Remember: The current meme is that it is a religion and, by extension, either that religion is the wrong religion or all religions are wrong.

Great post, Sven.

I'd love to see Glenn Reynolds, lawyer who doesn't understand carbon budgets, debate a climate scientist. Trouble is: Climate Scientists are too damn busy to do it, unlike Reynolds.

True happiness is knowing you are a hypocrite. -- Ivor Cutler

Stimulating the economy as best we can!

Further stimulation with Yoga Wear!

I'd love to see Glenn Reynolds, lawyer who doesn't understand carbon budgets, debate...

I wouldn't, because even looking at that skeevy hack gives me the all-overs. Also because of that one-way hash problem, which gives even the most barely competent ambulance chaser the rhetorical advantage.

But it would be fun to see Reynolds hoist on his own petard, even if debating the science is futile. There's one great zing in the lectures when he's talking about the limitations of climate modeling regarding cloud cover (i.e., their complexity exceeds current computer processing capability). He says, "so we kind of have to fake it when it comes to clouds with parameterization, just like the free marketeers here at Chicago do with supply and demand."

Yes it's all about the word "Trick".

The alarmists have been losing ground in the battle of public opinion every day and now this bomb lands. In response you can only provide this lame spin in defense. You’re bleeding support! Don’t you want to forgo the snappy little throw away lines and offer something substantive on your behalf. Maybe telling everybody again how you’ve got consensus on your side will work.

It looks like Glenn Reynolds IS debating the subject.

Link

Why don’t you step forward and prove him wrong. It should be easy because you know he doesn’t know what he is talking about. Here are a few items you might want to address.

Alarmist “scientists” did or attempted to:

Fudge data

Illegally avoid Freedom Of Information requests

Erase damaging E-Mails

Block publication of dissenting view points

Boycott scientific journals that didn’t entirely support their point of view

Rig the computer models to give them the answers they desired.

Dump the raw data that their research is based on

Don’t worry the MSM has your back. Their trying their best to not cover this story. It now appears that this data was leaked to the press before it was released on the net and they made no attempt to publish. Who would have though that?

Would someone go check on Metulj? I think I may have scared him and he’s hiding under the bed. I would reply directly to him but I think he may have blocked me. Please tell him that I will be gentle with him if he will come out. I know that for him to deal with subjects that he is not prepared to hear the truth about is unpleasant. However he must face it someday.

Sanchez: "those who are least competent tend to have the most wildly inflated estimates of their own knowledge and competence. They don’t know enough to know that they don’t know, as it were."

Heh.

Those are just hollow accusations reverberating around the right wingnut-o-sphere. Here is a little (nonlocal blog) data for you to chew on. Don't you people always ask where the evidence is? Come back when you grow a brain.

Hey, lookit over there--Al Gore had a big utility bill AND invests in green technology, so obviously global warming is a hoax!

What this fuss over emails and comments in computer code is really about is turf. Read the list of charges echoed throughout the right-wing spin machine and ask yourself whether warming deniers can live up to any of the standards they hold actual climate researchers to. They can't.

What the deniers are trying to do is claim exclusive rights to marginalizing critics, obscuring opposing viewpoints and burying facts. They are asserting their flagrant double standard whereby all researchers must behave with impeccable professionalism and full transparency and be willing to prove their purity by living in austere modesty, far from any desire for comfort or financial security. If any researcher violates any of the standards denier's zealously impose on them, the whole scientific community must pay.

Only deniers are allowed to be void of substance, glib and intemperate, selective of which facts they will acknowledge and dismissive of opponents. When they see someone like Mann acting like deniers always have, it makes them seethe with jealousy. How dare a scientist reach one tiptoe into their endless bag of tricks! Tricks are for the lying right; everyone else must be pure.

The trick is to get the right-wing global warming deniers all frothed at the mouth and ranting by using English in a fairly generic way. But, that can be tricky...after all everyone knows...silly rabbits that trix are for kidz.

