Over at Dr Curry’s Clmiate, Etc. there is an post about Is It Necessary to Lie to Win a Controversial Public Debate?, with Dr Curry’s comments on an article by Sociophysics scientist Serge Galam.
I was actually rather impressed by the five questions Galam asks.
I’ll get right to them. . . Read the rest of this entry »
Hamilton at WUWT commented:
It really does get up my nose that the media and governments think the people can only cope with a simple cause and effect situation – one factor causing one effect. So, more CO2 = hotter and less CO2 = colder has become a simple mantra which all can understand; it fits well with this patronizing view of general intelligence. Daniel’s piece on cloud seeding, suggesting that both atmospheric chemistry and cosmic rays are influential is probably closer to the truth. But of course there are now two influences which may well work in tandem. Far too difficult for the simple masses to cope with so let’s just stick with CO2 – it’s also got a better tax raising potential too.
It isn’t just the general populace. I’ve been underwhelmed by the inability of scientists to handle more than one variable. That is what reductionism is all about from what I know: Break everything into the simplest components and then analyze all of those, and Viola! you’ve got a whole scientific reality.
But the whole system breaks down when they can’t handle more than a simple cause-and-effect situation, like you say. But these are scientists, not just Joe Main Street. They can handle compound, to some extent, just by separating out all the pieces. But dealing with complexity is another story. Then it is just handled by creating reductionist models and letting the code do all the hard work. But they don’t seem to understand that it is still not a system – just a bunch of pieces – pieces that will act differently in tandem than they will by themselves. (Ask any pharmacist about that some time.)
I would imagine the next really big thing in science will be when someone comes up with math that will deal with complexity and do it well. I don’t think Chaos Theory or Catastrophe Theory are it, because we’d have seen an explosion in understanding by now.
It is all over my head, so I don’t know the answers, either. But reductionism never made sense for trying to understand complex systems. I don’t think we’ve gotten to first base yet. And climate is perhaps the canary in the mineshaft about that. Research on understanding the beginnings of life have been spinning their wheels for 60 years. (Freeman Dyson – a climate skeptic – was a young man palling around with Albert Einstein at Princeton when a solution to that seemed right around the corner; that was the early 1950s. Dyson is now the old man of science, with the accent on old.) Hot fusion is the same story. And don’t even ask about Quantum Theory; Physics has gone basically nowhere since that dead end took over, looking at smaller and smaller pieces, thinking if we find enough of them it will explain reality.
Really complex phenomena just seem to be over our heads so far. We go into them assuming simplistic things, and go off in reductionist directions, thinking it will eventually turn the tide, and then full careers (or two consecutive) go by and nothing is accomplished.
It doesn’t help that the reductionists dominate in so many sciences. It produces a lot of general use products for the consumer marketplace, so it has its place. But for understanding some of the bigger issues, it is failing in the marketplace of knowledge. Hopefully there is a Newton out there somewhere to take the first step toward really tackling complex systems.
So far the score is Complex Systems ~10, Western Science 0 (…I don’t know about Eastern Science).
http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/to-know-but-not-understand-david-weinberger-on-science-and-big-data/250820/
The above is an article recommended at Judith Curry’s Climate, Etc site and WUWT.
I don’t expect you to have the time to read this article about scientific knowledge having created so much data that we may never be able to catch up and understand any of it.
But one passage made me want to share it. Here is the passage:
We therefore stared at tables of numbers until their simple patterns became obvious to us. Johannes Kepler examined the star charts carefully constructed by his boss, Tycho Brahe, until he realized in 1605 that if the planets orbit the Sun in ellipses rather than perfect circles, it all makes simple sense. Three hundred fifty years later, James Watson and Francis Crick stared at x-rays of DNA until they realized that if the molecule were a double helix, the data about the distances among its atoms made simple sense. With these discoveries, the data went from being confoundingly random to revealing an order that we understand: Oh, the orbits are elliptical! Oh, the molecule is a double helix!
