Vote: for reinstating Climate Change back Onto the G-20 agenda !!!

[Gator 17,383]

24 minutes ago, Grapeviney said:

Why would you care about the UN - it's never been more impotent.

International / centralised agencies or organisations only gain power if individual nation states are willing to cede it, and there's no sign of that happening. In fact, the reverse may be true if you look at the current travails of the EU, which is lurking from one crisis to the next.

In Australia, we can't even wean ourselves off 3 separate tiers of government with its two houses of parliament nationally and in some states, an absurd and inefficient power structure.

So who exactly is going to enforce this new world order?

 

I didn't refer to a "new world order".  I'm merely educating Hood as to the real agenda of many of those pushing climate change, which is wealth distribution. 

[Grapeviney 9,733]

2 hours ago, ProDee said:

I didn't refer to a "new world order".  I'm merely educating Hood as to the real agenda of many of those pushing climate change, which is wealth distribution. 

No, but you have referred to a new form of centrist socialism. I'm just pointing out - and as you say, it is only an 'agenda' - that it doesn't exist other than in some people's minds, and there's little prospect of it coming into effect. 

[Earl Hood 6,086]

7 hours ago, ProDee said:

I didn't refer to a "new world order".  I'm merely educating Hood as to the real agenda of many of those pushing climate change, which is wealth distribution. 

Gee thanks for the education Pro. Given the recent study that reported that 62 wealthy individuals own more wealth than half the planet, I.e. 3 plus billion people, gee why would we want any wealth distribution? Imagine the consequences! Who in their right mind would want to attack the fossil fuel wealthy to transfer money to those solar, wind, renewable energy bastards?

It is just a matter of time before renewables are cheaper than coal. Solar has no limits on efficiency whereas all the others are limited as they are about making steam to drive a turbine. 

And by the way the UN is just a forum for the world's nations to meet, discuss and occasionally resolve issues! They might have an agenda but they have little power. You are making a mountain out of a molehill. 

[Dr John Dee 1,057]

On 31/1/2016 at 11:32 PM, ProDee said:

http://edberry.com/blog/ed-berry/new-study-sun-not-co2-causes-climate-change/

Perhaps the good Doctor may like to read this paper when he has time and give a view.  No disrespect, but I don't need Earl or Jara, who may talk about hot days in January, proffering an opinion.

It starts:

A new, peer-reviewed professional paper shows our sun, not our carbon dioxide, causes climate change. It also shows atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are an insignificant player, and possibly a non-player, in climate change.

Late, I'm afraid but thanks to peerless functioning of private enterprise in this country I've had no, or only fitful internet for the last week.

I do have a reply. It's very long. You can read it or you can ignore it, I don't mind. I'd initially just focussed on the Soon effort but, with all that time on my hands and no training reports or squabbles over Jack Watts to read I added a few thoughts:

 

A bit desperate, Ben.

The link you’ve used for some reason doesn’t work for me, so I went to what’s probably a more a more substantive and probably more sober summary of the Soon, Connolly and Connolly (SCC) paper (on Watts Up With That?) than the blog version you’ve relied on.

The SCC paper might be a contribution to the scientific discussion about climate change, but it ain’t in any sense ‘the science’. There’s a debate to be had by those properly qualified to have it, who don’t include me; so I’m not going down that path although at the level of methodology I’ve got some significant suspicions anyway. But even if SCC’s argument proves to have any credibility, which it probably doesn’t, it has to be taken in the context of all the other issues, measurements, findings, calculations and so on that constitute the climate as a field of study.

As far as that credibility is concerned:

(i) maintaining that SCC is a published peer reviewed paper might be a step too far. All I can find is a draft version of the paper as submitted to Earth-Science Review. A Google Scholar search of that journal doesn’t show up a published version of the paper. But Earth-Science Review is also not a journal for publishing original research. Its parameters, as set out in its explanatory note for authors, are: ‘Every review article published will advance existing knowledge and highlight new directions being taken at the forefront of expanding subject areas by synthesis, evaluation and discussion of previously published literature’ (my emphasis). There’s some expectation of a new contribution of some sort, but only by way of interpretation. I don’t know about the Connollys but Willie Soon, it turns out, has made a bit of a career of this reinterpreting of the work of others. And as for peer review, the journal requires only that authors submit the names of potential reviewers. Peer review is supposed to be blind and objective. Being reviewed by your mates isn’t really top drawer academic practice;

(ii) the ‘new’ argument that SCC present relies crucially on a statistical reworking based on a reworking of what was originally (also statistical) a reconstruction of solar activity prior to when it became reliably measurable (1978). An whatever they make of it, SCC don’t in fact share your confidence that their case represents ‘the science’, since they propose more modestly that warming due to total solar irradiation (TSI) is a plausible alternative to the CO₂ account;

(iii) the reconstruction SCC rely on, by Hoot and Schatten (1993), despite being described as having ‘stood the test of time’, has also been disputed thoroughly, but in any case SCC appear to lean less on Hoot & Schatten than on an ‘updating’– conveniently amplifying the potential effect of the original reconstruction on the global warming debate – by Scafetta & Willson (2014). There seems to be just too much motivated research involved in the way some (or perhaps more than some) denialists go about their business;

(iv) speaking of which, Jara is entirely within his rights to raise the problem of Willie Soon’s funding by the oil industry. It’s only a minor ad hominem alongside the shrill calumniating of climate scientists by the denialist mob with their constant nonsense about continuing access to some bottomless trough of funding as the motive for the findings they (climate scientists) make. The interventions of the oil industry in this area of inquiry are well documented and there is no reason not to examine closely (sceptically indeed) anything produced by oil industry funded researchers. The case of big tobacco, as Earl has already mentioned, ought to be just a little salutary when it comes to evaluating paid for ‘scientific’ findings;

(iii) Willie Soon has form with fiddling the figures: check the Soon and Baliunas controversy, if you like; it was another case which rested on ‘findings’ published in a peer reviewed journal but – in terms of that peer reviewing – in highly suspicious circumstances. In any case the figures were quickly and roundly challenged. And then there’s Soon’s accomplice on that occasion, Sallie Baliunas, a CFC denier (seriously) at the time. You can’t really get it any wronger than that … and the case of CFCs and the damage even a very minor anthropogenic contribution to the atmosphere started to do might also be salutary to those who think that CO₂ constitutes only this or that proportion of the atmosphere. CFCs and CO₂ are not – obviously – equivalent issues involving equivalent scientific questions, but recognising a need for caution to carry from one question to the other is probably useful.

