5% Chance? No Freaking Way

Via William Biggs, Paul Krugman is quoting a study that says there is a 5% chance man’s CO2 will raise temperatures 10C and a 1% chance man will raise global temperatures by 20 Celsius.  The study he quotes gets these results by applying various statistical tests to the outcomes from the IPCC climate models.

I am calling Bullshit.

There are any number of problems with the Weitzman study that is the basis for these numbers, but I will address just two.

The more uncertain the models, the more certain the need for action?

The first problem is in looking at the tail end (e.g. the last 1 or 5 percent) of a distribution of outcomes for which we don’t really know the mean and certainly don’t know the standard deviation.  In fact, the very uncertainty in the modeling and lack of understanding of the values of the most basic assumptions in the models creates an enormous standard deviation.  As a result, the confidence intervals are going to be huge, such that about every imaginable value may be within them. 

In most sciences, outsiders would use the fact of these very wide confidence intervals to deride the findings, arguing that the models were close to meaningless and they would be reluctant to make policy decisions based on these iffy findings.  Weitzman, however, uses this ridiculously wide range of potential projections and total lack of certainty to increase the pressure to take policy steps based on the models, by cleverly taking advantage of the absurdly wide confidence intervals to argue that the tail way out there to the right spells catastrophe.  By this argument, the worse the models and the more potential errors that exist, then the wider the distribution of outcomes and therefore the greater the risk and need for government action.  The less we understand anthropogenic warming, the more vital it is that we take immediate, economy-destroying action to combat it.  Following this argument to its limit, the risks we know nothing about are the ones we need to spend the absolute most money on.  By this logic, the space aliens we know nothing about out there pose an astronomical threat that justifies immediate application of 100% of the world’s GDP to space defenses. 

My second argument is simpler:  Looking at the data, there is just no freaking way. 

In the charts below, I have given climate alarmists every break.  I have used the most drastic CO2 forecast (A2) from the IPCC fourth assessment, and run the numbers for a peak concentration around 800ppm.  I have used the IPCC’s own formula for the effect of CO2 on temperatures without feedback  (Temperature Increase = F(C2) – F(C1) where F(c)=Ln (1+1.2c+0.005c^2 +0.0000014c^3) and c is the concentration in ppm).  Note that skeptics believe that both the 800ppm assumption and the IPCC formula above overstate warming and CO2 buildup, but as you will see, it is not going to matter.

The other formula we need is the feedback formula.  Feedback multiplies the temperature increase from CO2 alone by a factor F, such that F=1/(1-f), where f is the percentage of the original forcing that shows up as first order feedback gain (or damping if negative).

The graph below shows various cases of temperature increase vs. CO2 concentration, based on different assumptions about the physics of the climate system.  All are indexed to equal zero at the pre-industrial CO2 concentration of about 280ppm.

So, the blue line below is the temperature increase vs. CO2 concentration without feedback, using the IPCC formula mentioned above.  The pink is the same formula but with 60% positive feedback (1/[1-.6] = a 2.5 multiplier), and is approximately equal to the IPCC mean for case A2.  The purple line is with 75% positive feedback, and corresponds to the IPCC high-side temperature increase for case A2.  The orange and red lines represent higher positive feedbacks, and correspond to the 10C 5% case and 20C 1% case in Weitzman’s article.  Some of this is simplified, but in all important respects it is by-the-book based on IPCC assumptions.

Agwforecast1

OK, so what does this tell us?  Well, we can do something interesting with this chart.   We have actually moved part-way to the right on this chart, as CO2 today is now at 385ppm, up from the pre-industrial 280ppm.  As you can see, I have drawn this on the chart below.  We have also seen some temperature increase from CO2, though no one really knows what the increase due to CO2 has been vs. the increase due to the sun or other factors.  But the number really can’t be much higher than 0.6C, which is about the total warming we have recorded in the last century, and may more likely be closer to 0.3C.  I have drawn these two values on the chart below as well.

Agwforecast2

Again, there is some uncertainty in a key number (e.g. the amount of historic warming due to CO2) but you can see that it really doesn’t matter.  For any conceivable range of past temperature increases due to the CO2 increase from 280-385 ppm, the numbers are no where near, not even within an order of magnitude, of what one would expect to have seen if the assumptions behind the other lines were correct.  For example, if we were really heading to a 10C increase at 800ppm, we would have expected temperatures to have risen in the last 100 years by about 4C, which NO ONE thinks is even remotely the case.  And if there is zero chance historic warming from man-made CO2 is anywhere near 4C, then there is zero (not 5%, not 1%) chance future warming will hit 10C or 20C.