With the new database-based science, there is often no moment when the complex becomes simple enough for us to understand it. The model does not reduce to an equation that lets us then throw away the model. You have to run the simulation to see what emerges. For example, a computer model of the movement of people within a confined space who are fleeing from a threat–they are in a panic–shows that putting a column about one meter in front of an exit door, slightly to either side, actually increases the flow of people out the door. Why? There may be a theory or it may simply be an emergent property. We can climb the ladder of complexity from party games to humans with the single intent of getting outside of a burning building, to phenomena with many more people with much more diverse and changing motivations, such as markets. We can model these and perhaps know how they work without understanding them. They are so complex that only our artificial brains can manage the amount of data and the number of interactions involved. [emphasis added]
The bold passage immediately took my brain to traffic.
“Traffic?” You are probably asking, right?
In occasional discussions about driving and traffic (a big deal in the Chicago area, I assure you) I have probably heard twenty or thirty people rag on about when there is a barrier in one lane ahead, and “everyone” is getting in the non-barriered lane, forming one long line of courteous people, but then there is one discourteous “bastard” who drives up the almost totally open OTHER lane. These people get really LIVID about that guy “cheating” by not getting in line like everybody else. There is more to it even than, “Who does he think he is, anyway?”
Me? I grew up in an area where people didn’t all get at the back of one line, they formed two roughly equal-length lines, and merged when they got up to the front of each line, up at the barrier.
Which way is best? I don’t know.
Who is right and who is wrong? I don’t know.
But let’s discuss it a bit…
Read the rest of this entry »
[Plaintiff]: SOME OF THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD
[Defendant]: HUMAN INDUSTRIAL ACTIVITY
[Charge]: ATTEMPTED MURDER OF THE PLANET EARTH
Someone today made the claim I’ve heard from time to time that the climate skeptics, of whom I am one, shouldn’t be allowed to get away with picking holes in someone else’s hypothesis without having some hypothesis of their/our own to replace it. Now while on the surface that may sound reasonable, let us look at it another way – by looking at what would happen in our court system if that was the case.
What an interesting court system that would be, that in order to find someone Not Guilty, the defense in a criminal trial was required to prove that someone else – someone specific – perpetrated the crime instead. Of course, we would never consider such a thing, in this our enlightened age. A criminal charge is either found sufficient or insufficient to convict the defendant, solely on the merits of the case against him. Not on his ability to put the blame on someone else.
Though it is the defendant whose liberty is at stake, when a trial is held, it is the prosecution’s case that is really being judged. Many a case never even goes to court, even when the prosecutor is certain that his suspect has perpetrated the crime, because the prosecutors recognize that they do not have sufficient evidence to convict. After all, in our system, if a defendant is found not guilty once, he may never be tried for that crime again. Double jeopardy. The prosecution gets only one shot, once it goes into the criminal courts. So, rather than fail to convict, the prosecutor holds back, presumably hoping that more evidence will show up that will allow a successful conviction later on.
I heard a truism decades ago that went something like this:
In fighting against any anything, we always lose, because we inevitably take on the qualities of “our enemy”, the very ones we are fighting against. In so doing, the “enemy” ends up winning.” Even with World War II and Hitler, if you look at what America became – torturers, invaders of defenseless countries, world dominators, totalitarians to some extent – we lost that war.
Every time I stand in a TSA line at an airport, I can’t shake the notion of what it was like to pass through a Nazi checkpoint in 1941.
This is the way the moderately conservative German newspaper, der Spiegel, sees 9/11, on this the eve of its 10th anniversary Bush’s Tragic Legacy – How 9/11 Triggered America’s Decline:
The smoke was still rising from the rubble of the World Trade Center when Richard Armitage, at the time the US deputy secretary of state, spoke in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. “History begins today,” he said.
In the coming decade, Armitage would turn out to be right — except the politician could not have foreseen how tragic the history would be following the epochal event. It is the history of the decline of the USA as a superpower.
Immediately before the attacks, this country was in full bloom — like Rome at its peak, as TV host Joe Scarborough recalls today.