I could go on but I won’t … the problem here is not the specifics and scientific standing of SCC’s paper, which as I’ve said I’m not competent to judge, but the kind of dubious uses this sort of stuff is put to by lay denialists or those bloggers with ragtag qualifications masquerading as informed scientists and knowledgeable journalists and the like.

Sorry to have to go all socialist on you but science is more or less a co-operative process, it is conducted in labs, in groups, in all sorts of other forms of association and interaction (how many scientists do you think work at CERN or work on the data CERN produces?) The myth of the heroic individual who'll set to flight all those lesser minds with some improbable discovery or understanding or graph is something the denialist gaggle wants to hang onto, but that’s only self-interest on their collective parts (it’s because they’ve got nothing in common anyway other than their determination to deny or, beyond the reach of scientific questions, their tory beliefs and superstitions to bind them together). It’s also based on a complete misunderstanding of science’s past … FFS even Newton, who’s one of the biggest names in the game, said that thing about the shoulders of giants that Google is fond of quoting. Whoops, sorry, I forgot that you don’t use Google. But collaboration is what even Willie Soon does, with his co-authored papers and his digging out of dust-covered studies by others. With people like Willie, though, the denialists are so desperate for a hero that they don’t really notice little problems with their dreams like that.

But what their mythology means to the denialists is that they’ll latch onto any self-described contrarian with a theory or a paper or even what looks like a proof that one bit or other of the global warming science is wrong … and each and every partial fact or possible issue is turned by some thaumaturgical wave of the hand – recognisable only by the denialists – into a supposedly complete demonstration that there’s no such thing as global warming, no problem with CO₂ or other greenhouse gases, nothing to worry about.

It’s a bizarre misconstruction of what is usually taken as debate in scientific circles (which is not about simple objection and obstruction but involves sharing, discussing, evaluating, modifying, testing and so on in a broadly co-operative way. That’s one of the things peer reviewed journals are for: the sharing of the latest knowledge). It’s a substitution of a whole ensemble of approaches to inquiry by a flat-pack insistence on nothing but binary oppositions – either/or. I presume that these are expected to amount, opposition by opposition, to some kind of proof or other, adding up to something like a tipping point where climate science will be set to rout. Not that the denialists are patient enough for that; as I’ve said any one proof, or the illusion of it, any single vaguely credible argument is supposedly enough – as far as the bloggers and other imposters are concerned – to bring on the ruin of all that rigorously and systematically compiled knowledge that is climate science. Nor do they seem to care all that much whether it’s real science and real findings or not that they’re invoking in all these individual acts of denial. In the end, it’s only the impression that counts (making a pother of discontinuous skirmishes look like a war). Their only significant purpose is, as others have put it, the manufacturing of uncertainty* not the pursuit of truth. It’s not science and facts that matter but the facsimiles of facts and the illusion of science, enough facsimiles and enough illusions to produce and spread a belief in the non-scientific community that the scientists must be wrong, must be self-interested, must be this or that or part of the great communist conspiracy to take over the world by other means or anything else they might be up to in their secret, sinister laboratories. Whatever happened to the Illuminati anyway?

There’s nothing particularly wrong with binary logic, it’s familiar, comfortable, we use it all the time. But we also use it a bit too often to reduce complex issues and behaviours to what seem like simple choices (politics, obviously, which in western democracies usually relies on choosing between two main parties and even when other parties can get a look in things still default to crude distinctions between left and right … you know that, or you ought to, you depend on it all the time to carry you into all sorts of errors and problems). And if binary oppositions aren’t enough even to get at the intricacies of politics, when it comes to climate change they’re woefully out of their league.

Climate and the science of climate involve all sorts of complexity that can’t just be unthreaded by conventional forms of calculation, or by statistics (even conducted competently and properly) especially reduced to neat but inevitably simplifying graphs and graphics, or by mere contrasts between measurements and records. For one thing, there’s no single scientific discipline that encompasses the knowledge necessary to deal with it … which can be a bit of a problem since its reliance on other areas (physics, chemistry, meteorology, geology and so on) allows scientists from those areas to pass themselves off as ‘climate scientists’ without any significant or even sustained research history in the area. But more to the point, climate, in whatever way it’s described, is a dynamic system and understanding it doesn’t just involve complex mathematics but also trying to work with the potential effects of chaos.

Chaos theory was, in part, developed to try to cope with the difficulties (seeming impossibilities) involved in weather forecasting. Climate, as we know, is not weather, it’s weather multiplied by at least 30 (the agreed minimum number of years whose weather patterns provide a description of a climate). Nor is climate a straightforward global system, it’s a series of very different systems in multiple geographical areas that are themselves at best crudely delineated. Chaos presumably functions everywhere and with all sorts of potential force that we can’t see and can’t understand, even afterwards. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t be trying to work out specific issues and effects; for example, whether or not accumulated CO₂ is likely to have this or that contribution to climate, measured globally or otherwise. But it does mean that simple oppositions brought to bear on that level of working out need to be taken in their context, and their context involves so much more.

Chaos theory (the butterfly effect in meteorology) has been translated as ‘sensitivity to initial conditions in dynamic systems’, a simplification but one that tries to capture the progressive nature of changes that occur. There’s nothing linear (there’s certainly nothing reducible to binaries) about how changes take place, their scale, direction, effects and so on. This leaves climate scientists open to all sorts of assaults from deniers, all sorts of manoeuvres got up to look like evidence that, because chaos still continues to outrun their capacity to calculate its possibilities, they don’t really understand climate at all. But the kind of complexity that chaos introduces to the mad theatre that is the debate over climate change is one reason that I refuse to get into the-models-and-the-events-they-didn’t-predict game. The thing about climate modelling is that it’s an imprecise science, and admits to being such. Forget Tim Flannery, he’s only a geologist; look at the way responsible projections for, say, 2050 about warming and its likely consequences are expressed: as percentages; just the way forecasts are given on the Weatherzone page for my area that I consult from time to time and, as the binman has said, when they tell me there’s a 70% chance of rain I’m inclined to take an umbrella, or at least a hat.