_________________________________________________
"You can't fix stupid..." ~ Ron White"
"I never said I wasn't a brat..." ~ Talidapali

It looks like everybody has run out of personal attacks. In fact it looks like about six or seven posts have been cut off the end of the thread. I’m sure that it was an error and it had nothing to do with their content. It couldn’t be that a newbie opponent shows up and is taken to task by the regular tough guys here. He returns fire, doesn’t retreat, and all of a sudden the sharper retorts go missing. If it was an error I saved the page if you want to restore it.

Bingo. That there a few missing pieces to a jigsaw puzzle does not prevent identification of the puzzle's subject from the overwhelming number of correct pieces already in place.

How is it that you are still being duped by the Moonie Times and the fossil fuel industries?

I guess I’ll have to add a little fuel to the fire ever so often. No pun intended.

Since the CRU and NASA databases are the main basis for climate warming research the skeptics have wanted to look at their data. The CRU data is out on the net and NASA is next. Wonder what will be found there if it hasn’t already been dumped.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/03/researcher-says-nasa-hid...

“Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.”

“Mark Hess, public affairs director for the Goddard Space Flight Center which runs the GISS laboratory, said they are working on Mr. Horner's request, though he couldn't say why they have taken so long.”

“He said he was unfamiliar with the British controversy and couldn't say whether NASA was susceptible to the same challenges to its data.”

He’s the public affairs officer and he does know about the “British controversy”. Yeah! There are some competent people working there?

Then Babs is more interested in punishing the people that provided the public with data that we had a right to see in the first place. Or may be she won’t.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/70249-boxer-hacked-clim...

"We may well have a hearing on this, we may not. We may have a briefing for senators, we may not," Boxer said. "Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated.”

Then the House Select Committee on Global Warming held a hearing.

http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/02/what-no-raise-your-right-hand-photo-...

“The Ranking Republican Jim Sensenbrenner (WI) requested that the two administration science witnesses — White House science advisor John Holdren, most recently seen in the ClimateGate emails defending the erasing from history the Medieval Warm Period, and NOAA administrator and longtime activist Jane Loubchenco — be sworn in before testifying.”
“Chairman Ed Markey conferred, then denied the request.”
“Could lead to all sorts of unpleasant things. Like the truth. Or consequences.”

The lady actually brought something for show and tell. Go to the committee web site to see how excited everyone was.

This man seems to think that science has lost its way.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000142405274870410710457457209199373784...

“What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.”

And I thought that the scientist just wanted be helpful to society.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/Former-NASA-climate-scientist-pl...

“A former top climate scientist who had become of one the scientific world's most cited authorities on the human effect on Earth's atmosphere was sentenced to probation Tuesday after pleading guilty to steering lucrative no-bid contracts to his wife's company.”
“In addition to a year's probation, former NASA manager Mark Schoeberl, 60, of Silver Spring, was also fined $10,000 and ordered to put in 50 hours of community service. “

“Schoeberl was the chief scientist of the Goddard Space Flight Center's Earth Sciences Division and the head of the Aura Project, a NASA mission to study the Earth's ozone layer, air quality and climate. He has written extensively about the depletion of the ozone level, and the influence of humans on global climate change”

And lastly, for now. Jimmy seems to support a scientific dictatorship. Headed by him?

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/12/03/top-climate-scientist-says-copen...

“James Hansen, a leading climate scientist who was influential in convincing the world to take notice of global warming, says this month's climate summit in Copenhagen is on "a disaster track," The Guardian reports. Despite believing climate change is a serious danger, Hansen said that it will be better for the world if the Copenhagen meeting ends in collapse.”

“He calls the Obama administration's policies on the issue "half-assed."

So far you've launched ad hominem attacks on everyone here in your attempt to win friends and influence people.

Scientists and those who follow them are leaning about 400 to 1 scared to freaking out about our planet's failing health due to excess carbon emissions. That's even way lower than the average percentage of sociopaths in the human popuation and an extremely high rate of agreement.