The Republican President George W. Bush had inherited a fat budget surplus from the Democrat Bill Clinton. In Kosovo, the US, which Madeleine Albright dubbed “the indispensable nation,” had just shown the Europeans how it could resolve conflicts, even in their own backyard…
It was NOT all hunky-dory, though. Enron, along with their fellow criminals at Arthur J Andserson, was on the front pages, as were the collapse of other mega-empires, such as WorldCom. Carnivorous capitalism was taking a severe bruising in the press. The pedophile priests and the Catholic Church were very happy to have something push them off the front pages.
After watching several hours on that day ten years ago, I went to give blood. I wasn’t there five minutes when the guy behind me raised his voice and declared that, “We are so damned lucky that it was George W Bush who is President!“ Hackles up, my immediate reaction was to say, “You stupid idiot, if Bush wasn’t the President this never would have happened!“ Instead, in the interests of peace among grieving Americans, I bit my lip. Now I know that I should have spoken my peace and then gone to stand way in the back of the line – just to get away from such willful stupidity. In the days to follow, comedians and professors lost their jobs, as America went insane with forced compliance of any and all things Bush.
Google Earth, looking straight down.
Location 19°27′N 102°04′W
I read this as NOT a volcanic feature – even though it is ON a volcano. I base this on what I interpret as its interruption of the visible contours of the volcano’s western slope.
For anyone who would point out that this is right smack in the middle of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, yes, I know. However, there is nothing that precludes impactors from landing in volcanic fields. An inquirer merely needs to use some judgment in distinguishing.
In the selected image I intentionally left in a small Paricutín-type volcanic cone directly west. I think this shows that though there is similarity with the “crater”, it is only in its circularity. The small volcano is conical with a small circular mouth. The “crater”, if it is to be seen as a volcano, has a “mouth” that is nearly 90% of the diameter of the conical outer slope of the feature. This seems much more consistent with a crater than a volcano.
In addition, the caldera of the “crater” is flat, like many craters are.
If GE did not screw up the imaging, this shows clearly that the feature is a discontinuity vs the slope of the volcanic slope. I am certain that the “Terrain” database and processor in GE gets these things VERY close to accurate, even if the image overlaid on it is distorted in the process. If that is close to reality, you can even see the way the erosion channels on the volcano’s slope were affected by the impact process.
This “crater” is about 1km in diameter. The Earth Impact Database has ones listed that are smaller. I notice that there is only ONE crater in their list in Mexico, and that is Chicxulub. Wow. I think Mexico is ripe for discovery.
In any event, this one certainly isn’t in their confirmed list. I wonder if they have a list of “definitely not” failed candidates. Anybody know?
GE low angle view.
Zoomed into eye elevation 12,975 feet.
In the last image, I would point out the arc in the NW quadrant. That appears as if it might be an artifact of the trees planted there. Uruapan is known for its avocados, so I am betting those are avocado trees. It is certainly an orchard. By viewing it in GE in a dynamic way it is apparent it is not just an artifact of the trees, though. There actually IS a partial circular “ditch” or “swale” there. It seems likely that the soil there (and in some other areas in the crater) is deficient, because the trees are definitely not growing well there.
The pattern appears to be impact-related, with the impactor approaching from the SE and causing a splash pattern in the NW. But not too much of one. The impact was nearly vertical, but not quite.
The way to prove this crater out is to find an impactor. It does not appear to be a cometary impact, which would most likely (certainly?) have been an air burst, due to the normal friable nature of comets. So, a meteor could be found.
I think the low-angle view is terrific, the way it shows the flatness of the crater bottom vis-a-vis the volcano’s non-flatness, plus the interruption of the western slope erosion ridges.
I was not looking for craters. Uruapan is a city I’d like to visit some day. It is known for its avocados and lacquer, as well as touted buy some with being the second best food city in Mexico, only behind the city of Oaxaca. So it has been in my sights for quite some time now. But the crater is not easy to overlook. You can see the city in the lower portion of the top image, it is that close.
At WUWT, this thread engendered the following string of comments.
ENSO has a thrust?
