Gyroscopic Investing

I am so far removed from the science of global warming that I have absolutely no idea how to sort out who is telling the truth about it.

I think it is entirely plausible that the burning of fossil fuels on the scale we have been doing it for the past century or so is having some impact on the weather but when I see a narrative being advanced that calls for skeptics being burned at the stake as heretics I grow very skeptical myself, especially when you see politicians like Al Gore and Barack Obama at the forefront of it.

Desert wrote:

Fred wrote: I am so far removed from the science of global warming that I have absolutely no idea how to sort out who is telling the truth about it.

I think it is entirely plausible that the burning of fossil fuels on the scale we have been doing it for the past century or so is having some impact on the weather but when I see a narrative being advanced that calls for skeptics being burned at the stake as heretics I grow very skeptical myself, especially when you see politicians like Al Gore and Barack Obama at the forefront of it.

That's exactly how I see it.  I don't have time to personally research every controversial topic, and I've chosen to not spend my time on this one.  But the approach of GW's advocates makes me a bit skeptical as well.

The practical outcome, however, would be to know whether one will be reincarnated as a jungle pygmy or north pole eskimo - so one could have a stash of the appropriate body covering (or lack thereof) to seek while munching on the lobster that comes to the front door to greet me on the way home from a hard day of hawking supplements to Gore and Obama descendents. 


... M

The TL;DR version of "global warming" is that the "authorities" have constructed computerized climate models that predicted a rise in global warming temperatures for about two decades now.

It hasn't happened.  GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out).

Bullshit is a natural mixer for politics.

Desert wrote: I think I'd rather be reincarnated as a pygmy though.  I've always been fond of blow guns and poisoned darts.

I picture you looking like this in your next reincarnation:

[img width=800]http://www.bugbog.com/images/galleries/ ... -smoke.jpg[/img]

This is interesting:

[quote=http://thehill.com/policy/energy-enviro ... e-research]Smith defended his investigation, saying NOAA’s work is clearly political.

“It was inconvenient for this administration that climate data has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades,” he said in a statement. “The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made.”

Smith also said NOAA’s assertion of confidentiality is incorrect.

“The agency has yet to identify any legal basis for withholding these documents,” he said, adding that his panel would use “all tools at its disposal” to continue investigating.

Smith has been communicating with NOAA about the research since it was published in the summer, and their exchanges have grown increasingly hostile.

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (Texas), the committee’s ranking Democrat, has sharply criticized Smith’s requests.

“By issuing this subpoena, you have instigated a constitutional conflict with an inquiry that seems more designed to harass climate scientists than to further any legitimate legislative purpose,” she wrote last week. “This is a serious misuse of congressional oversight powers.”[/quote]

And I should care, why?  Aside from the humanitarian issues, of course. 

Looks like a huge problem for most of Europe not North America.  We should all move to Fargo or Canada if the doomsday computer model predictions ever come true.

MachineGhost wrote: And I should care, why?  Aside from the humanitarian issues, of course. 

Looks like a huge problem for most of Europe not North America.  We should all move to Fargo or Canada if the doomsday computer model predictions ever come true.

Accounting for material externalities and preventing "races to the bottom" is one of the core functions of government. Perhaps you don't need to "care," but then if we are going to go down that rout why don't we just abandon having government recognizing and defending private property... Or doing anything for that matter.

Besides. Pollution is theft. We should care about that if we are going to pretend to be moral and care about future generations.

moda0306 wrote: Accounting for material externalities and preventing "races to the bottom" is one of the core functions of government. Perhaps you don't need to "care," but then if we are going to go down that rout why don't we just abandon having government recognizing and defending private property... Or doing anything for that matter.

Besides. Pollution is theft. We should care about that if we are going to pretend to be moral and care about future generations.

Are you're talking about the fairness doctrine?  That's a weird thing to impose on the global warming debate which may or may not be of our own doing.  Even if it's not our fault, it's our government's responsibility to help all those poor starving children in climate changed Africa of the future?  Seriously?  Isn't that rather expansionist?

I don't see pollution as theft.  I see it as an unaccounted for imposed negative externality due to crony legal corruption or legal incompetence.  That's nothing to do with government and in many cases the government itself is what is corrupt.  I have a hard time equating greenhouse gases with pollution, though.  For one thing, they're food for plants.  And another, certain types of greenhouse gases have a rather pronounced global cooling effect -- should that be labeled pollution also?  And then we have the below drama which should make you seriously question the anthropogenic-cause dogma:

http://www.eco-business.com/news/carbon ... s-economy/

When I'm feeling cynical, I really don't see that this whole climate change ballyhoo is really anything different than the Communist Watermelons continually evolving to keep their utopian vision alive.