In fact, experience to date seems to imply that warming has been under even the no feedback case.  This should not surprise anyone in the physical sciences.  A warming line on this chart below the no feedback line would imply negative feedback or damping in the climate system.  And, in fact, most long term stable physical systems are dominated by such negative feedback and not by positive feedback.  In fact, it is hard to find many natural processes except for perhaps nuclear fission that are driven by positive feedbacks as high as one must assume to get the 10 and 20C warming cases.  In short, these cases are absurd, and we should be looking closely at whether even the IPCC mean case is overstated as well.

What climate alarmists will argue is that these curves are not continuous.  They believe that there is some point out there where the feedback fraction goes above 100%, and thus the gain goes infinite, and the temperature runs away suddenly.  The best example is fissionable material being relatively inert until it reaches critical mass, when a runaway nuclear fission reaction occurs. 

I hope all reasonable people see the problem with this.  The earth, on any number of occasions, has been hotter and/or had higher CO2 concentrations, and there is no evidence of this tipping point effect ever having occurred.  In fact, climate alarmists like Michael Mann contradict themselves by arguing (in the infamous hockey stick chart) that temperatures absent mankind have been incredibly stable for thousands of years, despite numerous forcings like volcanoes and the Maunder Minimum.  Systems this stable cannot reasonably be dominated by high positive feedbacks, much less tipping points and runaway processes.

Postscript:  I have simplified away lag effects and masking effects, like aerosol cooling.  Lag effects of 10-15 years barely change this analysis at all.  And aerosol cooling, given its limited area of effect (cooling aerosols are short-lived and so are geographically limited in area downwind of industrial areas) is unlikely to be masking more than a tenth or two of warming, if any.  The video below addresses all these issues in more depth, and provides more step-by-step descriptions of how the charts above were created

Update:  Lucia Liljegren of the Blackboard has created a distribution of the warming forecasts from numerous climate models and model runs used by the IPCC, with "weather noise" similar to what we have seen over the last few decades overlaid on the model mean 2C/century trend. The conclusion is that our experience in the last century is unlikely to be solely due to weather noise masking the long-term trend.  It looks like even the IPCC models, which are well below the 10C or 20C warming forecasts disused above, may themselves be too high.  (click for larger version)

Trendhistogramipccjune2008

While Weitzman was looking at a different type of distribution, it is still interesting to observe that while alarmists are worried about what might happen out to the right at the 95% or 99% confidence intervals of models, the world seems to be operating way over to the left.

50 thoughts on “5% Chance? No Freaking Way”

  1. I posted this a RealClimate – don’t know if it will make it past the filter. If it does I wonder how many posts it takes before someone tells me 1% is a perfectly reasonable estimate for a 20 degC rise even if such as rise has never happened in 600 million years.

    A recent editorial in the NYT referenced the work of an economist called Weitzman who apparently believes that there is 5% chance that CO2 will cause a rise of 10degC or more. His paper goes on to suggest that there is 1% chance of a 20 degC rise.

    Well, I took a quick look at the paleo-history of the earth and it seems to show that even when CO2 concentrations of 10-20 times what we have today the temperature was no more than 10 degC higher than it is today.

    http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif

    The paleo-record makes it pretty obvious to me that assigning a 1% chance to a 20 degC rise is a scientific absurdity yet this guy is quoted as an authority by the NYT.

    So my question is: why don’t reasonable people who believe that CO2 requires agressive action speak out against such absurd alarmism? I can’t believe it actually helps your case. If anything it probably hurts it.

  2. This post is just the usual mix of lies, misunderstandings and moronic repeatings of the same nonsense as always. It just demonstrates rather strongly that no science troubles your beliefs about climate.

    Note that skeptics believe… – they all do, do they? And you speak for them, do you?

    no one really knows what the increase due to CO2 has been vs. the increase due to the sun or other factors. – given the solar activity has been stable or slowly declining for at least the last thirty years, we can rule out the sun as a factor. Given that CO2 has been steadily increasing, it is rather obvious that it is a factor. Calculations show that it is the dominant factor.

    most long term stable physical systems are dominated by such negative feedback – just the usual retarded claim, which doesn’t really even make sense. What is ‘dominated’? How about a body accelerating due to gravity towards another body? There is obviously positive feedback there. For some reason you cannot grasp this simple fact.

