Conservative Group Plans Anti-Climate Education Program

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Ivan Seeking, Feb 18, 2012.

  1. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    I must profess a certain curiosity as to your opinion.


    Certainly there was profound warming in some parts of the world, but, for example, the Bransfield Basin sediment core implies a period of profound cooling between AD 1000 and 1100 which coincides with some of the warmest periods in parts of the northern hemisphere (eg the Viking colonization of Vinland/Newfoundland.

    I've always been of the opinion that most of the regional patterns ave some interesting analogs in the ENSO cycle, especially when considered in conjunction with some of the evidence of 'super el nino' events in (for example) South America, and evidence of a persistent la nina pattern.

    Incidentaly, a number of authors have recently put forward evidence that suggests that the 'Little Ice Age' may have been triggered by the sudden depopulation and subsequent reforestation that occured as a result of the 'Black Death'. The basic idea being that with less people, reforestation occured and there were fewer paddies being tended consequently emissions fell sharply, and uptake rose triggering a drop in temperature (or something close to that anyway).

    Usually, but not always. I only recently had a debate with an individual that was of the opinion that the idea that greenhouse gasses caused warming violates the second law of thermodynamics - this while at the same time implicitly maintaining that a massive object could accelerate and deccelerate instaneously.

    I recently had cause to perform some risk analyses along these lines using data generated by computer models on the level of inundation generated by various events ranging from a 1 in 600 year Tsunami to a 1 in 20 year storm surge. My task was to convert these numbers into "The percentage risk of (location) being inundated to X meters over Y years" based on both current MSL and a 0.5m rise in MSL, where Y was 50 years and 100 years.

    Part of the source for these sorts of concern (as I understand it anyway) comes from the fact that even where I live there are areas that currently have a 0% chance of being inundated to some arbitrary level (over say a 100 year period) that with a 0.5m rise in sea will have a 90% chance of inundation to the same level, purely as a function of topography and proximity to the coast.
     
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  3. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    Well there is no indication that there was any plan to create school educational materials that contradict the established science on climate change.

    Those modules were to be written/produced by David Wojick, who has the credentials to create educational materials on Climate Change suitable for K-12 students on global warming that isn't alarmist or overtly political.

    Having debated with David for years about climate change I would put his knowledge of the subject above anyone here, and certainly well versed for this task.

    More to the point, his specialty is in how to communicate these complex issues in a manner that is understandable.

    http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/author/dwojick/
    http://www.stemed.info/davidwojickbio.html
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Sure there is - its funding source. Those guys are propaganda generators in the service of corporate powers - that's their job. They aren't going to lay out money for an educational program that doesn't further their cause and benefit their support, which in this case means contradicting established science on all kinds of things including climate change.

    And David Wojick is a perfect and predictable hire for that goal - he's not a scientist, so there's no awkward issues of scientific reputation or integrity to interfere with his work, and his long and close relationship with Heartland's major funders (Exxon, Western Coal, etc) ensure approval from that all-important corner.
     
    Last edited: Feb 23, 2012
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  7. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    I don't agree.

    First of all David is a Scientist.

    And the people they are supporting are doing a good job of keeping the alarmists from being the only voices heard and there are many of us who don't disagree with the established science but still would like to see the reporting and explanations to be fair and balanced and not filled with hype and alarmist BS, like I routinely deal with on this forum.

    The Himalayas are NOT going to melt away in 30 years.
    The amount of CH4 in the Arctic is NOT increasing at all, let alone at huge rates.
    The oceans are NOT going to rise 1 meter by 1950.
    The Gulf Stream is not slowing down.
    Half the Species are NOT going to go extinct this century.
    The Earth is NOT going to become like Venus.

    etc etc etc

    The facts are that according to the Hadley Climate Center the 2011 Global Temperature was 1/3 of a degree warmer than the 61-90 average.

