So you were "specifically objecting" to something that you made up for me to have implied, and using that invented implication to label my actual postings a "strawman" argument. Pretty much, yes. When you put it in quotes as an assertion of mine. But they directly address what I see as the implications of your inability to confront my objections. And they do address the point I was making when you first claimed to "strongly disagree". And that is as follows: there is no such thing as "doing nothing". We can do the wrong thing, the right thing, the better thing, the worse thing, but we are in action here - we are boosting the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere, actively. We cannot do no thing about the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere. Hence the critical question is not whether we should act, but under what assumptions we should choose from our possibilities of action. What are the ordinary, default, status quo assumptions about the rate of CO2 accumulation and its effects?
Wrong Wrong again. So what? So what? My point remains the same Which is beside my point. Are you ready to read the post I originally made yet?
So then leave me out of the discussion. You don't have to invent implications for me and pretend to disagree with my posts and misrepresent quotes and so forth, if you're talking about something other than what I'm talking about. You can just post whatever it is you had in mind. Then your points will not confuse me by appearing to be in response to mine, and this situation: won't be so common and frustrating for you.
a GW proponent is one who proposes that the globe is warming- usually by reference to "the" average global temperature
This is the third time that you have directly accused me of dishonesty without any proof, and I'll thank you to withdraw your false accusation. Clearly, in the context of the discussion, or at least the thread of the discussion to which I was contributing, was about corrective action for climate change. Clearly, BenTheMan's post was referring to the economic cost of taking corrective action in the form of environmental policy, versus the economic cost of doing nothing (you had previously asserted that doing something now would be economically less costly than cleaning up the mess later). Clearly you failed to retain this context of the discussion and started misrepresenting (whether deliberately or inadvertantly) what Ben was saying and arguiing against a point that he wasn't making. So clearly then, I have invented nothing.
That would be just about every single researcher who has put together an atmospheric or oceanic temperature record of the past few hundred years. Oh blow me, I did not. And clearly your idea of what exactly is encompassed by the term "corrective action" is not clear to those of us not yet in possession of such giant brains as yourself. I have my suspicions, based on you sending me to people like Glenn Beck and Lord Monckton for information and your quick resort to insult, but the technique of assuming implications for other people and berating them accordingly doesn't suit my style at the moment. But if you have no wish to clarify the matter, we can proceed with some kind of discussion of the costs of "corrective action" vs the costs of "doing nothing" without the faintest idea what actions either term refers to - or rather you can: have at 'er. And I will return to the matter of the assumptions underlying all of our choices at the moment: given the physical reality and the general situation, what should be the default assumptions, the guides to decisions we have to make in the absence of sufficient information for an engineering analysis, regarding the general climate in which the next couple of generations of humans will live?
The only dishonesty happening here, vhawk, is the argument you are making. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you aren't doing so intentionally. You are equating that the entire concept of a global mean temperature is meaningless just because scientists cannot measure the global mean temperature perfectly and just because scientists quibble over how to exactly measure the global mean temperature. Wrong, on both accounts. Every scientific measurement is subject to some error. There will always be multiple ways to assess scientific concepts of any complexity. That error always exists and that multiple measurement techniques exist invalid neither the measurements nor the thing being measured. It simply means we don't know the value perfectly and we don't quite agree on how to measure it. Scientists do quibble over how to measure the global mean temperature. The key point: they are quibbling. You are ignoring that all of the different techniques, all of the different data bases, agree that the Earth's climate has warmed up over the last century. To say otherwise puts you in the same camp as those who deny the Earth is round. There is a place for legitimate debate, and that is what is the cause of this warming, and what, if anything should be done about it. Arguing that the warming has not happened is akin to arguing that the Earth is flat.
So when you made this statement: You weren't stating or implying that I had invented implications and misrepresented posts? And this doesn't count as accusing me of dishonesty? And here you're not trying to accuse me of inventing stuff on your behalf, and using logical fallacies? Absurd. I could have sworn that term was self explanatory, and I could have sworn I had already explainted, or at the very least intimated what I meant by it. In the context of the discussion corrective action would be any step taken to mitigate human induced global warming, or its effects - such action might include environmental policy calling for a reduction of carbon emissions, or it might include some of the big geoengineering projects that I hinted at, and have seen discussed. So someone who is pro environmental policy, and believes in Anthropogenic global warming can't investigate and present both sides of the argument, and can't recognize factual errors when they see them? (Note: I'm not saying anything about my position here, simply asking a question). Once again, the only uncertainty lies in your mind, but only because you've changed topics at some point without making it clear to anyone that you were changing the context of the discussion.
