Recap on Warmism

I have been ignoring the issue of Global Warming for a while, because it is pretty much settled.  Anyone who still believes in Warmism is stupid, crazy, or lying.  Usually stupid.

But, a short summary:

Climategate files:

The internal emails and documents of a conspiracy to falsify science, which revealed that peer review is a conspiratorial system to ensure that holy views are published and heretical views are not published, regardless of facts and evidence.  I have read about six hundred of the slightly over a thousand emails of the first Climategate release, and every single one is incriminating.  They are all more or less summarized by the infamous email “trick to … hide the decline”.  If you twit a leftist on any of the emails, they will patronizingly explain to you that “decline” does not mean what it sounds like it means, but resist explaining “trick” or “hide” no matter how vigorously you twit them on it, implicitly admitting that they know full well that “trick” and “hide” mean exactly what they sound like they mean.  The first climategate release was the emails of a criminal conspiracy to falsify science.  The second climategate release was the emails of a holy priesthood engaged in a crusade to purify the planet of the sins of mankind.

The climategate files not only give us reason to disbelieve “Climate Science”, but discredit all peer reviewed science. Peer review means you don’t get the actual evidence, but rather the consensus about what the evidence should show if it was not so wickedly prone to evil heresy. Peer review means that a consensus is quietly established behind closed doors, and then the evidence is corrected to agree with the consensus. This maximizes the authority and prestige of official science, at the expense of disconnecting it from reality. Science got along fine without peer review until the 1940s. The core of the scientific method is “Nullius in Verba”, “take no one’s word for it”. Peer Review reverses that for taking the word of a secret committee of scientists reaching agreement behind closed doors, reaching agreement for secret reasons on the basis of secret evidence.

No observed warming:

Supposedly the surface instrument record indicates the world warmed rapidly from 1975 to 1998. Climate scientists issued a bunch of models that accurately retrodicted this supposed warming, and projected it into the future, projecting doom.

Unfortunately, they then started making accurate measurements of climate, and, by and large, since 1998 the climate has cooled down as much as it warmed up. For sixteen years, there has been no net global warming. Climate models retrodict with wonderful, indeed quite improbable, accuracy, but have totally failed at predicting.

The surface instrument system was not maintained for the purpose of measuring minute long term changes in climate, but large days to day variations in weather. So equipment was frequently moved or replaced, generally moved to some place closer to people because of technological changes in the equipment.

Thus the surface climate record has large systematic errors if one attempts to extract climate data from that record. If one ad hoc corrects for those sources of error that tend to contradict the result one wants, and is less apt to correct for those sources of error that produce the result one wants, one can produce, in the short term, pretty much any result one wants.

Careful examination of “corrections” made by the warmists reveals some rather disturbing ad hoc corrections. They knew what the result should be, and if the data failed to agree, simply changed it, on the quite plausible basis that we know the data to be total cow manure. Since there is in fact no accurate indication of whether the world warmed in the period 1975 to 1998, they were totally justified in pulling data out of their asses.

Now in fact we have rather good data indicating the world did not warm up much over the period 1975 to 1998. In particular, global sea ice remains much the same as ever it was and the tree line has not moved.

But, supposing that the world did warm by the amount claimed over this period, climate models provide a very good fit, a suspiciously good fit, to that warming. Their retrodiction is extremely accurate, suspiciously so, given that what they are retrodicting is not at all accurately known.

Hence the Spirit of Mawson expedition attempted to sail through ice that their ideology told them was not there.

So, since 1998, the gap between the 1998 models and reality has grown very rapidly. They retrodict wonderfully, but their predictions have
been a total failure.

And same is, I expect, likely to be true for the 2014 models.

47 Responses to “Recap on Warmism”

  1. Frank Dellaglio Massachusetts

    Recap on Warmism « Jim?s Blog

  2. Irving Morano NYC

    Recap on Warmism « Jim?s Blog

  3. zandile williams

    Recap on Warmism « Jim?s Blog

  4. Post 4 is up on my blog. It starts from the stipulation that post 1 proved the pediatricians are totally confused about the science, and the stipulation that the Global Warmists have been likewise. It points out this falsifies the conception of humanity most people hold, and discusses the model of Gustav Lebon, which fits the data much better.
    http://whyarethingsthisway.com/2014/03/22/why-are-the-pediatricians-so-confused-about-the-actual-state-of-the-scientific-literature/

    • jim says:

      The guys who discovered quasicrystals won – after first getting a lot of grief that would have discouraged most people. The amount of grief he encountered is sufficient to suggest that this is atypical.

  5. Zach says:

    I thought this made sense in 2009:

    http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-to-save-yourself-from-chasing.html

    After reading it again, I still think it makes sense.

    Jim, do you have a direct link to the sex education video blog you did?

  6. […] pretty much puts Global Warmism to bed—the religion, not the science. Not that there was ever much science there. Sure, in theory […]

  7. Rollory says:

    A few other points that seem to be consistently disregarded:

    1) CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It is logarithmic in effect – greatest impact is going from none to some. The more you add, the less the effect. Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas and is also logarithmic, but declines in additional effect more slowly than CO2. Water vapor is a bigger factor in any greenhouse effect than CO2. Nobody talks about removing water from the atmosphere because that’s too obviously moronic.

    2) We are currently in an interglacial period of an ice age. The earth has permanent ice caps but they are currently comparatively small. The current interglacial has lasted about as long as they usually seem to; when an interglacial ends, there are glaciers in Pennsylvania. A cold earth is much more difficult to live on than a warm one.

    3) The earth has been warmer than at present in the past, with no permanent ill effects.

