ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

[Paul Beckwith]

Re: ClimateGate

Accepter might be better, good question. Supporter implies on is cheering on warming...

[Ed Seedhouse]

Re: ClimateGate

I'm surprised people from B.C. are taking such a harsh stand in view of the record on global warming.

I can't see why guys from B.C. are hung up on climate change and pollution. B.C. mines coal, other minerals, oil and gas. They have the forestry industry and the pollution from the paper mills. Every time they have a forest fire, which is often, all that pollution spews into the air. B.C. is a province which depends on pollution to sustain its citizens.

How can you explain this?

Well, I am not "the people" I am me, and I voted against the governments that are doing the things you accuse us (mostly correctly) of doing. So my "explanation" is that B.C. is badly governed in many ways, and that's the result.

[Ed Seedhouse]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

What additional evidence do you require?

Even one bit from you would be a refreshing change. The stuff you cited, even if true, is not evidence against global warming, nor is it evidence that the warming was not caused by human activity. If you think it is you are unable to reason.

[Bob Gillanders]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

Here the evidence from Encyclopedia of Earth : http://www.eoearth.org/article/glacier

"Various types of paleoclimatic evidence suggest that the climate of the Earth has varied over time. The data suggest that during most of the Earth's history, global temperatures were probably 8 to 15° Celsius warmer than they are today. However, there were periods of times when the Earth's average global temperature became cold; cold enough for the formation of alpine glaciers and continental glaciers that extended in to the higher, middle and sometimes lower latitudes. In the last billion years of Earth's history, glacial periods have started at roughly 925, 800, 680, 450, 330, and 2 million years before present (B.P.). Of these ice ages, the most severe occurred at 800 million years ago when glaciers came within 5 degrees of the equator."

Earth undergoes constant changes. The misleading assumption that it's caused by the humans is not supported by evidence that cooling and warming of Earth happened before in the very long history of Earth.

What additional evidence do you require?

Ernest, we all agree that glaciers have come and gone numerous times, plunging the world into ice ages, and it will happen again. So what. Nobody is debating that. The debate is whether or not human activity is changing the climate. Glaciers are concrete evidence of very long term climate changes caused by mother nature. It has nothing to do with the current debate.

[Gary Ruben]

Re: ClimateGate

Well, I am not "the people" I am me, and I voted against the governments that are doing the things you accuse us (mostly correctly) of doing. So my "explanation" is that B.C. is badly governed in many ways, and that's the result.

I realize you can't do anything about lightning strikes starting forest fires. However, if the polluting companies simply left, where would your tax dollars and high paying jobs come from? Besides the rates for Major Industrial, there are royalty rates on oil and gas and minerals. How would you propose replacing that income?

[Tony Boron]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

Even one bit from you would be a refreshing change. The stuff you cited, even if true, is not evidence against global warming, nor is it evidence that the warming was not caused by human activity. If you think it is you are unable to reason.

Sunspots !

Discuss amongst yourselves.

[Dan Scoones]

Re: ClimateGate

I'm surprised people from B.C. are taking such a harsh stand in view of the record on global warming.

I can't see why guys from B.C. are hung up on climate change and pollution. B.C. mines coal, other minerals, oil and gas. They have the forestry industry and the pollution from the paper mills. Every time they have a forest fire, which is often, all that pollution spews into the air. B.C. is a province which depends on pollution to sustain its citizens.

How can you explain this? B.C. doesn't even discourage pollution. They tax it to turn a buck with the carbon tax.

How about using your "intellectual defences" and explain this in a logical manner which is consistent with your stance.

There is a big problem with your argument here. You use the same term "B.C." throughout, even though it is clear that it has different meanings in different contexts.

When you say that "B.C. mines coal, etc." you are really saying that "large corporations in British Columbia, mine coal, etc." When you say that "B.C. doesn't even discourage pollution," you are really saying "the government of British Columbia doesn't discourage pollution, etc." When you say that "guys from B.C. are really hung up on climate change," you imply that "every person in British Columbia is really hung up on climate change."

You suggest there is an inconsistency for "guys from B.C." to be concerned about pollution when "B.C." doesn't discourage pollution. But you haven't shown this to be the case -- you have merely expressed an unsupported opinion. I think the onus is on you to justify your own claims, not on Ed to "explain this in a logical manner."

[Gary Ruben]

Re: ClimateGate

There is a big problem with your argument here. You use the same term "B.C." throughout, even though it is clear that it has different meanings in different contexts.

When you say that "B.C. mines coal, etc." you are really saying that "large corporations in British Columbia, mine coal, etc." When you say that "B.C. doesn't even discourage pollution," you are really saying "the government of British Columbia doesn't discourage pollution, etc." When you say that "guys from B.C. are really hung up on climate change," you imply that "every person in British Columbia is really hung up on climate change."

You suggest there is an inconsistency for "guys from B.C." to be concerned about pollution when "B.C." doesn't discourage pollution. But you haven't shown this to be the case -- you have merely expressed an unsupported opinion. I think the onus is on you to justify your own claims, not on Ed to "explain this in a logical manner."