It is more misleading for ALGORE to use the average global temperature the in the manner that He is using them. Reference the Milankovitch Cycles, the earth is now in it's most concentric orbit, which means that we are receiving a steady +6 % more energy from the sun, because of the concentricity of the present orbit. http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/gl...mate_patterns/ Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Figure 9. Eccentricity changes on a ~100,000 year cycle From the information I have read, from this point on the orbit will get more eccentric and the levels of peak energy for then Sun will become shorter. The summer seasons will become shorter and the winter will become longer, I think we are talking on a milleniel scale, but even the shorter cycles are in the 21,000 year range. So Al Gore and his bud's are the one you should be questioning, as there does seem to be a graphable decrease in average temperatures over th elast decade, if not longer, the peak temperatures in warming, of the last century were in the 1930tys, not the 1990's. http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/2005-09-15/trends.htm
First off. Global Average temperature isn't a meaningless term. If used correctly, it's a useful tool, irrespective of how it's calculated, and yes, there are several ways of calculating it. Firstly, presumably it's based on the average daily temperature - in otherwords, measure the temperature over a 24 hr period, and compute the average, this is a good thing because it will take into account any changes in the average night time temperature. There's a couple of main ways of doing this, you could measure the temperature at hourly intervals and then perform a simple mean calculation, or, you could measure the temperature continuously, find the area under the graph, and then compute the temperature which divides that area in half. Both are equally valid. To some extent, doing the first one is a lower resolution version of doing the second one (essentially it represents a Rieman Integral IIRC). The first measurment is easier to perform, the second measurement is more accurate. Secondly, it is possible to calculate a global average temperature, and again, there are a number of ways of doing this, but all of them involve using the daily average temperature at a number of locations. Like with all statistics, the more information you have, the more accurate the inferences you can make. With modern satellite technology, itis possible, or nearly possible to get a continuous read out of the surface or air tempterature at every point on the earths surface, from this you can perform much the same technique as the second method I mentioned. You can, for example, map out the isotherms, and then compute the thermal equivalent of a mean radius. Or, if you have a bunch of stations placed around the world, as we have had for a number of years, you can collect the data, and combine them, but, this requires the assumption that the physical location of the thermometer is in an area that is representative of the region that it's measuring for - For example, you're not dealing with a thermometer that's in a greenhouse in Iceland, and calling that the average temperature of Iceland. This is the part where things get tricky, because there are a bunch of things that can influence a thermometer that don't neccessarily represent local trends, or global trends. If these thermometers happen to be on an evenly spaced grid, then you can simply calculate the average of the average daily temperatures and be done with it. However, it's far more likely that thermometer distribution is going to reflect population distribution, it's going to be clumpy and uneven (for example, I'd wager there are more NOAA weather stations on the eastern sea board of the US then there are in the american mid west). So what you need to do then is calculate a weighted average, assigning each average daily temperature a value depending on how much surface area (or some such thing) the thermometer is representing. Now for my pet peeve. Statistics is not dishonest. It's only when people misapply it (and that happens frequently) that it starts to become questionable - and that's only as a direct result of people not understanding the implications or the short comings of the data they're dealing with. Most statisticians would probably tell you that it isn't neccessarily wise to look at average temperatures alone, ideally you should probably also be looking at the global peak average temperature (the global average of the daily maximum temperatures, or nightly minimum temperatures) and maybe a percentile or two. The reaosn behind this is that a shift in temperature might simply be a shift in modality, or a change in the shape of the distribution, without a corresponding increase in the spread of the data. And that's one of the key points that needs to be looked at - does the shift in average data correspond to a shift in peak data, or a change in spread. The information that I have seen on trends in global climate change is that not only is the average going to increase, but the extremes are going to become more extreme - the record setting cold snaps are going to be colder, and possibly more frequent, and the record setting heat waves are going to be hotter and possibly more frequent - so we're seeing an increas in the variance of the data, as well as an increase in the mean (or we will if these models are right). Unfortunately for everyone, Isotope proxies can only give information about averages, because that's what they respond to.