You are that guy standing in the stairwell of the World Trade Towers on 9-11 shouting through the megaphone, "Everything's under control...Go back to your offices!"

We are watching the human race attempt suicide at the behest of corporate mercenaries spending massive funds on your disinformation campaign.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/12/05/climate.data.met.office/

Believe it or not this is SOP for both sides i.e. Mathews, Schultz, Maddow, Olbermann, etc. on the left. Of course none of us watch any of those people do we?

Getting further off topic, I found this part kind of amusing. Shultz and Maddow didn't exist two years ago (on TV), and nobody except sports fans knew who Olbermann was. The 2008 elections changed all that, and a liberal/progressive viewpoint finally got a voice on cable TV news.*

But no, I don't watch them either. I quit watching Olbermann during the primaries, and only watched Maddow and Shultz a couple of times when they debuted just to see how their act would translate to TV from Air America. I guess I do watch Matthews occasionally (like once every two or three months) when there's something going on and I want to get the talking heads frothing at the mouth take. He's pretty good at provoking his guests.

And speaking of Air America, remember when Rushbots said it wouldn't last six months? How long ago was that? And now two of their on-air personalities have prime time MSNBC shows, and one got himself elected to the United States Senate. Go figure.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program...

(*I think this is the real objection to MSNBC: Conservatives are frustrated that they no longer control the message that dominates the airwaves, just like "liberals" were frustrated for eight or ten years before that.)

Isn’t it enough they want us to sit around cold and in the dark? Puritans!!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1233414/Copenhagen-prostitutes-promise-make-city-steamy-hot--offering-climate-conference-delegates-free-sex.html

Copenhagen's Lord Mayor has written to all 500 climate change delegates pleading with them to abstain from using services of the city's 'unsustainable' prostitutes.

Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6945445.ece

The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change skeptics.

“An artifact of poor mathematics":

http://www.thestarphoenix.com/technology/stick+craw+climate+change+crew/2307733/story.html?id=2307733

They also showed that Mann's calculations ignored the data showing a major warming trend in the 15th century, much like the warming of the 20th Century.

"That discovery hit me like a bombshell," wrote one scientist in the MIT Technology Review in 2004. "Suddenly the 'hockey stick,' the poster child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics."

In 2007, M and M scored again, finding errors in NASA's own long-term temperature records. The agency was forced to issue a correction, stating that 1934, not 1998, was the warmest year recorded in the United States.

This year, M and M have also raised questions about the accuracy of another hockey stick-shaped graph, this one by a British climatologist. The Canadians showed that the British graph - also showing drastically warmer 20th century temperatures than in the past - is based on tree ring samples taken from a mere 12 tree cores in a single region of Russia.

Don’t bring that trash in here:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/05/skeptics-press-obama-on-climate-summit/?feat=home_headlines

Climate-change skeptics, fired up by the controversy over a series of British scientists' e-mails, are putting President Obama on notice: Don't commit the United States to any long-term goals at next week's climate summit in Copenhagen.

One of the strongest such warnings has come from a member of the president's own party, Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia.

"Recent statements by Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern indicate that negotiators may be intending to commit the United States to a nationwide emission-reduction program," Mr. Webb wrote in a letter to the president.

"As you well know from your time in the Senate, only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country."

Fake but accurate:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/300ubchn.asp

As in the furor over Dan Rather's fabricated documents about George W. Bush's National Guard service back in 2004, bloggers have been swarming over the material and highlighting the bad faith, bad science, and possibly even criminal behavior (deleting material requested under Britain's Freedom of Information Act and perhaps tax evasion) of a small group of highly influential climate scientists. As with Rathergate, diehard climate campaigners are repairing to the "fake but accurate" defense

Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who in the past has trafficked in the most extreme climate mongering: "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow," Monbiot wrote in a November 23 column. "The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. .  .  . I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them. .  .  . I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely." Monbiot has joined a number of prominent climate scientists in demanding that the CRU figures resign their posts and be excluded from future climate science work