In any case, when your findings don’t match your predictions (your model) what you do is: (a) review your findings and correct any errors; (b) review your methodology and change it if necessary; (c) change your model. If climate is a dynamic system there’s no reason why its study shouldn’t be dynamic as well … indeed there’s every reason why it should be dynamic: open, adjustable, fluid. But those steps are all necessary in any proper scientific inquiry; it’s just that the moment (a) and/or (b) occurs in relation to climate models we get the inevitable hysteria from the denialist cacodoxy about fraud and manipulation and anything else that might make it seem as if there’s another error, another problem, another source of opposition.

But as long as the modelling processes are sufficiently open to scrutiny and are thus potentially falsifiable (Karl Popper’s test) then there’s absolutely no problem with errors showing up. Indeed, it’s best that they do. That’s how knowledge and understanding in this, and not only this, particular area develop and I’d rather that sort of development than some smug assumption, based on dodgy science – whether funded by big oil or not – or unscrupulous statistics, that things are going to be ok.

No doubt it’s possible to say that chaos theory might well save us all since, by some twist or turn, changes could head in another unpredictable direction (but if it does that won’t redound to the credit of any denialist because there’s no way denialism can even begin to predict or calculate such an outcome either). But it might just as easily mean that things become much worse than they’re predicted to be (which won’t be much to the credit of climate scientists themselves, although they will at least be able to say that they understood the direction if not the manner or proportions of change). Chaos comes with other unpredictabilities, though. One possibility is: chaos might mean that some small action by some community or country in the present might, by the conditions it introduces to the dynamic system of one local climate, have some very substantial effect globally later on. Wishful thinking, maybe, but it does put at risk the already recognisable silliness of deniers who want to recycle the old argument that if the Chinese aren’t cutting their emissions we don’t have to. If anything I do amounts to the flapping of a butterfly’s wing I’d rather it was in a direction that contributed in some likelihood to a more benign unravelling of chaotic possibilities than not.

 

Oh, and don’t start me on the 2% warming will be good for humanity crap. Chaos also says you’ve got no idea that this is likely and what we know already suggests it isn’t. But I’m with Jara on this one anyway. There’s another kind of smugness that goes with those sorts of attempts to turn climate change on its head, a smugness that might be easy enough to hang onto somewhere in the middle of a city with its nicely snowdomed protection from the real environment. But like Jara I’ve stood in the path of bushfires, armed only with a puling fire hose or a hoe. I’ve been on a firebreak as a fire jumped it. I don’t want others to have to go on experiencing the same or worse. And, sure, bushfires have always been around. But we’ve also got a pretty good idea of what their purpose and scale and effects were all about in this country. Where I live looks in one direction towards a place called Bald Mountain. It’s covered in trees. It wasn’t when the Europeans came because they scattered the locals and it was the locals who’d farmed it forever with fire and the fire killed off the saplings every burning season. Of course the Europeans chopped down all the other trees but – with an irony that’s hardly restricted to this place – they allowed Bald Mountain to reforest itself. Accidental environmentalism. We’ll need a lot more accidents, I suspect.

But I see you’re also back to saying silly things about planning and economies. Which is where I came in.

 

 

 

* perhaps you might to look at this on the doubt industry … and on the industrious Willie Soon: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2015/mar/05/doubt-over-climate-science-is-a-product-with-an-industry-behind-it.  I only came across this last night looking for something else. It probably makes much of what I’ve said redundant, but I’ve left that in place anyway.

 

[daisycutter 29,626]

please doc, promise to never discuss chaos theory with slobbo. i shudder to think how he could exrapolate exploit that

[Dr John Dee 1,057]

56 minutes ago, daisycutter said:

please doc, promise to never discuss chaos theory with slobbo. i shudder to think how he could exrapolate exploit that

I think the word you're looking for is excrabiliolate, isn't it? Although Robbo's a pretty good example of chaos in action anyway.

[Wrecker45 3,378]

On 2/4/2016 at 10:24 PM, Earl Hood said:

Gee thanks for the education Pro. Given the recent study that reported that 62 wealthy individuals own more wealth than half the planet, I.e. 3 plus billion people, gee why would we want any wealth distribution? Imagine the consequences! Who in their right mind would want to attack the fossil fuel wealthy to transfer money to those solar, wind, renewable energy bastards?

It is just a matter of time before renewables are cheaper than coal. Solar has no limits on efficiency whereas all the others are limited as they are about making steam to drive a turbine. 

And by the way the UN is just a forum for the world's nations to meet, discuss and occasionally resolve issues! They might have an agenda but they have little power. You are making a mountain out of a molehill. 

EH - This is what lefty lemmings just don't understand. If solar, wind and renewable's were cost effective, efficient and likely to be the way forward the wealthy fossil fuel industries would just invest in them. That is how capitalism works. 

Telstra didn't oppose mobile phones and broadband internet when they owned all the land lines. They adapted and invested in the better technology.

Sadly at the moment the socialists want Government money to subsidies inept technology. You can bet your bottom dollar if the renewable technology improves the fossil fuel industry will be at the forefront of investing in it.

 

 

[Wrecker45 3,378]

On 2/4/2016 at 8:36 AM, Dr John Dee said:

Late, I'm afraid but thanks to peerless functioning of private enterprise in this country I've had no, or only fitful internet for the last week.

I do have a reply. It's very long. You can read it or you can ignore it, I don't mind. I'd initially just focussed on the Soon effort but, with all that time on my hands and no training reports or squabbles over Jack Watts to read I added a few thoughts:

 

A bit desperate, Ben.

