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Dr Zaius

Just to show Gerection an example of something that has a lot of evidence though has also been descibed as a myth. It was a bad example, in hindsight, don't read too much into my use of it.

Dr Verchot is full of shit. In a hundred years this will all be old news.

Gerontion

How many people simultaneously describe the holocaust as a myth and something for which the evidence is compelling? What? Sorry, I can't hear you.

Any danger of you expanding on your riveting counter-theory to anthropogenic climate change? And in case you've forgotten your masterwork, you said, "My theory on climate change is this - heat from the sun. That is it. I think they call it solar flares, or something." Over just how many years did that piece of ground-breaking science mature? I particularly admire the 'or something' tagged on at the end. Masterful.

And just why is Dr Verchot full of shit? Is it because his views fail to coincide with the 'or something' theory of climate change? Or is there another reason? I'm all ears.

Dr Zaius

Who mentioned simultaneously? Why are you questioning me on something I haven't even said? You're clutching at straws now because you lost the debate. The more you say the more you are revealed to be twisting the argument to discredit other's opinions rather than form your own.

You are trying to make me look small & all you are doing is showing yourself to be a persistent bullshitter. Wayne Kerr put Dr Bob to bed with the truth & you should have gone, too. Now you're just trolling.

Dr Zaius

Poor countries have struggled to feed their populations since way back. Was that global warming? I thought it was down to the militias keeping it all for their armies.

He's trying to say people are going to starve to death over this shit & that's a lie. They would starve to death regardless as they have been for years before you monkeys invented global warming.

Propoganda. Speculation. Blinding science. Probabilities & some poxy graph. This is your evidence.

What a joke.

Gerontion

'Compelling' - post 78

'Myth' - post 82 (11 minutes later)

Exactly which debate have I lost? You've yet either to offer a scrap of evidence against the theory of anthropogenic climate change (and others have posted plenty of evidence for) or to off a counter theory (and I'll do you a favour by not dwelling on your kindergarten nonsense about the sun making the earth hot.) So, again, which debate is it that I have lost? Or is it the case that by a misjudged bit of cut-and-paste you've ended up in argument about which you know nothing and which you cannot win? I've asked you countless questions, all of which are germane to your original post; it is noticeable that you have failed to answer a single one. So let's stick to one. What comments do you have on the section from the latest IPCC report which I posted on solar forcing?

Edit

Jesus Christ. An effect can have multiple causes. Is this too hard for you to understand? People got lung cancer before smoking was introduced to Europe. Does this mean that the proposition that smoking causes cancer is " Propoganda. Speculation. Blinding science. Probabilities & some poxy graph"? No. It doesn't. An autistic baboon could see that. Why don't you do us all a favour and admit that you don't have a clue what you're talking about?

And if you want evidence, go to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change download the reports and read them.

Dr Zaius

Same as what the others' said - the IPCC talks bollocks. Even Stroller entertained this idea & he's a ball-breaking mod. I shouldn't have to repeat answers that you will find by reading the thread properly anyway.

Trying to say the Sun doesn't make the Earth hot just shows me what type of maniac you actually are. I've heard some cobblers in my time but you're taking the piss now.

Gerontion

Oh right. So on the one hand we have 'others' and a mod on some shitty internet board and on the other we have all the scientific academies of the developed world, thousands and thousands of scientists working independently, government departments, NGOs, and countless corporations. I can see why you're so skeptical; how very reasonable of you.

Look, there's no shame in not understanding a graph or a little bit of science. That's fine. Come out and say it. I'll understand.

Dr Zaius

That's correct. But then you insert 'simultaneously' in the middle all by yourself & try to twist the question.

Everybody following this thread (if there's anyone left not driven to distraction by your shit) has seen you do it & knows you have run out of argument. You are left trying to score cheap points by trying to be clever but ended up looking like a numpty as you've been caught out. Again.

Shame on you. I bet you're one of those ex-TV members, aren't you?

Gerontion

You're a joke. You clearly don't have a clue what you're talking about and you refuse to answer any of my questions so I can see no point in continuing this.

Dr Zaius

Are you an ex-TV member or not?

I'm curious. Tell me, please. You win the argument & everything - just tell me.

DrB0b

Dictionary.com

sta·tis·tics (stə-tĭs'tĭks)

1. The mathematics of the collection, organization, and interpretation of numerical data, especially the analysis of population characteristics by inference from sampling.
2. Numerical data.