    4) China, India, and the third world are not going to stop industrializing because of green lecturing. You’d have to do something on the scale of a nuclear war to accomplish that. This is never addressed in discussions of policy.

    The policies proposed as a result of environmentalist advocacy by their very nature are incapable of producing the results being advocated. It is also not clear that this outcome is a desirable one in the first place. Why, then, advocate those policies?

    You can take your pick between “stupid” and “evil”.

  8. […] A recap of why global warming is a sham. […]

  9. William Newman says:

    Yes, there it can be unwise to try to characterize a bogus position in excessive detail. It’s true one can easily bog down that way. It’s also easy to set BS meter needles twitching that way, because (with some exceptions, like fisking a high-profile document) the more things you attack the harder you need to work to convince a typical reader that each one really is significant and representative of the position you’re criticizing, not in some sense a strawman. But I think those problems show there can be rapidly diminishing returns, not that it’s unimportant.

    “To distinguish between warmism and lukewarmism, I would have to explain positive water vapor feedback and negative cloud feedback.”

    That looks almost like a violation of a usefully truthy HPMOR rule. (“You never called any question impossible, said Harry, until you had taken an actual clock and thought about it for five minutes, by the motion of the minute hand.”) Though maybe I just misled you. I did initially argue for care in defining your “Warmist” block of people. You pressed me for concrete examples of who needs to be distinguished in practice, and I did point to various lukewarmers. But my objective is not specifically to identify the lukewarmers as an important block of people. (Though it’s noteworthy that energetically implying that lukewarmers don’t exist is rather high on the list of CAGW talking points.)

    I don’t want to say it’s always appropriate to write a little semitechnical explanation (like Coyote Blog sometimes does). I do want to say it’s worth dozens of words in a piece this long carefully distinguishing your targets’ position from plausible alternatives. (Especially when your targets delight in confusing the issue.) It doesn’t need to be technical even at the level of concepts like “feedback”. If the main argument is primarily about nontechnical entryism and political correctness and hidden agendas and distortion, then it’s natural for framing text to be similarly nontechnical. E.g., I would consider it borderline overkill if you had written as much as “the CAGW rhetoric sometimes appeals to basic science like the (modest) greenhouse effect of CO2 itself. In reality the CAGW case is connected to such solid science only through two layers of gross exaggeration. The foundational layer is the dubious multipliers, overfitting to fudging and cherry-picking, and procedural exclusion of technical criticism performed by technically-trained apologists like the IPCC. [Overfitting is arguably technical, but it’s hard to completely avoid it when making the case against the IPCC and its beautiful hindcasts.] Above that, most of what Joe Public hears are further exaggerations beyond the official IPCC results, exaggerations pushed by nontechnical politicians and media figures, plus crude distortions like the occasional photoshopped polar bear and constant reporting of diminished arctic ice without reporting on increased antarctic ice.” That is not very technical. It does not describe any technically defensible position, jumping straight to technically indefensible IPCC positions. It does leave a sort of hole for the possibility that what CAGWers constantly treat as a no-man’s land is in fact home to their most influential critics. Iit doesn’t even suggest it, ’cause I freely agree connecting your argument to that could be a distraction. But it does in its own way “distinguish between warmism and lukewarmism” (if I correctly understand what you mean by warmism).

    Even granting for the sake of argument that addressing my concerns would necessarily add as much text as I wrote in the previous paragraph (not necessarily in a block, but scattered through the piece), I don’t think even that much text would really derail the main line of your argument.

    • jim says:

      Yes, there it can be unwise to try to characterize a bogus position in excessive detail.

      The thing is, Lukewarmers are imputing detail that the Warmist position does not in fact possess. Does Mann know the difference between positive and negative feedback? If he knows, he does not particularly care. The reason Warmists strawman the Lukewarmer position is not a malicious debating trick, but because it is beyond their intellectual grasp. We are dealing with primitive savages, Aztec priests, not genuine scientists.

      The Warmist position is that a weather event happened that supposedly never happened before. Therefore, the sins of man caused it, which sins must be expiated by the priesthood selecting some victims to sacrifice. It really is that simple.

      To which the reply must be that is did happen before, and that the sins of man show little correlation with the weather.

      Warmism is what Feynman called “Cargo Cult Science”, holy ritual crudely emulating the outward trappings of science. Most “science” is these days. Warmist articles in peer reviewed journals are no more substantive than photoshopped polar bears on the six o’clock news. They give you scientific sounding conclusions in scientific sounding language, without the source data or the method of calculation.

      “the CAGW rhetoric sometimes appeals to basic science like the (modest) greenhouse effect of CO2 itself. In reality the CAGW case is connected to such solid science only through two layers of gross exaggeration. The foundational layer is the dubious multipliers, overfitting to fudging and cherry-picking, and procedural exclusion of technical criticism performed by technically-trained apologists like the IPCC.

      Anyone who needs this explained to him is going to wonder who is the IPCC, and what is this dubious multiplier, and why is it dubious. You are vaguely pointing at a detailed coherent and superficially logical theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming that our opponents do not actually possess.

      The term “multiplier” in the sense that you are using never appears in Warmist works, only in critiques of Warmism. The term “climate sensitivity” does appear in warmist works, but it does not seem to be used in the same meaning as “multiplier” – it is not a dimensionless ratio that can be larger or smaller than unity, not a number, but more like sin and purity, not the kind of thing where one might say the “the climate sensitivity is 2.7” To a warmist, to assert that the climate sensitivity is 2.7 would be as ridiculous as if a Roman Catholic priest were to say that that the sinfulness of adultery is 2.7 A Warmist paper will say that climate sensitivity is greater than we thought, but will not give a number for what we supposedly used to think it was, nor a number for what we now supposedly think it is – which does not stop them from deducing from this unspecified change in this unspecified number that the temperature in 2100 will be precisely six degrees hotter.

