that there is a 36% posterior probability that 1998 was the warmest

year over the past thousand. If we consider rolling decades, 1997-2006 is the

warmest on record; our model gives an 80% chance that it was the warmest

in the past thousand years."

Now, somebody has to be alive during the warmest years on record, but it doesn't seem a bit beyond concidental that over 100 years ago a famous chemist said, 'If you do, X, then the Earth will warm', and then after doing that for a 100 years or so people say it is likely the warmest years in the last 1,000 years.

Since it is unquestioningly the biggest factor in our climate change, I would hope the consider it!

Uh no! (At least not practically. If you make up some scenario where the sun just turns off and on in some completely unexpected way based on what we know about how stars work, then that would change).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

(For the most, people agree that for the most part changes in solar output w/ the solar cycles are actually quite small. Right, it is very difficult to tease out the ~11 year solar cycle from the data we have.)

The question is the human contribution and how much are they overestimating the human contribution to be. (And until I see actual data instead of conjecture showing otherwise, I'll stick with it being "overestimating" )

Why do you assume an overestimate?

What would you consider to be actual data?

With the weather, no. Climate is different however.

Say models predict temps will warm 2 degrees in the next 100 years and you start preparing. But, the next solar minimum is stronger than anything predicted (we know the sun has it's cycles but we can NOT predict the strength of those cycles) and we see a 2 degree drop in temps for the next 100 years. You will have prepared for the wrong thing!

Fortunately for us, climate is long term. We will have amble time to prepare for either scenario.

This isn't really true. We've discussed this before. Climate can change relatively quickly. Much faster than we could effeciently move the relevant populations of people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

The other problem w/ your scenario is that you're talking about a coin flip situation. The next solar cycle could as likely be much stronger than what we've seen in the past.

AGW isn't a coin flip scenario.

---------- Post added August-30th-2011 at 11:54 PM ----------

Why do you find it odd? There are other posters, here on this forum, who are also scientists (and even who have worked directly with NOAA an NASA), FYI.

Also, here are a few links that show that the 'consensus' isn't really all that is cracked up to be (though, I know the folks who believe in AGW are akin to a religion (dare I say cult?)):

http://pubsecrets.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/another-bad-day-for-the-church-of-global-warming/

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/past-alarmism-and-the-future-of-manmade-global-warming/?singlepage=true

http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/GLOBAL_SCAM.pdf

1. The cosmic ray point has been addressed in this thread.

2. The things there aren't all that clear or misleading. There are large differences between Japan and the US, and it is difficult to tie affects to fish. There are also good studies that do show affects on development (e.g.):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21195558

The topic is very much up for debate. Generally, it is very likely the EPA/FDA guidelines are on the conservative side, but I'm not at all sure that's a bad thing.

If.10,000s of papers have been published since 1979 finding no link, it is very different than climate change then, right (EMF)?

The EPA didn't ban DDT because of a known cancer risk. Carson speculated that it caused cancer, but her book was published in 1962 and DDT wasn't banned until the early 1970s so while Carson's book may have been the starting point, it is difficult to claim that any data in it was the actual cause. The reason that the EPA banned DDT was related to the effects it was having on different animal species, including many birds (e.g. Bald Eagles (Oh and for the record, Carson's book was called "Silent Spring" (want to guess what it was mostly about)), and the fact that it is a long term persistant pollutant that accumulates in humans where the health affects weren't (and really still aren't today) understood.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Silent_Spring_and_the_U.S._ban

3. I only read to this sentence of the last one:

"It is impossible to measure the average surface temperature of the earth, yet the IPCC scientists try to claim that it is possible to measure “anomalies” of this unknown quantity."

satellites.

[Skins24]

You missed this point:

"Using our model, we calculate that there is a 36% posterior probability that 1998 was the warmest year over the past thousand. If we consider rolling decades, 1997-2006 is the

warmest on record; our model gives an 80% chance that it was the warmest

in the past thousand years."