Always happy to help improve a chap's vocabulary, you're very welcome Wayne. By the way, I'm not a researcher, Wayne, just a polymath and renaissance man Why do I post the stuff here?, purely to give Dr Zaius ammunition because I enjoy his trolling.

Wayne Kerr

Don't like your definition of statistics much. Personally I prefer the one from Wikipedia better. I put the important bit in bold .

What you provided above was just a big list of data. Mate climate change is an inescapably political issue – certainly one which I shouldn’t comment on with a belly full of beer at 2am in the morning . Anyway you may like the paper I attach below. Was written by the chap who wrote the article entitled “Apocalypse Cancelled” in the Sunday Telegraph, 5th November, 2006. Author is an extremely well known climate change researcher.

The summary of his argument was that ALL TEN of the propositions listed below must be proven true if the climate-change “consensus” is to be proven true. The first article attached considers the first six of the listed propositions and draws the conclusions shown. I think you may find some consideration in the other two articles posted below the “Apocalypse Cancelled” one.

His Propositions and Conclusions were:

1. That the debate is over and all credible climate scientists are agreed - False

2. That temperature has risen above millennial variability and is exceptional - Very unlikely

3. That changes in solar irradiance are an insignificant forcing mechanism - False

4. That the last century’s increases in temperature are correctly measured - Unlikely

5. That greenhouse-gas increase is the main forcing agent of temperature - Not proven

6. That temperature will rise far enough to do more harm than good - Very unlikely

7. That continuing greenhouse-gas emissions will be very harmful to life - Unlikely

8. That proposed carbon-emission limits would make a definite difference - Very unlikely

9. That the environmental benefits of remediation will be cost-effective - Very unlikely

10. That taking precautions, just in case, would be the responsible course - False

He's done a good job of steering between the strongly-held opinions and propaganda statements of climate change true-believers and contrarians alike - Check it out.


Apocalypse Cancelled

Hope that contributes more to the discussion than my drunken ramblings last night .

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Wayne Kerr

An article entitled something like Climate Chaos Don't Believe It


An article entitled something like A (Pre) Cautionary Tale on Climate Change

DrB0b

Your second link confuses me a little, I can't really see the relevance, it's about Radiation Safety Precautions in Canada, did you actually look at those links before you posted them? Were you trying to make a point regarding the "precautionary principle" discussed in the paper, if you are could explain in your own words as I'm not too sure what you're getting at.

"Particularly important is the emphasis on the link to scientific knowledge, rather than the whims of activist groups, together with the exhortation to assess the real and potential impacts of making a precautionary decision (whether to act or not to act), including social, economic and other relevant factors and risk-risk trade-offs."

I entirely agree with this. Perhaps you're thinking that "activist groups" refers only to tree-dwelling environmentalists, it doesn't, it also refers to groups sponsored by Oil Companies, Chemical Manufacturers, Big Agriculture and other, similar, groupings.

The first link you gave is very interesting, I have a lot of respect for Monckton as a person (none whatsoever as a scientist), the polar opposite of Littlejohn in every way but gender but I would appreciate it, if you expect me to respond appropriately, if you would put some personal effort into your posts rather than just posting links. Much as I enjoy debate it's a little insulting when a poster posts links and makes no attempt to summarise them in his own words or to express his own opinion or understanding of the issues but instead relies solely posting, bare, unadorned links.

However, as an act of courtesy, I'll respond to some of the allegations made in Viscount Monckton's article.

We need to be clear as to what Monkton is actually discussing - for much of the article he is actually talking about Climate sensitivity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia rather than climate change though at no point does he explicitly state this.

Fisrtly Monckton states "In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch)."

This is untrue. Hansen described three possible scenarios for temperature change in his testimony to congress, low, middle, and high. He stated the the low and high scenarios were implausible but that the middle scenario was highly probable. The middle scenario, as it turned out, was right on the button. Nor did he claim, ever, that sea levels would rise several feet by 2000. A climatologist, Patrick Michaels, took Hansen's testimony to congress, removed references to the middle and low predictions and re-presented it as Hansen's prediction. Patrick Michaels receives $100,000 dollars per year from the Intermountain Rural Electric Company, a company which operated several coal-fire power station. What does he do for the money? He's theor consultant for countering stories related to climate change.