    The earth, on any number of occasions, has been hotter and/or had higher CO2 concentrations, and there is no evidence of this tipping point effect ever having occurred – do a google search for ‘paleocene eocene thermal maximum’.

    climate alarmists like Michael Mann contradict themselves by arguing (in the infamous hockey stick chart) that temperatures absent mankind have been incredibly stable for thousands of years – no they don’t.

  3. Scientist – so do you agree that assigning a 1% probability to a 20 degC rise is a complete absurdity or not?

  4. Your comments about poor predictive models leading to so much greater need for preventative action coupled with comments about unstable systems which come and go explosively (nuclear detonations) reminded me of some cold war behaviors. Is the call to action on global warming nothing more than the 1950’s bomb shelter mentality? You have the threat of catastrophe so people want to do something to protect their interests. The biggest difference is that alarmists are going to make certain that everyone pays for the protection weather they think they need it or not. I guess this makes perfect sense considering the way damages are determined in our litiguous society. If damages are well defined, such as you might have with property in a car accident, there are really strict limits on the liability and payments. However if the damages are poorly defined, such as pain and sufferning, the sky is the limit.

  5. I usually don’t respond to scientrollogist’s turds, but this was really special:

    “What is ‘dominated’? How about a body accelerating due to gravity towards another body? There is obviously positive feedback there. For some reason you cannot grasp this simple fact.”

    Lol. And guess what? A body accelerating towards another body is quite frequently NOT a stable system. If you don’t believe me, try dropping an egg off the top of a tall building.

    Another example is the moon’s orbit of the earth. The moon is accelerating towards the earth, but any increase in gravitational force is countered by the intertial motion of the moon. No positive feedback, and the system is stable.

  6. Scientist, an object accelerating due to gravity does not have positive feedback, unless you count the MINISCULE increase in weight that would occur due to relativity as it accelerates. There is no other way that a unit increase in velocity would itself directly cause further increase. Drop the gravity thing: it’s not positive feedback.

  7. “How about a body accelerating due to gravity towards another body? There is obviously positive feedback there.”

    Gravity is positive feedback ?????
    Wow, “Scientist” must be the modern Newton of pseudo-science. In 10 years, with some new environmental regulations, his new physics “law” will be engraved in all post-modern high-school textbooks.

  8. don’t feed the troll.

    he will rant endlessly, call people morons, and demonstrate a remarkably poor grip on basic science.

    don’t even try with the gravity. he also thinks that applying constant heat to water until it boils is positive feedback. he has no idea what feedback is.

    i suspect he is really a sociologist studying the effects of nonsensical and quarrelsome disagreement in the blogosphere or a deeply pathological hermit.

  9. Raven – a useful paper is Roe and Baker 2007. They give an equation to determine the probability of a temperature rise of ΔT, given an estimated feedback factor f and the error on its determination σ(f). A representative estimate of f is 0.63, and a representative estimate of σf is 0.13 (these values are given in Roe and Baker). Using their equations, I find that there is a 5 per cent chance of ΔT exceeding 9°C, and a 1 per cent chance of ΔT exceeding 25°C. Slightly different values of f and σ(f) obviously change these numbers, so assigning a 1 per cent probability to a temperature increase of 20°C is not a complete absurdity at all.

    The reason for the non-zero probability of high temperature increases is a simple mathematical consequence of the relationship between temperature rise and feedback parameter. Despite these non-zero probabilities, no climate scientists really believe that temperatures might rise 20°C. The probability distributions give a most likely estimate of 3°C of warming for a doubling of CO2, and all pragmatic scientists tend to work on the basis that the climate sensitivity is not drastically more than that.

    I am hugely amused that people cannot even perceive the positive feedback inherent in gravity. Do you not even know the Newtonian equation for the gravitational force acting between two bodies?

  10. The historgram from Lucia’s is the output of a trivial similuation she created and has nothing to do with the IPCC models.

  11. The more uncertain the models, the more certain the need for action?

    Of course. Particularly for socialists.

    James Taranto (WSJ) points out that this is actually Pascal’s Wager:

    “If you believe in God and you turn out to be right, Pascal argued, the payoff is “an infinity of an infinitely happy life.” If the probability of God’s existing is anything greater than zero, then, the expected value of the bet is infinity, and therefore the rational thing to do is bet on God.