BC has control. They put a moratorium on Uranium exploration and mining years ago. Maybe it's gone now. I didn't keep track. They have royalty interests and are partner by their interest. When the companies weren't drilling enough gas wells they decreased the royalty to try to entice the drillers to develop the fields and that's this year. They sell the leases and permits. Do you also contend the U.S. and Canadian governments, which hold interests in GM, don't make autos? After all, they don't really assemble the polluting autos but merely own an equity interest and collect taxes.

B.C. doesn't discourage pollution. They tax it with their carbon tax. To make laws which will actually have a meaningful effect on reducing pollution would cut down on the tax revenue.

If taxation in B.C. isn't a problem how come so many companies are taking local governments to court on the issue? Can you tell me another province where it's going on?

Seeing as how it's people who elect and re-elect governments, it is the people who hold some responsibility for the policies.

Governments don't have money. You give it to them. If tax paying businesses pull out you'll have to either give them more money or pull out as well. Expenses won't decrease but revenue will.

[Vlad Drkulec]

Re: Spin!

Is there any chance, Ed, that you believe/say this because I am leaning away from your opinions?

I agree that the media is in full spin mode but the center cannot hold. Soon this story will be too big for even the mainstream media to ignore. They will be dragged to the spectacle kicking and screaming all the way. The bloggers thought it was a huge and well executed hoax at first so they nibbled at its edges and got more excited as they checked the veracity of the story that was unfolding.

I think Obama intended to make some grand gesture of commitment in Copenhagen. Even Democrats are uneasy and have cautioned Obama against writing any checks that he can't cash, given the poll numbers which suggest that 59% of Americans believe that some scientists have falsified data to support global warming. This is even before the information in those emails has been widely disseminated and understood.

[Ed Seedhouse]

Re: ClimateGate

I realize you can't do anything about lightning strikes starting forest fires. However, if the polluting companies simply left, where would your tax dollars and high paying jobs come from? Besides the rates for Major Industrial, there are royalty rates on oil and gas and minerals. How would you propose replacing that income?

Well, since our current system is heading us toward a major disaster, we'll have to find a way won't we? Or suffer the consequences. What will the cost be of that?

What you seem to be implying is "we can't change, because it would cost a lot of money". But not changing will cost us much more actual real wealth.

Scientists are giving us an unpleasant message. People are responding by shooting the messenger as they so often do.
But that doesn't change the facts. If our economic system can't adapt to the coming changes then it will die and a new one will take it's place.

[Vlad Drkulec]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

Its over folks.

Interesting quote on the following site:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ge...-michael-mann/