      Lukewarmism is a coherent and scientific theory of climate change that is a reply to coherent and scientific theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, which theory does not actually exist except in the minds of Lukewarmers.

      Warmists decorate themselves with random fragments of scientific terminology, and, on the basis of these random fragments, lukewarmers have invented a coherent, intelligible, and intelligent theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, and attributed that theory to the Warmists.

  10. Please read my survey and tell me why you think I’m wrong if you still do (which I doubt you will. Vaccine science is on the same intellectual level as Global Warmism, you just never looked into the details before.). Comment there if you would be so kind. I’m a fan, been following you since the days of libernet. (Well I lost you for more than a decade, but I’m back now.)

  11. Starman says:

    An actual scientific theory either has a 100% consensus or a 0% consensus. 97% consensus is fishy. It only takes one scientist to disprove a theory and another to repeat the test.

    The myth buster series was science in action.

    • gokart-mozart says:

      If there is a 100% consensus, it is either not science or it’s not a theory.

      The only reason, at bottom, to “do science” is to disprove theories. There are, essentially, no “climate scientists”.

  12. I’ve recently realized that Vaccine Science bears a lot in common with Global Warmism, as do some other fields like GMO safety as well, and Keynesian economics and others. I’ve started a blog talking about it, and also underlying causes with emphasis on the insights of Gustav LeBon, and how we can reorganize decision methods to do a better job of getting to truth.
    The first post is a survey article on what the actual peer-reviewed literature says about the safety of injecting vaccines containing aluminum into infants, and the second post briefly discussed how the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies wrote a 270 page survey last year that came to the opposite conclusion.

    • jim says:

      Vaccines are immensely beneficial. However their primary benefit is herd immunity, thus often the optimal strategy for the individual is for the individual to not take the vaccine, because of the frequently substantial risks of the vaccine, while everyone else takes their vaccine.

      If, however, lots of other people refrain from taking the vaccine, then the optimum strategy for the individual is to be a good boy and take the vaccine.

      One special case counter example to this HPV vaccination. The reservoir is gays, and if you want herd immunity you need to get all the gays vaccinated. But instead, in order to project a political message that HPV is nothing to do with gays, they propose to vaccinate virgin schoolgirls, an amazingly useless action with significant risks for the schoolgirls. It does not make sense for a woman to vaccinate against HPV unless she believes she is at significant risk of sex with a bisexual male. First vaccinate the gays. And if that does not entirely cure the problem, vaccinate the whores. And if the problem persists even then, then it might be time to think about vaccinating the sluts.

      They don’t want to target the groups where it would actually provide benefit, for fear of stigmatizing those groups as the cause of the problem.

      GMOs are safe, and fear of GMOs is superstitious.

      One very common genetic modification is to make the plant poisonous to insects. However, the poisons are substances destroyed by cooking. If they put that genetic modification in fruit, then I would be alarmed.

      • You make various claims like “vaccines are beneficial” and ” herd immunity exists” which need verification. I believe the explanation of why there are large numbers of documented epidemics among fully vaccinated population is that, according to a paper I’ve seen discussed but have not read personally, 2 years after last MMR booster (for example) 70% of the population have titers such that, if exposed to measles, they will not present clinical measles, but will have flu-like symptoms and will be contagious. Herd immunity requires something like 2/3 of population to be incapable of contagion.

        If you look at my survey, you will see it is quite likely that early vaccinations are causing the autism epidemic, and likely taking multiple IQ points off everybody in the population.

        Basically, there is an animal literature that shows that injecting animals with antigen provoking a strong immune response during critical periods of brain development reliably and repeatably causes brain damage in the adult animal, and repeatedly injecting with antigen reliably and repeatably causes autoimmune disease, and there are a number of epidemiological studies backing up the damage, eg regressed across the 50 states, 1% increase in vaccine compliance is associated with 700 additional autism or SLI cases and regressed across the top 34 countries, 7 additional vaccines on schedule is associated with 1/1000 increase in infant mortality, and other epidemiological studies. There are zero (0) epidemiological studies on aluminum or animal studies that I have found (or that the Institute of Medicine cited in their 270 page report) that don’t show damage.

        The only study that has fed GMO’s to animals for more than 3 months found lots of cancer.

        • Oh, also I forgot to talk about animal studies of aluminum. It causes brain inflammation and huge problems when injected in vaccine relevant quantities to mice. Infants today get 100’s of times as much aluminum from vaccines as from diet, and its in a form (AlOH bound up with antigen) that the kidneys can’t eliminate. Its injected precisely because if takes the immune system out of its ordinary operating range, because otherwise infants in the first year wouldn’t form antibodies to immune challenge like they want.

          • gokart-mozart says:

            One problem with your theory (and with the vaccinologists’ theories, too) is that they treat “vaccine” as a unitary thing, when in fact each one requires a case-by-case analysis.

            HPV, for example (and hepatitis B, as well, for non-surgeons) represent the best-case scenario for your argument. I was tangentially involved in the HBV decision, which resulted not from epidemiology but the fact that the only way to get in trouble at CDC/ACIP from 1979-1998 was to make a list of who should get HBV. The technical staff got so sick of it that they basically surrendered to universal HBV. I am not involved with the politics of HPV but I imagine it is similar.

            OTOH, polio and (regionally) Japanese encephalitis and Yellow Fever are excellent pro-vaccine examples. Rabies vaccine after exposure is another.