Next up are the two graphs Monckton presents as evidence that the UN dliberately left the Medieval Warm Period out of its calculations. There are two problems here. The first is that there is no evidence tahat Medieval Warm Period or a little ice age as global events ever happened, "…current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this time frame, and the conventional terms of 'Little Ice Age' and 'Medieval Warm Period' appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries (IPCC Report)". There were localised warming events in the Northern hemisphere but that's all. What is also puzzling is that the graphs are showing different things with different scales, I'm not entirely sure what relationship he's implying they have.

Secondly, he has no understanding of the "hockey stick" graph, this worn out argument is trotted out regularly. This graph is not false and the methodology has been shown to be sound - improvements and refinements have been made over the years as new research and evidence has come along, The US Academy of Science was asked by Congress to investigate the claims and counterclaims related to this graph and a commitee was convened, comprising both sceptics and believers, the report from that committee is here;
2006 report of the US National Academy of Science (pdf)

Also an article here;
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Backing for 'hockey stick' graph

This report states "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world"

There are, of course, still some uncertainities over ancient temperature ranges, such is the nature of good science, but as the report says "This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence".

Probably the best article I've read on why this was controversial in the first place is this one from New Scientist, published before the completion of the Academy's report;

"IT IS a persuasive image. Dubbed "the hockey stick" soon after it was first drawn, the graph shows the average temperature over the past 1000 years. For the first 900 or so years there is little variation, like the shaft of an ice-hockey stick. Then, in the 20th century, comes a sharp rise like a hockey stick's blade. The graph seems proof at a glance that we are drastically altering the climate of our planet.

So it is not surprising that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chose to put the graph in the summary for policymakers in its 2001 report. Some of the scientists must have hoped that the image would become an icon of climate change.

An icon it has certainly become, but not always for the reasons those scientists hoped. For the sceptics who dispute that global warming is real, or say it's nothing to worry about, the graph was like a red rag to a bull. They made it the focus of their attacks, hoping that by demolishing the hockey stick graph they would destroy the credibility of climate scientists and the notion of global warming as a phenomenon caused by human activity.

In the minds of many people they have succeeded. The hockey stick graph is widely regarded as controversial, if not plain wrong. "The hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics," physicist Richard Muller wrote in Technology Review in 2004. Others have described it as rubbish or even as a downright fraud. So what's all the fuss about? And who should you believe?

The saga began in the late 1990s, when palaeoclimatologist Michael Mann, then at the University of Virginia, and his colleagues embarked on one of the first serious attempts to work out the average global temperature over the past millennium. Direct temperature measurements go back only as far as 1860, so to extend the record back in time they had to use indirect or "proxy" records of temperature, such as the annual rings of trees and isotopic ratios in corals, ice cores and lake sediments.

Such proxy records have been painstakingly assembled by thousands of researchers around the world, but their reliability varies and there are also regional biases. Many records come from temperate parts of Europe and North America, for instance, where scientists are plentiful and trees have clear annual rings; there are very few from the southern hemisphere.

Prior to 1998, attempts to reconstruct past temperatures had been based only on a handful of regional tree-ring records. Mann's team tried to build a more global and reliable picture by including as many proxies from as many different regions as possible. It was pioneering work. The first version of the hockey stick graph, showing average temperatures in the northern hemisphere going back to AD 1400, was published in Nature in 1998.

The following year the team extended the reconstruction back to AD 1000, relying on the few proxy records that go back this far. This 1999 version appeared in the 2001 IPCC report, and is the one to which the term "hockey stick graph" usually refers.

At the time, 1998 was the warmest year on record (now surpassed by 2005, according to NASA), so based partly on Mann's work, the IPCC summary stated that "it is likely that the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year during the past thousand years". That got headlines. And trouble - not least for the voluble, self-confident Mann. It was the start of a barrage of detailed questions and well-publicised attempted refutations. The hockey stick turned into an implement with which to beat climate scientists.

The debate has spread well beyond the scientific community. Republican senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who calls global warming a "hoax", has repeatedly attacked the hockey stick. Last year, Congressman Joe Barton of Texas ordered Mann to provide the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which Barton chairs, with voluminous details of his working procedures, computer programs and past funding. "There is a concerted effort to undermine the IPCC. There are people who believe that if they bring down Mike Mann, they can bring down the IPCC," says Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. Santer himself came under attack after writing a chapter in the 1995 IPCC report.