    Krugman is interested in hell, not heaven. If nonbelievers are wrong about global warmism, the results will be “catastrophic.” Therefore, believing in global warmism is a good bet regardless of the actual probability that it is true.”

    Never mind that there is no evidence currently that it is true.

    Further,

    “Krugman’s thinking is similarly binary: Either global warming is true and the stakes are enormous, or it isn’t and they are trivial. But how do we know that global warming won’t turn out to be beneficial, or that efforts to avert it won’t have catastrophic consequences?”

    Most importantly,

    “One difference between Pascal’s Wager and Krugman’s is that whereas Pascal was making a case for individuals to embrace faith, Krugman is arguing for collective action–which is to say, he wishes to use the power of government to impose his beliefs on others.”

    Paul Krugman is not a credible economist.

  12. No evidence that global warming is ‘true’? Well, apart from the global average temperature rising… It is not often you see such pure flat-earthist denial, even on anti-scientific denialist blogs like this.

  13. “Well, apart from the global average temperature rising”

    Since when? Since 1942? Since 22 AD? Since 4 billion BC? What IS the temperature of the earth supposed to be? Oh, you have no idea?

    Sorry, “scienlist”, because you fail at common sense and math doesn’t mean we all do.

    But here’s another chance for you to call me some names. It helps us to take you seriously when you use Ad Hominem instead of debate.

    maybe you can make up some new language again- like you did last time with “eskimo” and claim that “og” means something you just made up. Again.

  14. Doesn’t the bell curve or gausian distribution swing both ways? If there a 5% chance the temperature will raise by 10C then I’d bet there is at least a 2.5% chance that it will cool by 10C and a 0.5% chance that it will cool by 20C using the same (im)precise predictions. How much should we spend on preparing for that possible scenario?

  15. Since when? Since 1975 or so. The rest of your post barely makes sense. Eskimo? What?

  16. Sean – the distribution of probabilities is not Gaussian. An analytical representation of it can be found in Roe and Baker 2007. Surely you should be able to see, though, that there is zero probability of cooling in response to a net positive forcing.

  17. “Since when? Since 1975 or so.”

    1: So we should base energy policy on 33 years of temperature data? your ignorance is epic.

    “The rest of your post barely makes sense. Eskimo? What?”

    2: See above, re epic ignorance. Don’t even remember what you yourself have typed.Witness.

  18. I think Lucia has nailed it to the wall! Well done. The idiots such as Mann, Hansen, Schmidt, Jones, Briffa, et al who are propagating this hoax need to be called to accounts. They and their pathetic disciples are on the brink.

  19. Scientist:
    “I am hugely amused that people cannot even perceive the positive feedback inherent in gravity.”

    I am hugely amused that you make such a big thing about nothing. Even an object falling from a plane at 35,000 feet will experience something like 0.19% more gravity at the surface than when it left the plane. That 0.19% ‘positive feedback’ would be totally swamped by the negative feedback of wind resistance.
    I suppose I should expect as much from someone who places so much significance on a trace gas comprising 0.038% of the atmosphere.
    BTW it’s highly possible for an increase in CO2 to not lead to an increase in temperature – if the negative feedback is larger than the positive feedback.

  20. “So we should base energy policy on 33 years of temperature data?”

    More to the point, when this GW scam is finally exposed, who’s going to pay me back the literally hundreds of thousands which I’ve already paid out in ‘environmental’ taxes – mainly fuel tax? Scientist, I hope for your sake that you and your kind have very good public liability insurance policies.

  21. og – anyone with half a brain would have realised that post was someone other than me, taking the piss out of me. Why should we not base energy policy on 33 years of temperature data?

    Peter – your imagination is spectacularly limited. My example was general, not limited to cases within the Earth’s atmosphere. Think perhaps of a cometary orbit around the Sun. For there to be no temperature rise in response to increased CO2, the feedback would have to be infinitely negative. I wonder if you agree that that’s unphysical? And despite your most fervent wishes, there is no scam to be ‘exposed’. That notion is just the insane dream of lunatic right wingers.

  22. “anyone with half a brain” Ah. That’s the scienlist I know. Ad hominem instead of those troublesome facts. Of course it’s impossible to tell who at your IP wrote the other comment, your mom, or one of your other personalities.

