I was actually rather impressed by the five questions Galam asks.

I’ll get right to them. . .The questions and what they triggered in my head (which is a lot of what a blog is all about, isn’t it?):

1.   Why have alarmists made overstatements while there exists no alternative explanation?

By this I assume Galam means that there was no reason to exaggerate.  Good point.  He may not have been the very first to do so, but lately I have been discovering some of Hansen’s statements over the years, and, by the gods, the man is a lunatic.  I honestly would not be surprised to hear some day that he bays at the moon.  he is so over the top, how could any rational person not see the overstatement every time he opens his mouth?

2. Why did alarmists succeed in getting the majority of public opinion to align along their unproved claim ?

This goes to the two Villach, Switzerland, climate conferences in the 1980s.  The first one, with the attendees representing their governments, ended in not much “consensus.”  They congregated later in the decade, this time with no governments involved, and with only alarmists invited, so it was all preaching to the choir.  With only alarmists there, a consensus was easy to attain.  They have been asserting that consensus ever since.  Who was the public to know that the scientists weren’t being on the up and up about “consensus”?  The public had no reason to think of scientists as anything but honest, with no axe to grind.  Basically, the public was trusting and the alarmists took advantage of that.  Policymakers, too.

3. Why did skeptics who adopt a rigorous scientific position without advocating an alternative claim fail (up to recently) to crystallize at least some part of the public opinion?

WHY is it necessary to provide an alternative at all?  Do we demand any defense counsel in criminal court to prove an alternative suspect perpetrated the crime in question?  Of course not.  It is only necessary to create a reasonable doubt.

And basically the skeptics’ agenda (if there is a single one) is the same as a defense counsel – that we SEE that there is a reasonable doubt, and we try to get others to recognize that the case is not proven, not by a long shot.  The prosecution (alarmists) have presented – from day one – a half-baked case.  All we have to do is make it clear to the jury (the public, and especially the policymakers) that the case should be thrown out of court, because the prosecution hasn’t presented a case worthy of the court’s time.

The secondary assertion in that question is that the credentialed skeptics did not garner any public support.  The alarmists would wave an unsubstantiated claim of “Industry shills!” and that satisfied the science editors around the world.  Yet – to this day – no alarmist has ever made public one shred of evidence to that effect.  The accusation was, in itself, evidently proof enough for the editors.

Let us leave not doubt:  The big blame for all of this goes to the science editors and journalists who were not skeptical about the extraordinary claim of global warming being caused by human industrial activity.  The assertion above about lapdogs was not me being amusing.

4. Why, despite the skeptic failure, has the alarmist majority been very adamant in slamming the skeptic behavior?

One word: Insecurity.

From 40 years in the working world, I’ve observed that the one manager to avoid is the one who knows he is scamming the bosses and is afraid his fraud will be discovered.  (That is not the same thing as ALL of us wondering how we got where we are – in this case, it is severe insecurity.)

Read the emails!  Behind closed doors, it is completely obvious that these guys are like the man behind the curtain – they know the science doesn’t stand up to close inspection.  They know their only defense is to diss the opposition, to make any muckrakers appear to have agendas, to attack, attack, attack.  When there is no defense for one’s research, (and there isn’t) then the only ploy is to attack.

Again, read the emails! It is all in there.

But let’s also ask what is meant by “skeptic behavior.”  What is it that the skeptics did?  They acted as a tough  audience for a scientific claim.  This is the job for the scientific community, most especially the journals and their editors.  Why should any outside ‘skeptic community” have even been necessary?

Short answer: It should not have been necessary.

But what is it they did?  As anyone is allowed, a very few of them wanted to check out the work of Michael Mann and CRU, and asked for the specific data that was used, and for a record of the adjustments made during the homogenization of the various data types.  The one single person who asked was Steve McIntyre, and his career as an auditor made him especially well-suited to checking (auditing) such data-intensive work as Mann and CRU had done.  McIntyre maintains to this day that he is not a skeptic.  Retired, he just was looking into what they did.  In the beginning CRU and he were civil in their dealings with each other.  At some point – about the time others, true skeptics like Warwick Hughes, got into asking for the same materials – the civility evaporated, and Jones at CRU became certain he was under attack.  The particulars of that time period are not entirely clear.

