Den ultimate klimadebattoversikt (Del II): Motl knuser Cook i 104 punkter

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Her er Del II av den tsjekkiske teoretiske fysikeren Lubos Motls kommentarer til John Cooks "Sceptical Science"-påstander i 104 punkter:

51. It's the Pacific Decadal Oscillation:
his argument that it's not the case is that the last time PDO switched to a cool phase, the temperatures were 0.4 deg Celsius lower than today. But most of the time since that switch belonged to a PDO warm phase in which the temperatures are generally increasing (and keep on increasing). So his argument doesn't disprove anything. He has confused a function from its derivative.

52. Greenland ice sheet won't collapse:
Cook sees everything accelerating and refers to the sea ice levels. However, the change of the sea ice level is very slow, and in agreement with the pre-industrial natural rates, so there's nothing qualitative here to discuss. The Greenland has been discussed in 46, too.

53. CO2 effect is saturated:
He claims that energy flows show it is not. Well, there is no proof via energy flows that it is not saturated, but it is true that it is not saturated. However, the effect is slowing down with the concentration. The same relative increase causes the same temperature change. So when the concentration was 200 ppm, a 1 ppm increase caused the same warming as a 2 ppm increase today when the concentration approaches 400 ppm. This slowdown is very important. Effectively, it means that even if the concentration of CO2 were rising exponentially, the greenhouse warming caused by CO2 would be linear. That's because the exponential is inverse to the logarithm. ;-) This slowdown is just another example of the inherent stability of the processes in Nature - a negative feedback.

54. It's the ocean:
He says that "oceans have been warming" which completely misses the point of the sentence "it's the ocean". The sentence "it's the ocean" clearly meant that the internal dynamics of the oceans, similar to the turbulent dynamics that he believes to be responsible for climate change on Jupiter in point 48, is responsible for the changes of the Earth. He has given us no counter-argument against this point whatsoever.

55. Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans:
It's a favorite misconception of some skeptics, and I agree it's a misconception (it appeared on the Great Global Warming Swindle, too). Volcanoes are just like a "few natural factories" and correspondingly, they emit roughly 100 times less CO2 than the people. On the other hand, they've been doing it for billions of years, so it's still true that most of the CO2 in the atmosphere came from similar natural processes, and not from industrial CO2 emissions which are very recent and will only last at most for a few more centuries.

56. CO2 measurements are suspect:
Well, indeed, the CO2 can be measured to be rising, but many people still misunderstand the high fluctuations of CO2 in various environments. The concentrations of CO2 in various places of the forest and/or in various rooms of your building differ by hundreds of ppm from each other. It's completely normal and causes no problems.

57. Animals and plants can adapt:
Cook says that many extinctions were largely caused by CO2. That doesn't agree with the scientific literature. Almost no theories of extinctions caused by CO2 remain alive in the scientific literature: much more convincing reasons have been found. Cook says that organisms can't adapt because the change is too fast. That's bullshit. It's not fast but even if they were fast, the organisms that live today are genetically capable to live in temperatures that differ by a dozen of degrees from the existing one. That's because their genetic material hasn't changed much for millions of years - evolution is very slow - and during the millions of years, the temperature has surely changed by dozens of degrees, anyway. So the changes pose no problem for the "inherent" abilities of animals and plants to withstand it. Moreover, there are trivial ways to adapt - move to a different latitude, altitude, and/or move the seasonal cycle closer to the winter - or a combination of these things. We can observe that no species are actually being threatened - or going extinct - by the climate change, too - and pretty much all opposite statements ever made have been proved wrong.

58. Less than 1/2 of papers support global warming:
Cook agrees that most or one-half of papers don't express any opinion about the AGW orthodoxy. Cook interprets it by saying that it's because the authors think that the orthodoxy is "obviously true" and they want to discuss "more advanced" things such as mitigation. That's a ludicrous wishful thinking. One can also conjecture that these papers don't say anything because the authors assume that it's obvious that AGW is crap - and they want to discuss something more sensible instead.

59. It's aerosols:
Cook suggests some incomprehensible problem with the timing in 1975 and 1990. Whatever the problem is exactly supposed to mean, it's clear that any of the IPCC and related models using aerosols to "handwave away" the cooling in 1940-1975 suffer from the same timing problem, but with a much longer duration and much larger amplitude. Aerosols remain an unknown and no models with them work reliably. Cook can try to obscure this fact but he can't obscure it. It even remains plausible that a changing amount or character of the aerosols is responsible for most of the climate changes in the 20th century. There's no available method to disprove this conjecture today.

60. It's El Nino:
Cook says that it can only explain the short-term changes but not the decadal ones. But he fails to notice that the frequency of El Ninos, relatively to La Ninas, has been higher during the recent "warming" decades. Again, it's completely plausible that most of the centennial changes are about the accumulated heat from the El Nino or La Nina episode whose representation is never quite dictated by "gender quotas" (recall that the words mean "boy" and "girl" in Spanish). Also, the relative frequency of El Nino and La Nina episodes may be affected by additional, slower cycles such as Pacific Decadal Oscillation. To summarize, there's no reason to call 30 years a "long term" when it comes to implications of ENSO cycles.

61. It's a climate regime shift:
A 2009 paper by Tsonis and Swanson was claimed to explain the warming as a qualitative switch to a different mode of the climate which is surely a priori plausible. However, Cook argues that he can divide the temperature into "internal" and "externally driven", proving that the latter is inherently increasing. However, the amount of "linear trend" included in various "regimes" is completely arbitrary, essentially assuming that the average "internal trend" was zero (without any justification), so he can't possibly prove that the internal regimes in the 20th century contributed no "trend-like" warming. The "separation" is impossible in general - and Tsonis and Swanson only got such a separation by "construction". The difference only looks monotonic because it was smoothed in this way - the internal effects were defined so that they can remove the biggest wiggles. Cook applies a flawed circular reasoning if he claims that the monotonicity of the difference actually implies that the "other (CO2-driven?) warming" was monotonic. It wasn't. The monotonicity was only improved by construction - by trying to subtract the wiggles - but such an operation can be done with noise and random possible signals, too. To summarize, Cook hasn't demonstrated that the regime shifts can't account for the "trends". I don't claim that it's inevitably so but I do claim that his "proof" is flawed.

62. It's microsite influences:
barbecue devices etc. often sit in the stations and Cook says that it doesn't matter. In reality, a huge portion of the surface stations was affected by such things and the accumulated errors often exceed 1 degree Celsius. A priori, the effect of the microsite influences may be both warming and cooling. In reality, because of the increasing energy (and heat) used by humans, the actual impact of the microsite influences almost always overstates the warming trend. But I do think that the paper that Cook cites is realistic, assuming that it didn't use some wrong adjustments along the way, and the microsite effects could actually be as small as the picture indicates.

63. Humans are too insignificant to affect global climate:
I agree with him that this is too sloppy an argument. However, Cook mentions one or two numbers - 26 gigatons of CO2 emitted per year. Humans are dramatically changing the composition of our "climate", he said. He probably meant the "atmosphere", not the "climate", because "composition of climate" really does sound silly. However, whether 26 gigatons is a lot or not has to be judged relatively to the atmosphere. It's just 1-2 parts per million of the atmosphere - one or two millionth. So the mass may look large relatively to your lunch but it is negligible relatively to the atmosphere. And don't forget that even the whole atmosphere is just 1 part per million of the mass of the Earth! Humans are not changing the composition of the atmosphere in a substantial way. They're just changing a trace gas - CO2 - that is very important for life to exist and that is importantly linked to the key industrial processes. Carbon dioxide is vastly less important for the climate than it is important for life and industrial processes.