Mann, however, still brims with self-confidence. Now at Penn State University, he treats his critics with something close to contempt. "A lot of scientists would have retreated, but Mike is tenacious," says Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, his collaborator on the climate science blog RealClimate.

Mann's style does not always help matters. "The goddam guy is a slick talker and super-confident. He won't listen to anyone else," says Wally Broecker of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York. "I don't trust people like that."

So the politics is nasty, but what about the science? First, the big picture. The rise in temperatures during the 20th century is generally accepted because it is based on direct measurements. What the hockey stick graph shows is that such a sustained and rapid rise is an anomaly in the context of the past thousand years. This is what you would expect if human activity is to blame for the 20th-century warming, but it is suggestive only. The warming might be caused by natural factors.

Evidence of human involvement comes from many other sources, including climate models. The simulations created by these models can be made to match the temperatures measured over the past 140 years only when the increase in greenhouse gases is included. These graphs also appeared in the 2001 IPCC summary.

The hockey stick has been repeatedly misrepresented as the crucial piece of evidence when it comes to industrialisation and global warming. It is not. Even if the hockey stick were shown to be a doodle that Mann did on a napkin during a night out, the evidence that the world is getting warmer, and that this warming is largely due to human activities, would still be overwhelming.

Fraught with danger

Leaving that aside, did Mann get it right? Does the hockey stick accurately reflect northern hemisphere temperatures over the past 1000 years? There is no doubt that reconstructing past temperatures from proxy data is fraught with danger. Take tree ring records. They sometimes reflect rain or drought rather than temperature. They also get smaller as a tree gets older, so annual or even decadal detail is lost. "You lose roughly 40 per cent of the amplitude of changes," says tree ring specialist Gordon Jacoby at Lamont-Doherty.

To reveal the "signal" behind the noise of short-term and random change, a proxy record for one region must be based on as many tree ring records as possible. It must also correlate with direct measurements of local temperature during the period of overlap - which adds another layer of complication, as in some cases human factors such as pollution might have affected recent tree growth.

So the first question is whether the proxy records Mann chose are reliable indicators of temperature. Some have been questioned. "He has a series from central China that we believe is more a moisture signal than a temperature signal," Jacoby says. "He included it because he had a gap. That was a mistake and it made tree-ring people angry."

Mann accepts that some of the measurements he uses do not directly represent temperature change. His argument is that, for instance, coral records showing rainfall levels in the Pacific are proxies for the El Niño cycle and so for changes in ocean temperatures. Jacoby is not convinced. "I'm not slamming what he did overall. It was a great effort, a great step," he acknowledges. "But he got into hot water by defending it too hard in places where he shouldn't."

Broecker is less accommodating. He says that Mann's hockey stick cannot be right because it does not show the Little Ice Age from roughly 1550 to 1850 or the Medieval Warm Period after 1000, whereas most tree-ring chronologies do show these periods. It is a point seized on by many sceptics, but Mann is unmoved. His point of departure almost a decade ago was that tree ring records alone won't do when it comes to measuring global temperatures, because they are biased towards temperate North America and Europe.
Many other researchers agree. "The Little Ice Age is primarily a European and North Atlantic phenomenon," says Keith Briffa, a tree ring analyst from the University of East Anglia, UK. "And the geographical extent of the Medieval Warm Period is still massively uncertain, because data is sparse."

Indeed, the proxy records suggest that high temperatures in one region tend to be balanced out by low temperatures in another. The tropical Pacific, for instance, appears to have cooled during the Medieval Warm Period and warmed during the Little Ice Age. "The regional temperature changes in our reconstruction are quite large; it's simply that they tend to average out," Mann says.

Most attacks on the hockey stick, however, focus on Mann's statistical methods. The meta-analysis he pioneered, in which different proxy records are merged, involves sorting and aggregating these signals and smoothing the result. Mann then meshed this proxy synthesis with the instrumental record.

Critics complain that by combining smoothed-out proxy data from past centuries with the recent instrumental measurements, which preserve more short-term trends, Mann created a false impression of anomalous recent change. "To be fair, Mann did correct that later on," Jacoby says. This made the blade shorter, but did not change much else. Mann also points out that he was one of the first to include error bars, which show how much variance is lost due to smoothing.