As it stands now, CRU would have been much better served if they’d simply given over the data and methodology. As actual scientists, they should have each been keeping a running  Lab Book – a day-to-day account of their thoughts and their trials and errors.  Lab books are important documents for scientists.  There is no reason to believe the CRU/Mann crowd were not keeping Lab books.

The stonewalling tactic of Jones that he lost track of his data is essentially horse crap.  Jones in email #

5. Why are alarmists suddenly and quickly losing support in public opinion?

One word: Climategate.

One phrase: “Hide the decline.”

Up to November, 2009, the alarmists had everything their way.  For over 20 years the alarmists had had things their way; they were the “favored son” of science editors everywhere.  Those science editors were almost universally puppies on the laps of the alarmists. Until then the effect of all the skeptics was basically nil.  Skeptical appeals to look at ALL the science was swept away with disdain, year after year.  WUWT and CA had plenty of site visitors, and plenty of grass-roots supporters.  But Skeptics had been marginalized.

Only when Climategate got out into the main stream media (within days, almost within hours) did anyone get the idea that the scientist might not have been on the up-and-up.  “Hide the decline” put doubt in the minds of public and journalists and editors alike.  “Hide the decline” created enough doubt to take the podium monopoly away from the alarmists.  Enough people read enough about hide the decline that they became a tough audience.

It was not anything the skeptics did.  They are still doing the same things they did before November 2009.  It is just that the audience now has a more skeptical mindset – about the honesty of the scientists.

And it was all done in by the scientists’ own words, among themselves, telling each other to use “Mike’s trick” to “hide the decline.”  The public didn’t even have to know <i>what</i> decline.

So, the “sudden” reason was that the alarmists most central to the entire global warming meme had shot themselves in the foot – with their own bullets fired years before.

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).

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…

I am one of the guys who will get in that other lane and “jump” ahead of the other people.  I don’t always, but for the most part, if it is open, I will cruise carefully up that lane, looking for a moment when one guy is sleep-driving and is slow to move up.  Then, me getting into that lane helps me, but doesn’t hurt most of the people behind, because that guy was going to be slow every time the car ahead pulls up.  I’ve seen times when self-appointed ‘cops’ will actually fudge his/her car over so far as to try to block people coming down that lane.

THAT METER THING, WHAT’S WITH THAT?

I started wondering why putting a column one meter in front of the door helps get people out faster.  Or is the model wrong and it is just a GIGO stupid academic excercise?  As much as I don’t like models in general, I think that one is right.

Why?  Let’s look:

• It “meters” the people.  (no pun intended)
• Especially only one meter from the door, there is only room for one person through at a time on either side – effectively creating two doors where there was one before
• Near the column the people have to separate into two groups, a left one and a right one.
• Then when they merge after going around the column, each pair has time to face each other and merge, with one going behind and the other ahead.
• Without the column they would be shoulder to shoulder, both facing the door
• Is it important that the column is slightly to one side?  Probably. But why?
• Because then one line of people becomes a dominant one and the other a recessive/passive one.
• This forces the passive line (I assume the one that has to take the longer way around) to FACE the other line of people more head on
• This view lets them assess slightly longer – and BETTER – and get a better idea of when and how to merge.
• Certainly the same effect could be had by having a small vestibule one meter deep with two open door frames on the inside wall and one door to the outside.

To me that is a dead parallel to the traffic situation.  And IMHO, it tells me why the courteous single lane approach is not the best means of getting traffic though expeditiously.  The concept that the cars will go faster because they are already all in one line does not necessarily follow.  See below about dawdlers…

Of course, all of that may be b.s on my part, trying to justify my preference as the better way, right?  Right, that may be true.  But maybe there is something there in that study.

COURTEOUSNESS AT THE BARRIER

Now, as to the barriered lane problem above, the people who get in the single file usually talk about it in terms of being courteous.  Somewhere long ago someone told them – or they concluded on their own – that getting in the back of the line is always what a good citizen does.  They talk about it as if to “jump” the line is to be antisocial.