64. It's land use:
Cook says that these effects are small etc. However, the changes to the albedo obviously induce temperature changes that reach tenths of a degree or degrees per century, too. There are additional effects - sewer systems reduce evaporation over cities and modify the wind patterns, humidity, precipitation, water vapor greenhouse effect, and many other things. It's very unreasonable to keep CO2 greenhouse effect and dismiss all these "land-use" effects because the latter are almost certainly comparable in their influence on temperatures.

65. Medieval Warm Period was warmer:
Cook says that only locally - globally, it was cooler, he argues. However, the "reconstructions" he offers are linked to the discredited hockey-stick studies (and especially the discredited people behind them). The best evidence is actually historical in origin, from the traditional civilized places, and it does suggest that the period was warmer than the present. It's unlikely that the whole world was "much cooler" than expected from these temperatures. But even if it were so, the temperature e.g. in England was (and is) more important for the Englishmen than the global mean temperature. Finally, in a recent BBC interview, top alarmist and hockey-stick advocate Phil Jones admitted that the MWP was warmer than the present on the whole Northern Hemisphere and he only speculatively suggests, with no real evidence, that it could have been different on the Southern Hemisphere. Even if the MWP were only warmer on the Northern Hemisphere, it would still make the claims that the present is "unprecedentedly warm" very awkward.

66. It's methane:
I agree with Cook that - regardless of the unknown feedbacks - methane contributes roughly 1/3 of the greenhouse effect of CO2. Whether it's negligible depends on your calculations. Clearly, methane is less clearly correlated with the industrial things that the environmentalist movement wants to reduce - so it's not interesting enough for them. But a 30% error in some calculation is pretty high. Methane adds more greenhouse effect than e.g. all the transportation on the Earth, and methane probably has a bigger potential to change than the CO2 emissions from transportation. Only complete calculations can settle such things - and calculations based on the assumption that everything but CO2 can be ignored are definitely wrong.

67. IPCC were wrong about Himalayan glaciers:
While Cook agrees that the year 2035 was wrong and unfortunate, he insists that they're retreating at an "accelerated" rate. That's not what the Indian report that studied the question found. Many of them are advancing and the general rate of their retreat hasn't accelerated. It's clear that even under the business-as-usual, the glaciers can't disappear in less than 300 - and probably 1,000 - years and some advocates of the climate panic are deliberately trying to hide this fact. Moreover, the error wasn't just a typo. It's just one among hundreds of examples in which the IPCC is trying to exaggerate the hypothetical problems and invent fake stories. Every single IPCC error that's been admitted was about the IPCC's attempts to exaggerate the hypothetical threat. It's no coincidence: this exaggeration and fabrication is the reason for the IPCC's very existence. And it has always been.

68. 500 scientists refute the consensus:
Cook says that they don't, and if they do, they just repeat "myths". Well, he can try to label them "myths" which doesn't change the fact that they often confirm and substantiate textbook material on the climate that every serious researcher in the discipline should be familiar with. See e.g. these hundreds of peer-reviewed articles or 31,000 scientists who disagree with the AGW orthodoxy, including 9,000 with PhD degrees.

69. Solar Cycle length proves it's the Sun:
Cook says it's been "settled" in recent years that the Sun couldn't have contributed to the changes since 1975. And I would agree if he said that one or two previously "suggestive" correlations have broken down once new data were included. However, the changes since 1975 contain a lot of chaotic weather events. It's still true and important that the Sun does matter for climate change - over centuries etc. Nothing has changed about the geological evidence linking the solar activity, cosmic rays, and the temperature on the Earth. Nothing has changed about the correlations between Maunder and Dalton minima on one side and the little ice age on the other side.

70. The science isn't settled:
Cook correctly says that science is never "quite" settled and different statements are known at different confidence levels. However, many of the key statements surrounding CO2 and climate are only claimed to be known at the 90% confidence level which is really just an euphemism for a 50% confidence level because a tiny amount of cherry-picking and distortion is enough to make 50% results look like 90% results. At any rate, the man-made climate change science isn't anywhere close to the conventional disciplines of hard science. And judging from the fact that the proponents of AGW are scared of the 5-sigma standards that are normal in proper scientific disciplines, it seems that they realize that all their "signals" will go away when a bigger amount of evidence is taken into account. If the "signals" for AGW were real, it would be straightforward to extend them to 5-sigma discoveries which has never happened - and it seems likely that it will never happen.

71. Phil Jones says no global warming since 1995:
Cook correctly says that the claim was about no "statistically significant warming" since 1995 but he obviously misunderstands what it means. He says that it shows our "inability to find a signal" over a short period. However, the period since 1995 is not short. It is comparable to the timescale where the "climate" often begins according to many people. In a period that is as long as 15 years, the global warming not only fails to be serious: it fails to be detectable with the most accurate gadgets and the most accurate statistical techniques to average over the globe that we have. Because a warming can clearly only become "dangerous" when it is much higher than the temperature differences we can actually detect, it follows that even if the observed warming were man-made, we will need at least a century for it to become "threatening", and claims that we must urgently change our civilization in this year or in the next year are unjustifiable.

72. Hansen's 1988 prediction was wrong:
Cook is trying to defend the indefensible. He says that the actual emissions followed Hansen's scenario B and so did the temperature. In reality, the actual emissions clearly followed Hansen's scenario A - business at usual - for which Hansen predicted a warming that was roughly 3-times faster than the actual one that has occurred since that time. If the initial points of the graph are merged according to the proper rules, we may actually see that the warming that has occurred since Hansen's 1988 testimony was even lower than in his scenario C, e.g. a nearly complete and sudden stop of the industrial activity. Hansen's predictions were spectacularly wrong.

73. Naomi Oreskes' study on consensus was flawed:
Cook says that all criticism has been retracted - and he only knows about the criticism by Benny Peiser (whose name is misspelled by Cook). In reality, Peiser only retracted his own version of the Oreskes paper because there were (finer) errors in his version of the analysis. But the very fact that Oreskes' paper has been completely wrong is indisputable. For example, point 68 above discussed and linked to hundreds of peer-reviewed papers that have contradicted the "consensus" and that were completely missed by Oreskes' flawed methodology. More precisely, some of them were published after Oreskes' paper - a moment when the meltdown of what Oreskes called the "consensus" has rapidly accelerated - but the main message for the present era remains: it's just a straight denial to claim that there are no peer-reviewed papers contradicting the "consensus". There are hundreds of them. They're surely inconvenient for Ms Oreskes or Mr Cook but sadly for them, that doesn't make them "unreal".

74. Record snowfall disproves global warming:
Cook actually says that record snowfall pretty much proves global warming. The champions of climate panic have always loved to interpret individual weather events as "proofs" of global warming and the likes of Mr Cook do so even when it is completely irrational. See Global warming causes snowstorm in D.C. for some explanations why global warming can't possibly have this effect. If the annual mean temperatures increased by 1.5 °C per century or so, places like Prague would see almost no difference. However, the reduced amount of snow would actually be the most visible difference. The total amount of snow cover in a year would drop by something like 25%. The percentage of snow-covered days is proportional to the percentage of days whose average temperature is below the freezing point. The latter would clearly decrease a bit in a warmer climate - but not enough to cause any real problems or qualitative changes. Also, global warming reduces the polar-tropic temperature differences which should reduce the storminess, driven by the gradients, and make the "extremely large" storms of all kinds less frequent. The opposite claims are scientifically unjustifiable - they're only being said because the proponents of climate panic like to spread fears and bigger storms are "worse" than smaller storms. They rely on the assumption that no one will ever check what they say - and everything they say in this respect is scientifically invalid.