ENSO originates in more or less upwelling of cold and nutrient rich in the region of the Humboldt Current. I have a review here -http://www.earthandocean.robertellison.com.au/
The thermal evolution of the Humboldt Current is best understood in terms of ENSO. ENSO is an oscillation between El Niño and La Niña states over a 2 to 7 year cycle. An El Niño is defined as sustained SST anomalies greater than 0.5O C (in the Nino 3 region) over the central pacific. Conversely, a La Niña is defined as sustained SST anomalies less than -0.5O C. The oscillations (more correctly chaotic bifurcation – but we will come to that) are driven by complex interactions of cloud, wind, sea level pressure, sea surface temperature, planetary rotation and surface and subsurface currents. The short explanation is that the Pacific trade winds set up conditions for a La Niña. Trade winds, south-easterly in the Southern Hemisphere and north-easterly in the Northern Hemisphere, pile up warm surface water against Australia and Indonesia. Water vapour rises in the western Pacific creating low pressure cells that strengthen the trade winds piling yet more warm water up in the western Pacific. Cool, subsurface water rises in the eastern Pacific and spreads westward. At some point the trade winds falter and warm water spreads out westward across the Pacific.
In the region of the Humboldt Current – there is a balance between upwelling where deep ocean currents emerge and suppression of those currents by a warm surface layer.
The reasons for more or less upwelling may hinge on the state of the Southern Annular Mode. Here is some up to date info on SAM – http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/gjma/sam.html
Here we are very at the edge on the known. I went looking for some connection between UV and SAM – and found myself quoted at – http://forum.weatherzone.com.au/ubbthreads.php/topics/28657/3/The_Southern_Annular_Mode_SAM. There is a good discussion there.
Here is an SST anomaly thermally enhanced satellite image from October last year.
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2010/anomnight.10.4.2010.gif
SST Anomalies 10/04/2010
You can see the PDO in the north Pacific and La Nina in full swing in the central Pacific. You can also see the potential for cold water being pushed up from the Southern Ocean and onto the western coast of South America in the area of the Humboldt Current. The region of the Humboldt Current is the most biologically productive area on Earth because the cold southern water is joined there by upwelling frigid water. The upwelling (or not) in turn determines the thermal evolution of ENSO. ENSO is many things but starts in upwelling – or not – in the eastern Pacific.
There is a direct physical link between UV and the SAM in the ozone layer of the middle atmosphere – and thus in storm tracks spinning of the Southern Ocean, pooling cold water off the western coast of South America and diluting the warm surface layer that suppresses upwelling in the eastern Pacific.’
ChiefHydrologist’s comments are welcome, and yet I see inconsistencies and have questions. It clearly appears to me that well into the year 2011 the cause of El Niño is explained, but not explained to my own standards.
Comments follow:
On Judy Curry’s Climate Etc. blog, a commenter on one thread said the following and I had a reply all typed up, but decided to post it her, instead.
[WebHubTelescope] Here is a simple financial market model, which essentially demonstrates the effects of implied correlation. When stock’s move in unison, then market swings become larger. When stocks differentiate themselves, some up some down, then the swings are smaller because the individual movements can cancel. We are entering a phase where the implied correlation is high and the stock market no longer shows useful differentiation. 400 to 600 point swings will become the norm.
How would you test this hypothesis?
Yes, exactly! ( A light goes on in my head…)
When they “move in unison”… Yes, that happens. It is about cyclical organization, perhaps in an unrecognized cycle that hides within what seems random but isn’t. Stocks or heat packets are normally randomized to some “normal” level. But in that randomness is also a propensity from time to time for things to align – to push in parallel. Just like rolling a die that comes up three sixes rolled consecutively.
This kind of thing could and would happen on several different scales over time. Sometimes the organization entrains a LOT of heat packets or stocks.