But my discussion here isn’t about politeness or being a good citizen.  Not unless getting the most people through the intersection soonest is being a good citizen.  So, which gets people through fastest?

A different  illustration (but analogous):

A frequent thing seen on 4-lane roadways is that at a red light, if a delivery truck or semi is sitting in one lane (call it lane B), many more than half the people will get into the other lane (lane A) – even if that lane has more vehicles in it.  Only when Lane A has a lot more cars in it will any drivers get into lane B behind the truck.

I have a rule of thumb.

If I can be in the first FOUR cars AFTER THE FRONT OF THE TRUCK, in lane A, I will go into lane A.  If I can’t, I will get in lane B behind the truck.

Why?  Because almost every time, at least ONE of those 4 cars in front of me in lane B  will dawdle and create a gap ahead of him/her and slow down the people behind.  This often creates an opportunity for someone behind the truck to pull from lane A into lane B.  

I now know from long experience that lane B is best for saving time, if I am going to be five cars in lane A behind the last vehicle in lane B. I KNOW that there is a REALLY good chance of moving into a gap in front of a dawdler in lane A.  But I need to be in lane B to take that opening.  If I am in lane A I am stuck.

Really, now, how many times have you been in lane A and had some dawdler (on his cell phone or not) who just will NOT pass that truck in lane B?  Lots of times, right?  A good number of people who get in a more full lane A are dawdlers.  They aren’t really paying attention, and they see a truck in one lane and they just automatically go in lane A.

Dawdlers are, as I see it, people who drive with their brains on automatic.  Most of my time on the road is spent in negotiating my way around dawdlers.  It doesn’t mean I am an aggressive driver.  It means I am paying attention and some others aren’t, and I prefer they not be in the way.

BACK TO THE BARRIER PROBLEM

Now take this to the barrier lane problem.  I KNOW that out of every four people in that non-barriered lane (let’s call it lane B again), one of them will be a dawdler.  Take that times perhaps 15 or 20 cars and that is a lot of dawdlers in one lane, slowing down the people behind them.

BARRIERS OR TRUCKS, IT IS ALL THE SAME THING

The truck in lane B or a barrier in lane B – it is all the same, functionally.

But in people’s minds, it is not the same thing.  When there is a truck in lane B, people think, “I will get into lane A because it will go faster; everyone knows trucks accelerate slower than cars.“  So, they get into the lane that will – they think – move faster.  Makes sense, right?

Yet a barrier they treat differently.  Even though the barrier is not moving at all, which is 100% going to be less acceleration than cars, in THAT situation, the drivers put on a different halo.  In that case, they talk about it as courteous or discourteous.  But it is all in their minds.  It is fine to want to be selfish and get past a slow-moving truck, but it is not okay to  be selfish to get past a barrier.  Huh???

You see, part of the problem is that MANY drivers simply don’t pay enough attention to their driving and do not consider that they may be slowing someone else down.  And the only time they really even SEE what is going on around them is when someone does something unexpected – meaning something ‘non-dawdler.’

NON-DAWDLERS

One more point:  The people who get in the lane with the barrier are the opposite of dawdlers.  They are people who are actually paying attention and are alert, not daydreaming.  So, even though they get up in the front of that line, they are intent on seeing an opening in front of a dawdler.  A good amount of the time spent in that lane, for people at the back, is spent waiting for the dawdlers to catch up, each inch-worm movement of the line.  Their 1-second or 2-second delay, multiply that times the number of dawdlers. Now multiply that times the number of inchworm movements in a line of backed up traffic in lane A. The delay because one or two alert drivers “jumped the line” is a whole lot less than what the dawdlers are costing the other drivers behind them.  That is my opinion about that.

I just prefer to not be at the mercy of all those dawdlers.

And I think all that has a parallel in the panicked room with the column.  The column turns each of the people into an alert “driver” when they round the column.  They have to (more than people shoulder do) face the other people and are – because of the column – given more time (which works for them!) to gauge when it is best to merge.

I think that the alert drivers jumping the line are nearly ALWAYS doing that, because they know they HAVE to, to merge back into the line.  And the alert non-dawdlers know they will do just fine in that situation, since they’ve done it many time before.