75. Sea level rise predictions are exaggerated:
Cook clearly doesn't like the IPCC mean value, which is 43 centimeters per century, so he even doesn't offer the figure. Instead, he speculates that the accelerating melting in Greenland and Antarctica may increase the figure to 75-200 centimeters per century: he claims that the IPCC doesn't include this contribution. However, it's not really possible for ice to "suddenly" increase its rate of melting by an order of magnitude. Such a "regime shift" is not supported by any serious work - except for a wishful thinking by Mr Hansen and a movie by Al Gore. While the 43 centimeters per century in the IPCC report is unspectacular, the truly realistic estimates such as those by Nils-Axel Mörner, probably the world's #1 expert in this discipline, predict something like 0-20 centimeters of sea level rise per century.

76. The Sun is getting hotter:
I agree with Cook that the Sun's output has been decreasing since 1978 - but once again, I disagree that the total radiated energy is the only parameter that determines the Sun's influence on the Earth's climate. But I would agree that there exists no immediately convincing theory that would link the temperature changes of the last 30 or 50 years to the solar parameters.

77. Water level correlates with sunspots:
It's just another variation of the methods to test the correlation between the solar activity and the climate on Earth. I agree that the agreement in this particular correlation has been unimpressive since the 1970s, but so was the correlation between CO2 and temperature. Clearly, a full theory of the climate is more complex than either, and chaotic, largely unpredictable dynamics is likely to play a key role here.

78. Solar cycles cause global warming:
I agree with Cook that the 11-year cycles don't give any useful contribution that could modify our estimates of the CO2 climate sensitivity. He discusses Tung 2008 but it is probably unnecessary. 22-year cycles may be more important but the case is not too strong, either. However, the slower cycles - that led to Maunder and Dalton minima etc. - are more likely to have an influence on the climate and the correlations continue to work. It's not nice that Cook is trying to pretend that by his discussion of Tung 2008, he "debunks" the influence of all solar variations. He surely doesn't.

79. CO2 is coming from the ocean: I agree it's not, not only because of the isotopic composition. However, if the warming were substantial, we know - from the ice-age cycles - that the oceans will release something like 100 ppm per 6 °C of warming. It takes some time for the oceans to heat up and for the outgassing to operate.

80. It's not us:
This is a surprisingly basic and general point to appear on the 80th place. As "proofs" that it's us, Cook mentions satellite-measured energy flows and the stratosphere cooling. However, the latter is a general by-product of any near-surface warming, so it says nothing whatsoever about "us". To see whether the warming is due to the greenhouse effect, we need to look at more specific "fingerprints" of the greenhouse effect, namely the warming in the tropical mid troposphere where the greenhouse theory predicts the fastest warming trend. And according to the observations, it doesn't work at all: when the relevant criteria of the type Cook mentions are used correctly, science clearly says that it's not us. The energy flows disagree between the observations and the greenhouse-dominated models, too: see Lindzen Choi 2009. Again, it's not us. Cook's arguments are complete bogus.

81. Over 31,000 signed the OISM Petition Project:
Well, I don't like these "body counts". But Cook says that the number is just 0.3% of science graduates - probably right - and the list only contains 39 scientists who are climate science specialists. That's nice but the 2500 people in the IPCC only represent 0.03% of science graduates, the percentage of climate scientists who actually mater in the institution is also low - relatively to e.g. railway engineers and NGO activists. And yes, it's true that the bulk of the climate scientists have been bought to spread the panic: 90% of the current funding for climate science is spent for the fabrication of fake evidence supporting the alarm (just compare the funding levels before the AGW became the most popular question of the climate science with the current funding which is 10 times higher). So indeed, I am not going to dispute Cook's assertion that most of the people who are paid to promote AGW do their job: the discipline is corrupt.

82. 2009-2010 winter saw cold spells:
I agree with him that it's primarily due to the strong phase of the Arctic Oscillation and doesn't immediately influence the global mean temperature. On the other hand, such events are often more important than the changes of the global mean temperature. While Cook correctly says that the Arctic Oscillation and similar events are different from the changes of the global mean temperature, he doesn't correctly deduce which of them is more important. The cold spells of the 2009-2010 winter were clearly more important e.g. than an estimated "underlying" 0.01 °C increase of the global mean temperature from the previous winter. So the focus on the global mean temperature is a focus on one of the least important things about the climate.

83. Ice isn't melting:
Ice has been largely melting for several centuries, since the bottom of the little ice age, and sometimes it was accelerating and sometimes it was decelerating. At longer time scales, such changes have alternated many times. However, Cook always says that every melting is "accelerating" - he repeats this adjective about five times just in this point. The actual data he uses to argue for such "acceleration" clearly have too much noise for the acceleration to be statistically significant. So he's simply comparing trends in various intervals, and if they're accelerating, he celebrates them. If they're not (e.g. his final graphs), he hides the fact. The resulting picture says nothing else than his whole "research" is composed of cherry-picking. Ice has been largely melting for a few centuries - with some glaciers etc. advancing but most of them retreating - but what the causes have been and whether the process will continue or will revert is yet to be seen. Clearly, not all (or most) changes of the ice volume since 1800 can be explained by the industrial activity.

84. Mike's Nature trick to "hide the decline":
Cook correctly says that the trick was to merge the tree-reconstructed noisy data from the past with the instrumental record in recent decades. Because the trees' dynamics looks much more muted, the reconstructed temperatures in the distant past look much less variable than the actual temperatures measured by the thermometers. So the recent changes are artificially magnified by the trick is merging the two sources. In fact, as Cook realizes, it's worse than that: since 1960, the trees would imply that it's been cooling! It's the so-called "divergence problem" that makes the whole methodology based on tree rings highly suspect, to say the least. Cook's bizarre claim is that the effect causing the "divergence problem" only affects the reconstructions after 1960. That's just like saying that until 1960, the Earth was flat but it became round after 1960. Laws of physics can't suddenly change in this way. Whatever is causing the divergence problem may have also invalidated - and probably invalidates - the trees' testimony about the temperatures in the Middle Ages, too.

85. Climate is chaotic and cannot be predicted:
He realizes that the chaotic behavior is there but just like most alarmists, Cook believes that the chaos goes away if you look at changes in a few decades. Well, it doesn't. The chaotic, pink-noise-like changes of the temperature extend to timescales as long as millennia: see Self-similarity of temperature graphs. So it's actually conceivable that most changes that we can see at any time scale between hours and millennia are changes of a chaotic character and therefore largely unpredictable. The problem here is that 30 years or so "looks long" relatively to the human life. But the human life has nothing to do with the climate. When we look what are the timescales at which the pink noise really starts to be regulated by negative feedbacks etc., we find that it is probably longer than a millennium.