Flaw in methodology

A more serious accusation has come from two non-climate scientists from Canada, who claim to have found a flaw in Mann's statistical methodology. Stephen McIntyre, a mathematician and oil industry consultant, and Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, Ontario, base their criticism on the way Mann used a well-established technique called principal component analysis. This involves dividing "noisy" data into different sets and giving each set an appropriate weighting. McIntyre and McKitrick claim that the way Mann applied this method had the effect of damping down natural variability, straightening the shaft of the hockey stick and accentuating 20th century warming.

There is one sense in which Mann accepts that this is unarguably true. The point of his original work was to compare past and present temperatures, so he analysed temperatures in terms of their divergence from the 20th-century mean. This approach highlights differences from that period and will thus accentuate any hockey stick shape if - but only if, he insists - it is present in the data.

The charge from McIntyre and McKitrick, however, is that Mann's computer program does not merely accentuate this shape, but creates it. To make the point, they did their own analysis based on looking for differences from the mean over the past 1000 years instead of from the 20th-century mean. This produced a graph showing an apparent rise in temperatures in the 15th century as great as the warming occurring now. The shaft of the hockey stick had a big kink in it. When this analysis was published last year in Geophysical Research Letters it was hailed by some as a refutation of Mann's study.

McIntyre and McKitrick say that their work is intended to show only that there are problems with Mann's analysis; they do not claim their graph accurately represents past temperatures. "We have repeatedly made it clear that we offer no alternative reconstruction," McIntyre states on his Climate Audit blog.
The obscure statistical arguments were overshadowed in late 2005 when Mann refused to give Congressman Barton his computer code. Mann regarded the code as private property, but his opponents claimed he feared refutation of his findings. Mann did eventually publish the code, but the damage was done.
In the meantime, three groups had been scrutinising the claims of McIntyre and McKitrick. Hans von Storch of the GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, concluded that McIntyre and McKitrick were right that temperatures should be analysed relative to the 1000-year mean, not the 20th-century mean. But he also found that even when this was done it did not have much effect on the result. Peter Huybers of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts came to much the same conclusion.

The work of Eugene Wahl of Alfred University, New York, and Caspar Ammann of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, raised serious questions about the methodology of Mann's critics. They found the reason for the kink in the McIntyre and McKitrick graph was nothing to do with their alternative statistical method; instead, it was because they had left out certain proxies, in particular tree-ring studies based on bristlecone pines in the south-west of the US.

"Basically, the McIntyre and McKitrick case boiled down to whether selected North American tree rings should have been included, and not that there was a mathematical flaw in Mann's analysis," Ammann says. The use of the bristlecone pine series has been questioned because of a growth spurt around the end of the 19th century that might reflect higher CO2 levels rather than higher temperatures, and which Mann corrected for.

What counts in science is not a single study, however. It is whether a finding can be replicated by other groups. Here Mann is on a winning streak: upwards of a dozen studies, some using different statistical techniques or different combinations of proxy records (excluding the bristlecone record, for instance), have produced reconstructions more or less similar to the original hockey stick.
More variability

Some reconstructions show much more variability, especially those based only on tree rings, but every reconstruction to date supports the main claim in the IPCC summary: the past decade is likely the warmest for 1000 years (see Graphs). Whatever the flaws in Mann's original work, it seems the broad conclusion is correct.

McIntyre is not impressed. "There is a distinct possibility that researchers have either purposefully or subconsciously selected series with the hockey stick shape," he told one reporter.

The sceptics are unlikely to give up, whatever the conclusions of a panel set up by the US National Academies to assess temperature reconstructions. But for most climate scientists, the controversy is a sideshow. Whatever happened before 1860, the world has been getting warmer since that time, and there is no doubt in their minds that industrialisation is mostly responsible.

What really matters is the future. The IPCC is predicting a rise of between 1.4 and 5.8 °C by 2100. Now take a look at the scale on the hockey stick graph. As Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany points out: "If humanity takes no action and this century sees a temperature rise of 2 °C, 3 °C or even more, the current discussions over whether the 14th century was a few tenths of a degree warmer or the 17th a few tenths cooler than previously thought will look rather academic."
The subtext of many attacks on the hockey stick is that if the world was warmer 1000 years than it is now, this shows there is nothing unusual going on and we can all stop worrying. Not so, says Briffa. If the world was warmer 1000 years ago, it would suggest the climate system is very sensitive to outside influences, whether past solar cycles or present accumulating greenhouse gases. "Greater past climate variations imply greater future climate change," he says. From this perspective, it would be most worrying if all the hockey sticks really are wrong."
Climate: The great hockey stick debate - earth - 18 March 2006 - New Scientist Environment


Back to Monckton. He claims the Chinese sailed around the Arctic in 1421. The evidence points to this being a myth. The claim comes from Gavin Menzies, author of 1421 How Chinad discovered the World and 1421 how China Discovered America, among similar titles.



