Bummer. I Didn’t Make the List

From Grist:

James Inhofe.
Marc Morano.
Richard Lindzen.
Bjørn Lomborg.
George W. Bush.

Names of shame, ignominy, criminals against humanity, against planet Earth itself.  Agents of the lethal delays in our response to escalating, accelerating, catastrophic global warming.

26 thoughts on “Bummer. I Didn’t Make the List”

  1. Did you notice that the author of the linked piece explicity mentions “positive feedback” as the key to driving climate change? That’s interesting, as it is seldom put so explicitly in the popular press.

    He specifically mentions feedback due to melting of reflective sea ice (footnote 1)…do you have any comments on that?

  2. Outstanding. Publishing that kind of stuff is just crazy. Good spot.

    That is so counterproductive to their cause.

  3. Interesting stuff, if only for the extreme religiosity of the phrasing. This sounds like something from the Inquisition in its religious fervor. Which is all pretty scary, when you think about it.

    There have been large books written about the futility of using rational arguments in religious controversies. Looks to me like this is one of those situations.

  4. I read “The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria”

    For the most part, the people in the book support AGW but were upset for the flogging they got because they couldn’t produce data to support AGW in their field.

  5. Why is Lomborg listed as a “denier?”
    ed – because he’s had the temerity to say things like “it’s not all bad” and “people are exaggerating”, rather than sticking to the One True Faith.

    It had a nice ending though:

    “Perhaps we must confront and embrace the depths of our despair before we can see clearly. Once we do, however, the remarkable fact is that we can likely do something about climate catastrophe, despite the necessity, for the moment, of bypassing our globally failed political process. Very briefly, local self-sufficiency and sustainability, steady-state no-impact economics, eco-restoration, and rational birth reduction (starting with but clearly not limited to “developed” countries, whose impacts per capita are many multiples of third-world countries).”

    Or in English, “We’re all doomed unless we go back to the Stone Age”.

  6. The AGW crowd is so confusing.
    It is not skeptics who deny that CO2 is not the main driver of the climate.
    It is not skeptics who deny that storm strength, storm frequency and global ACE is unchanged to down.
    It is not skeptics who deny that windmill power is unreliable, crazy expensive, and destructive of the environment.
    It is not skeptics who deny that the ocean is not acidifying.
    It is not skeptics who deny that global temperature readings are highly suspect as to accuracy and warming bias.
    It is not skeptics who deny that Ocean Heat Content is dramatically below what was predicted.
    It is not skeptics who deny that Hansen has made wild, incorrect predictions that have failed.
    It is not skeptics who deny that ocean levels are not rising normally.
    I guess if I was as confused as our friends over at Grist, I would be lashing out as well.

  7. ed: (November 11, 2009, 1:23 pm)

    Did you notice that the author of the linked piece explicity mentions “positive feedback” as the key to driving climate change? That’s interesting, as it is seldom put so explicitly in the popular press.

    He specifically mentions feedback due to melting of reflective sea ice (footnote 1)…do you have any comments on that?

    What is interesting is that he fails to mention the most likely negative feedback loop, to whit:

    Ice acts as an insulator – see stage [2] below

    1. More temp = Less ice = more open ocean
    2. More open ocean = more heat lost to atmosphere (and hence to space).
    3. More heat loss = lower temps = more ice -> goto [1]

    (Open ocean will of course absorb some energy from sunlight but at high latitudes this is less than the effect of [2] due to low angle of incidence)

    It’s a theory.

    The basic premise of all positive feedback loops seems fundamentally broken to me – if the planet worked on positive feedback we’d have been in the mire a long time ago. Natural systems that are (over large timescales) inherently stable must be predicated on a preponderance of negative feedback mechanisms over positive ones.

    Or maybe my world view is just too basic?

    Cheers

    Mark.

  8. A basic world view works for me. The book “snowball earth” makes a good case for the world being covered in ice, but the world bounced back to the balmy era of the dinosaurs. The planet makes a pretty good case that it knows what it’s doing.

  9. I don’t mean to give the earth consciousness, just that the planets natural systems seem to work towards equilibrium and not against it.

  10. He specifically mentions feedback due to melting of reflective sea ice (footnote 1)…do you have any comments on that?

    Yes, he is barking mad.

    The albedo of water varies according to the angle of incidence. At Arctic latitudes, water’s albedo is just slightly less than newly fallen snow, and greater than stuff that has been laying around for awhile.