Trust me on this: A major reason the dawdlers don’t go in that lane B – whether it is a truck or a barrier – is because they have a fear that they will not be able to merge back in.  Of course they will be able to – but they have the fear anyway.
Now, I mentioned that I grew up in an area where they FILLED both lanes pretty much equally.  My experience was that equal lines get more people through faster.  But I am remembering that from a long time ago, so maybe I am stroking myself… LOL
When I hear people rant about the line jumpers, I just keep my mouth closed, because I’ve learned that nearly ALL of those who rant about them are dawdlers, as best I can tell.   They are squeamish and hesitant people.  And they are the ones who get an alert driver merging in front of them, into the space the dawdler created.  And what are they crying about?  “If I had to wait in the line, then so should everyone else!”

I just hope that if I am ever in a panicked room, there is a column in front of the door, so that the dawdlers (who I am sure are NOT good in a pinch) don’t get other people killed.

[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.

The defendant does not have to prove his innocence, and if found not guilty in the current fair trial, he is set free.  “Not guilty” means that the CASE against him was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt, not that he was necessarily innocent.  It is not incumbent upon him to prove anything – only to create a reasonable enough doubt in the minds of the jury.

As taxpayers and as citizens, we are the jury regarding the facts presented, when our tax moneys are used to study a phenomenon.  As the jury, we are not required to derive solutions that others are – in our estimation – inadequately assessing.  Neither is this required of the defense counsel.  If called upon, we are only asked to assess and judge.  And what we the jury judge is not the defendant, but the case against him, and the case is limited to what has been presented in court.  It is the business of the prosecutor to present a strong case to convict, and it is the defense’s business to create a reasonable doubt.  The jury judges the evidence that makes up the case for each side.

The defendant in the case of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is human activity, specifically human technological activity, with a particular emphasis on that part called “human industry.”  It used to be called “progress.”  But “progress” has a positive ring to it, so the human activity labeled “industry” is in the docket, not progress.  Representing “The People”, are environmentalists, some of whom have garnered a virtual monopoly on a certain branch of science, climatology.  Like any prosecutors, the environmentalists are convinced of the sufficiency of their case.  It is, of course, their job to be convinced  – otherwise they would not be up to the task.  It is also obvious that in a courtroom if prosecutors themselves were allowed to be the jury, well, that would be a kangaroo court, wouldn’t it?  And no defendant would ever get off.  The prosecutors are not – and should not be allowed to be – the jury.  No one would disagree with that.

If that were the case, we would end up only having Grand Juries. In a Grand Jury, only the basics of the case made by the prosecutor (enough to get an indictment issued) is allowed a voice.  There is no defense of any sort permitted in a Grand Jury trial.

DOESN’T THE DEFENDANT GET TO FACE HIS ACCUSER AND CHALLENGE THE EVIDENCE?

Thankfully, there are those who want to hear “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”   This we take for granted.  Yet this has not been done for the case of AGW.  In public courtroom trials, there are citizens who accept the word of the prosecutors, no matter what.  After hearing the prosecutor’s side of the case, they are all for convicting at that point, even before hearing the case presented by the defendant, his case challenging the prosecution’s version of “the truth.”  Those who in the mid-1990s followed the O.J. Simpson trial may recall that at the end of the prosecution’s case, there was a hue and a cry to put Mr. Simpson away right then and there.  This was the case, even though not one minute had been spent on the defense’s case.  Only after both sides have presented their cases does it become the jury’s business to decide if the prosecution’s case has withstood the challenges of the defense.

We who are skeptical about global warming simply assert that the climate scientists as prosecutors have made a case, but that the case is not strong enough, and we assert the right to challenge their evidence and to have the other the other side of the story heard.  We assert that, after listening to both sides’ cases, there will be sufficient reasonable doubt. But when some of us (Steve McIntyre, e.g.) tried to use “discovery” to be able to look at the evidence for ourselves, the prosecution (CRU, and now Michael Mann) has stonewalled, asserting that discovery isn’t allowed for the defendant yet the prosecution somehow still asserts that the trial (of humans and their economic activity) should continue anyway, even with some of the evidence not being presented.