    We should not base policy on 33 years of data because that sample compared to the history of the earths climate (Which we can only really guess at) is statistically insignificant.

    “there is no scam to be ‘exposed'” That’s certainly true. It’s right out there in all it’s glory for everyone to see it’s utter valuelessness. The AGW bullshit is not a scam, it’s an outright lie, and the proponents of it know it, and they know everyone knows it, but they keep promoting it anyway.

  23. Scientist – A comet only has one force acting upon it. In any case, the ‘positive feedback’ you’re alluding to becomes an equal ‘negative feedback’ as it moves away from the Sun once more – average over time = zero.
    I’ll mention just one (of many) negative feedbacks in the atmospheric thermodynamic system – convection. Hot air rises, cools, and falls again.
    What if you’re wrong about it being just the insane dream of right wingers.? Will you then just deny that you ever believed in AGW? Perhaps you ought to start erasing all evidence of your involvement from the internet now.

  24. To Scientist,

    Regarding gausian distribution and all forcings being net positive. I can only see the abstract of the Roe and Barker paper. However I’ve seen the error potential in the treatment of clouds in climate models and it is huge. It swamps what happens in compared to green house gas radiative effects. Given that, the probability of under predicting temperature is probably almost as great as the probability of over predicting the temperature.

  25. og – your argument is risible. It’s equivalent to saying we don’t understand gravity because we’ve only seen it in operation for a tiny fraction of the history of the universe. You’re also too stupid to understand what ‘ad hominem’ actually means.

    Peter – as a comet moves away from the sun, the gravitational force on it weakens, and so it moves away faster than it would in a uniform gravitational field. Positive feedback again.

    Sean – your suppositions do not appear to be backed up by any studies in the literature. It is a simple mathematical fact that because the sum of feedbacks is positive, the probability of very high temperature rises is not zero but the probability of very low temperature rises is.

  26. Scientist – If the probablity of low temperatures is near zero, why did the earth spend 80% of the last 100,000 years in glacial periods and 20% in interglacial periods like we are in now? I would contend that in earths recent history, the odds of cold are higher than the odds of hot.

  27. It is a pity that scientists who accept the AGW theory are not willing to reject the more foolish statements, usually by non-scientists. I guess they see it as giving comfort to the enemy but they do harm science and their own case by allowing nonsense, such as Krugman’s stuff, to stand.
    It would be a sign of real courage for someone to say “I believe in AGW, but this is wrong…”

  28. “You’re also too stupid to understand what ‘ad hominem’ actually means.”

    Um, no. Based on your level of maturity, I expect I had already done my four years of latin before you were born. You, on the other hand, have displayed your obvious ignorance by that statement. You see, when you state “it’s hard to tell what made you laugh like a twat, but I can tell you that “og” in Eskimo means silly twat.” that would be an example of an ad hominem attack. You attempt to be clever and couch it in your typically liberal and mindless pseudoeducational terms as if to “educate” me, but you fail to understand the very simplest of facts, such as the fact that “Eskimo” is not a language. We won’t even discuss your utterly farcicial “fact”.

    On the other hand, when I call you a “fucktard” it is a simple statement of actual fact.
    1: Anyone who so vigorously defends such an ignorant proposition as AGW is by definition, a fucktard.
    2: Anyone who cannot understand that basing climate models on insignificant amounts of data is foolhardy, asinine, and asking for trouble, is in fact, a fucktard.
    3: Comparing gravity to climate may be the stupidest thing I have ever heard a human being say. That may surpass even the term “fucktard”, but as yet, the word has not been coined that describes that. Hey, I know, “ScienList”

    Look for Scienlist to toss up a webpage full of fake “eskimo” translations so he can cite it, now. because eveyrthing you read on the web is true.

  29. As I said before, the post you’re referring to was not written by me. I’ll demonstrate how stupid you look by insisting that it was me in my next two posts.

  30. I am og. I like to look at illegal pornography whenever possible. I don’t know any science whatsoever.

  31. There you go, og, you said it. No matter what you say from now on, I’ll simply refer you to the post where you said ‘I don’t know any science whatsoever’.

  32. Sean – do you deliberately misunderstand? I said the probability of there being little or no temperature rise in response to a positive forcing is zero. I did not say that the probability of there ever being temperatures lower than today was zero. It isn’t hard to see the difference between the two.