86. It's albedo:
Cook claims that the long-term change of the albedo - reflectivity of the Earth's surface, roughly speaking - would imply cooling (because the Earth was getting increasingly reflective, he thinks) but there's no "recent trend". This is a very problematic assertion by itself. Again, what is meant by the "long-term changes"? Clearly, whatever the trend is, it couldn't have been going on indefinitely because the albedo always has to belong to the obvious interval, between 0 and 1. Even more importantly, Cook contradicts himself. He claims that the albedo was increasing - the Earth was going more reflective in the long run (which would imply cooling). However, the ice-albedo feedback is a major feedback that should amplify the warming: the darker surface you have, the more energy it absorbs, the warmer it gets, and the more ice/snow melts. Cook can't have it both ways! Clearly, he would like the albedo - as a separate reason of the warming - to be going up so that it would add a cooling effect in the past, thus leaving more warming to CO2. On the other hand, he would love the albedo to go down in the future as a side-effect of the CO2-induced warming, to amplify the warming. He not only creates arguments that would "explain" predetermined conclusions - but his arguments actually contradict each other directly.

87. CO2 is not the only driver of the climate:
But according to Cook, it's the dominant one and is increasingly faster than any other radiative forcing. The first comment is clearly nonsensical: the CO2's radiative forcing is just 3.7 W/m^2 per doubling (and there has been less than one since the pre-industrial era) while the clouds themselves remove about 30 W/m^2. This is about an order of magnitude higher than the CO2 forcing - and there are many similar forcings that are comparable to the clouds, of course. After all, they have to add up to 235 W/m^2 that the Earth thermally radiates. But even when we look at changes, it is not true that the change linked to CO2 is the fastest change. We need roughly 200 years for a CO2 doubling, so it is 0.5% of doubling per year, or 0.005 times 3.7 = 0.02 W/m^2 change per year. Virtually any other known climate driver is faster than this! This fact remains to be true for all major drivers at the timescale of 10 or 20 or 30 years. After all, that's why it's so easy for the climate to show no warming for 10 or 15 years. Whether a CO2-induced warming becomes "inevitable" after 50 years depends on whether or not the other drivers have to average to zero at this time scale - which is far from obvious, to say the least.

88. IPCC were wrong about the Amazon forest:
And Mr Cook thinks it wasn't. Of course that it was completely wrong. For example, a 2007 paper by NASA studied the impact of the unusually strong 2005 drought on the region. The forests not only showed to be resilient but the drier regions of the tropical forest actually got greener! It's no contradiction because the region could actually be receiving higher-than-optimal precipitation on a typical year. Also, it should not be shocking that the IPCC wrote invalid statements about it because it was building upon a green advocacy group's ideological booklet rather than science. Unfortunately, such things became common with the IPCC and the climate community in general: it may be fair to say that the bulk of the climate science community has become an advocacy group rather than an impartial scientific institution.

89. Water vapor in the stratosphere stopped global warming:
Susan Solomon 2010 realized (or "discovered the wheel") that H2O in the stratosphere is an important climate driver. It seems that it has acted as a negative feedback, compensating for the warming caused by other factors (maybe including CO2). Cook argues that "long-term warming trend" suggests that such a negative feedback can't exist. I can't possibly understand the logic of his argument. His argument seems to be "one number, a 100-year warming, is positive, which is enough to rule out all inconvenient statements, theories, and observations." Well, it's surely not enough. There's been no warming e.g. since 1998 and although the reasons behind this fact may look chaotic because it could have been both warming or cooling (or none), science may still try to explain the detailed reasons. Solomon showed that a particular effect was nonzero and proposed it mattered for the changes since 1998 (among other things). As far as I can see, Cook has offered no rational counter-evidence whatsoever.

90. Scientists retracted claim that sea levels are rising:
Cook correctly says that the critics who made these authors retract the paper actually wanted to increase, not decrease, the predicted figure. After all, the main critic of the paper was Stefan Rahmstorf of RealClimate.ORG, a Gentleman who is trying to push all numbers in the discipline in one particular direction all the time. However, it's still true that the authors have retracted the paper. Point 75 discusses more reasonable estimates of the sea level rise.

91. CO2 is not increasing:
I agree with Cook it has been increasing: the 12-month running averages were increasing almost exactly linearly (unlike the temperature which is chaotic). About 40% of the newly emitted CO2 remains in the atmosphere today. It's likely that this percentage will increase because more properly, we shouldn't count the absorbed CO2 as a percentage of the emissions but as a percentage of the excess CO2 that is already in the atmosphere. Every year, we emit the equivalent of 5-6 ppm or so but the CO2 concentration only increases by 2 ppm or so. Clearly, the Earth has to absorb the remaining 3-4 ppm every year. It's absorbing this amount of CO2 because the CO2 concentration is elevated and the processes that absorb it beat those that emit CO2. However, this amount absorbed by Nature will get even bigger if the deviation from 280 ppm - the temperature-dependent equilibrium value - gets larger. For example, if the CO2 concentration reaches 560 ppm, the Earth may absorb 10 ppm a year which may exceed our emissions in 2100 when the concentration may reach 560 ppm. The CO2 concentrations may stabilize or start to drop at that point. If we stopped emitting CO2 completely, the concentrations would begin to drop by 3-4 ppm per year.

92. Mauna Loa is a volcano:
I agree with Cook that the specific features of Mauna Loa don't invalidate its measurements of CO2.

93. CO2 was higher in the late Ordovician:
The CO2 concentration was much higher e.g. 444 million years ago but the temperature was similar to the present one, disfavoring the idea that CO2 has a big impact. Cook cites a paper by Dana Royer which assumes that the solar constant was 5% lower at the time - which is plausible but supported by no further science in the paper. The paper observes CO2-temperature correlations but, much like Al Gore, fails to see that the bulk of this correlation is explained by the temperature's impact on CO2, not the opposite influence. Because of this reverted causal relationship, it's a fundamentally flawed paper. Geological arguments like this one do indicate that the climate sensitivity can't exceed 1 °C much. A linear regression gave us 0.9 °C per doubling.

94. It's not happening:
Quite a general point after these specifics. Cook's "new" arguments are that everything is "accelerating": it's been discussed many times. Nothing is really accelerating. And the warming in the early 20th century was actually pretty much the same as the warming in the last 35 years, suggesting no role for the humans (whose activity got much more intense since 1900). Claims about "acceleration" are cherry-picked observations from noisy graphs or downright fabrications. Cook's additional argument is that plants and animals are migrating closer to the Pole. This may statistically be the case - but they've been arguably doing such things for millions of years. And let's admit, even if the warming were important, the behavior of the animals is more rational than what some people recommend to the humanity. Birds don't stop building nests or using their key means of transportations such as their wings but they just migrate if they feel too cold or too warm. A migration by a hundred of miles can completely undo the temperature effect of a Fahrenheit degree of warming. That's enough of a reaction to 100 years of warming for a sensitive yet sensible organism (or species).

95. Global temperatures dropped sharply in 2007:
Cook says that it was due to La Nina and "exacerbated by" low solar activity. He gives us two reasons but he can't say what is the relative weight of the two phenomena. In fact, in other points, he dismissed the possibility that the solar activity may matter. The reason why he gives us two causes is not that he actually knows that both of them operate - but because a bigger number of non-CO2 reasons will make it more likely for a naive reader not to think about the links to CO2. Whenever it's cooling, it's cooling because of dozens of natural causes. Whenever it's warming, it's only warming because of man-made reasons. A simple propagandistic exercise - and Cook's readers must be really silly to buy all of his statements, especially in this awkward combination.