    Their data also shows that from 1895 till now we have been on a long slow warming trend, with the temperatures rising at a rate of .7 degrees per Century. (within that long slow warming trend there have been distinctive periods of warming and of cooling)

    From 1895 until the mid 1930s, prior to any significant buildup of CO2, the temperature rose at over twice the rate of the last 115 years, at a rate of 1.5 degrees per Century.

    From the mid 1930s to 1980 the global temperatures cooled at a rate of 1.2 degrees per Century, such that 1979 was colder than any temperature that we had seen in over half a century.

    And then it switched and started to warm again.

    And that's why the IPCC has to start in the middle of this cooling period to make it's claim of a Anthropogenic temperature increase:

    So to restate the IPCC declaration: some amount of the globe's .34 degrees of warming (as little as .17 degrees) over the last 60 years, is very likely due to an increase in GHGs.

    Why did the IPCC not state that warming before the middle of the 20th Century was caused by humans?

    Simply because just moving the starting point back to 1930 and the rate of temperature rise DROPS to but .6 degrees per Century, slightly less than the long term trend (an indication that the warming is not accelerating).

    Or consider that the global temperature trend, since 1996, has been slightly negative (-.13 degrees COOLING per Century), which of course doesn't mean that AGW has stopped (since that's not that long of a period), but the reality is that the actual long term temperature trends are below the lowest of the IPCC forecasts and not at all like the hot forcasts.

    And that kind of information is what hopefully we will start to see.
    Dealing with the actual issues and actual data more and spending less time on wild predictions from the most outspoken alarmists relying on the very hottest models using implausible scenarios of rapid and sustained global economic growth.
     
    Last edited: Feb 23, 2012
  8. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    In what field? Not in any way connected with climate, weather, history, physics, etc etc etc. His credentials are in civil engineering and mathematical logic. He has done no research in any area of the physical sciences, published nothing relevant, made no discoveries.

    Dude, that's not slow. That's explosive. That's the fastest rate of warming ever seen on the planet, so far as anyone has determined.

    And it's not the standard, consensus figure, which is about 1 degree per century - faster yet.

    Is that the kind of "educational" material we can expect from Exxon's think tank employees?
     
  9. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    He is big in eductation.
    The level of material being presented to K-12, does not require being a Climate Scientist, but clearly he has been extensively involved in this subject for decades because I was debating him on it at least a decade ago on the forum he hosts, ClimateChangeDebate.org.


    No it's not.
    Not even close
    The period from 1895 to ~1940 was at a rate of 1.5 degrees per Century
    The reason the longer period has less of a slope is because after the rapid warming at the start of the century the globe then COOLED from the mid thirties to the80s, at a rate of ~1.2 degrees per century (which is why some scientists were talking about the coming Ice age in the 70s) and then because the trend has been slightly negative for the last 16 years.

    The figures I'm quoting are derived from the CRU - Hadley Climate Center HadCrut3V data set which has the variance adjusted global climate data going back to 1895.

    Feel free to check the actual data and trends.

    This is the Data set that Phil Jones is responsible for (Yes, that Phil Jones from the Climategate Emails)

    http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/

    Note, the CRU data set is in broad agreement with the Satellite record that is available from 1979, though the RSS data set is now running just a bit cooler.

    Well they have nothing to do with Exxon, but yeah, real data compiled by actual Climate Scientists is exactly what I'd expect to see from David, presented in a very understandable manner.
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2012
  10. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    The guy is not a scientist. Claims that he is a scientist are in error.

    My point is not that one must be a working scientist to write elementary school textbooks, merely that he has no scientific reputation or standing to lose. He's a shill for the Heritage Foundation, which is part of the intellectual wing of Big Oil's propaganda generators.

    But that isn't a century, see - it's less than fifty years. And .7 C measured over an actual century is not slow. If it continues - and the evidence is more toward acceleration than dissipation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming - It will be the fastest global warming ever established in even geological history.
    Exxon and Chevron give lots of money to the Heritage Foundation, both directly and through individuals, other foundations, etc. Granted they are not as obvious or immediately appear as large as the Korean CIA and Moonies or people like Coors and Scaife and the Koch brothers, but they count.