Now, somebody has to be alive during the warmest years on record, but it doesn't seem a bit beyond concidental that over 100 years ago a famous chemist said, 'If you do, X, then the Earth will warm', and then after doing that for a 100 years or so people say it is likely the warmest years in the last 1,000 years.

Not sure which part of this relates to the conclusion :whoknows:

And part of the reason for that conclusion is, if you say go back 2000 years. Then we know the 1998 was not the warmest year of the past 2000 nor '97-'06 the warmest decade. X was not a factor then. X only increased during the 20th century. Why were there decades worth of cooling?

Uh no! (At least not practically. If you make up some scenario where the sun just turns off and on in some completely unexpected way based on what we know about how stars work, then that would change).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

(For the most, people agree that for the most part changes in solar output w/ the solar cycles are actually quite small. Right, it is very difficult to tease out the ~11 year solar cycle from the data we have.)

Uh, yes! Very yes.

There is no other factor more responsible for our climate and the changing thereof than our sun. That's not remotely questioned.

Of course changes in wind and water currents, and tectonic movements are the driving forces. But it's how those changes distribute the energy from the sun that's the main culprit. Then of course we have the cycles you mentioned above. And no, those changes are NOT small. Hence why we can have decades or hundreds of years of cooling or warming.

Why do you assume an overestimate?

I haven't seen anything that shows it's not.

What would you consider to be actual data?

Oh just something that includes natural and solar variations in it's conclusion of where they think the earth "should" be now. Or a reasonable explanation of why previous warm periods were not a cause of alarm then, but is somehow doomsday now. Or why this time around earth will for whatever reason turn off the systems it has in place to protect from runaway warming even though with this atmosphere that is not possible....

This isn't really true. We've discussed this before. Climate can change relatively quickly. Much faster than we could effeciently move the relevant populations of people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

That was caused by some event, as with all rapid climate changes.

That is not the norm.

The other problem w/ your scenario is that you're talking about a coin flip situation. The next solar cycle could as likely be much stronger than what we've seen in the past.

Yep it could be!

AGW isn't a coin flip scenario.

Maybe not, but it would be irrelevant either way. Which is one of my main points.

AGW wouldn't matter at all given strong enough or weak enough solar output (hence the mid 20th century global cooling scare)

[mossomo]

Or like you didn't care?

I do care very much. But there is this meme like there is this out of control crazy warming trend when the climate record will clearly show it goes through cycles. We've had Ice Ages before. Plural. It's been hotter and it's been hella colder. Man had no fossil fuels then and the climate changed. Our climate changes. Fact. Another fact...

Global warming over the last decade is false.

[mossomo]

Have you ever seen a record published using proper statistics based on his data?

Here is a copy of an INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC) graph that advances a certain data set that totally omits an uptick in temperature starting in the 900's: "Climate Change; The IPCC Scientific Assessment".

The following happened without fossil fuels or the Industrial Age:

Vikings: The warm climate during the Medieval Warm Period [MWP] allowed this great migration to flourish. Drift ice posed the greatest hazard to sailors but reports of drift ice in old records do not appear until the thirteenth century (Bryson, 1977.)

Check out: 10th – 14th century: The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum and Beginning of Little Ice Age

NOAA Paleoclimatology Program: Medieval Warm Period

Little Ice Age

Maunder Minimum

Chronology of Late Holocene Climatic Change

Glaciers are still growing

Norse seafaring and colonization around the North Atlantic at the end of the 9th century indicated that regional North Atlantic climate was warmer during medieval times than during the cooler "Little Ice Age" of the 15th - 19th centuries. As paleoclimatic records have become more numerous, it has become apparent that "Medieval Warm Period" or "Medieval Optimum" temperatures were warmer over the Northern Hemisphere than during the subsequent "Little Ice Age", and also comparable to temperatures during the early 20th century. The regional patterns and the magnitude of this warmth remain an area of active research because the data become sparse going back in time prior to the last four centuries.

