OT; Widespread Global warming

SNIP

Yep, consistent.

SNIP

Something is happening:

Something is happeing in line with their predictions. No more sunspots below 1500 gauss.

and it is referring to a paper published in "Current Science", the "pre-eminent" Indian science journal, with an impact factor of 0.9. Granting the controversial content of the paper, it would have got into Nature or Science - journals with an impact factors of about 30 - if had any worthwhile content.

In fact the cosmic ray hypothesis has been around for a while. It has long since been falsified, but denialist web-sites aren't known for throwing out bad hypotheses once they have passed their sell-by date.

Shucks, its just more denialist propaganda.

In this case the Indian governemnt has an interest in not beleiving in anthropogenic global warming - Inidan industrialisation is injecting rapidly increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, and they don't want to take the economic hit involved in going over to sustainable power sources. It wouldn't slow them up much, but India's famously corrupt administration means that their rate of economic growth has always lagged China, and - unlike China - never did as well as Japan did back when it was catching up with the western industrialised nations, and they don't think that they can afford to slow themselves dwon any more. Cleaning up the corruption would - of course - be more useful than lying about the causes of global warming, but the administrators involved do enjoy being bribed.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Dr Rao is hardly a hick scientist and not on Sourcewatch.

Former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization.

/quote

Prof Rao started his career as a cosmic ray scientist, under the late Dr Vikram Sarabhai, which work he continued at MIT. In association with the JPL Group, he was the first to establish the continuous nature of the solar wind and its effect on geomagnetism using Mariner

2 observations. Prof Rao's experiments on a number of Pioneer and Explorer spacecrafts, led to a complete understanding of the solar cosmic ray phenomena and the electromagnetic state of the interplanetary space.

/end quote

Well that's a change. At least you didn't blame the tobacco companies.

n y e

In the best tradition of denialist shills, he know everything about cosmic rays, and rather less about cloud formation and its effect on the climate. Try to get it into your head that if he had anything worth publishing, he would have got it into Science or Nature or maybe PNAS.

The fact that he seems to have had to use his political influence in India to get it published in an Indian journal with a rather low impact factor tells you all you need to know about the quality of the paper.

The tobacco companies were pioneers in the business of devaluing inconvenient scientific information. Some of the front organisations they set up are still in business, but they are now deluding people into believing that CO2 emissions are harmless, when it used to be tobacco smoke.

Fairly obviously, the tobacco companies don't have any direct interest in lying to the public about anthropogenic global warming, and I've never suggested that they did.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No, the tobacco companies simply questioned the methodology.

Program 11 details the methodology used for the original Surgeons General Report in '64.

What results is a "bootleggers and Baptists" public choice "game".

-- Les Cargill

I can't get to see Program 11, because I'm outside the USA. My guess is that it puts up R.A. Fisher's proposition, which was essentially that people smoked because they were more likely to get lung cancer. My father, not only a heavy smoker (like R.A.Fisher) but also a great admirer Fisher's statistical skills, found this convincing.

Medical students who had opened up the lungs of heavy smoker at autopsy and found them black with (carcenogenic) tar found the argument less persuasive.

The fossil carbon extraction industry is busy with just such a game at the moment, but it is a second line of defense - they've succeeded un persuading a lot of people that the scientific case for anthropogenic global warming is less than water-tight - which happens to be false - thus weakening the political support for the rise in energy prices required by any move to more sustainable energy sources.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Bill,

and how would you characterize the US gov'ts economic interest in giving itself the authority to control CO2?

Mark

Tsk. Very irritating - sorry about that.

No, it's a general exposition of the rather complex methodology the doctors who put the suggestions that became the Surgeons General Report used.

They whack off all the parts that won't fit in an undergrad or advanced high school treatment in the video, but they also examine things like Simpson's Paradox.

But there's still a disconnect even *there*. The tools just aren't really up to it, when it comes down to it.

The bootleggers aren't the prime movers. That's the point.

I remain quite skeptical of many of the conclusions drawn. It's still very early days.

No matter what's said, the AGW proponents are reifying a model into the status of fact. And to an extent, it really doesn't matter.

If you'll look, I think that the arbitrage "industry" is taking pretty good care of that as we speak. I agree that price is the mechanism by which carbon use declines ( arguing that Murkin SUV drivers are somehow sociopaths is foolish in the extreme ) but once you place a government in thrall of carbon sales, then the paradox underlying the Bootleggers-Baptist game becomes apparent.

First, get rid of all the subsidies. Then accumulate data for a while. Then possibly some form of public policy action might make *some* sense. But Kyoto treaty type things won't ever work - the game theory is trivial to show this. Defection is far too profitable.

-- Les Cargill

I WISH one of you warmingists would explain to me why warm is bad?

What's bad about milder winters, longer growing seasons, and lusher, more vigorous plant growth?

Please, Bill - explain to my why warm is bad. Please?

Thanks, Rich

The Church of Antismokerism doesn't want to be supplanted by the Church of Warmingism as the national religion.

I've seen the documents that show that the EPA violated their own rules for statistical significance (they changed their standard sigma of 5% to

10%) just so they could catch enough outliers to allege a _correlation_, and anybody with two neurons to rub together knows that correlation does not imply causation anyway.

But, if you're going to go by correlation, I've seen at least two studies, peer-reviewed and published in medical journals, that the correlation between cancer and personality type is so strong that smoking drops down into the noise.

Cancer is strongly correlated with personality type - Type A, which is the ones that are rigid in their thinking and have no emotional outlet (think Jim Thompson and Michael A. Terrell) is _stongly_ correlated with cancer; type B are plain ol' ordinary Joe next door types (much like, say, John Larkin, John fields, or Spehro Pefhany) and Type C are the artsy-fartsy, head-in-the clouds dreamer types, who have very little incidence of cancer.