    But the Heritage, though prospering, seemed to have been losing a bit of its edge lately, so the recent infusion of big money and a new direction from the Bradley Foundation must have been a welcome jolt. The new direction would be education - Bradley focus - and we look forward to seeing intellectual product of Bradley's standard, such as the output of Charles Murray (best known for "The Bell Curve"), in the field of "education" but bent to the purposes of the Heritage Foundation (rightwing authoritarian propaganda).
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2012
  11. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    Clearly our definitions don't mesh:

    David Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. He has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science and mathematical logic from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.S. in civil engineering from Carnegie Tech. He has been on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon and the staffs of the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Lab.

    Well no school district has to buy the material he produces do they?
    So yes he has something to lose.

    What part of RATE do you not understand?

    I said the RATE of warming was 1.5 degrees per century. That's equal to a sustained increase over many decades at a trend of +.015 per year, which is twice the rate of the entire record (117 years).

    The current evidence does not support acceleration as the trend for the last 16 years has been negative. You might wait until the trend again turns positive for a long enough period of time to be over 1.5 degrees per century to make that claim again.

    We don't know that.
    Our proxy records don't have that kind of temporal resolution to make that kind of comparison with the modern instrumental records.

    http://blogs.edf.org/climate411/wp-content/files/2007/06/last_400000_years.png

    But the fact is the warming at the start of the last Century was reasonably the same magnitude and duration as the warming at the end of Century.
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2012
  12. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    If you are unfamiliar with the difference between philosophy and science, Google can be your friend. If you are unable to distinguish political agendas and propaganda from education, Google may not be of any use.
    Like what? He's getting paid up front, apparently. The marketing of the "educational materials" he has been hired to produce is somebody else's job and expense - the Bradley Foundation, Heritage's apparent partner in this, has been throwing a lot of money that way in recent years.

    And you attempted to measure the rate over too short a span of time for the phenomenon, a variety of what is known as "cherrypicking". Move your window a few years back or forward within the relevant time span, your number changes drastically.

    I'll bet I could pick a one month span, maybe in 1998, that would give me a rate of 40 C @ millenium. So?

    Yes we do.
    Hence the word "established".

    The point was that your characterization of .7C per century as "slow" was ridiculous. The planet's entire atmosphere has seldom, if ever, warmed that fast. As far as we know, it's the all time record over 3 billion years.
     
  13. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    If all his credentials were in Philosophy you would have a point.
    But his other credentials, such as a BS in civil engineering and his work experience over a lifetime show that isn't the case.

    Well anytime you do a job for someone it affects your reputation.
    The output of this surely will as it will be CAREFULLY examined by people who are hostile to start with.

    And I picked no one month periods did I?
    The early part of the last century spanned ~45 years, certainly long enough to matter, as the middle of the last century was a 3 decade cooling trend that didn't turn around until the early 80s, so the current warming trend that you are discussing is SHORTER than the one at the start of the Century.

    The shortest period I dicussed was the most current period of 16 years, which I already admitted is too short to claim that AGW has stopped, but it IS part of the long term trend and the lenth of this slightly negative period DOES refute your argument that the trend is acclerating.

    No we don't.
    The NAS in it's review of the science explicitly makes that point. Our proxies of temperature before the instrumental record don't have that level of temporal and global temperature resolution.

    No it's not.
    We know that we don't know what the actual global record is over the last 3 billion years, but we do know there were other very rapid warming periods.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrupt_climate_change
     
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Even working civil engineers are not often scientists, much less people who merely got BS degrees in the subject before continuing their schooling in philosophy.

    He has no work experience as a scientist. He has no credentials as a scientist. He has no publications as a scientist. He's never been a scientist, and he isn't one now.