Look at clouds. Normally random and mostly vertical plumes, though their size and morphology fall into classes, but mostly some variation on “mandlebrotian” mushroom shapes. Yet we’ve all seen cloud patterns where there are very long rows in the sky. The wind action or something for a while is no longer acting random, though even the organization itself is a randomness. But maybe not. Look up also “Undulatus asperatus” clouds. What I saw was WAY better than that shown on Wikipedia. I have photos myself of this newly delineated cloud type, where they look like the underside of a vaulted ceiling, each vault 1/4 to 1/3 of a mile wide, and consistent in their widths, row after row and miles and scores of miles long. And it stayed that way long after I drove 30 miles. I did see the end of the pattern, and the wind flow still existed, even when the visible clouds had gradually faded to blue sky. Thus, it was not the clouds as the cause, but as the effect. They also extended far in the other direction, as far as I could see in that direction.
Here is perhaps the best image:
By Steve Garcia (feet2thefire)
It has now been more than 20 months since the CRU emails were outed, by whatever or whomever. Some day we may actually know who did it, but for now we certainly do not. Depending on who it was, we can only speculate now as to what the immediate motives were. Was it an insider who had seen the nastiness and not wanted to let it go on any longer? Was it an insider who had a grudge against someone at CRU? Was the server hacked into, as is claimed publicly by all on The Team and their many AGW brothers in arms?
Though all that will be extremely interesting if and when it happens, the bigger picture will eventually be this: Who won? And how decisive was Climategate, anyway? Or is it too early to tell? At some point people will try to assess that question. Is now a viable time to do that assessing?
I assert that it may not be too early to tell. And I think our side won, big time. After all, the lay of the land is certainly different. Having been caught trying to rig the game and even lying and fudging the data – and do be aware that much of the public does see it that way – The Team and the IPCC are struggling to gain the ascendancy and monopoly they once had. And it truly does not look like they are winning the battle. But once a witness or ‘expert‘ is caught in a lie, can they ever get the people who witness it to believe them again?
See this article at Der Spiegel, The Climategate Chronicle – How the Science of Global Warming Was Compromised
.
It is noteworthy that the first line of text in the article is a caption in a GERMAN magazine that reads
To what extent is climate change actually occurring?
Before Climategate, that caption would most likely have read
To what extent is climate change occurring?
To the warmers, it wasn’t IF climate change was happening, but how bad it was going to be. One word – actually – is revealing, about how even German news sources are doubting what 21 months ago would have been traitorous heresy to doubt.
The momentum certainly appears to have shifted.
But has it?
To answer that, we have to go back to the autumn of 2009 and ask what the balance of power was at that time, to establish a baseline to measure from…
The balance of Power in early November 2009
For all intents and purposes, at that time The Team and the IPCC had a monopoly on telling the story of global warming. The Copenhagen Conference was just coming up in a couple of weeks, and the media blitz was about to get started.
Outside of Steve McIntyre’s ClimateAudit.org, WUWT, and a handful of other skeptical sites, little attention was paid to skeptical arguments. Almost no newspaper or news website – certainly no network news organizations – printed or broadcast any skeptical positions, except to denigrate them or worse, to ridicule them as ostriches, anti-science wackos and warming “deniers” – the last one harkening back to Holocaust deniers, almost certainly intentionally.
Though Steve had poked holes that those in the know could see cast doubt on Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick, which had gone over the head of most of the world.
The warmers had browbeaten Roy Spencer and John Christy at UAH into changing their satellite adjustments (which I thought ended up being too big an adjustment).
At that time, those FOI requests referred to in the emails had been long since submitted. The stonewalling evident in the emails was well entrenched. The skeptics were trying to find enough information to attempt replication of The Team’s work having difficulty getting that information. But, also, the public was almost entirely in the dark about there being any other possible side of the story, in spite of the work of Christy, Spencer, Richard Linzen, Willie Soon, and others, including many studies on the supposedly non-existent Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that showed those two events were actually global, as opposed to Mann’s assertion that they were only regional.
Very little – almost none of – the research that argued against the AGW argument was getting out to the public. It also is shown in the emails, of course, that some of those studies were having trouble making it into the peer-reviewed literature – and that at least some of that was because The Team was blackballing authors they didn’t like and sandbagging certain papers when The Team was chosen to be the reviewers.
