Most prominent global warming skeptic changes his mind

[piasabird]

How well were they measuring temperature around 1800? I think this graph is a crock.

 

[Ninjahedge]

Question.

What does that program say, without the part that everyone is bitching and moaning about?

Was the REST of the program evaluated? People seem to get all up in themselves saying "Well THIS was wrong when he first said it" and ignore what is currently proposed (even if what was said previously did not have any effect in the first place).

So here is the question:

What is the program now? What does it say with the data provided? Has anybody looked at it WITHOUT the commented lines, regardless of if they used to be there or not, and verified the current program and results or are we all going to get caught up in Conspiracy Theories that don't amount to a rats ass when compared to current verified results?

After this nice year with the trees still green in NOVEMBER, then getting up to a foot and a half of wet snow (in some areas, 30" in some areas of MA), saying that there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING weird or different about the weather... AT ALL, is just plain ignorant.

 

[Jaskalas]

The great skeptic Muller, in his own words:

2003:

“Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.”

2008:

The bottom line is that there is a consensus -- the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] -- and the president needs to know what the IPCC says. Second, they say that most of the warming of the last 50 years is probably due to humans. You need to know that this is from carbon dioxide, and you need to understand which technologies can reduce this and which can't.

In fact, back in the early '80s, I resigned from the Sierra Club over the issue of global warming. At that time, they were opposing nuclear power. What I wrote them in my letter of resignation was that, if you oppose nuclear power, the U.S. will become much more heavily dependent on fossil fuels, and that this is a pollutant to the atmosphere that is very likely to lead to global warming.

2011:

‘We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. There was, he added, ‘no levelling off’.

His own data in 2011, what part of leveled off doesn't he get?

 

[dmcowen674]

Most prominent global warming skeptic changes his mind

Undaunted by his Koch brother funding, Richard Muller, the most prominent global warming skeptic in the scientific community, has completed a study concluding that the "hockey stick graph" is correct.

http://news.yahoo.com/skeptic-finds-now-agrees-global-warming-real-142616605.html

Gotta love how Republicans think cutting down all the trees on the planet could somehow be a good thing.

 

[Orignal Earl]

How well were they measuring temperature around 1800? I think this graph is a crock.

1800 was a magical time.

 

[Doc Savage Fan]

I'll bet some CRU scientists cheat on their wives. I'll bet some cheat on their taxes. I'll be some are assholes. And some of these scientists probably treat climate-change deniers with the contempt they so richly deserve and would rather not waste even a single second of their valuable research time entertaining data requests from such nincompoops.

None of these personal failings having anything to do with whether the data was valid and measured temperature rise is accurate. Because it's now abundantly clear that the data is good and temperature rise accurately reported.

But what all the attacks on the CRU and your continued pursuit of the irrelevancies you've documented above demonstrate is that this has nothing to do with science. It has everything to do with attempting to change the subject.

So tell me again how CRU scientists aren't as nice as you'd like them to be to climate deniers. Tell me a second time. Tell me a third time. And then tell me what this has to do with whether the data is good?

And tell me why it's still the case that not a single CRU attacker has made a post saying, "I was wrong about claiming that the data was fudged. I was wrong to claim in other threads that NASA was fudging results. I was completely wrong in questioning the data supporting the claim that temperature has risen significantly in the last 30 years. There's no data-fudging conspiracy."

But tell me again that CRU scientists aren't nice to climate-change deniers. I'm sure that has something to do with climate science.

And how many times do I have to tell you that the overall data is good despite all the bullshit...sheesh.

 

[Paul98]

So what we have now is two versions the first one which it was commented out, then the next one where it's a little different but is plotted.

This brings up the question, does ether of these matter? Until we have the final version or proof that this was used in any paper or final output. We don't have much other than what it is which is people working on a program.

 

[chucky2]

I quoted Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climategate

Here we have an ethics investigation that finds evidence of highly unethical and illegal behavior and then asks no one at CRU about it. What a joke.

If that is true then it was not an ethics investigation, but rather something else. If true, then the question would become what was it, and why was it billed as an ethics investigation instead of what it really was. This would be very very strange to me, as if the 'science is settled', then there should be no need for e-mail destruction nor lines of code such as what's been reported to ever be there.

FWIW, I believe the Earth is gradually warming. I'd just much rather have us concentrate on pollution reduction/cleanup rather than trying to make the Earth colder. I think if we did that, concentrate on not polluting/cleaning up, which is something I think everyone could get behind, we might just find that in doing so, we cut back on our greenhouse emissions as well.

Chuck

 

[umbrella39]

So is the solution to tax people more?