. What they reveal is something problematic for the scientific community as a whole, namely, the tendency of scientists to cross the line from being disinterested investigators after the truth to advocates for a preconceived conclusion about the issues at hand

One of the things the CRU emails prove is that the oft-cited figure of 2,000 top scientists is misleading; the circle of genuinely active scientists in the work of CRU and related institutions in this country is very small. Nonetheless, Al Gore and other climate campaigners have leaned heavily on the IPCC process as proof for their assertions that human-caused global warming is a matter of "settled" science. This, even though, in the last IPCC report on the science of climate change in 2007, the terms "uncertain" or "uncertainty" appear over 1,300 times in 900 pages, and the report describes our level of scientific understanding of key aspects of climate as "low" or "very low." The IPCC chapter on the climate models that are the principal tool predicting our future doom refers to "significant uncertainties" in all the models, and admits that "models still show significant errors."

You just can’t trust research funded by “Big Oil”:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/12/05/climategate-research-unit-sought-funds-shell-oil

Other e-mail messages obtained from the University of East Anglia's computers also showed officials at the school's CRU solicited support from ExxonMobil and BP Amoco.

And now for a little irony:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6738111/Climategate-reveals-the-most-influential-tree-in-the-world.html

Little of this extraordinary story been reported by the BBC or most of our mass-media, so possessed by groupthink that they are unable to see the mountain of evidence now staring them in the face. Not for nothing was Copenhagen the city in which Hans Andersen wrote his story about the Emperor whose people were brainwashed into believing that he was wearing a beautiful suit of clothes. But today there are a great many more than just one little boy ready to point out that this particular Emperor is wearing nothing at all.

The other is that the ugly, drum-like concrete building at the University of East Anglia which houses the CRU is named after its founder, the late Hubert Lamb, the doyen of historical climate experts. It was Professor Lamb whose most famous contribution to climatology was his documenting and naming of what he called the Medieval Warm Epoch, that glaring contradiction of modern global warming theory which his successors have devoted untold efforts to demolishing. If only they had looked at the evidence of those Siberian trees in the spirit of true science, they might have told us that all their efforts to show otherwise were in vain, and that their very much more distinguished predecessor was right after all.

The Truth About the ClimateGate E-Mails:

Yes, critics will cherry-pick and play "gotcha," as they have with the e-mails, but the science of climate change is robust enough to withstand that.

Other e-mails reflect the ugly politicization of climate science, which is unending. Climate scientists have been subject to harassment and character assassination (Google "Ben Santer" and "Wall Street Journal" to see what I mean), and just last week, Rep. James Sensenbrenner accused the researchers of "scientific fascism" and, with GOP colleagues, made the stunningly stupid demand that the EPA therefore stop regulating greenhouse emissions. It may be human nature to respond in kind; in one e-mail, a scientist wishes he could beat up a leading denier. But the scientists should be bigger than the know-nothings. Rather than "circl[ing] the wagons," as Curry put it, respond to misinformation with physics, data, and analysis as, for instance, the RealClimate blog does.

Especially since the science—paleoclimate data, heating in the stratosphere relative to the troposphere, and other fingerprints of manmade climate change—is so compelling. Take the two papers by climate skeptics that triggered that "redefine the peer-reviewed literature" e-mail. Both were cited and discussed in the IPCC report—and have now been shown to be riddled with errors. Science worked as it should, good research crowding out bad.

Dear Mr. President:

I would like to express my concern regarding reports that the Administration may believe it has the unilateral power to commit the government of the United States to certain standards that may be agreed upon at the upcoming United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties 15 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The phrase “politically binding” has been used.

Although details have not been made available, recent statements by Special Envoy on Climate Change Todd Stern indicate that negotiators may be intending to commit the United States to a nationwide emission reduction program. As you well know from your time in the Senate, only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country.

I would very much appreciate having this matter clarified in advance of the Copenhagen meetings.

