Global Warning/Climate Change

[gcdonner]

Unless meteorologists and scientists have colluded together to deceive the world, I don't see how anyone can deny that something is taking place. History shows us that it's happened before.

i talked to a guy a few days ago. he was in his 80's. he said, that his school teacher told them, "in 100 years, there won't be any winter." that statement would have been made LONG before climate change became the buzz word.

winters have not been the same as i remember them.

The snow was deeper because you were shorter...

Our climate goes in cycles, so warming and cooling trends are not to be unexpected. What is happening today however is being used for political purposes, and financial gain for some at the expense of others.

I heard that you don't need a/c in heaven...

[Bootstrap]

This whole topic has been politicized to the point that the deliberate manipulation of data will taint any discussion.

Exactly, and getting beyond that requires carefully looking at the data in some depth, and dropping the political tones of the discussion. In practice, that's hard to do on a forum like this.

And for whatever reason, people get really offended on this topic. I think it's related to the politicization. We don't get offended about astronomy or physics.

[Robert]

And just because one person does not want to talk about it, it does not mean others can not. If the thread tires you, feel free to ignore it. There is no reason why others should be shut down.

I just posted yet another example of those who have already decided that global warming is caused by humans are having to distort things to prove their point. It is fine if this is not something you want to discuss. I did not call for your response.

I will continue to post information as I come across it. If you are not interested in discussing it, then ignore the thread. I think it is rather humorous that yet again, the books are cooked to support the political decision that we have run away global warming.

[MaxPC]

And just because one person does not want to talk about it, it does not mean others can not. If the thread tires you, feel free to ignore it. There is no reason why others should be shut down.

I just posted yet another example of those who have already decided that global warming is caused by humans are having to distort things to prove their point. It is fine if this is not something you want to discuss. I did not call for your response.

I will continue to post information as I come across it. If you are not interested in discussing it, then ignore the thread. I think it is rather humorous that yet again, the books are cooked to support the political decision that we have run away global warming.

Robert, I'm sure there's plenty more information to come too. Keep posting.

Whenever government agencies get involved in the sciences, the books will always be cooked to serve political agendas. Only those sectors brave enough to post truthful data will have the ear of history as political agendas come and go. Planned Parenthood is quickly finding this out.

[Bootstrap]

The political narrative seems to be that the bulk of mainstream science cannot be trusted - but the scientists hired by lobbyists and politicians and political movements can. And it's part of the general scheme of dismissing all conventional sources of truth that might disagree with a political agenda. There's probably no point in discussing the data, because the nature of the discussion shows, time and time again, that people won't discuss the data if they don't like what it says.

Climate change is not about any one study, it's about the entire body of literature in a scientific discipline.

So now there's a gag order on scientists who work for many branches of the government, they can no longer blog or tweet or communicate directly with the public, they need political appointees to decide what things can be said about science. I agree with this blogger.

Merely five days into Donald Trump’s presidency, the administration is silencing the agencies tasked with protecting our environment, our health, and our food supply. This gag order sets a dangerous precedent and is sending a chilling message to civil servants throughout the country.

“We knew the Trump administration would go beyond President George W. Bush’s administration in attacking science and suppressing research, but we didn’t know it would happen so fast and so egregiously. Suppressing public servant scientists from communicating with the American public is a dangerous move that sets us on a path where policy decisions are divorced from reality.

“Scientists at the agencies should know that we have their backs. They have a right to speak freely and duty to share their research publicly. Even if the Trump administration doesn’t respect science, the American public does.”

[Bootstrap]

Whenever government agencies get involved in the sciences, the books will always be cooked to serve political agendas.

I really do believe entire fields of science do pretty well at studying their subjects. And publishing their raw data makes it much harder to cook the books, because other people will reexamine your data, question the gathering of the data itself, etc. Over time, the truth does emerge.

And it's hard for me to believe that the people you and Robert quote don't have political agendas. So let's discuss the political agendas of the people who oppose mainstream science too, if you want to discuss political agendas. Perhaps starting with the main lobbyists involved in this.

Forget the graphs. This isn't about doing science, the scientists know how to do that. This is about making it so hard to know what is true and false that people give up, saying we just can't trust science at all, so we might as well believe whatever our favorite politicians want to tell us.

Maybe we can put a gag order on scientists so they don't communicate with the public. Maybe we can threaten people's careers if they mention climate change on government websites. Maybe we can review all current and future grants that study these questions. All of those things seem to be happening right now, according to scientists who work at these agencies. Maybe we can make those pesky scientists shut up so they don't get in the way of our politics.

[MaxPC]

I think it's interesting that it was the Obama administration that ordered the cooking of the NOAA books for the political conference. Cleaning up that swamp of tainted data will be cheered by honest scientists and derided by the political lobbies who used tainted data for political and profitable gain.

