Climate links

Nov 23, 2009 18:00

Noting that Britain meets its emission targets because Thatcher closed coal mines (over bitter opposition from the Left) and the UK has nuclear power.

About the hockey-stick and problems with the tree-ring data:
It turns out that many of the samples were taken from dead (partially fossilized) trees and they have no particular trend. The sharp ( Read more... )

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Comments 8

Oh FFS. catsidhe November 23 2009, 09:08:00 UTC
Um, yes, they are ‘true believers’. This is because they ‘believe’ that they understand the science better than not, and ‘believe’ that the data and theory is explained by AGW better than the alternatives.

From their point of view, it's like ‘believing’ in gravity.

And - I will say this as nicely as I can - yes they feel besieged FFS, it's people like you and Bolt and the Screaming ‘Lord’ Monckton who are besieging them! how can you not see that?

‘Feeling besieged’ has no connection with ‘being wrong’, or the opposite.

Oh, and “… shows that since 1990, Phil Jones has collected staggering 13.7 million British pounds ($22.6 million) in grants.”

Um, yes, that is staggering. £13.7M over 19 years is £721,000 per annum. For his research group, so that has to pay for facilities, IT, salaries, travel, tax, all that fun stuff.

That's an amazingly small amount for a major research team. There are a good three or four teams of similar size or larger, just in one department of Engineering ( ... )

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Re: Oh FFS. erudito November 24 2009, 09:10:10 UTC
On research grants, since the poster is an academic physicist, perhaps that says more about relative grant sizes per discipline. (It seems a lot of money to me, given a lot of base costs would be covered by the university.)

I think Tyler Cowen has a good point about "Jacksonian" discourse. CAGW advocates can hardly complain if they engage in such regular ad hominen abuse of their opponents if some of that comes back.

And both sides think they are defending "obvious truth". That, perhaps, is part of the problem.

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Re: Oh FFS. catsidhe November 24 2009, 10:20:01 UTC
The relative grant thing: is the poster, perchance, a theoretical physicist? In physics, more than possibly any other discipline, there is a really big range between low and high end funding requirements.

And, no. Universities do not always pay ‘base costs’. Certainly there is a lot of pressure on research groups to pay their ways, to budget those ‘base costs’ into their grant proposals, and any strictures on where grant money goes are searched with fine-tooth combs for loopholes by administrations.

I would ask, the nastier comments (and, I might add, these were not comments meant to go into the common discourse, but were private expressions of frustration... I say things about my users which I would never say to them): when were they written? Were they first off the bat in 1990? Or were they, as I suspect far more likely, in the mid 2000s, after people like Monckton, and Bolt, and you, had been harrassing, abusing, denigrating and slandering them, professionally and personally, for years, and it was only getting worse ( ... )

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Re: Oh FFS. erudito November 24 2009, 11:27:48 UTC
The critique of the hockey stick, for example, was a great deal more than "nitpicking".

... had been harrassing, abusing, denigrating and slandering them, professionally and personally, for years,
Can you point to any occasion when I did any of that? Disagreeing is, of itself, not doing any of those things.

And the notion of poor abused CAGW folk being picked on by the big bad guys hardly fits with the way, for example, climate dissent in much of Europe is treated as some equivalent of Holocaust denial. Or with the regular, endless ad homimen abuse of sceptics. (All of who are allegedly paid for by Big Oil, etc.)

As a piece in the WSJ notes:
However, we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics.
Regarding timing, things are probably getting a bit tense in recent times because of the failure of warming (and sea level) to go as predicted ( ... )

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tcpip November 23 2009, 12:54:10 UTC
I really didn't expect that even you would fall for this sort of sensationalism without double-checking.

Here

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/

You know, for balance.

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Falling for? erudito November 24 2009, 09:11:04 UTC
From what I have seen, I agree with Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen: it does not appear to change the base issues much, hence my comment.

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Depends erudito November 24 2009, 09:14:19 UTC
First, the polling suggests there is a certain amount of scare-fatigue. The rhetoric has been so pumped for so long, people are increasingly over it.

Second, it rather depends a lot on whether they are actually correct. And to what degree. (I am fine with there having been some warming, even with some human impact. I am so not sold on us being the main cause or it being a looming catastrophe. The recent pause in warming being a case in point.)

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