If the prosecution (CRU, in this instance) is allowed to see the evidence, don’t you believe the defense should also be so entitled?  I assure you that Steve McIntyre had the wherewithal to assess the evidence.  When he did do so, in (<i>McIntyre & McKittrick 2003</i>), he found out that the prosecutor named Michael Mann had inexpertly mishandled the evidence, coming up with a non-supportable assessment.  In fact, McIntyre found that Mann’s “black box” statistics method (Mann is still yet to provide his evidence, and he is fighting such revelations in a real court) would produce the same kind of result (the infamous ‘hockey stick’ shape), no matter what kind of facts were put into it, even random data.  So, at least some of the evidence has been shown to be flawed.  That much is known.   Still, all the evidence available via discovery has not been handed over yet.  That was the specific issue (FOIA) in many of the Climategate emails of 2009, the issue that made the two sides very antipathetic to each other.

Coming back to it, should the defense HAVE TO come up with our own case, our own hypotheses?  We do have them, and have the people to deliver a more full hypothesis, but our people would need to have access to ALL the facts (i.e., data and methodologies) so as to know how to challenge the evidence. After all, the prosecutors did not themselves collect the data in the field.  Others did.  And the others provided that data to the prosecutors, but the prosecutors do not choose to let anyone else see the data or the methods.  Some might say that, yes, the data was made available to the BEST authors, whose results were publicized to great fanfare a few months ago.  That was not really true, though.  Some data was provided, but it was data that had been already adjusted.  Therefore, all BEST did was to do statisitcs on the adjusted data, so it made perfect sense that the BEST results were nearly identical to the previous work, the work done by the prosecutor/scientists at CRU, GISS and NOAA.  It is precisely the adjustments and the selection of data that is being challenged by the defense/skeptics.   We skeptics, thus, would come up with our counter-theory(ies), except the prosecution is not turning over all the evidence they have.  therefore, we do not have ebough information with which to work, in order to challenge the work of the prosecutors/scientists.

Human activities have been indicted, and we want to have a fair trial, and that means we get to challenge the evidence.  Isn’t that the way it is in any civilized nation, the way it is in any civilized courtroom?

I fail to see why supporters of the global warming argument mock us with ad hominem name calling (deniers” being the most egregious).  What about our case do they not get?  The activity of humans deserves to have a fair trial.  And that means hearing both sides of the case.  We all know that in the 1988-1990 period, when the “consensus” about global warming was first being  claimed, there was no fair trial.  The prosecutors acted as judge, jury, and executioner.  We did not hear any debate about the other side of the issue.  Everyone was told, “There IS no other side. All the opposition is manufactured by the oil industry, and we can’t trust any of it.  Our case is the only one worth listening to, and everyone should just ignore them.” Anyone reading this knows this is true: No debate has ever been held on this.  The prosecutor’s side ran around screaming, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” and everyone has been expected to accept it without debate.  The skeptics simply want to have their work replicated by someone outside the prosecutor’s office.

DO YOU MEAN THE ACCUSED GETS REPRESENTATION?

It is a sad thing that for a long time there WAS no debate.  Finally, when some people said, “Wait a minute! Are you sure?” The prosecutors said, “No fair!  We already concluded this!  Go home and shut up!  Move along!  There is nothing to see here!”

IT ISN’T OVER TILL THE FAT LADY SINGS

For some, the moment that began the defense of human activity was when Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick” graph was presented, ten times as big as a lottery winner’s check.  Here is the IPCC version of it:

That is one of my own clear moments where I asked, incredulously, “WTF is going on here?“  That was because I knew from school that there had been two extreme periods in the last 1,200 years.  One, the Medieval Warm Period (about 900 AD to about 1350 AD), was extremely warm.  The other, the Little Ice Age (about 1400 AD to about 1800 AD), was extremely cool.  And neither one of them showed up on this anointed graph of Michael Mann’s. I myself also vehemently disagreed with the amount of the cooling and warming; I still do not believe that such small quantitative differences can produce such great extremes.  For example, the Vikings farmed in Greenland, when it was only 0.7C or so warmer than in 1900?  I find that impossible.  I believe someone has screwed up.  I do have my very clear reasons, but this is for another discussion.

