E pur se muove

The Gormogons have a great post explaining the denialist position
for global warming:

Further, when we hear outlandish statements that cold waves are the result of GW, and that heavy precipitation is the result of GW, and that record snowfall is the result of GW, we really question whether you are stopping to think before you speak to the press. Yeah, some science makes no sense at first: all galaxies are moving away from the others, so that if you pick a random galaxy, every other galaxy appears to be moving away from it? But then you paint dots on a balloon and inflate the balloon...and suddenly the crazy concept is perfectly obvious. We are awaiting these analogies and demonstrations. Because until they arrive, you look foolish.

Maybe if your data checked out. But day after day comes another revelation of a flawed study, or that temperatures stopped increasing, or that something was incorrectly recorded. Maybe you should just stop and start over from scratch with a fresh approach. In football, this is called a punt. Science tries them all the time, but evidently only in other fields.

Hence, in a nutshell, here is what the average Denialist actually believes (and get ready to be surprised at how off-base your assessment of our concerns could be):

Denialists believe that climate science is a new and emerging field, with new discoveries and realizations frequently changing basic assumptions. We understand that observations (in the water, on the ground, in the air) conflict and often indicate a fluid and changing nature. We fully accept that some temperatures may be increasing, that atmospheric composition could be affected by man, and that these have long-term effects which may be disastrous for millions of people.

... and they continue on from there, go read the whole thing.

I'd also add that I agree with the Jerry Pournelle point of view, we don't have enough data, we
should be spending more on data. He often references Bayesian analysis, where as more
data arrives you get a better answer (we use it for decoding noisy communications from
downhole tools)

The warmists are still stuck on the precautionary principle, because there's a risk of something
bad happening we should panic and destroy our economies in the hope of preventing this
bad thing. Even as each drip drip drip of exposed bad data tells me that the bayesian
probability of something bad happening is less and less and the correct thing to do is
gather more data.

I'm not that worried about Co2, and though I think we are close to peak oil production there
are plenty more hydrocarbons available (maybe at higher prices). We should be working
on reducing imports of hydrocarbons and trying to find the economic green energy answer
that solves our energy import answer and not the global warming answer.

Cold weather

A column in the timesonline from the UK mentions that the UK Met service
is saying that statistically this will be one of the warmest winters ever. Of course
that's probably averaging in the southern hemisphere, so even after what seems to
me to be the coldest winter since around 1988, when one of the first times that I walked
out onto the flightline I stepped on a frozen puddle, flipped ass over teakettle and
dropped a tech order book that exploded into 1000 pages of FOD.

Hopefully people will start to come to their senses and ignore some of the stupider
climate change nonsense, like switching to 100% windpower that would lead to
periods like last weeks low temperatures killing thousands of people as they freeze
in their houses. High Pressure = low temp = no wind gives the coldest and hottest
days with lowest available power.

We need to be moving away from burning oil and gas for heat, but what we need to
move to for the grid has to be something that can be switched on and off, not waiting
for the breath of god to turn it on and off. There needs to be an intermediate
compromise that doesn't involve name calling, and a technical plan that is less
of trying to appease an angry Al Gore and more of a detailed look at what is available
and what will be available in 10, 20 and 30 years.

Build more nuke plants, study fusion and advanced storage and hydrogen. Instead of
cap and trade that looks like it will just enrich the Al Gores of the world, I'd put an oil
tax at some level below where prices are today, say $75 per barrel. In the USA I'd make
it an import tax. If prices are high it won't have any effect. If prices go low then low oil
prices won't destroy the economics of alternative energy or nuke power, and in the USA
it won't necessarily destroy the american oil industry again. ( or worse than it is right now)

Buy them out

One interesting aspect of the CRU scandal is that the scientists are
constantly unwilling to give up their "code" because that is the real work
that they have done over tens of years. Unfortunately for them and for
the world, their code looks like crap, it looks like my Fortran code from a
machine design class, where I struggled with it until the last possible minute
and my code was producing a cam with a diameter of 1E22 meters. Basically
a cam that would drive the Universe. I finally had to print it out, white out the
extra digits and photocopy it to keep from getting a zero.

These guys have written the same kind of code, full of goto's, and they deserve
to be eaten by velociraptors.