Firstly, it's eccentricity, not concentricity, and secondly, have you looked into any of the problems associated with solely attributing climate change to the Milankovic Cycles? The Wiki article gives a good summary of some of them. And were you aware that the most accurate models that we have for predicting climate change take into account variations of insolation as well as changing Carbon dioxide levels. I's not neccessarily a 'one or the other' thing. In fact, if there's one thing that science has taught me, it's that it probably isn't any single thing. Correct. Unfortunately for your idea: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It seems that the average annual solar insolation for the last 20 years has remained approximately constant, however, if the milankovic cycles were solely responsible, as you claim they are. If they were, there would be some sort of downward trend visible in Solar insolation, but there isn't. A point which seems confirmed by this graph also: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It would seem then that the downward trend you're referring to is a short term trend in response to the 'relaxtion' of a combination of the various oceanic and atmospheric oscillations that I have previously mentioned (PDO, NAO, AO, El Nino etc (implicitly these must be moving from a warm phase to a cool phase)) and the fact that we're currently going through a solar minimum at the moment (transition between cycles 23 and 24).
Nope. I think you are sincere and so forth. Just as you sincerely believed Al Gore had claimed that thousands of climate refugees were streaming into New Zealand. Such a person would seldom be found linking to Glenn Beck for Lord Monckton's take on Al Gore's film, or consistently following up misread "clear implications" with personal beratings. It's possible, but not the way to bet. The pattern is common enough to be a stereotype, and a little reflection should engender calmer thoughts, and milder reactions, eh?
Are you actually reading anything I say? Lord Monckton represents an alternative view. Did you bother reading the post where I linked to him? I notice that in your apparent Zeal to villify me you've completely neglected to mention the fact that I explicity stated: "I am neither citing Lord Monckton as an expert source, nor implying that I support his views, I am simply putting forward some of the other views on Gore's movie." And as far as stereotypes go, for one thing you have totally and consistently failed to prove that I have misread anything, and you have consistently squirmed, weasled, and resorted to various fallacies, either deliberately or inadvertantly. I have completely owned you in both of the debates we've had so far, and more relevantly, I have succeeded in presenting a balanced account, and have been able to equally criticize your posts and Buffaloroams posts. The only person that has been misreading or misrepresenting anything, is, in fact, you.
As you know (from reading my posts, right?) I am long familiar with Lord Monckton's "alternative" views. Likewise Glenn Beck's. And I will definitely take the implication of being linked to the pair of them on a forum like this, honestly linked for the info to be had, and evaluate the linker accordingly. I can't say I'm surprised, but it is a bit disappointing. The problem is the idea that considering people like Monckton as one side of an issue, including them for "balance", is somehow approaching an issue fairly and objectively. Another example: What you are doing there is finding some kind of balance, or fair accounting, that considers crackpottery and bullshit as equivalent to informed and considered opinion. You put down "both sides", and congratulate yourself on walking a line between. That does not include you in the category of "informed and considered". I don't think,myself, that you have yet considered my actual posts, or recognized that I have considered yours. The "implications" you find so clearly in mine, like the implications Monckton finds in Gore's movie, are nothing I recognize, and your treatment of them is nothing I feel bound to regard with any more courtesy than your punk ass is willing to extend.
Right, so you didn't bother reading the post in its entirety, neither have you taken in anything i've actually said. And you're making presumptions and judgements based on a single interview I've presented. Gotcha. How is Moncktons view any less extreme than Gores? Answer: It isn't. Moncktons "There's nothing to see here, it's all a load of hockum" against the mainstream view exactly counterbalances Gores "OMG we're all gonna die" against the mainstream view (make no bones about it, in spite of what you might like to think, some of Gores views do go against the mainstream as defined by the IPCC). Your bias shines through well and truely here. Right, because I present a source that I consider as extreme as Gore (remember, Gore's assertions go against the mainstream as well) somehow that makes me uninformed? Weren't you just berating me for putting you down? Oh dear. But then again, this coming from someone who's accused me of dishonesty what, two, three times now? See, that's the thing, I have, I've even pointed out where i've considered them, on more than one occasion. Right, so you're willing to just close your eyes and accept what Gore has to say? Me? I much prefer to think about what I'm told, it's far more enlightening. So when someone states "That’s why the citizens of these pacific nations had all had to evacuate to New Zealand" as part of a section discussing sea level rises, that it's supposed to mean something other than that the citizens of more than one pacific island nation have had to relocate to New Zealand because of rising sea levels? Right. Gotcha. Pray tell, how am I supposed to intuit meaning from this sentence? Close my eyes and select randomly from an english dictionary? Oh, and for someone that has just finished attempting to berate someone for putting someone down, you're sure doing a great job of being abusive here.