96. Trenberth can't account for the lack of warming:
Kevin Trenberth admitted that we can't account for the lack of warming and it's a travesty that we can't. In other words, the climate scientists have no idea what's been happening with the climate in the last 15 years. Yes, as Cook agrees, it's because of the internal variability and energy flows they can't understand right now. So it seems that Cook agrees with this point - it is not really possible to disagree. So he at least tries to spin this point by suggesting that the misunderstood internal variability and uncalculated energy flows don't matter. Of course that they do matter: they're what this climate problem is all about. However, Cook thinks that a public support for the AGW orthodoxy by Kevin Trenberth is more important than that they have no clue about the causes of the recent cooling etc. However, people who think rationally about this problem realize that what matters is the understanding of the energy flows - which doesn't exist - while some public religious rituals in which some IPCC representatives endorse some basic religious dogmas don't matter for a scientific conclusion. Cook's hierarchy of values is unfortunately the inverted one: religion matters and equations don't.

97. It's CFCs:
Cook says that the greenhouse effect from the (ozone-depleting) freons may be negligible. And it may be. But it may also matter, especially in combination with other things. Various people have tried to link the ozone hole and the global mean temperature in various ways. Cook apparently doesn't like it because it dilutes his CO2 message, so he doesn't discuss these papers even though he pays lots of attention to less important or convincing papers involving CO2. Well, I am not thrilled by links between freons and the climate, either - except that it doesn't matter what we feel. There could still exist such a relationship. It's not just about the direct IR absorption that may be negligible. The UV absorption and modified chemistry and biology may matter, too. The inherent strength of freons as greenhouse gases is huge. For example, HFC-23 stays in the atmosphere for 200+ years and it is more than 10,000 times stronger a greenhouse gas than CO2. It's clear that if we say that the greenhouse effect is important, we must look at methane, freons, N2O, and other things, too.

98. CO2 emissions do not correlate with CO2 concentrations:
Well, I agree that in the long run, the CO2 concentration demonstrably increases because of the CO2 emissions. The isotopes are an extra way to demonstrate it. However, it's important to note that this point has nothing to do with the temperatures. Neither CO2 concentrations nor CO2 emissions are significantly correlated with the global mean temperature - not even at a multi-decadal scale. It follows that they won't probably be too strongly correlated in the future, either. It is a childish mistake to imagine that by changing our CO2 emissions, we will be "directly" changing the temperature. The influence is pretty much undetectable.

99. It's ozone:
Cook says that O3 stopped declining in 1995 while the temperatures continued to growth. Well, they surely continued to grow less than expected by the AGW advocates: there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995, after all. The ozone could matter - and it could also matter with the opposite sign than he assumes: many of these points have been sketched in point 97 about the freons. More generally, you can see that Cook has an extremely biased attitude to all these questions. Whenever there is a potential climate driver different from CO2, he is satisfied with a tiny glimpse of an imperfection - showing that it's not a perfect explanation of everything - to conclude that the effect is completely irrelevant. Whenever CO2 is the candidate, he is ready to ignore any problems, add any extra adjustments and additional effects employed as "minor slaves" of the CO2. This is not a rational attitude of a scientifically inclined person: it is the approach of a hopelessly biased religious bigot.

100. It's satellite microwave transmissions:
Well, while it's ludicrous to claim that the energy emitted by the satellites can cause a significant warming (I surely agree with Cook on this one), similar effects should be carefully checked when the same microwaves are being used to measure the temperature from the satellites (and I believe that they're thinking about it). When demonstrating that the satellites' energy is negligible, Cook makes elementary errors in arithmetics: 5/500 is not 1 but 0.01, so the real result is 100 times smaller than his figure: the satellites are too weak by a factor of 100 million, not 1 million.

101. Tree rings diverge from temperature after 1960: We have already discussed the divergence problem in point 84. Cook repeats his preposterous conclusion that the divergence itself has to be man-made, too. In particular, he blames the divergence on "global dimming" and "man-made drought". The only evidence that the tree proxies worked before 1960 is their rough agreement that existed for a few decades but broke down after 1960. Note the dramatic difference in his interpretation of similar "divergences" in various contexts: when some of the impressive graphs showing the correlation between cosmic rays and the climate failed to be convincing after year XY, Cook immediately uses it to throw the whole cosmoclimatology away. But because he apparently likes tree proxies, when the correlation between trees and temperature fails - and it's been failing for 50 years - he invents new effects (and man-made ones!) that must surely be responsible for this divergence. Once again, double standards caused by the lack of objectivity if not religious bigotry. Even if drought or dimming were the reason for the "divergence", similar things could have occurred in the medieval period, too. There exists no good evidence that we can actually determine all the relevant factors that decide about the width of the tree rings.

102. A drop in volcanic activity caused warming:
Incredibly, Cook says that such a drop could have caused (a part of) the early 20th century warming but it couldn't have worked recently. Does he postulate another jump in the laws of physics? While he's eager to cite papers that "work" and explain the early 20th century warming, he doesn't cite any recent papers. After all, there have been no recent large volcano eruptions: the 1991 eruption of Mt Pinatubo remains the latest large eruption and it's been almost 20 years. If you look at his very own graphs, you will see that the eruptions in 1880-1920 were more frequent than those in the recent decades. So his own methodology doesn't support his conclusions. He's inconsistently mixing and spinning papers about different things, comparing apples and oranges with his predetermined conclusion that apples are more orange in color.

103. We didn't have global warming during the Industrial Revolution:
Cook correctly says that the CO2 emissions were a tiny portion of the present ones. Around 1800, they were 100 times lower than they are today. The only problem with his argument is that we actually did have global warming during the Industrial Revolution. I recently published the texts by Thomas Jefferson about climate change that sound almost indistinguishable from the "modern observations" of climate change even though they are 200 years old. Similar observations exist when it comes to the melting ice and other aspects of "climate change". So the real problem is not that we didn't have global warming during the industrial revolution: the real problem was that we did have global warming - or cooling - during ages when people could already observe the world but they were not yet emitting any substantial amount of CO2.

104. Southern sea ice is increasing:
Cook agrees but says that it surely has nothing to do with warming or global climate change. It must be due to "complex phenomena" such as changes of the winds and circulation. Note that such comments would be unthinkable if he tried to discuss the Northern sea ice. As we have noticed, all "warming" observations are about the climate, important signals that you should appreciate, worship, extrapolate, and be afraid of. On the other hand, all "cooling" observations are just an irrelevant weather that you should dismiss, humiliate, and spit on. With such a biased attitude, it shouldn't be shocking that Mr Cook ends up with an irrational orthodoxy based on 104 largely obscure misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and myths - and that his opinions about the most important questions are upside down.
There exists no climate threat and there exists no empirically rooted evidence that the human impact on the climate deserves the attention of anyone except for a few excessively specialized experts who should investigate such speculative questions. All opinions that the climate change is dangerous, man-made, or even relevant for policymaking are based on the irrational attitude, cherry-picking, intimidation, censorship, and the general sloppiness of the kind that Mr Cook has shown us once again.

And that's the memo.

PS: Nå fant jeg en brukbar link likevel: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/03/john-cook-skeptical-science.html.

[Josik]

Takk for oppfriskningen, Telehiv!