          • jim says:

            Epidemiological studies of weak effects are uninformative.

            Your argument is that injections of active aluminium cause damage. They are intended to cause local damage, to look like a hostile infection to the immune system, but I did not see data for the conclusion, that vaccine relevant doses of aluminium cause substantial harm.

  13. I am sympathetic to your position, but I think you oversell the strength of your conclusions.

    On the arctic ice thing, ice has declined 10% since 1979. That’s on the graph that you link to to claim no decline. I was surprised at how flat it was given what I’d been led to believe about it by the warmists, but the effect is very clearly there.

    http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg

    On global temperature, I think the standard graph is approximately correct, and not fudged. That is, +0.8 C anomaly since 1900, most warming occurring 1975 to 2000.

    ( I can’t find a raw data citation for this, which is worrying.)

    The CO2, Methane, and NOx records quite clearly show stable fluctuation for the last 800000 years, then a jump outside the normal bounds exactly at the industrial revolution.

    http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html

    (The treeline thing is cool, do you have a data citation for that?)

    That said, on top of the basic science there is very clearly a whole pile of alarmism, official religion, corrupted science, politics, and useless modeling.

    I am convinced that the above measures and basic story is correct. It all makes too much sense and corroborates too well with other observations to have been simply made up. The climate seems to be changing, and the most plausible cause is industrialization.

    Totally open to being convinced, though.

    ————-

    As for the antarctic ice thing, the data shows antarctic ice has been increasing. They can’t deny that. Whether orthodox warmism is willing to openly admit that fact is another story. I’m going to survey some orthodox thinkers to see what they believe, and how out of whack it is.

    • On a second look, arctic ice has declined 5%, not 10%

    • jim says:

      On global temperature, I think the standard graph is approximately correct, and not fudged. That is, +0.8 C anomaly since 1900, most warming occurring 1975 to 2000.

      ( I can’t find a raw data citation for this, which is worrying.)

      If you cannot find a raw data citation for this, you should disbelieve. “Nullius in Verba”, “take no one’s word for it”. I have patiently gone through the surface instrument data, and it is not something one can draw high precision numbers from. It contains numerous sources of systematic error that vastly outweigh any claimed change in climate. Maybe world temperatures went up in the period, maybe they went down. The surface instrument record is not good enough to tell us, never having been designed for that purpose.

      Cherry blossom time in Japan indicates warming, but has been influenced by the urban heat island effect. Maple syrup season allegedly indicates warming, but this seems to reflect the propensity of warmists to cherry pick statistics – the alleged warming is based on one season in one area, as compared with that season in that area forty years ago.

      One might simply take the average of all surface instrument readings, but then one realizes that surface instruments have been migrating towards the tropics, towards cities, and towards human habitation. To cure this, one might attempt to estimate surface temperature by area, and take the average of all areas, but one then discovers that for most of the area of the earth, the surface instrument data is utterly worthless. So one starts to get creative, and one soon realizes that one make world average temperatures go up, or down, or dance the watutsi, depending on how one massages the numbers.

      The CO2, Methane, and NOx records quite clearly show stable fluctuation for the last 800000 years, then a jump outside the normal bounds exactly at the industrial revolution.

      http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html

      The link you are looking at is the massaged data. They don’t tell you what comes from bubbles in ice, what comes from firn, and what comes from present day air measurements: They present a conclusion based on secret unrevealed data processed in ways that they do not tell us.

      They do, however, give links to unmassaged data. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/images/vostok_co2_ch4_from_bubbles.jpg, which shows nothing very unusual about 1950 CO2 levels. Of course we are higher than 1950 now, so now must be higher than ancient highs, but not very dramatically so.

      I am convinced that the above measures and basic story is correct. It all makes too much sense and corroborates too well with other observations to have been simply made up. The climate seems to be changing, and the most plausible cause is industrialization.

      But, with the rise of China and India, we have more industrialization than ever, and in the past sixteen years, we have had precise global measurements of near surface air temperature, which we never had before. And since we have had precise global measurements of near surface air temperature, climate has shown no obvious signs of net warming.

      An estimate of climate sensitivity based on the period 1975-1998, the period for which we have no accurate data, the period for which our data is pretty much made up, show high climate sensitivity to CO2. An estimate of climate sensitivity based on the period 1998-present, the period for which we have very accurate data, shows climate sensitivity not readily distinguishable from zero.

      • >If you cannot find a raw data citation for this, you should disbelieve. “Nullius in Verba”, “take no one’s word for it”. I have patiently gone through the surface instrument data, and it is not something one can draw high precision numbers from.

        >So one starts to get creative, and one soon realizes that one make world average temperatures go up, or down, or dance the watutsi, depending on how one massages the numbers.

        Some of those massages are more plausible than others, and I don’t really trust anyone’s judgment but my own on this. I’d like to see exactly what dance it does when I try to make sense of it. Everyone else is either too stupid or has too much skin in the game.

        Until then, I’m not taking anyone’s word for it, including yours, but using everyone’s word as evidence. That you are able to make the case you make weakens the evidence from everyone else’s opinion, but doesn’t eliminate it.

        >The link you are looking at is the massaged data.

        I don’t see any reference to any massaging. They cite a process in detail that should work to measure what they are reporting, and report numbers that could have been measured from that process, and don’t mention any other data crunching. I think the data is straight.

        The data you refer to is the same as what I was referring to. Those three graphs.

        >nothing very unusual about 1950 CO2 levels. Of course we are higher than 1950 now, so now must be higher than ancient highs, but not very dramatically so.