[PeterMP]

Not sure which part of this relates to the conclusion :whoknows:

And part of the reason for that conclusion is, if you say go back 2000 years. Then we know the 1998 was not the warmest year of the past 2000 nor '97-'06 the warmest decade. X was not a factor then. X only increased during the 20th century. Why were there decades worth of cooling?

Are you saying that it was warmer 2000 years ago than now?

Uh, yes! Very yes.

There is no other factor more responsible for our climate and the changing thereof than our sun. That's not remotely questioned.

Please cite something that says that changes in solar output are expected to cause a change in our climate in the next few million years or have in the last few million years greater than Milankovitch cycles (which are believed to cause ice ages and deglaciation).

I haven't seen anything that shows it's not.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=despite-climategate-ippc-mostly-und-10-02-22

http://news.discovery.com/earth/sea-level-climate-change-110603.html

http://www.nature.com/climate/2010/1004/full/climate.2010.29.html

Oh and how about OVERESTIMATES that likely will end up underestimating the effect of CO2:

http://www.nature.com/climate/2007/0707/full/climate.2007.15.html

How's that?

Oh just something that includes natural and solar variations in it's conclusion of where they think the earth "should" be now. Or a reasonable explanation of why previous warm periods were not a cause of alarm then, but is somehow doomsday now. Or why this time around earth will for whatever reason turn off the systems it has in place to protect from runaway warming even though with this atmosphere that is not possible.

Okay, first depending how you want to define runaway nobody is claiming there will be runaway warming. Nobody is claiming, for example, that we're going to drive all of the water on Earth to water vapor or some other silly claims you see people on the internet acting like scientists think is actually possible.

Now, with respect to your request how about this:

http://www.esmg.mcgill.ca/zhaomin_paper/Cochelin%20et%20al.pdf

(A link that I know you've seen before).

"The green MPM includes an interactive vegetation component and has successfully simulated the last glacial inception, at around 119 kyr BP (Cochelin 2004;Wang et al. 2005), and also Holocene millennial-scale natural climate changes (Wang

et al. 2005b)."

So their model includes variables that can simulate previous climate changes (e.g. natural variations) and they predict:

"In both experiments the green MPM simulated a warm climate in response to the higher levels of CO2, and the response for CO2 doubling in particular, was found to lie in the range of GCMs run with similar forcing (Houghton et al. 2001)."

(Oh and I should point out these guys are at McGill (which is in Canada) and have essentially no connection to the people whose e-mails were leaked in climate gate.)

That was caused by some event, as with all rapid climate changes.

That is not the norm.

If by "event" you mean something like a meteor or a comet strike, you either didn't read the link or know more on the subject than the vast majority of people that study the subject.

If by "event" you mean that something happened in response to the melting of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets during a warming cycle that actually caused a shift in the northern hemisphere climate and rapid cooling, then I'm curious why you think something like that couldn't happen now.

And something that isn't the norm IS happening now (it isn't the norm for large amounts of carbon containing molecules to be dug up from the ground and that C to be released into the atmosphere as CO2).

Maybe not, but it would be irrelevant either way. Which is one of my main points.

AGW wouldn't matter at all given strong enough or weak enough solar output (hence the mid 20th century global cooling scare)

Except there isn't much evidence that solar output realistically (again, if you want to ignore what we know about stars you can create scenarios where the sun just shuts down, but that would be just a made up scenario that has no basis in real information) can change enough to drastically affect climate. There is no evidence that the mid-20th century global cooling was caused by changes in solar output (Part of the mid-20th century cooling fear actually came from the pattern of previous ice ages, which if you don't know much about Milankovitch cycles seems like it should be ending soon.)

The most drastic changes in the Earth's climate are believed to be tied to changes in the Earth's positioning w/ respect to the sun (by changes in the Earth not the sun) that affect northern hemisphere insolation, which than drives changes in CO2 levels and northern hemisphere vegatation, which further affect climate.