    For someone who blathers on about basic physics, one would think he would be a little more cognizant of this simple fact.

  11. Hey Skipper,
    That is very interesting. I would like to be able to use that in a few discussions. Do you have any links for that?

  12. I couldn’t find anthing specific on specific albedo as a function of latitude, but this might be of interest.

    Optical properties and remote sensing of inland and coastal waters By R. P. Bukata -pg 61.

    http://books.google.com/books?id=FVpVENnqfLUC&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=water+albedo+angle+of+incidence&source=bl&ots=k1iktpUO3O&sig=ZiSxpBGsox-ca2Fn529wVfwv0E0&hl=en&ei=ud0AS8TpBIjSsQOJveyHCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=water%20albedo%20angle%20of%20incidence&f=false

    It states that at latitudes higher than 60 degrees north or south, increased cloudiness results in a DECREASE in albedo, but doesn’t give specific numbers.

    Considering that stormier and windier weather -> more whitecaps-> a higher surface albedo and cooler temperatures, how could AGWers ever have argued that global warming would lead to more hurricanes? Hadn’t they considered the negative albedo feedback?

  13. Alan,
    Thanks.
    AGW is all about extracting simple, linear and incorrect conclusions from complex, non-linear systems.

  14. We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.

    We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
    Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.

    This is a limited time, very unofficial offer.

    http://ftp.tomcity.ru/incoming/free/FOI2009.zip

    Sample:

    0926010576.txt * Mann: working towards a common goal
    1189722851.txt * Jones: “try and change the Received date!”
    0924532891.txt * Mann vs. CRU
    0847838200.txt * Briffa & Yamal 1996: “too much growth in recent years makes it difficult to derive a valid age/growth curve”
    0926026654.txt * Jones: MBH dodgy ground
    1225026120.txt * CRU’s truncated temperature curve
    1059664704.txt * Mann: dirty laundry
    1062189235.txt * Osborn: concerns with MBH uncertainty
    0926947295.txt * IPCC scenarios not supposed to be realistic
    0938018124.txt * Mann: “something else” causing discrepancies
    0939154709.txt * Osborn: we usually stop the series in 1960
    0933255789.txt * WWF report: beef up if possible
    0998926751.txt * “Carefully constructed” model scenarios to get “distinguishable results”
    0968705882.txt * CLA: “IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science but production of results”
    1075403821.txt * Jones: Daly death “cheering news”
    1029966978.txt * Briffa – last decades exceptional, or not?
    1092167224.txt * Mann: “not necessarily wrong, but it makes a small difference” (factor 1.29)
    1188557698.txt * Wigley: “Keenan has a valid point”
    1118949061.txt * we’d like to do some experiments with different proxy combinations
    1120593115.txt * I am reviewing a couple of papers on extremes, so that I can refer to them in the chapter for AR4

  15. FOIA,
    Thank you for posting this. It is incredibly interesting.
    It seems to have been pulled in the past couple of hours.
    Any hope of posting this interesting information elsewhere?

  16. If someone has the ftp space, I’ll upload the file where you want it. Beware, the sites hosting this file are probably using excessive bandwidth. This is a hot file right now. Just post the ftp location.

  17. Dave,
    That is great. I will order a back copy. I was able to download a zipfile last night, and if successfully able to open it and use it will make sure it is widely seen.
    And Hadley has apparently confirmed the provenance of the data.
    Now that we see the corruption of the AGW leadership, it is time to push back. Hard.
    There is no reason that AGW-demanded policies should go any further at all.
    There is ever reason to critically audit each and every aspect, and each and every leader, of the aGW movement for at the least unlawfully destroying government property, misleading their respective governments, perjury in sworn testimony, etc.

  18. Dave,
    Thanks again for the super-manual link.
    I managed to fubar the winzip download I did last night, and so will need this.

  19. I guess Kevin Trenberth, etc. didn’t tell Grist that it ISN’T getting any warmer??? ROFL

    From: Kevin Trenberth

    To: Michael Mann

    Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

    Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate

    Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600

    The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

    Also, why is it on skeptic sites like here, Wattsup, Tom Nelson, etc. random people can just comment using random names but on Grist and so on you have to register? And on desmogblog I clicked on comments and – get this – it just went to ‘you are not authorized to view this page’. WTF? I landed on there from googling desmogblog, haven’t been on their site in about 2 years…

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