        The data shows very clearly that for the 800000 years prior to the industrial revolution, at no time was CO2 outside the range 150-300 ppm. It was 386 ppm when they measured it. That is *very* anomalous.

        Whether that’s out by enough to cause trouble or not, I don’t know, but saying it’s not dramatic is misleading.

        >But, with the rise of China and India, we have more industrialization than ever, and in the past sixteen years, we have had precise global measurements of near surface air temperature, which we never had before. And since we have had precise global measurements of near surface air temperature, climate has shown no obvious signs of net warming.

        There is an underlying trend, possibly with a time delay from CO2, and large random fluctuations on top. 16 years is not enough time to see the effect of Chinese industrialization.

        >An estimate of climate sensitivity based on the period 1975-1998, the period for which we have no accurate data, the period for which our data is pretty much made up, show high climate sensitivity to CO2. An estimate of climate sensitivity based on the period 1998-present, the period for which we have very accurate data, shows climate sensitivity not readily distinguishable from zero.

        Obviously models overfit to any particular 2-decade period are going to be bonkers when there is 2-decade noise. This is something we would need to estimate theoretically, or find a reliable temperature proxy to fit with our ancient CO2 data. Of course this is going to be error prone, but should be able to show us something.

        • jim says:

          If you cannot find a raw data citation for this, you should disbelieve. “Nullius in Verba”, “take no one’s word for it”. I have patiently gone through the surface instrument data, and it is not something one can draw high precision numbers from.

          So one starts to get creative, and one soon realizes that one make world average temperatures go up, or down, or dance the watutsi, depending on how one massages the numbers.

          Some of those massages are more plausible than others, and I don’t really trust anyone’s judgment but my own on this. I’d like to see exactly what dance it does when I try to make sense of it.

          Been there, done that, got tired. You are trying to detect a 0.2 degree change in data where you will be making quite plausible seat of the pants corrections of a few degrees.

          The urban hotspot effect is a couple of degrees or so. People have checked this by driving through town with a thermometer. Plus it is simply obvious if you walk across a parking lot. So you want to throw out all sites that have suffered urbanization, which means you want their coordinates, and want to look at them from google earth.

          You will find that most of your data has obvious discontinuities, implying that the supposedly same weather station moved, or changed in some important regard. Moving weather stations are a huge problem, since stations tend to move to where the people are, which is more urban, closer to the tropics, and closer to sea level. Stations in cold and remote areas have been dropping like flies. If it snows, no one wants to maintain it.

          Because the weather stations were never designed or intended for this purpose, you need a lot more metadata about a weather station than you are likely to have. You really want a weather station that is in a rural area, that is still rural, and has not moved to a parking lot, or to the side of a building, nor has had a parking lot come to it.

          I don’t see any reference to any massaging.

          They say: “Law Dome (1- 2006 CE, merged with modern observational data)” There are also references to the fact that some of the air samples were collected from firn, and some were collected from bubbles.

          The data shows very clearly that for the 800000 years prior to the industrial revolution, at no time was CO2 outside the range 150-300 ppm. It was 386 ppm when they measured it. That is *very* anomalous.

          To conclude that, you would like to compare ancient bubbles in the ice with modern bubbles in the ice measured by the same process in a different part of the same sample. When they say that ancient bubbles showed x% CO2, it is just not true. Rather, from ancient bubbles, they inferred x% CO2.

          But, with the rise of China and India, we have more industrialization than ever, and in the past sixteen years, we have had precise global measurements of near surface air temperature, which we never had before. And since we have had precise global measurements of near surface air temperature, climate has shown no obvious signs of net warming.

          There is an underlying trend, possibly with a time delay from CO2, and large random fluctuations on top. 16 years is not enough time to see the effect of Chinese industrialization.

          Your time delay is an ad hoc explanation conjured from nowhere to save the theory. What is the physical basis of this time delay? Why is 1975 to 1998 (for which our data is worthless) compelling evidence for global warming, and 1998 to 2014 (for which our data is good) not compelling evidence against global warming? Twenty three years is long enough, but sixteen years is not long enough?

          There has been an underlying trend since the little ice age, which predates industrialization. The evidence that this trend has continued during the twentieth century is weak. The evidence could plausibly be interpreted as net warming from 1816 to 1935, and temperatures roughly stable thereafter, going up and down in roughly equal measure around 1930s levels – climate change indeed, but not strongly connected to human activity.

          • Been there, done that, got tired. You are trying to detect a 0.2 degree change in data where you will be making quite plausible seat of the pants corrections of a few degrees.

            Point taken.

            They say: “Law Dome (1- 2006 CE, merged with modern observational data)” There are also references to the fact that some of the air samples were collected from firn, and some were collected from bubbles.

            Oops. Missed that.

            To conclude that, you would like to compare ancient bubbles in the ice with modern bubbles in the ice measured by the same process in a different part of the same sample. When they say that ancient bubbles showed x% CO2, it is just not true. Rather, from ancient bubbles, they inferred x% CO2.

            Yes it’s a different process and it is conceivable that the bubbles method systematically underestimates by 50-100 ppm, but that doesn’t seem like the kind of thing they would miss, and I can think of no reason why it would be true. Further, the data wouldn’t make any sense if it showed no reaction to the industrial revolution.

            Your time delay is an ad hoc explanation conjured from nowhere to save the theory. What is the physical basis of this time delay? Why is 1975 to 1998 (for which our data is worthless) compelling evidence for global warming, and 1998 to 2014 (for which our data is good) not compelling evidence against global warming? Twenty three years is long enough, but sixteen years is not long enough?

            The time delay is not ad-hoc. Thermal mass and propagation delay is likely to be large. It takes time to change the concentration of CO2. It takes time to heat up the ocean. It takes time to change albedo.