The link you’ve used for some reason doesn’t work for me, so I went to what’s probably a more a more substantive and probably more sober summary of the Soon, Connolly and Connolly (SCC) paper (on Watts Up With That?) than the blog version you’ve relied on.

The SCC paper might be a contribution to the scientific discussion about climate change, but it ain’t in any sense ‘the science’. There’s a debate to be had by those properly qualified to have it, who don’t include me; so I’m not going down that path although at the level of methodology I’ve got some significant suspicions anyway. But even if SCC’s argument proves to have any credibility, which it probably doesn’t, it has to be taken in the context of all the other issues, measurements, findings, calculations and so on that constitute the climate as a field of study.

As far as that credibility is concerned:

(i) maintaining that SCC is a published peer reviewed paper might be a step too far. All I can find is a draft version of the paper as submitted to Earth-Science Review. A Google Scholar search of that journal doesn’t show up a published version of the paper. But Earth-Science Review is also not a journal for publishing original research. Its parameters, as set out in its explanatory note for authors, are: ‘Every review article published will advance existing knowledge and highlight new directions being taken at the forefront of expanding subject areas by synthesis, evaluation and discussion of previously published literature’ (my emphasis). There’s some expectation of a new contribution of some sort, but only by way of interpretation. I don’t know about the Connollys but Willie Soon, it turns out, has made a bit of a career of this reinterpreting of the work of others. And as for peer review, the journal requires only that authors submit the names of potential reviewers. Peer review is supposed to be blind and objective. Being reviewed by your mates isn’t really top drawer academic practice;

(ii) the ‘new’ argument that SCC present relies crucially on a statistical reworking based on a reworking of what was originally (also statistical) a reconstruction of solar activity prior to when it became reliably measurable (1978). An whatever they make of it, SCC don’t in fact share your confidence that their case represents ‘the science’, since they propose more modestly that warming due to total solar irradiation (TSI) is a plausible alternative to the CO₂ account;

(iii) the reconstruction SCC rely on, by Hoot and Schatten (1993), despite being described as having ‘stood the test of time’, has also been disputed thoroughly, but in any case SCC appear to lean less on Hoot & Schatten than on an ‘updating’– conveniently amplifying the potential effect of the original reconstruction on the global warming debate – by Scafetta & Willson (2014). There seems to be just too much motivated research involved in the way some (or perhaps more than some) denialists go about their business;

(iv) speaking of which, Jara is entirely within his rights to raise the problem of Willie Soon’s funding by the oil industry. It’s only a minor ad hominem alongside the shrill calumniating of climate scientists by the denialist mob with their constant nonsense about continuing access to some bottomless trough of funding as the motive for the findings they (climate scientists) make. The interventions of the oil industry in this area of inquiry are well documented and there is no reason not to examine closely (sceptically indeed) anything produced by oil industry funded researchers. The case of big tobacco, as Earl has already mentioned, ought to be just a little salutary when it comes to evaluating paid for ‘scientific’ findings;

(iii) Willie Soon has form with fiddling the figures: check the Soon and Baliunas controversy, if you like; it was another case which rested on ‘findings’ published in a peer reviewed journal but – in terms of that peer reviewing – in highly suspicious circumstances. In any case the figures were quickly and roundly challenged. And then there’s Soon’s accomplice on that occasion, Sallie Baliunas, a CFC denier (seriously) at the time. You can’t really get it any wronger than that … and the case of CFCs and the damage even a very minor anthropogenic contribution to the atmosphere started to do might also be salutary to those who think that CO₂ constitutes only this or that proportion of the atmosphere. CFCs and CO₂ are not – obviously – equivalent issues involving equivalent scientific questions, but recognising a need for caution to carry from one question to the other is probably useful.

I could go on but I won’t … the problem here is not the specifics and scientific standing of SCC’s paper, which as I’ve said I’m not competent to judge, but the kind of dubious uses this sort of stuff is put to by lay denialists or those bloggers with ragtag qualifications masquerading as informed scientists and knowledgeable journalists and the like.

Sorry to have to go all socialist on you but science is more or less a co-operative process, it is conducted in labs, in groups, in all sorts of other forms of association and interaction (how many scientists do you think work at CERN or work on the data CERN produces?) The myth of the heroic individual who'll set to flight all those lesser minds with some improbable discovery or understanding or graph is something the denialist gaggle wants to hang onto, but that’s only self-interest on their collective parts (it’s because they’ve got nothing in common anyway other than their determination to deny or, beyond the reach of scientific questions, their tory beliefs and superstitions to bind them together). It’s also based on a complete misunderstanding of science’s past … FFS even Newton, who’s one of the biggest names in the game, said that thing about the shoulders of giants that Google is fond of quoting. Whoops, sorry, I forgot that you don’t use Google. But collaboration is what even Willie Soon does, with his co-authored papers and his digging out of dust-covered studies by others. With people like Willie, though, the denialists are so desperate for a hero that they don’t really notice little problems with their dreams like that.

But what their mythology means to the denialists is that they’ll latch onto any self-described contrarian with a theory or a paper or even what looks like a proof that one bit or other of the global warming science is wrong … and each and every partial fact or possible issue is turned by some thaumaturgical wave of the hand – recognisable only by the denialists – into a supposedly complete demonstration that there’s no such thing as global warming, no problem with CO₂ or other greenhouse gases, nothing to worry about.

It’s a bizarre misconstruction of what is usually taken as debate in scientific circles (which is not about simple objection and obstruction but involves sharing, discussing, evaluating, modifying, testing and so on in a broadly co-operative way. That’s one of the things peer reviewed journals are for: the sharing of the latest knowledge). It’s a substitution of a whole ensemble of approaches to inquiry by a flat-pack insistence on nothing but binary oppositions – either/or. I presume that these are expected to amount, opposition by opposition, to some kind of proof or other, adding up to something like a tipping point where climate science will be set to rout. Not that the denialists are patient enough for that; as I’ve said any one proof, or the illusion of it, any single vaguely credible argument is supposedly enough – as far as the bloggers and other imposters are concerned – to bring on the ruin of all that rigorously and systematically compiled knowledge that is climate science. Nor do they seem to care all that much whether it’s real science and real findings or not that they’re invoking in all these individual acts of denial. In the end, it’s only the impression that counts (making a pother of discontinuous skirmishes look like a war). Their only significant purpose is, as others have put it, the manufacturing of uncertainty* not the pursuit of truth. It’s not science and facts that matter but the facsimiles of facts and the illusion of science, enough facsimiles and enough illusions to produce and spread a belief in the non-scientific community that the scientists must be wrong, must be self-interested, must be this or that or part of the great communist conspiracy to take over the world by other means or anything else they might be up to in their secret, sinister laboratories. Whatever happened to the Illuminati anyway?