Unfortunately, this was about 15 years ago, and I was under a(an?) NDA at the time - I was a document coder on TWO antismokerist money-grab litigations, so don't know how to look them up.

Anybody got Lexis-Nexus?

Hope This Helps! Rich

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The point is that politics is a game of compromise. The poeple who are concocting the compromises make deals that suit them, at the expense of the general public who aren't represented in the smoke-filled rooms where the compromises are hammered out.

With anthropogenic global warming, the people with a serious interest haven't even been born yet, so they really are under-represented.

All scientific theories involved reification. That isn't - of itself - a reason for questioning the scientific case for anthropogenic global warming. You need to find an alternative hypothesis that fits the facts at least as well before you have a tenable sceptical position. eople have been looking - hard - for such a case for moire than a decade now, and nothing that has ccome up has been remotely plausible.

The nearest thing to a logicallly consistent alternative is the grand conspiracy theory, which says the 97% of the world's best climatologists - the PNAS article made that 291 out of the 300 with highest citation indices - are collaborating to deceive the rest of us, which does happen to be thoroughly implausible.

Whence the argument that the tax-and-subsidise approach has to be fiscally neutral.

This ignores the effects of economices of scale. Germany's scheme for subsidising solar power generated enough extra sales to roughly halve the installed cost per watt of solar power. We've still got another couple of orders of magnitude to go before solar power under-cuts fossil-carbon powered generating plants, but we need a another couple of orders of magnitude more installed solar generation capacity.

Doing nothing isn't a good idea when the CO2 we are injecting into the atmosphere now is going to hang around for another 800years or so. At the moment, about half the CO2 we are injecting into the atmosphere is dissolving in the oceans, but as the oceans warm up and get more acid that proportion is going to drop.

True, which is probably why it was adopted in the first place.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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It is unfortunate that Rich doesn't have enough congitive capacity left to distinguish between science and religion.

And anybody who knows anything about the medical consequences of smoking knows that that the statistics merely picked out the areas where smoking was leading to increased mortality; once you started looking at the way tobacco smoke changed smoker's lungs and arteries, it was easy enough to see direct causation.

,

Personality type correlates with smoking and smoking causes cancer? This doesn't let smoking off the hook - as you say, correlation doesn't imply direct causation. The control condition would be mortality figures for the same personality types in social groups who don't smoke for ideological or social reasons.

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This is a popular delusion, originally gnerated by medical researchers who didn't know much about statitical inference. Incidnetally, Type A personalities got heart disease, not cancer, and the suspicion is that high blood pressure was the mechanism involved. Now that high blood pressure is routinely treated, this correlation may be going away.

ty

Google seems to work.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I've tried Rich, and you are just too dim to follow the explanation.

For the benefit of people who aren't quite as dim a Rich, anthropogenic global warming referes to increasing average temperatures across the globe as a whole. At a local level this is better described as climate change. During the big thaw at the end of the last ice age, climate change turned off the Gulf Stream, and the area around the North Atlantic got lot colder for 1300 years. If all the ice in the Greenland ice sheet decided to slide off into the sea next week - and its certainly sliding off quite rapidly at the moment, though nowhere near that fast - we could have a reun of the Youner Dryas

Nobody is predicting that this will happen, or even a serious risk that it might - though oceanographers have taken to reminding us that the Laurentian ice sheet didn't melt in situ at the end of the last ice age, but slid off into the ocean over a period of a couple of hundred years - but it is representative of the kind of odd stuff that might happen.

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum - some 55.8 million years ago - is another example of abrupt warming, which was coupled with a number of mammalian species going extinct.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

A great excuse for cutting oil imports and getting the US balance of trade back into the black, after a couple of decades deep in the red?

We all know that we are now finding less oil every year than we are burning, so oil is going to get more expensive, even if we don't consider the costs of the damage to the environment casued by injected extra CO2 into the atmosphere. Moving over to sustainable enrgy sources earlier rather than later could only strengthen the US geopolitical situation, and allow it to extricate itself from some expensive foreign entanglements.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

But since it's not difficult to identify an existing public choice pathology in it.... ? And people leave messes for subsequent generations all the time. If there's a good way *not* to, then don't, but ... where's the "good way" here? The best we can do now is sell indulgences....

Except those for which experiments can actually be run. We've been here before...

Not really- all you have to do is audit the methodology, and point up weaknesses.

This has happened many times. You don't need a conspiracy per se - just a common mode of weak thinking. I'm no denier - I just wish it was less ... flimsy before public policy is implemented based on it.

And when I see people decrying Freeman Dyson of all people... he's probably the gentlest soul who ever lived, and has done more for the species than most.

It can't be.

I mean subsidies to fossil fuel companies. If people want to experiment with alts, fine - but it's still money down a rathole.

That's just poor fire discipline.

-- Les Cargill

n

By making scarce and expensive the cheap, raw ingredient essential to all finished goods, energy, making our stuff more expensive in a competitive world marketplace? Good plan.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

I didn't ask for another useless goddamned sermon.

I asked three simple questions. This has grown to four.

I want to know, if you can answer in 25 words or less:

1. Why is warm bad?
2. Why is a longer growing season bad?
3. Why are milder winters bad?
4. Why is enhanced plant growth bad?

If you can't, or won't explain this, using little words so a denialist like myself can actually understand the answers, then you are so obviously full of shit that there is no reason for anyone to continue to trollfeed you.

Thanks, Rich

Heh. Aren't up to it, when you get down to it. This made me chuckle.

Cheers! Rich

See here:

:-)

Hopefully it's self-evident that *too much* warmer or colder is "bad," although how much constitutes "too much" is anyone's guess...