These are works of entertainment, not scholarly works. They were not verified or peer reviewed, his archaeolgical evidence has been refuted, and his historical technique ridiculed by professional historians. As an example, "Robert Finlay professor of Chinese history at the Univeristy of Arkansas has denounced the work as deeply flawed and dubious: "Menzies flouts the basic rules of both historical study and elementary logic. He misrepresents the scholarship of others, and he frequently fails to cite those from whom he borrows. He misconstrues Chinese imperial policy, especially as seen in the expeditions of Zheng He, and his extensive discussion of Western cartography reads like a parody of scholarship"

And this wonderful piece of invective;

"Unfortunately, this reckless manner of dealing with evidence is typical of 1421, vitiating all its extraordinary claims: the voyages it describes never took place, Chinese information never reached Prince Henry and Columbus, and there is no evidence of the Ming fleets in newly discovered lands. The fundamental assumption of the book—that Zhu Di dispatched the Ming fleets because he had a “grand plan,” a vision of charting the world and creating a maritime empire spanning the oceans (pp. 19–43)—is simply asserted by Menzies without a shred of proof. It represents the author’s own grandiosity projected back onto the emperor, providing the latter with an ambition commensurate with the global events that Menzies presumes 1421 uniquely has revealed, an account that provides evidence “to overturn the long-accepted history of the Western world” (p. 400). It is clear, however, that textbooks on that history need not be rewritten. The reasoning of 1421 is inexorably circular, its evidence spurious, its research derisory, its borrowings unacknowledged, its citations slipshod, and its assertions preposterous. Still, it may have some pedagogical value in world history courses. Assigning selections from the book to high-schoolers and undergraduates, it might serve as an outstanding example of how not to (re)write world history."
(Finlay, Robert (2004). "How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America". Journal of World History)

1421 hypothesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
History News Network
The myth of Menzies' "1421 " exposed

His assertion that Greenland was warmer more fertile in the past than it is today is true but his reasoning is again fallacious, it was warmer because of a localized climate change, not a global one.

Monckton also says

"Even a 0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a
fundamental physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report
is a short but revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial
factor converting forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate
models had found lambda near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing.
You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given
by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian
professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed
suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms).
The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001
report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's
later equation is to astrophysics. Like Einstein's, it relates energy to
the square of the speed of light, but by reference to temperature
rather than mass.
The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase
the UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's
true value is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively
repealed the law, doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper
by James Hansen says lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take
your pick. Sir John Houghton, who chaired the UN's scientific
assessment working group until recently, tells me it now puts
lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling of airborne CO2.
Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C."

This is just bamboozling people, worse than that it's mendacious, Monckton is assuming that his readership won't have the background to understand this and is trying to con them with numeric legerdemain. Unfortunately for Monckton his own scientific background is weak and what he's stated above is nonsense. His statement about James Hansen has already been disproved above.

The steffan-boltzmann law deals with black-body radiation, the Earth is not a simple black body, it radiates heat back into space. Lambda is defined for a perfect black-body. Monckton has failed to understand this and drawn completely erroneous conclusios, he has also forgotten that, in Scmidts words, "climate sensitivity is an equilibrium concept". As he hasn't taken this time lag into account climate sensitivity to CO2 looks much smaller than it really is. Mich more detail here; http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frcgc/resea...ensitivity.pdf

realclimate.org puts it quite well;


"Readers need to be aware of at least two basic things. First off, an idealised 'black body' (which gives of radiation in a very uniform and predictable way as a function of temperature - encapsulated in the Stefan-Boltzmann equation) has a basic sensitivity (at Earth's radiating temperature) of about 0.27 °C/(W/m2). That is, a change in radiative forcing of about 4 W/m2 would give around 1°C warming. The second thing to know is that the Earth is not a black body! On the real planet, there are multitudes of feedbacks that affect other greenhouse components (ice alebdo, water vapour, clouds etc.) and so the true issue for climate sensitivity is what these feedbacks amount to"

Monckton also says that "A recent paper by John Lyman, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, reports that the oceans have cooled sharply in the past two years. This is also untrue, if you look at Lyman's revised paper here http://oceans.pmel.noaa.gov/Pdf/heat_2006.pdf he admits that introduce an error caused by sampling biases in his work and that the new and corrected results show no cooling at all.