There’s nothing particularly wrong with binary logic, it’s familiar, comfortable, we use it all the time. But we also use it a bit too often to reduce complex issues and behaviours to what seem like simple choices (politics, obviously, which in western democracies usually relies on choosing between two main parties and even when other parties can get a look in things still default to crude distinctions between left and right … you know that, or you ought to, you depend on it all the time to carry you into all sorts of errors and problems). And if binary oppositions aren’t enough even to get at the intricacies of politics, when it comes to climate change they’re woefully out of their league.

Climate and the science of climate involve all sorts of complexity that can’t just be unthreaded by conventional forms of calculation, or by statistics (even conducted competently and properly) especially reduced to neat but inevitably simplifying graphs and graphics, or by mere contrasts between measurements and records. For one thing, there’s no single scientific discipline that encompasses the knowledge necessary to deal with it … which can be a bit of a problem since its reliance on other areas (physics, chemistry, meteorology, geology and so on) allows scientists from those areas to pass themselves off as ‘climate scientists’ without any significant or even sustained research history in the area. But more to the point, climate, in whatever way it’s described, is a dynamic system and understanding it doesn’t just involve complex mathematics but also trying to work with the potential effects of chaos.

Chaos theory was, in part, developed to try to cope with the difficulties (seeming impossibilities) involved in weather forecasting. Climate, as we know, is not weather, it’s weather multiplied by at least 30 (the agreed minimum number of years whose weather patterns provide a description of a climate). Nor is climate a straightforward global system, it’s a series of very different systems in multiple geographical areas that are themselves at best crudely delineated. Chaos presumably functions everywhere and with all sorts of potential force that we can’t see and can’t understand, even afterwards. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t be trying to work out specific issues and effects; for example, whether or not accumulated CO₂ is likely to have this or that contribution to climate, measured globally or otherwise. But it does mean that simple oppositions brought to bear on that level of working out need to be taken in their context, and their context involves so much more.

Chaos theory (the butterfly effect in meteorology) has been translated as ‘sensitivity to initial conditions in dynamic systems’, a simplification but one that tries to capture the progressive nature of changes that occur. There’s nothing linear (there’s certainly nothing reducible to binaries) about how changes take place, their scale, direction, effects and so on. This leaves climate scientists open to all sorts of assaults from deniers, all sorts of manoeuvres got up to look like evidence that, because chaos still continues to outrun their capacity to calculate its possibilities, they don’t really understand climate at all. But the kind of complexity that chaos introduces to the mad theatre that is the debate over climate change is one reason that I refuse to get into the-models-and-the-events-they-didn’t-predict game. The thing about climate modelling is that it’s an imprecise science, and admits to being such. Forget Tim Flannery, he’s only a geologist; look at the way responsible projections for, say, 2050 about warming and its likely consequences are expressed: as percentages; just the way forecasts are given on the Weatherzone page for my area that I consult from time to time and, as the binman has said, when they tell me there’s a 70% chance of rain I’m inclined to take an umbrella, or at least a hat.

In any case, when your findings don’t match your predictions (your model) what you do is: (a) review your findings and correct any errors; (b) review your methodology and change it if necessary; (c) change your model. If climate is a dynamic system there’s no reason why its study shouldn’t be dynamic as well … indeed there’s every reason why it should be dynamic: open, adjustable, fluid. But those steps are all necessary in any proper scientific inquiry; it’s just that the moment (a) and/or (b) occurs in relation to climate models we get the inevitable hysteria from the denialist cacodoxy about fraud and manipulation and anything else that might make it seem as if there’s another error, another problem, another source of opposition.

But as long as the modelling processes are sufficiently open to scrutiny and are thus potentially falsifiable (Karl Popper’s test) then there’s absolutely no problem with errors showing up. Indeed, it’s best that they do. That’s how knowledge and understanding in this, and not only this, particular area develop and I’d rather that sort of development than some smug assumption, based on dodgy science – whether funded by big oil or not – or unscrupulous statistics, that things are going to be ok.

No doubt it’s possible to say that chaos theory might well save us all since, by some twist or turn, changes could head in another unpredictable direction (but if it does that won’t redound to the credit of any denialist because there’s no way denialism can even begin to predict or calculate such an outcome either). But it might just as easily mean that things become much worse than they’re predicted to be (which won’t be much to the credit of climate scientists themselves, although they will at least be able to say that they understood the direction if not the manner or proportions of change). Chaos comes with other unpredictabilities, though. One possibility is: chaos might mean that some small action by some community or country in the present might, by the conditions it introduces to the dynamic system of one local climate, have some very substantial effect globally later on. Wishful thinking, maybe, but it does put at risk the already recognisable silliness of deniers who want to recycle the old argument that if the Chinese aren’t cutting their emissions we don’t have to. If anything I do amounts to the flapping of a butterfly’s wing I’d rather it was in a direction that contributed in some likelihood to a more benign unravelling of chaotic possibilities than not.