I read every post I responded to in its entirety. What does "extreme" have to do with anything? Monckton's a crackpot. Gore isn't. That doesn't make Gore less extreme - or correct. It means he has a sense of responsibility and a loyalty to reason. Sure. Like this: WTF? No, it's because you present crackpottery as information and regard that as balance. No, I never said anything like that. Are you willing to even figure out what Gore does say? Look at this: That's your fourth or fifth different interpretation of what Gore said, starting with the first one (the only one I've flatly denied, btw), a badly errant memory. My point, if you recall, was that what Gore said was cryptic - hard to interpret in context. You illustrate that. Another point I made was that the comment was an aside, not critical to Gore's argument. Attempting to discredit the movie's arguments by harping on these side issues is an interesting tactic, familiar to Glenn Beck's audience, but it's not "balance", and it's not considering what Gore - or anybody - has to say.
BS. Why, because he disagrees with you, or differs from the mainstream. Gore differs from the mainstream on at least one or two points, tehrefore the lable crackpot might also be accurately applied to him. Bzzzzzt. No I don't. No it isn't. I exactly quoted your own transcript that you linked to. You have claimed this multiple times, and I have pointed out multiple times that I was quoting your own transcript. Or are you saying that your own transcript was wrong. And the meaning of what I have said has been preserved, and upheld, you just refuse to accept it. This is more BS from you. First off, show me where I said that it was critical to Gores argument. Oh wait, you can't, BECAUSE I DIDN'T I expressed the opinion that I found Gores docudrama to be factually inaccurate - in other words, there were some points that were contained within the film that I believed to be just plain wrong, and I gave this one as a specific example. AT NO POINT have I commented on the over all accurracy of the film, save to agree with what Justice Burton said - that yes, over all, it represents the mainstream, but there are some things that he covers in it that are just plain wrong, and/or alarmist. End of story, and guess what. You loose.
You approach absurdity. I assure you I read every word of every post I responded to, and I observe that once again you pretend to a certainty you cannot possess. No. Gore does that, and he's not a crackpot. Kary Mullis does that, and he's not a crackpot (and he's a real scientist, making mistakes in reasoning right on stage there, about 20 minutes in). Glenn Beck is a crackpot, scientifically, and so is Lord Monckton, and together they make a team of crackpots, and taking them seriously as presenting an "alternative view" is not a balanced approach to considerations of real life. You did, with the Glenn Beck link to Monckton, which you defended as an "alternative view", and your self praise as presenting a "balanced" view. Well, the words you type on the screen as what Gore claimed have not matched that transcript, and often (four or five times on this thread) they have not matched each other. Your idea of a "quote" and mine vary, apparently. Which may explain your "quote" of me, that didn't match my post, and various features of your posts where you appear to be arguing with somebody else who goes by my nick. You probably mean "lose". But I like it this way - I'm loose from this; it has less and less to do with any argument of mine.
ALGORE isn't a crack pot? when He touts false information and then doesn't admit to it, what would you call Him. He has basically ignored the new information in any of His presentations that the Temperature Reading from NASA that He bases His claims on was forced data, and that it wasn't adjusted for the forcing that occurred. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Oh Crap! NASA Revises Temperature Data - 1930's warmest on record! By AnInconvenientPost In a stunning turn of events data (quietly) released by NASA shows that the 4 warmest years ever recorded occurred in the 1930's, with the warmest year on record being 1934 (not 1998). Lets see if Al Gore revises his road show. Update - Global Warming is actually a Y2K bug! Data discovered on NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) website revises recorded temperatures for the United States. It is expected that similar revisions will also be made for global temperature recordings. This information was discovered by Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit on Wednesday (8/8/2007). No NASA press release, no James Hansen (head of GISS) announcement, nothing. Could it be because they don't want anyone to see it? The data is certainly devastating for the Al Gore camp which has based much of their Carbon Credits sales pitch on recent temperatures (e.g. claiming that 1998 was the warmest on record). Turns out this NASA data was revised because of a Y2K bug in the algorithm used to adjust measurement station raw data. Blogger Finds Y2K Bug in NASA Climate Data. NASA's James Hansen has refused to release his algorithms but they were reverse engineered by Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit and NASA has since updated their data (so you know he Steve got it right). What this author finds truly disturbing (and disgusting) is that NASA would keep these algorithms secret. This is public information. Steve really should file a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request to obtain this and what ever else he needs. NASA would be very hard pressed to justify withholding that information. These events seriously call in to question anything James Hansen has touched, supervised, or managed. Not just because he got the math wrong but because he also hides his methods. He is apparently attempting to establish a new religion by requiring people to have faith in his data.