            Epistemically, you can’t conclude anything about the response of a system where the time-scale you are looking at is the same or less than the random fluctuations in that system, and your observations are within the normal fluctuations. All we can conclude from the recent flatness is that Chinese industrialization did not have an immediate and large effect, which I wouldn’t have predicted in any case. Both warming and non-warming are consistent with recent observations.

            As for the double standard, you misunderstand me. Using 1975-1998 as your prototypical data is just as stupid as using only 1998-2014. There is a 2-decade random fluctuation process on top of whatever underlying longer-term trends exist. To make any solid conclusion, you need to look at a long enough timeline that the random crap cancels out.

            There has been an underlying trend since the little ice age, which predates industrialization. The evidence that this trend has continued during the twentieth century is weak. The evidence could plausibly be interpreted as net warming from 1816 to 1935, and temperatures roughly stable thereafter, going up and down in roughly equal measure around 1930s levels – climate change indeed, but not strongly connected to human activity.

            This (climate change mostly decoupled from human greenhouse gasses, natural upswing since little ice age) is a good hypothesis and I do entertain it, but the conservatively stated official story is also likely. Incidentally, what’s your basis for “and temperatures roughly stable thereafter,”?

            • jim says:

              Your time delay is an ad hoc explanation conjured from nowhere to save the theory. What is the physical basis of this time delay? Why is 1975 to 1998 (for which our data is worthless) compelling evidence for global warming, and 1998 to 2014 (for which our data is good) not compelling evidence against global warming? Twenty three years is long enough, but sixteen years is not long enough?

              The time delay is not ad-hoc.

              Then explain its physical basis, rather than randomly spouting vaguely scientific sounding jargon. Why did none of the models predict it, or propose it was within the range of possibilities. What new physical phenomena does one need to stick into the 1998 models to get them to agree with post 1998 reality?

              Supposed warming from 1975 to 1998 was supposedly a direct and immediate consequence of rising CO2 levels. What then were the stable temperatures from 1998 onwards a consequence of?

              Epistemically, you can’t conclude anything about the response of a system where the time-scale you are looking at is the same or less than the random fluctuations in that system,

              So, what then makes the known stable temperatures from 1998 to the present a random fluctuation, and the supposed rise from 1975 to 1998 not a random fluctuation? The 1998 models claimed to predict doom. There predictions have not been realized.

              If you cannot conclude anything from sixteen years, how can you conclude anything definite from twenty three years? None of the 1998 models predicted that the current 2014 temperatures where within the range of possibility, therefore all of the 1998 models were wrong.

              The 1998 models were uncannily accurate in retrodicting data the modelers pulled out of their own asses, but completely wrong in predicting accurate data measured after 1998. Why then should we believe the models?

              Using 1975-1998 as your prototypical data is just as stupid as using only 1998-2014.

              But that is what warmists did until 2008.

              Incidentally, what’s your basis for “and temperatures roughly stable thereafter,”?

              Iceout data:

              This (climate change mostly decoupled from human greenhouse gasses, natural upswing since little ice age) is a good hypothesis and I do entertain it,

              Well then if the science is not in fact settled then perhaps we should wait for a few more decades for more data before we set up a totalitarian terror state and murder seven billion people in order to expiate our sins against Gaia.

          • Then explain its physical basis, rather than randomly spouting vaguely scientific sounding jargon.

            I’m not saying I know the details, just if I were going to attempt a climate model, I’d want to model the thermal mass and other propagation delay effects. There are many plausible such mechanisms, and our conclusions should reflect that possibility. Thus I’m not going to expect immediate change.

            What new physical phenomena does one need to stick into the 1998 models to get them to agree with post 1998 reality?

            Again you misunderstand me. The 1975-1998 warming was not a direct, pure consequence of global warming. It included a large short-term random upswing. I agree that fitting a model to this is retarded. I agree that the warmists did just that, and that peer review allowed their idiocy through and suppressed more reasonable models.

            What the warmists did is irrelevant, though. We are interested in the truth; under what model does the last hundred years of temperature “data” make sense, assuming it’s at all accurate? The model that neatly accounts for everything is that there is some combination of greenhouse warming and natural climate warming overlaid with noise of various timescales. This is completely consistent with observation and theory. Does it allow us to predict as accurately as the warmists claim to be able to? No. We don’t know the transfer function between industrial greenhouse gasses and climate, and the noise invalidates any short-term modelling. But it puts what we see within the realm of possible model parameters, and predicts elevated probability of warming

            Why then should we believe the models?

            Obviously the Synod is overselling it’s case. Obviously a model that retrodicts what we’ve seen with any kind of accuracy is grossly overfit and we should not believe it. We agree on this, and further discussion of what the theocrats are saying is pointless.

            Well then if the science is not in fact settled then perhaps we should wait for a few more decades for more data before we set up a totalitarian terror state and murder seven billion people in order to expiate our sins against Gaia.

            Lulz. Agree.

            • jim says:

              What the warmists did is irrelevant, though. We are interested in the truth; under what model does the last hundred years of temperature “data” make sense, assuming it’s at all accurate?

              Current fluctuations in climate are similar to or substantially smaller than historical fluctuations in climate – looks like temperatures rose from 1820 to 1930, 1950 or so, and have been roughly steady since. Hence the decline that needed a trick to hide it – proxies for temperature fail to agree with the supposed surface temperature instrumental record, partly because the proxies are no good, being cherry picked, but mostly because the surface temperature instrumental record was, until recently, even worse.

              So, if we want to explain recent fluctuations in climate, need to explain the ice ages, and our explanation of the ice ages sucks.