The solution is very clear. Give the Sun larger tax credits, if we don't the Sun will stop creating jobs, then how will the country, the WORLD, the MOON for that matter, recover...

 

[Paul98]

The great skeptic Muller, in his own words:
His own data in 2011, what part of leveled off doesn't he get?

Could have been that as I stated earlier that the last 10 years wasn't enough to say global warming has leveled off. Or that other short term factors were taken into account that won't change the long term trend. Give it another 50 years and it should becoming more and more clear.

 

[Jaskalas]

FWIW, I believe the Earth is gradually warming. I'd just much rather have us concentrate on pollution reduction/cleanup rather than trying to make the Earth colder. I think if we did that, concentrate on not polluting/cleaning up, which is something I think everyone could get behind, we might just find that in doing so, we cut back on our greenhouse emissions as well.

Chuck

Absolutely. :thumbsup:

 

[Fear No Evil]

The solution is very clear. Give the Sun larger tax credits, if we don't the Sun will stop creating jobs, then how will the country, the WORLD, the MOON for that matter, recover...

Or, we could blame the sun for not giving its fair share of energy to the earth. Tell it that it needs to give a bit extra for those with not as much energy as itself. :awe:

 

[Doc Savage Fan]

So what we have now is two versions the first one which it was commented out, then the next one where it's a little different but is plotted.

This brings up the question, does ether of these matter? Until we have the final version or proof that this was used in any paper or final output. We don't have much other than what it is which is people working on a program.

So you finally figured out what I was talking about...this is good.

You ask if either of these matter...I guess that depends on you and what you think is important.

In one sense...this really doesn't matter in the scheme of things as we know the post-1960 tree ring proxies are horseshit anyway. In another sense...the code betrays the coder's integrity.

 

[xBiffx]

Gotta love how Republicans think cutting down all the trees on the planet could somehow be a good thing.

What republican says that? Honestly, where do you come up with this shit? Most republicans, like most people I imagine, are all for doing what is possible to protect the environment. As long as that protection doesn't cost us our freedoms and more importantly an arm and a leg. People should be able to choose voluntarily how they choose to protect the environment. It shouldn't be in the form of a tax and the revenue from said tax does nothing but grease already oily hands.

People put way too much faith, yes faith, into thinking that government is the answer to all the problems. Same people put too much faith into this global warming garbage. In either case, its faith, because they believe in things that cannot be proven, or more often are disproved.

 

[halik]

Well at least we have the other 0.001% that disagree with the consensus, amirite?

 

[Ninjahedge]

Could have been that as I stated earlier that the last 10 years wasn't enough to say global warming has leveled off. Or that other short term factors were taken into account that won't change the long term trend. Give it another 50 years and it should becoming more and more clear.

Or you could just take the mean temp on that graph (what, quadratic reduction maybe?) and see that the line does slope slightly up.

The one thing that GW opponents seem to ignore is that this is not a case of 20 degree temperature shifts, but a HUGE change in global energy, only slightly changing the overall average in world temperature. (Mass takes a LOT of warming).

You crank the temp up only a few degrees, you get stronger storms that stay over warmer water before they hit land. You get climate and ecosystem shifts.

Now, if people want to argue the cause, they can, although there have been pretty strong correlations between CO2 and average temp.

The important thing to remember is this, if this happened 8000 years ago, we had other places to move to. Too hot in Fla? Pack up your gear and migrate north.

Today? We only have so much room, and with warming it threatens to wipe out our current infrastructure. We could lose a significant portion of our own development just because we sit around arguing over semantics and the ethics of E-mail deletion when any chowder head could probably get onto the records and see a slow, but steady increase in temperatures.

If people could focus on the problem and a way to handle it first, maybe we could get some agreement on this before all of our major cities (originally founded because of naval access) are underwater.

 

[Demo24]

It reached 2,000 ppm when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I'll make a deal to care when it reaches that.

"A slightly shocking finding," Tripati said, "is that the only time in the last 20 million years that we find evidence for carbon dioxide levels similar to the modern level of 387 parts per million was 15 to 20 million years ago, when the planet was dramatically different."
Levels of carbon dioxide have varied only between 180 and 300 parts per million over the last 800,000 years — until recent decades,

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.htm


Yes, because 15-20 million years ago = exactly what we have today.

 

[Ninjahedge]

@xB:

Until people are willing to give up 50HP on their 300HP "family" sedan, until they are willing to pay more than $1 for a pair of tube socks, until they are willing to watch less TV, insulate their houses, and recycle more, we are never going to get jack shit.