 

Oh, and don’t start me on the 2% warming will be good for humanity crap. Chaos also says you’ve got no idea that this is likely and what we know already suggests it isn’t. But I’m with Jara on this one anyway. There’s another kind of smugness that goes with those sorts of attempts to turn climate change on its head, a smugness that might be easy enough to hang onto somewhere in the middle of a city with its nicely snowdomed protection from the real environment. But like Jara I’ve stood in the path of bushfires, armed only with a puling fire hose or a hoe. I’ve been on a firebreak as a fire jumped it. I don’t want others to have to go on experiencing the same or worse. And, sure, bushfires have always been around. But we’ve also got a pretty good idea of what their purpose and scale and effects were all about in this country. Where I live looks in one direction towards a place called Bald Mountain. It’s covered in trees. It wasn’t when the Europeans came because they scattered the locals and it was the locals who’d farmed it forever with fire and the fire killed off the saplings every burning season. Of course the Europeans chopped down all the other trees but – with an irony that’s hardly restricted to this place – they allowed Bald Mountain to reforest itself. Accidental environmentalism. We’ll need a lot more accidents, I suspect.

But I see you’re also back to saying silly things about planning and economies. Which is where I came in.

 

 

 

* perhaps you might to look at this on the doubt industry … and on the industrious Willie Soon: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2015/mar/05/doubt-over-climate-science-is-a-product-with-an-industry-behind-it.  I only came across this last night looking for something else. It probably makes much of what I’ve said redundant, but I’ve left that in place anyway.

 

I like how you can't even open the link but write umpteenth paragraphs in response anyway.

[Bluey's Dad 3,419]

2 hours ago, Wrecker45 said:

EH - This is what lefty lemmings just don't understand. If solar, wind and renewable's were cost effective, efficient and likely to be the way forward the wealthy fossil fuel industries would just invest in them. That is how capitalism works. 

Telstra didn't oppose mobile phones and broadband internet when they owned all the land lines. They adapted and invested in the better technology.

Sadly at the moment the socialists want Government money to subsidies inept technology. You can bet your bottom dollar if the renewable technology improves the fossil fuel industry will be at the forefront of investing in it.

 

 

Yep, and they are. Shell owns patents in renewable energies, this article below goes into how they invest in biofuel, landfill gas and better methods of oil recovery:

http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2015/03/06/shell-oil-provides-surprising-developments-in-renewable-energy-along-with-oil-and-gas-tech/id=55211/

 

I remember reading somewhere that they also own some solar power patents, but can't find a link.

With the falling price of oil, renewables will make more and more economic sense to oil companies. Even if you accept the theory that oil companies buy renewable patents in order to keep them from being developed, eventually those technologies may become more profitable for those companies, and then they'll start the implement them on a wide-scale. They won't do it to save the environment, they'll do it because it makes them money.

Once it becomes more profitable for the oil companies to roll out more renewables, they'll do it. Ultimately they're in the money business.

The concern from the 'greenies' I guess is that this tipping point won't happen until it's too late for the environment. Not sure why a climate change denier would be concerned at all, given the oil companies will always do what's best for the oil companies. If that means renewables, they'll do it. Either way, the status quo of the existing energy companies remaining profitable endures.

As an aside, I'm sure that the USA would love to be less dependant on oil from the middle east. Their relationship with Saudi Arabia is heavily compromised by oil imports. Strategically, it makes sense for them to be less reliant on middle eastern oil. Likewise with Europe and Russia's gas pipelines.

IMHO, the tipping point for economically viable renewables isn't far away. TESLA's new battery technology is already making solar for individual houses a much more appetising prospect. Once the economics take over, the environmental argument takes care of itself. People will vote with their wallets, and the wallets and environment will then be aligned. Then we don't have to worry about climate 'drones' or 'deniers'. 

[Wrecker45 3,378]

48 minutes ago, Choke said:

Yep, and they are. Shell owns patents in renewable energies, this article below goes into how they invest in biofuel, landfill gas and better methods of oil recovery:

http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2015/03/06/shell-oil-provides-surprising-developments-in-renewable-energy-along-with-oil-and-gas-tech/id=55211/

 

I remember reading somewhere that they also own some solar power patents, but can't find a link.

With the falling price of oil, renewables will make more and more economic sense to oil companies. Even if you accept the theory that oil companies buy renewable patents in order to keep them from being developed, eventually those technologies may become more profitable for those companies, and then they'll start the implement them on a wide-scale. They won't do it to save the environment, they'll do it because it makes them money.

Once it becomes more profitable for the oil companies to roll out more renewables, they'll do it. Ultimately they're in the money business.

The concern from the 'greenies' I guess is that this tipping point won't happen until it's too late for the environment. Not sure why a climate change denier would be concerned at all, given the oil companies will always do what's best for the oil companies. If that means renewables, they'll do it. Either way, the status quo of the existing energy companies remaining profitable endures.

As an aside, I'm sure that the USA would love to be less dependant on oil from the middle east. Their relationship with Saudi Arabia is heavily compromised by oil imports. Strategically, it makes sense for them to be less reliant on middle eastern oil. Likewise with Europe and Russia's gas pipelines.

IMHO, the tipping point for economically viable renewables isn't far away. TESLA's new battery technology is already making solar for individual houses a much more appetising prospect. Once the economics take over, the environmental argument takes care of itself. People will vote with their wallets, and the wallets and environment will then be aligned. Then we don't have to worry about climate 'drones' or 'deniers'. 

Thanks Choke. Like always I agree with you and reason but see it from a slightly different perspective.

I have nothing against wind, solar, renewables and infact hope they thrive. I just don't buy into this argument that big oil is funding climate change denialism (I am certainly not payed by big oil) because at the end of the day big oil will buy into the most efficient and profitable way of producing energy.

Apparently we've passed the tipping point so no use worrying now. I say that a bit in jest like the climate scientists who are getting the sack at CSIRO at the moment and trying to argue the science isn't really settled they still need to do their models....

 

 

[Jara 1,153]

Hey Wrecker

 

re your response about the link between fossil fuel companies and the denialists. The NY times state quite clearly that Soon was heavily subsidised by fossil fuel companies. Why would they do this? As you said, they invest in alternative energy themselves.

 

I'm just speculating, of course, but I can see a pretty clear reason why they would want to fund the denialists. It's because they've got control of the current system, they are making zillions out of it. As the world switches to alternative energy, they will become just one more player. At present, for example, I gather that most solar cells, etc, are manufactured in China. The big oil companies have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and dragging out the change to renewables for as long as they can - bugger the consequences.