Du finner den også som PDF her: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/skeptical_science.html?Itemid=0

[Telehiv]

Hei Josik, håper påska har vært fin?
Har vekslet mellom lesing og veteranbilkjøring (åpen bil) når været har tillatt det.
Apropos link, oppdaget at der var en grei link da jeg hadde lagt inn teksten allerede...men det var litt gøy å sitte og rigge teksten, så fikk jeg lest stoffet mens jeg holdt på 

[ebye]

Mange takk for denne oppsummeringen, Telehiv.   

Det er stadig interessant og lærerikt å lese skeptikernes "utlegninger" om det alarmistene skremmer, avleder, desinformerer eller manipulerer med. Det nærmeste en kommer til slike desinformasjoner her hjemme er CICEROS Klimamyter. Dvs. de mytene som ble påfunnet i mars 2008, var jo et samarbeid mellom Met. inst,  Bjerknessenteret og CICERO. Her er en link til disse mytene

http://www.cicero.uio.no/webnews/index.aspx?id=10961

Det som er litt pussig er at det finnes ytterligere ett sett med myter hos CICERO, fra 2005

http://www.cicero.uio.no/fulltext/index.aspx?id=3797

Noe er likt, og noe er ulikt.

I 2008 var det en del aktivitet rundt disse konstruerte mytene, og en form for bruksanvisning ble publisert på forskning.no (des 2008)

http://www.forskning.no/artikler/2008/desember/206036

Ved leilighet kan det jo være av interesse å produsere de tilsvarende antimytene nå.   

Så litt teknisk løsning.

En måte å legge ut stoff på, f. eks. pdf-filer kan være å kjøpe et domene (Webhotell) og bruke et filoverføringsprogram (FTP) for å legge ut filer. Dette kan være pdf-filer, bilder (f. eks. jpg- eller gif-formater) og word-dokumenter. Et domene koster 3-500 pr år, for 1 GB. FTP-programmer kan hentes fra nett eller muligens fra Domenselger. Jeg har god erfaring med Domeneshop

http://www.domeneshop.no/

[zulusierragolf]

Telehiv, dette var ikke særlig imponerende:

1. Cook, Sks har pr. i dag en liste med 173 myter rundt AGW. Jeg har ikke sjekket alle, men fra 1-50 sjekket jeg hver 5. myte og fra 50 og ut sjekket jeg hver 10. myte. På bakgrunn av denne heller tvilsomt randomiserte sjekken konkluderer jeg at Sks konsekvent viser til underlagsmateriell i sine tilbakevisninger. Det betyr at dersom jeg ønsker å være en ekte skeptiker og vil sjekke om Cook har dekning for sin tilbakevisning av myter så kan jeg selv finne underlagsmaterialet.

2. Motls viser i liten grad til underlagsmateriale fra tredjepart. Ett sted viser han til to grafer som han ikke angir hvor kommer fra, eller hvor de opprinnelige data er hentet fra.

3. Jeg har ikke lest hele PDF'en nøye. Med med komplett evneveike argumenter som dette så er det kanskje ikke nødvendig heller: It's unlikely that the whole world was "much cooler" than expected from these temperatures. But even if it were so, the temperature e.g. in England was (and is) more important for the Englishmen than the global mean temperature. Fra punkt 65 om MWP. I en diskusjon om AGW er det den globale middeltemperatur som er viktig. Ikke temperaturen i England.

4. I samme punkt sier han at: Finally, in a recent BBC interview, top alarmist and hockey-stick advocate Phil Jones admitted that the MWP was warmer than the present on the whole Northern Hemisphere and he only speculatively suggests, with no real evidence, that it could have been different on the Southern Hemisphere. Her oppgir han faktisk en link til BBC hvor det er umulig å finne dekning for hans gjengivelse av Jones.
Jeg velger å omtale det som et faktamessig lavmål.

5. I punkt 95 finner vi en klassisk stråmann: Whenever it's cooling, it's cooling because of dozens of natural causes. Whenever it's warming, it's only warming because of man-made reasons. Mener Cook virkelig dette? Hvor har han skrevet det?

6, I punkt 81 finner vi en god gammeldags sammensvergelse: And yes, it's true that the bulk of the climate scientists have been bought to spread the panic: 90% of the current funding for climate science is spent for the fabrication of fake evidence supporting the alarm (just compare the funding levels before the AGW became the most popular question of the climate science with the current funding which is 10 times higher). So indeed, I am not going to dispute Cook's assertion that most of the people who are paid to promote AGW do their job: the discipline is corrupt. Min utheving.

7. Punkt 75:  Hmmmm.....: However, it's not really possible for ice to "suddenly" increase its rate of melting by an order of magnitude. - Javel? Men det har vitterlig skjedd i fortidsklimaet.

8. Punkt 37 betår av en stråmann, He says that the polar bears have to die because there will be no ice, en logisk svikt,: First of all, it's very unlikely that the sea ice will completely disappear in any foreseeable future:, men selv om all sjøisen ikke forsvinner vil en betydelig reduksjon også være en alvorlig trussel.
En ny logisk svikt: especially relatively to the direct observation of the final result which says that the polar bear population has increased by a factor of 5 in recent decades, from 5,000 to 25,000 or so. Jepp, helt riktig, da isbjørnbestand var på randen av utryddelse for noen tiår siden, og man la strenge restriksjoner på isbjørnjakt, ja da steg bestanden, pussig nok. For et mirakel!!

For ordens skyld en link til dokumentet.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/John_Cook_Skeptical_Science.pdf

Dette er eksempler - man kan sikkert sette seg ned å ta en grundig gjennomgang av hele listen. Men det har jo Sks allerede gjort.

Er det på dette nivået såkalt skeptikere tenker man kan argumentere?

[Telehiv]

Zulu,

ser ut som du er offer for en misforståelse her?

Du synes å mene at Cook er skeptiker, men Cook er skeptisk til skeptikerne, han er altså på lag med AGW/CO2-gjengen og IPCC. Dersom du syns han har lite å fare med, så skal jeg derfor ikke motsi deg på det 

Men grunnen til at IPCC-skeptikeren Motl likevel bruker såpass mye tid på å imøtegå Cook, er etter min forstand fordi Cook i mange tilfeller er langt mer åpen for AGW-motkritikk enn de klassiske alarmistene. 

Ellers så er ikke mitt ærend å forsvare noen av de nevnte parter, jeg er bare budbringeren av at en slik diskusjon foreligger.

[zulusierragolf]

Hei, jeg er klar over at Cook er pro-agw og at han på sin nettside forsøker å tilbakevise det han (og jeg) oppfatter som vanlige myter som blir fremsatt av klimaskeptikere. 

Jeg oppfatter også at Motl på sin side kommenterer Cook sine tilbakevisninger. Min mening er at han gjør det med lav kvalitet.

[Telehiv]

Hei igjen Zulu,

jeg noterer at du mener Motl holder lav kvalitet.
Jeg vet ikke hva som er din vitenskapelige basis for å vurdere god eller dårlig kvalitet rundt klima, men her er Motl sin iflg. Wikipedia:

Luboš Motl (born December 5, 1973) is a Czech theoretical physicist who keeps a blog commenting on physics, global warming and politics. His scientific research concentrated on string theory, of which he has been a passionate defender.[1] He proposed Matrix string theory in 1997.[2]

Motl was born in Plzeň, Czech Republic. He received his master degree from the Charles University in Prague, and his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Rutgers University and has been a Harvard Junior Fellow (2001–2004) and assistant professor (2004–2007) at Harvard University. It was during his years at Harvard that Motl started his blog, "Luboš Motl's Reference Frame", some of which is still hosted on Harvard's servers.[3]

While in Harvard, he worked on the pp-wave limit of AdS/CFT correspondence, twistor theory and its application to gauge theory with supersymmetry, black hole thermodynamics and the conjectured relevance of quasinormal modes for loop quantum gravity, deconstruction, and other topics. He has a presence on the Internet, where he often participates in discussions supporting string theory against loop quantum gravity.[4]

Motl translated The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene to Czech, and together with Miloš Zahradník, he co-authored a Czech textbook on linear algebra (We Grow Linear Algebra). He also authored L'equation Bogdanov, a book published in France discussing the scientific ideas and controversy of the Bogdanov brothers.