              But, supposing we explain the ice ages, such explanation would be scientific and non political. Warmism, on the other hand, is political. Warmism is a revival of the Aztec cosmology: That bad weather is human caused, it is extremely urgent to fix it, and we therefore need a priesthood organizing human sacrifices.

              In so far as warmism intersects with science, it is a God of the Gaps, claiming a supernatural explanation of stuff that we do not understand and are not likely to understand for some considerable time. The direct warming effect of CO2 is quite small, and the proposition that this small warming will result in very large warming and in increased undesirable weather events is without any scientific basis whatsoever.

              To discuss the positive feedback effect of water vapor and the negative feedback effect of clouds would be to treat warmists as if they were intellectuals, rather than ignorant savage thugs. It would be like attempting to discuss the ontology of labor value with Marxists. They don’t know, they don’t care, they are not interested.

      • Ember says:

        So one starts to get creative, and one soon realizes that one make world average temperatures go up, or down, or dance the watutsi, depending on how one massages the numbers.

        Besides the obvious intentional number fudging, incompetence can still play a role. (When you have scientists who weren’t formally trained how to code, who use Matlab scripts they just barely understand, and may sometimes use scripts written 20 years ago by grad students, is there any surprise that stupid mistakes are everywhere?) I had a professor who published a paper debunking another group’s peer-reviewed and published paper which had used a running average filter and compared the smoothed data with some other data, noted the peaks occurred at the same time spots, and argued for some relationship between earthquakes and atmospheric phenomena they had been theorizing for a while without any data to back it up. (I don’t remember the details — but they were excited to have the data look as it did.) Turns out they used a causal filter for the average (probably Matlab’s “filter” function) and introduced a significant phase shift from the original data. Using a non-causal averaging filter (Matlab’s “filtfilt”) has no phase shift and hey look, the peaks of the two datasets no longer match up, ruining the entire argument.

        What disturbs me almost as much as not having access to the original data is not having access to the source code of whatever processing steps happened. Nullius in Verba indeed.

    • pdimov says:

      “On the arctic ice thing, ice has declined 10% since 1979.”

      https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/understanding-the-1979-arctic-ice-cherry-pick/

    • gokart-mozart says:

      “On global temperature, I think the standard graph is approximately correct, and not fudged. That is, +0.8 C anomaly since 1900, most warming occurring 1975 to 2000”

      10 kYa there was two miles of ice sitting on top of the land where my home is.

      The problem with AGW, or your vision of it, is that prior to industrialization, there have been nearly continuous, large scale and spontaneously occurring changes in what you call “global temperature”.

      AGW treats these huge changes as irrelevant to their theory of the +0.8C delta (if it’s real), when in fact the +0.8C delta is embedded in a much larger story of +15C and -15C which appears to be a feature of life on this Third Rock.

  14. William Newman says:

    I recommend at least finding a better name for the early passage “anyone who will believes in Warmism”. Maybe “orthodox Warmism” or something. It’s not a standard name, and you’re even dropping the common “anthropogenic” qualifier. So some reasonable-but-new people will have to guess, and the connotations of Warmism-with-no-qualifications will make readers wonder whether you’re sweeping up people who agree that the temperature has risen significantly since 1800, and people who agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

    Really I wish you’d rewrite the entire intro. Especially in an an environment where people intentionally obfuscate their opponents’ positions, if you must introduce a new definition at the level of “warmism”, it would be wiser, e.g., to construct a paragraph which begins with the properties of the new definition and ends with the defined word. Along the lines of “There are many people who still accept the IPCC’s temperature forecasts as accurate. Many of them are confident of catastrophic consequences well beyond the technical forecasts that the IPCC is willing to commit to, and endorse catastrophic future consequences and/or claim that current circumstances (e.g., the big hurricane in NYC) are dramatic confirmation of the IPCC position. I don’t know a standard term for this; I will refer to these people as pseudo-orthodox warmists. […]”

    • jim says:

      Any more precise accounting of what Warmism is or is not would have to explain about positive feedback from water vapor, negative feedback from clouds. Who cares about those things?

      The average Harvard PhD has never heard of those things. He knows to bow his head when the television preaches the wrath of Gaea and piously say “amen”. The average global warming scientist only has the vaguest conception of such things. He knows that man has sinned against Gaia, deserves punishment, and that the priesthood of global warming should be placed in charge of administering mankind’s much deserved punishment.

      If we discuss positive and negative feedback, we are treating our enemies as if they were intelligent beings, rather than howling apes calling for the destruction of mankind.

      To discuss feedbacks would be like leading off a discussion of Marxism with an explanation of the ontology of labor value. They want to get their hands on our throats, after the fashion of 10:10, they don’t care about labor value and they don’t care about negative feedback from clouds. They want power, and they want to make us suffer.

      Khruschev did not explain that value was objective, he said “We will bury you”. Neither did 10:10 discuss water vapor feed back. Instead, they threatened our children, who they have taken hostage in the schools that they control. If they think we should debate water vapor feedback, they have the megaphone. So long as I have not taken their children hostage and threatened their children, I have the moral and intellectual high ground.

      • William Newman says:

        Consider the strayed-cow rule in the unwritten law described in _Order Without Law_. From distant memory: if friendly conversation doesn’t stop one’s neighbor from letting his stray cattle cause damage, apparently one doesn’t go to the law nearly as often as law and economics professors used to fondly imagine. One uses self help, but not any old self help. One doesn’t shoot and eat them. Instead, one drives them to somewhere that will make recovering them a PITA.

        The point is not to be polite to the offending neighbor, letting him off easy by not eating the cattle.