In his references he cites Michael Crichton's "State of Fear". It may have escaped Monckton's notice but State of Fear is work of fiction. It's about as relevant as me citing Enid Blyton's "Five go to Smugglers Top" as an authoritative source for a thesis on the larcenous propensities of the Cornish.


And here's what happens when somebody actually checks some of Moncktons references;

(From RealClimate » Cuckoo Science )


"Edward, your request highlights the problem not only with Monckton’s “stuff” but the general problem with having to address wilfully misleading pseudoscience. The pseudoscience is easy to write (I imagine it takes a certain chutzpah!), and one can scatter references throughout to give it a “faux-respectable” appearance. But it’s extremely tedious to go back and hunt down that papers and see whether the particular point (of Monckton’s in this case) is properly suported by the reference Moncknton cites in support.
However, I’ve spent two hours of my valuable time doing that for the specific point you raise (out of the 4 that I included in my original post, #30).
I said:

“‘Monckton makes the standard attack on the Mann “hockey stick” temeperature reconstruction and then asserts that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was “up to 3 oC warmer than now. However the temperature reconstructions in the proper scientific literature show that the MWP was significantly cooler that now.”
you responded with:

“That begs the question. Monckton cites numerous papers that suggest ‘northern-hemisphere evidence’ for the mediaeval warm period, and cites a dozen studies from the southern hemisphere.”
So let’s look at the references that Monckton cites in the sentence that jumped off the page at me and which I referred to in my post.

Here’s what Monckton says:
(page 5 of the supplementary ‘brief’ that Monckton url’s in his Telegraph article)
Monckton: “According to Villalba (1990, 1994), and Soon and Baliunas (2003), the mediaeval warm period was warmer than the current warm period by up to 3C. From c1000 AD, ships were recorded as having sailed in parts of the Arctic where there is a permanent ice-pack now (Thompson et al. 2000; Briffa 2000; Lamb 1972a,b; Villalba 1990, 1994).”

Let’s look at the papers that Monckton cites in justification of these statements:
1. Villalba (1990) “Climate Fluctuations in Northern Patagonia During the Last 1000 Years Inferred From Tree Ring Records” Quaternary Research 34, 346-360.
In summing up the variation in temperature during the period under study Villalba says (and this is the only point in the entire paper where Villalba discusses absolute temperature variations):
“The temperature departure mean for the coldest interval (1520-1670) is 0.33 oC lower than for the warmer interval (1080-1260)” [see page 354, 2/5ths down second column of the page]

2. Villalba (1994) “Tree Ring and Glacial Evidence for the Medieval Warm Epoch and the Little Ice Age in Southern South America” Climate Change 26, 183-197.
As in his article above (1.) Villalba makes one statement about absolute temperature variations from his analysis. He says:
“The mean temperature departure for the coldest interval (A.D. 1520-1660) is estimated to be 0.26 oC lower than the warmest interval (A.D. 1080-1250)” [see 186, 1/2 way down the page]

Notice that these variations between the Medieval Maximum and the Little Ice Age (no more than 0.3 oC or so) are not that different to what Mann showed in his ‘hockeystick’ curve. Why Monckton cited this work in support of his assertion that the MWP was up to 3C warmer than the current warm period is extremely difficult to fathom. After all there’s no question that the N. hemisphere temperature is now at least 1 oC warmer than the Little Ice Age. That would put the MWP around 0.7 oC cooler than now using the very data that Monckton cites in support of his assertion that it was “up to 3C warmer” than now.

3. I can’t access Soon and Baliunas’s paper. I’ll leave someone else to discuss this one. However I did read some of the papers that, themselves, cite Soon and Baliunas’s work and it it’s clear that the latter is highly flawed. [Read for example Osborne and Briffa (2006) Science 311, 841-844.]