Motl keeps a blog mainly discussing general science and politics. The blog discusses new discoveries in string theory and theoretical physics, often clarifies commonly discussed physics topics in the popular media, and points out common errors found in `alternative' theories of physics (such as violations of Lorentz invariance, causality, unitarity, etc). He also frequently disputes what he considers to be alarmism about global warming, and some of the statistical models used by some climate researchers on grounds such as incorrect prior probability distributions.


Jeg vet heller ikke hva du har publisert, Zulu, men her er et utdrag av tematikken for Motls publikasjoner:

- Higher-order corrections to mass-charge relation of extremal black holes
- The String Landscape, Black Holes and Gravity as the Weakest Force
- Equivalence of twistor prescriptions for super Yang-Mills
- Cubic Twistorial String Field Theory
- Matrix string theory, contact terms, and superstring field theory
- Heterotic plane wave matrix models and giant gluons
- Asymptotic black hole quasinormal frequencies
- An analytical computation of asymptotic Schwarzschild quasinormal frequencies
- PP-Wave / CFT_2 Duality
- PP-wave string interactions from perturbative Yang-Mills theory
- Nonperturbative Formulations of Superstring Theory (Phd Thesis)
- Two-parametric zeta function regularization in superstring theory
- Proposals on nonperturbative superstring interactions

I sum bør det her være basiskunnskaper til å vurdere fysiske forhold ganske bra.

[zulusierragolf]

Hei Telehiv

Et lite innledende poeng. Denne tråden har som ledd i tittelen: Motl knuser Cook i 104 punkter.
Mitt poeng. Nei, det gjør han ikke.

I motsetning til meg har Motl en imponerende vitenskapelig CV. Jeg på min side har ikke publisert noe som helst.
1-0 til Motl?

Nei, ikke helt.
Uansett hvor mye han har publisert så gjelder grunnleggende logikk for han også. Uansett hans CV kan vanlige mennesker som meg lett se at han argumenterer (på noen punkter) uten å vise til kilder eller andre fakta enn hva Cook gjør.

Man trenger ikke være professor i noe som helst for å oppdage at Motl forsøker å tilbakevise Cook ved å sitere Phil Jones på noe Jones aldri har sagt. I Motl sitt punkt 65 belegger han en av sine påstand med et fakta som ikke eksisterer. Da hjelper det ikke at han er professor i teoretisk fysikk (?)

Jeg kan gå gjennom Motl sin liste å finne den ene logiske brist etter den andre. Men rett skal være rett. Jeg vil også finne punkter som jeg ikke kan tilbakevise fordi jeg ikke har kompetanse til det.
Men min tillit til Motl synker som en stein når jeg ser at han på noen punkter argumenterer uten logikk.
Når han i tillegg utgir sin liste i navnet til en organisasjon som har en politisk agenda så får jeg mistanke om at det pågår noe annet enn en oppriktig vitenskapelig diskusjon.
Da får jeg inntrykk av at hans agenda er å så tvil - ikke skape klarhet.

[Amatør1]

I motsetning til meg har Motl en imponerende vitenskapelig CV. Jeg på min side har ikke publisert noe som helst.
1-0 til Motl?

Nei, ikke helt.
Uansett hvor mye han har publisert så gjelder grunnleggende logikk for han også. Uansett hans CV kan vanlige mennesker som meg lett se at han argumenterer (på noen punkter) uten å vise til kilder eller andre fakta enn hva Cook gjør.

Her er jeg helt enig med deg. Det spiller liten rolle hvilken formell posisjon en person har mht. vitenskapelig troverdighet. Riktignok har Motl solid naturvitenskapelig bakgrunn, men det beviser ingen ting i konkrete vitenskapelige spørsmål. Det hadde vært en fordel om våre klimaforskere hos CICERO og Bjerknessenteret hadde tatt til seg det poenget du her framfører. Grunnleggende logikk burde gjelde også i de institusjonene.

Man trenger ikke være professor i noe som helst for å oppdage at Motl forsøker å tilbakevise Cook ved å sitere Phil Jones på noe Jones aldri har sagt. I Motl sitt punkt 65 belegger han en av sine påstand med et fakta som ikke eksisterer. Da hjelper det ikke at han er professor i teoretisk fysikk (?)

Da er vi spente på hvilken påstand i punkt 65 du mener Motl belegger med et ikke-eksisterende faktum. Du hevder dette uten å vise til noen kilde som underbygger din påstand. Noe av det første du pekte på var at "Motls viser i liten grad til underlagsmateriale fra tredjepart", men hvorfor gjør du det ikke selv da? "Min mening er at han gjør det med lav kvalitet" sier du om Motls kommentarer til Cook. Men hvordan skal vi bedømme om det er dine eller Motls kommentarer som er av god kvalitet?

Vi får prøve med det konkrete du viste til:

65. Medieval Warm Period was warmer:
Cook says that only locally - globally, it was cooler, he argues. However, the "reconstructions" he offers are linked to the discredited hockey-stick studies (and especially the discredited people behind them). The best evidence is actually historical in origin, from the traditional civilized places, and it does suggest that the period was warmer than the present. It's unlikely that the whole world was "much cooler" than expected from these temperatures. But even if it were so, the temperature e.g. in England was (and is) more important for the Englishmen than the global mean temperature. Finally, in a recent BBC interview, top alarmist and hockey-stick advocate Phil Jones admitted that the MWP was warmer than the present on the whole Northern Hemisphere and he only speculatively suggests, with no real evidence, that it could have been different on the Southern Hemisphere. Even if the MWP were only warmer on the Northern Hemisphere, it would still make the claims that the present is "unprecedentedly warm" very awkward.

Vi er henvist til å gjette på hva du protesterer på av Motls utsagn i punkt 65. Jeg gjetter på at det er det jeg har markert i rødt du henviser til som "et fakta som ikke eksisterer"? Det kan vi jo sjekke, Phil Jones gir jo ikke akkurat hundrevis av intervjuer for tiden, selv ikke til BBC.


BBC: Q&A: Professor Phil Jones 
Saturday, 13 February 2010

"G - There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?

(Phil Jones:) There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm that today, then current warmth would be unprecedented.

We know from the instrumental temperature record that the two hemispheres do not always follow one another. We cannot, therefore, make the assumption that temperatures in the global average will be similar to those in the northern hemisphere. "


Her ser vi følgende
1. Du hevdet han i "punkt 65 belegger han en av sine påstand med et fakta som ikke eksisterer", uten å vise til hvilken påstand du protesterer mot.
2. Du brød deg ikke om å belegge din påstand med referanser, men fant allikevel å ville kritisere Motl for samme.
3. Når man så gjetter på hva du protesterer mot og leter opp kilden (det er ganske lett), ser vi at Motls påstand er ganske så korrekt. Phil Jones sier ganske riktig at "The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia", hvilket er en ganske dekkende beskrivelse av "the northern hemisphere".
4. Kanskje ditt poeng er at Jones mente MWP var framtrendende på den nordlige halvkule, men ikke så varm som idag? I såfall er du uenig med Cook: "Firstly, evidence suggests that the Medieval Warm Period was in fact warmer than today in many parts of the globe such as in the North Atlantic. "

Jeg tror vi er nødt til å konkludere, zulu: Din argumentasjon holder her for lav kvalitet.