The IPCC’s first graph, with the WMP and the LIA

I though, “Surely, someone will notice that oversight – the missing MWP and missing LIA – and point out the error of Mann’s ways.  Every meteorologist and climatologist in the world knows that those periods existed, so Mann must have screwed up.  Right?  Yeah, they will catch it.”  Wrong.  Instead of calling him out on it, everyone acted as if the MWP and the LIA had simply never existed.  It was as if Micheal Mann had time traveled to 850 AD and killed the grandfather of the MWP and the LIA, meaning that they were never born.

That was in 1998, and my skepticism pretty much dates from that time.  I began looking to see what kind of studies had been done.  I especially wanted to see what papers had proven that climate variability or climate were not the cause.  Other causes I was interested in, too – such as sunspot cycles, changes in the output of the Sun.  I wondered isf any of those might have been positively ruled out.  I write this in very early 2012, and still have not found anthing but assertions.  I’ve found no empirical studies that eliminate the other likely suspects.

I’ve since learned that basically there were two conferences in Switzerland in the 1980s, at which basically no one except environmentalists were invited.  The consensus among those enivronmentalists was that human indsustrial activity was putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, in line with Arrhenius’ late 19th century speculation.  In the 1970s we had been in the depths of the coldest period since the Little Ice Age, bringing some to wonder if we were going into a new Ice Age.  One of the organizations sounding the alarm about the coming Ice Age was no other than the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the UK.  Snce the 1980s, CRU has been at the forefront of exactly the opposite – telling all the world that a crime is being committed – the indiscriminate release of massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, causing the climate to warm.  Coming less than ten years after that cold spell, it didn’t occur to anyone among them to ask if it might be NORMAL for the world to warm up after an extended cold spell.  Instead they started making the case against human activity, and then began telling the world that such activities were going to destroy the world, if severe sanctions were not imposed.

From about 1988 until Mann’s paper in 1998, there were few people who didn’t hear the alarm, and few who asked, “Is it true?”  Mann’s hockey stick seemed to galvanize the people who did ask that question, and the beginnings of what are called climate skeptic blogs began to appear in the early 2000s.  The skeptics in essence became activists resisting the claim that human industrial activity was causing the climate to warm to dangerous levels.  The prosecutors – the environmentalist climate scientists – expressed a great deal of vitriol at the newcomers who disagreed with them.  Since the prosecutors had had their way for over ten years, at least a bit of hubris had set in, and it manifested in accusations leveled against the “skeptics” that they were paid shills for the oil industry.  Though no evidence has ever pbeen produced, over a decade later, the same charges continue to be made.

Prosecutors and defense council are never expected to be pals.  There is no reason that this case should be any different.  The climate scientists/prosecutors are not happy that their pronouncements of guilt are being challenged.  That is to be expected.  The defense/skeptics continue to point out the flaws in the prosecution’s case.  The ongoing case is still to be decided.  Of course, the real proof will be in what the climate does over the next several decades.  HOwever, with the prosecution asking the public to fund remedial actions that will, if enacted, seriously affect the economic activity of the nations of the world, the case can’t go on for decades.  They are asking for us to reach for our wallets now, to not wait to see what the evidence shows over the long term.  They assert that “we can’t wait any longer, we need to punish the perpetrators now.”

So, the defense’s approach was a holding action, while pecking away at the prosecution’s case.  All the while the prosecution has pushed for a summary judgement.  It appeared that they would succeed, but just before a critical juncture, some evidence was leaked implicating the prosecution scientists in a conspiracy to hide exculpatory evidence.  This caused a firestorm of support for the defense and was extremely injurious to the prosecution’s case.

As of this time, the case is still open, and the jury is still out.  But at least now the defense has begun to be heard, and the prosecution lost its mojo and the almost absolute monopoly on informing the public of the merits of the case.

Nothing is certain  right now as to the eventual outcome of the case, because it is not known yet how permanent the damage to the prosecution’s case has been.  A second batch of pertinent evidence has come out in the last two months, and it all seems to confirm the conspiracy to hide pertinent facts from the court.

The case seems now destined to go on for a long time.  The defendant is still free on its own recognizance.  More to come in this long and complicated case.  The fat lady has not sung yet.