    He's a propaganda campaign designer and "policy" consultant, employed by the Heritage Foundation to generate "educational" materials designed to advance the agenda of Exxon, Coors, Chevron, the Bradley Foundation, the Koch brothers, Richard Scaife, and the other major funders.

    His reputation is well established - that's how he got the job. He is almost certain to please his employers, and if he cared about anything else he wouldn't be in that field.
    That's Greenland, not global. Too small an area for any such conclusion.
    No, that's not long enough to matter. It's too short a time for any such conclusion. Even a full century is a shaky basis for a rate figured by century.

    Too small, too short -> invalid.

    .7C @ century is "slow" -> ridiculous.
     
  15. Ivan Seeking Registered Senior Member

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    957
    I have a BS in physics and took my minor in hydraulic theory through the civil engineering department. Civil engineering is great if you are building roads, bridges, dams, designing municipal services, or planning cities, but science it is not; not even close! It isn't even in the same league as other engineering disciplines, like electrical or nuclear engineer, which are also not science.
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2012
  16. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    His work experience is in fact oriented around scholarlay publications so with his deep knowledge of the issues surrounding AGW and developing Curriculums for K-12, he is an excellent candidate to head up this assignment.
    More to the point, if he doesn't produce something that school districts think is valuable then no one will use it.

    http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/...ulation-new-challenges-and-new-opportunities/

    That was my point, our proxies don't tell us it didn't warm that much because we don't have enough of them on a global basis (very few from the SH for instance, which is why Mann's "hockey stick" is just a NH temp reconstruction), but still warming of 10 degrees in the climate of such a northern locations of Greenland in such a short time is compelling evidence for rapid climate change on a far more widespread basis.


    Well that's pretty funny because this is the latest statement from the IPCC AR4 on the issue:



    So, if the warming period at the start of the century is "Too small, too short -> invalid.", certainly the period at the end of the century, of reasonably the same duration and magnitude is also "Too small, too short -> invalid."

    Compared to evidence of the climate changing so much that Greenland's temerature soared 10 C in a matter of a few years? Yes it is slow.

    Or compare that rate to the rapid warming coming out of the LIA. It was higher than 1C per century. (see Fig 3)

    http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/03/02/0902522107.full.pdf
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2012
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    As long as you understand that the assignment is to produce propaganda and deception for the Heritage Foundation's funders, yes - he is an excellent choice.

    His depth of "knowledge", whatever it may be (hard to tell, without relevant credentials or publications), will be employed to that purpose.
    What exactly about the word "global" do you find confusing?
    Not global. We have very good reason to think the local climate of Greenland fluctuates far more rapidly, in different directions, and over a far larger range than the average climate of the entire planet.

    A large, fast warming in Greenland is easily associated with global cooling, even - not warming at all.
    Invalid for what? The people evaluating mechanisms according to evidence are not attempting to draw your type of bogus conclusions from obviously inadequate and misrepresented evidence, as you are.
     
  18. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    I believe that's just some BS you made up.
    But go ahead, prove me wrong, post a link to a reputable study that shows that dramatic 10 degree warming of Greenland has ever been related to a period of Global Cooling.

    But there is plenty of evidence for rapid global warming:

    And

    http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/pastcc.html

    See fig 2, and note the rapid warming from 1830 to 1930 of approx .7 C.


    That's pretty funny again.

    You say 50 years is too short, indeed an INVALID period to draw climate conclusions from and then I post the quote from the latest IPCC report that specifically refers to a period of 50 years to draw it's conclusions.

    Clearly NOT a misrepresentation of the time period in question.
     
    Last edited: Feb 26, 2012
  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    I said no such thing.

    I said a cherrypicked 50 year interval is too short for you to draw the conclusions you drew from it. Intelligent and informed people using solid reasoning and evidence can draw all kinds of "climate conclusions" from any length of interval.

    So check it.