        Arguably it is polite to your other neighbors so they can more easily sort out what’s up (not trying to untangle possible motives of avarice) even if they have a lot of other things to worry about.

        From the offending neighbor’s point of view, this cannot easily be mistaken for politeness. It is leaving him fewer plausible ways to hide his culpability from the judgment of third parties. Hulagu is supposed to have rhetorically asked Qutuz “Where can you flee?” It’s not ordinarily understood as polite solicitude.

        “treating our enemies as if they were intelligent beings”

        That’s not my point, my point is carefully distinguishing enemies from people who are not enemies. This makes it easier for third parties to follow the distinction even if they don’t have amazing amounts of time, interest, expertise, other knowledge, or insight. Many times this is important. When the enemies you are attacking trade in misdirection and seem to have achieved their power in significant part by doing so, it’s probably one of those times.

        • jim says:

          That’s not my point, my point is carefully distinguishing enemies from people who are not enemies.

          So who are these people who are not enemies that we need to distinguish our enemies from? Is anyone likely to imagine that this post is a criticism of Anthony Watts or Steve McIntyre? What not-enemies do you have in mind? Name some.

          • William Newman says:

            Yes, those are the kinds of people I have in mind: your examples, plus mostly well-known lukewarmer-ish folk like Lucia-of-the-blog or David Friedman or Matt Ridley. And unknown readers whose private tentative technical judgment is something like how CO2 is obviously a greenhouse gas but a lot of other stuff seems shaky. And obscure but telling public examples like that 1940s-ish guy that McIntyre used a while ago to drily acidly illustrate some points about the IPCC. How far into the article must a new literal reader (not someone who already knows enough about the scene to shortcut by confident guessing) properly understand that you’re not attacking all that?

            How clear is it that your real agenda is not some caricature the reader has been primed to believe is the only possible Manichean complement of the truth? (Earth’s climate does not change, e.g.; or any possible squid ink as long as it tends to keep alive the idea that smoking might not be bad for you.)

            It’s hard to get into the head of casual readers, but such misunderstandings are surprisingly rampant in the general controversy, so my guess is that you’ll get a surprisingly large amount of confusion in previously-undecided readers.

            Picking “Warmism” to attack, and skipping a definition, and also skipping qualifiers like “catastrophic” and “anthropogenic” in “global warming”, is an unusually extreme departure from the “tell them what you’re going to tell them” form. Picking this particular controversy for such a literary experiment seems particularly perverse.

            • jim says:

              Picking “Warmism” to attack, and skipping a definition, and also skipping qualifiers like “catastrophic” and “anthropogenic” in “global warming”, is an unusually extreme departure from the “tell them what you’re going to tell them” form

              Who are the warmists? Obviously, from context, the criminal conspirators named in the climategate files, and the model builders who “accurately retrodicted this supposed warming, and projected it into the future, projecting doom.”

              Who is going to get confused? Seems to me that only person who would get confused is someone who is aware of the fine details of the scientific debate, knows about positive feedback from water vapor and negative feedback from clouds, but has failed to notice that whenever he turns on the television, he gets hectored about the need for the virtuous to make human sacrifices of the sinful to appease the wrath of Gaia. The only person who would get confused is someone who has only ever encountered warmism as genteel scientific discussion, rather than political and religious movement seeking power.

              But warmism has never been a genteel scientific discussion. It was always conspiracy and thuggery, it was always a political and religious movement seeking power. Science has been dead for for seventy years.

              Khrushchev did not say that value is objective, but that “we will bury you”, and 10:10 did not say that clouds create positive, rather than negative feedback, but that they would take our children hostage against us. David Friedman and Steve McIntyre are lukewarmers, in that they argue that it is likely that clouds create negative feedback. Do the warmists attempt to argue with them? Do the warmists say “no, clouds create positive feedback”? Do the warmists even know the difference between positive and negative feedback?

            • jim says:

              To distinguish between warmism and lukewarmism, I would have to explain positive water vapor feedback and negative cloud feedback. To explain these things, I would have to treat warmism as a serious scientific theory. Which it is not and never was. Official science just is not scientific. We did not defeat the Marxists by refuting the labor theory of value on epistemological grounds.

              Of course it was important to first refute the labor theory of value on epistemological grounds, but, that having been done, we could then forget about the labor theory of value, as Marxists had already forgotten about it, and get on with the real struggle. Similarly, lukewarmism is merely a stepping stone, an necessary step before one gets on with the real struggle. The point of lukewarmism is not to refute the warmists on the battleground of the scientific method, but to justify forgetting about that battleground, as the warmists already have done. (The science is settled!)

          • peppermint says:

            it’s still a scientific question, and needs to be gotten right.

            The warmists are excessively concerned about the purity of the environment. That’s not a scientific question; they could be right about everything they say scientifically and they would still be wrong about their claim that the western world needs to stop using coal, oil, and natgas and start instead using wind, solar, and geothermal.

            Also, only the most unhinged lunatics claim that the sea level is going to rise significantly. Even Al Gore didn’t make that claim. Didn’t stop him from showing a map of if it happened, but he had the integrity to merely suggest that it was going to happen instead of claiming it.

            We know they don’t actually think it’s going to happen or care about it happening, and merely want to use it as a bludgeon to destroy industry in the Western world, because they refuse to talk about nuclear power.

  15. josh says:

    Speaking of climategate. I read a great primer years ago related to the data files in the first climategate release and how they demonstrate that Mass used a sort of guess and check method to come up with an adjustment to bristlecone pine data. I have since been unable to locate the link. If anybody knows what I am talking about and could provide the link I would be very grateful.

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