[Telehiv]

Zulu,
først vil jeg takke deg for et saklig svar, som jeg vil kommentere etterpå. Men først ros til deg for at du ikke misforsto min intensjon med å trekke fram faglig/vitenskapelig nivå for å ha tilstrekkelige forutsetninger for å kunne vurdere vitenskapelige problemstillinger:

Amatør1 har allerede gitt et viktig svar om din selvsagte rett til å uttale deg selv om du etter egne opplysninger ikke er forskerutdannet. Dette støtter jeg både han og deg i.

Verden har jo sett en rekke eksempler på at både autodidakter og folk med lavere utdannelse har kommet langt i egenutvikling og forståelse på en rekke områder, jfr. folk som Ivar Aasen (en autodidakt men ledende språkforsker anerkjent ute i verden selv om nynorskfobiske østlendinger ikke vil være helt innforstått med det; Ibsen dumpekandidat i norsk på gymnaset; Einstein var slett ikke formelt utdannet på områdene der han erobret verdensfysikken; osv.).

Det er dessuten de færreste som er engasjerte og vet mye om en sak gjennom livets skole som også er direkte forskere eller publiserer på temaet. Mitt poeng var å sikre meg at jeg i allfall ikke innledningsvis usaklig avfeide deg som en person uten faglig grunnlag og/eller evne til å uttale deg om Motl leverer svar av god eller dårlig kvalitet: Du kunne jo vært en velutdannet fysiker eller med annen høy teknisk utdannelse uten at du dermed drev forskning innen klima eller nært relaterte emner.

Når du nå avkrefter det, gjenstår dine rent personlige egenskaper: Selv om vi åpenbart er rivende uenige har jeg også før sagt at jeg respekterer din vilje til saklig debatt. Der kunne folk som Prestrud (som har demonstrert til fulle at den Gud gir et embede gir han nødvendigvis ikke forstand; han har jo heller ikke formelt klimafaglig grunnlag i tillegg til sine skitne frekkheter som han tror hans adminstrative lederposisjon har gitt ham rett til) og Benestad (som avslører skremmende svake sosiale allmennkunnskaper og svak metodisk stringens i sak etter sak i tillegg til pinlig dårlige skriveevner rent generelt), og E. Jansen (som også ligger tynt an i historiske forsøk på sensur av "upassende" data) hatt mye å lære av deg.

Alle disse fusentastene, selv om de sitter i "maktens klimaposisjon", er jo av mer oppegående og balanserte mennesker - OGSÅ dem som har nok vitenskapelig basis til å gjennomskue dem rent faglig - direkte foraktet for sine sviktende faglige vurderingsevner og grisete debattformer.

Så til vurderingen av Motls kvalitet:
Det tradisjonelle kriteriet for å kunne påstå noe om en fyr av Motls kaliber vil normalt være (høy) vitenskapelig utdannelse på relevante områder, siden Motl i en rekke år har vært en lysende faglig stjerne på bl.a. Harvard-himmelen innenfor blytunge og faglig svært krevende disipliner. Motl har uten tvil en generell og sterk vitenskapelig basis for å kunne vurdere andres vitenskapelige nivå på endel områder, f.eks. de statistiske og fysiske øvelsene som foretas av folk som Mann, Jones og andre som vi skeptikere har sterk mistro til mht. skikkelig omgang med data.

Men her er vi ved et viktig punkt jeg tror de fleste sannhetssøkende mennesker vil støtte meg på:

Selv om man har en viktig vitenskapelig posisjon sier ikke det noe om vedkommendes moral og motiver eller evt. mer eller mindre forblindede tro på en viss retning i vitenskapen, slik at sannheten lider overlast som konsekvens til slutt.

Du er derfor i din fulle rett på linje med alle andre til å mistro hvem du vil av folk som uttaler seg om klima, historien har vist at det er det jaggu nok grunner til!   

Men har du samtidig vist at din mistro var berettiget?
Amatør1 har allerede svart greit når det gjelder dekning for uttalelser om Motls kvalitet; Motl hadde dekning i en konkret sak der du mener han ikke hadde det. For egen del vil jeg legge til at jeg ikke har funnet noe i Motls øvrige svar som jeg ikke har kunnet finne dekning for i underliggende litteratur. Hans klassiske forskerbakgrunn tilsier at han vet veldig godt hva han vil kunne arresteres for når han eksponerer seg på nettet slik han gjør i bloggen sin. Jeg har ikke sett at noen andre forskere har pillet fjæra av ham så langt, men vil gjerne gjøres oppmerksom på det dersom noen har tatt ham i faglig svakhet/feil.

Men så er ikke fyren lett å prøve seg på heller, når han tar fatt i deres egne svakheter: Når Motl som en av sine aktiviteter har drevet med bl.a. "higher-order corrections to mass-charge relation of extremal black holes" og "analytical computation of asymptotic Schwarzschild quasinormal frequencies" og "two-parametric zeta function regularization in superstring theory" så skal det en del til for å kunne hevde at Motl ikke har forutsetninger for å imøtegå klimaforskeres påstander som angår alt fra Mann og andre i The Team sin statistiske tilkortkommenhet til å bli avslørt for ren modell-gaming, gjentatt observerte sviktende fysiske forutsetninger (Motl er fysiker, ikke glem det) for hypoteser rundt varmelære, osv.

Jeg tillater meg derfor å hevde: De som ikke kan akseptere at The Team er tatt for en rekke alvorlige teoretiske, statistiske og metodiske svikt gjentatte ganger - på en rekke områder - av folk som McIntyre, Motl og andre som kan sine øvelser, har enten ikke faglig innsikt nok til å forstå alvoret og/eller mangler helt moralen til å ta det innover seg selv om de forstår det.

Det bør ikke være nødvendig å dokumentere en gang til at dette er et faktum; bevisene ligger lett tilgjengelige over hele nettet for dem som vil sette seg inn i sannheten om dette, selv om klimamakta har satt i gang hele statsapparat i flere land for å hvitvaske/dekke over det.   

[zulusierragolf]

Amatør1 - du har rett i at jeg kunne gjort meg mer flid med mitt innlegg, men det var altså et kjapt forfattet debattinnlegg og ikke et mer formelt hefte for publikasjon som skulle tilbakevise Sks.

Motl sier:  "Finally, in a recent BBC interview, top alarmist and hockey-stick advocate Phil Jones admitted that the MWP was warmer than the present on the whole Northern Hemisphere" Min utheving.

Jeg finner ikke dekning for WARMER THEN THE PRESENT i Jones sitt svar hos BBC.
Det er godt mulig Cook og Jones ikke er enige, men det er egentlig en annen diskusjon.

Jeg setter stor pris på tilsvaret fra Telehiv. Er naturlig nok ikke enig i alt. Det kunne vært fristende å gå løs på listen fra Motl, men jeg må velge hvilke slag jeg skal bruke krefter på. Og har ikke bestemt meg enda.