With the power to control what the public heard or read, there was a definite one-sided tilt to the playing field/battle ground. The consensus was being spread far and wide, almost totally monopolizing what the public heard. The skeptics were marginalized, often ridiculed – and most mendaciously – accused of being in the pockets of the big energy interests. (To this day, the AGW supporters assert that this latter is true, in spite of the fact that Anthony, a retired meteorologist, and Steve McIntyre, a retired auditor are by far the most effective skeptics and have never been shown to be on anyone’s payroll. That those two attend conferences sponsored by or attended by energy industry representatives does not mean anymore than that the U.S. and Libya are both in the U.N.)
These ad hoc allegations were parroted in article after article in the news media. Whenever it was necessary to give the skeptics any press at all, it was bad press, usually with this – almost as an adjective, typical being something like (paraphrased) “the industry shill Willie Soon.” Almost no entry about a skeptic was complete without such an inflammatory remark by science editors or writers. Yet no such attempt was made to ascertain the source of the funding for AGW proponents – who was paying their way to conferences to Switzerland or resorts in the mountains of Austria, for example. That would have been bad enough, except that Watts and McIntyre weren’t taking money at all. A double standard was in effect, that any money coming from a pro-AGW entity was seen as noble and pure, while funding from industry was evil. Time after time after time, this is what went out in our newspapers and on TV and radio news.
Solid Information and Unambiguous Claims (NOT)
When I first came to ClimateAudit, long before Climategate, I saw all the graphs and formulas and technical talk and I had two reactions. One was, “How am I ever going to learn about all this and keep up with these people? I’ve never seen a site with so much math.” (That is in spite of being fairly mathematically adept.) The other reaction was, “Gawd! At least there is something here to sink my teeth into.”
Finding any solid technical information about global warming from its supporters was difficult, if not impossible. Every post or article on the pro-AGW sites was filled with claims and summaries, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to go as straight to the source as possible. When I asked on Liberal sites for references, I was always directed to RealClimate, where there was claim after claim, assertion after assertion, paraphrasing after paraphrasing. But I wanted to see what the papers themselves said (not that most of it wouldn’t have been over my head in the beginning). And all the papers that were referenced were behind paywalls, so I couldn’t get into the nitty-gritty like I wanted to.
No one else could, either. Not unless they wanted to pay $30 per paper. So, in essence, their underlying story of CO2 was essentially being hidden from the public. And they knew it. The public was given summaries and assertions and headlines, mostly overstating and exaggerating the case against CO2. And the headlines were atop articles written by a small group of science editors around the country/world who, it turns out, were philosophically in bed with the AGW/IPCC folks. Article after article printed their assertions as fact – and more.
One thing that confused me was that even human activities other than CO2 were being ignored. I found out later on the reason for that Phil Jones’ co-authored study of UHI that turned out to be extremely erroneous).
One thing I saw so often it angered me was that a headline would make an assertion of something as if it was unambiguous, yet when I would read deep into articles for the exact words of the scientists, I almost always saw qualifiers like “we believe,” “most think that,” “up to,” and “it appears that.” Where the scientists themselves were equivocating, the headlines and opening words asserted certainty. Any reader scanning the article would not go deep enough to se the caveats. For allowing this misrepresentation, the scientists should not be let off the hook, though, because they let those headlines stand without pointing out to the editors their level of uncertainty.
Uncertainty About AGW
It took until Judith Curry’s blog, Climate Etc, in 2010, for the issue of uncertainty to be addressed seriously and publicly by anyone near the AGW center. That was more than 20 years on down the line. Climate science should be, at the least, embarrassed that it did not come from themselves. And sooner. Give Dr. Curry credit for addressing that long overdue issue.
But as I understand it, that blog would never have existed had she not read enough of the Climategate emails and files to begin to question the claims of AGW. Seeing “The Team’s” reaction to her move to a middle ground and give some credence to the arguments of the skeptical community, it is clear that it took some courage for her to do that. Again, give her credit, this time for her integrity.
So, one thing that came out of Climategate was Climate Etc., and the establishment of a serious middle ground. The terrain was shifted that much, at least. What had been accepted as “consensus” had shifted toward “non-settled science.”
What Constitutes a Win?