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.

I stood in line for over SIX hours that day – to give blood that, in the end, was not needed in lower Manhattan that day.  Six hours, knowing that right behind me stood that idiot who thought Bush was a great and powerful wizard.

Why it took the world so long to recognize Bush’s utter, utter imbecility I will never know.  By the time we “elected” him a second time (give thanks to Diebold for that), the rest of the world had awakened, wondering how 56 MILLION people had voted for him after his proven incompetance was out there for all the world to see – and after the torture has been outed to the world.  [caps in the original headline...]

So, as you can see, YES, America took on the qualities of Adolf and his henchman – and not only HAD them, but had the opportunity to refute them all – and chose instead to wrap its arms around it all!

Why people like that idiot in the line are still so stupid, I will also never know.

It is the history of the decline of the USA as a superpower.

No duh.

This would be especially ironic if it did happen to be an inside job (one neocon famously said during Bush’s first few months in office, “What we really need is a new Pearl Harbor,” and many still think the neocons did it).  I am neutral on that issue; they had the opportunity, and there are suspicious aspects that cannot be overlooked completely.  But, try as I might, the case against them is merely circumstantial.  I have not seen any convincing evidence, so against my better judgment, I give them the benefit of the doubt.  Why I do, I don’t know.  They certainly don’t believe it.  After all, they are America killers.  Much more than Al Qaida ever could have been.
In the last short while I have been flabbergasted that the hoopla over 9/11  has been as small as it has been.  I would have expected there to be a 3-month run-up to 9/11.  The recent silly “terrorist threats” only bring back to mind the absurdity and criminality of the Bush years – the NSA eavesdropping, the attack on Iraq, which had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, the Black sites all over the Middle East and Europe, the soldiers policing our airports, the long lines as the TSA imposed itself on us a la 1984, the Patriot Act – and most of all, of course, the torture of people by Americans (which still might some day have its day in the World Court).

It was the beginning of the end, but it did not happen in a vacuum.

[der Spiegel again] …These are costly defeats for America and the rest of the world…. According to a conservative estimate by Brown University, there have been almost 140,000 civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. The massive retaliation cost more than $3 trillion (€2.2 trillion) — dollars that would have been better used in America’s schools or in the wallets of US citizens...

Or, better yet, in the pockets of the high-stakes gamblers called Goldman Sachs et al.  To pay for their Jobs Bill.

In retrospect the term “Jobs Bill” should be applied to Bill Clinton, during whose tenure Americans had jobs coming out of our arse holes.

Today, following all the Bush-era tax cuts, the US is a deeply divided country in social terms. The gap between rich and poor is almost as great as it was in the days of oil barons and steel magnates in the last century. Five percent of Americans buy almost 40 percent of all consumer goods sold in the country.

Is this by default?  Just how LITTLE do the other 95% buy now, anyway?  So many people are now only buying at Wal-Mart anymore, and if you go into most malls or big-box stores, look at how few customers are walking the aisles – and see how empty their carts are.

The quiet is like a tomb.

Even necessary item in homes are having their life spans stretched to the limit.  And unnecessary ones?  Many never get bought, anymore.

The US has become estranged from the rest of the world. It is partly its own fault, but the rest of the world also shares some of the blame — because many only see America as a perpetrator, and no longer regard it as a victim.

This is a NON-Liberal German paper saying this, and Germany is, if anything, more supportive of the rich getting richer while the poor are left to fend for themselves.  Witness the present crisis of the euro and the EU, in which Germany is leading the charge to dump on Greece, Portugal, Ireland who are dragging the euro down.

Der Spiegel would be behind America – if only America had any capacity to be itself again.  This article was written as much as an epitaph as a criticism.  The super-power is dead!  Long live the super-power!

All I know is that the America of today has almost no resemblance to the America George W. Bush and I were born into or grew up in.

In answer to Richard Armitage, I would say, rather, that history died that day, at least so far as America was a leader and was so much admired by the rest of the world.  Even the jeans that were the icon of America have long since been made in China and elsewhere.  “America” has such a hollowness to it now.  The neocons killed the very thing they purported to venerate.  It certainly is the biggest blunder – of so many – that they perpetrated upon the U.S.