Now 2 of those 3 things are changing over the last 100 years.

Look, it is pretty simple. If you go back over a decade or so, 'it was the sun' was a common skeptic argument. The fact of the matter is that you don't see that any more. Skeptics are now running to cosmic rays (as has been discussed in this thread), clouds (see the recent thread on the work of Roy Spencer), and the actions of oceans (also related to Roy Spencer's work, but less obviously.) You see very little new arguments coming out about its the sun from the skeptic camp because for the most part it has been killed off by research and new/better data over the last year. You don't see "skeptics" here starting thread on the sun because there is little recent work suggesting the sun has played much of a role in the warming over the last 30 years or more.

---------- Post added August-31st-2011 at 05:22 AM ----------

Here is a copy of an INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC) graph that advances a certain data set that totally omits an uptick in temperature starting in the 900's: "Climate Change; The IPCC Scientific Assessment".

The following happened without fossil fuels or the Industrial Age:

1. Yes, our understanding of the past climate has changed substantially over the last decade. or so.

2. So? Did anybody ever claim that only one thing could change climate? If the first car accident I observe is caused by ice on the road would I be correct in assuming that car accidents can't be caused by other things?

---------- Post added August-31st-2011 at 05:28 AM ----------

I do care very much. But there is this meme like there is this out of control crazy warming trend when the climate record will clearly show it goes through cycles. We've had Ice Ages before. Plural. It's been hotter and it's been hella colder. Man had no fossil fuels then and the climate changed. Our climate changes. Fact. Another fact...

Global warming over the last decade is false.

Even if we start at 1998, the general trend for temperature is positive.

[Larry]

I do care very much. But there is this meme like there is this out of control crazy warming trend when the climate record will clearly show it goes through cycles. We've had Ice Ages before. Plural. It's been hotter and it's been hella colder. Man had no fossil fuels then and the climate changed. Our climate changes. Fact. Another fact...

Global warming over the last decade is false.

:secret: Global Warming isn't about decades, nor does it ever claim that the temperature will never go down.

But if you yell really, really, loud, it makes it better.

[Chicken Fried]

Please don't bull**** us about the "ice age" projection.

Those "projections" came from here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#1974_Time_Magazine_article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#1975_Newsweek_article

You should not be getting your sicence projections from the Time Magazine or Newsweek.

Projections of IPCC have actually been on the conservative side:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change#Conservative_nature_of_IPCC_reports

---------- Post added August-30th-2011 at 02:03 PM ----------

There are many scientists today who don't believe in manmade global warming. To say most scientists today believe in global warming it obvious. I believe in it. But not everyone believes in manmade global warming. There is no consensus in the scientific community.

Fossil fuel industries have SIGNIFICANTLY more resources than the "global warming industry". YES or NO?

If you are a sensitive type and you don't like people laughing at you, I suggest you anwser YES or avoid the question..

.

Why do you have to divert away from the fact that global warming is a trillion dollar industry? Fossil fuel profits are irrelevant. The fact is that the global warming industry itself is incredibly profitable.

[TimmySmith]

Why do you have to divert away from the fact that global warming is a trillion dollar industry? Fossil fuel profits are irrelevant. The fact is that the global warming industry itself is incredibly profitable.

Plus the fact that the IPCC's entire goal was to compile data from reports whose conclusion was based on Man Made Global Warming.

[Larry]

There are many scientists today who don't believe in manmade global warming. To say most scientists today believe in global warming it obvious. I believe in it. But not everyone believes in manmade global warming. There is no consensus in the scientific community.

Only if your definition of "many scientists" is "around 1% of people who actually study climate, and a bunch of people on a web page whose definition of "scientist" is 'anybody with a BS degree in something'."

And if your definition of "no consensus" is "no unanimous consensus".

Why do you have to divert away from the fact that global warming is a trillion dollar industry? Fossil fuel profits are irrelevant. The fact is that the global warming industry itself is incredibly profitable.