  33. If a model predicts reality and current trends as being <2.5% probable - equal to the probability that something that has never happened in 600 million years (i.e. 10C increase) - I would suggest that that model is FOS.

  34. “If a model predicts reality and current trends as being <2.5% probable - equal to the probability that something that has never happened in 600 million years (i.e. 10C increase) - I would suggest that that model is FOS."

    The current model maybe FOS.

    But there has been 10C increases in temperature in the last 600 million years.Thankfully they go down about the same amount too.

  35. Troll:

    “I am og. I like to look at illegal pornography whenever possible. I don’t know any science whatsoever.”

    Easily fooled scientist:

    “There you go, og, you said it. No matter what you say from now on, I’ll simply refer you to the post where you said ‘I don’t know any science whatsoever’.”

    LOL,

    Scientist I think you just fell for a troll post.This is not the real og you have been sparring with.

  36. Wow. You really are unbelievably thick. I made it spectacularly obvious that I was posting as ‘og’, to demonstrate how pathetically idiotic ‘og’ was for attributing to me a false post made under my name. Now you’ve topped even ‘og’s idiocy. Seriously, how old are you? You write like a backward 12 year old, and you obviously have significant comprehension problems.

  37. Good spot, Tommy. Especially since the Real Og links his identity to a URL, thereby allowing us to attach a direct reference point to him. Somehow, I think Scientist may have decide to post as og, but ignored that little factoid. Hard to believe, considering how anal he is about HTML links, but then, he only refers to those when he wishes to belittle others. I’m still waiting for him to post his credentials, like some many of his debate partners have been willing to do.

  38. “I’m still waiting for him to post his credentials, like some many of his debate partners have been willing to do. “
    —————————————————

    The most credible credential “Scientist” has is priest of the Church of Climate Doom.
    In his “science”, the speed of a falling apple is not proportional to time but is governed by the exponential law of “positive feedback”. His theory is compatible with the level of (mis)understanding of Al Gore. Newton must be rolling in his grave.

  39. Wow, Keith, what powers of deduction you have! I said I made it spectacularly obvious that I was posting as ‘og’, to demonstrate how pathetically idiotic ‘og’ was for attributing to me a false post made under my name, from which you cautiously state Somehow, I think Scientist may have decide to post as og. Nice one, Sherlock!

    I am a physicist. I have a PhD. What do you have?

  40. Sorry Scientist, I guess we were posting at the same time, and your reply beat mine. It does happen. As for my credentials, I gave them several threads ago when I first asked for yours. Surely you read that post, and the subsequent ones where I continued our discussion concerning carbon dioxide concentrations varying based upon altitude?

  41. “as a comet moves away from the sun, the gravitational force on it weakens, and so it moves away faster than it would in a uniform gravitational field. Positive feedback again.”

    My initial urge was to call you hopelessly ignorant and to tell you to go back to school and not come back until you’ve learnt something, but I won’t.
    My second urge was to make some flippant remark such as, “Wow, the guy’s discovered perpetual motion”, but I won’t.
    Instead, I’m simply going to point out your glaring error: Comets do not accelerate away from the Sun, they merely decrease their rate of deceleration as they get further away. That’s reducing negative feedback in your analogy, not positive feedback.
    If comets and other bodies, accelerated both on their approach to the Sun and as they moved away from it, they would have gotten faster and faster until the solar system flew apart, and we would not now be around to discuss it.

  42. Scientist,

    Note that skeptics believe… – they all do, do they? And you speak for them, do you?
    Come on man, you can do better than that. He is speaking in general terms. For example, Bush doesn’t care about black people. This does not mean ALL black people, Bush only means those who live in New Orleans and the greater USA area, not the ones in Africa and especially Saudia Arabia.

    given the solar activity has been stable or slowly declining for at least the last thirty years, we can rule out the sun as a factor. Given that CO2 has been steadily increasing, it is rather obvious that it is a factor. Calculations show that it is the dominant factor.
    If a stable or decline in Sun activity occurs at the same time as a CO2 rise, then they are related? Or is it the rise in CO2 which is suppressing the Sun, or maybe the decline in solar activity is causing recent cooling? Those calculations you speak of are obviously biased by the comfy funding of socialist governments. I can’t trust “Big Gov’t” funded studies to be true. Wait, I know, more “Big Gov’t” funding has led to a temperature increase. Correlation = Causation… weeee..e.e.e. hiccup…

    I am a physicist. I have a PhD. What do you have?
    A pack of sugar free gum, 3 quarters 2 dimes, 4 pennies (don’t you hate when they don’t give you a free penny), car keys, and some clothes.
    and
    Master’s degree in Computer Science and soon to be PhD in Computer Science. I focused on computer models and simulation, specifically complex systems and interactions.