Sincerely,

Jim Webb
United States Senator

Thank you Senator Webb.

Saudi Arabia calls for 'climategate' investigation

Homework:

IPCC Assessment Reports

IPCC Special Reports

IPCC Methodology Reports

ORNL director:

"Certainly, the scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change is pretty robust and does not depend on any particular group," he said. "I don't think it changes fundamentally any of the conclusions."

[..]

Mason said if you took every report that's associated with any of the e-mails and tossed them out, it still wouldn't fundamentally change the factual argument regarding climate change.

He also notes that, still, public confidence in scientific research is important.

I would add that clearly there are efforts to undermine public confidence in climate research.

public confidence in scientific research is important.

Meh. I think scientists just have to find, as the flaks are wont to say, a new framing device.

Little does Joe Wilson's state of South Carolina know, like A9 does, that wind power just doesn't work!  Besides it's too dangerous, unlike say, coal mining.

What would Joe or A9 say to GE and Clemson University?  Note in the link comments how there's no corner of the intertubes that doesn't have its A9s, Rushbots, Palinites, etc.  (Al Gore! WAHH!!!!!)

Link...

You are wearisome and I think you've been here before under other names. 

Me thinks so too.  For some reason the initial W comes to mind.

But it isn't science. Scientific method doesn't follow this path.

From the mind of Dr. A. Neun.  Tell us more, prof.  "It starts with rightwing bloggers acting at the behest of our friends who sell us our wonderful fuels!..."

This is interesting. If you don't accept AGW as fact according to Kari Marie Norgaard, a Whitman University sociologist who’s studied public attitudes towards climate science, you're in denial.

Now even sociologist insist we must comply. Really no room for debate as this has been decided.

Even as the science of global warming gets stronger, fewer Americans believe it’s real. In some ways, it’s nearly as jarring a disconnect as enduring disbelief in evolution or carbon dating. And according to Kari Marie Norgaard, a Whitman University sociologist who’s studied public attitudes towards climate science, we’re in denial.

“Our response to disturbing information is very complex. We negotiate it. We don’t just take it in and respond in a rational way,” said Norgaard.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared in 2007 that greenhouse gases had reached levels not seen in 650,000 years, and were rising rapidly as a result of people burning fossil fuel. Because these gases trap the sun’s heat, they would — depending on human energy habits — heat Earth by an average of between 1.5 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by century’s end. Even a midrange rise would likely disrupt the planet’s climate, producing droughts and floods, acidified oceans, altered ecosystems and coastal cities drowned by rising seas.

“If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future,” said Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, when the report was released. “This is the defining moment.”

 Wow.  I guess you convinced me.  None of that AGW crap for me.  Hot damn!  I'm gonna convert all my energy consumption to raw coal.  For cars, V8s for all!  Do they make Jeep CJ7s with diesel powered HEMIs?  Yeee-Hahh!!!!

As noted in a post earlier this week, The EPA on Monday announced a finding that:

...the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases--carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)--in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

 This is well articulated, from a molecular biologist:

 The scientific process that leads to discoveries that produce antibiotics and chemotherapies is built on the same structure that produces data on global warming. Scientists though are very careful, as you say, to point out that science is never absolute, and that we always leave the door open for new and better theories. However, many have taken this to mean that lack of 100% consensus or an absolute truth somehow invalidates the system. Keep in mind that the laws of gravity are still subject to future updating and/or refutation in light of new evidence, but if I hold a bowling ball over your head, I'm pretty sure you're going to be afraid that it will fall. Unfortunately what seems to happen is that when you have a debate on television on something like evolution, even if you have 99% of scientists believing in it, and one that doesn't, as long as you have a one-on-one debate many see it as 50:50. They take this to mean that "all the science isn't in," so we shouldn't believe the majority.   ... 

What does this belief one way or the other have to do with climate science?  

Do you really believe water causes global warming?  And haven't you argued that there is no warming?  Do you once and for all acknowledge warming at all?