OT: Scott Pruitt lol

And force US industry to survive on those engineers whose parents could aff ord to send them to university. The rest of the world isn't that silly.

For a long time US living standards were high enough that they could import tertiary trained experts from the rest of the world, but Europe at least h as caught up, and while a couple of years working in the US is still nice t o have - it proves that your English is up to scratch - it's no longer a pl ace where you would want to bring up kids.

Despite Jim's lack of enthusiasm, MIT is still a respectable university - p eople with a better grasp of reality than Jim still give it money.

Noam Chomsky still works there

and Jim doesn't.

Like the conclusions of the established climatologists aren't equally predictable!

You disappoint me. I've seldom seen your arguments so poorly motivated. You can't be serious! Science works by constructing hypotheses and by then weeding out the untenable ones. Not by denying dissenting scientists the raw data to 'freeze them out'.

Shame on you to defend such views!

Jeroen Belleman

If there is a Christian, is standing on the corner yelling "The end of the world is near.", people call him a nutter. However. if an atheist stands on the corner yelling "The end of the world is near.", he's called an environmentalist.

But you're not capable of interpreting the data yourself. You need the help of the government.

, and

e yet?

oth

nted

em on

two

that

hose

It's

ants

ly

hat

Trust James Arthur to get causation the wrong way around. Bad problems gene rate a lot of interest, and lots of interest generates lots of conferences.

Al Gore is a symptom, not a cause. He's a politician who happened to get in terested in climate change early, who gratified his scientific contacts by listening carefully to what they had to say and publicising it remarkably a ccurately.

This gave him public recognisation and standing, which he has exploited exp ertly.

James Arthur doesn't like him primarily because he isn't a Republican, and secondarily because James Arthur chooses not to believe in anthropogenic gl obal warming, while Al Gore has the good sense to believe the sceintists on the issue, rather than the people who maker money by digging up fossil car bon to sell as fuel.

He'll cite the book of Revelations, which does prophesy an apocalypse - but is rather unspecific about when it will happen, or why.

Because he will cite a considerable and growing body of scientific literature which is rather more specific about when things will go wrong, and how. It lacks some the dramatic detail of Revelations, but is appreciably more reliable.

Krw's brain stopped recording new data back before the literature on climate change started looking particularly persuasive - probably before 1990 - so he isn't equipped to appreciate the difference.

You can predict that zoologists are unlikely to publish anything that contr adicts Darwin's Theory of Evolution - reality is part of that conspiracy. t oo.

There's always Richard Lindzen, who never seems to publish anything that do esn't contradict the other established climatologists. Sadly, his contraria n hypotheses never seem to be verified by experimental test, but he does ke ep trying.

Science works that way.

Propaganda doesn't.

has an introduction which details the enthusiasm with which denialist propa ganda machine made life difficult for Ben Santer who wrote Chapter 8 of th e 1995 IPCC report on the science of climate change. That - and similar ant ics - have generated a lot of temptation to make life just as difficult for the denialists.

I'm not defending them. I'm merely pointing out why they exist, and why you might have to establish your bona fides to get past knee-jerk defensive po stures.

Science does have an ideal of open access to data, but science is done by r eal people, and people do tend to be bit careful what they say about civil liberties when the Klu Klux Klan is active in your neighbourhood.

University scientists around the world do a pretty good job. NASA and the U K Met Office have a duty to understand climate science as it applies to the US and UK national interests, and they get a lot of money from government to do just that - which pays for bigger and more specialised computers than most universities can afford. The government can help, but they aren't the only organisations with the tools and the expertise.

Hi Jeroen, You might look up Richard Muller at Berkeley. He is/was a climate skeptic, who looked into the temperature numbers himself... (or with his group.)

George H.

LOL!

Interesting quote from the the Wikipedia page about him

"This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demon strate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test da ta that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data i s called "Monte Carlo" analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitric k fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!"

My memory is that McIntyre and McKitrick tested Manne et al's procedure on pink noise rather than white noise.

White noise does average to zero. Pink noise - also known as 1/f noise and the drunkards walk - doesn't have a predictable trend, but any single seque nce has a statistical expectation of walking away from zero with the likeli est deviation being proportional to the square root of the number of steps. You don't know which way it will go, but it is going somewhere, and Mann's procedure will pick that trend - as it is supposed to.

McIntyre and McKitrick glossed over that point, and Muller doesn't seem to have known enough about pink noise to realise that he was being conned.

Any trend derived from pure noise, whether white or pink, is meaningless. Any scientist worth his salt knows this. The term 'drunkard's walk' normally applies to Brownian noise, which can be thought of as the time integral of white noise, and thus drops at 20dB/decade of frequency, twice as fast as pink noise.

Mann is a geophysicist. McIntyre and McKitrick are a retired engineer and an economics professor respectively. Muller is a physicist. Each of them should be familiar with the properties of stochastic signals.

I see that Muller & Co actually have some data on their web site. I'm going to have some fun with that. (Thanks George, for pointing me there.)

Jeroen Belleman

But if it's there, you'd expect trend-spotting software to find it. The software doesn't have any way of working out that it's looking at some class of random noise.

Muller didn't seem to be, if the quote was accurate.

McIntyre and McKitrick fit the pattern of "merchants of doubt"

I hadn't read the book when I first ran into McIntyre's output, but since then I've seen a lot more fake climate science from non-climate scientists, and I have felt progressively more dubious about McIntyre's claim to be a disinterested amateur.

Enjoy yourself, but don't forget that physics web-sites are infested with amateurs who think that they can do better than Einstein.

And delay climate armageddon by a couple of milliseconds. Persuading a few million people to take climate change seriously might delay it quite a bit longer, so the investment in private jet flights now is probably justified.

Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson just reminding us, once again, why he deserves his title.

The extra CO2 in the atmosphere is all ours - check out the Seuss Effect - and the global average temperature has gone up, just as you'd expect if you had more greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

The only fraud here is being perpetrated by the Merchants of Doubt

and Jim is one of the gullible suckers they have deceived. John Larkin is another ... Jim Thompson went to MIT so he should know better. John Larkin went to Tulane, which isn't much of an excuse, but better than nothing.

I wonder which "facts" Jim thinks he is referring to. John Larkin mostly points to denialist propaganda in the Murdoch press, though sometimes he drills down to an active denialist, like Anthony Watts.

You do have to be remarkably ignorant not to realise that these sites are taking you for a sucker. John Larkin is remarkably gullible, but Jim Thompson likes to present himself as sophisticated - though he's not all that convincing.