1), I suspect that your claims of "trillion dollar, incredibly profitable industry" are grotesquely untrue. Frankly, it sounds to me a lot more like one of those "well, if you take the entire budget of every single person who is in any way involved with any form of alternative energy" claims.

But I'll admit that I don't know.

2) And perhaps he's "diverting" because he thinks your claim that poor, overwhelmed, Exxon is the victim of a hugely funded campaign of lies which they simply cannot afford to challenge is such an obvious joke that even you know better.

But that's just a theory.

---------- Post added August-31st-2011 at 10:35 AM ----------

Plus the fact that the IPCC's entire goal was to compile data from reports whose conclusion was based on Man Made Global Warming.

Or at least, that's what the Kool Aid vendor told me.

[Baculus]

There are many scientists today who don't believe in manmade global warming. To say most scientists today believe in global warming it obvious. I believe in it. But not everyone believes in manmade global warming. There is no consensus in the scientific community.

MOST scientists believe that global warming is human driven, due to the amount of research from the last several decades. I believe that could be considered a "consensus."

Why do you have to divert away from the fact that global warming is a trillion dollar industry? Fossil fuel profits are irrelevant. The fact is that the global warming industry itself is incredibly profitable.

Big Oil is much more profitable than the AGW "industry," whatever that may be. Remember those "many" scientists you mentioned who you said "don't believe in manmade global warming"? Who you do you think pays them? Who do you think produces the research which is quoted by right wing media and pro-Big Business think tanks?

Fossil fuel profits are certainly not irrelevant, because that is what drives the anti-environmental efforts, regarding AGW. i.e., Koch Industries.

Sorry, but Big Business has one concern in mind -- its bottom line.

[Wrong Direction]

MOST scientists believe that global warming is human driven, due to the amount of research from the last several decades. I believe that could be considered a "consensus."

I have a genuine question about use of the word consensus in this regard.

Is the consensus that humans have an effect on AGW, or is the consensus that humans will cause the earth to warm to x degree (fill in the blank on what x degree means).

I mean, it's obviously easier to get people to agree to a broader definition like...humans have some effect on the temperature of the atmosphere, true or false? But that doesn't mean there's a consensus on the degree of the problem.

Maybe there is, so I'm asking.

[Spaceman Spiff]

Oh, this isn't the guy who created Miami Vice and directed Heat?

Who cares?

[Jumbo]

Oh, this isn't the guy who created Miami Vice and directed Heat?

Who cares?

That was my point. Besides, if GW is really a problem, just get some of those fancy robots to change into a group of super-powerful planet air-conditioners or something.

[Baculus]

I have a genuine question about use of the word consensus in this regard.

Is the consensus that humans have an effect on AGW, or is the consensus that humans will cause the earth to warm to x degree (fill in the blank on what x degree means).

I mean, it's obviously easier to get people to agree to a broader definition like...humans have some effect on the temperature of the atmosphere, true or false? But that doesn't mean there's a consensus on the degree of the problem.

Maybe there is, so I'm asking.

Both, since one leads to another. Here are a couple of examples of statements from scientific organizations which outlines their positions:

Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver."

http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/ssi/climate-change-statement-from.pdf

Another statement:

"The Geological Society of America (GSA) supports the scientific conclusions that Earth’s climate is changing; the climate changes are due in part to human activities; and the probable consequences of the climate changes will be significant and blind to geopolitical boundaries."

http://www.geosociety.org/positions/position10.htm

[Wrong Direction]

Both, since one leads to another. Here are a couple of examples of statements from scientific organizations which outlines their positions:

Good links.

[PeterMP]

The fact is that the global warming industry itself is incredibly profitable.

I understand that there are people that MIGHT make money from global warming regulations, but I'm curious, about do you have any evidence of anybody actually making much money (much less incredibile profits)?

And when did this start? Alexey has already pointed out, correctly, that global warming was already an issue among scientists in the 1970s, and the basic underlying research goes back 100 years.