All the crappy code should be over with by now. We're talking about adding
taxes to destroy the economy in order to reduce carbon output. Amateur coding
hour should be over and they should hire Apple or someone to write whatever
beautiful code they need and put the code on gold plated iPhones.

If we have to buy out all these guys and their scientific careers by giving them
professorships, money, women and software developers, then it will be cheap
at the price. They just need to give us the data and show exactly what they did
to the data on live TV to get the answers they have. If it still makes sense, then
lets talk about donning animal skins and hunting the nutria as my ancestors did.

To build their scientific careers at some podunk university in Britain they are willing
to destroy the western economies. They are either are true believers and the data
backs them up, or true believers based crap data. We need to know which it is.

Theodoric's tomb and sea level

I've been trying to read the pro-AGW case on websites
like realclimate and the Stoat. I'm trying to keep an open
mind, but much of what is presented doesn't agree with my
preconceptions that it was as warm or warmer in the past when
CO2 levels were lower. My other bias is that several degrees
warmer doesn't scare me, but if the ice starts to come back things
will be much worse. Going the low energy low emissions route would be
the worst thing we could do if it is actually getting colder, so I'm going
to try and give my anti-agw warming arguments to their pro-AGW
arguments.

the first link on the "is sea level rising" question takes you to the IPCC FAQ that says this:

Yes, there is strong evidence that global sea level gradually rose in the 20th century and is currently rising at an increased rate, after a period of little change between AD 0 and AD 1900. Sea level is projected to rise at an even greater rate in this century. The two major causes of global sea level rise are thermal expansion of the oceans (water expands as it warms) and the loss of land-based ice due to increased melting.

To say that no sea level rise occurred from 0 AD
to 1800 is a pretty big statement. There are
pretty good maps from after the renaissance, but
from 0 AD to 1500 there isn't too much, or at least
not enough to say it didn't happen.

One set of datapoints that exists are structures built near the sea
in classical times. The foundations of those buildings could be
close to sea level at the date they were constructed. if
they are close to a river then the foundations would be covered by mud as the
river builds out into the newly deeper sea, or if they aren't close to a river then
they'd be underwater assuming the sea rose.

A misconception that seems to be prevalent is that rising sea levels always means
less land available, that the sea will just encroach on us. Instead increases in sea level
either give rivers or delta fronts more space to fill, and land progrades out into the sea.
Or if there is no river nearby the newly higher sea lever transgresses over the land.
If sea level decreases, then rivers cut down as steeper hydraulic gradients give them
more energy. (a google search reveals several articles on archeogeology)

From a geological standpoint, ravenna has changed quite a bit over the centuries.
From classical times to the 19th century, the city was surrounded by rivers.
Along with the surrounding swamps the protecting rivers were a reason that
the emperors moved the capitol there. The adjoining city of Classe was the
port for the adriatic fleet and had access to the sea, now both ravenna and
classe are landlocked.

This indicates that the rivers running through Ravenna prograded outward into
the sea, and the height difference between the floors of the 6th century buildings
and current ground level is an indicator of sea level rise.


Theodoric's tomb is a stone
structure that is heavy enough
if it was going to subside it
would have disappeared by
now. It was built in 520 AD.

The difference in height between
it's current floor level and the
surrounding bluffs are around
3 meters. All the other classical
buildings in ravenna are 1-2 meters
below ground level I think that
this indicates sea level rise
is somewhere around 1 meter
per 1500 years , which is 60 mm per 100 years. That's an in the ballpark number
for the sealevel rise estimated by AGW (100mm/century).

"if the data don't fit, just make up some shit"

The purple avenger at Ace is channeling the ghost of johhny cochran and gives the
pithy summary of a great article over on Climateaudit:

"if the data don't fit, just make up some shit"

The much touted hockey stick is no longer mostly dead,
it's all dead.

All of the sudden, it isn’t the “hottest period in 2000 years” anymore.

Steve writes:

The next graphic compares the RCS chronologies from the two slightly different data sets: red – the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive (with the 12 picked cores); black – the RCS chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample of living trees instead of the 12 picked trees used in the CRU archive. The difference is breathtaking.