[nutbean 8,838]

4 minutes ago, Jara said:

The big oil companies have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and dragging out the change to renewables for as long as they can - bugger the consequences.

The reason big oil companies have a vested interest in dragging out the change to renewables is backed up by the a host of articles online - they don't make enough money out of it ( see articles by Forbes, bloomberg etc) - whilst oil companies are investing in renewables under pressure from shareholders, it is a very paltry amount. Wrecker is 100% right  - oil companies will invest in the cheapest most profitable way of delivering energy.

However, ( and I am sure this is where my attitude may contrast to Prodee and Wrecker) I see a country like Denmark with political will from its Government ( backed by the public ) that has transformed( transforming)  their energy sector to a renewable reliant model with success. I have little doubt that it has cost the country more than had it remained heavily reliant on fossil fuel but this doesn't seem to be part of the government/public debate. The debate is not fossil fuel cost vs renewables cost comparison  - it is a commitment to clean energy and continued debate/research into making it cheaper. 

 

 

[Dr John Dee 1,057]

3 hours ago, Wrecker45 said:

I like how you can't even open the link but write umpteenth paragraphs in response anyway.

Still trying to learn to read, are you Wrecker? This is what I said:

"The link you’ve used for some reason doesn’t work for me, so I went to what’s probably a more a more substantive and probably more sober summary of the Soon, Connolly and Connolly (SCC) paper (on Watts Up With That?) than the blog version you’ve relied on."

As I said before: go away. You're not worth dealing with.

 

[Bluey's Dad 3,419]

16 hours ago, nutbean said:

The reason big oil companies have a vested interest in dragging out the change to renewables is backed up by the a host of articles online - they don't make enough money out of it ( see articles by Forbes, bloomberg etc) - whilst oil companies are investing in renewables under pressure from shareholders, it is a very paltry amount. Wrecker is 100% right  - oil companies will invest in the cheapest most profitable way of delivering energy.

However, ( and I am sure this is where my attitude may contrast to Prodee and Wrecker) I see a country like Denmark with political will from its Government ( backed by the public ) that has transformed( transforming)  their energy sector to a renewable reliant model with success. I have little doubt that it has cost the country more than had it remained heavily reliant on fossil fuel but this doesn't seem to be part of the government/public debate. The debate is not fossil fuel cost vs renewables cost comparison  - it is a commitment to clean energy and continued debate/research into making it cheaper. 

 

 

I remember reading they stuck a bunch of wind farms out in the ocean. Shitload of wind out there and they don't need to worry about acquiring land.

There's an awful lot of wind in Bass Strait....

[nutbean 8,838]

17 minutes ago, Choke said:

I remember reading they stuck a bunch of wind farms out in the ocean. Shitload of wind out there and they don't need to worry about acquiring land.

There's an awful lot of wind in Bass Strait....

 

Denmark generated 140% of its needs and exported energy

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/10/denmark-wind-windfarm-power-exceed-electricity-demand

 

[Bluey's Dad 3,419]

36 minutes ago, nutbean said:

 

Denmark generated 140% of its needs and exported energy

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/10/denmark-wind-windfarm-power-exceed-electricity-demand

 

Wow.

[Wrecker45 3,378]

18 hours ago, Dr John Dee said:

18 hours ago, Dr John Dee said:

Still trying to learn to read, are you Wrecker? This is what I said:

"The link you’ve used for some reason doesn’t work for me, so I went to what’s probably a more a more substantive and probably more sober summary of the Soon, Connolly and Connolly (SCC) paper (on Watts Up With That?) than the blog version you’ve relied on."

As I said before: go away. You're not worth dealing with.

 

Still trying to learn to read, are you Wrecker? This is what I said:

"The link you’ve used for some reason doesn’t work for me, so I went to what’s probably a more a more substantive and probably more sober summary of the Soon, Connolly and Connolly (SCC) paper (on Watts Up With That?) than the blog version you’ve relied on."

As I said before: go away. You're not worth dealing with.

 

I can read just fine thanks. Just highlighting your very lengthy response is based purely on assumptions. 

[Dr John Dee 1,057]

9 minutes ago, Wrecker45 said:

I can read just fine thanks. Just highlighting your very lengthy response is based purely on assumptions. 

Well, as long as reading is defined only as the passage of the eyes across a series of words on a screen. Comprehension (the recognition of meaning as a result) is an entirely different matter.

I'm rather bored with taking responsibility for cleaning up after your messy little acts of stupidity. Let me explain it to you in simple steps:

(i) ProDee posted a link to a blog summarising a paper by Soon, Connolly and Connolly and subsequently asked for my thoughts on what – on the strength of that paper – he claimed to be 'the science' on the question of what's warming the planet;

(ii) I could not open that link. I went to another blog providing a thorough and, as I said, reasonably sober summary of the Soon, Connolly and Connolly paper;

(iii) I also found a link to a pdf version of the entire Soon, Connolly and Connolly paper and read the relevant parts of this. If you had any capacity to understand anything in my reply to ProDee, you would know that already;

(iv) I provided my take on the standing, relevance and scientific credibility of the Soon, Connolly and Connolly paper. I made no assumptions about that paper whatsoever. 

 Clearly you're not interested in the facts when (what you think to be) an opportunity for a bit of point scoring appears. Unfortunately you go on demonstrating how inept your powers of recognition are and how hamfisted your efforts to do anything about your misrecognition are as well.

I'm sure there must be a kindergarten for denialists site somewhere on the web. Why don't you go look for it.

[Wrecker45 3,378]

15 minutes ago, Dr John Dee said:

Well, as long as reading is defined only as the passage of the eyes across a series of words on a screen. Comprehension (the recognition of meaning as a result) is an entirely different matter.