Looks like the settled science just got a little bit un-settled:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/1 ... rming-over

A new NASA study found that Antarctica has been adding more ice than it's been losing, challenging other research, including that of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that concludes that Earth’s southern continent is losing land ice overall.
[...]
For now, the study authors say, these findings challenge current explanations for sea level rise, much of which is attributed to melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

"The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away," said Dr. Zwally.

"But this is also bad news,” he added. “If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for."

The paper calls attention to how difficult it is for scientists to measure small changes in ice height, particularly in East Antarctica, the largest part of the polar continent and the one that showed discrepancies with previous measurements.

http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/11/02/ ... orum-gwpf/

"A popular weatherman announced Saturday evening he has been sacked by leading French news channel France T�l�visions for publishing a book which accused top climate change experts of misleading the world about the threat of global warming.

Philippe Verdier, a household name in France for his daily weather reports on the France 2 channel, announced in an online video that he had received a letter of dismissal"

Pointedstick wrote: Looks like the settled science just got a little bit un-settled:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/1 ... rming-over

A new NASA study found that Antarctica has been adding more ice than it's been losing, challenging other research, including that of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that concludes that Earth’s southern continent is losing land ice overall.
[...]
For now, the study authors say, these findings challenge current explanations for sea level rise, much of which is attributed to melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

"The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away," said Dr. Zwally.

"But this is also bad news,” he added. “If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for."

The paper calls attention to how difficult it is for scientists to measure small changes in ice height, particularly in East Antarctica, the largest part of the polar continent and the one that showed discrepancies with previous measurements.

From the same article (as published in the Daily Mail, see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... warns.html):

'If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they've been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years - I don't think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.' 

The science is and remains settled.

Pointedstick wrote: Looks like the settled science just got a little bit un-settled:

TL;DR is Antarctica land ice is decreasing; sea ice is increasing.

Don't get misled by "settled science" global warming effects or lack thereof.  Correlation is not causation.  Causation is where all the politics is.

About that "97% consensus":

[quote=http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/cooking- ... and-the-97]There are many, many more excluded papers like these. They excluded every paper Richard Lindzen has published since 1997. How is this possible? He has over 50 publications in that span, most of them journal articles. They excluded almost all of the relevant work of arguably the most prominent skeptical or lukewarm climate scientist in the world. Their search was staggering in its incompetence. They searched the Web of Science for the topics of "global warming" and "global climate change", using quotes, so those exact phrases. I don't know how Web of Science defines a topic, but designing the search that way, constrained to those exact phrases as topics, excluded everything Lindzen has done in the current century, and a lot more.

Anyone care to guess which kinds of papers will tend to use the exact phrase "global warming" as official keywords? Which way do you think such papers will lean? Did no one think about about any of this? Their search method excluded vast swaths of research by Lindzen, Spencer, Pielke, and others. I'm not going to do all the math on this – someone else should dig into the differential effects of their search strategy.

However, this doesn't explain the exclusion of the above Spencer paper. It comes up in the Web of Science search they say they ran, yet it's somehow absent from their database. They included – and counted as evidence of scientific endorsement – papers about TV coverage, public surveys, psychology theories, and magazine articles, but failed to count a journal article written by a climate scientist called "How serious is the global warming threat?" It was in the search results, so its exclusion is a mystery. If the idea is that it was in a non-climate journal, they clearly didn't exclude such journals (see above), and they were sure to count the paper's opposite number (as endorsement):

Oreskes, N., Stainforth, D. A., & Smith, L. A. (2010). Adaptation to global warming: do climate models tell us what we need to know? Philosophy of Science, 77(5), 1012–1028.

In any case, they excluded a vast number of relevant and inconvenient climate science papers. In all of this, I'm just scratching the surface.[/quote]

Gettin' down and dirty!

[quote=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fed ... ate-study/]A nasty fight between a senior House Republican and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration over a recent climate change study is getting nastier.

The country’s chief society of meteorologists weighed in this week with a letter to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), warning the prominent congressional skeptic on climate change that his demands for internal communications and documents from NOAA “can be viewed as a form of intimidation” that could thwart federally funded research.

Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, stepped up his pressure on agency Administrator Kathryn Sullivan to divulge its scientists’ internal deliberations, demanding in a letter that she turn over the documents requested in a House subpoena by Friday.

“Your failure to comply with a duly issued subpoena may expose you to civil and/or criminal enforcement mechanisms,” the congressman wrote.[/quote]

Time to desert a sinking ship?

[quote=http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/11/19/ ... alse-path/]A team of prominent scientists gathered in Texas today at a climate summit to declare that fears of man-made global warming were “irrational” and “based on nonsense” that “had nothing to do with science.” They warned that “we are being led down a false path” by the upcoming UN climate summit in Paris.

The scientists appeared at a climate summit sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The summit in Austin was titled: “At the Crossroads: Energy & Climate Policy Summit.”[/quote]