    ++++

    On an even lighter note, I think we should create legislation to ban ‘Scientist’. Those Man-made-global-warming deniers deniers are squashing our consensus. There are more of us in consensus than those “peer reviewed” scientists.

  43. Keith – if your post was at the same time as my second post explicitly stating that I had posted as ‘og’ (to demonstrate ‘og’s stupidity in quoting a post that wasn’t me), that doesn’t excuse you from failing to grasp that I had already explicitly stated it once.

    Peter – read this statement carefully: it moves away faster than it would in a uniform gravitational field. As you are intellectually challenged I guess I have to say explicitly that nowhere in that statement is there anything which suggests that a comet is accelerating. Now how about thinking before you post next time?

  44. Sunsettommy:

    “Scientist I think you just fell for a troll post.This is not the real og you have been sparring with.”

    Scientist incredibly fails to discern the truth of my post.That it was ironic:

    “Wow. You really are unbelievably thick. I made it spectacularly obvious that I was posting as ‘og’, to demonstrate how pathetically idiotic ‘og’ was for attributing to me a false post made under my name. Now you’ve topped even ‘og’s idiocy. Seriously, how old are you? You write like a backward 12 year old, and you obviously have significant comprehension problems.”

    I noticed right off that you posted twice in just a minute of time.I made that post just to bring out the “fucktard” B.S. I have come to expect out of you.

    You do not write like a scientist since you are a foulmouthed jerk.Who is so darn quick to spread the bile in replies to just about anyone.Who differs from you.

    Your demonstration was demonstrably pathetic and so is your crappy reply to me.

    LOL

  45. Keith:

    “Good spot, Tommy. Especially since the Real Og links his identity to a URL, thereby allowing us to attach a direct reference point to him. Somehow, I think Scientist may have decide to post as og, but ignored that little factoid. Hard to believe, considering how anal he is about HTML links, but then, he only refers to those when he wishes to belittle others. I’m still waiting for him to post his credentials, like some many of his debate partners have been willing to do.”

    Actually I thought it scientist who wrote that B.S. But decided to play it up and expose his now predicable reply.He had posted 2 times in a minute.

    Og never writes like that at all.A give away.But Scientist writes like that a lot!

    LOL

    I never see this trolling foul mouthed troll in skeptical forums that are MODERATED.That is because he would be banned very fast.For his frequent bad mouthing.I would have banned this jerk within 24 hours at my forum.

    Here he survives because there is no moderator.

  46. Ha ha ha! That is a magnificently lame attempt to dig yourself out of a hole. Ironic? Of course it was. Of course!

  47. Scientist: “Peter – read this statement carefully: it moves away faster than it would in a uniform gravitational field. As you are intellectually challenged I guess I have to say explicitly that nowhere in that statement is there anything which suggests that a comet is accelerating. Now how about thinking before you post next time?”

    I did read it carefully and I did see that. But it’s what you made of it that I have an issue with – you trying to twist a clearly negative ‘feedback’ into a positive one.
    How do you expect people to take you seriously when you apparently can’t even get something as fundamental as the sign of the feedback right?

  48. A guy with a PHD fails to realize that he is getting his chain pulled:

    “Ha ha ha! That is a magnificently lame attempt to dig yourself out of a hole. Ironic? Of course it was. Of course!”

    Look fella I read this from the start:

    “As I said before, the post you’re referring to was not written by me. I’ll demonstrate how stupid you look by insisting that it was me in my next two posts.

    Posted by: Scientist | August 07, 2008 at 02:42 AM”

    It is so easy to get you to be an asshole in the thread.You failed to consider the possibility that you were being led by the nose.Did you even noticed that I was stringing you out?

    Remember this?:

    “Actually I thought it scientist who wrote that B.S. But decided to play it up and expose his now predicable reply.He had posted 2 times in a minute.”

    And this:

    “I noticed right off that you posted twice in just a minute of time.I made that post just to bring out the “fucktard” B.S. I have come to expect out of you.”

    Reading comprehension you say?

    LOL

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