    Among the better known possibilities: a huge ice dam blocking cool fresh water from its former path of influx from the North American continent can dramatically boost temps in Greenland for a while, while the rest of the planet is in a cooling cycle of sunspot variation, ENSOs, volcanic effluents, and glacial meltwater effects.

    All kinds of things can happen in Greenland, Antarctica, the Himalayan Plateau, and such places, while the global average temperature undertakes a quite different trend for a while. That's why we talk about "global" averages as different from local ones.

    That's why, for obvious example, people have put so much effort into finding out what was going on all over the planet during the Little Ice Age in the north Atlantic regions. The pros did not simply assume that things got colder everywhere because that region - much bigger than Greenland - was suffering extreme cold - they had to check. There were other possibilities, including major warming and heat waves in other places and even globally on average.
     
    Last edited: Feb 26, 2012
  20. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    10,890
    Two articles I have come across recently, both dealing with the Himalayan Plateu.

    The first of which seems to suggest that the reaon for the initially wrong estimates regarding Himalayan glacial melting is because people were observing the low, easily accessable glaciers, and extrapolating their behavior to the higher glaciers. It wasn't until the GRACE mission that we have been able to directly measure the mass of the ice in this area, and that has confirmed that it's not melting as fast as expected. This theory as to why this should be the case, as I understand it, is that the higher altitude glaciers have been subjected to less warming than the lower altitude glaciers, and so are melting slower.

    Meanwhile, experienced mountaineers seem to be saying that many of the glacial lakes are filling to dangerous levels because of the glacial retreat, and many of these are held back by ice dams, which are in danger of being refloated, and releasing large quantities of water rather suddenly.

    Hence my mentioning the Bransfield Basin sediment core in my post to Pandemoni, while there may have been abrupt cooling in Europe at that time, there is evidence of warming in Antarctica (or parts of it at least) something that I have been accutely aware of for a while now. The Little Ice Age was not consistent spatially or temporally, and in many respects (to me at least) most strongly resembles an unusual phase of ENSO. IMO there are a number of lines of evidence that seem to point in that direction.
     
  21. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    No Cherrypicking involved.
    I start from the beginning of the Instrumental record and go till the cooling period in the middle of the century to get the warming trend.

    But we also know, that the previous hundred years was even colder, so the warming trend was even far longer, just not backed by good instrumentation.

    The IPCC simply uses the most recent 50 year period, and if there is any cherry picking going on, they are doing it, because just moving the start date back two decades lowers the warming trend to less than the long term trend.

    Which is why the IPCC only uses that period:

    Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations. It is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent (except Antarctica) (IPCC AR4 - SPM )

    OOPS

    So check it.

    I knew you couldn't come up with anything to back up your claim.

    So once again, POST A LINK to a scientific journal aticle that supports your assertion that a 10 degree WARMING trend in Greenland is possible in a world that is having an overall global COOLING trend.
     
    Last edited: Feb 26, 2012
  22. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    So you had no mechanism, no theory, no argument, nothing to single out that time interval as being the significant one that could be extrapolated to the planet and global trends with confidence.

    That's called cherrypicking. That's not what the IPCC did.
    There was no ten degree warming "trend" in Greenland. There was an event, in Greenland. The relevant trend in Greenland was and is different from such events.

    But humoring you, here's about fifty links, almost any of which can be used to support such a claim of possibility:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrupt_climate_change
    http://www.eh-resources.org/timeline/timeline_lia.html
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Epica-vostok-grip-40kyr.png
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Cold_Reversal

    Or you could just ask yourself - the example you used, the end of the Younger Dryas, was a short and clearly defined event: what was the global temperature trend before, during, and after that event? How do you know?
     
    Last edited: Feb 27, 2012
  23. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    No that's not not cherrypicking.
    There was no region involved as the HadCrut3 data set is of the Global Temperature.
    And I took the first 50 years, a time frame that the IPCC claims is worth considering.



    And yet none of them do support that Greenland could warm by 10 degrees while the globe cooled.

    We "know" by use of temperature proxies.
     

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