When the corruption is that embedded the whole system needs to be shut down in order to review and sort the procedures and resulting data through cross-referencing and double blind studies. This allows the work of authentication to proceed without the interference of the political voices and ill-informed mass media owned by political agendas. I've seen this happen several times in my field. The cooked data is tossed and only the verifiable multi-studies with legitimate procedures is retained. It's the only way to move forward with good science. Like a computer, you have to do a reset to clear corrupted programming.

Keep us posted, Robert

[Bootstrap]

I think it's interesting that it was the Obama administration that ordered the cooking of the NOAA books for the political conference.

I think it's fascinating that you take the word of a blogger who quotes the Daily Mail, without examining his claims to see if they are true or not. The Daily Mail? Seriously? A gossipy tabloid?

Even Bates - the guy you are quoting (indirectly, through a blog post that quotes the Daily Mail that quotes Bates) - says this was not tampering.

In an interview on Monday with E&E News, Dr. Bates appeared to distance himself from some of what he wrote in the blog post, and from the way his criticisms were portrayed in the Mail on Sunday article.

“The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data,” he said, “but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was.”

Here's a summary of the response from the scientific community, with links to fuller scientific discussion.

Do the claims have merit?

Climate scientists, some of whom had worked on the data sets, voiced support for the work of Dr. Karl and the other researchers. In a post on the blog of the Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units at Maynooth University, Peter Thorne, who worked on the data but left NOAA before work began on the paper itself, disputed much of what Dr. Bates said.

Dr. Bates, Dr. Thorne wrote, was not involved in the data work and had misrepresented “the processes that actually occurred.” Dr. Thorne also disputed the idea that Dr. Karl had his “thumb on the scale.” Dr. Karl only used the data — he was not personally involved in the refinements, Dr. Thorne wrote. “At no point was any pressure bought to bear to make any scientific or technical choices.”

In a post at Carbon Brief, a British website that covers climate science and policy, Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, disputed the contention that the data sets used in Dr. Karl’s paper were unverified or that the data had been manipulated.

Dr. Hausfather was one of the authors of a review of the NOAA ocean data, which showed the most change. The paper, published in January, compared the old and new NOAA data with independent data from satellites, buoys and other sources and found that the new data matched the independent data more closely. The result, he wrote, “strongly suggests that NOAA got it right and that we have been underestimating ocean warming in recent years.”

In an interview on Monday with E&E News, Dr. Bates appeared to distance himself from some of what he wrote in the blog post, and from the way his criticisms were portrayed in the Mail on Sunday article.

“The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data,” he said, “but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was.”

Climate Home, a nonprofit site based in London that offers news and analysis, also weighed in on one of the central contentions of Mr. Rose’s article, that the publication of the NOAA paper had "duped” policy makers into adopting the Paris accord. The site contacted representatives to the talks from 10 countries; none said that the paper had any influence.

[Bootstrap]

Cleaning up that swamp of tainted data will be cheered by honest scientists and derided by the political lobbies who used tainted data for political and profitable gain.

I assume only people who agree with your opinion are considered "honest scientists". I think scientific journals and the scientific community have mechanisms for detecting problems by reviewing each other's work, and I trust them more than I trust opinions on an internet forum.

Until a group of scientists in the field agree with your conclusion that the books are cooked, I seriously doubt that it's true. Most of this data is available, for free, over the internet - precisely so that others can openly examine it. The claims people have made about this data have been examined repeatedly by scientists on other teams. And no, the Heartland Institute and other lobbying groups don't count.

I strongly encourage people to get their science from mainstream scientific journals. And especially not from publications an conferences created by lobbyist groups.

But it's very useful to look at who is funding the lobbyists and what they stand to gain. The Harvard Business Review had a great article on this, one of the few that really looks at lobbyists on both sides of the issue. The biggest polluters and the companies that are creating green technologies are most active. Not surprising at all.

Here's one tidbit:

A 2013 study found that two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions were produced by only 90 companies.

And it's not surprising that many of these companies are very active lobbyists. But so are some of the greenest companies:

However, our data also shows greater lobbying activity among greener firms within these same industries, perhaps because their firms can leverage new regulations to gain a competitive advantage over industry rivals. For example, one of the greenest utilities in the nation, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) spent the second highest amount (an estimated $27 million) of all firms lobbying on climate change in 2008 — just behind ExxonMobil, which spent $29 million lobbying and produces an estimated 306 Million tons of GHG emissions. PG&E openly supported a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, and even left the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the organization’s vociferous opposition to carbon regulation.

The whole article is worth reading carefully.

[Robert]

Well, we saw 8 years of an administration that was pushing this in one direction. We will see at least 4 years of an administration that will push in an opposite direction.

I tend to take the attitude that time will tell.

When everyone is saying look here and I am not allowed to look there, I immediately wonder why I am not allowed to look. What are they hiding? I will feel the same with the new administration if they do the same.