We should erect a monument on The Mall in Washington, dedicated to the narrow-winded fearmongers who America has followed into oblivion.  Without both the authoritarian mind set of them all – leaders and followers both – it goes without saying that we would not be where we are today.

After watching several hours on that day ten years ago, I

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.

• Steve Garcia | August 19, 2011 at 2:15 am

  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.

• Chief Hydrologist | August 19, 2011 at 5:27 am

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:

 

 

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:

Here you can get an idea of the length of them:

The photos do not do the reality of them justice.

The purpose of this post is not about clouds, however.  It is about randomness having within it periodic – and in some cases perhaps cyclical – organization to it.  I would call it Random Organization, or more fully, Cyclical Random Spontaneous Organization.

And I have seen undulatus asperatus clouds again, too.  In randomness can appear organization, which doesn’t make sense – but it does happen.

The purpose of this post is not to show cool clouds.  The purpose is to

If chaos theory does not cover random cyclical organization, it should.

A hurricane, after all, is even spoken of as “organized” – and it IS.  Yet what made that one depression organize when several others didn’t?  Randomness?  Yes, but two randomnesses can sometimes ad up to organization.  Why?  What governs this?  Does it have to do with, say, El Niño?  PDO?  AMO?  Climate overall?  It would only take a little bit of organization for the temps to warm up or cool down for a few years.  We call it variability, but it isn’t random; warm years tend to (but don’t always) foster more warm years, and the same goes for cool years and periods.  Climate study is – or should be – about these cycles.  By knowing them WELL, we would know what else is anomalous when it happens.  Without knowing these cycles, we are flying blind.

It also appears to me that once an organization occurs, it may have some staying power, that the organization has to be “broken”.  It does so with cloud shapes, as I’ve seen. Does it also occur in climate systems, and have some temporal stability when it does?  It seems quite possible to me.

The obvious climate – versus weather – phenomenon that this might apply to is the El Niño.  This warm plume appears every 3-6 years or so along the Equator in the Pacific and directly affects the entire length from Peru to well into Indonesia.  When it is not present, the condition is called “La Niña” which lasts 1-3 years – about half the cycle.  The duration of either is itself random and unpredictable.  Its full name is the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), since it occurs in the “South” Pacific, meaning the tropical Pacific – AND that it does oscillate from one state (regime) to the other.

No one knows exactly where the heat comes from.  And it is not merely a more focused arrangement of the heat energy.  There really is more of it.  See this.

ENSO is not the only oscillation in the planet’s heat system.  Farther north there is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which deals with far more total energy.  The PDO is much more newly discovered, and less is known about it.

We know about such climate things as the seasonal monsoons and the Gulf Stream, but those we have meteorological explanations for.  ENSO and the PDO we do not.  We do not know what causes them.  They do not, like the monsoons, come every year.  They are not permanent like the Gulf Stream.  Coming only every few years and at different times of the year, ENSO has something else governing it, other than annual seasonal warming and cooling.  The PDO lasts for multiple decades, usually two or three.  So whatever drives it, it must be cyclical, but not any cycle that is currently known.

This is one of those things that I run across and then have to cogitate on for a good long while, hoping my mind will attract more information.  Eventually, enough information will come along, and then I will see if this has validity or not.

Thoughts on this are definitely invited.  Input is good.

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).

• If we got an acquittal for CO2, it is a win.  There always was a reasonable doubt.  The jury just had to wake up to it.  Anthony and Steve M presented the case long enough and true enough so that could happen.
• If serious scientists are talking about the uncertainties in climate science, where they were not before, that is a win.
• If the world now does not accept the claims without some skepticism, it is a win.
• If previously stilled voices in the climate community now speak clearly and without being intimidated, it is a win.
• If more and more skeptical or neutral research papers are seeing the light of day, it is a win.
• If the news media has stopped calling us “deniers”, it is at least a partial win.
• If they sometimes don’t mention the ad hoc assertions of “industry shill,” it is a partial win. It means some of the respect is coming this direction.
• If the monopoly on climate change pronouncements is broken (and it is), then it is a win.

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.