I'm rather bored with taking responsibility for cleaning up after your messy little acts of stupidity. Let me explain it to you in simple steps:

(i) ProDee posted a link to a blog summarising a paper by Soon, Connolly and Connolly and subsequently asked for my thoughts on what – on the strength of that paper – he claimed to be 'the science' on the question of what's warming the planet;

(ii) I could not open that link. I went to another blog providing a thorough and, as I said, reasonably sober summary of the Soon, Connolly and Connolly paper;

(iii) I also found a link to a pdf version of the entire Soon, Connolly and Connolly paper and read the relevant parts of this. If you had any capacity to understand anything in my reply to ProDee, you would know that already;

(iv) I provided my take on the standing, relevance and scientific credibility of the Soon, Connolly and Connolly paper. I made no assumptions about that paper whatsoever. 

 Clearly you're not interested in the facts when (what you think to be) an opportunity for a bit of point scoring appears. Unfortunately you go on demonstrating how inept your powers of recognition are and how hamfisted your efforts to do anything about your misrecognition are as well.

I'm sure there must be a kindergarten for denialists site somewhere on the web. Why don't you go look for it.

Perhaps you should have said that in the first place.

I can only respond to what you write. Kindergarten insults aside,you pre-empted your long winded response with a number of "probablies". In my book that indicated you were making assumptions. 

You probably disagree ?

[Dr John Dee 1,057]

50 minutes ago, Wrecker45 said:

Perhaps you should have said that in the first place.

I can only respond to what you write. Kindergarten insults aside,you pre-empted your long winded response with a number of "probablies". In my book that indicated you were making assumptions. 

You probably disagree ?

Are you serious? You stick your nose (again) into a conversation between ProDee and I and expect me to have spelt out the terms of what I'm doing for your benefit. If you can't be bothered checking on the posts that make up a particular conversation then maybe it'd be a good idea to mind your own business since all you do is make yourself look more ridiculous than you already are (if that's at all possible).

Oh, and the word you're looking for is 'prefaced'. If anybody's been doing any pre-empting it's you. But never mind, just keep on finding ways to demonstrate your own blundering grasp on the language.

 

[dee-luded 2,959]

10 hours ago, Choke said:

I remember reading they stuck a bunch of wind farms out in the ocean. Shitload of wind out there and they don't need to worry about acquiring land.

There's an awful lot of wind in Bass Strait....

EXactly choke..!!!      East Gippsland   &  western Victoria.

 

this is IMO the key.   As we can run power cables from the sea farms, both ways to the Apple Isle (existing)  & to the mainland, servicing the local regions, Tas & Vic...  the wind-farms that the rabbott didn't like the look of,  can go off shore  "outa sight".

.

[Wrecker45 3,378]

On 2/10/2016 at 3:24 PM, Dr John Dee said:

Are you serious? You stick your nose (again) into a conversation between ProDee and I and expect me to have spelt out the terms of what I'm doing for your benefit. If you can't be bothered checking on the posts that make up a particular conversation then maybe it'd be a good idea to mind your own business since all you do is make yourself look more ridiculous than you already are (if that's at all possible).

Oh, and the word you're looking for is 'prefaced'. If anybody's been doing any pre-empting it's you. But never mind, just keep on finding ways to demonstrate your own blundering grasp on the language.

 

(1)0 Dr John, my words were used in appropriate context. Don't try and twist them.

(2) Sorry to interrupt your "conversation" but this is a public forum. What era are you from? I bet you have seen plenty of Melbourne premierships....

(3) Ad-Hominem attacks are a poor form of argument that you seem to specialise in. I don't mind a bit of banter, accompanied by a joke or some form of wit ,but your are lacking.

(4) Let's get back to arguing climate change where you are out of your depth despite your vitriol. 

[Dr John Dee 1,057]

1 hour ago, Wrecker45 said:

(1)0 Dr John, my words were used in appropriate context. Don't try and twist them.

(2) Sorry to interrupt your "conversation" but this is a public forum. What era are you from? I bet you have seen plenty of Melbourne premierships....

(3) Ad-Hominem attacks are a poor form of argument that you seem to specialise in. I don't mind a bit of banter, accompanied by a joke or some form of wit ,but your are lacking.

(4) Let's get back to arguing climate change where you are out of your depth despite your vitriol. 

Now you really are using words that are just a bit too big for you. An ad hominem is a means of attacking or dismissing an argument by some form of attack on the person making the argument. Since you haven't at any stage presented any form of argument, my pointing to the ridiculousness of your efforts at ridicule is hardly ad hominem. It's simple description.

As for ad hominems, try your point (ii). I'd use the word irony if there was any chance you'd recognise what that is, but let's just call it hypocrisy.

I don't need lectures from you about the nature of this forum. It  isn't a public forum, anyway, it's for people who've signed up as members, many of whom pay for the privilege of being such and probably would prefer not to have to put up with the sort of tripe you've been directing at me in some desperate point-scoring exercise that proves nothing other than your failure to understand even the basics of the language you're supposed to be using. About that language, I don't need to twist anything, by the way, your one repeated success is in your ability to tie yourself up in verbal knots. That goes with the territory when you grasp at words that you have no comprehension of.

If you think you've got some unfettered right to 'interrupt' a conversation between other members without even bothering to inform yourself of any of the previous discussion, you're even more arrogant than you are ignorant. Make whatever insinuations you like about me, they don't change either that arrogance or that ignorance.

And on your fourth point: if you're going to try to jump on a high horse about anything it's best to know where the stable is. You haven't – for obvious reasons – addressed one thing I've said on climate change. So you can put on whatever outsized jodhpurs and back to front riding boots you like, carrying on about getting back to a discussion you weren't having is just more hypocrisy.

Oh, and I don't mind being told by the witless that I lack wit, nor being told I'm out of my depth by someone too blind to know where the water is.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: go away. If you attempt to prolong your agony with even more efforts at insinuation or abuse, no matter how inept, I'll regard you as stalking.

 

 

 

[bing181 9,246]

Surprised this thread is still going. But as it is, some nice work here in regards to cognitive bias, Ted Cruz etc. etc. Credits etc. at the end.

 

[bing181 9,246]

On 9 February 2016 at 3:55 AM, Wrecker45 said:

EH - This is what lefty lemmings just don't understand.

The majority of governments world wide support and endorse the science of climate change and many, many of them are to the right, often well to the right.

Carry on.