4. Thompson et al (2000) “A High-Resolution Millennial Record of the South Asian Monsoon from Himalayan Ice Cores” Science 289, 1916-1919.
This paper bears no relationship to the sentence to which it is attached in Monckton’s “piece”. It’s about hydrology on the Tibetan plateau from analysis of a high-resolution ice core from Dasuopu, Tibet. It seems an odd paper for Monckton to cite in support of his “notion” that it’s not that warm now relatively speaking since the very last sentence of Thompson et al’s paper is:
“For the 20th century, the isotopically inferred temperatures on both Dunde and Dasuopu are the warmest of the millennium, and the recent warming is most pronounced at Dasuopu, the highest elevation site.”
Just to be absolutely clear, Monckton is using as a justification that the MWP was much warmer than now a paper that concludes that (in Tibet at least) the 20th century is “the warmest of the millennium”!

5. Briffa (2000) [I forgot to write down the title of this review] Quaternary Science Reviews 19, 87-105.
This is a general review of analysis of tree ring proxy data for reconstructing past climate. Again there is nothing in this review that in any way is supportive of Monckton’s statements. In describing the work in this field Briffa several times notes the unusual warmth of the 20th century inferred from the tree ring data. For example he says “The authors of this work again stress the ‘unusual’ nature of the apparent 20th century warmth.”, and there are several similar statements about the particluar warmth of the 20th century, especially that later parts.
Briffa has prepared and shows a couple of relevant Figures. In His Figure 2 he shows a composite figure of “Southern Hemisphere Temperature Reconstructions for Tasmania and Northern Patagonia” Each of these shows that the MWP was cooler than the present day temperature by this proxy data. In his Figure 5 under a section entitled “A New Northern Hemisphere Summer Temperature Record” he shows that the mid to late 20th century temperature as determined from tree ring analysis is far warmer than any period in the past that his analysis includes (this only goes back to 1400 AD).
I wonder if you’re beginning to get the point. At least in these two sentences Monckton is just saying “stuff” and “supporting” this with “apparent” citations to research that either has nothing to do with the point heâ??s trying to make, or which has been grossly misrepresented. Now perhaps some of the other stuff that Monckton says is better supported. But I’d rather you pointed it out to me, than that I spend hours and hours hunting down the papers, reading them, comparing what they say to what Monckton pretends that they say etc. That’s really the job of an editor. Sadly, the editorial process in the Telegraph has gone massivly awol in this case."


Finally, Monckton's propositions and conclusions;

"All ten of the propositions listed below must be proven true if the climate-change “consensus” is to be proven true."


This is just ludicrous. Bombastic nonsense. What basis does he have for saying all of his propositions, chosen by himself, must be proven. His propositions are his own and are as carefully chosen as street surveys that ask you "which is better, Starryshine Toothpaste or paedophilia" and later proudly announce that 99% of people think Starryshine Toothpaste is just great! I could come up with 10 propositions myself, make them sound pseudo-scientific, and rely on the fact that 90% of the people who read them won't know that they bear no relationship to reality - however nobody would take me seriously because I'm just an internet poster rather than a journalist in a national paper. His "propositions" have already been dealt with by many people, there are links above in this thread to the answers.


I've shown in the examples I've given that at very least a goodly proportion of his article is composed of myth, lies, and ignorance. If the IPCC reports contained errors in anything even approaching the same proportion it would be dismissed out of hand by everybody.

DrB0b

Hmm, you've changed the second PDF link now, I see.

DrB0b

Good grief, you are drunk aren't you? Monckton's not a climate researcher, not even close - he's not any kind of researcher, he's an ex-journalist with an education in classics.

"Although his critics charge that "Monckton's science is self-taught and his paper qualifications nonexistent," Monckton takes the view that it is "a very modern notion that you need paper qualifications to pronounce on anything and it comes from the socialist idea that people need to be trained in the official, accepted, dogmatic truths"

Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Err yes, data is the bedrock of science, are you suggesting we shouldn't use it and concentrate on pretty pictures instead?

Yes, of course it is, who said it wasn't? It is not however solely a political issue, changing policies or voting on it won't make it go away.

Marmite the Dog

Mummy! My head hurts. I want to go home.

DrB0b

^I told you, stay off the Guinness!

Marmite the Dog

^ A fucking Pikey who can't spell Guinness. Disgraceful!

Then again, I very much doubt that he can drink it either...

Wayne Kerr

I need beer. Just put those links in case someone was interested in reading them. Will stick to traveller's tales from now on .