As a lone Liberal here at WUWT, it has been a lonely 11+ years for me. But I have been treated with as much respect as I need, and have only been ridiculed once – when someone pointed out that I had used too many All-Caps. I took it like a man. I have never apologized to any fellow Liberals, and have lost a girlfriend of five years, but have made small inroads into a few people’s minds about AGW. But most of them thought I was addled in the brain. That was before Climategate. While few of those I talked with read anything of substance about Climategate, with the main stream media’s shift to a small level of doubt, at least some people’s minds have opened up to the possibility that humans are not sizably to blame for whatever warming has existed.
My aim was never to prove that AGW didn’t exist, even though I was always in the small group that distrusted the adjustments and do not believe (till shown with solid, replicatable science) that there ever was warming beyond us coming out of the Little Ice Age. I think it is enough to show that the science is too unsettled.
In order for that to happen, I always believed that something had to happen to throw doubt on the science behind the CO2 claims. Yes, in fact, I DID hope for a Watergate-style Deep Throat to show up. But that hope seemed so far-fetched that I never voiced it out loud. (So any of you that laugh at my 20-20 hindsight, laugh away. I can’t prove it.) Early on after the release of the emails, though, I was out there talking about Deep Throat. Whoever did it, may the gods favor him or her for many a year.
Now, in a court of law, to show reasonable doubt is enough for an acquittal. An acquittal, for the defense, IS a win.
Is there enough reasonable doubt?
With the level of attention given to AGW these days, with the yawns that greet claims against CO2 anymore, with governments abandoning efforts at controlling CO2 emissions, with even Germans (the most green country in Europe, if not the world) asking “To what extent is climate change actually occurring?” it seems perfectly appropriate to wonder if we have gotten an acquittal for CO2, simply by continuing to cast doubt and keeping at it like bulldogs (thank you, Steve and Anthony, in particular).
Perhaps at some point soon climate science will go back to being the sleepy ivory tower it always used to be. Before Hansen came along with his claims that we would be warming up (after the 1970s, ANY warming should have been seen as getting back to normal – and I assert that Hansen knew that – but he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to scream, The Sky is Falling!”). Before Mann and his legendary fundraising started an avalanche of money that the other climate scientists had to jump on.
All in all, although we don’t want to jinx it, it might be just about the right time to wave the victory flag. We are certainly in a far different world vis-a-vis global warming than 21 months ago. The climatologists are, to a very large extent, being ignored. Yes, there is an IPCC coming up, and perhaps we should wait until that is over. But I will predict that no matter what hoohah comes out of it, it will not have 50% of the energy of the previous IPCCs, because governments just aren’t listening with baited breath anymore. If there is any place where the mojo counted, it was with governments. But it ain’t there, no more.
Our victory lap is just around the corner. Yes, some people on the street will believe that the climate is changing, but – and this is the important part – then they think, “So what? We have other, more important things to worry about.”
Chicken Little is dead. Sprinkle the seasoning on and put it on the barbie.
Thank the gods for Climategate.
Cross-posted as a long comment on WattsUpWithThat, on its post entitled Antarctic ice models “not correct,” sea level rise “complicated”:
This is the way of learning new things: At first (IMHO the first century or five) simplistic ideas pop into mind, and we think we have a basic understanding of a phenomenon, and later on we learn of complications that tell us we have to add complexity to our understanding.
It isn’t that we are stupid, but it IS because we think that the model we have conjured up in our heads matches the reality. And once the brain model takes form, it is that which we are seeing when we see the phenomenon’s evidence being unveiled over time – we color our perceptions by the expectations that we have about our brain model, that it will prove out to be correct. So we keep crowbar-ing the evidence to fit the model.Some of us will see the Emperor’s New Clothes and push for modification of the model/paradigm/construct, against some level of resistance by the rest. Progress does get made, but those brain models keep fighting for their very lives.
Who knows? It might. I would love it if anyone here could tell me what causes El Niño – where is the extra energy coming from, and why isn’t it there all the time? What makes the heat plume move westward, then back? With movement there must be something akin to thrust.