The problem is not in the leaf-munching tree huggers asking people to bike to work, or the "All Amerikun" man buying a Ford-150 to get his groceries back from WalMart and BJ's. The problem is that the AVERAGE person still does not give enough of a shit to change their habits in the SLIGHTEST to help the overall picture.

We all keep doing our own and wait to point the finger at everyone else.

 

[Doc Savage Fan]

Now, if people want to argue the cause, they can, although there have been pretty strong correlations between CO2 and average temp.

Correlation is not causation.

The important thing to remember is this, if this happened 8000 years ago, we had other places to move to. Too hot in Fla? Pack up your gear and migrate north.

This actually did happen 1000 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

 

[Paul98]

So you finally figured out what I was talking about...this is good.

You ask if either of these matter...I guess that depends on you and what you think is important.

In one sense...this really doesn't matter in the scheme of things as we know the post-1960 tree ring proxies are horseshit anyway. In another sense...the code betrays the coder's integrity.

The problem was with what you linked to, which had nothing to do with output. Then given that the original complaints were about code where the output was commented out.

The code betrays nothing, code gets changed all the time there are testing phases, things go in and out and get changed all the time. Just these two versions should show that. Maybe they use that code but with values from an analysis. Or for comparing to other data,... Until you see the final version who knows what we ended up with.

Now as for the tree ring data I am going to have to somewhat agree, If the tree ring data is that much different from the actual data I have a hard time taking it serious. Well at least not without large error bars, or an explanation why they are diverging recently.

 

[Ninjahedge]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.htm


Yes, because 15-20 million years ago = exactly what we have today.

Demo, you need to read up a bit more.

"patterns" suggest we were actually due for a dip in temps about now. (Geologically, "about now" could be any time in modern history, but still).

What I worry about is that we ARE indeed in deep hoo-hah with one man-made effect counterbalancing a natural one. What will happen if this cycle progresses? If we start coming out of a mini ice-age and realize that the actual temp, if it was let to be, would have been 20 degrees warmer?

Also, as a side comment, just think of this. How long have we been at this level? How long do you think it would take us to warm up? This ain't a microwave oven. CO2 levels influence temps, but they take time to change....

 

[Demo24]

People should be able to choose voluntarily how they choose to protect the environment.

Ha, what a ridiculous statement. I guess we should go back to leaded gasoline and let people choose which one they want. Or let the companies decide just how 'green' they want to be instead of imposing regulations. Because I am SURE they would definitely sit down and say "you know what, yes we do want to install scrubbers". The reality is that companies don't care and without regulations in place to reign them in they'd spew out whatever they felt like. Why yes, I would like some toxic fumes to enter my atmosphere.

Most people are too stupid to bother figuring out which is 'best for the environment' and just buy whatever is the cheapest thing.

 

[shira]

And how many times do I have to tell you that the overall data is good despite all the bullshit...sheesh.

When you post "findings" about the behavior of CRU scientists, either you think they're relevant to this thread or they're not. I raised the topic of the CRU because of that huge thread we had on ATPN in which the usual climate-denial subjects on ATPN exaggerated the significance of what actually happened at the CRU beyond all recognition. How could so many posters - you included - write so much about "bad data," and yet now that it's abundantly clear that the CRU data was fine all along, no one is owning up to their nonsense?

Your own position is that, "of course the data is good." But you weren't saying that in the CRU thread, were you? It's that "of course" of yours that I take issue with. At what point did your skepticism about the data become "of course?"

Edit: And why are you - yet again - mentioning how CRU scientists did all that could to NOT cooperate with those they viewed as climate-change deniers? Their motives are completely clear, and have nothing to do with the integrity of the temperature data or whether the CRU did good science.

 

[Demo24]

Demo, you need to read up a bit more.

"patterns" suggest we were actually due for a dip in temps about now. (Geologically, "about now" could be any time in modern history, but still).

What I worry about is that we ARE indeed in deep hoo-hah with one man-made effect counterbalancing a natural one. What will happen if this cycle progresses? If we start coming out of a mini ice-age and realize that the actual temp, if it was let to be, would have been 20 degrees warmer?

Also, as a side comment, just think of this. How long have we been at this level? How long do you think it would take us to warm up? This ain't a microwave oven. CO2 levels influence temps, but they take time to change....

I'm not really sure what you are trying to point out to me here. A few people in here gave off some numbers, and I just counter with ones backed up by research.

 

[Ninjahedge]

Correlation is not causation.

But ignoring it is stupid.

If it hurts every time you "do this" well.....

This actually did happen 1000 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

That is kind of my point, although we may be talking a much larger scale with our current situation.

There is only so much room in Canada, you know?