I am a climate scientist, and it is clear that the evidence that "human activity is prominent [sic] agent in global warming" is NOT overwhelming. The repeated statement that it is does not make it so. Further, even if we accepted the hypothesis, cap-and-trade legislation does not do anything about it.
Here are the facts. We have known for years that the Mann hockey stick model was wrong, and we know why it was wrong (Mann used only selected data to normalize the principal component analysis, not all of it). He retracted the model. We have known for years that the Medieval Warm period occurred, where the temperatures were higher than they are now (Chaucer spoke of vineyards in northern England). Long before ClimateGate it was known that the IPCC people were trying to fudge the data to get rid of the MWP. And for good reason. If the MWP is "allowed" to exist, this means that temperatures higher than today did not then create a "runaway greenhouse" in the Middle Ages with methane released from the Arctic tundra, ice cap albedo lost, sea levels rising to flood London, etc. etc.), and means that Jim Hansen's runaway greenhouse that posits only amplifying feedbacks (and no damping feedbacks) will not happen now. We now know that the models on which the IPCC alarms are based to not do clouds, they do not do the biosphere, they do not explain the Pliocene warming, and they have never predicted anything, ever, correctly. As the believers know but, like religious faithful, every wrong prediction (IPCC underestimated some trends) is claimed to justify even greater alarm (not that the models are poor approximations for reality); the underpredictions (where are the storms? Why "hide the decline"?) are ignored or hidden. As for CO2, we have known for years that CO2 increases have never in the past 300,000 years caused temperature rise (CO2 rise trails temperature increase). IPCC scientists know this too (see their "Copenhagen Diagnosis"); we know that their mathematical fudges that dismiss the fact that CO2 has not been historically causative of temperature rise are incorrect as well. We have also known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered. We have long known that Jones's paper dismissing this explanation (Jones, et al. 1990. Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land, Nature 347 169- 172) is wrong and potentially fraudulent (see the same data used to confirm urban heat islands in Wang, W-C, Z. Zeng, T. R Karl, 1990. Urban Heat Islands in China. Geophys. Res. Lett. 17, 2377-2380). Everyone except Briffa knows that the Briffa conclusions are wrong, and why they are wrong; groups in Finland, Canada (lots of places actually) show cooling by this proxy, not warming; the IPCC even printed the Finn's plot upside down to convert the fact (cooling) into the dogma (warming).
Prof. McCarthy is, of course, part of the IPCC that has suppressed dissenting viewpoints based on solid climate science. His claim to support by "peer review" is nonsense; he has helped corrupt the peer review process. We now have documentary evidence that Jones, Mann, and the other IPCC scientists have been gaming peer review and blackballing opponents. On this point, the entire IPCC staff, including Prof. McCarthy, neither have nor deserve our trust.
We have tolerated years of the refusal of Mann and Jones to release data. Now, we learn that much of these data were discarded (one of about 4 data sets that exist), something that would in any other field of science lead to disbarment. We have been annoyed by Al Gore, who declared this science "settled", refused to debate, and demonized skeptics (this is anti-science: debate and skepticism are the core of real science, which is never settled). The very fact that Prof. McCarthy attempts to bluff Congress by asserting the existence of fictional "overwhelming evidence" continues this anti-science activity.
All of this was known before Climategate. What was not known until now was the extent to which Jones and Mann were simply deceiving themselves (which happens often in science) or fraudently attempting to deceive others. I am not willing to crucify Jones on the word "trick". Nor, for that matter, on the loss of primary data, keeping only "value added" data (which is hopelessly bad science, but still conceivably not fraud).
But the computer code is transparently fraudulent. Here, one finds matrices that add unexplained numbers to recent temperatures and subtract them from older temperatures (these numbers are hard-programmed in), splining observational data to model data, and other smoking guns, all showing that they were doing what was necessary to get the answers that the IPCC wanted, not the answers that the data held. They knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it. If, as Prof. McCarthy insists, "peer review" was functioning, and the IPCC reports are rigorously peer reviewed, why was this not caught? When placing it in context made it highly likely that this type of fraud was occurring?
The second question is: Will this revelation be enough to cause the "global warming believers" to abandon their crusade, and for people to return to sensible environmental science (water use, habitat destruction, land use, this kind of thing)? Perhaps it will. Contrary to Prof. McCarthy's assertion, we have not lost just one research project amid dozens of others that survive. A huge set of primary data are apparently gone. Satellite data are scarcely 40 years old. Everything is interconnected, and anchored on these few studies. Even without the corruption of the peer review process, this is as big a change as quantum mechanics was in physics a century ago.
But now we know that peer review was corrupted, and that no "consensus" exists. The "2500 scientists agree" number is fiction (God knows who they are counting, but to get to this number, they must be including referees, spouses, and pets).
The best argument now for AGW is to argue that CO2 is, after all, a greenhouse gas, its concentration is, after all, increasing, and feedbacks that regulated climate for millions of years might (we can hypothesize) be overwhelmed by human CO2 emissions. It is a hypothesis worthy of investigation, but it has little evidentiary support.
Thus, there is hope that Climategate will bring to an end the field of political climatology, and allow climatology to again become a science. That said, people intrinsically become committed to ideas. The Pope will not become a Protestant even if angel Gabriel taps him on the shoulder and asks him to. Likewise, Prof. McCarthy may claim until the day he retires that there remains "overwhelming support" for his position, even if every last piece of data supporting it is controverted. As a graduate student at Harvard, I was told that fields do not advance because people change their minds; rather, fields advance because people die.

[Ed Seedhouse]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

Sunspots !

Discuss amongst yourselves.

This has been considered, and the evidence does not support it.
Evidence please, not random squawks.

[Ed Seedhouse]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

So Vlad reads a random blog and believes some guy's unsupported claim that he is a "climate scientist". Typical, I am afraid, of the abysmal level of his postings.

Dear Vlad: the more you post the deeper you are digging yourself in.

[Vlad Drkulec]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

The stolen emails are from one place. All its work/research could be ignored and it would not affect the other science going on around the world. The vast majority of the raw data can be found on the web, for all to see.

No doubt the rest of the emails (only a selection was released) will be released before the next series of world talks next year.

You have obviously not seen the emails. The emails may be from one place but they show a conspiracy with tentacles around the world. The raw data has been erased or destroyed to avoid scrutiny and possible exposure of the extent of the fraudulent activity. I couldn't have received a better birthday present.

By next year this meme that AGW science is a scam based upon fabricated scientific evidence will spread so far that those talks will be stillborn.

[Vlad Drkulec]

Re: ClimateGate - A Question for Ed Seedhouse and Paul Beckwith

So Vlad reads a random blog and believes some guy's unsupported claim that he is a "climate scientist". Typical, I am afraid, of the abysmal level of his postings.

Dear Vlad: the more you post the deeper you are digging yourself in.

Have you suffered a traumatic head injury recently? If so, it could provide an explanation of your posts.

If this person chooses to be anonymous about his credentials as a climate scientist, it is quite possible that he fears repercussions of the type that are exposed in the emails that have been leaked or perhaps it is because "climate science" has reached such a state of disrepute that he chooses not to be associated with the "science" anymore.